I need a villain… (I’m holding out for a bad guy ’til the end of the night)

Do you know what the biggest problem with modern popular culture is? Lack of villains.

Okay, that’s not true, there are lots of villains, but no truly great ones, not recently.

I’ve been thinking this for a while, but it came to focus recently on watching the BBC’s The Musketeers (2014 – 2016). In season it had a fantastically complex villain in the form of Peter Capaldi’s Cardinal Richelieu, who could chew the scenery with the best of them, but was also in his way charismatic and patriotic. The dreadful things he did come across as being for the betterment of France, but insofar as his vision of France extends. The result was an extended fencing duel between Captain Treville and his three/four Musketeers, and the Cardinal Richelieu and his conspirators. The king is swaying in between the parties, almost as a marker of the progress of the fight.

Then in season two it the Comte de Rochfort, who was pretty one dimensional. The only cleverness is how long he Rochfort can hide his true intents. There is no real rhythm to it. Rochfort, though played well by Marc Warren, merely is evil, and he knows it – his only real goal is to capture or kill the Queen, he doesn’t see himself as the hero, he is a madman parading as the king’s confidant.

I’m only just watching season three now, and I’ve high hopes for Rupert Everrett as the Governor of Paris, I’ll take a guess that he’s plotting for the throne somehow, but the season seems to be a battle for the soul of Paris, and that’s okay it is a Musketeer story.

You know me and my love of Alexandre Dumas’ stories.

I cite this as an example within one show that went from great to weak villain. Generally, though, villains are weaker now. However, there are other examples of great villains, modern books, comics, TV and films are incredibly focused on the heroes, the desire to give heroes arcs overrides the need for an excellent complex villain.

Here’s the thing though, I don’t think it is as necessary to have a good hero arc, as it is to have a good villain arc. Heroes are fine being paragons, sure they can struggle, have complexities – but let Superman be Superman, let Lex Luther plot and strive to take on a paragon.

Give the villain a great motivation, give them subtlety, make them overcome obstacles, they’re the ones that need to struggle and succeed, that way your paragon of a hero has a true struggle, a good fight to overcome. Your hero is greater for having a greater villain. Be specific too; they should aim for something specific, achievable, not just vague.

There’s a reason why I think Thanos is greater than Palpatine in the villain stakes, Palpatine’s motivation is to rule the galaxy, with no real reason to, while Thanos aims to improve the universe in the only way he sees that can be achieved.

Maybe I’m wrong; maybe I’m missing a lot of great villains out there. I can accept that. Feel free to suggest some books in the comment section; my reading lists can never be too long.

Block Breaker #1

Block breakers are short stories, random ditties for which the only real purpose is to write something, anything when Writer’s Block strikes. Quality, verbosity, fidelity, consistency – not of these words apply. Just write or die.
It fell to second engineer William Hardaway, the future of all. Never in the history of man had so much rested on one person.

“Will you do it?” Susan Ashcroft asked, she was a young lean shrewd looking woman who’s intent gaze locked onto William.

The elder man cleared his throat, and stroked the unkempt site beard that wrapped round his face. “You ask too much,” he finally said, his voice raspy and breathless betraying some excitement at the offer he was being made.

“I ask nothing, I’m just the messenger,” Susan said with mild annoyance, “You are in control for now.”

“You’re asking me to die,” William stated.

“A noble death, all of creation depends on your choice, you have control,” Susan said.

“A noble death,” William mused stroking his unkempt beard again, “Yes. I can do that.”

“Then press the button,” Susan said, “Save us all.”

Deep within the bowels of the derelict spaceship orbiting Sol, a beaten and bloody William dragged himself to the engine console.

“You can do it,” Susan encouraged him, her image flickering in the air.

“For Earth, for Humanity,” William said and then screaming against the pain he reached out with both arms and pulled the levers that would finish the core overload. Alarms rattled off.

“You need to point the engines at the Sol, quickly there isn’t much time,” Susan said urgently.

William pulled himself up further, fighting the pain, the fatigue and the darkness encroaching on his vision, he pushed further along the console and pushed a button labelled ‘port thrusters’, the ship rocked and heaved.

“Thank you,” Susan said looking down. It was the last thing William heard before he passed out.

Just a thousands miles above Sol, the space ship rotated round, and then it’s engines exploded sending a wave of energy powered by an explosion made up of exotic particles. The wave hit the Sol, the Earth’s sun. As the explosion hit the plasma it became super heated.

One hundred and fifty million miles away, eight minutes at light speed, the people of the Earth celebrated as the dimness felt across the world faded and light started to stream again. It had been three months since the sun had begun to cool, and the apocalypse was nigh, but William Hardaway had saved them all.

Site Update

Update on recent performance issues

So been doing quite a bit behind the scenes to sort out my blog.

My old hosting was a bit overpowered for my needs, about 8 years ago when I’d gotten it I’d had bigger ambitions than a blog, and over the past few years the performance on the site had been excruciatingly slow and frequently chose not to work.

Instead I’ve gone just for wordpress.com – all my posts and such have been imported and I’m just playing about with the look and feel of the site. The good news is it now runs nice and zippy, and can concentrate on writing and blogging.

If you were following the old blog, you’ll have to refollow again I think.

Expect regular posts from now on.

Well well well… look at who’s darkening your door step

So I’ve been gone a while, but I’m back. I lost my mojo for a bit, combination of many many factors, which ultimately are dull, and uninteresting compared with what’s going on in your life, and the world in general – but it was important to me at the time, and it dragged me away from writing, and blogging.

As the title suggests, and the first line, (because apparently reiterating your point, however pointless is the best way to get it across), I’m back. I’m currently working on a project, an epic piece though slightly unoriginal in a world populated by George R. R. Martin, J. R. R. Tolkien, and many others… but it’s fun, and maybe along the way I’ll stumble into a something unique and interesting in the world of fantasy story telling.

I have other ideas piling up, which is great suddenly the creative juices are flowing again.

And I’m half way to fixing my site up – I’ve reinstalled WordPress, and managed to upload all my old posts and comments, (which turns out is very easy), but it’s still running slow.

I’m not sure what I’ll be blogging about – just a journal of my life writing, commentary on writing news, a significant amount about NaNoWriMo this year and future years, (and if that’s news to you… surprise! I’m obsessed with the non-competitive writing competition), a challenge or two, and I’d like to analyse other people’s stories, not just writing but other media’s too – because I find it fascinating. I’ll try and sort out things like that out, but I’m all a quiver at being back, and to be writing for a few weeks, and I wanted to share that.

That last minute complete turn around…

So, I told a falsehood last time I was writing here, I said I was going to do all the preparation. Well life has a way of getting in the way of the best laid plans. I’ve got plenty of research into the science of my novel, I’ve even drawn out designs for the vessel it was to take place in – but that’s as far as I got. Well not quite, I did spec out two characters, but they were more straw men meant to get the ball rolling. I mean one was a private detective paid to be on, what in cost terms, is the equivalent of an exclusive luxury round the world cruise. It wasn’t meant to make sense, it was just meant to be a start.

So, this story I wanted to tell, the rules I set myself, needed to be fully plotted out and researched to work. I haven’t done that, and it’s twenty minutes to NaNoWriMo. New plan then, I’m going to wing it. I don’t have any idea what the plot will be, but I’ll go at something hell for leather from midnight. The 50k day one is still the goal – might be even tougher now, but doesn’t that sound like even more fun?

Until I’ve got the first 50k, weather it’s day one, or day thirty, I’ll be a bit quiet here.

NaNoWriMo Preparation – the practical (fun) stuff

For the past couple of years I’ve been writing about various things I do to prepare for NaNoWriMo, it’s the things stuff. The electronics and software, the pens and the paper, etc… I’ve already mentioned my spare room, so I’ve spent some time setting it up, arranging it, and adding some motivation posters and such. I’ve had great fun, and there’s still some odd jobs to do until it’s quite ready for November in just 36 days.

Below is a list of the things my new den has, and some photos, for posterity, (because by the time November 30^th comes around it will probably be covered in screwed up papers, broken pens, cables strewn about, books stacked haphazardly, etc… etc…).

A 20m reem of paper, and lots of blutack so I can get it up on the wall and plot out my timelines and such in big.
A collection of physical books for guidance and inspiration, (yes as well as the Kindle ones, I’m quite loaded with advice from over the years). These include:
A4 whiteboards (2 of them, with whiteboard pens to go with), for when you just want to experiment with an idea without committing to anything, (you’d be surprised how liberating that is)
Huge collection of notebooks, and pens
And these things are pretty important up in the home office:
1. No TV
2. No Xbox
3. No fridge/snack draws

So, in earlier posts I mentioned I bought a new laptop this year, it’s the Acer Aspire V5 11.6” model. It’s snappy and comfortable to write on, and even though the screen’s an inch bigger than my last one, the whole laptop is smaller and lighter. So it’s perfect for NaNoWriMo.

For PC software this year I’m sticking with the tried and tested Microsoft Office, I’m on the 2013 version on this laptop and it’s nice and comfortable. I know there are alternatives, but they have never measured up for me. Aside from the Evernote Windows 8 app, (for syncing research), that’s pretty much it, some software yet to be decided upon for brainstorming, and the return of my over complicated NaNoWriMo Excel tracker.

I’m aiming for an uncluttered computer for writing. I’m not going to be writing on my mobile phone or tablet this year. In the past couple of years mobile writing has probably accounted for somewhere between five and ten percent of my overall word counts, however it can be frustrating at times, and my motif this year is to keep it simple, so I’m sacking it off. Instead the time I would have spent mobile writing will instead be focused on research, and I’m going to keep a running tally of what I need to research. It’s a nice separation I feel, because my computer does the grunt work for writing, and the mobile does the grunt work for just about everything else. So here’s what I’ve got on my mobile and tablet (Nexus 5, and Nexus 7 respectively):

EverNote, to collate and organise my notes, which handily shares with the Windows 8 EverNote app, not only that but it allows you to attach photos, links, website extracts, all very handy for research purposes.
SimpleMind, brainstorming charting tool for organising my thoughts in a brainstorm. The other reason I like these is the ability to lay out an idea, and then rearrange it, move information from one node to another etc… (great for settling on character backstories and such)
WordPress, because this year I’m not just going to stop blogging on October 31^st, and then resume again until July the following the year with a “Oops I forgot to mention I won”
Amazon Kindle app, (and also my Amazon Kindle device), for my collection of advice and inspiration books I’m going to try and make full use of this year.
Google Earth, not a tool I’ve used in previous years, then again my sci-fi has been largely extra-terrestrial, this time round we’re spending a lot more time travelling round Earth, and I think Google Earth will help in that goal of being more descriptive in my writing.
Wikipedia, I don’t normally have this app installed, more often than not it bugs me – and accessing Wikipedia through my browser allows for multiple tabs which is far better for research – however the saved pages function might come in handy. It also might not, because I can bookmark from a browser, so I guess watch this space.
Plume, to keep in contact with the NaNoWriMo Twitter community in less than 140 characters, (which is perfect for NaNoWriMo, why waste lots of words on communicating when they should be going into your novel!)
Simple Notepad, in case I know I’m going to be out and about, and the opportunity to pull out a computer and write is limited, this will be my backup, ideally I don’t want to do the writing on my mobile as mentioned already, but better to be prepared.
Writer’s Lists, an app I got after doing some Google Surveys, it’s pretty good as a quick reference for elements in story writing. I’m going to be running my plans through to see what opportunities it gives me to refine my plot and characters further.

So that’s the preparation for the how, where, and on what. Next post I intend to go in to what I do once I’ve had an idea. I’ve been planning what I write for a few years now, (and with three wins in a row, planning has kind of worked for me), so I thought I might share some of my lessons, and hopefully in the process actually codify what I largely do by whim and instinct, and fix that bits that are broken.

Where is this all going? – A quick follow up

So a few weeks back I wrote a post about my changing ambitions in writing. Basically it boiled down to going from being an ‘aspiring writer’ to an ‘aspiring author’*

Which is really thrilling.

Not that I was bored just writing, just the opposite, I just wanted more excitement and challenges by pushing the envelope.

I still think just writing for fun and frolics, to relieve stress, to exercise the brain, and to exercise demons, or whatever your motive for filling blank pages with glorious words, is not only perfectly fine, but perfectly good. I’d be more than happy to continue to do that – except that I feel the need to constantly challenge myself, and sometimes just doing it for for self-gratification doesn’t give me the impetuous to really reach and stretch.

And if I’m really honest, there other motive I have is for that little snippet of fortune and glory – but the odds of achieving either are without any doubt extremely long.

“The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.”

– Michelangelo (the renaissance artist, not the turtle)

I’m saying this for two reasons:

One because I didn’t want anyone to think my own personal change in goal for my writing is a slight at any other goal or purpose for writing. It isn’t – it’s a personal choice.
Two, because it leads nicely into my next blog post where I evangelise both writing and NaNoWriMo.

Whatever your reasons for writing, whatever you hope to get out of it – I hope you do it and get it.

So, I hope that clears the air a bit.

5 reasons I think everyone should try NaNoWriMo once

Before I go into what NaNoWriMo has done for me, and my five reasons I think everyone should try it, here’s a reminder of what NaNoWriMo is:

What is NaNoWriMo (well my interpretation anyway)

NaNoWriMo is the challenge to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. That’s as simple as it gets. It happens every year, and has been going on for fifteen years. It has a fabulous community, and great meet ups, (or at least I can confidently say it does from first-hand experience here in Leeds, UK).

Anyone who reaches 50,000 words is declared a winner, but you don’t need to give your novel to anyone, no has to read it – if you want an official win, you put it into software on the website that simply counts words and then forgets all but the number of words you wrote. It doesn’t have to be a master piece, you’re only aiming for a first draft after all*. The story doesn’t even need to be finished, you could hit 50,000 words, and realise you’re only half way through, and that’s fine.

The most important thing to remember about those 50,000 words, or more, or less, don’t edit. Don’t worry about what’s gone wrong three pages back, write around it, and ignore it. If you spot red squiggly lines, ignore them, move in. Spell checkers work just as well at the end of your novel, as they do if you run it each and every page. By not editing, worrying about spelling and grammar, you can focus on just writing. Get the first draft onto the page, and you can polish it up to a glorious shine after November.

In truth, no one need ever know you’re doing it. You could do it in private, your time a mysterious secret to your friends and family. You could just join the forums online, and never meet a person in the real world while you’re doing NaNoWriMo. Or you can go beyond the weekly meets, spend every night and day you can in the coffee shop as other Wrimos**, coming and going trying to do the same thing. You control how much or how little you get involved.

As to how you write, well you can do that on your computer, your tablet, your phone, or you can go old school and do it in a notebook using a pen, (though if your handwriting is as bad as mine, good luck). I suppose if you really wanted to go old school, you could get out the stone tablets and start chiselling away, (though I’m not convinced you could do 50,000 legible words in 30 days in stone, anyone want to prove me wrong?).

The choice is yours. In fact, that’s pretty much NaNoWriMo in a nutshell. You can choose what to write, where to write, when to write, (well within the month of November), what support you want, who to write with.

If you want to sign up, go to nanowrimo.org – check out some of the resources for getting started, there’s a lot of good information that can be of great value to newcomers and old timers. I do like a lot of the pep talks, (which can be found archived here: http://nanowrimo.org/pep-talks, my particular favourite being Piers Anthony’s in 2008, as not only is he one of my favourite authors, it was thoroughly entertaining and inspiring).

* draft; a first or preliminary form of any writing, subject to revision, copying, etc. (I’m not being patronising, I just really want to emphasise you’re not writing a finished piece, it doesn’t matter if freind was spelt wrong, move on and you’ll pick it up in editing).

** Wrimos; a participant of NaNoWriMo, or NaNoWriMo like challenge

Me and NaNoWriMo

The most common theme throughout my blog for the past 6 years has been NaNoWriMo. It’s as important a marker in my year as my own birthday, maybe even more.

It’s changed my life in so many ways, and it’s also helped me to keep something important within me alive. I don’t have a crystal ball, I can’t say for certain that by now I would have stopped writing, I think that’s a distinct possibility if I’m honest, (poetry has long since stopped being a facet of my creative life), but I do know for certain it’s changed how I’ve approached writing, and the lessons I’ve learnt don’t stop at writing.

What I’ve also got is three successful attempts at NaNoWriMo, and two rich lessons, (okay two years I failed to complete 50,000 words – I prefer to think of what I gained in my lack of success). With each of those attempts I’ve two stories to enjoy, the story of having tried, and the story that directly resulted from trying.

I’ve met some really fantastic people over the past six years, who’ve helped me a lot in writing, (hopefully I might have helped them on occasion too).

It’s incredibly exciting, you live life to deadlines, you have to rush to catch-up, or you’ll get lost in the middle of your novel and have to make the heart wrenching choice to abandon a story and switch to a new one so you can accomplish your goals. (I don’t recommend that by the way, but at some point it happens to us all – we just can’t take a story further without a lot of work, or starting it again, and you don’t go backwards in NaNoWriMo, you go forwards).

In fact, going forwards is one of the things I’ve learnt the most from NaNoWriMo, it’s given me a bit of ambition, a lesson in goal setting, rather than settling.

Finally, the five reasons to do NaNoWriMo

As a result of all the above, I honestly do believe if you’ve any interest in writing a story, from a short story to an epic novel, that you should give NaNoWriMo a try. So here are the five reasons I think you should give NaNoWriMo a try:

The most basic one of all, because you have an idea. Story telling is everywhere, television, the internet, the radio, it’s in your newspapers, and your magazines. Storytelling is a part of all our lives, so I’m willing to bet at some point in your life, you’ve had what you felt was a great idea. What’s the worst that could happen? If you don’t like your first draft, you can file it away for another twenty years, and if you do like it, you can enjoy it being realised, and you never know, you might make your fotune with it***.
You love books. You’ve been taking and taking for years, feasting on the latest J. K. Rowling, Katie Oliver, or Robin Hobb, maybe now’s the time to have a go at giving something back, to adding to the pantheon of storytellers? I don’t care what anyone says, if you write, you’re a writer, and that’s an accolade you can keep.
To be part of a community that stretches from right where you live to all the way around the globe. The local communities are amazing, and the global community will blow your mind. The regional wordcount boards have a peculiar focus each year – we here in Yorkshire, in line with our Olympic successes, like to sit with pride higher than whole countries. Everyone’s there trying to help each other, trying to outdo each other, supporting and cajoling just when you need it. You’ll meet new friends, try new things. You’ll part of one of those mysterious groups that take over whole areas of coffee shops, laptops and notepads dotted around, people calling out the latest challenge.
Whether you end up writing 500 words, 5,000 words, 50,000 words, or 150,000 words – it’s all good. Yes the challenge is to hit 50,000 words, but if you don’t it’s still great. If you only did 5,000 words, that’s more words than you had at the start of the month. Its 5,000 words closer to the story you always wanted to write. So no matter what, you can win.
To have fun. If you enjoy writing, enjoy it. There’s tremendous joy in building something new, it’s exciting, and thrilling… and in the world of the consumer it might even feel rare and precious to you.

I could go on, but I set out to just do five reasons, and I think that’s accomplished. NaNoWriMo, whatever your aiming for, is a defined time to do it, it’s a supportive community, it’s the opportunity to make something, to leave behind the what ifs, and say “I am”.

Unofficial reason number 6, every year they have new fun images to celebrate participation and success, and they’re a different theme every year. My favourites were the Venn diagrams, (what can I say, I do charts and graphs for a living), but last year’s 8 bit designs were a lot of fun.

*** I wish I could promise you a fortune, but sadly most novels won’t make it – but I can’t stress this enough, if you don’t try, you won’t know.

NaNoWriMo – Preparations

“May you live in interesting times…”

Purported to be a Chinese proverb to an enemy, source unknown

My job has been keeping me busy lately, (which is both good and stressful at the same time), so I’ve not had as much time to write blog posts, or more importantly prepping for NaNoWriMo, as I would have liked, (yes, I know readers to my blog are important, but it’s kind of pointless having a writing blog, if you don’t write).

November is going to be a tough month, but I’m confident I’ll be able to handle it – both my job, and the ridiculous number of challenges I’ve set myself this year. In previous years I’ve loaned out my Xbox, and blu ray player during NaNoWriMo to void myself of distractions.

Now this year, I live alone, and have other alternatives. I’ve got a whole spare bedroom which I’ve not really been utilising as well I had intended, but its perfect distraction free environment. Its only flaw is that it’s two flights of stairs away from the kettle – but I’ve got a thermos jug, so that should see me through extended writing stints. I’ve got everything I need now for it to be a home office, (library, keyboard, mice, monitor). It needs a bit of setting up still to be quite right, but it’ll do.

That’s my big plan for this weekend, getting it all setup and organised.

Of course that and I’ll deal with some planning issues. Pretty serious planning issues, which is the real reason for this post.

For a while I was really struggling to come up with an idea I could do. I had loads of ideas, some of them were reworks of old novels, others were original, (however I then decided most of them were derivative in some form or another). I knew I needed something special, given all my goals from this year’s NaNoWriMo, and I just wasn’t finding it.

I actually started writing a post bemoaning my lack of success, however moaning wouldn’t help, so on a train trip down to that there London, I got myself a nice fresh book, a new pen, (because fresh starts require fresh materials in my mind), and set up about going through my existing ideas looking for something I’ve overlooked, or accepting just because an idea might share some commonalities with a popular story or two, doesn’t mean it should be abandoned, (I mean a Sun Hero type story with a young mage set in a fantasy world, doesn’t have to be anything like Harry Potter – though my idea did involve his particular gift being for wielding lightning, which just crossed a line with me).

Luck, or the proverbial Muse, or whatever you want to call inspiration, was with me, I hit upon a new idea, and set up about plotting it out. It’s very different from all my other ideas this year, it’s got scope and challenge, it’s broad in its sweep, but with a core of characters that I can really flesh out.

I’ve got quite a few pages of notes already written, still got many more to go, and I need to do some time lines (before and after the start of the story). My only concern is whether I can hit the word count target I’ve set myself, I’m aiming for 200,000 words, but if I do that, I think it’ll be a lot of waffle, and the story telling might not be so clear, which goes against one of my challenges. I think it might be worth letting go of that one goal, and would be sensible considering I do have a job to do as well. I’ll keep the 50,000 words on the first day goal – that may or may not be achievable, but it’s really fun to try.

Another bit of preparation I want to do is some art work. A temporary cover to put on the NaNoWriMo novel profile page, but also illustrations from key scenes, objects, and people, make it easier to do the descriptive writing challenge.

So all in all, things are looking up. Roll on NaNoWriMo in just 44 days.

NaNoWriMo Playlist 2014

Continuing preparations for NaNoWriMo 2014 with the perennial playlist feature.

At least once a year I write a playlist to write to during NaNoWroMo, and there’s a whole logic around my choices which amounts to a few key rules:

Music that matches my story, (Starfuckers, Inc just doesn’t put you in the right place for a tender love scene)
Has reasonable pacing, (I will write in time to the music, that can have interesting effects on my writing),
Is not distracting, (if you have to stop and pay attention to the music in the background that’s bad, it’s a loss of momentum)

Now this year I had this whole plan around have three playlists, so I could better match the music that I’m listening to to the parts of the story I’m writing. One of the playlists would be entirely general music, the other softer more sad or romance inclined, and the last one would be frenetic and angry and gory to inspire a bit of carnage in my writing.

It’s a really good plan, however, I’ve also chosen to change my cloud music provider. Previously I’d been using Amazon music, (£22 a year), and have had no real regrets, especially since their desktop player really took off – but there’s no streaming to ChromeCast, and while the tracks themselves can be picked up by other apps, the playlists can’t.

So I’ve settled on Google Play Music, which confused the hell out of me because I thought it was £10 a month, (£120 a year!), but that’s just if you want a more Spotify like service. I don’t, I have lots of music, of which I add to occasionally, Google will let me upload up to 25,000 tracks gratis. And I can do all the fun stuff like stream through ChromeCast, and stuff.

I did consider going back to Spotify, but I prefer the limited ownership that mp3 has, compared with no ownership offered by streaming only services.

Unfortunately, as Amazon Music playlists aren’t sharable, I’ve had to spend time recreating my major playlists, and rather than spending ages recreating three more, I’ve just done one playlist for NaNoWriMo 2014. I’ll have to wait until my next project to play around with the multiple playlists idea, and single playlists have always worked well enough in the past.

Beneath the cut is this year’s playlist, it’s not in any particular order as I’ll keep skipping the music as I write.

NaNoWriMo 2014 Playlist Continue reading “NaNoWriMo Playlist 2014”