Counting Down

When I was little one of the first mental challenges my parents set me was learning how to count. I'm guessing that your early education was similar. "One, two, three, four, come on baby…" Eventually I got to be so proficient at it that I didn't even need to take my shoes and socks off.

These days I'm a master at this counting lark and can easily get to a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. It gets pretty boring after a while but I can count almost as well as that guy off Sesame Street now. In fact I wish I could write as well as I count. Words flow from me when the ideas are there and my fingers are pretty adept at typing, but I still don't do it as quickly as I'd like. I used to say that my target was to write a minimum of a thousand words per day. A thousand words, that's approximately a page of a glossy magazine or maybe four pages of a paperback novel. For someone who's trying to make their living from writing though a thousand words per day isn't quite enough. I need to be able to double, triple that amount or more.

You may have heard of something called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. Hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists around the world (so maybe it should be InterNoWriMo?) try to write the first draft of their novel, end to end, through the thirty days of November. That's just a first draft, nothing polished, nothing that I'd want anyone else to read. For many, that will be enough. Others won't make it that far. But some of us will use it as a springboard to give us the impetus to start and even finish our novels. However many drafts it takes to complete after November, it's NaNoWriMo that starts it off. I did it last year and the result was my novel, 'The Happiest Workplace on Earth.'  This year I'm using it to kick-start that book's sequel.

As part of the project you're encouraged to hit a daily wordcount. They suggest 1,667 to give a total of a 50,000 word first draft. I'm there or thereabouts at the moment. But I can't get my head past that 1,667 being a very arbitrary figure. And why is the first draft 50,000? Why not 60,000 which would be 2,000 words per day? That's much closer to a 'proper' book length.

Or how about writing for a given length of time rather than measuring the output? After all those 1,667 words could just be 167 repetitions of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'. Nobody says it has to make sense. And it's not something that I'm beholden to. Life, taxes, doing my accounts and watching Pointless all take precedence over work. I mean I try to get the words done but sometimes something important steals my hours. That's fine, it will always happen, but the problem comes when the time thief is something that's not really that important, like Candy Crush Saga. That's when working somewhere with no internet connection (like my local coffee shop) can come in so very handy.

Right, I'd better crack on. Time or words, however you measure my output, it's not as much as it could be today. And anyhow, I've just got to take a few minutes out to try and complete level 103…

© Shaun Finnie 2013

What Would Arthur Brown Say?

Dark nights, baked potatoes, visible breath, checking for hedgehogs, unrecognised pagan references, flash and thunder fire, woollen mittens and staying up way past bedtime, extremes of heat and cold.

For many of us in Britain the fifth of November is the only night of the year that we venture outside as a family after dark. It's the only time that we gather with family and friends and eat in the cold and dark, wrapped up against the weather. We're no longer a nation that spends much time outside but for this single evening we put that to one side and celebrate in the way that our grandfathers and their grandfathers would recognise.

But why? Are we really still jubilant about the foiling of a plot to bring down the parliament four hundred years ago? Or is it really just an excuse for revelry, for coming together, for showing the cold and the dark that we humans won't be cast down by such natural unpleasantries, that we now have control over illumination and temperature, that we are now the masters (and potential demolishers) of the environment in which we live?

How many people who oohed and aahed at the flames and the rockets on the fifth of November  know that the original celebrations had strong anti-catholic overtones and the first effigies to be placed atop the burning bonfire were more likely to be of the Pope than of the would-be assassin Guy Fawkes? And how many of us had a small family bonfire in the back garden, complete with our own fireworks display, as was common when I was a boy, forty years ago?

The celebration of Bonfire night seems to be in decline or at the least it seems to be merging with an increased celebration of Halloween (something that went pretty much unnoticed half a century ago) here in England. But don't go thinking that Halloween is an American tradition that we've imported to Britain. No, it was a British celebration that went over to America with the pilgrims. We here let it lapse while the colonial cousins continued it.

The moral is, don't believe everything that you've been taught to be true, especially if you read it on the internet. Remember, once upon a time everyone 'knew' that the earth was flat. Question everything, constantly.

* Bonus points to anyone who can tell us exactly what Arthur Brown would say.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Silence is Golden

I've been talking to several other writers about music recently. Specifically, what type of music, if any, do they listen to while writing.

Me, I love to listen to music. It's one of the great joys of my life. Just about any music will do from Mozart to Motörhead, Frank Sinatra to the Frank Chickens (look them up if you need to), I've never understood genres; it's all music. And most of it is interesting.

And therein lies the problem. Not only do I love music but I adore words, the combination of words, the subtle interplay of them that, when mixed by a good wordsmith, makes the whole immensely greater than the sum of its parts. And I can't hear a song without listening to the words being sung and the poetry that binds them together as lyrics. And if I'm listening to lyrics, to other people's words, then I can't really concentrate on placing my own specially chosen combination of words on paper or screen.

Some writers choose to play different styles music to put them in the mood for writing different kinds of scenes. Hard rock for an action sequence or a light piano piece for a gentle love scene. Whatever does it for them, I guess. For me, I'm OK as long as it's an instrumental tune with no discernible lyrics. Or if I'm struggling with something, if I'm stuck with how to express the emotion in a piece I'm writing or how to get my characters out of (or into) a particularly thorny plot hole then I'll turn the speakers off and work in absolute silence. That is, if you discount the dog down the street that barks incessantly morning until bedtime.

So, fellow witers, what's the soundtrack to your working day?

Maybe it's Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book"?
Or "It's Only Words" by the Bee Gees"?
Or, if you're recording the audio book of "The Hobbit", maybe you listen to OMD's "Tolkien Loud and Clear"?

Sorry.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Pursued By A Bear

'They', those wonderful and perfect people who love to direct the tiniest details of our lives, say that we shouldn't 'sweat the small stuff'. I'd broadly agree with that, unless the "small stuff" in question are pieces of onion. This should be sweated down to an almost liquid pulp so as to make the reeky root more palatable.

And the phrase isn't used to refer to obese kids on sports day either. That would be sweating short stuff, not small stuff.

The term about sweaty small stuff is more normally used to mean that you shouldn't worry about details, you should get the big things sorted first. Control the whole and you'll be mostly OK. Of course this contradicts other phrases like 'look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves' or 'God is in the detail' but nobody ever said that English was a simple language.

Unless you're Shakespeare, that is. He made writing so simple that the rest of us who put ink on paper (and dots on screens) can only bow at his feet. He had a way of making words flow so simply that they dripped from him like honey.

I went to see 'The Winter's Tale' this week, noted as being possibly the most problematic of the Bard's so-called Problem Plays. It's certainly unusual, starting off as an exercise in psychological terror before suddenly switching style at around the halfway mark and becoming a bawdy comedy. Some of the language used is among Old Billy's most impenetrable text too making the audience work quite hard if they want to understand every single word said.

But you know what? They don't have to. If a Shakespeare play's performed well then we in the stalls don't have to fully understand each and every word. We can get the feeling and the intention of the line from the actor's body language. They show us the meaning by their actions. That's why it's called acting.

Those who say that they don't understand Shakespeare have usually never his works performed live, their only exposure to the work being having been forced to read set texts at school. When performed by a talented cast who put their all into it the plays come to life, as vibrant today as they were back in Will's time. And of course it helps that they've been blessed by some of the most colourful lines ever to be penned.

Watching Shakespeare, you don't have to sweat the small stuff. Just go with the flow.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

badgerbadgerbadgerbadger

I want to see a badger with his
Pointy, stripy nose
And his massive, bulky silver back
And sharply curving toes

I want to see him shining bright
Beneath a moon-lit sky
I've waited here for half the night
I think he might be shy

The garden's full of fruit and nuts
And smothered in bird seed
I've laid out everything I've got
I want to see him feed

I want to see a badger
And so many other creatures
And I want to feel their fur and scales
And probe their unique features

And I want to hear a nightingale
Or cuckoo's simple call
Before their voices quieten 'til
They can't be heard at all

I want to see a tiger
Or an Arctic polar bear
But I'll have to travel quickly
Or there won't be any there

I want to see a dodo
Or a laughing owl in flight
Or a mighty stegosaurus
What a huge, impressive sight

But the pink passenger pigeon
Won't be passing by here soon
And the fierce Tasmanian tiger
Won't be hunting by the moon

"Extinction is Forever"
So the warning posters say
But they never tell precisely when
They never name the day

That a species will be gone for good
The death of all its kind
And if we'll even know it's gone
Or if we'll even mind

So I want to see a badger
While I'm still around to care
Yes, I'd love to see a badger
Oh look! There's one, over there

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Bargain Store is Open, Come Inside

If you live in a country village then your opinion will most likely be influenced by your peer group, your neighbours, your community council. It's a simple message. Independent shops are good, multinational supermarkets are evil. They're systematically killing off our livelihood, our neighbourhood and our countryside-ihood, clogging up and damaging our roads with their massive container trucks and forcing us to eat their homogeneous, flavourless foodstuffs.

If you live in an inner city, working full time and grabbing as much overtime as you can get but still struggling to pay the bills, your view will be just as clear. Superstores are cheap and convenient. Quirky little shops providing "the personal touch" between 10am and 3pm might be nice for the lucky few who can afford a friendly chat along with their artisan bakes and skinny lattes but in these days when most of us are strapped for cash and time, that's a utopian dream, a luxury that most of us cannot afford. And what does "artisan" mean anyhow? Isn't it the same as "handmade"? Weren't all our great-grandparents artisans?

Some see the likes of Tesco driving the little shop owner out of business with their stack-em-high, price-em-low attitudes. Others see a classic economics case study for the laws of supply  and demand, democracy in action with the people voting via their wallets.

As with so many things in life there are two sides to every story, neither of which is wholly right or wrong. Some people will never set foot inside a chain coffee shop on principle while other people can't see why anyone would ever pay more than four pounds for a plucked chicken. They both have what seems, to them at least, excellent views but to me they seem to be missing the point a little.

Isn't this entire argument just a symptom of a greater question, one that's basically political? I don't have any answers, it's for each of us to make our own choices here - a choice that sees beyond the black and white and delves into the various shades of grey behind the knee-jerk reactions.

But wouldn't it be nice if there was a place that was convenient to get to, where a group of food producers could gather together and sell directly to us, the consumers? A place with plenty of free parking that opens when most people aren't at work? And if such a place existed then, without the enforced profit margins of middle-men to contend with the sellers could afford to sell their wares at relatively cheap prices yet still make a living profit? Surely we'd all agree that this would be A Good Thing?

I'll be visiting such a place this weekend. It ticks all those boxes, as trendy economists say. I'll be going to my local farmers' market on Sunday. The food is top quality and I'll spend less than at any shop, large or small. As they say, every little helps.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

The Ballad of Thomas May

I wonder what happens in the school at night
When there’s nobody there and it’s locked up tight

And they’ve all gone home and turned out the last light
Tell me, what goes on in the school at night?

I wonder what happens when they’ve all gone home
And there’s just the caretaker all alone

Walking up and down in the empty halls
With his footsteps echoing off the walls

When it’s freezing cold because the heating’s off
But nobody moans that they’ll sneeze and cough

For they’ve all gone away to their comfy houses
And there’s no living things except the spiders and mouses

To hear the building groan and creak
In the way that old places like to speak

And to tell the tales of the things they saw
About all the kids coming through their door

All the generations, bad and good,
Who attended here from the neighbourhood

The crumbling school has seen them all
As they walked – “Don’t run” – through their crumbling halls

Silence in class or break-time noise
They’d all been here, all the girls and the boys

And they’d all gone home when the day was done
Yes, they’d all gone home. Well, except for one.

A twelve year old called Thomas May
Whose parents thought had run away

From home. They said they’d had a fight
About what time he should turn out his light

So he’d gone to school like he always did
But he never went back, this poor little kid

Who nobody liked and who sulked all the time.
When he hadn’t got home by eight or nine

They called the police and they searched the town
But no sign of Thomas was ever found

He’d stayed behind when school was done
Rather than face his angry Mum

And hidden away till silence fell
Long after the final lesson’s bell

He’d crept through the gym to the changing room
And there he’d hidden in the gathering gloom

'til they’d all locked up and no-one was aware
That a foolish boy was hiding there

But in the silent darkness out he came
Yet the empty school didn’t feel the same

Was there something there just out of sight
In an unoccupied school in the dead of night?

He thought he glimpsed, from the corner of his eye,
A shape, a figure, something flash by

He was caught on film about one forty-five
And that’s the last time anyone saw him alive

The security shots that the camera caught
Shows him running away, looking scared and fraught

Though it never showed what he was running from
Or what happened when the thing caught up with Tom

But we know that nothing good occurred
In the silent school where nothing stirred

For young Thomas May is still around
And his ghostly form can be sometimes found

You can see right through him like he’s made of glass
As he wanders around from class to class

Like he’s searching for an exit door
But poor Tommy May won’t go home any more

He’s the old school house’s resident spirit.
Every ancient building has at least one in it.

There he’ll stay to the end of days
Paying the price for running away

So don’t stay alone in a dark, dark school
Our you might end up like that young fool

Find another safe place to hide and play
So tell me children, what do you say?

© Shaun Finnie 2013