Alan Moore has a really interesting artical about the global adoption of the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta as a siybol of worldwide protest.Check it out: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16968689

I do love Dexter. And I haven't put any music up on this blog yet. So here's a tribue to the Dexter theme by Ben Ezra, found on the mighty Jamie Noguchi's Angry Zen Master.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and started reading the China Mieville short story collection I bought months ago. I got through one short story before I went to bed. It's called Looking for Jake, and is from the collection of the same name.

Admittedly, I was reading it at half-eleven at night, but I was deeply impressed. Mieville has a wonderful eye, which is something I've always lacked as a writer. I've got the equipment, so to speak, and I can turn a description when I want to, but usually my emphasis is character and voice.

With this first story in the collection, Mieville turns character into setting and back again. And he makes it look easy, the bastard.

As has been previously indicated, I've now completed the planning for the first act of Goodspider the Mad, and started planning the second.

 This whole 'planning' lark is a new one to me, which is kind of why it's taking so long. The first book I tried to write, Coldtouch and Dark, had no real planning and so fell apart in the second act in a rather heart-breaking way. This time, I'm unashamedly hyper-correcting: planning on a chapter-by-chapter, scene-by-scene basis, trying to pull the whole thing together in shorthand before I write it long hand. It's working pretty well, so far, but there's a part of me that wants to throw my hands up in the air and just start going at it. The only problem with that is that I know it won't work.

 I've also been recycling. The title characters of Coldtouch and Dark fit in this new book's second act rather well, albeit with a little tweaking. Their established dynamic is an engaging one, and one I know how to write. Because they're secondary characters in Goodspider, it leaves me free to put a lot of their character arcs off-screen, shedding the millstone-like weight of exposition and freeing them to be the fun, interesting characters I always wanted them to be.

 One also becomes conscious, when one plans in detail, of just how much an authorial voice matters. When you can review your complete story in every major detail, it makes you realise that there are things that you want to say with the book, things you always thought were implicit but aren't. And it also makes you realise that there are other things you are saying that you don't necessarily want to, things that have flown unbidden form your subconcious and made nests in the text. It's a very odd process, writing something long-form. You put a lot of yourself in, and sometimes what comes out surprises you.

P.S: Thank you Microsoft Office for the acres of useless crud you attached to the head of this post.

Well, I've just had a lovely holiday, and got a lot of writing done.

The structure for the first act of Goodspider the mad is now done. The second act is underway!

Wahey!

I'm currently busy as hell nailing down the top-level planning for Act 2 of Goodspider the Mad. I've also written the first part of the first chapter, which I'm now quite pleased with.  It sets the tone quite nicely. I've got to force myself not to write any more until the planning's done, which is hard. I might even post some of it, but don't hold your breath.

I've also been reading Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which is brilliantly written, no matter how much I disagree with his opinions on religion. The man is a true artist with words. And his heroine is so brilliantly unconventional that one can't help but like her.

Finally, in some rather sad news, my dog Mina was put to sleep at my parents' home on Monday. There wasn't anything else to be done. She was nine and 1/2, which is reasonably old for a Labrador cross, and she had cancer of the spleen that abruptly decided to attack. After five days' sickness, the vet decided the best thing that could be done was to end her pain.

I'm heartbroken: Mina wasn't my first pet, but she was the first one I was old enough to have a real relationship with. She was the family pet since just after we moved to Lincoln, and although clumsy and rather stupid, her personality was so endearing one couldn't help but love her.

Now she's gone, and I'm faced with the prospect of going home to a dogless house. It won't be the same. And though my parents may get another dog, in the fullness of time, it won't be my dog. It'll be theirs. And what with things being the way they are, I probably won't be in a financial position to own my own dog for some years. So now I am a dogless man, which doesn't feel good at all.

Welp, the High Court has officially brought America's hacker war to the U.K by agreeing to a U.S-style website blocking for Newzbin 2, a usenet search engine.

That's not just overkill, it's dangerous.

We've rcently been seeing a renaissance in the hacker community. True, it's been pretty infantile for a while, but gradually, I'm sure, the old hacker ethic will re-assert itself and we'll see more organised, professional attacks against the machinery of censoship. BT's cleanfeed will, I'm confidently predicting, be the first to go. It's weak, wobbly technology that's really only designed to block Child Porn, which is a tiny proportion of the Internet's content. Trying to block  illegal content is beyond its capabilities. How do I know? Because its proved, time and again, to be beyond the abilities of any system that's been put in place. If you're going to start breaking the internet, well, someone will build a better internet that you don't have control over. That's what happened when they cracked down on the early P2P networks: newer, better, harder-to-trace systems like bittorrent were born. The internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.

I don't want to see the free internet broken down into a series of renegade darknets. But it could easily happen. Very easily. And there would be nothing the authorities could do about it.

At the end of the day, is it really worth hobbling the most important communication tool the world's ever seen for the sake of a few stupid movies?

Following on from a thread on my Aunt's (Kate Ames') Facebook page, I have decided to devise new words for the familial relationships of the 21st century. You're welcome. Ahem.

Relatoid - Someone to whom you're distantly and ambiguously related, and for whom no word yet exists. Your sister-in-law's sister's husband, for example.

Funcle - Fake Uncle

Faunt - Fake Aunt

Fousin - Fake Cousin

Lepard - Long-term Exclusive Pardner. "My uncle's Lepard, My aunt's Lepard, etc." Should be said in a cowboy accent.

Famunit - A functioning family unit of any makeup. (ALT: Fabunit, from fabulous unit. May be popular amongst gay partners, or people who are just generally fabulous.)

Any more?

Those of you who know me know how much I love Avatar: the Last Airbender. Because I will have told you repeatedly and at length.

Now, finally, after three years off the air and one disappointing live-action movie directed by M. Night Shalama-lama-ding-dong, they're making a proper follow up. I am ridiculously excited. It's a kids' show, true, but it's one of my great guilty pleasures, along with animated Disney movies.

The great thing about Avatar is how fully-realized the world is. Rather than going for the standard-issue cod-medieval Western European fantasy setting, a la LoTR and its many imitators, they decided to take the standard-issue Eastern setting (A la Journey to the West) and run with it like crazy. It worked, mainly because they struck the right balance between respectfulness and daring. The writing's the best I've ever seen in any children's show ever. It's effortlessly fluid, the characters speak and react like real people, the villains are sympathetic and the situations have genuine danger, (which is the hardest thing to get right in any show, but especially one for children).

It's the kind of writing that's usually stymied by the producers' fear of what the parents will say. Bur in Avatar they got one thing right, and everything flowed from that: They gave us a hero, indeed, a group of heroes who were unambiguously heroic and good, whilst remaining human. They were never preachy, they were never over-the-top; they were just good people trying to make it in a difficult world.

And I think that's a bolder decision than it seems in this day and age. When you decide to make your heroes Good, it means you're taking a moral stance, which is the great no-no of relatavistic culture. In most modern adult television, we've come to like our heroes flawed. In some shows, like The Wire, that's perfect for the material. In others, like, say Angel, the moments of anti-heroism were irritating, as the show was clearly about Good versus Evil, and the writers seemed embarassed about it. The Battlestar Galactica remake was a particularly egregious example. The tone was unremiitingly bleak, and characters were wildly swinging between the opposite ends of moral spectrum with giddy abandon. What the producers are saying when they put out a show like that is: "Look, this is how it is! Man is an animal, willing to kill for scraps! Behold!"

But what you say when you put out a show like Avatar is: "There are things about humanity that are worth celebrating and defending." And oddly enough, in our strangely self-loathing times, that is a revolutionary act.

 Or maybe it's a kids' show about chop-socky kung-fu mayhem. What do I know?

*EDIT*

The wonderful Jamie Noguchi of Angryzenmaster , has more to say.

Folk Forest

I went down to Endcliffe park with some friends today to watch the Folk Forest event of tramlines, Sheffield's free music festival (Why they didn't call it Forest Folk, I don't know. They missed a trick there.). I saw two acts, the first of which was alright, but wasted on the crowd, and the second of which was pretty dire. It didn't matter much, I had fun anyway. Beer tents have that effect on me. The pic's of my friend Carrie, and of Isobel, the daughter of a mutual friend.

Looking Back.

All the old blog entries have now been imported to this site. There's some werid character encoding that I can't be bothered to put right, but they're all in there, and basically readable. Unfortunately, I couldn't auto-import them so I had to copy and paste them into the correct format by hand. This gave me the time re-read them, especially the ones about Coldtouch & Dark. And that made me a bit sad.

Coldtouch & Dark, if you're new here, was the novel I was writing for the better part of three years. It was the first long-form work I'd ever really done. I wrote one draft at a white heat, with no planning and no structure, reasoning I would be able to go back and fix it later. It wasn't very good, but I was very proud of it.

And now, three years and about five aborted drafts later, I've had to abandon it, because its structural flaws were pretty much insurmountable.

It's a heartbreaking business, watching something you love die.

In a way, I suppose, I would have been more sensible to put C&D aside quite some time agao, when it was clear that it couldn't survive without being completely re-written. But I couldn't, because I loved it. So I noodled at it, and I tried to put structure in place retroactively and yet, whenever I got to the middle of the second act, it died. It was like...watching a sad scene from a beloved movie. You know it's going to happen, but time after time, you fruitlessly hope it won't. Firefly fans know what I'm talking about: "I am a leaf on the wind, watch how I..."

So I finally had to go round the back of the proverbial woodshed with my shotgun and put my novel down.

And it makes me sadder than it should. I spent a lot of time in Coldtouch and Dark's chaotic, messy world. Flawed and hackneyed as the characters became, there was still always just a little spark of what made me fall in love with them in the first place. Their world was too busy, with far too many ideas, but it was my world, and they were my ideas. Some of them may be recycled, but some just won't work without context, and will have to be left to wither. It can't be helped. Novels die when they're not planned properly. This is just the way these things go.

But all is not lost. I'm only 26, I've learnt a lot from writing Coldtouch and Dark and now it's time to dust myself off and start again.

So I have. I've started writing a new book, which will be called Goodspider the Mad, or at least I think it will. I'm currently in the planning stages which, for obvious reasons, I'm keen to get entirely right. I'm going to plan this little sucker like crazy. I don't want to nail it down too much, but I do want to make sure that I always know where it's going. Hopefully, that'll save me some heartbreak down the line, but who knows? Wish me luck anyway!