There is an episode of Seinfeld, the show about nothing, where Jerry has a funny idea occur to him during the night, writes it down, then spends the rest of the episode trying to work out what he actually wrote.
I am sure every writer has experienced the frustration of having that great idea pop into their head, failing to write it down and afterward not being able to remember what it actually was. Hence the thought that it is always a good idea to have a pen and paper handy. I first got into the practice while at uni, of keeping the pen and paper handy on the bedside table. All too often the solution to the latest problem for a taxation tutorial or computer programming would occur to me during the night and I saved them by scribbling something down.
One of my vanities (curiosities, eccentricities) is writing comedy routines for my alter ego, Teddy Rant. I came up with one the other evening and scribbled out a rough outline. Earlier today I sat down to do something with the idea. It generally makes sense and is humorous but there, right in the middle of a seemingly key passage, is a string of incomprehensible scribble.
What on earth does that scribble mean? Where’s my George Kostanza or Elaine Bennis to help me out. I wonder if sending a copy of it to Julia Louis-Dreyfuss (Elaine) would be of any help? Doubtful, but it at least it gave me an excuse to briefly think about the lovely JLD as a pleasant distraction.
So the moral of the story is don’t just write it down, write it down so it makes sense afterwards!
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
And my perfect match is...
So there I was, happily tweeting away on twitter (Rossisawriter), when I noticed twitter's suggestions for who I could be following. I assume these suggestions are the product of some sort of algorithm which matches you against other tweeples with similar interests etc. But please, pray tell, what in the blue blazes of hell I am supposed to have in common with a bloody vacuum cleaner?? Yep, that's what twitter in it's wisdom thinks I am best matched with. No wonder I'm on my own.
Monday, November 29, 2010
NaNoWriMo 2010 and what I learned from it
Well I have made it to the end of NaNoWriMo but could not have gotten there without my writing buddy, Lisa, cyber-whipping me there (sticks and stones may break my bones, but whips and chains excite me!). So what lessons have I learned this year?
- I reconfirmed that I am a plotter/planner and not able to just sit and the keyboard with a vague idea and the story comes flooding in as some people seem to be able to do
- Do not get too wedded to the original outline as the story may well want to be going in another direction entirely and that little person in the head pushing it in that direction may well be right
- For NaNoWriMo - plan and plot further ahead!
- I did not know my characters well enough and found myself regularly wondering "hold on, is this what they would really do in that situation?" so more character work in advance for future projects
- That having a writing partner egging you on is a great way to work
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Why exclude males?
I have been a fan of Portia De Rossi for a long time. And not just because she is gorgeous. I thought her character portrayal in Arrested Development was simply brilliant. I also admire her for continuing to push for equal rights for gays and lesbians. For the record, I am straight, but I believe in simply live and let live, provided nobody is hurting anyone else.
I am, however, entirely puzzled by Ms De Rossi's stance on her recent return to Australia when she apparently refused to speak to male journalists. Isn't excluding someone based on their gender in direct opposition to her beliefs? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to spread the word as far and wide as possible? Ms De Rossi is publicising her recently released book that targets helping other women address issues of body image and self-esteem that she herself has had to fight. Again, what is achieved by excluding males from this publicity?
This one really does puzzle me.
I am, however, entirely puzzled by Ms De Rossi's stance on her recent return to Australia when she apparently refused to speak to male journalists. Isn't excluding someone based on their gender in direct opposition to her beliefs? Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to spread the word as far and wide as possible? Ms De Rossi is publicising her recently released book that targets helping other women address issues of body image and self-esteem that she herself has had to fight. Again, what is achieved by excluding males from this publicity?
This one really does puzzle me.
Friday, November 19, 2010
What does the BBC know?
My Internet-friend, author Kim Falconer, brought this one to my attention. Apparently the good folk at the BBC in their wisdom have determined that few people will have read more than six on the following list of 100 'classic' books. Those that I have read are in bold font and those I have started and either given up on (Tolstoy and Joyce!) or put to one side to go back to sometime, are in italics. I suspect plenty of other people will pass the test and have read more than six of these as well.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (and I HATED it - sequel was even worse!)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis -
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (boooooring!)
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Thursday, November 18, 2010
I was a bully
This entry is prompted by a piece about a little girl in the US being picked on for being different. http://tinyurl.com/22w6fzz
To my shame, I admit that when I was a young kid, I may well have been one of those bullies. There seems to be a degree of pack mentality among young males. In nature, the lame, injured, ill etc, particularly among prey animals, are often driven away from the rest of the herd because they attract predators. But that isn't much of an excuse for so-called civilised people. Get me one-on-one with those different kids and there probably wouldn't have been a problem.
One thing is for sure - if my parents had seen me pick on other kids along with the rest of the pack, I would have been in trouble. That was NOT how I was brought up. But even kids are smart enough not to do it in front of adults like teachers who could pass on the word at the next parent-teachers night.
In my second year of high school, for reasons unknown, other than he was possibly different in some way, I took a real dislike to a student a year behind me. And I picked on him. I recall one day giving him such a hard time that he lost it and lashed out, hitting me once. So, full of righteous indignation, I went after him and gave him a pounding. A teacher appeared on the scene, breaking things up. Still full of myself, I angrily claimed the other had hit me. Other students however quickly told the real story, that I had been the instigator. I wasn't exactly one of the popular crowd anyway (anyone seeing the irony?). So I was in trouble, my then less-than stellar reputation among the teaching staff dropped that much lower, the victim went on his way and I left him alone after that.
I did not give him much thought for several years until my younger sister commented one day that this young fellow had attempted to kill himself, partly because everyone 'hated' him.
That revelation really floored me. I was one of those arsewipes who had helped drive this kid towards suicide, even though I had left him alone for several years. By then I was at a senior high school and hadn't even seen the kid for more than a year. But, my God, did I feel guilty.
The next year, that same student now appeared at the same senior high school. So I made a point of saying 'g'day' to him. The look of mixed relief and gratitude on his face made me feel even worse. Out of a sense of guilt, I kept saying hello any time I saw him around the school. It eventually ceased being a thing of guilt and instead became just a natural thing to do. Did we become friends? Not really. But I think he appreciated knowing there was at least one person around who was going to at least make some sort of effort. And my greeting was always answered with a big, toothy smile.
That was thirty years ago. I have no idea where that young man ended up or how he is doing. I hope he is doing alright. Chances are that he's actually doing better than me. But I like to think that I have never forgotten the lesson that he didn't ever realise he had taught me. I like to think I haven't picked on anyone since. Well apart from good-natured stirring. And when politicians engage in stupidity, as far as I am concerned, it's open season.
I have had a mental list in my head for years now of people that I wasn't nice to when I was younger, much stupider and full of my own bullshit. I like to think that eventually I will find them all and simply be nicer to them.
As for Katie, the little sweetheart in the original article, she now has 435 comments of support from people all around the world, with celebrities like Alyssa Milano, Eliza Dushku and Tara Moss getting behind her. It's a pretty damn good bet that the bullies don't have anything like that going for them.
PS a quick update - Katie's story has really gone viral and soooo many people expressing their support for her. Yayy.
PPS At 16:02 Australian Daylight Savings Time, November 22, there were now over 1,200 messages of support for Katie and her mother.
To my shame, I admit that when I was a young kid, I may well have been one of those bullies. There seems to be a degree of pack mentality among young males. In nature, the lame, injured, ill etc, particularly among prey animals, are often driven away from the rest of the herd because they attract predators. But that isn't much of an excuse for so-called civilised people. Get me one-on-one with those different kids and there probably wouldn't have been a problem.
One thing is for sure - if my parents had seen me pick on other kids along with the rest of the pack, I would have been in trouble. That was NOT how I was brought up. But even kids are smart enough not to do it in front of adults like teachers who could pass on the word at the next parent-teachers night.
In my second year of high school, for reasons unknown, other than he was possibly different in some way, I took a real dislike to a student a year behind me. And I picked on him. I recall one day giving him such a hard time that he lost it and lashed out, hitting me once. So, full of righteous indignation, I went after him and gave him a pounding. A teacher appeared on the scene, breaking things up. Still full of myself, I angrily claimed the other had hit me. Other students however quickly told the real story, that I had been the instigator. I wasn't exactly one of the popular crowd anyway (anyone seeing the irony?). So I was in trouble, my then less-than stellar reputation among the teaching staff dropped that much lower, the victim went on his way and I left him alone after that.
I did not give him much thought for several years until my younger sister commented one day that this young fellow had attempted to kill himself, partly because everyone 'hated' him.
That revelation really floored me. I was one of those arsewipes who had helped drive this kid towards suicide, even though I had left him alone for several years. By then I was at a senior high school and hadn't even seen the kid for more than a year. But, my God, did I feel guilty.
The next year, that same student now appeared at the same senior high school. So I made a point of saying 'g'day' to him. The look of mixed relief and gratitude on his face made me feel even worse. Out of a sense of guilt, I kept saying hello any time I saw him around the school. It eventually ceased being a thing of guilt and instead became just a natural thing to do. Did we become friends? Not really. But I think he appreciated knowing there was at least one person around who was going to at least make some sort of effort. And my greeting was always answered with a big, toothy smile.
That was thirty years ago. I have no idea where that young man ended up or how he is doing. I hope he is doing alright. Chances are that he's actually doing better than me. But I like to think that I have never forgotten the lesson that he didn't ever realise he had taught me. I like to think I haven't picked on anyone since. Well apart from good-natured stirring. And when politicians engage in stupidity, as far as I am concerned, it's open season.
I have had a mental list in my head for years now of people that I wasn't nice to when I was younger, much stupider and full of my own bullshit. I like to think that eventually I will find them all and simply be nicer to them.
As for Katie, the little sweetheart in the original article, she now has 435 comments of support from people all around the world, with celebrities like Alyssa Milano, Eliza Dushku and Tara Moss getting behind her. It's a pretty damn good bet that the bullies don't have anything like that going for them.
PS a quick update - Katie's story has really gone viral and soooo many people expressing their support for her. Yayy.
PPS At 16:02 Australian Daylight Savings Time, November 22, there were now over 1,200 messages of support for Katie and her mother.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Right, we all know that da Vinci was a genius, don’t we. But to understand just what a genius he was, the believing is in the seeing.
I attended a touring exhibition of machines made from diagrams in da Vinci’s surviving notebooks. He made things like ball bearings. Now ball bearings are just an ordinary part of everyday life, in every motor vehicle for a start. But this was one heck of an innovation in da Vinci’s day. One of the things in this exhibition that really blew me away was what surely had to be the first self-powered vehicle: a vehicle powered by wooden springs!
So here is a gallery containing;
· Three different types of ball-bearing
· Two views of a seige machine allowing men to cross walls of a besieged castle in relative safety
· The exterior and interior of a tank powered by eight men with cannon facing all directions
· A cannon ship that fires in 360 degrees
· A robot!
· Water skis
· The framework for a human-powered glider
· A water-powered woodmill
· A spring-driven, self-propelled vehicle!
I attended a touring exhibition of machines made from diagrams in da Vinci’s surviving notebooks. He made things like ball bearings. Now ball bearings are just an ordinary part of everyday life, in every motor vehicle for a start. But this was one heck of an innovation in da Vinci’s day. One of the things in this exhibition that really blew me away was what surely had to be the first self-powered vehicle: a vehicle powered by wooden springs!
So here is a gallery containing;
· Three different types of ball-bearing
· Two views of a seige machine allowing men to cross walls of a besieged castle in relative safety
· The exterior and interior of a tank powered by eight men with cannon facing all directions
· A cannon ship that fires in 360 degrees
· A robot!
· Water skis
· The framework for a human-powered glider
· A water-powered woodmill
· A spring-driven, self-propelled vehicle!
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