Hot! Hot! Hot!

It’s been hot recently, have you noticed? Not just ‘hot for here’ but properly hot, Mediterranean hot. The kind of hot that makes normal people sweat in a way that makes us fat folks shout, “Now you know how I feel every day, whatever the weather!” It’s been so hot that streets have been melting and so have people. It’s the kind of weather that we in Britain get so rarely that it makes the front cover of newspapers. Who can forget the classic “Phew, What a Scorcher” headline? That’s how it’s been this year. We don’t get summers like the current one very often so people can sometimes let the heat go to their heads – literally and figuratively. They don’t realise that Anglo-Saxons like me aren’t built for this kind of weather. When it’s like this you have to be careful.

I’ve been doing the sensible things like staying inside in the shade, opening and closing the windows so that the ones on the cool side of the house let the most air in, drinking lots of water and having my fan on so much that the oscillating twister thing that turns it from side to side has broken. Now one side of me is frozen while the other is sweating like the proverbial pig. I keep having to turn around as if I’m on a spit. I’ve been taking naps at lunchtime wherever required and feasible, and I’ve not been overexerting myself.

My neighbours however have not being doing any such sensible things. They’ve never been in the house. We have a piece of communal land behind the house and they’ve pretty much commandeered it, sitting outside from morning till (their) bedtime (which is long after mine), drinking coffee and alcohol (both of which dehydrate you even further) and moving their plastic garden chairs to follow the sun across the sky for maximum potentially cancerous effects. They’re sweating even more than I am and permanently squinting into the sun. They have visitors over just about all the time who come for an hour or two or six and join them in their sun-worshipping.

They’re not overly loud, not affecting me in any way really. They’re just doing everything that we’re told not to. They’re blatantly ignoring all the health warnings and deliberately putting their bodies at risk. It’s shocking and I can’t for the life of me understand why they’d do such things.

So why do they permanently seem to have huge grins on their faces?

Turn a Different Corner

Science fiction writers have long had a tradition of creating works of alternative history, a subgenre telling stories based in some ‘uchronia’ – a time that doesn’t exist. The idea is simple: they take a setting or an event that we’re all (hopefully) familiar with and then twist the outcome a little so that the unexpected occurs.

But why do they write this kind of stuff and why do we, the readers, lap it up? Well all fiction begins with the simple question, ‘What if?’ and alternative reality tales ask more clearly defined ‘What if’s than most. It’s a plot device that can be used to answer big questions or show us something about ourselves and our world that we don’t (or don’t want to) usually see. Three famous examples are;

What if the Nazi’s had won World War II?
What if President Nixon hadn’t been assassinated?
What if the Apollo astronauts had found alien lifeforms already on the moon?

How would these changes in events effect regular people?  How would we have reacted in those circumstances? Would it have been how we’d like to feel we’d have acted? A good writer can hold a mirror up to us with these kind of tales while at the same time enticing us to read more with a rollicking good yarn. And that’s the kind of stuff we like. It has a built in backstory that we don’t have to go to the trouble of ploughing through chapters of prose to set up the payoff. We already know that Lee Harvey Oswald was waiting for the President in Dallas and that Neil Armstrong travelled through space in a Saturn V rocket. We don’t need much set up, we can get straight on with the story.

BBC’s Saturday teatime favourite Doctor Who has asked this kind of question for generations. In recent series they’ve had alternative histories involving the destruction of Pompeii, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare to mention but three shows from the last few years. They make little attempt at social comment, they usually just want to entertain and tell a good story. That’s the road that I usually go down too when writing fiction. I can’t see how my social or political views are more worthy of a platform than anyone else’s, so I just try to get a good tale down.

I’ve had my own attempt at this kind of story recently. It’s my first full length novel and it’s finally available for download via Amazon. It will be available through the i-store and other online shops in a month or so and a paperback version will hopefully be out in September. Its called ‘The Happiest Workplace On Earth’ and it asks the question, What If Walt Disney hadn’t died in 1966 but had continued the work that he was planning at the time of his death? What if he had completed the utopian city that he wanted to create and had actually managed to get people living and working in it? And what if that city became a terrorist target?

It's good to finally give people the chance to read it.

Centurion

It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks. I feel old enough as it is but even after I send my cards off to the recycler I’ll still be on the young side of fifty…  just. But sometimes I feel like I’m a hundred. My knees certainly seem that old when I’ve been hill walking or jogging. That’s what I get for playing American Football in my youth I guess.

My knees aren’t really a hundred though, nor is the rest of me. These blogs however, that’s a different story. This is my hundredth weekly report of my life as a struggling writer. I’ve enjoyed writing each and every one of them, even though the vast majority of them haven’t actually been about the art and craft of writing. I’ve written about cooking, sweating, hill walking, watching cricket, needing new glasses, music, things that annoy me (several times), the taxman, mental health and, on occasion, the writing and publishing process. And thankfully some of you have read them. I can’t thank you enough for your encouragement over the last two years.

In that time quite a lot has happened to me. I’ve ended my twenty-year career at a multi-national financial institution (not through choice – don’t believe everything you read about all bankers rolling in huge bonuses) and I’ve started living my life-long dream of being a full-time, self-employed writer. I figured that it was now or never so grasped the proverbial nettle and it’s been relatively successful, as long as you don’t measure success by monetary figures alone. I’ve had my work printed in several magazines and newspapers and have published a couple of short story collections along with half a dozen small quiz books and self-help books. Don’t mock, they pay the bills. Well, some of the bills. If I’m honest we’ve had to cut back on our spending as much as possible so those bills no longer include such luxuries as foreign holidays and satellite sports channels but I can’t say that I really care all that much. Those indulgences helped distract me from my unhappy working life so now that I’m doing something that I love, do I still really have that desire to travel to faraway places? Hell yeah, of course I do! But we take the life we’re dealt and make the most of it. And writing is what I most want to do. Amazingly I’ve got to a point where my long awaited (by me) first novel is on the brink of being unleashed on the market. That’s another ambition ticked off the bucket list.

I’m already well underway with the next novel (a cosy-crime murder whodunit) and there are a couple more quiz books coming, hopefully before the end of the year. And of course I’ll still be posting this blog every Friday for the foreseeable future.

Here's to the next hundred.

Stop!

There are several lessons in life that everyone needs to learn. How to tell the time; how to mix the perfect vodka martini; when to use an apostrophe correctly.

And everyone needs to know when they should keep on doing something and when it’s the right moment to say ‘Enough is enough, I need to stop this now’. When someone buys you the fifth tequila slammer of the night, for example, it’s probably time to quit. Or when you think it’s really cool to buy yet another Osmonds / Backstreet Boys / Westlife t-shirt (delete according to your age).

In my case at the moment, I’m having trouble knowing when to stop rewriting and editing my novel. It’s finished. I know it’s finished yet I can’t resist having just another little tweak at some part of it. And if I don’t think that particular section is as good as it can be then it stands to reason that the rest of it isn’t either – so I’ll start with another rewrite from the very beginning.

It’s so maddening. It’s been ‘almost there’ for a couple of months now but I seem unable to let go. Or should that be ‘unwilling’? I guess that what’s really happening is that I’m doing all I can to postpone the moment when I have to ‘send my baby out into the big wide world’, as it were. While ever I’m still working on it nobody can tell me that my book’s useless, so if I keep it locked up at home it – and me – will be safe from harm.

That’s ridiculous, I know, so it’s time to let go. It’s time to get the damned thing finished.

Now I’m sorry but I’ve got to cut this week’s blog short. I’ve got another draft to write.