Kit Whitfield's Blog

So sharp you'll cut yourself

2008-08-26T15:11:00.001Z

There is a problem that besets nervous and clever young writers, which tends to be more observable by their readers or audiences than by themselves: to wit, undermining themselves.

By 'undermining', I don't mean things like getting drunk when they should be writing, or insulting the person who offered to help read their first draft. Some people do that, no doubt, but there's another issue: writing into the structure of your play or novel the suggestion that you're just kidding, that even the characters don't take the situation seriously, and that it's all a game anyway. So, by implication, if the writing isn't any good, don't judge the author: they were only kidding.

Part of this is cultural hangover. The twentieth century having been full of clever literary bods, irony has been the name of the game. When I was an undergraduate I was the artistic end of a theatre committee, and me and my committee friends vetted applications to fund about a dozen different plays every term - of which we could afford to back about two or three. Approxmimately half of these plays promised to 'challenge the audience's preconceptions'; possibly more than half. A statistical survey would suggest that the audience's preconceptions were likely to be pretty battered things, and probably quite hard to shock, but that was what most hopeful directors considered the thing to do. They couldn't seem to keep their hands off the audience's preconceptions; tickling their funny bones or touching their hearts, or just putting on a play that they'd actually enjoy, somehow featured lower on the priority list. (Any director who promised to do that immediately doubled their chances of getting our money.) But the desire to challenge the audience was even greater when the play submitted was written by one of the students; it was there I noticed something that I've seen subsequently in novel-writing.

You want to write something; well and good. This is a nerve-wracking position to be in. You're going to try your best, but, well, it's possible people won't like what you write. Maybe you're not clever enough. So what a lot of inexperienced writers do is try to dazzle with as much cleverness as possible. Look, here are literary references! Look, here's a nod to the audience's presence! Look, I'm subverting your expectations of what literature should be!

Now, cleverness is all very well, but there comes a point where almost all the writer's intelligence is being directed into evasive action. When a piece of work involves a lot of flash and dazzle, but no sincere moments, little feeling for the characters, no willingness to commit to a storyline and see it through rather than playfully overturning every situation you set up and then taking a bow, what you're looking at is a frightened author. Trying to write a proper story, sustained with nothing but characters and situations that you've thought up for yourself, is an unnerving process. Particularly for young writers who've been educated in the tricks and tropes of the modern classics, little games to direct attention away from the story feel a lot easier: the hope is that the audience will come away filled with admiration for the writer's cleverness and making no judgements on the actual meat of the story, which was, after all, just a joke.

This isn't just a twentieth-century fashion, though. Attempts at dazzle are a fairly universal technique; most of Jane Austen's juvenilia, for instance, was parody of one kind or another. But they are, in essence, the diversionary tactics of an anxious author who's afraid that you'll laugh at their work if they don't laugh first.

Anyone feeling tempted to do this, take a deep breath. Writing is always scary, but you're going to have to stand to your work some time. If you mock your own scenario to pieces, there'll be nothing left; if you undermine your whole work, it'll collapse and you'll be ankle-deep in rubble. Better to keep early drafts private until you feel more confident. Endless quips at the expense of your own work is simply firing the first shot at yourself. Writing is always an attempt to seduce an audience, and for that, you need some kind of pitch, rather than undercutting your every previous remark until they have no idea what you're trying to say. Be brave!

Mikalogue at home

2008-08-20T09:51:00.004Z

Mika: Hellooo!!!

Guest: Agh!

Kit: What's the matter?

Guest: Oh, nothing, nothing. Um ... your cat just jumped up and it kind of startled me.

Kit: Oh dear, are you uncomfortable with cats?

Guest: Er - yes, just a bit.

Mika: Wanna be friends? Let us sniff each other.

Kit: Mika honey, come over here and stop bothering the nice guest.

Mika: But is interestin. New person. Have to get acquainted!

Kit: Okay, I'm scooping you up.

Mika: You is distractin Mika! Put down!

Kit: Look, a catnip toy! Sorry, she's just kind of curious.

Mika: Ooh, catnip! Kickity kickity kick! Groovy.

Guest: That's okay. It's just ... well, cats move kind of suddenly, don't they? I mean, one minute they're on the other side of the room, and them boom, there they are on the arm of your - aaagh!

Mika: Hellooo! Mika is back. Let us resume our acquaintance.

Kit: Would you like me to lock her in another room?

Guest: ... Er ...

Kit: Come on, Mika sweetie, it's kitchen time.

Mika: Nooo! Nooo! Open dooor! Thought you loooved! Let oooout!

Guest: I'm sorry about this.

Kit: No, it's okay. I'll fuss her more when you've gone.

Mika: Woooe!!! Is prisoner!

Kit: Life can be a serious of conflicting demands...

Mikalogue: A New Business Idea

2008-08-13T06:59:00.006Z

Mika: Ommmm...

Kit: Don't you mean 'prr', sweetie?

Mika: No. Is practisin.

Kit: What for, honey?

Mika: Ommm - is refinin technique.

Kit: You're kneading me like a nice girl, aren't you?

Mika: This not kneadin. Mika is studyin shiatsu.

Kit: You're massaging me?

Mika: Yep. Has money-makin scheme for office cats. We is natural masseurs. All cats knead with skill. Is gap in market. We starts stable of cats to go round offices an massage all the tense execs. Can make a fortune!

Kit: You think?

Mika: Oh yes. We starts with high-profit City firms. Must all be tense there, havin no cats.

Kit: Couldn't you stick to ones with ethical profiles?

Mika: Mean less money?

Kit: Yes, but better karma. That would be good for your shiatsu, I think. And ethical firms are a growth industry.

Mika: If we goes with firms you wants, you gets a smaller cut.

Kit: Oh, am I included in this business?

Mika: Course. You does paperwork. Paper really for chewin, but Mika's accountant has all sorts of different ideas.

Kit: Well, that's very nice of you to include me, sweetheart.

Mika: You has always been Mika's employee. We is just diversifyin. Now shh, this massage take concentration.

Writing against your orientation Part 2

2008-08-08T07:16:00.003Z

Donalbain asks in response to the post below about writing a character whose sexual tastes differ from your own:

have you ever written of m/m couplings? How did you find that? My imaginings would be that it would be easier to write a gay relationship where the partners were the same gender as the writer, than if they were the other gender. Especially when it comes to the sex scenes..

It's a good question. And I think I'm inclined to agree.

As yet, I haven't written a gay male protagonist; I may at some future date if it seems likely to improve a plot, but it's something I'd definitely consider a challenge. Writing against your orientation demands some imaginative projection; so does writing a character the opposite sex from you. For me, a gay hero would be conflating the two.

In fact, I'd consider male-male the biggest challenge of all, because it's the one I have absolutely no experience of. I know what it's like to be a woman feeling desire, which I can translate into desire for a woman. I know what it's like to be a woman desired by a man - in the book that comes out next year, for instance, there are a few moments when my male lead feels a confused sense of attraction towards a woman, so what I basically did was considered situations where I'd been around a man confusedly coming on to me, thought about how he acted, and tried to put a sympathetic interpretation on his behaviour.

Furthermore, I have a motivation when picturing male-to-female desire: it's something I have intensely wished for every time I found myself desiring a man. Even if I haven't experienced it, I've spent a lot of effort trying to generate it, and observing closely to see whether I've succeeded or not. Consequently, the symptoms of its presence or absence are familiar to me. I have an investment in male-to-female desire.

But desiring a man in a male way? That's a situation I've never participated in except as a bystander. And a more or less disinterested bystander at that: unlike the 'does he fancy me?' situation, whether or not one man fancies another is really not my business. My observation is correspondingly less personal; I'd like to think that every gay man found the fella of his dreams, but that's because I'd like as many people as possible to be happy. It's a pretty broad wish, and not one given to intimate observation. You simply never ask yourself if someone fancies your friend as passionately as you wonder whether someone fancies you. To write a male-male romance scene, I'd probably have to use an invisible woman somewhere.

The trouble is, the invisible woman would run into difficulties. On the face of it, that perhaps shouldn't be the case. After all, gay men and I have something in common: we fancy men. In theory, that should suggest that it's actually easier for me to write a gay man than a straight one; at least he'd be attracted to the same sort of people. I'd just have to put the invisible woman in the position of desiring protagonist, then lift her out again.

But actually, no. For one thing, you'd expect a gay man to be attracted to other gay men, and while there's no one physical or gestural type for 'gay', the overt mannerisms and fashions of gay subculture send out a signal that says to me, 'Not an option', which is something of a turn-off. Working out what it would be like to be attracted to them would take a lot of thought. Of course, plenty of gay men don't have big signifiers reading 'I Like Men!' all over them, and it would be easier to write being attracted to someone like that, but still, it would be a factor to consider, and I'd expect to do some research, as well as running it past an actual gay man to check I sounded convincing.

But, most crucially, there's also the question of different gazes. Reflecting on the last post, I recalled Alison Bechdel (author of Fun Home and Dykes To Watch Out For, highly recommended) remarking that 'woman as fetish', ie sexual features grotequely exaggerated, was a common cartooning style - so common that it's easy to overlook. She remarked that a character in Poppers by Jerry Mills was the gay male equivalent, a male body caricatured with biceps and pecs to impossible proportions. That sounded like a useful reference, so, thinking of mentioning it here, I did an internet search for further images that turned up nothing. When I tried 'gay comics' on Google Images, I struck something else (apart from horrifying numbers of Simpsons characters playing hide-the-sausage, images I'm trying to forget as soon as possible): lots of images of attractive men, drawn by men for men, that had a completely different feel from how attractive men look in my eyes. (You can repeat the search, but all of it's not worksafe, so I won't link here.)

There's something different about the male and female sexual gaze. Looking at a man through male 'eyes' is not the same. It's notable, for instance, how different films made by men and women are. Consider Point Break by Kathryn Bigelow, a film thronged with fit, half-naked actors, and compare it with Wild Things, directed by John McNaughton. (I was hoping to find an example of male-on-male gaze to compare to Bigelow's female-on-male, but, frustratingly, YouTube has failed to supply any of the examples I could think of, so bear with me. Or if you can think of examples, point them out.) McNaughton's cinematography lingers on the actresses in a familiar way: lots of shots of pretty bottoms and thighs, the camera's gaze often zooming slowly up the body, taking it all in, a piece at a time. This is a shorthand we all understand: the camera is leching at the girls. (Entirely appropriately for the mood and theme of the film; I'm not suggesting that McNaughton is necessarily a lech.)

But there's a lot of pleasure taken in the handsome actors of Bigelow's film too. It's just taken in a way that feels, at least from my own experience, distinctively feminine. Rather than pausing on the biceps, stopping to check out the pecs, moving down to the thighs, Bigelow favours shots from the middle-distance, in which we see the actor's whole body, or body from the waist up. The camera is generally still; rather than moving up and down the actors, the actors move within a poised frame. Birdwatching refers to the 'GISS' or 'giss' of a bird, which I believe is an acronym for 'general impression size and shape': the sense of a bird's bird-ness that enables you to identify it at a glance. Bigelow's camera is enjoying the beauty of the actors, but is taking satisfaction their giss.

And that feels feminine. At least in my experience, what I find attractive in a man has much more to do with giss than specifics. Things like the set of the shoulders, posture, movement, harmonious body line, can be very attractive - but you have to see the whole body to see how they work. This isn't necessarily any less 'objectifying' than the male gaze: enjoying how a man moves does not necessarily mean you're interested in his personality. It is, rather, a different way of enjoying a beautiful object: standing back to admire, rather than going in with a magnifying glass. On purely anecdotal evidence, I think it's significant that Point Break is the only movie I've seen that made me find Keanu Reeves or Patrick Swayze attractive: seeing them through female eyes made them look a whole lot better. But if Bigelow's camera had zoomed in like McNaughton's, the whole film would have had a different feel: it would have felt like the work of a gay man.

Lingering, up-and-down, sexual-feature-specific camerawork, in short, feels closer to the male sexual gaze than the female. I suspect this is a major reason why 300 looked so gay: its exaggeration of the actors' six-packs was the CI equivalent of giving an actress a boob job (feature-specific), while its half-naked actors were repeatedly filmed in slow motion (lingering up-and-down gazes). Everyone recognised the conventions of the male desire lens, and being directed towards male actors, it was hard to draw a hetero conclusion.

I'm wildly generalising here, so any gay man, straight woman or vice versa is welcome to post and disagree. There are plenty of exceptions; Craig Thompson's beautiful graphic novel Blankets, for instance, draws his beloved with a tender, sensual delight in the line of her whole body, and that's undoubtedly a male gaze. I'm mostly talking about my own overall impressions. But, of course, those are all I have to go on when writing fiction. Mostly, this is a roundabout way of saying that yes, I'd consider writing a gay woman easier than writing a gay man, because it's closer to my own experience...

On a different note, as the comments on the previous article were interesting but it's buried in what's-your-name posts, Anon commented:

I've heard a couple of lesbian writers saying that they have difficulty writing sex scenes with women in because it feels a bit too close to home. But if it's a man-on-man scene, they can let their imaginations run wild without feeling overly exposed.

I don't know if those writers are professionals or not - for all I know, they may be bestselling and brilliant - but it's my belief that you have to expose yourself if you're going to write well. I'm not exactly comfortable with my family reading my sex scenes - they read the stuff I write after it's published, and we have a don't-ask-don't-tell custom - but any kind of honest writing is putting yourself out there. To me, it feels just as exposing to write female-female sex as to write female-male, and no more exposing than to write a description of riding the bus. Any piece of writing exposes how you think, how you see, who you are, just as much as any other piece. It's all looking at the world through your own eyes, even if you've put on character-tinted spectacles. If you're trying to hide behind your writing, your priorities will be concealment rather than honesty, and you won't be writing your best. You gotta be brave about this stuff.

Putting together acknowledgements

2008-08-06T16:24:00.002Z

... and here's the list of everyone who contributed to the discussion.

Naomi, Donalbain, Jane Draycott, Wolfa, Ursula L, Jos, Cowboy Diva, Robb, Joolya, Christopher Subich, Hapax, Linda Coleman, Practicallyevil, Wesley Parish, Margaret Yang, Sunlizzard, Lauren, Ecks, Michael Mock, Sheila O’Shea, Alfgifu, and everyone who falls into the category of Anonymous.

As the book has to be in by Friday, if I've missed you, misspelled you or misrepresented you, now's the time to speak up; otherwise, this is the list as it'll stand.

So, if you want something changed or I've overlooked you, e-mail kitwhitfield@hotmail.com and I'll revise it. (Or post your complaint here, of course.)

Signing off, now on to other matters...

2008-08-04T09:59:00.003Z

Okay, I'm now taking the book to the publishers. Thanks to everyone who's participated. A few points, just so nobody's too surprised when it comes out:

1. The book is alternate history; its relationship to real history diverges during the ninth century, and the butterfly effect being what it is, that changes everything. A search for real historical figures or events will prove fruitless. I've followed the line of history as it seems plausible to me; hopefully you'll like what I've done with it.

2. However, history is a backdrop here; the structure is primarily focused around the adventures of two central characters, neither of whom you've met in the little precis I gave. Scholars looking for massive amounts of detail, I fear, may not find it, as my primarly interest was in the characters and too much info-cramming would have disrupted it. Hopefully you'll still find the story entertaining.

3. The mermaid-deepsmen, as I've presented them, are conceived with very little reference to folklore or tradition. Instead, I started from scratch, asking myself what people living in the sea would be like. My research materials tended more to nature documentaries and studies of feral children than to fairytales.

4. In all cases, if it's not what you would have done, by all means amuse yourself picturing an alternative, but let's agree here and now that you won't get mad at me if my idea of what's likely differs from yours.

5. A lot of the major issues raised were already addressed in the book; others were useful. For the sake of enjoyment, I'd advise against playing spot-the-editing when you read it; the odds of guessing right don't seem to me worth the disruption it would cause to the flow of the story. I'm not going to answer questions on that score when the book comes out, in any case, as I think it's liable to fragment the reading experience.

6. I'll be thanking everyone who contributed in the acknowledgements. If you want to be thanked by name, let me know your real name as well as the internet handle you used, otherwise I'll use the handle.

Writing against your orientation

2008-08-04T09:07:00.003Z

This is something I've been reflecting on quite a lot lately: the issue of writing a character whose sexual orientation is different from yours. It's surprising what it shows up.

The issue is simple, at root: it's much easier to write a character who shares your sexual preferences. I was reflecting on this while flipping through a book by an author who shall remain nameless out of good manners, as I believe s/he is married - but reading the book, I felt rather sorry for their spouse. Their ability to picture opposite-sex attraction was pretty weak, but the emotions between characters of the same sex, nominally friends, were vivid, yearning, fraught with physical details, romantic. This is purely speculation on my part, but one thing was unquestionable: the author was finding it much easier to identify with same-sex longings than with opposite-sex ones. There are a number of possible explanations, but Occam's Razor suggests that the author is gay but in the closet, perhaps even to themself. People in that kind of situation are the reason we need greater societal tolerance as fast as possible, because someone who feels that way being married to an opposite-sex spouse is probably finding and giving less satisfaction than everybody deserves.

But on literary terms, it got me thinking. The narrator of my current novel is bisexual tending towards gay. She got that way by an organic rather than a planned process: the book had been chugging along, not particularly considering her sexuality one way or the other, then a female character turned up, and the way my heroine described her made me think, 'Hm, that sounds like she's attracted to her.' This gave me two options: rewrite, or go with it. Her orientation had become an issue, and I had to make a decision. So I thought about it, and decided, in effect, 'Why not make her gay? Lots of people are.' Hence, I rewrote the scene again, drawing the attraction out, and a few weeks down the line, was writing my first ever lesbian sex scene.

And it's an intriguing process. I'm realising several things.

First, while my heroine, Rose by name, is not defined in my mind as A Big Girl-Fancying Lesbian - that is, her sexuality is not her primary trait, it's a detail rather than the key to her character - I swing back and forth on wondering how important it'll seem to readers. To me, as I said, it's one among many character notes; of all the gay women I know, the fact that they prefer skirt to trouser is seldom the most interesting thing about them or their main topic of conversation, so writing Rose's love life, my aim was to express the ordinariness of homosexuality rather than to let it overwhelm her presentation. She has a girlfriend rather than a boyfriend; big deal. But there are days when I wonder, should the book sell (fingers crossed), whether at least some people will be distracted from the actual plot into seeing it as A Book About Lesbians. I hope not, but time will have to tell on that score.

But all these speculations are bringing home to me how heteronormative a culture we still inhabit. If I'd introduced a boyfriend rather than a girlfriend, I doubt anybody would have blinked - even though I would have chosen the character's sexual orientation every bit as much as I chose it when I made her gay.

Second, it can require some considerable contortions to get yourself into that mindset. Nameless Author is a case in point: write attractions you feel, and you flow easily, instinctively; write attractions you don't, and the instincts aren't there. I was running some scenes past a friend of mine over the weekend (scenes that involve sexual thoughts or activity, this friend being an actual lesbian and thus more likely to spot clangers than me), and the conversation threw up some interesting things. She commented, to my gratification, that the scenes reminded her of some book she couldn't remember the title of, but as it was by a lesbian author, published for a lesbian audience by a lesbian press, and about, you've guessed it, lesbians, I assumed that meant the writing was reasonably convincing. But I'd had to do quite a lot of work to get there. And to do that work, I'd had to invent a new techinque: basically, I'd had to use an invisible man.

It went like this. Being fairly chronically heterosexual, I find the idea of being attracted to a woman a pretty abstract one. I can get my head around the fact that some people do, I can recognise that some women are pretty, but that's all in my head; if I ask myself 'Would I like to nibble that pretty woman?', the answer is a resounding No.

But attraction is physical: abstraction doesn't cut it. To write something well, you have to be able to empathise, and the easiest way to empathise is to reflect on how you'd feel in that circumstance. But the circumstances, ie in bed with another woman, hold no appeal for me, no matter how much they appeal to my heroine. She and I are simply at odds there, and it's a problem to solve. There are two options: basically, you can picture it as A Gay Attraction, which will run into problems if that's something you've never felt, or, more effectively, you can picture it as being attracted to someone. Being attracted to someone, I can picture pretty easily. It's just that there's always a man in there somewhere.

So what I had to do was translate. As E.M. Forster says in Maurice, describing his gay character trying to understand things, 'So much in current speech and ideas needed translation before he could understand it.' There were two techniques I could use, either of them effective in their way. One, when Rose crushed on her girlfriend, I could picture looking at a man, consider what that feels like, and then translate 'Mm, wide shoulders ... deep voice ... muscular forearms...' into 'Mm, narrow waist ... soft skin ... dainty wrists...' - that is, to picture crushing on features that I find attractive, ie masculine ones, then consider what features are particularly feminine and apply the emotions of 'crush' to those. I used an invisible man, in fact, to play the observed, and then shrank him down, smoothed off his skin, added some breasts and then, at the last minute, whipped him out of the picture and substituted Rose's girlfriend. (He was a little confused for a while, but he's recovering nicely in the back clinic of my imagination, thanks for asking.) The second option was to put the man in the position of observer, and ask myself, 'If I really fancied a man, how would I want him to look at me? What would I want him to feel when he saw me?'

Interestingly, my fiance was in the room as we discussed this and listening to the passages; he remarked that my invisble man sounded fairly feminine to him. The descriptions of Rose's girlfriend, he reckoned, might be plausible coming from a man who's looking at a woman he deeply loves or has a major infatuation with, but ordinary male attraction isn't quite that caught up in the fine details, like the colour of hair on someone's arms, or exactly how they turn their ankles. This was convenient enough - my heroine is a woman, after all, so having her look at a woman with feminine desire was exactly what I was aiming for - but I wasn't entirely surprised. I'd spent a bit of time in the previous book describing a man being attracted to a woman, and the writing had been more stark, more straightforward. That hadn't been too hard to write either; there was a man in there somewhere. It's just when there's no men there at all that my imagination starts to cast around.

I think it's this that contributes to heteronormative assumptions, actually: when you imagine desire, it always looks like your own, and if other people's desires aren't very visible, it's easy to forget they exist.

Has anyone else had this experience? Do you have other methods for dealing with it?

Polls closing!

2008-08-01T09:22:00.001Z

My goodness, you're all well-informed people! Thanks to everyone who's taken the time and effort to make suggestions, and to share the treasures of their knowledge with me - my editor called me up to exclaim, she was so impressed with the quality of comments. So everyone take a moment to bask in the glory of your own intelligence and erudition.

As I'm now looking at a rapidly-approaching deadline, and nothing's more frustrating than either making or reading a point that it's too late to address, I'm going to close down the enquiry at midnight today - that's midnight my time, ie London. Any final thoughts, bung 'em my way; after that, we'll move on to other things.

Get your editing hats on!

2008-07-25T10:45:00.001Z

Okay, here's the thing. I'm currently editing my second book, and I'd like to ask you all to help.

The book has a fantastical premise, and what I've learned is that, if you make one of those up, people tend to start joining in. They say, 'But what if this? What about when that happens?' And, the quirks of people's brains being an almost limitless resource and me being only one person, chances are there's a limit to how many of these questions I'll anticipate. Obviously, the more I anticipate now, the better, because by the time the book's printed and on the shelves, and somebody comes along and says, 'But hang on, what about such-and-such?', it's too late to do anything about it.

So, I'm going to tell you the premise of the book, and I want you to quibble with it. Ask me what happens under any circumstances. Point out inconsistencies. Spot potential problems. Weigh in. Get creative. Pick nits. There are no quibbles too stupid, no questions too small. Let's play.

I'll then review all your points as I'm going through the redraft, and hopefully turn out a book at the other end that answers all these questions, or at least, all the ones I can reasonably address.

------------------

Here are the ground rules, including a few legal disclaimers, as I'm sure most of you are normal nice people but you never know when the odd unreasonable bod is going to crop up.

1. I'm not gonna answer the questions on the website; if you want to know the answers, you'll have to buy the book.

2. I may not address everything; if it seems like the disruption to the book outweighs the benefits of answering the benefits of answering a question, I may regretfully have to ignore it. Don't take this personally.

3. I'll deal with your questions as I see fit; if you don't like my solutions, sorry, but that's my call.

4. The book remains entirely my copyright and intellectual property. If you make a suggestion and I am inspired by it or include it any way, that in no way entitles you to any right/s in the book, any right to control what's done with your suggestion, or any money made by me or my publishers or licensees in relation to the book at any point.

5. The copyright in the book remains mine. If the questions get you thinking and you feel the urge to write something of your own inspired by this, knock yourself out, but there's a difference between influence and plagiarism, and the latter is not okay.

6. By posting on this site, you irrevocably agree to these above conditions.

(Hopefully none of this really needs saying, but just in case anyone feels litigious later, it's best to clarify everything now.)

------------------

So, having got that out of the way, here's the premise:

In the ninth century, the deepsmen invaded the canals of Venice and laid siege to the city. Out of the water walked Angelica, half-landsman, half-deepsman, a two-tailed woman capable of walking on the land and swimming in the sea, and speaking the languages of both peoples. Angelica brokered a peace and forged an alliance between the landsmen and the deepsmen, and made Venice so strong that, centuries later, any nation with a sea border and a navy still needs for its ruler one of Angelica's descendants: a hybrid king, able to communicate both with the people of the sea and the land. Without them, no nation can protect its navy, and becomes too vulnerable to invasion by sea.

The penalties for any landsman who breeds with a deepswoman are severe, and any 'bastard' child found - any hybrid not directly descended from the princes - is destroyed by the state. Having a king's body but not a king's family, bastards pose too strong a threat to the succession: bastards in the past have raised armies and usurped kings. But now the royal house of England is failing, weakened desperately by inbreeding, and when a bastard boy is abandoned on an English shore and taken in by landsman, a secret conflict begins...

So, what are the problems with that premise? Come one, hit me.

Moral majority my foot

2008-07-23T10:05:00.001Z

It's something that's been pointed out repeatedly: preachers, politicians and those who make a living out of criticising other people's behaviour seem to abide by a rule of thumb - the louder they shout about how SINFUL something is, the more likely they are to get caught doing it. Homophobic preachers turn out to be gay. Pro-family politicians get caught cheating on their wives. Old Fashioned Values types get caught molesting the ducks in their village pond. Okay, I made that last one up, but the others are fairly common.

What's going on here? The theory I've seen most argued is sexual guilt; here are two particularly good articles arguing the case. The theory is this: plagued by an inner demon, people start shouting about how it possesses everybody else, to compensate for their guilt, and because they assume that everybody else is as guilty as they.

It's an entirely convincing theory, and I'm sure accounts for a lot of it. But, just to add to the speculation, there's something else that I haven't heard mentioned: familiarity.

My theory is this: we tend to base our understanding of human behaviour on our own experience, whether we feel guilty about it or not. The people ranting about activities they indulge in may partly be compensating - that is, the guilt comes first, and then the ranting - but it might also go the other way around. Looking for something to rant about, they pick the first 'vice' that comes to their mind. And, human nature being what it is, that's very probably going to be their own. It's a malevolent manifestation of an ordinary mental process - but the process in itself need not be malevolent.

Let's posit a perfectly ordinary, nice guy who happens to have a taste for, say, girls tied up and blindfolded with white silk scarves; we'll call him Jack. Now, Jack has no particular sexual guilt; there are things he likes and things he doesn't. He's heard of golden showers and spanking and ponyplay, but none of them float his boat - but there's something about that be-scarfed image that really does it for him. Some of his girlfriends have refused, or tried it once and decided they don't like it; others have been into it; he finally found a girl, let's call her Jill, who loved scarf-play and was also fun to be around and cooked fantastic pancakes. (I'd like my imaginary people to be happy, since they're trying to prove my point.) So Jack and Jill have a variety of sex, and at the kinky end of their repertoire, the silk scarves await.

Jack's sister, Mary, has a fetish of her own: she really likes nipple clamps. Her first boyfriend fled in horror at the thought, which made her feel pretty bad about herself, but lately she's taken up with Michael, who can't believe his luck at finding a girl who's willing, nay eager, to engage in something his previous girlfriends always refused point-blank to consider. Mary and Michael have their vanilla side as well, but when they're feeling kinky, out come the clamps.

One Friday night, all four of them are together at a family dinner. In passing, somebody at the table mentions kinky sex. None of the diners sit up and say, 'Oh yes, do you know what my favourite kink is?', because Auntie Susan's present and they don't want to shock her (unaware that ole Susie has a thing for dressing up as a naughty nurse who the kind-but-firm doctor just has to take in hand) - but in the privacy of their own minds, all of them think, 'Oh yes, kinky sex. That can be fun.'

But Jack's thinking, 'Kinky sex, that's right, that's bondage games and artistic poses.' Mary is thinking, 'Ah yes, kinky sex: masochism and sensation play.' Michael's thinking: 'Kinky sex, that means getting to enjoy your sadistic side in a consensual setting.' Jill's thinking, 'Kinky sex, oh the thrill of helplessness.' Susie and Uncle Henry, the lucky dog, are thinking, 'Ah yes, role play; those youngsters aren't as hip and revolutionary as they think.'

The thing is, these couples are picturing completely different acts, and within those couples, the understanding of them is different. Mary's heard of silk scarves and Jack's heard of nipple clamps, but those are not the images that leap to their minds. Because when they hear the word 'kinky', they're thinking of non-mainstream, somewhat naughty sex - and exactly what that means to them is based on individual preference.

Now, my imaginary couples are all well-adjusted people who think sex is for fun, so they don't cringe when someone mentions the word 'kinky', they just twinkle at their beloveds when they think no one is looking. But let's consider the case of Ezekiel.

Not unlike Jack, Zeke is a nice guy who would really love to see a beautiful woman bound and gagged - but unfortunately for Zeke, he grew up in an environnment where the common word wasn't 'kinky', it was 'immoral'. Or 'disgusting'. Or 'perverted'. Zeke's never dared suggest to any of his girlfriends that he's heard of this really interesting-sounding game that some people like to play; it's stuck in his fantasy life, and while he feels pretty bad about himself, and sure that everyone else is more normal than him, the image keeps returning to his mind. Zeke, living in a culture where sex is considered immoral and non-standard sex particularly immoral, also has a more limited range of information than Jack and Michael. The stuff he'd like to do leaps out at him every time he sees a suggestive-looking advert, but he was never allowed dirty books, his mates' locker-room talk is limited because they're all as short of information as him - or as frightened of being judged - and anything kinky is very much What Other People Do.

So, say to Zeke 'sexual immorality', and what happens? His mind leaps to the kind of 'immorality' with which he's most familiar: his own secret desires. Ask Zeke to talk about immorality, and he'll talk about those terrible men who want to degrade and exploit women.

His pal Jacob, on the other hand, is gay, but he can't tell anyone that. Poor Jacob struggles desperately not to look at the handsome men on the street, to keep his eyes off the Calvin Klein billboards, but however hard he tries, he can't stop wanting men. Ask Jacob to talk about immorality, and what 'immorality' is weighing most heavily on his mind? Homosexuals.

Like Jack and Michael, Zeke and Jacob will know that there's more than one kind of non-traditional sex, but each of them spends more time thinking of a particular variety than of any other kind. Zeke thinks that gay people are peculiar, because he has no idea he spends every Friday night out bowling with one; Jacob thinks bondage fetishists must be weird control freaks, because he never realised his easy-going buddy has leanings that way. And, thinking that such tastes are weird, they assume, on some level, that very few people must really be into them - too few to start getting worked up about. But their taste, oh my - that's a life-ruining thing! (Because, of course, it is messing up their lives to feel so bad about themselves.) That's serious business! When their pastor talks about how sexual sin can destroy marriages and happiness, each of them, in his own different way, feels like he knows exactly what the pastor is talking about.

Part of this is guilt about their suppressed desires, but there's also just the fact of familiarity. Say the word 'cat' to me and I picture my own cat. Say the word 'home' and I picture my own house. Say the word 'sin' and I picture my own vices. That's how people work. Our mental images are based on what we've experienced - even if, as with Jacob and Zeke, we've experienced it only in longings and fantasies.

Now, if Jacob and Zeke are lucky, they'll find someone who's right for them and achieve some peace with themselves. Maybe they'll have to move to Brighton or San Francisco to do it, but it could happen, and under those circumstances, they may calm down. But it's also possible that they'll remain stuck in the value system that condemns them. At this point, they're at risk of a variety of bad things, depending on their temperaments. Let's say that Zeke is a get-along guy; chances are, he doesn't want to get into a fight with anyone, but he'll be tormented by sexual guilt, find it harder to be open with his wife, and feel lonely and bad. His self-esteem gets rubbed a little raw each day; so, probably, will hers, because her husband somehow doesn't seem happy with her, but won't say why. Depression, stress and marital unhappiness beckon.

Suppose, though, that Jacob is a little angrier than Zeke. Considering the life he's living, he's got reason to be angry. Frustration gets to him, and he's an assertive guy, never one to take things lying down. In another place, he'd have made a terrific gay rights activist, but there's nowhere honest for his campaigning streak to go. If he's not careful, Jacob may find himself up on the podium inveighing against all those homosexuals, those degraded people who give in to desires he's fighting to keep at bay, who are having way more fun than him even though he's trying so much harder to be a good guy than they are ... Pain results for everyone, Jacob included.

But if the temperaments were reversed - if Jacob was the compliant man and Zeke forthright one - then we'd be seeing Jacob in the congregation listening sadly, while Zeke was up on the podium, castigating the degraded people who indulge in exploitative pornography.

The congregation's going to agree with either speech, so they may not think anything funny's going on. But, assuming they got to pick their own subject, it may be worth asking why they picked that one in particular.

If Jacob and Zeke are nice men, they may not want to spend their careers discussing how bad everyone else is. But if either of them is a really mean, aggressive guy who likes to scapegoat, we're in trouble. They've got their issue primed.

While someone yelling about a specific sexual 'vice' when they want to talk about sexual immorality in general is probably covering some guilt - if it's their particular kink and it's not allowed in their culture, they almost certainly do feel guilty - it's also likely to be the easiest 'vice' for them to picture. They've heard of exhibitionism and hot wax and cross-dressing, but because they don't see why anyone would find those exciting, the ideas haven't lingered in their mind very long, and may just not occur to them when they want to talk about temptation. Why would they? The ideas don't strike them as tempting, so classing them as 'temptations' takes an effort of imagination and empathy - and if you're the kind of person who likes to yell about how wicked everybody is, those are probably not the qualities you're leading with.

The basic point is this. Guilt is almost certainly present in people condemning vices they indulge in, but you don't have to feel guilty about a kink to have it be the first one that comes to your mind when you hear the word 'kink'. You just have to be interested in it. (Go on, what were you thinking of? Because I bet it's not the same thing next reader will picture.) Hypocrisy flourishes in environments where natural instincts are driven underground, but in this case, we could be looking at a particularly damaging expression of something we all feel, rather than a phenomenon unique to 'moral majority' types. People are often more similar than we think.

Where on earth can you get married like a sensible person?

2008-07-18T10:33:00.002Z

Okay, Londoners, I need help. I'm trying to plan a wedding and I'm up against the most horrifying industry I've ever encountered.

It sounds simple enough, right? We'd like to have a civil ceremony somewhere with friends and family present, then go somewhere else and eat. We'd also like not to have to spend many months' income on it. Those two things are astonishingly difficult to reconcile.

Not wanting to marry in a church, we started scoping other places that offer wedding services. Registry offices tend to be small, and while dire necessity may end up driving us to it, the idea of a two-tier guest list where only some people are allowed into the actual marriage ceremony seems against the whole spirit; a wedding is, after all, a community event. But everywhere else - everywhere that has a large room in a reasonably nice setting - has worked out that there's big, big money to be made in leasing it out, secure in the knowledge that we non-churchgoers are really pretty stuck if we don't find somewhere reasonably sized.

The going rate for a wedding and reception seems to start at about ten thousand pounds. That's the baseline rate. For Pete's sake.

It was when the locations we checked out revealed that they only worked with certain catering companies, and those catering companies starting recommending photographers, and marquee hire companies, and lighting technicians, and string quartets, that I got a full sense of what we were up against. I knew the wedding industry was vast and profitable, but I didn't realise the extent to which companies strike deals with each other. Once you engage with any part of it, you're taking on all of it. Every location has ironclad deals with other companies; you simply can't get married in location X, it seems, without signing up for overpriced canapes.

Even if you explain you're on a budget, there's a terrible sense of being railroaded. When the person you're talking to takes it for granted that you want a cake and canapes, it's quite hard to know where to start your explanation that really, you just want a nice, normal meal for a large group. When you explain that you don't feel the need for a formal photographer and your adviser starts recommending photographers who can do informal-looking shots, it feels ungracious to explain that what you meant was that pretty much everyone you know owns a camera and can work out how to use it. When someone starts talking about the champagne toast as if it were just as essential as signing the certificate, it feels positively thuggish to suggest that there's no law against toasting with whatever happens to be in your glass at the time. The wedding business depends on presenting as essentials stuff that you absolutely and truly don't need. I don't know whether any businesses use the word 'essentializing', but that's what seems to be going on. And in locations that actually have a civil license, they're right: they don't let you hire the place without their particular caterers - and caterers charge you for hiring everything, from staff to spoons.

It's driving me crazy. I want to get married, but I'm feeling like a mark.

I've managed to circumnavigate the dress issue, to my relief, because the idea of a wedding dress shop sounds like an ordeal. The whole individual-attention, princess-for-a-day aspect of it makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not a princess, I'm a middle-class adult woman, and people will only treat me like a princess if I pay them large sums to do so. The whole point of royalty is that people bow and scrape at you for free while handing over their tax money; if you're paying for that kind of treatment, somebody's putting somebody on. And I don't enjoy buying clothes at the best of times: the thought of spending hours in some mirror-lined room surrounded by overpriced dresses while some fashionable woman hovers like a vulture, pretending to be my new best friend while separating me from my money ... It all sounds awful. I just don't wanna go there. Consequently, I picked up a skirt I loved in Camden Market and bought a basque off Ebay, all for about a fifteenth of what I'd be expected to spend in a dress shop, and I feel a sense of piratical glee at getting out of that one.

But the location is proving a nightmare. We need a registry office or licensed place that can accommodate eighty to a hundred people without charging two thousand quid (much easier if you get married in a church; personally I'd like to see a foundation for secular wedding locations; the faithful seem to have an unfair advantage), and a place where you can get fed - either a restaurant with a large private room, or a hall you can hire that doesn't insist on you hiring their own particular buddies to cater. I sort of found one of each, but they're prohibitively far apart; I need places within striking distance of each other. Anyone know anything? Anything at all? Please, please help me out.

Gardening Mikalogue

2008-07-17T18:14:00.001Z

Mika: Oh noes! End of the world as we know it! Has to climb tree!

Kit: Mika, sweetie, what's the matter?

Mika: Has to run across garden! Wait, maybe it be better up tree!

Kit: Mika, are you bothered by us digging up the garden?

Mika: Earth moves! Kit digs. Hey, diggin, there be a thought. Mika will dig hole and have a pee.

Kit: You know, sweetie, if you could just dig consistently, you could have that big bush up that's giving me such a backache.

Mika: Oh, a spade! What to do? Maybe run in this direction!

Kit: Honey, it's okay, you know, we're just relandscaping the garden. You kept falling into the pond and getting all stinky. Look, there's a picture of you above. We had to wash you in the sink, remember?

Mika: Mika is kind and forgiving. Had agreed not to mention that disagreeable incident.

Kit: Well, that's very lovely of you, darling.

Mika: Mika is kind and lovin. Oh look, a jumpin frog thing! Enjoy your last moments, froggie, for nemesis sneaks up upon you ... Hey, it jumped! Cool! Mika will catch and kill cool toy.

Kit: Oh sweetie, don't do that. We need to rehome them in the park. Frogs are suffering in urban environments, you know.

Mika: Cool toys not suffer. Is for playin. Is jump for Mika! Hey, Kit put Mika down!

Kit: I've got to keep you away from the frogs, baby.

Mika: You is making Mika suffer!

Kit: I don't mean to, baby. But I've got a sore back and I can't keep crouching over you.

Mika: Gardenin is hard on everyone. Why not stop and come pet Mika instead? Look, rolls on stack of slabs, lookin all pretty...

Kit: You know, sweetie, you sometimes have a point.

Owie

2008-07-16T06:53:00.003Z

In between editing takes, we took a day yesterday to remodel the garden. And I am a bundle of aches.

Frog-rescuing has been a feature. We have a small pond in our still-quite-small garden, and as it was getting stagnant and Mika kept leaping into it (anyone who's ever had to wash off a dripping, stinky cat will recognise the domestic upheaval this creates), plus taking up loads of space and being a drowning hazard for any future children we plan to have, we decided it was time to get rid of it. Little did we realise until we'd drained it that this meant we were dispossessing more than half a dozen fully-grown frogs. I hadn't seen any tadpoles this year, so I assumed they'd all gone off to pastures new, but to my deep dismay, this turned out not to be the case. When the water level got down low enough, there they were, handsome green animals all hunching in the remaining water and looking at us accusingly.

Alas, the pond still had to go - among other things, it occurred to us that the main reason Mika kept jumping in the pond was probably to catch and kill them; we'd already found some corpses, so it was hardly a safe garden for them - but I love frogs and my conscience was twinging worse than my lower back.

Luckily we live near a park with several ponds. Out came my biggest cooking pot; I chased the frogs up one end of the pond with a spade, Gareth caught and potted them, and we hobbled down the road to the park, little heads butting against the lid like popcorn.

Finally we reached the park, identified the less heron-friendly pond, and tipped out the frogs. They swam off across the water, kicking their legs with graceful haste, hopefully to a new, cat-free life.

Right now I'm feeling like the villain of some children's novel - Richard Adams is yelling in my head - but at least we moved them to a bigger, cleaner pond. Sorry, froggies. Here's a question: does reading anthropomorphic books as a kid make you more likely to become an environmentalist, or at least a half-assed one who wanders around your local park with a cooking implement? Do loggers just read books about Roman commanders and football stars instead? Or what?

I'm engaged!

2008-07-09T09:22:00.000Z

My boyfriend Gareth and I are getting married!

Here's a game: I'm going to give the answers I've been giving a lot since announcing the engagement - but I'm not going to tell you the questions, just the answers. You can make up any questions you like to suit them.

1. Some time next summer.
2 .Under a tree in a park on a lovely sunny day.
3. No, I'm keeping it; probably we'll give both his and mine to any children.
4. It's on order, but it'll look like a flower when it arrives.
5. Actually no, I'm thinking in terms of red and black right now.

What do these mysterious answers betoken...?

Happy Kit. :-)

Kubrick and adaptations

2008-07-03T10:50:00.001Z

Credit for this theory goes to my boyfriend Gareth, but it struck me as well worth sharing. It has to do with Stanley Kubrick.

Kubrick's movies are glacially brilliant, works of crystalline misanthropy. His characters are almost all elegant grotesques; it's hard to watch James Mason and Shelley Winters in Lolita, for instance, without feeling a scorching shame for ever having wanted anything. Kubrick's camera lens is like Lucian Freud's paintbrush; seen through it, people are viewed with utter, unforgiving beauty that draws its fascination from all the elements of themselves that they'd least like to show. The art is beautiful, but it's hard not to feel ugly viewing it.

Now, it's generally known that Stephen King thoroughly disliked Kubrick's adaptation of his novel The Shining. King claimed that Kubrick had missed the point and made an empty film, and in fact made a TV version himself (which was much less well received). Handing your work over to Kubrick, this was more or less an occupational hazard - many of Kubrick's films are adaptations, and pretty much none of them are at all close to the spirit of the books he adapted: if you let Kubrick adapt your book, you got a Kubrick film rather than a film adaptation, and there wasn't much to be done about that. But among other reasons why King might have disliked the film - he claimed that Kubrick 'set out to make a horror picture with no apparent understanding of the genre', while actually Kubrick's house contained a copy of just about every horror story ever composed, and it seems likely that King's concept of the horror genre was just more, well, genre-ish than Kubrick's - there's a good reason why King might have felt upset by the film. The central character, Jack Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson, is an alcoholic writer. So, of course, is King. In On Writing, King remarks that 'I was, after all, the guy who had written The Shining without even realising (at least until that night) that I was writing about myself.' - which suggests an emotional attachment to Torrance's problems that went deeper than conscious self-portraiture. ('That night' refers to the night he realised he was an alcoholic; The Shining had been written several years previously.)

And that's the rub. In King's novel, the hero is the alcoholic writer, who eventually saves himself from his inner demons. It's a very personal tale; King says 'So when I wrote this book I wrote a lot of that down and tried to get it out of my system, but it was also a confession. Yes, there are times when I felt very angry toward my children and have even felt as though I could hurt them.' - and a confession is a vulnerable thing. Not something you'd be happy to see painted by Freud - or filmed by Kubrick. Because in Kubrick's adaptation, the father is the villain.

Nicholson's edgy, aggressive performance portrays a man whose problems aren't just alcoholism, but an undirected, barely-restrained, chronic state of anger. The incident of breaking his son's arm, described to the barman, Nicholson represents by a single, horrific gesture: having mimed pulling the boy up with an angry lurch, he shrugs impatiently, and snaps his fingers. It's the sound of a breaking bone, and also the sign of how little that broken bone really means to him. Nicholson's Torrance goes into the hotel a dark man: 'You have always been the caretaker', his ghostly predecessor tells him, and it's true. Torrance has always been part of the Overlook's horror. The hero is his son, in terrified flight from a father whose love cannot be trusted and whose evil cannot be controlled. In effect, Kubrick takes King's self-portrait and says: You aren't the hero, King. You're a bad man. You're a danger to your family. The harm you do is not forgiveable. You cannot save yourself. You would be better out of the world.

A superb film, undoubtedly better than King's TV version, but you can hardly blame King for having his feelings hurt.

Now, not every Kubrick film does it quite this way. His Humbert Humbert is altogether a more pathetic and forgiveable creation than Nabokov's brutal, self-flattering paedophile. Full Metal Jacket is upbeat compared with Gustav Hasford's elegantly written, bitterly angry The Short Timers, even though a lot of dialogue is lifted directly out of the book. (You can read an extract from it here, crudely processed but well worth a read.) Hasford's voice is both harsher - he describes the suicide of a comrade thus:

I know that Leonard is too weak to control his instrument of death. It is a hard heart that kills, not the weapon. Leonard is a defective instrument for the power that is flowing through him. Sergeant Gerheim's mistake was in not seeing that Leonard was like a glass rifle which would shatter when fired. Leonard is not hard enough to harness the power of an interior explosion to propel the cold black bullet of his will.

Leonard is grinning at us, the final grin that is on the face of death,
the terrible grin of the skull.

- while also describing vivid nightmares, and commenting on the receipt of encouraging letters from children back home:

Rafter Man reads the letters out loud. He can still be touched by them.
To me, the letters are like shoes for the dead, who do not walk.

Compared with this, Kubrick's comedic adaptation is almost cheerful; Hasford's rhetoric becomes the patter of maniacal sergeant, and the result is a black farce, not a tragedy, closest in spirit to the gleeful excesses of A Clockwork Orange - two films that portray male violence with an unapologetic, deadpan relentlessness.

But there is another film, surprisingly, where Kubrick's eye turns coldly on another artist. And, most surprisingly of all, he got that artist himself to direct it. I'm speaking of AI, Kubrick's late-in-life collaboration with Steven Spielberg.

The story of AI is a tragedy in itself: a robotic little boy, engineered to be the perfect suburban child, is cast out into an adult world that he cannot possibly understand. Trapped under the frozen sea, staring for millenia at a fairy-tale statue and begging for help, he eventually is found by the last civilisation: hyper-intelligent robots who cannot make him understand anything beyond his longing to return to his brief, perfect childhood. All that can be done for him is to reconstruct, artificially and for one day only, a facsimile of his home and mother. He spends a day in this perfect dream, after which he 'went to sleep', with a strong suggestion that there's nothing left to do but turn him off.

Doesn't that sound like the harshest possible interpretation of Spielberg, that genius of the family movie? The desire to reconstruct the perfect suburban childhood, replete with small details of Americana, fascinated with magical tales and always more beloved for his family tales than his adult-only films? The real Spielberg, of course, is an exceptionally successful adult man who seems to have a happy family life as well, so it's hardly a fair assessment - any more than it's fair to say that King's alcoholism destroyed his family, as his family appear to be fine - but Kubrick's eye is merciless: just as it says to King, Your sins are unforgiveable, it says to Spielberg, Your dreams are infantile, synthetic, cannot last, and all you're capable of.

That Spielberg himself directed this might suggest either Machiavellian genius on Kubrick's part or exceptional good will on Spielberg's, neither of which, based on their work, seems out of the question. But to assume either would be making the mistake of assuming conscious authorial intention, and that's a fast route to saying something silly. Let's consider it, instead, an interesting effect of the collaboration between artists, especially when one of them has so unblinking an eye.

Creepypasta

2008-06-29T12:48:00.004Z

My boyfriend Gareth has introduced me to an entertaining internet game, by the name of 'creepypasta': making up realistic-sounding urban legends and horror stories. Apparently the name comes from 'copy paste' stories, which became 'copypasta', meaning stories that people pasted and forwarded to each other a lot, hence 'creepypasta'. Click on the link and you can see some examples.

So, who wants to play? Here are a few from me:

Kissing a Mirror

If there's someone you want to make your own, there's a simple spell you can do. Press your mouth against a mirror at sunset and whisper the name of your beloved; then draw back and look at the shape your lips have left in the steam of your breath. If they form a perfect circle, your beloved will kiss you before the month is out.

But be very careful when whispering the name. If your teeth touch the glass, it will bring the kiss - but it will come at night, in your dreams. The creature that appears will have the face of your beloved, but its kiss will suck our your heart.

The Concrete House

There's a building in Lewisham they call Concrete House. It's overgrown with ivy, the walls cracked and the struts all fallen in, but the local council preserves it because it's one of the first houses ever built entirely of that material in the country. If you look in the council records, you will see that it's marked 'undergoing renovation', and indeed, there are walls around it, with barbed wire along the top – but the funny thing is, night or day, nobody has ever seen builders working there.

The walls are too high to see easily over, but if you stand on tiptoe, you can see the uppermost window of the house. Whatever led to the last owners leaving, they must have left in a hurry, because they didn't take all their stuff; there's a cork board still on the upper wall, papers on it fluttering in the wind. That's all most people see.

Sometimes kids go there on Halloween, peep over the fence with their torches, and swear they've seen faces looking out of the window, but there's no way that could be. The house is a shell, and the floors fell in long ago.

They say that on windy autumn days, the ivy rattles with a sound like scratching nails. The board through that window has dozens of papers pinned to it, but the rain and time must do their work. Sometimes they come loose. If ever you go near the Concrete House and see a paper blowing in the wind, pass on by. Whatever you do, don't pick it up. You will not recover from what you read there.

The Suicide Shoes (worked out in collaboration with Gareth, credit where it's due)

In 2006 there was a wave of suicides among young men in Bristol, all of whom had jumped off buildings, screaming they could fly. None of them knew each other, and all they seemed to have in common was that, at the time of their deaths, every one of them was out jogging.

Finally, an observant police officer noticed that there was a strange symbol, like a cross with eyes, written with permanent ink and hidden under the insole of one of the victims' shoes. When they investigated further, they found the same mark, always in a different place but always somewhere you wouldn't normally see, in every pair of suicides' shoes.

Forensic scientists examined the shoes, and found that their fabric had been saturated in some unidentified drug that looked a bit like a hallucinogen. The victims had suffered no ill effect when trying the shoes on before buying them, but once they started running, the sweat from their feet made the shoes damp, and the drug soaked into their skin.

Interpol traced all these shoes back to a single batch, produced in a particularly harsh sweatshop in South America. When asked about them, all the workers could say was that 'Papa Bird' had visited the day they were made.

'Papa Bird' has never been identified, and no arrests have taken place.

Scary dreams, safe plots

2008-06-23T09:37:00.004Z

A while ago, I described having woken up screaming after watching a horror movie that didn't scare me; well, last night, it happened again. Over the evening, I was watching a horror movie that shall remain nameless, as I'm about to say bad things about it: the storyline was confused, the source of the horror poorly worked out, and the action wandered around in an unclear sort of way. It wasn't that scary, either; a few tense moments, but most of them overplayed, and all in all, not that great.

Yet at about half past midnight, I sat up in bed, screaming so loud my throat still hurts this morning.

I'm evolving a theory about this. Genuinely frightening films scare me into wakefulness - I had to sleep with the radio on for two days after I first saw Hideo Nakata's Ring - but if they get into my dreams, they do so in a less dramatic way. I might twitch in my sleep, but I don't wake up shrieking. The ones that really get me going seem to be ones that, not to put too fine a point on it, don't entirely hold my attention or convince me with their plots.

Storylines are a structure, they require order and control. Watch Rosemary's Baby, and the chain of cause and effect is frightening precisely because it's so ruthless. Even The Shining, the story of characters trapped in a building of obscure and incomprehensible malice, has a precision to its structure. Exactly how the Overlook is next going to express its hostility is up for grabs, exactly what kind of horror we'll run into next is an open question, but the overall trend is clear: the hotel wants to destroy six-year-old Danny and consume his father Jack, and will use whatever attacks and manipulations will work best. Some of what the hotel throws has a random element - a naked woman in a bathtub, a bartender - but they all make a certain kind of sense: they're all things that will get Jack's attention and draw him into the hotel, and the random horrors we see at the end are after Jack's mind has broken and anything can come flooding in. The hotel undoubtedly has its own logic: we don't fully understand it, but there's no doubt that it's there, and that's part of the nightmare.

Most horror stories, in fact, take place in a world of rules. Different rules, harsh rules - you shouldn't get your face sucked off just for remarking a few times that you'd like to meet Count Magnus - but rules nonetheless, and even all-bets-are-off rules like in The Shining have a kind of precision to them. The implacability of such rules is often part of the horror: without realising it, by watching Sadako's tape or opening the Cenobites' box, the victim has effectively signed a contract. The fact that they didn't read it correctly and don't like what they find they've signed up to is beside the point: they signed, and the party of the second part is not about to release them from the agreement. It's not fair, but it's got a by-the-book narrative justice. The logic of horror stories is presided over by a hanging judge.

We emerge from such stories into our own world, where we know the rules. A good horror movie can convey its rules so convincingly, dovetail them so neatly with the rules we live in, that it gets into your thinking: you remain jumpy because, after all, the characters began living in the same rules that we do, and they only discovered new ones once the horror started closing in. Probably Michael Myers won't break into your house, but then, you never see him until it's too late. Probably there's no Freddy Kruger, but we do dream, don't we? Probably there's no Sadako, but I watched the film on tape and breathed a slight sigh of relief after a full week had passed and Sadako didn't come to get me. Good horror stories mess with your sense of the rules: they start with the reality everybody accepts, and then add on some nasty little fine print to make you worry that you might just have missed it. After all, the characters didn't realise what they were signing until it was too late either.

That's good horror stories. But in the end, you can reason with those. We know, deep down, that the odds are in our favour, and the narrative logic speaks to our conscious understanding. When we get into the subconscious, it's different. Watching a not-very-coherent horror movie, I tend to comment on it as it goes along (in my own mind if people want me to shut up, aloud if not): That doesn't make sense. Those two claims about the supernatural seem to contradict each other. The monster doesn't seem consistent in its motivations. Most of what I feel a sense of narrative frustration.

Then I go to sleep, and it would seem that my subconscious hasn't been listening to anything I said. The subsconscious, too, has its own sense of structure. Good storywriting involves the subconscious, but it comes out in grammatical sentences and shaped plots: our brains are wired to create order. This is why they don't suddenly decide that maybe today they'll give breathing a miss, just to see what happens. Predictability is what keeps us alive. We're orderly creatures, and the creative brain delights, not in chaos, but in creating new and surprising patterns. But throw an incoherent horror movie at the subconscious, or at least at mine, and it picks up a different message: Things are confusing. The rules don't make sense. You can't predict what's going to happen next. And, alarmed by this disordered state, my dreaming brain starts assuming that if a monster can turn up for no reason in a horror movie - not just for an unlikely reason, but no reason, backed up not even by story-logic - then perhaps it can turn up in my bed as well.

Hence, I suspect, the maniacally snarling face that loomed over me last night. I tend to hallucinate stuff hanging over my head when I'm half-asleep anyway, but it's usually grey glittery lights or vague shapes (once I saw a furry snake with a mouse's head, which was startling but not exactly scary). This time my brain, primed to anticipate unjustified spooks, put a scary face on it. The vague sense of menace had lingered from the film, and the garbled logic, that seemed so unconvincing when I was awake, suddenly seemed threatening in my sleep. I suspect, too, that this may be one reason why children are so prone to nightmares: the rules of the world are complicated and take a long time to learn, and until they've got the hang of them, kids have far fewer defenses against the suspicion that the world might suddenly lurch. Confusion is debilitating, and it would seem that if you confuse me enough, I regress to childhood dreams.

There's a joke in here somewhere - what makes a writer wake up screaming? Bad plots - but it's an interesting thought, anyway. Anyone else have this experience?

Editing

2008-06-19T10:50:00.002Z

Here I am at another stage in bringing a manuscript along: diving into the process of going through my charming editor's comments.

This is an interesting experience. My first reaction tends to be horrified: look at those comments! She's right! That doesn't quite work! It makes no sense! Why didn't I realise that? It is because I am a fool, a fool! Reviewers will eat me. Readers will scorn me. Oh dear...

After a while I settle down and tell myself that if I can write a book I can rewrite it, remind myself that the manuscript is not, in fact, written in stone and I can change whatever the heck I like, and it's fortunate to have an intelligent editor who spots my oversights before a reviewer can get to them, and then I settle down into thinking of explanations for the stuff that needs ironing out.

I may be a bit buried for a while, but that's what I'm doing, in case anyone wonders.

Oh, and it was my birthday yesterday: I am thirty-one, which I've always thought sounds younger than thirty. My thought for the year: Do it and be scared of it once; don't do it and be scared of it forever.

On which note, back to the scary world of spotting all the mistakes in my first draft. :-)

Monkeys that swim!

2008-06-17T11:16:00.000Z

It can be a tiring world sometimes, and in those situations, you need happy thoughts. This is mine:

Monkeys that swim.

What's yours?

A weekend Mikalogue

2008-06-13T11:55:00.001Z

Mika: This Mika's mat. Is not movin.

Kit: Oh, there you are, sweetie. I wanted to ask you something.

Mika: Is Mika with the wants. Mika wants, Kit does. Will accept fish treat if you is wantin to give one of them.

Kit: No, sweetie, I've got a question.

Mika: Can Mika has one?

Kit: Yes, here it is: what's with the mat? Did you hear the rhyme, 'the cat sat on the mat'?

Mika: This Mika's mat. Is lyin down on it.

Kit: I see that, baby. But there's a poem about cats on mats. I'm wondering if you have an interest in literature after all.

Mika: Your questions is confusin. Give Mika fish treat or go away.

Kit: Sorry, sweetie, we're running out.

Mika: Would accept prawn cracker.

Kit: No, those are bad for you. I shouldn't have let you get into our take-away, really. But look, why are you on that mat? It's drafty under the door, the mat's all rough and dusty...

Mika: Mika has thick beautiful coat. Knows not of these draffs you speak of.

Kit: So what are you doing on the mat?

Mika: Is leanin on door. Is nice down here.

Kit: You're kind of a mystery to me, sometimes, honey.

Mika: Mika sensible. Is you the one with the confusles. You calls food take-away, but when Mika tries to take it away, you intervenes.

Kit: Does that mean you want some of our dinner?

Mika: No thank you. Is not hungry. Is happy down here.

Kit: I guess I should stop trying to figure you out and just admire your beauty.

Mika: Aha! You is comin on after all. You gets purr. Prr.

testing

2008-06-11T12:18:00.001Z

Blogger seems opposed to me posting today. Will this work?

The inexorable march of world domination continues

2008-06-11T09:55:00.004Z

... Bareback has sold rights in Spain!

To these guys: Ediciones B, a great publisher who do a lot of crime and thriller novels, including authors like James Patterson, Anne Perry and Patricia Cornwell. Excellent news, in fact, and Viva Espana!

Banned books

2008-06-09T09:14:00.001Z

Noodling around on the internet the other day, I discovered that one of my childhood favourite authors, Judy Blume, holds the status of one of the most banned authors in America. That's an odd kind of compliment, really, but it is a compliment if you've read her books: they raise issues that children really ought to think about, such as racism and sex, and deal with them intelligently. To take an example, Blubber is a book that covers bullying, but our narrator Jill is, in fact, one of the bullies. Not the ringleader, but an active lieutenant, who cheerfully believes the victim, Linda, 'deserves' her persecution - only to find herself under fire when she stands up to the class leader, and bullied by, among other people, her former victim. Jill's period of suffering is shorter than Linda's because she's more assertive and her tormentors eventually get bored, but there's no triumphant moral victory, just a broadening in the understanding of an unremarkable girl. Apparently the book is challenged for 'offensive language', by which I assume they mean an occasion when the class ringleader calls Jill's Chinese-American best friend a 'Chink'; now, Jill immediately yells 'Don't you dare call Tracy a Chink!', and we're clearly not supposed to approve of the word, but, looking back, I do think that was the first time I'd encountered the word as a child, so possibly censors are worried Blume might be teaching bad language. Frankly, that's a stupid idea: kids are going to encounter the bad words at some point, and for my part, encountering it first in a story where only the nastiest kid in school thinks it's okay to call someone that gave me a swift and thorough demonstration of why it was a word I didn't ever intend to say.

Similarly, Forever, the book that everyone passed around my class when I was about twelve - which is very likely how it was intended to be read - apparently remains a huge scandal, because it's frank about a sexual relationship between two seventeen-year-olds. Actually the book has a big invisible sign nailed to it that reads 'BE RESPONSIBLE!', because the plot details cover, as well as technical details about stuff like premature ejaculation and the non-inevitability of female orgasm, risk factors like STDs, unwanted pregnancy, infidelity and the effects of sexual pressure on, horror of horrors, boys as well as girls - one of the characters is an emotionally unstable and confused boy who, distressed at his girlfriend's continual attempts to coax him into a sexual normality he's not sure he's comfortable with, ends up making a suicide attempt. All in all, it's a guide to the pitfalls of sex as much as the pleasures - but, of course, it does present unmarried teenagers having sex as a perfectly normal event, and, well, you can imagine the consequences on an innocent mind.

Judy Blume deserves to be defended not just because censorship is a bad thing, but because she's an excellent writer. There's a reason why her books are so popular, and it's not just because she mentions masturbation. Her popularity made many adults in my day assume she was trashy, but kids are often more acute readers than adults, and Judy Blume is good. Her grasp of character is subtle and and acute, her ability to convey drama in small everyday details is striking, her insights are sharp, her dialogue is convincing and her views are humane. What she also is, as well as educational in the best sense, is a good start for kids who want to love literature. A tremendous proportion of children's fiction is fantasy fiction; magic and such is so common in them that you hardly notice it. But while many reading kids grow up to be fantasy readers, many more do not. Judy Blume, Jacqueline Wilson, Beverley Cleary, Anne Fine - all are, to a greater or less extent, 'issue' writers, but they're also mainstream books for kids. They're about everyday worries, and domestic frictions, and naturalistic crises, and social concerns - all the things that are the staple of mainstream adult books. Speaking from personal experience, I never had anything against books-with-magic when I was a kid, but Blume and Cleary meant a lot more to me than the more fantastical stories, and while I write fantastical stuff now, as a reader, my tastes still tend towards naturalistic drama. It's good to have access to books of that kind as a child: people's tastes begin quite early, and without writers like Blume and Cleary, I would have been missing out. These books are good for children artistically as well as socially; only one genre on the shelves is never good for anyone.

But the issue is wider than this. If you look at the list of the top 100 banned books in America, you'll notice something: an awful lot of them are really, really good. I'd actually call this list to the attention of anyone who has teenage kids or teaches English: it's got a lot of outstanding books on it. Mark Twain is on it. So is Toni Morrison. So is Margaret Atwood. So is Aldous Huxley. So is John Steinbeck. So is J.D. Salinger. So is Harper Lee. So is Maya Angelou. So is Isabelle Allende. So is William Golding. So is Kurt Vonnegut. These are authors that adults read and admire, never mind kids. There are a lot of teenage classics there too: S.E. Hinton, Lois Duncan, Lois Lowry, Paul Zindel. Anyone who makes it onto that list is in distinguished company; as a writer, it makes me wish more people were offended by my books, just so I could rub shoulders with so many people I admire. There are some horror stories there, plus a bunch of sex-ed books; my personal favourite juxtaposition is around the fifties:

52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell

Major literary/political classic; sado-masochistic porn; educational guide; mass-market horror; charming children's classic; bomb-makers' manual. And the children's classic gets more complaints than the bomb-making book. Amazing.

What strikes me about this is that a lot of the books complained about have very little morally wrong with them. James and the Giant Peach, for instance, the only objection I can imagine is that James's horrible abusive aunts get accidentally squashed by the peach and nobody is sorry - that is, obedience and respect for your elders are not considered necessary if those elders are mean to you. It takes a profoundly authoritarian way of thinking to consider that idea one that children should be kept from. But book-banning is always authoritarian; that's what so bad about it. The idea that people should not be free to consider the world for themselves and make up their own minds, that they can't be trusted with that responsibility, is a terribly dangerous one.

Even so, the moral lessons of the books are often such that it's hard to see what the objection is. Hinton suggests that violence is bad. Duncan suggests that irresponsible malice leads to tragedy. Lowry suggests that secure conformity backed up with brutality is not worth having. Zindel suggests that you shouldn't manipulate people for fun. These authors depict kids who are cannot rely on authority for everything, who are free to make bad decisions and often do so. They suffer for it, they regret it, but they were free to do it in the first place. It seems like the complainers feel the idea that it's possible to do such things completely trumps the idea that it's wrong to do them. By this logic, kidnapping your teacher (Duncan) or lying your way into an old man's affections (Zindel) shouldn't just be bad, it should be inconceivable. Even countenancing the idea that real people might ever do such things is too close to an endorsement.

I wonder if the idea of Biblical inerrancy has something to do with it. A fundamentalist Christian - and I'm fairly sure that a big proportion of the complaints come from that direction - is, after all, someone who has an intense belief in the power of the written word. The Bible is infallible, the ultimate guide to everything in this life and the next, and you disobey it at your peril. That's attributing a lot of power to a book. And from there, it's perhaps easier to attribute tremendous power to books in general. If the Bible is infallibly true, then perhaps every book is making an equal claim to truth: if J.K. Rowling depicts wizards, it must be because she wants people to believe there really are wizards, rather than because she's asking them to suspend disbelief.

But it's even more than that, I think: a truly authoritarian Christian seems to have difficulty with the idea that, unlike the Bible, most books aren't primarily didactic. If an author is writing a story, it must be a parable - and not just a parable that the reader can consider and reject if it doesn't ring true, but a parable the author demands that they accept.

This, I think, is why so many Christian knickers are in a twist about Rowling. I used to assume that they thought, rather naively, that she was advocating black magic, and if they grasped that she was actually writing an epic of good versus evil that happened to be ecumenical in its religion, they might calm down. But actually, I now think that's the whole point. Rowling's good-versus-evil struggle is more threatening to a fundamentalist than a simple depiction of Sin. She's positing a world in which a struggle between good and evil can take place without reference to Christianity - and that's a massive, profound challenge to the fundamentalist worldview. A fundamentalist believes that only Christians can be goodies and tackle evil; Rowling invents a world in which not-particularly-Christian goodies tackle evil. To a fundamentalist, she's demanding that you give up the idea that you have to be a Christian to be good. There's a tremendous spiritual greed in such objections - basically, if you're not Us then you're not entitled to any moral claims at all, and anybody who says otherwise is evil - but it does explain why a book that portrays anything an authoritarian Christian dislikes sympathetically is such a big deal. Identifying writing and preaching as identical, and utterly opposed to their children hearing the preaching of other faiths, fundamentalists have to kick off about every book that presents a convincing and sympathetic depiction of human behaviour.

Hence, the banned-books list is a particularly good guide to anyone looking for challenging and well-written material. Odds are, if it's convincing enough to get a complaint, it's probably good, and if it offends authoritarians, it's probably got something sensible to say. Obviously not every protested book is a classic; the Goosebumps series gets a lot of complaints as well, and those are competent but undemanding spook stories rather than great works of literature - but it's notable what a lot of good stuff raises a fuss, and I, for one, feel motivated to check out some of the titles on that list that I haven't read, because I bet they're good. If we're Thinking Of The Children, obviously there's no need to forsake common sense; Anne Rice's erotica and the Anarchist Cookbook should not be on the same shelf as Roald Dahl, and if a librarian refused to check them out to a six-year-old, I doubt anybody reasonable would object. But to insist that such books shouldn't be available at all is not just Thinking Of The Children: it's demanding that adults can't read them either; it's asking that your library, which is supposed to be a cross-section of available literature, joins you in pretending that they don't exist at all. And that's a fantasy you've no business getting didactic about.

The Mikalogues meet literature

2008-06-06T09:34:00.002Z

Mika: Aha, see you has book! Mika fites book! Bites it!

Kit: Mika, stop that.

Mika: Paper products is for chewin.

Kit: Mika, I wish you'd stop trying to eat my books whenever you see me reading. Books are important, you know.

Mika: Why?

Kit: Well, sweetie, people care about books. I write books. People work very hard to put all those letters down on the page.

Mika: Wif pen?

Kit: Yes, that's right. You take a pen and make shapes that spell out words.

Mika: Chase pen! Catch it! This good game.

Kit: I know you like chasing pens. That's why I close the door of my study. You kept trying to catch my pen tip when I was writing.

Mika: Close door, Mika has nap. Can chew book?

Kit: Sweetie, do you have some kind of animus against literature? It's writing that keeps you in cat food, you know.

Mika: Animouse? Where? Fites it!