Ross Lawhead's Blog, page 11

When Orson Welles Met H G Wells

I can’t remember how I ended up with this audio clip, but I’ve been carrying it around from computer to computer for some time, and I don’t remember ever listening to it until this weekend. It certainly deserves to be remembered and reflected on — it is a recording of a radio meeting between Orson Welles, the director and star of the then-recent radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and H G Wells, the British Science Fiction author who wrote the original book.

According to online sources, the meeting took place in 1940. Orson Welles was an energetic twenty-five year-old, and H G Wells was a very respectable seventy-four. There was almost fifty years between them both. Each were in San Antonio for separate engagements and a radio affiliate took the opportunity of having them meet, and broadcasting a short dialogue between them. The War of the Worlds radio play had been broadcast two years earlier, and although much has been written of late minimizing the furor caused by people taking the broadcast seriously, there is no doubt that the show caused a sensation. The extent of its effects is discussed by the two men. At the end, Wells aids Welles in giving a ‘plug’ to a new movie that is described as having “many innovative camera techniques” — Citizen Kane. There had been war in Europe for nearly a year, and that is spoken of,  as well as the work The Shape of Things To Come, which predicted that war seven years earlier, to an accuracy of four months.

The audio file is below to play or download, and a transcript follows.

Download: “When Orson Welles met H G Wells”

TRANSCRIPT:

HOST:  Good evening ladies and gentlemen, this is Charles C Shaw speaking. KTSA is honored this evening by the presence in our studios of two great men: the world famous H G Wells, world famous British historian, author, and student of world affairs; and Mr Orson Welles, the genius of stage, screen, and radio. This is the first time that Mr H G Wells and Mr Orson Wells have appeared together. In fact, they met for the first time only yesterday in San Antonio. But this is not the first time that their names have been linked. Two years ago, Mr Orson Welles adapted Mr H G Wells’ book The War of the Worlds for radio purposes. And you know the rest. Revising the story somewhat, Mr Orson Welles depicted an invasion of the United States by men from Mars. Although he explained it numerous times during the program that it was fictitious, the country at large was almost frightened out of its wits. Men called radio stations offering to enlist, others were panic-striken. The realization, frightening though it was, was a tribute to Mr Orson  Welles’ genius. And thus the name of “Wells”, Mr H G W – E – L – L – S, and Orson W – E – L – L – E – S became linked. H G Wells, in the opinion of many, is the world’s most famous man of letters. He has come to San Antonio to address the United States Brewer’s Association. And Mr Orson Welles is here for a town forum address Wednesday. In this meeting of great minds, I feel rather inconspicuous. And the less I have to say, the better you listeners will like it. But first, my I interest you gentlemen in a discussion of Mr Orson Welles’ broadcast of Mr H G Wells’ book The War of the Worlds.

WELLES: Are you turning the meeting over to us, sir?

HOST: I am.  (laughter)

WELLS: He’s turning it over to us. Well, I’ve had a, uh, series of the most delightful experiences since I’ve come to America, but the best thing that has happened so far is  meeting my little namesake here, Orson. I find him the most delightful carrier — of my name and also an extra ‘E’ which I hope he’ll drop soon.. (laughter) … seeing no sense in it. And I’ve known his work before he made this sensational Halloween spree. Are you sure there was such a panic in America or wasn’t it pure Halloween fun?

WELLES: I think that’s the nicest thing that a man from England could say about the men from Mars.  Mr Hitler made a good deal of sport of it, you know, and actually spoke of it in the great Munich speech. And there were floats in Nazi parade showing –

WELLS: He hadn’t much else to say.

WELLES: That’s right!  (laughter) And it’s supposed to show the corrupt condition and decadent state of affairs in democracies that The War of the Worlds went over as nice as it did. I think it’s very nice of Mr Welles to say that not only I didn’t mean it, but the American people didn’t mean it.

WELLS:  That was our impression in England we had articles about it and people said had  they not heard of Halloween in America when everyone pretends to see ghosts?

HOST:  Well, there was some excitement caused. I really can’t belittle the amount that was caused, but I think people got over it very quickly.

WELLES:  What kind of excitement? Mr H G Wells wants to know if the excitement  wasn’t the same kind of excitement we extract from a practical joke in which someone puts a sheet over their head and says “boo!” I don’ think that anybody believes  that that individual is a ghost, but we do scream and yell and rush down the hall. And that’s just about what happened.

HOST: That’s a very excellent description.

WELLS: You aren’t serious in America yet. You haven’t the war right under your chins, and the consequence is that you can still play with ideas of terror and conflict.

HOST: Do you think that’s good or bad?

WELLS: It’s the natural thing to do until you’re right up against it.

WELLES:  Until it ceases to be a game.

WELLS: When  it ceases to be a game.

HOST: Now here’s a thought: Mr H G Wells’  writings were termed “fantastic” and a few years ago, well might they have been conceived such. The Shape of Things to Come, which told of a long internecine war was such a fantasy. But Mr Orson Welles, do you think it’s so fantastic in light of today’s events?

WELLES: It’s certainly not so fantastic. And the one question that Mr Wells has spoken of not only in The Shape of Things to Come, but has hinted at or directly prophesied such a s state of affairs following a wasting war and returning to a feudalism that the world would find itself in again. Today in Mr Wells’ lecture, he said quite the most interesting thing that I’ve heard in a long time. He said that he commenced, just recently, why he thought there was any reason why mankind should so emulate the phoenix and  should so get itself out of its mess. He proposed a couple of solutions but he did admit that there was a possible excuse for a gloomy point of view,. And it would be good to be realistic about it and not to dismiss the gloomy point of view any more. Perhaps the time had come to look ahead since the future — Mr Wells’ future, which we’ve always adored — is suddenly upon us. We are living right now in that famous H G Wells future, which we all knew about.

WELLS: And before we get away from the microphone, tell me about this film of yours that you’ve been producing. You’re producer, aren’t you … ?

WELLES: That’s right.

WELLS:  … Art director, you’re everything! What’s the film called?

WELLES: It’s called Citizen Kane. 

WELLS: “Citizen Kane“, yes. Not C – A – I – N, but –

WELLES: No, K – A – N – E. And this is of course the kindest, the most gracious possible thing to do, Mr Wells is making it possible for me to do what in America is spoken of as a “plug”. (Laughter) He understands a fine old American custom –

WELLS: I don’t understand these words, yes.

WELLES: You understand the value. Mr Wells wants me to tell you that I have made a motion picture and he’s kind enough to ask me a leading question concerning it.

WELLS: I am looking forward to it.

WELLES: You are very kind, sir. It’s a new sort of motion picture with a new method of presentation, and a few new technical experiments. A few new methods of telling a picture, not only from the point of view of writing, but of showing it.

WELLS: If I don’t  misunderstand you completely, I understand there will be a lot of jolly good new noises in it. (Laughter)

WELLES: I hope so!  I think jolly good new noises are what the motion pictures could stand, could well afford these days. I hope you’re right, and I hope there are some jolly good new noises, I can think of nothing more desirable in motion pictures. I’m all for some jolly good new noises.

Guest Blog – Shawn Small Stories

The Virtues of Not Going on a Pilgrimage

First of all, I love to travel, as I’m sure that most of us who read Shawn’s blog do. I took my first Wonder Voyage with him this summer. It was an enriching, nourishing experience for my soul and a stimulant for my mind and imagination. Travelling is great, and it’s best to do it with the right mindset and philosophical approach, and for many of us it’s what keeps us alive in an exciting, wide-eyed world of wonder.

But what do you do if you have the pilgrim’s itch and you just can’t travel?

Click here to open the rest of the post on Shawn Small’s blog.

Everything Has A Cost

“Write the book that you want to write. You don’t get the chance to tell people what the book you might have written would be.”

That’s the advice that came from my parents more than once while I was writing Book 2, and it’s one of the things that I kept at the front of my mind throughout. If there was anything that I learnt this time around, it was that. And I can truly say, with hand on heart, that I have written the book that I wanted, but it was far — very very oh so far — from easy.

Last week I signed what my publisher calls a “Manuscript Verification Form”, which is a short document stating that I, the author, will not make any more significant changes to my book. I signed it hurriedly and gratefully, and my editor was no less grateful to have it signed. We were both relieved that it was done, I think (barring the final proof edits). When I think about all I went through since I started this book, it feels like it happened to someone else, a long time ago. Already my mind is distancing itself from the experience. Here’s a little of what I went through while writing this book:

 I had two part-time jobs. As a first-time writer, I can’t yet support myself fully on my writing. When I started book two, I was working at a supermarket, doing the evening shift which started at 3pm and finished at 11pm. I would come home, eat, catch up on the Mentalist or Doctor Who and then write from midnight to 5am, and then sleep from then until noon. It was only three days a week (Thu-Sat), but it was still brutal. Once I worked a Sunday, and it was pure chaos. I negotiated a break for a couple months and never went back because that was when I found job #2: child-minding for some friends of mine. I look after two boys every day for about five hours; it is more rewarding work and the clients are easier to deal with, even though I have to change them. Would that supermarket patrons had the maturity and composure of two year-olds.
A very close friend of mine died. She was my housemate for over two years and was a friend that I could geek out about Buffy, Firefly, Terry Pratchett, and Battlestar Galactica. We had an almost perfectly synched TV routine and she would laugh as I made fun on the commercials or yelled at the news. One wet morning in October she got hit by a truck and died within minutes. The last time I saw her was to give her a signed copy of my first book, and to lend her a few seasons of The Big Bang Theory.
I moved house twice. (I’m currently doing so again, but book 2 is finished, so this one counts in book 3′s column.)
One of my cousins died. We hadn’t seen each other for years, and rarely communicated, but you always have a special place in your heart for someone who used to arrange games and activities for you when you were young. Someone who would run around the house in their Wonder Woman underwear, while you ran around in your Superman pajamas.
I fell in love and got engaged.

Now just about all of that could properly be called the cost of living, not the cost of following my art, but that cost me something too. I forced myself to make a lot of hard decisions while writing the book, which resulted in cutting (at the lowest estimate) about 30,000 words. I still remember the day I decided to cut almost 12,000 words (about two of my long chapters). That was nearly a month’s work, and it was good (really good) stuff, but it didn’t involve the main characters, or the central plot, and so it had to go. I made a lot of those sorts of decisions as I went along, and for the last third of the book I couldn’t tell, on a given day, if I would be editing or writing or rewriting.

Some sections took a lot more work than others. There are about seven or eight scenes that take place in the past, at different points between the 10th and the 20th Centuries, and I had to put a good couple days’ research just into finding out about the time and the characters. I also used eight different languages in this book — Modern English, Old English, Scots Gaelic, Manx, Cornish, Latin, Norman French, and Modern German — and each of those (to varying extents) had to be studied and grappled with.

The challenges weren’t all self-imposed. After I sent the editor the first draft of the book (actually the sixth draft I’d created), we started discussing the story and some of the elements that didn’t work so well and we decided that we needed to rewrite the first chapter, rewrite the last two chapters, and add another main character. It took me two more drafts to really pin all that down.

All this editing and rewriting got me into pretty hot water with my publisher when I started missing my deadlines.  They’ve got a business to run, and if they have no books, they have no money coming in. They were also thinking of you guys, the readers, who are eagerly awaiting the second book in the series and want to get it into your hot little hands as quickly as possible before you start looking for your fix elsewhere. When the pressure on me was at its greatest, I picked up some weird stress disease which made the skin around my eyes crack and flake off — at time it literally looked as if I were crying blood.

All of this isn’t really a play for sympathy, it’s really just to give you a peek behind the curtain and see that it isn’t all fun and games. And it also explains to anyone who has said to me “it’s alright for you, at least you’re doing what you love” why I get a sort of haunted, distracted look on my face. Because although I do love it and it fulfills and completes me, it is devilishly hard (at least it is the way I do it), and it does come at a personal cost.

But still, throughout I was thinking “write the book you want to write… write the book you want to write…” and through it all — the joy, the sorrow, the pain, the fun days and the difficult phonecalls — I can say that I did. If even shedding blood was demanded of me to make A Hero’s Throne a better book, then I did it, and with a glad heart.

A Hero’s Throne – Cover Preview

Coming this Winter!

The Realms Thereunder (1940s Timewarp Edition)

I made this just as a bit of silly fun because I love the iconism of the early Penguin book covers. I made it by scanning a couple of the old books that I own and then just moved and copied the type around.

Between the REALMS

People always want to know where writers get their ideas from. Most writers are accutely evasive about their answers. However, I remember the exact instant I became inspired to write The Realms Thereunder with near crystal clarity, even after five years.

It was late January in the Bavarian Alps. My mother, against all probability and power of prediction, had taken a job at a castle that had been converted into a hotel/conference centre and I was visiting on an extended vacation. The !Hero project had just folded, leaving me ruinously in debt, both financially and emotionally, and I was looking for my next project, something that would help me put the pieces of my life back together, or as many of them as I could find.

The Pinzgau region of Austria is a kind of permanent borderland. The nearest airport was in Germany, and the mountain pass that led directly into Italy could be plainly seen to the south. It had a reputation for being a sort of cultural cul-de-sac. Outsiders could call it 'backward', but it would more accurate to call it 'ancient'. Bavaria, like Småland in Sweden, Devon in Britain, and the American 'Deep South' are all places I've had varying degrees of contact with, and they're all places where the inhabitants not only have a feeling for the history of their territory, but also a sense of continuity with it. They're places where the old ways are nearly forgotten because they were always thought too important to have to remember.

Going through a rough patch in my life – feeling in a spiritual wilderness, I entered the habit of taking morning walks in the nearby forest. The valleys between the winter Alps are places where the sun is only occasionally visible, even if it is able to penetrate the snow-heavy clouds. It was still too early for it to have risen above the mountain range, but the forest was bright with a diffused light that cast no shadows, but at the same time everything was in a shadow.

I would pick my paths along the deer trails of the forest that wound along crevices and fissures, between clearings, and through copses. Farm buildings and boundaries flitted in and out of view, but mostly it was a wilderness that didn't give the impression of being tamed so much as trapped – cornered, like an animal.

I had just taken a step downwards, into an attractive clearing, when I heard a low whistling sound – a sort of THRUMMM – and five enormous crows came whiffling through from the woods behind me and began circling the clearing, arcing and orbiting above my head. They made no sound, but the poetry and intricacy of their flights were like a symphony, movements rising and falling in intensity. I stood frozen, barely breathing, for about a minute and a half, and then they were gone, the dark forest instantly masking their forms as soon as they left the clearing.

And as they left, it seemed as if they left a hole in reality, a gap in the world. Maybe they were attracted to it, maybe they created it, but between the boughs and the branches of the trees, I could have convinced myself that I was looking into another world, and that just ten or twenty steps would take me past the threshold of this and into an obscured and wild otherworld.

It would be nice to say that I took those steps into a new land, but I didn't. I was terrified, and not ready to leave this one. I let the moment pass. The world turned, the neurons in my head started firing in their normal courses, and the path lengthened – the door closed. I went back to the castle and I didn't go looking for that place again.

But I'd been inspired. I knew the story I wanted to tell now. I wanted to tell of the magic of the borderlands, of the magic that existed in the places that are between places, of the people that are between people. I wanted to tell the story of the world behind this one, which was still just on the edge of memory, and nearly out of sight. The world that Pink Floyd's Comfotably Numb expresses it perfectly: "When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse/ Out of the corner of my eye./ I turned to look and it was gone,/ I cannot place my finger on it now,/ the child is gone, the dream is gone…"

The heroes of the book would be neither children nor adults. The characters they met would be neither helpful nor unhelpful, neither right nor wrong, and often neither dead nor alive. The quest they were sent on would neither be finished nor failed, and the evil, once they faced it, would not be wholly evil.

Those are the themes for Book 1, and I believe they are true, universal themes for us in our lives. There will be different themes and ideas for Book 2 and 3, but this was the story I had to tell first. All of us are born into incompletion, and we're searching for answers, clinging to connections. We pass through many borderlands in our lives, transition from person into person – and that's the story I needed to write first, and that's the story of The Realms Thereunder.

My Phone

My Phone

This is a picture of my phone. When I bought it it wasn't top of the range, but it was top of the middle range. I bought it mostly for the oyster-flipping-open-thingy feature, but it had a new internet searching feature and voice recognition technology. What it did not have was a colour screen or a camera — those were on the next model.

I've had my phone for over nine years. That's why it's so worn. I get pretty much the same reaction every time I show it to someone. "Oh, wow! That's so retro!"

I would question the use of the word "retro" as applied to something less than a decade in age. However, in the realm of technology, it does seem pretty ancient. The thing is, my phone isn't an affectation, it was one of the best on the market at the time and I paid £119 pounds for it. It's not a protest either. I'm not a ludite — I have two computers, a Kindle, an mp3 player, an X-box, a sleek digital camera, a 42 inch plasma TV, and a DAB radio. I appreciate technology, but I don't understand the need to constantly upgrade. Why does a "love of technology" just mean a "love of new technology"? Nothing that I buy gets replaced because it's old, it gets replaced because it breaks.

Sadly, my phone is broken now. Just about all of it still works, but the LCD screen is kaput. It's sad times. To know it was to laugh at it. I took good care of it. I stepped on it twice, but I didn't wash it like my last one. To many people, though, it was broken already, but it did everything that I needed a phone to do — call and text people. For everything else — games, pictures, movies, internet — I had something else that could do that. I couldn't think of any reason why I would want to change it other than if I wanted to look cool, which I didn't care about.

Also, I think there's an issue of responsibility here. We live in a time where we are conscious of how our food is grown, where it comes to us from, what additives are in them, how our clothes are made, the environmental cost that we pay for extracting oil from the earth, and the additional cost to the environment in using it… all the pitfalls of industry, except the human and environmental cost of making phones and computers. I can't remember ever reading an in depth article or news report on this topic. Information Technology is a massive business, and call me suspicious, but I think there's probably a reason for that.

Anyway, that's not why we're here. We're here to mourn the passing of something that I had with me almost every day, longer than any pet. I bought my phone in, if memory serves, April 2003. Let's look around the internet to see what was going on at that time. Oh, okay: Iraq had just been invaded, people were starting to get worried about this thing called "SARS", I'd just seen Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for the second time in the cinema, and was looking forward to the two Matrix sequels and Finding Nemo. The DaVinci Code had just been released (the book), and The Time Traveller's Wife, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would also be released that year. Brad Pitt was still married to Jennifer Aniston, George Bush jr was still in his first term of office, andthe TV show 'Friends' was still on air.

Well, it's been a long road. Goodbye, little buddy.

Book 2 Update

Click to enlarge

The Writer’s Toolkit #171 – Coping With Loss

The most frustrating thing you will most likely face as a writer is lost work. For whatever reason — you hit the wrong button, you removed the wrong cable, there was a software malfunction, something inside your computer went ‘pop’ and now there’s a bad smell and the screen won’t work — for whatever reason, you’ve lost your work. Whatever failsafes you usually have in place have been circumvented, and the stuff’s gone, man. It may be a few hours’ worth of work, it may be a day’s, it may be a week’s. For myself, I routinely delete a day’s worth of work accidentally every five years or so. If you keep playing the game, you’re going to get a bad roll every once in a while. It’s nothing to be ashamed about, it happens to the best of us.

 The question is — what do you do?

1. Don’t panic. You know where that leads to — tears and stress napping, that’s where.

2. Check your word processor’s options tab and see what its back-up system is. It may have been storing files automatically. If so, you can find the pathname to where that is.

2b. You may as well tick that little box that’s next to the words ‘back-up my work automatically’, now that you know about it.

3. Time to get down and dirty with your computer. Run a search for all the files that your computer has created/edited during the time you were working on the file. It may be in there.  Find an undelete program and scan your drive. Here’s a good free one: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ Talk to that guy you know who’s good with computers, he may have some helpful advice.

4. SPEND NO MORE THAN 1 HOUR ON STEP 3. Seriously, I’ve spent over a day exhausting every minuscule iota of hope in tracking my lost work down. Longer than it took to write it in the first place. And then I’ve lost two days of work. If you can’t find it after an hour, it’s gone. You lost the battle.

5.  Fix yourself a large drink. Quadruple espresso, a soup bowl of green tea and jasmine, three fingers of Scotch — whatever it is, name your poison. Bottoms up.

6.  Put on some loud music, put your head down, and WRITE. I actually lock my door as well. Remember all that frustration and inwardly directed anger? Time to roll that out. Write down everything you remember, in whatever order you remember it, as fast as you remember it. Don’t worry about getting it verbatim. Chances are, you’ll write it better the second time around anyway. You’ll find that it’s all pretty much still there, just follow the threads.

7. Learn from your mistake. Whatever it was that created the odd circumstances that led up to your work’s disappearance — fix that! Joining Dropbox is a good solution that would have helped me out today.

Now it’s a few hours later and you’re done, and still have about half a day to work in. Go take a small break and come back to it fresh, putting it all behind you. Congratulate yourself for handling the crisis in a capable fashion.

The Writer's Toolkit #171 – Coping With Loss

The most frustrating thing you will most likely face as a writer is lost work. For whatever reason — you hit the wrong button, you removed the wrong cable, there was a software malfunction, something inside your computer went 'pop' and now there's a bad smell and the screen won't work — for whatever reason, you've lost your work. Whatever failsafes you usually have in place have been circumvented, and the stuff's gone, man. It may be a few hours' worth of work, it may be a day's, it may be a week's. For myself, I routinely delete a day's worth of work accidentally every five years or so. If you keep playing the game, you're going to get a bad roll every once in a while. It's nothing to be ashamed about, it happens to the best of us.

 The question is — what do you do?

1. Don't panic. You know where that leads to — tears and stress napping, that's where.

2. Check your word processor's options tab and see what its back-up system is. It may have been storing files automatically. If so, you can find the pathname to where that is.

2b. You may as well tick that little box that's next to the words 'back-up my work automatically', now that you know about it.

3. Time to get down and dirty with your computer. Run a search for all the files that your computer has created/edited during the time you were working on the file. It may be in there.  Find an undelete program and scan your drive. Here's a good free one: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ Talk to that guy you know who's good with computers, he may have some helpful advice.

4. SPEND NO MORE THAN 1 HOUR ON STEP 3. Seriously, I've spent over a day exhausting every minuscule iota of hope in tracking my lost work down. Longer than it took to write it in the first place. And then I've lost two days of work. If you can't find it after an hour, it's gone. You lost the battle.

5.  Fix yourself a large drink. Quadruple espresso, a soup bowl of green tea and jasmine, three fingers of Scotch — whatever it is, name your poison. Bottoms up.

6.  Put on some loud music, put your head down, and WRITE. I actually lock my door as well. Remember all that frustration and inwardly directed anger? Time to roll that out. Write down everything you remember, in whatever order you remember it, as fast as you remember it. Don't worry about getting it verbatim. Chances are, you'll write it better the second time around anyway. You'll find that it's all pretty much still there, just follow the threads.

7. Learn from your mistake. Whatever it was that created the odd circumstances that led up to your work's disappearance — fix that! Joining Dropbox is a good solution that would have helped me out today.

Now it's a few hours later and you're done, and still have about half a day to work in. Go take a small break and come back to it fresh, putting it all behind you. Congratulate yourself for handling the crisis in a capable fashion.