Tag: fiction

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Trying Out Urban Folklore

On Thursday of last week, I was invited to a storytelling event in Dundee run jointly by the authors behind MK Hardy and the science fiction publisher Shoreline of Infinity.

I was given around six weeks’ notice to prepare a piece around the theme of dark folklore. I needed that time because I’m the first to admit I don’t typically write folklore, unlike one of my fellow performers, Erin Farley. However, an idea did eventually hatch.

In storytelling circles, local stories tend to be well-received, especially if the details are spot-on. I realised this year marks the 70th anniversary of when the trams in Dundee were discontinued. I built my story around that event, placing myself into the position of someone who was involuntarily taken on the last tram ride, and setting the story on the same day as the event.

I approached this story in a different manner from any of my previous ones. Instead of starting with a pencil and paper to jot down ideas, I began to piece together its constituent elements while out walking. This wasn’t a concious choice, just the way the story naturally presented itself.

I found one great advantage straight away. Had the story been written down first, it would almost certainly have been more difficult to memorise, but composing it in my head produced a memory palace effect, especially as much of the action involved physical movement.

This method allowed for a lot of embellishment, as no two versions were the same in rehearsals, but this also made the timings difficult to predict. I knew the slot was eight minutes; when I first performed the piece against the clock, I initially believed I’d need to stretch it out to fit the time.

Instead, the clock reached eight minutes and I was barely halfway through. That triggered off round after round of edits, removing and simplifying details while trying to keep a sense of suspense that a longer story allows. That said, these edits helped to solve a major problem near the start: how to contrive a way to make a character from 2026 voluntarily step onto an unfamiliar tram from 1956. In the simplified version, the character instead catches a modern-day bus and is transported through time involuntarily.

Around the time I started regularly performing, I would sometimes adopt a prop. I have one particular piece, for instance, that is most effective when delivered through a megaphone. At the event on Thursday, I revived that idea, taking a last-minute decision to wear my rucksack because it lent a sense of transience to the occasion.

By all accounts, the whole Shoreline event went down a treat with the Dundee audience. This was the publisher’s first foray in the city, as they usually run their nights in Edinburgh and Glasgow, so I hope they’re persuaded to come back in the future.

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A New Impetus for Writing

I found myself with more time than expected at the weekend because two seperate plans were cancelled. I used the time to catch up with some overdue writing. I’ll address that later in the entry, but we firstly need a little background.

I’ve occasionally mentioned that I write fantasy stories under a pseudonym on a well-known website. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m not at a stage where I wish to claim ownership of these, so references to the plot will be vague.

Since my last update about the matter on 27 August 2024, the situation has progressed a little.

After writing 24 parts of my first story, which we’ll call Series A, I then posted an unrelated Series B. That comprised seven parts, drip-fed from April 2024 to February 2025.

In September 2025, I then added a surprise 25th part to A. I consider B to be complete, but I also thought A was complete at 24 parts, so there’s always the possibility of another.

If you’re still following that, good work.

With that unexpected time available at the weekend, I cracked on with two new pieces.

The first is a one-off story that isn’t intended to be a series. It’s also set in a different universe from the other stories, where genetic modification is almost as easy as laser eye surgery is in our world. I’ve been working on this for months to reduce the worldbuilding and exposition in favour of story. I’ve now struck a suitable balance, so that’s been submitted.

The website has decent standards of quality control, so there’s always a wait for approval, but I hope to see that online over the next day or two.

The second is a new series, which we’ll call Series C, and is unrelated to the aforementioned two series. The difference here is that I know where the end-point will be, whereas I kept writing A and B until running out of ideas.

The main character in Series C is travelling a specific circuit so the reader knows from the outset how many parts there are expected to be. This also more easily allows me to introduce recurring characters at specific points without resorting to retcon techniques. What the readers won’t know until the final part is that the character is not quite who she claims to be.

All I need to do now is keep up the motivation to write those parts without too many other distractions.

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Listening to Lunar Lore

Like millions of people over the last few weeks, I’ve been following the progress of the Artemis II project to orbit the moon and return home.

I’m no expert on space, but the mission appears to have been a textbook one. The splashdown was even timed perfectly for primetime Friday night TV in the US, although we in the UK had to stay up somewhat later.

Since the last visit to the moon, computing power and data rates have improved enormously, offering a multimedia experience that was still science fiction in 1972. Despite this, I largely followed the trip in audio form.

BBC Sounds already had an podcast called 13 Minutes to the Moon that was resurrected for the occasion. The title is somewhat misleading because the episodes aren’t 13 minutes long; rather, it orginally covered the final 13 minutes before the Apollo 11 landing.

In its most recent form, Maggie Aderin from The Sky at Night presented a daily summary with guests including the astronaut Tim Peake.

Oddly enough, the lack of visual information didn’t diminish the coverage at all. At times, in fact, it helped when the presenters stepped in with context and small details that a video stream probably wouldn’t have paused to explain. I’ve mentioned before that I enjoy audio drama, and listening to each update felt like the next part of the saga.

These missions are all but guaranteed to seep their way into popular culture over the next few years because we’ve seen this pattern before.

We’ll see retrospective documentaries and scripted dramas exploring the relationships between the crew members. We’ll see a glut of novels using space travel as a backdrop or a metaphor, much like we’ve seen terrorist attacks used since 2001.

Some works will be thoughtful, and a good many more will – frankly – be opportunistic. Either way, they’ll be trying to make sense of a moment that’s not only historic, but already feels that way.

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Join the ALCS Today

Year after year, there’s one topic I revisit on this blog, and that’s encouraging readers to join the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS).

For nearly 50 years, the organisation has been collecting royalties on behalf of authors. Unlike primary royalties, such as book sales, these are from secondary uses of creators’ works, including: photocopies, cable retransmission, digital reproduction and educational recording. Members receive a bank payment in March and/or September every year, depending on the types of work registered and how often the works have been requested.

If your work appears in at least one publication with an ISBN, you’re almost certainly eligible to join. You’ll need that ISBN, plus a few other details about the work.

Be aware of the one-off membership fee of £36, which is deducted from your first payment rather than paid upfront. There is also a commission of 10% taken from each annual payment, which allows the ALCS to continue to fund its work.

This year, writers received a total of £47.5 million. This is not shared equally, but is based upon the number and type of works registered. It almost certainly won’t be enough to live on as a passive income, except perhaps if you’re a prolific author.

Rather, it’s an acknowledgement of the principle that authors should be paid when a transformative or derivative work is made using someone else’s source material.

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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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Warming Up for the StAnza Festival

As we step into February, the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews is just six weeks away. This year, it runs for the shortest period I’ve ever known: from Friday 13 to Sunday 15 March. It’s typically four or five days long, with 2022 extending to seven.

Before the pandemic, I would make a weekend of the festival, booking accommodation and attending a wide range of events. The Byre Theatre remains the main hub of activity, but many events are hosted in other venues around the area.

The last time I stayed over was in 2020. Since then, I’ve become more selective, partly due to other weekend commitments and partly because it’s challenging to absorb a lot of intense poetry in one go. Staying over also allowed me to see the poetry slam, which finished after the last bus home, although it’s now held earlier in the day.

One of my other favourite traditions was to start Saturday morning with a panel event that included either a cake or a pie, plus a hot drink. That doesn’t feature this year, so I’ve instead booked a bracing coastal poetry walk, followed by a practical Writing Hour with Fife Writes. The festival atmosphere always nudges me to write a poem or two anyway, so it’s a good start.

These are just the events I have planned so far. There’ll no doubt be others that catch my attention once I’m actually there, and I’ll be sure to tell you all about it.

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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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The Cultural Value of the Public Domain

When I heard about the recent adaptation of Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, I absolutely had to see it at some point.

The novel has been a talking point among my poetry circle, the Wyverns, since we released a released a pamphlet with the theme of Frankenstein in 2018. There is a local connection in that Mary Shelley was living in Dundee when she started writing it.

For literature in the UK and EU, a work remains in copyright for 70 years after the death of the author. Even if that law had been around in 1851, Frankenstein is still squarely into the public domain, so any director is allowed complete artistic freedom. The consensus seems to be that this version is faithful to the spirit of the novel, but not the details.

If Mary Shelley somehow arrived in our time and was able to watch this, I think she would be impressed.

But copyright law varies by juristiction and by type of work. In 1998, the US passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. This extended the copyright of works authored by corporations, meaning they wouldn’t become public domain until 95 years after the date of their creation.

The legislation was named after the late Sonny Bono, who believed that copyright should be in perpetuity. However, the true beneficiary is widely thought to be The Walt Disney Company. Only within the last two years has its first creation – Mickey Mouse – fallen into the public domain, and we can expect to see more following suit over the coming decades.

In the literary world, novels from the middle of the 20th century novels are beginning to fall out of copyright. A prime example is Nineteen Eighty-Four because George Orwell died in 1950, just two years after its publication.

Wikipedia maintains pages about works that will become public domain in 2026, and if you fancy reading some of these, they might be available on the Gutenberg Project website.

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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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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.