Wilfred the Green Duck.

So I wrote last night in a power cut. I wrote this morning when Robin woke up for work, despite not needing to be at work until half eleven. Then I missed the early bus to work and was therefore five minutes late.

Um, yeah. Turns out writing before work is not a good idea, because I push myself for 'a little longer' and then leave it too late before I get up for work, and then I'm late, and then I get stern looks and have to stay afterwards. But it does leave me raring to continue writing. Plus, today it didn't exactly matter because I've agreed to stay the afternoon due to excessive busyness.

But I also have Wilfred the Green Duck. Wilfred the Green Duck came into my possession today as I bought a ticket for a local duck race and got an adorable little green duckie as a souvenir. For those unfamiliar with the tradition, British people sometimes do a weird thing where we all buy a ticket and in doing so sponser a rubber (well, plastic) duck. A big sack of these ducks, which are numbered to correspond with the tickets, get chucked into a local river and they then race downstream to the finish line. There are usually prizes given from the pot of money from participants, though most of the money goes to a particular charity or cause. I think it's a brilliant tradition and I love buying ducks for duck races. But this time I got Wilfred.

Wilfred is now sitting on top of my computer screen with his newly-given name blutacked to his chest. My day went from hellish to bearable the minute I got a small green duck :) It's the tiniest things that make the world awesome.

Am I middle-aged already?

Twitter confuses me. Like, really confuses me. It's...how does it even work? I mean, I've got a Twitter account, posted a couple of tweets but I don't talk to people in real life on a regular basis...why would I have staccato discussions on the Internet with them mostly consisting of symbols and text speak?

Plus there's this whole weird culture of being able to actually talk to famous people on there. Internet stalking reaches new levels and I am simultaneously in awe and slightly scared. First there's Google searches with IMDB, online pics and celebrity stalker sites, then there's Facebook and Myspace where you can suddenly type in someone's name and find out if they have a profile there, and then Twitter where you can follow their daily mundanities like some kind of reality TV show. Now, I'm not ragging on Twitter - I love Felicia Day's tweets and I'm sure if I were to think of something worthwhile to tell the world about in 140 characters (as opposed to the lengthy ramblings I post here), it would be a highly useful tool, but half of it is incomprehensible anyway.

And following...that also confuses me, I mean, it's awesome to be able to see what your friends and favourite musicians/writers/actors/whatever are posting on a day to day basis but the rapidity of Twitter makes one piece of information obsolete by the next minute.

It makes me wonder if I'd had my heyday of laughing at my parents for not understanding the Internet and am now one of the intellectually out-of-date. But then I suppose if I can get over the shame of Internet fangirling, maybe it could be useful to know when Neil Gaiman is bathing his dog or whatever.

'Inception'

This is the kind of film where I'd usually leave it a while before making definitive comments to allow it to percolate and make sense in my head, but goddamit I just can't stop thinking about it. I guess this is how people who watched 'Avatar' and decided they wanted to live on Pandora felt, only instead of a tropical world filled with aliens I can't stop thinking about dreams. I've always had incredibly vivid dreams but no ability to lucid dream except when directing a narrative, and that doesn't usually work for long (and I'm kind of grateful -some of my best ideas have come from dreams). But, like the very concept of 'Inception' (an idea planted subtly inside the mind so it can influence someone's decisions), the film refuses to leave me alone. Damn you Christopher Nolan, stop sneaking into my dreams and influencing my life!

Worst thing is I was actually put off by the coverage it got in the film magazines I read. I just got kind of sick of seeing pictures of Leonardo DiCaprio in a suit staring just above the camera, but I'm terribly glad I bothered.

I kind of feel like I've been waiting for 'Inception' for quite some time without realising it. It's a brilliant piece of cinema that doesn't make you question your reality to the same extent as 'The Matrix', but shows you the possibilities of what virtual worlds can be. It's cyberpunk for the new millenium, without ugly jacks and 'Avalon'-esque cyber suites, instead an organic and psychic journey into different levels of consciousness. Honestly, I was mentally designing a roleplaying game as I watched the film, because the world's internal consistency is really really good. Of course, flashy special effects and high-concept awesomeness are nothing without a good story and characters, as the Matrix sequels showed us. The thing that makes this film so damn good is the actors. Leonardo DiCaprio is Dom Cobb (I consistently misheard names throughout the film - 'Dom' as 'Tom', 'Mal' as 'Mol' and 'Seito' as 'Zeito', so forgive me if any are incorrect), a highly skilled 'Extractor', who breaks into people's minds and steals their secrets. Cobb is deeply messed-up on many different levels and the audience's journey of discovery is with him rather than the plot. The plot stands up really well on its own, but it also provides a fantastic vehicle for bringing his personal issues to crisis and resolution. Cobb's wife, Mal, has been haunting his journeys into the dream world, causing problems and messing up his heists. In a wonderfully James Bond-esque section at the beginning, cross turns into double cross with pace and tension, while the audience is still desperately trying to understand why they're in Japan...and then someone's dream...and, yeah, OK, let's just go with it till they explain it. Cobb's attempts to reconcile with his wife, get back to his children, avoid men who are hunting him and clear his name are all carefully woven around the plot. DiCaprio portrays Cobb's inner life and emotion with depth, realism and subtlety that show his acting skills: he is Cobb, just as Heath Ledger was the Joker in 'The Dark Knight'. It never feels like DiCaprio is acting because you can't see the cracks, the self-consciousness and the decisions to play it this way or that. The supporting cast (if they can even be called that - this is an ensemble piece) are brilliant too. Even the characters with the least screentime are well thought-out and likeable. Ellen Page is wide-eyed and adorable with that nice edge of intelligence she does so well, but her character Ariadne (get your subtle Greek myth references here) is smart and audacious enough to basically save the day, which Page plays well. I hope I'm not the only one who noticed the slightly creepy but brilliant vibes of emotion between Cobb and Ariadne (symbolically she mimics both Mal and Cobb and there's a definite 'other woman' feel to the scene where Adriadne breaks into Cobb's memories). But I like that there isn't a love interest (except Mal, kind of, in a messed-up way) - it would have been all too easy to have a brilliant architect from Cobb's past as Ariadne so he could simultaneously resolve his issues with Mal, move on to someone new and tick a Hollywood box. Thank you, Mr Nolan, for constantly surprising me.

Man, I'm going to go on about this all day, but every character in the thing was good. Like Eames (Tom Hardy), the guy who mimics figures from a person's life while in their mind, and has some of the best snarky lines (plus is British and therefore awesome). Then there's Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). I adore Arthur for his deadpan exhanges with Eames and Ariadne. If Gordon-Levitt had played the character weakly, he could have faded into the scenery, but like every other character in this film, Arthur in 'Inception' just makes me want to know more. Even the 'Chemist', Yusuf (Dileep Rao), Cillian Murphy as the 'Mark', Ken Watanabe as Saito and Marion Cotillard bring depth and brilliance to their performances, however little they're onscreen or archtypal they're required to be. I mean, this film had Michael Caine and Pete Postlethwaite as bit-parts, for God's sake! The strength of the cast really elevates 'Inception' to awesomeness.

The effects are top-notch, too. Nolan likes to do things the hard way rather than relying too much on CGI (thank God somebody does) and the fight scenes are enjoyably non-Matrix-y. This isn't beautiful, balletic wuxia fighting: it's people who are pretty decent at fighting punching and shooting each other. Still, if that sounds boring, bear in mind that one fight scene takes place in a hallway as it tips to bizarre angles and eventually goes into zero-gravity. Yup, zero-gravity. And Nolan did that with a minimum of CGI. It looks awesome. The conceptions of the dream-worlds are beautifully done as well. They're shot to look real, giving the minimum of clues that you're in a dream, but then Paris folds over on itself or water starts bursting through every window. And then there's the great, eerie city of Limbo, filled with crumbling edifices and memories. Some critics have commented that Nolan's dreamscape is very limited and mundane, and I must say my dreamscape would likely be some kind of floating zeppelin library, but it's necessary. See, the whole point is to trick the Mark into thinking they're not dreaming. Or, sometimes, to think they're dreaming, and then think they wake up, and they're actually still dreaming. So a city made purely of hamburgers is probably not what the dream thieves are going for. Still, I'd be interested to see what characters made inside their own heads when they dreamed (we see the dreamscapes of Cobb, Ariadne and Seito, but they're all pretty mundane. I like to think Eames's would involve some kind of stately pleasure-palace where he can snark all day long).

The pace of 'Inception' is weird, more novelistic than movie-pace, but it kind of works. Frankly, when you have a climax consisting of three action scenes across three dream worlds, each with its own level of time distortion, I have to give serious kudos. Pretty much the only criticism I can level at 'Inception' is that it could have been several different films and each is one I would watch. Or a TV series. I would love a TV series with this kind of conceit and talent behind it, but that would never happen or would end up like 'Dollhouse'. There is an awful lot squeezed into the film and it's already pretty long. Nolan doesn't suffer fools gladly in his films and you know if you're going to see a Nolan sci-fi thriller you'd better be prepared to keep up, but the expectation might well put off some viewers. But damn, I would love to see more heists in the dream scape and exploration of the concepts behind it, as well as the characters I now like so much. I was really sad when 'Inception' ended (though also satisfied with its conclusion) because there was no more of it. I simulataneously hope for and fear a second movie, because Nolan has built a world I want to spend more time in, but the thing that makes 'Inception' really great is its emotional heart, and I'm not sure that could be sustained for another film. Still, I want more Eames and more Arthur, more Ariadne and Seito: I want to see where they come from and how they develop. It's enough to drive a girl to fanfiction.

'Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror' by Chris Priestley

I was captivated by the scraggly illustrations of 'Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror' in the library, produced by David Roberts, that were somewhere between Ronald Searle, Edward Gorey and Quentin Blake. The book itself is a series of short stories with a framing narrative, each story told by the eccentric Uncle Montague to his (insert indeterminate number of greats) nephew Edward in his creepy house in the woods. Every story is punctuated by Edward's realisation that an object from the story, often irredeemably lost within the story itself, is here, on the wall as a trophy (or a warning...)

There are (un)healthy doses of Edgar Allan Poe in 'Uncle Montague...', as well as a clear influence by the Victorian children's exemplar books which meted terrible and extraordinary punishments to any children who disobeyed their elders. Every character in the stories has an identifiable transgression (except maybe the final short story, which is also the creepiest) and each pays in an appropriate way. Priestley admirably weaves subtle horror with a faux-Victorian setting to build up an atmosphere that fully lends itself to the twist in the tale so common in ghost stories of the time.

Priestley's prose isn't action-packed or thrumming with anticipation, and sometimes I felt the denouement fell a little flat as a result, but the style Priestley pastiches effectively is instead full of creeping terror and things half-seen out of the corner of your eye. This is not the place for oh-it-was-only-a-cat scares (unless they are of the Silent Hill double whammy variety!) The stories grow more grotesque and scarier as they go, each introducing more explicit horrors, until we reach the climax of the book: the framing narrative itself. I thought Priestley overdid the ghostly phenomena at Uncle Montague's house slightly, but perhaps it is just that, as the stories slowly build pace, the framing narrative must build faster, since it only has the bits between the tales to work in. Trust me, hang in there. It's totally worth it.

This isn't the sort of book to become an instant worldwide classic like His Dark Materials or Harry Potter, but it's really worth checking out. It's the sort of odd little book you stumble upon and that piques your interest on its own terms. I find that's a common thing with short story anthologies, especially, but I hope that in the future children (and maybe adults like me too!) will dig this out of the rows of Twi-likes and find joy in a horror style that never truly goes out of fashion.

Useful things

So I'm trying to formulate lists using the handy list features of blogger of useful writing resources online and also generally interesting writing blogs or websites that haven't been as personally useful to me. The reason for the divide is that many blogs are, for instance, primarily about publishing or getting an agent, which is currently not relevant to me, but they're still really good, enjoyable blogs with valuable advice. Also, there are blogs which are writers' own blogs about the process of writing which are not so much tools for others to use but merely observations on their own work, which again are fascinating but not necessarily useful.

I'll try and keep them updated, since it helps me to make a note somewhere central about new sources of inspiration and advice (I'm rubbish at remembering web addresses). Writing books are something I'll also try and assess somewhere (since it's very difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff at a quick glance-through), but that's a different form and therefore won't be included in the lists. Note that the kind of advice I personally like is very specific (very much not of the 'write a scene where your character is sitting in a park' or 'write about your last holiday' because they feel like primary school again to me) and I am in no way deriding others' working methods. I find concrete advice about plot and characterisation to be useful, personally, as well as more inspirational ideas about the creation of story and the importance of narrative, so that's what I'll be focusing on.

'The Carbon Diaries 2015' by Saci Lloyd

I've literally only just finished this book but I've barely been able to put it down. Therefore this will be a slight rave review, be ye warned ;)

So 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' is a fictional diary by a teenage girl called Laura Brown in 2015. A big storm hits Britain in 2010, costing thousands of lives, and to combat global warming, the British government (Saci Lloyd is careful not to predict the outcome of the 2010 General Election, since this was written in 2008, so she just refers to 'the prime minister') makes the UK a guinea pig for a new carbon rationing system which means that life must change drastically for Brits. Add to this increasingly extreme weather conditions that are linked to the predicted results of global warming. But Laura doesn't care about that stuff: OK, it makes her life more difficult, but all she wants is a normal life where she can get decent results at college, play with her punk band and go out with the boy next door.

I don't respond well to preachy books, but the nice thing about 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' is any preaching it does is either very subtle or very obvious and put into the mouths of characters presented as self-righteous. But still, it gets the message across with terrifying alacrity. Where before I enjoyed apocalypse and disaster movies out of a kind of combination of schadenfreude, vicarious thrill and general amusement, now I don't want what happens in this book to happen to anyone, ever. Laura never turns round and says "Oh, God damn you, older generation! Why did you do this to us? Why?!!!" She grumbles that they were selfish, but she just deals with the way the world is because that's the only way to survive. The people she gets angry at are the people who continue to be selfish and make the world worse. Gradually, the trappings of civilisation fall away and people either sink or swim, but it's written in such a personal way that Lloyd never breaks the illusion that this is a real diary, about real people.

The style is natural and fun, though occasionally it strays into 'totally rad' territory with jargon that'll be dated pretty soon, and Laura presents the world she lives in with wit and wry observation. For instance, her friend gets stuck in John Lewis due to snow storms and power cuts. Laura's response? "Serves her right for being middle class." There are so many little moments where Laura expresses something I've thought but never said, and Lloyd really does tap into the zeitgeist of modern Britain, even if things do get a little unbelievable at times (Laura's parents, a couple of aging hippies, are taken a little too far). Not only that, but when it's time for pathos, Lloyd shows she can handle that admirably too. I'm not sure she succeeded in her aim of showing how a global crisis can pull people together (attempts to do so are treated with cynical humour) but she certainly shows how it strips away the pretences we put up to make our lives more interesting.

All I can say is, this book is amazing, and it really makes you want to both change the world and stock up the cupboard with tins and blankets. The thing is, 'The Carbon Diaries 2015' doesn't preach that whole 'changing the world one person at a time' shtick - what it presents is the necessity of a change in culture and mindset which, Lloyd suggests, is something that's not going to happen till it's almost too late.

'The Poison Garden' by Sarah Singleton

I find this cartoon of a rhino on Kristin Cashore's wonderful blog This Is My Secret almost unbearable to look at or think about. It makes me really sad for the rhino and frustrated that I can't help it, despite the beauty and humour of the cartoon. So yeah, I'll cry about a cartoon rhino desperately trying to become a unicorn :( And that is why I cope with the world through dreams and pretend dragon-slaying.



The other picture makes me laugh though :)


'The Poison Garden' by Sarah Singleton is fabulous. And I don't just mean that in the sense of 'good', I mean that it's story-licious. It's like stepping through worlds I never want to leave. Dammit, I want a magical garden where I can grow plants that make perfumes and live forever in the real world, so that beautiful red rose won't wilt and those daisies will stay fresh. 'The Poison Garden' is a bit untidy in places but the plot is enjoyable enough to keep me reading despite the slightly odd pacing. Plus I love any books which revolve around the intricacies of old-fashioned pharmacology or magic. I feel this is comparable in style to 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' by Susannah Clarke, though less dark and adult in tone.


'The Poison Garden' is about a young boy called Thomas whose grandmother dies, leaving him a mysterious box that lets him into a magical garden. He discovers that she was part of a group called the Guild of Medical Alchemists who all have their own pocket-dimension gardens and that one of them poisoned his grandmother, as well as being told he is to inherit the power to remake his own garden as he wishes.

I may just have been being dense, but it took me quite a while before I realised that 'The Poison Garden' was set in the nineteenth century, but it has such a lovely nostalgic feel that it didn't seem out of place when I did realise. A label at the beginning wouldn't go amiss, however. The subject matter probably struck an extra chord with me because I have fond memories of playing in my grandmother's garden, which she spent a lot of time caring for before she had to move into a bungalow due to her health. Singleton gives you mental gardens to play in and you feel the joy in discovering them that (I hope) she felt in creating them. She manages to bring across so much individuality in each garden: I suspect everyone would choose a different one as a favourite. My mum would love Albion, as it's near the sea, whereas I would enjoy Nineveh a lot. That's actually one of the pities about this book - Singleton is more concerned with the story than the setting, which is admirable, but we barely get to explore the gardens at all. I would love to have seen more of them, especially the ones near the end, and have a few choice details explained (like who the lady in Nineveh was - I always assumed Hegel was gay from the way he talked about Karsch). Thomas is quite likeable but his female counterpart, Maude, is darned creepy, as he acknowledges in his narrative. It's weird therefore, that she ends up being presented as suddenly less creepy and more well-adjusted than expected. There doesn't seem to be a character arc there, more a character shift to provide him with an ally of his own age. But the adults in the Guild of Medical Alchemists are nicely-drawn characters and the idea that one of them is a killer adds a nice level of suspicion about their motives. Unfortunately the killer is a bit of a late addition to the story and the traitor is a pretty obvious choice, which means we don't end up having to question our assumptions about any of the Guild members. It also feels a bit of a cop-out when an extra party is added halfway through a story and is very obviously the killer, ruining the carefully-wrought tension and suspicion that had been built up.


Essentially, this book could have done with being two books in which Singleton could fully flesh out the characters and magical gardens. It would also allow her to dwell more on the main character's years in the pharmacy of Dr Constantine, which I found highly interesting, as well as developing Dr Constantine's character and maybe spending more time getting to know Mrs Lawrence and Miss Hudson, who feel a bit underdeveloped. Still, it's highly enjoyable, well-written and terribly imaginative, reminiscent of classic Diana Wynne-Jones. Recommended, if you like magical tales of weird and wonderful dreamscapes.