I had two contacts from Brazil today. One was a sixteen year old writer called Vitoria Pratini (a friend of Frini) leaving a comment on my blog in Rio. The other was Merche Clark whom I stayed with when I was in Rio. Merche, you may recall if you have been following my adventures, is sister to my studio mate John Clark and owner of the Jamer Bookshop. Merche made me feel very welcome when I was in Rio. If you are in the city and you have a moment to spare, get yourself down to her bookshop and buy some books. It would be nice if they were mine, but any purchases would be greatly appreciated I'm sure.
And speaking of John Clark, I'm off to see Slumdog Millionaire with him tonight. I hope it is as good as everyone says it is, because I am dog tired and might just fall asleep.
This blog is in serious risk of degenerating into a name-dropping site, but I used to work for Danny Boyle a long time ago. He was the director of the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs and I did a couple of posters for him. I have chatted in a port-a-cabin with Danny Boyle. Are you jealous? Don't be. I specialise in working with people before they were rich and famous. It's actually quite annoying.
Mad Men is back. I was traumatised by the loss of The Sopranos and missed out on The Wire but Mad Men is superb television. It's dark, it's clever, it's sexy. It is so well acted. People used to say British TV was the best in the world (by which they meant the BBC). If that was ever true, it isn't any more.
Britain is not showing itself capable of coming up with anything as good as Mad Men. The Sopranos could never have been made here. And it's not just about production values and access to movie-making talent and facilities (though that does make a difference obviously). It is the ambition. Mad Men is art. What British TV in recent years can you say that about?
The BBC prides itself on costume drama and quite rightly so. But Mad Men is also costume drama and it shows what you can do within that format.
It can be more than slipping a sex scene into a Jane Austen novel.
Wednesday, 11 February 2009
Monday, 9 February 2009
Cutting and pasting
I am still deep into the rewrite. I work on a computer and there are good and bad things about that way of working when it comes to doing alterations.
The good thing is that you can move whole chunks of texts - whole chapters if necessary - by cutting and pasting. The bad thing is that you can move whole chunks of text - whole chapters sometimes - by cutting and pasting.
What I mean is, it can be too easy to change things. The text starts to come apart at the seams because it is no longer a solid mass, but a collection of floating paragraphs. And a novel needs to hang together.
I'm not just talking about plot (or the story, if you object to the word plot) here, though obviously that is very important. I want my work to read well - to sound good. Messing about with the structure of the book can play havoc with those nice rhythms you created in the first draft.
That said, I think that radical change is better than the odd tweak here and there. As long as you always keep a copy of the original you can always revert. You certainly get nowhere by being precious about your own text.
Better to be brave than tentative.
The good thing is that you can move whole chunks of texts - whole chapters if necessary - by cutting and pasting. The bad thing is that you can move whole chunks of text - whole chapters sometimes - by cutting and pasting.
What I mean is, it can be too easy to change things. The text starts to come apart at the seams because it is no longer a solid mass, but a collection of floating paragraphs. And a novel needs to hang together.
I'm not just talking about plot (or the story, if you object to the word plot) here, though obviously that is very important. I want my work to read well - to sound good. Messing about with the structure of the book can play havoc with those nice rhythms you created in the first draft.
That said, I think that radical change is better than the odd tweak here and there. As long as you always keep a copy of the original you can always revert. You certainly get nowhere by being precious about your own text.
Better to be brave than tentative.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Goosebumps
We had the lovely Mardi Dungey and her son round this evening. Mardi is back in Cambridge from Tasmania for a week. It was great to see her and to hear that Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror is in the bookshops in Hobart. We miss her and Ross a lot.
Earlier in the day I went over to Sainsburys to do a rare supermarket shopping trip and Radio 3 had David Daniels as a guest. I have never really 'got' opera. It is just about the only music form that leaves me cold and I get a little tired of how it is used as some sort of cultural benchmark. I see no reason why people singing drivel in often quite silly voices should have any greater inherent value than jazz or country and western. It certainly did not have that status originally.
That said, I can't remember who it was, but I heard someone on Radio 2 picking some favourite pieces of music and one of them was David Daniels. What an extraordinary voice. It is easy to say that he sounds feminine, but that misses the point. His voice has a weird unearthly quality because he is a man and yet sings in that beautiful clear voice. I am normally immune to men with high voices (with maybe the exception of Curtis Mayfield) but David Daniels is incredible.
Just as I suggested with the very different Howard Devoto (and boy is that an understatement), download a track and bang up the volume. It will give you goosebumps.
Earlier in the day I went over to Sainsburys to do a rare supermarket shopping trip and Radio 3 had David Daniels as a guest. I have never really 'got' opera. It is just about the only music form that leaves me cold and I get a little tired of how it is used as some sort of cultural benchmark. I see no reason why people singing drivel in often quite silly voices should have any greater inherent value than jazz or country and western. It certainly did not have that status originally.
That said, I can't remember who it was, but I heard someone on Radio 2 picking some favourite pieces of music and one of them was David Daniels. What an extraordinary voice. It is easy to say that he sounds feminine, but that misses the point. His voice has a weird unearthly quality because he is a man and yet sings in that beautiful clear voice. I am normally immune to men with high voices (with maybe the exception of Curtis Mayfield) but David Daniels is incredible.
Just as I suggested with the very different Howard Devoto (and boy is that an understatement), download a track and bang up the volume. It will give you goosebumps.
Saturday, 7 February 2009
Ch..ch..ch..changes
I am working on the my new book for Bloomsbury. I have been calling it Ghosts in old blog posts and then changed that to The Secrets of Hawton Mere. I am wondering if that is going to be the title when it goes onto print. Titles are strange things. They are either there from the start - sometimes before the start - or they they just loom out at you one day.
I see nothing wrong with this. It would be a problem if the nature of the novel was in a state of flux and the title tinkering reflected this indecision. But a title needs to be right. And the only way you know if it is right is when you hear it.
I have spoken at length to Helen Szirtes about the various issues she has with the book and the issues I might have with those issues and so on. But surely this means I am a terrible writer. Surely I should be able to do it all on my own. Why do I need help? I am a failure etc etc. . .
Well not really. The editor/writer relationship is one of constant negotiation. Certainly a writer who gives in to every suggestion probably doesn't know what they are doing. A writer who refuses to accept any suggestion is probably insecure. And a writer who refuses to consider good suggestions - especially when they are coming from someone as intelligent and insightful as Helen - is just plain stupid.
For a lot of the time I was an illustrator I would do anything to avoid using someones suggestion. I felt like it was my job to come up with the ideas and I had failed if someone else did it. I would reject perfectly good ideas just so that I could hang on to the notion that it was all my work.
I think working in newspapers changed that. In newspapers you are usually dealing with an editor rather than a designer and they are used to talking things through with journalists - that's the way they work. Journalists tend to have an annoying desire to have every word in the article portrayed in the illustration, but at least they know what they are talking about when it comes to the article you are supposed to illustrate or the concept you are dealing with in your cartoon. At the Independent I had Matt Hoffman on the comment pages and he was no more going to let a lame cartoon of mine through, than he was a lame column. And quite right too.
I still don't take advice easily. I still want to do everything myself. But with writing I think I'm more willing to accept that what I've done might not be the only way to go. I want everything I do to be better than the last thing I did. I want everything I do to be the best it can possibly be and if someone can see a route to that better than I can, then I'm not going to deliberately walk the other way just to be bloody minded.
Philippa Milnes-Smith got in touch having read Helen's suggestions and gave me some more, just as thoughtful as Helen's. I won't be incorporating them all. In fact some of the detail will become irrelevant as I work and areas are discarded or added to and characters dropped and introduced. But Helen and Philippa's comments will help me decide what to keep and what to lose.
Isabel Ford sent the proofs of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth today. It is a general rule of thumb that publishing deadlines are drawn to each other as if by some kind of gravitational force. So I need to get this book sorted out and back to Bloomsbury and then I need to get the proofs read and sent back. It is going to be a busy few weeks.
I see nothing wrong with this. It would be a problem if the nature of the novel was in a state of flux and the title tinkering reflected this indecision. But a title needs to be right. And the only way you know if it is right is when you hear it.
I have spoken at length to Helen Szirtes about the various issues she has with the book and the issues I might have with those issues and so on. But surely this means I am a terrible writer. Surely I should be able to do it all on my own. Why do I need help? I am a failure etc etc. . .
Well not really. The editor/writer relationship is one of constant negotiation. Certainly a writer who gives in to every suggestion probably doesn't know what they are doing. A writer who refuses to accept any suggestion is probably insecure. And a writer who refuses to consider good suggestions - especially when they are coming from someone as intelligent and insightful as Helen - is just plain stupid.
For a lot of the time I was an illustrator I would do anything to avoid using someones suggestion. I felt like it was my job to come up with the ideas and I had failed if someone else did it. I would reject perfectly good ideas just so that I could hang on to the notion that it was all my work.
I think working in newspapers changed that. In newspapers you are usually dealing with an editor rather than a designer and they are used to talking things through with journalists - that's the way they work. Journalists tend to have an annoying desire to have every word in the article portrayed in the illustration, but at least they know what they are talking about when it comes to the article you are supposed to illustrate or the concept you are dealing with in your cartoon. At the Independent I had Matt Hoffman on the comment pages and he was no more going to let a lame cartoon of mine through, than he was a lame column. And quite right too.
I still don't take advice easily. I still want to do everything myself. But with writing I think I'm more willing to accept that what I've done might not be the only way to go. I want everything I do to be better than the last thing I did. I want everything I do to be the best it can possibly be and if someone can see a route to that better than I can, then I'm not going to deliberately walk the other way just to be bloody minded.
Philippa Milnes-Smith got in touch having read Helen's suggestions and gave me some more, just as thoughtful as Helen's. I won't be incorporating them all. In fact some of the detail will become irrelevant as I work and areas are discarded or added to and characters dropped and introduced. But Helen and Philippa's comments will help me decide what to keep and what to lose.
Isabel Ford sent the proofs of Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth today. It is a general rule of thumb that publishing deadlines are drawn to each other as if by some kind of gravitational force. So I need to get this book sorted out and back to Bloomsbury and then I need to get the proofs read and sent back. It is going to be a busy few weeks.
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
Adverts
There are two brilliant adverts being shown on British TV. Both feature children, but are very, very different.
The first is a road safety ad. It shows a man haunted by the broken body of the child he had run over. It is not only a horribly effective advert, it is a brilliantly creepy piece of film making. It is a model of restraint, and shows that you can get pack a jolt and a shudder into a very short time frame if you know what you are doing. It's the banality of the locations that make it so horrible. It is shocking, in the best sense of the work.
The new Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad by contrast is hilarious. It is also a wonderful piece of film making and is also, in its way, a model of restraint. The performances by the kids are brilliant. How anyone came up with the notion of children waggling their eyebrows to a a dance track as a way of advertising chocolate I cannot imagine.
But I'm very glad they did.
The first is a road safety ad. It shows a man haunted by the broken body of the child he had run over. It is not only a horribly effective advert, it is a brilliantly creepy piece of film making. It is a model of restraint, and shows that you can get pack a jolt and a shudder into a very short time frame if you know what you are doing. It's the banality of the locations that make it so horrible. It is shocking, in the best sense of the work.
The new Cadbury's Dairy Milk ad by contrast is hilarious. It is also a wonderful piece of film making and is also, in its way, a model of restraint. The performances by the kids are brilliant. How anyone came up with the notion of children waggling their eyebrows to a a dance track as a way of advertising chocolate I cannot imagine.
But I'm very glad they did.
Monday, 2 February 2009
Snowflakes are falling
Snow finally came to Cambridge today - and indeed most of the UK. It was pretty deep by the end of the day. I walked my son to school only to find that the school was closed and had not been added to the list on the local BBC radio. Still, it gave us a chance to see what Cambridge looked like under a crisp clean layer of snow. And it looked beautiful if course.
Later in the day we went out to Grantchester Meadows which looked magical and was all but deserted. The snow was relatively untouched and stretched away to the horizon, blending into the blank sky. The river was black and a large hunk of grey ice floated by on a strong current.
One of the many advantages of working from home is that it means you get a chance to have a snowball fight with your son (though I shouldn't be saying this as my publisher/agent may read this and wonder why I am not nose to the keyboard.
But this was perfect snowball snow and we must have had a snowball fight every chance we've had since he was able to throw one.
But it may be time to stop. His aim is getting too good.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
Tea? Coffee? Frostbite?
I opened the curtains today and groaned. There was no sign of the sharp frost we had been promised and that meant that I would have to go to football with my son and not only that, I would have to stand on the sidelines serving teas and coffees in a freezing cold wind.
The parents take it in turns to serve refreshments at the matches and today it was my turn. It was bitterly cold and my son still belligerently refuses to score a goal. Why can't he play table tennis or badminton something indoors, where parents could take it in turns to serve cocktails and finger food?
One of the important parts of serving refreshments is that the kids get squash and biscuits at half time. Of course I screwed that up and though Will and Jane Hill (their son goes to the same school as mine and has recently joined the team - and has already scored!) stepped in to help me, it arrived just as the second half was starting.
I am an utter failure as a soccer dad.
The parents take it in turns to serve refreshments at the matches and today it was my turn. It was bitterly cold and my son still belligerently refuses to score a goal. Why can't he play table tennis or badminton something indoors, where parents could take it in turns to serve cocktails and finger food?
One of the important parts of serving refreshments is that the kids get squash and biscuits at half time. Of course I screwed that up and though Will and Jane Hill (their son goes to the same school as mine and has recently joined the team - and has already scored!) stepped in to help me, it arrived just as the second half was starting.
I am an utter failure as a soccer dad.
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