I suppose that the feel of the sharpness of the knife across the throat does wonders for the clarity of vision.

What I mean is that my sacking having been confirmed in that I have received the official letter inviting me to attend the meeting—May 5th—explaining why I will be sacked, the processus has started. Firing someone here in France is a quite long process—it will take them nearly 3 months to do so. And it is also full of dangers in that, if they don’t respect a mess of legislation and jurisprudence then the company can be taken to task. The penalties can range from reintegration of the fired person (very rare), to compensation—depending on the number and gravity of errors. Judging from MB’s track record and the mistakes they have already made, we shall have fun. I should not laugh yet however, as I imagine that there must be many a slip between gallows and here.

. . . . .

However since notification I have been working with marvellous concentration. Bill is completely revised and awaiting some readers’ reactions. Then I shall bundle it off to a couple of French editors. Can’t do any harm. Juliet which although it has been revised I don’t know how many times is being cleaned from start to finish. Any scene that doesn’t work, doesn’t flow is rewritten on the spot. No more changing the colour to blue as saying to myself, Yes, well I must come back to this at some point. When I’m sure that Juliet is clear then I must write the synopsis and the covering letter and send it off. Then I can get down to work on Pirates. The planning is nearly finished (well anything from half to three-quarters finished depending on what really happens when they split up…) but it is in sufficient state to let me work on it. I am also counting that I have learnt enough from revising Juliet to make that process a lot easier for Pirates.

Once Pirates is underway I can—by way of relaxation—work on planning Died. And develop the notes for the other ideas that I have jotted down in my notebook. Or pehaps I should revise the short stories that are sitting on my hard drive doing nothing. To see.

So, as I mentioned in the beginning, having the knife to one’s throat does bring a marvellous determination to get on with things.

Read the interview with Neal Stephenson at Salon yesterday. He has started to calm down, and be less arrogant (as witnessed by comments also on his site here ).

He had fun things to say:
quote

Some people in the science fiction world are ever alert to anyone who’s showing signs of that. I don’t begrudge them that. I understand where they’re coming from. So I always make it clear that I consider myself a science fiction writer. Even the “Baroque Cycle” fits under the broader vision of what science fiction is about.

SALON: And what’s that?

Fiction that’s not considered good unless it has interesting ideas in it. You can write a minimalist short story that’s set in a trailer park or a Connecticut suburb that might be considered a literary masterpiece or well-regarded by literary types, but science fiction people wouldn’t find it very interesting unless it had somewhere in it a cool idea that would make them say, “That’s interesting. I never thought of that before.” If it’s got that, then science fiction people will embrace it and bring it into the big-tent view of science fiction. That’s really the role that science fiction has come to play in literature right now. In arty lit, it’s become uncool to try to come to grips with ideas per se.

. . . . .

This ties in with other material that I have read recently that ‘genre’ fiction is the last place left where people who care about character and plot (and other ‘out-dated’ 19th century conventions) still find a place to right.

{
LATER UPDATE:
Found it! I knew I had read another article talking about the ‘essence’ (for want of a better word) of short stories. Here it is.
}

I find this interesting as well, because I quite often hear people say, or press writers lament, that people no longer read poetry. This is, of course, untrue. Looking around me I see lots of people reading poetry. There are probably more people reading poetry today that any time since poems—in the form of songs and balads—were the principal means of disseminating ideas. However people read their poems differently, and, to a large extent, the literary short story has taken the place of the poem for that epiphany moment. But that doesn’t stop people reading poetry.

. . . . .

Stephenson also talks about his way of writing, and I can only agree with him on that. There is some sort of school that confuses writing with sculpture. And the need to pare down your work. I think that idea of just writing what is good, and not moving on to the next sentance until you’re proud of the one you have right now under your pen, is much more efficient method. And at least, in this way, when you’ve finished, you have something that is readable from start to finish. Not something that must disappear into an iteration of revising/rewriting. Small argh.

While on this front, Kim asked me to read her ‘Bill’ (this was the book that I printed out and gave out as the New Year’s book this year. It doesn’t have a section here as I took a very old English version of this story and wrote it in French. One day, I’ll get round to (re)doing an English version). Anyway, while reading it to her—after a near five-month pause—I was horrified to find that it was so bad. Either that or I have learnt a little meantimes. Anyway, as I read it to her she sees me scribbling in the borders, slashing at text, and making notes. I just hope that she doesn’t go home and start doing that to her own books…

Terry Pratchett is the master of the backhanded throwaway phrase. Try this for a typical example: “She thought about getting bigger rooms, with a little garden, and about bringing her goats over. The smell might be a problem, but the goats would get used to it.” (Free translation from the French – La Huitième Fille, p158). Delightfully cackhanded, no?

Yes, I am reading this in French, and I must say that it is written delightfully. I am even tempted to say, you don’t know Pratchett until you have read him in the original French.* I have not read this book in English so I am not qualified to say that it is a good translation. However, I suspect that it is.

Bad translations, and I have read a lot, come to me in English. I read them in French, but it is the English that I hear. For some reason the translator just hasn’t managed to haul the work—kicking and screaming, I don’t doubt—into the new language. Good translations make the book appear to have been written in that language. I suspect that Patrick Couton is a very good translator.

I didn’t get this impression at all with Neil Gaiman’s Stardust translated by Frédérique Le Boucher, I’m sorry. Perhaps someday, someone else will get to translate it…

. . . . .

Having just finished The Amber Spyglass ‘Le Miroir d’Ambre’ in French (which confirms my doubts about the titles in French, Pullman very clearly describes the making of a spyglass… small sigh) I wonder about the translation of Jean Esch. It appears to flow beautifully, I get none of the hiccups and hesitations that I get with books that haven’t quite made it into French. However, and it is the titles that do this to me… I wonder how close these books are to the English, and how much the translator has ‘made them his’, to a certain extent. I will have to re-read all of these in English to see.

Anyway, the third tome was the most unsatisfying of the three. Yes it was wonderous. Yes it was an surprising finish, and there were some very beautiful and thought-provoking ideas. (And yes, it did seem a lot like C.S.Lewis using Paradise Lost as a subtext. In fact I think that Pullman is very close to Lewis in his vision/writing. They are probably diametrically opposed in their philosophy/beliefs—if anything Pullman’s work is a strongly anti-clerical piece, where Lewis is an apologist Christian using Christian imagery. But they both seem to work in a similar way, they both have this same creeping from a contemporary world to other symbolic worlds. The links are very strong and I may come back to do a blow-by-blow comparaison at some point.)

But the book is still dissatisfying. At the moment it reminds me of (gives off a similar feeling to) The Rise of Endymion by Dan Simmons but for the life of me, I can’t think why… I shall try and come back on this, too.

What dissatisfied me? An example would be the Gallivespians. They seem not to be real characters but to be plot devices of the type—Oh, I need some mechanism that will allow me to follow the children, show what they are doing in so-and-so, and get them out of a few sticky situations… hop, Gallivespians. I don’t buy it. The polar bears were wonderful (OK, I have a weak spot for polar bears) and they fitted in beautifully with idea and the existing myths, building on and then expanding in names, locations, custom, deeds. To me (and this may say more about me than the books) the Gallivespians never created any empathy and resonance.

The alethiometer also started to become a tired ‘plot-voucher generator’: “Oh, look now the ‘force’ is telling me that i must go here, and do that, and say this…” What started out wonderous and mysterious in Northern Lights lost its mystery and appeal.

. . . .

But what I say here doesn’t change the qualities of the books. They are written in a fluid, literary manner that is never cloying and is a delight to read. I would reccommend them to anyone, and encourage children to read them. In the same way, I encourage Kim to read, and enjoy, the Narnia books. This doesn’t mean that I share C.S.Lewis’ world vision/philosophy, just that these remain wonderful and necessary stories for adults and young people alike.

If I do point out areas that create problems for me in plot and character, it is because I am particularly attentive to all these things, doing my best to try to learn and understand. This is not literary criticism, this is just me, trying to take tin dolls to pieces (and hopefully put them back together correctly) in order to see how they are down.

What has struck me about the Pratchett books that I have read so far, is how well they work. The style is throwaway sixth-former. There was always one of these guys around, they were always highly-intelligent, hyperactive males, with a sense of humour that allowed them to slip through the different clans, tribes and conflicts that cut through the classes. They wrote presposterous stories to make their friends laugh. They satirised the school, and generally got published without too much hassle in the school magazine. This is a style that I recognise. And in the realm of Comic Fantasy that Pratchett practises, it could be considered that anything could go. As anything could happen, he could have the cupboards stuffed with preposterous plot devices, thin characterisation, deus ex machina cluttering the wings… yet he manages to make believable (wild, woolly and ridiculous, but still believable) characters, and the plots seem consistant growing out of his characters actions.

This is another, and much more difficult, lesson to be learned.

. . . . .

• Famous Star Trek (mis)quote: ‘You don’t know Shakespeare until you’ve heard him in the original Klingon.’

I just saw this

(By the way, the French, who will scold you vigourously if you say, for example, gwitar, persist in saying Ze Gwardian. But there again they say K’nore for Knorr, so I imagine that they think the Brits say K’nite for the guy in a tin can perched on his destrier. End of interlude.)

I have been progressing like wild fire on Pirates. While this is undoudoutably A Good Thing^TM I should have been working on Died, or at least, that was my intention. And Juliet is awaiting another revision.

While I don’t believe in inspiration—just hard work. I can’t really feel up to adandoning a good creative streak when the ideas flow on and on. Perhaps inspiration favours the prepared notebook?

I have spent most of this weekend working on Pirates. I have developed (that is, I have written out as notes) around half of it and I am quite happy with it so far.

A mysterious new character has appeared, a couple of minor objects have taken on a degree of importance that I hadn’t even begun to suspect when I started. I have abandoned the five-different-narrators structure (interesting, but didn’t really bring anything that a single POV couldn’t handle), and everything is more simple. Have even integrated the first chapter into the single POV in a manner that suits me fine (even if it is corny). I now need to get some names together to get a handle on some of these people. It is also fun in that the original ‘central’ character is still here, but has slipped into a secondary position, one of the others—and I just added him because I needed help in one scene or two—has become central in his place.

I have also found an application—like an outliner—that allows me to write up passages, add stuff, move scenes around etc. Most important, it can be configured to back up as plain text. Really important that. I have no wish to put any of my work into a closed, proprietary format. (Can you imagine having a novel stuck inside a DRM protected version of MS Word? Or just as bad, in a version of MS Word to which your subscription has expired? I think that both of these are worse than having a disk crash and losing the work. In that case, you know that it is gone and lost and that you only have yourself to blame for not making a good backup. But having the file right there on your hard drive and not being able to read it without paying the Microsoft tax…)

Anyway, I am testdriving MacJournal and will say what I think about it even if my use is probably non-standard.

There is a shop near the job that sells cheapo videos, DVDs and CDs. Judging from the subtitles I suspect that the DVDs are imported from Belgium (see also Miscellaneous Info, bottom of this page ). It was also here that I was walking past one day when I thought, Hey, Kim’s old enough to appreciate ‘The Princess Bride’ now, but where can I find it? turned and bumped into a video cassette of the film—which I promptly bought and we have subsequently both enjoyed it a lot since.

So, this Friday while nursing the sort of sinuses (sinii?) that only a good Parisian cold can give you, I looked over the stock while Ludivine went next door to pick up her photo prints. As she’d left them two days ago, her One-Hour Photo Developement was, at last, done. (Yep, it only takes an hour, but you have to wait 2 days until your hour comes up—this is a consequence of one of Newton’s laws of conservation of mass or energy and keeps the universe in order according to Steven Hawkings, or perhaps it was Robin Williams).

On the pile outside the shop I noticed Traffic by Steven Soderbergh.

I have a DVD-buying policy: if I find them at under 10 euros and I want to see them, I buy. This is not an impulse buy: it is a well-thought out rational act that will be explained later on this very paragraph. Knowing this, the shop next door prices them at 9,90. This may seem a lot, but if I watch it twice then it is roughly the same price as 2 rentals. A seat at a multiplex costs 9 euros (although our local cinema only costs 3,81; so we tend to see most films there. Probably the only film that I have seen elsewhere in the last year is Holes that I went to see with Kim and Charlotte at Les Halles). And of course, if I buy DVDs, I can exchange them with Nadja.

So last night, well-dosed up on aspirine (which if you think about it, is strangely appropriate), I watched Traffic instead of going with Ludivine to Magali’s birthday party. I also cleaned up notes for Pirates but that is another matter. I found it wonderfully filmed, performed and everything. If you get a chance to see it again, have another look; there’s not just the colour difference in the three stories, the camera style, rythmn of the cuts and overall flow is different also. You just don’t notice at first because of the colour. Michael Douglas was watchable for probably the first time ever and even his hair appeared appropriate here. I finally got to see Benicio Del Toro (one of Ludivine’s friends claimed that I ressembled this actor who I had never heard of… Now I’ve seen the film I can understand she said that. I don’t look like him though; I saw him as he really is in an interview on the disk afterwards, but if you imagine his character Javier Rodriguez Rodriguez as having been half-turned into a toad, then I suppose that you might have a good physical description of me. But without my natural charm of course. Thereagain, I probably don’t really have that much of that either. Oh well. I can’t sing, I ain’t pretty and my legs are thin. As Peter Green once remarked ).

What really struck me in the film was a scene between Francisco ‘Flowers’ Flores and General Arturo Salazar where the former is talking about his stereo, and how he burns his own CDs—just like those in the shops, I believe he says. This didn’t advance the action in the slightest. It did give a superb exposition of Flores’ character, and opened the way for Salazar’s subseuqent manipulations of this loser. But everything struck true, the words and the acting. (Of course, they were supposed to, this is one of the ways that one makes films, stoopid…) Watching this brought to me the sense behind Show, Don’t Tell that you read about everywhere when they talk about the Craft of Writing. I hope, one day, to be able to write little bijou scenes just as good, concise and efficient as that one is.

And this one:

Ramples (also known as Landlubbies) and the Welkin (Skyfolk) have coexisted for centuries. However, in recent times relations between the two have grown distended and difficult. While the Lubbies seem hell bent on messing everything up in their end of the world, or it appears this way to the Welkin, the Skyfolk haven’t exactly been wasting their time; ever since the savage assasination of their last King and the subsequent and mysterious disappearance of his twin sons and heirs the Kingdom has been in turmoil. Even between the Welkin, antagonism is growing as some remain faithful to their vision of the traditional way of life, while others set sail for new horizons (and are not against a little buccaneering on the way).

Unaware of these events, even as they take place just above his head, Detective Inspector McHarry is called on to investigate the disturbing disappearance of one, two and then three young children. The subsequent investigation and chase will lead him, accompanied by his unfortunate assistant, through the countryside around the industrial town of Mouldburton, and then off into the hills and crags of Wales where the last of the Welkin cling to their place in the clouds.

There he will pursue, and be pursued by, pirates as well as (at least up to now) what he had always considered as mythical beasts, before the lost children are brought back home. And, as you have probably guessed, the adventures are not without consequences to the pretenders to the Old Throne.

This is a story where Jonathan Swift, R.L.Stevenson along with J.M.Barrie are all called in to assist with the telling; where the action spans centuries and continents not only in their breadth but also in dizzying heights; where magic and piratry all come together and you may finally understand why your parents insisted that you finish eating your fish…

Just in case you were wondering, here is the blurb for Juliet:

Juliet finds the country farm where her parents have moved ‘just as interesting as old dishwater’ (her words, I hasten to add, not mine). But then a planned motorway, and the need to cut across a nearby wood for a service road, and the surprising way these projects affect a neighbouring rabbit warren, all conspire to make her life a little less ordinary.

I finished my latest runthrough on Juliet last week. I think that I have all the plot mechanics ironed out now; things that were too vague are definately clearer. But I am still not satisfied with the manuscript. I tried reading parts out loud and immediately heard problems of rythmn and structure. Small argh. These are moments when I think that dictation software is a good idea. (I know it isn’t, this is just shifting the problem elsewhere.) So a new rewrite is due.

This week I set out to continue Died. And got hijacked. Two new chapters for Pirates appeared. Just like that. (Just the plot, not the writing… would it be so easy…). What really happened was I was thinking about different plot mechanics and twists and these prequel scenes appeared. Prequel in that they take place before what was previously Chapter One. This is annoying as I had decided on a particular structure. This is not annoying in that they are good and interesting and solve a lot of later problems. It just means that I must go back and cross out the structure idea.

(I might as well explain the structure idea: Pirates is in 5 parts—seems like a good structure, and fits the plot—each part was to be narrated by a different person from the book, in that it would be his/her POV in play there. Except the new prequel chapters can’t be narrated by the person who should do Part One. He cannot, cannot be there. Impossible. Shucks. It was a nice idea. Medium-sized argh.)

About a film that I was invited to see..

The best thing to do about it [the film] is to ignore it. With a bit of luck it will go away and everyone will forget about it. It will become discouraged and despondent and will eventually get the hint and drag its ugly carcass outside to the kennel. There it will die a lonely and prolonged death and will be well forgotten until years later when Dad finds it while hacking back at the undergrowth that once formed the croquet patch and discretely digs a hole to shove it down deep before anyone notices anything amiss. At the same time he will get rid of all the collected (false and yellowing) milk teeth that the children have been setting out for years to trap the tooth fairy who wasn’t having any of it and so left the job to Dad—which, as you may have gathered, happens with all the dirty work anyway. He also slips in that rat from the attic that he eventually caught as he is lucky enough to have the pit to hand. It is that sort of film.

...or is there some strange urban poetry to my inbox today?

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A letter to the Editor in Salon commenting on this article— Abridged Too Far by Hilary Flower, got published.

Please note : you may have to clickthrough a day pass ad to read material on Salon. It is quite painless and generally worthwhile.

I finished the latest run through with Juliet and have probably 10% of the work in blue with comments to myself inside braces. This may not seem like much but that is at least 5000 words in limbo. More even in fact as there often second and third choices in there. I understand that this is because this is special for a number of reasons, it being the first real work that I have attempted (oh, all right, the second then…), and the fact that I want it to be good. And finished. I think that the only way to achieve this is to put Juliet aside for a while.

-sigh-

The sigh is because Died isn’t going better. Expanding my notes is so slow. Yesterday I probably managed 5 lines. 50 words???