Wednesday, January 28, 2009
[writing technique] you may or may not agree
One happy spin-off from having no internet is the chance to rework the three novels and much of the weekend was spent doing that. Writers might be interested in skimming through this post to see if it’s what they do and they might offer some helpful tips for me.The greatest problem with a partly autobiographical novel is the fan fiction trap or to be more specific, the Mary Sue trap. Either the main character is so outrageously immune to bullets, poor shooting, being wrong or else he/she always comes through in the end, in the face of almost insurmountable odds, that the thing is a bore.
The Andromeda series fell into that trap when it became a super-hero vehicle instead of a good series. The trouble with the Russian section of my novels is that those things really did happen but they read, in a novel, particularly badly and so it was necessary to at least split the main character into two people and the main girl into two as well.
The next step was, rather than having two superheroes coming at you, for each to have realistic foibles and not to have things always working out well in the end.
Three decisions may or may not have been wrong.
Firstly, I went with a plethora of characters, each filled out at least to an extent and last count there were 58 of them, some with similar sounding names [Sean’s criticism].
Secondly, the books are written in the third person, rather than the autobiographical first person.
Thirdly, where many novelists run sub-plots as separate chapters, e.g. Tolkien and some run them interwoven, jumping from scene to scene, I’ve taken the risk of organizing the twenty five or so chapters in each of the three books to be about fifteen pages long and within each chapter are sub-chapters, marked with Roman numerals, which are both irregular in length and jump from one sub plot to another.
There are usually three subplots going on at any one time, each converging in some way, somewhere down the track.
The number one problem is to mute the main character sufficiently so that his sub-plot does not occupy, say, three pages while another character’s troubles occupy half or three quarters of a page.
On the other hand, one mustn’t mute the main character to the point of blandness and that’s definitely an issue with one of the two protagonists, Marc, for whom I’m having difficulty making him genuinely attractive to women and men. I’d like him to be more attractive than the main character – he’s certainly adept in what he does.
The difficulty with the main character now is that he never seems to actually do anything but is usually around when things are being done, usually by the women around him who are the main agents in moving the plot forward.
I don’t think the feminists will have any criticism of the characterization from this perspective. He occasionally provides an insight which has moderate impact. He seems a bit passive to me, with bouts of craziness but he has a modicum of wisdom, born of experience.
Another issue is which characters last throughout the book and which come and go. In the novel’s original form, one man and one woman went right through. Now it will most likely be so but the two who go right through do not become an item until the second book.
Finally, do the characters grow as people, [the Robinson Crusoe motif] and how do they grow as people? Three novels is a long time to make people grow. The way around it, of course, is two steps forward and one step back.
Anyway, I’d appreciate your thoughts on writing.
[ho hum] learning from the beeb
Check this one out:It is to be presented by Rageh Omaar, a black Somalian Muslim.
Would it have been too much to expect a British TV company like Channel 4 to perhaps show things from a white Christian point of view - being that the Crusaders were white Christians?
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
[today's recipe] prepare and enjoy
A friend of mine intensely dislikes my food posts and the French in equal proportions. This post is dedicated to him.
Pappardelles au saumon fumé
Ingrédients :
300g de parppardelles
200g de saumon fumé
40g de beurre
2 Cs d'huile d'olive
1 bouquet d'aneth
1 pincée de piment séché
50g de parmesan râpé
sel
Recette :
Dans une assiette, taillez les tranches de saumon en lanières d'1cm de large. Mélangez-les avec l'aneth ciselé, le piment et l'huile d'olive.
Dans un faitout, faites cuire les pâtes dans de l'eau salée.
Egouttez les pâtes, remettez-les dans le faitout.
Ajoutez le beurre en parcelles et remuez sur feu très doux jusqu'à ce qu'il soit fondu.
Incorporez les lanières de saumon et leur huile de marinade. Mélangez délicatement. Couvrez et laissez reposer 2 minutes afin que le saumon fumé tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmesan râpé
Conseils :
Les parppadelles sont des pâtes larges et fines, faites les cuire croquantes et remuez-les délicatement
afin que le saumon tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmessan râpé.
Boisson conseillée : pinot noir ou blanc d'Alsace
Mon commentaire :
Ajoutez cette recette à votre carnet pour ajouter votre commentaire personnel !
Enjoy!
Pappardelles au saumon fumé
Ingrédients :
300g de parppardelles
200g de saumon fumé
40g de beurre
2 Cs d'huile d'olive
1 bouquet d'aneth
1 pincée de piment séché
50g de parmesan râpé
sel
Recette :
Dans une assiette, taillez les tranches de saumon en lanières d'1cm de large. Mélangez-les avec l'aneth ciselé, le piment et l'huile d'olive.
Dans un faitout, faites cuire les pâtes dans de l'eau salée.
Egouttez les pâtes, remettez-les dans le faitout.
Ajoutez le beurre en parcelles et remuez sur feu très doux jusqu'à ce qu'il soit fondu.
Incorporez les lanières de saumon et leur huile de marinade. Mélangez délicatement. Couvrez et laissez reposer 2 minutes afin que le saumon fumé tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmesan râpé
Conseils :
Les parppadelles sont des pâtes larges et fines, faites les cuire croquantes et remuez-les délicatement
afin que le saumon tiédisse doucement.
Servez avec le parmessan râpé.
Boisson conseillée : pinot noir ou blanc d'Alsace
Mon commentaire :
Ajoutez cette recette à votre carnet pour ajouter votre commentaire personnel !
Enjoy!
[teachers] love them or loathe them
When I met my first wife, she was hanging about in the company of engineers, an earthy bunch who generally called a spade a spade.
Let me tell an anecdote. She’d apparently been rabbiting on about me and how they’d now have to get a king sized bed in. I walked into the after work bar where she’d been holding forth and one of her colleagues proclaimed, ‘Nah, a double will be more than enough.’
One job group they didn’t have much time for was teachers, of which I was one. Their criticisms of teachers ranged from inflated sense of importance and being ‘lefties’ to teachers’ opinions so simplistic and amateurish that they weren’t worth heeding. And all those holidays!
Holidays
In a society where the politics of envy is the prevailing philosophy, teachers’ holidays were a never ending bone of contention and reached ridiculous proportions when they were made to come in and ‘work’ during school holidays.
For a start, any teacher worth his [her] salt is going to spend a substantial portion of that time preparing for the new term, cleaning the classroom, arranging things, photocopying, ordering in and so forth. It doesn’t need a prescriptive regulation to achieve that.
For any forty minute lesson, a good teacher devotes another fifteen to twenty in preparation and this used to be drummed in to student teachers by their teacher trainers.
So, back to those holidays, what you had were staff sitting around creating work, to make them look occupied, when their preparation had already been done, they were substantially ready and for what? To assuage a section of the community with absolutely no idea, which perceived all teachers to be on a cushy number.
Usual criticisms
Don’t get me wrong – lazy teachers are the bane of any head teacher’s existence plus their habit of only being able to see the micro-world of their own classroom, rather than the big picture. Such people also tend to be squabblers over unimportant matters, not unlike the children they teach.
One of the greatest criticisms of teachers is that they’re not in the real world. It generally helps if they have families, IMHO but that’s no guarantee of realistic approaches to life which they pass on to children and the number of times my staff had parent-teacher interviews and were insisting on their classroom rules at the expense of common sense were too numerous to mention.
A lot of this came from the political views of the teaching profession. In a job where the key components in classroom management are compassion and good order, these dovetail neatly with the socialist view of the compassionate society, while free enterprise and initiative can be seen as dangerously subversive.
Preparation and example
The criticism that teachers are lazy because they work such short hours is total hogwash. In any profession you’re going to get the lazy who come to lessons on time or even a few minutes late, [a big no-no in teaching, when you should be there ten minutes early to set up].
One of the best tests of this was the use of cassette players. The teacher rushed in five minutes late, noisy children sitting around aimlessly and then started to cue the cassette to its place, nothing set up on screen, discs not in place and feeling under pressure.
On the other hand, walk into a good teacher’s room and she [he] is there when the first children arrive, probably setting things up round the room, notes are at hand and she can share a joke with the child and listen to his/her latest news.
Discipline
At a seminar I once attended, one young teacher asked about discipline and my little contribution was that the best way to maintain discipline was firstly not to worry about it, to make it a low priority on your list. It also helped if you knew your material back to front, were well prepared, had set up the materials and you didn’t see the child or the parent as an adversary to be negotiated or contained.
At university, my best lessons were the speech practice topics where I had very little immediate control at all, everyone was deep in argument, gesticulating and haranguing and it would have taken ten minutes to quieten them all down. Better to let it run its course.
In the end, one of the most helpful things for discipline was simply to care. If the kid knew you really liked him, it made it so much easier but better was to only say no when it was absolutely necessary. How many people say no automatically without reasoning why? ‘Well, it’s the rule, isn’t it?’ Why is it the rule in the first place?
Saying no
There’s not a lot of difference between the home and the classroom in this.
A friend of mine has no problem with discipline at all but his wife has constant trouble.
Her approach is to threaten and say, ‘If you do that again ..’ Then next time she says, ‘If you do that again …’ When she does give punishments, she hasn’t the heart to carry them through and they know they can always get round her.
The result is ongoing discipline trouble and stress.
He has a different approach. If he says no, then it’s no. It never alters, even if he hasn’t the heart to impose the penalty. ‘You step across this line and you don’t get this treat.’ The kid steps across the line and she doesn’t get the treat. Never has, never will.
He has no discipline trouble at all and he compensates for that with good humour and treats, within certain boundaries.
In teaching, the golden rule is never to threaten anything, never employ the term “if”, unless you’re prepared to go through with it.
Example: One girl who hardly ever attended at university turned up one day and from the beginning, she showed not the slightest intention of getting into the topic. Instead, she sat there, looking down at her feet and making little dance movements with them.
That was one thing but the moment she started trying to engage the attention of those in the group with the lowest attention spans, I stepped in. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘What? What have I done?’ she appealed to the group as a whole. I opened the door and waited five to seven minutes till she’d gone, her last words threats to sue me.
Then I got back to the lesson, apologizing to the group for the scene.
Educational fads
This one has been saved for last and it’s my pet hate.
There’s a staff of teachers discussing which English textbook to use next year – Streetwise, Opportunities, Knockout? For better or worse, a book is adopted and immediately half those teachers appear in the staffroom at breaks, muttering out loud, hands flailing, ‘Oh I can’t use this text – it’s impossible.’
Still, it’s adopted and the parents are slugged for the cost of the textbook, the workbook, the exam maximizer, the cassettes and the study guide. They’re told it’s the latest thing in education, the ants’ pants.
For two years, all is well but then a new intake of staff doesn’t like this book imposed on them and the rumblings become a chorus of dissent so the whole process begins again in the name of progress and hey presto, a brand new textbook is now adopted and parents are slugged yet again.
Next year it starts all over again when some new educational fad comes into vogue, some academic from Canada or Australia having written in a journal that the latest research indicates that children should learn a different way.
Welcome to the prevailing state of education.
Let me tell an anecdote. She’d apparently been rabbiting on about me and how they’d now have to get a king sized bed in. I walked into the after work bar where she’d been holding forth and one of her colleagues proclaimed, ‘Nah, a double will be more than enough.’
One job group they didn’t have much time for was teachers, of which I was one. Their criticisms of teachers ranged from inflated sense of importance and being ‘lefties’ to teachers’ opinions so simplistic and amateurish that they weren’t worth heeding. And all those holidays!
Holidays
In a society where the politics of envy is the prevailing philosophy, teachers’ holidays were a never ending bone of contention and reached ridiculous proportions when they were made to come in and ‘work’ during school holidays.
For a start, any teacher worth his [her] salt is going to spend a substantial portion of that time preparing for the new term, cleaning the classroom, arranging things, photocopying, ordering in and so forth. It doesn’t need a prescriptive regulation to achieve that.
For any forty minute lesson, a good teacher devotes another fifteen to twenty in preparation and this used to be drummed in to student teachers by their teacher trainers.
So, back to those holidays, what you had were staff sitting around creating work, to make them look occupied, when their preparation had already been done, they were substantially ready and for what? To assuage a section of the community with absolutely no idea, which perceived all teachers to be on a cushy number.
Usual criticisms
Don’t get me wrong – lazy teachers are the bane of any head teacher’s existence plus their habit of only being able to see the micro-world of their own classroom, rather than the big picture. Such people also tend to be squabblers over unimportant matters, not unlike the children they teach.
One of the greatest criticisms of teachers is that they’re not in the real world. It generally helps if they have families, IMHO but that’s no guarantee of realistic approaches to life which they pass on to children and the number of times my staff had parent-teacher interviews and were insisting on their classroom rules at the expense of common sense were too numerous to mention.
A lot of this came from the political views of the teaching profession. In a job where the key components in classroom management are compassion and good order, these dovetail neatly with the socialist view of the compassionate society, while free enterprise and initiative can be seen as dangerously subversive.
Preparation and example
The criticism that teachers are lazy because they work such short hours is total hogwash. In any profession you’re going to get the lazy who come to lessons on time or even a few minutes late, [a big no-no in teaching, when you should be there ten minutes early to set up].
One of the best tests of this was the use of cassette players. The teacher rushed in five minutes late, noisy children sitting around aimlessly and then started to cue the cassette to its place, nothing set up on screen, discs not in place and feeling under pressure.
On the other hand, walk into a good teacher’s room and she [he] is there when the first children arrive, probably setting things up round the room, notes are at hand and she can share a joke with the child and listen to his/her latest news.
Discipline
At a seminar I once attended, one young teacher asked about discipline and my little contribution was that the best way to maintain discipline was firstly not to worry about it, to make it a low priority on your list. It also helped if you knew your material back to front, were well prepared, had set up the materials and you didn’t see the child or the parent as an adversary to be negotiated or contained.
At university, my best lessons were the speech practice topics where I had very little immediate control at all, everyone was deep in argument, gesticulating and haranguing and it would have taken ten minutes to quieten them all down. Better to let it run its course.
In the end, one of the most helpful things for discipline was simply to care. If the kid knew you really liked him, it made it so much easier but better was to only say no when it was absolutely necessary. How many people say no automatically without reasoning why? ‘Well, it’s the rule, isn’t it?’ Why is it the rule in the first place?
Saying no
There’s not a lot of difference between the home and the classroom in this.
A friend of mine has no problem with discipline at all but his wife has constant trouble.
Her approach is to threaten and say, ‘If you do that again ..’ Then next time she says, ‘If you do that again …’ When she does give punishments, she hasn’t the heart to carry them through and they know they can always get round her.
The result is ongoing discipline trouble and stress.
He has a different approach. If he says no, then it’s no. It never alters, even if he hasn’t the heart to impose the penalty. ‘You step across this line and you don’t get this treat.’ The kid steps across the line and she doesn’t get the treat. Never has, never will.
He has no discipline trouble at all and he compensates for that with good humour and treats, within certain boundaries.
In teaching, the golden rule is never to threaten anything, never employ the term “if”, unless you’re prepared to go through with it.
Example: One girl who hardly ever attended at university turned up one day and from the beginning, she showed not the slightest intention of getting into the topic. Instead, she sat there, looking down at her feet and making little dance movements with them.
That was one thing but the moment she started trying to engage the attention of those in the group with the lowest attention spans, I stepped in. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘What? What have I done?’ she appealed to the group as a whole. I opened the door and waited five to seven minutes till she’d gone, her last words threats to sue me.
Then I got back to the lesson, apologizing to the group for the scene.
Educational fads
This one has been saved for last and it’s my pet hate.
There’s a staff of teachers discussing which English textbook to use next year – Streetwise, Opportunities, Knockout? For better or worse, a book is adopted and immediately half those teachers appear in the staffroom at breaks, muttering out loud, hands flailing, ‘Oh I can’t use this text – it’s impossible.’
Still, it’s adopted and the parents are slugged for the cost of the textbook, the workbook, the exam maximizer, the cassettes and the study guide. They’re told it’s the latest thing in education, the ants’ pants.
For two years, all is well but then a new intake of staff doesn’t like this book imposed on them and the rumblings become a chorus of dissent so the whole process begins again in the name of progress and hey presto, a brand new textbook is now adopted and parents are slugged yet again.
Next year it starts all over again when some new educational fad comes into vogue, some academic from Canada or Australia having written in a journal that the latest research indicates that children should learn a different way.
Welcome to the prevailing state of education.
[interim report] for those who wish to know
This marks one week in the new flat and how’s the report card?
It’s a lovely flat, carpeted and centrally heated, with piping hot water and clean cold water but of course, it’s so empty to look at, with no drapes as yet and virtually no furniture.
The main room, with its vaulted ceiling, is quite chic really and the more ordinary bedroom does the job. Newly rebuilt, the paintwork and carpets are all new, spick and span and the kitchenette is modern.
I’ve come to a decision – I’m not getting a fridge for a long time. It’s been one week using semi-skilled milk powder, tuna lunches, fruit and vegetables with one piece of fresh meat bought daily and the gas takes care of the cooking. So the microwave is also postponed.
Perhaps the main thing going for this place is its aspect, the panorama it looks out on. Down near the sea, it has a view of a marina on one side and well, the sea, on the other. Passing ships provide a constant backdrop and it’s possible to go down and visit them from a short distance, if that’s your wont.
Let’s not dwell on the fact that I might be unceremoniously booted out tomorrow if my circumstances suddenly change, which they may well do and instead, let’s pretend I’m going to be in here for some time, even finding fulfilling employment.
Truth is, it could be a lot worse than it currently is.
By the way, I really like the pay-as-you-go electricity with the readily readable meter. I’ve worked out that, with the heating on almost full time and with the other drains on power, I’m using 74.4 pence of electricity per 24 hours. How does that compare to you?
By the way way, did I ever write to you how much I love my Mac Tiger? This has to be the best computer I’ve ever used.
It’s a lovely flat, carpeted and centrally heated, with piping hot water and clean cold water but of course, it’s so empty to look at, with no drapes as yet and virtually no furniture.
The main room, with its vaulted ceiling, is quite chic really and the more ordinary bedroom does the job. Newly rebuilt, the paintwork and carpets are all new, spick and span and the kitchenette is modern.
I’ve come to a decision – I’m not getting a fridge for a long time. It’s been one week using semi-skilled milk powder, tuna lunches, fruit and vegetables with one piece of fresh meat bought daily and the gas takes care of the cooking. So the microwave is also postponed.
Perhaps the main thing going for this place is its aspect, the panorama it looks out on. Down near the sea, it has a view of a marina on one side and well, the sea, on the other. Passing ships provide a constant backdrop and it’s possible to go down and visit them from a short distance, if that’s your wont.
Let’s not dwell on the fact that I might be unceremoniously booted out tomorrow if my circumstances suddenly change, which they may well do and instead, let’s pretend I’m going to be in here for some time, even finding fulfilling employment.
Truth is, it could be a lot worse than it currently is.
By the way, I really like the pay-as-you-go electricity with the readily readable meter. I’ve worked out that, with the heating on almost full time and with the other drains on power, I’m using 74.4 pence of electricity per 24 hours. How does that compare to you?
By the way way, did I ever write to you how much I love my Mac Tiger? This has to be the best computer I’ve ever used.
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