Categories
Uncategorized

Well Read? Me? ha ha ha!

OK, so I don’t do many of these so-called “meme” thingys – but lists can be fun and this came up on a blog I found whilst tag surfing.

Bold means I’ve read it.
Italics means I intend to read it (yeah right!)
[] means I love it.

List is from The Big Read

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 [The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams]
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie-the-Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 The Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

The partial-bold ones are not a mistake, they represent ones I’ve not finished.

So, about 12-15 depending on whether you count the partials, actually slightly better than I thought when I first saw the list. Anyway I’m off now to read some more of no. 50.

Categories
Uncategorized

To Mooch or to Cross?

I have a bookcase that is overflowing with books. Many of these are books I’ll never read, or never read again. In the past I would have — after a suitably long procrastination period — have taken them down to the nearest charity shop. However I recently became aware of two different websites that I wanted to try out.

The first, which I heard of through M. is www.bookcrossing.com. The idea is that you register your book, which gives you a unique book number, write a little message inside the cover and then “release it into the wild” i.e. leave it in some public place. The message includes a URL which is specific to the book and if the finder visits the site they can then create a journal entry for the book. In this way you can share your unwanted books and track their progress around the world.

The other site is www.bookmooch.com which is a book swapping site. Here you simply list a number of books you want to give away. For this you accrue points. You spend these points on “mooching” books from other users. The system is set up so you’re giving away about twice as many books as you’re receiving, which works out ok because the postage on two books is usually less than a new book.

So I’ve been thinking which one of these sites to use. On the one hand I like the idea of tracking a book, but then again I’m not sure of any suitable public places to release them in that I normally go to. BookMooch cost money in terms of postage, but on the other hand I get books in return. Then again, I already have an impressive pile of unread books without adding to it at the moment.

Solution: I’ve joined both. I’ve registered a few books to release via book crossing – I’ll think up some places to release them even if I have to make a special trip somewhere, and I’ve added a list of books I’m prepared to send off to Book Moochers. In fact I’ve already had my first request for one.

I’ll let you know which turns out to be the better system.

Categories
Uncategorized

Dr H. Fan Art

Here’s something cool. Dr. Horrible fan art. Check out Wonderflonium.com

I’ve got “The Death of Billy” as my new desktop background.

Categories
Uncategorized

Watch this it’s Fun!

Title says it all really. I was thinking to review it but it doesn’t need it. 3 x 13-15min episodes of a web-based super-villain musical. Created by Joss Whedon + family and friends. And it’s Joss doing what he does so well – reversing a well-worn concept, the good guy is really the bad guy and the bad guy is the good guy and there are fun songs and silly jokes. Plus Barney from “How I Met Your Mother”, Mal from “Firefly” and Vi from Chosen.

Watch out for the ending if you’re a Whedon newbie – but it’s just Joss doing what he does. Plus, I’m sure the story’s not over.

It’s available free online until midnight tomorrow and after that I think you need to pay to download it.

My favourite songs are “It’s a Brand New Day” and “On The Rise” both from ep 2.

UPDATE: It’s back online for free. Click here to watch now.

Categories
Uncategorized

Flubbage

Sorry about the title. It’s not a reference to Flubber honest. It’s sort of inspired by “phlebotinum” mixed with a desperate desire not to entitle this “Random Musings #23916753″[1]

It’s also an attempt to not let a week go by without posting. A week would be tomorrow, but well there’s a rare event – Paul leaves the house for other than work or shopping – happening tomorrow and so I probably won’t be blogging then.

Actually I almost blogged at the weekend, until I realised that I was about to unload a load of personal angst on you all. Which is fine and everything (it IS my blog) but I sort of decided I was going to keep the ratio of personal to interesting low didn’t I? Then I thought I’d review something, but the only ‘something’ I could really review would have been Doctor Who and that was exactly the wrong kind of terrible to write about (bad but not enough to inspire me to be rude or funny). Still, recalling Dr Kermode’s wise words (3rd para) maybe I should make the effort anyway. Here goes:

It was crap. Brain in hand, looked a little too much like other small pink moist organ in hand. It was vaguely sexual in a not very pleasant way. Plot had enough holes to upset even me. Moral dilemma really forced. Nice music. Nice scenery (snowy bits). Nice, though pointless, chase scene.

That’s all I can force myself to say, Kermode or no Kermode.

Anyhow. The remaining 23% of this flubbage is that I have at least re-visited my neglected LoveFilm DVD rental queue and added a few new releases and upcoming movies. Also added The Nines as suggested by friend of the blog lethebashar. Hopefully there’s something in that little lot that I can get my reviewing teeth into.

Oh and I got a package in the post today. I haven’t opened it yet, but it’s from my sister and is probably related to going-out-event (see above). It looks suspiciously like a book/books, which makes me think

a) I really ought to finish at least one of the three books she gave me for Christmas.[2]

b) Maybe the occasional book review wouldn’t hurt.

Anywhat, [3] I haven’t done any actual writing since last week’s moment of clarity, but then I have been working on something else. A rather ambitious project to do with resisting the passage of time. Seems not to be working, the final proof will come in a few hours I suspect.

Sorry if this seems a bit fillery but flubbage can be like that. Flubb, flubb, flubb.

See you next time.

[1]Even though, now that I look at it, that sort of looks like a better title. Oh well.

[2]At my suggestion, I asked for books because this crazy idea that I was going to write and reading’s important and…

[3]Makes a change from ‘anyhow’ don’t you think?

Categories
Uncategorized

FYI

Not a proper blog post (that would be a time-waster) just a few points of interest.

* That blog post itself yesterday took 90mins!

* M. was fine about what I wrote, except she claims it’s me that keeps us talking when we’ve nothing to say.

* I did my hour’s writing – a little over in fact – and completed a rough draft of an idea for AFO challenge for Jan 🙂

* I didn’t do my reading, nor have I yet today 🙁

* I stayed up way too late and consequently am tired. Still, coffee exists and tomorrow is Friday!

* I’m not using WordPress bullet points again until I can figure out how to stop the font going all weird.

Categories
Uncategorized

Time

M. got me a couple of books on writing for Christmas. In the introduction to “A Novel in a Year” Louise Doughty asks

Think what you are prepared to sacrifice. Writing a novel takes many, many hours, and those are hours you could spend planting roses, raising children, earning money — or even just having a nice life. What, in your life, is going to disappear, to allow you the time to write a book?

Well, I’vc got no roses to plant or children to raise, but nevertheless that hit home. Mostly because I think, I’m aware a) how much time I seem to waste doing nothing, and b) how long it seems to take me to write things[1]. And then, even within the general category of ‘writing’ there’s a lot of activities I might undertake:

  • AFO reviews and critiques
  • AFO challenge stories
  • both of M.’s books are work-books, books with exercises I can work through
  • blogging – which itself is many categories (more later perhaps)
  • reading – everything I read on writing says to read more, and I read a lot less than I once did. And a lot of what I read is other amateur writers – which is fine but I’d like to start exposing myself to really good writing.
  • Big Serious Writing Projects – not even sure what these will be yet. Maybe they’ll be short stories I want to get published, or a novel, or even a screenplay

So what is going to disappear from my life to enable some or all of this? Well first let me clarify that it may only be ‘some’. I’m going to keep an eye on it but I may scale down my involvement in AFO. At the moment I’ve been reviewing virtually every new story, which has been taking hours. I can’t blame anyone else for that, it’s partly an ego thing that I want to be seen as a good citizen and partly a procrastination thing – 90 mins reading and reviewing a 3,000 story is “writing time” without me having to do the really hard work of my own writing. But I’m still pondering. I need to give it more time, see how things develop.

Anyway back to what will disappear? Here’s what I’m thinking so far

  • time not really doing one thing or another. I spend a lot of time half doing things. I’m watching TV but also surfing the web. I’m supposed to be writing but I’m fiddling with computer settings. If I can reclaim even a little of this ‘noodling around’ time I’ll be doing well[2]
  • Watching TV – much as I hate to say it, having spent a good part of the last year establishing what is now a really nice MythTV system, I spend too much time watching TV. So on stats alone, since it’s a large proportion of what I do, it’ll need to be a large portion of what I need to give up. Fortunately that’s not too hard (I think). A lot of what I record on Myth is might-be-good-let’s-record-on-the-offchance crap which I then watch just so I can delete it and keep the disk from filling up. I think I’m going to stop doing that. Or at least I’ll set it to auto-expire and if I don’t get around to it before it does, oh well.
  • Surfing the web – same rationale as the above. It’s what I spend a lot of time doing so there’s a lot of scope to cut back. This will actually be helped by the fact that I’ve gone a little cold on SoF (which used to account for many many hours online), now I mostly check it through habit. A lot of what I read I’ve seen before in some other form now. Interestingly, M., who I met on SoF, feels the same.
  • some late night chats with M. – ok, a slightly delicate one, since I haven’t actually mentioned this to her yet. It’s not the chats per se I want to cut back on, just some of the lateness. M. and I have the ability to just talk and talk, which is wonderful and the sign I think of a close friendship, but sometimes we try to live up to that even when we’ve not got a lot to say – so somehow there’s a feeling that all’s not well if we only chat for half an hour. And the lateness causes tiredness which makes things like sitting down to spend an hour writing a challenge. I know it affects M. too. What I want to do is to actually do stuff which we’ve talked about in the past such as having a limit to how late we talk on week-nights and not trying to force it when we’ve neither got much to say.

How much time that will realistically net me I’m not sure. However I’ve put together a vague plan of how I might spend my “writing time”:

  • Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays – an hour of “writing” time and half an hour of reading. The writing time will usually be AFO related. I’m going to try to make sure I alternate between reviews and my own writing.
  • Saturdays – two hours writing time spent working through “A Novel in a Year”. It’s got a weekly structure and I don’t want to get ahead so any “spare” time can be spent on AFO/other projects. At least half an hour reading.
  • Sundays – three hours writing time (probably in 2 90min sessions) working through “Creative Writing – A Workbook with Readings” with is a pretty serious textbook (also a present from M.) Half an hour (or more) reading – although Creative Writing has readings in it.
  • Mondays and Fridays – these are “writing optional” days. I deliberately worked in some flexibility into the system. I can write if I want to, feel inspired. Or just have the night off, start/end the weekend if I’m tired. I’d probably write my blog on a Monday or a Friday. BTW I want to start blogging at least once a week. What I’m going to blog about is best left to another post I think (this must be pretty long by now[3])

Anyone who’s noticed that this looks suspiciously like New Year’s Resolutions is right but I’m not going to get too hung up if I don’t stick to it. If I miss it one day, I’ll get back to it the next. If I only half-keep to it I’ll be doing a heck of a lot better than I have done.

2008 is the year of me taking writing seriously!

[1]On monday I wrote a 2,000 word story for AFO. It took me two hours to write, another two to re-write/polish and it still felt like a rough draft when I was done.

[2]I think some noodling time is essential otherwise I’ll feel like I’m too regimented.

[3]Eek! Just check preview and it’s very long. Oh well. You read to here didn’t you?

Categories
Uncategorized

Christmas Party

I don’t know why I always go to the work Christmas party but I do. OK, it’s free but is that enough reason to humiliate myself?

I go to the party, as do various people with their wives, partners, girlfriends etc. It’s formal so I end up feeling uncomfortable in a suit whilst all the women there are wearing cocktail dresses, short skirts, plunging necklines, generally making themselves look very attractive. Except that they’re not trying to attract me. So I get slowly drunk whilst all the while realizing that I’m missing out.

Why do I do this again?

🙁

Categories
Uncategorized

Losing My Religion

It’s probably a strange thing to say more than nine years after I stopped going to church, but I think I may be losing my faith. And I’m only just discovering this now because of how my brain sometimes works like a computer running Windows.

Let me explain:

If your computer crashes or is unexpectedly rebooted in error, then Windows, if that’s what you’re running, will offer you the chance to boot something called “Last Known Good”. It’s an option to boot with the same settings as the last time it was successfully booted. It’s there in case you made a change so bad that you now can’t get into Windows at all. “Last Know Good” is your fall back position, what you can default to in order to have some chance of recovering from whatever it was that went wrong.

I think I have something like this. I’ve noticed before that I tend to stay in roughly the same mood from the time I go to bed to the time I get to work the next day. It’s as if, without anything to change it, I carry on in the same emotional direction (switching metaphors I could call it Newton’s First Law of eMotion). If I’m happy when I go to bed, I’ll be happy when I get to work, because nothing will have happened to change that. If I’m angry at the end of the day, I will be when I get up. “Sleeping on it” has no effect.

Except it’s kind of a false echo. I don’t think I really maintain that feeling, not the times I’m thinking of anyway. I think if I did I wouldn’t be so easily changed so soon. I’ll feel the anger but the first joke from a colleague cheers me up. I’ll be happy until the first irate customer brings me down. I’ll be operating in “Last Known Good”.

I think this works with people too. If the last time I saw/spoke to you we fought, chances are I’ll be carrying that with me into the next meeting. It may not even be a real experience. I’ve dreamt of falling out with people and been wary of them in the waking world. (Yes I know that happened in an episode of Friends, but also has genuinely happened to me.) And whilst the passage of time can help, make it easier to make a change in the next encounter, I can still be running on the previous emotion for a long time.

A really long time as it turns out, maybe nine years or more.

When I left church, when I decided to stop being a Christian – there was always a small part of me that thought I’d one day go back. I was angry and disappointed and frustrated and burnt out – and on some level I knew that and knew that once I’d had a chance to calm down, relax, re-group I’d be able, and I’d want to, go back.

But I stayed away too long, and my first few tentative steps of return were through a website called Ship of Fools (you may have heard of it), a place where I learned to doubt some of the truths I’d formerly believed. That was a problem, but precisely because I always saw myself going back to the same kind of faith that I’d had. When I read threads on the Ship, I tended to side sub-consciously with evangelicals, whilst at the same time having those doubts about evangelical belief.

It started to wear me down actually, and I took a sabbatical from the Ship. I believe I’ve mentioned it on here. I was so tired of “my” beliefs being attacked without having the confidence in them to defend them. Then I got in contact with old friends from my church days. I made a couple of weekend trips to visit them. I visited my old church, and a newer one planted out from it. Lots of familiar faces, familar forms of worship. It was comfortable (on the whole – my old place were having communion and I didn’t feel right about taking it which was slightly awkward).

And yet since then – which was about a five/six weeks ago – I’ve had a growing sense that that’s not what I believe any more. I had secretly expected, even hoped, that these trips would re-invigorate my faith. It didn’t happen. Instead I find myself thinking that I’ve lived the last nine years without it and done ok. Well ok, a lot of that time I was somewhat screwed up. But a) who isn’t? b) a lot of that was fallout from my original burnout and the rather strange choices I made after it – quitting my job and moving hundreds of miles away, having to start a new social life at 33 when I was a introvert to begin with, an introvert who wanted to curl up in a ball and lick my wounds.

I’ve probably “not done so well” in the last few years as much because I needed friends and a life as anything else. And anyway, in the last year, it’s gotten really good. I’m still something of a loner, but I’ve been more consistently happy than I’ve been, well ever really.

Some of you might be thinking that whilst it’s fine that I’ve ditched evangelicalism there are other ways to be a Christian, and I shouldn’t give up on faith altogether. Whilst I understand that point of view, there are two reasons I don’t think I’ll be popping along to my local liberal motr church or anglo-catholic tat-palace: 1) I think I’ve gotten a pretty good idea about most of the flavours of Christian belief – and the problem is that there are two many of them and they are contradictory. I’d probably be tempted to go for a One True Church religion if it wasn’t for that fact that there are two of them (ok many more than two, but two with a real claim to being ‘authentic’). I don’t know what my fixed points are any more. I used to have the Bible.

And 2) – well 2) is simply that I don’t feel it any more. I don’t feel the certainty, the need, the desire, the sense of something… I guess I miss prophesying (“my calling”) and being part of something larger than myself, having a bigger purpose.

I may still surprise myself but for now I’m happy losing my religion.

Categories
Uncategorized

Gvim and vigour

I had the urge to blog tonight. I haven’t for a while and I feel like I’ve lots to say. However it’s getting late and I don’t want to be too long.

So I’ll try to be quick on the subject of gvim.

gvim

Gvim is “graphical vim” and of course vim is “Vi IMproved” and vi is an editor on Unix/Linux. So what I’ve done is set up gvim. I’m going to use it to write with. At this point anyone who knows what vi is like is probably thinking I’m crazy. For those who don’t, vi is not a word processor, it’s a text editor. It’s an editor with an obscure, esoteric and out of date way of doing things.

But I’m used to it. It’s been on every Unix/Linux computer I’ve ever used going back nearly 20 years. I already use vim to make posts to AFO. You may recall I use tin

tin

as my newsreader, but tin allows you to configure your own editor. So I went with vi, or rather vim. The difference between vi and vim are subtle but important. Vim has many more features. I’ve only scratched the surface but it’s the ability to customise and configure shortcuts that I like. So I’m basically using those well-worn vi commands, but I have an auto-wrap at 78 columns. I can re-align a paragraph with a single keystroke. I get colour-coding of my headers and quoted text.

Since at the moment, I’m mainly writing for AFO, and AFO is usenet which is a ‘bare text’ medium, I don’t need fancy word processor features (by which I really mean simple stuff like bold, italic, font sizes). And as much as I like OpenOffice, especially the not-having-to-buy-MS-Office part, it’s slow to start and feels like overkill to type what is essentially text, maybe with the occasional underline.

Actually OO has downsides for text as I’ve discovered. It converts double-quote characters into left- and right- curved quote characters. Which look cool – in OO – but are in some extended, probably unicode, character set. When I Save As text and then copy and paste into tin, which is configured for plain ol’ ASCII, I get ? instead. Now I could figure out how to get OO to stop converting them, or figure out how to get it to convert them back when I save, or configure tin for full character set support – but in the end it’s easier just to write ASCII.

Usenet has conventions for most simple formatting. Behold bold: *bold text is between asterisks*. Observe italics: _underscores mark italics_. So I am mostly ok. If at some point I want to start writing for other outlets and want a .DOC, .RTF or .PDF file, OO will still be there and I can adapt any text docs easily enough. I may even figure out a little script to convert usenet formatted text to something OO could import. That’s the sort of thing I’d enjoy.

The only remaining question is why the g? Why gvim? No real reason. It has a few buttons to do common tasks. All of which are merely doing the equivalent of various keystrokes. It stands alone and can run from the desktop. But then I could run regular vim in a terminal, even create a shortcut for it. No, the only real reason was that the simply excitement of installing gvim, configuring it the way I like it and setting it up with a desktop shortcut,

shortcut

is a motivation for me to actually use it. In other words, it helps getting me writing again. Which is important. I’m enjoying writing at the moment but getting myself down to it is still a bit of a challenge and the inner child in me can go “ooh shiny new toy” at gvim to get me over that initial hurdle.

(Those of you who are laughing at the idea that a) gvim is a shiny toy or b) that installing and configuring a text editor is in any way exciting can just go… Well my bet is you stopped reading after the pictures. 😛 as we say in usenet land)