Marc Nobbs's Blog, page 23

Bonsai!

This isn’t a writing related post. In fact, it couldn’t be more unrelated to writing. But this past weekend I visited the local garden centre with my family and we found a display of Bonsai trees on show. Evidently they were there to be judged by the local Bonsai society. Bonsai growing is something I’ve always been interested in, but never had the time to really have a good crack at. I guess it appeals to the meticulous side of me – the side that might spend hours agonising over using the right word in a sentence or researching something seemingly trivial before putting it into a story.

So, naturally, took some pictures and had a long chat with some of the growers.

A couple if these trees are more than fifty years old. I wanted to ask the owner how much he thought that particular tree would be worth on the open market, but didn’t think it would be polite to.

This one is a favourite of mine. I love the way the trunk is split open yet it keep son going, and the fact that it is in flower..

 

 

Sorry, It’s Been a While

I’d like to officially deny the rumours that are not whirling around at present. I’m not dead. I’ve not given up writing. I’m not in hospital with some horrific illness or as the result of an epic car crash or some other such tragic accident.

Truth is, and I know this’ll sound like I’m repeating myself, it’s just that my day-to-day life has gotten really busy again and my writing, website and blog has had to take a back seat. Again.

It’s really frustrating actually. Especially when you are ‘on a roll’ with a project in the way that I was with A Tortured Soul. You ‘lose the flow’ to some extent when you’re forced to put it aside for a time and it takes a huge effort to get back into the mentality needed to pick it up again. But, I’m hoping that now the summer is here that’s exactly what I’ll be able to do.

Of course, I’m hoping the British Summer this year will contain some actual sun and not much rain, so that shows how realistic my hopes are, doesn’t it.

Well, Colour Me Surprised, Daenerys

It’s a well used cliché that the film or television adaptation is never as good as the book. The images put up there on screen by the film-makers are not a match for your imagination and inevitably things from the book get missed out in the transfer to the screen.

Take Harry Potter, for example. While the majority of the adult casting was pretty much spot on, but can you honestly say that the boy you pictured when you first read the first book was a young Daniel Radcliff? Alan Rickman as Snape? Yeah. Dame Maggie Smith as McGonagall? Pretty good. That CGI thing as Dobby? Not really. And speaking of Dobby (**SPOILER ALERT**) his sacrifice in book seven, which really marks the turning point not just of the book, but of the whole series, is made all the more poignant and hard-hitting because he’d been a loveably annoying little shit in pretty much every book from the second one onwards. And yet, in the film series, his death doesn’t carry the same weight, in my opinion, because we hadn’t seen him in films 3, 4, 5, or 6.

But I digress.

The point of this post is this, on Monday night, while watching episode 4 of series 3 of Game of Thrones, I was not only surprised by the ending to the episode, but also left thinking “How could George RR Martin have possibly delivered that surprise as effectively as they just have on the screen?”

I’m talking, of course, (**SPOLIER ALERT**) about the revelation that Daenerys understood everything that the slave trader had been saying ever since she met him.

Now, I’m not stupid. It was pretty obvious even to me that there was no way that she would just ‘give away’ one of her dragons, and it was pretty obvious that said dragon would turn on the slaver and return to (the very lovely) Dany. But sudden speaking in Old Valyrian was a genuine surprise to me.

It suddenly made sense why the film makers had given us subtitles and a verbal translation by the slave girl. In fact, because of the dual translation, in retrospect, it should of been obvious that she understood the language and was playing ignorant. But maybe I am stupid, because I didn’t twig it until that moment of the reveal.

Now, why do I think it would have been hard to keep that a surprise in the book? Well, first off, I haven’t read “A Storm of Swords” yet, I’m still halfway through “A Clash of Kings”, so maybe what I’m about to say isn’t valid, but up to the point I’ve read, every time the story switches to the goings on across the Narrow Sea, Daenerys has been the chapter’s POV character. So how the hell do you keep the secret that she understands what’s being said and have the revelation that she does be a surprise, if you’re telling the story from her point of view?

I guess the answer would be to use a different POV character. Ser Jorah for example. (Who else thinks Iain Glen is great in GoT, BTW? What a voice!)

I don’t know if this is how GRRM handles it, or even if he doesn’t treat it as a secret/revelation at all, because, like I said, I haven’t read that book yet. Maybe this is just a way for the film-makers to end episode 4 with a bang. Which they certainly did.

I’m not saying that the adaptation is better than the book in this instance, (I only know of one time that’s happened – The Shawshank Redemption) But I am saying that I just found this particular revelation to be one that film would be capable of handling better than the written word.

Anyway, in case you have no idea what I was talking about, here is the scene, courtesy of You Tube. It’s simply brilliant.

Stowe Gardens, Buckinghamshire

This is not the least bit related to A Tortured Soul, or any of my other writing, but this past weekend I visited the very beautiful Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire with my family. It’s a National Trust property, and this was a ‘free’ weekend. It normally would have cost us £30 to get in but because they were having a membership recruitment drive, it was free!

Always good to get something for nothing in my view.

It was a lovely day, quite warm but not too hot. Perfect in fact for wandering around a proper English Garden. Anyway, here are a few of the photos I took.

 

On top of the walk around the gardens, my son got very excited because he saw FIVE Ferraris on the journey there/back. Probably due the proximity of the gardens to Silverstone. Hell, we passed Silverstone’s entrance on the way back, which he also got very excited about. However, one of the said Ferraris was blue. Which is just wrong. Ferraris should be red, black or yellow, but never blue. It was a very nice blue, but it’s still wrong.

Thank You Bradley Stoke

Whilst I’m not exactly the stat-hound that I once was, I do still take an interest in the number of ‘hits’ my website gets and where those hits are coming from. A couple of weeks ago I saw quite a ‘spike’ in hits and they all seemed to have come from the same place. And that place was a blog posting by a fellow British Author, Bradley Stoke.

And although I’m couple of weeks late in expressing my thanks to Bradley for the very nice piece he published (for the same reasons stated in Monday’s post), it’s still better late then never, isn’t that what they say?

As I said, Bradley is a fellow Brit and he had work published at Ruthie’s Club. He is also, unusually, a New Town in South Gloucestershire and I think I’ve actually been there once. Mrs Nobbs once lived in Gloucester and I’m sure we went for lunch in a pub in Bradley Stoke once.

I digress.

Bradley has his own WordPress blog and you can find his stories on Smashwords, his ASSTR site and on StoriesOnline. A couple of Bradley’s more recent works have found their way onto my ‘to read’ list (which is a looong list right now) – I’m particularly looking forward to reading “No Future” when he’s finished publishing it. (I never – okay, very rarely – read works that are ‘in progress’. I much prefer completed books. I must admit though to not having checked back with “No Future” in the past few weeks to see if it is complete yet, but I’m hoping it’s soon)

Bradley’s work is a little more ‘out there’ than mine. I suppose you could classify what I write as fairly ‘vanilla’ or ‘straight’ fiction, whereas Bradley’s settings are a little more unusual and ambitious. “No Future” for example is…

“…a future history of England over the Twenty-First Century and into the next. It is a multi-threaded narrative that travels from place-to-place, succeeds from year-to-year, and passes from one person to another. England’s green and pleasant land is visited by famine, plague, war and pestilence. Governments come and go. The ocean levels inexorably rise. International relations worsen. And the English people stumble through the chaos as best they can.”

Damn! One can only marvel at the ambition of that and the imagination that it would require to write it (not to mention the level of disciple required). Like I said, I’m looking forward to its completion so I can read it.

So, Bradley Stoke, not just a town in the South of England, but an author worth reading too.

The Joy of Jobs (Work, not Steve)

Easter was at a funny time this year, I thought, sitting as it did at the end of March. For me, Easter signifies the busiest period of my working year, and this year was no exception. But usually Easter is a break from the madness – calm before the storm or a chance to relax afterwards – but this year, not so much.

March 31st is the end of my firm’s financial year, so the week or so prior to it and the couple of weeks after are, as you can imagine, pretty busy for me in the accounts department. The end of March also marks the end of the Payroll year (the tax year actually ends on April 5th, but my firm’s last pay date is March 28th). And that just adds to the general workload.

And, usually, I get a break before this busy period with a early Easter or after it with a late Easter. This year though, Easter came smack bang in the middle of it all, and any chance I had to relax and benefit from the break was nullified.

So, whereas one might have expected the Easter break to be a chance for me to crack on and do some serious writing, instead I’ve done very, very little as all my energies have been used up at work and I’ve been too tired to get my mind in gear in the evenings.

Still, the busy period seems to be over now and I’m looking forward to getting back into the writing groove, so to speak. I just hope it doesn’t take too long to find it again.

Are You Feeling Sick Yet?

So, how was your Easter? Feeling sick from all the chocolate yet? I’m not because at 38 I’m considered too old to be bought chocolate eggs – so I just have to buy my own, hide them away so nobody (i.e. the wife and kids) sees them and eat them in secret.

I’ve only got one left now.

Interestingly, I had a conversation with my wife about the why, when Easter is all about the death & resurrection of Christ, it’s represented by chocolate eggs and bunny rabbits. “What’s that got to do with Easter and Christ?” she asked. “Bugger all,” I replied, “Now shut up and let me eat my egg in peace.” (I didn’t really say that.)

I guess the eggs and bunnies is more to do with spring that it is with Christ. Just like Christmas is so close to the winter solstice even though historians believe that the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth was probably born in September.

But anyway, Easter weekend was pretty good for me from a personal point of view – not so good from an author’s point of view, by which I mean I didn’t do any writing. At all. None. So I’m no further along with the manuscript than I was last time I updated you.

The reason for this, of course, is that Easter weekend was pretty damn good on the ole gogglebox. Revolution started its run on Sky1, the penultimate episode of The Walking Dead on FOX. New season of Doctor Who. New season of Game of Thrones. Pretty damn good. Add to that a Girls Aloud concert on MTV Live (my guilty pleasure – hey, there’s a blog post in that somewhere), and Wolves winning two, count ‘em TWO, games of football.

Yeah, pretty good weekend.

Back to work today though. And back to writing later tonight. If there’s nothing good on the box that is.

I’ve Been a Bit Naughty

There’s an old adage amongst writers that says you should never edit your WIP until the first draft is finished. And this makes absolute sense – it would be far too east to get caught up tweaking the early text here, changing it there and wind up never actually getting around to finishing that first draft at all.

But I must confess to being a little bit naughty here – I’ve gone back and made some major edits to a ‘middle’ section of A Tortured Soul before having gotten to the end of the first draft. Of course, I have my reasons, and the edits I’ve made haven’t been to ‘polish’ the text or tweak the dialogue or prose – they’ve been pretty major.

Let me explain.

When I started writing I had, in my head, a rough timescale over which the plot would take place. It would begin in mid-September 2012 with the climax taking place sometime in spring 2013. But… I stuffed up. As I wrote I found that I’d reached a ‘pivotal’ point in the plot far too early – in terms of plot timescale I hadn’t even reached mid-November.

Now, I didn’t think this would be a major problem. I went back and wrote a few extra lines here and there earlier in the text that shifted the timescale on to a much more appropriate mid-January, and carried on writing. But as I carried on writing, the lack of any real substance for what happened during the now ‘missing’ couple of months began to become a problem. In particular, I realised that Paul would have received some news over the Christmas holiday that would affect his mind set on going back to university in January (where I’d picked up writing from).

And the more I wrote, the more of a nagging problem it became…

Then, something else significant happened. I wrote a ‘chapter’ that felt wrong. It felt disjointed – as if half of it belonged in the previous chapter and the other half was part of the next chapter. So I did the only sensible thing and started to cut and paste.

Only, I got carried away. Once I’d started to cut and paste chapters 19 and 20, I then found myself shifting bits of other chapters around. And then I got as far back as that annoying section of text in chapter 12 that contained the ‘missing’ couple of months.

Cut,snip, paste, type…

I wound up cutting that chapter in half, pasting some of it to an earlier chapter, some of it to the following chapter and then inserting blank lines with instructions of scenes I needed to write to fill in the gaps.

So this isn’t so much ‘editing’ the first draft in the sense of making the text better, it was more adding to the first draft by writing non-linearly rather than my usual rigid linear method.

Has it worked? I’m not sure. Yet. I’m now left with a birthday celebration to write, followed by an awkward Christmas dinner over which some unwanted news will be given out (as well as some pleasant news too). I’ve not written those scenes yet, but I do know what will be happening in them. And those scenes will fit the text that follows much better. That, at least, will ease the turmoil in my mind over the timescale of the plot, and allow me to get on and write to the end of the first draft. After that, I can do a ‘proper’ edit, focusing on polishing the text, picking up the typos and ensuring continuity and that the plot hangs together sensibly.

At least, that’s the plan.

Tough Week

Damn, was a tough week. Lots and lots going on in the ‘real world’ has meant that I’ve hardly written a thing since Monday. I even have what I hope will be an interesting blog post that is half-written waiting for me to finish.

But, life goes on, right? These things happen. Hopefully this week will be better and I’ll get more writing done.

Fingers well and truly crossed.

Blurring the Line–When Does Erotica Become Pornography?

I define myself as an author of Erotic Romance and Erotic Short Stories. Bu I know full well that some of a more puritanical nature would define me as a Pornographer. Now, I’m fine with that, after all these are just labels and they are, at the end of the day, pretty meaningless. Or are they? According to this article in The Daily Mail, Dutch MEP Kartika Liotard is trying to introduce a all-out ban on pornography in the EU, and that would make the label placed on a piece of work pretty important – it could see it banned or not depending on that label.

Now, let’s ignore the irony of this amendment being introduced by a Dutch MEP and let’s ignore that the Daily Mail supports a ban on pornography on the website that contains ‘celebrities’ in little to no clothing in the side-bar. Let’s also ignore that the European Parliament is not a legislative body and so a vote to ban pornography there would not be law in any country.  Let’s also ignore that such a ban would be so unenforceable as to be laughable and that the amendment is to a report called ‘Eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU’ and claims that the pornography ban is to stop the ‘exploitation’ of the actresses who are paid far more than their male co-stars but makes no such claim for homosexual pornography (presumably that wouldn’t be banned as it doesn’t exploit women).

Let’s ignore all that and focus on the important issue. How do you define pornography and who will decide what is banned and what is allowable? Is it possible that my novels & short stories would become illegal in the EU should this type of ban come to pass?

The short answer to the second question is, I believe, no. But let’s explore this a little deeper.

The proposed ban is aimed squarely at the flood of visual pornography that our children have far too easy access to on the internet. Because, as we all know, visual pornography is only viewed by evil men who subsequently go out to rape and commit all sorts of horrible sex crimes after spending all day doing nothing but watching porn. The ban would almost certainly not cover French ‘art porn’ which is so very respectful to women and besides it has a very high artistic value in any case. It also is unlikely to cover ‘erotic literature’, which, thanks to EL James and 50 Shades, the world now believes is written exclusively by women for women. No, the ban would only apply to evil men and their evil porn empires who corrupt all before them into thinking of women as nothing more than tight holes and receptacles for cum.

Okay, I’m taking sarcasm to new heights there, but seriously, where do you draw the line between what to ban and what not to? And even when it’s drawn, just how blurred is that line?

I’ve written about this before, as have many, many others. In my article, I argued that the difference between porn and erotica lies in Character. And that’s something I stand by. I have always invested a lot of time and effort in character development and that is, I believe, not only what separates porn from erotica, but also what separates good fiction from bad.

i concluded my earlier article with this …

Characters in porn are merely “faceless” cocks and pussies. Porn appeals to our base urges. It has it’s place, and that place is a tool for sexual gratification. Characters in erotica are “real people”, with real emotions, facing real problems and solving them in realistic ways (most of the time). And it’s because these characters have depth and history that they react in different ways to different situations and the resultant plots are stronger and feature more conflict and resolution. And that, at the end of the day, is what good fiction, erotic or otherwise, is all about.

Of course, my argument that character and its development is all important leads very nicely into my Tuelam Venit series and in particular into A Tortured Soul. The development if the central character, Paul, is the key to the whole book. I was e-mailing back and forth with an editor friend of mine who’s beta-reading for me about a particular aspect of Paul’s character, the resolution of which will mark the conclusion of the book. I asked the question ‘is this character trait realistic and believable’. Her answer was ‘yes’ (although said in more words than that) and my immediate thought was ‘that’s a relief as the whole book becomes pointless otherwise’.