Valentine's Day

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So, friends, it would appear that yet again, Valentine's Day has crept among us, ready to suffocate both the single and attached alike under a deluge of tacky presents, cuddly toys and sickly chocolates. I may sound cynical or thoroughly unimpressed by the entire debacle, but for once, it is not because the day simply reminds me of the desolation of being single. This year, I am not single. No, I am cynical and unimpressed because of the mass consumerism engendered by a day which should be about romance, spontaneity and love.

I celebrated Valentine's Day with my boyfriend on 2 February. This was partly to do with scheduling conflicts, but also because we don't really like to do what is expected. We're awkward that way. Hence the reason why I made him a card. That's right, I made it. I combined my knitting skills with my love of making things and ended up with a pretty spiffy item. It's unique, and the time and effort I put into it is a much better indicator of my affections than how much I might spend on something. I could have bought the most beautiful card in the world, but where is the imagination and thought in that?

So, if you're lucky enough to have a partner for Valentine's Day, here's my top three ways to celebrate.

1. Make each other cards. They don't have to be soppy or sentimental - in fact, the funnier the better. Laughter should be a key part of every relationship, and the effort involved in making cards demonstrates how much you care. Anyone can spend money, but not everyone is willing to spend time.
2. Buy presents, but don't go for the usual crap. Really put thought into it. Ignore what the shops tell you to buy, and get them something that you actually think they'll like. For example, how about a book by their favourite author, or those shoes/that video game they've been putting off buying due to the cost? Treat them.
3. Go out for dinner, but go somewhere fun. Ignore all the romantic schmaltzy toss that is available around this time of year. Choose somewhere unusual, or different. Again, put thought into it, and concentrate on enjoying each other's company as opposed to putting on a front of romance just because that's what you're expected to do.

But what if you don't have a partner? You can still celebrate the sentiment behind the day. Remember that the Nuremberg Chronicles of 1493 describe St Valentine as being a Roman priest who was caught marrying Christian couples (and generally aiding Christians) at a time when Christians were being massively persecuted by Rome. He was beaten and stoned, but eventually beheaded. Really romantic, huh? So here's my top three ways to celebrate this altruistic saint.

1. Donate time or money to a cause you strongly believe in. St Valentine risked death by sticking to his principles - the least you can do is go shopping in Oxfam.
2. Organise a night out with your very best friends. Love comes in many forms, and simply being around people you care about is often the best reminder of that age-old adage, love is all around.
3. Buy a pet. Make sure you'll be able to care for it, and tend its needs - a dog/cat/rabbit/hamster etc. is for life! Though if you do get one and look after it properly, it'll love you unconditionally! A dog certainly won't care if you forgot to brush your teeth, or haven't had time to get your roots done. It'll love you regardless.

Let me know how you all get on....

Why Spinning Is Like Writing

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Some of you may know that I'm a keen knitter. Many a story problem has been resolved after I've mulled it over during a knitting session, letting my unconscious tackle the issue while my conscious mind focuses on lace or cables. I've been knitting for over a year now, and I thoroughly recommend it as a useful pasttime. It's relaxing (until you realise you've misread the pattern and purled where you should have knitted), it's portable, and it produces an end-product. Much like writing, really. Both require minimal materials (two sticks and string allows you to knit, and you just need something to write both with and on to write) and both require a combination of your left and right brain.

Anyway. I had a go at spinning last night. No, not the exercise, but the rather ancient craft of turning raw wool into something approaching yarn. A friend of mine is a member of the Guild of Weavers, Spinners and Hand Dyers and she kindly agreed to do a spinning class for the knitting group I go to. We had a go with hand spindles, as well as a spinning wheel, and the only conclusions I can really draw are that; a) spinning is a lot harder than it looks, and b) it requires the sort of hand-eye co-ordination you'd normally expect from a ninja.

Still, it was fun to try something new, and while I was trying to remember to let the twist in AFTER I'd stretched the roving, I thought about how spinning is actually very akin to writing. (See? This is the blog of a writer. I knew I'd get writing in here somehow) Your initial process of spinning is like writing a first draft. You take raw words/roving, and spin them out into a continual story/yarn. You tease and twist, stretch and spin, trying to craft something you can use. Though even when your roving has run out and your spindle is full, you're not done. Just as spun wool must be plied, washed and snapped before it can be knitted, a story needs to be honed and polished before it's ready for the light of day.

It's this last part that I struggle so much with. Once I've written something, I want people to read it. I want it to be acknowledged, digested and understood. I still can't grasp the notion that a story needs to be put away and allowed to 'mature' before I can re-read it and spot the glaring errors. I think I'm too impatient for my own good...but there's always that little voice in the back of my head going "Well it has to go public sometime!"

How about you? Are there any crafts you do to help with writing? And how long do you leave stories to mature?


(NB: The image I used for this post is actually one of my own - it's a spinning wheel I found on a staircase at Chillingham Castle, Northumberland)

Apocalypse

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On 5 February, I wrote an entry about the power of books, inspired by The Book of Eli. Today I want to write about something else, inspired by the same film - the post-apocalyptic trend in fiction.

Back on 21 January, I wrote an entry about The Road. Films often reflect the world or society that produces them, which is what makes film studies such a natural companion to social history. Horror in particular often gives greater clues to the state of a nation's mindset than any other genre, casting that society's villains as the celluloid boogeymen. Therefore it's hardly surprising, in this rapidly disintegrating world, that we'd have two films within days of each other set in post-apocalyptic versions of America.

In both cases, our protagonists have the goals of travelling from one point to another, and the journey itself because almost as important as the destination. Indeed, in both films, a far greater portion of the running time is devoted to the journey than it is to backstory, or the destination itself. Think of it as a sort of 'It's not where you're going, it's how you get there that counts' kind of idea. Both visions of this future have their similarities and differences, but they got me thinking about the different kinds of post-apocalyptic worlds.

• Apocalyptic plague - Zombieland, and other films of a similar ilk, showed us a world overrun by the living dead. The apocalypse has been a bloody one, as zombies feast on humans, and humans have to use their few remaining wits to stay alive. Even I Am Legend dips a toe into this territory.
• Man's basest nature takes over - Mad Max went for the lawless future where whoever owns the fuel holds the upper hand. The Book of Eli strays close to this territory, although water becomes the rare commodity, and the owner of the water gets the power. All pretence to civilisation falls away in a race for the survival of the fittest. Darwin is apparently proved right.
• It's the end of the world as we know it - The Road or The Quiet Earth show us an empty, desolate world, with protagonists struggling to maintain their humanity as the things that humans take for granted wither away. Cue sweeping shots of barren landscapes, or empty cities. The Book of Eli would also fall into this category.

There is some truly remarkable post-apocalyptic fiction being produced at the moment, both on screen and on paper. Stephen King's The Stand is one of the best epics, dealing with the world reeling from the aftermath of a viral epidemic, while Max Brooks' World War Z gives us multiple accounts of a zombie apocalypse, told by the survivors. Even the young adult category is getting its own apocalypse survival story, if you consider Twenty Years Later, the forthcoming work by promising new writer, Emma Newman.

Thing is, I have to admit, I'm less interested in what happens after the apocalypse - I want to know about the apocalypse itself. How did it happen? Was it man-made, or divine retribution? Or simply an accident, a quirk of nature? It's not often you get to write Armageddon, but I certainly enjoyed doing so when I wrote Checkmate!

What do you prefer? The apocalypse, or what comes after?

The Power of Books

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Being as I am a fan of both Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington, I went to see The Book of Eli on Wednesday. Before going in, I knew nothing about the film, and had few expectations, but I wasn't quite expecting what I saw. For those who have yet to see the film, the basic synopsis is that Denzel Washington plays Eli, a man possessed with the conviction that he must carry a book across the wasteland that was once the United States. On the way, he encounters a small town (think 'Wild West' meets Mad Max) struggling under the dictatorship of Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman. Carnegie is searching for a Bible, convinced that if he controls faith, he can control his townspeople. Lo and behold, Eli's book is a Bible, and so begins the struggle for Carnegie to get hold of it.

It's a peculiar film, in a lot of ways. On one hand, it's a film that teeters dangerously closely to the edge of sentimentality in its depiction of religious conviction, with Eli so convinced that he's doing the work of the Lord that he keeps going when most would give up. Yet on the other hand, it yanks back the comforting blanket of personal faith to expose the control and manipulation of people by religion that lies underneath. Eli tells Solara, his female travelling companion, that "after the war", Bibles were burned because many believed them to be the cause of the war. As far as social commentary goes, it's a little ham-fisted, but in a clumsy way, the film has highlighted the importance of books.

Religious books, encyclopaedias, text books and even novels all tell us something about the world in which we live. A heavy tome about chemistry and a dog-eared copy of a hard-boiled detective novel are alike in their ability to grant power to the reader. Throughout the ages, dictators have recognised both the power, and the threat, of the knowledge contained in books, which is why the pages of history are dotted with scorch marks and burnt edges. Of course, the much higher level of global literacy makes the availability of information so much more dangerous. If people can read, then nothing is stopping them learning about economics, philosophy, history, mathematics or, inevitably, religion.

This, in a way, is another of The Book of Eli's veiled warnings. Few people can read in this post-apocalyptic world, leaving men like Carnegie and Eli as the sole interpreters of the written word. Interpretations are often coloured by bias, and where Eli appreciates the spirituality of the Bible, Carnegie sees only a route to power, at the expense of the spirituality of those he seeks to oppress. It's essentially a microcosm of religion as a whole. Some people view the teachings of their chosen religion as guidelines on how to live a fulfilled, and happy, life. The rest use the teachings to instill fear and obedience into their followers. This is why I say that books contain information and knowledge, but not truth. Truth is far too subjective, and open to interpretation. There is nothing inherently wrong with the information - it is the way in which it is used which casts a ruddy glow or gloomy shadow across it.

I won't sport with your intelligence by discussing the "twist" ending, but sufficeth to say, the book is not all that it appears. I would have imagined that you guessed that already. In a lot of ways, Eli is a truly admirable character, devoted to his cause and possessed by the sort of inner fire that you often dream about finding within yourself, when you're clinging to a pole in an overcrowded train carriage on a wet Monday morning. My biggest problem is that I simply can't put enough faith into the teachings of the book he is trying to hard to protect.

Still, in this digital age, it's quite nice to see a film centered upon a book. After all, I can't quite picture a film in which one man would happily shoot another over a Kindle, can you?

Iron Council; Or how I learned to love China Mieville

Tweet I'm quite pleased with myself today - I finally finished China Mieville's Iron Council this morning, meaning that I have started on the right path towards completing one of my New Year goals. That is, I wanted to read at least one novel every month for the whole year.

Now, I'll be honest with you. I didn't always like China Mieville. My good friend Simon was determined that I'd like him, and loaned me Perdido Street Station a couple of years back. It sounded interesting, and I wanted to like it so much since Simon clearly thought a lot of it. Trouble is, I didn't like it. Not at first. I persevered with it for Simon's sake, getting bored with the length of time it was taking for anything to happen. Then, about 3/4 of the way into the book, it did. BAM! I couldn't put it down.

Still, that's a fairly bad sign if it takes me until almost 75% of a book to decide I like it. Simon was still determined that I'd like Mieville, and let me borrow The Scar. I think The Scar is a much more successful book (possibly because the location is a lot more limited - New Crobuzon's sprawling nature means that sometimes more emphasis is placed on the geography than the plot), and features a host of fabulous characters (Uther Doul, the Brucolac, Tanner Sack etc.) but it still took me until half of the way in before I liked it.

Thankfully, where Iron Council is concerned, I liked it immediately. I found it quite difficult to warm to any of the characters, since they're all either selfish, arrogant, pathetic or one-dimensional, but the plot managed to keep things cracking along at a fair pace. He divides the book into smaller books, each concerned with past events which explain the present goings-on, or with the machinations and actions of the present. Mieville has certainly got a broad vision of his continent of Bas-Lag, and his sheer invention of geography, science and history makes this an incredibly awesome book. New Crobuzon, his immense city that provides a home to countless different species, becomes a character in its own right; both backdrop, and protagonist.

If you like sprawling epics within the speculative fiction or fantasy genres, then I suspect that you just might grow to like Mieville as much as I have...

Science, Or Why I Don't Just Do Art

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It's not something that I talk about all that often, but I am actually a great lover of science. My dad is an engineer, so I've had an awareness of the rational forces that hold the fabric of the universe together since I was little (he once helped me make a warren truss bridge out of drinking straws and push pins). I always thoroughly enjoyed biology, chemistry and physics at school, although I confess that anatomy held my attention the longest. I'm continually fascinated by how things work, and I suppose anatomy is similar to mechanics, in a way - it's simply mechanics on an organic level.

Anyway. I'm already starting to digress. Now, as well as loving science, I'm also heavily interested in the arts, and humanities. You can look at me as being split down the middle, if you like, a bit like Spock. Science, logic, rationality and reason on one side, and creativity, art, language and music on the other. So when BBC Four decided to run a programme on the history of chemistry, I was thrilled. You just don't see "history" and "chemistry" in the same sentence often enough. Episode two is on today (you can catch Chemistry: A Volatile History on BBC iPlayer) although I finally got around to watching the first episode with my dinner.

I was hooked! I learned how to get phosphorous from urine, how to make an electrical current using salt water, copper and zinc, and how thermometers work. It's all truly fascinating stuff, and I think that science, in a way, actually helps me to be more creative. Some might believe that in drawing back the curtains and showing what the world is made of, and how the universe works, scientists are destroying the magic and wonder of life. I disagree. In showing me how all of these random elements interact in a particular way, I'm even more in awe that the whole system works at all.

Air is made up of 21% oxygen. Only a few percent less and we couldn't breathe. But how does it stay at the right percentage?! It's questions like this that don't make me go, "Oh, there's no magic in the world, it's all science..." It's things like this that make me go, "Science makes it work...but HOW?!"

The world is wonderful, people.

Still Running (Flash Fiction)

Tweet Apologies for the lapse in blogging, dear friends - real life had that annoying habit of getting in the way. Weddings, interviews - that sort of thing. Anyway. I've just been looking back through my notebook and discovered I actually have some reasonably decent work squirrelled away in there, so I must prompt myself to work on the stories. It's really not good practice to leave them 'festering' like that.

In lieu of anything else, I thought I'd post an old flash fiction of mine, slightly edited. I give you...

Still Running

"Yeah, we never thought the old girl would make it, but she has. War means nothing to her!" Caleb patted the generator. A kind smile creased his face.

Rising out of the concrete floor, the machine was a tumble of pistons, steam pumps and glass valves. Rust marked its metal skin like smallpox scars. It hummed quietly, an archaic melody out of place among the pragmatic Resistance.

"How much juice can she handle?" Philip stepped back to see the antique control panel. Needles flickered across coloured bars behind grimy panels. Buttons and levers, smeared with oil, covered the switchboard.

"Enough to power the Resistance. That's all we'll ever need." Caleb grinned.

"I guess she’s the founder member then. Eighty years old and still running."