Con's Blog
An occasional blog about the stuff I write, what inspires it, and pretty much everything else. Includes rambling about Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.
Knowing as I do that there are thousands upon thousands of you out there all deeply concerned that I've not posted anything since my half-arsed Led Zeppelin blog ages back, I just want to reassure you that normal service will soon be resumed. I've been on holiday and have been hard at work writing short stories as well as developing ideas for when I get started properly on Book Two.
So stand ready world.
A quick one.
A song came up on 'shuffle' the other day and I thought to myself, 'When they make a film/ long-form TV show from Will's adventures, I want this to be what plays over the closing credits of the final episode.'
Tis Ramble On by Led Zeppelin. Can you guess why, Readers?
I don’t know about you, but it bugs me when I’m reading a book and keep wondering how I’m supposed to pronounce the names of the characters or the places. There’s a character in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy calledPeter Guillam. How on earth are you supposed to pronounce ‘Guillam’? Turns out it’s ‘Gwillam’, or thereabouts.
Fantasy is particularly bad for this sort of thing, whether that’s names that are impossible to say or, for that matter, thinking you’ve pretty much got it right only to discover that you were wrong. How many of us got C’thulhu right first time? And who here can hold their hand up and say, ‘Yes, I was rolling the ‘r’ in Mordor long before Peter Jackson.’ Really? I’ll bet you weren’t.
So, in an attempt to prevent pronunciation frustration, here is a brief guide to how to say some of the names in The Blade Bearer. Because the last thing I want is annoyed readers. And to any professional pronunciation people, please forgive my attempts at phonetic rendering.
I’ve been working on a short story which is now up on my website (for free).
It’s a satisfying process, mainly because of its brevity. You create this small thing that is, hopefully, entire unto itself, like a clockwork mechanism, each part fitting neatly with the others to create something that is pleasing in its modest scale.
Of course, it’s not necessarily an easy thing, and there are plenty of masters of the craft to both show us how it’s done and to set the bar. While I was working on The Witch of Venn I kept thinking about Arthur Conan Doyle, and how the best of his Sherlock Holmes stories fit that model of the perfectly-formed vignette, the old pocket watch, oiled and beautifully crafted to fulfill its function. This is partly to do with the satisfaction of watching Holmes do his thing, trusting that a solution is on its way, delivered we hope with his customary verve and wit. Yet solving the puzzle is merely the clock bells chiming their pleasing tune – the pay off when the hands have completed their revolution. What really matters, and what is so challenging for the author/ clockmaker, is putting the pieces together. The delight of pleasing chimes is seriously undermined if the watch doesn’t also keep time, ideally with a reassuring tick and movement of the hands. The story needs to sweep around, combining the cogs of character with the gears of plot.
I have no idea if The Witch of Venn succeeds on the terms of this tortuous simile. My process is to build the plot outline in my head as well as roughly sketching the characters, then to start writing and hope that the scenario is robust enough and the characters rounded enough that the piece will emerge. In this sense, of course, it is nothing like watch-making. It’s more akin to drawing, where you begin with the rough sketch and, layer by layer, refine it until you get something close to what you thought you wanted in the first place. But, still, your working and refining should not be visible in the finished product. All that refinement should be unseen. The decisions the characters make, the twists and turns of the plot, should generate the feeling, once the reader is done, that they could not have been any other way. Like at the end of a Sherlock Holmes mystery when we say, ‘How come I never saw what was staring me in the face all along?’ while also saying, ‘I wouldn’t want it any other way.’
Ultimately, what I guess I’m trying to say is that I want my short stories to be pleasing in their wholeness. I want you, dear reader, to be satisfied but maybe not too satisfied. Perhaps the best metaphor is actually the old 45 single. The short story should be like that 3’30” of pop perfection – splendid in its own right, yet somehow not quite enough. We should want more.
There are other stories on the way, so let’s see how they work out.
PS. I also need to work on my proofing skills. Apologies for the typos. I'll upload a clean copy soon.
Pity those of us who were young D&D players and fantasy fans in the 1980s. There was - and I can't emphasise this enough - absolutely nothing for us outside of games and novels. What I mean is, there were no fantasy movies.
Or at least there weren't any half-decent fantasy movies. Ask someone of a certain age what there was to watch (usually on rubbish video taped off the TV) and they will give you the list: Krull, The Sword and the Sorceror, Ladyhawke, Dragonslayer, Willow, The Beastmaster, and - my personal favourite - Hawk the Slayer. If you haven't seen any of them then don't bother. Really. Don't. Go look for them on Youtube if you must but be prepared to be underwhelmed.
There was, however, one light shining in the darkness, but it wasn't in the movies, it was on TV. Robin of Sherwood first appeared in 1984 and, to a thirteen-year-old lover of Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, it was wonderful. Where fantasy movies were cheap and nasty, all half-arsed scripts and terrible acting, this was well made, with proper actors acting ike real people. And it was kind of mucky. The world of Robin of Sherwood looked like the real world, or at least how we imagined the real world of England during the Norman conquest. A problem with a lot of the fantasy movies was their locations. Most were probably filmed in California to keep costs down (I could look this up but I have better things to do with my time). The only one that looked even vaguely like the worlds I imagined in my own head was Hawk the Slayer, which was a British movie. Robin of Sherwood had real, northern European forests and proper castles and longbows and broadswords. The characters spoke in British (mainly English) regional accents. The costumes were not outlandish nonsense. There was magic in it, but it wasn't overdone, no doubt because the special effects were not up to it. The show worked well within its limitations.
I watched a few episodes recently and was surprised at how well it held up. Yes, the music - which was wonderful at the time - is now a bit dated. Yes, the swordfights look too much like fencing. Yes, you can see some of the creakiness in the sets. But what holds up are the performances and the scripts and the general look of it. For me, it was hugely influential, depicting a world of magic and adventure that was grounded in some sort of truth. There is a very minor scene an episode in Series 1 called Seven Poor Knights from Acre, where Robin and Marian pay a visit to an inn. They're there to get some information. There's not much action, just a bit of dialogue and exposition, but it looks so good and reminds me of players in a role-playing game, visiting an inn to ask questions and move the adventure along.
I realised just how influential it was when I rewatched the first episode. Our first encounter with Michael Praed's Robin of Locksley is him running through a forest, carrying an animal he's killed while being pursued by soldiers and a nobleman. I have no memory of this scene but, somehow or other, twenty years after I first saw it, the idea of that as a splendid opening to a fantasy adventure must somehow have stuck.
