Month: Jan 2024

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Looking Out for Each Other

One of the best pieces for anyone looking to be published is to fully read the submission guidelines for any publisher you wish to contact.

It came to my attention late last week that Auroras & Blossoms is soliciting submissions with conditions that many writers and editors consider unfair and unorthodox. You can read some reactions to these guidelines online and find links to the publisher’s website.

For someone like me who has made hundreds of submissions to many publishers, I can immediately see what’s wrong. For instance, it’s highly uncommon for a publisher to withhold royalties unless the writer makes a donation. For a beginner writer who hasn’t yet developed that frame of reference, it’s easy to be caught out.

Fortunately, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association is also worried about this problem. They run a blog called Writer Beware that’s geared towards any author, regardless of genre, highlighting the latest scams, impersonations and general shadiness. Unbelievably, this has been online since 1998.

Shortly before posting this entry, I discussed the blog with a pal. She not only already knew about the Writer Beware blog, but told me she’d brought Christina Kaye to their attention after a bad experience. Since the original post in November 2021, many other writers and industry professionals have added their voices, with a couple of comments even dating from last week.

While the problem of dodgy publishers isn’t new and isn’t going away any time soon, there are at least some in the industry who have your back.

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Looking at Loqueesha

There are plenty of films released each year that are given a lukewarm to negative reception. However, to make it onto the Wikipedia page titled List of films considered the worst, it has to be particularly bad.

At the time of writing, there are some predictable gems on there, like The Room (2003) and Cats (2019), along with forgotten and obscure features like Reefer Madness (1936) and Glitter (2001).

But one in particular caught my attention: Loqueesha, released about six months before Cats. It’s a vanity project directed, produced and co-written by its star Jeremy Saville.

The plot centres around a white barman who sends an audio recording to audition for an advice show on local radio. When his first attempt is rejected, he sends a second one pretending to be a black woman. After landing the job and fronting a successful show, he needs to maintain the illusion.

There are many reasons why it has a score of 1.6 out of 10 on IMDB and an astonishing 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. For a start, there aren’t enough plot points even to stretch to feature-length picture, and let’s skim over the borderline racism.

If there is one salvageable aspect of this film, it’s the dialogue. In the 98-minute running time, I don’t recall hearing much that I would describe as cliché. Yet it does need a lot of tightening to account for the lack of sub-plots. It could probably be shortened to a half or a third of its current running time, and be turned into a TV or radio drama.

There’s also a lesson here about lessening your control of a project. The staging or filming of a script is typically a collaborative process, with different people taking well-defined roles. The writing credits are shared, but perhaps doing the same for the other roles would have improved this film from bad to mediocre.

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When the Pastiche Becomes the Product

In 2017, I went to see The Square at the cinema, knowing it was meant to be a postmodern send-up of the contemporary arts scene. However, with the disjointed narrative, I came away with the distinct view that the film embodied the very concept it claimed to parody.

I’ve recently been thinking about this idea, but through a different medium. For my poetry circle, I wrote a verse intended as a pastiche of those ‘literary’ poets who often appear from nowhere and are showered with critical acclaim, frequently disappearing just as quickly.

The 19-line verse takes place on the third of January in an unspecified year. It’s from the point of view of two people who have moved to New York from Ireland and Scotland, and how the fantasy of living there has turned into reality. The last few lines were intended to be jarring, switching focus to an unrelated and overlooked secretary preparing to search for another job.

On submitting the poem, I asked the group members to consider the verse first and then to read the explanation. I wanted them to gauge whether – like The Square – the pastiche had become the product.

I think I’ve got away with it. Although there was constructive criticism of some parts, the consensus was that the abrupt change of focus didn’t come across as jarring as I’d intended, with one member saying it was a fitting ending to the piece.

I’m happy with the results of this most unscientific experiment, so I’m not inclined to repeat it for the moment. If I did have the chance to be one of those ‘literary’ one-hit wonders I talked about, though, I’d be inclined to grab it, however fleeting it proved to be.

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No Fun ‘Til February

I really like January. It carries none of the bustle and hassle of December, but instead has a fresh feeling, as though the cellophane has just been removed from the new year.

There is a trade-off here, though. The relative stillness of the month means that nothing particularly literary is happening right now. We need to wait until March for both the St Andrews poetry festival – or StAnza – and the Scottish Poetry Slam Championship in Glasgow. Many other literary fairs and gatherings don’t happen until summer. Even the Scottish Book Trust has given participants until the end of this month to enter their December 50-word story competition.

Outside of the literary scene, I would normally take part in Fun a Day Dundee. This is aimed at artists rather than writers, but it’s to help them through the slump of January. I usually find a way to incorporate text. However, that event isn’t running in its usual form this year, although hopes are high for 2025.

The best I can do at the moment is to complete the books I borrowed for the readathon a couple of weeks ago and return them to the library.

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Using the Shavian Alphabet for Scots

Over the last week, an alternative rendering of English has come to my attention: the Shavian alphabet.

The name is derived from the last name of George Bernard Shaw, who disliked silent letters and non-phonetic spellings, and argued that the existing alphabet is insufficient to represent its sounds. However, he had little to do with its creation as it was developed more than a decade after he died in 1950.

Much more detail is available on a dedicated website run by one of its proponents. In simple terms, its main purpose is to eliminate ambiguous spellings by creating just one symbol for each possible sound actually used in English. For example, the current alphabet reserves just five letters for vowels as written, whereas there are around 20 vowel sounds. The letters of Shavian are more akin to Arabic than Latin.

This blog has taken longer to research than I initially imagined it would. However, no source seems to have addressed what I think is an obvious gap. The variant of English spoken in Scotland shares a similar problem with standard English in that the letters don’t necessarily match the sounds, with the extra issue that more words have more than one spelling, depending on how the speaker pronounces it.

On top of that is an additional guttural sound, represented by ch in words such as loch or Auchterhouse. This is not unique to Scotland, also appearing in languages such as Spanish and German.

In my view, adding a representation for that sound would go some way towards making it suitable for Scots speakers. The International Phonetic Alphabet devotes the letter x to it, which is not already used in Shavian, but also can’t be drawn with one stroke like the rest of its characters.

As it stands, it’s unlikely we’ll see any widespread use of the Shavian alphabet in our lifetimes. But who knows what practical applications might be found for it in the future?