25
Jun
2009
Categories
Broadcasting
Tags

The Bargain BBC

The BBC is an easy target because it makes a lot of its money from licence fees. Somehow that makes a lot of people think they know best how to run it. They don’t, of course, but the fact that the revelation of its bosses’ expenses has happened today - just after Parliament has been hauled over the coals for MPs shameful squandering of public funds - means they’re ready and willing to drag it over the same political coals.

Here’s a headline:

Grab from The Guardian

£350,000. Tsk tsk tsk. That’s 2,456 licence fees gone on expenses.

Why isn’t it more?

It sounds like a lot, but that £350K was run up by ten board members. An average of £35,000 each.

Over five years. So an average of £7,000 per person per year.

To run the BBC - a job that involved international travel, late nights, wooing suppliers, customers and talent, researching, entertaining and providing five national television networks, ten national radio networks, the World Service (radio and TV), 40 local radio stations and countless web sites.

They should really be congratulated for keeping things under such tight control.

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22
Jun
2009
Categories
Books

By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept

No review this time around. Just a quote. This comes from By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept by Paulo Coelho.

Man runs into an old friend who had somehow never been able to make it in life. ‘I should give him some money,’ he thinks. But instead he learns that he is old friend has grown rich and is actually seeking him out to repay the debts he had run up over the years.

They go to a bar they used to frequent together and a friend buys drinks for everyone there. When they ask him how he became so successful, he answers that until only a few days ago, he had been living the role of the ‘Other’.

‘What is the Other?’ they ask.

‘The Other is the one who taught me what I should be like, but not what I am. The other believes that it is our obligation to spend our entire life thinking about how to get our hands on as much money as possible so that we will not die of hunger when we are old. So we think so much about money and our plans for acquiring it that we discover we are alive only when our days on earth are practically done. And then it’s too late.’

‘And you? Who are you?’

‘I am just like everyone else who listens to their heart: a person who is in enchanted by the mystery of life. Who is open to miracles, who experiences joy and enthusiasm for what they do. It’s just that the other, afraid of disappointment, kept me from taking action.’

‘But there is suffering in life,’ one of the listeners said.

‘And there are defeats. No one can avoid them. But it’s better to lose some of the battles in the struggle for your dreams and to be defeated without ever even knowing what you’re fighting for.’

‘That’s it?’ another listener asked.

‘Yes, that’s it. When I learned this, I resolved to become the person I had always wanted to be. The other stood there in the corner of my room, watching me, but I will never let the other into myself again - even though it has already tried to frighten me, warning me that it’s risky not to think about the future.’

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17
Jun
2009
Categories
Books, Writing
Tags

Book progress

45,369 words.

Of course I’m not going to gauge success on the number of words I’ve written. Neither am I going to proclaim it ‘finished’ when I hit a certain number. It’s finished when the story is told.

Crossing the 45,000-word mark this morning, though, was a bit of a happy moment as I’ve set myself a vague 90,000 word aim (target is too strong a word, I think), as conventional wisdom appears to be that the count that most publishers are looking out for is somewhere between 80,000 and 100,000 for a first-time novelist.

Reaching 45,369, with half of the story told, then, means that I’m pretty much in line to get there without making it unsaleably long, or so brief it would fit in a pamphlet. It’s 50.41% of 90,000 words.

So, what is 90,000 words in terms of regular book print? Well, looking around on the web most people seem to estimate around 10 words per line, with 25 lines per page in the average novel. So that would be 250 words to the page.

On that basis 90,000 words would run to 360 pages.

It’s not an exact science, of course. If you have a lot of dialogue you’ve probably written fewer words on each line with more lines overall, but it’s interesting to do the maths.

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15
Jun
2009
Categories
Picture story
Tags

The cat… lounging again

It must be quite idyllic being a cat. After a whole Sunday spent sleeping under the Japanese tree a couple of weeks ago, he spent this Sunday flopping about in a deck chair.

It’s a life of luxury.

Cat in a deckchair

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13
Jun
2009
Categories
Papers and Mags
Tags

The local paper

I sometimes wonder whether all local papers as parochial as ours, which takes ‘local’ to its logical extreme. There are pages in the middle that report the smallest stories in town. Where else could you read about Joyce’s scones?

DARBY & JOAN - Mrs Ashford welcomed everyone to the meeting held at the community centre and get well wishes were sent to Mrs Barford. Members were thanked for their generous gifts for the club’s stall at the church fete on June 13. The competition for a wedding photograph attracted some lovely entries dating from 1924 to the present day and there were two photos printed on a cushion. Members had to think back to their childhood days to guess the answers to the nursery rhyme quiz which was one by Mrs Tebby. After that, members were pleased to tuck into Joyce’s scones and a cup of tea.

Or the amazing prizes on offer at the Women’s Institute?

WOMEN’S INSTITUTE - …the competition for a table mat was won by Jean Sapsford; and the runner up was Elsie Briggs. Members are reminded that meetings will start at 2.15pm in Broomfield Community Centre when the speaker will be Paul Irvine on health. The competition is for a cereal bowl.

Both of those are in this week’s issue.

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12
Jun
2009
Categories
Books
Tags

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

The Book Thief is the perfect demonstration of why publishers are so keen to get their authors on those big tables you see in bookshops, or at least it was in my case. If it hadn’t been set out by the door in the shop near work I’d probably never have found that. That would have been a shame.

The Book ThiefSo, the premise. It is 1939, 1940, and the years around then, and Germany is at war. Liesel Meminger is abandoned by her mother, not entirely voluntarily, in the town of Molching, near Munich (don’t bother checking - it’s fictional). There, she is handed over to a loving foster father and a fierce foster mother, who ladels every sentence with a generous serving of German expletives. Had her younger brother not died on the train there, she’d have had company, and might not have had such a hard start in her new home, but he did, so she did.

Over the 550 pages that follow, Germany fights what eventually becomes a war of attrition and the book’s narrator finds his workload only ever gets heavier. That’s because the narrator is Death and there are an awful lot of bodies to pick up.

Who would ever have guessed that Death could be such a quirky, approachable character; likeable, even. Who could ever have known he had such a way with words, for if there is only one reason to read this book it’s surely the style of language.

Zusak is something of a linguistic genius, and if you don’t envy his skill at constructing sentences you’ll certainly never have read before, then you really ought to be writing yourself. Never expect the expected, as he pulls out perfect adjectives, powerful similes and metaphors that make me very jealous indeed.

But perhaps the trouble is that that is the only reason to read this book, and that’s a shame. I didn’t identify with any of the characters, I didn’t feel sympathy or empathy, and even towards the end I didn’t really care whether they survived the Allied bombing or became a fraction in the statistics of war.

Yet, still I don’t feel that the hours I spent in Molching, watching Liesel grow and mature was time wasted, and Kathryn thought it was great, which perhaps explains how it won itself a place on that table.

Overall, then, three out of five. Brilliantly written, not so brilliantly plotted.

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11
Jun
2009
Categories
Journal
Tags
,

Nuts

I know warnings about packets of nuts containing nuts are nothing new. It’s a symptom of compensation culture that means manufacturers can’t afford not to print it, even if it’s a clear packet and it says ‘Mixed nuts and raisins on the front’.

So it wasn’t a surprise to see it on my bag of nuts

More surprising was the fact that they also felt the need to point out that they’d been ‘packed in a factory where nuts & sesame seeds are handled’.

Well thank goodness for that.

Bags of nuts

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10
Jun
2009
Categories
Books, Writing

What I’m writing

Here’s a secret: I’m writing a book.

Not the first, granted, although somehow I managed to forget to write about the Aperture book once it had been published and arrived in my hands. Don’t know why - it took months to put it together and despite some misgivings I have signed the contract for a second edition.

Anyhow, this isn’t that. This is fiction.

I had an idea for a story at the start of the year which matured over the next few months, pretty much until we went to the Dales at Easter, in fact. By then it was more or less worked out in my mind, and one evening I mentioned it at dinner and ended up sketching out the story. I hadn’t planned on doing that, but it’s probably as well that I did, as everyone said they wanted to read it.

So, on the train home, I started to write.

And it’s going surprisingly well. My characters are behaving, they’re saying the things I want them to say, and they’re not going off down any unexpected tracks. The secret, as I’ve discovered, is careful, extensive planning. It’s the only way you can keep them in control. After all, if you don’t know where you need to take them, you shouldn’t be surprised if they wander off on their own.

Skipping that stage was the cause of my downfall last time around. Back then I raced off with nothing but a word-count in sight and the results were, frankly, rubbish. It all petered out at 115,000 words, when the story was only half way told.

I’ve looked back at it since and it’s trash. And contrived trash at that.

Re-reading that blog entry, I can see that I’d managed to put down 50,000 words in three weeks, which should have told me something fairly obvious. Apparently it didn’t. This time, in a couple of months of writing I’d done 40,000 words. A respectable total, and one with which I’m satisfied, as I know this time around that the story has integrity.

That’s why the characters are behaving themselves: I know where they need to go, and I know what they need to say in every conversation. I also know who they are, how they got where they are, and how this defines their motivation for every move and spoken word.

It’s very fulfilling, but much harder work than I’d imagined. I’m determined to see it through, though. Hence this entry. Now that I’ve admitted I’m doing it, I have to finish it.

Watch this space.

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09
Jun
2009
Categories
Technology
Tags
,

Red faced

iPhoto 09 has a neat little facial recognition feature, which helps it file all your photos for you. Look, here it is in action:

iPhoto

Pretty clever, isn’t it. Personally I’m hoping that if we’re putting all our hopes for national security in the hands of smart CCTV and facial recognition it works something like that.

And not something like this:

iPhoto

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08
Jun
2009
Tags

PCW RIP

PCWPoor old PCW. Incisive Media, its owner for the last couple of years, shut it down today, declaring it financially unviable in the current economic climate.

A rather familiar refrain just now, so why mention it here? Because PCW is where I got my break, big or otherwise, 12 years ago.

It wasn’t the first magazine I wrote for, but it was the first one that gave me a full-time job; still the first of only two full-time jobs I’ve had in journalism. When I joined I envisaged staying for a couple of years, but by the time I left I’d been there for seven and a half.

It was riding high back then. For a while we the UK’s biggest-selling computer magazine and both advertisers and kit suppliers were falling over themselves to get onto our pages.

Apparently not any more. When its shut-down was announced today it was still drawing in 54,009 readers every month so, as Chris of the Brennan intimated, clearly the ad sales were very poor or the rates were too low.

Or the readership figure was a bit out.

It’s a sad day, seeing it go like that, but I do feel it strayed a bit lately. Some very strange covers, a fair amount of re-used copy in between them, and an apparent fascination with certain subject matters, which came up more often than they probably should.

There might be some job losses so it’s nothing to celebrate, even if you do work for a rival publisher, but it’s something I think a fair few could see coming. That, though, doesn’t make it any less of a shame, or that it will be any less missed.

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