Tag: fiction

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A Good Day for Goals

In honour of our team reaching the World Cup for the first time in 28 years, Monday 15 June was designated as a public holiday across Scotland. In practice, it wasn’t mandatory, although my employer observed it.

The holiday was motivated in part by the timing of their first match against Haiti. Kick-off was at 9pm in Boston on Saturday 13 June, which equated to 2am on Sunday morning in the UK. I don’t care much for football, and I’ve long been opposed to public holidays, but even I must grudgingly admit it was a nice gesture.

I decided early on to use the day for catching up with my writing, dividing my time three ways: editing existing text, writing further narrative, and worldbuilding. By the evening, the project was on firmer ground than in the morning.

As I explored on the blog three years ago, I’ve tried many times to write outdoors and it rarely works out well. So despite the brilliant weather on Monday, most of the day was spent inside at the computer, except for a couple of walks with the official Taskmaster podcast.

Although I’m a fan of the TV show, this companion piece had somehow bypassed me. So every time I go for a long enough walk, I catch up with one more past episode, which has helped me to make a decent dent in the archive.

In my experience, consistent and steady sessions are the key to making progress on a large project.

For around a decade, I’ve owned a copy of War & Peace by Leo Tolstoy. I’ve been going back to it intermittently during this time, and I’d reached page 767 of 1296 pages by October 2024 – although much of the latter section is given over to endnotes and other explanatory details. Despite its length, most of the chapters can be read in ten minutes; there are simply a lot of them.

On 22 May 2026, I set some time aside to read one chapter before bed and another after waking up. While I don’t always manage, I’m now rapidly approaching 900 pages, so I’m on track to finish by the end of summer.

The public holiday was a massive boon for that writing project, but without also tackling it on a regular basis, it could take a long time to finish what is expected to be a series of nine stories. At least the groundwork is firmly in place, and when I find that regular time to work on it, I’ll have a stronger idea of its future direction.

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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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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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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.