Tag: fiction

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Fun with Fandoms

The website Archive of Our Own – or AO3 to its users – has existed since 2008, growing in popularity over the next few years. Writers can use it to post fan fiction, taking characters that already exist from books, films or even real life, then placing them into new stories or retelling existing stories from another angle.

Despite knowing about the site since almost day one, I didn’t open an account because I only used it to read the stories of one pal who would use characters from Star Wars.

More recently, it’s been brought to my attention that another pal writes and collaborates on steamy romances between two male Formula One drivers, so I finally opened an account in September to read them. Then, quite independently, I learnt someone else had published a multi-part tale placing the members of a 21st-century alternative rock band into a 1930s adventure story.

I’m being deliberately imprecise in these descriptions because all three writers use pseudonyms and don’t necessarily want their identities associated with their pseudonyms.

It’s common for fan fiction authors to stay anonymous, as some published authors actively dislike their characters being used in other work, even when the resulting work isn’t earning any money. Anne Rice and George R R Martin are two prominent examples. In other cases, there is potential for libel where living people are featured.

While mere threats of legal action are a dime a dozen, I can think of just one case involving fan fiction that actually went to court. In 2009, Darryn Walker was arrested on charges of obscenity after writing a story imagining the kidnap and murder of the pop group Girls Aloud. Ultimately, the author was cleared of all charges. If you’re interested, the offending text has been archived.

Although I’ve published many short stories online, they all featured original characters rather than existing ones. I think if I were going to write any fan fiction, I’d probably pick Rosaline from Romeo & Juliet. For starters, there’s no risk of legal action from William Shakespeare. For seconds, she’s a seriously underdeveloped character considering how pivotal she is to the early plot; if she hadn’t rejected Romeo, the events of the entire play might never have happened.

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Start a Story Late, Finish it Early

Every so often, a pal and I run a readathon where we invite members to set aside some time one weekend to catch up on reading. It last took place a couple of weekends ago, and I intended to make some progress with War & Peace.

However much I wanted to read, though, I kept putting it aside because I wanted to write. I can’t think of the last time I had such an urge to pick up a pen. I was continuing a fantasy series under a pseudonym on a well-known website. It’s a passion project and I can’t foresee a time where I wish to claim ownership, so references to the plot will be vague.

The classic wisdom for writing a story, and especially a play, is to start late and leave early. The aim is to hook the reader by going straight into the drama rather than explaning the backstory, which can be done once said drama is established.

Stories will sometimes will arrive fully-formed, and these are a joy to write. In the most recent parts, I’ve had a strong idea of where the charcters should be, yet I’ve struggled with how to place them there while maintaning the pace of the story.

Despite its genre, this series still has one foot in the recognisable world. In the most recent part, I needed four characters to end up in a riverside cottage and I tried to build up a sense of drama before they even arrived.

The first draft saw their trains delayed because of industral action and bad weather, so there was a sense of relief upon arrival. Another draft saw them arrive early, only to be told by the grumpy cottage owner they couldn’t enter for another two hours.

Because fiction is so subjective and personal, it’s difficult to teach someone how to spot where the action should begin. When you’ve been doing it for a while, though, you develop a sense of where it fits best.

As I continued, I realised the real drama would happen at the cottage, so I didn’t need to create any more on the journey and I began the story at the time of their arrival. By contrast, if I’d needed to convey any backstory to the reader, having the characters stuck on a train chatting about previous events might have been the ideal way to do it.

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Oh No, It’s Not a Panto

It’s widely known in the theatre industry that Christmas pantomimes often keep venues financially afloat for the remainder of the year. As such, many companies take the opportunity to stage sure-fire hits, sometimes bringing in a celebrity to play one of the leads.

There are exceptions, however, like the Dundee Rep. They no doubt face the same financial pressures as any other theatre, as the Christmas production is generally a tried-and-tested hit, but they steer clear of traditional pantomime. Previous productions have included A Christmas Carol or The Snow Queen.

This year, the Rep has taken yet another approach with Oor Wullie: The Musical.

Like a pantomime, there’s a good guy and his sidekicks, a cruel baddie intent on causing mayhem, and a focus on laughs rather than plot. The script employs a similar technique to last year’s hit film Barbie, where the audience is invited to suspend their disbelief as characters transfer between the real world and the fantasy world at will.

Yet there are few of the traditional hallmarks. There are no crowd shout-outs and the action isn’t set at Christmas-time. Instead, the three main hooks are:

  1. The character of Oor Wullie is owned and published by the Dundee-based DC Thomson, so the audience is familiar with the setting and the catchphrases.
  2. It’s one of the few festive productions where a significant portion of the dialogue is in Scots.
  3. The show has previously been staged and is a proven hit.

I’ve talked rather dryly about the production so far, but I had a lot of fun seeing this on Friday just gone. If you’re nearby and fancy it as well, there are just a few more shows left.

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Subject Matters

I learnt yesterday that Jamie Oliver has withdrawn his children’s novel Billy and the Epic Escape over accusations that it stereotyped Indigenous Australians. It had already been on sale for six months.

As the backlash dies down, it’s being quickly replaced by puzzlement. If this book had been written by a previously-unknown author and released by a small press, it’s easier to see how this might have happened.

But this is one of the country’s best-known celebrity chefs contracted to one of the five largest publishers in the world, namely Penguin Random House. The manuscript will have been seen by countless pairs of eyes before the first copy was even printed. Each would have looked at a specific element such as grammar or typesetting, and that would typically include some consultation with the community it portrays. The story is also widely believed to have been ghostwritten, adding another possible layer to the checking process. We’re unlikely to find out who this is. It’s almost always a contractual requirement that the identity of a ghostwriter is not revealed.

Still, this book somehow slipped through the net, and the reason might never be known. I’m only conjecturing here, but it’s possible that everyone involved assumed someone else was dealing with the matter, or maybe any concerns didn’t reach more senior ears.

It must be stated that there’s nothing wrong per se with authors writing outside their own experience, but it’s vital to have an insider’s perspective. When Frederick Forsyth wrote The Day of the Jackal, a fictionalised background to a real assassination attempt on Charles de Gaulle, he used his background in investigative journalism to construct his plot. It shows in the precision of the language and imagery, even if I personally think he could have deployed a few more commas.

Regardless of whether it’s done for well-justified reasons, banning or withdrawing a work is often the best promotion it can receive. I wasn’t aware of Billy and the Epic Escape before this news broke, nor about Oliver’s most recent cookbook, which is also on sale and has attracted no controversy.

At the time of writing, it’s still possible to bag a copy of the novel from Amazon UK, and you can bet the remaining stock will sell out soon.

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Dungeons & Diaries

Since just before the pandemic, I’ve been involved in at least one Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) game. I’m currently in two: one every fortnight in Dundee, and another every six to eight weeks in Fife.

For those unfamiliar, D&D is a tabletop role-playing game where players create and improvise adventures, guided by the Dungeon Master (DM). Players describe what they want their characters to do, and the DM narrates the outcomes based on dice rolls and the game’s rules. The setting is usually a fantasy land where weapons can be wielded and spells can be cast.

Every D&D game is unique. In my case, the Dundee players are all in the same writing group and live in the same general area. As such, we know each other well and sessions tend to be filled with in-jokes. By contrast, the Fife players generally need to travel and won’t see each other from one week to the next. We make the most of our time with longer and more intense sessions than the Dundee game.

One of the few factors that unites both games is that I’ve volunteered to be the designated note-taker. I’ve long been able to touch-type, so I can keep an eye on the action at the same time.

But why is this important? The simple answer is: there’s a lot going on. It’s not necessary to capture every detail, but because campaigns can span multiple sessions, it’s easy to lose track of key names, plot points and locations.

It must also be stated that my notes are still predominantly from my character’s perspective, so I can’t stress enough that the other players should keep additional personal notes. For instance, while tidying up the Fife notes yesterday, I realised one character had encountered two others in a room we entered, but I hadn’t recorded what happened to them during or after that interaction.

It sounds like tedious admin, but I enjoy this process as it helps me out enormously with co-ordinating the two games.

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A Personal Path to Paisley

Back in July, I mentioned I had my poem January & You published by Speculative Books. The launch was scheduled for Tuesday of last week in Glasgow.

I knew I wouldn’t have much time to catch the bus after the end of my shift. As such, I’d kept my phone off to avoid any distractions, only turning it back on once I was on the bus. Shortly after it pulled away, however, I received an email. It explained the launch had to be cancelled because of illness, with apologies for the short notice. There is a hope to reschedule it for later in the year.

My time on a Tuesday evening is typically ring-fenced to run a writing group, but I’d arranged with the other leader to make an exception. Had I seen this before we started moving, I might just have cut my losses on the cost of the tickets and stayed in Dundee to help out with the group. Now I was stuck on the bus for around 45 more minutes until we reached the park-and-ride in Perth, so I considered my options.

I could have stopped there and found my way back to Dundee. But some of the buses are painfully slow and infrequent, while the railway station is at the other end of Perth, so I might not have made it back before the group was over. Besides, booking at the last minute is never cheap.

Instead, since I knew the writing group was in good hands, I elected to continue to Glasgow and then on to Paisley.

I was at university there between 2002 and 2005 taking a BSc Music Technology course, long before I was interested in prose and poetry. While I’d been back several times, my most memorable visit took place in 2017 when I thought I might find some inspiration for poetry.

I did find inspiration, but not in the way I’d expected. In short, I barely recognised the place beyond the town centre and I wrote an entry about this when it happened.

Today, I would have taken the time to find the layout of the area, see where the side streets were leading and work out the most convenient way to visit other places. For example, I used to volunteer at a community radio station in the Glasgow district of Govan. I can’t understand why I always paid extra for buses when I can now look at a map and see two more direct routes covered by my travel card.

I didn’t intend for this entry to be so personal, but I also didn’t intend to visit my alma mater. If there was a silver lining, it’s that the resulting poem from 2017 was published in a collection about the town. The more I think about it, the more I’m inspired to write a sequel, so I’ll see where that takes me over the coming days.

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Taking a Show on the Virtual Road

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a pet project. Now the proposal has been accepted and advertised, I’m finally at liberty to tell the public.

Since 2021, Sweet Venues has organised the Dundee Fringe. Like its Edinburgh counterpart, the organisers don’t run the shows themselves, but provide the venue and invite performers to apply for slots. In previous years, I’ve run a game show, but this time around, it was time for something different.

In fact, I already had a solid idea with pal who shares a similar sense of humour. One of our recurring jokes was to talk about organising a tour of Dundee but telling tourists absolute nonsense about the city instead of facts.

I half-seriously wondered whether we could actually make this happen, even as a one-off event. Then when Sweet Venues put out the call for performers, the final piece of the puzzle fell into place. We didn’t need to take anyone around the city; using just a projector, the city could come to them.

Just before I made the application, I started by pulling together a presentation, making sure my pal was willing to co-host. We held our first rehearsal at the weekend, ironing out a few flaws in the script and making sure the technical side worked without fail.

If you’re in or around Dundee, you’ll be able to see The Virtual Nonsense Tour of Dundee on Sunday 15 September.

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Back Into Short Story Writing

I’ve been unwell for the last five days or so. It’s been frustrating in many ways, having to stay in the house most of the time. On the other hand, it’s given me the impetus to work on some writing.

The work referenced in this entry was published under a pseudonym on a well-known website. For the avoidance of doubt, I’m still not at a stage where I wish to claim ownership of this, so the references to the plot will be vague.

A year ago this month, I finished writing a series that was supposed to be a one-off but ended up as 24 parts. I was partially spurred on by the positive reaction to the previous parts, plus I was able to take the existing characters to different locations where they met new characters, which generated new plot points.

In the intervening time, I’d had another promising central idea plus a few unused plot points that couldn’t be put into the first series. I then spent some time figuring out how to differentiate the two universes.

In April, the elements fell into place and I published a new story on the same website. I made it clear this was not related to the previous series, but I did believe there would be a second part, so I left the ending open enough to allow for that.

And that’s what I’ve been working on while I’ve been in the house. I think this series will be five parts long, so significantly shorter than the first series, but I don’t yet know where this will take me next.

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Last Call for Creative Scotland Open Fund

Over the last couple of days, Creative Scotland has announced the closure of its Open Fund for Individuals.

In short, the decision has been taken because the Scottish Government were unable to confirm the release of £6.6m in the Grant-in-Aid budget. There is a full statement about the closure on their website including the deadline for all applications: 2pm on Friday 30 August.

As the closure has only just been announced, the long-term effects have yet to be seen. The topic has dominated my recent conversations with other organisers. One possible outcome is that it will be more difficult for artists to host riskier solo events, and instead prompt them to join established companies who might be less willing to take risks.

I’ve been fortunate in my projects that I’ve never needed to apply for funding. Yet having this avenue cut off potentially limits the scale of my future endeavours. I hope next year’s budget brings a more favourable result.

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Submitting to Publishers Again

About a month ago, Speculative Books told me they would be publishing one of my poems in September, and I look forward to attending the launch. On the other hand, I subscribe to Writing Magazine, but there are a pile of unopened copies in my bedroom.

A couple of days ago, on a whim, I decided to open the latest one. I used to read the articles, but now I flip straight to the publishing opportunities, considering each one on its merits.

For starters, I discount any competitions or pay-to-publish schemes. This extends to those publishers that offer no payment nor even a copy of the book. Sometimes an opportunity seems legit on the surface, but the description on the website is unclear, self-contradictory or occasionally unhinged. One site was even blocked by my VPN as a threat, so that was soon dismissed.

From that magazine, I found a handful of possible publishers. In one case, I even had a story ready to go. In another case, I need to wait until the next submission window opens, but that’s clearly marked in my diary.

Now I need to find the time to go through the rest of the magazines and see who’s still accepting pieces after all these months.