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May

Write More

By Scribbleboy 2 Comments

Categories: Book, Life List, Review, Site and Writing

Last week I started work on a set of icons to represent each of the challenges on this blog. Since you last saw them I’ve taken note of your suggestions, played around with them a little bit more and even drawn some new ones. Over the next few days I’m going to be posting each icon, my reasoning behind its design and a progress report for the challenge.

Turns out I have a lot to say about my first challenge so this one gets a post all to itself.

1. Write More

A simple concept but one that is difficult to represent using an icon. My first thought was to interpret the circle as a full stop but out of context this was meaningless. Then I considered turning it into a single quotation mark but this suggested conversation and would probably have ended up as a poor imitation of the Vodafone logo. I thought of ink blots, the end of a pencil, the ball in a ballpoint pen, weirdly shaped nibs on fountain pens and discounted them all as antiquated or meaningless out of context.

A screwed up piece of paper was the best idea I could come up with and as you can see I played around with a number of variations. I’m not sure any of them work, after staring at them for this long I wonder why I’ve created buckets of oversized popcorn.

The challenge itself, with its various subsections, has become overly complicated too. Let’s recap.

1a. Began as “updating [this shiny new blog] at least once a week”. I was so successful at this that I later wrote “I’m now going to aim to write 500 words a day and blog at least three times a week (one of these will always be on Monday).” This obviously failed and I was later forced to admit that “the standard issue WordPress calendar is beginning to resemble an empty wasteland devoid of posts”. Later still I attempted to resurrect the challenge and that too eventually failed.

let’s just knock this one on the head, I’ll blog as and when I feel like but no less than three times a week, unless life gets in the way, which undoubtedly it will.

1b. Hook the blog up to Facebook. Done.

Depending on my mood I turn this off and on but it does bring a lot of traffic to my site. Illogically, there are certain posts that I’m happy for strangers to read but not comfortable with my friends on Facebook seeing. I guess this is a combination of knowing that people who have taken the effort to read the blog genuinely do care and a realisation that my Facebook friend list is stuffed with people who I’ve forgotten I’ve added and the overly-sensitive.

1c. Install the Visual Bookshelf on Facebook. Done.

The reason behind this was to encourage me to read more and overall I think it’s worked. So far I have read and reviewed Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn by the incomparable Stephenie Meyer.

I also read The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl by Belle De Jour and micro-reviewed it here (“made me realise how much is has been watered down for television. If you think you’d enjoy frank, funny and full on sex stories then buy this book, otherwise probably best to give it a miss.”) I also quoted it when writing about jogging.

The Further Adventures of a London Call Girl is another book that I have completed. In fact I read this one first, obviously discounted prices and pictures of a scantily clad Billie Piper in some way inhibit my ability to read the word sequel properly. Like the first time but not as tight is both an accurate micro-review and a rather obvious innuendo.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay is a book with a great sense of style and dark sense of humour. You’ll enjoy it either way but if you’ve watched the tv series it’ll add an extra dimension to the characters you already know and make you realise how faithful they were to the original text on screen.

Back in January I alluded to my reading of The Secret Dreamworld of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. You should definitely give this a shot. Ignore that it’s chick-lit, ignore the film (I’m told they’ve changed a lot of things for the big screen) and just read this book, haven’t read something that has made me laugh so much in a long time (watch Rebecca’s letters to her bank manager grow more and more ridiculous as the book progresses).

I am currently reading Beloved by Toni Morrison (yes, still).

Frost/ Nixon, as referenced here, is another book I have yet to finish. Dylan on Dylan, mentioned here, also sits on my pile of books to read.

Since then I’ve also picked up The Vice Photo Book (mentioned here, quoted there). I micro-reviewed it as “Between it’s hardback covers Vice Magazine spend 336 pages documenting the shit-stained, sex-obsessed nature of humanity in all its full-frontal full-colour glory”.

I’m also reading Love All the People by Bill Hicks. Bill and Belle make strange bedfellows in my post about jogging. My penultimate read is Rebel Code by Glyn Moody. Yes, it’s a book about open source software, deal with it.

Finally, I am meant to be reading the Bible. I’ve discussed this before and even contemplated buying a New International Version. This Easter Baines bought me a pocket sized NIV (thank you) so now I have no excuse. I have decided that instead of starting from the beginning (again) I’m going to soldier on from Samuel I and attempt to get an overview of the entire book.

1e. Freelance. Ultimate fail.

I need to do something about this.

1f. NaNoWriMo

I have the official National Novel Writing Month book which means I know how to capitalise NaNoWriMo correctly. It’s now just a case of waiting for November and then attempting to write a 50,000 word novel. Somehow I think I’m setting myself up for failure here.

Summary: This challenge has been half completed. If you have any more writing challenges they’re getting a new number because this is just getting confusing.

Jan

Atheist Bible Study

By Scribbleboy 2 Comments

Categories: Atheist Bible Study, Book, Review and Writing

I’ve searched the holy books
I tried to unravel the mystery of Jesus Christ, the saviour
I’ve read the poets and the analysts
Searched through the books on human behaviour
I travelled this world around
For an answer that refused to be found
I don’t know why and I don’t know how
But she’s nobody’s baby now.

Nobody’s Baby Now, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Anyone who’s known me long enough will know that I am fascinated with faith. More often than not this takes the form of stupid questions such as “Why did the Christian God guarantee Jews a place in heaven?” and “How do you live a good life if you’ve been reincarnated as a rock?”

Even though I don’t understand it I imagine faith would be a wonderful thing to have. To believe that every good deed you do will be rewarded, that there is something more than life and that all seemingly random acts are part of a great plan must be reassuring. To have a book to refer to in moral dilemmas rather than just trusting your gut must help too (although my gut’s getting quite good at this one).

I was not christened, nor were my parents regular churchgoers and so my first real encounter with Christianity was when I went to primary school. We used to sing stuff like this;

I danced for the scribe and the pharisee,
But they would not dance and they would not follow me.
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John
They came with me and the dance went on.

Lord of the Dance, Sydney Carter

Back then I didn’t know what a scribe was, let alone a pharisee. I still don’t know why everyone’s dancing. This illustrates the problem with a lot of the stuff they taught me at school, they only taught me half of it (and most of that was wrong). In my next post I will expose the deceitful treachery that is the song Who Built the Ark? (Brother Noah Built the Ark).

My second experience with religion was when I joined the Cub Scouts at the age of seven. Just like at school we had to pray here too and just like at school I was getting nothing. If I really squeezed my eyes closed I could get some weird patterns and I could always conjure up that night’s episode of The Simpsons in my head but this didn’t seem to be the point of the exercise. Occasionally you’d sneak a peek at everyone else and wonder if it was working for them.

When Peter O’Toole said, “When did I realise I was God? Well, I was praying and I suddenly realised I was talking to myself.” he might have been onto something, either that or he’s going to burn for all eternity.

The problem was you couldn’t ask people what they saw when they prayed, asking the difficult questions was always frowned upon. I remember asking my dad what the animals on the ark ate and his response being, “Who have you been talking to?”

It was answers like this that made me attempt to read the Bible the first time around. The only problem was that when I was little I thought you weren’t allowed to skip parts of a book and parts of the Bible are very boring (why they don’t put the family trees in an appendix like they do in The Lord of the Rings I’ll never know). It is these tedious family trees that meant the first time I never made it past the third page.

In 2007 I tried again and managed maybe two to three books of the Bible. It wasn’t until I took the Bible with me to China in 2008 (I’d promised someone that I would, don’t ask), finished all my other books and was stuck on a 24 hour train that I got as far as Samuel I (the ninth book of the Bible).

Unfortunately, when I got back to Britain I put the Bible on my “books I should read” pile and it’s been abandoned ever since.

When people find out that I’ve been attempting to read the Bible their response tends to be, “Why? You’re not a Christian.” This is true, I’d rather reject something I don’t fully understand than believe is half-heatedly. it just seems weird that a book that has shaped our culture, is the basis for our legal system and has influenced the language and imagery of artists for generations is only read by Christians (and somehow I think they might be biased).

So, with all this in mind, every time I read a book of the Bible (yes, I’m starting again for a third time) I will try and write some kind of summary for the blog in a feature I have decided to dub “Atheist Bible Study.” Hopefully it’ll be amusing enough for people to read it and inoffensive enough for my effigy not to get burnt in the streets.

Jan

Breaking Dawn: Just Say No

By Scribbleboy 5 Comments

Categories: Book, Review and Writing

This review is riddled with spoilers like Swiss cheese is riddled with holes. If you want to fully enjoy the Twilight series then refrain from reading it until you have tackled the 754 page behemoth that is…

Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (2/5)

Not since I made it half way through Crash, a book in which the principal characters are sexually aroused by car crashes, have I read anything quite so disturbing.

As with its predecessors, Breaking Dawn is a testimony to the power of love, however this time it focuses on the pain people are willing to endure in its name.

Once they are married Edward whisks Bella away to an island off the coast of Brazil for a romantic honeymoon/ to be date raped. It is only due to the power of love that, when Bella wakes up in a broken bed, covered in bruises and down from the pillows that Edward has bitten through, she doesn’t press charges. After all it’s what she wanted, even if she can’t remember most of it.

Unfortunately for Bella her sparkly vampire who doesn’t produce any bodily fluids is firing on all cylinders in one department and it isn’t long before she’s been impregnated with his hellspawn. Once again it is down to the power of love that, with the foetus growing at an alarming rate and cracking ribs as it goes, no one thinks to abort the violent little half-breed.

During the pregnancy the baby forces Bella to start drinking human blood and it isn’t until the blighter decides to snap Bella’s spine that Edward performs a cesarean section, with his teeth. Stephenie Meyer has managed to create a pregnancy scene that is so horrific it should be required reading on abstinence-only programmes across America.

The baby’s first action, it’s a girl by the way, is to bite Bella. Yes, the infant tries to drink her own mother, which is rather harsh considering Bella is already on her deathbed. Cue Edward injecting vampire venom directly into her heart and veins to save her.

With Bella busy writhing in agony on the Cullen’s sofa and Edward busy wringing his hands and generally being pathetic it is down to the literary third wheel that is Jacob Black to narrate the second part of the story.

This secondary perspective is incongruous with the previous three books and serves little purpose, perhaps only saving Stephenie from having to write with any kind of emotional intensity as Bella goes through an immense amount of pain for the vampire and the baby she loves.

The wolves want to destroy the hellspawn, Jacob doesn’t and forms his own pack. The wolves don’t attack the vampires. With this non-plot out of the way it’s time to return to the real story narrated by Bella who is now a fully fledged vampire. She has decided to call her baby Renesmee because being half vampire isn’t enough, you have to get bullied at school as well.

The events of part one forgotten, everyone now loves Renesmee the magical talking baby, some people a little too much. When Leah (a character so insignificant I’ve never even mentioned her before) joined Jacob’s pack I figured they’d get together; they both have an unrequited love and could have had lots of fun licking their wounds together. Unfortunately, Stephenie decides to have Jacob develop a weird werewolf crush on a child barely out of the womb. Yes, Jacob hates bloodsuckers and said Bella would be dead to him when she became a vampire but don’t let the facts get in the way of a mediocre story.

In contrast with part one, in which Bella suffered an obscene amount of pain, in part three she has it way too easy. As a new vampire she has complete control over her raging bloodlust, even getting to meet her human father, and has morphed from a clumsy girl into a agile vamp with super powers. To top it all off the Cullens have even built her and Edward a sex cottage (seriously).

It is at this point that Stephenie Meyer should have called it quits and hit the publish button on FanFiction.Net. Unfortunately, she didn’t and the reason why is the same reason as ever. At some stage someone (whose name if ever revealed will be cursed through the ages) bought Stephenie a how-to book on novel writing as a last minute gift. Chapter three of this book is probably called something like “Plot: Your Story Should Have One”, unfortunately Meyer possesses a rare genetic mutation that makes this chapter invisible to her until she is at least three quarters of the way through writing her novel.

Roll plot. The leaders of the vampire world the Volturi have heard of Renesmee, unfortunately they think she is a crazy vampire baby with an insatiable hunger instead of a half human child who is exploring far beyond her expected reading grade.

Knowing that the Volturi will kill the baby and punish those responsible, the Cullens begin to assemble a collection of witnesses to testify that the baby is half human. There are 30 odd vampire witnesses that turn up, each of these characters is as paper thin as the next (they are all listed alphabetically by coven in the vampire index but there’s no point reading this because none of these characters develop the plot in any way).

After the new arrivals have spent a while showing off their powers (the ones that stand out being the ability to control the elements and to taser your enemies) and practising for the epic battle that will inevitably ensue the Volturi show up. Unfortunately, Meyer disappoints on this count too and the entire dispute is peacefully resolved using the “super power” that is diplomacy.

So by the end of page 754 (“And then we continued blissfully into this small but perfect piece of our forever.”) the reader is back to where they were on 387. The Cullens are content and the Volturi have returned to Italy where they can continue to be morally ambiguous in peace.

An all too neat ending to a disappointing series that was nonetheless compulsive reading. This is the final nail in the coffin of the Twilight series and I promise to give you at least a month to recover before I even contemplate reviewing anymore fiction.

Jan

Eclipse: Now With Added Plot

By Scribbleboy 0 Comments

Categories: Book, Review and Writing

Are you a young girl who uses this blog to inform your choice of teen fiction? If so please let me know, it would be most amusing. Also don’t read this review it may contain spoilers.

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (2/5)

Mocking a book that uses fridge magnets as a recurring metaphor isn’t the most intellectually strenuous of activities, nor is it the right one. Eclipse, the third installment of the Twilight series, may have its flaws but it’s the best book that Stephenie Meyer has written.

After dropping a big hint that I’ll soon be receiving a whole load of physical intimacy and a car* Stephenie quickly gets to work introducing a plot within the first chapter. This is impressive for an author who has previously only tacked plots onto the end of her novels as half-hearted afterthoughts.

A pack of vampires are running amok in downtown Seattle and sworn enemies the Cullen vampire clan and the Quileute werewolf pack must join forces to defeat them. An impressive plot, considering her previous work, but one that is a long time coming. After introducing the plot on page eight readers then have to wait until page 198 for any further development. In the mean time we are to forced to explore the relationship between Edward, Bella and Jacob; a love triangle that is only rivalled in tediousness by the relationship between Thomas the Tank Engine, Lady the Tank Engine and the Fat Controller.

Plot, however, is not the only thing that Stephenie has developed; Bella’s character has changed for the better too. Bella was always meant to be an intellectual but all she did in the previous two books was name check writers and dawdle two steps behind the reader.

Twilight

Bella: “I wonder if Edward’s a vampire?”
Reader: “Well duh… it tells you on the back of the book.”

New Moon

Bella: “I wonder if Jacob’s a werewolf?”
Reader: “Well duh… he told you in the previous book.”

This time Bella makes some not so obvious observations and actually reads and references Wuthering Heights on numerous occasions. In the short break between New Moon and Eclipse Bella has also grown less whiny and improved her co-ordination. Yes, she’s still insecure but at least this time you can see why. Yes, she still has accidents but only twice and one of those is an injured hand caused by punching a werewolf. The other occasion is when she cuts herself in the forest and even then she smears the blood around to leave a false trail for the rival vampires.

Disappointingly however, when it gets to the fight scene Bella is still as needy as ever and the closest she gets to defending herself is self harming. Another negative is that the larger and more interesting battle is taking place some distance away and as readers we only witness it through what Edward chooses to tell us.

The Twilight series has never really been about plot though, it’s been about the emotional connection between Edward and Bella (read: will they ever get it on?) Since Stephenie Edward doesn’t believe in premarital sex a certain something has to happen first though and we find out Bella’s answer in this book (the suspense).

All in all, not a bad book, however, the writing style has now become something that can no longer be excused as American English or the grammar of a teenage girl. There are clear failures in proofing here and as I look at the length of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn, the doorstop of a novel that follows it, I get the sinking feeling that Meyer’s publishers are too busy rolling in money to bother editing her manuscripts anymore.

*”I firmly believe that my fans are the most attractive, intelligent, exciting, and dedicated fans in the whole world. I wish I could give you each a big hug and a Porsche 911 Turbo.”

Jan

New Moon: A Remarkable Achievement

By Scribbleboy 0 Comments

Categories: Book, Review and Writing

New Moon, Stephenie Meyer (2/5)

Do you think that Edward Cullen is a dishy dreamboat? If so you should avoid reading New Moon, avoid reading the rest of this review and continue with your programme of medication (you’ll probably never be allowed to sleep in a room without padded walls but on the plus side, with phrases like “dishy dreamboat”, you obviously have world class alliteration skills).

If, however, you felt that Edward’s patronising and arrogant personality was matched only by Bella’s whiny petulance then you’re in for a treat. For the first 450 pages of New Moon, Stephenie Meyer’s second attempt at a novel, the alabaster Adonis is off gallivanting around Brazil, Italy and I-don’t-even-care-anymore.

Unfortunately, this means readers are subjected to an extended emotional breakdown on the part of Bella and not much else.

With Edward out of the picture Bella picks up some dangerous and uncharacteristic pastimes (riding motorbikes, talking to strangers, jumping off cliffs and listening to rap music). If you’re thinking “Wow, the new Bella sounds a lot more fun than the old one. I’m glad she’s gaining some independence.” then I’m sorry to disappoint. The only reason she’s doing any of these things is so she can hear Edward’s voice warning her to be careful. Yes, that’s right, she hears voices.

Bella’s also made a new friend, Jacob Black. His main interests include being a native American Indian, smiling, restoring his VW Rabbit and turning into a werewolf. It takes Bella a long time to figure that last one out and it causes plenty of conflict in the couple’s not so gripping non-relationship (maybe she should have just re-read Twilight and paid more attention to the part where Jacob talks about his family being descended from wolves).

In the tradition of Twilight it is not until readers are the majority of the way through the book that Stephenie realises she’s going to need a plot. Cue Alice and Bella hopping on a plane to Italy to rescue Edward from vampire elders the Volturi. Even a vampire who’s been going through a dry spell of 110 years would be forced to admit that this section of the book is one hell of an anticlimax.

In summary, New Moon is a remarkable achievement; Stephenie has managed to create something that is even worse than Twilight. By now your mind will be numb to the pain caused by her poor grammar and rampant Americanese and you will no longer expect any kind of action or character depth to be present on the pages. All that will keep you reading is the hope that Edward will return and that something will happen (SPOILER: Yes he does and no it doesn’t).

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About

Born in Paignton, somewhat educated in Stoke-on-Trent and living in Peterborough. I am a footsoldier in the army of the unemployed and an occasional blogger. I spend my days applying for jobs and watching Glee.

I survive on caffeine, willpower and savings alone. This blog is a record of my successes and failures as I try and complete life-improving challenges suggested to me by readers.