Continue reading »]]> It’s surprisingly hard to get good photos of a city at night.  Lord knows I’ve tried, and lord knows I’ve failed.  It’s said that a lighting designer should be able to take good photos, as it’s all about colour, contrast, angles etc., but frankly no matter how well-intentioned my composition, I always find that the camera tends to shake.  Which is a shame, as a busy city at night is, quite simply, beautiful.

Therefore!  In a spirit of ‘oh that’s interesting….’ these photos aren’t mine at all, but were taken by my favourite ever technician, Ian, who seems to have a knack for getting nice pictures down far more than me.  (A skill which he perhaps regretted the day his department asked him to take a photo of the same thing every fifteen minutes for every hour of a week, in order to create a stop-motion film of not very much happening over great amounts of time….)

Continue reading »]]> Sitting on the train yesterday, on my way to rehearsals, a man in a bright green suit reading a book entitled ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Kaballah’ suddenly stood up, crossed the aisle, sat down next to me, lent across the table and said, “May I tell you about the most important thing you’ll ever hear?”

Oh dear, I thought.  8 hours of rehearsals to go, and it’s gonna begin with some preaching.  But hell, the train had just left Ashford, and I was getting off at Canterbury, so at least there was a fixed time limit on everything so, okay, bring it on…

… and what happened next, I will tell you another time.  For now, let’s go bigger than the St. Pancras-Margate Express… let’s have a conversation about God.

I am atheist.  Could you tell?  It’s been fairly apparent across this blog, but I’ve always danced around the issue of why I’m atheist and why I don’t believe in god – and oddly, I do feel the need to separate these two things into different categories, for reasons I’ll come to – for the simple reason that it’s something people still get worked up about in this day and age.  So!  Here let me lay it down – these are my personal beliefs, you are allowed, indeed, invited to disagree entirely with me, but I am aiming to avoid too many flaming arguments or, worse, opinions from either side of the debate which are precisely that – opinions, rather than reasoned thought.  With this caveat laid, please read on…

Firstly, let me tackle the atheism part.  I am, in all probability, atheist because my parents are.  Simple fact.  Most people are religious because their parents are – converts are still few and far between – and while the nature of faith may differ from generation to generation, it’s never-the-less one of those simple things we have to acknowledge in life.  Kids tend to believe what their parents believe, and I was raised atheist.

Atheism has, interestingly, acquired connotations in recent years which I was not raised in.  At its simplest level, it is denying the existence of a god – which I do – but as our society gets more secular, atheism has itself become raised to an almost ideological level.  At its best, it is the application of rationalism to tradition, the use of reason and the scientific method, and I have plenty of time for it, as these are all sane things and far more prone to clear thinking and, oddly enough, compassion than many religious doctrines are.  I say compassion, in the sense that a big part of being religious is being not someone else’s religion.  Social identities are frequently constructed based on polar opposites – I am a woman in that I am not a man; I am British in that I am not French; I am Christian in that I am not Jew and so on and so forth, and even within various faiths there are distinctions.  I am Catholic, not Protestant; Lutheran not Kalvinist etc. – and we’ve all seen where these divisions lead.  Atheism is arguably therefore a compassionate ideology, in that there is no distinction between man, woman, Muslim or Hindu, none whatsoever, and no reason for there to be.

However!  Put the word ‘militant’ in front of anything, and you’ve got a problem, and atheism can, like all good ‘ism’s be militant, dismissing – with reason – the philosophical structures of religion and, at the same time, also dismissing the people who harbour them.  There is an ugly implication here, that those who believe in god are, for this simple act, irrational, foolish and quite possibly stupid, and at this destructive logical position, I draw the line.  It is a militancy that makes no allowance for those who believe in a god, with a moral code thoughtfully derived from this faith, and those who believe in the literal truth of an ancient text.  Certainly, to believe in the literal truth of often contradictory and unprovable texts does seem irrational; but to believe in god for the answers which have not yet been given, and to follow a moral code derived from this faith, is neither irrational, nor something which any sane person would condemn.

However, militancy is something that has haunted religion for a few thousand years too, with frequently disastrous consequences.  But, as this is already turning into something of an essay, I’ll guess we’ll come onto that in the next part of this ramble…

Continue reading »]]> So it turns out I’m doing a signing on February 23rd!  Which is a surprise to everyone, not least me, as the book isn’t out until March 1st… however, the guys at Forbidden Planet in London have pre-ordered loads of Minority Council in, and with any luck the last of the bruising will be gone from my hand and yes… it’ll be groovy… I’m hoping for biscuits… and hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

http://forbiddenplanet.com/events/2012/02/23/benedict-jacka-and-kate-griffin/

Continue reading »]]> It’s been a few days since I blogged, and the reason is that my hand, currently looks like this:

It is not, I hasten to add, a life-threatening injury!  There’s nothing broken, nothing bleeding, no bits are going to fall off.  All I have are some rather bruised knuckles, and an impressive swollen thumb – hardly life threatening, but a real bugger to type with.  I acquired these injuries while doing escrima, the martial art which I am continually surprised to find myself enjoying.  I haven’t been hurt doing it before, and doubt I’ll be hurt doing it in time to come, as the instructors are alert and the students, generally, very careful.  But it was while doing a drill with a rather more experienced student, that I realised there are certain key things required to be really good at martial arts.  There’s strength… perhaps more debatable with weapons based combat, since a big stick is a big stick regardless of who’s holding it… there’s speed, agility, technique, focus – courage, I’d argue, is also useful as you need to be confident enough of yourself and your adversary to walk up to them with a cry of ‘come on with your big stick if you dare’ and thus hopefully avoid having to use all of the other qualities – and finally there’s awareness.  The person I was sparring with has strength – lots of it – and technique – plenty, and enough focus that I sometimes wonder if he’s trying to fry an invisible ant on my forehead whenever we spar.  What he doesn’t necessarily have, is a wider awareness of the rest of the room.  Thus, when the teacher said ‘now block a side attack’ I went to block a side attack, and was startled to discover a stick coming inbound for my head.  The good news is that the stick did not hit my head.  The bad news is that to save my skull, I sacrificed a few other bodily parts en route.

Once through the initial indignity of physical distress, this entire experience is also a reminder of how difficult it can sometimes be, being the junior kitten in a room of senior cats.  I am still fairly new at escrima, and so if someone with better technique, more experience and a look that could cut through titanium, decides that he’s going to swing his stick at your head when you’ve just heard the teacher ask him to try and take out a few ribs instead, what can a girl do?  I did politely point out, while hopping with pain, that I expected him to go for the side rather than the top, but he informed me he believed he was doing all-round attacks and when it’s junior kitten’s word vs. senior cat’s word, and when senior cat has just removed junior kitten’s right thumb, I ask you again, what is a girl to do other than grin, bare it and hope there’s some arnica at home.  I like to tell myself that the fact this man entirely failed to notice that I was now clutching a rapidly swelling limb, as he came barreling in with his next, very strong and beautifully executed attack, is more a reflection on my warrior spirit, than on his being a plonker.

Make no mistake – I still enjoy martial arts and don’t particularly blame my sparring partner, in the sense that it’s unusual for an attacker to declare their intentions before attacking.  It turns out – and no one should really be surprised – that I am better at weapon fighting than close-quarters wrestling, owing, I suspect, to the fact that I lack any kind of strength or endurance, but can move quickly if pressed to and have a great advantage in terms of reach.  However, considering that I am, in all other ways, forms and means, an utter wuss, I might just carry on thinking about these things as purely an academic exercise…

Continue reading »]]> I keep notebooks – a little obsessively, it turns out.  When I had to go to Kent for rehearsals last weekend, I got on the train with pen and notebook in hand, only to discover that my notebook was only one page from being finished.  That one page didn’t last me to Ebbsfleet, and for thirty five, stressful, borderline traumatic minutes, I had nothing on which to write.  Needless to say, I always have a reserve notebook for just these emergencies, but had, in a moment of naive foolishness, left my reserve at home in London, and so on arrival in Canterbury I had to race to the nearest stationer and get a new notebook, or suffer the dire psychological consequences.

I also have a slightly obsessive relationship with pens.  I write all my novels on the computer, because it’s far faster and, interestingly, the speed at which I write changes my narrative voice.  But I take a lot of longhand notes first – not just on books, but on things I’m studying, on lighting cues gone astray, and on things I need to get done before the day is out.  Writing in biro is, I find, a rather tedious thing, which always makes my handwriting messier and the weight of the pen on the paper feels tiring.  Writing in fountain pen is better, but here is another complexity – I don’t always write left-to-right.  Frequently I write from right-to-left, and need a pen which can handle this indignity.  I hate expensive fountain pens, because they seem like something just waiting to be lost, and have, over the years, formed a deep and loving relationship with the £2.49 fountain pen that Rymans sells for schoolkids, as being one of the few which I can coax into moving easily over the page, with my eccentric handwriting…

I’ve written many exams with these pens, and filled up well over thirty notebooks over the years with them, but it is a simple truth that every 2 years or so, I’ll lose one, and indeed quite recently I went through this trauma and spent an embarrassing part of the small hours of one morning on my hands and knees in my bedroom, trying to work out where the hell it could have gone.  I know that, financially speaking, we’re not talking about a huge expense here, but I do get sentimentally attached to my pens in a way which, I know, is just a little bit odd…

As you will have also noticed by now, I tend not to write in English.  I do sometimes, if it’s something very important which I need to remember, or need to do, but mostly, I write in a mixture of other alphabets and languages.  This all started in secondary school, when two things convinced me I absolutely needed to develop my own code for taking notes in.  Firstly, I had a very long commute from home to school – about an hour and a half each way – and spent a lot of time on the underground scribbling away.  As people will on the underground, strangers would lean into study my notes, and I found this intrusion horrible.  Secondly, I had one or two lessons at school which were just catastrophically dull, and writing was my escape from them.  If a teacher caught me writing something in English which wasn’t about car parks in Argentina or the poetry of Gerard Manly Hopkins, well, I was probably in trouble; if however, the text they saw on the page was impenetrable, then there was no way to prove what everyone suspected – that I just wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention to class.  Thus, I began to develop various codes of my own…

After a while, my codes evolved.  Cyrillic was the first alphabet I learnt, but the absence of the letter ‘H’ and a few other quirks quickly forced me to add in characters from Ancient Greek to fill the void.  Then, when it became apparent that several people I knew could read either Cyrillic, or Ancient Greek, or both, I started using bits from Arabic and Urdu to see me through, again, substituting my own symbols for letters which the alphabets didn’t support.  Interestingly, I found different alphabets lent themselves to different tasks. The fluid curves of Arabic are great for contemplation and introspection; the quicker Cyrillic is good for notes, and by the time I was 16 I was also adding more abstract symbols for words which I used commonly, or for negations of an idea – a grammatical idea pinched from Mandarin.  I acquired a bit of the Punjabi alphabet as well for a while, but actually found the large symbols and erratic joins made for a slower longhand than I needed, so I tend to only trot that one out when feeling tired.  I hasten to add, I am no good at languages – but alphabets and codes have always been something I enjoy and feel relatively comfortable with.  And so, over the years, the notebooks have filled up, and I have a slightly malign hope that one day, some poor shmuck will be paid by an academic institution to try and read them… in which case, good luck to you…

Continue reading »]]> Good god, where did January go?  We are now, officially, only 6 weeks from the publication of the Minority Council.  For lo!  The cover has appeared on the blog, and you can read more about the book in the books section… and yes, it’s all getting a bit imminent really.  I would celebrate on the day itself, but exasperatingly I’ll be in a technical rehearsal, struggling, sweating and cursing my way through a lighting plot.  I might indulge in a bit of extra cake, however…

For those who are wondering, my warning remains – do not read this book on the kindle.  For my full rant on the theme of why, I suggest you look back through the blog, where you will discover a bitter tirade about the inability of kindles to cope with columns.  I know it may seem odd, it may seem petty, but honestly, when you get to the bit where suddenly it’s important, you’ll find it’s really very, very important.  I have no idea if there’s a hardcover version – my instinct is no, but I really dunno – but for everyone who’s just looking for a simple tale of fairy dust, monsters, sorcerers, Aldermen and things not to do while high in Canary Wharf, the paperback is getting pretty damn imminent!

Continue reading »]]> Well it’s stonking, isn’t it?

‘Nuff said, my work here is done….

The basic facts are easy and fairly well known.  The original St. Pauls Cathedral died a horrid death during the Great Fire of London in 1666, along with most of the city and several million rats, a large number of which were carrying Black Death so good riddance really.  The brand spanking new St. Pauls Cathedral which we all know and love was built by Christopher Wren as part of his plan to remodel London post-fire into a glorious new, shiny city.  Unfortunately all Christopher Wren’s good intentions were rather undermined by the determination of the people of London to get on with things regardless of whether the city looked good or worked well around them while they did so, and thus only a few icons of Wren’s metropolis were actually ever built.  St. Pauls Cathedral, I think we can all agree, is a pretty stonking symbol of what might have been.

Although it is still very much a house of God – something I, as an athiest tourist find a little disconcerting, to be honest – there is a £17 entry fee to anyone not intended to say friendly things at the Creator, except for a few rare days of the year.  One of these days – that of the Lord Mayor’s Show – was the day I went for precisely this reason, with my favourite stage manager and script supervisor, to have a nose round the interior.  The crypt famously houses a whole host of bigwigs, of whom Horatio Nelson has got the first class ticket booth, no question.  Rather less well known is that the crypt was also the place where my Great Uncle Reg (I kid you not) spent a large part of the London Blitz hiding out playing cards.  He, along with four other artists serving with the fire service, had been conscripted into fire watch duty from the top of St. Pauls, on the rather naive belief that, as artists, they’d care passionately about the fate of the historical landmarks around them.  However, as the bombs fell and large parts of the city burnt, it seemed that art lost out to the wonders of a well-insulated, underground, reinforced bunker beneath a cathedral…

Miraculously, and perhaps despite my Uncle Reg rather than thanks to him, St. Pauls survived the Blitz unscathed and has, in recent years, been cleaned, revealing that its soot-grey stones are in fact bright white marble.  Tourists now surround its dome, which still commands a fairly respectable view of the city, while more tourists go into the Whispering Gallery just inside the dome where, so the stories go, you can put your ear to the walls on one side of the gallery, and someone can whisper into the stones on the other side, and you will hear them speak as if they were stood right next to you.

Two minutes walk from the Millennium Bridge, and ten minutes from London Bridge, Blackfrairs, Holborn, Clerkenwell and Bank, the cathedral itself is now something of an island in a sea of one-way traffic systems.  It’s also still a camping ground for the Occupy London protestors, who are camped out (very neatly now) in front of its steps.  This is not the entry in which I discuss this particular movement, except to say that there’s a lot to protest about at the moment and I’m quite chuffed someone is doing it, even if I question some of the tactics involved…

In other trivia, St. Pauls Cathedral was the centrepiece for the final showdown of the first Horatio Lyle novel, in which the laws of physics were used and then really rather abused to, I think, spectacular effect.  For anyone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about… go read…

The photos below are nearly all taken by Gina Pratsis, my favourite script supervisor, except for the exterior shot, which is mine!

Continue reading »]]> Ronald Searle died a few weeks ago, and this is a brief blog entry to commemorate the fact.  For those who don’t know, he was an artist, most famous for the Molesworth books and St. Trinians – he also drew a series of very famous images from his time as a Japanese POW during the Second World War, when he traded portraits of his captors in exchange for paper and charcoal, creating a stark and rightly renowned visual documentary of his time as a prisoner of war.  He was also, via marriage, my Great Uncle, and though I barely knew him, a drawing he did of my Grandfather’s cat, sits in pride of place above my parent’s mantlepiece, and a fatter, more indulged blue-grey moggy you can barely imagine.  As a primary school kid, I was introduced to Down With Skool, one of the wittiest, most charming books I have ever read, as an incentive for attending dyslexia class in what was, I now realise, a sublime piece of convoluted psychology on my mother’s part.  As it turned out, I wasn’t dyslexic in the least, but it hardly mattered as I had been introduced through this experience to some of the most brilliant drawings and cartoons I’ve ever met.  For anyone who hasn’t seen any of Ronald Searle’s work, I suggest you go looking, and it will doubtless last for many generations yet to come.

Continue reading »]]> Argh!!  Hate ‘em!  Hate ‘em hate ‘em hate ‘em!  I hate the automated voice that goes ‘Hi there!’ and the way it announces, ‘right, I’m just waiting for that…’ as if it’s anything other than a binary algorithm designed to weed out that percentage of the population with a high blood pressure and dubious coronary system!  I hate the tinned music they play at you as if somehow phoning your electricity company is an inspiring and life-affirming event, I hate the relentless bureaucracy that always wants my name, age, martial status and financial prospects before it’ll tell me how much I’m being robbed, I hate – oh and this is something I REALLY hate – I hate the way they continually take money from my account even when, by their own admission, THEY owe ME several hundred pounds!  I hate being invited to get paperless bills and then not receiving them by email, hate the cheerful, chipper font and happy smiling cartoon-figures pasted over the paperwork with which they eventually do inform me that they’re raising prices despite their obscene profits in the last financial quarter.  I hate arguing with them when they’ve got it wrong, hate moving from one to the other when they try to claim that such a thing Cannot Be Allowed, hate the calls from my providers informing me that if I was a new customer, I could get this amazing package, followed by the incredulity – no, the indignation! – at discovering that I’m already a loyal customer and thus can’t receive anything of any note whatsoever.  I hate the difference it makes between getting two different types of people at a call centre – the chipper cheerful ones who I really do feel guilty about arguing at, and the dour, sour, more-than-my-jobsworth gits who perpetually put you on hold without saying a word, and inform you that they Do Not Have The Authority To Authorise That Transaction.

I hate utilities companies!!

Continue reading »]]> Well it took a while.

About 3 months in fact.

Which is, I realise, about as long as the book took to write!  Whoops.  If there was ever proof for the hypothesis that two perfect words are harder than 140,000 rambling ones, there it is.  But!  After a lot of stress and angst, I believe we have the final title for Urban Magic 5!  Welcome, dear reader, to Stray Souls…

Continue reading »]]> Highgate Cemetery.  I’d been meaning to go for years, as it seems a disgraceful thing to class yourself as a proper, let’s-turn-it-all-to-fictional-uses Londoner and not go to Highgate Cemetery.  It’s famous beyond the boundaries of North London, as a proper overgrown wildness where famous people are buried amid claws of ivy and ancient, cracked stones.  George Elliot is there, as is Karl Marx whose tomb is marked by a spectacularly large image of himself.  Myths surround Highgate, almost none of which have any basis in historical fact – tales of nefarious goings on beneath the trees, of mystic connotations and spooky events – and frankly, walking around the place, you can see why.  To my mild irritation, there’s a £3 charge to enter the cemetery, and while I can see the need to preserve the grounds, in a way Highgate only really became famous, even a tourist attraction of a kind, when it became overrun and disturbed.  There are also two Highgate Cemeteries – a Highgate East and a Highgate West – and to this day I’m not sure how you get into Highgate West – at least while still breathing.  If you want to have an oddly similar experience of a place where nature has run wild, then Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington provides a similar vibe, with the added benefit of no entry fee, and an option on cream teas afterwards…

But enough of words… let’s see if photos can give the gist.

This isn't actually in the cemetery, but you pass it on your way up the hill, and it gives a good idea of what's to come...

Tombstones vary hugely; this one gives special mention to the owner's pet dog.

... while this one once again proves that being part of a secret order, doesn't necessarily need to cramp your style.

Angels - heavenly or sinister? Discuss.

Sometimes, it IS about the lighting.

And finally, Karl Marx's tomb... starkly communist in style, perhaps, yet not very modest in execution...

Continue reading »]]> I saw a film a few days ago, which ended with these words:

“Please use your liberty, to help promote ours.”  It’s a quote from Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Burmese National Democratic Party and the film was, appropriately enough, a biography of a large part of her life.  I went to see the movie for a number of different reasons, not least the presence of Michelle Yeoh who, as readers of this blog may recall, is one of my idols along with Grommit (of Wallace and Grommit fame).  Without wanting to say much about the film, I can comfortably reveal that I wept buckets, which is not something I’m prone to do.

The quote at the end was as much a statement about the woman it originated from, as it was about the movie itself.  My life is, for the large part, comfortable, safe, secure, and the state is ethically obliged and socially expected to be looking out for my interests, even if I sometimes believe the methods that the state deploys and the ideology that it uses to decide how to look out for my interests, are flawed.  It’s very easy, under such circumstances, to sit back and say, ‘isn’t it terrible what happens in…’ and there the thought process ends.  The events on the other side of the world are, to most people in a hurry at nine a.m., as to nothing compared to the agony of trying to get on a crowded bus, or the indignation at a parking ticket – it can be hard to think yourself into another person’s shoes, let alone shoes that have walked such distant soils.  Yet if the twenty first century brings anything, it is the technology to learn of a world beyond your own, and arguably, the act of knowledge brings with it a degree of obligation.

Once you reject, and wisely so, the use of force to bring about change then you fairly quickly have to fall back on words and ideas, and in this regard, the making of a film is as much a political act as a piece of art.  Nothing is black and white; there are no perfect saints and no absolute ideals, but there are a few ideas at least which come pretty damn close.  The freedom to speech, the freedom to debate, to think, to criticise; the freedom to chose for yourself, to be judged for your deeds and not for your race, creed, colour, wealth, social status or political inclinations; the freedom to live a life without fear.  I have respect for those peoples who say ‘your ideas are not my ideas, and should not be imposed’ but there are some ideas, I think, which are integral not to any one culture, or philosophy, but to the very nature of what humanity is.  And if we can do nothing else, then at the very least, let us spread them.

Continue reading »]]> Take…

1 wendigo with a slim grasp of the use of language in the modern world

1 missing goddess and her angry pet dog

1 shaman with dubious job prospects

4 killer builders with only one smile between them

1 vampire

1 necromancer

1 troll

1 banshee

1 pack of super-strength anti-histamines

2 temples

5 murders

… and more tea than the mind can comfortably conceive.

And you have my title dilemma for Urban Magic 5 in a bag.  No more, however, will I say on this subject for now, if only because the publication date for the Minority Council is actually approaching, and it will in fact be released on March 1st just as we go into our final day of tech for this musical I’m lighting (why is it I’m always in tech on publication day?!) – and therefore I kinda think the priorities should shift.  (Remember!  The Minority Council is the only book I’ve ever written where I am actively advising all readers to chose paper, not Kindle!)  Think fairy dust and insects now… and the lost spirits of the city later…

Continue reading »]]> Well, another year, another solar cycle… welcome to 2012!  Looking back on 2011, it hasn’t been all bad… there’s been a lot of lighting, some of it from quite wacky positions on quite unexpected jobs… there’s also been a lot of writing.  The Minority Council is finished and ready to go, Urban Magic 5 is sat on the hard drive waiting for the next round of editorials, there’s The Book Which Cannot Be Named (yet) currently with my agent.  There’s also been a rehearsed reading of one of my attempts at a play, a vague attempt at a screenplay for something else which Cannot Be Named, and of course I’m now sat down having a think about Urban Magic 6 and the big musical that heralds in the New Year.  So, in the grand scheme of things, I’d say things were going…

… alright!

I don’t mean to sound so surprised about it, it’s just that it’s always tricky getting anything resembling an objective lookback on a year.  Bad news tends to be remembered more than good, so to look back and say that, all things considered, the bad news was kept at a reasonably low level and the good news was actually kinda quite chipper, is a bit of a comfort.  As for 2012… the year of the Mayan apocalypse and, in possibly not unrelated circumstances, the London Olympics… who can say?

Happy New Year, everybody!

Continue reading »]]> Don’t judge a book by its cover, the old adage goes.  But let’s face it, we do.  Perhaps more interestingly, we – or at least, I – also judge a book by its title.  Remarkable how a few words, or sometimes even one, can tell you everything you need to know about a novel.

A title instantly tells you genre; a thriller might be a couple of punchy, weighty words, like The Unforgiven Gun or, the one I’m currently wading through with cries of ‘no, but really?’ – The Killing Fields.  (Featuring, it has to be said, a man so manly that I can’t help but wonder if anyone’s ever sat him down and invited him to consider the wonders of a gentle back rub, a relaxing music and some sushi.  I believe I don’t violate any copyright when I inform you that the tag line of this novel is: Jack Reacher.  Men Want To Be Him.  Women Want To Be With Him.  More, do you need to know?)

A title can tell you about the quality of the book – perhaps it’s light and fluffy – Three Shops, Two Shoes and a Honeymoon – or maybe it informs you in a single word that what you’re about to sit through will not be a bundle of laughs – Sorrow.  It can suggest period – The Extraordinary and Unusual Adventures of Horatio Lyle, for example, instantly implies an age when the author’s name was a couple of initials on the spine, and the title not only gave you the gist, but also attempted to encapsulate the plot – being a witty tale of disaster, betrayal, magic and what not to do with magnesium oxides, brought to you by C.W., the cover could perhaps explain.

Even within genres, titles can imply a hell of a lot about the subject matter.  Take, as the area I’m most comfortable in, fantasy.  The Sword of [insert mystic kingdom/prophet here]… almost invariably implies a quest, or at the very least a magical artifact.  The Lord of [insert kingdom/magic] tends to suggest geopolitics with a chaser of mystic intoning.  Burning Magic, or perhaps, Magic Awakening or words along these lines can often imply a tale of one man/woman’s struggle to come to terms with their destiny as the witch/wizard of the moment.  One of my favourite titles – The Warlock In Spite Of Himself - once again gives you both a great deal of the characterisation of the novel, while simultaneously, in six little words, telling you a hell of a lot about the tone of the author.  The [insert here} Gate often suggests dark forces, presumably coming through said gate, while [Something] Dawn usually implies some serious character development as our protagonists either move from a state of ignorance to bliss, or equally often, watch something very nasty indeed move from a state of slumber to awakening, with a heavy threat of sequels already implied in that where there’s a dawn, there’s usually a Noon, Twilight and Night yet to come.  Sometimes titles can tell you the setting and, to a degree, the chronology and subject matter – take American Gods, one of my favourite books, by Neil Gaiman, one of my favourite writers.  The fact that it’s so clearly American gives you a geographical place; it further more tends to imply that we’re talking post-War of Independence; Gods suggests at once the theme but Gods in conjunction with America?  Are we talking Native American spirits – perhaps – or are we dealing with a slightly wackier, more modern take?  Either way, we’re intrigued.

Thinking of intriguing, there’s that last category of titles which don’t really tell you anything at all, but which are perhaps a combination of things which should mean something alone, combined into something else entirely.  Sticking with Neil Gaiman, there’s Neverwhere, a title which tells you very little at all, while suggesting all sorts of things that you really can’t explain.  I’ve done something similar myself – Waywalkers, for example, really doesn’t mean anything, although it does imply at once that we’re gonna be dealing with some people walking a very special way.  Mirror Dreams and Mirror Wakes again tell you very little, although it’s clear that they remain connected; and of course, A Madness of Angels could mean almost anything, but asks you to accept that if common usage is ready to be abused, then so might a few other preconceptions.  The Midnight Mayor, Neon Court and Minority Council all follow a rather more obvious path, in that they tell you at once what the book is about, while also informing anyone who hasn’t read a word of my writing to consider that their usual concepts – the Lord Mayor, for example – are about to get twisted.

Ironic, all this being so, that I am so totally, utterly stuck for a title for Urban Magic 5.

Ah well.

Continue reading »]]> Another year, another Crimble… more food, hopefully more presents, with any luck a bit of snow.  Absolutely failing to watch the Queen’s speech (and who can blame us) but definitely watching Dr Who or else Christmas is really rather ruined.  Hopefully some Wallace and Grommit to see us through, and maybe a walk on Boxing Day before the annual cooking of Mum’s Christmas Curry Surprise.

To all who read this blog, old and new…

Merry Christmas!

Continue reading »]]> This will be a post mostly in pictures, owing to the fact that I managed to burn the finger that does the letters ‘u’, ‘j’, and ‘n’ on a soldering iron, and as a touch typer I’m really not coping well with trying to write with a plaster the size of an elephant’s slipper on my hand.

But!  Parliament Hill.  According to local mythology, it’s named so in honour of the Gunpowder Plotters, who stood on top of it waiting for the Houses of Parliament to blow up in 1605… and were disappointed.  I went walkies there with a technician friend, and studying the maps we reached the rather pleasing conclusion that it could well be possible to walk from Golders Green to Highgate Cemetery with little more than 200m of streetwork all the way.  It juts onto Hampstead Heath, where in the summer it’s more than possible to find people paddling away in the bathing pools (I will not be among them) and where, according to popular cinematic tradition, spies meet to exchange mutual understandings of a shifty kind.  Something which always surprised me, in the sense that it’s a good uphill walk to Parliament Hill, best accessed by Overground, and thus rather inconvenient for any agent who is based in Vauxhall or Cheapside… but who are we to question the rigors of espionage?  Dog walkers are another universal norm, and once the weather warms up, picnicking and kite flying are among some of my very few childhood memories of the place.  On a good day, you can see all the way across London to the South Downs, and looking north towards Highgate it’s a useful reminder of the fact that London, while mostly flat, is essentially built in a river valley, though the river itself was long lost behind the houses and towers of the city below.

Continue reading »]]> When playing Hamlet, it must be such an advantage, having big hair.  In fact, thinking through the Hamlets I’ve seen, only one didn’t have big hair, and I can’t help but feel that he fell back on obsessive cigarette smoking to make up for its absence.

Big hair, though, is great.  You can tug it, pull it, twist it, run your fingers neurotically through it, hide behind it, peer from within it, cower beneath it and generally drag the stuff around like a protein-fibre embodiment of the inner, tortured soul.  And while big hair wasn’t the main thing I noticed while watching the latest Hamlet I’ve seen, down at the Young Vic, it is the first thing that leaps to mind as I sit down to write this entry.  Big hair is great… big curly hair, even better.  All the satisfaction of self-mutilation by hairdo, with added twist for that extra-special sense of the universe unravelling chaotically all around.  What more could you possibly require?

I was not, I feel I should explain, deliberately angling to see Hamlet.  It’s not that I wasn’t interested – I always am – but somehow in the great mess of Stuff That Needs To Be Done, I kinda missed the boat on this particular production, right up to the point where an old school friend said, ‘hey, I’m in town, going to the theatre, wanna have dinner?’  Sure, I wanted to have dinner, and we met up on the South Bank to be within spitting distance of her show.  ‘Hey… it’s at the Young Vic… how’d I get there?’ she inquired, and hell, it’s not like I was going anywhere better, so off we wandered down to the Cut, a peculiar road that links Blackfriars and Waterloo, and which hasn’t quite worked out if it’s the height of trendy, arty fashion or a sensible place to buy groceries.

‘Hey!’ she exclaimed again, and by now, dear reader, I suspect you can see the deadly trap, ‘Maybe there’s a few spare tickets?  Wanna try?’

Well, okay, like I said, I’m not doing anything better tonight, and while I’m hardly holding my breath, I’ll ask…

‘Sure, we have returns!  You want?’

Do I want?  Do I want to see a play which is, let’s face it, hardly renowned for its brevity and wit.  A brief, chirpy romp through some of the more comic episodes of Danish history, a light-hearted examination of the human soul and all the quirky, chipper things it does… Hamlet is not.  But hell, it’s a Thursday, it’s raining, there’s nothing on the box, and unlike TV, once you’ve missed theatre, you’ve really missed it, and I guess it’s all good research so…

‘What the hell?’

Ten minutes later, not at all sure how I’d got here, I found myself entering the theatre through the stage itself, which is always an interesting experience for an audience member, albeit a slightly ridiculous one for a techie, and scrambling up into a seat between four Americans – ‘I’m not sure about the concept’ – and three students – ‘oh my god, can you believe it?’  The production, it turned out, was mad.  Not a little bit mad.  Not pushing the boat out there a little, but absolutely, unapologetically, insane.  I have never seen a Hamlet more unsure of his own sanity, who struggles with his own thoughts to such a degree, so vulnerable or, as established, with bigger hair.  It always manages to surprise me just how many different interpretations can be pulled from this play.  I’ve seen Catholic Hamlets, wracked with guilt for unspecified sins; schoolboy Hamlets enjoying screwing around with other people’s minds.  I’ve seen a really rather funny Hamlet who breaks down entirely as soon as everyone else buggers off stage, and a teenage Hamlet who twitches and stutters through his youthful predicament.  I’ve seen a lot of white floppy shirts, and a lot of iffy sword fights; I’ve flinched when blood bags fail, and cheered quietly inside whenever someone manages to hide a mini-fogger inside a ghost’s coat.  I’ve even helped turn the rig around for one Hamlet, who spent a speech handcuffed to a very large piece of truss, and every time we changed the rig I couldn’t help but wonder… does this man know just how much wattage is flowing through the metal he is now attached to?  Can he conceive of the power pulsing through the cables overhead?  If you are to ever judge a piece of scenery in terms of how dangerous it is, dear reader, then have a look for the green and yellow earth bond that’s wired into any spare bit of metalwork.  Much thicker than your index finger, and you know you’re in trouble of a crispy kind…

I guess we have to hand it to old Shakespeare again, that jammy sod, for pulling off a piece of drama which is both so well known that the audience can pretty much sing along with the good bits, and yet which every time lends itself to interpretations ranging from the baggy-trouser Tudors through to pill-popping inmates in a mental asylum, each with reasonable justification behind the decisions made.  The words may be the same, but oddly enough, each production is unique, and in its own way, proves once again why this play is performed so many times, and still has so much power, even today.

It occurs to me that I haven’t actually said whether this latest production, down at the Young Vic, is any good.  The answer is… I doubt if ‘good’ or ‘bad’ even enter into the equation with a play like Hamlet any more, but if it does, then I’d say that it’s absurdly wacky and fairly damn stonking.  Let’s just hope the lead actor has any hair left to play with by the end of the run….

Continue reading »]]> Finished!

Finished finished finished!

Finished finished finished finished finished!

FINISHED!!

(This is not going to be the most edifying post of my career, I hasten to add.)

And have I mentioned….

I’ve finished!

But what, I hear the strangled cry, have you finished?  Urban Magic 4 (the Minority Council) and Urban Magic 5 (title row still ongoing) are both completed.  It seems a little early to have even started Urban Magic 6 so what, but what, has got you deploying multiple exclamation marks?

Well….

… you may ask…

… but what kind of crappy writer would I be if I gave the game away already?

Whatever it is, all you need to know for now is… it’s FINISHED!!!

Continue reading »]]> I’m not musicals woman.

Which is ironic, considering I’m in the process of lighting one.  One with a huge set, a lot of dance number, and no room to put any booms in, if anyone’s concerned.  Also, I realise, thinking about it out loud, no room to fly a bar in any lower than about 8m, which does kinda put pay to fly floor skimmers… anyway, where was I… oh yes, musicals?

I’ve never really got into them, I’ve never really seen many, and I should also add that me and kids shows tend not to get along.  And I tell you all this so you understand that when I say GO SEE MATILDA in the West End, I am the most surprised of anyone to discover myself giving it emphatic capital letters.  It’s delightful, joyous, funny, witty, colourful, vibrant, and even has (very few) cheap tickets for under 25s.

Go see right, right now.

Continue reading »]]> Can someone explain spam to me?

No, but really?

What is the point of it?  Why?  I understand computer fraud, and get quite excited now whenever I receive an email inviting me to change my security details by putting in my username and password, or asking me if I’ve considered the benefits of CASH CASH CASH to be won.  I enjoy the spelling mistakes, appreciate the occasionally florid language, and get a tingle of satisfaction in seeing the ways in which website names have been so cunning adapted to make you believe that HSBC genuinely does want your data, or the Nat West is looking for a way to verify your account.

I can also appreciate some of the sheer brilliance that goes into modern day computer hacking, and am fascinated by the technology of it and the skills involved.  The notion that, even as I write this, a computer program might be recording my every keystroke, or using my computer as a server for someone else, engages that part of my brain which enjoys an intellectual challenge, even if it rouses to fury that part which has two novels to finish up and an anti-virus system which keeps on asking if I’m sure.

But then there’s spam.  It attaches itself to my blog on a regular basis, and on a regular basis I clear it out thanks to wordpress’ filter.  It ranges from the vaguely entertaining – a bombardment, for example, of comments from random addresses reading ‘I say, how wonderful!’ or ‘You certainly pinned that one down’ or ‘Couldn’t agree more, if only I could think like that’ designed to play to the ego of the reader, through to the more traditional rxtlyepp@nnzwtiiaslst.com blasting my system with gobbledegook.  And here then, is my question…

… why?

Continue reading »]]> We’ve all seen it.

The little swiggly green line of shame that appears whenever Microsoft Office doesn’t feel comfortable with your syntax.  Turning off the ‘check my grammar’ function on my computer is one of the first things I do whenever I get a new word processing program, but I tend to leave spellcheck on, minus most of its functions.  I do not, for example, want my occasionally wacky use of capitalisation corrected; if I hit the indent button several times, it is not because I’m having a difficult moment with a recalcitrant little finger, and above all else, more than anything, I refuse to believe that this many words in (British) English have ‘z’ in them.

However, even with spellcheck stripped down to its absolute minimum, I still get the regular red line of reproach on a fairly regular basis.  Street slang, it seems, is not permitted by Microsoft, and writing characters such as the Tribe, who talk entirely in text messaging, creates whole pages of red that infuriate the slightly obsessive editor inside of me.

It’s a question which I suspect has been dogging the English language since the time of the Norman conquest… even though, strictly speaking, the way I’m using language when writing the Tribe is wrong, is it still permissible based on usage?  I know several people, generally, it has to be said, older people, who get very worked up when they hear people talking on the street, exclaiming in their linguistic pain, “But ‘sick’ isn’t good!”  Obviously as someone who’s background is obscenely book-heavy, I’ve been bred to turn my nose up at street slang, but I must admit, listen long enough and even I can appreciate a certain charm in the utterly ungrammatical, entirely incorrect language of the inner city.  Often delivered at break-neck speed, and replete with all sorts of filler sounds – ‘yeah man’ and ‘like’ being common exemplars – never-the-less there’s a certain enticing, bantering rhythm about the language of ‘well sick, blood!’ that, for my part, draws the listener in.  Even if this wasn’t the case, I don’t think Microsoft can deny that usage is beginning to trump strict grammatical form.  If we accept that ‘street’ is going to more and more introduce into the natural flow of our daily language, it does raise another interesting question – if language is mankind’s greatest invention and gift, then will our use of it change us?  What will we sound like, in fifty years time, when we’re all talking well street yo, and how will it change our society as a whole? The question is potentially troubling, in that words are often a mirror of society, and as a woman I do begin to question whether being known as a bitchin’ bitch is not, in fact, a linguistic regression to less enlightened times.  Then again… ‘bitch’ in that context arguably no longer has the meaning as understood by Microsoft Word… though that could change at any moment, subject to the way the conversation goes. How long, I wonder, until the Prime Minister has to start biggin’ it up with the kidz?  And if he does, considering the mastery of saying nothing at great length which politicians have at the moment, will this new use of language be such a bad thing?

Continue reading »]]> While I try to avoid more than one political diatribe a week, it would be a bit daft not to mention the UK’s strike, which happened yesterday.  It was, for anyone not aware, a protest across a large number of public-sector unions against pay cuts, redundancies, pension cuts etc. and as if anyone could have any doubt on the subject, I supported it.

I can see the argument against the strike – disruptive, potentially futile, what can really be achieved in this economic climate?  Unfortunately I think they’re rather dwarfed by the bigger question, which is this – is our government’s current policy, particularly with regard to the public sector, the right way to handle the situation?  And I’m afraid, I’m increasingly thinking not.  The phrase ‘I’m no expert’ must in all honesty be thrown out here, but before that’s turned into ammunition for dismissing my point of view I feel I should add that I’m perfectly aware, intelligent (I hope) and as well informed as any citizen taking an interest can be.  I’ve heard the various sides of the argument and can’t shake the feeling that these massive – MASSIVE redundancies being proposed in the public sector are entirely dependent on a false notion – towit that the private sector will sweep to our rescue and not only re-employ all the people who will lose their jobs, but employ them better.  A notion which, frankly, I consider ridiculous.  The private sector of our country is as much in the crap as anyone else, and more importantly, if a private company is asked to step into the shoes of public institutions in such a climate, surely by definition it’s going to cut corners.  It will aim to save money, by cutting corners and, quite probably, hiring fewer people for less!  The word of the moment, in fact, is ‘out-sourcing’ which is very often code for ‘making some other bugger’s responsibility’ which would be vaguely tolerable, were the things we’re out-sourcing not the life and blood of our country.  Schools, hospitals, ambulances, emergency services, local councils – are you really going to convince me that a private sector struck down by the recession in this country are going to somehow run these better once all the people who ran them before have been made redundant?  Really?

As any reader of this blog can tell, I’m a huge supporter of the public sector in this country.  I get genuinely angry when people talk about ‘soft’ public sector jobs, as if somehow a doctor has it easy, or a firefighter doesn’t deserve a starting salary of £21,000 for running into the flames.  Cliched though it is,  you can’t help compare this with bankers, footballers, or that strange class of people know as ‘celebrities’, not to mention members of parliament (£65,000 per annum excluding, famously, transport, living, office and in one classic case, duck-pond maintenance expenses) and wonder if actually, we haven’t got something horribly wrong here.  Private enterprise, at the end of the day, serves to make a profit, and not for the people; the public sector has no greater goal than to serve the people, and arguably the faff and confusion which can often result from this is merely because government and society continually strives to find more and better ways of doing this, even if they sometimes get it wrong.  It is the embodiment of the greatest good for the greatest number; it may not be perfect, it may not have the go-get’um drive of private industry, but it has something better – it has the ‘do right’ drive of millions of well-trained professionals who, despite their dodgy salaries and frequently frustrating bureaucracies, never the less strive to do their best by the rest of society.  And this, more than any government ideology, or private interest, I think we should all fight to sustain.

Continue reading »]]> As regular readers of this blog will know, I occasionally get angry about things our government are doing.  In fact, over the years, as I’ve become generally more aware of the politics of the UK, I’ve been getting ever angrier.  Angry about the BNP, for example; angry about the invasion of Iraq, about our education policy (essentially ‘if you can’t take an exam in it, does it count?’ and, worse, ‘blame the kids’) and of course, most recently, angry about what our government is trying to do to the NHS.  I think the thing which has me most worked up is this controversial issue of ‘duty of care’.  According to current UK law, the government has a duty of care towards all its citizens, within which few precious words is implied a responsibility to damn well look after us regardless of race, creed, colour and – of course – income.  But the NHS reforms currently proposed appears to scrap this, which does raise the question of what the hell it is our government is planning in replacing this idea with?  This isn’t the place for my rant on the subject of our health services… I’ve had that one and you can all find it in earlier blogs.  This is a more politics-specific rant, as, on the subject of the NHS, and in a rare moment for me, I protested.  Not in a very dynamic way, not in a go-out-into-them-mean-streets sorta manner, but through an organisation called 38 Degrees I signed petitions, wrote letters and generally put my name to a collective cry of ‘whoa there jimbo, we’re really not happy about this’.  Tens of thousands of others joined in this activity, and we achieved…

… well, not that much.

We didn’t stop the bill, we didn’t stop the government forcing the measures through to the House of Lords for a reading, but I damn well hope we raised questions, led to debates, made our voices known and all the things which frankly, the democratic process stands for.  As they say… it’s not always the winning so much as the taking part, which seems the entire democratic system of the UK summed up, however dearly I do wish we’d won.

Imagine my surprise, therefore, when a few days ago I received an email entitled ‘You’ve Been Insulted’.  At first I assumed it’s spam – spammers these days being highly inventive about the ways they get you to open your inbox – but looking at the email address I recognised it as originating from 38 Degrees, the campaign group I’ve been protesting through.

“Yesterday Health Minister Simon Burns compared 38 Degrees members to zombies – for emailing our own MPs about risks to the NHS!” proclaimed the email.  It didn’t seem very likely, and I rolled my eyes a little at the way people manage to dress these things up to promote an agenda even if, in this case, the agenda is mine.

“Watch this video clip!” it proclaimed, and so with a sense of ‘let’s see what you’ve done now’ I did indeed.  And knock me down with a feather, but there indeed was Simon Burns, Health Minister, announcing not only that this organisation which, seems to me, to be little more than a movement of politically-aware citizens, has ‘zombie-like’ tendencies, but that we are ‘frightening people.’  Oddly enough, the accusation that I was a zombie (I suppose, therefore, blindly following in the steps of others rather than thinking for myself) didn’t make me nearly so angry as the suggestion that I and those of my ilk who had signed petitions on this subject, are ‘frightening people’.  We may not have all the facts, we may indeed, be wrong, and I’m open to persuasion on this subject, but understanding MPs these days is a surprisingly difficult task.  Both government and opposition use the same language to say different things, and both can prove their entirely contradictory points with absolutely contrasting, yet immediately testable statistics, or acquire equally reverent looking experts to testify to entirely opposing views.  There is a language in politics which says very little at great length, discussing massive ideas without ever once saying a word which might have meaning.

Alright, I thought, perhaps I’m seeing this clip out of context, so off I trotted to BBC iPlayer to scan through parliamentary health discussions for that day and sure enough, there is Simon Burns, announcing that I am a frightening person and alas, the context does not appear to redeem him.  Where before I might have been open to the government laying out its health policies in a rational and comprehensible manner, suddenly I sit up and realise that this man has no real respect for my views or, it seems, the nature of democracy itself.  Democracy is a flawed system, but as Churchill put it, the least bad system available – it is reliant on discussion, debate, on differing views and argument, on listening to the people and either convincing them or acknowledging them.  What arrogance – what mind-blowing arrogance! – to then turn round and dismiss tens of thousands of people and their views as ‘zombie-like’ and ‘frightening’.  A whole segment of society, a whole mass of people, educated and concerned people, and what are we to our politicians, to our leaders?  We are an irritating buzz, to be swatted away and disregarded.  And that, more than anything else our government has said or done, I can not forgive.

Continue reading »]]> Anne McCaffrey died a few days ago, and this is therefore a very brief blog entry to say farewell to an author who, for much of my youth, was one of my favourites and who still remains a firm presence on my shelves.  Her Dragonriders of Pern series was one of those that really got me into fantasy as a teenager, and to my mind, no one has done dragons better before or since.  The Ship that Sang was a classic story I have rarely seen surpassed, while her Rowan books and the tales of living ships remain, even now, firm fixtures on my bookshelf.  She was both that rare thing – a prolific female science fiction writer – and that rarer thing yet, a genuinely talented writer whose works lured people in and held them over the many years in which she wrote.  She will be missed by many readers in the years to come.

Continue reading »]]> “Yo yo, bitches!”

The young man who uttered this phrase is from Teddington, not necessarily your most bitchin’ hood in Middlesex, yo.  He’d been in the lighting department for a week and a half, and for the first week and a half he was reasonably sedate.  Then suddenly, out of no where, it seemed that he discovered that not only would the department not bite, but that we barely even growled, and he came out of his shell.

“Yo bitches, how’s it hanging?”

The first time he said this, I smiled at the joke.  The second time, I rolled my eyes at his debonair wit.  By the time I realised that this was going to be how he both began and ended all conversations, I was beginning to get frankly worried.  When you’re working a 13-hour day, six days a week, it’s hard to maintain a jovial composure all the time, and in the face of a continual cry of, “Yeah, I’m gonna go get me a bitchin’ bitch!” my usually temperate nature was coming under strain.

Inside part of the set...

It’s the end of another epic fit-up.  For two bitchin’ weeks, the lighting department has hauled, heaved and grumbled its way up and down ladders, over lighting bridges and down the sides of some truly epic bits of scenery, all in the name of…

… well, I probably shouldn’t say what it’s in the name of, but I can promise you that Shakespeare would be surprised to discover how much of his work could be interpreted as a farting joke.  I was working as a lighting electrician in my favourite theatre, for my favourite lighting designer, and beginning to remember why I’d dreaded fit ups so much in the past.  It’s not so much the heavy lifting, the dragging and the hauling… it’s the sheer amount of running up and down you have to do before you’re even in a position to do any of the lifting, dragging and hauling.  In a big theatre, there is nothing more frustrating than dragging tools and equipment all the way to the furthest lighting gallery, only to realise that you’ve left the one vital screw you needed back down in the lighting cage, some four minutes of bleak backstage corridor away.  There is no such thing as a ‘five minute job’ in this theatre… because first, there’s the ten minute walk before you get to begin the five minute job, and by day 10 of this, your feet really know it.

I am, I realise, not a very good technician.  I mean – I’m okay, I think – but the simple truth of the matter is, I’m a far better lighting designer.  I care about colours and angles, beam and form, texture and rigging points, but I can’t muster the same passion for plugs that some of my electrician colleagues can achieve on these occasions.  What’s the difference between .75 cable and 1cm cable?  About 0.25cm, from what I can tell, and there my enthusiasm for the subject ends.  I can do the maths involved in current calculations, no worries, but at the end of the day my primary concern is ‘will it explode’ and the finer details of ‘is the cable run elegant?’ largely pass me by.

I’m also very bad at taking orders, it seems.  Good at taking orders when they make sense to me, but a lot of the time when doing big, big shows, you find yourself being asked to do a job that seems to ridiculous, so futile, and so liable to failure that the overwhelming desire to turn round and say, ‘I’m sorry, you want what?’ does indeed, alas, become overwhelming.  Ask me to Go Rig That Parcan and I’ll do it… send me up there in a safety harness four hours later in order to peel off a bit of electrical tape of find a lost pair of pliers – jobs which really could be done at a later time, when there’s not 30 actors on stage – and there’s every possibility that my insubordinate nature defeats my rather subordinate role.

But!  All that said and done, working as a technician has its perks.  For a start, I do genuinely think it expands my knowledge of Stuff I Can do as a lighting designer, and exposes me to the ways other people works, even if occasionally that exposure takes more of the form of a dire warning.  Working in a large theatre, you also find yourself, quite by accident, acquiring a rather odd family.  As a writer, and indeed a lighting designer, your life is largely freelance and can therefore run the risk of becoming a little lonely, unless you work very hard at getting out of the house some time.  As a technician, you spend so much time begging metalwork from construction, working round the painters in scenic art, blagging clamps from rigging resources and fighting over the last pair of snips with the boys in the lighting cage (where all the ever-vanishing tools are kept) that you can’t help but make friends, and maybe even influence people.  The sheer diversity of people you can meet always come as something of a surprise to me – surprising the unlikely friends, and surprising too the occasionally frustrating nits who you have to deal with – and it exposes to me a world of politics and wranglings, unfulfilled attractions and implausible relationships – which otherwise I’d have nothing to do with at all.  So while I may not be pleased to be perpetually greeted with, “Yo bitch, you getting some?” when walking into the lighting cage, I am at least, interested.

Continue reading »]]> “I’m an environmentalist.”  It’s something I’ve always wanted to say, but I’ve never quite felt I have the credentials to get away with it.  I care about the environment, and in my own bumbling way, try to do my bit – recycle more than I bin, turn lights off, never turn on the boiler if it can be done with the kettle – that sorta stuff – but the term ‘environmentalist’ in my mind implies a whole world of dedication and labour which, frankly, I just haven’t achieved.

I used to have this argument on a fairly regular basis with a friend.  It went something like this:

“There’s no point!” quoth he.  “Just because you recycle doesn’t mean that everyone else does and you’re so unimportant in the grand scheme of things, what good do you do?  You’re not turning off cars, you’re not inventing cold fusion, you’re not finding alternative energy sources or campaigning for whales, how, exactly, does your neurotic ‘turn off the TV when you’re done’ and ‘make sure you don’t leave lights switched on unnecessarily’ help save the planet?  It doesn’t!”

And practically speaking, he kinda has a point.  But on the other hand, Planet Earth made it to seven billion people a few days ago, and while this makes me so far away from the wrong end of a decimal point, in the grand scheme of things, it’s hardly worth counting, the naive hope exists that if more people think as I do, then we can make a difference.  Even if only one in ten people on the planet turn their light bulbs off, that’s still seven hundred million people saving, say, 100W a second, which, 252,000,000,000,000 Joules saved per hour, which seems to me to be quite a lot, and well, I’d feel statistically quite chuffed to think I was part of that one-in-ten statistic.  The problem is… once you start thinking like that it’s fairly easy to turn round and go ‘well, others will be part of that one in ten, so I may as well carry on like I do and be part of the nine-in-ten who don’t give a damn’ at which point again, I think the question has to be flagged… you don’t give a damn?  You don’t give a damn about the planet?  That seems a little narrow-minded, really, not least since all we’re talking about here is turning a light off in your living room.

“The evidence is questionable!” retorted my rival.  “The case is not that simple!  Everyone says that ‘recycling is good’ but then, the energy involved in recycling is bad!”

“Yes, but landfills are worse.  Think lesser of two evils!”

“Science hasn’t got the answers on global warming, or the polar ice caps melting, or the rivers running dry or any of this!” he replied.  “It can’t predict what will happen!”

At this point, my pithy reply of ‘no, but there seems a fairly strong consensus’ had to be shoved into the background, since the gentlemen I was arguing with was so far ahead of me in terms of his scientific knowledge and abilities that really, any argument on the subject would have been a little unbalanced.

“Okay, alright – there seems to be two options.  Either the vast majority of people who study the subject are getting it wrong, and we’ll all be fine, or there’s a ever-growing chance that the seas will rise, the climate will shift, storms will grow stronger and more violent, draughts will become harder, winters harsher, rivers drier, species threatened and food scarcer even as the population booms… and while I concede that there is no definite, absolute, 100% guaranteed way of proving that this is the case, shouldn’t we maybe try and do something on the off-chance?  I mean, on the off-chance it rains, you carry an umbrella… on the off-chance the house burns down, you take out insurance… so maybe, on the off-chance the entire planet will become smothered in its own cloud of artificial pollution and mankind will obliterate itself in wars of water and wars of oil even as the cliffs crumble into the sea, shouldn’t you, but just maybe shouldn’t you, turn off a lightbulb or two?”

I’m not very good at arguing my point, usually – at least, not when I have to speak it out loud.  But this time, I think, I hope, he paused to think a little longer than usual.

I don’t know what the future brings, or what can be done.  But I can’t shake the feeling that in the grand scheme of things, there’s not much grander out there, than the future of the planet itself.

Continue reading »]]> I like London in the autumn.  Make no mistakes, there are certain snags… it gets dark unreasonably early, and I go through multiple pairs of gloves in an attempt to prevent my fingers turning blue (which they do remarkably easily).  Getting out of bed becomes harder, and getting back into it takes longer as there’s always that initial shudder of horror as you realise just how far your feet are from your body core, and just how chilly it is down the far end of the blanket.

But there are certain perks.  London is a city full of trees, which is a large part of what makes London brilliant, and as the autumn comes everything changes colour as all the leaves fall.  There’s certain rituals that can be enjoyed – finding conkers (which I still collect for my Mum, as apparently moths don’t like ‘em) and shuffling through great drifts of leaves being the two obvious examples.  The ivy clinging to my estate turns yellow, then brilliant red, while the tops of trees turn a bright, almost tacky yellow.  The light, for all that it’s rare, goes this slanting pale creamy colour, turning orange for sunset, and feels somehow both brilliant and thin all at the same time.  In short – when it’s not raining – autumn can be an oddly beautiful time of year, even in the city.

Continue reading »]]> “Now, Kate, you do realise that we’re going to need some romantic love interest, don’t you?”

The film producer uttering these words is someone I respect.  I’m surprised, in fact, by how much I respect her, since traditionally the relationship between authors and producers is nothing if not fraught.  But, scarily, the lady in question, who I think we’ll call Thumbelina for the purpose of this post, not only manifests huge intelligence and energy, but scarily seems to know my works better than I do myself.

“I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but it’s just what needs to happen,” she explained with a sigh.  “There needs to be a love interest.”

As readers of my works will probably have noticed, I don’t really do love interests.  I’m perfectly happy doing sexual tension, and hints of Things Yet To Come, but generally speaking, I draw the line at actual snogging.  Not because I’m adverse to it – not at all – but because the stories I tell tend to happen over a very tight period of time and frankly, I’m not convinced that the adventures I subject my characters to are really a sound basis for a relationship.  Horror, terror, shared wonders and mutual disasters, sure, I can see how they might bring people together in a crisis, but frankly if these are your surrounding circumstances then you should really be far too busy dealing with the problem, than indulging in romance.  Priorities, people, priorities!  Talk about bad timing.

There are certain cliches of fantasy romance as well, which I simply don’t understand.  For example, injuries.  We’ve all read, I suspect, those cases where Hunky Man and Heroic Woman stand up together and duel either each other, or appalling monstrosities, only at the end of the battle to realise that they are united by a love of their swords and, bizarrely, of each other, and to fall head over heels into bed with each other.  But while I can’t claim to have dueled any monsters lately, as someone who every now and then engages in heavy physical work, I find the notion of doing anything other than pulling the blanket over my head at the end of the day and whimpering, ‘gimme a back rub’ to be utterly exhausting.  Surely, but surely, when battling the forces of an oncoming darkness, the priority would be to get eight hours solid sleep, a decent breakfast and a really hot cup of tea?

Admittedly, all this is largely a by-product of my setting a large number of my works over a very tight time period.  (Because there’s nothing like a ticking narrative clock to cheer me up….)  If I wrote more works which spanned many years, then absolutely, I’d be far more open to romance since I figure, a lot of the going-to-the-pub, working-each-other-out stuff can be summarized in two brisk lines of exposition, job done.  But even then, there are certain dangers.  Sex, for example, is something that really has not graced the literary world with fine examples.  It’s not a process which stands up well to being laid out in occasionally scary detail on the page, not least because attempts to romanticise it and soften up the finer details of anatomical process often lead to unwise ventures into the realms of ‘gushing’, ‘pulsating’ and, horror of horrors, ‘manhood’.  One or two bolder writers attempt to define it in more metaphorical tones, but even then you can quickly end up with frightening images of giant sea monsters and their inks, or terrible accidents in saunas.  The conclusion, I think, we’re forced to reach is… if in doubt, take a paragraph break.

Continue reading »]]> SNCF.  I’m sure there was a large part of my childhood, when I thought these letters were something you saw on ancient roman pennants.  It took a while to recognise that these were in fact the letters that denoted French Railways, an organisation which seemed to me, in my youth, to be the most marvelous thing ever invented by man.

Our adventures would go something like this: come the end of school term, myself and my parents would drive to Dover or Folkstone on the South Coast, and board the ferry across the English Channel.  The ferries were – and are – huge monsters, layers on layers of decks for cars and lorries, and then layers of decks above for over-priced chocolates, arcade machines and sofas where for only £5 of your English money, you could buy half a croissant and some brown liquid in a cup.  The internal corridors up from the car park always smelt of engine oil and fumes, and the worst case scenario for a driver was if their car alarm, knocked around by the turning of the ship, would start to wail, at which point a voice would come over on the ship-wide tannoy and invite the owner of shame to report in.  I would always insist on going on the decks, first to watch the White Cliffs recede behind us, then to watch for the spike of Calais Town Hall approach in front of us.  As France grew closer and closer I’d look at Calais – not the world’s most inspiring town – and imagine that the weather was already warmer and the beaches already sandier, and demand that my parents were first back into the car deck to unload their car, even if we were, in fact, at the very rear of the disembarkation queue.   As we trundled through customs, I was fascinated by the options available – ‘Nothing to Declare’, ‘Something to Declare’ and the rather more ambiguous sign of a giant, razor-toothed circular saw.

It was a short drive from the ferry terminal to the ‘international rail terminal’, a fenced-off area of sidings with nothing more to announce what it was than a few lack-lustre signs and a very long queue.  Here, in a medley of ‘A’ gantries and ‘B’ sidings and ‘C’ lanes, my father would join a crawling line of cars edging their way onto the double-decked motorail carriages, which, once combined with the passenger cars, formed a snake that felt to me, at least a mile long.  Then we waited.  The terminus cafe was fairly quickly renamed the Terminal Cafe, as it was not only the purveyor of the worst food in France, but on several occasions it managed to poison whole train-loads of travellers at a go.  The worst case of this kind happened on the one holiday when I already had a sore throat, and thus wasn’t eating… on the Friday, therefore, I sat hungry and miserable watching my friends eat, and on Saturday morning I woke up revived, refreshed, to discover that I was the only healthy person in a carriage of groaning, green misery.

Finding your berth on the massive train could take a good half hour, wandering along vast, curving platforms in search of the six-bunked compartments.  Once settled in, my parents and our travelling companions would groan and curse until that glorious moment when the engine finally fired up – not because this meant we were going anywhere any time soon, but because it meant the air conditioning at last came on.  On those trains where there wasn’t a buffet car, meals of bottled water, scotch eggs, ham sandwiches and crusty bread were immediately unwrapped, and if there weren’t crumbs on your bunk within five minutes, something had gone wrong.  I was given the top bunk – my Dad would make a semi-safety net for me out of his trouser belt to prevent disaster in the night – and as the sun went down, we’d rattle slowly out of Calais station for the destination of choice.

‘Sleep’ on a train is a bit of a mis-nomer.  ‘Rattly dozing’ is more accurate.  In SNCF 3rd class sleeper booths, the ‘pillow’ is essentially two bits of sheet with some air in between, and the mattress is a hardened plastic shell.  The train rattles and bumps as it meanders across France, continually stop-starting, and you’d be amazed how quickly six travellers in a booth begin to smell – abd the toilets aren’t even going to be considered here – but, if you do manage to sleep, there is a moment when you wake up and realise, miraculously, that you’re somewhere else entirely.  The most exciting wake up I ever had was when taking the train to Rome; I came to in a completely black compartment, not a glimmer of light peeking through the blind, but I felt oddly refreshed and alert and couldn’t understand why it was still so dark.  Then with a roar and a sudden change in the pressure of the air, there was light coming in around the blind, brilliant blinding light, as the train, it turned out, had just passed through a tunnel in the middle of the Alps, and it was already a smiting white morning.

As the years went by, the number of places explored by sleeper train in Europe have grown, especially with the advent of the Eurostar which has largely meant leaving the car behind and travelling as pedestrians.  With friends and family, I’ve grown to love the adventure of boarding a train at 7.01 a.m. in London, only to change trains at 9.30 in Paris, hopping onto the RER to shift between Gare du Nord and Gare du Est in search of the next step of the journey.  I’ve discovered how hard it is to find good chips and chocolate in Brusselles Midi, while waiting for the overnight train to Berlin, and how cheap the connection is to Cologne, where we once visited the cathedral and ate ice cream while waiting for the next train to Vienna.  I’ve played cribbage on the TGV from Montpellier, a train so fast you can practically feel the wind against your face even as you swish along in the quiet carriages, and gawped at the ostrich farms outside Bratislava.  Even when beyond the European rail network, a holiday in Korea was largely defined by train journeys; for £80 myself and my companion had unlimited access to all trains across the country, and we rode the super-fast trains with their little read-out that triumphantly told you how many km/h you were doing at any given moment, down to the little commuter trains rattling through paddy fields, with the wide-eyed glee of wandering strangers.  You’re almost never comfortable, almost never relaxed, invariably badly fed, and generally exhausted at the end of a long train journey, but in an odd way, that’s just part of what makes it so brilliant.

Continue reading »]]> I am not a scout, I have never been a scout, I have no knowledge of scouting…

… except to say that perhaps, as a girl, it’s more likely I would have been a brownie.  A division which, in fact, went some considerable way, in my youth, to bias me against both movements outright.  Why, I would rage, did the boys get to walk around in cool colours with penknives in their pockets and, in my rather giddy imagination, learn to hunt the dreaded bears of Hackney, while girls had to wear poo-coloured jumpers and, I assumed, learn to sow?

In many ways, my childhood activities were defined by my neighbours, more than my own family.  I grew up, an only child, in that odd position of being perpetually the middle child between the pairs of sisters who were my friends.  I was a year younger than Merry, and a year older than Pippin; in the same year as Frodo but a year younger than Samwise, and so on, and in this capacity, I found myself fairly quickly placed in the midst of these sisters and their social activities as something of a buffer for their rivalries.

Thus, various unexpected and not always appreciated activities were foisted on me in my new-found role as Alsace-Lorraine in early modern politics.  (For anyone concerned, that’s the only geo-political history reference I intend to make for the rest of this blog, if not, perhaps, ever.)  Youth drama club, for example, was a fixture in which the future cast of Biker Grove (as it then was) learned how to pull each other’s hair without causing permanent damage, while I, shy, gangly, gormless and about as talented in this area as a broken toilet seat, cowered by the lighting desk wondering what all the shiny buttons did and whether they’d let me push one.  (They didn’t.)  Ballet only happened once – even aged seven I knew I was never going to be a dainty little fairy, and I believe I may have cried when they told me I was going again – but thankfully the school burnt down before this threat could be carried out and I, relieved, took up the violin instead.  Donkey club was a once-monthly torture which I was sucked into in my role as a diplomatic Switzerland between two sisters.  For two hours we’d waddle round a field in Kent, picking up giant sackfuls of donkey dung in huge plastic bags, cold, wet and in my case, hayfever attack ground zero, before grooming the often foul-tempered and smelly donkeys of the refuge before being allowed five minutes each to ride the creatures.  Aged ten, I was already too tall to ride the donkeys – they’d sit between my legs while I walked along the ground with them beneath me – and so the main prize of the occasion rather passed me by.  Bitter?  Moi?  No….

All that said, I had no illusions, even as an infant, that I’d particularly enjoy scouting.  The realisation had hit me by a fairly early age that myself and camping, or indeed any kind of outdoor skills that didn’t involve being able to deduce the nearest way to the best bus stop by the alignment of an off license alone, were not going to mix.  At secondary school, I took vast amounts of ignoble pleasure in watching my colleagues suffer and curse their way through the Duke of Edinburgh awards, although again, in my role as diplomatic buffer I was occasionally left as witness to the good friendships shattered in this cause.

And then…

… a few weeks ago, we were rehearsing a play in scouting hut in Kew (it having reasonable hire rates) and, during one of the breaks, I had a look at the badges on the wall and knock me down, if your modern, twenty first century boy scout, can’t get a prize in public relations.

Public Relations?

When did this happen?  I mean, there’s more traditional badges still there – camping, running, tennis, shooting – all hardy outdoor stuff – but when did public relations, computing and, to my slight confusion, ‘aeronautics’ make it into the boy scout syllabus?  This was not the cliche I had embraced.  (The badge for ‘Our Faith’ also induced a certain consternation in me, for different reasons…)  Is it a good thing?  Is this not, in fact, a sign that the scouting movement truly is adapting to today, to create the leaders of tomorrow?  Perhaps it is.  But then again, what does it say about tomorrow, if public relations is still going to continue to be the requisite skill of the future?  In my opinion, not much good at all..

Continue reading »]]> We’ve all been there.  It’s 9.30 at night, you’re incredibly tired, it’s been a long, bone-breaking day, there’s nothing on the TV, it’s too early to go to bed, you’ve finished the book you were reading and know that if you do try and break on through to Chapter 11 of ‘Teach Yourself Mandarin’ (after taking about 4 years to get to Chapter 10 – ‘At The Hotel’) – your brain will be so weak and feeble that not a single stroke nor tonal intonation will stick.   But damnit, you’ve watched a lot of rubbish TV while in this state of mind, and you’ve seen a lot of terrible films and while, sure, you deserve a break, is another bad-SF marathon or cop drama really going to bring honour upon your house?

And then you hear it…

… possibly the softest, the gentlest, the most dulcet and reassuring tones ever to issue forth from the TV or, in my case, from BBC iPlayer.  The utterly calming voice of David Attenborough.

As a child, my Mum had certain ambitions for my cultural education.  The first was not to let me encounter Jane Austen until I was at least 15, on the basis that I’d probably hate it before then.  The second was to win me over to Shakespeare by letting me watch all the grisly battle scenes in Henry V, until that glorious day when I’d finally sit up and go ‘but Mummy, what happens in Acts 1-4?’  Her final determination was that, before I was too jaded to appreciate it, I’d be sat down in front of the TV to watch David Attenborough being sat on by an eighteen stone guerilla in the middle of the jungle, having nits picked out of his hair.  And credit to her, she achieved all of these!  One cool autumn night I heard a cry from the living room and my Mum roaring out with surprising volume that I had to get downstairs NOW to see this classic bit of filmmaking.  “It’s great!” she hooted.  “You just know that the film crew are pulling stupid faces at him from behind the camera.  But how does he do it?  How does he convince all the animals of the planet to perform for him?”

And indeed, over the years, it does seem like nature and Attenborough have entered into a strange, mutual compact.  Killer whales, it seems, will beach themselves in search of seals at his command; flying fish will leap from the waves, and of course, my new favourite exploit… penguins will commit criminal acts for his delight and delictation.  (Thieving Penguins is the film clip in question.)

But leaving aside David Attenborough’s role, for a second, as prime source of penguin-based entertainment, as well as owner of one of the most soothing voices ever to be broadcast before bedtime, he’s also the purveyor of a passionate, informed and powerful message.  Through the frequently stunning, and occasionally genuinely moving images of our planet – remarkable, fascinating images – we are not only informed in a way which we haven’t been before, but a genuine sense of wonder and protective passion for this planet and all things on it begin to seep out of the very TV screen.  Our horizons are broadened, but we are also invited to consider how our actions in Europe may affect the ice of Antarctica, which will in turn affect the waters of the Pacific which will affect the jungles of South America which will in turn affect us once again, and somehow this vast concept – the protection of our planet – which is usually too vast to comprehend, becomes both accessible and, perhaps more important, extremely relevant to us all.  And that, more in a way than anything else, is worthy of praise and admiration.

Continue reading »]]> Things I am doing this week:

My tax return.

My mother’s tax return.

Tidying the flat.

Going swimming with my swimming buddy.

Playing chess with my swimming buddy.

Learning escrima.

Playing badminton.

Doing play edits.

Tinkering with a TV drama outline that may or may not be of some interest perhaps one day somehow possibly.

Returning proofs.

Doing filing.

Learning how to make carrot cake.

Sorting the odd socks in my odd socks drawer.

Defragmenting the hard drive.

Attempting to organise dinner with a man who doesn’t like coconut in his curry.  (Inexplicably.)

Reading about the Madhouses Act and the history of Bedlam.

Chasing my local library.

Sending skype-haiku (my responce to the 150 character limit on all skype text messages) to a friend in Egypt.

Rambling.

Such activities are usually a sign of one of two things, in any writer.  Either a) serious writers block or b) the completion and delivery of their latest novel.  And the good news of the moment is… it’s not a).

Continue reading »]]> Well, this is a turn up for the books.

Obviously my rage, my uncontrollable rage at Kindles not doing columns is still pretty active.

But actually, the main source of my rage, the main thrust and cut of my fury, has been suddenly abated by my publisher having a burst of triumphant genius that makes it all alright!  And interestingly, the side-effect of all this is that readers of the Kindle are, for the Minority Council only, really not going to get the same experience as readers of the paper version.  And frankly, their loss.

Also interestingly, this is perhaps one of the rare occasions when contributions to this blog, besides making me extremely happy and adding, I hope, to both the sum of knowledge and quality of debate available, have also suggested interesting solutions and ideas for this otherwise very sticky problem.  To all who contributed – my thanks!  In a small but extremely groovy way, you have actually made a massive difference to the final printed version of the Minority Council…

Continue reading »]]> I was beginning to come round to the concept of the Kindle.  I was really warming to it.

As a writer’s daughter, naturally I love the smell of paper, the feel of it, the sight of books on my shelves, the comfort of curling up at night with a reassuring weight of text and a sexy cover by my bedside.  I love books not merely for their content, but for what they stand for – learning, stories, adventure, exploration, a sum of knowledge – and in this sense I suppose my attachment to traditional ink and paper could have been seen as sentimental, more than practical.  I love my local library, too – not least because it’s free and I am now second in the local authority queue for the new Terry Pratchett book.  (Can’t wait!)

I’m also, like most of publishing, not yet quite sure what the e-book revolution is going to do for the written word as a whole.  Readers of this blog will already be aware of my, and most other writers main concern – in a market where suddenly everyone can self-publish to iTunes, how are professional writers going to earn their living?  I am all in favour of many people writing, but from my biased place in life I do genuinely believe that the publishing process serves both the author, by feeding them, and the reader, by essentially acting as a quality control barrier.  It’s not always right, it’s not always just, it’s not always even much of a quality control system, but it’s something – however, this is a different rant, and a different debate.

However, all this said, I was genuinely beginning to warm to the kindle.  It’s lightness, it’s size, it’s ease of reading, it’s potential to carry vast numbers of works and save on luggage space, it’s slow shuffle towards affordability, it’s environmentalism, the ease of purchase… there were all sorts of things beginning to beguile me.

And then I learnt the horrible, profound, shocking truth: the kindle can’t do columns.

It may not sound like much of a complaint, but when one of your novels features a whole chapter where…

… and it’s really quite good…

… and absolutely needs columns…

… and the kindle can’t support the format and your publisher can only do one proof so every single damn format of the book has to change…

… and suddenly this really quite good section with columns in it is a rather less good section where the formatting is all over the place…

… because of the kindle…

Suddenly rage becomes the order of the day.  The Wittenberg press could do columns; Windows 3.1 could do columns, hell, even a manual typewriter that you have to hit with the strength of a Titan can do bloody columns, but the kindle?  Oh no.  It can’t even do eccentric formatting to create the illusion of columns.  I am a writer who likes to play with the toys technology has given me, and with indeed the usual laws of voice and structure that literature presents, but for a single bit of should-be revolutionary technology, I find myself shot in the foot, screwed over by a machine that should be the herald of tomorrow and is, in fact, a source of unbelievable rage and frustration for me.

It may sound like a petty rage now…

… but just you wait until you read the book….

Continue reading »]]> What are our government doing?

What are they doing?!

What will make them stop?!

Why would anyone in their right mind go ahead with a policy that ignores the advice of experts, ignores the views of the doctors, ignores the views of the patients, ignores the statistics, responses, analysis and input of everyone who has even the remotest shard of interest in the area… and attempt to pass this bill on the NHS?  When did the ideological zeal of our government reach such absurd, non-sensical heights?  I understand the need to save money, but where does this strange belief come from that every single one of the tens of thousands of people being laid off in the NHS are redundant?  I hate middle management as much as the next girl, but I want my doctors to be focusing on the medicine, not the paperwork, and for my nurses to be spending their time monitoring the patients, not worrying about the cleaning rota!  How can it be saving money when the cost of the redundancies themselves are almost as great as the saving made; how can it be economically sensible to spend hundreds of millions on re-organising the system from the top down?

It seems that this is a fairly a standard government reaction to problems – since we can’t get rid of doctors and nurses, let’s ‘re-structure’ as if the NHS isn’t reeling from being re-structured every new parliament session.  It feels active, it feels on it, it feels like politicians Making a Difference instead of government screwing over the actual medics by completely changing their working environment.  And when things start to totter as the new system grinds and sweats and staggers into place, let’s declare ‘well, everything has teething problems’ – but these teething problems are life and death!

And as for encouraging ‘competition’ – I don’t want ‘competition’ in my healthcare services!   I really don’t!  I want one clear, simple service that is the best that can be provided.  As an asthmatic, I’m already livid to discover that my condition is classified as ‘patient-manageable’ and thus something I can bare the brunt of the costs on.  Yes, it’s manageable – I can prevent myself getting asthma attacks so long as I stay away from dust, pollen, cats, dogs, pollution, strenuous physical exertion and laughing too hard.  The last thing I need is my doctor to sit me down and offer me five alternative treatments at five alternative costs from providers who, at the end of the day, are in medicine to make a profit!

I know the argument – competition encourages excelling, because the providers need to be the best to keep our custom – but at the end of the day, the providers aren’t in medicine for the good of others, they’re in it to make money from the patient’s distress.  And in a way what enrages me more about this argument is the implication that those providers who are in the public sector, who don’t seek to make a profit from what they do, are somehow less effective, less on it, less passionate about my well-being.  Do doctors, when leaving a private clinic to go and work in a public hospital, make a careful mental note to tune their patient care down from ‘soothing’ to ‘brusque’?  Do nurses, as they enter an NHS ward think, ‘well, I’m not being paid so much to be here so that bastard who is crying out in pain can wait an extra five minutes while I make myself a cup of coffee on the tax-payer’s time?’  As someone who’s both been through and watched close family members go through the NHS over many years, I find this notion truly offensive.

I consider it a shameful failure of the government to even consider fobbing off some of the powers of the Secretary of State for Health.  This is one of those areas where you want, where society deserves a centralised authority, since if there is no central power governing healthcare then before you know it every region’s healthcare services will be defined not by the number of people or the instances of disease, but by the GDP of the local city or the average income of the family household, and it will be different strokes for different folks, just like the good old days of the 1880s.  Life and death are far, far too important for anyone less than a government body to take absolute responsibility for.

My government does not speak for me, and worse, is not listening to either my voice nor the voices of my peers.  For ideology and pride, they will do our healthcare system incredible harm.

Save our NHS.

Continue reading »]]> Ta-da!  It’s here!  It’s new!  It’s shiny!  It’s…

… well, it’s still all the same actual content…

… but it’s the new blog!

Oddly enough, I feel I ought to apologise for the lack of narrative tension that preceded this.  Usually if change is coming in this sort of manner, I try to heighten the tension first… however, in this case, the amazing dude who’s been spending the last 48 hours blatting emails back and forth with me about how to make everything sexier, didn’t realise he was going to have time to fix the blog until Tuesday evening.

‘Hi there!’ he exclaimed.  ‘Turns out, I’m bored!  Shall we?  No time like the present.’

I like to think, however, what we’ve lost in narrative suspense, we’ve more than made up for with shininess, grooviness and, above all else, the element of surprise…

Continue reading »]]> “I need to know how much 15 Amp cable and DMX you have,” I said.

The man looked briefly tortured.  “Well,” he replied at last, “One mustn’t be too ambitious about these things.”

As a lighting designer, there are certain things you take for granted.  15 amp cable – the round pinned stuff you see in theatres everywhere – is still in the UK the most common way of getting electricity from here to there, and the vital stuff of all work ever.  DMX is a data cable, and every theatre in the country, from Aberdeen to St. Ives, uses this plucky protocol to control all the wonderful equipment that their 15A cable has just got power to.  Work in any mainstream theatre and you don’t even bother to ask – of course you don’t – because the idea that they haven’t got enough of either of these is just too ridiculous to consider.  But, after a few dodgy fringe experiences, I do now tend to ask the managers of smaller venues exactly what they’ve got, as, if nothing else, it tells me how much more I need to bring.

It is also a useful test question, as you will get one of two responses.

Any professional technician, anyone who can tell a plug from a socket or has even half an hour’s exposure to a lighting desk or sound board, when asked how much 15A or DMX there is in the venue will look you in the eye, and give you a very special look.  It is the look of, ‘how thick do you think I am, jimbo?’ and it will be followed by either; “Uh, lots, duh?” or “We don’t have as much as I think we oughta, but I’ve been collecting so you’ll be okay for your purposes, yeah?”  It’s all the same basic kettle of fish, as, generally speaking, wherever a professional technician is operating in a fringe venue, the first thing they do – the absolute first – is make sure they can get power and data to whatever it is they’re controlling, even if that thing is only a bare bulb on a stick.

Then there’s the rather less professional answer.  At it’s most honest it is this:

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it all sounds marvelous and you’re welcome to look.”  This was the answer given to me by a wonderful man in Euston who, in the classic way of staff at a fringe venue could indeed not tell a socket from a plug, but was immensely excited to learn that there were people around him who could, and he was a man with whom I was happy to share my production desk cake.  (I am a lighting designer who believes in having as much cake as possible on her production desk.  And indeed on her writing desk too…)

“Uh, yeah, that’s the stuff with three pins, isn’t it?” was a rather less useful response from a man in Hammersmith, while “You’re gonna have to hire,” was the downright rude reply of a lady in Lambeth.  Am I?  Am I really?  Or is it that you are simply unwilling to admit that you don’t know what this stuff is, when I can quite clearly see three boxes of it out of the corner of my eye…?

All of which brings me back to where we began.

“One mustn’t be too ambitious about these things,” he said.  “I’ve had some wonderful people come in here and do some wonderful things, really professional lighting designs, you mustn’t try to over-engineer.”

The speaker of these deadly words was the actor-turned-manager of a small venue which I shall leave unnamed.  He stood before me in a dark pinstripe suit, and like a character from a 1930s drama with a large sofa in it, lent on a wooden-handled umbrella while not quite meeting my eye.  I hesitated – what to do at this delicate juncture?  He was in a potentially difficult situation; the owner of a theatre which had a great deal of technical potential, it would have been what I believe is traditionally termed a ‘loss of face’ for him to raise his hands wide and simply say, ‘I don’t know what this is, why, is it important?’  He was supposed to be the source of all knowledge, the insightful man, the inside guy – and yet there he stood, clearly not knowing the basics and worse, rather than admitting to this he was asking me, the visiting lighting designer, to lower my expectations.  Lower them… because of cable?

“Mind if I have a nose about?” I squeaked at last.

This was a relief for us both, as it it enabled me to find what I was looking for while praising him for having it in stock.  Indeed, I found more than I expected – many lanterns that weren’t on his kit list.  “Yes, I believe they don’t have any bulbs – but I’ll get them ordered in, of course!” he exclaimed, seeing my expression.  My heart swelled – more lamps, more cable, the day was looking up.  “What’s the lighting desk like?”

“Superb, absolutely superb.  The monitor hasn’t been working for a while, but we’re getting that fixed before your technical rehearsal.”

“Oh good; so that’ll all be fine.”

He beamed, his pride restored; I smiled, my confidence a little boosted.  The next day, the producer phoned me – no new bulbs were being purchased.  I rolled my eyes and lowered my expectations a little.  The day after that I went in to rig and focus the lighting design, watched by four very affable actors who’d volunteered to be my rigging crew but who couldn’t, alas, tell the shiny end from the heavy end of a light and were thus reduced to beer-drinking duties.  I turned on the lighting desk, turned on the monitor and saw… darkness.

“The monitor isn’t working,” I exclaimed, trying to hide my rising fury when the manager came in the next day.

“Have you tried playing with the nobs?” he suggested.

At this juncture I began breathing through my nose.  A props maker once told me to try the sacred mantra, ‘breathe in with anger, breathe out with love’.  A stage manager suggested, ‘I am floating beneath the still surface of warm water….’  After many years, I’ve settled with breathing through my nose and counting to ten….

“Do you really need a monitor to do your programming?”

… make that twenty.

Continue reading »]]> So, I’ve dabbled.

I think that’s about as good as it’s going to get.  I’ve dabbled in martial arts and it’s been… interesting.

My motivation, if anyone is curious, has been two-fold:  1.  I am not a fitness nut, I will never aspire to run the London marathon or really achieve anything with my body other than comfort.  However, when I am 87 I would like to be able to walk properly and I don’t want to be in any physical pain, so I figure I may as well look after my body now.  However!  I do find exercising very, very boring.  Walking I’m completely on board with – walking I love, it’s the best way to see a city – but formal training, quite possibly with someone shouting ‘move, move, move!’ at me – no.  I get easily bored and easily annoyed.  Therefore, my mission has always been to find something that keeps me healthy and vaguely engaged.  2.  Hitting things is cool.  I mean, not advocated, and not something I’d like to do outside the comfort of the sports hall, but there is a certain satisfaction on taking out the quiet frustrations of the day that we all acquire, on something soft, squishy, controlled and not liable to scream.  In the nicest possible way.  Thus… martial arts.

So, when I went to LSE, I took up karate.  Not because karate seemed remarkable to me, but because it was the only martial art I’d really heard of and, more importantly, taekwondo clashed with my ‘Military Revolution – Charles VII to Napoleon’ class.  I was the new, 5’11 gangly girl at the back of the class, who’d stopped playing hockey aged 17 because it was getting too earnest, and I was rubbish.  For two hours a week a scary Greek man prowled up and down the lines of his sweating, pain-wracked students and barked, ‘higher!  Harder!  Keep going!’   The senior student paced with him, declaring, ‘no no no, all wrong!’ before pushing your knee into exactly that position of extraordinary pain that you’d been so delicately attempting to avoid.

‘You must improve your physical fitness!’ Sensei would declare, as we ran round and round the hall, a desperate sweating collection of unfit humanities students wondering why they thought this would be more fun than an essay on the sociology of Weber.  Occasionally a more talented, more experienced student would be pulled to the front to demonstrate a kata that they had learnt, and with a blood-curling cry of warrior frenzy they would unleash a series of kicks and punches at the empty air which left the rest of us quaking.  There wasn’t any real explaining of what we were doing; our warrior’s stance was a warriors stance; our front kick was a front kick and the actual mechanics of why were left behind the more pressing question of what would make it stop?

By week eight, and us newbies were coming under pressure to buy our uniforms – the white-trousered, white-jacketted sign of… insert your martial philosophy here.  Staggering home from karate, the thought crossed my mind that, while I perhaps knew now how to make a proper fist, or perform a roundhouse kick, I was so focused on the pain in my legs that the usual awareness of surroundings which we all use to defend ourselves from any danger in ordinary life, was almost entirely shot to pieces.  If someone had mugged me, I would a) have not seen them coming and b) probably been too shattered to resist.  The rational voice of willpower at the back of my mind whispered, go on, it’ll get better but as I sunk into a hot bath in my hall of residence with the muscle relaxing bubble bath up to my chin and a textbook on the Algerian War of Independence by my side, rationality met physicality, and physicality won out.  I did not buy my uniform that year, and remain very much a karate novice.

“I believe it’s important that women can defend themselves in London,” said my flatmate in the second year at LSE.  The ‘in London’ part was rather important to her – Milton Keynes, it seemed, did not have crime.  I considered this statement, and for a brief, naive moment considered suggesting to her that wandering through the city with an attitude of ‘everyone’s a mugger’ probably wasn’t a healthy state of mind to begin with, and combining this with the ability to kill someone with your thumb may not be the wisest move.  But she was a force of nature, and I’d more or less forgotten my karate pains.

“It’s called jiu jitsu,” she explained, handing me my membership card.  Well, she’d sorted out my membership too, so I guessed that meant I was on board.  Off we trotted to the gym of an evening, and here we met our new Sensei.

My poker face has never been much to write home about, but when every transgression against the sobreity of the moment is punished by ten push-ups, you quickly learn how to lock your features into a fairly neutral stance of ‘gosh, Sensei, I am very sincere’.  I learnt how to sincerely kowtow, while sincerely drawing an imaginary katana across my body in a sign of peace.  I learnt how to sincerely raise my hand on the edge of the gym mats to request access to the dojo (the back room of a fitness club in Holborn; class before ours – women’s pilates) and when told to embrace the bushido, I sincerely managed not to laugh.

Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy jiu jitsu more than karate.  I did.  This time, what we were doing and why was being explained to us, and the focus seemed on far more defensive moves than aggressive.  However, there was also a lot of learning how to tumble and wrestle, and when you’re essentially made of elbows with some bit attached – as I am – this isn’t particular easy.  Dignity goes out of the window early on anyway; trying to man-handle a six foot three, eighteen stone economics student from Austria to the floor without use of teeth, does fascinating things to your self of physical esteem.  But it was fairly clear that while my flatmate had a real talent for locks, burns and twists, I was always going to be a fairly poor jitsuka.  Never-the-less, I struggled on through to yellow belt, and gamely tumbled and twisted and fell my way to my painful reward.  ‘You have great spirit’ I was informed by the exam board, ‘even if your technique is not the best.’  It was an accolade that reminded me a little of my GCSE Art report – ‘she is very bold, if perhaps a little too determined.’  When the opportunity came to make a tactful exit from this world of bowing and wrestling, I did indeed make my escape – highly bruised, slightly blooded, and a little more dangerous than I’d been three months before.

There were, I’d decided, easier ways to maintain fitness.  And besides – I had acquired the one skill that I knew I needed more than anything other.  It wasn’t a question of how I kicked, or where I punched, or how I tumbled.  In the months of fighting what I’d found more than anything else was this: if I had to, I really would fight back; I wouldn’t panic or lock or freeze, and it’d probably be dirty and very much not in the spirit of bushido when I did.

A friend of mine runs a blog – ‘Tiny and Fierce’ which, if you ever met her, you’d realise was appropriate in every way.  She practices a martial art called krav maga which works by the very sensible philosophy of ‘do whatever works’.  When we meet, she shows me her bruises from fighting, and I show her my bruises for lighting, and occasionally she laughs.  If you want to hear thoughts on martial arts in general, and perhaps more interestingly, how they relate to women, then to her I will recommend you… just don’t let her practice on you…

http://tinyandfierce.tumblr.com/

All this said, you can probably imagine my surprise, to find myself back in a gym a few weeks ago, by mistake, I hasten to add, holding a stick in either hand, staring at the face of a girl called Amy as the two of us tried to work out whether we were parrying with strength, or merely acting as a buffer for the other’s technique.  It’s a martial art called escrima – which I’d never heard of – and it prides itself on teaching unarmed combat, stick fighting, knife fighting and, at advanced levels (so they claim) self-defense techniques with a biro and a mobile phone.  And while I suspect I don’t have the time to commit to mobile phone levels of skill, I find, to my surprise, that I am thoroughly enjoying it.  For a start, my tutors are not Sensei Senior and Senpei Junior, but Nigel and Charlie, two affable geezers who like to explain things.  There are no push-ups for punishment, or push-ups at all that I’ve met so far, and the class consists of students, the youngest of whom is 22 and the oldest of whom is well into his mid-sixties.  I haven’t had to bow, kowtow, or even put on my poker face, and when I leave the class, though I am frequently in pain, I can at least walk to the station without having to sit down and ask little old ladies if I can borrow their zimmer frame.

The only problem is, based on how junior I am at the moment, if I am attacked, do you think my attacker will give me a minute to find a suitable stick?

Continue reading »]]> Turns out, I’m a new writer.

This information comes as a bit of a surprise to me since, sure, I’m young but really, honest to god, it’s been a lot of novels.  Eleven years of writing, in fact, and – who’d have guessed – eleven novels and counting.  And while I’m completely open to giving advice on how to be a new writer, and things to look out for, and all that jazz, I am ever more surprised to find myself described as a new writer. Reasonable hack seems more plausible, in fact.

Turns out, everyone is a new writer until the age of 35.  We’re also young writers until then, by which time, so the theory goes, we will have acquired enough wisdom and artistic strife to make for decent scribblers.  My agent’s policy, in fact, is never to take a client under the age of 45 unless she can absolutely help it.  Anyone younger than this suffers from two great defects – they can’t take editorial criticism, and they don’t really have anything to say.  So the theory goes.

Depressingly, I have some time for this hypothesis.  Asked a few months ago why so many of my books were set in London, I was forced to answer, honestly, that I haven’t lived anywhere else.  This doesn’t stop me, I hasten to add, from investigating a lot of places across the globe.  I enjoy travel and adventure, and am continually scribbling away at other things (watch this space) where London isn’t such a star.  But the simple truth remains… the world is rich with things I have not seen and therefore, cannot plagiarize…  ahem, I mean… adapt…

As to whether age brings an open-minded attitude towards editorials, I’m not sure.  No writer enjoys editorials, and I suspect no one does them with a particularly good grace.  I suspect all age brings is a certain emotional maturity to cushion the blow of being informed that your towering work of genius is, in fact, a bit rubbish all things considered.  Or words to that effect.

There are some interesting quirks of being both A Young Writer and at the same time, an eleven-years-in-the-business hack.  For a start, other writers never quite know what to make of me.  Sit me down in a room of fantasy and science fiction scribblers and there’s a usually very high chance that I am a) the only female b) the only person under the age of 45 and c) have a longer backlist than my companions.  These deadly factors taken together tend to produce a ‘does not compute’ sign behind the eyes of the writers, in much the same way it can manifest a ‘no information – please panic’ look in the eyes of technicians when I tell them about my literary career.  To my surprise, I also find myself having been with my publishing company longer than most of the people there who edit me, while simultaneously being many, many years younger.  I don’t think it’s possible for a 25 year old to be an institution, but I’ll sure as hell give it a go.

This can sometimes lead to embarrassment.  Last year, I attended a very nice festival with a lot of very lovely people, where one of my duties in exchange for silly amounts of cake was to sit on a panel entitled, you guessed it, New Writing.  My fellow companions were a lovely lady who’s first novel was about to published, a very pleasant young man who’s second book had just been released, and a slightly temperamental older gentleman who’s first novel had just been released in the UK and who was advertising the fact by wearing a t-shirt showing its front cover.  (Something which, while perhaps commercially sound, I can’t help but feel was a moment of fashion shame.)  The audience answered a wide range of questions to which my main answer was… I’m sorry, I was 14 at the time and it was ten novels ago, I find it quite hard to remember… I doubt if I’ll be asked to sit on that panel again.

I suspect my age is one of the many reasons why so many people, when faced with the truth about my writing career, simply choose to ignore it.  And fair enough – it is ridiculous.  If there is any faith in the notion that I might, conceivably be telling the truth, the most immediate question is, ‘so have you had your book published yet?’ at which point the floodgates open and the whole messy story comes out.

In recent months, I’ve been dabbling with the world of play writing (long story) where once again, I am informed that I am a New Writer.  But then problems!  I’m not a nice, friendly, mouldable New Writer in search of delicate guidance and constant reassurance.  I’m a New Writer with an agent and publishing experience and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, a lighting designer’s firm attitude towards theatre of ‘don’t give me this art shit – is it groovy and does it work?’  Asked to fill out a form recently for a ‘young writer’s programme’ I found I had very little to put on it.  A whole page listing my training as a writer, and courses I had taken, had to be left blank as I have had none of these.  Another page listing my theatrical career as a writer was only two points long… and the fact of all the novels had to be included in a box entitled ‘any other information’.  It turns out, I fall into no easy categories.  I’m not old enough to be Established but too experienced to be Young.  I’m not ridiculously successful but then neither has my career been a complete cock-up, and the trend seems to be in a reasonable direction.  I’m not a one-hit wonder, nor any sort of wonder at all; neither am I artistically tortured, living hand-to-mouth purely as a writer, spending six months of every year writing and six in a fume of impoverished creative torment.  I work in theatre when I’m not writing, because I love it and because, let’s face it, writers ought to get out of the house sometimes.  Surely this, more than anything else, is how we get past being both Young and New, and become something better?

Continue reading »]]> I am very grateful for my anonymity.

I’m aware that there have been plenty of books, which are read by lots of people (hurrah!) in a wide and occasionally surprising number of places (huzzah!) but, and this is a key and groovy thing for me… I’m not there while that happens.  Indeed, on the rare occasions I see people reading my works in public, I tend to do a comic double-take followed by a quick scarper from the scene trying not to giggle.

Like all writers, my publisher knows that I long for praise and hand-holding and to be told that the words on the page are actually okay, but also like most writers the idea of ever being identified for what I am, by strangers, is a little horrifying.  Somehow the connection between my writing the words and Actual People reading them… remains a largely disassociated concept in my brain and this, I think, can only be a good thing.  I know there are photos of me out there on the web… but a photo is only a single frozen moment; usually a cheesy one, or an image of being intimidated by a camera, which I definitely am.  A photo doesn’t capture the moment of waiting-at-the-bus-stop me or the getting-angry-at-the-post-office me and so I’m protected as much by being out of context as by the sheer implausibility of a random stranger having memorised my features from google images.

People desire praise, or at the very least appreciation, regardless of what they do.  Different people want praise for different things… an average cook who has tried very hard to make a special meal; an elevator engineer who got the system to work again after only 8 hours stuck on the bottom floor, and wants others to appreciate how hard it was; even your local roadsweeper who hopes you realise that this mess isn’t tidying up itself.  With writers the need for appreciation can often be enhanced by how hard it is to come by.  The financial rewards are minimal, which is one fairly standard indicator of success ticked off the list; editors are busy and your readership are divided from you by that self-same barrier of disassociation that I’m often so grateful for.  Even technicians want praise and appreciation – but as our work is often so specialist, we tend to only get it from our colleagues who remain the only ones who can understand why what you did with that D.C. power supply was really so damn smart.

So yes, praise and appreciation… it’s a natural human instinct and something I personally have no problem providing for others who have merited it, or even who just need it to be okay after a difficult day.  But then there’s fame.  Or perhaps more precisely – there’s celebrity.  And this is where I begin to struggle.

As a lampie, I spend a lot of time watching actors.  See them come off stage after a successful performance, and you could well believe that they had walked on the moon, the emotions are so high.  And it’s easy to understand why – they aren’t just receiving appreciation, they’re receiving it from total strangers.  People with nothing invested in admiring their work, have never-the-less taken this opportunity to rise to their feet and applaud, stranger-to-stranger.  It’s the ultimate accolade and it’s very easy to see why it’s a heady drink.

Actors who haven’t quite yet made it  – and this includes the vast majority of all actors everywhere, sad to say, who all know that they may yet make it even though they haven’t quite yet – tend to deny that they want success for the fame and the glory.  Gimme cash, they reply.  But in an industry where success is, by very definition, being identified and appreciated by a huge wealth of strangers, claims that the adoration of the masses is a burden rather than a temptation can fall a little hollow. Which isn’t to say that the majority don’t do it for the love of the work itself; they do – but let’s not disassociate praise from success here.

Then, of course, there’s a huge supply of people who seek adoration without necessarily having any qualities at all by which it can be obtained.  I was genuinely horrified when I heard how many people applied for the RADA acting course and worse!  How many put as their reason for learning to act, ‘so I can be famous’.  When did this become a goal in and of itself?  If fame must happen, then surely dear god it should happen for a damn good reason – for a remarkable talent or an amazing achievement – rather than because the need to be praised is especially strong.  I get genuinely angry when I hear talk of ‘celebrities’ whose only qualification for the interest expressed in them by the world is that they want it really, really badly.

And finally there’s the downsides.  With so many celebrities popping up for such flimsy reasons, society has almost swung full circle and now there is a serious danger that Joe, who was praised last week, will this week be condemned and his life picked apart by an angry crowd who have suddenly realised that the object of their adoration wasn’t really worth it.  Fame now become voyeurism, and the only sensible – if far too rarely chosen option – seems to be to run away as fast as you can.

There’s also Scary Fame, and occasionally even I can feel mildly sorry for those few individuals who have genuinely acquired Scary Fame through talent and gripe and who, as a result, will find knickers being proffered to them by unlikely strangers for implausible purposes.  I say ‘Scary Fame’ partially because the emphatic capitals kinda make sense, but also because it can be genuinely intimidating.

The one time I had to talk to a Scary Famous actor, I did so for two reasons.  1.  I was mildly curious and he seemed vaguely affable.  2.  He was consistently failing to find his light, owing to shocking inconsistency in where he went on stage.  Motive 1. wasn’t really going to swing it for me by itself, because I’m not particularly good at talking to strangers, but motive 2. was becoming such a problem that the whole lighting department was getting genuinely angry about it.  As possibly the most junior member of the department, and arguably the least fussed, I wasn’t really candidate material for the ‘can you please stand still so we can light you’ conversation – but none of my colleagues seemed willing to give it a go.  When I finally mustered the guts to go up and ask the actor to behave himself, please, he fairly enough asked why it had taken so long for us to tell him this.

“We’re intimidated,” was the answer that came naturally to my lips, and even as I said it I realised it was probably true.  Why?  The very idea seemed ridiculous – intimidated of a vaguely ginger guy who couldn’t find his light and or tell his DMX from his MIDI?  Sure, he’s a good actor but I’ve met good teachers, and good doctors, and good writers whose work I have admired and respected and with whom I have had no problems whatsoever in striking a conversation.  And damnit, it seemed even more absurd that I was intimidated, considering that I’d been force-feeding Stephen King ice from a bucket by the age of 3 (long story) and knew perfectly well that the authorial aspect of my life could cause surprise and consternation, were it to be revealed.  What was it about fame that changed things?  I wanted absolutely nothing from this man other than he stood two steps further downstage so we could light him.  I was vaguely curious as to how he’d respond to this request, but then I was also vaguely curious as to the story of the man behind the bar who appeared to have votive Buddhist tattoos up his right arm, so that interest is pretty generic.  Perhaps it was the praise of so many others – at the point where strangers are willing to offer their time, their interest, their adoration and quite possibly their clothing up to this rather random individual, starting a conversation with anything less than a high-stakes opener seems a little frail.  There is a sense that, in terms of our social expectations, those who have Scary Fame are functioning in a world so far removed from what the rest of us understand that bridging the gap is in itself, a complex diplomatic procedure, and one I wasn’t really revved for.

“Why don’t people just talk to me?” offered Scary Famous Man.

I made feeble noises.  Eleven novels in – more than a million words behind me and a few award nominations to boot – and I settled for default neutral sounds.  My ‘ah’ was on top form.

A minor conversation therein followed about the difficulties of talking to people.  I suggested that being a female graduate of the London School of Economics didn’t necessarily give you the right tone to be a lighting technician.  I found myself using ‘mate’ I explained, despite plainly being what I was – a graduate of a posh girls school in West London who’d gone on to study the Ottoman Empire before discovering that Lights Are Cool.  It was just a form of social blending.

“I hate that,” exclaimed Scary Fame.  “I hate it when people are all like ‘yeah, yeah, mate, how you doin’?’ when they’re actually posh.  Just be yourself!”

I may have fallen back on more neutral sounds at this juncture.  I was, after all, guilty of this sin already…

Three days later, I was doing my pre-show checks and there was Scary Fame, warming up on stage.

“Hey, mate, you okay?” asked one of the stage hands.

“Yeah, yeah, mate, grand,” came the reply.  “How you doin’?”

I managed to make it into a backstage corridor for laughing out loud.  For all of Scary Fame’s exclamations to the contrary, it seemed that even he, despite the adoration, praise and appreciation, still needed another kind of belonging… and suddenly it was far harder to be intimidated in any way at all.

Continue reading »]]> “The wages of sin are death!” my grandfather would wail, on those rare occasions when he came down with a disease.

“Mensch, wir haben gelitten,” concurred my father from the darkened bedroom where he would lie, whimpering with surprising volume, during those rare days of his confinement.

“What’s the point of being ill,” he’d further add, when he felt able to engage in conversation, “If you don’t let everyone know about it?”

Sat with my head in a bucket at 4 a.m. this morning, I was actually rather grateful that no one knew what was going on in my bathroom.  It just doesn’t seem kind or humane to inflict this on anyone else, even a casual observer.  And worse  – when I finally recovered enough self-awareness to phone my ex-boyfriend at eleven o’clock this morning, to demand sympathy, I was a little embarrassed to learn that he too had been diseased not 24 hours ago, and had he felt the urge to phone me and wail down the phone?  Not so much…

Suffering in silence is all very well, but I can see myself going mad very easily in these present circumstances.  Even if the thought of eating anything at all didn’t horrify me, the house is bare, quiet and still.  Laundry that needs laundering sits reprovingly in the basket and I would do something about it but every joint in my body aches like it’s just climbed Everest in a pair of flip flops.  Total apathy, mixed with the desire to watch ridiculous amounts of TV, overwhelm the otherwise sound and sensible desire to sit up, stand straight and Get On With Things, damnit.  What I really need right now, is someone to a) provide me with toast and marmite and b) instill the sense that, while it seems right now that there really is no horizon, and the wages of sin quite possibly are death, somehow it’ll be alright really.

Until that moment, I suspect that today is going to be a teddy-hugging, hot-water-bottle-filling, dressing-gown kinda write-off.  Which wasn’t the plan at all.

Continue reading »]]> We’re often told that you have to respect people’s opinions.

Your culture is not my culture; your ways are not my ways, but I can see why you have adopted them and I respect your right to chose to behave in x or y manner – so the mantra goes.  And it’s a good one – in fact, respect and tolerance are probably two of the most important features of any functional society.  So I, as a fairly ardent atheist, will try my best to respect the faith of my peers.  Not because I believe in god, nor because I have much time or sympathy for many of the social institutions that have sprung out of faith in god, but because nine times out of ten a belief in god causes no harm to others and much good to those who have it and so really, why the hell should I kick up a fuss based on my own belief set?  If some women chose to wear a veil, that is their choice; if others regard the condom as evil well then okay, fine, you’re entitled to that belief so long as you don’t go around telling me that condom use has no effect on the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases.  I will tolerate pretty much anything, so long as it does no harm and has been freely chosen by those who practice the belief.

Then sometimes something comes along like this…

http://conservapedia.com

… and I’m afraid my best efforts at respect and toleration suddenly break down.  Founded as a conservative response to wikipedia, that well-known den of athiests, liberals, agnostics and slander-mongerers, most of whom are, it hastens to add, unemployed youths in a manner which does somewhat remind me of large swathes of the graduate population of the UK at the moment – conservapedia brands itself as ‘an encyclopedia you can trust’ and in its own, quiet and well-footnoted ways, sets out an agenda that horrifies me.  I was introduced to it by a gentleman who we’ll call Gandalf, who was himself rather surprised to discover that he is a proponent of the homosexual agenda, which seeks to reduce the freedom of speech of its opposition, distort Biblical teaching and oppose hate crimes, which are themselves merely a ‘liberal invention’.  Astonishment was my main reaction, until I finally read a conservapedia article on feminism and was myself amazed to discover that I, as a casual feminist in the sense that I still don’t think we’ve quite nailed equality entirely but we’re really getting there, manifest the following qualities (sourced from http://conservapedia.com/Feminism):

• never wanted gender equality; they want power for the female left^[4]
• in movies, falsely portray the men as inherently evil, dumb or incompetent, and the women as inherently good, smart or competent (note that this conflicts with gender equality)
• pretend that there are no meaningful differences between men and women when that advances liberal causes (e.g., women and men equally in military combat, to weaken the U.S. military), but reject equality when that results in more money to women (e.g., VAWA funding of women’s groups)
• oppose chivalry and even feign insult at harmless displays of it (see battle between the sexes)
• view traditional marriage as unacceptably patriarchal
• belittle and mock other women who desire to have children or raise a family^[5][6]
• shirk traditional gender activities, like baking^[7]
• support affirmative action for women
• prefer that women wear pants rather than dresses, presumably because men do^[8][9]
• seek women in combat in the military just like men, and coed submarines
• refuse to take her husband’s last name when marrying^[10]
• believe marriage implies female servitude when it is in fact a mutual bond
• distort historical focus onto female figures, often overshadowing important events (Eg: Henry VIII’s wives take precedence in common knowledge to his actual reign.)
• object to being addressed as “ma’am,” or feminine nicknames such as “sweetheart” or “honey”;^[11] object to other female-only names, such as “temptress”
• take offense at grammatical rules of the English language, like using the pronoun “he” when referring to a hypothetical/anonymous person, or phrases like ‘fireman’ and ‘stewardess.’
• support of the homosexual agenda

Forgive my insertion of the entire list here, but as each point is so astonishing to me I really couldn’t find any material to trim.  Tolerate the beliefs of other, I say to myself, tolerate and understand, but then this… this is not merely nonsense, it is harmful nonsense.  Worse, it is nonsense to which there is no arguing.  Reason and rationality seem to have no place here; polite discourse is overwhelmed by words that have no particular meaning – feminist, liberal, socialist, agenda – as if these twisted concepts are enough to reject learning, debate, discourse and study.  It genuinely distresses me to think, not so much that there are people out there who believe in the value of baking over equality between the sexes, but that there is no room for disagreement.  That an ideology can be so solidly set that there is no hope for reply.  I will strive to tolerate the beliefs of others, and open my mind to the possibility that my own beliefs may be flawed, but how can I accept the views of those who seem to have rejected toleration themselves?  How do you argue without reason, how can you prove a point when your evidence will be dismissed as biased and there an end?  Another example – arguably less harmful but oddly more extreme – came when accidentally stumbling on the flat earth society.  I’d heard of this organisation, but never actually thought it existed and yet here it is…

http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

… and not only is it real, but it makes well-thought through arguments against which there is no reply.  And why is there no reply?  Because the evidence that people like myself use to argue against there being a flat earth are the product a conspiracy, run in the main by NASA.  I have been brainwashed.  I am, myself, unfit to debate the point because I do not appreciate how far my knowledge, mind and thoughts have been corrupted by the liberal society in which I have been raised.  Thus not only are my arguments dismissed, but I myself am dismissed as a worthwhile individual to have a conversation with, and so the madness continues.  Thus, a question in the flat earth forum…

Q: “NASA and other world space agencies have pictures of the Earth from space, and in those pictures the Earth is clearly a globe; in this day and age, hasn’t it been proven beyond any doubt that the Earth is round?”

… receives the following answer:

A: NASA and the rest of the world’s space agencies who claim to have been to space are involved in a Conspiracy to keep the shape of the Earth hidden.  The pictures are faked using simple imaging software.

Beneath it a footnote points out that…

PLEASE NOTE: This means that pictures confirming the roundness or flatness of the Earth DO NOT CONSTITUTE VALID PROOF.

And thus the argument is ended before it began.  Science is rejected; Conspiracies with capital ‘c’s are embraced.  Those who disagree are categorised as part of this or that agenda, or slaves to this or that incorrect ideology.  Debate is sabotage; dissent is conflict.  And worse than all of this – not merely is the information being put through unfounded, flawed, mis-represented or just plain wrong – but the manner of its delivery teachers its readers to close their minds down, and accept only one ultimate truth, rejecting not merely the arguments of the world around them, but also the people who disagree.  And this I do not, nor cannot condone, understand or forgive.

Continue reading »]]> Dull dull dull.

I mean obviously, not dull.  I’m doing copy edits on Urban Magic 4 (the Minority Council) and am mildly relieved to discover that the book itself, is not dull.  There’s a lot of stuff happening, and Swift is definitely having a bad day and things keep cropping up that have a definite feeling of Narrative Significance Which May Be Important Later and villains are holding parties and parts of the East End are being filled with monstrosities and Willesden Junction has never had such adventurous goings on within it boundaries…

… so when I say dull, please don’t think I mean the book.

Oh no.

I mean the editing of the book.

There’s three stages to all editorial processes.  The first is your proper editor – the publisher, if you will – writing a lovingly worded email that essentially goes like this:

Dear Kate,

I really really loved the book.  It was amazing.  I loved x, y and z and thought you really captured a, b and c.

I was just wondering, however, if you thought that the appearance of the singing pink elephant on page 42 really helped with the cyber-punk feeling.  I know how brilliantly you do techno-edgy death, so I was surprised by the sudden lapse into jazz-based animal pornography around this point.  Do you think 50 pages is a little too much sex and trombones?

But really, really loved it overall, a great effort, absolutely brilliant, maybe change the plot, characters and narrative please.

Love and Kisses,

Your Editor.

This first stage is often the most painful in the sense that the sex-crazed, trombone-playing, pink-elephant in question may in fact be, to you as the writer, the most poetic thing you’ve ever written ever and that it doesn’t quite conform to the theme of your latest work – ‘Darth Techno Death 5′ – is, you feel, a rather petty publishing concern.  But 9/10 the editor has a fairly valid point and your job as an author is to seethe, curse, twitch and eventually, comply unless what’s been suggested is really, really stupid.  (So far I haven’t had to worry about this latter problem.)

The next stage – the one I’m currently at – is copy edits.  This is a more fine-toothed comb editorial stage where a freelance copy editor goes through line by line looking for missing words, spelling mistakes, odd accidents in punctuation and throw-away errors which your chief editor was really rather too busy to handle.  And by now you, as the author, have probably read the book some 4-5 times (maybe more, I’m just drawing from my own average) and you’ve got the gist.  Because the edit is in finer detail there are a lot more comments and by page 45 you’re beginning to feel, if not a little tired, then perhaps a little inadequate for just how many times you’ve mis-used a semi-colon, or failed to spell ‘dissent’ with the right number of ‘s’s.  There’s also that lingering little question – is this cock-up in this sentence really me?  Was I that tired when I wrote this appalling muddled paragraph?  Good god, but was my imagery so feeble at this moment?  And so on.

And while the text itself remains exciting (oh yes!) the process of making sure that the comma is italicised in an italicised sentence and that the Neighbourhood Eye has capital letters all the way through, because it deserves them, fairly quickly becomes a head-bang-against-wall experience.

Finally there’s proofs.  I love/hate proofs.  They’re the final stage, the final text laid out as it will be in the book.  In many ways, it’s the finest of all editorial layers.  You’re looking almost entirely at grammar and layout now, and word changes are very few and far between.  Like most things, I learnt how to proof-read from my Mum, who proudly claimed that she could spot a Garamond full stop in a Times New Roman sentence.  There’s a lot of looking for dodgy line joins too.  As the book has been laid out for the proofs, some words have been split, and a fairish chunk of the proof read is making sure that you don’t have any odd splits in words.  ‘Legend’ is my personal favourite, very-often split across a line to become the rather less fantastical ‘leg-end’.  To all those technicians who have been confused as to why I address them as leg ends, here is your answer.

So this is what I am doing this month, as well as finishing Urban Magic 5.  (Another title-stumper.  Oh dear but I’m not very good at titles.)  Deep breath… sharp pencil… prepare to slaughter those rogue commas, please…

Continue reading »]]> I very rarely blog about productions I’ve worked on.  I mean, I blog about the working, because it ranges from the exhausting to the occasionally comical, but you may have noticed, dear reader, that I very rarely mention the job itself by name, unless I think it’s truly stonking.

I also rarely invite people to come see my work.  As a lighting designer I’ve done a lot of shows where I’ve thought the lighting was quite nice, but not many people want to see a ‘quite nice’ use of backlighting.  Productions only work when every aspect is ticking along at the maximum – sound, lights, staging, direction, acting, design – if even one of these elements is dodgy then I tend to put my hands up and say ‘well, at least my part is alright’ and back away.  It’s a surprisingly hard thing ticking all these points at once, and I have yet to work on a single show where there wasn’t some weak element, even if that weakness is heavily disguised or happens only in the wings.

Therefore it’s with a sense of novelty that you find me turning round and saying… Tinderbox, by Lucy Kirkwood, in the Broadway Studios, Tooting, is a damn fine production that I’m really proud to have worked on.  The acting is superb, the design is stunning, the direction is sharp and clean, the sound is excellent and the lighting is… not too shoddy all things considered.

And there’s been a lot of things to consider, I hasten to add.

Tinderbox has been the reason why my blogging has been so scatty the last month or so.  It’s a ‘site specific’ project which is code for taking a venue entirely unsuitable for theatrical use, and turning it into a theatre.  It’s a massive challenge for anyone and as the lighting designer, I’ve spent as much time banging my head against the wall as actually calling up channels on a control desk.  There’s no power to speak of in the venue, and every second of every minute I spent in the space, I had a calculator in my pocket and would wonder with each increment of a fade, whether this would be The Watt Too Far.  There’s no infrastructure, no where to put lights, and a very tight budget to get the structure that you need.  Essentially, to make a site-specific project work, you have to build your space from the ground upwards, and when you’re a lighting crew of one, this is not particularly easy.

On the other hand, the venue we’re working in is scheduled for demolition so, whenever faced with any insurmountable problems of wiring or cabling or getting data to a rogue lamp, a cheerful cry of ‘knock a hole in it!’ would usually be raised by producers and designer.  “I get to do whatever I want!” the designer, Katie, exclaimed, gleefully waving a drill in one hand and glue gun in the other.  And she has done, essentially, whatever she wanted.  The space has been transformed and the set is, I genuinely think, a triumph. This is not the first time I’ve worked with Katie, and over the years our relationship has become as much about cake as art.  I can show you the link to some of her art…

http://www.katielias.com/#

… but not, alas, to any of her cakes.

While less cake-orientated than perhaps you might have hoped, the director was truly excellent throughout, although I don’t know if he has noticed his own habit of holding his head in his hands while trying to convince you that It’ll Be Alright, or if he realises just how much of the play he mouths along to during runs.  The acting company are absolutely brilliant, not a single weak link in the chain, and while I, as LD, can see all the problems with the lighting in that space, the more I look at it, the prouder I am of what we did achieve with our time, budget and resources.

So if you are in Tooting, and feel like an unlikely night out in an unusual place, then I heartily recommend Tinderbox.  I may even see you there…

http://www.tootingartsclub.co.uk/

A press night card that made me smile...

Continue reading »]]> Ah, lunch with your editor – that time honoured tradition.  Starve yourself for three days in advance, drink nothing but mineral water in the run-up, and then, when you’re actually in the restaurant, order lobster.  That is the sacred tradition as passed down from mother to daughter through my family and, I suspect, through all connections of all literary folk everywhere.

My father, after 35 years in publishing, now boasts a paunch which he himself describes two ways – firstly, as a hazard to shipping, which I’d say is fair enough, and secondly as an industrial injury from 35 years of expense-account fuelled wining and dining with authors.

The problem, he’d often say, is that the authors you most like dining with, tend not to be the ones who demand the greatest attention.  Bestsellers have to be kept buttered up, and there is a temptation among the truly successful scribblers of this world to order the most expensive meal on the menu, not because they particularly enjoy it, but because ‘they’ve earnt it’.  Lunch, you see, is a sign of respect in a profession where actually, it can be quite hard to work out if you’re appreciated or not.  Sure, you get occasional sales figures, but does these incomprehensible forests of numbers really mean anything to anyone other than the accounts department?  You might get fan mail (and huge thanks to anyone who has ever boosted my ego in this regard) and immediately the soul is lifted with a sense that your job truly is worthwhile – but generally the writer’s life is a rather lonely one, spent sat in front of a keyboard day after day wondering ‘is it good enough?’  The time-honoured tradition of a publisher’s lunch is the moment in which your editor sits down, looks across the (preferably candle-lit) table, perhaps lays a single, clammy paw onto yours and whispers, ‘You’re worth it’.

For my part, I both love and dread the publishing lunch.  I love it because my instinct, even after all these years of being a graduate (well, I say that – after one year of being a graduate) is never to turn down free food.  I love it because often enough this is an excuse to sit down with people who are every bit as nerdy as I am, and flap and get excited about mutual interests.  The last time I had lunch with my agent, I was a little bit giddy having just donated blood on the hottest day of the year and, having sat up a little too fast, immediately fainted again.  (I hasten to add, I have never fainted before in my life and, did I mention, the hottest day of the year?)  My agent shuffled me across the street from the donor centre, sat me down in the coolest, darkest place she could find, and plied me with tapas while I waffled inanely about things to write and the pretty pictures in my head, and she took scarily immaculate notes with a silver pencil and updated me on the adventures of her cat.  What my Mum would describe as a ‘high level exchange of business intelligence’ is, usually, an excuse to catch up on what TV we’ve watched and how much we both want holidays.

There are, however, a few downsides of lunch.  Because I don’t very often see my editors, whenever I am contacted by them with the suggestion ‘let’s meet’, especially if this immediately follows a book submission, the suspicion dawns behind my mind that this is it.  This is the polite let-down meal, the kindly sorry-not-for-us dish of humous, the ever-so-friendly ‘I can see what you’re trying to achieve but I don’t think it quite works’ and so the sacred institution of being hand-held and told how important I am becomes a little bit tarnished by the overwhelming concern that commercial reality might impinge on an otherwise entirely pleasant meal.

I am also, to my Dad’s great disappointment, a failure in terms of my authorial responsibilities.  The one time I tried lobster (cautiously, in Canada) I wasn’t particularly impressed.  I tend not to have room for a starter, and a main course, and a pudding, and being annoyingly tee-total I’m unable to casually order the most expensive drink on the menu.  In fact… I like Thai food, let’s face it, and while I’m sure there are posh Thai restaurants in London, my favourite ever restaurant has a handy £7 lunch menu for two courses and really, I don’t need that much choice because all Thai food is amazing Thai food so really, all things considered, I’m letting down the side a bit.

All that said… I am writing this entry with about four and a half hours to go before I do indeed have Lunch With My Editor.  This is the first time I’ve ever had lunch, in fact, with this particular editor, and while she seems lovely in every respect I am aware that this is a unique opportunity to paint myself as the demanding, tyrannical, monstrous wannabe-bestseller that every author nurtures deep down within their soul.  The question is… can I make it to lunch without having any breakfast?