The Writer & the Computer

Last week, I spent eight days without a computer.  Now, that shouldn’t have affected my writing too much.  I’ve been writing fiction for many decades and had my first professional publication in 1980.  I wrote six novels and innumerable short stories and poems, using a mixture of handwriting and a manual typewriter, until I finally got my first PC in the mid-nineties (60Mb hard drive and about one step on from Bill Gates’s prototype of Windows).  I shouldn’t depend on a computer to be a writer.

The result (at first, certainly) was to leave me at a complete loose end.  All my WiPs of any kind exist only as computer files.  They’re backed up, of course (memory stick, CD and Googledocs) but nothing I can get at without a computer.  There was nothing current I could work on.  I could have started a new story from scratch, of course, but even that would have had pitfalls.  I re-use a lot of characters and settings, and I tend to rely on being able to flick open the file for a previous story to check on what I said there about this or that.  All on the computer, of course.

All right, so maybe I could submit some stories.  Well, even if I could find markets that take snail-mail submissions, and then pay the exorbitant mailing costs (international mail, since there are very few UK-based markets), I need the internet to find them and check out their guidelines.  Then I’d need a submittable copy of the story and a proper cover letter – both of which mean printing it off the computer.

So could I use the time for research, or discussion of the craft?  Well, about from a monthly writers group, all my discussion about writing is carried on over the internet; and, while I have a large collection of books and could no doubt research some topics, I rely heavily on what I can find online.

I did gradually find solutions.  My town doesn’t have any internet cafes, but I was able to use the computers at the library – for one hour a day, excluding the two days the library’s shut and the one day I arrived to find their computers down.  That enabled me to check my emails and at least look in on the writing groups I belong to, but most importantly, I was able to print off various unfinished and unrevised stories, and then work on the hard copy.  Then again, when I finally got the computer back, I had a lot of typing to do, so that wouldn’t have been a long-term solution.

The upside was that, without the distraction of social media and games, I was able to focus more on the work I did have access to, and I got several things done that had been hanging around for too long.  The downside was that I couldn’t really have kept that up for long.  Printing at the library’s a lot more expensive than printing at home; I’d have to have found some time to type up the work I’d done; and I’d also have had to have found time to submit it, all within the very limited computer access.  And I’d have ended up with stacks of paper to file away somewhere – something I’m eternally grateful to computers for freeing me from.

Hello, I’m Nyki, and I’m a computer-dependent writer.

Review of Tempest by Bob Dylan

I’ve been a fan of Bob Dylan since 1965, and I’ve almost always been able to tell in advance how I’m going to rate a new album.  I remember counting down the days till I could go into the local record shop and buy Blood on the Tracks, whereas in other cases I looked at the album and decided I’d get it some time.  Although some of those have grown on me a bit, that first vibe has usually been confirmed. 

I was excited as soon as I heard about Tempest.  It’s an album that’s divided Dylan’s fans – hardly a new experience for him.  I can understand people not getting it, but I’m definitely in the “it’s a masterpiece” camp.

I’ve mostly loved Dylan’s recent output, especially Love and Theft, Modern Times and some tracks from the Tell Tale Signs collection, such as ‘Cross the Green Mountain.  The songs on Tempest seem, at the same time, a continuation of the same groove and a new departure.

As with most of his recent work, Dylan’s casting a jaundiced eye over the modern world – “the new dark age” as he once called it – attacking hypocrisy and lamenting the loss of honour and compassion, but his world-view has rarely been as bleak as this, and his voice matches it.  Dylan’s voice has always been raw and rasping, but it’s even more so now.  This is an element many people seem to dislike, but it seems to me that he’s finally achieved what he’s been trying for since he was twenty – the true rough edge of blues masters like Charley Patton or Blind Willie Johnson.  In spite of the rasp, Dylan’s in full control of what his voice is doing, and his timing, phrasing and ability to invest a word with extra meaning are unimpaired.

He’s using his touring band on this album, and it shows clearly that they’re used to playing with him.  Like all Dylan’s most successful backing combos, such as the Band and the Kooper/Bloomfield line-up of the mid-60s, they have the knack of sounding like an extension of what Dylan’s doing, without sacrificing their individual musicianship.  It’s not an easy balance to maintain through his various musical styles, and they achieve it beautifully.

For any new Dylan album, though, the most significant factor has to be the songs he’s come up with.  For the most part, as on recent albums, it ranges from Chicago blues, to country ballads to rock ‘n’ roll, but there are variations – Scarlet Town is as swampy as a six-foot alligator, while Tin Angel is a barely sung folk ballad over an ominous bass riff.

Lyrically, the earlier songs on the album are fairly direct (well, direct for Dylan, that is) and play about with his old habit of setting up clichés only to explode them in our faces.  I’m searching for phrases to sing your praises he warbles at the beginning of Soon After Midnight, but this isn’t some dumb romantic song.  His “date with the Fairy Queen” is on night-time streets full of whores, death and vengeance – Two-timing Slim, who’s ever heard of him? I’ll drag his corpse through the mud.

Dylan has said that he wanted to make a religious album, but it didn’t turn out that way, and religious imagery haunts many of these songs.  You went and lost your lovely head for a drink of wine and a crust of bread (from Narrow Way) suggests the Christian Eucharist, as does Man cannot live by bread alone, I pay in blood, but not my own (from Pay In Blood).  This is a long way, though, from the straightforward religion of the late 70s/early 80s, and the references are both uncomfortable and ambiguous.  Is the blood he pays in the blood of Christ, or the blood of other people – victims of war, perhaps?  Or both?  Maybe, in the end, that’s distinction isn’t what the song’s about, and you can take it whichever way you like.

The later songs are more oblique.  Scarlet Town begins with the opening line of the traditional ballad Barbara Allen, but then goes its own way into a nightmare vision of life in Sodom and Gomorrah where you fight your father’s foes... You fight ‘em on high and you fight ‘em down in, you fight ‘em with whiskey, morphine and gin.

Tin Angel also begins as if it’s going to be a traditional ballad (Black Jack Davey in this case) but soon veers off into what could perhaps best be described as the lovechild of Isis and The Man in the Long Black Coat, but far darker and more vicious than either.  This Tin Angel couldn’t be further from the gentle song of the same name on Joni Mitchell’s Clouds – and, since Mitchell criticised Dylan for plagiary a few years back, maybe the choice of title isn’t an accident.

 The title track is a thirteen-minute telling of the sinking of the Titanic, but not a straightforward version.  Dylan has transformed the event into a myth of a society that can’t see that it’s ship is sinking, in a way that reminds me a little of Black Diamond Bay.  An assortment of characters that would do justice to Desolation Row are intent on their own business – even Leonardo DiCaprio gets a look in back on the ship – overseen by the Watchman (Dylan himself?) who saw the Titanic was sinking and tried to tell someone.

Dylan has only ever done one song before that’s a tribute to a fellow artist – Lenny Bruce from 1981, which was uncompromisingly direct.  On the final track here, Roll On John, he gives us a version of John Lennon’s life that doesn’t allow mere facts to get in the way of a good myth – on a slave-ship, ambushed where the buffalo roam, it tells us not how Lennon’s life was, but how Dylan sees it.

Modern Times was criticised in some circles (including by Joni Mitchell) for the way Dylan based some of the tracks on older songs, even though it was no different from what he was doing in the 60s, basing songs on Scarborough Fair, Lord Franklin, The Parting Glass and many others.  There’s been criticism of Tempest on the grounds that he uses many quotes in the lyrics, but this misses the point.  There’s an old saying that a bad poet/artist etc imitates, a good one steals.  Dylan steals, just like Homer or Shakespeare, but far from cheating, the connections the quotes evoke give a whole extra shade of meaning.  Just as they do in Elliot’s The Waste Land, which is widely considered one of the great poems of the 20th century.

There’s been speculation that there may be significance that this album has the same title as Shakespeare’s last play (well, more or less his last).  Dylan’s joked that his title is missing The, and that makes all the difference.  Whatever the significance, I can’t imagine him calling it a day before he has to.  On the form of Tempest, I hope that’s a very long time.

Witch in Aoife's Kiss

The September 2012 issue of Aoife's Kiss is now out, featuring my story Witch. The seventh story to be published about Eltava, swordswoman and adventurer, goes back to show her at fourteen, when boring grown-ups got in the way of adventures.

Aoife's Kiss is an excellent magazine (and I'm not just saying that because they've published three of my stories now) and this issue also includes fiction by Steve Newton, Tim McDaniel, D. Thomas Minton, Rebecca Harwell, L. Joseph Shosty, Mary E. Lowd, Brent Knowles, Charlie Brooks, Tony Peak, Giovanni Giusti, Sarah L. Byrne, Grant J. Howe, Olga Godim and Eamonn Murphy; poetry by Diego Miller, Sandra Sowers Platt, Stephanie V. Sears, Holly Day, Anna Sykora, Will H. Blackwell Jr, Yue Xing Wang and Jason Sturner; and an interview with James Gunn.

All this and the striking cover by Laura Givens for a mere $9.00

from this site.

An Old Horror Story and a Convention

A little over thirty years ago, I was a young, aspiring and mainly unpublished author.  I’d had one or two poems in magazines, but my most prestigious story publication was in a school magazine.  My main interest as a writer was (as it still is, to some extent) a cross between epic fantasy and sword & sorcery, with occasional diversions into other genres.

In 1980, I discovered through a friend that the Fontana horror series, edited by Mary Danby, was accepting unsolicited submissions.  I had an idea for a horror story, so I wrote Safe as Houses, submitted it and was delighted when it was accepted and appeared in The Thirteenth Fontana Book of Great Horror Stories – immediately before a reprint of a story by some chap called Lovecraft.  Whatever happened to him?

And then – nothing.  Looking back, I don’t really know why I didn’t write some follow-ups and submit them to Mary, or to any rival publication, but I simply went back to writing fantasy and, increasingly through the 80s, a surreal style of story I described at the time as “dislocated realism”.  I submitted here and there but, in the days before Ralan, Duotrope and electronic submission, it wasn’t easy to find potential markets, and I had to wait another fifteen years for my second published story.  It’s gradually developed from there to the point where now I can (occasionally) sneak into fully professional magazines.

I was always proud of that first publication, but I didn’t really think that much about it.  Horror was always something of a fringe interest for me, and it wasn’t till I started googling myself a few years ago that I was surprised to discover how many hits Safe as Houses got, and that it was part of a horror classic.

Even so, it was completely out of the blue that I got an email earlier this year from Johnny Mains.  He was going to be interviewing Mary Danby as one of the guests of honour at Fantasycon, and was trying to get as many authors as possible that she’d published to be there.  I’d have loved to go to Fantasycon properly, but owing to being on the wrong side of the economic policy of a certain government who shall remain nameless, I couldn’t afford it.  However, I was invited to come down to Brighton for the Saturday as a guest.

I’ve been to various cons as a punter, but this was my first time as a guest, in however minor a capacity.  It was a wonderful day.  Besides mixing with the con crowd, meeting up both with people I knew in person and people I’d only known on line, I got to meet Mary at last.  She was delightful, and endearingly astonished at the fuss everyone was making about her books.  I discovered that she’s descended from Charles Dickens, and the niece of Monica Dickens, and it was awesome to be sitting right next to a member of a great literary family.

Johnny also came over as a really nice guy.  The authors who were there took part in the discussion, giving our reminiscences (although some of the others had a good deal more to contribute than I did) and then shared her signing session.  It was mainly for her new collection of her own stories, Party Pieces, but some people brought along copies of the anthologies, and I got asked for a few signatures.

It seems strange that something I did that long ago, which seems pretty much detached from my current writing, is almost certainly my most widely read story, and can still have an effect after so long.  So I’d like to thank Mary for publishing it, Johnny for inviting me, and both of them for being so friendly and welcoming.

And next time, perhaps I’ll be invited as a guest of honour for my bestselling novel.  Well, I can dream....

Why Can't I Never Use No Double Negative?

When judgement was called for in Hamlet’s duel with Laertes, the official result was Nothing neither way.  This must have given a headache to generations of teachers trying to impress on their students that they shouldn’t protest I never done nothing.  Why did the greatest writer in the language transgress so?

The answer is that it was perfectly correct to say that in Shakespeare’s day, just as it’s perfectly correct to say in French ce n’est pas faux, even though it contains two negative elements.

The No Double Negative rule was the result of grammarians trying to apply mathematical logic to language.  This would be a dubious activity anyway, but in doing so they committed the elementary logical error of assuming that, just because two things are called the same, they must be the same.

The argument’s simple: if you multiply -2 by -2, you get +4; therefore, if you apply one grammatical negatives to another, the result is a positive statement.  This doesn’t hold water, though.  A negative number isn’t just the absence of the positive, it’s a mirror image, and a mirror image reflected in another mirror ends up the right way round.

This isn’t true of a grammatical negative.  If it were, the statement I didn’t take a step forward would actually mean I took a step backward.  In fact, a negative here is simply a statement of nothing – though in relation to a specific nothing.  The mathematical equivalent would be multiplying by zero, since multiplying any number by zero simply negates it, producing zero.

So what do we get from 2x0x0?  Two?  Four?  Of course not – it’s exactly the same as 2x0.  (Now I’m going to get a mathematician protesting that there’s some theoretical difference between the two sums, but that’s just splitting hairs.  The result is the same.)  In the same way,  a negative negativing another negative should still give us a resounding negative.

So what does this prove?  Well, nothing really, apart from as a cautionary tale against trying to apply logic to anything as illogical as language.  The English language is what it is – chaotic and inconsistent – and the rule against a double negative is part of that now.  Perhaps, though, we could feel less superior next time we hear someone breaking that rule.  It was good enough for Shakespeare.

What's Your World Called?

One of the things many fantasy writers seem obsessed with is giving their invented world a name.  In some ways, this is reasonable – it’s a lot easier to talk about if you can call it something – but does it really make sense?  After all, what’s our world called? 

Well, in fact it has hundreds of names, but most of them are either the common word for the ground we walk on, or else the generic word for a world.  Why should other worlds be different?  As Ursula LeGuin put is in her SF novel Rocannon’s World, there are planets without names, called by their people simply The World...  There’s no reason for a fantasy world to be different.

Of course, LeGuin did give a name to her most famous fantasy world, but that’s a little different.  Just as the Earth is simply a description of the ground we walk on, if you lived somewhere that was nothing but islands and oceans all mixed up together, why wouldn’t you coin Earthsea as a word to mean Everything?

The same principle applies for a country, a planet or an entire plane of existence: it only needs a name for people who are aware of something else.  A tribe living in the rainforest, that maybe has some dealings with a tribe that lives a couple of days’ journey away, doesn’t need to give their homeland a name.  Even when inhabitants do become sufficiently aware of the rest of the world to adopt a name, it’s often very functional.  Take Germany, for instance.  It’s proper name is Deutschland – and all that actually means is The Land of the People.

The scale of naming works gradually outwards: your village as opposed to others; your local territory, perhaps defined by a larger town; your country; your continent...

Many of the classic fantasy worlds are actually at one of these levels.  Narnia, for instance, is the name of a country, not a world, while Middle Earth is a continent.  Tolkien’s world (which, of course, is only a mythical version of our own) does have a name – Arda – but this is only used when the perspective is of the Valar, who know of something beyond it.  Elves, dwarves, humans and hobbits, like our ancestors until very recently, just call it the World.

And this is the point.  We now sometimes think of our planet as Earth, not just the earth (or sometimes Terra) because we’re now aware that there’s something more, even though it’s largely a theoretical knowledge.  Most of us never claim to have met an alien (and almost certainly none of us actually have) but we know that, theoretically, there are probably other planets somewhere with other species living on them.  Even if there aren’t, we have stories about them, so we need to think of Terra, not just the world.

This can apply to entire fantasy worlds.  If you write, for instance, about a world that’s linked by stable magical portals to one or more other worlds, with which they’ve interacted, traded, made war and so on for many generations, then of course they’ll need not only names for the other worlds, but one for their own, just as we’re aware of living in Britain, Canada or Japan.

For a story, though, that’s set in a single world whose inhabitants are unaware of anything beyond it, there’s no reason for a name other than the local word for world.  But that raises a problem in itself.  You could decide that some name (let’s say Shansilea) is the word for world – but whose name?  Our world contains thousands of languages and, even in our age of globalisation, a few dozen that have international status, and all of those (certainly all the international ones) have their own word for our planet.  Which is the name?

None of which is saying that a writer shouldn’t give their world a name, if only to be able to talk about it; but be careful of how to present that name.  Your main character might call it Shansilea, since that’s the word for world in his/her language, and that can be how you talk about it, but be aware that other characters might use a different name.

Or, of course, the god who created your world might have decreed that its name shall be Shansilea, now and forever.  Fair enough.  Your god, your world, though you still have to explain how that commandment is common knowledge throughout the world.

My main world still doesn’t have a name, after more than forty years of development.  If I want to discuss it, I call it the Traveller’s World.  I could pick someone’s name for it, but which?  If I chose the Kimdyran name, for instance, I’d be afraid of offending the people of Errish, or Hafdosu, or Shillau.  Such is relativistic world-making.  So it remains the Traveller’s World.  Or just The World.

Review - The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists

A while back, I came across an interesting-looking CD in the library called The Hazards of Love by the Decemberists.  I took it out for a weeks on spec, fell in love with it and bought my own copy as soon as possible after I had to take it back.  I’ve also got three of their other albums now (Picaresque, The Crane Wife and The King Is Dead) with the rest on my wish-list.  They’re all excellent, but The Hazards of Love remains my favourite.

According to the band’s account, it originated when their main singer and writer, Colin Meloy, became intrigued by an album of the same name by 60s British folksinger Anne Briggs.  Meloy loved the album, but decided it had only one fault – there was no title track, which he regarded as a waste of a great title.  He set out to write one, and ended up with a sixty-minute concept album instead.

Now, I know there are people who run screaming when “concept album” is mentioned.  There are certainly plenty of bad, self-indulgent examples to put them off, but I personally consider a well-crafted concept album the best possible use of the format.  The Hazards of Love is up with the best.

It tells a strange tale, rooted in folklore, of wild forests, animals that are really enchanted humans, gods of wood and water, faithful lovers and dastardly villains.  The story’s told in a sequence of songs and instrumentals that veer between folk rock, prog rock and hard rock, with plenty of variety to move between the dreaminess of young love and the hard edge of murder and kidnap.

Not that the story progresses in a linear, logical manner.  The songs form vignettes of key moments in the tale, with the listener left to construct a plot around them, although plenty of clues are given.  When the main villain, known as the Rake, makes his appearance, for instance, we might be forgiven for wondering exactly what this has to do with what’s gone before, and I’m still not entirely sure what happens to him in the end.  He does play a vital part in the story, though, and more than makes up for any vagueness by the quality of the songs relating to him.

There are four characters in the song, along with parts that are told by a neutral narrator.  The two females, Margaret and the Queen, are represented by guest vocalists – Becky Stark and Shara Worden respectively – but Colin Meloy does both males – William and the Rake – as well as the narration.  This could be seen as dramatically a weakness, although it’s never really a weakness to have plenty of Meloy’s vocals, but it’s very understandable.  He wrote the thing and, while William has a lot more of the album, there’s no way anyone who’s written The Rake’s Song is going to give it to someone else without it being torn out his dead, bloody hand.

Musically, although the Decemberists are based in Portland, Oregon, much of the obvious influence seems to be British, ranging from Steeleye Span to The Who (the Queen’s song Repaid reminds me a little of The Acid Queen from Tommy) and the band tackles the large range of styles effortlessly, from the brooding folk-prog of Annan Water, where the backing includes a hurdy-gurdy, to the crashing hard rock of The Rake’s Song, perhaps the most individually memorable number.  In spite of the British flavour, though, drawing on much of the kind of music I love, my absolute favourite musical moment on the album is when the wail of a pedal steel guitar breaks into the finale.  It shows a perfect musical judgement that never fails throughout the hour of the CD’s running-time.

You may have gathered by now that I love The Hazards of Love.  It’s a personal taste, of course, but I feel this could very well be the best album of the third millennium so far.  Well, perhaps with the exception of Dylan’s Modern Times, but that’s another story.  If what I’ve said here suggests the kind of thing you might like, do yourself a favour and get it.