Matt Bruce

Book Review: Danger Close by Stuart Tootal

2010-06-12T15:27:32Z

I’ve been quiet of late doing, among other things, the one thing that all accomplished authors I’ve encountered recommend of all aspiring authors: reading books. The upside is that I get to work through my mountain of unread books; the downside is that it means my creative output is reduced (well, I think it’s a downside). My reading tastes are probably as eclectic as my music tastes, as I figure there’s a vast world out there and there’s lots to experience and discover. I’m also convinced that the most interesting people are those who have experienced and read widely. A unitopical boor is easy to come by, but a polymath is a rare joy.

As part of my polymathic aspirations and the desire to inspire, I thought I would begin sharing the occasional book review. They probably won’t be news to those who are familiar with my Goodreads profile or occasional Amazon review, but I do hope that you enjoy them.

Today’s review is a modern war memoir recommended by a friend and a British Army officer. There may be a few such memoirs that end up reviewed here, but that is probably because he’s lent me some books and I don’t want to have them on my shelf collecting dust.

Danger Close: The True Story of Helmand from the Leader of 3 PARA by Colonel Stuart Tootal DSO

Review by Matt Bruce, 12 June 2010

This memoir from the commander of 3 PARA, the 3rd Battalion of The Parachute Regiment, details his experiences in Afghanistan during their tour of duty there in 2006, and their eventual return to the UK and his subsequent promotion up and away from 3 PARA. You may remember the author’s name from newspapers in 2007, as he resigned from the Army in response to the mistreatment of soldiers. This book is that story, but conveyed with pride of a job well done, not self-pity.

Unlike most war memoirs, this is written by not only an officer, but the battalion commander. As such, it gives both low level experiences that you would get from an on-the-ground soldier — such as that found in Sniper One — and the higher level picture of trying to do the right thing by your men while dealing with the politics and cost-cutting from above. It’s an unenviable task, clearly executed brilliantly, and written in a very engaging style.

The final chapter, “Fighting the Peace,” is the incredibly moving story of the return of 3 PARA to the UK, particularly the MOD’s treatment of the injured (now that the MOD shares existing NHS facilities rather than using dedicated military hospitals), and fighting to ensure that soldiers who have been disabled or mutilated in the service of their country aren’t just kicked out of the Army. Lastly, and perhaps more amazingly, although we have been aware of post-traumatic stress disorder for decades now, the chapter outlines that the facilities and procedures in place for dealing with it are laughable at best. If even half of it is accurate, it makes me ashamed to think that my votes and taxes are used to treat these people so badly.

In closing, it is worth mentioning that the book’s epilogue states that a number of situations and problems described in it and various newspapers have been, or are being, rectified.

This review can also be found on Goodreads and Amazon UK.

It’s the Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

2010-03-08T23:19:13Z

If you’re a fan of films or write your own screenplays (or want to), you’re going to enjoy this:

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

As with anything that plays on the formulae of scripts and stories, you can probably spot a dozen or more films to which just this few minutes of trailer could apply.

Actually, that may be a good exercise: go ahead and name all the films you can spot in this trailer.

I’ll start with the two most obvious: Rain Man and There’s Something About Mary.

Hat tip to Colleen Lindsay.

February submissions & rejections

2010-03-08T23:27:35Z

Thought I might add a little something to make myself accountable as a writer in the form of a periodic listing of submissions and their results (acceptances, rejections, etc). It should be a fairly short regular posting as many publications, at least those who even do them, take months to provide a response.

So here’s what I’ve done in the last month:

Submissions & Queries

31 January: The First Line (literary)
16 February: The Binnacle; The Bitter Oleander (both literary)
17 February: Boulevard; Confrontations; Glimmer Train (all literary)
18 February: Take a Break (women’s tabloid); Australian Woman’s Day (women’s general interest)

Rejections

16 February: The First Line
22 February: Take a Break

I’ve provided the names of the publications here to give writers of any level an idea of what’s out there. Your favourite search engine or one of the major market indices — such as Writer’s Market (Amazon|AmazonUK) and Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook (Amazon|AmazonUK) — will give you their submission guidelines and contact information.

Remember that — just as the Lotto catch-phrase says you’ve gotta to be in it to win it — you’re never going to get published unless you can submit your work and risk rejection. Acceptances are feathers in your cap showing you’re doing something right, whereas rejections are a good excuse to give that piece another polish using your increased skills and knowledge.

So… how many works have you submitted recently?

Writing group annual dinner

2010-02-18T00:25:50Z

Last night was my new writing group’s annual dinner, and roughly three-quarters of the membership turned up, some with partners. It took place at a local “pub grub” chain pub where the building was nice, the food was nice and the service was… let’s just say that basic arithmetic induces terror in modern serving staff*.

Due to the unusual seating setup, I ended up seated by the secretary and his partner and was pretty much within shouting distance of two other people, so it made most of the evening a relatively close-knit chat. Though some of the people began moving around and chatting after the main course, so I got to chat with a few other people, too, and it was in general a lovely night.

If you are new to a writing group, or you have somehow not managed to attend your group’s annual dinner (or similar), I highly recommend you make the effort. If nothing else, you have a nice meal, a few drinks and the chance to socialise with people you have a great deal in common with… even if some of them write in genres that you don’t like or couldn’t imagine writing. The depth and breadth of the genres in my group is breathtaking, and I find each of them fascinating as I get to know the people who write in them.

If you’re a writer (or wannabe writer) and you’re still flying solo: join a writing group. It will broaden your horizons, expand your social circle, teach you a great deal about writing and how to read, and will provide opportunities that sitting at home are much less likely to do.

—–
* They wouldn’t let us pay individually, as there were thirty of us. They wouldn’t let us pay as a group, as the group’s official cheque book was a business-type account without a guarantee card. In the end we did manage to convince them to let us pay by tables, of which there were three. Then began the inevitable ‘But I only had the lentils!’ bean-counting common to groups the world over. When I’m King Of The World, it will become law that all group meals will be totalled up and divided evenly between everyone who participated in the meal. Seemples.

Tuesday birthday haiku

2010-02-16T11:32:32Z

Another year past,
another solar orbit.
Time flies, doesn’t it?

My birthday sure came around quickly this year. It seems only a week or two ago that I was digging my driveway out of the snow so that I could head off to Christmas Day festivities, a month or so before that it was Easter, and then a few weeks prior to that it was my previous birthday. Tempus does indeed fugit…

In your pre-teens time takes an eternity, often measured by the arrivals of birthdays, summer holidays, Easter and Christmas. Then you hit your teens and things are then measured (at least where I grew up) by notable birthdays — 13 (teenager!), 15/16 (age of consent), 17 (driving licence) and 18 (drinking age). Aside from the round numbers of 20 and 25, and the more traditional and now meaningless “coming of age” 21st birthday, in your twenties you notice that these events start to speed up. I’m now officially in my “late thirties” and they’re getting even faster. But there’s hope once you get into your forties, fifties and beyond. No, wait… I got that wrong. There isn’t. It just gets faster still, so I’m told.

But it’s not all bad. Growing old is a privilege that most of humanity doesn’t get — even in this day and age. I also like to reflect that those who have achieved mighty things had exactly the same hours in each of their days as I have in mine. If anything, we have more leisure time available than any of the generations who have gone before us. Most of us get Saturday off for a start, saying nothing of not having to forage for food or shelter, and living twice as long with better quality lives than people even a century ago. And while it’s a far cry from the futuristic computer utopia we were promised in the 1970s — that computers would reduce our working days to 4 hours or less with the same productivity and pay — the reality is that we’re required to get more done in the same amount of time simply because we can.

The plus side to this is that we can achieve more in each of those days than ever before — the trick is to make what you’re doing meaningful, if and where you can. And that’s exactly why I’m writing and working on building a career as a writer.

While exactly how I achieve that is still slightly nebulous (to use classic British understatement), I am working on creating a short story each week and submitting it to publishers, building my technical skills as a writer (not that you’d see it in this long and winding, self-indulgent ramble of a post), testing out how social networking can complement my activities, building a network of contacts and going to conferences. If nothing else, it’s a fascinating journey that I’ve just begun, and I’m enjoying all of it.

I received an excellent birthday present from the Open University last night: the results of the writing course I’ve recently completed. It’s a result with which I’m extremely pleased, and the tutor’s marking and personal comments are extremely encouraging. The tutor is also encouraging me to turn the piece I wrote for the assessment into a full book, so I suppose that’s high praise? She’s also encouraging me to take the next level creative writing course, which is the natural progression of this creative writing stream. It’s a year-long course costing over £600 and will require 600 hours of study (around 19 hours per week), so it’s not something I’m going to do without serious consideration. But I am serious considering it, and have until late Summer to decide.

Kindle 2 and I just had our first argument

2010-07-08T09:22:35Z

Flickr CC-BY timspalding

Last night I tried to use my Amazon Kindle 2 for the first time in a week or so, but took it out of the case in which I keep it to discover a dreaded new screen with the bold title: Critical Battery.

It said to charge it for a few minutes before I could use it and, as the Kindle only comes with a US mains charger, I use my iPhone’s mains-to-USB adapter to charge it beside the bed. Because the iPhone takes us back to mid-1990s in terms of battery life, I charge that every night and neglected the Kindle while I’ve been reading a couple of dead-tree books. So I put the Kindle on charge for 15 minutes then, when it still wouldn’t do anything, I left it to charge overnight and went back to reading the paperback version of Ernest Hemingway’s remarkable A Farewell to Arms (Amazon|Kindle|AmazonUK).

First thing this morning I discovered that the charging light had gone off sometime overnight (it’s supposed to go from amber while charging to green when fully charged). I did a few online searches and discovered various ways to kick it back to life, but none of them worked. One of the recommendations was to plug it into a computer USB slot and when I did this the USB drive connection came up straight away. A few minutes later the screen flashed a few times, I gave it a few more minutes, unplugged it, held the power switch for 15 seconds and released, then held the Home switch for 15 seconds. Presto fixo!

I’ve since been reading up on why I got such appalling battery life while the unit was switched off. (Manuals, pfft!) Sliding and releasing the power switch only puts the unit into Sleep mode, and it will still connect periodically via 3G to download any subscriptions, update page locations, bookmarks, etc.

To switch the device Off (as in for it not to consume any power), with the device still On you need to slide and hold the power switch until the screen goes blank.

Everything I’ve read indicates that this will maximise battery life while the device is not in use. And, unless you’re one of those people who have daily newspaper subscriptions or have multiple devices that you sync between regularly, who needs to have it synchronising while you’re asleep? It will do that anyway once you switch it back on next time, and will take all of about 15 seconds.

To maximise battery life while you’re using the device, disable the wireless (Menu > Turn Wireless Off). You can always enable it periodically to do a sync. This will give you a few weeks battery life when used with other battery-saving settings (small font to minimise page turning, not using the Kindle Store via the device, etc).

I very much like my Kindle 2 and, while it’s not perfect, it is another step towards an interesting future for publishing.

Update (7 April 2010): Since writing this article almost eight weeks ago — after which I switched the wireless off unless I was actually downloading content via wireless or USB (which I did 3-4 times) and switched the device Off (as above) when not in use — I have been using the Kindle almost daily and haven’t had to charge it. The battery meter was gradually decreasing from 100% and got down to about 70% full until last night when it gave me a Battery Low popup, then five minutes later gave me the dreaded Critical Battery screen. I plugged it into the mains charger that came with it (via a US-to-UK plug adapter) and it restarted happily a few minutes later, after which I left it to fully charge overnight without problems. Aside from the sudden change from 70% charged to Battery Low to Critical Battery — making the charge level indicator worthless — I’m very pleased that I got nearly eight weeks of regular use from the Kindle between charges.

Tuesday sleep deprivation haiku

2010-02-09T10:35:11Z

The weekend on-call,
risk of sleep deprivation.
Kills desire to write.

Part of my day job involves being on-call for one weekend in every 6-8 weeks to fill in the gaps between our 24-hour “follow the sun” customer model when the North American team finishes their Friday afternoon and the Asia-Pacific team starts their Monday morning. It’s easily the worst part of my job which, as far as things go in workplaces, means it’s a pretty good job.

My first week on-call saw my first call-out occur at 1:00am Saturday morning and took 3 hours to fix. The next call came in at 5:00am and took 4 hours, during which another call came in at 7:00am so had to work two emergencies concurrently. By 11:00pm Saturday evening I was beginning to panic as it was clear the calls were going to continue, many being worked in parallel, I’d had no sleep since Thursday night, and I was working at 100% workload. It continued until 6:00am Monday (before we had the Asia-Pacific team)… and I had to be in the office for 9:00am. Your mind starts to do weird things in that kind of situation, and I can honestly say that I have some idea of what sleep deprivation torture is all about. (Though such victims tend not to get paid for the experience and it’s not done by their employers).

That experience was almost five years ago and I’m pleased to say that this weekend on-call was nothing like that first one (in fact, nobody in the company has ever seen a weekend like that). But living with that possibility stifles all creativity, so this weekend was spent watching DVDs and, perversely, waiting for Monday. On the plus side, I’ve now finally seen George Romero’s Dead trilogy — which was purely for research on the zombie story I’m writing, you understand…

Now it’s Tuesday and the juices are flowing again!

Wednesday creative headspace haiku

2010-02-04T00:00:14Z

A brand new story
was writing itself tonight.
No chance of sleep now.

As I’ve probably mentioned already, I’m a huge fan of the zombie and zombie apocalypse genres, including but not limited to things like Army of Darkness, 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Dawn of the Dead, World War Z, and the Resident Evil series (Zombieland and a few others are in my LoveFilm queue). So I’ve been wanting to write a short story in the genre for a while, and I’d very much like to write a novel and/or screenplay in it eventually.

Having not done it at all before, on the way home from work this evening I put a bunch of the pieces together, came up with some great ideas and decided to give it a go. Here we are 2,100 words later (and nowhere near finished) and it’s time for me to go to bed. With all this creativity bursting out of my head, the story wants to continue writing itself. I could probably reach 8,000 or more words tonight if I just let myself go.

The problem is that I can’t — I have a day gig that pays the bills. The other problem is that with this creativity unleashed, I am going to have a hell of a time getting to sleep tonight. I mean… it’s midnight and I’m writing a new blog post, the night is cool, the heating is off, and I’m running like a fan heater.

Is there a trick to just switching off?

Sunday story submission haiku

2010-01-31T18:52:26Z

Tried new software to
write more productively, but
it ate all my work!

Tomorrow is the deadline for the Spring edition of a magazine that I’ve been interested in submitting something to for a while now, called The First Line, as mentioned in an earlier post. I nearly chose not to write something for this edition, as I’m not a big fan of writing on religious themes, but I found a way around it and decided to give it a go.

As I had all afternoon and evening available, I decided to try out a new piece of writing software I bought this weekend that’s designed to make you more productive, the desktop edition of Write Or Die! (US$10). It’s written in Adobe AIR (familiar to most Twitter users) and — along with the expected text input area and ability to save as plain text — it will give you a progress bar if you specify the number of words or the amount of time (or both) that you want to write in that session, and it has a few options that will first prod you or even punish you, if you want. Not a bad motivational tool, as you find yourself typing continually to avoid the flashing and noise, while avoiding self-editing, and it’s easy to churn out words with little effort.

Or so the theory goes. Cutting a long story short, after using it to write a story that I was quite pleased with, I saved it over a file of the same name (no big deal, the operating system should ask me if I’m sure, etc, and do it seamlessly), exited the program and opened the file in an editor to discover that the save I’d just made didn’t happen. I don’t know what went wrong, but none of it got saved: 1200 words and 45 minutes flushed away.

I was not a happy bunny at all. I’m not pointing my finger at the software, as I really don’t know what went wrong and where. It could have been the software, it could have been AIR, or it could have been me, I just don’t know. Besides, it’s not like it was a novel.

So after making a cup of tea to regain my composure, I set about to writing it again, with as much of it from memory as possible. This time I used another piece of software that I’ve been meaning to use properly for some time: OmmWriter (watch the demo video, it’s stunning). It’s currently only available for the Mac, it’s free, and it uses a Zen-like atmosphere to stop you from getting distracted. It’s a beautiful looking piece of software and does the job very well.

The story has now been fully written, imported into OpenOffice.org for formatting, edited and improved, saved as a Word document (per their submission guidelines), and submitted for their consideration. Now begins the waiting game…

Borrowing an idea from a friend’s website, here’s a bit of fun to sum up today’s writing:

Friday end of writing course haiku

2010-01-28T23:49:40Z

Writing course finished.
Time to focus on writing,
markets to conquer!

Today marks the end of the writing course I’m taking with the Open University, as the final assignment (worth 70% of overall course mark) is due. I submitted mine last night, in a rare example of beating the deadline by a mile, and now the waiting game begins. Marking may take a couple of months.

It’s a basic level 12-week online course that I decided to take in order to pick up any fundamentals that I may have missed throughout the years. It turns out that I’d missed very little, but there were a few bits here and there that were useful, it was excellent practice, it gave me a huge ego boost (the feedback on the first assignment was stunning), and it provided the ability to get the work critiqued objectively (something I now can obtain via my writing group).

The other reasons I took the course were to give me confidence in my abilities by knowing I understand the fundamentals, to be able to say that I have taken a formal creative writing course, and it acts as a good preliminary to a more intensive course of study. The natural progression from this course is Creative Writing, which is a year-long course representing around 600 hours of study and costing over £600, so is not something to be taken on lightly. Other choices include an MFA degree course or other individual courses, either with the OU or elsewhere. If I do decide to take another course sometime soon, expect I’ll mix-and-match individual OU courses with third-party courses.

While I very much want to develop my creative writing skills, I also very much want to develop scriptwriting skills — primarily screenwriting for film and television. As of October 2009, the OU seems to have completely flushed all screenwriting and playwriting courses out of their course list… including the basic level Start Writing Plays course I wanted to take. It’s possible they’re in the process of developing new courses, particularly as there are excellent private screenwriting and playwriting courses available for comparable cost, but I’ll have to wait and see.

So for now, my plans are to just get on with writing and submitting work to markets, as well as gaining a foothold in periodicals that interest me. I now know I have the necessary fundamentals, so now it’s just a case of putting it to practice more often and playing the submit-and-wait game.