Tag: prose

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Janae and Jenny Join a Gym

On this blog, I don’t generally post poems or stories. Instead, I look mainly at what’s behind the writing. There’s a simple reason for this. Once a piece has been published online, most publishers won’t consider it. After all, how would they expect to sell books if the text can be found on a website?

I’m today making an exception because I’m unlikely to send the featured story to any publications. It’s dedicated to a poet pal called Ross McCleary, who – incidentally – has been published by Stewed Rhubarb.

Every day, Ross features running jokes on his Twitter account. These are too numerous and nuanced to discuss in detail, but one of these is a weekly critique of the You Be The Judge section of The Guardian, where readers are invited to voice their opinions on an issue dividing a friendship or relationship.

On Friday, it was a couple who attend the same gym but have very different attitudes to working out. I quipped to Ross that I could write a short story with the title Janae and Jenny Join a Gym. He replied simply that he wouldn’t read that.

So for the benefit of everyone else in the world, here’s that story.

The story

It was straight out of a romcom, the way they met. The short version is that Jenny Aitkin and Janae Atkin both began working at the same time in separate departments of a multinational company. After months of each accidentally receiving emails for the wrong person, they finally met at the Christmas party, had a good old laugh about the situation – and quickly became a couple.

That was a year ago. I discreetly checked the calendar. Whatever had initially attracted them must have long worn off because they’d now spent half their relationship coming to me.

‘Your trouble is,’ said Jenny, interrupting herself to turn to me, ‘her trouble is, every time we go, Janae is constantly scrolling on her phone. We’re there to work out.’

‘I pace myself. What’s the point in burning yourself out on the warm-up?’

‘We were in a high-impact class.’

‘I told you I wasn’t ready for that.’

I raised my hand. ‘Hang on. What did the instructor say about this?’

‘Nothing,’ said Janae, ‘just got on with the class.’

‘But the other people, the other regulars, they’ve all noticed. They’re full of praise about what I’m doing, but she wouldn’t know that because she never pays any attention, too busy taking pictures and… God knows what.’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘let’s not throw around accusations. Let’s drill into this a little further.’

I asked Janae to talk freely without interruption under the pretence of giving her side of the story. In reality, it was a distraction. Over the last six months, I’d made a couple of key observations about the relationship between Jenny and Janae. Firstly, to my mind, they acted like an animated DVD menu. Unless someone actively pushed a button to interrupt it, you would hear the same drivel coming back around every couple of minutes.

I nodded tactically at her version of events. Speaking by herself, she always stuttered quite a bit, as though she was missing the regular counter-argument from Jenny.

‘Go on,’ I encouraged, after a particularly long pause.

‘Wait,’ said Jenny, ‘where the hell is all this coming from? This is all out of the blue.’

‘Let her speak,’ I soothed.

Which brings me to my second key observation. In older couples, it’s common to see a high level of co-dependency. Yet these two were both under 30 and both in the unwavering mindset that a couple must do everything together. Of the many ethical issues associated with being a counsellor, none of my practice colleagues ever discussed the issue of keeping a couple together for the sake of repeat business, even if they were each other’s biggest problem. In fact, it would be out of order for me to suggest splitting up.

So I’d encouraged them to join a gym, suggesting they might benefit from spending 30 minutes – maybe an hour – on different equipment, then exchanging notes later on. I knew full well they couldn’t, although I didn’t predict how wildly different their attitudes would be.

Speaking of partnerships that weren’t working, I’d wanted to break away from this practice for a couple of years now, run things my way instead of gaining approval the other counsellors. I saw an opportunity here. For the last six months, every penny I’d received from these clients was paid into a savings account by standing order.

If they stayed together long enough, they were going to buy me a deposit on my own business premises. I’d already made enquiries about reserving the business name: Russ Norloch: Relationship Counselling.

I noticed we were less than five minutes from the end of the session. It was time to play one of my favourite moves: the holibobs card.

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘you’ve been a couple for a year now. It occurs to me you’ve not been away together yet, am I right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘May I suggest a short Christmas break somewhere nice – a long break if you can spare the time. I think you both deserve one.’

‘Oh we do,’ said Jenny. ‘I’ve got trip ideas coming out my ears.’

Janae turned to face her. ‘Really? That’s news to me.’

With six more months of arguments virtually guaranteed, I said, ‘Have a think about where you want to go, and I’ll see you both at the next session.’

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Lights, Camera, Industrial Action

Last week, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) trade union began industrial action, shutting down production on many high-profile TV shows.

The union leaders’ demands are complex, but they revolve around issues such as contract lengths, payments from streaming media, and the use of artificial intelligence software. Here’s a background of what’s happened so far.

This strike is particularly disruptive to talk show hosts like as Jimmy Kimmel, yet it also affects some scripted dramas like Stranger Things, where rewrites are commonly made on the fly.

Of course, this doesn’t imply that writers are the most important members of a film set. Rather, they’re part of the well-oiled machine of production. Take one part out and it begins to fail.

By comparison, a strike by the actors’ union Equity could inflict just as much chaos as the WGA has done. In UK terms, the Bectu trade union represents non-performance roles in broadcasting, so a member walkout could cripple the BBC.

At the time of writing, we don’t know how long this strike might endure. The action taken in 2007 lasted for 14 weeks. This time around, with 97.8% of its 11,500 members voting in favour, we might not be seeing much Saturday Night Live for many weeks to come.

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Rubbish + Time = Cult Classic

Yesterday afternoon, I decided it was time to watch Spice World. It tells a fictional tale of the events leading up to a concert at the Royal Albert Hall, comprising many surreal moments and fantasy sequences, not to mention self-parody by the band members.

Let’s be clear, this is not a great picture if you like a plot. The disjointed story interweaves a crew trying to make a fictional movie about the band, an entirely separate crew trying to make a fly-on-the-wall documentary, and a newspaper mogul trying to usurp their success. It instead helps to think of the film as a series of loosely-related sketches.

That’s before we arrive at the dozen or so celebrity cameos, some slotted clumsily into a screenplay written by Kim Fuller, brother of the band manager Simon Fuller. As such, there is a lot of self-indulgence here.

Despite this, the film has become, according to one source, the highest-grossing musical film of all time. The initial negative reactions from its 1997 release tend now to be coloured by nostalgia. The Odeon even held limited screenings to mark its 20th anniversary.

It’s even been suggested that some studios make intentionally bad films in a go-for-broke fashion. Sometimes it’s to keep the rights to an idea – or sometimes they reckon the gamble can pay off. The 2003 Tommy Wisaeu film The Room is a case study all of its own.

If there’s any sort of lesson to be taken from this, I think it’s that writers sometimes need to worry less about the quality of work and focus on simply producing it. If you want it to exist in the world, sometimes you need to make it yourself. In Spice World, someone took arguably the most famous singers of the era, wrote them into a rather silly script, and we’re still talking about it more than 25 years later.

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Notes of Note

Jack Kerouac wrote his novel On the Road in the era of the typewriter. The trouble was that had a story to tell and didn’t want to be interrupted every five minutes to replace the sheet of paper.

His solution was to buy a roll of teletype paper, giving 120 feet of paper in a continuous scroll. That’s the equivalent length of approximately 123 sheets of A4. The novel was reportedly written in three weeks while his wife supplied him with coffee and Benzedrine.

The entire scroll was displayed at the British Museum in 2012. Had it been written today, he likely would have used a computer, robbing popular culture of this artefact.

I’m reminded of this stream-of-consciousness approach as I look at a Simplenote entry I’ve had for the past two weeks or so. Coming home from a poetry gig, I thought of a few lines of verse, adding a few more lines shortly afterwards. Then yesternight, I added a lot more lines, with only minimal editing.

In terms of plot structure, it’s very disjointed and I don’t intend to resolve this. I’m also satisfied with the opening lines and the closing lines, yet I feel it needs something more in the middle to bulk it up from the 23 lines it currently contains and I can’t tell yet what its final form is likely to be.

While it’s unlikely this short note will end up like On the Road, I do have one precedent for a project that grew out of all recognition. I started off writing a one-line gag about how we fictionally used to order YouTube videos by post. By the time I’d finished editing, it had ended up as a short story with more than 1,700 words.

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Second Chance Sales

Over the years, I’ve amassed a lot of novels and poetry collections. Some of them have been finished and enjoyed, while I’m never reasonably likely to read the others, so it was time to clear out most of my shelves.

After letting my pals have the first pick of the collection, I then sent ten of the remainder to Music Magpie for instant cash. I could have sent fifty, but I was only offered pennies for some of them, giving me much more hassle for a relatively low payout. Additionally, some of the books were signed and/or personalised, so I’ve divided the rest between charity shops and eBay.

During this process, I wondered how published authors feel about seeing their books in second-hand shops, so I decided to throw out a question to them. Of my dozen or so sample size, it seems the overwhelming majority wouldn’t mind this at all. Typical reasons included:

  • Their words were accessible to people who might not have bought them otherwise.
  • They liked the idea of their books being spread more widely than the first recipient.
  • Charities receive the benefit from the sale of donated books.
  • It is simply part of the ‘circle of books’.

Honourable mentions go to two parties. The first is the author who sometimes leaves a secret note for the next person who picks up the book. The second is to Gutter Magazine. It has become a running joke in their office that at any given moment, a certain Oxfam bookshop has at least five copies for sale. They added that many of their issues sell out, so it was lovely to see them ‘in the wild’ once again.

I also had a book written by the grandfather of a former colleague about travelling to Hong Kong. She’d originally lent it to me for taking on a railway journey, but I didn’t manage to read it After a four-year gap, it has now been returned.

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Converting Formats

Of all the factors plaguing Dungeons & Dragons players, arranging a convenient time for everyone to gather is probably the most difficult. This meant my group ended up seeing the film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves at different times in different cinemas.

Making this film was a real gamble. Not only is it taking a largely open-world game and telling a linear story, but it also sits in the shadow of the last Dungeons & Dragons film made 23 years ago. That one has a score of just 3.6 on IMDB compared to 7.9 for the current one, and Ginny D from Critical Role has analysed what makes it so terrible.

Computer games in particular have a track record of being made into badly-received films, and there are plenty of top-ten lists online purporting to show the worst. Conversely, there is also a history of movies being made into great games. More than 25 years after its release, for example, GoldenEye 007 for the N64 is still highly regarded.

For me and two of my group, though, the gamble seems to have paid off, with all of us enjoying what Chris Pine and the cast brought to the table. It’s also no secret that a solid structure plays a large part in the success of any motion picture. In a blog post, the writer Michael Hague explains the key turning points of most major scripts, and the writers nailed this one near-perfectly.

With all this in mind, it remains to be seen how The Super Mario Bros. Movie fares at the box office this weekend.

T

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How to Collect Secondary Royalties

Even in the writing community, it’s not widely known that published writers might be entitled to secondary royalties. These are generated when a work is lent, copied, rebroadcast, &c. Not only that, it’s simple to register for collection.

Firstly, you’ll need the ISBN and/or other details of the publications where your work appears. Then sign up for the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) and follow the instructions. Lifetime membership is £36, which is deducted from your first royalties payment so you pay nothing upfront.

There are two payouts per year: in March and September. Writers might be paid in one or both of these, depending on what types of payments have been received. The amounts you receive are never a fortune, but just enough to acknowledge the use of your work.

When I received my payment last week, it was £93.88, with most of that coming from UK fees, but some from EU and non-EU sources. I currently have six works registered, dating back to 2016.

I can’t find a breakdown of the exact amount contributed by each work, but judging by the pattern of payments, it’s a safe bet to assume the more recent ones are higher earners, and I’m quite happy about that.

That latest work was an anthology that took more than two years from the first meeting to the final publication, featuring a number of local poets and photographers. We knew from the start there would be no payment because it was for charity, but we had been promised a complimentary contributor’s copy.

It then emerged that the committee had decided not to offer this. I still have the chain of angry and disappointed emails. Some of the writers offered potential compromises or solutions, but the issue was never resolved and most of us refused to buy a copy.

So although the amount isn’t great, I’ve earned enough from my contribution to buy several copies, even though I still wouldn’t.

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Where to Start?

I’m attempting to write the 22nd instalment of a short story series. It was supposed to be a one-off piece, so to reach this point is a tremendous achievement. But because of the existing body of work, this plot in this part has to be consistent with the rest. It therefore needs to include two particular elements:

  • A small piece of wrap-up from the previous story.
  • A scene where one of the characters makes amends with the rest of the group.

The trouble is that these elements need quite a bit of explanation. They’re slowing down the plot, even when I start in the middle of the action and refer back to them. At this stage, I might have to take the story in a different direction, as long as it fits with what’s gone before.

The good part is that there’s no particular deadline for this piece of work. It’s for a private group and I’m under no obligation to write anything. In this case, however, a deadline might be useful to focus my thoughts. Maybe I can impose one on myself and come up with a workable solution.

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A Little Poetry

Every year, I take time to visit StAnza, the poetry event in St Andrews. The festival is typically spread over the course of around a week, so I normally book a few events on the same day. This year took a significantly different form but it was no less literary.

I booked just two events: the breakfast poetry in the morning plus the slam competition on Saturday evening. I’d planned to use the middle of the day to visit a pal I haven’t seen for around three years.

He introduced me to a game called Bananagrams. It’s easier to demonstrate than explain, but fans of Scrabble will likely enjoy it. We played four games and discussed a few of the books on his shelf.

By the end of the afternoon, I’d decided to skip the slam. It goes on late into the evening and I was too tired to stay up. Instead, I used the time to compose an overdue card to a pal in Dublin, complete with a handwritten letter that ended up being four A5 pages long.

If I were one of these people who posted these vapid inspirational quotes, I’d end with something like ‘The serves as a reminder that even when plans change, there are always opportunities to connect and create meaningful moments.’ And yet that very much expresses how I feel. Just this once, let’s lean into this sentiment.

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Doubt, and the Avoidance Thereof

There have been a few occasions recently where I’ve had to explain a complex idea in writing without the risk of being misunderstood. This is where my favourite clarifying phrase comes into play: For the avoidance of doubt.

The last time I deployed this phrase was yesternight in a business email. I’d previously asked one person to refer me to another, and then I’d changed my mind a couple of days later. However, the first person hadn’t received the revised message before the second person made contact.

I then replied to all parties explaining there had been a misunderstanding somewhere but – for the avoidance of doubt – it wasn’t a big deal.

It’s normally considered bad form to use the passive voice, but I find it an advantage here. The phrase doesn’t accuse the other person of communicating poorly, only that a mix-up has occurred somewhere.

Depending on how you normally speak, you might want to use different phrasing, but it’s a good template for ensuring all parties are on the same page.