Jonathan Pinnock's Blog, page 11
April 14, 2016
Spilling Cocoa
I may come to regret this. I’ve just set up my first-ever magazine. It’s called Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis and it’s open for submissions now. Go and have a look. Submit. Please.
April 4, 2016
Film Review: VICTORIA
On paper, this sounded amazing. A high-adrenaline heist thriller shot in a single take on the early morning streets of Berlin. No cuts, no trickery, just one long hand-held take. I love a narrative gimmick, me, and this sounded right up my street. Here’s the trailer. Fun, eh?
I should have been warned. Last time I fell for this kind of thing, I wasted an hour and a half of my life watching “Russian Ark”, which is a fabulously glitzy single-take ramble through the rooms of the Winter Palace of the Hermitage Museum. Totally spectacular and technically brilliant, but (for me at any rate) it lost the plot, along with my attention, about halfway round. It became far more entertaining to wonder about all the frantic scurrying around there must have been going on behind the scenes.
The thing is, gimmicks are great fun, but if that’s all there is, the story fails to resonate. The main reason why Pixar were successful from the off wasn’t just that they produced the first-ever full-length computer-animated film. It was that they coupled their technical brilliance with a terrific story, and it’s the story that ultimately lingers on. The clue’s in the title of their first feature, “Toy Story”. It’s technology (toys) and narrative (story) working together. I’m really looking forward to putting that into a PowerPoint presentation one day, BTW.
“Victoria” is, despite the hype, not a great film. For me (again), while it was technically clever, it didn’t work at all as a story. However, it didn’t work at all in quite an interesting way, because not only did the gimmick fail to serve the story – it actually wrecked it completely.
Now from this point on there will be spoilers, so I’ll make a break and then continue.
Still here? Good.
Right, the premise of the story is that a young Spanish girl (Victoria) alone in Berlin hooks up with a bunch of four dodgy blokes and ends up driving a stolen van for them when they take part in a hurriedly-organised armed raid on a bank. This is set up by a proper hardcore villain who did some favours for one of the four (Boxer) while he was in prison. Obviously this all goes horribly wrong, and we watch how it ultimately plays out (basically, all but one of the four die and she herself gets off scot free). This takes place over a period of roughly two and a half hours.
I can see you asking the first question, which is why in God’s name does this girl end up getting involved in all this? And this is where the main problem arises, because the film needs to spend a lot of effort showing us her motivation. So, for example, as the film opens, she is dancing wildly in a club on her own, she goes to the bar, downs a shot of Schnapps in one and offers to buy one for the barman. However, he fails to show any interest in her, so she gets on her bike and starts to cycle home. Therefore we have established quite quickly that she is lonely and vulnerable. So far so good.
Getting her credibly involved with this bunch of losers is trickier. We meet them as she leaves the club. They have no money and are being refused entrance. One of them (Sonne) starts hitting on her in the way that men in movies always hit on young, lonely, vulnerable, drunk girls and she responds in the way that young, lonely, vulnerable, drunk girls always do in movies, by developing a bad case of the nervous giggles and playing along with whatever japes he gets up to – rather than, say, waving a can of pepper spray at him and saying that if he doesn’t back off, he will get a face full.
Anyway, the four are celebrating the birthday of one of them, Fuß (who is already completely paralytic) and they and Victoria begin hanging out, stealing some bottles of beer from an all-night store whose owner is fast asleep being the counter (thus usefully, I suppose, showing that Victoria is not above a bit of petty thievery herself) and climbing out onto the roof of a block of flats to drink it. Then Victoria says she has to go as she has to open the café where she works in a couple of hours, and Sonne offers to see her there. She agrees to him coming with her.
At the café, they flirt a bit more, including a splendidly daft bit where Victoria turns out to be a failed classical piano player (cue more angst from her and words of comfort from Sonne) and then at last the tempo begins to ramp up a bit when Boxer turns up to say that his villain chum is demanding that they do the bank job straight away. The four blokes disappear in a stolen van. However, they reappear soon afterwards because Fuß is now throwing up everywhere and can’t take part in the heist. They need a driver and Sonne asks Victoria if she’ll do it. UNBELIEVABLY, she agrees, although surely if she’s that keen on him, she can arrange to see him some other time soon anyway? However, AT LONG BLOODY LAST WE ARE FINALLY OFF.
We are now ROUGHLY AN HOUR into the film. I saw the trailer. I read the reviews. I was promised a high-adrenaline heist thriller. IT IS ONLY JUST STARTING. I know WHY it is only just starting, because they had to spend the last hour preparing Victoria for saying yes to joining them on this stupid mission BUT TO BE HONEST I’M STILL NOT SURE I’M EVEN BUYING THAT.
A thriller where the time sags is not a good thing, and one that doesn’t keep you asking questions is an even worse thing. And that’s the second big problem with this film. Because of the real-time narrative, it has to keep setting everything up before it happens. There are, of course, no flashbacks. There are no dangling questions. And the thing is, if you’re not providing the questions for the audience to ask, they’ll think of a few themselves. Such as, why on earth has Mr Big decided to call them together and prepare them for this heist literally a quarter of an hour before it takes place? Is he even more of an idiot than they are?
Also, didn’t they leave Fuß in the café? So after the raid and the brief interlude tiresomely celebrating in the club, why do they go back to the now-abandoned getaway van to try to retrieve him? (I was really confused about this.)
And that baby that Sonne and Victoria steal as cover for their escape – it’s a bit quiet, isn’t it? Also, how come no-one spots them abandoning it in a shopfront? And does it get reunited with its parents? (I was really quite uneasy about this.)
How come they manage to flag a taxi down in the middle of an area subject to total police lock-down?
And when they take refuge in a posh hotel at what I assume was around 7am, why isn’t the lobby full of businessmen checking out and people going to breakfast? Why is it empty apart from one single receptionist?
If I’d had been provided with a load of other questions to occupy myself with, I wouldn’t have started asking these until much, much later. But the only question the film was actually offering me instead was “Are these people going to get away with it?” and to be honest, I couldn’t have given a monkey’s about any of the blokes and I wasn’t even too sure about Victoria herself. And even then, when Sonne is about to expire in the hotel suite, he actually tells Victoria to take the money and go, because no-one knows who she is. Which basically tells us exactly what how she’s going to get away with it, thus removing the need for that question. And sure enough, that’s precisely what she does. The only tension involved in the final scene was from me asking MY final question, which was “Why for God’s sake doesn’t she clean Sonne’s blood off herself before she walks out into the street – isn’t someone going to notice?”
So, yes, this film annoyed me. I was so looking forward to it. To be fair, some of it was actually pretty good. I liked the generally scuzzy feel to it and the realistic dialogue. Even when the guy playing Sonne fluffed his lines about halfway through (saying “Hotel” instead of “Café”), it seemed like he was just being naturalistic rather than making a small mistake that would entail going through the whole thing again another day (then again, I thought all of that while watching the movie – I shouldn’t have had time to). And the ramshackle nature of the heist was endearing – I liked the fact that they’d managed to steal a van with a door that didn’t work properly, and I enjoyed the moment when Victoria managed to stall it at the exact moment when they’d gone in to carry out the raid.
But that wasn’t enough, really. It just didn’t thrill me. I suppose what I was expecting was something like this stupidly violent Russian music video (ignore the dubious choice of cover shot):
There’s more story crammed into those five minutes than in the whole two and a half hours of “Victoria”. The same director’s got a whole full-length film, “Hardcore Henry”, in a similar style coming out later on this year. Now that could be something. Still, I’m not building my hopes up this time.
April 1, 2016
Thresholds Feature Writing Shortlist
Well, then. I seem to have made it through to the next stage. This is all rather splendid, because it means that whatever happens, my piece will be published on the Thresholds website. It also means that whatever happens, I’ll win something. I’d completely forgotten there were prizes for all the shortlistees, and to be honest, that stack of books is almost enough to make me hope I don’t win either of the big prizes. Almost, but not quite.
In other news, my 2009 story “Hidden Shallows” was one of managing editor Camille Gooderham Campbell’s picks from the Every Day Fiction archives. In case you’re interested, here’s the Dashipedia entry about how it came into being. (What, you mean you’ve never looked at Dashipedia? Took me bloody ages, that did. Did George Saunders bother doing something like that for “Tenth of December”? Did he hell.)
March 29, 2016
Citations and Erdős Numbers
I’m suffering from a cold today so I’ve given myself permission to do something silly. I was recently Googling my name (don’t tell me you don’t do that, because I won’t believe you) and I thought I’d have some fun and try Google Scholar instead. It turns out that my work has been cited in some pretty hardcore places, so I’ve added a couple of new pages to this site, just to show off.
Here’s where my software books have been cited. (Actually, at the moment, it’s just the one book – there are too many for the collaborative ones.)
And here’s where Mrs Darcy versus the Aliens has been cited. Yes, it really has. Amazing world we live in, eh?
Of course, I began to wonder if these citations might point towards me having an Erdős Number. Because, obviously, this is something that everyone should aspire to. However, it turns out that the online tools to check collaboration distance (try this one if you want some fun) sometimes get a bit confused. I got quite excited when a couple of my Wrox co-authors appeared to have an Erdős number, only to find that they’d swapped places with someone with a similar name halfway along the chain. In any case, it turns out that collaboration on an elementary textbook doesn’t really count, although I have to say I’m quite prepared to argue the toss about the Wrox books being elementary if I ever actually do find a collaborator who’s made it all the way. “Erdős Number 5″ would look massively cool in my Twitter profile.
March 21, 2016
Thresholds Feature Writing Longlist
Quiet here, isn’t it? The reasons for my silence are not entirely unrelated to the terror alluded to in my previous post, which has induced one of my (thankfully quite rare) episodes of frozen brain. Anyway, I had some good news today from the people who run the excellent Thresholds annual feature-writing competition. Last year I failed to make the longlist, although they did like my contribution sufficiently to subsequently publish it. This year I have gone at least one better. There are, however, fourteen very talented writers (including several online chums) still between me and that £500, so I’m not counting my chickens quite yet. Instead, I’ll just be adding it to the list of things to worry about…
February 12, 2016
The Terror of the Finished Manuscript
Yesterday morning I made the last couple of tweaks to the first complete draft of my new book and I am now in a state of high anxiety, a state that I anticipate being in for the next few months at the very least. There’s a lot said about the terror of the blank page, although I’ve never really found this an issue. The question has never been “what on earth do I write?” but “which of the many things buzzing around my head do I want to pick?”
The real terror, to my mind, is the terror of the finished manuscript. What if the thing I’ve spent over a year of my life on turns out to be shit? The MA programme at Bath Spa was a wonderful safe place to try out stuff without fear of embarrassment, but I’m now about to start the long process of sending this thing out into the real world. Here’s a chronological list of things that could go wrong (all of which I am envisaging right now):
Beta readers hate it – since these are friends and family, this could be especially awkward
No agent will touch it
An agent will take it on but won’t be able to sell it
It’ll get sold to a rubbish publisher
It’ll get published and ignored
It’ll get published and reviewed badly
No-one will buy it
People will buy it but will start looking at me in a funny way
And that’s just the first few that came into my head.
The worst of it all is that I suspect it doesn’t get any easier. Why am I doing this again?
February 4, 2016
Café Writers Poetry Competition Commendation
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I still don’t really understand poetry. With fiction, I can read most things and have a decent stab at working out what they’re going on about, however opaque or experimental. But there is a sizeable body of poetry that eludes me completely, and I’m forced into a position where the best I can say is that sometimes I like what I read and sometimes I don’t. I really don’t feel I’m that much above the level of understanding shown in this hilarious exchange on the York Literature Festival / YorkMix poetry competition.
Which is an odd way of introducing the fact that I’ve just won a commended prize in the latest Café Writers competition – one of a dozen prizewinners chosen out of almost 2000. Yes, you read that right. 2000. I still can’t really get my head round it. It’s actually the best competition result I’ve had in years, whether fiction or poetry, and yet I still don’t really feel I know what I’m doing.
The awful truth is that I haven’t actually written a poem for over a year. There are good reasons for this – I’ve been concentrating on my current novel, for one thing – but it still means I feel like a bit of a fraud. I like writing poetry, though, and I’m sure I’ll go back to it soon once the first phase of novel edits are done. And maybe I’ll understand it a bit better one day so I begin to feel like a proper poet.
Oh, and I do like the published prizewinners, by the way – especially ‘Living in Trap Street’, which is wonderful. Take a look.
January 31, 2016
Fish Off The Hook
Excellent news. The people at Fish have sorted out the problem with my entry. The problem – as far as I can make out – seems to have been a twofold one.
First of all, there definitely seems to be some kind of issue with the “buy one entry, get one half price” offer. I know of at least one other person who has had a similar problem (although, for reasons related to the second part of the problem, they got their entry fixed a lot quicker than mine). The good news is that they appear to be going through all the “unpaid” entries by hand and sorting them out. (I don’t envy them having to do that.) However, if you have taken advantage of this offer, it might be worth checking your author page to see what the status of the second one is.
The second part of the problem was to do with my having two author accounts and e-mailing them from the address that was tied to the wrong one. For some reason, they don’t seem to be able to look up entries by using the name of the account (which I was giving them), or indeed by using the number of the entry (which I was also giving them). They can only look them up by using the e-mail address, which of course was the only piece of information that I was (implicitly) giving them that was wrong. The result of which was that I appeared to be banging on about a completely unrelated entry that was (a) paid for, (b) for a different competition and (c) several years old. They almost certainly assumed I was some kind of crank.
Many thanks to the people at Fish and also to those who helped behind the scenes.
The only thing is, after all that, I’m really not sure if the entry’s any good. But I guess it’s the principle that counts.
January 27, 2016
The One That Got Away
Attention short story writers! Has anyone else had problems with their entries for the Fish competition this year? Or is it just me?
This is what happened to me.
I’m a pretty regular entrant for the Fish competitions. They’re pricey, but there’s potentially a fair bit of kudos to be had if you get into the winners’ enclosure. I haven’t, as it happens (and chances are I won’t in the future once this post has gone live) but I have been shortlisted for the poetry competition in 2014, the flash fiction one in 2008 and the full length short story one in 2009. Long shortlists, but close enough to make it think it might be worth carrying on entering.
On November 30th of last year, I uploaded two entries for the short story prize, noting that whereas the price for one entry was €20, the price for two was €30. I duly paid my €30 via PayPal. However, I didn’t receive any confirmation that my stories had been entered, so I went to look at my author page on their website, where it appeared that only one of the stories had actually been entered. The other one was flagged as “unpaid”.
So I wrote to Fish via their online form:
I just entered a couple of stories for the short story prize and paid €30 (order ID XXXXX). However, only the first one is showing up as being “paid”. Can you reassure me that both will be entered into the competition?
I also mentioned underneath my sign-off that my user account was JonPin. Remember this, because it will be important later.
On December 1st, I got this message back:
You have uploaded and paid for one Flash Fiction entry.
To upload more, simply repeat the entry process.
Let me know if I can help in any way.
Huh?
This is what I wrote back:
I hope not! If you take a look at my account, you’ll see that I uploaded and paid for two short stories (entry ids SS15/YYYYY and SS15/ZZZZZ). I paid €30 for this (€20 for the first one and €10 for the second one). However, only SS 15/YYYYY is marked as having status “Marked”. SS 15/ZZZZZ is marked as having status “Unpaid”. I hope this doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been entered.
I then got a generic e-mail from the “Fish Publishing Team”:
We noticed you are experiencing difficulty uploading one or more entries to the Short Story competition.
Entry lines have been extended until December 3rd at mid-night GMT, to assist you with any technical difficulties you may have encountered.
Let us know if we can help in any way.
To which I responded thus:
No problem in uploading at all. The story is there and, crucially, paid for. The problem is, as I’ve already reported to you, it’s showing up as “Unpaid”. So extending the deadline isn’t going to do me any good, I’m afraid.
Their response on December 2nd was not entirely helpful:
Your entry is showing up as paid from this end.
So I replied with this:
Sorry to be pedantic, but do you mean that BOTH of my entries are showing up as paid? Because SS15/ZZZZZ is still showing up as unpaid.
They replied with this:
Yes, with the e-mail address: [redacted 1] there is one entry. Do you have another account set up with a different e-mail address?
which at least explained some of the confusion. It turned out that I had a zombie author account (jonpinnock) at Fish containing a single one page story entry from 2013 which was tied to the e-mail address [redacted 1]. My main author account was tied to a different e-mail address, [redacted 2].
Unfortunately, the people at Fish had assumed that because I was e-mailing from [redacted 1], I was referring to the zombie account, despite (a) the fact that I’d told them I was specifically referring to the user account JonPin, (b) the only story in the jonpinnock account was one from 2013 and (c) none of the short story identifiers I’d given them matched up with the zombie account.
I thought I could clear things up by sending them, on December 3rd, a couple of screenshots from JonPin:
Please find attached two screenshots (user JonPin). The first is from my payment screen. As you can see, I’ve paid for TWO entries, the first at €20, the second at the discounted price of €10.
[screenshot showing entry ID XXXXX with two stories, YYYYY at €20 and ZZZZZ at €10]
The second screenshot is from my entries screen, where it shows the second entry as “Unpaid”.
[screenshot showing YYYYY flagged as “marked” and ZZZZZ flagged as “unpaid”]
Please can you sort this out?
There was no reply to this, so on December 7th, I e-mailed them again:
I was just wondering if you’d got any closer to resolving this. It’s still showing exactly the same – both paid for, but only one marked as such. The account name is JonPin, and I think it’s tied to account [redacted 2].
There was still no reply from Fish, so on December 17th, I e-mailed them again:
This still doesn’t seem to have been resolved. I just logged in again as user JonPin and the situation is exactly as I reported before: two entries to the short story competition paid for, but only one of them marked as such. Can you please either confirm that both have indeed been entered (and marked as such) or refund the fee for the second entry, €10.
Which seemed fair enough.
However, there was still no response from Fish and to be honest I got caught up in Christmas and other stuff and didn’t chase it any further. But then on January 25th, a stray neuron fired at Fish HQ and the following e-mail popped into my inbox:
From this end, you have uploaded one entry and paid for it and there is no sign of another entry.
What competition did you enter it to? Can you please forward a copy of your PayPal receipt?
Apologies for any inconvenience.
Gritting my teeth, I responded with a screenshot of my PayPal receipt:
I entered two stories (SS15/YYYYY and SS15/ZZZZZ) into the Short Story Competition. I’m attaching my PayPal receipt which clearly shows that I paid €30, i.e.€20 for the first one and then the discounted price €10 for the second.
I hope it isn’t too late to sort this out.
There was no response to this. So yesterday (January 26th) I thought I’d nudge them along once more in case they were still confused about what I was talking about:
I’m attaching a picture of part of my author page (JonPin). As you can see, I have one entry flagged as marked and one flagged as unpaid. Can you please either (1) reassure me that the “unpaid” one (which, as we all know, has actually been paid for) has been entered and marked or (2) refund me the €10 for my second entry.
What worries me is that this suggests there is a problem with your entry system and I’m sure there must be many others in the same situation.
So far I have had no response to this at all.
Anyone else taken advantage of the €30 two-story discount? If so, have both your stories been entered? Have you checked?
January 21, 2016
Work Still In Progress
I had a plan. I was going to finish this novel by the end of 2015. Then I was going to give it a quick whizz through and send it out to a couple of trusted beta readers so I could have it ready to chuck out into the world some time in the first quarter of this year.
Then December came along with all that December brings with it and I ended up not writing a word between the end of November and the beginning of January. And the problem was that I’d left my main character on the cusp of the BIG REVEAL which would explain pretty much everything that had happened in the rest of the book.
This was a problem because during December, when I wasn’t able to find the time to sit down and write, I was constantly going over the big reveal in my head and planning how it was going to unfold. Over and over again. The result of this was that by the time I sat down to write it, it already felt as if the big reveal had been going on for a month and I was frankly bored of the whole thing. I ended up with a horrible, clunky mess.
I guess it all comes of not plotting. I somehow imagined with this book that at some point I’d sit down and work out what was going to happen and why, but somehow I never actually did. I raised this with my tutor at Bath Spa and, to my considerable surprise, she told me that if I felt comfortable with not plotting, I didn’t actually need to. So I didn’t. And I was very pleased to find out recently that Ian Rankin feels exactly the same way (and, it turns out, for much the same reasons).
The downside of not plotting is that you tend to end up with a massive tangle of stuff to explain at the end. This is really good if your aim is to confuse the reader, which I guess is the case in the kind of mystery novel I’m working on. However, the time has to come when you do have to sort it out, but – and here’s the tricky bit – without looking as if you’re sorting it out. I suppose it’s analogous to the problem with exposition at the start of a novel. It’s probably necessary for you to explain, for example, that your characters have three arms, are the size of ants and live on a square planet called Zöbsqurtz, but do you let that emerge during the course of a (possibly rather stilted) piece of dialogue or do you just come out and just say it? Or do you incorporate some kind of device like Douglas Adam’s Hitch Hiker’s Guide?
Anyway, I ended up disposing of the large clunky explanatory mess (and one entire character, who now no longer needs to make an appearance at all) and I’ve now got a slightly tighter, slightly less clunky explanatory mess. The really good thing is that I’m happy enough with it to put it to one side and continue on to the spectacular final scene, which I’m enjoying a LOT more.
85000 words down, maybe 5000 to go. Let’s say we’ll do this by the end of January, right?
You’re on.