Tag: writing

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Stories That Spawned a Saying

There are any number of everyday sayings that started out as phrases in literary works.

The example that comes most easily to mind is Hamlet. The script virtually acts as a Rosetta Stone of phrases that were probably fresh when first penned by William Shakespeare, but have since devolved into clichés. We won’t have time to explore all these in this entry; besides, Wikipedia has us covered.

Before introducing the two phrases I’d like to explore, a couple of honourable mentions:

Monkey’s Paw

Last week at writing group, one of the members used the phrase monkey’s paw. Having never heard it before, I assumed this was the invention of the Internet era, perhaps in reference to some meme or another. As such, I was surprised to find it dates back to 1902, specifically a short story by W W Jacobs. With those initials, it’s a real shame he didn’t live to see the World Wide Web.

The story centres around a mummified monkey’s paw which has been cursed. The owner will be granted any wish by the paw, but always with unforeseen consequences. This has come to apply to any similar situation in real life where the positive effect is outweighed by the negative.

The Monkey’s Paw is now in the public domain and can be read on the Project Gutenberg website. On the whole, I feel it’s well-written, but I would like to have seen more time taken to ramp up the tension before the third wish was used.

Jekyll & Hyde

On Thursday of last week, I went with a couple of pals to a stage production of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; a search reveals the title is apparently not prefixed with The.

The concept of a Jekyll and Hyde character is so widely known that even those unfamiliar with the Robert Louis Stevenson novel often understand his duality. I too wasn’t particularly familiar with the story, but I enjoyed its execution and I’d be interested in reading it in full.

This particular adaptation took the source material and turned it into a one-woman stage production. Additionally, I’m already acquainted with the writer (J D Henshaw) and the performer (Heather-Rose Andrews), and we had a brief discussion after the show about the staging of it.

There was, unfortunately, just one scheduled performance or I would urge you to go and see one.

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Unaware What’s on the Air

This past weekend, I tuned into part of a 48-hour broadcast by Dundee Radio Club. The stream began at 2pm on Friday via their website, with audience interaction on Instagram, ending shortly before 4pm on Sunday.

I was having difficulty listening to the stream at first. The radio player simply wasn’t showing on my browser, yet it didn’t seem to be blocked by my VPN or the ad-blocker. Once I did manage to receive the feed early on Sunday morning, I kept listening until the very end in case it disappeared as suddenly as it arrived.

It isn’t often I have difficulty describing an event, but this one is proving to be a challenge. Each of the programmes – to use the term loosely – was an audio contribution from people around Dundee, but following no specific theme. The organisers wanted, and I quote from the Open Call: sonic artworks, interviews, conversations, music sessions, storytelling, audio lectures, dj-mixes, radio plays and more!

As such, you might be listening to a history of ambient music for 20 minutes, followed by an artist sharing thoughts about cows while standing in a field, and then a DJ set featuring techno music, and the 40-plus hours I missed must have been equally as surreal. While not explicitly stated, there was a real sense that the event was intended to be an ephemeral affair, with no recording made available afterwards.

I’m part of the Amps network, which is a community of people who make and cultivate creativity in Dundee, and I voted for the Club to receive funding for this project. I was influenced by my previous volunteering at three different community radio stations. I’d given up the last of these by 2013 because I was becoming much more interested in writing by that point.

While I still wouldn’t go back to having a regular presenting slot, I’m still frustrated about missing my opportunity to take part in this project.

The Open Call somehow passed me by, despite following their Instagram page since August 2024. I even think I know what topic I would have presented. Still, I’ll keep that under wraps just now, as it isn’t time-sensitive and can be used some other time, perhaps if Dundee Radio Club returns one day.

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What to Write, What to Write

The primary motivation for making these blog entries is to keep me producing at least one piece of writing per week. Most of the time, I have something to say, but there are others where the tank is empty.

At the moment, I have several writing topics I can draw upon, but none are enough for a strong or cohesive entry. These include:

  • Creating a new character and backstory in Dungeons & Dragons after the former one was killed off. Before doing this, it would be more appropriate to discuss it with the group ahead of making it public.
  • Writing separate emails to the complaints departments of two different companies, but there isn’t much to tell because both queries were solved relatively quickly.
  • Snatching time to write blog entries while doing other activities. Again, I can’t think of much else to add at the moment.
  • Watching my first David Lynch film and exploring how he approached the script, but I need to read up on this subject further before talking about it.
  • What happens when a blog is abandoned by its user, yet is still online and untouched years later. I found a suitable example last week, but I’ve touched on this topic fairly recently when talking about my own LiveJournal blog back in November.

There might be a time in the future when these ideas suddenly become relevant, so they’re parked away for future use. While I was plodding through them, I wondered how much more motivation I would have if were paid like a columnist.

For a start, the process would be somewhat different. I use this blog to say what’s on my mind, whereas a journalist wants to explore a topic cohesively or to put forward a point. After submission, it would then be edited or revised by someone else for legal compliance and/or impact, so it’s debatable how many of my own words would remain.

The National Union of Journalists maintains a spreadsheet of how much its members report being paid for a variety of publications. For those rates, I reckon I could find an angle for any of these parked topic ideas, perhaps using the complaints as a critique of contemporary customer service or commenting on how the works of Lynch have bypassed me over the years despite his popularity.

I’m almost certain I couldn’t earn anything from this blog in its current form. Even by paying attention to search engine optimisation and including affiliate links, it’s simply too niche and too bland to gain any serious traction in the mainstream. I’ve even fallen out of the habit of checking the countries where my visitors are accessing it.

I add the caveat that there’s always a remote chance it’ll blow up in popularity for seemingly no reason, which sometimes happens online. Barring that, I’m happy enough for this page to remain as it is. It hardly receives comments, but it hardly receives tedious people nit-picking some fault or another, allowing me to speak as I find. That’s a trade-off that suits me nicely.

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Blogging on The Move

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had a plan to visit the eight Millennium bridges in mainland Great Britain: seven listed on Wikipedia and an unlisted one in Ayr that I learnt about from pals. Along the way, I would keep a blog of my progress on Tumblr.

As I had such a strong idea about where I would be at certain times and what I’d be doing, I was actually able to draft a substantial chunk of text in advance and simply copy it over to my travelogue.

Real life, of course, frequently has other plans. For instance, my first stop was to be the Millennium Bridge in London. However, my train from Edinburgh Waverley was cancelled at Newcastle. By coincidence, I’d planned to stop there on the way back for the Gateshead bridge, so I hastily wrote up a revised entry explaining the situation.

The planning did pay off, though. When reached the Big Smoke, I’d also planned to make a quick side-visit to the former London Weekend Television Tower and I’d already written and edited a block of text about why I was going there.

It was helpful that most of the trains had at least a USB socket, if not a 230-volt socket, so I rarely worried about running out of power. It was also helpful to have an All Lines Rover, which lets you travel on almost any National Rail line for a week, as it was necessary to be very flexible about my plans.

That was especially true when I cut the tour short after the seventh bridge at Ayr. The Glasgow one was within sniffing distance, but Storm Éowyn was closing in. There were already some cancellations that day, and no trains the following day, so I couldn’t risk being stranded.

By complete coincidence, I missed the bulk of its effects. The same day, I’d already arranged to be in York, where I’d booked a hotel before the full tour was planned, with it being somewhat central. I was then heading further south to visit a pal in Rhos on Sea. I did catch the fringe of Storm Herminia as I visited Penzance and Land’s End, but that was rather tame in comparison.

Some of these journeys took hours at a time, allowing me to make a lot of progress on a fantasy fiction series I’m writing. I write different projects in different ways, and this one uses a Google Drive document in a browser so the formatting of the text matches the paragraph spacing of the website, meaning I can copy over the text wholesale.

Even today, phone signal is still patchy on many parts of the nation’s railways. I’d assumed Google would simply cache my text locally during dropouts and post it when I next reconnected. What happens instead is that the browser won’t accept any more input until the signal is present. To work around this, I made a local copy, which I hope has maintained the correct formatting.

My next piece of writing will be less fun: an email to Great Western Railway, who sold me the train ticket. While the staff accepted it, all but two automatic ticket barriers failed to recognise it, and those two were only at exits rather than entrances.

That was the second time I’ve been on a tour of the Millennium bridges, the first being in 2023. Although I’ve no plans to do that route again. I’ve learnt a lot about how to prepare for such a tour and how to write about it. Once I think of a new challenge, I’ll build on that even further and tell you about it nearer the time.

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Trying My Hand at a Chapbook

In the world of writing, there are all sorts of routes to publication for poetry and short stories, but they divide roughly into two main types.

The first is a competition format. This usually requires payment of an entry fee, which goes towards a cash prize for the winner – and sometimes runners-up – along with publication. I don’t normally enter these. Among other reasons, the cost is often excessive and the rules of entry tend to be complex and sometimes contradictory.

I much prefer the second format: an open call from a publisher. This is typically free and simple to enter, although the trade-off is a lesser payment, if any is offered at all. Here, the glory lies largely in publication and a contributor’s copy.

That said, the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize recently caught my attention. In this competition, the publisher wants poetry chapbook submissions of between 15 and 30 pages. Three winners, anonymously judged by the editors, will receive $5,000 and 500 copies of the book.

I’ve wanted to compile a collection for some time now, so this seemed the ideal opportunity. Additionally, unpublished individual poems from the manuscripts may also be offered standard publication in Rattle.

I’d already settled on a theme of self-confidence and romantic relationships, so I looked through the 200 folders in my poetry archive, hoping to find 12 suitable pieces. I found 11, and I wanted them to flow by mood, almost telling a story. Yet they wouldn’t fall into a suitable order no matter how they were arranged.

As the deadline was closing in, a solution eventually presented itself. I added a 12th poem that wasn’t on the same theme but could be read as such with some canny placement. I then wrote a 13th piece lifting some elements from that poem but taking them in a different direction, and these two act as bookends for the chapbook.

The other problem happened around the middle of the collection, where two poems with contrasting moods disrupted the flow. I separated them by writing a very short 14th piece, just two lines long, but it worked to calm the waters.

The winners will be announced in mid-April, so I’ll be sure not to submit the same poems anywhere else until then. In the likely event that my work isn’t accepted, I still have a chapbook to submit elsewhere or perhaps even to publish myself.

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Pencil, Paper and Privacy

I’m in a poetry circle called the Wyverns. Each month, we write a piece and share it with the rest of the group, inviting constructive feedback from the others.

This month, the prompt was Cartoon characters. With only four days until the next meeting and a hazy idea about what to write, I churned out a piece and an introduction directly into an email. After checking it over for any obvious errors, it was then sent to the other members.

When I told the group about how I’d composed the poem, it started off a discussion about the writing process, primarily whether we used paper to start, or entered it straight into a computer.

Typically, my pieces do start on paper. I make sure to buy a diary with plenty of note pages because these double as my notebook. It was a habit I developed a few years ago because I was typing all day at work, and it was a relief to pick up a pencil instead.

As I’m a touch-typist, writing by hand is considerably slower, but it can also allow more time to think about the text while composing. Paper also affords a less linear approach, freely allowing the addition of words with a carat mark or margin notes. A word processor, by contrast, typically likes to restrict the user to one line. There are odd exceptions like Microsoft OneNote, which can be used as a digital scrapbook.

I find writing by hand works best for prose and poetry. These blog entries are composed much more quickly, often in reaction to something that’s happened the same week, so these are entered straight into WordPress. I run a writing group every Tuesday and I often use that time to polish them off.

While we’re here, if you do a lot of writing on a computer in a public place, my advice is to buy a privacy screen immediately.

You can see the image straight on, or slightly to the left or right, while anyone looking at too steep an angle won’t be able to make anything out. Mine attaches with unobtrusive clear pads and stays permanently in place, but some other designs are removable.

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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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Poetry Connections and Train Connections

Although it happened too late to write up in this blog, I was at the Inn Deep bar in Glasgow last Tuesday for the launch of The SpecBook 2024. One of my poems had been published by – as the name suggests – Speculative Books.

Copies of the collection had been sent out to contributors, but as mine was lost in the post, I collected one there. What I didn’t realise is that there are actually two small volumes. It was great to see my name in print other than in poetry group pamphlets.

Part one of the schedule was devoted to the published readers, so the first section lasted for a long while. The audience were reminded to support rather than heckle, which is exactly what I would say.

Part two was given over to an open-mic, where anyone could read a poem, whether they were in the book or not. I even met someone I knew from my former open-mic, but I wasn’t able to stay long enough to hear her work.

That was because I’d never visited Inn Deep before and I’d booked my travel cautiously. I’d allowed plenty of time between connections, going from one coast of Scotland to the other. As it happens, this worked out so well that I was home an hour earlier than expected.

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Site Stats for Gavin Cameron

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about dipping back into an older blog. Further to this, WordPress sends me an email every month about my site statistics, displaying the number of visitiors, views, likes and comments received, along with an indication of changes from the previous month.

The most recent one, received yesterday, showed that November brought 144 views from 131 visitors, who left 17 likes.

I don’t typically monitor such statistics – if I look at them at all – but that’s a decent ratio, even if all the figures were all down from October. There were also no comments, but this page tends not to attact them and I’m happy enough with that.

The core purpose of this blog is to give me a reason to write every week, and it’s served that purpose for 11 years now. Whether anyone actually reads it is a side-issue.

What I do hope people will read is The SpecBook 2024, published by Speculative Books, as I have a poem included there. The launch was supposed to be in Glasgow in September but was cancelled due to illness.

So let’s hope tonight’s rescheduled launch goes ahead as planned, and I’ll report back next week on how it went.