'Watching the Pool' at EDP and my WIP

Having left the world of government with a vow never to use another acronym as long as I live, here I am doing it again. *Sigh*

For non-writer folk (that is, people who don't have dialogue-testing conversations with plants, have more blood in their system than tea and who don't check ICanHasCheezburger every fifteen minutes) EDP is the webzine (web-based magazine) Every Day Poets and WIP is my Work In Progress.





Today EDP have put up my poem 'Summer Holiday: Watching the Pool' on their site. EDP is fun because people can rate your poem and leave feedback and it is always good to hear what other people think, especially people who don't know you. Even if it isn't always 100% positive it is always a good lesson for the future.

Now, on to my WIP, the dystopian novel 'Maynard Hill'. I put up a post last summer about the feedback I had had from my novel. While it wasn't all bad (they liked my writing style and opening) they felt 'disappointed' with the story. Everything they said I could see where they were coming from but I just didn't have the energy to start all over again.

However, when I was researching my article about dystopian films, since published in MediaMagazine, I got excited about the genre again. I can do this! I said to the plant.

So I opened that file I hadn't touched in months and went to work. The WIP is now down from just over 100,000 words to 50,000 words. Talk about killing your darlings. I have basically pruned out the dull bits and I'm going to plot out a whole new subplot which will weave into the story and then take it onwards to an more explosive ending set later in the future. Ka-pow!

I have learned such a lot writing flash fiction and short stories and I hope these lessons will translate across. I have thought so much recently about what makes a story; flash fiction can be likened to one of those sketches that only comprises a few well-placed pencil marks but shows character, movement and theme within that.

Wish me luck.

The Magical, Magical Internet

Every so often I take a step back and wonder how the world hasn't been blown off course by the explosion of the internet.

We have entirely absorbed it into our lives: email, Google, online banking, job hunting, blogging, travel booking, price comparison, information, information, information galore.

One group especially that has been able to take advantage of the internet revolution is the writers of the world.

The other day I was writing a short story and needed a fictitious company name. I searched for my company on the web to check it wasn't already in existence, thus possibly saving me a lot of hassle in the future. Before this information was available at the click of a button I would have had to go... where exactly? I'd have contacted (written to/phoned) Companies House in Britain for a start. But where do I go to find out about the rest of the world? Does it matter for legal reasons? Again, I can research this very question now: the information is all there.

And what would Charles Dickens have done if he needed to know how olives were processed? He would have had to have visited a library and waded through volumes of information to find what he needed. Of course, there is no substitute for decent research but when you just need a nugget of information to bring your short story to life the internet in invaluable in the amount of time and cost it can save you.

I really felt the connective power of the internet when I moved to America a month ago. I logged on and my writing group was still there, albeit five hours ahead of me. So much of the writing community is virtual, whether it is online critiquing groups or writers blogs, that much of the feeling of being alone in the universe is now removed; we have rich resources of advice and constructive criticism at our fingertips.

Submitting work is now increasingly reliant on the internet.
E-submissions of novels are lagging behind (oh, the cost and waste of resources involved in the submission process is just painful!) but new, smaller publishing companies are slowly turning towards the paperless approach.

Thanks to websites such as Duotrope the submission process for short stories/poetry goes something like this:
1) Write tiny, polished gem
2) Search Duotrope for appropriate publications
3) Go to publication website to learn more, read previous editions, find out submission information
4) Submit tiny, polished gem by email
5) Wait an inordinate amount of time for response
6) If paid for tiny, polished gem money flies through the virtual ether into Paypal/bank account.
7) No postage waste or trees cut down; orangutans and polar bears are happy.

The market for fiction has also expanded (despite the depletion of print short story magazines) because of the countless new online fiction publications that can be read from anywhere in the world and the increased access to foreign markets.

I can do all this from anywhere in the world, from a beach in the Bahamas to a bungalow in Reading. If I live in Siberia I can still write and quite possibly order all my books off Amazon, although I don't know how long they'd take to arrive. I can still procrastinate terribly on ICanHasCheeseburger from a houseboat in Vietnam.

The internet is truly magic.

New Words

Just a little something I came across today.

I was reading an article in the Comments section of The Times Online about the male pill. The article was quite light-hearted, discussing the attitude of dog-walkers to un-castrated dogs, a study in China where only about four fifths of the men remembered to take the pill even though they were (presumably) being paid to take part in the experiment, and the tendancy of both men and women to lie about contraception. All interesting reading over a lunch hour.
Being the online version, comments had been posted at the bottom of the page. One included the phrase 'I loled when I read about your dog'.
The word 'loled' isn't in the dictionary. Or if it is, it won't mean 'perfect tense of the abbreviated form of Laugh Out Loud'.


Yet. The language of technology is forever creeping into our speech. 'Phone has dropped its appostrophe to become both a noun and a verb in its own right. I've already mentioned The Times 'Online'. Even e-mail has lost its hyphen: I email, you email, they all emailed some emails.

Lolcats abound on the website ICanHasCheezeburger (much loved on this blog). Almost everyone under the age of 25 would be amazed if you thought 'lol' at the end of a text stood for Lots Of Love (a joke elaborated on brilliantly by the comedian Matt Kirshen).

Very soon lol, loling, loled, lolable will all make their way to the Oxford English Dictionary. For anyone who is a little uncomfortable at the idea, I like to think of language as a big party to which we are all invited and there's always room for one more. Even the poor castrated dog.