Clare O'Beara's Blog, page 8

October – Octocon and a Graphic Novel Art Masterclass

Octocon 2019 went off well, and in keeping with my tradition I’ll now tell you what happened at last year’s Octocon in Dublin. At that time, we were preparing for Worldcon, and the many Worldcon organisers were not involved in Octocon 2018 for that reason, so my offer of help was gladly accepted and I was kept busy. I also went around interviewing several people to make podcasts for my college course on multimedia journalism.

Panel on Dragons

This included me, and two of the other guests, Diane Duane and Peter Morwood, arrived at the very last minute due to public transport.
We had a great time and chatted about how dragons could evolve (I said the wings would be heat radiators from such large beasts and would develop into useful appendages) and history (Beowulf in Europe, water dragons in Asia) and our favourite instances. Anne McCaffrey’s Pern dragons were most favoured, along with Tolkien’s Smaug and Ursula leGuin’s dragons.
I mentioned allegory, saying The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo would have been less impressive as the girl with the Chihuahua tattoo. A question mentioned Robin McKinley’s books about Dragonhaven, which I was delighted to discuss. I also raised The Great Zoo of China by Matthew Reilly – Jurassic Park with dragons in China. Diane was struck by the possibilities and asked why this hadn’t been filmed yet.

Book Launch: Sean Williams and Garth Nix, for their latest collaboration, Let Sleeping Dragons Lie, and the entertainment was high as they held sword fights with mock swords during a reading / re-enactment.

I bought the first in the series, Have Sword Will Travel for my nephew and niece, and got it autographed. The authors told us that they get on well but in a collaboration there needs to be a veto person selected.

Panel on Comics and Graphic Art

Michael Carroll, famous for his Judge Dredd work, told us that a picture is indeed worth a thousand words. He said if research is measured in units, 100 units are needed and 2 or 3 appear in the story.
Colleen Doran, graphic artist, warned us not to give artists an excuse to go on the internet. Give enough detailed specs that she can work, or three hours later nothing is done. Put a picture in the document file of her script and let her work from that. She uses an app to show her what she does in time stages on her computer and locks selected sites. This makes her twice as productive.
C.E. Murphy, author, said it was so amazing to have someone turn her works into pictures. Such a different process to writing novels. Writing for a comic is collaborative and continually exciting, fast. Not as isolating as novel writing.

M - there are restrictions when scripting for someone else’s world like Judge Dredd. But you only rise by climbing. Some of his best work came from these series.
CD - she does not want to draw simple, easy art. She wants challenges. Presented with an eight page script which was very complex, she had to dissect it with highlighter – the writer had gone into sounds and smells and she had to animate it and draw in the style of another artist.
Comics are a separate medium to graphic novels.
Colleen admires Watchman, saying she can read the pages backward and forward. She once drew a page that could be read forward, backward, in a circle and across diagonals. Nobody got it. Pictures are narrative, not illustrations. There is a different way to read them. In the 1960s comics, a caption described the image. Today, it is all deconstructed. She recalled a useful caption in Avengers – “Later, after they escaped...” the caption plastered over holes in the plot.

Panel on Being Human

Juliet E. McKenna, Garth Nix, Sean Williams, Ruth Frances Long and Karina Steffans.
Juliet made a conscious choice to exclude non-human races from her fantasy. Just wizards and dragons. Is there a desire to be human or just accepted by humans among races in SF&F? Why is human best? She thinks it’s easier for writers than a character who wants to be the best American citizen or British Empire citizen. Superheroes often are not humans, who want to be accepted. Those who are adopted or mutated, made into a robot etc. are human.
Garth said dogs may have characters that humans value, like loyalty. Sean said you can be human but bad, or inhuman but good.
J – creatures may live a different lifespan to us. Aliens, cyborgs etc. have their own frame of reference.
S - they are heroes of their own stories. Nonhuman characters are a very valuable tool for writers.
J - the bicycle was introduced in the 1880s and killed the village idiot. The rural marriage circle widened because people could now travel 21 miles instead of 7 miles to seek a wife. Thus, people were marrying people from further away. This was an unintended consequence of technology.
Question - Cyberpunk – can your brain be hacked?
S - bots and fake news are the same thing.
R - when printing arrived governments and churches tried to control it and control translations.
J - medical tech and genome studies show tech starts at the top and trickles down.
K – racism exists when there is just one race, humans. If there are altered races, it could be worse.
G – “those other people are not human” = institutional racism. Often an excuse for a power grab in history.
S – looked up the definition of human – walks on two feet, has opposable thumbs – so is anyone with less than this not human?

J - The Ship Who Sang.
G – Asimov’s robots. Is sentient a better term?
J - Social media equals bread and circuses. It’s distracting from serious threats to democracy.
G - Corporations get human status rights but humans do not get corporation rights.
K – she’s living in Ireland 22 years, passport 10 years ago, nobody believes she is Irish.
Question – what is the new class of better than human? After royalty, etc of the past.
G – Billionaires.
J - the Little Mermaid had to mutilate herself for acceptance as a human. She wants to rewrite stories in a positive way.

Colleen Doran, Guest of Honour, Masterclass

And screen viewing of her work Trollbridge.
Neil Gaiman wrote Good Omens and he would fax pages of work in progress to his pals. Neil wanted to have Trollbridge adapted in 1998. This was not her preferred work by him. Thus she did not look into the mythology behind the Norwegian troll tales. She sat down to adapt without realising what Three Billy Goats Gruff is about. The goats arrive in order of size, smallest first, and Gaiman’s book had one person, Jack, at three ages.

Twenty years later she was asked to do a GN version. The twelve pages would expand to 64 pages. Now she is more mature than in her 20s and Gaiman was older too, giving new perspectives.
She doesn’t like her work to look like digital art. Handmade paper can be used as a background, with the image drawing pasted over it. Oil emulsion and silver paper, with final colours added on a separate layer.
She added to be careful about your jobs. She took one to make a GN of an Anne Rice book – the publisher needed a page a day. She started great but that didn’t continue. People remember your bad work. She didn’t get asked to do a GN again for 20 years. Be sure you only take work you love and that will make you look good.

Story to Script. Mood, pacing, characterisation, symbolism, subtext, subversion.
Mood - colour or the lack can show mood.
Pacing – rural time is slower, people walk a long time and distance between adventures.
Characterisation – body language, clothes, motions, facial expressions. Embellishment, suggesting a fairyland for instance.
Symbolism – the child has a yellow t-shirt, the young teen a black and yellow striped t-shirt, the older teen a black shirt. No capping stones on the bridge to show danger, no protection.
Subtext – subtextual abuse of a child.
Subversion – evokes a children’s book but it is Jack’s choose your own adventure, a more mature story. The editor suggested a final page of a lonely troll. Colleen was tired and had not got an ending she liked, but the editor’s suggestion worked.
She took a photo of the side of her house and Photoshopped brickwork, which saved her from many hours of drawing bricks. In some cases, a page took longer in PS than it would by hand, due to layers of transparency and brush effects. Not practical for comics as they can’t pay someone to spend two days on one page.
Pagination – got to do this as a cartoonist for a comic. The big reveal needs to be on the left page as you just turn the page. Comics may have ads. They fall on the same page in each book, so put a big reveal on the left page after a right page ad. This affects pacing.
A block of thumbnails is good to show the art. She can work on her strengths first and then whatever is left.
She needs to draw the important characters’ faces first. In the past, artists drew in metal. Silver, copper, lead, wire in a stylus. Metal on treated paper, trace corrodes, tiny strokes.

Panel on the Monster’s point of view (POV)

Sarah Maria Griffin – in a retold Frankenstein, a woman makes a partner, but she is the monster. She’s a teenage girl and people find it hard to relate to her, but he is quite nice as a programmed robot.
Jan Siegel – the writer’s journey needs to make the reader see the monster’s lair.
Peadar ÓGuilín – he never goes to the monster’s POV but grew up in Donegal where nationalists got the raw end of the stick for generations. The Sidhe (the Fae) in his book The Call experienced what the Irish did. Many generations later the Sidhe try to be revenged upon Irish children. This is like the POV of Texas Comanches versus white settlers. Colonialism is brutal.
Jan – sins of ancestors are visited on descendants, when everyone needs to move on.
Michael Carroll – favourite monster is Jekyll and Hyde. The author wrote it in three days, but his wife destroyed the manuscript, so he wrote it again.
S - We see evil queens in Disney. Feminine rage and female revenge. Poison is used. As a child this led her to fear older, superior women.
J – a school play cast her as the evil queen in Snow White and she was pleased. There is a glamour turning to ugly women trope (the Shrek type) but no glamour to ugly men. Often elegant, sexy, evil women are shown. “What scares you is not differences but similarities,” Robert Bloch. Also, in Scooby Doo, the monsters turn out to be human.

Panel on Fighting

Peter Morwood said for swordfighting he enjoys The Three Musketeers.
Juliet McKenna said 50% of the fight is not getting hit. She is in an Aikido club. A policeman had a few weeks of training there and it helped him in a riot.
Gerry McEvoy – films show a lot of circling and posturing.
J – inflict nerve pain rather than try to do physical damage. Fiction is entertainment, so go for light realism. Don’t use all the technical terms you researched, in the story. Watch it on YouTube and describe it in your own words. In Aikido the better someone is, the less there is to see. She has taught brown and black belts and has been doing Aikido for 35 years.
Oisin McGann – film choreography has got very good, the actors no longer telegraph punches. Small moves.
J - readers have a low tolerance for pages of cut, thrust, parry, that’s repetitive.
O - use props from the environment to vary the action.

J - nobody is holding a sword correctly, does nobody teach them?
G - Female fighters are terrifying. They tend to go for a decisive move.
J – women training don’t have to unlearn being strong. Her husband is 6ft and a black belt in Judo and Aikido, but women make progress quicker. They use the strength of hips. Men tend to use upper body strength. The longer the arm, the more leverage.
O – a boxer has the advantage for the first few years, then the martial artist’s technique wins as they have more options, like hip throws.
J – researches in Royal Armouries at Leeds.
P – sports have been developed to be safe.

Guest of Honour chat with Colleen Doran

She posts on social media, not about politics but about women’s rights. She said on social media it’s important to block trolls, don’t just mute them. They have thirty sockpuppet accounts and will just move on to the next target.
She reads authors’ blogs, and if she doesn’t enjoy the content, why would she buy their books?
A woman constantly hears “You must have slept your way to the top,” but a man doesn’t.
She said online abuse is very serious in America. If she says representing gay people in comics is okay, someone turns it into a political statement. She once worked for a black-centred comic imprint and what was said about them was foul. Women are getting called liars even for backing up what other women are saying.
Colleen grew up believing that what you did would determine your fate. But she saw no matter how talented or hardworking some people were, other people would still hate or put them down. An artist was called a token minority hire by racists. There is no level of talent that can protect you from other people’s hate.
Now, a lot of guys are getting trouble – which women got all along. Social media brings horrible stuff. All women creators get this hatred – some deny it but will admit in private messaging, because they know if they admit in public, they will get more. She puts nothing personal on her pages, as others tried to dox her. Some women use a non-gendered username to avoid the trolls.
A middle aged man got fixated on her when she was a teen, and stalked her for thirty years. He would get other people to follow her and hit her on the head. He worked in a comics house in the ‘bullpen’ and sent impressionable young geeks. Now there are laws against stalking. She called the police and security to him two years ago at a public event and he was dragged away.

Panel on Book Publishing

Juliet McKenna – the mid list writer is dead. Writers can now cut out the middleman. There is still a significant market for paper. Producing one book a year is not enough to make a living. Two or more, often under other names. No backlists are carried anymore. Writers all want the rights to their e-books. As a writer you are a small business. You can still make a living, but in a different way to 10 – 15 years ago. Small press gets a prize winner, and big London firms want to move in on it. Small houses are publicising by social media and word of mouth.
Claire Hennessey – when reviewing go into detail about what you did not like, to explain which reader would enjoy it.
Edmond Barrett – you need momentum. Need books regularly. He left a couple of years between books and the sales did not pick up again.
J – really prolific authors will be published from two houses.
CH – frequency of publication may be decided by the publisher not the author.

Closing Ceremony

Thanks went to the Guests of Honour Pat Cadigan and Colleen Doran. Thanks to John Vaughan for running the Golden Blasters. Dave Lally announced the winner of the best of winners of this short film contest; Einstein-Rosen. As I had seen this during the 2017 Octocon, I didn’t mind having missed the 2018 Golden Blasters; I was staffing a table in the Dealer Room for any author who wished to have their books sold at the Con. Thanks to main organiser Sakura.
The announcement was made that 2019 would see a smaller Octocon, as a Worldcon was too large and expensive for every regular Con attendee, and next year would be a community event.

Later I made two podcasts from my interviews with Dr Edmund Schluessel, Peadar ÓGuilín, Eris Byrne, Sakura, Eileen Gormley, C.E. Murphy and Liz Bourke. Find them on my website.

I’m sure you’ll agree that Octocon 2018 was a fantastic and informative occasion, and that’s only a flavour of the panels I attended; there were many more events of other sorts including a Doctor Who panel and creative workshops, masquerade and film events.

This month I am making The Prisoner In The Tower: Short Story & Big Cat Bones free. Download it 9th – 12th November. This is a short story followed by an article on lynx and lion in the British Isles; we now have lynx, bear and wolves in a wildlife park in Donegal. The three bears were rescued from terrible conditions.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Prisoner-Tow...

https://amazon.com/Prisoner-Tower-Sho...

Any reader not in UK or US should use the Amazon.com link and the site will then offer to take them to their local store. If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Watch my book trailers for my science fiction series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPp...
Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

September - Lockpicking on Culture Night

September was a particularly packed month for me. College began again, for a start. This year we are expected to produce multimedia journalism to a higher standard, using what we have already learned, and to learn more about website development. For the other students, this third year is their final year. I shall be taking my final few modules during a fourth year, as I started part-time and took fewer modules that year. This year my college suggested I take eleven modules to finish my degree, and I said no. At such times, I believe it helps to have 100% attendance and good results. All of the modules this year are contributing to my final grades though, so I can’t slack.

Early in the month I attended a talk in Trinity College, on the nature of time, and I’ll return to that at a later date. I also went out with my husband on Culture Night (when various institutions and cultural centres open their doors) and took up an invitation which had been extended to me to visit Tog, a hackerspace and makerspace in Dublin. We were made welcome and saw their 3-D printer, laser cutter, woodworking bench, wood burning pizza oven made from scratch, theramin, and a wire (model of a) shark, among other items.

I am told the makers have a photo development darkroom, and they love making sustainable items, repurposing, upcycling and more. I hope to return on coder night, depending on the time I have available, but on Culture Night families were coming in to visit so we sat around picking locks and chatting. The makers take the padlocks off the Ha’penny Bridge over the Liffey. These days they can buy lockpicking tools for the purpose, but in the past, they used to make their own, and some still do.

Worldcon staff had a final meeting and several of us were discreetly wearing our bronze pins as Worldcon Heroes. I was in Logistics and Event Logistics; I was also the Media Recorder and the Hugo Awards MacGuyver. No, there wasn’t time to sleep. I’ll try to fit in a longer account, another month.

Recently I took a box of Worldcon Programme books to the Royal Dublin Society Library, where the Archivist and Chief Librarian eagerly came to collect their copies. The other books – about 20 - will be made available to RDS members.

Right now I am getting ready for Octocon, the national SF&F convention, which will be held on just one day this year, Sunday 13th October. Come and join us!

https://2019.octocon.com/

This month I am making Dining Out With The Ice Giants free, to celebrate Octocon, so grab it 12 – 14 October.



https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dining-Giant...

https://amazon.com/Dining-Giants-Arou...

Any reader not in UK or US should use the Amazon.com link and the site will then offer to take them to their local store. If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Watch my book trailers for my science fiction series:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPp...

Visit my website:

www.clareobeara.ie

for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

August - Worldcon in Dublin and Calculating River Flow

I've just spent a week and a half helping to staff Worldcon, the World Science Fiction Convention. This was held in Dublin for the first time and all hands were needed. My husband Allan also attended and gave me great assistance. The Hugo Awards were carefully administered, and duly awarded in a stunning ceremony.

The atmosphere of excitement, friendship, teamwork and optimism became an absolute credit to the main event organisers. I don't know when I've enjoyed myself more. I learned an enormous amount every day and all this will be enriching my written work in due course. The Worldcon torch has been passed to New Zealand.

Being a nature lover and environmentalist can be mentally, physically and emotionally draining these days. When you feel you have drawn the last drops of optimism and faith from the well, I recommend getting involved in some activity like Worldcon or another non-profit group. This replenishes not just the bucket but the well. The awesome accomplishment of a team - quite often composed of strangers - shows the power of what humans can also achieve to protect nature. And you will make friends.

I am still catching up with life after the Con and preparing to head back to the new college year. So instead of a longer account I’m going to provide something useful. This can be taught with students, schoolkids, Guides and Scouts or just as a family team.

During my Ecology course I measured state of flow of a small river, the Nanekin. Here are the figures which we gained by timing an orange as it bobbed down the river for (a previously measured) 10 metres.

The times recorded over ten metres were as follows:
1) 11.78 seconds
2) 13.06 seconds
3) 11.85 seconds
4) 11.72 seconds
5) 13.06 seconds
The trips which took less than twelve seconds were when the orange was near the left bank, looking upstream, or in the centre. The two trips over thirteen seconds were when the orange floated near the right bank. This demonstrated to us that different rates of flow were occurring in different parts of even a small river.

In order to average the times I have added them up and divided by five.
11.78 + 13.06 + 11.85 + 11.72 + 13.06 = 61.47
61.47 divided by five = 12.294 per ten meters per second. This is the surface velocity of the river.
Multiplied by 0.8 = 9.8352 per ten metres per second. This is the velocity of the whole river body.
Divided by ten = 0.98 metres per second.

Berg’s Classification of River Flow:
State of flow
Velocity

Torrential: Over 1m per second.
Fast: 0.5m – 1m per second
Moderate: 0.25m – 0.5m per second
Slow: Under 0.25m per second.

According to the scale, the Nanekin was ‘Fast’ even during this dry period of winter with a velocity of 0.98m per sec. A good comparison would be to time the flow at different seasons.
Children should be reminded that stream water is likely not safe to drink. While in the vicinity, why not spot water birds and plants, fishes and invertebrates? Rivers can be highly entertaining.

To celebrate the great time we had at Dublin2019, I am making Murder At Dublin Mensa free to download. Grab it 7 – 9 September.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Dubli...

https://amazon.com/Murder-Dublin-Mens...

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Watch my book trailers for my science fiction series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPp...

Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

July – My SF Book Trailers and Worldcon in Dublin

My SF book trailers have just gone live on YouTube.
A Dublin hacker teams up with a London reporter.
The future of journalism… is dangerous.
I guerilla-filmed the scenes on location in Dublin and London, including a climate change protest march, and produced these trailers myself. Many authors get professionally made trailers. I was able to use the skills I have been gaining in college, and so control all the creative process. Second year of my journalism degree has been hectic but fun and exciting. I have learned a tremendous amount of new skills and got to use Apple computers with professional programs like Pro Tools and Final Cut Pro 10. The podcasts and films I made are now available on my website:
www.clareobeara.ie

Here are the YouTube links.

Dining Out Around The Solar System
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soc7u...

Dining Out With The Ice Giants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEMo5...

Dining Out With The Gas Giants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp-pK...

Dining Out On Planet Mercury
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXHI6...

And the trailer for the whole series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GadPp...

An interesting comparison is this excellent graphic novel-style book trailer for Harvest by Olga Werby.
She writes about discovering alien nanobots on Saturn’s moon Mimas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfJnQ...

Dublin is getting ready to host the SF WorldCon in the National Convention Centre. This event will be 15 – 19 August. I’m on the organising team – currently helping arrange for backstage equipment – and I’m the MacGuyver for the Hugo Awards. Which reminds me that I need to get on with reading and voting on the Hugo entrants. A member of the Con is sent an e-mail package of the works, or most of them, and this is a treat worth the price for some members
who can’t travel to attend. So far, I am even more impressed with the content than usual. I hadn’t read any of the material, except some of the novels in the running for best series, so this is a feast. We also have a Retro Hugo Award at Dublin but as this is old material the works are not made available.

What else is happening will include dramas, a concert orchestra, artworks, a masquerade and book signings galore. Did you know galore is an Irish word? The term comes from go leor meaning all or many. And bids will be made for hosting future WorldCons.

Day tickets are still available for WorldCon. Come along! Plan to stay for the whole day. WorldCon says:
Remember to buy your memberships to Dublin2019 soon! Online sales will close at 00:01 on Friday the 2nd of August (Irish time).
There will be NO on the door sales of memberships or day passes! We repeat NO on the door sales! You CANNOT turn up on the day and buy a membership.
https://dublin2019.com/

During August I’ll have SF books free, so this month I’m making an Irish summer book free to download. Show Jumping Team is a best seller and continually popular as a YA read. This book is also selling well in paperback. All my books are available for reading by anyone using Kindle Unlimited, and I still get paid per page read.
Grab it free 27 – 30 July.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Show-Jumping...

https://www.amazon.com/Show-Jumping-T...

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

June – College results, Farm and Forestry Awards

College was absorbing, entertaining, enjoyable and exhausting this year. The bitter cold snap after Easter drained my energy. The marks are out now, and I am pleased enough, given that my fellow students had taken modules during the first year using Apple computers, digital photography, broadcasting and Photoshop, and I didn’t get those modules because I was part-time. I’ve got to fit them in after I’ve got my final degree results, to make up the ECT points for the honours journalism degree. But that doesn’t help someone who is thrown in at the deep end of making podcasts and films. As those who’ve been following my Goodreads blog know, the college closed my part-time course and obliged me to give up the day job and take the course full-time or lose the degree. I have 100% attendance and the work is paying off for me. Shortly I’ll be putting book trailers for my SF books on YouTube, as well as a documentary on disability access in London.

I’m preparing for Science Fiction Worldcon in August, as a volunteer organiser. This event will be held at the National Convention Centre in Dublin. More on that next month!

One of the most pleasant occasions I report on each year is the Royal Dublin Society Spring Awards for Farms and Forestry.
This year’s awards were presented in the RDS Concert Hall, which was packed, and we were treated to a sumptuous lunch featuring the best of Irish produce.
Ms Bernie Brennan, the President of the RDS, welcomed us and thanked the sponsors as well as the expert volunteers who provided the judging panel. Climate change and biodiversity are high priorities for the RDS, as well as amenity value for the community.

Minister of State for Food, Forestry and Horticulture, Andrew Doyle TD, addressed the gathering and spoke of some of the challenges ahead for Ireland. Resource sufficiency is important on an island where much of our energy and food has to be imported, but we are also major food exporters. Climate change and environmental practices are treated seriously and pilot programmes are established to breed sheep and cattle with an eye to reducing carbon use and climate change. Our biggest indigenous industry is agrifood.

The multipurpose nature of forests was noted – biodiversity, water conservancy, climate change abatement and community woodland as well as fuel and materials. Forestry was 1% of the land cover not long ago and now covers 11% of the island. Grants are available for reforestation and afforestation, for conifers, mixed, deciduous, agriforestry and more.
Trees complement other farm enterprises and Andrew Doyle mentioned a neighbourhood woodland scheme in Roundwood; interest has increased due to showcase events. Biodiversity and sustainable management schemes can be worked alongside commercial timber. A woodland improvement scheme is used for secondary thinning in broadleaf forests. He is a landowner himself and planted forestry over decades. He commended all involved.

The RDS had four cattle awards, based on improved productivity and sustainability of genetic stock. The sheep section had a Lamb Plus award to draw attention to the carbon footprint of agriculture and sustainable production. The prizes were crafted by an Irish woodturner and were accompanied by a cheque and medal, and a certificate of merit.
The Genetic Index awards went to Jim and Frampton Jeffrey from Cork, with Suffolks. They showed gains in efficiency from superior genetics. A profit results for the farmer and they can farm in an environmentally sustainable way.
Henry Noel O’Connor in Roscommon had the highest Eurostar Replacement Index Belgian Blue cow in the country.
The Economic breeding index award went to Liam Leahy from Cork.
The Dairy herd award was won by Michael Bradley from Cork.
The Beef herd award went to Patrick Drohan from Waterford, and was collected by his wife Jane as he had passed away.

For the Forestry awards, the judging panel goes out for weeks voluntarily, visiting farms and giving advice to entrants. This advice is being considered to be a main benefit of entering. Henry Philips and Jim Reidy are two of the panel members. A trophy, medal, cheque for €2000 went to the winner of each section, and the runner-up gained a medal, certificate of merit and a cheque for €1000.

Community Woodlands
Second was Tintern Forest, a mixed woodland in Wexford. This is around Tintern Abbey and has a walking path, walled garden, Coillte (the state forester) operated forestry, and 40,000 visitors a year. This wood is managed for biodiversity.
First was Vartry Reservoir community woodland in Wicklow. This amenity has 20km of trails and a neighbourhood scheme; it is managed by Dublin County Council and Wicklow County Council.

Multipurpose Forestry
Second was Matt Fogarty in Tipperary, who planted his first tree in 1987. This expanded to 20 hectares and he now has 100 species, of mostly hardwood trees, excellent for biodiversity.
First was Cratloe Wood in Limerick. Mark McLoughlin from Coillte collected the award. The beams of the roof of Westminster Hall came from this forest. The plan is gradually to remove conifers around the lough and increase biodiversity; the trails were praised.

Production Forestry
Second was Patrick J O’Reilly in Cavan. First tree was planted in 2003, and he now has 17 hectares of Sitka Spruce and Oak. He educates others including students from a local college. He and his wife Ann show them how to conserve the environment.

First was Clonad woodlands in Offaly, owned by the Irish Forestry Unit Trust. They concentrate on sustainable timber, protect and enhance biodiversity, use local contractors, give talks and demos, encourage walking and cycling through the forest. In 2012 they asked Stephen Healy to carry out an ecology survey to identify areas of the most value, and have used the results to best effect.

Farm Forestry
Professor Gerry Boyle of Teagasc, the State’s Agriculture and Food Development Authority, presented the awards for Farm Forestry. The farm woodlands were expected to be productive with social, environmental and financial benefits.
Second was Thomas Pollard of Tipperary. He has 89 hectares of which 48 are in trees. He used the difficult or marginal land for this purpose, so as to manage his better land better. He planted Spruce, Alder, Oak.

First was Gerard Deegan in Westmeath. He was an organic farmer with dairy, a commitment which is stressful and time consuming. He planted 75% in trees with mixed woods. Now he runs an organic calf enterprise and poultry. People with special needs can come to visit the woodlands and enjoy the facilities.

Tom Kirley presented the Talamh (Irish word meaning the ground) Awards. This is a sustainable farming and sustainable living award, a new initiative to promote sustainable agriculture; adding value to a farm or family enterprise through entrepreneurship. Ailbhe Gerrard in Tipperary won for woods, organic grass for lamb, beekeeping, beeswax candles and a hive-share scheme so people can invest in beehives. She lectures in Gurteen Community College and runs Brookfield Farm, and also participates in blogging. She gained a €2000 award and a trophy made by the Irish Goldsmithing and Silversmithing Council.

A sustainable living award was gained by the Leahy Open Farm run by Therese Leahy in Cork. They have crazy golf, an indoor play barn, a petting farm, old machinery exhibits, a thriving business which provides local employment and work experience for young people, of benefit to local accommodation, and to food suppliers as they run a coffee shop. This is a fine example of agritourism.

Agri innovation uses principles applied from science and technology to bring about greater efficiency, sustainability and a reduced carbon footprint. Smart Farming as it is now being called, is a positive and proactive approach to better resource management. Cost saving is between €8000 – 10000 per year per farm and reduced greenhouse gases. Information is shared to help others. The Ceres Sustainability award is a new longterm sustainability measure for development of rural areas.

We also heard about Self Help Africa, run by the charity Gorta (an Irish word for hunger) which works in 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. They feed families and supply markets to support 3.5 million people from their projects. Vulnerable communities are given new crop varieties with zero tillage and effective manures – productivity rises.

Among the extremely interesting people I met, was Muiris O’Sullvan who talked to me about sustainable energy. He was sent to analyse the differences between photovoltaic panels and installations during 2010 – 11. The Northern Irish grid has farmers getting paid for putting surplus power into the grid. A 45% grant is given and the VAT at 13% is probably reclaimable. The South was not ready with grid infrastructure. Farmers were looking for batteries. Summer is different to winter in terms of generation. He advocated choosing pivoting panels to track the sun’s light and follow it to lower angles, but the pivot itself uses some power.
Farmers need a reason to put panels up as they don’t give an income. He saw panels with a 10 year life, but they have improved since; they also need to be cleaned frequently as dust obstructs light collection, so covering a barn roof is not the ultimate answer.

Some people asked me why I was taking notes throughout the speeches and awards, when I could just ask the RDS for a list of winners. I said I needed the practice; I did, but I also know that taking notes captures the flavour of the occasion and the asides and praise which are not in a prepared list. The afternoon was extremely enjoyable and friendly, and the great part of bringing together livestock farmers with forestry farmers and farm enterprises, is that everyone can learn from everyone else.

Summer is an ideal time to visit Scotland, which is very much on the side of environmental tourism. With this in mind I am making my book Murder At Scottish Mensa, set in Stirling, free to download from Amazon Kindle. All my books are available for reading by anyone using Kindle Unlimited, and I still get paid per page read.

Grab the book 4th – 8th July:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Scott...

https://amazon.com/Murder-Scottish-Me...

Anyone whose Amazon store is other than UK or US should use the link to Amazon.com which will then offer to take them to their local store.
If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcasts about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

May – How Google Maps was created

I attended a fascinating talk in Trinity College about Google Maps and mapping our world. The speaker was Ed Parsons from Google London. “I firmly believe technology will improve all of our lives over time,” he told us. The benefit of Google Maps alone, has been calculated to be £300 for every family in the UK.

Maps are used more today than ever in history. The Ordnance Survey in 1801 produced a one-inch scale map of Kent. (This was a coastal area at threat of invasion from France or Spain.) As the name ordnance suggests, the idea was to show what could be a defence against cannons. A wall was classified as “an obstructing feature” until last year. We were also shown six-inch maps of Castleblaney and Londonderry from 1835. Most maps were produced by government agencies for other government agencies, for instance to register land ownership or charts for shipping.

A classic example of a map which is representative instead of truthful is the London Tube map.
Next we saw the internet cable maps – from Ireland to USA; to UK on the way to the EU.
A photo of Tim Berners Lee was shown with his Next Cube on which he invented the basis of the World Wide Web. This computer is in the Science Museum in London, owned by his employer CERN. If a map is stored on a web server, that server can be switched off – but a printed map can be stored.

In 1993 Xerox Parc Map Viewer came out in June, using the Mosaic Browser which had gone live in January. This map was developed by Steve Putz, and was a raster image showing latitude and longitude, viewers could zoom in. The first web map doesn’t exist now, except in a few screenshots. Technology has kept improving so rapidly that old code has been just superseded, often without being stored, but the old map could be re-made.

The first job this produced was digitising postal code boundaries. Maps are now drawn from content in databases. In 1995 / 96 Multimap in the US and Mapquest in the UK were created. The business mode was that they were store locators. AOL bought Mapquest for $1million.

The Wayback Machine stores old versions of sites in an archive. But it only stores HTML to show a homepage, not the maps, because they were in another server. It’s still not showing last year’s maps, which may have been updated.

Web 2.0 created by Tim O’Reilly, is interactive. Google bought Where2 in 2004. This was an Australian firm, and it was the second firm Google bought. This was engineered to serve itself for ads and analytics. At first North America and British Isles only. An employee of Google invented an idea called the Mashup by combining a Google map with a Craigslist listing of rental properties, which showed up as pins. This original version only exists in screenshots now, and at the time he did this, neither Google nor Craigslist knew about it. The map was dynamic as listings changed so the status was ephemeral.

Open Street Map used GPS. They sent a minibus full of people to map a city or the Isle of Wight.

Ed Parsons was the Chief Technology Officer at the Ordnance Survey when Google Earth was launched. Google bought all the satellite imagery and aerial photos, made available to view free of charge, paid for by ads. An image is captured at a point in time. Ed assured us “Storing satellite imagery takes up less room on servers than kittens falling off sofas.”

For Street View, Amazon had a similar project in SF and NY. Cars were used to capture the images. Some of the mapping can show previous dates. Street View is available for most of the inhabited world now, but not as much of Germany due to privacy restrictions. The makers generally had to blur faces, car registrations and so on. Germany had additional requirements; they have to get permission of all the homeowners first, and if required they have to blur the building image. They do not have a database of what the real images show – to comply the raw image has the blur burnt in.

Early mobile phones and early smartphones did not have Global Positioning System - GPS. Bill Clinton signed an order in May 2000 to give GPS from the military for civilian use. However, in 2006 the Nokia N95 cost 700 euros. The GPS would drain its battery in 15 minutes. In 2007 Apple created its iphone. This had no GPS. Steve Jobs did a demo on stage using Google maps to find a Starbucks and order coffee, but it was faked to show potential.

Now, we can get driving information and routes using ambient location – this relates to a knowledge of location that is continually accessible. Google allows people using its phone system to opt-in to anonymously show data streams on how fast traffic is moving; on each street in Dublin, say. How busy is a pub typically at this time? This is told by how many phones are moving. How busy is the next bus coming along? Full but the next one will be empty. People like public transport real time info.

Maps are egocentric. Once the centre of the world map was Jerusalem. Now it’s ‘me’. Ed Parsons assured us we can delete all the info Google stores about us. But if we choose to share, Google can tell us how long our commute will be.

We can investigate contextual fiction. This means downloading a story like Breathe by Kate Pullinger, which draws in content like placenames and weather from where the reader is sitting.

Home assistants also know where we are. An app Home and Away switches house lights on and off via the phone. Nest heating has phone proximity sensors too. These draw on the Internet Of Things (IOT). “The map of the future is no map but a series of devices talking to each other. There is no happy ending. Could be because of the way we interact with information it will be impossible to store archives.” Google says: “We just love measuring everything.”

Q&A
Q: Maps are not entirely true? A: Mapping is getting very objective but personal use is more subjective. Cartography is subjective – you can subtract content to get relevance. If you ask for Chinese restaurants in Dublin Google doesn’t want to show you burger bars. You can switch off the phone, go off grid, explore, choose to be lost. But kids today have confidence that they can turn the phone back on. City planners need to know where people go but even anonymised data is sensitive, so it won’t be sold to third parties.

Q: Mapping developing world cities? A: Map sheet changed every 10 or 15 years – do we really want to update every feature every time it changes. Mapping from Google was originally to help car drivers in California. Most map users in India are on bicycles. In Africa, they are in minibuses. Now countries have new mobile phone systems so excellent signals. These are robust, Chinese made systems.

Q: BBC copied the Domesday Book onto DVD. A: At a conceptual level, these are different things; documents, data. Combination of data and algorithm used for geospatial tools. As a commercial secret the algorithm is not shared. “Largely at this point in time it’s black boxes”.

This was a fascinating, lavishly illustrated talk, and I enjoyed it hugely. The speaker’s love for maps themselves shone through and brought a historical perspective, as well as the technological one we expected. Thanks again to Ed Parsons, Google and the Trinity Long Room Hub.

Speaking of tech, my first SF book Dining Out Around The Solar System will be free to download from Amazon for a few days. Because I don’t put books into a ‘box set’ this means that anyone who buys the full series with one click gets the benefit of the reduction in price. If you have only read the first part of this longer book, now is the time to grab the full length version. May 30 – June 2.

Dining Out Around the Solar System
A Dublin hacker teams up with a London reporter.
The future of journalism… is dangerous.

The books in this series have recently gained some reviews from Jemima Pett, SF and F author.
"Probably the best put-together future world in existence."
https://jemimapett.com/?s=clare+o%27b...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dining-Out-A...

https://amazon.com/Dining-Out-Around-...

Anyone whose Amazon store is other than UK or US should use the link to Amazon.com which will then offer to take them to their local store.
If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.
Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcast about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

April – Filming the coming of Spring

This is getting written at the start of May, because April was just too hectic with college assignments, including film production, and the leadup to exams. I have been warned that third year will be even more intense and the workload greater. When I heard this, I said “Okay, I’d better clear the decks over summer,” and as the lady I was speaking with was French, she asked me what this meant. “In the old days, when a big ship was sailing into battle, the crew used to clear anything loose off the decks so they would not trip,” I explained.

Spring was a long time coming and after some heat, went back to cold. I found the cold drained my energy and it greatly annoyed my cats, who had shed most of their winter fur. Finally, though, the sun looks to have arrived. The cats are making the most of windowsills and this morning I saw our boy cat lying on the warm shed flat roof, not bothered to do more than watch the crows and magpies, which were picking at food scraps a few feet away with great unconcern.

I was delighted to get out – admittedly during the cold snap – and assist a fellow student with filming a park. He did the filming but needed a nature expert to explain what we saw; the apple blossom opening, different trees in different stages of leafing, fungi breaking down dead tree stumps, a mallard and duck paired off swimming cosily together on the pond. I suggested he film me as I pulled some loose bark off a rotting stump, as there would be insects under it. He filmed and sure enough we found woodlice tucked away. Grey squirrels were dashing through the canopies and rooks were making high nests, jackdaws disappeared under a corrugated iron roof to tend their own nest, while a bumblebee queen hummed through the tulips.

Spending all winter indoors really does leave me with cabin fever so this was a great way to relax. Of course, I didn’t have to worry about the final product, since I already had all my own footage, but it seems to have come out well.


If anyone wants to read more about my student filming and film production, check out March’s blog here about filming in London, or my college blog on WordPress which also contains some of the photos I took. Here is a link to a post I called ‘Editing and producing short films with a cast of thousands’.

https://clareobearamultimediajournali...

I’ll make a cheerful springtime book available free to download from Amazon. Silks and Sins is a story of flat racing and romance in Ireland, for the adult reader.

Geri and Jackie O’Keane inherit their father’s riding stables in Ireland and, both business women, set about modernising, including a website. When Jackie meets Valentine Murney, a rising star in the flat racing world, her life appears complete. Val, who admits that he’s no saint, is dedicated, good looking, kind, and a great lover. Jackie sets her sights on the highly competitive 'most stylish lady' raceday prizes. Meanwhile Geri is drifting towards her own relationship.
But when two spiteful stable girls tell Jackie that her jockey boyfriend has been sleeping with someone else, she faces making a decision which might be the greatest mistake of her life.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Silks-Sins-C...

https://amazon.com/Silks-Sins-Clare-O...

Grab the book free 9th – 12th May!

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.
Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog here about disability access and places to visit. You can find my podcast about Octocon on the News and Events page. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

March – Filming in London

This year’s March followed a February in which Britain had the hottest winter day ever recorded there, two days running. We were in London filming during that time. I bought a Crosstour action camera from Amazon, having taken advice from my lecturers as to which one to get – the latest model has three different settings so it is not always on wide angle. This camera is tiny and light, similar to a GoPro. I kept it in a case which allowed me to screw on a mini tripod. As the camera is so tiny it can’t be kept stable in the hand.

This camera records footage or photos in HD onto a tiny HD card. I filled the card on the first full day’s filming and bought another. The twin batteries that came with it go in one at a time. When the battery runs low you change them. I bought a powerbank so I had two batteries fully charged and the powerbank fully charged each morning. As I was walking around, the drained battery could be recharging from the powerbank in my backpack. The camera can also be controlled by a smartphone app, which gives you a bigger screen.

I was making two kinds of film – book trailers for my SF books and a short documentary about disability access. So far I am very pleased with them. I am making them on college Macs using Final Cut Pro 10. When the films are assessed and graded I will place them on my website and Youtube and I’ll place links here on Goodreads. I am delighted with this action cam technology, as this lets people make the film they want to make, not one that is dictated by the limitations and weight of equipment.

I took as my guidebook The Guerilla Film Makers Pocketbook: The Ultimate Guide to Digital Film Making. This is a brilliant and concise how-to, utterly practical, with interviews and tips from many experts. One piece of advice was to make a call sheet, which is a list worked out in advance of what shots you need to take each day, in which order, and the routes to use to go between locations.

Following our call sheet saved endless time and debate on location in London, as we only had three days. For one day’s outline I had written, First fine day. That was our first full day, so we did that, including lunch at the SkyGarden in the City. The next day brought rain, but I had the most important shots. I can’t recommend this book, or this camera, highly enough.

Speaking of my SF books, I have just been humbled by a marvellous review from Jemima Pett, author of more than one fantasy series – and Londoner.
She says:
“It’s addictive, compelling, and probably the best put-together future world in existence. With added cute and blobby aliens, and great gadgets. And Jovians in the Dome. What’s not to like?”
Read her full review of Dining Out with the Gas Giants.




This month by special request I am making Rodeo Finn a free download; grab it 5th – 7th April.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rodeo-Finn-C...

https://amazon.com/Rodeo-Finn-Clare-O...

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.

Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest. I blog on my own site about disability access and places to visit. And we'll be adding my podcasts this month.

February – Fun Making Podcasts and a Silken Chinese New Year

Modern journalism is flexible. Multimedia describes the craft nicely. My degree course taught us to make podcasts before Christmas. First, we listened to and dissected a RadioLab podcast, then we had to make our own. Most of us used our phones as recorders; one person who needed something a little more impressive to interview a politician was lent college equipment.

I chose to interview attendees, organisers and authors at Octocon, the National Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention. Everyone I approached was extremely polite and helpful, considering this was only a college project. I took a notebook and wrote down spelling of names, and anything else required. We chatted about everything from robots hopping on an asteroid to the casting for Doctor Who, independent authorship, and the feminist viewpoint.

I had to make a short and a long podcast and pick a separate theme for each. I also ended up producing them on two different computer programs and two different computers with different operating systems. The college uses Apple Macintosh for this purpose whereas at home I’m a Microsoft user, so everything was new and strange. The short podcast was produced on the Mac using ProTools, which may be industry standard, but I am not in the industry and found it unnecessarily complicated. This one contained four interviews, sound effects, music, a sample of a short story and comment.

The longer podcast was produced at home on my trusty Win 10 PC. The program was Audacity which will work on PC or Mac and is much, much easier to use. I made a half hour podcast over a weekend. This contained seven interviews, sound effects, music and comment. As the grading has not been completed yet I can’t release the podcasts, but they will be hosted on my webspace when I am able to make them public. I will be providing links!

This semester, we started out making music videos and are moving on to creating short films. I’ll talk more about that next time.

I attended two fascinating lectures in the Trinity College Long Room Hub as part of the Dublin Chinese New Year Festival for the Year of the Pig.

Dr Aglaia De Angeli told us about the trade in raw silk from China and Italy. She explained that raw silk from homegrown silkworms was 86% of all exports from the Italian peninsula in 1850. The unification of several nation states into one country was in 1861. The French Empire including Rome and Napoleon controlled the rest of Italy, also Spain and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw. Austria-Hungary were French allies. The island of Sardinia was separate, part of the Kingdom of Turin and Genoa on the mainland north of the island.

Britain and France then won the opium wars against China, shaking the Italian silk trade. Piedmont silk was high quality, but Asian silk was shipped at a low price to Britain, flooding the market. The East India Company (originating in Britain, the first global company) decided to make silk into organza instead of the Italian spun silk. Between 120 - 200 thousand workers were in silk production, about half of those in the wool industry.

China sent raw silk to Britain which exported produced silk to France, 18% to 36% over time, from 1810 to 1860. France decided to cut out the middleman and linked to Japan for trade. Factory Acts were enacted in Britain, but not in France, where workers had longer hours. France used this advantage and exported to the United States, which led to the collapse of the British silk industry. In 1869 the Suez Canal opened, shortening the route from the Far East and making it easier to bring cargoes like tea, silk and spices without spoiling. Porcelain was often used as a ballast because it doubled as a trade good. Initially the trade was in clipper ships, later steamships.

In 1863 China and in 1866 Japan traded with France. The French import of silk was only 10% from Italy at this time, and a scanty amount from Britain, as the Asian silk was cheaper for the same quality. In 1860 France and Britain had a free trade treaty. Bengal silk and East Asian silk were considered cheaper and better quality than Chinese silk.

Silkworms had flourished in Italy in the River Po valley of Piedmont, at the top and west of Italy, from the 1400s. Both raw silk and dried silkworm were traded to Italy as well, but high customs duty was put on imports of raw silk, raising the price. In 1869 the first mechanised loom to spin and weave silk was constructed; up to then this was a cottage industry, as it was in China.

I’ll come back to the lectures next month; I certainly learnt a great deal, and saw that trade wars are nothing new. We also learnt about Chinese humour today, and how it is possible to create satire when the government is always watching.


With spring soon to be upon us, I’m making Murder At Kildare Mensa free to download to your Kindle or Kindle app on PC or phone. This light mystery book deals with stud farms and skydiving in Ireland. Grab it February 26 – 27.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Kilda...

https://amazon.com/Murder-Kildare-Men...

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.
Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie

for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.

January – A pickup truck for Christmas, Language and the Novel

Wishing all my readers a good New Year! We spent Christmas in Wales and Somerset, a relaxing break away from work, computers and stress, catching up with family and friends (and with reading). When we arrived at Bristol Airport, the car hire firm had allocated all their cars, so we were handed the keys to a four-door, four-wheel-drive giant pickup truck.

I was happy to accept the challenge, given that I drive a van normally and the pickup had good mirrors. As my husband commented though, many drivers would not have wanted to take on such a behemoth. We also had issues like the truck being half-automatic, keyless start, and unwilling to lock unless it was satisfied about every tiny detail. Great fun. The suspension bridge between Bristol and South Wales has finally been made toll-free so this made the drive all the sweeter.

Last month I started describing a lecture on the novel in Trinity College by visiting fellow Professor Barry McCrea (Notre Dame). We were told that drama was the foundation of the Irish literature tradition and the development of the novel here came about only after the overthrow of colonisation.

“The novel is the highest expression of a people’s civilisation”

according to Bartolome Mitre – Argentine politician, soldier, author and historian.

Minor languages, meaning those surviving colonisation by people with a dominant language for instance, have many poets and few novels. Folk histories were oral traditions, then medieval collections of tales coagulated into novels. When I told my mother this she riposted “Chaucer”, but I said I’d thought of that, but The Canterbury Tales was actually a collection of short stories unified. Other examples that come to my mind would be The Decameron, and The Odyssey, the Voyages of Sinbad, A Thousand and One Nights, the deeds of Finn and the Fianna, Robin Hood. Prof McCrae told us Ireland was headed that way until colonisation. Ireland produced many fine poets. Today, he said, Irish language poetry is being written by second-language speakers while native Gaelic speakers are writing novels.

A novel needs to be in a plausible language setting. He suggested the ‘encounter with a stranger’ key narrative tool. We would not hail a stranger in Irish as they might well not speak it. Finnegans Wake does this, using phonetic Irish which makes the dialogue read very oddly to those who take it as English and signifying an agenda. An example given was addressing someone with “Guinness thaw tool” for “Conas ata tu” meaning “how are you?” In modern novels the vernacular words have shrunk and are not generally understood. The tale could be set in an alternate world in which the minor language is spoken. An example given was a graveyard in which the dead and buried speak as they did while alive: Cre na Cille, Graveyard Clay by Mairtin O’Cadhain.

TV soaps can be created but dialects have to be mixed as actors come together. Geography is also part of language representation; An Beal Bocht, or The Poor Mouth, is a satire and anti-novel, which represents absurdity. This occurs through a fictional district in the west, linking places that are actually on the north, west and south of the island.

Social class is also represented through dialogue. In Great Expectations Pip spoke as a blacksmith’s son but by the end he was a gentleman with a new way of speaking. The German term bildung for social mobility gave novels their category of bildungromance. When lower class people are socially advanced, they gain the language to describe their former lives. I see this in many British social history novels. The Country Girls also transitions from rural Gaelic to English. This was written by Edna O’Brien in 1960 and will be the One City One Book choice for Dublin during 2019.

An Italian novel by Elena Ferrante, L’amica Geniale or My Brilliant Friend, is located in Naples, where the rich spoke Italian in the 1950s but the poor spoke in local dialect. The novel is all written in Italian with “she said in dialect” added as needed.

Actually, I was told by a friend some time ago that prior to WW1 most Italians spoke their own dialect which had evolved at the time of warring nation-states, despite the Tuscan version of the language being declared official upon unification in 1861. (Tuscany being wealthy and fertile in the north and the southerly states having a lot more mountain.) During WW1 the generals discovered that troops from various areas could not understand orders or communicate with one another, so a determined effort had to be made to superimpose Italian, with older folks clinging to a dialect, as in Donna Leon’s books about modern Venice.

Boomtime fiction explores economic advances while stagnation fiction shows no changes, as in Joyce (or Steinbeck) just exploring the day. A minor language may be left behind, like an immigrant needing to use the language of the new country. The ecosystem of this language shrinks and it no longer possesses rungs on the social ladder.

During question time I mentioned that some fantasy novelists are drawing on Irish when they bring the hidden world of the Sidhe into contact with modern day, as it would be quite natural for the Sidhe to speak Gaelic still. I cited Seanan McGuire and Peadar O’Guilean. However, I said modern readers are not expected to read paragraphs in Irish and only a few phrases might be used, so Prof McCrae likened this to Tolkien’s use of Elvish. Another point was that a minority language can be spoken by the elite, like French being spoken at the Russian court or Catalan being the tongue of the mercantile class of Spaniards. This was a fascinating talk and a great opportunity for me to learn.

Next month I’ll tell you how I recently learned to make a podcast and a music video in my journalism degree course.

Murder at Irish Mensa – which visits Trinity College – will be free to download from 24th – 26th January.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Murder-Irish...

https://amazon.com/Murder-Irish-Mensa...

If you enjoy a book please leave a review, which helps other readers.
Visit my website:
www.clareobeara.ie
for news, puzzles, books, reviews and events. I blog there on venues with good disability access. I am also adding book covers to Pinterest boards after I review the books, so feel free to find me on Pinterest.