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Rediscovering a Dream Journal

Around two months ago, I rediscovered a dream journal I’d kept on another blogging website for around 2½ months in 2011. At present, all the entries are locked away, but the pinned entry suggests that mutual friends were welcome to follow it, and there’s an overview of my motivation.

I was inspired by a blogger friend who often experienced called WILD, or Wake Induced Lucid Dreaming, and how she found it a great source of inspiration for writing. This would have been less than a year after I started with the former National Novel Writing Month the previous year, so I was keen to try anything.

I did talk in the pinned entry about general techniques for falling asleep and how to check whether you’re in a lucid dream. At the time, I didn’t seem to realise there is a specific technique for learning how to induce WILD that would only have been a Yahoo! search away. What a missed opportunity.

I didn’t intend for the project to last any specific period; I didn’t set a time frame at all. It was just to there to store the material for use at a future date.

From the first entry on 27 July 2011, I made 11 regular updates – excluding the pinned post – with fragments of dreams I’d had over the last few days. One phrase that appears a lot is Forgotten on Waking, and that became the subtitle for the blog.

So what of the actual contents?

I need to be selective about what I post because some people referenced are still around. Other fragments have been tagged NSFW, or Not Safe for Work, whereas this WordPress blog is firmly PG. But there are some repeatable gems, reproduced here with the original grammar intact:

  1. 24 July: 1 saw round poles about 100mm wide and 1m long, with a large, “knob,” at the end of each, with an eight- or nine-letter word beginning with H word stamped on the handle. They were placed in a bucket in a white room like an art gallery. Still in the art gallery, I was impressed by a stand that held six posters – two wide and three tall – being folded up into a box shape about 50cm cubed.
  2. 31 July: I was arranging with a friend to pick up a crisis loan of £100 on my behalf and him asking via text message if he could use some of the money to travel back to give it to me. He replied, “If I don’t enjoy it, I’ll go away and never speak to you again.”
  3. 12 August: Dream 1, fragment: I learnt that the two men who operated the puppets on The Sooty Show were Army reservists, so they could only film when they weren’t required to be on duty.

Reading these again after 15 years, I can see why I thought they might eventually prove useful. The Sooty Show fragment in particular feels like the sort of premise that might make for a good short story, although I’d fictionalise the TV show. Even the objects in the art gallery objects might worm their way into the description of a scene.

While writing this entry, I intermittently thought about restarting the journal, maybe for a limited period, but it’s not a reliable method of generating writing prompts, Eleven entries across 2½ months isn’t exactly a production line, particularly when so many of them amount to Forgotten on Waking. The process also requires the will and the means to make notes immediately after waking up.

Rather, the value of this collection is closer to keeping a box of miscellaneous electrical wires. Most won’t have any practical use, but you might occasionally need one for a particular project.

Perhaps that’s enough reason to keep the journal as a fossil: you never know when you’ll need a mysterious art installation, a crisis loan, or an Army reservist puppeteer.

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A Least Favourite Book

A couple of weeks ago, I answered one of the daily prompts that WordPress provides, talking about the book Room by Emma Donoghue. Today, I remembered I had another one stored for future use, and here it is:

Have you ever regretted reading a book — which one and why?

If you don’t want to know what happens in the novel Crawling Round South Oakwood by Stephen Slaughter, then stop reading here.

This book was released in 2012, and I first heard of it in Writing Magazine after it won an award for cover design. The words become fuzzier as you read down the cover, and they’re interspersed with pictures of beer glasses gradually emptying. I thought it deserved the award, but it proved the old maxim of Never judge a book by its cover.

It’s an tried-and-tested technique to hook the reader with immediate action. Just as Romeo and Juliet opens with a street brawl, I expected to see it all kicking off down the pub. Instead, we’re presented with the overwritten opening sentence.

Although I was more interested in the thought of a weekend break for two in Paris, which was the first prize of a competition in the local paper, the attention of my colleagues was firmly gripped by news which had not been reported in the paper and which was unlikely to ever reach its pages.

This sets the tone for the entire novel: dense with unnecessary detail and light on plot. We have to sit through pre-drinks at the narrator’s house, some uninteresting description of their favourite TV show So You Think You Know What You Are Talking About, and then a turn-by-turn account of how the group walks to the pub.

I don’t regret reading the book per se, but I do regret carrying on past the first chapter. Some authors can skilfully do virtually nothing with their characters, but not Stephen Slaughter.

The closest we come to any interesting action is a scuffle that breaks out in the middle of the book. There is no foreshadowing, no build-up of tension, just two characters who seemed like friends until they decided they had some sort of problem with each other.

Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another book with as few redeeming features. The plot is so banal that that I can’t even remember how it ends, and I’m not buying another copy just to find out. It’s likely some idle chatter about their beloved TV show.

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Murder She Floats

At the recommendation of a few people, one of them Richard Osman, I started watching The Good Ship Murder a few weeks ago. All the episodes are available on the Channel 5 website, provided you’re within the UK.

As the title suggests, it’s a crime drama set on a luxury Mediterranean cruise ship. This is the real-life MSC Virtuosa. Although the name is widely publicised online, it’s never mentioned in the programme except for the credits, presumably to avoid contravening product placement rules.

I’ve become a fan of the programme, but I could see through the formula from the start. In short, it’s like Murder She Wrote, but at sea. Shayne Ward plays Jack Grayling, a cabaret singer who was once a detective. He ends up informally investigating the suspicious deaths that occur on the ship and in port.

The production also receives incentives from the Malta Film Commission. I’m conjecturing here, but with its close proximity to Italy, I wonder whether that’s why we frequently see Italian supporting characters and locations.

But what about the other leading characters? The real strength of any script lies in what it does with these.

Grayling needs the help of Jamil Al-Rashid, his colleague in Housekeeping who can gain access to areas of the ship that a cabaret singer can’t go. He also has the trust of Kate Woods, the ship’s First Officer and his own romantic interest, who can act as lookout.

The contrast between leading characters is the bedrock of any ensemble piece. The A-Team, for instance, would never manage with four characters like Hannibal Smith or B A Baracus.

As for antagonists, an honourable mention must go to Geoffrey Breton as Staff Captain Piers de Vreese. He’s so well-written that I find him insufferable, and I often wish he would be pushed into the sea under cover of darkness.

The series was created by Mike Benson and Paul Matthew Thompson, who have written a lot of British TV dramas and soaps between them, but this appears to be their first collaboration. There is a further credit – Based on an Original Idea from Ben Frow – referencing the long-serving Director of Programmes at Channel 5.

Importantly, it never pretends to be highbrow or realistic. Viewers are taken to sunny far-flung locations and asked to suspend their disbelief while the former cop manages the friction between his crewmates and goes on to uncover the vital clue that the serving police have overlooked.

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Rewriting the Ending of an Award-Winning Novel

There’s nothing more intimidating to a writer than a blank page, so WordPress provides a daily question to help out. I don’t often answer these, but I liked this one from a few weeks ago because I had an immediate answer.

This entry will, by necessity, contain major plot points about the Emma Donoghue book Room. If you don’t want to know what happens, skip over this entry. The question is:

If you could rewrite any book’s ending, which one would you choose?

Continue reading “Rewriting the Ending of an Award-Winning Novel” →
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Listening Over Lecturing

Many years ago, I volunteered at a community radio station in Glasgow. As well as turning up for my shift, however, I made a point of showing up at their other events.

At one of these, I was introduced to someone who was supposed to be some big deal in radio, even if the details of his background are now hazy. I can’t even remember whether he was actually a professional or just an enthusiastic amateur. In any case, I was starting out with presenting and he knew more than I did, so I asked him whether he had any advice.

This turned out to be a mistake. Rather than first asking a few establishing questions, he talked at me non-stop for about ten minutes. I’m trying to remember even one of the points he made, but all I can recall is the wide-eyed enthusiasm in his face.

I subsequently learnt there can be something of a ‘wannabe culture’ in community radio, and it’s likely he was part of that. Many volunteers are genuinely there to make a difference to the listeners, but a few believe they could have been on Absolute 90s if only their luck had turned out differently.

I was reminded of this incident recently when I was asked by two different people for general writing advice. I could easily have launched into my own ten-minute speech. I could have reeled off all the times I’ve been published, that I took over National Novel Writing Month for Dundee & Angus, how I used to run an open-mic, what is the best time of week to post a blog, and a hundred other topics.

But what use would it have been? Writing advice is only effective in response to a specific problem.

So instead of channelling that wannabe, I find it more useful to ask some establishing questions, starting broad and narrowing it down. These questions could include, but are not limited to:

  • What’s your current project?
  • Which part are you stuck on?
  • What solutions have you tried so far?

That way, everyone saves time and the person asking gains a much more useful insight than hearing the other person trying to prove their vast knowledge.

Whether the other person takes that advice, however, is another matter.

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The Formatting That Went Out of Date

A rare Wednesday entry, but I couldn’t let this lie. You might have read yesterday’s entry The Story That Went Out of Date, which includes a short story at the end.

It has become apparent that the formatting only appears correctly on https://gavincameron.co.uk. The first line of each paragraph was supposed to be indented like a novel; instead, anyone viewing on the Reading page or the Jetpack app would have seen a wall of text, and nobody likes a wall of text.

It seems I haven’t quite yet cracked the coding on this site. As such, I’ve gone back and edited it, so the formatting should show correctly everywhere.

Thank you for your co-operation.

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The Story That Went Out of Date

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about the challenges facing writing with the advent of generative text software. Much of the discourse has become dull and repetitive, and what I haven’t seen discussed much is how new technology can quickly make an existing story obsolete or dated.

Pick up any novel from the 19th century or before, and the characters will travel by horse or on a ship with sails and rigging. Enter the 20th century and characters will use home phones or call boxes to speak to each other. Readers are quick to make allowances for the age of the text. But what happens when the piece is more recent?

I was reminded this week of a story I wrote in 2015 called Film Star Reanimation Ltd., where the plot revolves around resurrecting two dead actors for a feature-length film.

It’s something that was possible at the time, but involved a lot of manual input and guesswork. It was inspired by, and makes reference to, an advert for Galaxy from 2013 which starred an electronic replica of Audrey Hepburn. Here’s an article from 2014 about how this was achieved.

Now, 13 years on, this sci-fi idea is edging closer to reality, rendering the plot less outlandish than it appeared on its first outing. As such, I can’t foresee this being published professionally now, unless I wait a few decades and present it as a historical piece.

I can find three versions in my files: two from February 2015 and one from December 2015. The last one is the version I’ve included under the cut.

It’s only 1,352 words and I’d like to edit it properly because there are enough plot points in there to unpack it to twice that length. Nonetheless, I’ve left the words unchanged, only the formatting to make it appear correctly on WordPress.

For anyone keeping tabs on my WordPress awards, by the way, the site today awarded me two badges while fixing that formatting:

  • CSS Sorcerer. You’re a developer now. Basically.
  • Perfectionist. Edit a single post over and over again. It’s still not right, is it?

Film Star Reanimation Ltd.

Continue reading “The Story That Went Out of Date” →
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A Second Spin at the Intercity Disco

Almost exactly two years ago, I wrote an entry titled The Attraction of the One-Off Piece. This was all about a one-night-only show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival titled The Greatest Literary Beef of the 21st Century.

My entry title has subsequently become redundant, since Ross McCleary and Stefan Mohamed.have done it again with another one-night show – Incubus Succubus Vengabus – that happened on Wednesday 12 August, two years to the day since the literary beef.

Even if I could recall every detail of the 45-minute script, it would take as long again to explain the context behind some of the gags and references, not to mention careful straddling of the spoken-word genre and the stand-up comedy scene.

Besides, I’m not sure I want to give too much away. The best comparison I can make is to imagine the offbeat comedy of Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer, but instead aimed at a audience almost entirely comprising their friends, followers and fellow poets who understand many of the in-jokes.

One thing I will let slip is a sketch where they searched the title of their last show and read out the automatic summary from Google. I’m reliably informed this was drawn entirely from my blog. This gives me ideas about hiding metadata in this post to influence search engines in the event of a third show, possibly in another two years from now.

Instead, I’ve already made my suggestion for a third show, pointing out that some of the lyrics from We Like to Party! (The Vengabus) on the left are strikingly similar to those from the Billy Ocean track When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going on the right.

I’ve got something to tell ya
I’ve got news for you
Gonna put some wheels in motion
Get ready ’cause we’re coming through

I got something to tell you
I got something to say
I’m gonna put this dream in motion
Never let nothing stand in my way

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Discontent Over Content

On Sunday, I went to a one-off screening of the renowned film Quadrophenia (1979), starring Phil Daniels, Leslie Ash and a number of other actors who went on to become bigger stars through the 1980s and beyond. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the sound design, but my focus today is the content rating.

To give you a brief overview, any film intended for cinematic release must first be submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) who give it an age rating and advice to audiences regarding the type of content to expect. In that regard, it performs a similar role to the Motion Picture Association in the USA.

Each classified film begins with a black card including the age rating and the advice. I noticed it was given a ’15’ certificate, so nobody younger can see it. I also noted it was an older style of certificate from 2002 and appeared to be a 35mm print rather than a digital one, suggesting it hadn’t been reclassified for some time.

There is strong language from the start of Quadrophenia, not to mention flashes of nudity, which likely nudges the ceiling of that age rating. Out of curiosity, I had a look into the justification on the BBFC website and found an unusual pattern.

The cinema release was rated ‘X’ in 1979, which is now obsolete, but equivalent to an ’18’ certificate today. It was then reclassified ’15’ in 1996 and 2015. However, the home entertainment release was rated ’18’ in 1986, 1998 and 2006. I’m unable to find a justification for the difference in the two levels.

Meanwhile, something interesting had happened at the tail end, after the credits. The audience briefly saw a blue ‘NC-17’ certificate. It’s unclear why this appeared, so I can only assume there had been an mix-up somewhere. Confusingly, ‘NC-17’ means nobody under 18 will be admitted.

The MPA website directed me to FilmRatings.com, which said it was given an ‘R’ rating in 1979. This indicates that an under-17 can only see the picture with an accompanying parent or adult guardian. Again, I was unable to find a justification for the difference in the two levels.

In the UK, film ratings have been mandatory since 1912 and in my own experience, they generally err on the side of being too strict, so I was surprised a ’15’ was even entertained. It is possible to seek guidance before shooting a frame, though, and I’m reminded of correspondence between Edgar Wright and the BBFC about the question of strong language in The World’s End, which was subsequently passed at ’15’.

But I do think this rather quaint system, now more than a century old, will become obsolete in our lifetimes in favour of self-policed ratings.

The BBFC has a partnership with Netflix which allows the streamer to assign ratings to its own output, subject to regular audits. With the trial extended into 2028, I don’t doubt we’ll see the major Hollywood studios enter into similar partnerships, freeing up the classifiers’ time for other work.

I even suspect we might one day see the end of such systems completely. There is no mandatory age-rating system for even the most violent or explicit novels. The publishers instead target the right audiences instead through marketing. We’ll see what happens with films.

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This Isn’t a Music Blog, But…

Something incredibly exciting is happening with the top 40 right now. Last week, the track Rein Me In by Sam Fender and Olivia Dean reached 19 non-consecutive weeks at number one. In doing so, it surpasses the 18-week record set by the Frankie Laine single I Believe in 1953.

The last time anything threatened to come close was during the first half of the 1990s with Bryan Adams and Wet Wet Wet with soundtracks from popular films. These have been pushed into third and fourth place respectively. Conversely, Rein Me In is a slow-burning hit with no obvious cultural trigger, with the trade-off that it hasn’t yet bored everyone senseless.

For better analysis, I invite you visit the Chart Watch blog.

I mention this phenomenon because it leads nicely into the topic of this week’s entry: what do I listen to while writing?

The short answer is: nothing specific. My radio is generally tuned to BBC Radio 1 for the breakfast show every weekday morning and the chart show on a Friday afternoon. If I want a change, I might switch to an adult contemporary station like Absolute Radio or one of its offshoots.

I’m also a regular listener to the speech output of BBC Radio 4 Extra, but not while writing. Pop and rock music lyrics tends to fade into the background, whereas comedy or conversation can be distracting.

I used to have a specific playlist. The majority of it comprised music from the 2007 film The Assassination of Jesse James, composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, with additional Cave tracks to bring it up to one hour.

These days, I normally use the a resource like the music of Jason Lewis for longer projects. He makes mixes of up to there hours with isochronic tones that pulse on and off at regular intervals. These are supposed to affect brainwaves in a productive fashion. I can’t say whether that’s true or not, but I find they tend to support writing rather than distracting from it.

Sometimes, of course, you need to take the soundtrack you’re given, particularly at writing group. The pub where we meet commonly plays ambient music and/or sports commentary, both of which can be loud and not conducive to writing.

As I edit this, however, I can hear a mixture of classic hits at low volume, so I hope that continues until 8pm.