The Mostly Completed Website

Finally done it. Mostly. Finally finished the redesign of my Mostly Official Website.

There is, at least, content in every section; some noise, some words, some links and some drivel on this blog. Obviously, I will continue to add more and more content as more stories get written and more music gets composed. And maybe I'll even get some publication credits to boast about.

All I have to do is think of something useful to do with this blog. My mate Suw has suggested that I get involved with digital rights campaigning as I have some professional experience dealing with copyright and permissions. She has instructed me to swat up on the subject by reading Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig and to also familiarise myself with the Creative Commons initiative. She has also mentioned me to Cory Doctorow, European Affairs Coordinator at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (amongst other things), whom I have completely failed to get in touch with thus far. Er... I will email him soon... promise.

No doubt she will also encourage (for "encourage" read "badger") me to support Danny O'Brien's efforts to start up a British equivalent of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. You can read Danny's article in The Guardian to find out more.

Oh, and I am writing a bunch of flash fictions for a book project, a ghost story for another book project and continuing to compose music for Mad Hatters' Review.

Oh, and I am still looking for a fucking job.

Hmm. I'm actually quite busy, aren't I?

And this post has a stupid amount of hyperlinks in it. Sorry about that.

Déjà vu

I go to work and I file timesheets. I'm thirty years old and I am doing the same kind of work I did when I left school. My career path seems to be folding back on itself.

It's only a temporary job that I have taken on, the second since being made redundant last November. I'm only doing it until I secure a permanent job doing something vaguely interesting and more impressive for a reasonable wage. It's only been six months. I'll find something soon. I will. I won't have to spend the rest of my life scrounging a living by rearranging office detritus. No I won't.

But it is difficult not to feel demoralised and worthless when, despite having tried to develop your work skills and make your way in the world of jobs, you find yourself once again doing the kind of dogsbody's work you were doing over ten years ago.

London targeted again

Four "incidents" in London today - exactly two weeks since the last attack that claimed 57 lives. The London public transport system targeted again; three underground trains and one bus.

Fortunately, no major casualties have been reported. It seems that four bombs were detonated but the explosives failed to go off. While this is a huge relief it seems very strange that all four devices failed to detonate successfully. But I'd rather have "curious" than more deaths.

It is most worrying that a second incident has happened in the same place so soon after the first. I sensed a feeling from some people that London had "had its turn" as a terrorist target. There were no follow up attacks in New York or Madrid so today's encore, although causing little damage and claiming no lives, is deeply unsettling.

Remembrance of bugger all

My friend Tom Saunders posed this question on a discussion board: Ever made a sentimental journey? If so what did you learn?

My answer: No.

Many people have nostalgia for the place in which they grew up. They sometimes take a sentimental journey back to their old home towns, to the streets where they played as children, the house in which they lived. All manner of memories and emotions are reawakened by being in that place again, the place of their formative years.

I too once returned to the street where I grew up and stood before my old house. And you know what? I felt nothing. It was just a house. I used to live there and now I don't.

Many people also attach certain memories to specific songs. "Ah, when I hear that song I am taken back to that wonderful summer I spent in Paris with Marie!" and suchlike. Me, I hear a song and I think, "I like this song." Sometimes a song may remind me of seeing the band in question at a gig but otherwise I like a song only because I like the song and not because it reminds me of a happy time in the past.

I seldom reminisce about either the good times or the bad. I am bereft of nostalgia.

On the one hand this is quite liberating. I don't have any ties to any particular time or place, no baggage, but on the other hand I have never felt like I have any roots.

Tom has now declared me "The Anti-Proust".

To whom it may concern

It is always nice to receive local visitors, so "hello" to whoever it was in Oxford who spent - blimey - 2 hours 42 mins 59 secs looking at this blog today.

I note that said local person was logged on from Oxford University Press; in which case, and in the words of Yossa Hughes, "Gissa job." I've applied for several positions at OUP but thus far have had no luck. Any tip offs would be greatly appreciated.

Failing that, leave a comment or hit the "contact" button the next time you drop by and send a message as it would be good to make the acquaintance of a fellow Oxfordian. (Is "Oxfordian" the word of an inhabitant of Oxford? Probably not).

Heart of gold

Here's a fun online widget that every writer should be aware of: The Cliché Finder

Thanks to Myfanwy Collins for finding this.

But I don't feel for the characters...

Whenever I see a beautifully crafted sentence, an imaginative combination of words that perfectly describe a mood, a feeling or a sensation, I wish I could do that.

Some writers are mostly interested in language rather than character or plot and this shines through everything they write. I, on the other, am not. I'm no prose stylist. I am not likely to overwhlem my readers with the sheer beauty of an image I have conjured with words. I just can't write that way.

But, then again, that is not what I am interested in as a writer (although I enjoy it as a reader). I'm interested in ideas. I lean more towards concepts - I want to make a point about human nature, about society or whatever. I may do this through black humour or allegory.

This can sometimes lead to my stories having no real characters in them because they aren't stories about characters. They may not even have plots as such. Sometimes I simply write about a situation and put people in to bring the situation to a head.

Critics point this out to me as a shortcoming so maybe I need to work on it. But the problem is that I don't think it is a shortcoming at all. Someone recently said of a story of mine that "the characters simply feel like devices to move the plot along". My thought was "yes, that is exactly what they are... because the story isn't about their characters". There was a reason why I didn't develop them as "real" characters; if I thought the overall point of the piece would have been enhanced by further developing the characters then I would have done it.

Different stories perform different functions: some describe the minutiae of everyday life, some are metaphors for an aspect of society, some are character studies, some are manifestations of an abstract idea. Likewise, different readers have different tastes and have different preferences for what elements are present in the fiction they read.

Each type of story needs to be judged with different criteria because their aims are different. Each story needs to be judged for what it is and not for what the critic may prefer it to be.

March Of The Penguins!

Forget Batman Begins, Fantastic Four or War Of The Worlds... the must-see movie of the season is a natural history documentary about penguins going for a stroll and falling over a bit.

La Marche de l'Empereur (March Of The Penguins) has made more money per screen than every US blockbuster relased thus far this year - $2 million from a paltry 64 screens since its release on 24 June to be exact. Obviously, in total gross that doesn't compare to the $50 million+ the big blockbusters make in their first weekend but, then again, they get shown on 3,000-4,000 screens.

I love it when small, obscure, specialist films break out like this and piss over the mega-budget Hollywood competition.

You can read more about the penguin sensation on The Guardian's website.

Mildly obsessive attention to detail

I've made a few cosmetic changes to the banner graphics and the rollover buttons. Y'see, I thought it would be nice if there was some indication on the banner of which section you are currently looking at. So, the item of the section you are currently looking at is now highlighted in orange as opposed to the regular grey.

A nice touch, don't you think? No great aid to usability, to be sure, but nice.

But... uh... I couldn't stop there, could I? Oh no. As pleased as I was with this fairly inconsequential aesthetic amendment, something did not sit right. The glow. You'll notice that the "hover" image simply turns the text from grey to burgundy with a small amount of burgundy glow. But when I passed the mouse pointer over the new orange highlighted text image the switch to burgundy with the burgundy glow didn't look quite right to me. Something had to be done. I know, I thought, I'll keep the burgundy text colour but I'll change the glow to orange!

Oh yes! That looks so much more effective. Heh heh heh, grey text... orange text... burgundy rollover with burgundy glow... burgundy rollover with orange glow!

It's that kind of small attention to detail that makes a good website. Of course, it's Saturday night and I am at home fussing over tiny aesthetic considerations on my website that nobody will even notice rather than, say, going out, getting drunk, meeting people, dancing and getting laid.

You may find it hard to believe that I don't actually live in my parents' basement.

Crap joke of the day

David Hasselhoff walks into a bar and says to the barman, "I want you to call me David Hoff".

The barman replies "Sure thing Dave... no hassle."

Courtesy of Charlie Williams.

TXT mystery

I have just received the following text message from a person unknown:

Boy, BOY, i know you're awake boy

This happens every six months or so. I get sent a text message or even a voicemail from some girl who seems to have a rather volatile relationship with her boyfriend. I only ever get the merest hint of what's going on but the messages I get are invariably something like "Stop avoiding me. If you want to talk, come round later, I'll be awake". She once left a voice mail that I mistook for an old friend of mine so I hit the 'recall' button and started talking to her. It soon became apparent that neither of us knew who the other was. She hung up quickly, probably embarassed for having left a fairly intimate voicemail at the wrong number.

Occasionally, though, she makes the same mistake and I get a text message. I don't reply - wouldn't want to embarass the poor girl any further.

Having meandered off on that little tangent, I don't think this message was from her. I sent a reply saying "I am awake. Dunno' who you are so you have me at a disadvantage".

It'll be interesting to see if anything comes back.

UPDATE: Just received a reply. "Maybe I like taking advantage boy". And another! "Come on I know you are a toilet trader".

Hmm. Should I reply? Could be a nutter. On the other hand, there may be a story here.

FURTHER UPDATE: Mystery solved. Just an old friend messing around. By some bizarre coincidence, it is the same friend that I mistook that strange voicemail girl for I mentioned above. Small world.

Blimey...

I told you people read Suw's blog. Already this morning I see new comments posted by total strangers and even a trackback that, if nothing else, proves that the trackback gizmo is working.

So, everything appears to be working properly. Groovy!

Um... am I really sad for getting excited about this? Best you don't answer that question.

Comments

Just to let the couple of people who posted comments earlier today that I have installed a new 'comments' and 'trackback' gadget - POWERED BY HALOSCAN! - so all previous comments have disappeared off into the ether.

All I have to do now is figure out how 'trackbacks' work...

Buy this book or the puppy gets it

I'm going to take a moment to pimp a rather fabulous book of short stories entitled Brother, what strange place is this? by Tom Saunders.

There are several reasons why you should buy this book:

1. It's good.
2. The short story is a dying artform in the U.K. There are very few literary magazines publishing short stories. Those that do are struggling to survive in the marketplace and are seldom to be found in high street bookshops. Also, very few book publishers are willing to risk publishing short story collections as the general perception is that there is no market for them. You would think that in this fast moving society where free time is the most precious commodity of all, you would think that people would appreciate their fiction in smaller, bite-sized chunks rather than committing themselves to a full novel. So why not not send publishers a message that there is a market for short stories by subscribing to one or two of those struggling literary magazines and buying some short story collections, starting with Brother, what strange place is this?
3. I have been down the pub with Tom Saunders and he is a bloody nice bloke.

So, go buy this book. You will be helping a talented writer (Tom) and a struggling, unemployed writer/composer/blogger (me) by doing it via this link to Amazon.co.uk.

Or the puppy gets it.

Makin' tracks into the blogsphere...

My mate Suw Charman, who is a bit of a "name" in the blogsphere*, has kindly blogged about my blog so I thought I would blog about her blogging about my blog because I thought I would test out this 'trackback' thingermyjig.

I do realise that anybody who has found my blog via Suw's blog is likely to be au fait with such things as 'trackbacks' and are probably rolling their eyes and thinking, "Pfffft! Simpleton!"

Well, I don't care. I'm new to this shit and it's going to take me some time to figure it all out.

*In other words, geeks may have heard of her.

Slowly but surely

Gradually figuring out how to customise the Blogger template. We now have a Blogroll! Exciting!

Uh... I need to get out more.

Reconstruction update

Ooh, look - see the customised banner at the top of this blog? Could it be that my attempt to shoehorn my own code into the Blogger template source has actually worked? I shall have to go have a play around to find out.

After only four hours sleep last night I got up at 8.00am to write a response for Round 2 of this flash writing contest I still haven't fully explained to you. I managed to send off my entry bang on the deadline of noon. I think the story turned out alright in the end but it wasn't brilliant. Then again, maybe the judges will mark it highly against all my expectations... or they may hate it and boot me out of the contest as I suspect they will.

Anyway, back to the website troubleshooting. Something is bound to have gone wrong somewhere...

Reconstruction and other business

Tonight I have put together a rather stylish new navigation banner for my revamped website, even if I do say so myself. I have forsaken the industrial metal look of the old site in favour of a more... er... contemporary... sort of... thing.

Anyway, the point is that it is looking quite nice. Whether I can get the pop-up menus of the navigation bar to work properly remains to be seen.

And then I will have to start migrating all the old content over to the new site... and I also have to decide what I am going to do about the 18 months worth of journal entries I wrote and hand coded in HTML. Was there really anything in that old diary of mine worth salvaging? Actually, come to think of it, there were some bits and pieces that would make interesting little articles. I'll just trawl through it all shove the edited highlights up on the new site.

In writing news, the flash knockout contest in which I am participating, and which I haven't told you about because I've only just started this blog, is going OK. I survived the first round which means that I will have at least two stories published in the resulting book. Did I not mention that all the contest entries will be appearing in a book? Well, they are. The only problem is that I have until noon tomorrow... er... today to finish my entry for Round 2. Or, more acurately, I have until noon today to actually think up a fucking story, start writing and complete it. Yup, inspiration hasn't been in abundance over the weekend.

Oh... and I still haven't got a job. Better do something about that too.

In the meantime...

OK, so while I am faffing around getting this puppy to work, why not go and check out Issue #2 of Mad Hatter's Review which features some marvellous fiction, poetry, non-fiction and combinations thereof all set to vivid artwork and, most importantly, fantastic music, some of which was written by me.

OK, just testing this sucker out

Hello, blog reading type people. I'm just trying this puppy out to see if it works and then I am going to try and figure out how to incorporate it into my existing website.

Groovy.