An industrial legacy

I only fitfully buy the local newspaper, but this week’s issue has a strange story that has its origins back in 1984. In the UK we had a miners’ strike back then, and I now live in an old mining area. It turns out that during the strike, ‘someone’ (the paper is careful not to point a finger, because there’s likely to be an investigation) made a number of unauthorised and undocumented tunnels, and they weren’t properly maintained.

The local mines were all closed shortly after the strike ended.

I vaguely knew that old, unmaintained mines have risks of spontaneous combustion. There’s a UK Coal Authority list of seams with this risk. Wikipedia offers a short and general explanation and the US Department of Energy has a file that gives more detail.

It looks like at least one of the seams containing an undocumented tunnel is actually now alight. The first indication was that gardeners living above the seam found themselves pulling fully cooked vetegables from their back gardens and a couple of feet down in the earth, apparently, the temperature is 60 deg. C.

And this seems to be, on the face of it, the result of stuff that happened almost 30 years ago inside the mine during a miners’ strike, while the miners were picketing the mine gates. Stuff that wasn’t recorded at the time and got glossed over afterwards. Apparently there’s an entire street affected, where the houses may now be uninhabitable due to heated foundations and the risk of smoke percolating up into the houses through the ground. And much as that might be a stunning visual image to use in a story, its real-life occurrence is clearly going to have a major effect on the families living in that street.

I can see this one running for some time with inquiries, insurance claims, lawsuits and suchlike.

The £57 bolt

No, it’s not a story about special bolts for aircraft or some such. The car seat jammed, wouldn’t move forward or backward. I got under there with a torch but couldn’t see anything. Pulled, wrenched, hit the mechanism with a hammer. I’d have taken the seat out, but the position it was jammed in meant I couldn’t get to the rear bolts holding the seat runners.

Hence a quick trip to a mechanic, who had to use considerable ingenuity to get a spanner to the rear bolts, took the seat out and discovered the problem was another loose bolt, I think one that dropped out of a box of stuff I’d had in the car recently, that had rolled under there and jammed the mechanism.

So in essence one loose bolt cost me an hour and a bit of the mechanic’s time, but at least the seat works now.

Being torrented, that whooshing sound, and other matters

The story of the last week can be encapsulated in two quotes. 

The first is one that comes up on the front page of a freelance website I use: ‘The first 90% of a project takes up 90% of the time you allocated for it; the last 10% of it takes up the remaining 90% of the time.’

The second one is a quote from Douglas Adams. I already knew it but found it again accidentally when I clicked into a story about him: ‘I love deadlines. I love that whooshing sound they make as they go by’ (OK, it may not be an exact quote but you get the idea). So as far as I’m concerned I’m currently on last Monday’s work, it’s going slowly, and my own writing projects are similarly backed up.

The thing is this: if you’re writing distance learning courses you need to remember two things, really. One is that courses need to be regularly updated with old material replaced by fresher examples and all the dead links exchanged for comparable ones that actually work. And the second is that unlike a lecture situation, if you write something that glosses over a point you assume students know and they don’t know it, unlike a lecture there’s no row of blank faces in front of you to warn you that you might need to backtrack a little. It has to be right and it has to be properly documented, first time. And getting these things right does indeed take around 180% of whatever time you set for the job.

In other news – I’m apparently being torrented. I got a heads-up on this from a bit of spam I caught that was a link to torrentsradar.com. So the short stories and bits of flash fiction I put on here are being made available as pirated versions. 

This is the first time it’s happened (that I know of), and I’m not altogether pleased. At one level it means the stuff I’ve posted will be more widely read, which is the aim of most writers – especially those who are relatively speaking unknown. However, it means people are reading my stuff without coming back to jonvagg.wordpress.com to find me, and possibly don’t even know I wrote it or that it’s freely available on jonvagg.wordpress.com. So writing stories may entertain more people but it’s not exactly going to work as publicity for me.

Moreover, while those pieces are short, free giveaways and I make no money from them, they’re clearly now a part of the ‘digital economy’ though I confess I don’t see how the torrent site makes its money. It appears to have no adverts and no membership fees, though it is affiliated to a trafficholder site that allows people to buy and sell clickthroughs. So at some level they’re making someone money apart from, presumably, WordPress whose business is hosting free content and which has probably made a tiny fraction of a cent off my content by now… 

While I’m on that topic, incidentally, I also checked out Pirate Bay – something I last did about two years ago – and I notice they no longer have adverts from big-name banks, insurance companies and supermarkets as they did back then. When I first saw those ads I was very tempted to shop in the local supermarket and announce at the checkout that I was taking that week’s shopping as part-payment for my intellectual property rights… These days they seem to be taking ads from D-list dating sites, which suggests they’re experiencing hard times.

I’m also clearly now going to have to police Amazon, Smashwords and other places to see if other people have been ripping off my stories. So if you’re reading this blog as part of a torrent, just bear in mind you can subscribe to jonvagg.wordpress.com and get exactly the same content by Jon Vagg for free. If you’ve been trying to pass yourself off as the author of any of my stories, expect to get some grief about it quite soon.

And in future, while I’ll be posting ruminations of different kinds on here, and I’ll still post the occasional story, the stories will be in a format that won’t be quite so easily pirateable – not because you won’t be able to get the plain text, but because there will other things bundled with the stories that you’ll be missing out on if you don’t come to jonvagg.wordpress.com to find out about. Call it a proof of concept if you like, it’s a set of ideas I started working on for multimedia stories and while I haven’t had time to develop it properly, once I’m done with the current round of distance learning course revisions I’ll be able to spend a little bit of time bringing a year-old idea to fruition.

The end is nigh!

Last night, after something like four months of a group of us juggling diaries, we finally did the video shoot for a project I’ve had in mind since late last year. There’s more to do: some still photography, design work, and fitting the whole thing together. It’s been a steep learning curve because I’ve had to work out how to do video editing and various ancillary things, but the end is now in sight. Another couple of weeks and I should be able to show and tell…

Lost in space?

We had the elections to the local council today. I voted, but was extremely unimpressed. I evidently live in a black hole, a pit, at an address no one can reach (or possibly doesn’t dare to approach). No doorstepping, which I admit I’m happy about. But no ‘vote for me’ flyers from any person or party either. Do they want me to vote into a void? Or does my vote not actually matter to anyone? Just as well I’d taken at least some initiative prior to voting…

Just thought I’d say…

… I ‘m still here. Just not blogging as much because I’m working hard on some new projects, some educational and some more speculative and fiction-based (I was tempted to day they’re fictional projects but that would give the wrong impression). As someone or other said on another blog I sped past the other day, I don’t have enough bandwidth to progress those projects and find interesting things to blog about. You don’t really want to know what I had for dinner and what time I got up this morning, do you? (If you’re really curious the answers are chicken risotto and 7am, which is uncharacteristically early for me since I’ve worked graveyard shifts for the last couple of decades – evening teaching, overnight editing, working until dawn to finish stories and so forth.)

One thing I have been tracking, though, is the ‘progress’ being made in universities to rationalise degree programmes (i.e. close many of them down), merge schools and faculties in order to effect budget cuts, and so forth. The Times ran a story last week about how some universities were likely to end up being taken over by private education companies. I haven’t seen other papers, even the Times Higher Education, run with that story though a more general one about cuts in humanities degrees is here.

It’s difficult to see quite how the government could force the issue (since universities are founded by royal warrants), though presumably reducing funding for selected programmes would close down financial options to the point that it becomes the least worst option for some institutions. How that would affect student experiences is a whole other question, I guess. In some respects it might make universities more ‘client centred’ though having worked with quite a few large companies in my time, I’m yet to be convinced that mainstream managerial culture is quite up to the job of managing degree programmes. Which is not to say some companies aren’t good at it – they are – but that it has very specific challenges that require specialised expertise to address.

I’ll add that to my list of things to blog about another time, though…

Thinking about spending money!

I’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that I’m going to have to spend some cash. Probably. My wallet is famed for the number of padlocks on it, and I’m renowned for trying to find cheap solutions to problems. You know the kind of thing: the wall of your house is falling down? No problem, a bit of duck tape will solve that… But this time, I suspect I may actually have to pull some actual currency out. Maybe.

The problem is this. I want to create a PDF file with a movie embedded in it. And the various programmes I have available to me for creating PDFs won’t do it. When I export to PDF, what they do is give me a nice picture of the first frame of the movie. Some of the problem appears to be with inserting the movie in such a way that it’s not an inline file, but that’s proved beyond the apparent capabilities of the programmes I’m using. There are workarounds on some of the Mac forums but they appear to require me to know a great deal more about programming than I actually do. Having spend an entire day playing with half a dozen programmes I’m bored now, so probably paying money to solve the problem is the way to go.

Allegedly Acrobat will do what I want. And so will iWork (I hate that over-stylised lower case ‘i’; nO wOnder kIds don’t uNderstand wHere uPper-cAse lEtters aRe sUpposed to go but i rAnted aBout that a wHile back).

The one saving grace is that fortunately both have a ‘try before you buy’ policy so I should be able to assemble the stuff I’m working on and see if I can make it work. If I ever do, it’ll be here before it’s anywhere else.

Meanwhile if anyone has any ideas that would work on a Mac, are free, and don’t involve Word, OpenOffice or Scribus (which I’d thought originally would be the ones most likely to work), I’d be interested to know.

Arts, (lack of) money and the need for inventiveness

The unsurprising news emerged yesterday that many UK arts organisations will have their public funding reduced or cut entirely. The arts generally is always a bit of a soft target, open to a range of criticisms from less eligibility (‘how can you spend money on the arts when there are no many funding shortfalls in health/welfare/education?’) to profligacy to poor taste (‘you mean my taxes paid for that crap to be displayed in the gallery?’).

I have, I confess, very mixed views about this. On the one hand, my own ‘involvement in state funded art’ amounts to reading my stories at a couple of events that received Arts Council and local authority subsidies. That’s probably about as much as any writer does. On the whole we work in a sector of the arts that gets probably less public funding than any other. On the other hand, I’m aware I go to events, exhibitions and the like that cost vastly more to put on than can be paid for through ticket sales, so I’m benefiting from arts funding in that sense.

State funding isn’t always the best kind of funding to have, and a lot of the most innovative work often happens in obscure holes and corners of the art world (I mean ‘art’ in its broadest sense to include the whole spectrum of artistic endeavour), funded in ways that range from impromptu to implausible, and in some cases the artwork itself is carried out in secretive and illegal ways – yes, I’m thinking here mainly of graffiti. But that said, we also need to recognise that what’s obscure and innovative at one point in time is the orthodoxy twenty years later, and that the UK as a whole is a major global producer in the economy of signs and images. It relies heavily on the flow of artistic and cultural talent in all kinds of areas from music to art to scriptwriting, screenwriting, niche areas of film and even niche areas within film such as special effects. And, of course, development of computer games… it would wind up being a long list.

Anyway. Rant over. What intrigued me today was a BBC article, ‘Arts world gets creative in funding crisis‘. Ideas being tried out now are crowdfunding through multiple small donations via the Wedidthis, Sponsume and Wefund websites; sponsoring individual members of an orchestra, with side benefits including dinners with them; venues being opened up to events such as weddings and receptions; and increasing numbers of in-person and online courses in creative areas run by people who have public reputations in those areas.

The arts are being squeezed in all sorts of directions; not just public funding, but the role of the internet in providing free access to many arts products, whether because the artists have to put it out free for promotional reasons, or internet piracy (which in music and now increasingly in writing means that artists get paid nothing for their work and need to build other income streams – live performance or whatever).

It probably won’t all work out alright in the end. There will be casualties along the way, including, probably, the collapse of some well-known and well-respected organisations. The people who are most recession-proofed, however, will be those who’ve struggled without funding already, trying to get their artistic vision across in unconventional ways. I’d hope that those people, who are often the real cutting edge of new art talent, will be able to struggle for a bit longer, become even more inventive about how they operate, and not just survive but prosper. I’m hoping at least some people will find that what doesn’t kill them makes them stronger. And I’m hoping that’s not a vain hope.

How writing a story is similar to building a garden summer house

I’ve been away for a few days, visiting friends. This is something I don’t do often enough, really. Even though I took work and my laptop and internet dongle, I never got round to doing much more than checking email and reading a bit of a novel because other stuff was going on, so while I’m notionally behind on where I wanted to be with my writing, I feel recharged and I’ll catch up.

The ‘other stuff’ that was going on largely involved erecting a summer house in my friends’ garden. It went up without much trouble and with people more expert than me doing most of the detailed work.

I helped out, though I’m far better at making joints between ideas than I am at getting bits of wood to butt up together neatly. If the summer house had been made out of concepts laid over a philosophical framework I would have done a really neat job. But that thought stayed with me, and of course making anything – from a garden summer house to a story and indeed almost anything else – will have many similarities.

On this view, writing a story involves:

• taking delivery of a bunch of pre-made bits and pieces. With a summer house, these are largely factory-made sections and should be all you need (though we added some refinements). With a story, these will be things you’ve gathered from the grab-bag of your own imagination and research. They will include plot elements, character qualities, odd facts (real or invented), situations and locations (real or imaginary), and so on.
• checking the plans and diagrams to see what you’re supposed to be doing. You do have plans and diagrams for your story, don’t you? Actually I often don’t; or at least, my plans may not bear too much of a relationship to the pieces I have to play with, or describe them with the same level of incoherence that I used to find in the manuals for electronic appliances in the 1970s.
• making sure you have all the right tools. Drills, bits and screwdrivers for stories. The right character ‘voices’ for dialogue when building a summer house. Or is it the other way round? A lot of the summer house building was carried out with character voices anyway. I often do drill down, conceptually anyway, into locations and plot details to focus on small details. A good supply of coffee and tobacco in either case (I know, they’re bad habits… treat these as optional).
• actually erecting the structure. Colourful vocabulary, occasional use of swearwords essential for both stories and summer houses. Holding odd bits of wood at awkward angles while your fingers freeze is not mandatory for stories, unless that’s your particular thing.
• making ‘improvements’ as you go along and then finding these cause more problems you need to solve. Done that. Fortunately in the case of the summer house, there were some extra blocks of wood to ensure the thing was packed correctly, and we could use those. That may not be the case with a story.
• sitting back, enjoying the result and deciding on decoration and finishing. Stories may not need a coat of paint on them but there are always bits you want to tinker with at a later date. This process can go on until someone wants to publish, and then you have to let go. That won’t be the case with a summer house, which will always be a work in progress.

See? Similar processes. Next time: how writing a story is similar to drug dealing (or something).

 

Blogging and not blogging

When I first got into the blogging thing, I found some places that gave advice on the whole business of ‘successful’ blogging. The tips included:

• write several pillar articles – tutorials that offer useful advice or reference material.
• write a blog post every day (and keyword/tag them well).
• comment on other people’s posts.
• link/trackback to other posts/websites when you refer to them.
• encourage comments.

There was more, about getting onto blog carnivals, getting listed on blog listings, sending posts out to be used as ezine articles and such, but that was the top and bottom of it.

And, of course, I follow all this advice fitfully – there are probably four of five ‘pillar’ articles on here, mostly concerned with e-learning, written over a period of close to a year. And I certainly don’t post every day.

Mostly I post when: I have something to brag about; one of my friends has done something I want to publicise (which reminds me, Psy-tek has just composed and recorded two tracks if anyone wants to license their use); something interesting or humorous happened; or something has caught my eye, often an obscure or offbeat thing on a news report.

Mostly, though, I don’t post when nothing much has happened, or when I’m busy. I have a life. It may not be much of a life, but at any one point I probably have some distance learning material to write or update, some student work to assess, half a dozen stories in various states of completion that I may or may not want to submit anywhere straightaway because I have some longer-range plans, and ‘just normal everyday stuff’ that always seems to take a lot longer to accomplish than I think it’s going to. Plus, of course, there are occasional points when I’m actually away for a few days.

So basically, if there’s nothing new on my blog it probably means (a) I have a deadline to finish distance learning materials or mark student work, or (b) I’m on a roll with the writing and managing 1500+ words a day. That may not be a lot by some people’s lights – quite a few of the writers I know on here easily do double that, but it seems to be about my limit. All I can say is spending a couple of hours hung up on how to phrase a particular sentence does seem to mean I don’t need to spend ages rewriting and editing at a later stage!

For the last week or so the answer has been (b). In addition to the stuff I’ve been writing, late last night I came across a wonderfully surreal passage in a Thomas Pynchon novel that set me on a line of thought and by this morning it had become the solution to a plot problem in a piece I started writing in late 2009 but that hung fire for about a year because I didn’t have a way to develop the story. And now I do.

However, it will have to wait because right now the answer is (a): after a long lull, my email has suddenly filled up with student papers for assessment. So I’ll stop now…

Apparently you’re supposed to end with a question to encourage comments. Here’s two for the price of one. What, if anything, stops you from blogging? What do you see as a mark of ‘success’ in a blog?