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shedboatshed, a classic

ivanpope — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 16:36:10 +0000

“He’s interested in the creation of objects; he is a researcher, traveller, narrator. He looks at the way things got to be the way they are, and reasserts a human connection between processes we take for granted” – Rachel Tant.

Decent stories will find great readers

ivanpope — Thu, 24 May 2012 12:48:45 +0000

Hugh Howey writes a great piece for the Huffington Post about how his book became a hot movie property. Along the way he sets out why independent publishing will be a success despite the naysayers.
How My Self-Published Book ‘Wool’ Became A Hot Movie Property

With sites like IndieReader springing up to support the plethora of great underground stories, and with eager shoppers looking for gems in the creek bed, I believe this is a process to celebrate rather than fear. No one worries about the boring videos on YouTube (which I amply supply). We’re too busy sharing links to the best of them.

Decent stories will find great readers. Killer websites will amplify this process. And Amazon will continue to assist us by leveling the playing field, by allowing our books to be ranked according to your tastes, rather than the tastemakers. And the end result will be more great stories at lower prices and more writers able to transition from dusting bookshelves to stocking them with their own works.

Writing a shack

ivanpope — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:22:56 +0000

Building a shack is like writing a book.

First I waited years on a list to get a piece of hardscrabble hillside. They call them allotments and I have to grow fruit and vegetables and flowers on it. The allotment is in a valley of ramshackle allotments called Roedale. From a perch at the top of my alloted space I can see the sea. When the sun shines it is like a very part of heaven.

I will build a shack. I can’t buy a shack or magic one up overnight. I have to collect the material for it, piece by piece. Luckily I have a car, so everytime I see a skip outside a house I slow down and look in it. Sometimes I strike gold. Timbers, ripped out from house extension work, are tossed away. I stack them carefully on top of my car and drive them to the acre.

See what I’m doing. It’s like the mental process of writing a book. You have to collect a lot of old dross before you can write. Some of it is big strong timber and some of it is wormy slag, but you don’t know what you’ll need until you commence work.

I have to build a platform for the shack. I have to build an outline for my book, or a structure, or a plan. If the base isn’t solid, it will not stand.

Then, painfully, piece by piece, I can start to construct this monster. Of course, in my mind’s eye, I know how it will end up. I have seen it, otherwise I never would have started. But there is a long journey between a vision of glory and creating that glory. And of course, for everything that you add to the structure, everything else might change. Sometimes you’ll find that, despite collecting a huge pile of materials, enough that it looked like two or three novels could be built from this, you will run out of content, of ideas, of joy, of momentum.

Then the process of collection must being anew. In fact it must never stop. This writing lark is a continuum, there is no start and no end. Everything comes from everything else.

One day my shack will be built and I will sit in it and write my third novel.

Heart of Darkness

ivanpope — Tue, 15 May 2012 17:16:19 +0000

Started to re-read Heart of Darkness and came across this great quote for my work in progress: Takers & Keepers.

He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know. Imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.
Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad

Think only of the book you are writing

ivanpope — Fri, 04 May 2012 23:02:59 +0000

From the very wonderful Brain Pickings:

In 1932-1933, while working on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, Miller devised and adhered to a stringent daily routine to propel his writing. Among it was this list of eleven commandments, found in Henry Miller on Writing — a fine addition to these 9 essential books on reading and writing, part of this year’s resolution to read more and write better.

COMMANDMENTS

Work on one thing at a time until finished.
Start no more new books, add no more new material to ‘Black Spring.’
Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
When you can’t create you can work.
Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
Discard the Program when you feel like it—but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

Under a part titled Daily Program, his routine also featured the following wonderful blueprint for productivity, inspiration, and mental health:

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

For more of Miller’s obsessive recipes for creative rigor, dig into Henry Miller on Writing.

The Museum of Innocence

ivanpope — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 20:25:45 +0000

I’ve always been a writer but I also became an artist along the way. I’m trained more as an artist than as anything else and for a long time I made more art than writing. It slowly occured to me that lots of the things I wanted to talk about in my art were very hard to do. There were issues of complexity, of how to make large pieces of work, of how to address multiple complex issues. I could do this in art, but it took time and money to get anywhere interesting and in times when I had little or no money I had to stop talking.
There was also the issue of how literal one is allowed to be in art. I haven’t stopped making art, I can’t wait to get back to it, but I’ve decided that I can address the issues I wanted to in writing. I made a decision that the novel was a good simulacrum for the best art (or the best art is a simulacrum for novels, I don’t mind which). My subject remains the same but I found I could get a lot closer to the subject in a wordy novel.
Orhan Pamuk, the Nobel prize winner from Turkey, wrote a book called The Museum of Innocence. He owned an old house in Istanbul and he decided to create an actual museum to work with the book. It’s taken a decade to make this museum. There are 83 different cabinets and 83 chapters in the book – a lovely mirroring.
As the Guardian reported:

Many cabinets feature video and sound installations depicting 1950s Istanbul. But the place is decisively not a museum of the city: many newspaper clippings, ads and “historic” photographs have been fabricated to represent specific characters and scenes from the novel and are by no means authentic objects.
Pamuk worked with several cutators and young Turkish artists to find a way of realising the project, which he had had in mind ever since the 1990s when he bought the house.

I completely understand the desire to do this. I have had one show that created objects from the edges of one of my novels and I would really like to do more, it is a very satisfying way to work.
The website of the Museum of Innocence.

People I knew without the gelatin

ivanpope — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 11:48:24 +0000

“The deceased, as you know, have the inconvenient habit of cooling off too slowly; they’re burning hot. So they are turned into aspics by pouring memories over them–the best form of gelatin.
And since deceased greats are also too large, they are cut down. The nose, say, is served separately, or the tongue. You need less gelatin that way. And that’s how you get yesterday’s classic as freshly cooked tongue in aspic. With a side dish of hoofs, from the horse he used to ride.
I’m trying to remember the people I knew without the gelatin. I don’t pour aspic over them, I’m not trying to turn them into a tasty dish. I know that a tasty dish is easier to swallow and easier to digest. You know where it ends up.”
Testimony: The memoirs of Dmitri Shotakovich

Getting through the decade

ivanpope — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:39:47 +0000

Following a significant birthday last year I wrote a list of things I set myself to achieve in the coming decade.

Take up Yoga
Publish a novel
Earn more money than I consume
Take up a watersport that requires a wetsuit
Do something at the Edinburgh Festival
Buy a freehold piece of land
Lose two stone
Have an exhibition of my photography
Travel to ten new countries
Undertake public speaking
Write a song for a band
Get a radio show
Gain a regular writing slot in a public publication
Make some new friends
Build a structure: hut, house etc
Learn to fly something
Take a gap year
Learn to play bass guitar
Keep running for the whole decade
Visit every place in my family tree

Some of these are straightforward (he says). Some are long shots. Some are quick wins, some are going to take a few years. But all of them are written in public.

So, farewell then Encyclopaedia Britannia

ivanpope — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 08:11:37 +0000

Encyclopaedia Britannia is to cease publishing as a paper based product. This announcement has been twenty years coming for me. Almost the first commercial organisation to have its future questioned by the rise of the internet was the Britannia, a vast unwieldy publishing monolith from a previous age. It seemed obvious, even on day one of the web, that something that took dozens of years to produce a new edition and which had to be printed and shipped on thousands of tons of paper was vulnerable to this new knowledge distribution system.

And the problem with the EB used to split commentators on the subject. Some looked forward to a day when all knowledge was in the ether and instantly updated, others bemoaned the loss of scholarship and history that such a move would entail. To tell the truth, back in those days none of us knew what we were talking about.

So it has finally come to pass. In a world rapidly moving to a new phase of digital publishing the inevitable has occured. No more paper volumes. No more door to door salespeople maybe. But not the end of the Encyclopaedia Britannia. Not yet, anyway. Now it just has to compete with everything else published digitally, including its baby brother, Wikipedia (which even dropped the glorious and mediaeval ‘aedia’).

The king is dead, long live the king.

Stop Stealing Dreams. That’s ironic, right?

ivanpope — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 14:32:23 +0000

Seth Godin: Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore?

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link.”

I never liked apps, because they head in one direction only – towards a closed web. My entire adult life has revolved around the web. It works because it’s open. I’m iffy about electronic book readers because they link only to a closed ecosystem. I hope someone is going to come up with an open source reader pretty soon before it’s too too late and we wake up one morning to find that Amazon owns our reading options.