EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

Hit Girl, and why film reviewers should stick to what they know

Last week, I had a bit of a night out with a bunch of friends. All male, all film-makers, all nerds (and I mean that as a compliment). A few beers, a bite to eat and a movie. There was only one choice of film with that crowd, really. It had to be Kick-Ass.

Now, I will admit to a slight feeling of unease going into the Vue West End for this one. I’m not the biggest fan of Mark Millar. I find his work simplistic and derivative. And Matthew Vaughn made a bit of a hash of Stardust, dazzled by a big budget and Hollywood starfuckerage. But I’d had a couple of beers, and I was feeling accommodating.

I had a really good time. It was fun, silly, gory, sweary no-brakes nonsense, and I laughed more in the cinema than I have since subjecting myself to Emmerich’s godawful 2012. The comics references were spot on, the fight scenes just on the right side of wire-fu overload, and Nicolas Cage was a delight as he channeled Adam West’s 1960’s Batman.

But the absolute star of the piece is Chloe Moretz as Hitgirl. She oozes confident nonchalance throughout, curling her lip with aplomb at every curseword. She still comes across as a kid, but not one that has been damaged in any way by the manner in which her dad has brought her up. Frankly, seeing an 11 year old girl on the screen that isn’t interested in Barbies or makeup makes a refreshing change.

Of course, certain members of the press have glommed onto the fact that Hitgirl dresses up in a short skirt and throws c-words around like shiruken, and began shrieking that the end times have come. Christopher Tooky in the Daily Fail loses the plot completely, throwing teenage pregnancy stats into the mix, before stating

The film-makers are sure to argue that there’s nothing wrong with breaking down taboos of taste – but there are often good reasons for taboos.

Do we really want to live, for instance, in a culture when the torture and killing of a James Bulger or Damilola Taylor is re-enacted by child actors for laughs?

…which is, of course a typical Mail tactic. Take an argument and then immediately present the worst possible scenario as the next logical step.

It’s telling that the Mail website has closed the comment thread on Tookey’s review. As the Bleeding Cool forum notes, every single comment blasted the critic for his over-reaction. Kinda cheering, considering that it was pretty obvious that the Mail would have it in for the movie – or rather it’s writer, Jane Goldman, wife of Mail bete noir Johnathon Ross.

Meanwhile, over at the New York Times, Manohla Dargis also manages to find the wrong end of the stick with both hands. Calling Mark Strong’s mob boss a “supervillain” is a bit of a head-desker, but I can let that go. However, she can’t resist the icky angle either, claiming

Tucked inside this flick is a relationship as kinky and potentially resonant as that between Lolita and Humbert Humbert…

*wince* Well… no. Not unless she was watching a whole different cut to the one I saw. While Manohla has at least sussed that Kick-Ass is at heart a satire of superhero movies, she hasn’t cottoned on to the fact that Hitgirl is the latest in a looong line of kid sidekicks. Robin is the obvious example, and notably in Frank Miller’s Dark Knight incarnation, the cape and pixie boots were worn by a girl.

Sidekicks are typically wounded characters, and will frequently suffer at the expense of the main character. Green Arrow’s ward Speedy famously ended up on drugs (the clue was kinda in the name he chose) and the Jason Todd incarnation of Robin was killed off by popular demand. Rick Veitch’s Brat Pack goes even further, making a group of sidekicks both stooges and over-worked helpmeets to their headliners, and the victims of a superpowered serial killer.

Hitgirl’s character path tightly knits into the rites of passage that every sidekick undergoes. The tragic loss of a family. The extensive training, interspersed with the fatherly urging of the superhero in charge that she’ll never quite be good enough, that she keeps making schoolgirl errors. By having her break free from this towards the end, by having a (kinda) normal life with a new family, she breaks the dysfunctional chain that would always see characters like Dick Grayson unable to forsake the cape.

It’s the fact that she can rise above that training, use what’s appropriate and discard the unhealthy bits that makes Hitgirl such a powerful character. She’s no role model, but no-one’s claiming that she should be.

The last word, though, should come from Hitgirl herself… or rather, Chloe. In an interview with MTV, she comes across as likeable, grounded and totally cool about the whole situation – unlike the critics, who don’t seem to be able to see past the fight scenes and swearing. Swearing that, as Chloe herself points out, would have her grounded until she was twenty if she dared to try.

Chloe, the commentators of Mail Online and just about every other person with at least two brain cells to bang together should be able to see that Kick-Ass is broad satire with a few wry points to make about the state of the comics, and indeed the comics movie scene. Claiming it as a symptom of some greater malaise is not so much missing the point as running past it blindfolded while whooping and waving your arms about. Apart from an uptick in purple wig and mask sales, I can’t see the Hitgirl phenomenon hitting the streets in any major form.

Although if it helps to drop the instances of playground bullying – I’m all for it.

Oh, Chloe’s on Twitter as well. @ChloeGMoretz. Keep an eye on this kid. She’s gonna be something.

Dear Rob

Dear Rob,

You must be sick of hearing from me by now, but I promise this letter will be the last one you receive before the election.

We came into this together, you and I. I had moved into the area not six months before the 2005 general election that made you my MP, and something about you made me feel that I needed to keep my eye on you. Maybe it had something to do with the way you were always in the local papers. Your slick demeanour. Maybe it was simply because you lived just down the road from me. Whatever it was, you piqued my interest, and I looked you up on TheyWorkForYou, and started seeing just what it was you had to offer my adopted hometown.

I’ll be frank, at first you weren’t doing anything to allay my suspicions. You questions in the House were partisan and party-tactical, rather than seeming to show any kind of concern for the constituency. But slowly, this began to change. Your open and honest approach to your expenses means that you are one of the very few MPs in the House who have a clear record on the scandal. Your support for local business, and the fact that you’re willing to get behind initiatives like Camra’s campaign to save the British pub have led me to view you with respect. And if I wrote to you, dashing off an angry email about libel reform or the Digital Economy Bill, you wrote back. It’s always exciting to get a letter from your MP on that lovely, creamy Commons notepaper.

It’s with no small measure of regret, then, that I have to tell you that you do not have my vote on May 6th. I don’t ever take my responsibilities as a citizen lightly, and I have carefully read the manifestoes of all three leading parties, as well as indulging in those neat little online quizzes that address policies rather than personalities. Boy, it was a shock to find out that I agreed with UKIP on something.

But for the most part, my choice is clear. My politics veer towards openness and freedom of information, towards compassion to the down-trodden and less-fortunate, towards education as a way of curing the kind of knee-jerk paranoia and blind hatred that frequently comes out of ignorance or simple misunderstanding.

Simply, I do not believe that Britain is broken. I believe that we are living in an age where there war, poverty and hatred have never been at lower levels. We live in a country free of religious and ideological persecution. We are watched, but we watch too, and our press is free to expose corruption and abuse of privilege. I choose to vote for a party that does not come up with the same old cliches and paranoia, that chooses not to demonise children and those who come to our country in search of a better way of life.

Further, I certainly will not vote for a party whose main manifesto pledge seems to be that we should do the government’s work for them, by signing up to run schools and hospital trusts. This is a bit rich following the grass-roots campaign that sprung up against the Digital Economy Bill. Hundreds of thousands of voters wrote to their MPs and ask them not to rush through a fundamentally compromised piece of legislation. They did it anyway, in rushed debates in an almost empty house. Writing to me afterwards and saying:

Even if every single Conservative and Liberal Democrat MP voted against the Bill, it would still have passed if every Labour MP had turned up to vote.

is fair enough. But the Tories chose to abstain from the vote, which is even more distasteful. At that point it had become obvious that your party had already chosen to deal with the Government on this issue, and their absence from the house during the three readings of the Bill is galling in it’s sheer disregard for public opinion. If you’d chosen to make a fight of it, I might have been impressed, and who knows, the result might have been different. But you and your colleagues simply turned your back, choosing not to bother.

So, here we are. I honestly wish you the best in the upcoming election. After all, we’ve been through some turbulent times together.

If you win on May 6th, expect to be hearing from me.

Best Wishes,

Rob.

Oh, and I love your new website, by the way.

Documenting the Damage

To complement Clare’s pics of our trip to Amsterdam, here’s the full Flickr set of my photos.

Genieten, alstublieft!

Dammed If We Didn’t Do That.

The last time I was in Amsterdam was a bit of a blur. It was for a conference/trade show, and I made the most of it. In fact, more than the most of it. One enduring memory is of wandering around the waterfront in a vicious rainstorm, completely lost, trying to make sense of a map that was starting to dissolve in the deluge. At five in the morning. Blind drunk. Not my proudest moment.

Visiting the city again with TLC, as I’d promised her years ago, was always going to be a different experience. We promised each other culture, and sophistication, and the occasional beer. And that was exactly what we got.

Our approach to a city is always the same. We’re walkers, preferring to pace out the bounds of our territory. It’s the best way to see cities like Amsterdam, which is particularly strong on both architecture and street art. The layout of the city is particularly good for this kind of flaneury. It’s built like a web, or half a dart board. It’s highly conducive to unfocussed rambling.

The bulls eye of the town is Centraal Station, a cheap and easy 20 minute train ride from Schipol Airport. From here you can pick up trams, buses or taxis to pretty much anywhere in town. I can seriously recommend the smartcards that give you unlimited access to all the public transport options – ideal for those moments when you’ve walked yourself to a standstill.

For a place that prides itself on it’s friendliness towards the pedestrian, Amsterdam can be treacherous towards the unwary walker. The aforementioned trams are everywhere, and they sneak up on you. They’re electric, and quiet. A real contrast to the thumping, shrieking gallumphers we rode in San Francisco.

Then there are the bicycles. Boy, are there ever bicycles. Here’s a challenge for you. Take a few photos in Amsterdam, and try not to have a bike in any of them. It’s an impossible task. Bikes are chained to every railing, lamp-post and hydrant. And everyone rides them. They’re a cheap, simple and universal way of getting around Amsterdam and they absolutely have the right of way. Frame a lovely shot by the canal and I can guarantee that someone on a bike will spin through just as you hit the shutter.

They’re not pretty, either. People ride boneshakers here, and they’ve frequently been modified in ways that Heath Robinson would applaud. Carriers have been adapted from old crates, wine boxes, shopping baskets. Some machines have extended front forks with big boxes in them that tote everything from the week’s shopping to pets and children. Occasionally, the brave and foolhardy fit these contraptions with two-stroke engines. At least you can hear those coming. TLC and I were both nearly mown down by speeding bikes. It would have been our fault, too.

But the remarkable thing is how matter-of-fact people are on cycles in Amsterdam. No-one wears lycra and hi-vis. Hardly anyone wears a helmet. Everyone’s in their normal, everyday clothes and they rattle along without a care. Even the girls in the high heels and the tight, short skirts. The ones I definitely didn’t notice. It’s refreshing and cheering to see a whole town cycle in the same way that I do – without flash or attention, treating it as a cheap and easy way to get around. No need for special clothing or ugly fashion. Just get on and go.

We were in town for National Museum Weekend, a chance to see some of Holland’s extraordinary cultural heritage for cheap or free. We discovered a little too late that the two museums that we specifically wanted to visit were not participating in the promotion. Not cool, really. It’s telling that one of the few capitals that allows free and unrestricted access to it’s treasures is London. I won’t be so blase about popping into the National for a lunchtime amble after reflecting on the thick end of €60 that we paid to see the two collections.

The Rijksmuseum has even more of a brass neck for opting out of the free weekend when you consider that the majority of the building is closed for refurbishment until 2015. This means that you’re paying full price for a limited look of what is on offer. I should be fuming. But the fact is that the curators have been very clever, and have put on show a beautifully compact version of the full range. For your money you get a concentrated burst of the best that the Dutch masters had to offer. All the Rembrandts that I wanted to see were there, and displayed at their best. I didn’t walk out feeling cheated, which is a testament to the carefully considered choices that have been made. In fact, in it’s current form I can heartily recommend it. Just try and get a discount if you can.

We took the advice of the excellent Time Out Amsterdam guide, which pointed out that the best time to hit the busy museums was towards the end of the day. This gave us plenty of time to stroll as we liked through the streets, across the bridges and down the canals of this most labyrinthine of cities.

I said earlier that Amsterdam is weblike in layout. In practice, this means that if you’re not careful, a canal path that you think is leading you north-south can be leading you west-east instead. It’s easy to get lost in the maze of streets in the old centre, and we did. But somehow, it’s ok. Getting away from an accepted plan or route often means you find things you wouldn’t be looking for. We tripped over the cool shopping district of Nine Streets entirely by accident, and blundered across the amazing art design shop Droog while looking for something else which has completely slipped my mind. For the most part, we were content to mosey, or amble, or stroll, soaking up the atmosphere, gaping at the astonishing architecture that seemed to be around every corner, and finding mind-boggling examples of street art proudly displayed in places which would have British councils sending little men out with buckets of whitewash.

Did we indulge? Well, depends what you mean. We ate and drank royally, which is hard not to do in a town so stuffed with bars and cafes. If you’re on foot, it makes sense to take plenty of rest breaks. I love the Dutch way with coffee, short and strong without being an espresso. And of course, beer is a passion. The trick is not to drink in the English way, in pints. It’s prohibitively expensive. A large Heineken will set you back four and a half euros. Best to stick to halves, and savour the flavour of the stronger, more esoteric brews. I’m rather partial to Chimay, which packs an 8% punch and is not designed to be sloshed back like mouthwash. The point is to sit, linger, chat and observe. Once you get that slower pace into your head, everything else makes sense.

So, did we indulge? Well, no. We’re not smokers, hate smoky rooms, and wouldn’t know where to start in a coffeeshop. We had too much to do and see to waste a day getting baked. I know I sound like a prude but, sorry, not really interested.

As for the other side of Amsterdam – it’s everywhere and nowhere. The newsagents all have hardcore porn openly on sale, but then that’s the same all over the continent. I still remember a French school trip where Color Climax books were racked with the comics. Now that’s a way to spin a 14-year-old’s head off his shoulders. But unless you know where to look, or you wander down certain alleyways, you’re unlikely to see much smut.

The funny moment for me was approaching the Ould Kerk, Amsterdam’s equivalent to St Paul’s, only to be waved at by girls in glass-fronted stalls in the courtyards behind the massive old building. It’s like putting booths up in Paternoster Square. It’s that mix of the sacred and profane that makes Amsterdam such a great place to visit. It’s relaxed and uptight all at once, deeply religious and wildly secular. And it’s as tolerant a town as any I’ve ever seen. We had a brilliant, if exhausting time. Am I glad I went to Amsterdam?

A few recommendations. We stayed a little out of town, on the Vondelpark, and more by luck than judgment ended up a two minute walk away from one of the main tram routes into town. This is a good thing, and means that we ate at more local-style bars than the touristy joints.

We tended to breakfast at Brasserie de Joffers, on the Willemsbergweg at Cornelus Schuystraat. It has high white ceilings, and a calm, easy air about it that smooths you into the day. Further down Willemsbergweg, Bar Gruter is a tiny ramshackle place with bags of charm and a good line in strong Belgian beer. In town, Locaal ‘t Loosje is right by the Ould Kirk, and a cool place to rest your head after being confronted by women of negotiable virtue. Prinsengrach is one of the prettier canals, and we were lucky to get seats at Cafe Prins on Prinsengrach. Their croquettes are delish.

The shopping streets around there are part of the Nine Streets district, and there are plenty of design gems. If you’re really into that kind of thing, Droog on Staalstraat is as much an art gallery as a shop, and filled with good and strange pieces.

Speaking of which, Outland, heading back towards Centraal Station on Zeedijk, has a brilliant range of urban art and collectibles. I picked up a couple of incarnations of my spirit animal, that help sustain my inner life and make me smile. But Amsterdam is so full of sights and experiences that my recommendations only serve to show you the things I enjoyed. Everyone has their own inner Amsterdam. You should find out what that is for yourself.

(All pics have been taken from Clare68’s Flickrstream. Check the rest out here. Leave comments. She loves getting comments.)

Five Days Of Script Frenzy

Well, so far so good. It should be noted that the first week of Script Frenzy has coincided with a Bank Holiday, and some shift time off. So I’ve been able to get my head down and hack out some serious scriptage.

Let’s do the maths. I’m writing a seven part comics series, each of which is 16 pages long. So far I have 20 pages down. But this equates to 33 actual script pages written, which means that whichever way you look at it I’m ahead of schedule. If I was to be positive, I could declare that I’m a third of the way there.

I wouldn’t say the story is spilling out of me, though. I have to break everything into pages and panels, and make sure that the story flows and works on a page, issue and collection basis. It’s not really a slog, but I’m aware that I can’t just blaze through a word-count in the same manner as Nanowrimo. I’m treading a bit more carefully than normal.

Further, the way Celtx (the scriptwriting software recommended for this adventure – Final Draft but free, thus with less of the bells and whistles but a dedicated comic-writing setup) formats a comic page is a bit, well, ODD. It breaks things down into an A/V script – that is, everything in boxes, description to the right, captions, bubbles and SFX to the left. It makes all kinds of sense, but it’s not something I’m used to. I really hope it’s acceptable for the final page count like that, otherwise I could be in real trouble.

Progress will also be delayed somewhat by an upcoming trip to Amsterdam for to partake in the drugs and ladies of negotiable virtue culture and maybe a small beer or two. I’ll be taking the Dell, but I expect my page rate to drop. Which is why I’m trying to stay as far ahead of schedule as I can now.

So, if you’ll excuse me. These coyote-spiders aren’t going to stalk my hero by themselves.

The Amazing Derek

When I was a teenager, a couple of friends and I used to jump on a train and head over to the bright lights of Clacton-On-Sea if we had a sunny school holiday with nothing better to do. It was a good place to get away from the parental units for a day, and generally misbehave. We’d hit the arcades, egg each other on into buying cheap lagers from the Spar on the esplanade, and try and desperately fail to talk to girls.

One event we always managed to fit into our itinerary was a visit to the Alhambra. This was a shabby cinema/theatre, tucked away in a side street. It had a bit of a reputation for showing obscure horror and sci-fi, and my friends and I made a habit of checking out what was on.

But if we were lucky, we would be in town while the management of the Alhambra made one of their regular attempts to pick up some of the spill-over crowd from whoever was playing at the pier theatre (Bobby Davro normally, if memory serves.)

Now. The management of the Alhambra had some strange ideas as to what constituted good live entertainment. Downright … bizarre ideas. Which was why me and my mates were always enthused when we crossed into Harold Road from the Marine Parade, to see signs up announcing the triumphant return of the Amazing Derek.

The Amazing Derek’s shows were short, sharp, and to the point. They were free to get in (the management made money off the concessions stand. We certainly ate our bodyweight in Revels whenever we pitched up) and lasted no more than ten minutes. It was closer to a sideshow in a fair than any proper theatrical venture. None the less, we scampered up, bought our chocs and settled down in the worn red velvet seating for the show.

The Rocky theme would blare out of rattling speakers, and Derek would stride out on stage. He was a short, wide man with a curious ruff of ginger hair nestling round the base of his skull. He wore a red silk dressing gown. On the back, wonky gold lettering proclaimed “THE AMAZING DEREK NOBODY DOES IT BETTOR”. The crowd, well, the three teenage boys in the front row, went nuts.

His stunning assistant, whose name I never did find out, then stepped daintily onto the stage. As daintily as you could do when you were dragging a heavy wooden sawhorse, anyway. She placed this in front of Derek. Then she dug in a hidden pocket of her costume (way too small and tight for a woman of her effusive dimensions, but she had our undivided attention while she struggled with her bustier) and after much drama and groaning of tortured fabric, produced a blue sateen bag. With much ceremony, she took three walnuts out of this bag and placed them carefully on the sawhorse in a line.

She withdrew. The lights dimmed a little.

Derek slipped his robe off.

I could describe the explosions of ginger hair that blazed over his chest and back. I could describe the taut firmness of a belly that had clearly made good friends with the Hofmeister Bear a long time ago. But really, all anyone was looking at when Derek disrobed was his gigantic penis. He was enormous. I mean, jaw-droppingly huge. His cock was as thick and wide as a police truncheon. It swung gently from side to side as Derek paraded across the stage, making sure the whole audience got a really good look at it.

Inevitably, this was the point where there were walkouts. We always stayed. We knew what was coming.

Derek positioned himself in front of the sawhorse, and grasped his manhood firmly. Then he lifted, and swung. CRACK. The walnut on the left shattered. Derek swung again. CRACK. There went the walnut on the right. CRACK. The walnut in the middle, sending nut-shards all over the delighted teenage boys in the front row. He stood back, to let us admire his feat of strength and dexterity, and then the curtains came across again. We would be on out feet by then, applauding wildly, but he never came out for an encore. We didn’t really need it. The act was perfect just as it was.

Last summer, I was at a loose end on a day off, and quite out of nowhere decided to visit Clacton. Have a wander around, have an ice cream, watch the sea. An aimless, nostalgic kind of a day.

Quite by chance, I found my route led me back along Marine Parade to Harold Road. I smiled, and thought I’d take a look and see if the Alhambra was still there.

It was. Not only that, but a faded banner outside declared “!!!TODAY LIVE IN PERRSON THE AMAZING DEREK!!!”

It couldn’t be, could it? I had to find out. Entrance was 50p, a concession to straitened times. The spotty girl at the concession stand seemed uninterested in my stories of past visits, and had no idea if this was really the same Derek. I slipped into the cool dark interior of the auditorium. The seats were a little more worn, but just as I remembered, and the seat I always took in the front row was free.

As I sat, the Rocky theme crackled out and the curtains opened. The Amazing Derek strode out on stage. He was a little plumper, and the ginger ruff had gone white. But it was clearly the same man I had seen twenty-five years earlier. The assistant, also the same, dragged out the sawhorse. I could hear her costune complaining from the immense strain it was under. But now she ducked back into the wings, bringing out a Tesco carrier bag. Out of this, and with great ceremony, she produced three coconuts, which she placed with the same care on the sawhorse.

She withdrew. the lights dimmed a little.

Derek slipped his robe off.

The ginger explosion had gone white, the belly had a bit of a sag to it. But Derek’s cock was as long and thick as ever. The damn thing could have qualified as an offensive weapon.

He took up position, and grasped his manhood firmly. Then he lifted, and swung. BAM. The coconut on the right exploded in a shower of white flesh and juice. BAM. The one on the left did the same. BAM. The coconut in the middle burst into pieces. I was picking coconut out of my hair all the way home. It was extraordinary. He stepped back, and the curtains fell.

I couldn’t help myself. I snuck backstage, and introduced myself as a lifelong fan. Derek was charming and polite. His voice was Essex gravel, but he was intelligent and erudite, if a little amazed that anyone would have remembered him. His stunning assistant Charmaine, his wife of thirty-seven years, made us all tea.

“I’ve got to ask,” I said eventually. “When I was a kid, it was walnuts. What made you upgrade? I mean, it makes for a better show, but what made you think of it?”

Derek smiled, and dug in the single pocket of his robe, producing a small pair of glasses which he perched on the tip of his nose.

“Thing is,” he said, “my eyesight’s not what it used to be.”

Oh, dear. Lou Charloff tells it better anyway.

Flash Stance

I should write more flash fiction. It’s a great way of keeping up your daily word count, while at the same time not having to commit to a bigger project or challenge. Lord knows, I don’t need the encouragement to get involved in those (hel-looo, Script Frenzy).

The format, for those members of the Readership unaware of the concept, is what I used to call a short short. A short story under 1000 words, frequently coming in at well under that count. I could, if I had the idea, knock out a piece of flashfic on my train ride to work in the morning. It can be a way of writing a quick joke, or to map out a concept, or simply to fire out a character piece. The choice is yours. The only restriction is the word count.

Yesterday I hammered out my first piece of flash fiction in at least a year. I had, for once, a proper reason to do so. I submitted the story to a new incentive, The Campaign For Real Fear. This is a competition jointly created and judged by horror authors Maura McHugh and Christopher Fowler. The aim is to find stories that tap into 21st century terrors, rather than simply rehashing the same old monsters and tropes. The limit is 500 words. As Maura and Chris say in their intro, “If you can’t scare us in 500 words, you won’t manage it in 5,000.” It’s a great idea, and one I’m happy to both participate in and endorse.

Closing date for entries is 16th April. I know there are members of The Readership who would excel at a challenge like this one. Gentlemen, start your engines.

(Flash fiction is a very different deal to slash fiction, which I can’t write. I’ve got no interest in writing about other people’s characters, and I’m no good at sex. Writing sex. Sex scenes. I can’t do sex scenes. Shut up.)
(That’s probably why I’ve never got on with LiveJournal. I keep trying to explore it, and end up mired in some Russian teenager’s Farscape/Stargate mashup. Which turns into an orgy. Topless Robot have a great thread of the worst slash fic on the web, which I applaud and view as a public service. They go there so you don’t have to. It’s a dark mirror to the excesses of the human imagination. The Pokemon abortion fetish story is especially eye-opening.)

(I shudder to think what that last sentence is going to do to my Google stats.)

(image from Flickr user degan’s stream.)

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?