Michael Marshall's Blog, page 7

WAH! First giveaway winner… and second giveaway rules…

Okay. I forgot that my son would be at school at the time I needed to select a winner, so I drafted in my wife instead. She’s pretty random.

The winner has now been selected, and an email sent. If you don’t receive that email, I’m afraid it’s not you. But now… the second giveaway commences.

For the pure hell of it, I’ve decided to augment the system for this one. In addition to people who subscribe to this blog, I’m going to punt out a “Chance to win” tweet about the giveaway tomorrow morning (Pacific time), and will open the draw to anyone who retweets that tweet.

People who’ve already subscribed to the blog will be included in this next draw and thus get a second go… in recognition of you all being so jolly quick off the mark. The draw from all blog subscribers and everyone who retweets will happen next Monday, the 11th.

To raise the excitement to potentially dangerous levels, I’m going to include a paperback of KILLER MOVE with this one, to be signed to the same person, a different one, or… whoever you wish, within the bounds of legality and sanity.

I’m not even sure that I understand this whole thing any more, but I think it boils down to:

1. If you’ve already subscribed to this blog, no action is necessary. You’ll be in the next draw too.

2. If not, you can either subscribe to this blog, or retweet the tweet. Or both.

I hope that’s clear. Now I have to stop typing the words ‘tweet’, ‘subscribe’ and ‘draw’, because they’ve stopped having any meaning to me.

New Aunts

A bonus to living in a country where they (allegedly) speak the same tongue, is being continually reminded how much nuance exists in the language.

I’m not talking about words that are simply different, like lift/elevator or pavement/sidewalk. Neither do I mean variations in idiom, though those are plentiful. You don’t ‘pop to the shops’, but ‘run to the store real quick’; and you’re not ‘cross’, either — a term which causes confusion and/or hilarity — but ‘mad’. I mean instead the ways in which choices of words or terms can be used to signal your level of cultural integration. I remember a friend better-versed in French than I once advising that a snappy way of dealing with someone giving you grief in Paris would be to pop right back with ‘Q’est-ce-que tu veut que je fasse?’. While on the surface this merely means ‘What do you want me to do about it?’, you’re also tutoying your interlocutor (presumptively deploying the informal pronoun ‘tu’, rather than ‘vous’, a subtle way of being dismissive) and furthermore throwing the subjunctive at them (by using ‘fesse’ rather than ‘fait’, thereby indicating you’re not just some dickhead foreigner, but know how to talk proper). I may have got the French slightly wrong, but my point still holds.

There’s plenty of that to be had here, too, though I generally try to avoid snarling at people. There’s the way you respond to someone saying ‘Thank you’, for example. The obvious — and in most circumstances the best — is the traditional standby of ‘You’re welcome’. We still don’t really use that in the UK (despite what we try to teach our children), instead greeting any thanks with suspicion, as though they might be a covert additional request, or an invitation to have a fight. Here it is always sincere. You’ll hear richer versions sometimes, such as ‘Oh, you’re welcome’ or even ‘You’re so welcome’, though you have to be female or really quite camp to get away with the latter.

For the more adventurous, you can come back with a curt-seeming ‘Sure’, which is apparently not only perfectly acceptable and polite but quite manly; and recently I heard for the first time in ages someone responding with the old school ‘You bet!’, which I love, but isn’t something I’m going to be able to get away with in an English accent.

The accent is a problem. People here will greet friends (and strangers) with a ‘Hi’ or ‘Hey’, both of which I flatter myself I can carry off. When it comes to ‘Hey – what’s happening?’, or especially ‘Hey – what’s going on?’, however, I know my limits. Californians over quite a broad age range can make the latter sound relaxed and friendly and cool. I sound either like I’m making a genuine and rather querulous inquiry, or as if I’m on drugs and in danger of passing out.

Pronunciation effects individual words too, as with the ubiquitous ‘awesome’, used here to mean everything from a superlative to ‘thanks’ or even almost an equivalent to some uses of the British ‘cheers’. English people pronounce the first syllable ‘awe’ near the front of their mouth, with a pushing-out lip movement: Californians set it further back toward the throat and keep their lips out of it, producing more of an ‘ah-some’ or even ‘ossum’, exactly like ‘possum’ without the ‘p’. Even a word as short as ‘dude’ is hard to nail. ‘Dood’ comes close, but the vowel sound is again pulled further back in the mouth than feels entirely natural. I do my best with both words, naturally, but probably wind up coming across like someone’s dad trying to sound cool, which of course is what I am.

Harder still is the process of learning that you can say some things here with sincerity which in England would only ever be uttered with weapons-grade irony: ‘thank you for sharing with us’, for example. Conversely, the mix of vicious ribbing and self-deprecatory humor that forms the backbone of English banter is likely only to provoke bafflement, alarm, or the offer of an introduction to a therapist specializing in self-esteem issues.

There’s a general openness in American discourse that can make an English person feel unnerved and on the back foot, with inevitable consequences. The family was sitting at the counter having a sandwich in a nice little café up in the mountains the other Sunday (Coffee 9 in Ben Lomond, which I can highly recommend), and chatting amongst ourselves, when a teenage girl nearby asked me if I was speaking in a ‘British’ accent (there are no English people here, we’re all ‘British’). I allowed that I was, at which point she asked, with dawning wonder, if she had a accent. I said um, yes, an American one. This appeared to blow her mind. (The odd thing is that after a year and a half of living here, I’ve more-or-less stopped hearing the American accent as an accent, and instead accept that it’s me who talks funny).

The conversation went a little pear-shaped after that, sadly, as the girl continued to express her awe at the idea of her having an accent, to increasingly furrowed brows on our part, and then ultimately departed, doubtless feeling that the three weird British people had been starting to stare at her in an unfriendly way.

When it comes to conveying reserve bordering on hostility, we Brits don’t need recourse to words. But what do you want us to do about it, huh?

Stupendous WE ARE HERE giveaway

Alright, maybe ‘stupendous’ is over-selling it a little, but it’s only a few weeks now until the UK publication of my new book, WE ARE HERE. Orion gave away a couple of proof copies of the novel a few weeks ago, but I gather this somehow ended up being restricted to certain territories, and so I’ve scored a couple more and would like to make them available to the world and possibly the universe at large, (although winners from other solar systems should know that they will be expected to handle their own shipping costs).

The best way I can think of doing this is requesting that anyone interested subscribe to this blog. Don’t worry, I’m not doing this as a sneaky way of getting more people to read my meandering rants – you can unsubscribe again immediately afterwards if you choose (though somewhere, a baby angel will shed a tear, and when that tear falls on the ground it will shatter with a sound that will never be heard until it’s too late for all mankind).

It’s just that last time I ran something like this I did it by randomly choosing Twitter followers and wound up in the rather ignominious position of trying to foist books upon people who’d obviously either followed me on a passing whim or while very drunk, and who were frank in their bafflement at having someone hassling them about a free book. Plus there was a nice young lady called HotSuzie7 who graciously accepted the novel but then tried to involve me in activities that would have been inimical to the continued peaceful progress of my marriage.

So — if you’re interested in winning a proof copy of We Are Here, please subscribe using the button over there on the right, where it says ‘Subscribe’ in turquoise letters. You then need to click a confirm button in a message you’ll be sent. I’ll get my son to randomly select an email from the list next Monday, and then again the following Monday… I will of course be delighted to inscribe either copy to you, a significant other or indeed your cat.

In the immortal words of Hank Kingsley (I’m happily working through the LARRY SANDERS SHOW from the very beginning at the moment)…

… This is exciting, isn’t it?

Child Proof

One of the peculiar things about being a parent is watching your carefully-nurtured sense of self shouldered aside, as your world is increasingly structured by your child/ren, and your role in life becomes not ‘novelist’ or ‘really rather decent chap’, but ‘Nate’s Dad’.

I’d started to become accustomed to this in England, but it really jumped to the fore when we moved to California. My day-to-day life didn’t actually change much. Yes, there was a beach and sunshine and excellent salad dressings, but I still spent most of my time alone in a room, staring balefully at a computer. My son was out at the sharp end of change, every day, starting a new school and meeting new people and dealing with the myriad cultural differences that aren’t obvious until you start trying to actually live in a foreign country. Gradually these have come to affect our lives, too, including the role of being a parent – especially as we’re still new here and I really am now just ‘That vague English dude, you know – Nate’s father.’

Parenting is different here. In London, for example, parents are pretty comfortable with admitting their child is being an arse. They may be the first to posit the idea, in fact. If two children get into a scrap in a middle-class park, then the on-duty parent of both sides usually defaults to bollocking their own kid first (to the utter confusion of the children involved).

In California parents do not describe their child as an arse, at least not in public (they may throw them in a dungeon when no-one’s looking, for all I know). The parents here seem better at being on their children’s side — even if this sometimes involves infantilising them, just a tad. They have carefully constructed and adhered-to systems of privileges, and I can understand why: as a child gets older you may find yourself inventing rewards simply so they can be withheld. It’s a depressing tactic, but sometimes the only language they seem to understand. I remember once hearing a hostage negotiator on BBC Radio 4 wearily noting a similarity in the difficulties of dealing with young children and terrorists, in that neither group understands or fears the sanctions of authority.

Here the kids do seem to understand, and that might be because their parents are more consistent. I’m probably just revealing my own inadequacies in the field, but it seems to me that parenting in England is conducted on a pretty ad hoc basis, something to be bumbled through with as much good grace as possible, like a game of football or the Second World War. Parents in California seem far more ready to believe they can make a difference through continual action and affirmation and old-fashioned respect, which may be an adjunct to the dated but still popular notion that anyone may, through hard work and a good heart, become President. Actually, I think both approaches have their merits. It may do a child good to inform him or her that unless they stop being so smug, egocentric and generally tiresome they won’t get to be Prime Minister. Though evidently that didn’t work for Mr and Mrs Cameron.

It’s more subtle than this, of course, and I haven’t been here anywhere near long enough to get to the bottom of the differences, or even to be able to articulate them. After we came here my son rapidly developed something akin to an America accent, by necessity. During his first weeks it became clear the other kids simply couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying. People in England — including children — are used to American accents from film and television. Here the only English voices you hear are those of baddies on film, or effete ineffectuals like me. Without setting his utterances to a style of music the other kids could recognize — and also altering his word choice — he couldn’t be understood.

Usages differ in unexpected ways. In days of yore — by which I mean the 1970s and 80s — the word ‘bummer’ had only one connotation in England (at least in my juvenile circle), and it didn’t relate to a circumstance that might ‘bum you out’. It was a pejorative term meaning ‘male homosexual’. The more American meaning of the word is now well understood, but it’s still a term that rings oddly in the UK because of its echoes with ‘bum’ (which is not used In American in the sense of ‘bottom/behind/posterior’).

In our first month here my son started using ‘bummer’ at home, a lot, and I gave him concerted grief about this until I happened to be at his school one afternoon, and heard his charming but firm and proper first grade teacher using the term openly in front of children in the playground.

Nate witnessed this too, and turned to me. ‘See?’ he crowed. ‘I was right, and you were wrong.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. ‘But you’re still an arse.’

Cats, and Invisible Souls

As I sit here working, I can see a cat out of my window. This is actually quite rare. Santa Cruz is a pretty doggy place. From hulking Hispanic dudes squiring minuscule Chihuahuas, to petite West Side moms out jogging in the company of a Wolfhound, the canine world has a big paw print in this town. I can understand why. People here like to exercise and go to the beach and hike and stuff, and dogs are totally up for that, especially if they get to madly dash about to no discernable purpose. Imagine the response of a cat to being told it was going running, or to the beach. It wouldn’t have to say anything. The look on its face would be enough.

Now, I don’t mind dogs. I can see the point of them, and since arriving have struck up affable acquaintanceships with a few belonging to friends. I am, however, a cat person. Inveterate, long term, through and through. A big cost of coming to live here in California, however, has been saying goodbye — or at least au revoir — to my own.

Quite soon after we got together, my wife and I traveled to Scotland to acquire a cat. We didn’t do it that way just to make our lives difficult, but because we’d encountered the Burmilla breed courtesy of my editor and thought we might like to have one. On being confronted with a room full of kittens our initial resolve crumbled and we wound up leaving with two, a brother and sister we called Spangle and Tilly.

Tilly was — and remained — tiny and feisty, the first of the litter to be born; Spangle was far more shy, and larger, the last of the same litter. They were white and grey, yin and yang, and for seventeen years these cat people enlivened and enriched every moment of our lives. There were downsides, like the fact their housecat status (for a long time we lived in flats, and neighborhoods where the feline territory wars were fierce) meant we could never leave doors or windows open, and the amount of fur shed per unit time eventually gave my wife a lasting allergy. Both cats came into the study to work with me every day, however, and hung out with us on the sofa in the evening, and slept next to our heads every night. I loved them both, but Spangle is as good a friend as I’ve ever had.

Then we discovered Santa Cruz and realized that’s where we needed to live. Concern about the cats was wound into this decision from the very first, and we came out here for an exploratory year on the strict understanding that, once we’d found our feet, the cats would follow. We had someone they knew house-sitting our property in London, and looking after them, and so — while I know they missed us — their life went on pretty much as normal.

Until, after three months, Tilly died.

She’d been ailing for a year or two, and we’d been dripping fluids into her on a weekly basis for eighteen months before we left. Finally it got too much for her, and she went. Anyone who’s lost an animal, especially after so long, and when you weren’t able to be there at the end, will be able to guess how that felt.

They will probably also be able to understand my feelings on realizing that Spangle, now eighteen, is simply too old to fly. You can’t transport animals across the Atlantic in the cabin. They have to fly in the hold. They travel in custom-made crates and every effort is made to protect their wellbeing, but I’m not putting my old friend Spangle through that. Instead he’s gone into retirement with my widowed father, and the arrangement seems to be working very well. Both are happy, and look after one another.

It’s hard, though.

Jean Cocteau said “I love cats because I enjoy my home, and little by little, they become its visible soul”. That’s both beautiful and true. The house we’re living in now, though good and comfortable, feels a little empty without a feline presence — especially the presence of our own particular cats.

Life costs, I guess, and rates of exchange are hard to fathom.

The cat I glimpsed earlier is still out there. I’ve no idea who it belongs to, and he’s not doing much of interest, just staring vaguely in the bushes. It’s strange how much difference his presence makes, even though he doesn’t know I’m watching.

I miss my cat.

We’ve finally gotten to the point of wondering whether we should encourage some local felines to come and share our lives here, not least because I think my son needs a pet, as all children do. If we go ahead, I’m sure it will be a good thing, and that our lives will be enriched in the way that only those creatures are capable of.

But I still miss my cat.

The Wall of Annoying Words

I’ve already banged on about some of the words below, but you know what? — you haven’t stopped using them. I’m going to keep banging on until you do. I’d like to encourage you to add some of your own, in fact, so that we can over time generate a useful list of banned expressions that we can hand over to the authorities. I will, of course, have ultimate say about whether a word gets onto the wall of shame. No-one said this was a democracy.

Minimalistic

The word is ‘minimalist’. Don’t put -ic on the end of what’s already an adjective. Why would you do that? Why? Isn’t it a bit stupidalistic? As people on Twitter pointed out when I muttered about this before, there’s something especially dumbalistical and ironicalisticallynessish about making the word ‘minimalist’ longer.

Simplistic

This is actually a perfectly good word. The problem lies in denizens of the Internet habitually mis-using it. It does not mean a pleasingly focussed feature set, which might be a GOOD THING. ’Simplistic’ is a pejorative term meaning ‘excessively simplified’, and is therefore a BAD THING. You’re using the term perfectly wrongly, do you see? Well, do you?

Chillax

For Christ’s sake. There is no better way of making it clear that you’re an utter tool than by using this ‘word’. Just stop it. Even deploying it ironically is on a knife-edge, so don’t take the risk. Either say ‘relax’, or ‘chill’ (if you must). Or preferably bugger off back to your ‘crib’.

Functionality

What does this even mean? It’s used in sentences like ‘For a version 1.0, this software has impressive functionality, but…’, where it appears to indicate… it’s not total crap. If you’re reviewing something and you’ve used this word, try cutting out the sentence it appears in, and see if you’ve lost anything of value. Ten bucks says you haven’t.

Form factor

You don’t mean ‘form factor’, you mean ‘shape’. No, really, you do.

Piracy

As used in relation to software and TV shows and music and books. ‘Piracy’ sounds jaunty and daring and as if you’re doing something rather cool and dashing and should be played by Johnny Depp. You’re not — you’re being played by that fat, sweaty guy who hangs out round the back of the KFC and always looks like he’s just hurriedly re-done up his flies. You’re stealing. At least have the balls to acknowledge that and come up with some half-assed rationale.

Writer

Specifically when proceeded by the word ‘virus’. Listen up, you little ****ers, producing viruses is not ‘writing’. It’s ‘exuding’, as one might exude pus from a badly-infected sore occasioned by seedy sexual exploits powered by precisely the kind of knock-off Viagra you’re trying to peddle. Using some piece of software to exude crap that starts “eval(gzinflate (base64_decode (‘tVh7b9pYFv87I+” isn’t creation. It’s destruction, it’s a criminal waste of everyone’s time, and it’s ****ing annoying, so stop it for the love of God, before I call down upon you The Curse Of The Busy Man Who Does’t Have Time To Rebuild His Sodding Website Every Few Weeks, You Assholes.

Workflow

One irritating thing about this word is that I can’t think of a concise synonym, which usually proves a word is worthwhile. It’s still annoying, though, possibly because when people write about a piece of software ‘fitting into their workflow’, it seems their ‘workflow’ only ever involves writing blogs about software that may or may not fit into their ‘workflow’.

Curating

I go back and forth on this one, but currently it’s on the outs. You have not ‘curated’ a selection of links to interesting or cool things on the web. You’ve ‘chosen’ them. Actually, you’ve just ‘shared’ your bookmarks (and trust me, ‘sharing’ is in the bullpen for this list). Obviously some degree of choice has taken place — otherwise you’d have linked to absolutely everything, in which case you’d merely be the Internet, duplicated — but that does not put you on a par with someone who’s selected just three tea-cups from the entire history of domestic potteryware over the last five thousand years for a high-profile four-month exhibition at MOMA or the V&A. Here’s a deal – you can call yourself an Internet curator if you also wear a little bow-tie and a green cardigan all the time. And shave your head but grow a beard. Even if you’re a woman. Okay?

Momtrepeneur

I only learned this one recently. As a snappy term for the vogue for moms to roll up their sleeves and start micro-businesses specialising in decorative geegaws fashioned from recycled ballet shoes, or tiny pots of organic canapés for dogs, I guess it kind of works (though it seems a tad sexist and patronising). It’s still annoying, though, probably because it’s one of those arch little neologisms — ‘staycation’ is another — cooked up by slackers to legitimate writing endless screeds of unnecessary text about something zeitgeisty.

So — what are the words that cause your brain to seethe and make it impossible for you to chillax? I’m not talking about the obviously appalling collections of letters like ‘twitterverse’ or ‘whatever’ or ‘Russell Brand’, I mean the ones that make you want to start sharpening pointy sticks and hunting down the perpetrators with deadly intent…

The Anternet

The Anternet One upside of my recent battles with ants – which are going passing well, thanks for asking: a combination of bait traps, orange oil, cinnamon barriers and no-holds-barred squishing (combined with finding the tin of not-quite-closed Golden Syrup which had evidently acted as their Mecca) has for the time being reduced them to the level of Minor Crisis – is that I’ve finally understood how the Internet works. Something I initially found freaky ...

Antmageddon

When we first moved to Santa Cruz we lived over on the east side, in the Live Oak district. We were a short block from the beach and thus enjoyed regular sightings of sea otters, occasional trios of dolphins and even two days of hump-backed whales. Squirrels of many different hues gambolled on our deck, and there was a profusion of bird life to observe, too. A few months ago we bought a house on ...

The Paperless Trail

As someone who’s spent the last three weeks packing up a house ready to move — and has another two weeks of it to go — I feel compelling to share some weary pieces of advice with you. 1. Throw everything away, immediately. The instant someone gives you something, or you buy it, or an [...]

R is for Ray

As many of you will know, a few weeks ago saw the death of a seminal figure in science fiction, horror and fantasy – and perhaps the best short story writer of all time – Ray Bradbury. A few years ago I was honoured to be asked to write an introduction for a prestige re-issue [...]