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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The Formatting That Went Out of Date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 You might have read yesterday’s entry The Story That Went Out of Date, which includes a short story at the end.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.

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The Layover Formula: Taking My Own Proofreading Advice

For those keeping track, I’ve received no further badges from WordPress at present. I’ll issue updates on that story as I receive them.

Meanwhile, I’m still very much on the writing kick from the start of this month. I’ve previously made allusions that what I’m writing is part of a fantasy series published under a pseudonym on a reasonably well-known platform.

I’ve now churned out two new chapters. The first part totalled around 3,700 words, which is already nearly twice as long as some of the previous chapters. Every story has to be approved by an administrator, and the longer it is, the longer the approval process tends to take.

That first part also ended on a major cliffhanger that will steer the rest of the story. As such, I want to make sure the second part resolves all the action in the first. The second part ends with a resolution rather than another cliffhanger.

I’ve built up both parts in a non-linear fashion, then joined the dots to make a complete narrative. I didn’t consciously choose to work this way; that’s just how it panned out. I’ve been tinkering with the story so long now that I’m down to only minor changes on each reading.

On Thursday of last week, I decided it was time to listen to my own advice: leave it aside and come back to it later. To determine the minimum period that a piece should be left aside, I use a self-devised formula: either (a) one minute per word, or (b) 24 hours, whichever is longer. I’ve dubbed it The Layover Formula.

So a 600-word short story would be ten hours, which is rounded up to 24 hours. By contrast, my next chapter currently stands in the region of 6,600 words, or a layover of approximately 4½ days. In a happy coincidence discovered while writing this, 10,000 words leaves a gap of almost exactly a week:

Word Count Minutes Layover
100 100 24 hours
500 500 24 hours
1,000 1,000 24 hours
2,000 2,000 1.4 days
5,000 5,000 3.5 days
10,000 10,000 7 days

I last looked at the file late on Thursday night and I told myself not to open it again until tonight. I was permitted, however, to carry out some adjacent activities:

  • Jot down relevant notes in another document so I don’t forget them.
  • Work on the history, background and lore of the stories.
  • Start preparing and writing the next chapter.

I’ve been so distracted by all the adjacent work that it’s actually been rather easy to avoid looking at the document. But when I am working on it, one way I like to proofread is by using text-to-speech synthesis because it won’t skip over most spelling or grammar errors.

Microsoft Word can do this, where it’s called Read Aloud, and the voice is reasonably realistic, albeit with the occasional incorrect tone or word stress. The mobile app also has this feature, although I found it kept stopping around two minutes after the screen was locked.

Faced with this problem, I thought it might be prudent to create an audio file instead that could be heard while walking.

Text-to-MP3 converter tools are a dime a dozen, but many of them offer a trial limit of around 1,000 characters before a subscription is required. I found a PDF to MP3 tool that was free of charge and suitable enough for my purposes, even if it handled page breaks with a long gap.

Once the proofreading was done, the piece will be ready to submit and I can give the audience the resolution they crave. I can’t control how long the approval might take, but I can decide how long to wait before submitting it.

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The Wild West of WordPress Badges – Supplemental

After posting yesternight’s entry about WordPress badges, I then received the one below for publishing ten consecutive posts at the same hour of the day.

By telling you about this at an unusual hour, I wonder whether this will, in turn, generate further badges. I’ll let you know either in a later entry, or the usual Tuesday update.

WordPress achievement badge with an orange circular background featuring a stylised alarm‑clock icon; below it the text reads ‘Creature of Habit – Publish 10 consecutive posts at the same hour of the day’, with a green link beneath stating ‘See all your achievements’.
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The Wild West of WordPress Badges

Four weeks ago, I received a notification from WordPress that I’d been awarded an Achievement called Palindrome Post. I’d never heard of such a thing, so I took a closer look.

This is given for a post with at least 100 words where the word count reads the same backwards as forwards. This could be 121, 1,221, 12,321 or a similar pattern. It was credited to the post A Fully-Booked Weekend.

And yet WordPress itself tells me that post is 267 words long. This doesn’t include the title nor tags, and the words in hyperlinks are also counted individually, so I’m not sure of the methodology used. That said, I was only vaguely aware of the achievements system before this, so it’s prompted me to look down the list.

The first two badges were all achieved within the first month of the blog’s life: 200 follows and 1337 Likes. But the wonky maths returned in January 2014 because I don’t understand how this – a weekly blog – could have earned the 500 posts badge.

And then more than a decade passed with nothing.

The next time I heard about the badges was on the 12th Anniversary of the blog in October 2025. I then received two awards on 26 May 2026: Globe Trotter for receiving views from 50+ different countries, and The Headliner for changing a post’s title five or more times before publishing. I’m surprised I took so long to achieve that last one, since the title often goes through a few drafts.

But what about the badges I haven’t yet achieved?

With my predictable Tuesday night update schedule, I know I won’t achieve some of them, including Night Owl for posting between midnight and 5am, nor Early Bird for posting between 5am and 8am. I’m also unlikely to be a Marathon Blogger, publishing for 30 days in a row, and definitely no Dear Diary for posting every day for a whole year.

But there are some within my grasp. I’ll win the Daily Reader badge if I visit the Reader page for 30 days in a row, or Ship It! if I publish a post very quickly with no overthinking allowed; again, I’m surprised this hasn’t yet happened, considering the number of last-minute entries. I’m also in danger of triggering Necromancer for publishing a draft that’s been gathering dust for over a year.

Looking into the future, I won’t achieve Novelist unless I wait a long while or seriously increase the length of my entries. Unbelievably, I’ve written less than 4,000 words across all my entries out of the required 50,000. I also won’t see Leap of Faith until 2028, as I hope to be posting on Tuesday 29 February.

Peppered in between the visible achievements are a list of secret achievements. I’m not opposed to surprises per se, but I think it’s unfair to hide these rather than encourage users to work towards them.

Fortunately, one user has listed a few more that I didn’t know about, so I can use that as a starting point. Perhaps the real achievement is simply remembering this little system still quietly exists in the background..

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A Critical Hit in Edinburgh

On Sunday, Critical Role performed a show in Edinburgh for the first time, and I had the privilege to be in the audience. But before going any further, it’s worth explaining what Critical Role is, because this is a writing blog rather than a Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fansite.

This event is a long‑running collaborative storytelling series where a group of professional voice actors play D&D. They building character arcs, improvise plot turns and twists, and shape an evolving fantasy narrative. It’s part-game and part-performance, combining into a sprawling epic.

I’d known for more than a year that this was happening, but I didn’t instantly snap up a ticket, reasoning that while I did enjoy them, I wasn’t a superfan. That was until earlier this month, when I heard there were a number of resale tickets available. I gave it some consideration. Some pals said I could stay overnight after the event, which eased the logistics enormously, so my mind was made up.

After some fish and chips, we headed to Edinburgh Castle, a location that almost seems engineered for fantasy storytelling. You can bet the audience leaned into it too, with the vast majority of attendees in some form of costume, many head-to-toe.

Their live shows are known for being lengthy, as you can see from the running times of their existing videos. This one ran from 6pm sharp to around 10:40pm, including a 20‑minute break.

I knew the comedian Daniel Sloss would be acting as MC, but I didn’t realise he would play such an integral part in the story. For me, he was an absolute highlight, merging the established tropes with peculiarly Scottish humour. At one point, he offered the actors bottles of Buckfast and they seamlessly made it a minor plot point.

The only downside was the almost absent crowd management. The queues for bathrooms, drinks and merchandise were so unclear that more than on logjam formed without stewards keeping the flow moving. It didn’t derail the actual event, but it was noticeable enough to tar the experience.

I’m giving away as little as possible here because the recording will be available on YouTube in due course. I was quite far away from the action, so I did watch most of it on the giant video screen anyway. It’s different, however, when you’re surrounded by hundreds of people echoing the catchphrases or stamping their feet when the baddies were blasted to bits.

It’s unlikely I’ll be following Critical Role around the world, but if they chose to come back to Scotland in a year or two, I’d consider going again.