In Search of "Counter-Pain"...

# “But, Sean, don't get callous, I'm sure it'll be fine. I love you, I love you, Oh, brother of mine…” # - Fleet Foxes

“When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.”

“And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills.”

“And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.”

“I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant Land of Counterpane.”

I sometimes end posts here on my blog journal with a quote or poem (or even a video clip – and in that department, this one’s no different – see below!) but for various reasons, I wanted to begin this quite personal post with a childhood poem I used to read that I still hold close in my adult years…

“The Land of Counterpane” by Robert Louis Stevenson was one of the stories I read and re-read growing up and is one of the first that taught me about the importance of imagination. The story has come back to me this year in particular because since about mid-summer I’ve been coping with trying to recover from a minor operation but it’s unfortunately taking me longer than anticipated to heal… To say it’s been a challenging time for me is an understatement on all levels, and it’s even taken its toll on my creative writing…

I thought that a forced extended period of leave from my day job as I recovered would actually be a good thing to give me time and space to focus on my scribbles, but actually it marked my first major experience of writer’s block… Perhaps it was because I was (irrationally) anxious about whether I would ever heal, but whatever the reason, for about two months from July to August this year I didn’t really do anything apart from maintain this blog journal and my Official Homepage. This did keep me “ticking over” but I was acutely aware that my ‘writing urge’ had waned somewhat…

I didn’t spend the whole time moping though and still pursued other creative past-times, like watching how our back garden was growing. I’ll allow you a snigger at that statement, but I remember as a toddler visiting my paternal granddad while he was “convalescing” at a home called “St Camila’s” (Camillus) in Hexham near our home town and he improved leaps and bounds there, while surrounded by greenery and peaceful climes. One of the great pleasures I’ve discovered in recent years now being a proper home owner is a love of gardening. Now, I’m not as old as my grandfather at the time of his recovery but I couldn’t really do any manual labour in the garden as I rested up post-op (I admit to feeling bouts of being decrepit at 32!) – despite this, I spent a good few afternoons in the summer sun reading books on a blanket on our lawn while observing bees and insects, and all manner of garden wildlife go about their daily routines. And as I watched them, I was learning a valuable life lesson – patience. I’ve always considered myself to be quite a patient person but ironically being a “patient” of the NHS system for a good few months of this year has taught me the real meaning of the word…

As the days and weeks went on I also noted how our fledgling vegetable patch was developing (we’ve got a grand plot for our own mini Agricultural Revolution in our back garden, starting this year, attempting a crop-rotation growing plan). In past years we’ve mucked about growing small pots of salad, potatoes and tomatoes (the easy things) but this year I’ve watched as our ambitious plantings of pumpkins, sweet peas, runner beans, and fennel have all come to fruition. This too taught me the importance of patience (something that’s sure to come in handy in the coming months as I await replies from literary agents – see my previous post!) but it also reminds me of a quite unique ongoing gardening plan that I read about a while ago called “The Square-Metre Project” and this summer has taught me, just what the founder of that project always maintains – “there’s an immense pleasure to be had from the microcosm aspects of life”…

Another hobby of mine is a love of all things cinema and that too kept me going as I rested up at home. Everyone has their “old reliable” films that they go back to as a sort of “security blanket” and my own helped me keep contented and relaxed… For me, it’s the original Indiana Jones trilogy, the new Indy IV film and the little-known Young Indy TV series – all of which kept my brain occupied and ticking over as I watched them on DVD while recouperating this summer and my creative imagination began to get in gear again as I thought up new "fan fiction" to my favourite series of films…

Now, the point here isn’t that I can while away many an hour just blankly staring at a TV screen but it’s more about the power of film (and good stories) to move and even heal… I’ve talked before about influential and milestone films that I’ve come across such as "Pangea Day" and "Tommy's Story", and recently on my return to the world of work I’ve had the privilege once again to see a collection of short films by up-and-coming filmmakers from the UK called “The Magic Hour” by 401 Films. Within the presentation, was a short titled “Paraphernalia”, a fantastic little tale of a boy who is shadowed everywhere he goes by a useless robot who only he can see and soon grows sick of, but in the end, can’t live without… It’s a brilliantly inspiring story committed to film and could only be told effectively through that medium, really.

So now I stand at the back end of my recovery process, and look back on the whole experience, I know the lessons I’ve learned (because if I can’t take something from it, what a waste of time it would seem!), but the important thing now is that I’m on the mend, even though it’s taken the best part of 6 months to heal, and my recovery process was helped in no small part by the power of my imagination to help distract me (and, yes, escape) from everyday life and my belief in the strength of storytelling (both on film and on the page) in helping you get through difficult times… So I’ll end this personal post on a high with one of the finest pieces of storytelling on film I’ve seen this year, which has finally graced the waves of the world wide web – it’s an art film installation by Matt Stokes called “The Gainsborough Packet” which was originally shown back in April at the Baltic in my home town and I’m so pleased to be able to share this fantastically inspirational tale with you now (just press or click the "Play" triangle-on-its-side directly below to see it!):



(You can also CLICK HERE if you have trouble playing the clip above to view "The Gainsborough Packet" by Matt Stokes)

On The Road To Publishville # 3 - "The Literary Agent & Publishing House"

# “But, oh, my God, if I was somebody I’d be doing it all just fine, but I’m a real late starter so I’m making up for lost time…” # - Nerina Pallot

Well, the moment’s arrived for me, at long last (10 years to be exact!) and I’ve come to the oft mythical place I’ve seen in my head where I’d be in a position to send off a sample of the completed manuscript for my first novel to the potential literary powers-at-be out there… So that’s the hard work over with, right? Well, no, actually, because as I’m constantly finding on this long and winding “Road to Publishville”, the easy bit is over with and now the hard work is probably just beginning…

So now the “Road” in front of me really does fork. There’s potentially three different ways I could go now. The first is one called “vanity publishing” (literally to go down the route of publishing the book myself) and it’s perhaps one that would seem obvious since I’m fairly webwise nowadays, using blogspots and web pages to put my short stories on the Net… BUT, and it’s a very big BUT, my aim with my writing has always been to carve out a career as an author, moving on through various rungs of the ladder as I see it today. And although, I DO use web tools a lot to talk about my scribbles, they are a means to an end and are very much just that - “tools” to get me somewhere – and that is to be represented as a published author, where I might one day be able to walk into any bookshop and pick up one of my own novels…

With that first branch of the Road eliminated and forgotten about, the next question nowadays seems to be, do you submit your manuscript direct to a publisher or to an agent? Traditionally, it has been direct to publishers but less and less these days allow this now – lots of them mark their websites and listings in the publishing handbooks out there as “no unsolicited manuscripts accepted”, which basically means, no submissions straight from an amateur author (they want you to be represented by an agent). There’s also what’s known as the dreaded “slush pile” to contend with if you decide to risk it and just send off your book direct to publishers – imagine multiple skyscrapers of manuscripts littering a publisher's desk and then just consider that yours might not necessarily be anywhere near the top of the pile to deal with any time soon…

So, for my money, (and this is of course my own personal choice, it’ll be different for everyone) I’ve decided I’m going to approach literary agents instead of publishers direct – this is after considering all I’ve set out above but also once again because of the fact that if I want any chance of building a career in creative writing at all, I’ll need an agent anyway in the long run! I think the reputable ones are only supposed to take money from you once they sell your book to a publisher – then it’s generally between 10 and 15 percent commission, nowadays… But this is really worth it because they’re meant to have all the contacts an amateur like me just doesn’t have with book places and they have even been known to help writerly types with keeping accounts and matters of taxation, apparently.

Once I decided to go down the agent’s route, it was a decision of exactly which one(s) to send to, and that’s where an invaluable book came in useful – since about 2005, the CHILDREN’S Writers & Artists Yearbook has been published on an annual basis around each October time in the UK, and you need a copy of this if you want to find out who’s who in the world of younger reader publishing… (the only drawback is that you get repeated articles from the previous years about kids writing, but the article number grows too, and so does the size of the book, but thankfully the cost is still kept pretty much the same!)

Using this resource as a starting point, I used the list of UK literary agents in the book to circle an initial list of (in my case 13) likely agents who I seemed attracted to (some of the reasons were random, some stronger than others, but you have to chose somehow!) and then I sat with the list for a little while, eventually dwindling that list to my favourite three. This shortisting process was a more focused one and one of the major factors that ultimately attracted me to these three was that they were ALL asking for submissions via email, rather than in a hard-copy posted Royal Mail format… For me, as a writer who sees endless benefits in using the World Wide Web to help the growth of his scribbles, this approach from Agents is both forward thinking (on an eco-“green” level) as well as immensely appealing for future career-building with a potential agent, because hopefully our “mind-sets” will be similar, going onward from this similar standpoint.

Incidentally, if you’re reading this, wondering about the style in which you should set out your manuscript sample submission, there are some great tips out there for the “correct” way to submit your work to agents but you may want to refer back to my second “On The Road” post (because to some readers, this may come before this 3rd post on the subject!). I will say here though that some general guidelines might be to make sure you check if submissions are asked for in double-lined spacing, with or without a cover sheet, to a specific editor email address, and also ensure that (if you’re submitting to a UK agent for UK publication in the first instance) that dialogue in your book is marked with single quotes, not double.

The last two posts of my “Road to Publishville” journey have ended with a focus on some other aspect of my personal writing portfolio, and with this third entry, I thought I’d close with news that very soon there’ll be another of my “Story Starts” appearing on that page of my Official Homepage to help encourage readers to become writers themselves (hint to finding the Story Starts page on my Main Site is to look for an object that could perhaps mark your homework - just bear with me, cos I may have to take some pages down for maintenance, including “Story Starts”, as referred to in my previous post here – but, never fear, they’ll be “back in a bit!”) Reading the Bookseller recently, I came across a similar big-publishing movement called “Story World” to my “Story Starts” (I know I’m not the first to think it up, by the way!) so you never know when one of your ideas could make it big…

The other news is that not only is my Official Writing Website being updated now with lots more properly clickable links… (all but a “Final Five” mystery objects in the next month or so!) but until next time on this Road to Publishville, where I’ll be (quite probably) talking about how to deal with waiting for a response for agents and (hopefully not!) facing rejection letters, I’ll leave you with another of my “Coming Soon” type of ”writing trailers” to the short stories to come from me in 2010 once my “Moon Crater”TM novel has properly been “put to bed” – sit back, relax and enjoy the show, folks… (Oh, but make sure you press or click the "Play" button below first!)

The Zip Code Challenge # 3 finally arrives! (Well, almost...)

# "And you can't talk about it, and isn't that a kind of madness to be living by a code of silence when you've really got a lot to say?" # - Billy Joel

It’s been a little while since I last announced and launched another of The Zip Code challenges connected to my my "Moon Crater"TM novel and it’s sort of been tied up with me having to become more web-wise this year.. As regular readers will know, I’ve been using a mix of blog pages and Google Page builders to create some of the web pages of my Official Writing Website, but soon Google are doing away with their Google Pages so in anticipation of the inevitable disappearance of my Zip Code Challenge page (built with GPages) I’m temporarily suspending the page and will resurrect it later in the year – never fear, though, it will come back bigger and bolder than before…

The hunt WILL continue though with Challenge # 3 entitled “Everybody’s Earth” (can you spot an ongoing theme here that may be running within the 10 puzzle challenges that make up The Zip Code? #1 was called "Molten Mercury" and # 2 was "Volcanic Venus"!)

Anyway, the Code will continue on a grander scale throughout 2010, so keep an eagle-eye out, Special Agents, and just as it disappears from the Radio icon on my main website, it will reappear SOON via a “weirdly wordy” object on my Official Homepage – (wobble board SFX!) “Can you tell what it is yet?!”

Incidentally, (there’s always “an incidentally”, with my posts, right?!) I’m becoming a big fan of modern update of The X-Files (well, it IS, isn’t it?!) called Fringe, and one clever ongoing “puzzle game” they have on that show is flashing up “glyphs” at ad breaks or between important scenes that spell out a clue to that particular week’s episode – you can only crack the code if you have the glyphs cipher though… (a bit like the Zip Code, really!)

Many More Moon Musings...

# “We only stay in orbit for a moment of time, and then you’re everybody’s satellite… I wish that you were mine, I wish that you were mine… # - Counting Crows

Reading my posts on here and looking across at my Official Website you could get the impression that I’m a bit obsessed with the Moon (in more ways than one!) Well, I won’t deny it – ever since I was old enough to go for a stroll with my dad and the dog on their evening walks, I would always gaze up on clear nights to the see the full Moon and wonder what it would be like to walk on it, what it had been like in the past and how we’d shape its future tomorrow…

You’d have to be living in isolation inside some distant impact crater to not be aware that 2009 is the 40th Anniversary of the time man first set foot on the Moon, and I just couldn’t let this year pass without marking it in some way on the blog. So I thought I’d give my own take on the celebrations as well as linking in a small sort of preview of my very own still-developing lunar-linked set of stories called “Moon Crater Adventures” …

For me, personally, the Moon has had special resonance at varying moments in my life so far… From childhood memories of my dad's recollections of standing outside the family flat at 3AM on “Mary Street” back on that fateful morning back in ’69, staring up at the glowing full Moon through Earth-bound binoculars (and even chucking a sickie from work the next day for a lie-in – tsk-tsk!); to HIS father, my grandfather, who spent his youth growing up in an earlier age of horse-drawn carriages and wind-up automobiles, and who was by all family accounts glued to the TV whenever ANY space shuttle was launched, fascinated, by those new-fangled contraptions for flying into space; to the film that my now wife and I went to see as part of our first date together – “The Dish” (all about the little-known story of the Australian receiving satellite that was used by NASA to relay pictures of the Moon landings across this planet on July 20th, 1969 – it’s really a cracking yarn and a recommended watch!)

The “Lunar Day” celebrations definitely gives me an opportunity to give a bit of a (hopefully tantalising) mid-year mini update on my “Seal Your Own Fate” online gamebook series which I’m calling “Moon Crater Adventures”. Last November I gave out some exclusive info on the Adventures in the form of early ideas and drafts that came from the sketchbook of my co-pilot on the stories, illustrator Rich Windass. And since Rich has also this year so enthusiatically taken up the challenge of illustrating my “At The Time Before Time Collapsed” prelude to the first Adventure called “Simulacrum”, the “sneak-peak” in this post comes in the form of a couple of more sketches – this time of a pair of characters central to the plot – two robots, called AIR and ICE… Come November, this year, there’ll be a little more of the story of “Simulacrum” revealed in our regular annual update slot here on the blog but for now I can also tell you that quite fittingly in connection with the Moon landing commemorations, that the Prelude (intended as an “online graphic novella”) involves an adventure on a planet not of our own that may or may not be a Moon itself nowawdays…

The commemorations for four decades since man first set foot on the Moon really have been something to watch this year (and watch A LOT of TV documentaries on the subject I have, recently, recapping the achievements of the entire Apollo missions, not just No11, as well as the Russian and European contributions too), but looking back for me now as an adult and writer of adventure fiction and occasional science fiction isn't as exciting as gazing forward (and still wondering “What if...?”) There’s a new “space race” getting geared up through the world’s media all centred on the Moon because of the possible discovery of water that could be used as fuel, and only in June this year NASA’s “LCROSS” was launched in an attempt to prove just this fact… (it will complete the first part of its mission in early-October and I’ll be keenly watching for the results as they’re beamed back to Earth to see if it all leads one day in my own twilight years to a futuristic 21st century “Tranquility Base”…

There's lots of brilliant links out there this year to mark the 40 years since Armstrong first inspired the next generation to imagine the possibilities of space exploration but I'm going to end this post with my favourite 4 links (one for each decade of exploration and inspiration so far) from the thousands that 2009 has produced to celebrate Man’s involvement and fascination with the Moon:

• "Google Moon" - a great emerging tool for exploring our planet's satellite from the comfort of your own home...
• "The Missing Moon Reel!" - the story of original lost NASA footage from '69...
• "But I wasn't even born in 1969!" - get the full story as the Eagle lands and events are recreated for today's audience...
• “More Moon Ice!" - detailing a new global Moon mission where 1.6 million people signed up to the 'Send Your Name to the Moon' campaign.

p.s. I didn't have room to talk about it in this post but Google Mars is also a good resource site for future space explorers and adventurers to visit, but, then again, that's best left for another time and another story...