As promised in my previous entry, this is a brief analysis of the reviews the extract of Elin’s Story has received on YouWriteOn.com.
t the time of writing, Elin has received eleven reviews of which I have removed two. We’re allowed to remove one review for every five we receive, which can improve the overall score the extract has and its placing in the charts. (Every time you collect five reviews the software the site uses recommends the review with the lowest rating to remove.)
In fact, I’ve removed one review since publishing the previous blog entry and improved the standing of Elin’s Story in the charts considerably. From 27 she’s now floated up to position 21! (A position she shares, it has to be said, with 19 others.)
Reviewers write a short text – there’s a 100 word minimum, but most people go beyond that – and then rate each text on eight criteria. The result is transformed into stars.
Judging by the breakdown of voting which you can see in the right-hand panel above, the features of this bit of Elin’s Story that my readers like the most are: the characters, my use of language and the dialogue. The aspects that people like the least are the story’s pace and structure.
Looking at the written reviews bolsters this picture. I get considerable praise for my writing generally (use of language), for the dialogue and the characters. One reviewer even makes a point of saying she likes Nell and the friction between Geoffrey and Walter. When a reviewer praises characters by name it must mean the characters have come alive for that person.
The big divide seems to be over the narrative voice and the pace of the story (the two seem to go togther). One reviewer writes approvingly of “the pov which in effect converts a lot of the narration to internal dialogue…” Another writes “Changes in point of view were smoothly managed and gave life to the characters.” And a third “Although the prose is quite heavy, I found the pace and flow of the writing carried me through…” But a number of the reviewers who commented were less enthusiastic: “There are a lot of different points of view, including one in first person, and I felt that also affected the pace of the story.” And “…you had so many switches of scene and points of view that it made the read difficult.”
One reviewer felt the story was over-researched (“swamped by the wealth of research”), another found it “reasonably well written …but …over-detailed…”. On the other hand the two other reviewers who mentioned the research were very positive: “This is a very well-researched piece. I enjoyed the setting very much indeed. I felt I could see and smell London.” And “A very well written piece, obviously well researched.”
Five reviewers gave me detailed punctuation, grammar and vocabulary feedback, and three spotted anachronisms. (Well, two of them are anachronisms, one I’m not sure about.) I also had one very useful specific suggestion about improving the start which I think I will incorporate or at least try out.
I had not expected this exercise to be so motivating, but since deciding to post on the site my productivity and daily engagement with Elin’s Story has increased to the point at which I’m now casting around for another competition to take part in, hoping it will carry me on to complete the novel. I’m looking in particular at the Historical Novel Society International Award. Not so much because I seriously believe I’m in with a chance of winning, but for the two deadlines, 30th September and 30th November, which actually seem achievable.
Watch this space!
Additionally [18th May]
I posted a link to the YouWriteOn extract as well as a different sectionin Elin’s own voice to the Written Word Ning (Fiction Addicts Group) and received some good feed back from there too.
I’ve now responded to Chris Singh, Adele and Arlene individually. Many thanks!
Since writing the above, Elin’s Story on YouWriteOn has received one more review and dropped from 21 to 25 in the charts.
f you read my previous entry At the Quill, then you’ll know that I submitted the first 7000 words of my novel Elin’s Story to an online competition called The Next Big Author at the end of March.
Well, it’s been a month now and the competition is over (and I didn’t win) so it seems like a good moment to review it and the reception that Elin’s Story received.
I’m going to break this into two parts. In this blog entry I’m going reflect on The Next Big Author Competition itself. In the subsequent entry I’ll take a look at the comments and score that Elin’s Story received.
Okay, The Next Big Author is a competition run in co-operation with an Internet site financed by the British Arts Council called YouWriteOn.com. YouWriteOn.com is an Internet site which allows participating writers to submit up to 7000 words of a novel, or a full short story, and have it peer-reviewed by other participating writers. The whole process is free of charge, and I’m still trying to work out whether the whole thing is entirely charitable, a sink for UK tax money, or whether they actually make money by selling publish-on-demand services.
I’m a little suspicious because there are certain elements of the site and of the competition which don’t feel exactly kosher.
For example, the Next Big Author has its own Internet site, but channels people to YouWriteOn.com in a way that is a little reminiscent of some Internet spam sites. The Next Big Author site, in its rules for the competition, says that entries need to receive “4 reviews and ratings during April 2012 to enter the YouWriteOn.com story charts”. But the rules on the YouWriteOn.com site are quite clear that you need eight reviews and ratings before you can enter the charts.
The system that YouWriteOn.com uses assigns your text randomly to another participant, and randomly assigns another person’s text to you to review and rate. You have four days in which to write and submit your review. Once you’ve done so, your text will be randomly assigned to another participant within 24 hours.
If you read my previous entry you’ll know that within five days of my submitting Elin’s Story I managed to review seven or eight other people’s texts so could expect 7-8 reviews of Elin’s Story in return . I was expecting other people to be as quick off the mark as I was, but that was not my experience. Instead each of the reviews that I received in April took the reviewers three or four days to write. As the system waited 24 hours between receiving a completed review and sending my story out for review again, you understand that I was frustrated to get to the end of the month with only seven reviews.
Elin’s Story never even entered the charts in time for consideration in The Next Big Author Competition.
Possibly I was unlucky. In the last 10 days since the end of April I’ve received four more reviews. The story has entered the charts now (it’s riding at 27 at the moment, tied with 18 others).
So, a bit of a disappointment. On the other hand, the competition did give me the motivation to put together a longer piece of text and make it public. It also gave me feedback from a variety of readers which I will take a look at in my next blog entry. And, actually, placed 27th (even though tied with 18 other people) isn’t so very bad.
I’ve decided to leave the extract from Elin’s Story up on the site at least until the end of this month and see if new reviews and ratings might lift it a little higher.
Interested in the winners of The Next Big Author Competition? Go here!
Interested to read the extract from Elin’s Story on the YourWriteOn site? Go here and click on “I want to read sample chapters from this book”.
urther to my previous entry: it’s been 5 days since I last received a review, so whoever was assigned my text to read on 4th April is cutting it a bit fine to complete their review within the four day limit. I’m impatient to see my reviews and score and as I can’t see the score till I’ve received 4 reviews, I’m not looking at what the reviewers have written yet either. (This isn’t me practicing self-discipline – more self-preservation. I want to have a few different opinions so I don’t let myself get hung up on one. As I am very likely to do.)
In my last, I wound up suggesting that friends and readers who are not registered at YouWriteOn might register and write me a voluntary review – but I now realise that won’t help my chances in the competition as voluntary reviews and scores are not counted into the score. Fair enough – that would make it too easy to cheat by campaigning for votes (or encouraging people to give negative scored or reviews to others).
So, if you’ve read the extract, don’t write me a review on YouWriteOn, but if you feel like it, please DO send me a review. (If you don’t have an e-mail address for me, use this site’s Contact form – follow the CONTACT link at the top of the page.)
n 26 days of work during March I see from my spreadsheet that I managed to write for an average of nearly 3½ hours each day and averaged about 379 words per hour. That doesn’t look like an awful lot I know, but it was an improvement on both February and January.
The main reason I didn’t work more days in March was a week’s visit to London to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday on the 15th. I got back home on 22nd and almost immediately started working on the latest rewrite of the first 7000 words of Elin’s Story. On 30th March, I was able to submit it to The Next Big Author, an online writing competition.
The Next Big Author competition is described on its Internet site as the “February 2012 Writing Competition”, the period for submitting entries was 17th – 31st March, and the result will depend on the score each text has attracted by the end of April.
If I’ve understood everything correctly (and I’m only 90% sure that I have) “The Next Big Author” is in part a ploy to promote an Arts Council financed Internet site called YouWriteOn. At least, one has to be a registered user of YouWriteOn to take part in the competition and everyone already registered is automatically entered into the competition. The prize – for the Top Ten most highly rated novel extracts submitted before the end of March – is to have your text read and analysed by a professional publishers’ reader at the Little Brown Company.
What’s involved in this competition? First of all you have to register and submit your story to YouWriteOn. After you’ve posted your text, you have to accept and review a submission by someone else and your text is presented for review to another person who has also registered to take part. For every review of someone else’s text that you write, your text is presented to another person for review. The idea is to collect at least eight reviews from different people. (You need eight reviews before your text is eligible for the YouWriteOn charts.)
Of course I hope to be one of the ten prize-winners at the end of the month, but besides that I’m looking forward to reading the feedback I get from my reviewers, who after all are all people in the same boat as me; writing creatively and hoping to become authors. Up to now I’ve not gone out of my way to solicit reviews, and though the few friends and family who’ve read bits have been encouraging, I’ve not had much feedback from people I don’t know who have no reason to see the best in the text.
’m a bit nervous about the feedback I’ll get, truth to tell. Nervous, but excited too.
As part of any review you write for YouWriteOn, you have to mark each text on eight different things (Plot, Dialogue, Setting, Characterisation, Use of Language, Pace and structure, Narrative voice, Theme) using a five point scale. So the top mark that any reviewer can give to any text is 40 and the bottom mark that any reviewer can give is 8. I’m going to guess that the marks one receives for the eight plus reviews are averaged out, since I see that it’s possible to try to improve your score by removing the marks of one reviewer for every five reviews you receive. In other words it’s not the number of reviews that you receive after eight that matters, but the score that each reviewer gives you and how that affects your average result.
After a time – after you have been reviewed by several different reviewers – you hope that your overall score will begin to reflect an accurate consensus of the quality of your work. You also hope that your score will be sufficient to put you in the Top Ten.
In order to get at least eight reviews I have to review at least eight texts by other people. When you accept a text to review, you have four days in which to review it and you’re promised that if you review within about 36 hours that your own text will have a better chance of being given to someone else to review. I posted my story on Friday, 30 March, and at the time of writing five days later, I’ve reviewed seven. One more to go!
I have absolutely no idea how many people have entered texts for this competition, and because YouWriteOn runs all year, I guess, a couple of the texts I’ve been given to review were posted some time ago. But four of the seven were posted in the last three days of March, so I’m guessing all of them were by people hopeful to be The Next Big Author.
o what do my competitors look like?
This is going to sound really obnoxiously self-satisfied but of the seven texts I’ve reviewed so far, only one of them is of a similar quality to my own. I don’t think I’m blind to my own limitations as a writer saying this. I really don’t!
One of the reviewed texts was (I promise you!) barely literate. Three others were peppered with spelling and grammar mistakes and misused words (and two of these were written by people with cloth ears for dialogue). One text was written by someone whose language seemed lifted from American TV series for teenagers, full of clichés and stereotypes. One text was well-written but … well … boring.
And one, one was a gem. Really well-written with rounded characters, a fascinating setting and an interesting idea. I’d be happy to share a place in the Top Ten with that one, and not terribly disappointed to be pipped at the post by it. But the shame of being beaten by any of the others!
Elin’s Story has received two reviews so far, but I’m holding myself back from reading them till I have a clutch of five or six.
If you’re not registered with YouWriteOn, then all you can do is read the story, but if you are registered you can see the one page summary too … and write me a review. (Hint )
Ah, don’t take that hint seriously. See here. [This para added 8th April 2012]
big part of the fun of the Gothenburg International Film Festival is getting to see films you would probably never otherwise see. Sometimes you find yourself choosing a film to see simply on the basis of its title, sometimes because the one you wanted to see is sold out, sometimes because it is from a part of the world that you are interested in but which seldom produces films. Africa in my case – I always try to see Festival films from sub-Saharan Africa.
Another part of the fun is logistical – the constant uncertainty of whether you’re going to get in time to the place where the film is being shown. Over the whole Festival I think there were at least three major delays on the No. 6 tram line, the one the Festival and Gothenburg Public Transport bill as the “Festival Tram”.
On the morning of 1 February I found myself on my way to the Haga Cinema on Linnégatan to see Grey Matter, a film from Rwanda. As there was a backup of trams from my part of Gothenburg – some sort of breakdown somewhere – the tram was very crowded: full of teens late for school and having a riot. Then when the tram stopped at Nordstan it was stormed by hoards of kindergarten kids. Standing room only. Fortunately I had a seat but I also had two kindergarteners looking curiously over my shoulder as I tweeted on my mobile phone.
“What are you DOING?” Asks one.
“I’m Tweeting.”
“What’s your name?”
“John – what’s yours?”
“Alma! Ebba!” I see a teacher hovering nervously, separated from us by the sardine packed hordes. I smile at her in what I hope will seem a reassuring manner, but it only seems to make her more nervous. What a world we do live in.
At Prinsgatan I managed to eel off the tram and took myself into the Haga Cinema. Lots people but no queues. Anarchy, but a much lower level anarchy than on the tram. I found the theatre where Grey Matter was to be shown and joined the crowd milling around outside. While we were waiting, I counted 12 people coming out of theatre. Now, I was waiting for the first showing of the day so why were people coming out of the theatre? Perhaps there’d been a private showing earlier, or perhaps they’d been camping out on the floor. (For some reason I prefer to believe the latter.)
Despite the apparent anarchy, once the doors opened everyone hanging around outside was able to get a seat, including me though I found myself seated rather a long way from the door. From being nervous about whether I would manage to get in to see this film, I started to worry about whether I would be able to get out of the cinema in time to get across town to my second film of the day. Oh, the worries one has!
Matière Grise (Grey Matter) was a very moving film, and in places rather disturbing, as you would expect from the first feature length film to come out of Rwanda in the aftermath of the genocide. The film is a bit disjointed in that it is composed of three independent stories which do intertwine with one another, but jarringly I thought. The first story is about a filmmaker called Balthazar (perhaps a representation of Kivu Ruhorahoza, the writer and director of Grey Matter) and his struggles to finance the film is trying to make. His government contacts complained that his film is backward looking and want him to make upbeat, educational films about, for example, the fight against AIDS. The second story is a Kafkaesque fantasy about a man locked in a prison and reliving his role in the genocide of the “cockroaches”. (Literally – this story involves real cockroaches.) The third and longest part of Grey Matter is taken up with a young man’s struggle for sanity and his siter’s struggle to help him and hold the two of them together in a family. They are survivors of the genocide; their parents and the rest of their family have been brutally murdered.
Coming out of Grey Matter I found myself drawing parallels with the Korean film Characters that I saw the day before. (See Part 2.) Both films use bracketing stories about the making of a film and in both films the bracketing story blends with the film’s “true” story. I found Characters more than a bit pretentious, but I did not have that feeling about Grey Matter – at least not nearly to the same extent. Yes, the pretensions were there, especially in the first section when the filmmaker is discussing his cinematographic antecedents and references, but they were nowhere near as intrusive as in Characters which really didn’t have anything much to say. The story in Grey Matter was so powerful and the characters, especially in the second and third sections, so much more believable, that the pretensions did not assume the significance they did in Characters.
Grey Matter was one of the films this Festival that I found myself continuing to think about for long after. If I get the opportunity to see it again I will certainly do so.
y second film of the day was the French language Iranian film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plumbs), a – mostly – live action film by Marjane Satrapi, the author of the charming, funny, touching animated autobiography Persepolis.
Chicken with Plumbs must also be based on a graphic novel. It’s obvious in much of the live action cinematography – there is a quality of tableau vivant over a number of scenes in the film. Also, the film breaks into Satrapi’s characteristic black and white animation in at least one place.
Chicken with Plumbs tells the story of world-famous violinist Nasser Ali Khan and how he goes about committing suicide – first failing humorously, but finally tragically succeeding. Why does he suddenly decide to kill himself? Is it the row with his wife? Is it his broken violin which he is unable to replace? It turns out to be because of a lost love, recently re-met. In good Thousand and One Nights style the film contains many small stories that appear to be incidental, but that all contribute to the whole, and make for a very satisfactory completeness in the film. As I left the cinema I found myself tweeting that “Chicken with Plumbs is the best film I’ve seen so far this #GIFF”.
With a certain amount of perspective now – and having seen a few more films at the Festival – I want to revise that statement. Chicken with Plumbs was certainly one of the most complete and satisfactory stories that I saw presented in a feature film. Visually it was also very satisfactory – beautifully made, with wonderful sets, very good acting, funny and sad. But it was also very sentimental. It was a more rounded story than the one in Persepolis, but not nearly as edgy. True there were a few references to the history and politics of Iran, but Chicken with Plumbs is a fantasy. It would work perfectly well without any of those references and could very easily have been transposed to another country than Iran. I enjoyed it, I recommend it, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to see it a second time. (The trailer is fine though… )
That was my last film of the day as I had some translation work to do in the afternoon, so I shall break off my account here. Continued in Part 4!
ne disadvantage of being a dedicated Gothenburg International Film Festivalian is the headaches you sometimes wake up with. They’re the consequence of craning your neck for hours in uncomfortable cinema seats. But it’s all worth it (he says, knocking back the aspirin).
[BTW, the embedded video here to the right is the GIFF vignette from last year. I'll embed this year's at the beginning of Part 3.]
Sunday 29th January I only had one film to look forward to. I was going to see Death of a Superhero in the evening, but had other things to occupy me during the day. My good wife Mrs SC, on the other hand, was set up for a full day – getting up early and coming home late.
Her first two films were back-to-back Chinese documentaries. The 90 minute The Interceptor from My Hometown (director Zhang Zanbo) and the 2½ hour Fairytale by Ai Weiwei. Fairytale documents Ai Weiwei’s week long installation in Kassel in Germany in 2007 with 1001 Chinese people and the process of selecting them and bringing them to Germany. (Fascinating and positive says Mrs SC, though the first half about the selection process was the most interesting.)
It’s The Interceptor from My Hometown, though, which has most frequently come back in family conversation since GIFF. The Interceptor… is about a civil servant, a man from Zhang Zanbo’s home town, a former schoolmate, whose job it is to help the Chinese local authorities save face by stopping citizens submitting petitions of complaint to the central government in Beijing. The people have the legal right to petition the central government, but when they do they shame the local administration. More than this, the central government would find it impossible to function if it was forced to deal with every infringement of people’s rights and livelihoods made by the local authorities. Consequently the local authorities employ people to ‘intercept’ petitioners, and bring them back home (where they can expect to be punished for their temerity in trying to exercise their legal rights). The central authorities turn a blind eye to this practice.
y headache had cleared by the time I got to see Death of a Superhero in the evening. I wanted to see this film because the principle character is played by Thomas Sangster who you’ll remember from Love Actually as Liam Neeson’s stepson Sam, the little drummer-boy in love. It had completely escaped my attention that Andy Serkis was heading the cast list, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him as well.
Death of a Superhero is charming about teen angst and anger, moving about cancer and funny about all three. Fifteen-year-old Donald (Sangster) is dying of what I take to be leukaemia. Certainly a cancer. He is undergoing chemotherapy, has lost all his hair and sports a variety of t-shirts with macabre comments (“One more PET scan and I’ll glow in the dark”). The boy is a cartoonist and graffiti artist (a good one) – though the book on which the film is based doesn’t seem to be a graphic novel, which was my first thought. The film is about how Donald, his family, schoolmates, girlfriend and thanatologist (death therapist – Serkis) cope with his illness and inevitable death.
Very good acting. Believable story (up to a point – still in two minds about the high-class call-girl and the thanatologist’s role in paying her for services unrendered). Well-made film though. Worth seeing.
Monday 30th January I was busy all day with work and my cineaste self got put on the shelf. To make up for that, on Tuesday 31st I managed to see four films.
ickets for GIFF are not cheap – just one fifth below the price of the regular, expensive cinema tickets and no cheaper than the tickets for screenings at the not-for-profit cinemas. But there is the daypass option. The GIFF daypass is a flat rate ticket that gives you free entry to any film starting before 4pm on weekdays. If you see at least six films with the daypass, you begin to ‘save’ money. This year I only had four days in which to use the daypass, and Tuesday 31st was my first. I got off to a good start and used it to see my first three films of the day. The fourth, which was an evening screening, I had to pay extra for.
My first film was Iris, a Finnish-Swedish costume drama which was showing at Draken, the festival’s core theatre. It was a popular showing, but Draken is a real, old-fashioned film theatre and can swallow 700 people or more, so it was not overfull by any means.
Iris turned out to be a children’s film. Very nicely made, pretty good child actors, and the story was good overall, though I thought it a bit uneven in places. It wasn’t quite the film I’d expected to see. I had misinterpreted the description in the catalogue and was expecting an historical drama about the experiences of a turn-of the century Finnish-Swedish artist and her family. The film turned out to be an account of a summer in the 1890s when Iris (Agnes Koskinen), the eight-year-old daughter of artist Ester (Maria Salomaa) is sent away to the Åland Islands to live with her uncle and his wife while Ester visits Paris. The Ålands are an island group lying between Sweden and Finland in the Baltic Sea; they belong to Finland but speak a form of Swedish called Finland-Svensk.
Iris is a sweet film about the culture clash when town-bred, bohemian Iris has to adapt to a rougher, working-class life in the country. It’s hardly a new subject, but apparently this is the first time a children’s costume drama has been made in Åland, so it’s been a big thing for the Åland community. Scandinavians are generally very good at making children’s films, and Iris is no exception, but it’s not an exceptional film. Kids might like it.
My second film of the day was the Belgian-Togolese Blue Bird. Also a children’s film, in the sense that the protagonists were two children, five or six-years-old, but so very much more. Blue Bird is based on a play, L’Oiseau bleu, from 1908 by the Belgian symbolist writer Maurice Maeterlinck. In fact, though the film and play start in the same place (the children are playing with a blue bird which escapes), the film quickly departs on its own journey and weaves an independent – though still symbolic – story out of the lives, games and improvised performances of the Togolese actors, none of whom are professionals. Filmed entirely through a blue filter, the heat and the light of sub-Saharan Africa (which I know also from personal experience – myself a six-year-old) was transformed in shades and tones of blue. This contributed to the mystical, magical quality of the film.
Now, at the time of writing five weeks later, I think of all the films I saw at this year’s festival, Blue Bird was the one that left the greatest mark visually. I dreamed in blue the night after seeing it.
After Iris and Blue Bird I was a bit dazed, but I had another film to see. Definitely not a children’s film this one, but after the previous two, I was perhaps less than receptive to Characters.
It seems the South Korean director, Kwang-Ju Son, has made a number of short films before, but this is his feature film début. Well, it looks like a long film made by a short film maker. I’m still not really sure what Characters is about, beyond depicting a couple of handful characters in various constellations. There’s more than a nod in the direction of Pirandello here (Six Characters in Search of an Author), but I don’t think the director is able to pull it off.
Each of the characters has his or her story, some brief and clichéd, some more complex though fragmented. Some of the stories link up: the popular film maker trying to make a film to please the critics; the scriptwriter with family problems. At the end the scriptwriter phones one of her own characters (played by the same actress), who then walks away into a wasteland that turns into the sea. Pretentious? Mmm…
ou’ll be pleased to know I took a break between Characters and my final film of the day. I rested my eyes (and my neck) and then met up with my wife and, as it happened, our niece in the student bar at Chalmers, the technical university. We had a meal and a drink and prepared ourselves for The Boy who was a King, a Bulgaria documentary. Mrs SC and I met in Bulgaria and have a soft spot in our hearts for the country. At GIFF, if there’s a Bulgarian film being shown, we try to see it together. This year there were two films from Bulgaria, but I wasn’t able to see Tilt, so that left …
The Boy who was a King is a weird, weird documentary about Simeon Saxcoburgotski who was the last Tsar (king) of Bulgaria. He inherited the throne after the death of his father Tsar Boris III at the age of six in 1943. Exiled in 1946 by the post-war communist government, Simeon lived in various places, eventually settling in Spain, his wife’s homeland, where he lived the life of a playboy or a businessman, depending on who is telling the story. In 2001 he became the first former monarch to be elected by popular vote as Prime Minister of the country he had once ruled as king.
Although the film starts conventionally enough, with clips of newsreels and amateur films showing the young prince in the palace grounds, gradually the feeling grows that something is not quite right here. The first interviewees, long retired palace servants are straightforward, though they are filmed from a distance, sitting in chairs or wandering through the rooms, apparently talking to themselves. From there the film gets increasingly peculiar. It’s as if the director, Andrey Paounov, has gone out of his way to track down the most extreme people to interview. The taxidermists in the natural history museum, the ‘white-trash’ Bulgarians who dive from the wreck of the royal yacht, the founders of a royalist club, the Japanese immigrants who sing their self-composed paean of praise for him, the seamstress who has made a suit for him with a record number of pockets (and who thinks he is a giant of a man, over six feet tall, when he is clearly not much taller than his cousin Prince Charles in the clips where the two of them are seen together).
Simeon himself comes across as far and away the most normal person in the film. And I’m still not sure if Andrey Paounov is out to ridicule Simeon and his followers, or if he is trying to make a Bulgarian film in imitation of the sort of pseudo-documentaries that get airtime on commercial TV.
here is a scene in The Player of Games, a science fiction novel by Iain M Banks, in which the protagonist, Jernau Gurgeh, while swimming backstroke, is dictating into a microphone that is tracking his movement up and down a swimming pool. I have to confess that even I found that unlikely, but what an exciting idea!
My ideal has me leaning back in my armchair, eyes closed, feet up and arms relaxed, speaking my novel into the air while somewhere across the room a computer records my voice and puts my words into accurate text. Alternatively, I see myself walking in the countryside, pausing by inspiring scenery and dictating poetic descriptions that, far away, the computer in my home turns into immortal poems.
Every four or five years over the last fifteen or so I have invested in the latest example of voice recognition software in the hope that now my dream will come true. It hasn’t – yet – but hope springs eternal in the human breast.
I can’t remember who made the first software I tried out, but I know I had a stint with IBM’s, and now I’m working with Dragon NaturallySpeaking from a company called Nuance. This is the first time I’m using a microphone which does not attach me to the computer with a cable – certainly an improvement. But I still have to sit here looking into the screen in order to catch all the errors the software generates.
It’s not terribly conducive to keeping up a creative flow.
The instructions I have tell me that I should speak in full sentences and as naturally as possible and that this will help the software to identify correctly what I’m trying to say. That works part of the time, but much of the time – especially when I’m writing fiction – I dictate as I think: I say something, I change my mind, I repeat, I hesitate, I pause for thought, I go back and change words, phrases, punctuation. And Dragon doesn’t always like me to do this. Just at the moment it seems to be behaving itself remarkably well – yes I’m dictating this and I think Dragon knows I’m talking about it and is on his best behaviour.
But it does have a nasty habit of using completely the wrong pronouns. In the last sentence of the previous paragraph I actually dictated “is on its best behaviour” – and when I dictated that phrase in quotation marks just now, Dragon printed “is on the best behaviour”.
The other frustration is the punctuation. I try to use only commas, dashes and full stops, but even these tend to get in the way of my flow. More irritating though is that Dragon only understands the word “full stop”, it seems, in three times of every five uses. I never know whether it’s going to print a punctuation mark or whether it’s going to write out “well stop”, “stop”, “will stop”. In desperation at one point I taught it a new pronunciation for the punctuation mark in which I sing – that works but it doesn’t really save my sanity.
Supposedly the dictation program programme is supposed to get better at recognising my pronunciation and style as we go along, and I think it does in fact. (Now, I just had to sing a full stop there!) But he it doesn’t seem to be getting better very quickly will stop.
I’ve been using Dragon mostly for translation work over the last few months. I find it easiest to read Swedish and translate in my head sentence by sentence and then dictate. And I also use it for blogs now and then – and I suppose that’s going to become more frequent in the future now I am preparing a second “business” homepage. But though I try weekly to use Dragon for creative writing, I do it because I feel I ought to try rather than because it is a pleasure and a help.
ooking back over the last month I see that I have managed to exceed my target average of two hours writing a day but my average number of words a day has dropped by about 300 words. I managed a blog entry each week, as resolved, but once again did not manage to write much more than 5000 words for Elin’s Story – though I did manage 150 words more than last month. Once again I started writing a short story but didn’t complete it, though I did manage to submit a short story (“Elephantasy”) of 6300 words – it was one I wrote last year – so I satisfied a part of my commitment to the W1S1 year.
The series of articles that I pitched to an Internet magazine in January has been accepted, and I wrote and submitted another in the series, but I’ve no idea when they’re going to be published so I won’t crow about it and tell you the publisher just yet. I should add that there is a distant and vague promise of some sort of income from these articles, but I’ll believe it when I have the cash in my hand.
As I mentioned above, I’ve started gearing up to publish and administer a new homepage. After three and a half years of trying to write my novel and living off my savings, I’ve come to the sad conclusion that I need to have an income. I am breathing life into my firm, John Nixon English Language Services, marketing myself principally on the Swedish market. Hopefully it will bring in some paid work. I have one customer, so if I can get just one more that will be a 100% improvement. Ah, the joy of statistics!
Deciding what to put on the static pages of my new homepage is fairly straightforward, but I can’t just have static pages. I’ll need a blog and a podcast and probably the occasional video film as well, so I’m planning that at the moment. Language Services implies an interest in language and languages, so I’m anticipating a blog about English and Swedish and the Swedes’ use of English (and perhaps the English’s use of Swedish). Many years ago I started writing a book about Viking Words – the 10% of everyday English words that we have inherited from Old Norse. Now I’m thinking about disinterring that and maybe turning it into material for a podcast. We shall see.
Hopefully, I will find Dragon more useful for writing this material than I have found it for creative writing. Of all the four voice recognition software I’ve tried over the last 15 years, this is by far the best. Despite my complaints above, I do believe it has improved my productivity. It’s also better at spelling English than I am, which is another point in its favour! Though I have to say I am constantly surprised that, though I have it set to British English, it insists on spelling “program” with the American spelling. It is the only word it does this with: colour, organise, centre, analyse, fibre, traveller, manoeuvre, defence, catalogue … but program. Most peculiar.
And as another guide to productivity, let me just say this text of 1200-odd words took me about an hour and ten minutes to write and another 50 minutes or so to correct and post to both blogs where it appears.
fter nearly 30 years of living abroad, Britain when I return to it can often seem like a parody of the country I remember. A place designed to service (and sometimes disservice) tourists and with a peculiar obsession for a past distorted by selective memory, nostalgia and sentiment. It doesn’t seem quite real, somehow. I know this isn’t a fair picture; that I am myself seeing Britain through my own distorting lens (for I only come to Britain nowadays as a tourist), but there it is. That’s the Britain I see and, it seems, it’s also the Britain Ben Hatch and his family spent five months exploring as they researched the guidebook he and his wife Dinah had been commissioned to write.
Are We Nearly There Yet? is not the guidebook (that would be, I’m guessing, Frommer’s England with Your Family and Scotland with Your Family). Instead, it’s the story behind the guidebook. Ben and Dinah take their two under-fives, Phoebe and Charlie, and drive around Britain. They stay in a different hotel every night and visit tourist attractions day out and day in, testing the hotels and the attractions for child-friendliness (and parent-friendliness). It seems like a mad way to make a living and something only a masochist would choose to do, but it makes for an entertaining story – perhaps most enjoyable for people with experience of young children.
With credits from John Cleese, Terry Wogan, Richard Briers and Tim Brooke-Taylor among others I was expecting a laugh a page; perhaps I should have read the credits more closely. The words “moving” and “touching” occur almost as frequently as “funny”. Because the book is not simply an account of the trials and tribulations of guidebook writing, it’s also about Ben Hatch’s relationship with his father.
David Hatch, a one-time member of the Cambridge Footlights Revue, had a distinguished career in BBC radio behind him before being knighted for his services as chairman of the Parole Board. During the course of Ben’s book, David Hatch is diagnosed with a liver cancer that has metastasised, fights it, is brought low by it and ultimately succumbs to it. So interwoven with the story of the sometimes manic, sometimes mundane trip around Britain, we have the thread of Ben’s childhood, youth, adulthood, and the push-pull of his father’s personality. (And it seems to have been quite an outsize personality.)
I started reading this book expecting it to be entertaining, and an easy, straightforward read. And it is entertaining – in places it’s very funny – and it is written in an easy style, but it’s not nearly as straightforward as I anticipated, and at one point it reduced me to tears. To be sure, it’s more than possible that my reaction to Are We Nearly There Yet? is coloured by my own relationship with my father and by his death from pancreatic cancer (which followed much the same course as David Hatch’s liver cancer). Still, I thought this was a good read, certainly funny (the “draft copy” texts for the guidebook especially amused me), but, yes, equally touching and moving. I would definitely recommend it.
This review is also published on the Amazon.co.uk page for Are We Nearly There Yet?. To visit Amazon’s page for this book click on the illo above or here.
If “graffiti artist” wasn’t the contradiction in terms it so often is …
(Do click on the picture and view it full size!)
The graffiti artists were snapped near my home one sunny autumn day, working on a now-demolished wall. The figures are posterised from some rather poor quality photos of mezzo-American figurines from the collection in the Louisiana Gallery of Modern Art just outside Copenhagen.
he Göteborg International Film Festival (familiarly known as GIFF) takes place annually at the beginning of February in Gothenburg, and has done so for 35 years. Or is it 34? I know they jumped over the number 13 but can’t remember if they managed afterwards to make the numbers correspond to the years. Not that it matters really.
GIFF started small in the 70s and has grown and grown. Today it’s the largest of all the Nordic film festivals. Most importantly (for reasons of local pride) it’s bigger and more prestigious than Stockholm’s international film festival. (Ha! Take that, Capital City!)
Gothenburg’s festival has now reached the stage where it offers some 450 long films (and dozens of shorts) shown in 9 or 10 different locations over a 10 day period, and attracts an audience of some 32,000 film lovers and cineastes. It’s also an important venue for the trade, with deals being done and prizes being competed for. The series of seminars and debates held in the new-since-last-year Lagerhus social central offers extra events to interest the general public, students of film and film buffs who may be taking a break from the rigours of end-on-end movie going. There are side events – this year’s video installation Curtain Callers at Magazingatan 3 for example. And there’s a social side to the festival which spills over into the pubs and clubs.
I’ve attended GIFF annually since moving back to Gothenburg from Sundsvall in 1998, but I was a sporadic visitor even before, when I had the opportunity.
The beginning of February, in cold-damp Gothenburg. Of course you want to be sitting in a packed cinema, all breathing together. As ever, this year, I found myself wondering if I would break my record and go down with a cold within the first 24 hours. But no, both I and my good lady Mrs SC remained remarkably healthy throughout.
And I managed to tweet all the way through the week about the festival and the various films and events I went to. This blog entry is based on those tweets.
My first film was The Color Wheel. An American film shot entirely in grainy black and white. (I think the title was supposed to be a joke.) Lots of shaky Dogma-style hand-held camera action. There were some funny lines (especially in the first third of the film) and situations. Still, I wouldn’t choose to see it again. I had the feeling it was a student effort produced as a final, graduation masterwork. All the characters (bar one) seemed about the same age, friends or classmates of the director and writer? The principles, Carlen Altman (JR) and Alex Ross Perry (Colin) were clearly revelling in improvised backchat, some of the other actors though were clearly uncomfortable with this and were, simply, wooden. And the story … well, I felt the story hadn’t really been worked out and the conclusion was clichéd and a bit desperate. As the lights came up after the film was over, the guy in the seat next to me said “I don’t know”, and that was my reaction too.
Two weeks on, I still don’t know.
Left: Still from The Color Wheel with writer & actor Carlen Altman as JR. Right still from QM I think I’ll call her QM with Ann-Sofie Sidén as QM.
My second film of the festival was actually a series of short art films by Ann-Sofie Sidén. All interesting and enjoyable each in its own way, and all of them of much higher production quality than I, at least, am used to seeing from films made for video installations.
The first film was QM, I think I’ll call her QM in which a paranoid psychiatrist ‘studies’ a mud-woman (QM = Queen of Mud) imprisoned in a room in her house. I’m not giving anything away when I say QM escapes at the end. The second film was Head Gallery Piss Up. It documents the installation in a gallery in Vienna of a squatting, pissing, full-size model of the artist in bronze. Fascinating and surprisingly funny! The third film was Curtain Callers a film of events behind the scenes before, during and after a performance at the Stockholm Royal Dramatic Theatre. This latter piece (as mentioned above) was also being show as an installation (5 screens side-by-side with surround-sound audio) which I also managed to see later in the week.
All 3 films were worth seeing, though they probably benefited from being seen together and with Ann-Sofi Sidén present and answering questions put to her by an interviewer and the audience. She was disappointed – to say the least – about the projection of Curtain Callers at the Bio Roy. Too bright, she said, too loud.
Later the same day (this is Saturday 28th January) I saw my third film and first documentary, Deaf Jam in one of the lecture theatres at Gothenburg’s Technical University, Chalmers. Part of the fun of GIFF is getting to see films in places one wouldn’t normally visit. I’m only ever at Chalmers at festival time.
I though Deaf Jam was fantastic. I tweeted that I was blown away. A film of deaf teens working with American Sign Language and imagery to create visual poetry … and then finding ways to communicate to/with hearing poets and on to an audience of predominantly hearing people.
I was so impressed I tweeted an appeal to Swedish Educational Radio (Utbildnings Radio) to: Please! Buy Deaf Jam and show it on TV. No response though.
OK – A bit long for a blog entry (but about par for me). I’ll break here with the intention of continuing in a later entry. I’m also planning to write some longer reviews of some of the films and post to the IMDb – I’ll add links as I go along. In the meantime, here’s the trailer for Deaf Jam.
t the time of writing, Elin has received eleven reviews of which I have removed two. We’re allowed to remove one review for every five we receive, which can improve the overall score the extract has and its placing in the charts. (Every time you collect five reviews the software the site uses recommends the review with the lowest rating to remove.)
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Thanks for reading.
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y second film of the day was the French language Iranian film Poulet aux Prunes (Chicken with Plumbs), a – mostly – live action film by Marjane Satrapi, the author of the charming, funny, touching animated autobiography Persepolis. 
ne disadvantage of being a dedicated Gothenburg International Film Festivalian is the headaches you sometimes wake up with. They’re the consequence of craning your neck for hours in uncomfortable cinema seats. But it’s all worth it (he says, knocking back the aspirin).
ickets for GIFF are not cheap – just one fifth below the price of the regular, expensive cinema tickets and no cheaper than the tickets for screenings at the not-for-profit cinemas. But there is the daypass option. The GIFF daypass is a flat rate ticket that gives you free entry to any film starting before 4pm on weekdays. If you see at least six films with the daypass, you begin to ‘save’ money. This year I only had four days in which to use the daypass, and Tuesday 31st was my first. I got off to a good start and used it to see my first three films of the day. The fourth, which was an evening screening, I had to pay extra for.
ou’ll be pleased to know I took a break between Characters and my final film of the day. I rested my eyes (and my neck) and then met up with my wife and, as it happened, our niece in the student bar at Chalmers, the technical university. We had a meal and a drink and prepared ourselves for The Boy who was a King, a Bulgaria documentary. Mrs SC and I met in Bulgaria and have a soft spot in our hearts for the country. At GIFF, if there’s a Bulgarian film being shown, we try to see it together. This year there were two films from Bulgaria, but I wasn’t able to see Tilt, so that left …
ooking back over the last month I see that I have managed to exceed my target average of two hours writing a day but my average number of words a day has dropped by about 300 words. I managed a blog entry each week, as resolved, but once again did not manage to write much more than 5000 words for Elin’s Story – though I did manage 150 words more than last month. Once again I started writing a short story but didn’t complete it, though I did manage to submit a short story (“Elephantasy”) of 6300 words – it was one I wrote last year – so I satisfied a part of my commitment to the 
