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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Thinking of the Bard It’s well known that males spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. And I admit quite freely that it’s true of me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think of other things too. Only this morning, for instance, I caught myself thinking about William Shakespeare. I do this quite often because he’s interesting, mainly in considering how he worked. His day job was as an actor and, somehow, he found the time in between prancing about on stage, to write a serious number of plays and poetry too. So his copious production would lead us to wonder just how much planning went into his writing. We know, as well, that he sometimes had to dash off a new play to keep the coffers of The Globe Theatre filled in the lean years. Which, in my book, means that he was probably a pantser. Obviously, the likelihood is that I think that because I’m a pantser myself but, when you remember that he handicapped himself by writing most of his plays in iambic pentameter, I really can’t see how he had the time to do a lot of planning with all that already on his plate. But this brings me to the conclusion I’m really driving at. Shakespeare was far less conscious in his writing than you would think we are, judging by the amount of rules and advice that float around in places like WdC. He didn’t have time to consider all the methods and essentials that we love to burden ourselves with. At any rate, none of these rules and regulations had been invented in his day so, if he used any of them, it would have been entirely unconscious and natural to the way he worked. I bet you the one book he’d never have written would be an instruction manual on how to write. He just sat down and wrote. At incredible speed and with amazing insight into humanity. Which leaves me with this thought: If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it ought to be good enough for us. Word count: 346 |
| Messages in the Night I have fallen into the habit, when I wake up for my nightly pee, of taking the opportunity to fire up ye olde computer and checking to see that folks on WdC are behaving themselves. Part of this ritual is to open Messenger and hoover up any spare gift points lying around in the little word games it offers. And that is how I’ve noticed a curious anomaly. The rewards for these games are much smaller at night than they are during the daytime. At a guess and not having been interested enough to calculate the thing over stats recorded during a lengthy period of time, I would estimate the rewards as 50% of the day rate. And that’s not even considering the fact that far fewer games are offered at night. It’s not that I’m overly concerned about the matter, living in the blessed time zone known as WdC Eastern Standard Time as I do, but I wonder at the mind that did the extra programming to ensure that the (presumably random) operation of the games should have a built in prejudice against the antipodes and Asia. What can be the reason for this apparently deliberate isolation of the eastern hemisphere of the planet into a state of gift point poverty? Thinking about it, I have decided that what governs the frequency of the games and value of the prizes is the number of people in Messenger at the time. So the value goes up when there are lots to compete and drops when numbers are low. Therefore, my benighted and unhappy upside down friends and denizens of the far east, the solution lies in your own hands. Recruit others in your region to WdC and Messenger and the payment is, at least partially, in the form of gift points. Word count: 301 |
| Being Useful It's not a conversation if everyone agrees; it's a fan club. You guys need me - I'll disagree with anything. |
| More on the Stats I thought for a while that I was beginning to understand the strange logic of the stats. Having been through a period of record-breaking numbers, I narrowed the cause down to a poem I had written entitled Jordan Peterson. It must be the use of a currently important name, I thought. All the bots see it and bring in the searches on the name. Which seemed a reasonable explanation for a while. Then the stats began to wither away and I figured that the unintended trick had played itself out. So I tried an experiment to test the theory. I wrote something including the word “trump” as a verb. Nothing happened. So, either I should have capitalised the word to mislead, or it’s not the cause of the wild fluctuations of the stats at all. And, of the two possibilities, I’m inclined to believe the second. It just seems to me to be more natural that stats should be inexplicable and disobedient to all logic. Which is not to say that I will give up trying to understand them. Word count: 180 |
| Pictures My only excuse is that WDC made me do it. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Today, I wrote a poem consisting only of pictures. Well, emojis, that is. And that’s after swearing I’d never do such a thing. But I couldn’t resist. This is how it happened: The prompt for Express It In Eight was “Write a prehistoric poem.” A quick think revealed that was not going to be easy because the very definition of “prehistory” is that it’s from a period when writing hadn’t been invented. So to write a prehistoric poem would be an immediate anachronism. Which kinda made it a bit difficult. But they did have cave paintings. And I could write a story (or poem) in paintings as symbols of words. And the only way to do that in print without fancy graphic programs and hardware was emojis. So I wrote a poem using emojis. Nothing too complex, of course - that would be really difficult both for me and the reader. Just one pic per line. And it’s only eight lines long, obviously. But it does tell a story of sorts. Poetically. Some of it can be deduced by hovering the cursor over the pic until it tells you what it’s name is. Otherwise you have to deduce from the nature of the pic what it’s meant to convey. It’s a sort of non-word puzzle. I won’t put the poem in here or even give you a link to it, as I’m not particularly proud of it or think that it deserves your attention. But if you fancy trying to decipher it, you’ll find it in the contest page. And I won’t even tell you to enjoy it. Word count: 285 |
| Official Contests I have entered an annoying pattern with regard to the official WDC contests. Every month, I promise myself that I will get something done for them early so that it doesn’t hang over me for the entire month. Then I look at the prompt, have a think, and have no astounding inspiration. Often, I might have the germ of an idea but it’s not enough to start with. So I wait. And that, of course, is my undoing. Invariably, I have only a few days left when I have to admit that waiting isn’t going to give me a better idea. Then I start with what I’ve got and, usually, it develops as I write and I end up with something at least vaguely presentable. It gets entered just before closing date and I swear I’ll do something early for the next month. And so the pattern continues. I often say that most of my stories are begun before I know their ends, and it’s true. But it’s no way to live. The self-induced pressure is just as uncomfortable as it would be if applied by someone else (more so, in fact, since it’s easier to disappoint myself by giving up on it). Plus the possibility of fizzles is always present. A fizzle being a story that ends in just that, of course. I have quite a collection of those. And now the end of May is near and I still haven’t had a better idea for Short Shots than I had when I first saw the visual prompt for this month. Once again, I’m going to have to start with that and see what happens. And it has to be good to stand a chance of placing, as usual. Why am I telling you all this? It’s just another way of delaying the moment when I’m going to have to begin the story and see where it takes me. Procrastination is my middle name. Word count: 325 |
| Privacy Policy With all this talk of updating privacy policies, I thought I really ought to have one so that I could update too. After much thought and consultation with experts, I've completed it. Here it is: Mind your own. |
| AI and All That The palindromic Damon Nomad has put up a Newsfeed post about publishers requiring guarantees from writers that they have not used AI in their submissions. I am amazed that they should think that this constitutes an effective defence against such cheating (which is what it is, after all), since cheats can hardly be expected to tell the truth having already demonstrated their nature in this regard. What astounds me even more is the number of writers who dabble with this demon called AI. If there is anything that threatens the profession of writing more than AI, I have not had the imagination to conceive of it so far. And, that so many writers play so merrily with the means of their own destruction is incomprehensible to me. I am stupid enough to have thought that writers, of all people, would have the sense to do nothing whatsoever to assist in the fortunes of AI. If there is one invention that should be uninvented now, while we still can, it is AI. Word count: 171 |
| Quotation Cogitation I am sure we would have many more memorable quotes if we were told, "Okay, these are gonna be your last words. Make sure they're good ones." |
| Being Consistently Inconsistent A while back I came across one of these web things that claim to analyse your writing and tell you who you write like. Naturally, I threw a few things at it and, like most people (judging from today’s experience with the one found by Steven), it came up with a different name every time. I can remember that Conan Doyle was one of its wild stabs. And Stephen King, if my memory serves me correctly. It seemed that it was concerning itself more with genre and subject than style, so I ignored it and went about my business. When Steven offered an alternative link to a similar contraption today, I watched everyone having a go before trying it myself. This actually produced a surprise in that one person achieved a steady answer every time - Stephen King for Steven. Everyone else was getting a different answer every time. Steven, of course, is published, so maybe this app is displaying something beyond the circus trick we all took it for. Is it possible that what counts is consistency more than anything else? I thought I’d give the thing a go at some of my stuff. Started with excerpts from a short story hanging around nearby. Got a different author every time, really disparate - Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood and Leo Tolstoy. I knew I was versatile but in one story? I threw a few more excerpts from elsewhere at it. Once again, a different answer every time. So I tried complete short stories. Same again, authors ranging from Daniel Defoe to James Joyce. Now, it’s true that I tend to alter my style to fit the type of story I’m writing. So I get wordy when I’m writing something set in Victorian times, steampunk and stuff like that, much more direct and conversational for present times, and often experimental when writing sci-fi or fantasy. But the claim that my style changes all the way through something as limited as a short story, that surely is ridiculous. So I am forced to the conclusion that the machine is not looking at style at all, but at things like subject, genre, word lengths, language pitch, and suchlike. But what then can we say about Steven? Is he just incredibly lucky and has hit the jackpot three times in a row on the random selection machine? In which case, I suggest he buy a lottery ticket right now. Or is it identifying something really consistent about Steven’s writing? In the end, it comes down to what some nerd of a programmer thinks the machine should look for in assessing the writing of various authors. And I am rather dubious in accepting his judgement in that case. Although I’m sure he’s a great judge of D&D games authors. Word count: 463 |
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