Category: writing

writing

Rabbit, run.

I have a totem. A familiar, if you will. A spirit animal that is with me always, a nurturing friendly presence that helps to define, while at the same time disguising me. In some ways it is akin to the daemons of Philip Pullman, in others closer to a superhero’s secret identity. If you have seen me on the internet at all, you have seen my familiar too. I allow him to represent me out in the world.

I’m talking about the rabbit. More specifically, I’m talking about Frank Kozik’s Smorking Labbit, who in different guises serves as my avatar, my game face.

I have been fascinated by rabbits for a very long time. Mankind has an ambivalent relationship to them. On the one hand we view them as coote widdul bunnies, and keep them as pets, and wail like the world has ended when a fox gets into the hutch and chomps them up. At the same time, they are pests, turning verdant grassland into desert, breeding exponentially, causing massive damage and subsidence as they dig out their runs.

In myth and popular culture the rabbit is seen as both trickster and messenger. I’m thinking of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, the herald to new and psychedelic experiences. This figure reappears in the Jefferson Airplane song of the same name, and in The Matrix. When Neo is invited to “follow the white rabbit”, you know he’s not going to be led to the nearest McDonalds.

As trickster, of course, the popular embodiment is Bugs Bunny. Ostensibly, his battles with Elmer Fudd are simple hunter/prey stories. Except we know that the end to the story will not be Elmer sitting down to wabbit stew. But there’s a sheer glee to proceedings, and you know that Bugs delights on getting one over on his foe. He’s not looking to get away from Elmer. He’s looking to beat him. Br’er Rabbit’s adventures in the Song Of The South have a similar resonance. In those tales, though, danger is a little closer to the surface. You get the feeling from reading the stories that Br’er Rabbit is really thinking on his feet, surviving on his wits. If he fails, he’s dinner.

Finally, of course, there’s Roger Rabbit. He’s motivated by love of Jessica of course, but also by a creative urge. Witness the point where he and Eddie Valiant are handcuffed together. He can free himself, of course. But only when it’s funny to do so. This speaks very clearly to me as a writer. Going through hoops purely for comedic or dramatic effect – that’s me all over.

All these characters are masters of disguise too. They are fluid, ever-changing, trying on new clothes and faces in a whirl of re-invention. Bugs is especially mercurial, and his penchant for cross-dressing is well-known, and has led to endless internet discussion on his sexuality. I’m not so sure. I think it’s more the case that he’s bursting to constantly try new ideas, new ways of winding up Elmer, and he knows that dressing up as a girl is one way of getting a rise out of his enemy. Erm, figuratively speaking, of course. Although the question should be asked…

Me neither. Jessica Rabbit, now…

Ahem. Yes, well, moving on.

Frank Kozik is an American artist best known for his concert posters, coming out of the underground rock scene of the early eighties. But to me his most enduring creation will always be the Smorking Labbit. It embodies everything I love about their mythic qualities. It can be cute and decidedly not at the same time. And, because of the nature of the drawing, open to reinvention and reinterpretation. This really speaks to me. I love the idea of my disguise being able to wear a disguise. He can be custom fitted for different events and fora.
This here is the classic black labbit, sweet but a bit fierce. My icon of choice, and possibly ink someday.

This little fella is was up until recently my Facebook … face…,
Until I replaced him with this Kent Culotta image, which somehow seemed a bit more me.
And this chappie is ideal for SF and steampunk forums.

This is really just scratching the icing on the metaphor. Do an image search on smorking labbit and you can see how multifarious my little daemon can be.

One last story, which in a way describes where the rabbit idea came from in the first place. When TLC and I first started seeing each other, we were living a five minute walk apart. It was easy for me to spend more and more time at her place, until I had practically moved in. At which point I discovered that her flatmate had coined a nickname for me.

I was “Bobsy Rabbit, the lodger.”

It’s all been downhill from there, really.

A Writer’s Rites

As we’re coming up on another month of writing, I thought you might be interested to know how I go about knocking out 1670 words or four pages of script a day. It’s not as tough as it sounds.

My prime time for writing seems to be the morning. It’s when my brain seems to spark, and the words come out with very little effort on my part. Frequently, the only thing stopping them coming out in one big lump is my typing speed. This at least gives me the chance to think ever so slightly about what I’m slinging onto the page. After about two o’clock, I can feel my mental processes slowing a little, and writing then becomes a bit more of a chore. I’m an early bird, not a night hawk, and I work accordingly. I’ll only work after 8pm if the situation is desperate (which with NanoWrimo, it often is).

I write on the move. Specifically, on the train between Reading and London Paddington, which works for me on a ton of different levels. Firstly, it falls into the right time slot for creative thinking. Secondly, it’s distraction-free. I can’t hop onto the internet, and phone signal goes into a black hole at least twice on the trip. I have become adept at picking the train that will always have a free seat (the 6:56 from Worcester Shrub Hill, if that level of detail interests you) and for the half-hour journey into That London I can successfully immerse myself in the task at hand. A lot of my recent blog posts have come from the train. If I’m using my iPhone and the excellent WordPress app, then they can be written and posted before I get into Paddington. Anyone that bitches about the iPhone keyboard clearly needs to give it a bit more time, because if a fucknuckled gimp like me can knock out three hundred words in a train trip, then anyone can. If I have to work a weekend, which means slower trains, then I can easily get a thousand words done.

I can and do write at home, but then it’s in concentrated half-hour bursts, After that the temptation to hop onto Twitter or browse my Reader feeds becomes just too strong. I read somewhere that concentration on any one task will slip after 45 minutes. It’s slightly less than that for me, or maybe it’s just for the five years that I’ve been using this method I’ve got used to working in half-hour sessions. But really, it’s down to organisation. I find that if I break the word count for the day down into easily manageable chunks, then I’m less likely to give up and fart around on something else. In simple terms, if I have a day at home, three half-hour sprints would get me a day count of Nano. That’s not really such a bind, and if I work through the morning that’s me done before lunch.

My writing tool of choice nowadays is a Dell netbook, the Mini10v. Dirt cheap and simple to use, with a great, full-width clicky keyboard. It’s light and portable, and doesn’t have all my stuff on it, unlike my beloved Blackbook, which is starting to show it’s age after years of being lugged around.

The Dell is running Ubuntu, a version of Linux that I’m starting to really enjoy. It’s like all the good bits of Windows without any of the virusy nonsense. This is intriguing, as one reason for my choice of the Dell was that it was relatively easy to hack into running OSX, a process called Hackintoshing. I don’t plan to do that now. I’m having much more fun playing with an open system, and getting it to work in the way I want.

I’m not leaving The Church, of course. I am and remain a profound and evangelical Machead. However, working with Ubuntu has taught me that I’m actually less platform dependent than I thought. Without really thinking about it, I have been moving away from proprietary software and towards open-source equivalents. I’m a big fan of OpenOffice.org, which has great auto-correct and formatting tools. I haunt the internet using a mix of Firefox and Chrome, depending on mood. Both are pimped. There’s no excuse for anyone running Firefox not to add extensions like Flashgot and Shareaholic. And I rather like Scribefire, a fully featured blogging platform running in the browser.

My email and calender needs have been cloud-based for a while now, and an arcane net of apps ensure that events update to all our devices, both at home and away. Google Docs and the brilliant Dropbox take care of syncing and back up of all my writing.

The key is flexibility and mobility. I’ve learnt to my cost that I have no control over when and where an idea will drop on me. The seed for Pirates Of The Moon came out of a single misheard phrase in a conversation. Sometimes I don’t even get that much of a warning. The point is, I need to be ready. if an idea is not written down, if an appointment is not noted when I make it, then it may as well not exist. I have a small leather satchel (not a man-bag, alright? A satchel. Shut up.) which carries the Dell, chargers, notebooks, et al and means that I’m prepared for anything, anywhere. I carry my writing space with me. Give me a chair and a flat surface, and I’m good to go. Actually, at a push, I can write standing up on the train. But that’s maybe pushing things a little too far. I may be a nomadic writer, but I’m not a masochist.

Script Frenzy


Because I believe in making life difficult for myself, I am doing Script Frenzy this year. Hence the badge over yonder.

This is the script-based version of the Nanowrimo challenge that I’ve done for the past 4 years now. Same challenge, different discipline.

The idea is to come up with a 100 page formatted script in a month. That’s as restrictive as the challenge gets. It can be film, stage or comics based, and on any subject. As long as you get those hundred pages out, the rest is up to you, foolish writer.

This year, to add to the firsts, I’ve decided to write a graphic novel. My love and respect for the form knows no bounds, but it’s been a while since I did anything creative with it. It’s about time I put out and got some words on paper which is, after all, the ethos of Nano and Script Frenzy. Their logline should be Just Do It, but I think a plimsoll company got there first.

Just to make things even more complex, I’m trying an experiment in form. A couple of members of the Readership have been bored to oblivion already by me banging on about the transformative nature of the comic I’ll be writing, and you can probably figure out what I’m going to try if you look up my recent comics posts. I don’t want to say too much, because I think I’m onto something genuinely new here. Let’s just call it an old school response to the idea of digital comics.

It begins, appropriately, on April Fools Day. I’m prepping like mad now, working on format and structure. I did some sums last night, and realised that to do the story I have in mind properly, I will need to write 112 pages instead of the hundred required. Seven blocks of sixteen pages. I’m breaking the task down into managable bites, figuring out page counts for each day and week. This, to me, is the only way to do it. The breakdown works out to just under 4 pages a day. A hundred pages of script might not seem like much, but I’m planning on getting 25 panels into some of them. (Any comics professionals reading this just winced at the last sentence. Comics generally have between six to eight panels per page. Watchmen was notorious for sticking to a nine panel grid that is a pain to write and draw.) At some points, I think it’ll be pushing it to get a page a day done.

I’m nervous and incredibly excited about this project. It genuinely feels like a leap into the unknown. If it works, then I think I might just have hit on a new way of getting comics onto the page.
If not, then hey, it’s only a funnybook, right?

The White Event

X&HTowers, busy as everWell, Reading really caught the brunt of the cold weather this time around. X&HTowers is blanketed under about a foot of cold crisp white stuff, and looks more festive than Santa’s new socks. I’ve been really lucky with shift patterns over the festive season, and am happy to report that The Big Freeze, as most unimaginative news outlets are calling it, coincided with three days off. Yes, OK, I have to work this weekend, but I don’t have to work now, which pleases me greatly.

2010 is, I think, the year when Working From Home becomes much more important, especially if the country continues to be caught out by EWEs (Extreme Weather Events, Ⓒ Rob Wickings if no-one’s snagged that term yet). It’s like taking a duvet day without the guilt, or the chance of getting caught out by the boss. With the prelavence of netbooks and smartphones it’s now so easy to Work From Home that you can do it from a cafe. Or if you prefer, the pub. Why pay for all those expensive business premises when you can just bitch about your colleagues and play soduko in the nearest Barstucks? It’s been coming for a while, and all it takes is one more EWE, one company where no-one bothers to come in, business continues as usual and the clients don’t notice and … well, I reckon it’s time to start investing in multi-purpose public spaces. Wave of the future, I’m telling you. Make ’em weatherproof and give ’em free wi-fi and creche facilities, and you’re rocking. Why close libraries, when you could turn them into something like that?

Happy Feet
Happy Feet

I wish I had the option. Sadly, my work still requires a physical presence, which means braving public transport and the train services. I have a bicycle. Buggered if I’m going to use it in this weather. I can walk to Reading Station if I need to, which I have to frequently as buses and taxis evaporate in Reading as soon as the weather takes a turn for the rotten. If you need a workout, nothing beats walking uphill in a snowstorm. It’s that heel-toe action that you have to adopt to prevent the comedy prat-fall and inadvertent face-first snow angel action. It works muscles that you’d forgotten you had. Muscles that have taken the opportunity to remind you of their presence by complaining loudly.

The House Elf Takes The Strain
The House Elf Takes The Strain

The end result of all this has been that I have taken great pleasure in spending the last couple of days with my butt in a chair, laptopping. I have been working hard on a New year treat for you all, which is the first step in what I am calling The Year Rob Makes Contact. I have great hopes for this year, despite all the evidence so far that it’s going to be rubbish. Come on, we’re only a week in. Give the new guy a chance.

In the mean time, here’s a little something. Below is a PDF to a short piece called The Body Politic. It’s excerpted from a longer piece, Under Glass, which I SWEAR will never see the light of day. It was a badly-misjudged piece of erotic writing, and it makes my toes curl in all the wrong ways. Not pretty. The bit I’m sharing has a few merits, though. It’s here as a PDF. I’d appreciate it if you can let me know if you have any problems either reading it, or dumping it onto your hard drive. My reasons for this will become clear soon enough.

Click the arrow to download THE BODY POLITIC

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There Is A Light That Never Goes Out
There Is A Light That Never Goes Out

Stay warm, everyone.

One Week Down

Yes, well, sorry about that. Nano has a way of sucking up any and all free time available for blogging. regular members of the Readership should know by now that I have a tendency to disappear at this time of the month, pop my head over the parapet to apologise and complain, and then vanish again for a while. All I can say that the proof that I’m not simply being lazy and neglectful is available for your perusal. Please, check the side bar for the daily updates.

It’s going well, I think. For the first time ever, I had the story fully plotted before I started, which has really helped me to keep things rolling along. There won’t be a moment this year when I have to stop and wonder exactly why I just painted my character into a corner from which there’s no way out.

The shift I’m on now has really helped this year’s word count. I have days off in the week that I can dedicate purely to getting the words cranked out, which is brilliant. in the first three days of November, I’d already had a weeks worth on the page, including a 4000 word day, which is a new personal best. I’m not about to brag, though. There are three people on the Oxfordshire group that I affiliate with that are already at the 50,000 word target. I cannot, would not and shall not match that kind of pace. I’m in a comfortable place now. No need to push the matter.

I’m pleased to see that X&HTeam-mate Simon Aitken has embraced Nano this year, and seems to be, typically for him, taking the challenge in his stride. Read all about his experiences here. He has some interesting points about process and methodology, and I want to talk more about the nuts and bolts of getting words down in a later post, as well as the social aspects of locking oneself in a dark room for a month.

For now… back to it.