Tag: writing

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A Piece of Good News

In response to an open call, I sent a couple of poems to Speculative Books in Glasgow at the end of December. I then forgot I’d done this until I received an email to say one of them had been selected for an upcoming anthology.

I don’t submit work to publishers nearly as often as I once did. These days, I’m more focussed on organising writing groups and other projects. In fact, the submitted piece was written for my monthly poetry circle and probably wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

I’ll be receiving two contributor’s copies in due course, ahead of its official launch in September, which I will no doubt publicise again nearer the time.

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Fringe Previews

Although a digital version is available, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe still diligently prints a paper catalogue of events. This year, it runs to a total of 384 pages, with six to 12 events per page.

Since the festival doesn’t take place until 2 to 26 August, there is still plenty of time to pick shows, so I’m working out which ones are showing when I’m available.

As I do this, I’m reminded that comedy – and especially stand-up – is the dominant form. It takes up almost a third of the catalogue, and you can find it from tiny attic venues to 1,000-seat theatres.

It strikes me there must be some crossover with certain productions. Comedy and spoken word have elements in common. And then the line between spoken word and theatre isn’t always clear, while the catalogue groups together physical theatre with dance and circus. And at what point do dance and circus become cabaret or variety?

Even experienced promoters must have to make tough decisions about which category where a given show should be placed. Should a humourous theatre piece go in Comedy and potentially be crowded out by other events, or be included in Theatre where readers may be expecting a more serious production?

In any case, the popularity of the festival might be starting to ease off. It’s notorious for causing performers to make a loss, largely because of accommodation costs. Even the well-known Jason Manford and Gail Porter say they’ve been priced out.

But that’s a matter for the future. For 2024, it’s business as usual, and I look forward to going once again.

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A Plea to Organisers – Create an Event Listing

If you’re the organiser of a literary, comedy or any similar event, I urge you to read this entry about the importance of creating clear event listings. Or should you really be unable to spare the time, at least skip to the bottom line.

Regular readers will know I host and co-organise an open-mic for writers called Hotchpotch, typically on the second Wednesday of each month. We then have a self-imposed deadline of four days to compose a bulletin about the next event.

While a substantial chunk of the text remains static from month to month, we always go around the members at the end of each session asking for other local events to be featured in that bulletin. We take a recording for our reference and make sure we ask for the time, date and venue.

The problem arises when it’s time to compose the bulletin. At the last session, a member said he’d be performing the following week at an open-mic for musicians. As it was a venue well-known by locals, I thought it would be easy to find.

I discovered this particular place uses Facebook for its events, as do many others. This is not a problem in itself, but it was difficult to find a reference to the open-mic, as all the events were years out of date. I eventually found one reference in a picture that had been pushed down the feed by other updates.

This is only the latest instance of being unable to find events. Some have websites that haven’t been updated for some time, if ever. Others omit vital information like the start time, or require the visitor to email an organiser for details.

By now, you might be thinking there’s a simple solution: ask people to send us events in writing, complete with URL.

But this isn’t the easy option it sounds. I’ve been running this event a long time, and collecting events while you have members’ attention is much easier. Waiting for people to send in submissions can cause a significant delay, and some forget entirely once they’re back home.

With Hotchpotch, we post our bulletins in three main places:

  1. On an opt-in email announcements list.
  2. As a Facebook event.
  3. At a static URL that always shows the latest update.

Additionally, we post the static URL to our social media pages every couple of weeks, so visitors shouldn’t have to scroll back more than three or four updates to find it.

Despite the bottleneck caused by finding external events, our reason is a simple one: if we don’t do it for other organisers, they’ll have no reason to do it for us. There are some organisations, such as Creative Dundee and I Am Loud who regularly boost our events, and reach people we can’t.

The bottom line is: Whatever format you choose to publish your listings, please keep them in an obvious place and update them regularly. Take an afternoon to sort out your online presence: it helps new – and existing – punters to find your events, it helps promoters to boost them, and it helps our community as a whole.

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Not Lost, But Hard to Find

A couple of weeks ago, I made an entry about keeping an archive of pieces and how I found one particular poem that wasn’t stored in OneDrive with the rest of them. A few days after writing that entry, my backup system was put to the test.

On Sunday 2 June, the town of Leven was finally reconnected by railway after 55 years. Along with a couple of pals, I was one of the first passengers on the revived service, and we decided to head for a coffee. One minute, I was using my phone to tell people about my day; the next, it went completely black and wouldn’t react to any button pushes nor attempts to charge it.

Fortunately, there were a lot of services I could still access, such as the aforementioned archive. However, some relied on two-factor authentication, which requires using a phone as verification, like I used to secure WordPress.

The short version of the story is that my old phone was beyond recovery, but I now have a new one, and I have full access to all my services again.

In all that excitement, I didn’t have much of a chance to think of a writing-related entry. But I do wish to reiterate the advice of backing up all your work, both locally and online, so you don’t fall victim to an unexpected loss.

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Writing a Character Backstory, But Enjoying It This Time

This entry is a spiritual sequel to a post from two years ago about a character from a game of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D).

When I mention D&D, there will likely be some readers who immediately switch off mentally. However, I promise this entry will not go too deeply into the game mechanics, and will instead focus on characters and storylines, so I invite you to stick with me.

I’ve been playing for the last few years in different groups. The most recent game has also been my longest, with sessions roughly every fortnight over the previous 18 months or so.

Every D&D game has a Dungeon Master (DM) who controls the general setting and what happens there, as well as acting as the voice of any secondary characters encountered.

When I began that game, I let the DM choose the attributes of my character. Many players consider this the most enjoyable part, but in my other games, I’d always found it a chore. My input was limited to giving my character a name – Max Wellhouse – and writing a placeholder backstory, with a view to expanding it in the future. D&D characters always work as a team, so the backstory typically explains how each character met the others.

Then I happened to watch this video from professional player Ginny Di, titled 5 backstory bad habits that drive your DM nuts. During the first section – Not having a catalyst – I began thinking about the placeholder backstory from months previously, and the pieces began to fall into place one by one. I’d written a background for Max Wellhouse, but not a backstory. It lacked a clear motivation for him to join the other characters.

You know how I said earlier that I’d found character creation a chore? Within two days of Ginny posting that video, I’d written paragraphs of backstory and motivation, comprising one main thread and two minor arcs, and what’s more, I enjoyed the process. I won’t reveal the content here, since it hasn’t yet been revealed to the other players.

Separately from this, I met up last weekend with one of my past D&D groups. The game halted a few months ago after we lost our former DM, and we’ve now decided to reform with an amended line-up. I was granted permission from the new DM to transplant my previous Captain Coconuts – from two previous games and rewrite his backstory from scratch. Again, I was inspired enough to write that up within 24 hours.

In the new backstory, Coconuts owned a ship and would seek out sea-based jobs and opportunities. On one job, he was accused of selling substandard copper to a powerful merchant. He sailed away as fast as he could with the merchant chasing him. Although Coconuts made his escape, it was at the cost of his ship smashing into rocks and sinking, leaving him on dry land with the few clothes and items he could salvage. Bonus points if you spotted the veiled reference to Ea-nāṣir in there.

Once again, I really enjoyed writing that, even if the character was pre-made with the assistance of the previous DM. I think that’s because I was doing it in the wrong direction.

Before this, I’d always tried to create a character, and then formed a backstory that would fit into the world. I think a better approach is to establish the world first of all, then have everything follow from there.

At the weekend, for example, the DM told me the world would be dark and serious. If I didn’t have Coconuts already made, I could then work on a backstory that might suit such a setting, then figure out what type of character might end up in that situation.

Unless something goes horribly wrong in either game, I expect it’ll be a while before I need to create another character, but I will make an effort to enjoy the process this time.

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Lost and Perhaps Found

When I started writing around 2010, I made a point of keeping an archive of my work.

Every story and poem has its own directory, and dated revisions are kept within each one. Plain text doesn’t take up much storage space, so there’s plenty of scope to keep doing this into the future.

About two or three years ago, I was looking for a particular poem I’d written; I knew its title, many of the words, and roughly when it was written. So when the archive showed no results after several attempts, I realised my system had broken down somewhere and wrote it off as a loss. I could have reconstructed it with a little effort, but I never did.

There’s a common misconception about Snapchat that it deletes every picture you send. In fact, you can set it to keep a copy of every picture you add to the My Story feature.

Fortunately, I’d not only set this up, but I’d taken a clear picture of the original handwritten verse four years earlier – and I’m not in the habit of doing that. In February 2022, while looking for something else, I found that picture. The original verse had almost certainly been shredded along with other papers. I swiftly copied the words into a Word document and placed it in the archive.

Luckily this was only a 16-line poem. Other writers have suffered far greater losses. Jilly Cooper, for instance, lost the original manuscript of Riders on a London bus and it took her years to rewrite.

Not all losses are accidental. A significant quantity of drama has been wiped from BBC and ITV archives, including episodes of popular shows like Doctor Who and Dad’s Army. Before the advent of home video, there was little incentive to keep old programmes except to resell them overseas.

In some cases, collectors and members of the public have discovered recordings; some in great condition, others needing significant restoration. The BFI used to hold an annual screening called Missing Believed Wiped, featuring a selection of recovered footage, but I’m unable to find any recent events.

It remains a mystery whether I typed out the poem in 2018 then lost it, or whether it was never typed up in the first place. I’ve nonetheless started backing up my archive locally and online so no further mishaps should happen.

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Eight Weeks of Writing Group Independence

Every Tuesday, I run a writing group with a pal. Until eight weeks ago, the group was affiliated with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo).

We broke away to form an independent group after we felt the organisation was not working in the best interests of its members. You can read a previous entry exploring the reasons for this.

In the weeks following the announcement, we fielded a few questions from members, largely to reinforce that the new group would feel as familiar as we could make it. Only a couple of people have left, but no more than would have happened anyway.

In short, it’s been something of a velvet divorce.

I’d been running the group for about nine years, while my pal came on board about two years ago. We feel we know what works with our members and what doesn’t, and this secession allows us to take our own actions without needing to toe the line of an umbrella organisation with their own differing priorities.

There are still aspects we need to work out. For instance, we have an outstanding question of how to attract new members without being overwhelmed by new recruits. This, however, is not an urgent problem and we’ll work it out in due course.

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The End of the Renga

Back in 2020, I was invited to take part in a collaborative project started by the poet W N Herbert, known to us all as Bill.

His idea was simple. He would create an email list containing a group of poets. Then each month, he would send out the first stanza of a new poem and incorporate suggestions from those poets for a second stanza, then a third, and so on. The complete poem would be posted publicly by the end of the month.

From the start, Bill introduced us to the renga form. We did play somewhat fast and loose with its complex rules and conventions, but we mostly stuck to the alternating stanza length: a three-line haiku followed by two lines of seven syllables each.

Here’s part of a recent renga. Depending on the contributor, some parts were written in standard English and some in Scots.

Then two days ago, he announced the project was at an end. It seems this always intended to run for four years, but in the initial excitement of being asked to contribute, I hadn’t read that part.

I haven’t always had the time and/or inspiration to contribute, but I always made a point of reading the constructed renga when it was sent out. The next stage is to think about publication; Bill has a lot of experience in this area, so it’ll probably happen.

Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing about whatever project he has planned next.

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Ideas Coming Out My Ears

Occasionally, I sit down to write this blog on a Tuesday only to find my tank of ideas is empty.

At the moment, I have a different problem. I have a list of subjects, but I can’t find a way to start on any of them. For example, today’s entry was meant to be about the problem of plagiarism among poets, but I couldn’t move past the first line.

Instead, let’s pick this up next week, once I’m able to articulate one or more of these ideas.