A long, long time ago...

No, it hasn't taken me five weeks to see Star Wars.  Just five weeks to blog about it.

Let me start off by saying that what JJ Abrams has done with Star Wars is a triumph, certainly in comparison with the previous Lucas-driven drivel, his cracking storylines about galactic taxes (or something) and obsession that no frame can have enough furry CGI vermin.

I took the scrolling yellow text, fading to infinity, as a given.  And then the star destroyer filling the screen, then dwarfing the audience, then dwarfing Exeter itself.  That filled me with the belief that we were back on the right track.

And then a rollercoaster ride.  Brilliant.

But, alongside the childlike grin, I started to get a strange feeling.  The unhappy young adult trapped on a planet at the arse end of the universe from which he/she escapes on the Millennium Falcon, shepherding a droid with information encoded within it that has to be got to the right people...  A baddy in a black mask...  The spherical death machine in space, which still has an unguarded letterbox to post shit through...  Even an obligatory cantina scene.

Hold on.  This isn't a continuation of the story; this is a bloody reboot, a remake.

And, as if to really highlight the point, the ending...  What do you think that's setting us up for?  Okay, so it's more windswept island than swamp but, really, do I need to draw you a diagram? 

I know I'm not the first to point any of this out - there's a line of us as long as the ones outside the cinemas back in '77.  When, exactly, did JJ do anything truly original?  Super 8?  Since then it's been oh-so-clever remakes.  There are meant to be an infinite number of stories in the universe (or is it seven?) - so why repeat them?

But maybe the last laugh is on JJ.  I've said several times before in these postings that those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.  At my most paranoid I've wondered whether we'll be rebooting the Great War in ten years time, with our current tweens and teens, conscripted boots on the ground, in the Holy Land against the massed ranks of ISIS.

Maybe that's his point.  What comes around, goes around.  A long, long time ago stories were told for the first time, but not the last.

If it happens, it won’t be the strangest thing this year

As with most 11-year olds, the Boy gets easily confused about things, such as returning clothes and books to their allotted drawer or shelf, or shutting doors once you’ve opened and gone through them.

But recently, he got confused over something that made me think twice.

It was an episode of the Film Programme on the 70^th anniversary of ‘Brief Encounter’, the not-in-the-least sci-fi film that I’ve previously speculated may count as real, literal sci-fi on the basis of Trevor Howard’s pushing back of the boundaries of medical science in Africa.  In this, Francine Stock wondered out-loud about whether Alec was, in fact, a serial bounder who had preyed on bored housewives previously, possibly regularly, rather than a good egg helplessly besotted and confused.

The idea that characters have existence outside of fixed texts just baffled him.  His strong view was that there’s a book or a film and what they say or do is in the script; otherwise they don’t exist.  If the text doesn’t tell us whether Alec was prone to dalliances, or that his (non-)affair with Celia Johnson was an uncomfortable departure for him, then it’s a non-question.  What happens is in the book or film; if it isn’t then why ask?: there is no existence for a fiction.  QED.

It’s a stance that has a logic.  You and I are flesh and blood, we have a life when others’ aren’t looking.  To ask what we’re doing the rest of the time is a real question.  If you only exist on a page then the rules aren’t the same, there is no existence outside the script.  To speculate on what a fiction, a creation, does outside of what the author tells us does seem somewhat bizarre.  To extrapolate from the actual made-up to the yet-to-be-made-up (Alec is a philanderer; Chewbacca marries Bungle; James T Kirk is finally picked up by Intergalactic Yewtree) has a hint of intellectual masturbation about it.

And, lest we forget, it’s the sleight of hand that allowed M Night Shyamalan to forge a film career (think about it; The Sixth Sense works for the moments we’re privy to – but what about the bits in between?).

But, maybe, we’re doing this all the time.  Our Facebook and  Linkedin profiles, our online lives present us in such a way.  It’s more important to be seen online than off.  We’ve split.  It used to be that only Mister Bond’s reputation preceded him.  Now all our reputations precede us.  Soon, our reputations will go places we won’t follow, won’t even be invited.  They’ll be more important than us; what our online creations that share our face and name, but are constantly smiling and continually successful, are up to will matter more than the activities of our last-century actual beings.

It’s getting to the stage where we’re beginning to feel inadequate, not in comparison to our peers or our neighbours or our bosses’ or parents’ expectations, but in comparison to our own online claims.  And not factual claims, I’m not talking about the brazen porkies, but the gloss we put on things, the selfies of us doing, having, achieving.  We can’t be that person 24/7, even if that’s the person staring back at us from our own profile page 24/7.

Search on Google and you can find horror story after horror story on abuse and bullying through social media leading to suicide.  But how long before somebody takes their own life without anybody else’s intervention, simply through not being able to live up to their own hype?

Believe me, if it happens, it won’t be the strangest thing this year.

Review of the year - must try harder

Words written c37500

Stories completed 6

Rejections 102

Acceptances 1

Or possibly change my strategy altogether...

Modern-day irony

Words written c37500

Stories completed 6

Rejections 99

Acceptances 1

Stumbled across an article the other day promising to tell me how to better cope in the information-overload age, how not to go crazy with the relentless bombardment of views, opinions, facts, data, information, knowledge, psudo-knowledge, quasi-knowledge, numbers, words, images and stuff.  Particularly stuff.  How to cut down our brain-input to a manageable burbling brook of what's most important.

Quite agree that that sort of thing is vital.

So I took an important first step by skipping it.

Listen carefully, I will say this only once (for a second time)

(Well, there's irony for you - a reprint of an earlier posting which garbled its formatting for no immediately apparent reason...)

I'm doing a lot of DIY at the moment, renovating a Victorian villa on the English Riviera.  A bathroom has recently been on the agenda.  Which means a lot of cardboard boxes to open and things to assemble and fit.


Which also means a lot of instructions, diagrams, insert tab A into slot B, and so forth.  Not that I've spent a great deal of time studying them.  Hell, some I only find in the box when the towel rail is nailed to the wall (that is right, isn't it?).


Which has led me to think of why instructions seem so alien to us.  Maybe it's just a man thing, but I suspect it's more of a Mankind thing.  There's an oil & water nature to humanity and paper instructions.  We love information, can't get enough of it.  But whatever you do, don't tell me how to do things.


I once took part in an Operation Raleigh selection exercise, during which the selectors instantly spotted what a total liability I would have been in the wild.  One of the exercises, the only one where I acquitted myself with any kind of honour, involved following a set of instructions.  I think I may have done something like this before as an army cadet, so I suspected that the instructions ended with 'please ignore everything above'.


Hence I just read the last line, which was indeed an instruction that quashed all the commands that went before, and sat whilst my teammates carefully made paper aeroplanes or something.  I was the only person to complete that task correctly - by doing nothing.  Given that I approached the exercise totally out of character - I rarely start reading instructions, let alone finish them - this rare victory just underlined the correctness of the decision not to let me loose on the developing world. 


But, I digress.  I've come to the conclusion that we have been trawling an evolutionary cul-de-sac here, and that Apple have got it right with products that don't come with any instructions.  There were no instructions produced by cavemen to help catch that mastodon.  You just did.  Then we went through a brief (in cosmic terms) period of creating items too complicated to understand at first glance, and we needed to back the up with telephone directories of how-to wisdom.  But now we're heading back to intuitive design, point n' shoot, click n' collect.  Or something.


Our TVs are slightly behind the curve - in my youth they had three controls at the front (on/off, volume, channel) and two at the back (vertical and horizontal wobble); now I have three remotes, each with three dozen buttons.  But I suspect in ten years those buttons will boil down to a few intuitive controls.  Maybe I'll choose my channel by mind control (in which case, how do I avoid defaulting to porn?).


So, my advice to you is, if you want to surf the evolutionary bleeding edge, you can chuck all those instructions.  If you need them, your thing is clearly a bit cro-magnon.  And you wouldn't want that, would you?

A homeopathic hit rate - and just as effective

Words written c35500

Stories completed 5

Rejections 99

Acceptances 1

I have a simple annual target: to sell three stories.

You'll see from the numbers that, with Christmas already here if you're in retail, this year is not a vintage one.  Response number one hundred is rejection number 99.

And then, take into consideration that I'm due a grand total of $14.16 (or a $7.08 'kill fee' if my story is stillborn) for my efforts.  Not much of a career, is it?

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it

Words written c35500
Stories completed 5
Rejections 83
Acceptances 1

I don't know what it is about the current incarnation of Dr Who that grates so much.

Or, rather, I don't know which aspect grates the most, whether it's the Doctor-centric storylines, with the time lord being the centre of attention rather than a dispassionate observer in others' stories who watches the equivalent of laboratory rats bumble around a maze before intervening, or Malcolm Tucker's trying-too-hard-to-convince-everyone-including-himself performance.

But, as a writer, hackles - which I didn't even realise I had - rose during The Witch's Familiar.  You see, as a writer, you construct a storyverse with a set of rules, the local laws of physics and logic.  And then you stick with it.  Tales of American series having telephone-directory size guidebooks to character and setting are legion, with the hanging threat that any writer who strays outside of them can forget ever working in that town again.  Or planet, if it's sci-fi.  So, if you have to make up a get-out-clause to get you out of a corner of your own painting, then go back to the start and do not pass Go.

You see - spoiler alert! spoiler alert! - the Doctor solves his problems with a laying on of hands (hello? the Doctor as Jesus?), channelling his regenerative energy.  Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't ever recall that being in the Doctor's arsenal.  In fact, my childhood recollection is that the Doctor met his regenerations as I would root canal work, as a rather nasty experience being done entirely to him.  Not by him.  I don't remember the Doctor having any control whatsoever over the whole regeneration trip.

But suddenly, because its the brush that's now needed to paint himself back to the doorway of this particular room, he can turn it on like a tap.

I'm not proposing to do this, but I wonder how many storylines from the last fifty years would be different if he had had this power all along.  Which, of course, within the Dr Who storyverse, it turns out he had all the time...

Issigonis said something along the lines of any fool can design a big car; the challenge is in designing a small car.  And promptly gave us the Mini.  Bend the rules all you like.  Find ones that everybody thought was a rule, but isn't (like you can't set the engine sideways).  But don't break them.  Or make up new ones.

It's damn hard keeping a character going for 35 series over half a century.  All credit to them.  But when you have to make up new attributes to get out of ever more extreme scenarios then you may wish to consider whether the Doctor has run his course...