Author Archives: Cas

Just a thousand words

The third night out their pattern changed. They drew up to camp, aways back from the road, shortly before dusk as usual, but Rofan was edgy. Lukam watched as he muttered something to his brother and then approached Jariel Janir where she stood watching the campfire catch on the tinder.

“You sure?” her low voice carried to where he stood with the horses.
“I am sure, my lady” Rofan growled back. Jariel nodded, then stared at the ground for a moment, stiring the dust with her boot toe. Satisfied with something, she stooped down and picked up six, no seven, objects from the ground. Lukam would swear later they were just pebbles like the countless others scattered around the clearing. Next he watched as Jariel walked slowly round their burgeoning camp at the limits of the firelight, bending down at intervals to place a pebble on the ground.

“Ei, doi, kay, hir, vir, lar-tei” she muttered one word with each stone. Back at the fire, she raised the last and seventh pebble to her forehead, muttered “sai” and placed it in the pouch that hung from her belt. Lukam felt as if someone was watching over his shoulder, but as he made to turn, Jariel knotted the pouch shut and the feeling was gone. He shook himself slightly, shivering at the cool night air. Jariel then continued her preparations for their dinner as if nothing out the way had happened.

“What was that?” He queried Kriss as he neared the fire himself.
“What was what, mercenary?”
“With the pebbles? What LeiLei – he had slipped into the habit of calling her the Chalman for lady as all the others did early on – was doing?”
“Oh. The lady was just casting the boundaries”. Kriss caught his puzzlement. “More’n that, you need ask the lady your questions yourself”. Kriss turned away to check on their guests, effectively closing the conversation.

Nothing loath, Lukam approached Jariel at the cookpot.

“Jariel Janir? May I talk with you?”
“Of course mercenary. Sit. You can peel those roots whilst you’re at it”. Grey eyes smiles over her saibu. Recognising a superior authority, Lukam grinned in return, admitted defeat, and set to work on the mound of tubers.
“What did you do just then? With the pebbles?”
“I cast the boundaries” she spoke as if that was all he needed to hear.
“And that means?”
“Ai, I forget at times you are Nation-born, mercenary” she settled back on her heels and looked afresh at him.

“The taught you of Toth, in the village where you were born?”
“I was raised to follow Toth, yes”.
“I sense something else though, in your tone. I would guess you spent time with the Sisters?”
“Eh, yes. Now you ask, the Sisters had the raising of me and my brother for a year or so after my mother took sick. Then I started Layishan and that side of thing sort of took the hind step”.
“So your understanding is of the Nation world. You know of this world and the next that follows. You were raised in a land where death follows birth and Spirit follows death in a clear line”.
“Yes”.
“In Chalman we see things a mite differently. Our lives are more… ‘circular’ – I use that Nation word, but it does not translate direct. For our purposes now it will serve. We acknowledge something beyond Spirit. Our name for it is ‘Sula’, which is closest to your ‘power’ I would think. Ah, I see from your eyes you have heard of Sula. From a Healer, perhaps?”
“Our healer for a term at Layishan was Chalman trained. His reputation was formidable”.
“I am not surprised. Not for nothing, the best healers on Kenmarkiu come out of the sands. But I stray from our point. Sula, power, ties us all to this world. It turns through us all, to differing degrees. It lets us do things your Nation tutors would have slandered as ‘magic’. Casting the boundaries like I just did is simply that. I set the limits to our camp. Oh, it will not be some impenetrable barrier, so hide your skeptiscm Rikart Lukam. It will simply let us know if people approach”.
“The words? You spoke… it sounded like a chant to me”.

“Counting words only, mercenary”. She raised a reassuring hand. “Worry not, I will try to refrain from corrupting you with my desert magic till we are well beyond the reach of Frenan witch hunters”.
“Why do you tell me this so freely?”
“You asked”. She smiled again over her saibu. “I am a Healer, Rikart Lukam. Part of the reasoning for my very existence is to impart knowledge. If a savage Northern blademan is all Ruad presents me with then, by the six tribes, I shall make the most of the opportunity”. She held her arms wide to the night sky for a moment then dropped, the moment of levity passed.

“Get some rest, mercenary. The boundaries are cast and are as safe as we can make them. Ne’el has first watch, then Rofan. You have third, so I suggest you sleep while you can. From here out our journeying is going to get a little more exciting. I would rather we had been further on our way, but we deal with the hand the fates have given us”. She rose to her feet gracefully, patted him on the shoulder, and took the basket of tubers to Kriss at the other side of the large fire.

Sunday Roast: I am just a bit undone

Oof. This hasn’t exactly been the best week ever in my life. Can I just say, IBS sucks? Those of you without it, thank your lucky stars! When an evening ends up with you being carted to the walk-in centre at nearly midnight by your poor landlord, you know things are pretty dire. Which leads me to a related rant about the idiocy of putting lactose in pills for IBS, when dairy is a very common trigger!

Stupid bloody drugs companies and stupid bloody pharmacist not checking before she gave me the prescription. I managed to find an alternative drug, but it is only designed for short-term intervention, not longer term like the one my GP proscribed. Once again, my body is its own worst enemy, and I shall be having to investigate alternative therapies. At least recent studies show peppermint oil is still effective. And to be fair, I would rather natural remedies over constant pill-popping, if I have a choice in the matter.

Thanks to Moose for this link (it happened during my gastro-intestinal hijinks, so I missed it): a church in Russia is stolen. How did they NOT notice it was getting smaller, day by day?!

Jane Eyre rates as one of my all-time favourite books and graphic novels are a format which intrigues me, so Jane Eyre, the graphic novel sounds absolutely lushious. Christmas is just round the corner, *hint hint* (the proper text version, not the simplified)

You’ve all seen Wall-E, right? Well, if you haven’t, the film is very good and the robot is just the avatar of adorability. But, is it possible, that Burn-E is cuter? He response at the end, and the other robot’s response to him… Awesome!

Why are authors so obsessed with their cats? [And yes, the blocked writer in me also wants a cat. Good to know in some things I am conventional]

Can’t find earrings you like? Make your own

I am having a graphic novel/geek binge this week, clearly. Well, these things happen. Yummy previews of new Coraline film

We’ve all read those books where, whatever happens, you KNOW the hero isn’t going to die. One recent book both Moose and I read (Six Sacred Stones) “killed” the main character in the middle of the book, gave him a miraculous escape, then cliff-hangered on another apparent “death”. Come on, we both shrieked independently as we reached the gripping climax. There’s no way the author would kill him off – he clearly lacks the balls and skill to continue the story without this pivot. So it pleases me to find authors willing to kill main characters off. (I am also reminded of the very start of Buffy the Vampire Slayer [tv], where one of the main circle of friends gets vamped in the first episode. Jos Whedon wanted to send the message that anything could happen in this show)

A beautiful short story to bring a lump to your throat: Little Gods

I want a FreakAngels tank. I don’t want to pay $30 in postage. *grumble grumble* (I also want the throw, but that I can rationalise less easily)

One for my brother – a movie of World War Z, the book which had the pair of us discussing the best weapons with which to survive a zombie apocalypse (and whether it is better to just give in to the inevitable or go down fighting)

Told you I was in a geek-phase: yummy looking Ignition City, the latest offering from Warren Ellis, is also wetting my tastebuds

Seven Pounds – it is not often I can watch a movie trailer these days and DON’T get the entire plot. But this one has hooked me

Cadillac Records – I’m a sucker for a movie with songs, I’ll admit it

And with this small, but perfectly formed Roast, I am going to down tools and head out into Oxford to see what lovely surprises Sainsburys has to offer. Joy!

I Am What I Am Not *repost*

The following is reposted from my back-up blog, BM2. Whilst it is not the most cheerful thing I have ever written, it is part of me, and it feels wrong not to have it in the proper archives.

What follows is one of those times when blogging for me really is therapy. Feel free to look away now.

All my adult like I have been struggling not to be defined by what happened when I was 14. I refuse to base my personality on some thing that happened because a doctor refused to make a house call. But, no matter how hard I fight not to be defined soley by what I don’t have – what got taken away; what I had no choice or control over – there is inescapably part of who I am now that is because of it. I am who I am, to some extent, because of what happened when I was 14 and all that followed after.

It is not a conscious decision exactly, but I am the type of adult I am because – possibly – the traditional female role as incubator of the next generation is denied me. Or at the very least made a lot less likely.

I never wanted kids. Even “Before” I never was one of those to play with dolls or to be the “mummy” when we played grown-ups. I identified with George in the Famous Five, not Anne. I went through puberty with the knowledge something was a little bit wonky with my insides and it affected my outlook more than a touch. I looked at alternate pathways. The alt-pathway is so much more fun so I’m not unduly upset, I will hasten to add. 2.4 still doesn’t hold much appeal.

I am trying to express something that is not all that clear to me. Do I say I don’t want kids because the biological chances are slimmer and I am in self preservation mode, or because I really don’t want kids?

Why am I thinking on this now?

Because after ten years I have finally wrested a diagnosis from the doctors and that diagnosis is PCOS.

I have been tottering around some sort of diagnosis for years, but for the past six months I have been undergoing the latest in a long (and slow) running barrage of tests and explorations all designed to ascertain really how fucked my reproductive system is. We know it is screwed at least halfway round the thread, but is it tightened all the way down, that is the question?

I was dreading actually getting a diagnosis. I couldn’t put my finger quite on why till I forced myself to realise it is because I am not sure I really want to know. Getting answers means – well – it means you have answers. An answer of “actually, all is normal and tickety boo” peversely would still throw me as much as a “you’re totally screwed Ms Kemp”, because the former means I have no excuse. “I can’t” is somehow more acceptable than “I don’t want”. “Don’t want” just makes people smirk knowingly and count down the days till you conceive. Plus, “don’t want” makes you look selfish. “Can’t” gets sympathy.

“Can’t” and “look at other options” are part of my identity now.

Much though I thought I would not define myself by a negative, I am defined in my own head partly by my (potential) inability to bear children. To be told I actually could would, bizarrely, take away a crutch and force me to reevaluate my self out of my comfortable hole. Then again, the alternate diagnosis of “oh shit…” is not exactly a comforting prospect either. “Oh Shit” forces you to deal with different problems. To have it confirmed means… I don’t know what it means.

Basically, ignorance is bliss but my mum told me to get to the bottom of the matter and I am a good girl, so I am doing as I am told. A tentative PCOS diagnosis two years ago was nice. The assorted symptoms fit and it explained a lot but didn’t confirm/deny anything so I was still in blissful limbo land. The doctor (and my mum) wanted a final set of scans to make sure.

So I got the first scan only to be told the “Oh shit” option.

Turns out? The “Oh Shit” isn’t much fun either. It is never a good sign when the radiologist goes silent and mutters “oh dear…” under her breath. Oh goes “Wow…” when measuring bits and pieces on the screen. Turns out a 6.5 cm cyst is not the best thing to have. What would have been nicer is that she could even have found the other ovary at all, but it is probably just very good at hiding.

That’s it. No “worry/don’t worry” just a “my Grandma, what big cysts you’ve got”, which completely looped me out. Of course the NHS website is very soothing about these things and logic dictates if it was seriously worrying I wouldn’t have to wait 6 weeks for a follow up, but even my basic understanding of biology leads me to think an unexplained lump 6.5 cm big anywhere in your body is not a good thing to have.

At the end of the first scans I was further down the Oh Shit branch of reasoning and – you know what? – it is not that comforting after all to have a decade of suspicion reinforced. It would have been nice to have it all over-turned and be forced to reevaluate myself as a “have options” girl instead of firm up the “no chance” argument. Save me from pity. Save me from myself. Save me from my brain hurtling round my head at a gazillion miles, with none of the stations it is likely to stop at looking particularly inviting. I am making a mountain out of a (fairly) large cyst, I know that, but experience tells me to plan for the worst. I am reaching hatch-battening time and dear god I think it is going to be a big storm.

I got the results of the second scan and, as expected, PCOS is where things are at. All things considered, it was more a storm in an extra-large Starbucks mug than anything else. Still stormy, but it could have been one hell of a lot worse.

All the way through I was convinced that ignorance and “who the frack knows what is going on in there?” were bliss. I would rather have kept at the guessing stage than the whirlygig my thoughts and emotions have been on lately. But now I actually do know what is going on, I am rather comforted. As there was never any chance of a “you are normal” diagnosis, the diagnosis I have been handed is about as “nice” as could have been expected. On the scary scale we are talking a PG as opposed to a full on straight-to-video 18+ it could have been.

Labeling things is so very satisfying I find. Once you name something, you set limits on it, make it definable, approachable, surmountable.

I can see a way forward now. I know my options and I know what I have to do. At the same time I don’t like it confirmed that from now on I am the girl without her health. My body is making it very hard to be anything other than the girl who defines herself by what she hasn’t got. I am rapidly becoming the girl I never wanted to be. The girl who others pity. Seriously, if I was a dog you would have had me put out of my misery by now!

I saw the speech therapist the other week and we got to the bit of the consultation where you have to list your medical history. Ten minutes and several pages of notes later, she said “My, that’s quite a lot to have happened in one so young” followed by her being annoyingly (but sweetly) sympathetic and asking if I had had counseling to help. Actually, I have. She asked me if I was angry. I was.

For the longest time I was very, very angry at the doctors, at myself, at the universe, at my family, at everyone. But anger just takes it out of you and now it it is just the situation I have to deal with. Things could be worse, things could be better. Things just are. Why waste your time wishing things were different? This is the life you have to live so you might as well get on and enjoy it.

She says, over and over, because saying something often enough will make it come true.

I have PCOS. Many people have it worse than me. It turns out that the assorted medications I could take to help are, for one reason or another, not suitable for me. Which is a state of affairs that doesn’t surprise me if I am being honest, because I never was one to make it easy on myself. So I am left with lifestyle change and a future that is just so depressingly healthy.

I think that is what is bugging me most now. Oh, for a magic pill I could take to make everything all right and that would let me keep on living life (and eating) as I want to live life and eat. But there is no magic pill. I need to take responsibility for myself, depressingly grown-up though that sounds.

*shrug* It’s all character building, right? If nothing else it means I have things to write about on the blog.

*update*
I’ve got some amazing and touching responses to this post – thank you.
If you’re worried you might have PCOS, you have PCOS or you know someone who does, I would recommend you talk to a healthcare professional. There are also lots of very good support groups out there such as Verity in the UK and these in the US.
If you want to talk to me, but don’t want to leave a public comment, please feel free to email me on cas.brightmeadow[at]gmail.com

One Month In

It’s been a month now, or just over to be counting true, that I have been living in the city of the dreaming spires. I figured now might be a good time to have a look back and see how it has all gone.

I’ll make no bones about it, from the first I have loved Oxford. I love the buildings, I love the vibe, I love the area. I am at the northern edge of my geographical comfort zone (till you reach the Borders anyway) but it still feels southern enough for me. Being only an hour-ish from Southampton and London by train does help. A lot! I have yet to explore the greater Oxfordshire area, but I’ve only been here a month and I don’t have a car (or know anyone with a car) – give me a chance.

As for the job. Oh, the job. *sigh of contentment* I have been having meetings over the past month with various people from different departments around the division and they all keep asking me the same questions:
1) How am I enjoying Oxford
2) How am I enjoying the job
3) How did I get into publishing
4) Why did you get into publishing

My answer to 1) and 2) is still at the bouncing-up-and-down on the chair, squeeeeing like an excited toddler hocked-up on Halloween candy, stage. I quite simply haven’t stopped grinning from ear to ear since I walked through the door on my first day. There’s got to be a down-side around here somewhere, but I have yet to stumble across it. I reckon it’s hiding in the bottom of the author contracts filing cabinet (my nemesis), waiting to jump out and attack me. In the manner of the bogarts from Harry Potter, it is probably going to take the form of a freakishly important interest list that slipped down the back of my In Tray, never to be seen till this moment… It may not sound scary to you, but to me, that’s like total collywobbles time. That, and credit control running after me, pitchforks waving, yelling “you set this customer up as a 97 when they are obviously a 99!!!”

Worst-case scenarios which have clearly been influenced by the subject matter I spend my days surrounded by (kids books can be really scary!) aside, I am loving the job.

How and Why I got into publishing are questions whose answers I am still working on. “I just love books” is a pretty safe bet. It is nice to be surrounded by people who – in the case of my boss on Friday night, literally – throw titles at you and demand you have great conversations about them. Getting more into it, I keep coming back to the last couple of years working for SCC. Time and again, we worked with clients who had only the most basic levels of literacy, if that, and they kept bring up 1) how alienated from mainstream life they felt and 2) how this alienation at least contributed to the assorted lifestyle choices which had them coming to our offices at the end of the day. There is no doubt in my mind that education is the silver bullet to so many problems. Part of that is getting children hooked on reading, and getting them hooked young. How do you hook them? By creating beautiful, funny and engaging books that they want to read.

The best bit of my job so far was last week when, as a result of a massive tidy out of the office (as an aside, I think it might finally have hit them that when they hired someone who liked to organise, that’s what they got), I had a huge pile of old proofs and slightly battered books. It was the recycling or the waiting embrace of some hapless infant for them, and I chose the infant. I spent a happy half hour sorting through the pile, picking out those I think he will enjoy, and those I think he SHOULD read. I am not expecting all of them to be read, or enjoyed, but even if just one sparks an interest in a new author or genre… The desire to go down the library and see what else there is out there… Then that was a good day.

Corrupting new minds. Mwhahahaaaaa. Yup, that’s why I got into publishing *devil*

OK Cas, I can hear you all mutter, there has to be something that isn’t going so rosy, because, well, this is you we’re talking about. There’s always something.

I am missing the folks from Southampton more than I thought I would. I hadn’t realised quite how meshed I was in certain networks, till they were no longer just down the road from me. Even if I didn’t see them every day, just knowing they were there made a huge difference. I have never been a big one for labels, but I am clearly more “alt” than I had figured, because in Oxford I am surrounded by lovely, lovely people – who are all very normal. Or rather, all very wacky, but in their own Oxford way, which isn’t quite my way. For example, I am the only one I know up here with any ink or multiple piercings, let alone cropped purple hair! I certainly can’t imagine any of them rocking out to NIN at the Dungeon!

I am comfortable around the people here and a making good friends, plus picking up old friendships, but always I am feeling a certain subtle push to tone down bits of me. There aren’t the people, yet, who I can totally be myself around. It is a little bit draining, so I find myself dashing down on the train to badger Neko for tea and corsets (not a euphemism). I am not expecting it to be like this forever, however. I know for sure these things take time, and that it took time for me to settle into Southampton. I will find “my people” here in Oxford. In the meantime, I am spending a lot more time on Facebook!

Will I stay here in Oxford? How can you ask me that after just a month! Right now, I am loving it here. The city is the perfect blend of town and country – not too big, not too small. The job is one with prospects in a field I know is for me. I am 26 now and yes, certain nesting tendencies are starting to make slight nudges in the back of my brain. I want to settle down. I want a place of my own, to decorate as I will, and to have a pet cat. The student style of relocating every six months/year no longer seems quiet so fun. I want to get my stuff out of storage. I want all my books in one house, not scattered across three counties! At the same time, I get itchy feet. After three, four years in a place I feel the need to find somewhere new. New horizons. New people. So I have just moaned for two paragraphs about how I have yet to find people I can be myself around, but I am loving the process of finding them anew. The thought of a whole life in one place appeals to the 2.4 side of my nature, but mostly it is giving me the heeby-jeebies. Perhaps what I really want isn’t a place, it is a person. Someone to travel on with me. Now there’s a thought…

Anything else? Well, I fit into a pair of size 14 jeans for the first time in many a year. And the Aspiration Trousers! They are a leetle snug still, but with a tunic over the top they look ace. So what if the silly diet nurse’s scales say I am not loosing anything. My dimensions are slowly, surely shrinking, and that is good to hear finally.

P.S. I’m getting another tattoo. Don’t tell my father.

Sunday Roast: When was the last time you went Wahoo!

Seriously? Think back. When was the last time something made you go “Wahoo!” involuntarily? If it has been a long time, then you need to do something about it, because everyone needs a Wahoo! moment.

For the curious, I have had not one, but two, Wahoo! moments in the last week. It has been a good week 🙂

I don’t actually own any Threadless t-shirts, because the cut is all wrong (I detest things tight to the neck), but this design is just awesome!

I want this chair. The chances of me ever getting this chair? Slim to none, but I still want it. Or one of them Aeron thingies. Or actually, I’d just settle for a properly adjustable one that doesn’t make me feel like a tactical device has exploded in my lower back after I sit in it for more than half an hour 🙁

I remember Windows 3.x with great fondness. It was my first ever OS. To be sure I had played on the few earlier machines my brother and father had, but it was 3.x which was installed on the first PC that was mine (one of my brothers cast-offs). So it saddens me to hear Microsoft are finally stopped licences. Also though, I am amazed it’s kept going so long!

There is a new study under way to see how yoga helps with bad backs. Anecdotally, I would agree – my back has always been better after periods of gentle, toning exercise, not just yoga. Which is why it is a bugger that the cheapest yoga sessions I can find in Oxford are £8 a time. Roll on the New Year and the gym opening up at work, that’s all I can say!

And this one from Moose. As she says, the My Name is Earl effect?

Roll on the movies…

Valkyrie – I am really on the fence about Tom Cruise. As a person, I think the man is a twit. As an actor, he does have moments. More to the point though, I think I want to see this film, because I am just intrigued as to how they go about simply telling the story.

Confessions of a shopaholic – yes, bubblegum fluff, but the trailer made me laugh out loud a few times, and that is always my benchmark to putting it in the roast. Definitely a DVD though!

Angels & Demons – I DO NOT WANT TO SEE THIS FILM. I just had to say that off the plate. Also, I have never seen The Da Vinci Code and have very little desire to see that either. What amuses me about this though is that A&D is meant to be the PREQUEL to TDVC, but it’s being packaged as a sequel. Someone watch the film and tell me how it goes please?

So I shouldn’t find Leo DiCaprio attractive, I really shouldn’t. He isn’t my type, all that pretty-boy-ness. But… *whimper* I am finding him attractive, and a damn good actor!
Revolutionary Road – if I can get memories to Titanic out of my head, Winslet and DiCaprio make a brilliant pairing.
Body of Lies – bad facial hair not withstanding, some tasty action. Plus an aging Russell Crowe. Could be worse…

Nobel Son – just… so screwball it hurts!

And that really is it for this week. The time has come for me to emerge from my nest of blankets and face the cold, wet, windy day to buy some groceries. Bleck.

What makes a good writer?

People I respect, trust and love in differing proportions have told me, many times, that they like how I write. I have a style, it seems, that is “lyrical, easy and a joy to read” (a direct quote from an essay/short story I wrote a year or so back). Welcoming; funny, others have said when grades weren’t riding on the product.

My own writing aside, for it is phenomenally hard to judge your own worth, I know that in turn there are writers who I like and writers who I don’t. I seem to innately know what makes a good sentence, though I am often times hard pushed to articulate and analyse precisely what grabs me about certain writers.

As an aside, given my line of work, I am fortunately getting rapidly better at this!

At a stab I would say it is the voice and personality good authors bring across the page. Words should flow easily and be a joy to read to the point you don’t know you are reading. Rather you are watching the story unfold in your mind with no conscious effort. Great authors take words and ideas and play with them till they make your brain sing. Each time you read them you get something different from the piece. From the comfort-blanket-fluffy of a decent chick lit, to the tense suspense (can I DO that to the English language?!) of a brilliantly plotted thriller…

There is no excuse for bad writing, as I frequently yell at a book or the TV screen at yet another awful offering with wooden dialogue and paint by numbers plotting.

People think it is hard, but it is not, is it? I just write down the words I hear spoken in my head. I speak, so I write. Moose mumbled that she couldn’t write like me. Who would want to? Surely it is better to write like yourself? In my last job I was the proof reader and copy editor of choice for the whole office, and a few heads of service from the next office over as well. I never quite understood why people felt they needed my help, but clearly the words just fit together for me.

But I am still not sure what makes a good writer.

It is not a strong adherence to grammar or rigid sentence structure; I certainly couldn’t pick an adverb out of a police line up. It isn’t even a varied vocabulary, though it certainly doesn’t do any damage. When I helped people do rewrites of their work, the first thing I always did was get them to put the pen and paper away and just talk to me. Tell me what they wanted to say. Once freed from the idea they had to sound “impressive” on the page, or be the next incarnation of Shakespeare, they would find their own voice. Their own pattern and what they then wrote invariably sounded true. My job was then nothing more than acting like a spell-checker with legs and a cute smile.

Maybe then it is the sense of flow and rhythm and a pattern to the words. I repeat: if you can speak, you can write.

I’ve been vocal in the past, and was vocal just last night, about my loathing for Dan Brown (he of Da Vinci Code fame). I shall stress once more for readers newer to Bright Meadow that I have no problem with what he wrote (unlike my Renaissance Historian landlord), rather my hatred is reserved for how he wrote. Or more precisely, for the execrable excuse for prose he vomited onto the page. Certain people should never be let in front of the word processor, let alone find an editor to take them onto their list. His writing is just so stilted, with a jerky rhythm, and dialogue that is the literary equivalent to badly dubbed Japanese samurai movies.

*shudder*

In contrast, a book I started reading last night: Crowboy by David Calcutt. From the first line I was hooked. I found myself speaking aloud in the character’s accent.

    “So I’m outside the city one evening on me usual rounds, sorting through the leftovers and picking me way through the day’s dead. Not that there’s much to be took. The best of the fighting’s over now. That all happened in the first few weeks after the soldiers come, and what with the city having took a good battering and the best of its people dead or run off, everybody’s got themselves settled down not to a good long siege”

Whole chapters, the whole book, written in the accents, the very voices, of the characters themselves. That is hard to do. It is tricky enough to find your own voice in writing. It is that much harder to be consistent with the voices of others, especially in varied and non-standard dialects.

Maybe this need for a coherent voice is partly why I dislike so many first-person narratives. So few writers can pull it off, most of the time it just jars as I read.

I am becoming something of a writing snob. There are so many great authors out there, but they are drowning under the weight of the mediocre. Why should I waste my precious time on a sub-standard product? Quality speaks over quantity every time, or at least it should. I know a book is good when I find myself slowing down from my usual break-neck reading pace, to savour what is written. When I get to the end of the book and instantly go looking to see what else the author has written. When people have to throw things at me to get my attention. When I miss my bus stop because I am engrossed.

That is the sign of a good writer.

I just wish I could pin down exactly what they did and how they did it. Because it is more than just a “voice”, I know it is. It has to be. It can’t be that simple?

Sunday Roast: a thief in the night

I sit here on my bed, hair still damp from my shower, listening to Disturbia on LastFM, and as I look out across the back gardens of central Oxford to the grey skies above, I wonder how to introduce the roast and the lovely month of November.

Then I realise I have already done it.

Welcome to the eleventh month of 2008 people. Hasn’t this year flown by so quickly, and yet seen so many changes? I wonder what the last sixty-one days have in store to enthrall us all? Only one way to find out, I guess, and that is to live it. To the MAX! as the advert would have it.

The last few days have seen my head go a little bit screwy. One minute, everything is glorious and the next… ooops! I think it hit me that *crap!* I am in the process of making a new life in a new city and that my safety net is over an hour away by train. It also hit me that I’ve got the most ink of anyone in my current acquaintance by far – not that this is the be-all and end-all, but it comes to something when I am the most alt in a crowd, not the least! Worry not, I shall do my best to fly the flag and make it a point to scurry back to Soton as frequently as possible for regular doses of the odder side of life 😉

I think the time has come for me open the lid on the veritable Pandora’s box, which is our Internet…

I have always had a thing for short stories – I love how they just present snippets and leave you to make up your own mind. They are also really hard to do well! So I like it when others come round to my point of view

Graphic novels aren’t just about superheroes. If you haven’t read Maus yet, I strongly recommend you do!

I love it when I discover new blogs: Margaret and Helen – two American ladies who have been friends for 60 years, with great insights into modern life (their take on the current election is refreshing and honest)

And that is, rather surprisingly, it for the blog side. Now for the bit I know you all come for really, the movies:

My Name is Bruce – I am enjoying the absurder side of life at the moment. This film just looks delicious

Defiance – Daniel Craig being all heroic… How is that NOT going to be a good film?

Were the World Mine – see my afore mentioned comment regarding the absurd. Plus, great social commentary

The Reader – and to end with a trailer for a film that is genuinely intriguing me. I love that I can’t get the whole film from this one trail. I am hooked and I will be getting it on DVD (because the chances of it making my local Odeon are slim-to-none, let’s face it!)

And c’est tout with the links. My hair is now dry, thanks in most part to it being only a few inches long, and the weather is not actually raining on me, so I think I shall go to the covered market and see what veg I can pick up to keep me fed through the week.

*hugs*