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Lost and Perhaps Found

When I started writing around 2010, I made a point of keeping an archive of my work.

Every story and poem has its own directory, and dated revisions are kept within each one. Plain text doesn’t take up much storage space, so there’s plenty of scope to keep doing this into the future.

About two or three years ago, I was looking for a particular poem I’d written; I knew its title, many of the words, and roughly when it was written. So when the archive showed no results after several attempts, I realised my system had broken down somewhere and wrote it off as a loss. I could have reconstructed it with a little effort, but I never did.

There’s a common misconception about Snapchat that it deletes every picture you send. In fact, you can set it to keep a copy of every picture you add to the My Story feature.

Fortunately, I’d not only set this up, but I’d taken a clear picture of the original handwritten verse four years earlier – and I’m not in the habit of doing that. In February 2022, while looking for something else, I found that picture. The original verse had almost certainly been shredded along with other papers. I swiftly copied the words into a Word document and placed it in the archive.

Luckily this was only a 16-line poem. Other writers have suffered far greater losses. Jilly Cooper, for instance, lost the original manuscript of Riders on a London bus and it took her years to rewrite.

Not all losses are accidental. A significant quantity of drama has been wiped from BBC and ITV archives, including episodes of popular shows like Doctor Who and Dad’s Army. Before the advent of home video, there was little incentive to keep old programmes except to resell them overseas.

In some cases, collectors and members of the public have discovered recordings; some in great condition, others needing significant restoration. The BFI used to hold an annual screening called Missing Believed Wiped, featuring a selection of recovered footage, but I’m unable to find any recent events.

It remains a mystery whether I typed out the poem in 2018 then lost it, or whether it was never typed up in the first place. I’ve nonetheless started backing up my archive locally and online so no further mishaps should happen.

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Tackling War & Peace

Around 2015, I bought a copy of the Leo Tolstoy novel War & Peace. I say ‘novel’, but it actually comprises four volumes, telling the story of the French invasion of Russia through the eyes of four fictional families.

The book is noted for its length, but all the chapters are short enough that you can read one or two before bed; there are just a lot of chapters. That also doesn’t mean the story has been stretched out longer than it needs to be. Tolstoy has enough plot points to justify the word count.

I recently found the book again, with the bookmark still around the halfway point where I left it. I’d fallen out of the habit of reading it, and I’d really like to restart it.

My edition has character biographies at the start, but I made a decision early on that I wouldn’t try too hard to keep up with the individual characters and instead just enjoy the story.

I think my best tactic for diving back in is to devote a full day or weekend to making progress. Meanwhile, the book is now at least in a prominent place so it won’t slip my mind.2024-05-21 Fractal

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A Play on Words

Back in December 2021, Wordle started to explode in popularity, with a reported two million daily players at one point.

As a fan of word puzzles, I thought this would be right up my street. However, I’m also someone who dislikes hype, so it took me a long time to start playing. In fact, it was January 2024, exactly two years after the game was bought over by The New York Times.

I’ve now enjoyed it for 108 days straight. Around a third of these were guessed on the fourth try, with a 23-26 split between the third and fifth tries respectively, and ten that went down to the sixth guess. There have been days when I simply haven’t reached the answer, leaving me with a disappointing 94% success rate and no way to make up for it other than continuing to win until the losses are statistically insignificant.

The other word puzzle I play of a morning is Full Rainbow, which gives visitors three minutes to unscramble a seven-letter anagram. Sadly, it’s not possible to open an account to keep track of your score; you can only use the same browser and make sure not to clear your cookies. Instead, my personal aim is to be in the top 50% of players for solving it quickly.

I’ve always enjoyed word puzzles, and I was even an early adopter of sudoku before it took off in 2004. It’s probably no wonder, as my gran avidly completed the puzzles in Take a Break each week, while my grandad preferred the daily cryptic crossword.

I’m convinced he would have enjoyed Wordle because a similar deduction technique can be used for solving crosswords. For example, whenever there’s a ‘K’ at the beginning of a word, it’s unlikely to be followed by a ‘U’, or if it’s near the middle or the end of a word, there is likely to be a preceding ‘C’.

At the time of writing, Wordle gameplay remains free of charge. There has long been speculation that this might change, although it has become almost a loss leader for the paper’s subscription puzzles. Until then, I’ll keep playing, with a view to restoring my score to an acceptable level.

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Eight Weeks of Writing Group Independence

Every Tuesday, I run a writing group with a pal. Until eight weeks ago, the group was affiliated with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo).

We broke away to form an independent group after we felt the organisation was not working in the best interests of its members. You can read a previous entry exploring the reasons for this.

In the weeks following the announcement, we fielded a few questions from members, largely to reinforce that the new group would feel as familiar as we could make it. Only a couple of people have left, but no more than would have happened anyway.

In short, it’s been something of a velvet divorce.

I’d been running the group for about nine years, while my pal came on board about two years ago. We feel we know what works with our members and what doesn’t, and this secession allows us to take our own actions without needing to toe the line of an umbrella organisation with their own differing priorities.

There are still aspects we need to work out. For instance, we have an outstanding question of how to attract new members without being overwhelmed by new recruits. This, however, is not an urgent problem and we’ll work it out in due course.

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The End of the Renga

Back in 2020, I was invited to take part in a collaborative project started by the poet W N Herbert, known to us all as Bill.

His idea was simple. He would create an email list containing a group of poets. Then each month, he would send out the first stanza of a new poem and incorporate suggestions from those poets for a second stanza, then a third, and so on. The complete poem would be posted publicly by the end of the month.

From the start, Bill introduced us to the renga form. We did play somewhat fast and loose with its complex rules and conventions, but we mostly stuck to the alternating stanza length: a three-line haiku followed by two lines of seven syllables each.

Here’s part of a recent renga. Depending on the contributor, some parts were written in standard English and some in Scots.

Then two days ago, he announced the project was at an end. It seems this always intended to run for four years, but in the initial excitement of being asked to contribute, I hadn’t read that part.

I haven’t always had the time and/or inspiration to contribute, but I always made a point of reading the constructed renga when it was sent out. The next stage is to think about publication; Bill has a lot of experience in this area, so it’ll probably happen.

Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing about whatever project he has planned next.

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Plagued by Plagiarism

Back in 2015, Sheree Mack was accused of plagiarism by another writer. The claim was that her story The Tracks was based upon A Mercy by Judith Turner-Yamamoto. The publisher New Writing North believed the accusation had merit and pulped the remaining copies of the Mack story.

It subsequently emerged that other writers had similar concerns, coming to a head that year when Mack published what was described in The Guardian as a semi-apology on Facebook, admitting to “slackness and carelessness”. The same article also covers other notable examples from the writing scene.

And so everyone moved on and the matter died down, at least until a few weeks ago, when Sheree Mack was announced as a headliner for the upcoming Timber Festival. She will appear alongside Simon Armitage, although there’s no suggestion that he’s guilty of copying work.

I’m a member of a poetry page on Facebook that has members all over Scotland – and a long memory. A couple of the members have written to the festival urging them to think twice about her inclusion, while a few others have given first-hand accounts of hearing her stolen poems, one of which was in front of the original poet.

The festival has responded to the effect that they believe her actions were a one-off occurrence. This means the appearance at Timber is expected to go ahead as advertised.

It’ll never be possible to stop plagiarism, but the wider question is what we can do about it when it does happen. There probably needs to be a test case before a solution can be found.

I can see a parallel between this incident and the hip-hop scene of the late 1980s. Around this time, music sampling was becoming increasingly common, thanks to the rise of solid-state storage that allowed songwriters to loop sounds without the need to splice tape.

With no precedent to stop the practice, many tracks of the era simply borrowed bits and pieces of other tracks without credit or payment. Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S is a textbook example, containing 29 identified samples and many more unidentified ones.

The scene started to put its house in order at the start of the 1990s when Gilbert O’Sullivan objected to the rapper Biz Markie using Alone Again Naturally in a new work. Their record labels went to court and the judge found in favour of O’Sullivan.

From that point on, record labels were careful to clear any samples before using them in a recording. It’s far from a perfect solution, but the framework has been in place for more than 30 years at this stage.

I can’t immediately foresee a situation where such a case will happen in the poetry scene; it’s more fragmented and less commercial than the music industry.

Until that changes, a publisher having to pulp a few books isn’t seen as a great loss in the big scheme of things, even if it’s a massive deal for those who have had their poetry stolen and/or reworked without permission.

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Ideas Coming Out My Ears

Occasionally, I sit down to write this blog on a Tuesday only to find my tank of ideas is empty.

At the moment, I have a different problem. I have a list of subjects, but I can’t find a way to start on any of them. For example, today’s entry was meant to be about the problem of plagiarism among poets, but I couldn’t move past the first line.

Instead, let’s pick this up next week, once I’m able to articulate one or more of these ideas.

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Discussion Questions About Discussion Questions

On Sunday evening, I reached the end of the Richard Osman novel The Man Who Died Twice. I always like to read over the acknowledgements, and then I turned the page to find a section titled ‘Discussion Questions for Readers’.

Most of the questions give away plot points, so I won’t repeat those here, but there are a few only tangentially related to the story, such as ‘Have you ever been lonely in a new town?’ and ‘What is an acceptable name for a pet, and what is unacceptable?’

I’d never before seen this feature in a novel, so I asked around to see whether others had. While some pals were – like me – surprised to see this outside of an educational setting, others reported discussion questions appearing in other books, such as:

  • A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
  • The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, both by Taylor Jenkins Reid

These titles were all published in or after 2012, and I’d be interested to find out whether any older novels also have this feature.

One respondent reported debating with herself whether such questions encourage critical thinking or are merely there to spoon-feed reading groups. I’ve considered this question myself, but I have no conclusions so far.

It’s not clear whether the discussion section was the initiative of the author or the publisher, but I expect you’d want to test the waters first. My edition boasts ‘The multi-million-copy bestseller’ on the cover, so I expect Penguin Random House knew by this point that its readers would want to discuss the title.

Although I really enjoyed The Man Who Died Twice, perhaps I haven’t seen a discussion section before because I simply don’t normally lean towards crime fiction, cosy or otherwise. However, I will keep an eye out for this in the future.

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Sky Writing and Railway Reading

Yesterweek, I talked about going to Dublin for a few days and what I would bring to read and write on the three-day trip.

The flight there takes about an hour and five minutes from Edinburgh. I used the journey there to write six postcards, which I would then post on arrival, and tackled some other writing on my return. As predicted in that last entry, the cashier was indeed rather bemused as she handed over my stamps.

On the second day, my pal and I took a train to Belfast and back, taking around two hours each way, I split my time between writing in my notebook and reading my magazine.

It was helpful to have this time, but it would be more helpful if I were able to recreate this experience at home without the expense of travel. I’ve heard the suggestion of listening to ambient train noises as I write, but I also rationally know I can step outside my door at any time; not something you can do on a mainline railway.

If you’ve any suggestions on that front, I’m all ears.

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Sky Writing

If you’ve flown with Ryanair before, you’ll know the company doesn’t have a generous baggage allowance. So when I head off to Dublin for a few days tomorrow, I’ve had to be selective about what I bring for reading and writing for the journey.

I’m definitely bringing my laptop, which will sit alongside my plastic A4 document holder. This comfortably holds my A5 paper diary and a commercial-sized paperback. My current read is The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, and it’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to read a whole series.

However, I’m going to visit a pal from university on her birthday weekend. We typically swap cards by post, so I’m taking the opportunity to hand it over in person and I’m including a book, which will take up the other half of that document holder. As such, I’ve decided to take my copy of Writing Magazine to read instead, as it’ll slot nicely into the holder.

This gives me just enough room left to slip in some postcards. I know these went out of fashion with the advent of the text message and they’ll likely arrive home long after I do, but I specifically wanted to send some. I’ve already stuck on the address labels, so it’s just a matter of writing the messages and taking them to a post office, no doubt to the bemusement of the cashier.