But it's MY story

One sleep to go and then I'm on 6 weeks holiday. Woo hoo.

But I didn't come here to talk about that-- I don't want the few readers I have to leave through jealousy.

No, I have come to talk about EnVision. (www.sf-envision.com I believe-- I would make that into a link if I knew how.)

Envision is five days where a published author attempts to help me with my novel, making it nice and sharp and shiny. My tutor is Tansy Raynor Roberts. She has already read 100 pages of my story and sent an email to me yesterday suggesting that I take along more of the story if I have it because she has some "structural suggestions".

And you see... this worries me. I have about 360,000 words of story written in the structure that , from the evidence I have so far,Tansy doesn't like. 360,000 words. That's a lot of words. I really, really don't want to be making any major structural changes.

And I'm getting defensive as well when I haven't even talked to her about it. I've already caught myself working out the excuses I'll use to say I can't change anything at all.

Ahhh, well. I'll get over it, I'm sure.

On the subjects of money (as in, If I don't at least listen to Tansy I've wasted my money), I have to decide if I will buy a new CD player for my car. It seems to be on permanent eject. Now, normally I could live without a CD player in my car (have been doing it for a while now) or I could just go buy a new one. Not a huge problem either way. But I am just about to take 6 weeks off work and spend it driving around lots of horrible places (like Victoria). Do they have real music in Victoria that I can pick up on the radio? Or do they just have Peter Andre, Shannon Noll and S Club 7? And, if I do go and spend $200 (or whatever) on a new CD player, will I then be caught in the middle of said Victoria with lovely music but no money to buy petrol?

Hmmm... quite a dilemma.

Death and Loathing

The stupidity of some people astounds me. Well... come to think of it... it doesn't. But anyways, to the story.

I went to see a movie yesterday, which would not surprise most people who know me. (It was Dirty Pretty Things actually-- very good.) There I am in the foyer before the movie started with a whole heap of other people (most of whom were going to see Touching the Void, which I thought was pretty unusual, but is totally beside the point) when someone collapsed. He (referred to as "the patient" from here on in, readers) was walking along, coming out of one of the cinemas and... gone. Fainted. Admittedly, it was a fairly spectacular effort involving collapsing barricades and big (non-collapsing) lounge chairs but, still, it was just a faint.

The guy wasn't dead. I could see that he was breathing from about 3 meters away.

Someone in the crowd start calling for a doctor. You know, "Is there a doctor in the house" (though, somewhat unfortunately I thought, he did not use those exact words). Not a bad idea. Just in case. Can't hurt, right. And while this guy is shouting, someone has rolled the patient onto his side. All going well so far.

When no response came to the call for a doctor "... or someone who knows CPR" was added.

Now, I know CPR (or did 5 years ago and I don't imaging it's changed dramatically since)but, as I said, I could see that it wasn't required (a lovely tight T-shirt was involved[can you say sarcasm, children?])and a couple of people in the thick of the action seemed to know what they were doing-- they had rolled the patient onto his side, after all, and had left it at that.

But then the stereotype, still not getting a response in his search for a doctor, rolls the patient onto his back and starts leaning on his chest-- as if he's trying to do CPR. Now the sentiment was nice, I'm sure but there was not a lot of science in his methods. He sat straddling the patient's legs and leaned on his chest at some random point... That was it. Thankfully he only did it once before someone slapped him around (though unfortunately-- it was a day of unfortunate happenings-- it was more a metaphorical slapping).

Now, the process (of CPR, not slapping) really isn't that hard and any ten year old who's seen one episode of ER and three of All Saints would have gotten closer to doing it properly. And that's ignoring the fact that the patient was still breathing (and, therefore, pumping blood) quite well on his own. In fact, about a minute later he was on his feet and out the door (despite some people telling him to hang around a bit longer).

The patient actually came out of the movie I went in to see, and it really wasn't that bad. (Sorry, just looking for a way to tie up my little story...)

The moral... People should need to pass some type of test before they are allowed to walk around in public.

Three and a half days of work remaining until the start of my holiday. Woo hoo.

Strange v.3

And what's strange this time? Strange enough to get me doing two posts within an hour?

Here we go...

Isn't it strange (well, not really) how quickly life can change? Not my life in this case. And in this case, that's a good thing.

One the guys I work with just came in and told me his girl friend is pregnant. (Nothing at all to do with me, I swear, it just got me thinking). This pregnancy was unplanned. They don't live together and had no firm plans for doing so before this came up. Now, he's canceled a trip to Europe in August and they're moving in together next month.

His whole world changed in about 2 minutes. Less than that. How long does it take for a woman to say, "I'm pregnant?". How long for her to convince a guy she isn't joking? How long to convince him it's his fault? Possibly the one time ever a guy might want his girlfriend to be sleeping with someone else...

But that wasn't really when his life changed. That happened a month ago, or two months ago, or whenever it was. He just realised it when he was told. Right now, you or I could be doing something that will change our lives (ok, possibly not-- I don't think this blog will have that effect). But any little thing could be the moment. Most people know this, I think, but never give it any thought.

Knowing that any moment can change your life, truly realising it, would you have unprotected sex? Would you make fun of the slightly strange, always-staring guy working in the next office? Would you stop for a moment to talk to the lonely old lady who lives across the street?

It could be any of these things which send our lives spiraling off in some other direction like a bad movie... and yet we hardly give them a though. And the moment may not be as obvious as getting someone pregnant (or getting pregnant).

Hmmm... That's all a bit deep for me for a Wednesday afternoon, especially with pinicle of Australia culture (the State of Origin) appearing on TV tonight-- GO THE BLUES!!

Words and Pictures

As strange as the way different people go about creative writing is the way individuals (being me, in this case) look at different forms of creativity.

I write fantasy and science fiction (although my output at the moment suggests that I don't write much at all) but when it comes to photography I like it to be real. For me, cameras and computers just don't mix-- at least in terms of creating pictures. Printing and storing is fine.

I like to point a camera at something and come away with a good picture or not (as is more usually the case). That's where the fun and the skill lies, surely. Anyone (within reason) can take a crappy picture (within reason) and turn it into something interesting (within reason) on a computer. Why have a camera at all? You could probably search the net and find the right sort of picture to doctor.

One thing that always bothered me (in respect to my ability or lack-there-of with a camera) was all the bad shots. From one roll of film there may be one or two that I want to keep. Seems terrible. But I was reading a book by Steve Parish-- mega famous Australian photographer who does all those "Australian" calendars and stuff-- even if you don't know his name you will have seen heaps of his work. Anyways, he was saying that one of the pleasures of photography was getting back your roll of film (or developing it or whatever), having a look through the pics, and finding that you have one or two good ones. Of course, he standard of good and mine are quite a bit different, but it's good to know that a pro who's been doing it for about 40 years goes through the same sort of thing. Wading through the bad ones-- where you cringe or just shake your head and wonder what you were thinking-- is worth it when you suddenly come across something that works. Even more so than in writing, what others think of the photo is irrelevant.

I can't imagine feeling the same way with writing. Imagine being willing to write 20 bad stories to get four that were worth the effort. Okay, admittedly, it usually takes a lot more time and effort to get a bad story than to get a bad photo but you could change the ratios and still get the same answer. 12 bad stories for 4 good ones? 8 bad for 4 good? Actually, that's probably about my ratio with short stories at the moment, but I can tell myself that those bad stories are not actually finished and I'll get around to fixing them up one day. My bad photos? I just don't want to fix them-- that would be cheating.

Write and Wrong

I find it amazing, the different ways people go about creative writing.

Some people need to plan everything, knowing what will be in each individual chapter before they even start writing. These people also tend to have lots of back story for the characters and the worlds (in the case of speculative fiction, which is what I am mainly concerned with). There probably aren't many that go to the extent that Tolkien did, but stil...

I'm the opposite, really. Or at least as close as you can get to the oppposite. If I plan to much I just get bored with the entire thing. If I know the ending and exactly how everyone gets there then why the hell would I want to go through the whole long process of doing the writing?

I generally have a bit of an idea where I'm going. I know some point along the way that my characters are going to hit.

*These two character need to meet at some stage and have a certain conversation.
*There will be a battle at this location that will send Character A off in a different direction.
*Character A and Character B are going to fall in love.

I know stuff like that, but have no idea how I'll actually get to that point until I 'm starting to get close. I do the writing to find out.

When I was at Conflux (sci-fi convention held recently in Canberra) I went to a panel given by... Well, I can't remember his name, but he wrote a fantasy book called Across the Face of the Word. Seeing he came from a map making background, he started his story with a map. How crazy is that? He explained at one point how he'd drawn this mountain range (absolutely wonderful maps) and then set about inventing a pantheon of gods to name some of the peaks after. What I want to know is, how does he know that that mountain range, and that pantheon of gods, are going to suit his story once he gets there? Is he automatically going to twist his story to suit the maps? Or would he be willing to change the maps? Seeing I know (from the way he was talking) that there's no way he'd change the maps (he did spend a good number of years making them, after all) I can guess what the answer would be. Sara Douglas starts stories the same way, apparently. Crazy, I tell you. I used to do it when I was about 10 years old, because, if nothing else, it is a great way of procrastinating. Now days, if I have a map at all, I find out what it's like as the characters move about the world.

Same thing with characters and history of the world. How can I possibly know what I'm going to need until it comes up in the story? A battle on this plain 500 years ago? But I want one of the characters to have fought in that battle... The world and the history should be there to suit the story, not the other way around.

Sure, with those who plan, they will know more about how their story and geography and history all fit together than I know about mine because they've planned the story. But most of the history will be about the details of the story and are not really needed at the beginning...

By the same token, it seems that it does help if I know something about the future in my story at some point. With the story I just finished (well, a few months ago now) I was well and truely stuck. Sat in the same place, about 1/3 of the way in, for a long time. Then, suddenly, I worked out exactly how the good guys were going to win at the very end of the book. I'd had a general idea previously but... Once I had it worked out in my head I wrote lots, though it really had no immediate relevance to the bit I was stuck on. I wrote 110k words in two months. It was a great ending (well, I thought it was then and I still do now) and I wanted to get there to see how it all happened.

So some people plan... Me, I wander along until a scene or an idea or a... something... grabs me and says, "Come look at me." I don't think I could do it any other way. (Possibly gets back to that lazy thing as much as the boredom. Planning and writing? Twice as much work.)

I'm sure someone could come along and tell me why planning is very important. and the thing is... they'll be right. Writing would be a lot easier if there was a right way to do things, but it wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun-- it would just be designing another bridge or writing another computer program-- and if I wanted to be doing one of those things, I'd be doing it.

Enemies

Apparently I have an arch-nemesis. No, seriously.

A guy at the place where I work (a term I use loosely) has always been a bit strange. A bit difficult. He sometimes does unusual things that most normal people would not consider doing in a regular working day. Well, maybe that isn't right, actually. A regular working day at a place that is as laid back as the place where I work.

The unusual things he does normally makes my job more difficult. I have to talk to the customers, etc and clean up his mess. I never really thought that much of it. It was just him being a bit weird.

But...

Apparently...

He was doing that to get back at me for all the things that I deliberately do to make his life difficult.

What do I do? I am a service co-ordinator. He is a technician. I organise his daily runs, along with 3 other techs. They generally get a maximum of 7 jobs a day, booked a day in advance. Occasionally they get eight. And occasionally, rarely, when we had a really bad whinger (a technical term from the service industry) I will call one of the techs and add the job in on the day.

That's what I do. There isn't really a lot I can do to make his life difficult. I could send him from one side of the city to the other, but to do that I would generally have to do the same thing to one of the other techs to cover. I could give him all the difficult jobs but, again, that'd mean sending other techs all over the city to cover. I could make sure I ring him every time to add in extra jobs, but, well, if he can't do it he can't do it.

But, I've been doing my best to piss him off for about 2 years. First I've heard of it.

Most people who know me will say I'm honest and laid back. I can also be a prick. Who's always wonderfully nice? Sometimes lack a bit of tact (only when I couldn't be bothered). But be a real prick or that long? Come on, that would take more effort than it's worth. I don't hold grudges. I'm not vindictive. I generally make it obvious how I feel about people then get on with life. As I said, the guy is strange, but I never actually disliked him.

So anyway, I'm off home now to iron my nifty black costume and practice my maniacal laugh.

Retraction

I go and say I don't have problems with plot, etc, then I think of a conversation I was having with some people from the writing group the other day.

I was having a problem with distances in my novel. I have these "magical" gates that lead between worlds. On one of the worlds, where they have vehicles that allow you to travel over great distances very quickly, the gates are a long way away. On another two worlds, where one character has to walk between the gates, they were with in a couple couple of days' walking distance. How convienient. It was annoyig me immensely. Kate didn't seem to see the problem, but came up with the answer anyway. A river. Easy. Get a guy in a boat that's heading down stream and he'll go a damn long way very quickly. I knew that. I just couldn't see it. I had dragons in my head (for flying on the back of, though that would have created a whole new set of problems) and could not seem to get past them.

And... yes, there's more problems.

I need explosives to work and gun powder to not work. Or, at least, for guns to not work. Kate couldn't understand this one either, though possibly I didn't explain it too well. This time she didn't come up with a solution. I need explosives. No way around it. Unless someone can come up with another way to destroy a very large alien spaceship that doesn't involve any form of advanced machinery (ie, more advanced than levers, inclines, pulleys and wheels). But I don't want guns because that ruins a whole heap of fun and irony.

Seeing dragons won't help I'm kinda stuck, though it is not something I really have to worry about for a while yet.

Thoughts v. Ability

At the moment my life seems to revolve around writing, books and movies. A lot of people would consider that to be fairly boring, but I don't have too many complaints.

One complaint I do have is that comma in the phrase "writing, books and movies". I would really like to write books and movies. The trouble is, they are completely different forms of writing and unless you are someone like William Goldman it's really hard to get your brain around the two methods. It is for me, at any rate. Plotting and rhythm comes easy for me in novels (well, I think it does, though no publisher has put their money on the table yet to say they agree). This has possibly made me a bit lazy when it comes to writing. Most times what I write in a first draft is pretty much how things will stay. I don't need to go around attending to the plot or adding in major bits or characters or whatever. But scripts? Now there's another story.

When I was about 16 I wrote a terrible, cliched, boring, high minded thing that would have been too cloying for a Hallmark film. Since then I have had numerous ideas that I can not beat into something resembling a reasonable script.

I have a co-written television pilot that could be great-- ideas and characters from a now established genre (super-heros) but original enough to be... Original. Trouble is, it's only a first draft and I'm not sure I can make it any better. Where do we go with it? Nobody wants to read a first draft, even though most producers will bring in their own script doctors/writers to change and fix things anyway. Another mate and I are playing with an update of an old British TV comedy. We have a basic idea... Easy. Now comes the hard part. Neither of us are really sure how to go about it at this stage. Oh well.

I found out today that the short story I recently had accepted (in the anthology Encounters, published by the Canberra Science Fiction Guild-- http://www.camrin.org/csfg/main.htm ) needs no further editing or fixing or whatever. Which means my lazy streak is completely satisfied as I get to sit back and wait for the anthology to appear. That's what I like to see.

That will be story number 3. It's called The Final Battle. The other two were The Art of War in issue 28 (I think) or Aurealis. And The Ferrymen in Glimpses, which was an anthology put out by my writing group. (I'd put up the address for the group, but the site is in the process of having a nervous breakdown.)

I've noticed a strange thing with my short stories-- the few that I write. The main characters usually end up dying. Or, at least, it's suggested that they will be dying very soon after the story ends. Hmmm... What does that say about me, I wonder?

Greetings and Salutations

I'm not quite sure why I'm jumping off the blogging cliff behind the other lemmings but here I am, leaping without a thought as to how I might look when I hit the bottom.

Anyways, a bit about me, for those who don't already know...

My name is Scott Robinson and I live in Brisbane, Australia. While not sitting at work complaining (as I would be right now if I wasn't typing), I write.

I have had a grand total of 7 poems and 2 short stories published. I also have another short story coming out sometime later this year, I think. I used to write poetry all the time-- I even thought I was going to make a living from it when I had my first poem published as a smart-arse 13 year old. I soon got over that. Now, as a smart-arse 30 year old, I think I'm going to make a living from writing novels.

I am about to embark on the final draft of a two book fantasy/space opera story that I think is good enough to be published, but may be ignored anyway because it doesn't quite fit.

As of the first of July, I will be attending EnVision (www.sf-envision.com), which is a 5 day novel writing workshop where published spec-fic authors look at your novel to see where improvement might be made.

And straight after that I will be taking a bit of a road trip to Melbourne to try to get away from work as much as possible. It is supposed to "refresh" me and make me enjoy my job again. I already know that isn't going to happen and I'll be looking for a new place of employment soon after. Oh well.

But if I can't find something interesting to put in here after all of that...

And speaking of work, I should really go and do some. Damn them.