CLOG - Comedy Literature Only Group discussion
Introductions
Here's a scene I've just put up on my website if anyone's interested. D'Artagnan and Blandford Candy. https://jemahlevans.wixsite.com/jemah...
Hi all, Greetings from across the ditch. The name’s AndyPaine, or maybe Randy, or even Mandy... I don’t know who I am anymore.
That damn World Cup really messed me up, First because the games went all night, and second because Australia was horrid. Oh and third because I drank too often.
Anywho, I’m back at it now and determined to give my 6 followers a new book. I’m still writing slowly; Dumb Luck has about 4 chapters to go, and I’m just doing a cover to put my novella Danny Diaz up.
And I’ve started on raw games, my new war based titanic tale.
Good to see everyone is keeping at it.
Jemahl wrote: "Here's a scene I've just put up on my website if anyone's interested. D'Artagnan and Blandford Candy. https://jemahlevans.wixsite.com/jemah......"
Love the etching style illustration.
Andy wrote: "Hi all, Greetings from across the ditch. The name’s AndyPaine, or maybe Randy, or even Mandy... I don’t know who I am anymore.
That damn World Cup really messed me up, First because the games w..."
Peter Sellers once said, "There used to be a real me once, but I had it surgically removed."
Mod
Yay. Good to hear. "4 chapters to go..." Is that significantly further than we'd have read? (Note: nobody has yet taken me up on the offer of a beta read.)
James wrote: "Jemahl wrote: "Here's a scene I've just put up on my website if anyone's interested. D'Artagnan and Blandford Candy. https://jemahlevans.wixsite.com/jemah......"
That's an engraving of the historical D'Artagan from Sabran's history.
Mod
I thought the historical D'Artagan was Michael York...
Looking at his actual title - Charles Ogier de Batz de Castelmore, Comte d'Artagnan - you've got to assume that 17th century passports had more room in them than today's.
Rob wrote: "Jemahl wrote: "That's an engraving of the historical D'Artagan from Sabran's history."I thought the historical D'Artagan was Michael York...
Looking at his actual title - Charles Ogier de Batz d..."
French aristos. Long names went out of fashion for a bit in 1789.... The real D'Artagnan is almost as fascinating as Dumas' character. Soldier, spy, explosives expert, friends with real individuals called Athos, Portheu and Aramitz, and the Queen of France's diamond necklace really was stolen by an English milady (The Countess of Carlisle). Dumas ripped off the history so well, I can rip off Dumas and the history, tee hee. Although Im on a colonial Heart of Darkness tip at the moment, the next one will weave a lot of the plot of Dumas sequel to the Musketeers and their attempt to rescue Charles I, with Blandford on the other side. I'm sort of enjoying the metafictional stuff Im slipping in even if only 1 in a 100 readers seem to notice. :)
My, but it seems awfully quiet in here.Echo ...
Echo ...
Anybody there?
Nobody in here, Will, only us chickens.I like to think that our former companions have shot to fame and left us poor scribes behind.
Mod
It would be nice to think so, wouldn't it? Who's actually writing comedy at the moment?
I know Andy C is writing horror, for reasons best known unto himself, but that doesn't fit neatly into the realm of CLOG.
I haven't written anything for about a year now, but that's mainly been due to a lack of time and a desire to see how well/badly Shelf Life does, before deciding whether to attempt a sequel.
I have heard nothing more from Andy in Oz re his Titanic Tales, and we last left Flatpack at a pivotal moment, from which it does not seem to have moved on.
I read 'Of Blood Exhausted', which was as entertaining as ever, and I'm always ready to read anything that the rest of you have in progress. (I'm just in the process of writing up some notes for Andy C, having just finished reading 'Shelley Town RPG.")
If anyone out there has a WIP and they want a bit of well-intentioned feedback, please shout out.
Hi Will,You back to full health, I hope?
I had a spell after one of my ultra clingy cats had to go to sleep, where I had peace to do some E&U stuff. I shuffled chapters around, wrote a couple new ones and changed plot direction. Still got to re write the opening chapter or two now that the characters have developed their own personalities, and left behind those i saddled them with at the start.
Still struggling with the POV concpt,, but am just gonna batter on and worry about that if and when i ever finish.
That said, I recently thought I'd try my music blog again, and see if I could maybe generate some advertising income. God knows what possessed me that day a month ago!
It takes up most of my time so E&U has sort of ground to a halt again.
But I reckon my Loud Horizon blog won't last too long and I'll be back for good. For ever, more like.
I got the 3rd Huntley-in-the-Bog book ready for SWMBO to proof late last year, and need to do a dozen end of chapter illustrations before release into the wild. But life seems to get in the way of serious writing. Can my writing be called 'serious'? things. My youngest granddaughter is giving me some great quotes for secondary characters, but inspiration for drawing is slow to show itself.
Good to see the gang are still here. Hope everyone is fit and well.I'm still in the land of the living after my heart attack a little over a year ago. I was forced to press pause for a while and found that I quite liked it. So I kept life on pause for heck of a lot longer than I had any excuse for.
Book-wise, I had a funny experience. To be perfectly honest, I'm still having it. Lengthy anecdote follows:
Way back in 2011 I wrote a science fiction comedy novel - a cross between Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Close Encounters. Working title: "That Bubble Moment".
I hawked it around agents and publishers with no success. After a while I gave up on it and started again by self-publishing "Love, Death and Tea." That was quickly followed by my Bond-spoof "Global Domination for Beginners". And it was around about then that we all met.
A couple of years ago, I had a brainwave. I took the basic premise of the unpublished "That Bubble Moment" and rewrote it as the sequel to "Global Domination for Beginners." This became "First Contact for Beginners" and was the novel I was working on when I had my dicky ticker incident.
Then the weirdness happened. One of the agents who had previously turned me down wrote to me. My 2011 novel "That Bubble Moment" had resurfaced and she quite liked it. Was it still unpublished? She wanted to show it to publishers.
That gave me a headache. It's great news to attract the attention of an agent, but I really didn't care for something I had written back in 2011. I thought the rewritten version "First Contact for Beginners" was much stronger.
But the agent didn't want to run with that version because it was a sequel to a self-pubbed novel and she didn't want to offer either it or Global Domination.
So I've had to rewrite the 2011 book for the third time. That's in proof-reading at the moment and I'll be sending it to the agent in a couple of weeks time.
I'll let you know how it all pans out ... or not, as the case may be.
Hi all,Writing a bit here and there, and keeping the writer dream candle burning.
However, I’m still having children at a rate that is to be advised against. It’s most disadvantageous to my writing time. Should have been a warning somewhere.
Hope everyone is well.
Andy wrote: "Hi all... still having children at a rate that is to be advised against. It’s most disadvantageous to my writing..."Hi Andy!
Question: are you sure these are real children?
It is a well-documented form of synesthesia for artists (particularly writers) to begin imaging their books, stories, cocktail-napkin doodles and epic poems as actual physical offspring.
Fitzgerald enrolled 'Beautiful and Damned' 'in a French boarding school, which it attended till expulsion in the fifth form.
Hemingway would push all his manuscripts outside, shouting for them to get exercise and prove themselves.
Virginia Woolf insisted on taking a copy of 'Orlando' everywhere in a little sailor suite and nursing it. Quite embarrassing at your more literary soirees.
Have a trained editor check your alleged 'offspring'. Tickling them is also a good home-test for actual biological reality.
I tend to think of them as household gods, demanding of human sacrifice... so yeah, now you mention it, not all that different from children.I haven't been entirely idle. Got a new novella up on WattPad called End Game (tag line: Beware -- a reclusive billionaire has a plan to save us all.) Otherwise just the usual doodling about that may or may not end up as something.
Hi all, and thank you for remembering me Rob. I'm unsure which chapters I have offered up for nourishment, the last three being;
Plié on the Pie,
Falling asleep without a goat,
&
The Cirrus of Pestilence
The latter is in the final touching up stages. The book is accelerating towards its inevitable peroration and should, therefore, be ready for publication by 2034.
Good wishes to all
Roger, ( in view of Savage's vast age I have put him out to grass. He, together with a damnably attractive shetland longhorn have now produced six little savages, bless)
Mod
I'll let you know how it all pans out ... or not, as the case may be."
That's excellent. Very exciting. Very best of luck with it, Will.
Mod
Writing a bit here and there, and keeping the writer dream candle burning. However, I’m still having children at a rate that is to be advised against. It’s most disadvantageous to my writing."
Have you considered giving the kids some early-years training in creative writing? I'm guessing they'll have a genetic predisposition. You could get them started and then let them do all the hard work while you spend more time by the pool, performing the role of editor. (And finishing the latest Titanic Tale, naturally.)
Mod
Would it be cheeky to ask for a sneak peek? I haven't read one of yours for ages. I miss them.
Mod
I'm unsure which chapters I have offered up for nourishment..."
The last I read, our hero was about to take a bath. Things were hotting up.
Oh, and good news about Mr Curtains. Everyone needs a happy ending.
Mod
Happy to do a beta read if it would help, James.
Ok, once I've finished tidying up the latest chapter, I'll send it over, Rog
Rob wrote: "Would it be cheeky to ask for a sneak peek? I haven't read one of yours for ages. I miss them."Sure. Are you on WattPad? I can send you a copy if you prefer.
Mod
A follow up to my agent story from June 2019. I duly rewrote my novel around July, sent it to the agent ...And waited ...
and waited ...
and waited ...
So I emailed the agent again and got a "sorry, not interested" reply. Ho hum.
Look on the bright side, Will - at least you had hope for eight months. That must have been exciting.And what do these 'agent' people know, anyway ....??
Mod
And waited ...
and waited ...."
Sorry to hear that, Will. Do you have any plans for the re-written piece?
Rob - not sure. I now have three versions of the same novel. I'm going to let a little time slip by and re-read the last two to see which I prefer. I think I need some distance from both before I'll know what to do.In the meantime I'm still working on the novel I was writing while waiting for the agent. I've had feedback to bump it up from 66,000 words to 70,000, which sounds like good advice.
How about you?
Mod
I'm still waiting for inspiration to strike, or to whisper in my ear, or to do whatever it does these days to attract attention.
I have a few ideas. I have one of those cork-boards on my wall, much favoured by obsessive detectives and conspiracy theory cranks; it's covered in lots of little post-it notes connected by pins and coloured threads. I'm not sure it helps, but it's amusing to watch people's reactions when they first come into my office. I'm thinking of adding a few glossy photos of strangers' faces with big red Xs across them, just to see what people do.
I'm moving at a glacial pace towards an outline plan, but like most glaciers in this modern era, my ideas tend to evaporate before they actually get anywhere. What I really need, of course, is a period of enforced isolation without any social distractions. If only, eh?
Thus far, my books have tended to play with ideas of what's real, so I don't know if it's a good or bad thing that my latest one will, too. That's if I can pull together all the right elements, of course. I've been kicking around the idea of writing in the first person this time, which would be a major departure. If I manage to get anywhere with it, I'l start a new thread and try to solicit some feedback. I'm concerned that this discussion platform has become increasingly moribund so that might be a way of injecting some energy into it.
In the meantime, keep us posted if you get a breakthrough.
Interesting what you say about First Contact. You are quite right that the MC is more reactive than proactive. Maybe that's something I'll address if I ever write the fourth version.Good to hear that you're still writing, even if the ideas are a bit of a struggle. Sometimes the best thing we can do is to dive right in and be surprised by what our characters come up with. They know the story better than we do.
First person is challenging but fun. Or should that be fun but challenging? You can do things that you can't do in third person, but equally there are limitations. It took me a while to get used to it. I'm still learning. If you want we can start a separate thread about first person. I'd be up for a chat about that.
As you say, we've all got more time on our hands. Would be good to fill it with something other than Netflix ...
Mod
It might be nice to kick a few ideas around about 1st versus 3rd person. Previously, I've preferred 3rd because it allows me to look at the bigger picture from different people's perspectives: showing what the bad guy is up to; showing what the MC is doing; introducing little comic asides to view the situation from the perspective of someone who's affected by it all but doesn't know what's going on...
However, my latest idea is more focused on one person's view of an issue, and it's all about what he discovers. At this stage, I can't see any benefit in straying outside his view of things.
Also, I'm aware that some people much prefer to stick with a single perspective, so it might make the result more widely appealing. I'm not one of those people - most of my favourite novels are 3rd person - but it's partly about the appeal of experimentation. Who knows? I might become a convert...
Rob wrote: "I'm a bit wary of diving right in. I did that with my first and then found that I had to break it into two books in order to keep things to a sensible length. But maybe you're right. Writing someth..."I found that the effect of writing in first person hit me in stages.
The obvious first thing is that your MC can only see what he/she can see. That opens up possibilities for interesting tensions around not knowing something.
The next stage for me was realising that first person gives you more chance to play with narrative and character voice. You can also get deeper inside your narrator's head if you want.
It starts to get funkier when you play with the concept of an unreliable narrator. The first person MC may not be telling the truth.
Arguably funkier still is when you start playing with the idea of who the narrator is talking to. That can bring the reader into the story.
The one that intrigues me is working out when the narrator is speaking, Does he/she know how the story ends? Or are they giving a diary update and don't know what will happen "tomorrow",
Lots of fun and funky ideas to play with.
Day one of the clampdown …Hi all, hope you are all hunkering down in style. We’ve just had the hard word down here in NZ, so it’s social isolation for me for the foreseeable future. It’s not too big a deal as I work from home anyway (and that is continuing as normal) So, all in all, can’t complain (except about the lack of my daily barista-made coffee – the prospect of doing without which fills me with existential dread)
And guess what? I’ve been writing. Just finishing up in fact. I’m at the part I like best – when all of the shoehorning of plot bits into place is over and all that’s left is the spit and polish.
I’m pretty happy with how it has turned out. It’s kind of like a locked-room murder mystery, only without the murder. Not overtly humorous, but I hope a few chuckles along the way. I did it for the open novella contest over at Wattpad. Write a 20K novella in three months in response to a given prompt. Only took me two – surprised myself at how easily it came once I got started. Especially after spending the previous year getting bogged down in this novel thingy I had been working on.
It’s first person, so I guess that’s my vote on that debate. Mostly for the sorts of reason that Will listed.
In a way finishing now is bad timing – even though work looks like continuing as normal, being stuck at home should allow more time for writing. Perhaps I will have to start something new. Or go back to the novel or one of my other dead ends (of which I am developing quite a collection). The latest was formerly one of those – so not as desperate as it sounds.
Keep well
Good to hear from you - and great to see you flying the flag for First Person!I'm finding it a tad hard to write at the moment. When there's so much drama going on in the world I find it hard to get my head into creative mode. I had the same thing over 9/11 and Brexit.
So I'm editing instead. That seems easier.
How about everyone else? C'mon let's have some sitreps from those bunkers!
Raymond here, sitting among the flowers.
err...helloThis is really strange, I've just woken up and it appears that I have slept for about 10 years. Had it not been for the sound of everybody in the country clapping together at precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, I would probably still be asleep.... what is going on?
I switched on my laptop and was confronted by a document entitled 'Chapter 25: Play that funky elevator music white boy'. Strange indeed.
I intend to follow the example of the previous entrant here, and sit among the flowers in the hope that normality returns.
Regards
Rip Van Cushions
Dear RipSad to say, you have actually been asleep for 70 years, or maybe a lot more!
You will notice that some of the shops that are still open now have counters, and you ask the servitor for what you need. They bring it for you, just like shops used to do when you were buying four candles, or was it handles for forks?
Cash has virtually disappeared. You will now need a bit of plastic to wave at a box, which then beeps, and charges you three times for your goods.
Nobody is allowed to stand near you, in case you have the Black Death, or are a witch, and children are barred from everywhere, or whipped, instead of being heard. No more can they spend their days vandalising parks and throwing rubbish about. (The parks are closed) Where’s the fun in that?
All foreigners have been banned, and any who go out in the streets are regarded as coming from another planet; we are probably not far away from the pograms of the Middle Ages.
Spare a thought for the terrorists, who now have to go home to their families and be good citizens, or they are stuck here with a house full of sweating jelly, and can't go out to deliver it. They can’t even get deliveries of detonators anymore because the arms factories have closed down, as deemed non-essential.
The police have the power to hit you with batons (or at least tell you off severely), as in Georgian London, and take money off you if you break any of the new laws that are invented by the news channels.
Drug dealers are becoming the new poor, because every time they get in their BMWs to deliver to the provinces, the police stop them and send them back home, leaving them with big bills to pay to their own suppliers, or lose various parts of their anatomy.
Oh, and Royal Mail is making a comeback to its heyday in the Fifties, as everyone sends their contraband by post.
Welcome back to new England (as compared with New England, which is, bizarrely, in another country).
Mod
Sorry about the delay. I've been missing notifications for some reason. No activity for weeks, then I turn my back for a moment and everyone's chatting. I guess it must be me...
Work has been really busy - the other reason for my lack of contact - but with clients now shutting their doors like townsfolk when a gunslinger's in town, I suspect I'll have a bit more free time from here on in. As soon as it goes quiet, I'm going to try to plan out a rough outline for a story. I think I might give the first person approach a go, just for the sake of education.
Interesting that you said that you find it hard to write when there's so much drama going on in the world. I hadn't thought of it like that but maybe that's the reason for my own dry spell. If real life is more dramatic than fiction, it's probably worth pausing to sit up and look around. That's going to be my new go-to excuse for any lack of productivity.
Maurice; I'm delighted that you've been writing again. When do we get to see it? (Or do we just log into Wattpad for that?)
Ray, I don't know if you received it but I sent you an email a few weeks back with some typos etc. listed for your final Tartan fling. It was the one where I mentioned that 'vase' only rhymes with 'face' in the US. I just wanted to be sure you'd seen it. If not, drop me a line. Otherwise, enjoy the flowers but try not to crush any.
Mr Curtains: don't listen to Ray. In no time at all, he'll have you painting your windows black or wandering through meadows reciting Jorge Luis Borges. Besides, you have a novel to finish. Our hero was about to take a bath, as I recall...
And Rob - I have downloaded Omega. Thanks...
Hi RobYup. The new one is called Filling in the Blank and it is up on Wattpad (https://www.wattpad.com/user/MauriceArh).
Another tuppence on the POV thing – you also might want to consider the omniscient POV as a best-of-both-worlds option. You get the flexibility of third-person while still being able to have a distinctive voice and an opinionated narrator who may or may not be a character in the story. Conrad’s Captain Marlow is an example, and Hitchhiker’s IIRC.
I’ve heard it is considered out of fashion these days (is that right? I can’t think of any good reason why it should be?). Either way, I’d like to see it make a comeback.
(An aside that Ray if no one else might appreciate : in my computer programming days I used to be bedeviled by these error messages bleating about “different levels of indirection”. I was never quite sure what it meant, but I’ve always liked the phrase as a description of what you can do with first-person and/or omniscient.)
MauriceI think the main reason that omniscient is out of fashion is because it can lead to chronic head-hopping. The reader doesn't know which character is supplying the point of view at any one time, or even a disinterested out-of-body POV which is in no-one's heads.
Readers don't always spot it when an author is head-hopping but it can reduce the impact of the writing without them knowing why.
Take a scene with the POV character and a second character who may or may not be lying. The POV character has to try to figure out if the second one is being honest. That introduces a tension which would be lost if we went overboard with omni and saw the scene from both points of view.
Better still, have the same scene but this time the POV character is the one who may or may not be telling the truth - the classic unreliable narrator. Now we're talking!
IMHO almost anything can be made to work, but omniscient is one of the POVs that can be done very badly. I find that the trick is to leave the reader with gaps that they have to fill in with their own imagination.
Mod
Yup. The new one is called Filling in the Blank and it is up on Wattpad (https://www.wattpad.com/user/MauriceArh)...."
Just finished reading it. Excellent as ever. But if I can offer a suggestion, don't call it 'The Sky God' - you'll attract people with the wrong sort of expectations.
What happens next with it?
Mod
I think the main reason that omniscient is out of fashion is because it can lead to chronic head-hopping ..."
I won't be going for omniscient, even though it can be great fun when done well. (A Series of Unfortunate Events, for example.) I want to try something new - something more... (I want to say 'psychologically intimate' but that sounds very pretentious.) Something more centred on a person's thought processes; on a single character and a single perspective. That single perspective will be important structurally, too.
Rob wrote: (some blither)..."So. Billy Blake can rhyme 'Eye' and 'Symmetry', but I can't rhyme 'vase' and 'face'.
Bah. There is no justice in Albion, no more than balm in Gilead, truth in wine or t-paper in Houston.
Thank you for your edit-notes, Rob! More so, for the act of making them. I've vowed not to begin another novel till I've cleaned up every last 'breath' vs 'breathe', 'past' vs 'passed', and especially 'an esthetic' vs 'anesthetic'.
That last is all through my writings, like a secret message waiting to be deciphered. Just waiting.
Hope all are keeping well, with all!
Mod
I didn't say you can't rhyme 'vase' and 'face'; I'm sure it sounds perfectly lyrical when spoken by a Texan. I just said that a native London-dweller (or the equivalent inhabitant of Londonish) couldn't rhyme them. They're not always so obliging, these Fictionals...
But you're welcome. Of course. A truly excellent series.
Rob wrote: "Just finished reading it. Excellent as ever. But if I can offer a suggestion, don't call it 'The Sky God' - you'll attract people with the wrong sort of expectations.What happens next with it?"
I think you are right about the title, I've pretty much given up on the Sky God -- it would mean changing the cover apart from anything else.
What next? Nothing really -- it just floats off into the aether to fend for itself. It is still in the competition of course, but as Wattpad is still mainly populated by lovelorn teenagers I don't imagine much happening from that direction.
Meanwhile, for another take on how rhyming works different in Texas, you could do worse than take a listen to this...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BR-1B...
Mod
Meanwhile, for another take on how rhyming works different in Texas, you could do worse than take a listen to this..."
Thanks for the link; made me smile.
Presumably, Filling in the Blank will eventually take the form of a self-published work at least?
Rob wrote: "Presumably, Filling in the Blank will eventually take the form of a self-published work at least?..."
I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I'd rather just stick stuff up on Wattpad and skip the Amazon-style self publishing route. It may not generate any revenue (like the man said: 'Ain't no money in poetry ...") but on the other hand I sometimes get to say hi to the people who read the books. Better still, I don't have to do anything to promote them. Readers just seem to turn up from who-knows-where without my doing anything -- I can't really imagine that happening on Amazon. Not huge numbers -- perhaps 50 people so far for White Matter and 100 for The Anomaly -- but enough to dilute the feeling that I am writing these things purely for my own self indulgence (though I am).
CLOG - Comedy Literature Only Group
Books mentioned in this topic
Small Stories: A Perfectly Absurd Novel (other topics)The Sprouts of Wrath (other topics)
Pussy Planet and Other Endearing Tales (other topics)
Unreliable Histories (other topics)
The Endless Land (other topics)
Yes, but only very short ones.
(Sorry - a belated answer.)