The unannounced blog-break

There’s been a little blog-break going on over the past few weeks. Very refreshing.

The regular schedule should be back in place soon. 

 

Sounds funny

Currently in my day job we are working on a ‘people leaders’ project.

Every time someone says it, it sounds like they’re saying ‘people eaters’. Seriously, every time, no matter who says it.

And every time I giggle like an idiot.

Just Because

Pity there was no attribution for this image... it's lovely.

A non-god joke

Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

Dangerous language

Recently I seem to have stumbled across a lot of different people talking about various dodgy uses of language of the kind that politicians and bureaucrats indulge in.

I’m sure almost anyone reading this blog would have a few examples tucked away, but there was one that proved to me how dangerous language of the weasel-word variety can be . It’s been on my mind again recentlyand still sickens me.

The statement, regarding the treatment of a prisoner whose legs had been reduced to a bloody pulp by a soldier beating him, said that the injuries resulted from the repeated application of reasonable force.

What kind of world does that type of language use create?

Refreshing, if deliberate, break from convention

I watch a lot of movies, and I watch most genres. The result of which is an ability to guess exactly how the plot will play out after watching only the opening scene or two.

This, as any movie buff will know, is not so much a superpower of the watcher as a sad reflection on the factory-line scripts that dominate many film genres.

It was refreshing to find myself watching a movie where, for a change, most conventional plot devices were broken. Despite the fact that the set-up for the cliché was there so the breaking felt a little deliberate (why write them in at all?) but refreshing none-the-less.

The movie in question is Real Steel. This is essentially a family drama about an eleven year old and his slightly hopeless, estranged father who, once a boxer himself, now fights robot boxers. The kid is sassy, the father is a disillusioned battler, the love interest is sexy (and tokenistic) and things get decidedly cute at times, but I have to say I respect the writing for breaking conventions, for some good characters and because it’s about robot boxing.

Unless you love family movies, this probably isn’t a movie for you no matter how much you like the idea of robot boxing.

Interesting to me also, as a writer and lover of film, was a plot point introduced and never followed through on, which left me wondering what the original script had looked like. The final product certainly feels like it was hacked about a bit, and that always makes me wonder how much better, worse or just different the script was before it went through the movie-making-committee process.

 

 

 

Nor did I

Did you know that both ‘pavement’ and ‘cement’ come from Latin words? Nor did I.

Thomas, James and Percy

As you get older, it’s easy to look at the changes around you with suspicion… let me share with you a bookish one that I find suspect.

I grew up with the original books about an anthropomorphised train called Thomas and his mates Duncan and Percy. These weren’t brightly coloured picture books with cartoon styled trains in them. They were books with normal locomotives ont he covers; big, bold steam locos.

Even with faces painted on their boilers these were real trains, in a real world. anthropomorphised? Yes. Cute? No.

Don’t read me wrong; I think the current version is adorable and great entertainment, but it makes me wonder why the shift from reality to cartoon. Feels to me like we aren’t trusting kids to use their imaginations, and maybe that we’re talking down to them.

Mind you, the Railway Stories books were read to me, so maybe that makes a difference? I don’t know how unusual that was in my cohort, but I gather it’s getting rarer these days.

Romance of place

2013 sees the World Fantasy convention happening in Brighton, England and along with other writers from my neck-of-the-woods I am planning on making the trek over.  This has led to a flurry of ‘what else can I do while over there’ trip planning (got to get value for the 23 hr trip each way!) and a commensurate internet image trawling endevour.

One of the places I’d love to visit is Tintagel.  Essentially there’s not much to see there but some ruins and there are plenty of other ruins to see around Britain, so I was thinking it was silly to go to that area just for Titagel. Then I saw a picture. Sigh.

Some places just have romance. Whatever other interest it might hold, I know I’m going to stand there looking at the ruins as a blustery wind knocks me about and I’m going to go “wow”. Even if it’s raining. Which it may well be.

Have you seen Contagion?

If you haven’t seen this movie yet, then I recommend it to writers as an interesting piece of storytelling sans-protagonist. While it is the story of an outbreak of deadly flu from patient zero to ‘cure’, it lacks a single character driving the story (unless you want to call the germ the protagonist) and hasn’t got a standard story-structure. 

It cobbles a narrative flow together from experiences of different people though their stories are mostly very detached from each other. Overall it’s an exploration of different things that would happen during such an outbreak.

That last point differentiates this film from many through-multiple-eyes stories because the view points are much fuzzier here.

Personally I found the lack of a protagonist a bit distancing, but it was interesting to watch.