Ken Preston's Blog, page 11

This is not quite my last blog post of the year . . .

. . . but it almost is.

There’s a word for that, isn’t there?

Penultimate.

Never much liked that word, really. Despite the promise of one more after the current one, it still sounds so very final to me. As though this is the end, forever and ever.

Which it isn’t. Because next Sunday I will have my last blog post for 2017, and even that won’t be my last.

Yes, I’m afraid you will be having to put up with me every Sunday in 2018 too.

Although it is traditional to look back on the year gone by on New Year’s Eve, I’m going to indulge myself in that particular tradition tonight, on Christmas Eve.

It’s been a year of mixed fortunes really.

As many of you will know I have had issues with water leaking into my cellar. This a converted cellar, used as a room and where I sit down to write. As you can imagine this hasn’t been easy, but what has made it worse has been Severn Trent’s utter lack of empathy and even willingness to investigate the problem. We have had to battle every step of the way, (since the beginning of the year!) whilst Severn Trent consistently denied any responsibility for the problem. Well the issue of the leak is now fixed (and yes it was their responsibility) and now we are entering into the next stage of the battle: Who is going to pay for the repairs to the tanking system which was breached by the amount of water pressure it had to deal with, and who is going to pay for replacement carpets and redecorating?

(Hint: According to Severn Trent, not them.)

Our local community in Stourbridge was hit hard by the brutal murder of a mother and son. Something like this sends shockwaves through your life, even though we didn’t know them personally (although my eldest was in the same form at school as Pierce).

Even more personally distressing was the loss of a good friend from cancer on September 29th. Her absence from our lives has been devastating for many people, but especially her husband and daughter. I think about Wendy pretty much every day, and I should imagine I will be doing so for some time to come.

[image error]

On a more positive note, 2017 saw the publication of Joe Coffin Season Three, my short story Speaking in Tongues, and the second edition of Caxton Tempest at the End of the World, plus another My Weekly novel, Woman of Mystery. I also continued my work with the adult creative writing workshops I run with author Kerry Hadley-Pryce, was invited to become the lead writer for the Kidderminster Spark Young Writers’ group and set up an after school creative writing club for years 5 and 6 at Greenfield Primary School. On top of that I now co-host the Waterstones Open Mic event every month and I had my first ever speaking engagement, at the Soroptimist Annual Literary Dinner.

It’s been a busy year.

So what’s in store for 2018?

You know what, you’ll have to come back next Sunday on New Year’s Eve to find that out.

But the way I see it right now, 2018 is looking busier than 2017!

I’m going to finish here, and wish you all a warm, lovely, peaceful and very merry Christmas. Be kind to each other, and let’s enjoy the giving over the receiving.

Merry Christmas!
The Nightmare Before Christmas Santa GIF from Thenightmarebeforechristmas GIFs

The post This is not quite my last blog post of the year . . . appeared first on Ken Preston.

We Need to Talk

We need to talk about all those people living on our streets.

I’m not an expert on this sort of thing, far from it in fact. And so, because I’m not an expert, I don’t understand it.

I don’t understand how people can wind up having to live on the streets in the first place.

I don’t understand how, once they end up homeless, there’s no help for them to get rehomed.

I don’t understand how they make it from day to day, especially in winter when the temperatures drop and the snow arrives, and the ice, and the freezing rain.

I don’t understand how they can protect themselves, and the few possessions they might own, from those who would do them harm.

I don’t understand why the government doesn’t do anything about it.

Or the local councils.

Or the church.

I don’t understand why we don’t do anything about it.

I don’t understand how I can walk past those people sitting on the pavement, some of them in sleeping bags, some not, and not help them.

Except . . .

I’ve tried.

I’ve given money. I’ve bought sandwiches. I’ve offered a bed for the night. I have sat and talked with them. Shared my lunch during my lunch break, me in my suit sat next to a homeless guy in a subway in Birmingham, both of us eating a sandwich and chatting and laughing about something or other we saw as lunchtime workers hurried past us.

I have tried over the years, and yet none of it feels anywhere like enough.

But, as someone said on another forum where I was expressing my distress at the numbers of homeless we are currently seeing in my town and how I wished I could do more to help, you can’t beat yourself up and feel guilty for actually doing something to help.

And I’m not the only one. I know many people feel the same way I do.

Where I live in Stourbridge a group of individuals from the local community are getting together to collect donations of warm outer wear such as coats, gloves, hats, sleeping bags, which will then be distributed to homeless via local charities.

In reality these people could do with a home.

Or at least a roof over their head.

But it’s something.

And this is a spontaneous outpouring, a need to reach out and help the defenceless and the disenfranchised who are living and sleeping rough.

Still . . .

We need to talk about all those people living on our streets.

The post We Need to Talk appeared first on Ken Preston.

Sailing Away From Shore with XTC

I’ve been thinking recently about the artists I admire in the business of creativity, be it writing, music, art or film. And I realised recently that what connects them all is the publish and be damned ethos they all seem to share. That maverick sensibility which impels them to carve their own path through that minefield of what is known as a ‘career in the arts’, and forget what anybody else thinks, including their audience.

Possibly this has been on my mind recently because I have been listening to a lot of XTC. Formed in 1972 and disbanded in 2006, XTC moved from punk through to electric pop, lush melodic symphonies of English summers alongside some Beach Boys harmonies and Beatlesesque tunes whilst carving out their own original place in British music history.

I’ve been a fan of XTC since I first discovered them in 1983. And I have always admired their left of centre attitude and their refusal to be tied down to current musical tastes and thinking.

I remember reading a review of one of their albums which concluded with the line, ‘XTC have now sailed so far out to sea that they have no hope of ever reaching the shores of commercial pop music ever again.’

And I remember thinking, Wow, that’s brilliant.

Because they were like no other band around at the time or since.

Who else would have renamed themselves as The Dukes of Stratosphear and released an album of original psychedelia in the 1980s? They then went back to being XTC again, but 25 O’Clock proved so popular they were pressured by Virgin Records to release a second Dukes album a few years later.

[image error]

XTC never reached the height of popularity they could have done but are now considered to be one of the unsung heroes of British music.

That’s because they did their own thing, and they never gave up.

It is easier now that it ever was to do your own thing, but it’s also harder. It’s easier because the route to DIY publication is accessible to anyone with a computer and an internet connection. But that’s what makes it harder. It is so easy, everybody is doing it and so it is difficult to get noticed amongst all the noise.

The publishing industry has changed enormously over the last decade, and is certainly unrecognisable from the point of view of an artist in the 1970s, say. And the publishing industry is continuing to change as new technologies come to the fore, and as we learn how to use the technology we already have.

But I believe there is one strategy that all creatives seeking to make their mark, to express themselves and maybe even connect with others through their music or writing or film making, should have.

And that is: Persistence.

And that’s it really.

Because when I think of XTC and the fights they had with their record label, their resistance to touring, their insistence on directing their own musical style rather than simply repeating what had worked on the last album, I see that dogged fight to carry own. To carve their own path.

To never give up.

And it’s hard.

Especially in the face of criticism and negativity.

Of rejection.

But it’s the only way.

Don’t follow the mass of popular thinking and reading and listening.

Go your own way.

And keep going.

That way you might well end up somewhere nobody else has ever been.

Just like XTC who sailed so far away from land they never had any hope of reaching it again.

But instead they found something better.

 

Featured Image used under licence CC-BY-SA

The post Sailing Away From Shore with XTC appeared first on Ken Preston.

That’s What Writers Do.

I almost didn’t write a blog post for this week.

I am so very busy at the moment it seems that a blog post is the bottom of my to-do-list.

And yet, if I missed this week that would break my run of fourteen straight weeks of posting a new article every Sunday.

And it seems important to not do that.

Seth Godin discusses urgent versus important here. My long list of things that need doing screams urgent at me. But if I take a careful look at it I can easily find the important work that needs doing first. The work that needs prioritising.

The most important work I can do on any day of the week, but especially Mondays to Fridays, is sitting down and writing.

Because I’m a writer.

And that’s what writers do.

Of course there are the creative writing workshops to plan, there are the book covers to design, the editing and formatting that needs doing, the marketing, the open mic sessions to host and attend, the networking, and the list goes on.

But if I didn’t write any more books, if I didn’t keep honing and practising my craft, all that other work would eventually dry up.

[image error]

I am currently writing Joe Coffin Season Four.

I sat down on Friday morning and I managed to write one sentence.

One sentence.

I had a lot on my mind.

Writing a novel at a rate of one sentence a day isn’t practical.

Obviously.

But I still sat down at my work desk and wrote.

Tomorrow will be better. Hopefully I will crank out a thousand words.

But the point I’m trying to make is, no matter that on Friday I only managed one sentence, I still prioritised the writing.

In the last fourteen weeks, during which time I have had to deal with all manner of life stuff (including, but not limited to, running three streams of creative writing classes, hosting regular open mic sessions at Waterstones in Birmingham, a book formatting job, chasing up non-payment for work done, losing a dear friend to cancer, and consequently suffering a thankfully relatively brief but almost catastrophic crash in my mental health, family issues and work) I have posted every Sunday.

And I have sat down at my desk and written something, even if it was only that one sentence, every day.

Because that’s what writers do.

The post That’s What Writers Do. appeared first on Ken Preston.

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

I first read Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway in 2013 or 2014, so that is about three or four years ago from my present moment in time. If you wanted to skip reading the book and go for the condensed version instead, well, all you need is the title. The title sums up the book’s message perfectly eloquently. But if you want the message to be expanded and filled in then you need to shell out the couple of pounds it will cost you to get a second hand copy off Amazon.

I suppose right now you might be thinking, Hang on, why do I even need this book in the first place? You’re the one who brought it up.

Well, if you are hesitating over some form of action you feel you need, or want, to take, or if your life is stuck in a rut and you can’t find your way out, or maybe you feel trapped in a job or a marriage, or if . . . well that list goes on. In other words, if now that I have brought this book to your attention you think maybe you could do with reading it then yes, you probably do need to read it.

Mention of this book had been cropping up in various seminars and training sessions I attended for work over the years, but I always resisted buying it. Seemed like too much self-help mumbo jumbo to me. But then June 2013 arrived and if you have been following this blog for some time now you know what that means. Yes, I had what we British like to refer to as a ‘a bit of a funny turn.’

In other words I had a breakdown.

In my quest to get better and beat the Black Dog once and for all I fully embraced the self-help industry and one of the first books I ordered, on the advice of my first counsellor, was Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.

Now, I’ll be honest with you, it does get a little bit too New Age for my personal tastes in parts. But its core message is one that resonated with me and makes a hell of a lot of sense.

You don’t have to be brave to do something new or take action.

You just need to feel the fear and do it anyway.

Because that’s what everybody else does. All those successful people you envy for their fearless determination to get things done, they also feel the fear of failure, of making fools of themselves, whatever, but they go ahead and do it anyway.

I’ve been writing for years, but it is only in the last few years, since that ‘bit of a funny turn’ that I have actually started telling people I am a writer. Before that I used to pretend that it was nothing more than a hobby. That way I didn’t have to go public with my intentions to write and publish books that might actually, horror of horrors, sell.

You see, if you’re going to stand any hope of success in turning those dreams of yours into reality, you have to go public. You have to commit to the work and to the possibility that you might fail. In fact, failure is guaranteed along the way but failure is part of the learning process, part of the journey to success.

So I started saying yes, this what I do. I’m a writer.

It felt a little embarrassing at first, as though I was pretending to be a writer. But that’s also a good tactic to take too. Act like you are what you want to be. (This is also a good tactic for poor mental health. Feeling down and depressed? Haul yourself out of bed and plaster a smile on your face anyway. Get asked how you are by someone, tell them you are great. Often you wind up feeling the way you are acting.)

So yes, I started telling anyone who asked, I’m a writer. And I started writing more, too. I set myself a schedule, started treating it like the job it is. Next I started reading my work out loud at open mic events. This had a twofold positive effect. One was that my confidence in public speaking began to grow and secondly I began to meet other people, not just writers but readers too.

Then in 2016 I saw an opportunity to join Writing West Midlands as on of their assistant writers at their Spark Young Writers’ groups. This was voluntary and I had to apply for it and interview too. But I got it and spent a year volunteering at their Wolverhampton group, but now in 2017 I am leading a group and I get paid for it.

As I reached out and met more people and took more opportunities, more opportunities and people began reaching out to me. I now run three different creative writing groups (and I get paid for all of them), I host an open mic event at Waterstones in Birmingham and I have been contacted by people asking for my help and advice with publishing and writing.

Much of what I have done over these past few years since 2013 seemed to culminate in an experience I had on Friday evening. The year before I had been contacted by a member of the Soroptimist International (a charity organisation that exists to enable women) and asked to speak at their Literary Annual Dinner.

A year can pass you by very quickly.

The event was held at Hagley Golf Club, a black tie do with a three course dinner. There were three authors booked to speak, Gillian McAllister, a Sunday Times top ten bestselling author and Aaron Wilkes, an author of children’s text books and published by Oxford University Press.

I was on last.

Aaron and Gillian were both great, interesting and funny too.

And then it was my turn.

I thought I would be nervous when I got up to speak, to over a hundred people by the way, but I wasn’t. I was calm and confident in my material and my ability to deliver it.

And I had a great time.

The entire evening was good fun.

The next day I was buzzing from the high of it. And it was then that it occurred to me that a few years ago I never could have envisaged myself standing up in front of all those people and delivering a fifteen minute talk on writing.

Never.

But I had, and it was all because of that slow but steady accumulation of new experiences. Of finding those new opportunities and saying yes to them.

That’s the message for today.

Feel the fear and do it anyway.

Seize the opportunities.

Say yes.[image error]

 

The post Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. appeared first on Ken Preston.

Do We Really Need Any More Books?

Does this poor old world of ours really need any more books? Aren’t there already enough of them out there to keep us going?

I’ve written twelve of them, well actually I’ve written more than that but I’ve published twelve of them. With all the books already out there filling up the bookshelves both virtual and digital, what makes me think the world needs another book? That anybody would even bother reading it?

In 2010 Google reported that there were 129,864,880 books in existence. This accounts for all the books ever published in the history of mankind. But when you take into account that in the United States of America alone in 2013 it was estimated that there were between 600,000 and a million books published each year, then that figure is now a few million higher.

Interestingly, the UK publishes more books per inhabitant than any other country, at 2,875 titles per million inhabitants, but this excludes self-published books and so the number will be much larger. That makes me happy, to think that we produce more books here per person than any other country.

So why should I be adding to that number? Why on earth do I think that my infinitesimally small drop of work is worth adding to the tsunami of literature that we are currently deluged with? And even if it is, how will I ever hope to get noticed amongst all that noise?

And it’s not just literature and authors that is making all that noise. Television, computer games, social media, when stacked against those things books are actually turning into a niche activity.

And yet still we keep writing them and publishing them.

Back before the home computer if you wanted to write a book you had to type it out, something my eleven year old son does, by the way. He writes his stories out on a typewriter and then gives them to me to transcribe onto the computer.

So yes, the author had to type his book out on a typewriter, and there was no delete key and copy and paste function. And contrary to the popular image of the author sat at his desk, his feet buried in a small hill of screwed up sheets of paper, no writer would waste paper like that. It cost too much. In fact, American crime writer Lawrence Block used to buy the most expensive paper he could get his hands on to discourage wastage and mistakes.

And so, once you finished that novel and you wanted to send your manuscript out to a publisher, well you had to type the whole thing out again, because that publisher was likely to lose your manuscript and if you didn’t have your own paper copy you no longer had a novel. And yes, the publishers often lost manuscripts and so if you wanted to send it off again you had to type the entire novel out once more, and for as many times as you sent it out and the publisher then lost it or returned it to you covered in coffee stains and creases.

Imagine doing that with Lord of the Rings or War and Peace.

You had to be tough to be an author back before the home computer was invented.

But now? Now we have computers and it used to be that you could print as many copies as you wanted off with the click of a button, but now you don’t even have to do that as you can email your manuscript in.

In fact, forget that bit about submitting your manuscript to a publisher, it will probably just get rejected anyway. You can self publish now with ease. And Amazon let you do it for free on their Kindle platform.

Digital technology has made it easy for everyone to be a published author. All you need is access to a computer and the internet.

No wonder we are drowning in that tsunami of books.

So why write another book? What’s the point when everybody is doing it?

I not only write books, but I teach creative writing. With author Kerry Hadley-Pryce I run an adult creative writing workshop at Kingswinford library. I also run an after school writing club at Greenfield Primary School and I am employed by Writing West Midlands to teach creative writing to teenagers once a month in Kidderminster.

So I’m kind of doubling down on the problem really, as I am not only writing books but encouraging and enabling others to do the same.

But that’s because we need books. We need authors and writers. We need those people in society who are slightly odd, slightly weird. The ones who get up early in the morning to write before the rest of the world wakes up, the ones who would sometimes rather spend time with imaginary friends than real ones, the ones who complain about all the projects they have on the go, despite the fact that they are all self imposed and could be dropped without any repercussions whatsoever.

And books are miracles. Miracles of communication and empathy. At the very least a good book will entertain us, help us escape for a while into a different, and quite possibly more dangerous life, while allowing us to step back into the comfort of our own life by the simple act of closing the book.

And who hasn’t had their emotion stirred by a book? This summer I read A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, and was left devastated by its moving portrait of friendship and trauma.

As a child I loved reading.

It was through my love of reading that I finally discovered the facts of life. School had let me down, and so had my parents, but my ignorance was finally dispelled when I read The Fog by James Herbert. Stephen King had me too scared to look in the bathroom mirror for many years after I read The Shining and Guy N Smith reduced me to a blubbering wreck with his description of giant mutant crabs scuttling up the beach and snipping arms and legs off their victims in Night of the Crabs.

[image error]

I love writing and I love reading, and maybe the world doesn’t need another book, but actually I don’t care.

Because I need to write. I need to get those people, those imaginary friends of mine, out of my head and down on the page so that others can experience those imaginary lives.

And I love it when readers email me and tell me how much they love Joe Coffin, not just the books but the man himself. By the way, Joe Coffin is a big hit with my female readership. Not sure why, because he’s a big, ugly brute of a gangster who doesn’t think twice about dealing out violence and death according to his own moral code. I asked a female friend of mine who is a big Joe Coffin fan, what is it about him that all you women love so much? The only answer she could give me was, “Well Ken, us girls like a bit of rough sometimes.”

And that’s why I write books too. The connections I make with people through my writing. This amazing miracle, whereby I type words onto a computer and then somebody else reads those words and they get it.

They really and truly get it.

That’s a special connection made between two people who will most probably never meet.

A connection made through books.

And that’s why we need more of them.

 

The post Do We Really Need Any More Books? appeared first on Ken Preston.

I’ve No Idea What it Might be About

One Saturday a month I run a creative writing workshop for children aged between eleven and seventeen.

One of the boys today, let’s call him John, finished the task I had set them very quickly indeed. He wasn’t really into it, I could tell that much. So, after a discussion with him about what he liked to write, I set him a challenge.

We both had to write out three short story titles. The stories could be in any genre. But the titles were going to be judged at the end by my workshop co-leader, who would decide which one was the best.

(At this moment, having thought all this up on the spot and practically as the words were coming out of my mouth, I wished heartily for thought transference powers of some kind and hoped that she would judge John’s work the best.)

This idea of thinking up random titles and not worrying about what the story might actually be is a technique I have used before to think up an actual story. In fact I once used this technique to write an entire novel which I then sold to two publishers.

Anyway, I wrote out my three short story titles. I can’t remember the first two, they were pretty blah.

But I was obviously just getting warmed up for that third one.

Because I love that third title.

And I might even write the story.

Cinderella Machete.

One of the girls in the workshop, let’s call her Jane, said, “I really want to read that story!”

Which is great.

But I’ve no idea what it might be about.

None at all.

Except, I did then go on to write the opening paragraph.

Cinderella stood there, blood splashed over her face and dress, gripping her machete with both hands and said, “Give me my glass slipper back. Now.”

And Jane said, “Now I really want to read that story.”

So, you know, I might just write it.

The title I turned into a novel and sold to two publishers was Twenty Seconds to Free Fall. It’s on Amazon now.

[image error]

Again, I had no idea what that story might be about. It turned out to be the rallying call of my skydiving instructor heroine Katrina, seconds before leaping from a plane.

How to Eat a Car is another random title and one of my favourites of my own stories and it goes down a storm at open mic nights.

It took me a while to figure out what that one was about. Even when I was writing it I had no idea how it would end. Until I got to the end, and then it just sort of wrote itself.

The Man who Murdered Himself is another one.

It’s a technique I should use more often. Because, like all writers, I get stuck. Quite often actually. And that random writing of phrases and words can sometimes help to get me unstuck.

So yes, Cinderella Machete. Watch out for that one.

And who won the story title writing competition?

John, of course, with Jason versus the Monkey Jelly Bean Horde.

Genius.

The post I’ve No Idea What it Might be About appeared first on Ken Preston.

The Men’s Club

Do you ever wake up on a morning and think to yourself, Am I the only person on this planet who isn’t a sexual predator?

All right, wait a minute, I know, that’s the wrong question, isn’t it?

Let me ask it again.

Hey, fellas, do you ever wake up on a morning and think to yourself, Am I the only man on this planet who isn’t a sexual predator?

Because that’s what I’m doing this morning.

When I first read the story about Kevin Spacey and the allegations of his sexual assault on Anthony Rapp, I have to admit my first thoughts were, That sounds more like a clumsy, drunken, desperate attempt at sex than an actual assault.

And then the next day when I saw the news story about Michael Fallon having to resign because he put his hand on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s knee fifteen years ago, an incident which she says he has already apologised for and upset and distressed nobody, I thought to myself, This is some kind of crazy world we are now living in where a knee touching incident becomes a political scandal and causes a man to lose his job.

But I kept silent.

Because the internet is a scary place for people who voice an opinion.

I did discuss it with my wife, and she was in agreement with me. In fact, she reiterated what Julia Hartley-Brewer said and that calling the Michael Fallon incident an assault devalues the real assaults that some women have been through.

But then I woke up this morning and read the new allegations against Spacey, and new stories about Dustin Hoffman and Brett Ratner, and yes, I thought to myself, Am I the only man on this planet who isn’t a sexual predator?

Because that’s kind of how it feels at the moment.

I’m a firm believer that we, us humans, are slowly becoming better at being people. That we are becoming more enlightened, kinder, more tolerant. And despite the media’s persistence in bombarding us with a relentless tsunami of negativity, there is evidence to back that belief up.

But then I come across news like this and my faith in humanity dips a little.

Because that list of sexual predators just seems to grow and grow.

And then I looked back at the story about Spacey, in light of those new allegations, and I realised that Rapp was only fourteen years old at the time.

Fourteen.

I have a son who is fourteen.

My next thought was, Where the hell were his parents and why did they allow him to go to an adult party unaccompanied at that age? Rapp addresses that issue here.

Many of these (although not all) are historical incidents. And some people (but not all) learn and change and mature as time passes.

What was once deemed acceptable by society at large (and yes, I agree, a society and culture that has largely been created by and led by a male culture) is now no longer acceptable. And for good reason too.

But where does that leave us now? What do we do with the knowledge that so often in these abuse cases other people in power knew about what was happening, knew that there were sexual predators in their midst, and yet chose to keep silent?

(An almost institutional silence existed for decades at the BBC in the cases of Jimmy Savile and Stuart Hall, and Quentin Tarantino, whose entire film catalogue has been bankrolled by Harvey Weinstein, has ‘apologised’ for saying nothing about what he knew.)

And what can I do, the person who woke up this morning asking himself if he was the only man on this planet who isn’t a sexual predator?

Well, part of the answer lies in the question, doesn’t it?

Men, and in particular white men, are the leading players in this horror story. The powerful, the significant.

We need a new worldview in which diversity is at the heart of everything we do. Diversity of gender, culture, race, sexual orientation.

And we need it soon.

The post The Men’s Club appeared first on Ken Preston.

Nuns on the Run – The Greatest Movie Ever Made?

I took Thing One and Thing Two to see Jaws last Sunday. They’ve both seen it before, of course, on DVD. And I have seen it so many times I have lost count, but we’re easily talking three figure numbers here.

Seeing Jaws at the cinema again was an opportunity not to be missed, and for Thing One and Thing Two I considered this to be an essential part of their rites of passage from something something to something something something.

Yes, you got me, I’ve no idea what I am talking about there.

Anyway, the cinema was full, which I find always helps with atmosphere, and the film looks fantastic in its restored, digitised 4k version with all the bells and whistles and knobs on.

And it holds up well forty-two years on from its original release. What really struck me upon viewing it this time was the biggest difference between Jaws, released in 1975, and modern movies being the long takes in the older film contrasting with the hurried quick-fire editing of modern films.

Yes, I know, I’m turning into an old fart. But honestly, I get so confused sometimes with the rapid editing of the action in these modern films, which I am supposing is there to try and generate some excitement in the audience.

All it does for me is give me a headache.

Afterwards I asked the boys what they thought of it and of course they both said they loved it, which is sort of a required answer if I’m completely honest. Although, Thing Two did say that if he had remembered the scene where the head pops out of the hole in the boat he would have thought twice about seeing the film again.

[image error]

I love that film, I really do.

And I have already written about it here and here.

And if you have ever met me in the flesh than you have probably had to listen to me bang on about how it is the best film ever made in the history of man, or something.

Which it is, obviously.

And you can read why here and here, and why Mark Kermode thinks Jaws is ‘One of the truly great and lasting classics of American cinema’ here.

The surprising thing is though, not everyone agrees with me.

Someone I know thinks the best film ever made is Withnail and I. And someone else thinks it is Arrival. And Thing One and Two’s mother thinks the best film ever made is Nuns on the Run.

No, seriously. She does.

Of course what we’re all saying is, ‘this film is my favourite film.’

Which is very different to saying this film is the greatest film ever made.

And we are all products of our time and place of birth, of our upbringing and our exposure to literature and art. In other words, we all bring our own baggage to the movie theatre or the television screen, which then filters our appreciation of the film we are watching. And so the argument for the greatest movie ever made will go on and on, amongst film critics, amongst film fans and geeks.

Except for when it comes to Jaws.

Because Jaws is the greatest film ever made.

Obviously.

 

The post Nuns on the Run – The Greatest Movie Ever Made? appeared first on Ken Preston.

Last Sunday the Zombie Apocalypse Arrived

Last Sunday afternoon, Zombies invaded my hometown of Stourbridge. To be fair, there had been a few weeks’ worth of warning. Posters had been up in our local quirky, coolest venue in town, Claptrap, asking for zombie volunteers for a music video shoot. But still, if you weren’t in the know, it must have come as quite a shock when the zombies actually arrived.

[image error]

Being the opportunist that I am, I took the . . . erm . . . opportunity of a bunch of zombies hanging around town to grab myself a new author profile photograph. For a long time now I have wanted to recreate the Dawn of the Dead publicity shot of director George Romero standing amongst a shambling horde of rotting dead, the director gazing up into the camera as though there was nothing wrong.

The trouble is, you can never find a ragtag band of zombies when you need one.

Except there are other days when you can.

[image error]

The video shoot was for Ian Passey of The Humdrum Express, and he was very generous in letting me pinch a few minutes of his valuable time. After all, he did all the hard work of setting this up and I just piggybacked on it in that opportunistic way I mentioned earlier. I did hang around and help out holding back traffic later on when the zombies left Claptrap and invaded Stourbridge.

Health and Safety even applies to zombies, don’t you know?

Anyway, here I am addressing the assembled horde of zombies and looking like I know what I’m talking about, whilst Ian stands in the background looking on and Nick J Townsend, who was filming and editing the video, gets ready to take my photograph.

[image error]

And here is the finished photograph which, I have to say, I am very pleased with.

[image error]

Thanks Ian and Nick!

The post Last Sunday the Zombie Apocalypse Arrived appeared first on Ken Preston.