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Lurking Musings

~ Musings of a newly published writer

Lurking Musings

Category Archives: Wierdness

The Avengers UK: Crossover universes

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Film, Musings, Wierdness

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

All the Geek, Anthony Stewart Head, Avengers Assemble, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who, doctor who companions, Emma Peel, entertainment, geek culture, Gene Hunt, Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, James Bond, Joss Whedon, Judi Dench, Lara Croft, Nick Fury, River Song, Sarah Jane Smith, Sherlock Holmes, Steve Moffat, The Avengers, y chromosome, You Tube Fake Trailers


This particular photo-meme caught my eye the other day. It caused in me two almost simultaneous responses:

1) OMG someone should so make that film!!! Or at least make a fake trailer for it on You Tube by splicing together lots of bits of different shows in a way that makes it look as if they are all in the same plot!!!

2) There were no women in the group they had put together…

Before I discuss 2, let me just say that I really, really, REALLY want someone to make that trailer. Because I am sad like that. Such things really do amuse me. I went squee when I found this video done in celebration of Doctor Who’s 50th Anniversary. So if someone with the right skills could put together a video like that for the Avengers; United Kingdom I would be really pleased.*

Number 2… I was surprised at how much it concerned me. The fact that the purported fictional TV show was very Y chromosome heavy did make me wonder about the role of women in UK geek culture.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There are strong women in UK Geekdom. What concerned me was the fact that all the examples I could think of off the top of my head were supporting characters and many of them were already involved in the franchises represented by characters in that line up. Hermione Granger, various Doctor Who companions (Sarah Jane Smith and River Song being the two that spring most readily to mind), Judi Dench’s portrayal of M in James Bond… the UK just did not seem to have a straight up Geek lead character who was female (unlike the US where there are a few, though many of them are Whedon creations like Buffy). I was so concerned I expressed my opinion on Facebook and did get a couple of suggestions for strong female characters who were not involved in the franchises already mentioned (Emma Peel being one who I had somehow forgotten…) or who were sole leads (Lara Croft) but it does seem as if UK geekdom is a little thin on the ground. Plus, my concerns were not so much with the state of the feminist credentials of UK geekdom but rather with my own inability to think of some. I mean, I can be excused not thinking of Lara Croft because I have never played the game** nor watched the films but I used to watch the Avengers (the UK TV drama) all the time as a child*** so Emma Peel should have leapt out at me…

Maybe I am overthinking this, of course. It was, after all, just a fun bit of photo-manipulation that someone did. However, I think the discussion on facebook did come up with the following concept…

 – Ditch Harry Potter and replace him with Hermione. Her competence far exceeds his and it means we can have a couple of love scenes with Ron, who can also get jealous when Bond makes a move on her somewhere in the middle of the film (she’ll rebuff him, cos she’s not an idiot, though there may be some flirting, but Ron doesn’t know that…)

 – Chuck in Emma Peel in the Black Widow role. She fits the stereotype of that part perfectly, albeit with more English poise…

“I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.”
Come on, you can so see her delivering that line as well as Samuel L Jackson did 🙂

– The team needs a Nick Fury. Someone to be all tough and shouty and manly and sarcastic at all the team members when they mess up. Which UK character suits this role best? Why, only Judi Dench’s M has the sheer brass balls to step into Samuel L Jackson’s shoes.

 – There has to be a role in this for Rupert Giles. Ok, technically Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a US show but Giles is so very British and there are few things that cannot be improved by the addition of Anthony Head. He could be the team’s librarian and be having an understated and typically British affair with M.

 – An enemy. In Avengers Assemble (or The Avengers as we still call it in the UK despite the rename…) that enemy was Loki who is devious and entertaining and malicious. There is really only one enemy that fits this mould in UK geekdom to my mind – The Master.

Of course there were other more outre suggestions for this film. Someone suggested that, since The Doctor is involved, in theory no time period is restricted. This means that we could have some other rather cool UK TV characters turning up. He suggested Richard Sharpe but we could also have Cadfael, the medieval mystery solving monk, Miss Marple and several others. Plus it might explain why Gene Hunt is there in 2012 (almost 30 years after the events of Ashes to Ashes and possibly in an alternate universe created by the minds of Sam Tyler and Alex Drake) and why Emma Peel is there (being, as she is, a character intrinsicly tied to the 1960s). In fact, in my head, this plot involves a centuries spanning plot spotted in several different time periods by different characters…

Hmmm, maybe I am overthinking this. Time to stop for now, I think. Before I start writing fan fic (and I have enough trouble finding time to write the characters I have created never mind taking on someone else’s intellectual property…)

What this does reveal is the appeal of crossover universes. Even though such things are ludicrous in concept and are likely to be done badly in fan fic and similar, they can be the cause of squee. They can also be done rather well in the right circumstances, as evidenced by the Wold Newton family created by Philip José Farmer  which ties many ficitonal characters (including Sherlock Holmes and James Bond) together into one family tree (making them all descendents of a group of people exposed to a radioactive meteorite near the North Yorkshire village of Wold Newton). There is also Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen**** which has a similar concept. In fact, in the 1969 version of this series there is a very cool cameo by a certain Mr Tom Marvolo Riddle.

So, for discussion purposes, feel free to comment to add ideas for UK genre characters you would add to our Avengers team or for plot ideas for things that the team can face. Also comment if you have any other ideas for crossovers or actual crossovers that you have seen (whether they are well done or not).

*And if you could persuade Steve Moffat to actually make it, even better… having first made sure you have sacrificed to the gods of litigation to prevent various companies suiing him for Copyright… And if Moffat does want the gig and can sort out the copyright for the franchises he doesn’t own in that selection I have some plot ideas for him… 🙂

** No, really. I have never played Tomb Raider. I don’t tend to play computer games much. It’s ok, though. I checked. I don’t need to hand in my Geek card unless I also stop roleplaying and reading, watching and writing science fiction and fantasy.

*** And this had nothing to do with Emma Peel, leather catsuits and particular hormonal imbalances that occur around the age of 11. Absolutely nothing at all. I only ever watched it for the articles.

**** The graphic novel version not the film which was sort of OK (for, as Obi Wan Kenobi would say, a given value of OK which some may translate as ‘awful’) but had nothing on the graphic novel in terms of Victorian sleaze, drugs and nastiness and made Alan Quartermain not a drug addict and Mina Harker a vampire instead of the traumatised victim of a Vampire.

The importance of science in paranormal research

17 Saturday Mar 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Guest posts, Musings, Wierdness

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

guest blogging, guest posts, importance of science, News From the Spirit World, Paranormal, paranormal research, parapsychology, recent article, Research, Science, Scientific method, spirit world, Statistics, writing


Over at the News From the Spirit World blog site I have been discussing a recent article in The Guardian regarding scientific methodology in relation to parapsychology.

http://newsfromthespiritworld.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/the-importance-of-science-in-paranormal-research/#more-257

Warning: it contains some discussion of stats and I even mention P values. Those with an allergy to t tests should probably stay away…

[AW Blog chain] Rainy Days

12 Monday Mar 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings, Wierdness

≈ 28 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write, Brits, Communism, Crusades, Cyprus, Drew Barrymore, Engels, Marx, Neuromancer, Night City, Paphos, Rain, Rainy City Roller Girls, Rainy Days, Richard I, Roller Derby, Vampires, William Gibson


Taking a break from Vampires for a moment to talk about Rainy days (can we squeeze in a link there? Well, er, Vampires can’t cross running water and, er, ok, I’ll stop trying and just blatantly jump out of topic for this one…). Rainy Days is the topic of this month’s Absolute Write Blog Chain.

As several of the Brits on AW have commented, this is a topic we can do. We are renowned for our weather. While the US has tornadoes and hurricanes and Windy Cities and Kansas and the famous New York snows and all that dramatic weather, we have our famous ability to talk about it. And, for all that it is a stereotype and a cliche, it is true. We Brits do indeed talk about the weather a lot. Especially the rain. Because it does it so bloody much here.

Paphos castle in Cyprus. Do I need to point out how convenient it was for the beach?

It’s true. In fact, there is compelling and irrefutable historical evidence* that the true and sole reason for the Crusades was so that Richard I would have an excuse to build a series of castles on ‘critical tactical locations in the Middle East’ which also happened to be on sunny islands in the Mediterranean with easy access to the beach and a short hop across the bay to the local tavernas. You see, we love our wonderfully rainy weather so much that we declare long and pointless wars in sunny climes just to get away from it so we can talk about it to foreigners in their own language** Holidaying Brits the world over should be proud that they are maintaining a tradition of avoiding the rain which has been practised since the Middle Ages. Including the creating carnage on the beaches aspect.

But apropos of the above, I have an even greater reason to talk about the rain than the average Brit because I live in Manchester, a city which has its own sinister micro-climate which ensures that it rains here more than any other place in the UK (with the possible exception of parts of Wales but general concensus there is that the gods have a grudge). Manchester is, in my opinion, the place that William Gibson was really describing when he talks about Night City in Neuromancer. A place so grim and damp that it could be argued it was directly responsible for Communism because of the effect it had on Marx and Engels. Put it this way, we have a Roller Derby team*** who call themselves ‘The Rainy City Rollergirls’. That has to mean something with regards to our association with the wetter of the weather phenomena…

So it was with great surprise that, in the middle of last month, I read a headline which said that the UK was potentially about to suffer drought (apologies for the Daily Mail link here…). This was in a week in which I had spent several hours standing at open bus stops while the heavens poured down upon me, when my usually reliable waterproof coat failed in its primary function due to the sheer volume of water that was hitting it and when we did not see a hint of blue sky at all even once it had stopped (temporarily) raining. Of course, in typical media bias, the newspapers were actually talking about a situation in which some people who lived in the south east (which has the lowest rainfall, the least number of reservoirs and the highest population) might have to reduce their water usage by not using hosepipes rather than

This is a proper, serious drought and one which deserves attention...

what I would call a real ‘drought’ which has a more cracked earth and dessicated rivers feel to it. Still, it made me think about the UK’s relationship with rain. We hate it, we try to get away from it, we hide away under waterproof coats and yet it is actually a very essential environmental feature. Without it, we die. On a less dramatic note, without it there would be no ‘green and pleasant land’ for poets to witter on about (and also no daffodils, which may be a relief for those who are no fan of Wordsworth). Rain is like the unwelcome member of the family who we have to invite to our parties but shun when he arrives. With the environment changing so dramatically at the moment, maybe it is time to embrace mad old Uncle Deluge and appreciate him while we can. Perhaps next time it rains, more people might leave their hoods off and turn their faces to the clouds to feel the water run down their faces for the sheer joy of celebrating the fact that it still rains and so we might continue to live for another decade or so? Perhaps…

Hmmm, got a bit environmental there for a moment… do excuse me….

There, see, perfect view of the train lines. Look at that and tell me it wasn't planned that way...

*Absolutely convincing evidence which I cannot, for reasons I cannot explain, show to you at this point in time but trust me it is compelling and irrefutable and comes from the same reliable source as the evidence that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that William Rufus built Newcastle Keep close to where Newcastle Central train station was to (eventually) be built in order so he would have a great view for his obsession with train spotting. They planned a long way ahead these Normans, you know…

** Which always seem to sound almost exactly like English but spoken really loudly and slowly.

*** I have no idea how we acquired a Roller Derby team or even how it came to be a sport in the UK, I blame Drew Barrymore… though I have noticed very few men complain about a sport which sees young women skating aggresively around a ring as being ‘not cricket’ but then, maybe I am reading the wrong newspapers. It took a lot longer than this for us to discover ‘American Not at all Football’ and ‘Baseball’ to the extent of having our own teams so clearly the trick in exporting sports is to ensure plenty of sexy young women in your teams…

Participants and posts:

Please feel free to check out these other great blog posts which form part of this chain.

orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)

Bogna – http://bemaslanka.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)

Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)

pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

Nissie – http://www.paperheroes.net (link to this month’s post)

Lyra Jean – http://beyondtourism.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)

Domoviye – http://working-in-china.com (link to this month’s post)

magicmint – http://www.loneswing.com (link to this month’s post)

areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)

julzperri – http://www.fishandfrivolity.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

hillaryjacques – http://hillaryjacques.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

AFord – http://af12.webs.com (link to this month’s post)

Tomspy77 – http://thomas-willam-spychalski.webs.com (link to this month’s post)

ronbwriting – http://ronbwriting.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

J. W. Alden – http://www.authoralden.com (link to this month’s post)

SuzanneSeese – http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com (link to this month’s post)

Turndog-Millionaire – http://turndog-millionaire.com (link to this month’s post)

Second Chances [AW February blog chain]

21 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings, Wierdness

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write, Absolute Write Anthology, AW, MacAllister Stone, productivity, Publication, Roleplaying games, Waypoint LRP


So, the topic of this months blog chain for the AW forum is Second chances. I had to have a bit of a think about this topic as I actually could not think of an occasion where I could honestly say I remembered my being given a second chance. I am sure there were actually lots of occasions but my memory was not presenting them to me in an easy to access way. I suppose I could have talked about how I realised that I had actually met my wife several years before meeting her ‘for the first time’ but that seems a little too personal for a writing blog and, besides, I am not sure it quite fits the topic as intended. So, I was a little stuck…

Then it occured to me that this is the AW blog chain and late last year the AW moderators announced an anthology for members to submit to and I remembered that I had a second chance right there in that process.

First, some history…

Macallister Stone, the overall owner and moderator of Absolute Write announced a call for submissions for a speculative fiction anthology by members of the AW Forums. This thread became one of the longest forum posts in history* and currently stands at 3244 posts. I talk about it in an earlier post Mistress of Suspense. Flush with recent success in publishing (i.e. one short story published…)I decided to risk my luck against the no doubt thousands of really very good writers and see if I couldn’t get a story into that anthology. So, I tidied up Dances with Drums, a story set in a world I created for the LRP game Waypoint. It was SF(ish) and I was rather proud of it, though it had yet to be picked up. I sent this off and hoped for the best.

It got rejected.

But there were some rather nice comments given, including one which said that the world building was interesting and very well done. I had some problems with trying to give too much information in one sentence, however…

Given that the deadline was still far away and the rules allowed for this, I decided to throw another hat into the ring and sent off An Element of Desire, my contemporary fantasy which had also not yet found a home.

This, my second chance, fared somewhat better. I got a response saying that they really, really liked this and that it was being put forward to the ‘second round’. At this point, it basically came down to what space there was available for the stories to fit in the anthology. I was tentatively optimistic…

At this point MacAllister showed the world how she was a Mistress of Suspense (see the thread and my post for the full story) as she kept us all on tenterhooks for ages while, slowly, the second rounders were whittled down to a list that fitted into a normal sized anthology.

I didn’t make the final cut. Sometimes second chances don’t come out either. However, this showed me that there was a market for the things that I write. All I need to do is polish it up – tidy up some issues with grammar, for example. The one sale was not just a random fluke. Both stories went out to beta readers as soon as they were rejected and I am in the middle of revising them both for submission to other markets sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I am writing other things…

If you want to read the final anthology, it is now available for you to buy from a number of locations, all of which are linked from this url:

http://absolutewrite.com/absolute-visions/

When you buy it and read it, remember that these were the stories which beat my exceptional efforts. Therefore, they must be absolutely phenomenal…

*Well the longest I have ever seen…

If you want to follow and comment on the other posters in this blog chain, feel free to click the links below…

Turndog-Millionaire – http://turndog-millionaire.com/ (link to this month’s post)
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post)
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
magicmint – http://www.loneswing.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Tomspy77 – http://thomaswillamspychalski.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
LilGreenBookworm – http://themayhemofwritingsahm-style.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
LiterateParakeet – http://lesliesillusions.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
AFord – http://af12.webs.com/ (link to this month’s post)
writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
SuzanneSeese – http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Bogna – http://bemaslanka.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
kiwiviktor81 – http://storygenerator.net/ (link to this month’s post)
randi.lee – http://emotionalnovel.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
These Mean Streets – http://ohno-anotherwritingblog.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Domoviye – http://living-working-in-china.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
julzperri – http://www.fishandfrivolity.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
Nissie – http://www.paperheroes.net/ (link to this month’s post)
in_one – http://quirkythomas.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post)
sambgood – http://www.samanthabagood.com/ (link to this month’s post)

Death and taxes

10 Tuesday Jan 2012

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings, Wierdness

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Benzene, Christopher Lee, Danny DeVito, Death, DNA, inspiration, Neil Gaiman, Ouroborous, Taxes, Taxi, utter rubbish.


It is sometimes strange where inspiration might come from. For example, today I got a letter from the tax office. I happened to be musing on that letter (mainly confused thoughts about what the hell they were talking about and what particular confused comments I would make when I rang them to say ‘Eh?’ a lot) when a funeral crawled slowly by. This, of course, made me think of Benjamin Franklin and triggered the following inspiration in me:

Death and Taxes – he’s an accountant working out of an office above a funeral home, she’s a mortuary assistant single mother. Together they fight crime…

I got as far as working out characterisations for the main characters and some concepts of how plot would develop before common sense kicked in and told me it was a stupid idea. Besides, the one that followed it was even better:

Death and Taxis. Starring Danny Devito and Christopher Lee. He’s the manager of a New York cab company, his partner’s the anthropomorphological manifestation of the end of life. Together they fight crime.

I, of course, blame Neil Gaiman entirely for the whole ‘they fight crime’ trope. I still find it hilarious even many years after he used it in the Kindly Ones. This is probably why I am not likely to ever be a writer of sit coms or TV drama.

This incident did make me wonder about inspiration and what can cause it. It is basically what happens when our brains make connections between things which might not normally be connected and derive from them some epiphany – often a clue as to how to progress something that was causing problems. Whether it be a difficult scene in a story or cracking the structure of benzene, as humans we pay attention to external stimuli and if we see something inspiring we often interpret it in light of whatever problem we are currently working on. It’s a symptom of our ability to pay attention to things. Sometimes it is not an obvious inspiration, the universe can be subtle and a number of small stimuli add up to one great idea. Other times it is a blinding flash – a road to Damascus moment. You see the spiral staircase and think about the structure of DNA or dream about Ourobouros and wonder if Benzene might be a ring structure or see a funeral procession and think up a crap TV Sit com concept.

Sometimes I wonder if the key to being a good writer is understanding this process of inspiration and learning how to use it effectively. But then, I am a scientist and my first impulse is always to try to analyse everything…

If you feel like commenting, feel free to share any experiences or thoughts you have had with inspiration…

Home for the holidays [AW forum blog chain post]

09 Friday Dec 2011

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Musings, Wierdness

≈ 25 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write, Blog Chain, Christmas, December, Glenridding, Hills, Hotel, Lakes, Mountain, Pirates and Swashbucklers, The Lake District


I'm captain of this ship...

So, on the AW forums there is a blog chain and the idea is that you get a slot in the month and, during that slot, you post about the topic given. So, it is now my turn and this month’s topic is ‘Home for the Holidays’. Given the season and the American nature of many of the members of AW, one of course must assume that the ‘Holiday’ referred to is ‘Christmas’.

This is a strange one for me because we generally don’t go ‘home’ for the Christmas. Home is where I live now and if I go anywhere for Christmas it is usually away from home. Ever since I got married and we acquired a dog, Christmas for us has been spent with my in laws in a hotel in the Lake District. This hotel, on the shores of Ullswater, a few miles from Penrith in the village of Glenridding, is a wonderful place to spend Christmas for a number of reasons:

1) The food. There is a lot of it. Many, many courses and not a sign of the endless piles of washing up that are the usual karmic reward for eating too much. The hotel used to do a seven course feast on Christmas day but they scaled it back to a mere five courses recently after too many guests exploded following the consumption of a final ‘wafer thin mint’. No, I am not exaggerating. Well, maybe a bit…

The hills are also wreathed in mist...

2) The isolation. Look up at the photograph on the top of this blog. I took that shot from the field at the back of the hotel. In any direction you look in from there, all you can see are hills and mountains. The photo to the left of this text shows more of them. In fact, the hills and mountains serve to block pretty much all mobile phone signals. Once you arrive there, you are cut off from the outside world very effectively. Well, unless you ask for a log in for the hotel’s free Wi Fi to get onto the internet… 🙂 If you want to be incommunicado, this is the place to be. In fact, I completed Gods of the Sea over last Christmas because it was easier to open a word file and do some typing than it was to log into the wi fi to check the internets. Productivity was improved! Also, it has been scientifically proven (by me, just now, I shall post the results of my extensive experiments in a paper I shall send to the Lancet) that bleak, isolated, pretty locations are not only restful but also pretty cool and very good for the brain.

3) Dog Friendliness.  The hotel for us absolutely defines the gold standard of the concept of ‘dog friendliness’. Some hotels claim to aspire to this but they all fall short. This is a place where your dog can walk in, put his or her feet up on the reception counter, and be given a biscuit from the jar that is always behind the bar. When Santa Clause appears in the bar on Christmas morning to give all guests a present, there are presents for the dogs too. There are also lots of places to walk them and a lake to swim in. And yes, dogs do go swimming in the lake on Christmas day… Insane creatures that they are.

The water here is almost frozen...

4) The walking. You go to the lakes to go walking. With your dog if you have one. There are lots of places to explore in the local area, some of them more hardcore than others. One year we made the ill judged decision to take a seven mile hike around the lake on Boxing Day in some of the worst ice and snow seen for many years. It’s a route we’ve done before and found easy, even after 3 days of eating our entire body weight in food every day, but the solid ice made the gentle rolling hills far more treacherous. Especially when you have a sure footed canine on a lead trying to pull you into the valley because ‘there’s some interesting smells over there’. Crampons and ice picks may have helped. A sled, a few more dogs and some time to train them to all pull in the same direction would have been ideal. This year, we intend to pay more attention to the weather report before we leave.

5) Finally, apropos of the above, there is one thing that makes going to the Lake District a fun and interesting Christmas experience and that is the fact that it is more likely to:

SNOW!!!!!!!!!

There are other reasons, many of which would take too long to adequetly explain here. The upshot of it all is that, while I have in the past enjoyed Christmas at home (both at our home, my parents’ home or that of my in laws) the experience of spending a relaxing Christmas in a hotel where the people doing all the work are being paid to do it is one certainly worth doing at least once in your life.

You can find other participants to this blog chain here:

Participants and posts: orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com (link to this month’s post) Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) pyrosama – http://matrix-hole.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) AbielleRose – http://stainedglassinthenight.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) writingismypassion – http://charityfaye.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) Domoviye – http://lets-get-happy.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) AuburnAssassin – http://clairegillian.com/ (link to this month’s post) Areteus – https://lurkingmusings.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) Diana Rajchel – http://blog.dianarajchel.com/ (link to this month’s post) Alynza – http://www.alynzasmith.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) SuzanneSeese – http://www.viewofsue.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) robeiae – http://thepondsofhappenstance.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) SinisterCola – http://acgatesblog.wordpress.com/ (link to this month’s post) MamaStrong – http://inamamasworld.blogspot.com/ (link to this month’s post) kimberlycreates – http://www.kimberlycreates.com/ (link to this month’s post) Cath – http://blog.cathsmith.com/ (link to this month’s post)

Not really feeling it.

02 Wednesday Nov 2011

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Wierdness

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Absolute Write Anthology, body clock., cycle of the moon., daylight times, mild depression, Publication, utter rubbish., word counts


It may be the change in season – some form of SAD caused by it getting darker earlier after the change in the clocks – or possibly something to do with some other aspect of my lifestyle at the moment – diet, sleep patterns, something like that. It may simply be the cycle of the moon or some hormonal flip or even a low level flu or other bug. Whatever it is, I’ve not been feeling in the best of moods lately. Today seems to have been the deepest trough, however, and the major effect seems to have been on my own self esteem.

In short, I have spent the last few days in the absolute and inviolable belief that everything I have written, am writing and will ever write is utter rubbish. I came to realise this when I found this thread in the Absolute Write  forums – Convinced WIP is awful. I also realised on reading this that it is not so unusual for writers to feel this way on occasion. In the rational part of my brain, I know full well that this is a ludicrous thing and probably indicative of a mild depression – possibly triggered by not yet adapting my body clock to the new daylight times. My intellectual brain is citing various pieces of evidence at me such as:

1) There are lovely, wonderful people out there who have said that they like your writing.

2) You have actual publications and apparently some people who are not you, your family or your friends have bought and read them.

3) Lots of other writers have the same feelings and it is not indicative of you, your writing or anything like that but merely an expression of some deeper neurophysiological issue.

However, as anyone with an endocrine system knows only too well, in cases like these the intellectual part of the brain never gets a vote and the rampant craziness is given free rein on the mind.

As a result of this, I have actually done very little writing today. I did achieve my daily word count goal but rather than write something interesting and creative as part of a story I slogged out 700 words on a guest post I have promised to another writer. And I wasn’t 100% certain that I liked those words. I’m still not. I may delete the whole thing and forget all about it at which point I may as well have not bothered writing anything in the first place. I had intended to go through some stories and chapters I had got some beta reader notes on and make the changes but every time I tried to do that I just could not summon up the enthusiasm. I’d also intended to schedule a guest post someone had kindly done for me, which should have been a 5 minute job and therefore an easy win and I couldn’t even do that.

Instead my day involved sitting with the dog on the settee and watching DVDs and surfing the internet. I suppose you could call that research but I never really ever intended to write a story about sitting on the settee with a dog.

So, here is the question. How do you get over these slumps? What techniques do you use to overcome the feeling that everything is futile and worthless? I suppose in my case my technique is avoidance. I have removed myself from writing in the hope that my keen will return following the rest. Are there any other methods?

Tomorrow I intend to be more proactive and actually do something. But then I said that yesterday as well.

Amazon wierdness

01 Tuesday Nov 2011

Posted by D.A Lascelles in Wierdness

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Amazon, John Scalzi, Pirates and Swashbucklers, Publication


This is just a short post to share my confusion with the rest of the world and to make sure I don’t get beaten up by another author who happens to have the same name as me (it’s already bad enough that I share a name with a Viscount! I mean, you’d think a surname like mine would be relatively rare, wouldn’t you?)

Yesterday I took steps to set up my author page on Amazon. Mainly because I was feeling left out because all the other authors on Pirates and Swashbucklers had cool linky things on their names and I didn’t and I wanted to be in with the cool kids. This involved contacting Amazon and telling then that I was a contributor to said book which therefore, apparently, gave me the right to set up an author page. I think they have to establish that this is indeed the case (and I am sure the fine folks at Metahuman Press who are no doubt getting an e-mail about this will back me up on this claim 🙂 ) but they’ve let me set it up anyway on spec until such time as they can confirm or deny my claim. You can find said page here – D.A Lascelles Author Page

Now, here we have the issue. Said page now seems to count me as not only a contributor to one book but also the author of two other books:

The Road to Quality

Self-assessment for Business Excellence (Quality in Action)

Ok, it is possible that I had some strange fit a number of years ago during which I not only wrote but apparently published two manuals on Quality and Business Excellence, despite having no qualifications nor experience in such areas, and then had the memory completely wiped from my mind. It’s a very slim possibility (up there with Albert Einstein being the love child I conceived with Elizabeth I) but I suppose it is possible. However, the more likely explanation is that Amazon made some form of mistake and linked another writer’s work to mine by accident. I assume it is because the author of these two books shares some thing in common with my name (though in both cases no one is listed as the author…).
Anyway, hopefully very soon Amazon will sort this out and assign those books to their correct author and this will no longer be an issue. In the meantime, if said mystery author is out there I would like to say ‘Sorry! It was not my fault! Please don’t beat me up!’
At least this is not so big a mix up as the one John Scalzi encountered recently… 
Edited to add: Got an e-mail this morning from Amazon. In 3-5 days the books will be removed from my site and thus will I be safe from being beaten up. For the time being…

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