Tag: blogging

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Back In the Room

A number of factors came together yesterweek, including scheduling problems and technical problems, which meant I couldn’t bring you a full entry. In the short explanatory note, I mentioned there were three possible topics I could cover. During the intervening period, however, I’ve added another one to this list, and it’s that I’m covering today.

The horror film Backrooms was released into cinemas at the tail end of May, and I had a chance to see it on Wednesday of last week. The director Kane Parsons didn’t come up with the central idea, but used the existing concept from popular culture. He’s previously expanded upon it with a series of short films available on YouTube.

In short, the eponymous backrooms are an endless maze of empty rooms and partitions that resemble an office or storage space, often illuminated by harsh lighting and decorated in shades of yellow. The architecture is largely stable, so any character who goes through an entrance can typically return to the previous room, and objects can be carried in and out.

The limitability of the place also frequently reminds people of a real-life place they’ve been before. In my case, my dad used to have a hair salon in the basement of a bank, which was accessed by a long staircase. Fluorescent lighting was a necessity, since there wasn’t so much as a window at street level. I also remember an unfinished section that looked onto bare rock; I called it the dungeon.

But I’m going off the point somewhat, as this blog is about writing, not art. In the film, the setting is front and centre of the whole narrative, so I was interested to see how it was described in the script. I expected there would be a leaked copy of the screenplay going about. Instead, I can only find a minimalist rendering that strips out everything but the dialogue, making it no help at all.

Nonetheless, I liked that the sets are varied, but there are no contrived traps for the characters. They’re often free to leave at any time, provided they know which corner to turn and if they can outrun anything that’s chasing them. It also steers clear of parodying films with similar characteristics, such as The Shining, The Blair Witch Project or Being John Malkovich.

Considering the practical sets built for the occasion, it’s remarkable this was delivered with a budget of $10 million, which is low-budget in Hollywood terms. Yet there is one other film around at the moment with even tighter purse-strings.

If $10 million is low-budget, then the $750,000 to shoot Obsession is practically pocket change. There are some parallels: this is also a horror, and its writer-and-director Curry Barker also started on YouTube. From here, however, it travels in its own direction, following a more conventional path with storytelling and gore at its centre.

It may be a coincidence that these two directors have come from a similar background to release low-budget horror films in the same month.

Equally, it might also be the beginnings of a trend where we see ideas transfer more readily from the computer screen to the cinema screen. If so, we must also brace ourselves for a hundred photocopies of Backrooms, or narratives just different enough not to tread on the toes of Obsession.

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It’s Not Happening This Week

My schedule and my technology has been against me for the last few days. It’s frustrating because I have three possible topics I could cover, but I’m unable to explore any of them.

Instead, I’ll be back next week with a full entry.

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The Radio Show Reviews That Never Happened

At the beginning of the year, I briefly considered devoting the last entry of each month to a review of a different programme from BBC Sounds. I listen to a lot of their audio comedy and drama, so it seemed like a workable idea at the time.

I abandoned the plan soon after, however, and there are a few reasons behind that decision. The saved draft from 19 January 2026 included a list of the shows I thought I might cover. Here they are in the order they were written down:

The list also illustrates the first problem with the idea: whatever I reviewed would need to be available at the time. Like most streaming platforms, BBC Sounds removes programmes after a set period.

The entries with links were still active at the time of writing this entry, so if I’d decided in January that the topic for May would be Clare in the Community, readers wouldn’t be able to listen for themselves.

Which brings me to the second factor behind the abandonment: how much time I have available to review them.

When I listened to each of these programmes for the first time, it was on an informal basis where I wasn’t necessarily taking in every word but gaining a general sense of the plot. By contrast, an effective review needs active listening, for which I would need to go back and take notes. Fukushima, for instance, contains more than three hours of script, time I doubt I would be able to spare.

When I was studying for my M.Litt Writing Practice & Study degree, I was roped into writing three book reviews for the university magazine. I say three, but for one of these, I’d written the review before the tutor told me she’d only lent me the book for interest; it was still accepted for publication, so my effort wasn’t wasted. It was rewarding to see the finished product, but there was so much input for an article that took five minutes to read.

My third and final reason is the most detailed one.

Let me take you back to a banner advert I used to encounter on the Internet in the 1990s. The headline was Tired of seeing movies based on one guy’s opinion? I’ve long forgotten the name of the service, but it would have been an early aggregator for audience reviews.

At the time, I thought this was a fantastic idea. If I was unsure about Titanic or The Matrix, then instead of relying on the film review in the paper, I could see what others thought before buying a ticket.

But with the crowd-as-reviewer model now the more dominant one, I can see the flaw in hindsight. That one guy, as they put it, generally understood structure, nuance and how to convey this to readers. He was worth a dozen armchair critics who instead based their reviews on the attractiveness of Kate Winslet or had a bee in their bonnet about the science of the titular Matrix.

As such, I asked myself whether we really need any more reviews, albeit in a more niche art-form than cinema. Taken with the other two reasons, my answer – at least for the moment – is in the negative.

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Back to Basics with Spell‑Checking

I’ve been using the free tier of Grammarly since 2017, but I’d disabled the extension in Firefox.

This was primarily because my old computer didn’t have enough RAM and couldn’t easily handle the extra work. Even once I invested in upgrading the memory, I simply didn’t think to turn it on again.

So for a long time now, I’ve been writing these entries without the aid of a spell-checker, and that’s led to a few errors that weren’t picked up manually.

Last week, I decided to switch it back on, and I was quickly reminded of the other reasons I’d disabled it.

When a suggestion box appeared underneath the text, like correcting suggesiton to suggestion, I found this useful.

But Grammarly also constantly pushed its Pro membership level through these boxes. The software was set up to reveal only a few advanced suggestions per day before blanking them out and telling the user to upgrade.

I found those few advanced suggestions would amount to little more than a find-and-replace with a thesaurus; found might be changed to discovered, or stay to remain. There appeared to be no way to switch these off or even to snooze them for a fixed period

I’ve been writing long enough to know I need a strong spell-checker but a low-level grammar checker that only looks for obvious errors like should of rather than should have.

Grammarly was already beginning to bloat with features even in 2017 and this has only continued to grow. It must be stated, however, that’s far from exclusive to this software, and there are writers who will benefit from that Pro level subscription. I’m simply not one of them.

After closing my account, it was time to take advantage of the spell-checker built into Firefox. By adding a third-party dictionary to ensure all words belonged in British English, I’ve been able to catch the majority of errors without the need for further suggestions.

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This Year’s Visit to StAnza

About a month ago, I mentioned I was gearing up to visit the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews. That took place from Friday to Sunday.

I’d booked two events in advance. The first was a virtual writing hour with Fife Writes during Friday lunchtime, so I was able to take part remotely. The other was a poetry walk along the coast on Saturday morning where we stopped every few minutes to hear a related verse.

I’d left a lot of slack time while the rest of the weekend came together. For example, one of the volunteers wanted to speak with me about a new spoken-word event she was setting up, but our schedules didn’t match up, even for a quick conversation.

However, I was able to catch up with a pal who lives in the town. We generally only see each other around once a year. He’d booked a Kate Ireland show for Saturday afternoon, so I followed suit. At the last minute, that was cancelled and replaced with an event by Dean Tsang, who chose the order of his poems using a spinning wheel. I enjoyed that a lot, probably more than I would have enjoyed the expected show.

I go back year after year because it’s a small festival with an ever-present sense of poets coming together to read and write poetry. I can only identify one area of criticism, around pricing, and I’ve said as much in my feedback form.

I understand the aim of their ‘pay what you can’ model to make it accessible to everyone, which comprises a range of up to four price points that could be £5, £10, £15 and £20. I find this to be too much choice. I’d prefer to see just one or two options: (1) the break‑even cost with a surplus, and/or (2) a concession rate. Additionally, that would give me a clearer sense of what the event actually costs to run.

The feedback forms normally include a section where you can specify how much you spent on travel, accommodation, food and drink. I’d kept a careful tally, but that section was missing this year.

For the first time since before the pandemic, I stayed overnight in St Andrews, partly so I could go to shows later at night. I ultimately didn’t go to other events because the times were awkward, but I did nosey around Toppings bookshop before heading to bed at a reasonable time.

There was one other reason I stayed overnight. In August, I’m taking part in a charity Kiltwalk, and the aim is to walk from St Andrews to Dundee via Tentsmuir forest. While I do walk long distances regularly, this is an especially long route, so I need to go on some training walks.

That was the second one I’ve done so for. Every time, I’m learning the best way to prepare and – importantly – what not to do.

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Three Ways to Proofread in a Hurry

Other than the actual writing, there is another basic skill required from a writer, and that’s to look over back over the words at a later stage to ensure they have the intended meaning.

It can be tempting to edit immediately. With the exception of the most obvious errors, however, I advise against this. Proofreading and subsequent editing is best done cold, as if seeing the text for the first time. It’s also a good idea to keep Track Changes turned on during this time.

But what if you have a piece you need to finish? Below are three tips that have helped me.

1: Leaving enough time

My guideline is to leave the text aside for a minimum of one minute per word, or for 24 hours, whichever is longer. So a villanelle might be left 24 hours on account of its brevity, whereas a 4000-word story might be picked up again in around three days’ time.

I would not be offended if anyone picked up this formula and publicised it as ‘Cameron’s Rule’, or suchlike.

2: Changing the typeface

After reading and reading the same text over again, the words sometimes merge together. One way to counteract this is by changing the text to a completely different typeface and/or the colour of the text. Have a rake through the ones available on your machine and find a legible one in a different style.

If you prefer to make your first draft by hand, you’re already at an advantage when you transfer it to a computer. The same text can look different on a screen. I find I can write what seems like a long paragraph by hand but it seems shorter when viewed in type.

3. Ask someone else to read over it

This method comes with some risk, especially if you’re in a hurry. What if the other person fails to reply? What if it requires a detailed rewrite?

The trade-off is that it’s a often reliable gauge of how readers might view the piece. I’ve sometimes heard back from folks that some content needs to be explained more, or occasionally that they grasped the concept and the words can be cut back.

However, you choose to do it, it’s worth investing the time. You don’t want to find an error once you’ve had 1,000 copies printed.

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A Tale of Two Topics

When I update this blog, I aim to stick with one topic throughout. But I hope you’ll indulge me just this once as I follow up last week’s entry about copyright and the public domain, and then follow up with the planned topic.

Copyright caveats

A few days after I posted my entry, the YouTube producer Chris Spargo released a relevant video, exploring a section of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 that I didn’t know about.

In 1929, J M Barrie granted the rights of his play Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Hospital so they would benefit financially from its every performance. Although the play fell into the public domain in 1987, this arrangement was specifically written into legislation to make sure it continued in perpetuity – or at least until it’s repealed.

For the avoidance of doubt, the hospital has no creative control over the use of the play and can’t prevent performances from going ahead. It can only collect fees from any performance that is staged.

Disconnection doldrums

It was fortunate you were able to see last week’s entry. Where possible, I like to have at least a draft lined up 24 hours in advance. I can then tinker with the text just before publication at 7:30pm on a Tuesday, which coincides with a weekly writing group.

The staff are very accommodating in the pub where we meet. Probably the only criticism is something outside their control. Because the place was a cinema until 1998, it still has thick soundproof walls that also interfere with Wi-Fi and mobile phone reception.

Often we manage a weak but stable connection with a combination of our own hotspots and the pub Wi-Fi. But on Tuesday of last week, we were out of luck, no matter what we tried. So we stopped the in-person session and moved to the house of the other group leader. Once online, we were able to keep the members of our Discord server informed about what had happened.

One of the strengths of the weekly two-hour meeting is having that ringfenced time either to write or to carry out administration. For example, I picked up an overdue task about transferring my Web domain and hosting to a new plan, as the one I used was being phased out.

This then led me down a path of ‘Do I really need [insert feature]?’ and ‘What if I do away with that email address?’ It took a few days, but I’m pleased to report that the transfer was smooth, so this site stayed online.

In fact, the other group leader and I occasionally schedule admin days where we can make desicions about the direction of the group and/or solve ongoing problems. These are always deliberately held on a non-meeting day and in a different location.

This week, I’ve taken extra time to prepare. I drafted this entry on Sunday night, and made amendments yesterday, so it’ll almost certainly be in the can and ready to go at the appointed time.

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Boulevard of Broken Plans

An artist pal was visiting Dundee from Glasgow this weekend, and he suggested we see a screening of the animé Princess Mononoke. This was newly restored in 4K quality and was showing for a limited time only.

Before and after the screening, we talked about our unrealised projects, and his long-term plan to move to London and make a start on some of these. While I have nothing so dramatic to declare, I do have projects that either need to be started or are now safe to reveal.

It’s a little cliché to do this at New Year, but I promise it’s entirely a coincidence. Here’s a selection of them, not all of which are related to writing.

Unstarted projects

I keep a draft on WordPress with any ideas I think might make for suitable full-length entries. At the time of writing, these comprise:

  • The NoSleep community on Reddit. Members post their own horror stories that might plausibly be true, and other members are invited to share in the world as if it were real.
  • The events of September 11th. With the 25th anniversary happening later this year, this might be the ideal opportunity to explore the aftermath from a literary perspective.
  • Watching animé. I’ve not a frequent film watcher, and the only animé I’ve seen is from Studio Ghibli, so perhaps there’s some room to comment from an outsider’s perspective.

There are also some live events I’d like to start up:

  • Stage confidence classes. Regular readers will know I’ve been bandying this idea about for years. So far, no matter how I’ve approached it, the pieces haven’t yet fallen into place.
  • A dating event. It can be difficult to write a short bio for a dating app and to suss out the other person. So this meet-up event would attempt to solve the problem by inviting a friend to do the talking instead.
  • A spontaneous poetry stall. I would set up my computer and a printer with two-inch wide paper label tape, and improvise poetry for visitors. The templates have been designed and the cost of labels counted out.

Secret plans revealed this year

Roll on January

Every year, I take part in a local project called Fun a Day. This encourages participants to create something during the month, however they wish to define that.

I’d already planned out Roll on January, where I would roll two d6 dice every day for a month and track how many rolls it took to display a double six. I then learnt on New Year’s Eve that there wouldn’t be a Fun a Day in 2026, but I’ve gone ahead with the project anyway.

Double Zero Challenge

The above Roll on January wasn’t the first time I’d experimented with dice-rolling. In fact, I’d been refining the format for more than 12 months.

I tried out a one-off stream on Twitch with two d20 dice, seeing how long it would take to roll a double 20. I then moved to pre-recorded videos on YouTube, with some success, but the videos frequently lasted more than an hour.

As a compromise, I then swapped these for two d10 dice. These still take an unpredictable length of time, but nearly 50 videos in, I think the format has been perfected.

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Who Reads This Stuff Anyway?

The first entry to this blog was posted on 10 October 2013, making it 12 years old last month.

The intent was to create a deadline each week so I would keep writing regularly. That’s going well so far because when this entry is published, it’ll be number 641, or an average of at least one entry a week. But how many people are likely to read it?

Well, that depends what measure you use.

If you look at each entry, you can usually find at least one or two Likes, although some have in the region of eight or nine. The same names tend to pop up week after week. Altertatively, we can look at stats provided by WordPress from December 2024 onwards. The number of monthly visitors ranges from 113 throughout May to 548 in October – with one outlier.

For some reason, August attracted a total of 1,163 unique visitors, most of whom came back two or more times:

Data visualization of site traffic from July to November, showing a sharp rise in both views and visitors during August 2025. Tooltip reveals 2,742 views and 1,163 visitors for that month.

The timescales match up with two entries from that period. The first talked about an Edinburgh Fringe show by Ross McCleary and Stefan Mohamed, while the second addressed the thorny topic of Creative Scotland curbing its funding. I can only expect one or both topics were on the minds of my audience.

All of which is interesting to me, but I haven’t even touched upon the reason I started writing this entry.

Every time I hit Publish, an email is sent to anyone who opts into receiving notifications. I was advised yesterday by a long-term aquaintance that her email provider had suddenly started placing my WordPress notifications into a folder, starting with an entry from June about audio dramas. Before then, the last email in the folder was from a reply I’d made on LiveJournal in December 2016.

Unless something unpredictable happens, I know this blog is never going to reach a wide audience. It helps me to stick to a regular deadline. If it finds an audience, then marvellous, and if not, nothing is lost.

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A Look Back to Ten Years Ago

I have a couple of upcoming projects that I’m not ready to talk about just yet. To fill the gap, I’ve instead looked backwards in time to the entry closest to today: 26 October 2015.

With the title Relentlessness, the entry described a hectic week. The open-mic night Hotchpotch held an event aboard the vintage HMS Unicorn, the Dundee Literary Festival had just been and gone, and the artist studios WASPS held an open weekend. I’d also been to see Hamlet at the cinema, presented by National Theatre Live, while our writing group was gearing up for National Novel Writing month.

As I read back this snapshot of events, they somehow don’t feel like they happened ten years ago, even though I rationally know they did.

For instance, WASPS studios is very much still open for business and Jen Robson is still around, albeit working from a home-based studio. Hotchpotch is still going, although we’ve never been invited back onto the Unicorn. Then we have National Novel Writing Group, which only ceased operations this year.

On the other hand, although none of us realised it at the time, the last Dundee Literary Festival would be held in 2016. It took until March this year for a replacement event, the Dundee Book Festival, to start up.

There’s something both appealing and lamentable about that ephemeriality. No doubt I’ll feel the same when I look back upon this year’s projects from 2035.