Spreadsheets!
Who doesn't love a spreadsheet?
IN BRIEF:
We’re going to Eastercon! James Kinsley1 & Ray Adams2 will be hawking their3 wares at the Hilton Metropole in Birmingham over the Easter weekend. Huzzah!
16th May sees the return of the Norwich Independent Book & Zine Fair, brought to you by the good folks at Salò Press. Ray Adams and that other guy will be there, too.
More writing has occurred. Less exhausted, heading back to work, and actually got some momentum on a horror novel I’ve been working on.
ON WRITING:
I am experimenting with being a plotter.
I’ve made much previously of my rather “let’s see where this goes” approach to writing. Start with a thing, write the next thing that happens, keep going until you have either (i) a book, (ii) an unretrievable mess or (iii) a better idea. It’s not exactly a sophisticated process, but it’s not done me so bad so far4.
However, the project I’m working on at the moment, the one that’s fired up my writing furnace after four months of exhausted Bargain Hunt-watching, is a horror story about a small town under siege from spooky shenanigans. Which means: big cast, multiple viewpoints, multiple concurrent narrative threads. Which, in turn, means: break out the spreadsheets.
Ironically, given my hitherto reluctance for this sort of thing, I love a spreadsheet. Our house runs on them. I can tell you our monthly average food bill for the past ten years, how much our Art Fund membership has saved us in gallery entrance fees since we joined in 2016, how many words I wrote in the week ending 24 Feb 2023 (2,539, since you asked)…
It’s sort of an illness. But one I’ve never really utilised for my writing.
Mainly, it has to be said, this out of a desire to just get on with it. I’m impatient, I’ve never been one for delayed gratification, I don’t want to spend time fannying about with notes and whatnot when I could be writing. The result? Some fairly linear, single-track (albeit marvellous and critically acclaimed) books.
However, in opposition to my beliefs about virtually everything else, I firmly believe that as a writer you should be challenging yourself constantly, trying new things, learning new skills. It’s one reason why I’m a genre-hopper. So plotting it is for this one. A list of characters, their relationships to other characters, any physical description I’ve used and, most importantly, a chapter-by-chapter track of who’s been featured or mentioned in each (or died), in order to make sure I’m bringing the whole cast along.
It’s also useful for, and I’m picking an entirely hypothetical example out of thin air here, realising when you’ve said that this guy is the father in family X, and also that this other guy over here is the father in family X. And not in a Modern Family sense. Yep, it’s surprising how easy it is to make dumb mistakes like this.
Obviously I don’t know yet how this project will pan out, but who knows, maybe if it’s a winner, I might even take the next step and move from spreadsheets to some sort of writing software.
I have enjoyed:
Gene Kelly - We watched Anchors Aweigh with my niece the other week5, after she’d previously enjoyed Singin’ In The Rain with us, and we were all blown away by the dance sequence that Gene Kelly had with Jerry off of Tom & Jerry. I’m aware this is a famous clip so I’m not exactly first to the punch with this, but this was made eighty years ago, and it’s flawless. Can you imagine sitting in a cinema in 1945 and seeing this??? It’s insane.
The Blackening - The tagline “We can’t all die first” tells you everything you need to know about where this film is coming from. This 2022 horror flick follows a group of college friends at a reunion party in a cabin in the woods6 being terrorised by a masked killer who wants them to prove their black credentials in order to survive. The trope of black characters dying first in horror movies is just the start of the racial themes explored in this whip-smart, hysterical horror-comedy. My favourite gag? When one asks “What do we now?” and another replies “Call the cops?”, at which they all break out laughing. At a time when US “law enforcement” is more emboldened than ever to shoot whoever they feel like, it’s a punch in the gut.
America, yesterday. The Happiness of the Katakuris - Takashi Miike has a bit of a reputation and THotK even more so for being one of his oddest, so I’m slightly ashamed to say I bought this with enthusiasm and then didn’t watch it for over a decade out of trepidation. Turns out I’d been denying myself a real treat. The film follows a family who, emboldened by rumours of a new road, buy a guesthouse in a remote location, only for said road not to appear and so they slowly face ruin. When they finally get a guest, he commits suicide in his room. Determined not to let bad news scupper their chance of success, they decide not to report it, but to bury him out by the lake. When their next guest dies in his room, things start to get out of hand. Blending musical numbers, claymation, zombies, a karaoke sequence and some really dark, dark humour, this is certainly as odd as its reputation suggests. It’s also infectiously joyous and very, very silly. I loved it.
“You’re confused??” Ski Sunday - Can’t explain it. Don’t watch a lot of sports, never been skiing and my only experience of winter sports is playing Cool Boarders 2 on the PS2. Ruddy love a bit of Ski Sunday though.
All my gamer references are from the PS2. Even that 1945 clip of Gene Kelly dancing with Jerry Mouse has better graphics than this.
You can buy It’s Hard to Tell You This, Parallels, and Greyskin directly from Deixis Press, and Playtime’s Over directly from Propolis. All should also be available from all the usual places, online and off.
Ray Adams’ self-published books are available from Amazon, until I get around to finding a more ethical alternative, or out of my garage.
I also review books on my website, most of which are available through my affiliate book shop on uk.bookshop.org - it’s a great alternative to certain online leviathans owned by Trump-supporting billionaires, and supports independent bookshops. Affiliates also get a % of books sold through them, so if you buy something from them, I gets paid...
Me.
Also me.
My.
Look at my sentences. I’m a professional writer, don’t you know.
Most accurate review on Letterboxd - “If you liked On The Town but you would have preferred it better if it had a more convoluted plot, less cohesion, not that one guy who wasn't Frank Sinatra or Gene Kelly, and felt much longer then boy do I have a movie for you!!!”
Ruh-roh.