The portfolio concept

Of the many silly terms people have come up with in recent years, I think the ‘portfolio career’ is one of the silly ones. However, I can’t argue with the concept because I know lots of writers who do have multiple sources of income.

The strength of this approach is that, hopefully, some of the jobs in the mix hit closer to writerly passions than a normal full-time day job, and there’s the flexibility of hours and how many jobs are taken on at any one time.

The downsides are… well actually pretty much the same as the strengths. That flexibility tends to lead to regular over-commitment. The writerly passions tend to represent very time-consuming jobs.

What I notice most is that this portfolio approach, while rarely dull and quite a bit more free than a single occupation just doesn’t translate to more writing time. It can, and does for periods of time, but it’s not actually a goes-hand-in-hand type deal.

For me the old idea of a single full-time job is – as long as the hours are the hours and don’t overflow – more restful and more predictable. Yet I too am attracted by the idea of doing more than just one job.

Memories of seeing

The other day I was talking to a friend of mine who – like me – loves movies. We were at an independent cinema seeing Life of Pi and I mentioned I hadn’t been there for some years.

I remember very clearly what the last movie I saw there was. In fact, as we discussed that, I realised I can remember all the movies I’ve seen at that cinema.

Since our conversation I’ve moved on from just that one cinema to the surprising conclusion that it applies to almost every movie I’ve seen on the big screen. Of the ten or so cinemas I’ve frequented since I was a kid, I can probably tell you at which one I saw any given movie.  And I have no idea why.

Not that I’m surprised to remember the premier of Final Fantasy because it was a revolution in 3d animation. Or that I remember seeing Spirited Away for the first time as a part of a Studio Ghibli mini-festival. Even the German film Men is memorable for an argument I had with my brother about seeing it.  And I’ll never forget the mobile phone incident during Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon!

As for the rest… I’d never realised how well etched in my memory the experiences were.

My companion for Life of Pi was a bit shocked that I had these clear memories of what I’d seen at that one cinema. He certainly didn’t have the same recall.

That’s got me wondering now… Do you remember the details of the experience of seeing a movie, whether it’s only the great ones, the awful ones, or the ones with certain people?

The eternal tweet

140 characters doesn’t sound like a lot, so it’s not surprising that people have come to wonder how many tweets it would take before all possible tweets (in a single language) have been tweeted.

Then comes the maths. For which I will direct you to the excellent mind of xkcd’s author by clicking here.

The result? In practical terms, we will never run out of things to tweet.

Not sure if that’s an encouraging thought or not…

Where are the women?

Waiting for my movie to start, I wandered around the cinema looking at the posters for upcoming flicks.  On one wall were posters for Iron Man, Wolverine and Superman. Opposite were posters for Die Hard featuring Mr Willis and his fictional son, an action thriller starring Mr Wahlberg & Mr Crowe and an action sci-fi starring Mr Cruise.

Where are all the women?

Why not have a daughter who’s a CIA operative? After all she featured in the last Die Hard movie.  Why can’t the cop embroiled in the evil politician’s machinations be a woman? Or why couldn’t the evil politician be a woman?  And in sci fi, all the reasons people give for why men are the action heros (physical strength etc) are even further from being an excuse.

I forgive the comic book based movies slightly, because the female superheros never were as well-known. But it’s not like you can’t write a new  female superhero.  They don’t have to be old comic book characters.

Ironically, I was pondering this while waiting to see Hansel and Gretel which has a very strong female protagonist, though it’s set up as a shared lead with her brother.

In 2013, why am I asking this question?

 

Pranks are not harmless

In a week where every second discussion seems to be about the sad events around a radio prank call, I’ve found myself really infuriated by the commentary.  Every single person I’ve heard discuss it has used a variation on the phrase ‘harmless prank’.

Pranks are not harmless. How can they be when their purpose is to provide a laugh at the recipient’s expense, by fooling them in public?

Stop and think about that for a moment.  When you play a prank, you invite people to laugh at someone either for their reaction (if the prank causes anger, fear, disappointment or confusion) or for their being the fool/dupe who doesn’t know what’s going on.  You are rendering the person helpless. You are opening them to public ridicule.

That is not nice behaviour. That is not harmless behaviour.

And if you did it repeatedly to the one person it would be called bullying.  Yes a bully takes pleasure from the recipient’s helplessness, but there’s a fine line between that and the pleasure a prankster gets in playing pranks or practical jokes.

Of course most recipients of a prank or practical joke are going to laugh it off. Some genuinely enjoying the joke. Others laughing because they know they’ll be ridiculed further for being a ‘bad sport’ or ‘having no sense of humour’ if they don’t.

And that’s actually the main reason pranks aren’t harmless. You, as the prankster, have no idea what being the butt of a joke will do to the recipient.  Particularly where you are pranking a stranger.

Maybe they have a terrible fear of public exposure. Maybe they have very fragile self-esteem. Maybe their sense of self-worth is integral to having the respect of others. Maybe they spent their school years being bullied and similarly humiliated by their peers and were damaged by that.

Of course pranksters who aren’t bullies don’t imagine their prank will do harm. But nor do people who talk on their mobiles while driving, yet there’s a very good reason why that’s banned in this country.

My reading

Today I was updating my reading list here on the bloggie, and decided to take a quick count of how many books I’ve recorded for each year since I began.  ‘Twas interesting.

Seems that I’ve read around 30 books a year. Sometimes a few more, and sometimes a few less, but it’s remarkably consistent considering I swing from one a month to… well… I think I read 11 in October.

I also read over a hundred short stories in a year, and there is the reading I do for my writing groups, so it  was a pleasant surprise to find I do that much reading in a year.  Makes me wonder how I find time to watch all the movies I watch!

Old but new

In rustling among the chaotic corners of my house I discovered an old CD player of the shove it in your bag variety. The poor thing is as old as most of the people who make me coffee these days, but it still works pretty well so I have employed it to be my music giver while I write.

It’s been a while since I’ve listened to an album right the way through, and I’m kinda liking it. Of course, not having listened to a lot of the CDs as CDs in an equally long time, is part of the novelty.

Whether it helps the writing process is yet to be seen.

A crime of the times

In the midst of a crime novel binge, I have discovered I am the victim of a real crime. It is, thankfully neither bloody or gruesome, but it is very much a crime of our times.

Some sneaky little so-and-so has been tapping into my password protected internet connection and downloading in the middle of the night.

Unluckily for them I have one of the lowest download limits available so, despite their being clever enough to not download anything the size of video, I noticed it.

I say ‘unluckily’ but so far I haven’t managed to defeat my friendly local cyber-thief. Given that it was an already password protected wireless network, I started by doing the logical thing and went for a stronger encryption type which they clearly laughed at (or they have somehow gotten a key-logger onto my computer).

So then I changed to my other computer and updated the passwords to both my modem manager and the wi fi access to longer, less ‘words in english’ concoctions. It took two days for them to crack that.

What is truly creepy about this crime, is that I have no houses behind or in front of me. And even if you say the wi fi might reach as far as 50 mtrs , that encompasses about 10 houses. So, unless there’s something even stranger going on, there’s a dedicated person in one of those houses stealing from me.

The sad thing is, that it doesn’t seem the police have any department who looks after this kind of cyber-crime. Scams and denial of service attacks, yes, but not this. I’ve reported it anyway to the local constabulary, but I’m not holding my breath.

To be honest, I almost wouldn’t care about someone stealing such small amounts of download time off me, or the fact that the cops seem ill-equipped to deal with it, but for the thought that this thief could be downloading anything.

Sure the perpetrator could just be some pimply faced geekazoid who doesn’t believe in paying if they can manage not to through their own cleverness. Or it could be someone quite deliberately concealing illegal activity of a much more serious nature.

I have a few other tricks to try to thwart them with, but if I have to go back to using a 10 mtr cable so I can blog from my couch, I will.

Moral of the story is: check your daily internet usage from time to time – you never know who’s stealing from you in the dead of night.

 

Escapism

Some time ago I was accused of reading for ‘escapism’. This was because I openly admitted to not being interested in books which were about unhappy (and not very pleasant) people being horrible to each other, or books which were all about loss, betrayal, racism, rape or child abuse.

At the time I thought it was a bit of a silly way to express it (and a little judgmental), but since I’ve decided that it really doesn’t make sense.

I acknowledge that some people like to read books that are confronting and deal with ‘issues’, but I think it’s fair to say most people read to escape. We read because we are taken to a place we can’t visit and on a journey that has nothing to do with our reality.

And if I prefer to escape to worlds where not every child is fiddled with, not every lover is betrayed and not every woman is violated, then is that necessarily more escapist than what anyone else reads?

The book bitch

At a recent gathering of scribes, the group descended into a great deal of bitching about some of the best sellers of recent years. Partly on the quality of the writing, but a lot on a deep moral disdain for the type of character placed at the centre of these immensely popular books.

I’ve been feeling increasingly like that about movies and TV shows… I don’t get why ‘joe average’ seems to like characters who are just plain nasty, mean or despicable. What’s happening to us that we think arseholes are to be loved?

Odd.