Hi guys.
I want a bit of advice today. I'm still writing the WIP, and still loving every word. My lord it's popcorn, but it's fast and bounces from one crisis to another. There are surprises and twists, a few really grotesque characters, and in the middle of it all is Trist, back home after years away, and his friend Feng, a phoenix.
Phoenixes only bond with humans once a century, maybe twice. They're rare, and seen as the best of the creatures of faery, the queens of it- all are female. Now, Trist is a conflicted guy (we don't know why, at the start) and the bird, an emblem of purity and rebirth, guides him towards doing the right thing. It doesn't always work, and when it does Trist has his own approach to being a goody - he'll burn nine bad guys to save ten innocents. Still, he's guided by Feng, which really makes the phoenix the main character in the book.
Here's where I need advice. The working title for the novel is Firebird. Self explanatory, brief, a decent title. But another possibility has occurred to me, which is Queen of the Fae. A bit of mystery in that one, and it might be better. Or not.
So, which do you prefer? I seem to have fewer readers now Google+ has toppled off this mortal coil, but I'm sure you loyal lads and lasses who remain can help me out. Which title is better? Drop me a comment if you can.
Cheerio.
Showing posts with label character. Show all posts
Showing posts with label character. Show all posts
Friday, 1 March 2019
Friday, 26 January 2018
Magic And Derring-Do
The new novel, How The Stars Shine, seems to have stronger love themes in it than I'd planned, or than I've done before. It's not a romance, by any means. I can't say much without risking spoilers, but I'll note that love takes many forms, and more than one appears in the story.
It wasn't planned. Stories take their own shape sometimes, just as characters do - or should, if they're any good. I'll reach a certain point and a character will want to do something I hadn't considered before. That's good, it shows the tale has life thrumming through it, and unexpected things may happen. If I don't know for sure what's coming down the line, the reader isn't likely to. But this time, it's got me thinking. Stars is the first from-scratch novel I've begun since I met my wife. Everything else was at least blocked out before then, and largely written. Its broad form was set. Stars was not, and it's changing in my hands.
Could this be, do you think, because I have love in my own life at last?
I remember I said to Caz, before we were married, that I wasn't sure I felt love in the way that other people do. There have been signs of it. Me not crying while my whole family wept at the funeral of my grandfather, things like that. I'm known as a distant man, unapproachable as one of my friends called me - and if that's what my friends think, how must I seem to people who have only just met me?
Caz broke through these walls of mine without trying. I noticed one day that she was already inside my castle, having a good rummage about and putting pictures on my walls. And I didn't mind. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. Again, not love as most people know it, eh? Then came the babies, Bella and Evie. Bells will be two next week. And with them, no doubt at all, I have learned to love the way everyone else does. Overwhelmingly, swept-along-in-a-flood helplessly loving them. I know now that all my doubts about love were rubbish. I can feel it fine. I just hadn't found the right place and time before.
So love is a part of me now, and I guess it's finding its way into my work. That's OK. I'm not going to end up being Barbara Cartland. My stories will still be Fantasies, there'll be magic and derring-do and hopefully some strange cultures that the reader hasn't seen before. But maybe there will be a softer tone, just now and then, and you know, that's OK too.
It wasn't planned. Stories take their own shape sometimes, just as characters do - or should, if they're any good. I'll reach a certain point and a character will want to do something I hadn't considered before. That's good, it shows the tale has life thrumming through it, and unexpected things may happen. If I don't know for sure what's coming down the line, the reader isn't likely to. But this time, it's got me thinking. Stars is the first from-scratch novel I've begun since I met my wife. Everything else was at least blocked out before then, and largely written. Its broad form was set. Stars was not, and it's changing in my hands.
Could this be, do you think, because I have love in my own life at last?
I remember I said to Caz, before we were married, that I wasn't sure I felt love in the way that other people do. There have been signs of it. Me not crying while my whole family wept at the funeral of my grandfather, things like that. I'm known as a distant man, unapproachable as one of my friends called me - and if that's what my friends think, how must I seem to people who have only just met me?
Caz broke through these walls of mine without trying. I noticed one day that she was already inside my castle, having a good rummage about and putting pictures on my walls. And I didn't mind. Hmm, I thought. Interesting. Again, not love as most people know it, eh? Then came the babies, Bella and Evie. Bells will be two next week. And with them, no doubt at all, I have learned to love the way everyone else does. Overwhelmingly, swept-along-in-a-flood helplessly loving them. I know now that all my doubts about love were rubbish. I can feel it fine. I just hadn't found the right place and time before.
So love is a part of me now, and I guess it's finding its way into my work. That's OK. I'm not going to end up being Barbara Cartland. My stories will still be Fantasies, there'll be magic and derring-do and hopefully some strange cultures that the reader hasn't seen before. But maybe there will be a softer tone, just now and then, and you know, that's OK too.
Wednesday, 2 August 2017
Just as Cool
When you write a character, it has to be genuine. We all know that, right? I produce pages of details I never use, because the reader doesn't need to know them all - but I do. They help me work out how the character will react in a given situation. I can't really have a bloke who's homophobic then turn out to be bisexual, can I?
Motivation matters. A person's history, his family's background, a thousand other things; they all go into making that person who he or she is. That controls how the character behaves. And that's why I'm having trouble with the idea of Doctor Who as a woman.
Let me say first that I like diversity. The BBC (who makes Dr Who) is in trouble for having too few ethnic minority stars, and above all for paying its male staff much, much more than their female counterparts. It deserves that trouble, too. It pays lots of men over £1 million a year, but no woman earns half that. It's a disgrace.
But turning the Doctor into a woman doesn't feel like diversity. It feels like ticking a box. The current companion is Bill, who ticks three boxes - ethnic minority, female, gay. The BBC is straining so hard to be right-on politically correct that it risks losing sight of what the character actually is.
The Doctor was conceived as an antidote to all the comic-book superheroes of the 1950's and '60's. Give them a spider bite or a radiation accident and they started to defy evil by hitting it a lot. By contrast, the Doctor never used violence. He used cleverness instead. He was intended to show young boys that cleverness was just as cool as flying about in a red cape and punching the bad guy on the nose.
But girls know that already, you don't have to teach them. Women know how to talk better than men, how to compromise, because they don't have all this testosterone and ego thrashing about inside them. OK, these are generalisations, but they're largely true. So where does this leave the Doctor? A woman who prefers to talk and use her wits isn't anything out of the ordinary.
As for the show, it's gained a transgender Doctor, but lost the multi-box ticking Bill. That needs to be addressed, gosh yes, I'm horribly afraid that the next season or two will give us a gay Cyberman, a female Dalek, maybe a Weeping Angel from a persecuted minority of the species. It's all very modern, but you know, modern changes. Twenty years from now the Doctor is likely to look as dated as the original Star Trek - the Sixties in space, more or less.
Making the Doctor female is just tokenism. If the BBC wants to do diversity properly, instead of just filling quotas, here's how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhl3m3GjlLQ
(Roly is my favourite)
Night night, Squirrels.
Motivation matters. A person's history, his family's background, a thousand other things; they all go into making that person who he or she is. That controls how the character behaves. And that's why I'm having trouble with the idea of Doctor Who as a woman.
Let me say first that I like diversity. The BBC (who makes Dr Who) is in trouble for having too few ethnic minority stars, and above all for paying its male staff much, much more than their female counterparts. It deserves that trouble, too. It pays lots of men over £1 million a year, but no woman earns half that. It's a disgrace.
But turning the Doctor into a woman doesn't feel like diversity. It feels like ticking a box. The current companion is Bill, who ticks three boxes - ethnic minority, female, gay. The BBC is straining so hard to be right-on politically correct that it risks losing sight of what the character actually is.
The Doctor was conceived as an antidote to all the comic-book superheroes of the 1950's and '60's. Give them a spider bite or a radiation accident and they started to defy evil by hitting it a lot. By contrast, the Doctor never used violence. He used cleverness instead. He was intended to show young boys that cleverness was just as cool as flying about in a red cape and punching the bad guy on the nose.
But girls know that already, you don't have to teach them. Women know how to talk better than men, how to compromise, because they don't have all this testosterone and ego thrashing about inside them. OK, these are generalisations, but they're largely true. So where does this leave the Doctor? A woman who prefers to talk and use her wits isn't anything out of the ordinary.
As for the show, it's gained a transgender Doctor, but lost the multi-box ticking Bill. That needs to be addressed, gosh yes, I'm horribly afraid that the next season or two will give us a gay Cyberman, a female Dalek, maybe a Weeping Angel from a persecuted minority of the species. It's all very modern, but you know, modern changes. Twenty years from now the Doctor is likely to look as dated as the original Star Trek - the Sixties in space, more or less.
Making the Doctor female is just tokenism. If the BBC wants to do diversity properly, instead of just filling quotas, here's how.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lhl3m3GjlLQ
(Roly is my favourite)
Night night, Squirrels.
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