Rat Photoshoot, Take 1

Those of you who have flicked through the back entries of this blog may have already seen the first pictures of my rats, Billy and James, that I posted here. Today I decided to take some more pictures of them, for your delectation. They’re difficult critters to take good photos of, particularly in the bad light we were working with (our house seems to be incredibly dark and even a well-positioned lamp didn’t help much) but these are the best of the bunch.

We’ll start off with Billy. They’re both eating little crunchy nuggets, one of their favourite foods, which explains why they’re holding something small and brown.

And here’s a slightly clearer picture, this time of James.

After the initial shock of hearing the camera shutter once or twice, these guys certainly aren’t camera shy. The main problem, aside from getting them to sit still, is keeping them far enough away from the lens to actually focus on them! Being rats, they just have to get as close as possible to the action, in this case the camera, to see what’s going on.

So there you have it: Billy and James enjoying a snack. What do you think? Anyone got any tips for taking rat (or rodent in general) photos? I’d love some advice!

Richelle Mead – ‘Succubus Nights’

(Which, I should point out, seems to be called Succubus on Top in the US, but is Succubus Nights in the UK.)

Georgina Kincaid lives a complicated life. She is, as you might have guessed, a succubus. When she sleeps with someone, she takes some of their life energy, which she needs to survive. That has perks, of course – an active sex life being one and immortality being even better. However, that also means she can do little more than kiss her mortal boyfriend, Seth. Then there’s her incubus friend Bastien, who has just arrived in town with the intent of seducing a radio celebrity and leader of a group that stands for ‘family values’. To top it all off, one of her co-workers, Doug, is starting to act strangely, making Georgina’s work life difficult too.

That all sounds rather overwhelming. There is, after all, a lot going on in this book. In less capable hands, that could make the book a chore or just downright confusing, but Mead constantly keeps the pace up and the action entertaining, helped along by narrator Georgina’s strong voice throughout the novel. There’s not a great deal in the way of fight scenes or action in that sense, but there is a fair amount of sex and, most importantly, some great characters.

Those characters, most particularly Georgina, are what really drive this book along. With the exception of a few of Georgina’s immortal friends (who I suspect may have played more of a role in the first book in the series, which I haven’t read), the main characters are well fleshed out and genuinely interesting. Georgina herself is fascinating, as she struggles to reconcile her growing love for Seth with her need to constantly cheat on him to keep herself alive. Not only that, but she seems determined to keep an eye on everyone around her, helping Bastien with his plan of seduction and watching out for Doug as his behaviour becomes increasingly erratic.

This is, as I’ve just mentioned, the second book in the Georgina Kincaid series and on the strength of Succubus Nights, I’ll definitely be getting a copy of the previous book. Succubus Nights is fabulous fun: fast-paced, sexy, witty and yet constantly managing to explore its heroine’s deeper emotions. If you like urban fantasy or paranormal romance, this is definitely worth picking up.

Wanted

I’ve just got back from seeing the film (or movie, if you prefer) Wanted and thought I’d post my initial thoughts. Be warned though: this isn’t a film that really encourages intellectual debate so you’re not really going to get any.

First thoughts: well, it was gorier than I expected, but then I hadn’t realised going in that it was an 18 certificate. I’m not sure what that equates to in American film ratings, but suffice to say there was more blood that I had thought there was going to be, including some fairly graphic shots of people getting shot. As in, seeing the bullet come out of their forehead in slow motion and close-up, before being rewound to show the bullet being fired, including going back through the victim’s head. All CGIed clearly, but still pretty gorey.

Second: the main focus of the film was on action scenes, which is pretty evident if you’ve seen the trailer. Forget extensive character development (although I’ll admit you can see a change in Wesley, the main character, as the film progresses) or highly developed back-story. There is a back-story, concerning weavers who for some mysterious reason decided to become assassins, but you could pretty much strip that right out of the film and have little effect on the story. Apparently it’s an adaptation from a comic book, so I imagine there’s more plot detail in the original format. As a film though, there’s a definite sacrifice of plot for the sake of action scenes.

Third: having said that, many of those action scenes are pretty damn cool. Think cars flipping over other cars so that the driver of the one on top can shoot someone through the sun-roof of the one below. Think running around on the tops of trains and big guns and the physics-defying feat of curving bullets in the air. Additionally, the whole film is slick, well shot for an action film and has some really nice little touches, like the words spelled out by flying letters as a computer keyboard is smashed over someone’s head.

Overall, this is a film to see if you want a mindless couple of hours of fight scenes, chase scenes and general over-the-top, heavily CGIed action. It’s entertaining, but don’t expect any big message or life-affirming moment at the end. At least there was no obvious set-up for a sequel, which is always a good thing. This film doesn’t really need one. It’s silly, violent and entertaining, but it’s really not clever.

The Fickleness Of Inspiration, Or ‘Why I Keep Cheating On My Novels’

On the 5th of May this year, I wrote a post on writing, here on this blog. In it, I said I’d just started a new novel and was about 7000 words into it. At the time, I was sure that that particular novel was possibly the best thing I’d ever written. The most lyrical, the cleverest, with the most believable characters. Until I decided that I wasn’t having fun writing it and that there was no point carrying on.

Skip forwards to the 2nd of June, when I made another post, in which I detailed the joy of beginning a new novel. Yes, I’d started something new, something that I’d been thinking about for a good three weeks. It was a Young Adult fantasy novel and I was absolutely convinced that it was, once again, going to be the best thing I’d ever written. And yet, a few weeks later, it lies more or less abandoned. I might go back to it and keep plodding on, but I have no immediate concern with finishing it. This time I realised that I wasn’t enjoying writing about two sixteen year olds so I gave up.

And now, of course, I have yet another new idea, one that I’m sure will be brilliant. I’ll start it over the next couple of weeks and see how far it goes.

It all sounds pretty hopeless, doesn’t it? A slew of failed novels. “You’ll never get published that way,” I hear you cry. Well, perhaps I won’t. The truth of the matter is more complex though. After all, I have finished novels in the past – four, in fact, over the period of about four years. And that’s alongside all the ones that I abandoned: the ones that I have realised aren’t going to work, because I don’t like the characters, or the plot is weak, or any number of other problems.

Clearly, if I ever do get published, I won’t be able to carry on this way. For the moment though, with the freedom of obscurity, I can pretty much do whatever I want. I’m determined not to get into a rut where I hate what I’m writing. The best way I can see to avoid that is to keep experimenting, keep trying new novels, until I find that ones that stick and that I love well enough to see through to the end.

Now, I’m not advocating throwing in the towel on a novel as soon as it gets difficult. However, particularly if you’re not a published writer, I think it’s a good idea to always remember why you write: hopefully, because you enjoy doing so. If you’re not enjoying what you’re writing at the moment, maybe you need to rethink it. Change the way the story is going, add in a new character or simply start over if that’s what you need to do. Just make sure that you really are having fun with your writing. After all, it’s better to scrap one novel than to end up hating the whole process and giving up writing altogether, don’t you think?

Novel Ideas And The Images That Spawn Them

I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to write a post about ideas. Coincidentally, this post over at StorytellersUnplugged appeared yesterday, which very much sums up what I wanted to say. Individual, striking images and ‘what if’ questions tend to be what I base my fiction ideas on, or at least what I start with. Looking back through my notebook of ideas that I’ve written down and not found a use for yet, I find all sorts of sentences detailing single scenes/images:

A world of monumental architecture in which humans are tiny.

A city built on the shore of a lake.

A man so obsessed with his dead wife that he creates a personality construct of her so that they can always be together.

Some of those doesn’t sound like much in and of themselves, but in my mind each one is accompanied by a single image. Whilst the images themselves cannot be the basis on an entire world or plot, I do have a way of building them up, until I do have something that could be used for a novel.

The ‘what if’ questions come in once I’ve got one of those images firmly in my head. I start to ask questions. So, for the latter phrase about the man and his dead wife, I might ask myself, “What would happen if that computerized wife began to develop a new personality?” Or for the first sentence, “So who built that monumental architecture? What happened to them?”

From those questions, I quickly find many more developing. The first question soon starts to build a character or two: the wife and probably the husband too. The other questions supply a world and a non-human race, or at least in my mind they do. In turn, I ask yet more questions about these new creations, until with the answers I can fully flesh them out.

You can see how quickly a single scene in my head can spawn enough questions and ideas to base a story, perhaps even a novel, off. So, next time an image pops into your head and stays with you for longer than a few seconds, don’t just forget about it. Write it down and try asking yourself questions about that scene. You never know, just like the computerized wife, it could develop a life of its own!

Wimbledon

I’d planned to write something about ideas today. Not exactly ‘where do you get your ideas from’ but something along those lines. Unfortunately, I have been distracted by tennis. Yup, it’s the first day of Wimbledon today and I’m finding myself more interested in watching that than doing any meaningful work. It’s strange: I tell myself every year that there’s no point in my watching the tennis because I don’t know enough about it. And, every year, I find myself watching it anyway. There’s something oddly compelling about it.

Anyway, that’s basically a long way of saying I’m not going to be posting about writing today. I’ll save that for tomorrow, hopefully. So, anyone else here watching Wimbledon? Who do you think is going to win? I suspect it may well be Federer again, but we shall see.

Giving Yourself Permission To Fail

I’ve noticed this subject coming up on a few blogs recently. The general idea does pretty much what it says on the tin: you give yourself permission to fail in your writing. To write stuff that sucks and that no-one will ever  read. The sort of thing that you write when you’re just starting out, perhaps as a teenager and that you still cringe to think about now.

On first glance – or thought – this seems like a strange idea, particularly if you would one day like to be published. Why would you want to write something so terrible that no-one will ever read it? You’ll never make any money out of it, you won’t be proud of it and it will feel like a waste of time. So why would you want to give yourself permission to fail? Because it won’t be a waste of time at all.

Some of the best literature has been written because the author allowed themselves to take risks, and it is this which equates to allowing yourself to fail. Often, when you’re taking a risk and trying something new in your writing, there is every chance that it will go horribly wrong. You will have failed miserably. On the other hand, in taking that risk and allowing yourself permission for things to go wrong, you may just end up with something wonderful. Something original, fresh, maybe even bordering on unique. Something that no-one else has ever done before because they haven’t taken that same risk.

So, there you have a reason to take risks and sometimes allow yourself to make a mess of your writing: because in doing so, you might just come up with something brilliant.

R.J. Ellory – ‘A Quiet Belief In Angels’

A Quiet Belief in Angels starts much as any serial-killer novel: there is a killer on the loose in the small town of Augusta Falls and he’s murdering little girls. Joseph Vaughan, growing up in the town, wants to do something to stop the killings and bands together with a group of his friends to form the Guardians, with the intent of protecting the town’s children. Seems simple enough, right? Well, that’s how this book starts anyway.

Beyond the beginning though, this book is no ordinary crime or thriller story. The focus here is less on the killings themselves – the identity of the killer is revealed at the end but is almost irrelevant for much of the book – and more on Joseph as he grows up. Joseph is very much a scarred character, who has to live through terrible tragedy, which is only in part due to the murders. Each time though, he manages to love again, even after all he has been through, which makes Joseph a sympathetic character.

As you would expect from a character study, told in the first person, most of the book is slow in pace. There are digressions from the main story and long descriptions and conversations that don’t seem to go very far. Luckily though, even when the style of the novel is meandering, it is nearly always compelling. The descriptions of people, in particular, are unusual and fascinating. My main complaint was with the one or two overused metaphors/similes – I was sick of the phrase ‘heart like a clenched fist’, or indeed any reference to fists at all, by the end. Additionally, that end takes a long time coming. The last third of the book seems to drag a little, saved only by the wonderful writing; there are sections that could really have been cut without affecting the overall story.

Ultimately, this book is not what I expected. I picked it up thinking I was going to find a tightly paced thriller, but instead got a thoughtful character study. That’s certainly no bad thing and if you’re looking for something from the more ‘literary’ end of crime fiction, you can’t go far wrong with A Quiet Belief in Angels.

The Times That Remind Me Why I Write

These last couple of days have been pretty good for me, writing-wise. Although my actual page count hasn’t been huge, the simple act of writing recently has reminded me why I bother to do it. Put simply, it’s been going really, really well.

These are the sort of days that I look forward to. Days when the words just flow. Days when I know that what I’m writing is pretty damn good. Days when I don’t put down the pen even when my hand starts to ache, because I just want to get the words down on paper right then.

Of course, when I look back at what I’ve written, I won’t be able to tell from the words alone whether they came easily or whether I struggled over them. Strangely, having the words flow doesn’t seem to make the end result read any better when it comes time for revisions. Luckily though, that doesn’t make the enjoyment of writing any less.

Perhaps even stranger is the fact that trying to write about this feeling is remarkably difficult. It seems to be just one of those things you’ve got to experience to understand. And even though I have experienced it, trying to explain it to an outside observer is nigh impossible.

I realise this is a short post compared to my usual outpost, but that’ll have to do for today. I hope you’re all feeling as good about your writing as I am. In fact, if you are, why not leave a comment on this entry to let me know? Share the love, and all that!

Rohan: Blood Feud

I’m taking a bit of a break from the blogging about writing today, partly because I feel that I’ve been neglecting my other interests lately. Also, if I think about writing any more this weekend, I may just fry my brain.

So, a question: has anyone out there played a MMORPG called Rohan: Blood Feud? If you have, is it any good? Is it worth playing?

I’m in the process of (very slowly) downloading it so I might be able to try it out tonight. The pictures look pretty which, if I’m entirely honest, is one of the reasons I’m drawn towards some MMOs and avoid others. Hey, I’m a girl – I’ve got to have at least one or two stereotypically feminine traits. Apart from liking pretty things, I don’t have many others.

My main concern at the moment is that my aging laptop may well not run it. It’s getting to the point now that it even struggles to run games that are aimed at people with old computers. The minimum specs on the Rohan website are actually above what my laptop has… But we’ll see. WoW frequently informed me that my poor old laptop’s specs weren’t good enough, yet that ran perfectly well.

And that’s it for now. If Rohan runs, I’ll try to get a review of it up here in the next week or so. But, well, don’t hold your breath. My laptop has been failing for a long time now.