Imagine a world without coffee. Or, more specifically, imagine your world without coffee. Chilling isn’t it?
But how different would things actually be? Some of us would pick a different drink in the mornings. Some of us might look elsewhere for those mild hits that coffee provides. Some of us would even have different jobs. On the whole, when you think about it, things wouldn’t really be that different. (BTW did any of you see Fringe? Remember the alternative universe where coffee was as valuable as gold…?)
Yet, coffee plays such a huge role in most of our lives. It’s the drink that gets the world to work, the drink that keeps us going, the drink that can genuinely be the highlight of an otherwise banal day. It’s more than a habit: it’s a culture; an artform; a necessity. (It’s also a business, of course, but let’s not get vulgar here.)
I wonder sometimes how much of our coffee love is derived from the ritual, rather than the drink itself. I won’t deny that I love a cup of decent coffee (and I looovvvve a cup of great coffee) but it’s almost exclusively something I reserve particular times of the day. When I get to work the first thing I do is to go and get my coffee–the working day just doesn’t feel right, in fact it can barely even start, until I get my coffee. At weekends I’ll usually save it for a late morning treat, sometimes after the shopping’s been done, sometimes as an incentive to actually go and do the shopping (though my wife now makes better coffee than most of the local cafes anyway). Either way it has its place in the day.
Other drinks just don’t have the same structure. Tea I’ll drink almost anytime (though I confess to having decaf in the evening as I like to be able to sleep at night). Beer (and wine) I’ll usually avoid drinking too early, but otherwise it comes down to whenever I fancy one. I’ll enjoy the occasional Coke if the day is really, really hot and the Coke is really, really cold. I’ll drink water when I’m thirsty, and that’s about it.
This article on Cracked.com (see item #1) makes me wonder if we have been conditioned in some manner to invest in coffee as a ritual pursuit. After all, there’s more money to be made if people habitually buy a coffee each morning as part of going-to-work instead of just buying one on the days they feel like one. There’s a whole business to be built around positioning coffee as the centrepiece of social gatherings and, even, business meetings. There are habits to be formed and profits to be made.
But … I don’t really mind that. Sure, coffee is expensive, but it gives people pleasure. Sure, there are too many coffee chains (and too many corporations making ridiculous sums of money out of them) but in this day and age I think people need a good excuse to get together in person.
So, maybe buy your beans from a local roaster, and choose an independent cafe over a chain, but most of all – enjoy your coffee. If it makes your day a little brighter then it’s something to be embraced.
My wife and I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day at all, but if people want to use it as an excuse to be extra romantic for a day then that’s great. If the card companies get to make a bundle of money out the day, that’s just business. If some local restaurants can make some extra bookings by running Valentine’s Day specials, then that’s a handy boost to their livelihood right there. No one really loses (unless you honestly think sending that Valentine’s Day card to Anne Hathaway is going to pay off big time).
What interests me more about the Day is the brilliant disconnect between its sappy romanticism and the massively violent connotations it has as an historical event. It’s a bit like the UK’s Guy Fawkes Night, in which we celebrate the fact that a group of conspirators and several large barrels of gunpowder *didn’t” blow the House of Lords to smithereens by lighting large bonfires and blowing hundreds of tiny gunpowder-fuelled fireworks to smithereens. We also traditionally throw a stuffed mannequin, touchingly referred to as a ‘guy’, onto the fire (even though the real life Guy Fawkes wasn’t burned: he was hung, drawn and quartered – either way: take that, fake Guy Fawkes!)
Death, often violent, and commemorative events seemed to be inextricably linked. Whether through coincidence or bizarrely dark planning, February 14 marks the date, in 1929, that five members of Chicago’s North Side Gang were lured to a garage, lined up against a wall and shot to death. Naturally they weren’t just delicately despatched with a bullet or two: they were turned into burger meat with something approaching 70 machine gun rounds and a couple of shotgun blasts just for good measure. You don’t see that mentioned on the Hallmark cards.
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre is, of course, just a crime of opportunity: various machinations and circumstances happened to line up on February 14 and so the event has borrowed the St Valentine’s Day label ever since. The story of the man who gave the day his name in the first place is arguably more interesting, and possibly more brutal.
The ‘real’ Saint Valentine
The following is all taken from Wikipedia by the way. While the exact history is unknown, and the stories therefore vary, Saint Valentine – who back in the year 273 was going by the far more ordinary name of Valentinus – had either the misfortune or poor judgement to be a Christian back in Rome. As we all know Christians weren’t very popular in Rome, except with lions, so he Valentinus was already on some fairly shaky ground. Eventually he was arrested by Emperor Claudius (not sure if that’s Claudius of ‘I’ fame or not…) but luckily the emperor took a liking to his prisoner. However, apparently one to look a gift horse square in the mouth, Valentinus unwisely pushed his luck and tried to get Claudius to convert to Christianity. Claudius decided not to take up the offer on that occasion and, for his efforts, Valentinus was sentenced to be beaten with clubs and stones and then beheaded. Not the best outcome for Valentinus, unless of course his goal all along was to have a whole day named after him – in which case: score!
Typically things get a bit vague after that. Why did we decided to appropriate the date of Valentinus’ brutal death, not to mention his name, as an excuse to send each other cards and flowers? No one really knows. One possible clue is that Valentinus was arrested for performing wedding ceremonies for Christians. There are also suggestions that Valentine’s Day was set up to replace the pagan fertility festival of Lupercalia: switch paganism for Christianity, and fertility with marriage and you have a much easier transition than, say, replacing Lupercalia with ‘wear a fez to work’ day.
So, next time you send or receive a Valentine’s Day card why remember that you’re marking the death of a man who gave his life so that Christians could live happily ever after. Or the death of a man who was too dumb to give out and realise when he was onto a good thing. Or the death of a man who was willing to die for his beliefs. Or, most likely, something else entirely. That’s history for you.
p.s. – apparently Saint Valentine’s head is kept in a church in Dublin … again, you don’t see that on the cards.
When I think about ‘pies or practice’ two things come to mind. Firstly: how much I love pies. Secondly: how much I need to practice on my guitar. Actually there’s a third thing that comes to mind, and that’s how there’s absolutely no link between the two whatsoever. It would be tempting to suggest that I desperately wanted to practice my guitar, but was helplessly trapped beneath a hundred-weight of pies. Or, perhaps I could pretend I suffer from a strange variant of synesthesia in which the sound of a guitar playing smells exactly like pie. Maybe I consistently have the best intentions of practicing my guitar, but need to consume the traditional pre-guitar pie before I can even consider picking up my plectrum. And then need to rest while the pie goes down. And then of course I’d need another pie before I could start playing. And so on.
But, no – those would all be lies.
I can’t even make a thematic link between the two: the more pies you eat, the bigger you get; while the more you practice something, the better you get. And yet we’re always taught that bigger doesn’t necessarily equal better. A structural link maybe? A pie has an outer shell with a delicious interior while practice is a non-physical concept and therefore lacks both an inside and an outside…. hmm
I could add that I definitely need more practice making pies. Over the last few years I’ve found myself more interested in trying to cook my favourite foods instead of always buying them pre-prepared (I’m talking things like pies, pizzas, breads here, not the your average ready-meal kinda foods). I’ve only tried to make pie two or three times and each time it’s come out a bit lacking. One one occasion I didn’t cook the meat in the right way – it was cooked, just chewy because I didn’t stew it long enough. Other times the pastry hasn’t been right … I think I might have neglected to blind bake it (I haven’t upgraded my skills to the point where I make the pastry yet btw). Actually, now that I think about it, pie-making is a really time-consuming process. Maybe it really should just be one of those things I just buy in the shop, or have at a restaurant.
While my fingers gently bleed
And that leads in no way at all to the saga of my guitar. Many years ago I was a decentish guitar player, I used to play every day, and was even in the requisite band when I was few years out of my teens. Sadly in more recent years my playing has dropped to the point where my fingers threaten to bleed if I pick up the guitar for more than half an hour.
I had every intention this year of getting some serious practice in: I cleaned up my guitar, restrung it (and I really, really hate restringing guitars), and then carefully left it sitting in the corner of the bedroom where it’s hardly been touched this year.
I’m a fairly self-conscious player. I know how painful it is for others to have to listen to an amateur twanging away at his strings, so I’m reluctant to play when other people are around (the obvious irony being that if I practiced more, I’d probably play well enough that the rest of the family wouldn’t complain too hard about it – or they’d at least complain with their voices, instead of sharp sticks and rocks). I don’t like playing when the kids are asleep, in case I wake them up. Then again, I don’t like playing when they’re awake because I feel that if I have time enough to play guitar then I should be using that time to play with them.
As you can see I’ve rationalized myself away to the point where there is almost exactly zero opportunity for me to practice my guitar.
It’s not as tragic as it sounds. The one thing I have been practicing more this year is the thing that I really wanted to put my time into: my writing. It’s seven weeks into the year and I’ve already completed a new short story, which is phenomenal for me given my usual pace. I tend to view short stories as a sort of practice run for characters, themes, plots, or simply for the discipline of writing: if I can get into the habit of writing short stories regularly, then I’ll feel confident about my ability to complete a novel one day.
The 52 Blogs project has also kept me writing at least once a week – you could say it’s getting me into some ‘best practice’ blogging. In all honesty, if I don’t bake a single pie this year, or crack out a single Neil Diamond / Roxette mashup on my acoustic, as long as I keep up my writing practice I’ll be very happy indeed.
In thinking about this week’s post I’ve realised quite a big contradiction about myself: I love books but I’m a terrible, terrible reader. It’s not that I don’t like reading, it’s just that I’ve gotten out of the habit in recent years. I could blame my iDevices – why limit yourself to a single book when you can take the whole internet to bed with you? – but the truth is that my iPad has been just as instrumental in getting me back into a good reading habit. No more of this needing two hands to keep your book open; no more having to remember which page you were up to; no more trying to keep the spine uncreased so your wife doesn’t beat you.
My answer to this dichotomy is that the pleasure you can take from books (or that I can, at least) is not solely in the reading of them. There’s more to it. Something intangible. Something that lies between the pages.
Some of my most treasured possessions are books. I have a collection of old Doctor Who novelisations (thanks to the awesome Seb Sharp) which take me back to my childhood every time I look at them. I have a handful of old Richard Stark crime novels that always remind me of a holiday in the USA during which I dedicated myself to collecting (and reading) as many of a particular imprint as I could. I have some ‘trade paperback’ editions of some Anne Rice novels which I picked up over a day in San Francisco, during which I separated myself from the rest of the family and spent my time giddily walking from bookshop to bookshop.
Like many possessions, books inevitably associate themselves with memories … and yet it’s not just about memories. I get a lot of pleasure from simply walking round bookshops (more so with secondhand bookshops for some reason). I’ve been guilty in the past of simply buying books because I loved the look and feel of them – and because they were included in a 3 for 2 deal. These books would sit proudly on my shelf but invariable end up unread. Lately I’ve managed to train myself not to buy books on a whim (and in writing this I wonder if it’s in any way connected to the drop in my reading rate?).
Of course, things are different now: the ebook is here. Having read the above you might think I’d try growing a second heart just so I can fill it with contempt for the non-physical book. As it happens quite the opposite is true.
The advent of the ebook, as well as the arrival of internet publishing channels for independent authors, has given me the chance to share my own stories with an audience for the first time. No longer am I subject to the narrow definitions of acceptance laid down by publishing houses, or subject to the whims of an editor’s taste or publishing restrictions. Now, for better or worse, I can complete a story, get it on the internet, and have people reading it almost instantly. Just a few years ago this would have been unimaginable.
This isn’t always a good thing: there are a lot of really, really bad writers out there who can now fill the virtual bookshelves with rubbish. However, for an author trying to find their voice and work out which kind of stories their potential audience want to connect with this sort of shortcut is priceless.
And yet, with convenience I can’t help thinking there’s always a price. If you’ve seen any post-apocalyptic films, particularly ones from the 1970s or thereabouts, you’ll have seen at least one where the survivors eventually learn about the world they’ve lost through the books that have survived.
Digital books won’t survive an apocalypse (unless it’s a strange one where our electricity and communications remain intact). There’ll be an entire generation of writing that will instantly disappear. I wonder if the survivors will find themselves learning about the past world through a strange combination of one-dollar Shakespeare classics and reality show biographies? No doubt some of the millions of copies of Fifty Shades will make it through and provide an invaluable sociographic insight into our current culture.
Obviously I hope this apocalypse never happens, but I do wonder what the historians of the future will make of a past where vast portions of our culture and heritage were stored on inaccessible digital media.
Anyway …
To cap off this typically rambling post I wanted to consider the question: what is a book?
Is it words printed on a page? No, an ebook is just as worthy of being called a book (even though we haven’t grown out of the ‘e’ distinction). Also, there are plenty of other instances of words printed on paper that aren’t books.
Is it a story? No, because our bookshops and libraries are filled with non-fiction, and some of my favourite reads of all time are non-fiction (I have a particular fondness for ‘behind the scenes’ type books, Hollywood history, and so on).
Is it prose? No, because most of us feel just as comfortable referring to children’s picture books or graphic novels (comic books) as books.
My conclusion is that a book, rather like a film, is escapism. A book will give us the chance to escape into a fictional world; into someone else’s life; into a different time. Even the blandest seeming books give us those moments where we imagine we can cook a flawless five course dinner; or fix our own car; or exercise ourselves back into fitness. Or simply to learn something we didn’t know before.
Books give us a window to somewhere else, it might not be somewhere far away, but the book is often the first step on that potential journey.
And if we don’t read we miss out on all those first steps that we could be taking.
When I was told that our prompt for this week’s 52 blogs post was the word ‘special’ I had three soundbites pop into my head almost immediately. Two are tangentially related, but the third is nothing more than an entertaining memory. I’ll save that one for last.
Special is Different
Back in 2009, shortly after coming first in the Next President of the United States, Barack Obama became the first sitting president to be a guest on a chat show… and he did a pretty good job of demonstrating why presidents don’t go on chat shows with the fall-out from this offhand joke:
Obama: No, no. I have been practicing…I bowled a 129. It’s like … it was like Special Olympics, or something
As it turns out I’d actually misremembered the quote a bit and looking at it now it does seem a bit insulting: the clear implication being that special olympians aren’t as good at their sport as regular olympians. Either way, my initial (mis)understanding of the gaffe got me thinking about the use of the word special. It’s one of those occasions where a word in a certains contexts has developed a whole array of meanings, some of which are derogatory (think also of ‘gay’).
I’m fascinated by the way that language changes, how words evolve, get appropriated and misappropriated, develop meanings other than those that were originally intended. Special is one of those terms that you would assume emerged out of political correctness, but you have to wonder whether it’s used to make the ‘special’ people feel better or the ‘regular’ people feel less uncomfortable using words such as ‘disabled’. If we really wanted the ‘special’ people to feel better I expect we’d just call them ‘people’ – we wouldn’t have special olympians; we’d just have olympians – but instead we have this condescending terminology which equates to saying to someone: I’m going to call you special so you think that your difference makes you superior but in fact the word is just going to serve to highlight the same difference that we’re busily trying to brush under the carpet.
In consequence, we now have a culture where you can successfully insult someone by calling them ‘special’ (which is the crux of Obama’s gaffe: that ‘special’ is inferior).
Special is Fatal
Now, since this is my blog let’s go ahead and make things even more sinister.
If you have even the vaguest awareness of World War II history you’ll quite probably have the same upsetting connotation come to mind as I do. If you’re a history noob then all you need to know is that the Nazis used the term ‘special treatment’ because even those sick, murdering bastards realised that you can’t get away with having your business diary openly state: “Tuesday: murder another million jews, gypsies and homosexuals”.
While I don’t expect there’s any conscious link between the two uses of the term, it is interesting that the word ‘special’ is used in both cases as a mask: in one case to hide the use of murder, and in the other (I’m guessing here) to hide the use of a word such as disabled which could be seen as insulting, derogatory, prejudicial, offensive, disturbing or merely uncomfortable (of course, now the word ‘special’ can be seen as all of those things).
There’s also the use of special to signify other: you’re not the same as me, I fear you – you’re other – but I shall mask my distaste with a positive sounding term. … too cynical?
(Incidentally, I had assumed when I started writing this that the Special Olympics were inaugurated before the war, before the unfortunate misappropriation of the word. So it shocked me a bit to learn that they first one took place in 1968 – years after the Holocaust – but maybe the sinister connotations of the word special weren’t quite so widely considered at that time).
Special is The Same
The second sound bite comes from Babylon 5, a darned good sci-fi series from the 1990s that gives me plenty of brainfood even to this day.
To give you the briefest possible context you just need to know that the below quote involves three character archetypes: Delenn is the Wise Alien; John Sheridan is the Hero; Ivanova is the Voice of Reason. So… John has just been talking to Delenn and found her pretty impressive, then has the following exchange with Ivanova:
Sheridan: “Ever had a long talk with Ambassador Delenn, Commander?” Ivanova: “Yes, from time to time. Why?” Sheridan: “She and the universe seem to have a special relationship.” Ivanova: “… Don’t we all?” — Sheridan and Ivanova in “A Distant Star”
This was a pretty big eye opener for me. I was well used to science fiction giving us wise aliens and treating them as ‘special’ (both in the sense of being different and ‘other’, and in the sense of having some sort of wisdom or ability the rest of us might covet). Suddenly, with one almost offhand remark, all bets were off: we’re ALL special!
In the sense of the above quote we all have our own special relationship with the universe – such a simple truth, but one that most scriptwriters would avoid because they need their characters to stand apart from one another. In a more down to earth context we’re all special because we’re all unique and different; by the same logic no-one’s actually different because we’re all different. You’re only as special or different as the next person because that next person is just as unique as you are.
Sorry …
Special is Awesome
Let’s comfort ourselves with a reminder that in more innocent times, before you read this post, special could mean something awesome. That’s the message in the song I’m going to talk about, but it’s not the reason why I’m bringing it up.
Some years back I used to work in a UK record store called Our Price. One day a colleague of mine put on a Pretenders album and Brass In Pocket eventually came on (it’s probably one of the few Pretenders songs that I genuinely like, but that’s neither here nor there). My colleague’s humming along and we come to the chorus – the moment where Chrissie Hynde drawls “Ahhhm Spesh-aahhhl” – and out of nowhere my colleague puts on his best falsetto and joins in echoing “Speciaaaal!”
It got a laugh out of me at the time and whenever I hear Brass In Pocket I will always hear my old colleague singing it like a castrati (“Speciaaaal!”).
Check out the video below: the moment I’m talking about, if you don’t already know the song, is when the band members hold up the menus with – you guess it – ‘special’ written on the top.
Also, I never, ever found Chrissie Hynde remotely attractive, but this video …
Full disclosure: I chose this week’s topic; not because I had something in particular to write, but because I thought it would be a less abstract topic for people to tackle this week. However, having chosen the topic I quickly realised that I really didn’t have anything clearly in mind to write. Nevertheless, let’s press on…
As said above bedtime is one of my favourite times of day (no really, it literally says those exact words just above). It always perplexes me how resistant my six-year-old son is to the concept of going to bed. I tell him how it’s the best time of day: you get to lie there and sleep! But, no: he would much rather run around and throw himself at the furniture … which does sound kinda fun now that I write it down.
Up until recently it was a challenge to even get him to stay in bed: ironic given the challenge associated with getting me or his mother out of bed. Lately, however, he’s learned to read and we’ve found it much, much easier to get him into bed – he may not go to sleep when we want him to, but more often than not he’ll just be lying on his bed reading (and not throwing himself at the furniture).
I like to think that he’s finally discovered the real value of bedtime: it’s that time when you finally get to escape the day (for more, similar, thoughts on escape read my wife’s blog post on the subject).
Bedtime: part one
For me bedtime doesn’t necessarily start at the moment I climb into bed. It starts when I decide that I’m done with the day and I’m going to move towards achieving that vegetative state. That moment usually comes at around 10pm.
Many years ago, when I was living on my own I had a semi-regular ritual that would involve chocolate and bourbon (yeah, that sounds much more interesting that it actually was, so maybe I’ll just leave it there with whatever mental picture you’re desperately trying to evict from your brain right now).At the moment bedtime effectively starts with what my wife and I call “Friends’o’clock”, which is when the reruns of Friends start on Foxtel (9:30pm to 10:30pm, if you were wondering). Once I decide to embark upon Friends’o’clock it means no more computer, no more domestic tasks, no more of anything constructive or energy-draining: it means the productive day has officially ceased.
Bedtime: part two
Vegetating in front of the TV naturally evolves into vegetating in bed and reading. Traditionally this would involve reading books, but during the last few years I became fairly ill-disciplined and allowed myself to get distracted by browsing the internet on my iDevice. This year I’m trying to make amends by getting back into proper reading.
Reading provides the real escape: the chance to properly escape your day and immerse yourself in someone else’s world. I think it’s important to have that tangible, mental break from whatever issues have taken up your day. It’s all too easy to switch the light off, put your head down, then find all the unresolved details of your day bouncing around, repeating and recreating themselves, giving you grief all over again.
I occasionally have trouble getting to sleep. Last night it was because I had a coffee at 5pm (it was a great coffee: it was totally worth it). Other nights it’s for no reason at all. I’ll go through days or weeks of taking hours to get to sleep, then weeks or months of sleeping just fine.
When I was much younger I used to, for want of a better phrase, play movies in my head to help me get to sleep: I’d put myself in an episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, or imagine I was Batman, etc.
As it happens I do much the same now, except I think about the stories I plan to write (and let’s not come away from this thinking that my stories are just great for sending people to sleep!). Bedtime is when I get most of my best ideas: the idea for Colder Still came from me lying in bed listening to a dripping tap; Graves came from an image I woke up with of a gravestone in my front garden; there are numerous other instance where the idea has popped into my head during bedtime, or the full plot has magically congealed itself.
Bedtime: part aaargh!
There’s a slightly more sinister side to bedtime, which I’ll briefly go into here since I don’t have any other ideas about how to end this post.
Once the lights go off everything … changes. A noise outside becomes more pronounced, a creak inside becomes sinister. A doorbell or phone ringing would be utterly heart-stopping. These aren’t things that necessarily keep me awake (though I will dwell upon them if I happen to be awake) but they all become more intrusive once you’ve turned the light off and decided that it’s time for the day to end.
Of course, these things also provide great prompts for stories …
I would have been six years old when my Mum took me to Leicester Square (braving the impossibly tall and vertigo-inducing escalators of Leicester Square underground station) to see Star Wars. It definitely wasn’t the first film I ever saw but, as with many people of my generation, it was one of the first to make a lifelong impact.
Suddenly there were heroes, villains, princesses, spaceships – and a whole galaxy in which to fly them. There were insurmountable odds and terrific victories, death and rebirth, machines that you wanted to have as your best friends and heroes that could save the whole universe.
(It wasn’t until many years later that I started doing things like looking for the tape holding Carrie Fisher’s breasts down, or thinking: “A farmboy, a pirate, a walking rug and an old man taking on squadrons of enemy soldiers while trapped on the most technologically advanced battle station in the galaxy? They’re totally gonna die!”)
When I thought about the topic ‘rescue’ for this week’s post one of the first images that popped into my head was this:
One of things I remember most about Star Wars, it turns out, is Luke beseeching: “We have to rescue the princess!”. Years later the phrase “Save the cheerleader, save the world” would get similarly stuck, and now I must wonder if there was a slight echo in the heads of the scriptwriters for cheers.
Probably not, but it’s nice to think so.
Of course, one of the best things about Star Wars – and having been brought up on Disney films, I must have noticed this at the time – is how the princess didn’t really need rescuing. Sure, she was locked in a cell, in that same technologically advanced battle station, with an imminent death sentence hanging over her head, but once she hooked up with Luke and Han they were on equal footing right from the outset (“Didn’t you have a plan for getting out?!”)
It’s an important lesson for an impressionable six year-old: classic stories have heroes rescuing princesses, but the truly great stories have the princesses rescuing the heroes once in a while.
The other picture
As a totally unrelated side note, while I was googling for the above picture I also found the image below which I have never, ever seen before in my life. While I don’t profess to be a Star Wars obsessive, I’ve still been enough of a fan to have seen most of the existing promotional shots several dozen times over. Finding a promo still I’ve never seen before – and one that’s clearly from A New Hope – is pretty exciting to a geek like me.
Check it out: Leia is clearly in her New Hope costume, complete with donuts, but Luke almost looks as if he’s from Return Of The Jedi. Look a bit closer: is Mark Hamill actually in his own clothes, had he only just been cast? Could it even be part of Han Solo’s costume? What’s the background to this picture?
The voice is one of a writer’s most important tools. Sure, being able to write good and spel stuff is important too, but if a writer can truly grab their audience then some sins can be overlooked. In fact, along with plot and character, voice is one of the three key tools in the writer’s workshop. Together they give you: what’s going to happen in your story; who’s going to make it happen (and, if you’re doing things properly, why); and how it’s going to be told.
Warning – the rest of this piece will unavoidably include some shameless plugs for a few of my stories…
One of the great advantages of the short story form is that it lets you try out a multitude of voices with only a limited risk of pissing off your audience. For a budding writer such as myself this is an infinite and invaluable playground: I can not only take time to discover my own voice without having to go back and rewrite screeds of fiction but also try on plenty of other voices for size.
For my first two stories, Colder Still and Graves, I didn’t give much thought to the voice. I was far more concerned with telling the story and, at that stage in my non-career, simply finishing it (actually, the finishing is still proving an issue…). With Colder Still, in particular, I was a little surprised to end up with two characters who bore virtually no resemblance to myself: one a bitter drunkard; the other a soldier in World War II (I am neither of those things). In fact for a time I was marginally worried that readers would think that the the bitter drunkard character was in some way meant to represent my own inner voice (he doesn’t in any way).
For Graves I was far less ambitious. I made no real attempt to define a voice since the main character simply provides a viewpoint for the reader; he doesn’t drive the story greatly, merely lets it happen around him. For stories like that you sometimes want a Generic Male (or Female) so that readers can more easily put themselves into the story. (As a footnote here, judging by the reception for Graves, which is easily my most popular story to date, I think I’d successfully found my voice by this point).
Obviously then I got cocky. My next story, Bunnies, proved a real challenge. Following a slightly tortuous development I eventually settled on a story in two halves, with a different primary character in each half… which, of course, meant two voices again. To make life even harder for myself I decided the first half would be from the viewpoint of a nine-year-old girl (and I haven’t been one of those since ever!). After writing the first page a few dozen times I realised the interesting conundrum this posed: how to give my story the voice of a nine-year-old girl but not make it read as if it had been written by a nine-year-old girl. I got there in the end, but it took quite a few drafts to get to a point where I was happy with what I was doing.
While most of my stories default to a Generic Male voice, the experience of writing Bunnies did give me the confidence to not shy away from other voices when needed. For The Last Laugh, a parody of pulp/noir fiction, I not only had to move out of the horror genre that I’d settled comfortably into (unless you find clowns scary, in which case we’re still right at home there) but make sure that my main character had just the right hard-boiled tone about him.I’m not sure how successful I was with the story, but it was certainly a lot of fun to write.
In perhaps my boldest departure yet, the story I started last week is written from the point of view of … well, I don’t want to give too much away but let’s just say the main character could hardly be further away from who I am. I hope I can pull it off.
As a last footnote I’ve noticed, while writing this post, that I’m not particularly keen on the voice it uses. It seems – to me at least – a little self-important (“When I was knocking back some beers with my good friend Shakespeare the other day, I gave him some points on that new Scottish play of his …”). I’ve toned it down a bit but since I don’t want to labour this post, and since it’s probably just me being self-conscious, I’ve decided to leave it as it stands. Just seemed an interesting final irony …
What would life be without cake? Cakeless, I guess, but let’s not dwell on that horrific, potentially post-apocalyptic scenario (and let’s just hope that even when the world ends the good old-fashioned bakery will still prevail).
Although I’m not a huuuuge cake eater it’s reasonably safe to say I’ve never met a cake I didn’t like. Put a cake in front of me and I will eat it (put two cakes in front of me and I will eat both and score myself a nickname for life). I prefer chocolate based cakes … actually I prefer chocolate based anything – and I’m frequently unexcited by mere sponge cake but, as you’ll see below, several of my favourite cakes don’t even involve chocolate.
So, what follows is a list of my top 5 cakes; cakes that have made an impression on me over the years; cakes that I would have to do my duty by nomming into oblivion were they to be placed in front of me; cakes that, by all rights, should be an essential component of a carefully calorie-controlled diet.
5 Manor House
This is one of of Mr Kipling’s ‘large cakes’, but if your definition of large is the same as mine then you’re likely to be disappointed at first. However, if your definition of large is ‘can I eat this entire cake in one sitting’ then you’re in good company with a Manor Cake.
It’s true that this isn’t the best cake in the whole world, but it’s one of the most convenient (just open the packet and slice… or not) and it saw me through many a hangover in my teenage days. For that reason alone it makes it into my top 5 cakes.
4 Jaffa cake
Is it a cake or is it a biscuit? Well, it goes hard, rather than soft, when you leave it out (oo-er) so it’s a cake. Actually they tell you it’s a cake right on the packet so if you still think it’s a biscuit then there’s nothing more I can do for you. Eating an entire packet of Jaffa Cakes is all too easy: the dark chocolate, the tangy orange jelly, the firm, spongy base. What’s not to love?
3 Carrot cake
Vegetables? Plus cake? What dark sorcery is this? That was mostly my reaction when I was first invited to try some carrot cake. Since then I’ve been hooked. It has to be moist and it’s better with the cream cheese topping (and some cream cheese filling too just for good measure). Dry carrot cake is a bit like flat beer: you’ll drink it, but you’ll hate yourself with every mouthful.
2 Cheesecake
I love almost any cheesecake. It can be a packet mix with ground-up digestive biscuits for the base, or it can be a full-on New York style baked cheesecake: I don’t discriminate when it comes to cheesecake. While the filling is the best part, it wouldn’t be anything with the contrastiness of the crumbly, crunchy base – possibly what draws me to Jaffa Cakes too.
OMG – what if they made a cheesecakey version of Jaffa Cakes? Has anyone done this? Can we patent this idea?!?
1 Chocolate fudge brownie cupcake
The best cake in the universe is one my wife makes (no I’m not being biased there: you’d totally agree with me if you tried one of these). We bought the Crabapple Bakery Cupcake Cookbook a few years back, tried the Chocolate Fudge Brownie Cupcake recipe and never looked back. I think we’ve only tried one other recipe from the book since we got it.
The basic recipe for this cupcake is chocolate, chocolate and more chocolate. And butter. It is chocolate in cake form: all the chocolatiness of chocolate and all the cakiness of cake (if you’ve been disappointed by other ‘chocolate’ cakes then you’ll understand what I mean). The recipe is supposed to include icing, but you don’t really need it – the cakes are *that* good. If you live in Sydney you might be lucky enough to try an ‘original’ at one of the weekend markets otherwise grab a copy of the book and try some homemade – it’s worth it.
(Disclaimer: I’m not sure how much of the awesomeness is in the recipe and how much is from my wife’s tender, loving, mad baking skillz but you can only try and hope for the best.)
I’ve set up, and am participating in, a new blogging initiative called 52 Blogs. The idea is simple: to get all participants to post (at least) one blog per week. Full details are here if any readers fancy joining in.
The first topic is cake, so if you find yourself wondering why I’m suddenly writing about cake, well … now you know 😉
