Take notes!

Note to self: always write down the interesting things as soon as you hear or think them.

History drawls a veil over exactly when I started to do this: I should have wrote it down, that moment I first put pen to paper knowing I would otherwise forget that witticism, perfect line, cunning plot, great title, cracking dialogue.

So I never go anywhere without a notebook, and if you want to be a writer, neither should you. My most recent acquisition is this fab personalised one from The Dog's Doodahs.

Some people complain I am 'stealing their ideas'. These are usually people who will never do anything useful with the ideas they have, and ideas that are doomed to die young and unfulfilled. Plagiarism? No? It's a Public Service!

You have to be careful, occasionally I don't write enough and just find random words staring back at me that mean nothing:

the Darth Vader of fairies

synchronise your mothers

regurgitated garnishes from previous incumbents

Apostrophe wife

fake town?

I still keep notebooks, especially for journeys, but some are too lovely to use. And now I jot ideas on my phone or iPad, too, ready to transpose into a Word document... which now runs to over 70 pages. You do the math.

Then be afraid.

Do you make notes? 

My Klingon for a horse...

If you're writing science fiction and running low on plot, it's not unheard of to dip into classic literature and... erm... borrow a story (I'm looking at you, Russell T.)

There are only so many plots, right?

Anyhoo, I was just about to go to sleep the other night when someone on Twitter started up  #SciFiShakespeare - a 'hashtag (or should that be mashtag?) game' with an irresistible combination if ever there was one.

As some of you are not on Twitter and so miss it's more fun elements, I have listed as I sometimes do here, some my favourites (some in the screen grab on the left, and some pasted below).

Do chip in with your own Shakespeare / scifi mashups in the comments below:

@Dr_Dmo: My Klingon for a horse

‏@JohnMoynes: 

But soft, what beast through yonder stomach breaks?

@Beanmimo: 

(Stolen from Spitting Images a long long time ago) To be not not to be, that is illogical Captain.

‏@HefSan:

Close Encounters of the Richard III Kind

 @sturadernie:

To take arms against a sea of tribbles and by opposing, end them…

And of course, not to be outdone, I came up with:

For in that sleep of Darth what dreams may come? and Don't Panic and let slip the dog of war!

Happy Towel Day

Did you know it's Towel Day?

Every year, around the known universe, fans of the late, great Douglas Adams do towel-related things to celebrate his genius.

I discovered Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in my teens - on radio, then the books. They are the works I most wish I had written. I love his fount of ideas and the way he marries comedy with deeper truths.

If you have never read it, and I urge you to do so, click here for a full explanation of the significance of the towel, which finishes with:

"...any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with"

I blogged a towel-related story yesterday without having even remembered it was Towel Day, so I probably already have Betelgeusian* Brownie Points for that.

Despite the fact that I really don't like being told not to panic, some of my favourite quotes are from the first of the six books in the H2G2** trilogy:

Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so.

"It's horrible - it's like being drunk."
"What's so bad about being drunk?"
"You ask a glass of water."

A man who no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India company.

"I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."

Anyway, I can't sit here blogging all day - it's a beautiful day and I'm off up the nearest hill... with my towel.

Later...

And here is the proof (and there's Hilbre Island in the background again!

* Full list of races and species in the Adams Universe is here

** Geek shorthand for Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and also an Adams-created alternative to Wikipedia which is seriously worth a browse: www.h2g2.com

A Penny for Them

Okay, people. I'm feeling a rising swell of righteous indignation about bankers!

I've been thinking about the bonuses* bankers are getting whilst the rest of the country worries about rising costs, job losses and the other austerities to come. But how can we make our voices heard? Aren't we powerless in giving our pennyworth?

Yes, I've been thinking about the humble penny.

What if thousands and thousands of people went into their local bank on the same day and each paid in a cheque (or several) for a penny?

Think of the paperwork it would generate as each cheque had to go through clearing! People could go online and make 1p transfers, 1p payments. If enough people did it, and did it for a reason (ie a clear link to an online campaign that explained our disgust at banker's bonuses) it could make the ordinary person's view heard more strongly.

...I'm thinking on my feet here, but there are other ideas around this: everyone could pay their 1p to the same person or organisation, or charity (do organisations/charities get charged for cheques?). Or we could all hoard our pennies and then pay them all in on the same day...

I know there'd be queues and lowest-paid bank staff would suffer**, but it might make a point, eh?

What do you think? Are you with me? Shall I attempt to 'go viral' on this?

And what should it be called? I'm thinking:

• A Penny for Them... which is APT
• Watching The Pennies
• Spend a Penny
• Bad Penny
• Every Penny Counts
• Until The Penny Drops...

Meanwhile, if you are against the Bankers' Bonuses, there are two campaigns that I've found on Facebook:

Give Up The Bonus - founded my pugnacious North-west MP, John Prescott

NoBonus4RBS - founded by maverick songwriter Billy Bragg

.... except that... just a minute... these may have been campaigns from previous years... *sigh*

* See (see The Poet Laura-eate)

** I used to be a bank clerk so I know. 1980 - 1990. I call them my 'wilderness years.'

Austerity Measures

Times of austerity are here, they tell us – a reigning in (of wild horses?), the tightening of belts, the empty larder, the gathering clouds, the doom, the gloom.

But which of us can say, hand on heart, that we don't have too much stuff, that we could get by without the lava lamp, the novelty egg timer or the impulse-bought 'must-have' espadrilles crafted by the tiny grubby fingers of child labourers? (insert your own foibles here)

The aesthete would say that a life of simplicity is the ideal - just enough to eat, no worldly distractions, self-sufficiency. A loaf of bread, a cup of wine, and thou...sands of books at your local library - for now (though they wouldn't dare trying to close Wirral Libraries after what happened last time.)

If Osbourne wants a list of which services to cut back on, here are 10 suggestions of what should be first up against the wall:

• Public sector award dinners
• 50% of all meetings
• Bankers' bonuses
• 'Think-tanks'
• Tank tanks
• 75% of public sector PR and marketing
• Local authorities sponsoring football teams
• Subsidies to farmers not to grow stuff
• The space programme
• ...oh, and the war, the weapons, the bombs, the missiles

But don't panic! There are plenty of things we can all do to 'pull in our horns' (that's one for the Inky Fool), save money and make our own lives more sustainable: 

• Re-use and repair old jokes
• Shop around for cut-price air – it's just as good as full-fat
• Only eat second hand food
• Get rid of the dog and buy a bargain-basement budgie... some of them really go cheap!
• Sell your soul on eBay - top prices paid
• Use your library - spend your days sitting near the thrillers smelling of wee
• Save water costs! Share a bath with a neighbour
• Turn off your brain at the mains when you're not using it
• Repair any broken promises or hearts (you might need a 'handy man' to do this)
• Become a 'friend of the preserving pan' (pictured)

Next week:  How to grow your own gazebo from seed  

Related post: Time of the Signs - more amusing political posters

Where do ideas come from, mummy? #3

On an earlier post, Doctor FTSE described the Walker Art Gallery as 'A mine of ideas' and of course I haven't mentioned these yet as a source of inspiration:

The Idea Mines of Disturbia in the outer districts of Conscious are rich picking for fossickers if you get there at dawn.  Dig deep in the dark of what seems to be your own psychosis and thought-bats will be disturbed, circling up and around you and out of the cave mouth, always turning left. 

It's a dangerous place - rhymes and reasons leach intoxicating gases. The canary in the cage still sings, but the songs get steadily bawdier and are now accompanied by a small mouse on a trombone.  It’s very bluesy – you always get that from mice.  You’ll need a hard hat on that soft head because grains of truth and falsehood drip down on you – indistinguishable from each other in this light. Here's your maiden aunt's madiera, here's a magic monsters appearing out of empty boxes in a leotard spangled with sequins (each one chipped from the marble heart of a thalidomide angel). 

Voices flutter in your ear like tiny people reciting the rules of forgotten institutions: you must not wear red after dark, or smoke a pig, or scratch another persons arse, or dress as yourself, or redeem all the coupons, or complete the trick mathematics that will send you into a parallel universe where shit is luminous green and truck drivers are welded into their seats forever and daisies take a year out now and then to go travelling – you see them in deserts, on barren mountains, tossed on stormy seas telling each other how great the soil used to be. 

But you obeyed the rules and you haven’t fallen, though there are precipices here that could send you tumbling down into kaleidescope canyons, diving for butterflies lying waterlogged on the ocean bed.  What are you looking for?  Why did you come? With your pick axe and thesaurus, and everything turning into a poem: a bag to catch the story in and hold it as it squirms, a honeysuckle hunger and some bones to feed the worms. The wonder of it all, the wonder of it all - a hundred men digging for compliments on the outer slopes and you in the brilliant darkness with kisses coming at you, covering your face though it’s grimy with day-old dreams.

"Nurse!  She's come round again!"

More about ideas here:

Where do ideas come from mummy? #1

Where do ideas come from mummy? #2

Where do ideas come from, mummy? #2

I have been accused of having 'ideas'. I can't argue. I have more ideas than I know what to do with. Something in the wiring of the brain maybe.

So I do get a bit tired with people, especially poets, sticking with the same old same old. I knew one who went to work on the train and walked his dogs at weekends. ALL his poems were about riding on trains and walking dogs. A clever writer could probably squeeze a fair few metaphors for life, the universe and everything out of such mundane material, and on occasions he did. But there are limits to how much he could surprise or challenge - or to how much he surprised or challenged himself as a writer.

So where do ideas come from? Lots of places. But often from making links between the seemingly unrelated. Not sure if I do this naturally or just trained myself to, but it's been productive. My 'Silence Museum' poem came about simply by mis-hearing Science Museum, but it got me thinking about something I hadn;t thought about before.
Here's an exercise:

• On lined paper, make a list* of subjects you might like to write about - do it quickly and freely without thinking too hard
• Fold the paper vertically so you can't see the list. Forget what you've just written.
• On the same lines, write another list.
• Unfold and see what appears next to each other on a line.
• There'll be a lot of nonsense, but (usually!) one or two marriages will leap out at you - connections zapping between them... acrobatic firemen, coin-operated walking boots, cat scaffold...

* It helps if each vertical list is of broadly the same kind of thing. You could have a list of concepts (fear, lonliness, ballroom dancing, last person on earth, parent) OR 'voices you'd like to write in (animal, fictional character, profession) OR places (library, museum, island, train) or interesting adjectives (coin-operated, camouflaged, open-top)

Just playing around like this has generated a few nice ideas, especially for short, quirky poems and stories.

Where do YOUR ideas come from?

Where do ideas come from, mummy? #1

Here's a great tip for getting ideas flowing - get into your brain quick before your brain knows you're in there.

I do this all the time and it's thrown up some wierd and wonderful stuff!

1. Sit down somewhere quiet where you won't be distracted (unless you're distracted by quiet) with pen and pad or computer.


2. Pick a subject - quick! Something vaguely on your mind? Have you been thinking about eyebrows or oysters? Or pick a word at random from a book you have close to hand. It doesn't matter what you choose - this is just a starting point. Don't think too much. You're not browsing here, you're shoplifting. Pick it and run with it.


3. Start writing. Start on the subject you just picked but if you veer off don't worry - the important thing is to keep writing non-stop for ten minutes. The trick is to train yourself not to think too much.


4. Don't stop! If you get stuck write down the first words that come into your head even if it's nonsense. No-one's watching, no-one's judging. It's a different way of using your brain - tapping more into the subconscious and that's where the good stuff is!


5. After ten minutes, stop (unless you're on a roll in which case you might want to see where it takes you).


6. Maybe now, maybe later, read back what you wrote. Sometimes it really will be gibberish, butI have found that often what you have written is rich in ideas, phrases, sometimes even the beginnings of characters or plots for stories, occasionally even the skeleton of an entire poem.


7. Take what you want from this - if there's a good phrase or idea file it away for later, or use the exercise to jump-start your day's writing. If there's nothing there, don't be put off. Try another time.

The exercise is particularly useful if you want to write on a particular subject and have drawn a blank. Your right 'creative' brain makes connections you may not have thought of. Here's an example:

Broken Biro

two kinds of broken biro – the knackered bic – a simple snap, a short sharp blow to the back of the parentheses - and the unreconstructed ballpoint spilling it’s nuts and bolts before you – the tiny spring like the ring binder of your almost empty jotter, the worn knob you press and repress for the satisfying click that masquerades as action, the internal gubbins – casings, little plastic rings and tubes if you’re lucky, the slim missile of ink – a weapon of mass deliberation. Thick blue black blood. Sometimes, miniature engines or batteries, a yard of dazzling coloured silk like a magician’s entrails, a swarm of ideas, barely visible to the naked eye, the declaration of independence inscribed on a piece of fluff, a new species of bacteria unleashed, splendid microscopic racehorses galloping off down the page, raw wit in its natural state, the dust of all your fore-fathers, molecules of air once breathed by Julius Caesar, the composted droppings of the doubt fly.
Look at it all – innocuous, lacking deliberation, just the things that happened to be inside your pen. What to do with it all? Where to keep it?