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Tag Archives: M T McGuire
Who is the piano playing dog? Find out at the AIA Grand Opening Party.
Who is the piano playing dog? Visit the Awesome Indies Grand Opening Party today to find out. Watch an amazing video and vote on the best explanation for who the dog is and what he’s doing.
Click here or on the banner above.
And don’t forget to check out the 99c sale.
Filed under General Wittering
Redline it but don’t pop it.
For a long time now, I’ve been thinking that I should explain why it takes me so effing long to write each one of my books and today I’ve been galvanised into it by reading this cracker of a post, here. As well as why it takes me so long to write a book this also brings me onto a subject dear to any writer’s heart; mojo management.
Basically, the premise is that a lot of people are a bit wishy-washy about art and not ‘forcing’ it and use the ‘don’t force it’ line as an excuse to give up and be lazy. He talks about how mood alters your perception and how you can write stuff you think is rubbish only to find, the next day, that it’s not so bad (unfortunately, in my world that process also works in reverse, but I digress).
Now, I get exactly what this fellow means, especially the bit about writing stuff that looks crap and then finding that it’s not so bad. I find reading the first draft of a scene incredibly depressing but I shut my eyes to it and edit. And then somehow, if I put in enough work, it becomes magically transformed and when I read it and think,
“Blimey, I can’t believe I wrote that.” I know it’s time to move onto the next scene.
However, for what it’s worth, I think most of the people talking about not forcing art are actually talking about burning out.
Burn out is way different. Burn out is dangerous. Let me explain.
OK, so, I’m a stay at home Mum with a very lively little 5 year old, elderly parents who aren’t too well and who live a long way away and as the result of a recent traffic accident I currently have to snarf painkillers like smarties. So my life right now features three things in sensurround; worry, constant interruption (welcomed but constant nonetheless) and chemicals.
Hmm… so as you can guess, none of these things are conducive to quality writing outside school hours and none of them make for a lively brain. The chemicals are temporary, so the background is usually just the two things; Mumzilladom and worry about my folks – I’m definitely not the dutiful daughter I always assumed I’d be, which is kind of grim face on.
What I mean is that in anyone’s life there’s a lot going on. Add the odd curve ball, traffic accident at the moment but things like family deaths, organising a surprise party or something like that and it’s easy to find that the heart, not to mention the diary, is too full to create. In my case that’s usually at the point where my mind is so fucking knackered it can’t be arsed to wander.
Trust me on this, I’ve been there and hit the wall and at that point if you don’t step back, you’re going to end up mental. This is not about laziness or procrastination or refusing to start in case we fail, this is about capacity. That’s the point when it’s almost physically painful to write – not at the end of the day, we all feel like that then – but at the beginning.
That’s when you’re in danger of losing the love, of becoming a slave to the addiction as opposed to in love with your characters and addicted to the process. When this happens to me, the only cure is to stop everything, rest my mind and spend a few days/weeks/months, however long it takes putting stuff back in until my mojo returns. It’s entirely natural so if this happens to anyone else, don’t worry, the mojo will return you just have to be patient and wait.
So the big trick, for supreme mojo-management, is never reaching that can’t be arsed to wander point; knowing when to stop spewing out words. There is no option, in times of impending burn out but to sit back and reset.
There’s no harm in redlining your mojo occasionally, except that… hang on… where is the red bit? Oh for heaven’s sake! Trust me to have a car with no red bit. Alright, look, just try to imagine it in OK?
So for me, never getting burn out means writing a bit less but giving it more welly when I do. It’s worth it because when I can’t write, I miss it. There’s no harm redlining your mojo occasionally to, erm, de-carb your chambers (phnark) just don’t keep it there. Burn out is why it’s good plan to have more than one project on the go. Burn out is deeply unpleasant because it leaves you desperate to create, but unable to.
However, burn out should not be confused with laziness. Writing, painting, any art is the most fantastic fun, more than fun, it’s a drug, but it’s also bloody hard work. And frankly, if it isn’t, I suspect you’re doing it wrong.
There are days when writing my book feels like weeing a full sized house brick, except that there are days when I think pissing a housebrick would be easier. What I’m trying to say is that I have never done anything so hard in my entire life. But I can’t let it go. Right now, I’m not writing, but that’s because it’s the holidays and trying to write now is the fastest short cut to burn out there is. I know my limitations and that, I’m afraid, is why I take two, whole, sodding years to write a book. I know, it’s shocking isn’t it?!
Please be patient, K’Barthan three is nearly there but it may well be next April before I can release it.
Filed under General Wittering
Real life is not like films…
Talking about thinking coolly in a crisis, in this post reminded me of an instance where that very much didn’t happen.
Yeh, so you know in films where some bloke runs in and shouts, “They’re beating up thingwot, come and help” and everyone gets up and runs with him to the rescue? Yeh well that doesn’t happen in real life. What they do in real life is ask you about fifty million pointless questions interspersed with the phrase ‘calm down’ while you shout, repeatedly, “Will you just come the f**k with me to rescue so and so?”
Here’s how I learned that this scenario is in absolutely no way, whatsoever, based on fact….
One Saturday night, aged about 18, I was walking home with a boyfriend and about 100 yards from our house he was attacked. We knew his assailant had 10 friends round the corner because we’d walked through them. I thought about kicking the bloke in the nuts but he looked pretty beefy and able to take down both of us. I wondered whether to knock on the door of a nearby house but I knew they wouldn’t dare let us in. So I hit on a cunning plan. I would go and get reinforcements. My own house was 100 yards away containing my dad a 6ft 2 ex rower and my brother, a well built 6ft 4.
So I ran to my house as fast as I could; speed was of the essence. I was calm until I tried to unlock the door. Lots of adrenaline = shaky hands. Did it but the thing that made it hard was not my shaky hands. It was the key my parents had left in the other side. Yes, they’d locked us out, and left the key in, making it impossible for us to get in. Except that by some miracle, I managed to get my key into the lock – yay! But it dropped out and jammed under the door meaning it opened about five inches and wedged fast.
I try to pull it closed again but it’s wedged fast. I ring the bell.
Dad and brother come to the door, taking their time.
“Quick! come with me, X is getting beaten up. Please come and help him,” I say. Imagine a voice of urgency here and a slightly shaky demeanour but I still had a handle on the panic. I push at the door. Trying to move it but it’s wedged fast.
“Calm down, we’ll get this open,” Dad gets down and sees the problem at once. “You’ve jammed the key underneath it.”
Why was it even in there? Yes, I thought that.
“Forget about the key. Come out of the back door, X is getting beaten up. NOW. I came home for your help.” The tone of my voice has gone up and the decibels have increased.
“Why would I want to come out of the back? It’s alright, it’ll be open in a minute. What’s the hurry?”
“They’re beating up X. Please come and help.” (Screaming).
“There nearly got it. Where’s X?” asks Dad.
“For fuck’s sake! Why d’you think I’m in this state? He’s getting beaten up!”
“What?” asks Bro.
“Beaten up, attacked just down there.” I point.
“OK calm down, come inside and tell us all about it,” says Bro.
“I can’t come in and fucking calm down. X is just down the road being beaten to a pulp and he needs our help.”
“Ah that’s got it,” says Dad. “We’ll have this door open in a jiffy.”
They opened the door then. The porridge-headed smeckers. Just as X turned up looking reproachful.
“Oh hello X. What happened to you?”
X throws me a look as if to say “you didn’t fucking tell them?”
“Everything alright?” says Dad.
Of course it’s fucking not.
“No I’ve just been attacked,” says X.
The penny finally drops.
“Where did you go?” X asks me reproachfully
“I came to get help but it went wrong.” I glare at Dad and Bro. Very wrong.
X looks at me even more reproachfully, and I realise he’s thinking, “yeh right. Coward,” and know that our relationship is doomed.
Filed under General Wittering
Dangerous situations: How not to do the school run.
This morning, I was a bit of a tit.
Actually, I was a wanker of monumental proportions. Not intentionally, I hasten to add. It was just that an amalgamation of badly made small decisions culminated, this morning, in one catastrophic misjudgement. It was Victorian day at school and McMini was all got up as a Victorian boy. He is small and mercurial, with blonde curly hair. The epitome of cute. But he can take a while to get ready. So we were a bit late and after a weekend gardening, I’m a bit stiff. Consequently, though I needed to get a wiggle on, it was a bit of a labour getting us going on the bike – he sits on a seat behind me – and we start out with a hill. It can be a bit of a grim haul sometimes, getting us up that hill. Today was particularly pants, I felt very stiff and tired and seemed to be going incredibly slowly.
However, I’m not so sure I was. I’ve got a lot fitter over the course of the term without noticing. So when I get to the top of the hill, I build up speed and go faster sooner. I did notice this a couple of days ago, when frustrated with my snail like speed I looked down and realised I was cycling up the hill at 12mph which, at the beginning of term, is about as much as I can achieve on the flat. I suppose the nub of it is that when I think I’m going quite slowly, I’m actually riding faster and it could be that my judgement has not caught up. Yes, this is the making excuses for myself paragraph. But despite noticing I was cycling faster in places, I hadn’t really hauled in the implication of what that meant.
So this morning, after creeping up the hill I am trundling along the top and I approach the cross roads at the top. It’s a pretty blind junction so I always slow right down and either stop completely or roll very slowly, so I keep a bit of momentum to get across and get going again. Today, I got there, slowed down, as I usually do. I saw a car coming up the road but it was far enough away not to worry and braked some more, saw nothing coming the other way and started pulling across the road. Then I noticed there was another car. Very close. Something a bit panicky happened about the braking, here. I recall worrying that I hadn’t gripped the levers; whether it was true or borne out of the shit-I’m-not-stopping aspect of it, I don’t know. But I remember consciously ditching Plan A: stop because I knew that I wasn’t stopping and that braking or no braking I was going to overshoot the junction into the oncoming car’s path.
“Shit!” I thought. “Not with McMini up.”
My brain dropped words after that. They took too long. Instead, a picture of us being pushed five yards along the tarmac, trapped under the bumper of the stopping vehicle flashed into my head. I had to get out of its path. I pedalled like fuck. She got our back wheel, there were about 4 inches in it I reckon. There was a massive bang, the back of the bike came round, I didn’t consciously put my foot down but I knew I had because I felt my knee pop and then we were on the road, and McMini was crying, but clearly fine and trying to get his seatbelt off and get up. I unclipped him and held him tight. Telling him it was OK. Telling myself it was OK when I knew damn well that I’d almost killed both of us.
The first thing everyone said; the policeman, the nurse, the doctor – if you’re going to get knocked down, outside a Doctor’s surgery is a very good place – was that it could have happened to anyone, that we all misjudge things. I know this is true. And I know that when I do stuff up, there’s nothing to be gained by worrying about it. Keep calm and carry on. But there are times when I wonder, because either I misjudge things a lot more than other people, or I’m unlucky enough to receive full retribution every time. The short of it is, I don’t usually get away with my misjudgements, or maybe I’m no different to anyone else, but just more prepared to admit it.
And what does this have to do with writing?
Well, all this made me think about how I write about pain and danger. I write them from my own experience. I have endured the kind of pain, in both knees, that has made me whimper and reduced me to tears. The most recent moment being just now, when I went to the freezer to get a frozen chicken out. I’d say there are levels of pain I haven’t experienced but I definitely cry at about level 6. The most pain I’ve ever experienced was, er hem, wind after a c section. Yes ladies, they don’t tell you about that. Sudden evil pain that makes you cry and apologise to everyone round you for the fact you’re rolling about about whispering swearwords under your breath – an 8 for that one. Gripe Juice fixes it in minutes.
So when I put my characters in pain, or danger, they tend to react the way I do. Because using my experience is the only way I can make it believable. But I’m not sure it would be believable to everyone, because we all react differently to peril and pain.
So far, though, through any amount of pain, my thoughts have always been clear. Likewise, in danger, though I may make the wrong call, I weigh up the situation before making a decision.
Likewise, in pain, I’ve always been able to think. Which means I probably haven’t experienced the heights of agony I might think.
To be honest, four out of five times in moments of peril I’ve had very clear concise thoughts. As usual, I was surprised after this morning, at how incredibly clear and fast my thoughts were. But also disappointed at how, if I’d just been that little bit smarter, I could have kept braking and turned the bike sideways, allowing the girl to move her car out round me. I think that in some ways, it’s rather harder to write dangerous situations realistically once you’ve been in some. Because the way they unfold is so different to the way you would expect. And I suppose that’s why you can only really make things in your plot work if you, yourself, can believe that they can. And I suppose that’s how so many of those mad 1960s shows like the Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and the like were so popular. Because while you have to have that grain of truth upon which to hang it all, it’s that writing with conviction, rather than what actually happens in real life, which allows us to suspend disbelief.
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and have a bit of a lie down.
Filed under General Wittering
Women writing sci-fi? Disgraceful!
OK, a controversial one today. I’m going to talk about Mad Americans.
Sorry my American friends but when your compatriots turn barking they really go for it, you guys do mad better than any nation on earth. Not even we British can touch you. And that’s saying something.
Have you heard the latest? Science Fiction Writers of America, an organisation which, by all accounts, makes… well… even Republicans look open-minded has been in the news this week. Some of its members have expressed a view that women shouldn’t write sci-fi. This is, apparently, because they think that too many of the Sci-fi novels written by women have – gasp – romance in them! Mwah ha hahargh. I do ‘get’ that, I loathe and detest sparkly vampires but they’re just a trend, a fad and they’ll go away. They’re not caused by women! However, members of the SFWA are putting forward women sce-fi writers as the reason for this. Are you hearing a teeny bit of Sheldon Cooper on this one? Are you?
So, that’s the basic gist. Because of a passing trend for intergalactic bonk busters and the odd instance of characters falling in love in recent sci-fi, the SFWA has decided this:
Women authors = too much coitus. Phnark.
Well, they didn’t decide the ‘phnark’ bit I said that.
Well of course! That’s it, it’s our fault because we all know that Sci-fi, like D.I.Y. is serious hard-core man work that should not be attempted by women. Snortle!
Well, I got most of my info from Cora Buhlert’s excellent blog here. One of the articles she links to is a cracker here. I can recommend checking this site, it features sci-fi stories from around the world, properly around the world. It’s interesting, definitely worth a look.
To be honest, would anyone outside the United States see SFWA as the flagship organisation of the sci-fi genre? In Britain, perhaps, although I wouldn’t but then, I think that the ‘special relationship’ was made up by Winston Churchill to salvage some semblance of dignity after Yalta. History is always skewed by the perspective of those who write it; he wrote it, after everyone else was dead. But other English speakers/readers? I don’t know. The SFWA speaks for Americans, which is great but that’s not the English-speaking planet. From outside the US we foreigners can get the impression that, to an awful lot of Americans, their country IS the world which is fine so long as they don’t treat us as if, by being beyond their receptive parameters, we have no right to exist.
However, the thing that strikes me most forcefully about all of this is that if the SFWA wasn’t an American organisation, there probably wouldn’t even be a debate raging at all. How can a country be so forward and yet so backward at the same time? How do the nutter Americans get so het up and more to the point make so much noise? Zero tolerance or what? Some parts of the States must be stifling to live in. Check this! Mwah ha ha hargh, it’s absolutely hilarious but the sad thing is, it’s real. Do they not see the comedy in what they’re saying? Who stole their sense of humour, their sense of fair play? Then again, I’m British when we go to ‘protest’ on racial or religious grounds this happens http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/may/27/york-mosque-protest-tea-biscuits
See? Muslims aren’t bad people even if some bad people happen to be Musilms.
Sorry, tangent there. What I’m saying is that more and more people are learning to speak English every day. Right now the US represents just under half the English speakers on this planet – but that’s in countries where English is the national language, totted up by me looking at the population figures. It doesn’t count the people in other nations, where English is not the national language, but lots of people speak and read it. So the US is the noisiest market and it’s the biggest single market but it probably represents a lot less than half the population reading in English.
This also raises a broader question: What choice for a non American sci-fi author? You can address the US market, but it’s pretty conservative so you need to tailor your books specifically and then they may not fit so well elsewhere. You may well need to spell your book in American, write about American people and use American settings. If you’re writing sci-fi your protagonists, if they originate from Earth, will have to be very American in their outlook and culture, no-one will ever be allowed to wear a jumper or a jersey, the word will always have to be ‘sweater’. No-one will be allowed to use the interesting swear words because the Americans only know two; all in all, a bit dull.
Alternatively, you can write in your own voice, accept that the scary Americans won’t listen – but do you want them to anyway – welcome those who do, and speak to the other English-speakers of the world; Africa, Australasia and Eurasia. Places where there are millions of people who are willing and far more readily able to enjoy a story written from a differing cultural viewpoint. People who see English as a global language so understand that a faucet and a tap are the same thing. Also, BONUS, these are emerging economies where people have money to spend on books, unlike the US whose economy looks, from the outside, as if it’s almost as far down the lavatory (or the John) as ours.
I loved the quote from the South African writer along the lines of why would I join the Science Fiction Writers of America, it has nothing to do with me? Do you think the worm might finally be turning? It really is time organisations like the SFWA and more broadly, certain sectors of the US began to try and understand other cultures – and more importantly were educated to do so – the way we understand theirs.
Could it be that, if the SFWA becomes more of an anachronism, and remains US-centric, it will come to realise that it is only the representative organisation of bigoted, male American sci-fi writers? It could be a world player but not without a change of attitude. Otherwise, it will be marginalised as the rest of us get bored of doing everything a certain way ‘so the Americans can understand it’ and another more outward-looking, inclusive organisation will step up and become the world ‘voice’ of the genre.
Homework: Read that ‘vox popoli’ post again and try and list the differences in attitude between that and the comedy skit shown below.
Answer: There are no differences.
Filed under e-publishing, General Wittering
Bargain Boost!
Just a quickie to thank the lovely people at http://www.indie-book-bargains.co.uk/ who have named me Author of the Day today! Oh yes! I am very excited. I know it’s late on but if you get a chance, whizz over there and have a look at the site, not because I’m the author of the day but because there’s all sorts of interesting stuff on there, and some good books too!
I particularly like the bit which says, “Get an e-mail every time M T McGuire releases a new book.” Mwah ha hargh. I’m not going to be cluttering up anybody’s in box. If you want to collect really and I mean really rare spam, from me, just click on that box.
Filed under General Wittering
M T McGuire Authorholic 