Write Fast (er)

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

My last two posts have both basically been about procrastination. It's a word you'll find a lot if you search this blog.

When procrastination (a word I apparently can no longer type at the first attempt which may indicate that I'm trying to avoid it in yet another way) is the modus operandi then you go looking for all sorts of ways of overcoming it, in a kind of back door fashion.

Perhaps I should really, really try outlining. Reads books on outlining.

Perhaps I need to write and write around all sorts of ideas and see where they take me. Lots of ideas and an inability to put them in any order. (Though this is more helpful than the first approach, and does at least let the creative side of the brain do some work.)

Perhaps I need to rewrite what I've already rewritten at least once (or twice). Yup. Just forestalls any progress in the section that I haven't written at all.

I should introduce a dragon!! Wow, great idea, and the dragon takes off and takes over all the other ideas and still doesn't seem to have an actual role to play.

Wait! Here's a thought. I could just get on and write. Phew! Radical. While trying to work through the Save the Cat beats approach (and running into a huge blank spot in Act II) I noted that Jessica Brody, who has written Save the Cat! Writes a Novel says that she can't even look at sorting out the STC beats until she's actually got to know who her characters are and what they're doing. And the only way she can do this is by writing an awful first draft. (A 'shitty' first draft, as Anne Lamott always calls it.)

Kristen Lamb in a post called Is your story stuck? says basically the same thing. She cries "STOP!" and adds, "I am a HUGE fan of fast-drafting because then we simply don’t have time to over think every step we’ve made."

She suggests three ways to move forward out of the quicksand.
1. Refuse the urge to edit. 
2. Learn to Fast Draft
3. Kill someone

I'm great at the ignoring the first suggestion, am able to do the second (although not as quickly as some writers) and haven't tried the third - in this book. Nasty, horrible people who are harming my hero/heroine have been killed off in the previous three books. And it's probable it will happen to the current antagonist. But killing off someone random? That takes a bit of guts. 

Meanwhile, here I am blogging. Instead of writing. Fast - or slowly. Procrastination is beginning to set in again (it's past time for lunch; you've got to go and see a sick uncle; the dog needs a wash - no wait, I've already done that today).

Time to wind this post up and make some progress...

Save the Fantastic Cat

I've been re-reading Blake Snyder's excellent, Save the Cat, as well as reading for the first time his third book, Save the Cat! Strikes Back. They're extremely encouraging for writers, whether screenwriters or novelists, or storytellers of any kind. They give a means to work out structure far more satisfactorily than any other 'system' I've come across, and they offer ways to go back over your work and find flaws, and work out how to fix them.

My mode of operation, however, tends to be that I have to initially write something of the story before I can figure out who the characters are and what they're up to. I can't just take an idea and fill up Blake's 15 beats without that.

In fact, as I've no doubt mentioned before, I've been writing a fourth book in the Grimhilderness series, and it's been going very sluggishly. Procrastination is part of the problem; life getting in the way is another problem; and lack of where to go after a certain point is another. But I do have a bunch of characters who are alive in my head, and I have a number of situations, and a general sense of what the overall story is.

This is more than enough to get started on the 15 beats.

Except that I immediately began to discover that things just weren't going to work, once I started setting my story as it stood alongside Blake's beats. Not because I couldn't match certain things up, but because the hero turned out to be passive, and there was no great reason for him to go on any journey anyway. In fact, if  he had any sense he'd go into hiding. Hardly the work of a hero. So back to the drawing board.

I re-watched J K Rowling's film Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Rowling's world is so full of stuff by now that she can reference all sorts of things and fans will pick up on them. (I'm not quite so good at keeping such detail in my head as those sorts of fans.) I thought about her story in terms of Save the Cat.

It's interesting to ask: who is the hero? Whose journey are we going on?

Because plainly we have a quartet of lead characters, and the most important of them, Newt Scamander, doesn't go on any great journey at all: he is what he is, unlike Harry Potter, who goes on an immense journey over seven books. Is there a catalyst moment for Newt? I suppose you could find one, and you could find some of the other things that heroes are supposed to have in stories. But Newt is already fully-formed at the beginning of the movie; he doesn't need to change in any great way. Nothing much troubles him - except when there's a threat to his beasts. Otherwise he has a resource for almost every situation and doesn't really need others to help him much.

Which means that the hero who changes is someone else. Snyder mentions this in Strikes Back: the character who isn't quite the main character but who goes through the process of being stuck to having something unstick him to being thrown into a different world to being changed and finally coming back to what he loves but with a different viewpoint.

This is plainly Jacob Kowalski. He starts off on the back foot with no hopes (turned down by the most wonderfully po-faced Bank Manager you've ever seen), with the only life he can envisage being stuck in a canning factory - even though he's served his country in WWI. He is affected by a catalyst - the meeting with Newt and the accidental swapping of their bags. And even though he's the American equivalent of a Muggle, he's thrust in the magical world, and sees all kinds of things he never knew existed. He faces fearsome creatures and learns to love them, and even copes with the horrific rhinoceros-like creature that nearly stomps him to death. And in the end, even though he loses his ability to see magic at work, he gets his much-desired bakery shop and it's a roaring success. And at the very end, Queenie turns up there, and it looks as though his life may change even further.

But besides Jacob, another one of the quartet goes through a considerable journey too, and that's Tina, the kind of magical detective. She's down on her luck as well, having made some mistake in her job, and is reduced to investigating without the proper authority, being put down by her bosses (again) and generally not being able to understand Newt's nonchalant approach to life.

But the things that change Jacob's life change hers too, and she's forced to accept Newt and work with him, stepping into a different kind of world as well, where she has to see that Newt is far ahead of her in the play, and even, in the end, will rescue her from her past when she's threatened with death.

I don't know whether Rowling wrote the script as we see it portrayed in the movie, or whether she wrote the outline and dialogue. However it was done, it's a considerable feat, juggling all the elements that are in it. And if you can keep up with it all, it's likely you'll find Snyder's 15 beats being worked through in their proper order and giving the film a solid underpinning.

Five top blog posts

I'm always interested in stats, though that doesn't mean I always use them well, or understand their finer points. 

Blogger obligingly provides stats on a number of things related to my posts, and, out of curiosity today I checked the top blog posts of 'all time' from my blog. They're a real mixed bag, and there seems no rhyme nor reason as to why any of them should have been viewed so often. 

But for the record (because possibly they'll change at some point) here are the top five posts as of the 16th August, 2017. 

Top of the list is the Commonplace post which dates back to 2011, and is a bit of a riff on the word insurance, and the sorts of things that came up when I searched that word on my Evernote. A more random post you'd hardly imagine. Perhaps people search for the word insurance a lot! It's had twice as many views as number two on the list. 

Curiously enough, I hadn't checked this post for a while. I'd thought it related to an entirely different subject... 

Number two is Random thoughts on the Zirka Circus which goes back to 2010. This was a positive review of a small circus that was touring New Zealand at the time, and in fact has been back again at least twice since then. You'd think small circuses wouldn't be very impressive, but in fact they often include considerable talents (and these people really work for their money), and are very enjoyable. But then, I'm a circus fan from way back. Though I must say I miss the performing animals, even if that isn't a very PC thing to say anymore. 

Third on the list is Skinny ties, also from 2011, which seems a most unlikely subject to be viewed Twilight series, Robert Pattinson. It's been amongst the top five since it first appeared, pretty much. I wonder if it has to do with the photo that accompanies it, which may possibly be the actor from the Twilight movie, Robert Pattinson. 

Fourth on the list is Debating Compost, which dates way back to 2007. It's a brief piece arguing that cooked foods go just as well in composts as uncooked. Though someone's concern about this was that it encouraged rats. That's possible. We used to have a cat who dealt successfully with any rats and mice around the place, but when my daughter moved out, she took the cat with her - it did belong to her after all. During the course of the move the cat walked out the door of the new house and vanished for a couple of months. The daft thing was living at the park just down the road and was being occasionally fed by some kind person who eventually took it to the Vet. The cat had been microchipped, so the Vet was able to identify my daughter as the owner. 

And fifth is Fat amplification, the most recent of the bunch, from 2016. It's merely a bit of chat about the joys and woes of amplification of musical instruments, particularly in a church setting. Maybe the problem is widespread!

The doggie-door saga continues

About ten days ago we installed a doggie door in our back door.  We wondered if the dog would ever work out how to get himself out of it, and back in again, in spite of considerable encouragement, treats, undignified pushes from behind and so on.

Well, all that wonderful hard work we did on helping him to discover that he now has an open door policy has paid off, and he trips in and out of it (I don't mean literally) without blinking an eyelid (again, don't be a literalist).  Occasionally he feels he should wait for permission, but we try and avoid giving him that.  He has to be his own man on this matter, and decide that when he wants to go out, he just gets on and goes.

He's had some routines in the past for going out. For instance, if we were in the lounge and he'd been in bed for a while in the other room and decided he needed a late night pee, he'd come in and stare balefully at me until I realised what he wanted.  Then he'd scoot to the back door and dance around in circles until he was let out. He doesn't have this option anymore, although he did try the baleful look thing last night. I ignored it for a while but finally realised that old habits die hard and he needed me to at the very least go to the kitchen and pretend to give him permission while doing something unrelated.

We used to find he was forever wanting in and out while we were making dinner in the kitchen. I don't quite know what the reason for this was, but it was annoying continually having to open the door for him.  Anyway, this issue has gone; if he wants out, he goes out.  And sometimes sits at the backdoor thinking about old times when he had us on a string and we would jump to action as soon as he indicated a need.

I feel as though a little something has been lost in the relationship, but I'm sure there are compensations.  The back door isn't getting scratched for one thing.  The cat hasn't decided that it's a multi-animal door, so she doesn't use it (it's probably beneath her dignity anyway, though how a creature that dumps a large mouse or small rat on the doorstep should consider itself to have dignity I don't know).  Consequently there's no squabbling between the cat and the dog as to whose access it is. And there's no longer the crazy rabies-infested-mad-dog-behaviour when it discovers, on our opening the door, that the cat is sitting just outside it.

Doggie-door

We've spent a good deal of the last two days installing a new back door.  When I say 'new' I mean 'different.'  We got it secondhand, which of course brings some interesting installation issues with it.

The reason for needing a new door is that we wanted to put a dog-door in, and the old door, being basically a sheet of frosted glass within a frame, was likely to turn to splinters if we cut into it. Yes, I know it can be done, but we were wary of the possible collapse of it.

We got the door fitted in place yesterday, but all the other sortings out, such as replacing the handle and latch and fittings around it etc, took a good deal of today.

And then there was training the dog to go in and out the dog-door.  He didn't seem to appreciate that it had been set in place for him.  It may not have helped that the cat, on discovering it, went through it with only a marginal amount of assistance.  The dog refused to have anything to do with it.

We encouraged and cajoled and used little treats, but none of this would get him to actually go through it by himself.  We gave him little pushes through, and though he baulked each time at this flapping thing that he had to deal with on the way, he'd make it to the other side.  But not on his own.

He sits there starting at it, and you can see that he's thinking: life has been okay so far; why does there have to be this unsettling new thing come into it?  He claims that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.  We remind him that he's only three.  That's 21 in dog years, he says.  We're not impressed, and offer him another little treat.

He's now been in and out the dog door umpteen times during the course of the day, but not one of those occasions has been of his own volition.  He has a theory that the cat, having gone through it first, has polluted it somehow, and furthermore, it's demeaning to follow in the pawprints of a cat. 

Update: to our surprise, yesterday, he went out of his own accord.  But coming back in?  Nope.  He's going to leave that for next year....

Paradoxical cat

Apparently it was Erwin Schrödinger's birthday yesterday, our time, and because the UK and US are still catching up, they're still celebrating it.  Google, in fact, has celebrated it by producing one of its doodles:

I'm not quite sure why there's a particular fuss about this one of Erwin's birthdays; it's only his 126th, not the sort of number you'd normally celebrate with or without the hundred.  Can anyone remember their 26th birthday celebrations?  I'm not going to ask if anyone can remember their 126th, because I don't expect that people of such an exalted age will still be playing on their computers at this time of night. Actually, according to our current records, no one has lived to the age of 126 as yet - to find people that old you have to go back to early Biblical times.  The oldest person on record in modern times was Jeanne Calment, of France, who lived to 122 years, 164 days, and her birth date was verified.  Jeanne was certainly close to celebrating her 126th birthday, you might say. 

Meanwhile back to Schrödinger, who's famous in popular science, as it were, mostly for his paradoxical cat - or the lack of his cat.  Don't ask me to explain, because quantum physics - in which the cat features to a certain extent - isn't one of my specialties.  The cat features even more in science fiction, I think, where some very clever stories have been woven around this fictional creature.  For some reason the cat has taken on a life of its own, becoming part of popular culture, and while its name is known the reason why it is important (or unimportant) is much less known.  That's a bit of a paradox in itself.

 

Dogs, cats

Because we have several grandchildren, we've tended to have a couple of booster seats somewhere in our car most of the time.  These come in handy when the grandchild who lives with us happens to go out in the car with us, or when another grandchild stays overnight and we have to drive him or her home the next day.

The rest of the time, the dog commandeers the booster seat.  Or he did until recently when we removed the cover because it needed a wash, and he didn't find the hard plastic to his liking.  It's not as if he uses the booster seat to sit up and look out the window.  I'm not sure that he'd be able to see out the window even if he did. (Perhaps we should check out pads and seats online to see if we can get him a combination of proper seating so he can actually see out the window.)  But when the booster has its cover on he's happy just to lie there, his head hanging over the edge, dreaming - I suspect - of what it would be like if his head was stuck out the window and the wind was making his ears fly backwards behind him. 

I have no idea why dogs like to have their heads stuck out the window with the wind making their tongue loll around in their mouth, and their eyeballs thud back into their sockets, and the aforesaid ears (our dog's are particularly long and fluffy at the moment) trailing behind them.  As a human, I could endure this for maybe five minutes before the buffeting would force me inside. Dogs seem to be able to handle it indefinitely.

We have a friend who has a dog that's similar in size to ours, and he loves to put his head out the window - in fact he'd have his whole body outside the window if it was practical to hold him at the same time.

Isn't it curious that dogs, which are just as much part of the human fabric of life as cats, love to travel in cars, while cats almost entirely abhor it?  From the time our dog was small he would travel in the car happily, and we only have to mention the word 'car' these days to have him scratching madly at the front door trying to get out and race to the vehicle.

Perhaps it would do the tempers of cats good if they'd consent to travel outside their chosen boundaries occasionally.  It might get their lazy bodies off the top of the couch where they lie pretending to be invisible.  They wait for you to plonk yourself down, and then, just when you least expect it, they delight in giving your ear a good wallop, tearing it open with their claws in the process.  This doesn't endear them to humans.

Dogs somehow manage to chew at your hands while playfighting without doing you damage (well, ours does).  Cats don't know what playfighting is.  We have a cat as well as a dog.  We've had cats almost as long as we've been married.  Only rarely have they consented to behave in a way that was rational to human beings.  Dogs can barely help themselves: they're open, honest, humble, full of integrity, and downright crazy.  Cats are just crazy.

Photo courtesy of Public Domain Pictures

Compressed

While checking through Evernote for items containing the word, compressed, I came across an article which talked about ten things you can do to improve your computer's performance.  I immediately tried one, that of dealing with some of the items in the start-up of the computer.  Skype has been insisting on starting up when I open up the computer, and getting a call from a relative when you're still in your pyjamas and haven't put your teeth in is a bit disconcerting.  So that's been sorted. 

I've was interested to note however that the article also talked about opening up your computer and cleaning its inside.  Crikey.  That sounds a bit scary.  Making the computer work without opening anything extra up is enough at the best of times; opening the machine itself sounds too technical for words.  Not that I haven't been inside a computer a few times in the past, but that's usually been out of necessity, not for a spring clean. 

Anyway they suggest, among other things, using a can of compressed air to dust the interior parts.  Don't touch anything!, they also warn; just let the air do the cleaning.  You don't need to set out and buy air compressors for the task; that's overkill (or is likely to kill your computer dead, from the inside out).  A small can is all that's needed. 

Continuing on with the subject of compression, I was reminded that there's talk of using cassette tapes as data storage, in this case, big data storage, like all the information that floods through Facebook on any one day, or the 1 petabyte of info (that's a million gigabytes to you) from the world's largest radio telescope.  Now presumably, just as you won't be using a full scale air compressor to clean out your computer, you won't be using one of those manky old cassette tapes you've had stuck in a box since the 80s to store any data on.  These tapes will store "35 terabytes of data - about 35 million books worth of information - on a cartridge that measures just 10 centimetres by 2 centimetres."  The tape will be coated with particles of barium ferrite.  Of course you all know what barium ferrite is, but I had to look it up on Wikipedia, and truth to tell, I wasn't any the wiser when I had. Anyway, this fancy stuff seems set to change the way we store data.   As long as the cat doesn't get hold of the tape, and play at running around the kitchen with it, unravelling it as it goes...

Advantages of walking a dog

One of the advantages of a dog is that you rediscover your neighbourhood while taking him out of a walk. When my children were small we used to spend a lot of time walking up and down the hilly streets where we live, and finding all sorts of interesting stuff on the way.

Things haven't changed all that much in the intervening twenty-five years; most of the house that were there when the kids were young are still there, most of the cracks in walls, most of the stony driveways that have never been paved over, some of the houses that have never been painted, and much more. Only the people have come and gone.

And that's another interesting thing: I met a man last Saturday whom I hadn't seen for several years. Turns out he's been living down the road for at least five of those years, has married and is just about to have his second child. This evening, while out walking before the evening meal, we met two children (they were cousins, they told me) who asked if my dog was friendly. Someone on Facebook called him a furball the other day, and that's pretty much what he is - badly in need of having his first haircut, in fact. So the last thing he looks is unfriendly. But I assured the kids he was perfectly friendly, and they patted him and chatted in a way that you hardly come across in the neighbourhood these days.

And further up the road I came across a man wearing a t-shirt with 'Speaking in tongues,' 'Holy Spirit' and the like on the back. You'd think someone willing to wear that would be a pretty ardent Christian, but he told me he hadn't been to church for quite a few years. The t-shirt (and several others in different colours that he still owned) were made when he was attending a Revival church in Australia.

Dogs are great conversation starters - it wasn't until my dog stopped outside this man's house (he was unloading his van) that I noticed the t-shirt.

These sort of things have never happened with any of the cats we've owned....!

The Vole

Sometimes dreams are so memorable you think, This must be significant.

I woke around four this morning, decided to go to the loo (as one does) and came back and eventually went to sleep again (as one hopes to do). I dreamt that our cat got stuck out in the laundry with a vole. How I knew it was a vole I have no idea, because when I thought about it after waking, I had no picture in my memory banks of what a vole actually looks like. It certainly doesn't look like the creature that appeared in my dream. [The picture at the left is of a vole, which is something like a mouse.]

Anyway, in the dream, I went into the laundry discovered the vole in there and...went for help. The vole in the dream was about the size of a mole, but not the colour. It was furry, and possibly grey or brownish. And it seemed to be in no hurry to go anywhere.

On going for help I went back to the front of the house, which, as houses in dreams do, had expanded sufficiently for there to be a large party going on with heaps of young people, some of whom I apparently knew. I found my wife and told her about the vole, and we headed back through the house, through the kitchen, (which, like the rest of the house had become rather large, and where there was some woman in charge who was not impressed to have anyone else in her domain) and out to the laundry. There we discovered that the vole had bitten the cat's tail off. In spite of having a kind of hole where the tail should have been, the cat wasn't particularly perturbed, which even in the dream I found a little surprising.

My wife, without hesitation, picked up the vole and dumped it outside on the back steps, discovering in the process that it had a collar around its neck, as though it was someone's pet. The vole sat on the steps, no more perturbed than the cat, and obviously not inclined to head for cover.

One could go on about there being some significance in everything being larger than life (or at least larger than normal) in the dream, from the vole to the kitchen to the front room. But the largeness of things wasn't the aspect that most struck me; the vole was what seemed most interesting.

Certainly I knew the word, 'vole,' from somewhere in the past, but it's not exactly a word I'd use in everyday speech. We don't have voles in New Zealand, as far as I'm aware, and I don't think I've ever seen one anywhere. What would cause the brain to conjure up this word - and attempt to picture it in my mind (even to the extent of providing a wrong image)? Why was there such a lack of angst about the cat losing its tail? And how come the laundry was the only room in the house that didn't grow larger than usual?

Dreams are intriguing, but I don't usually get left with such an interest in them....

Couple of finds

While waiting for the new piano to arrive, I've been trying to sort through the piles of sheet music that were in my piano stool. Remind me next time I clear out a folder of single pages to keep them in some sort of order, please. Almost every song has every other page reversed, and some songs are mixed in with other songs and pages are missing, and I'm seriously inclined to throw the lot in the recycling bin and be done with it.
However, I have found two things that I'm happy about: the words of the carol, Said the Cat to the Mouse, which my wife loves, but can't remember the words to, and, a photocopy of an article that appeared in a Sydney paper quite a few years ago. It's by Fred Blanks (can that be a real name?) and it lists the famous composers, how many years they lived, and how productive they were per annum. I first saw it on the wall of a music teacher's rooms, and was intrigued by it then. Not sure how I managed to get a copy, but I'd like to put it on a spreadsheet and do some extrapolating beyond what Fred himself does.
Just had a look on the Net - Fred Blanks is a real name. He's written a lot on music, apparently.