Un-hiding this again, because I have decided, after much soul-searching, to drop the prices on these books as far as I can in an effort to stimulate a few more sales.

Part of the reason for this is the ruinous thirty-per-cent markup Amazon.com have put on them. I got an email from Lulu a while back saying they were going to remove that, but for some reason the Amazon prices actually went up, which didn't help my mood any.

Apologies to those who have already bought them, and also thanks, because it really did help.



For those without Flash, a link is here.

And a reminder: if you have read either of these books, do please feel free to leave a review on the relevant page (just click on the title of the book to find it).

Hopefully there will be something new soon.

Okay, now that the tumult and the shouting has died down a bit I'm starting to see people saying how good this Torchwood was.

And that's fine. Really, if you enjoyed it and thought it was good, more power to you. Skip merrily on and ignore me for a moment, because I'm going to go into some details ( behind a cut )

Well, I watched it, and the best thing I can find to say is that I shall never have to watch it again.

( But not the last thing, obviously... )

( All spoilers, all the time... )

There are at least two separate sides to writing, and you have to be good at both of them to make a good story.

There's the stringing together of words in a pleasing fashion, producing the gags and quips and the stirring speeches and the heartwarming lines that reveal oh so much about the hidden depths of the character you invented five minutes ago. This is the flesh and the features, the skin and hair and eyes and mouth of storytelling, and some writers do this very well.

And there's the construction of story, bolting together of incident and character, sinking massive piles of logic into the soft ground of unreality and testing them to make sure they hold firm, swinging girders of causality through the air on the crane of your imagination and snugging them firmly and precisely into the right place, and every so often stepping back a hundred miles or so to make sure your structure is neat, symmetrical and above all safe, because your readers will be stepping and climbing and swinging about on it, and not all of them will be wearing the personal antigravity belts of the willing suspension of disbelief...

...oookay, that metaphor's probably about as strained as it's going to get, but you get the idea. Stories need bones as well as flesh. Some writers are great at the bones, and can produce these gaunt, raw-boned monsters with the barest minimum of flesh on them. Other writers create pulsating globs of flesh that just lie there and pant, or (if they're slightly better) creatures that look perfectly human and even beautiful till they move and you notice their legs bend the wrong way. Or till you get to the head and discover a clown mask grinning at you because the writer couldn't be bothered to finish off the skeleton with a skull.

And now I have to end this because something else has just been brought home to me.

And there, ladies and gentlemen, goes the ball game.

( Spoilery bit... )

From la_marquise_de:

My LiveJournal Sitcom
Living With smallship1 (TBS, 10:30): smallship1 (Laura Dern) finds a coat in scendan (Emma Thompson)'s sock drawer. That weekend, tigerbright (Samuel L. Jackson) makes lots of money playing guitar on the street and makes billroper (Jennifer Connelly) jealous. That same day, braider (Tiffani-Amber Thiessen) gets lost on the way to lily_c (Dennis Rodman)'s house and spends the night in a Broadway show. Also, bardling (Kevin Bacon) and kajafoglio (Sheena Easton) collaborate on writing a romance novel. Nearby, folkmew (Tom Waits) and filkerdave (Jenna Elfman) perform slapstick at a playground. Everyone learns a valuable lesson.
What's Your LiveJournal Sitcom? (by rfreebern)

Personally, I'm not sure of the casting here, but I've been wrong before...

I promised more on Charmed, but my brain is useless. Suffice to say that we enjoyed it.

We are now doing The Pretender, which I'm enjoying more (and imagining a Big Finish Unbound audio which I will probably never write even for fun: "There are Time Lords among us. Geniuses who can travel anywhere in time and space. In 1963, an organisation known as UNIT isolated a Time Lord called the Doctor and exploited his genius for their research. Then one day, their Time Lord ran away..." In this version, Susan would have got away in the TARDIS with Ian and Barbara, the Doc would have regenerated at least once in captivity, and the world would be mostly ruled by Britain using advanced technology extracted from the Doc under torture. UNIT would have been formed a lot earlier, obviously, and been a much more hawkish outfit. Ah well.)

Today I have a Richmond Fellowship appointment, forward to which I am not looking. EDIT: the Richmond Fellowship helps people with health problems get back into work. Unfortunately for them to do this the idiot in question has to be there at the right time for the appointment. We have now rescheduled to Friday morning. Gahhh.

We are watching the Torchwood thing (I have no grudge against Torchwood, because while it has largely been rubbish, it is not trying to usurp the place of something I loved) and finding this version quite enjoyable, though I am confirmed in my suspicion that RTD has not an original thought in his head ("we're building this thing and we don't know what it is"? A For Andromeda, anybody?). He can do snatches of comedy in the midst of drama, though, and we laughed a few times.

I would like to place it on the record that I officially cannot stand the heat. Unfortunately, getting out of the kitchen doesn't help.

Many and many upon my flist are going through various brands of hell at this time, such that I could spend the entire morning going through and sending hugs and good wishes here and there across the globe. I hope they will not take it unkindly if I simply send each and all of them hugs and good wishes from here.

Thanks to all for slug suggestions, some or all of which I shall implement.

Now on with the motley, the thingummy and the whatnot, and off to get more painkillers...

When the Countess is on a roll, she doesn't like to be stopped.

So it was that, at six o' clock this morning, we finally watched the last episode of Charmed. On which more when I have finished processing.

I then went out into the garden, to which we have made further additions, and started picking slugs off the plants. I stopped counting at twenty. The slug traps don't attract them as much as the plants do, and the 100% organic granules that are supposed to stop them moving don't.

I hate slugs. The constant reappearance of more and more and more slugs, their casual assumption that our purpose in life was to find them new plants to destroy, was what mostly put me off trying to do anything in the garden last time. They are the physical embodiment of depression in a horticultural context, as if it needed one.

I will not be beaten. But I think we may have to give up on being jog-friendly and get something that actually kills the buggers. Too late for the garden lilies, the rhubarb and too many other things, though.

( Thoughts on isms and their consequences behind here... )

Our town used to have a main post office.

( Then it was closed. )

( (misspelling intentional) )

Okay, I'm back six pages (correction: FOURTEEN) on my flist and it's just occurred to me that I'm not actually taking anything in here...if I've missed anything important, please let me know.

We had valydiarosada and the_magician down for the first time in far too long this weekend, and it was wonderful to see them. The joy was compromised a bit by the fact that V did not make it to the Eric Bogle gig that was her other reason for making the journey, and we only got Chris for about a day for most of which I was too wiped and/or busy being domestic to make much music. We did do some, though, and worked on two recent songs of mine inspired by the Countess's Mershane stories, which I'm trying to get her to let me put on Lulu (there, I said it! The secret is out, ha-ha!) cos they're good. And we got to show off our still a bit work-in-progressy but starting to come together garden.

(EDIT: Oh, and we also watched a recording of the nMC's last set, which was wonderful and fun and full of people who are a lot more talented than me and do more with it. Not that this is a surprise.)

There's a thing with me, which may be the depression or the CFS or something else I don't know about, but it was starting to come out in the last few Nycons we had. I love my friends and I want to see and talk to them and hug them and make music with them, but I need frequent alone times in among. This feels horribly selfish when people have driven miles to see us, and it isn't anything to do with anything but my own internal workings, and I am hoping that it will get better. Especially if we do this more often, which I hope we will.

So, a good weekend all round, and we have two more planned, gods willing.

Internet down for four days. Sorry about the enforced silence. Back now and endeavouring to float my distinctly subprime knickerbockers.

The Dowager Countess used to say "God (or Life, or Whatever) never puts anything on you that you can't handle," or words to that effect.

At least two people whom I know and love are currently ill as a result of having had put on them way more than they can handle, and I'm not even counting the Countess. So that comforting platitude is simply that, a meaningless noise, a tune we whistle in the dark to keep each other quiet.

Meanwhile, we have moved from Roswell through Andromeda to Charmed, and I've come up against another one. To be fair, there are practical reasons for this one; when writing a series about magic (or sufficiently advanced technology, for that matter), there is always the danger of making the magic too powerful and removing the possibility of tension. After all, if magic can solve any problem, if all your witches have to do is go shallamy-gallamy-zoop and everything's all right, what kind of drama could they ever come up against? So writers try to introduce a sort of "game balance" concept into their stories, to make magic weak in as many ways as possible, or to make it prohibitively expensive to use. I think this may be why Peter Jackson and other storytellers don't actually like magic. And mostly I'm okay with this. I mean, strict fairness of this sort is still an improvement on the staggering iniquity of real life.

But there's that one thing that nags, and it comes up in the episode where one of the sisters meets the Angel of Death (who, like most bad guys in Charmed, is British) and finds she can't save anyone from him.

"It was his time," says the British guy.

Oh gee, was it? Well, that's good to know. Maybe that guy on the operating table, maybe it's his time. Maybe the surgeon should just back away from the table and watch density--er, sorry, I mean destiny taking its course. That woman crossing the road in front of me without looking, maybe it's her time. All those people who've died in wars they didn't start and didn't want, maybe it was their time, maybe that makes the wars all right. Maybe it's my time, right now.

Death is not evil, because only things that people do can be good or evil, and death isn't actually a people. But that doesn't mean you don't fight it. It's your time when you want it to be your time. When you have actually wrung out of life all the sweetness it can possibly hold and there's nothing left but greyness and failure and pain and not even the tiniest spark of hope anywhere. When you're ready. And even then you might be wrong. There are circumstances under which that good night can be the only place to go, and I understand that...but anyone other than me making that decision for me, even after the fact, is dead wrong. Er, to coin a phrase.

So while I understand the dramatic reason for this little bit of quietism in the face of the ultimate reality, it still bugs me, and I can't help feeling that writers could find ways of keeping it dramatic without having to kill off characters and say "it was their time." Because, as with technology, if magic can't stop people dying, then what the hell good is it?

I am currently joyfully immersed in the writing of a lady whose imagination leaves me awestruck, whose seemingly effortless command of character and plot beggars description, and whose use of language brings me to happy tears more often than anyone else's.

And I happen to be married to her.

I feel immensely proud and privileged.

Followed a link to Language Log, and discovered once again that I am one of the bad guys, a "prescriptivist." Apparently insisting that there are, or should be, rules in the use of language, that following those rules means the language works better--that language is (as I've said many times) a tool, in other words, not some amorphous glob of living, breathing, ever-choobling and evisculating culture-stuff--is bad, because great writers (they say) don't follow these rules, because the rules were only imposed in the last couple of centuries by self-appointed authorities like Dryden and Doctor Johnson (who they?), and because mentioning that there are rules upsets people and how dare I.

So this is what I have just posted as a comment:

Okay. Looking around me, I see that very many people walk across the street without bothering to look both ways, or even one way. I seem to remember being taught some sort of a rule against that, because of cars being forced to stop to avoid running me over, but this is a fairly recent thing, put about during the last century by self-appointed "authorities," and clearly the rule is outmoded and invalid, because these days even quite well-off people--even people who drive cars themselves--do it. So, as long as the speed limit is low enough that cars should be able to see me in time to stop, I don't have to worry about that silly rule. If anyone honks at me, or even worse, hits me, I shall call them a prescriptivist and rest secure in the knowledge that I am in the right.

Well, no I won't, obviously, because that would be stupid. So why is it not stupid to deny the validity of the rules that make language clearer and more universally understood?

The ordinary split infinitive is not something I get overheated about. Some rules are merely guidelines, and this guideline, I think, is intended to as far as is possible under normal circumstances discourage usages like that one right there, because if you can stick a word in between the "to" and the actual verb, what's to stop you sticking an entire subordinate clause in there?

If the rule just causes you to momentarily stop and think whether you want to do it or not, that's it doing its job. (And yes, that one was deliberate.) Quoting great writers who use split infinitives is not to the purpose, not "because they're great and you aren't," but because by definition (having become great writers) they always think about the language they're using. Rules help people to do this, to think--and to learn to think--about what they want to do. I honestly don't see any reason why anyone would have a problem with that.

In case anyone hasn't checked the top post, I've lowered the prices on my books, because I'd really like to sell a few more. It means I won't be making much on them, but then, I wasn't exactly making a fortune on them before, and I'd rather more people got to read them. I'm learning as I go here.

The Amazon.com price has gone down as well.

A friend posts about hir journey through various careers and how satisfying it's been to change course every now and then and do what looks interesting.

I find myself happy for hir, but saddened for me, because what looks interesting to me, what has always looked far more interesting than anything else, is what I'm doing right now: writing. I don't know if this is what's called having a vocation, but if it is it should come with a big black-edged health warning.

Some writers go through a squillion different jobs before they end up writing, and it looks good on the back blurb ("Fenton Squinge has been a plumber, security guard, brain surgeon, trapeze artist, hedgehog sexer and saggar maker's bottom knocker...") and I always wonder how, because all jobs these days require you to have umpteen years' proven experience in the same job. Me? Shop assistant and office drone. And every moment of every day I spent in those jobs I would rather have been writing (indeed, tell it not in Gath, but sometimes I was). I don't have any urge to sail to Cairo and become a camel wrangler, or join the Army and learn to mend jeeps, or go back to college to study modern architecture. I want to write. And maybe do some music. And getting paid for it would be nice if possible.

I know, I know, I've already moaned at length about this and I really don't want to repeat myself (I'm not repeating myself! I'm not repeating myself! Oh God, I'm repeating myself!) so I should cut this short.