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What is a writer? I've been trying to find the right words to start this post for the last half an hour, composing one witty opener after another, deleting each as I realise just how cheesy, or schmaltzy, or downright pathetic they sound, and this has led me to question what it is that I actually do. What, when all is said and done, is a writer?
The Storyteller: The first job of any writer is to tell a story. That's true even of those who write books of fact, for even these worthy minds must engage the curiosity of the reader and hold their attention until the end of the book. We like to be entertained and educated, and so the writer as a storyteller is an important member of our collective society. Hurrah for the storyteller and the escape he brings.
The Liar: Isn't it odd that somebody who lies is often accused of 'telling tall tales' or 'making up stories'? That's all a writer ever really does, especially a writer of fiction. We bend and twist and distort the truth until it becomes believable, until the reader is entirely immersed with the framework of our craft. We even lie about the people in the stories, conjuring them out of thin air, much as a medieval fakir might summon ephemeral djinns from a bottle, but even more disturbing are the writers who turn their eyes towards real people. Beware the lies the writer spreads.
The Party Animal: Writers are always surrounded by people, all of them jostling for attention, demanding their fifteen minutes and screaming their histories into the writer's mind. They all want to be our friends, happy to do whatever we ask just to gain our favour. They are our playthings, and yet their touch is as insubstantial as a shadow, for they are all characters of imagination. At least, that's what they'd prefer you to think. Envy the writer, for he is always the centre of attention.
The Hermit: Despite the multitudes of faceless phantoms, a writer is a lonely soul. For hours he must toil, burning oil into the night, labouring over his latest tome as any craftsman must labour. Every letter of every word of every paragraph on every page drips with his sweat; every clause and sub-clause reeks of his blood. There is no respite for the writer, and no-one to lend their back to his efforts, for the writer guards his art with manic obsession. Pity the writer in his solitude.
The Visionary: What wonder, to be able to understand so much and yet reveal so little. The future is an open book to the writer, laid out before him as clearly as the past. All that happens in the world is merely another piece of the puzzle that the writer forever picks at, slowly introducing the reader to 'The Terrible Truth' or 'The Glorious End'. Praise the writer for his prescience.
The Hack: How easy it must be to take the works of great masters, chew them up until they merge into one tasteless lump, and then spit them out on to the page for all to see. But here the writer is at his best, creating new epicurean delights for the reader, blending the ingredients in just the perfect way to produce something new and tantalising. Such a shame that while he treats you with his wonders, all he's really doing is recycling yesterday's leftovers. Don't trust the writer, especially when he cuts his own throat just for you.
The Dichotomy: A writer is all of these things, and more, but first and foremost, a writer is just a person, doing a job, trying to get by in life. Have a care for the writer.
G'nite Sleepsville. I'm off to bed.
Just to prove that I'm not always ranting about bad things, I thought I'd share this news story from National Geographic with you.
The concept of the 'Beanstalk', or as it's now known, the Space Elevator, has been around for years. Arthur C Clarke suggested the idea in his 1979 novel, The Fountains Of Paradise, and since then it's been a popular sci-fi commodity. Take a string, carry one end into a space and attach it to a counterweight, tether the other end to a surface-based platform and let science do the rest. The 'cars' of the elevator travel up and down the nano-tube cable using electric motors and magnets, propelled by the energy of light alone.
I know it might sound a bit far-fetched but I've been following this project for some time and I'm with the believers on this. The economical advantages the technology offers are astounding, allowing solar exploration (ie: trips to the outer planets) at a fraction of the cost of contemporary space-shots. And just imagine the views as you're slowly lifted from sea-level to sixty-two thousand miles above the planet. It may not be for everyone but I really hope that this works. Hell, I want to be on the inaugural journey.
The biggest attraction for me is the travel opportunities it presents, and not just extra-terrestrial travel. Once you're in space, you're not limited by any of the resistive forces you get in the Earth's atmosphere, such as friction. Circumnavigating the globe goes from being a sixty-plus hour journey to just a few hours. You can watch the planet roll under you as you cross three continents, and it doesn't end there. Getting to the moon will be a stroll in the park, while visiting the nearer planets such as Mars or Mercury will be within the budgets of most people (as far as I can tell the biggest advantage of the elevator is its running costs - they're next to nothing compared to space flight).
It's still a fair distance off, but I'm betting that not many people believed JFK when he told the American public of his intention to get a man on the moon within a decade. And that was only forty years ago.
Keep climbing Sleepville. One day you'll reach the stars.
Other links:
Liftwatch.org - This site keeps track of all development on the elevator. [RSS]
Space.com - A good overview of where the technology is today.
Spacewire.net - Another good news site for things space-related. [RSS]
NASA - NASA have been working on this for a while. This article is from a few years ago.
The Arthur C. Clarke Foundation - Probably the best place to get info about ACC on the web.
(Dr) Hunter S Thompson
(07.18.1937-02.20.2005)
When truth no longer
Reaches the minds of people
Whispers touch their hearts.
RIP
A friend of mine, Steve, is an entertainer by trade. One of his skills is fire-breathing, not to be confused with fire-eating which is a totally different skill and tends to lead to a lot of heartburn, apparently... But anyway, Steve's a fairly proficient fire-breather, and when he's working outside local nightclubs it all looks very spectacular.
For his job, he uses paraffin, a fossil-fuel variant that could potentially be used in explosive devices. He also likes to play around with electronics, modifying various gadgets for the act he's part of. So far, he hasn't been arrested as a terrorist, but based on the recent knee-jerk changes suggested by Britain's Home Secretary it wouldn't surprise me to see him going down for being a terror-sympathiser.
Everywhere I look in the news, I see these knee-jerks cruising the internet in search of scapegoats. The most popular one at the moment seems to be the Iran/Uranium story. As with Korea before, the 'developed' world is trying to maintain peace by limiting Iran's capability to produce nuclear weapons. To this end, they've requested (demanded) that Tehran cease all uranium enrichment and associated industries. Tehran, quite rightly, have since pointed out that like the rest of the (developed) world they do have a right to provide their citizens with low-price domestic power, and have objected to the rest of the world (America) asking (demanding) that they don't even think about nuclear technology.
Okay, so I know that we need to scrap nuclear weapons, and ideally we could also do with getting rid of nuclear generators, but until somebody can come along and give us a cheap, efficient, safe replacement there isn't much of a choice ... oh, wait a second, there's hydro-electric, wind farms, solar, tidal, gas ...
If the rest of the world (GWB) is so concerned about the nuclear threat from other nations, there is of course one simple thing that could be done to smooth things over; let's scrap all nuclear research. Seriously, why is it right for one half of the world (The Bush Administration) to develop, build, test and stockpile nuclear technology of any form, while advising (threatening) the other half (everybody else) with annihilation if they so much as look up the word 'nuclear' in the dictionary. Oh, and while we're on the subject, it's nuclear (pron. nu-klee-uh), GWB, not new-killer as you seem to believe.
Just like North Korea a few years ago, Iran has defended its recent actions by claiming to be developing a nuclear reactor. If this is true (and to be honest, I can't see any reason why they'd lie in face of the arguably unnecessary response to Iraq in the last decade) then throwing all the toys out of the cot as the USA, Britain, France and Germany are doing right now is not the way forward. We have nuclear reactors, so why can't they? And don't give me any bull about weapons-grade materials; I don't see any of the four 'developed' countries I listed scrapping their own nuclear stockpiles right now.
This whole situation has the potential to get a hell of a lot messier. An independent report has confirmed that traces of uranium found in Iran came from contaminated equipment brought in from Pakistan (a country which already has nuclear capability and now seems to hardly get any complaints from the 'developed' world ... strange that). The Bush Administration has condemned the report, saying that it contains 'unresolved concerns'. Even more amazing is the reaction of an unnamed spokesperson, who has explained that the report does not address "...the Bush administration's strong belief that the country was developing and pursuing a nuclear weapon." So now it's enough for the governing body of a country to act purely on their own belief? Is this one comment really an indication of the way that GWB makes his presidential decisions, based on his (and his Administration's) beliefs? If that's true then I'm really scared of the future. Really fucking scared.
On Sharpe's Wolf Pit, Tybalt has posted an article about giving people a second chance. The article covers the disarmament of the IRA and the growing support for Colonel Gadaffi from the democratic world, and uses these two examples to show how people can change. In contrast, nobody seems to even want to give Iran that same consideration. All I want to know is 'Why?' If we continue to threaten countries like Iran with trade and economic sanctions simply because they want the same technology that we have then the political atmosphere in the Middle East (and undoubtedly the rest of the 'undeveloped' world) will only get worse. Last month in London there were a number of terrorist actions that led to a loss of life. It doesn't make any difference whether those lives belonged to innocent citizens or terrorist suicide-bombers; the fact that anybody died at all is a terrifying indication that peace is a long way off.
I carry no support for the actions of terrorist organisations, and that includes (at this moment in time) the governments of the USA, Britain, France, Germany and every other country that use their privileged technological positions to threaten and coerce smaller, weaker countries. The 'developed' world has become the playground bully, and is now trying to take the cool toys away from the other kids. Is there any wonder that the rest of the world can only see one course of action?
I look forward to a future where violence is the very last, very least popular reaction to any situation. Before throwing punches, everybody should step back, talk it out, think about their position and come to a compromise. Just because you've got the biggest stick, that doesn't mean you need to use it.
My message to the so-called 'developed' world is this: Show us all just how developed you really are. Put down that stick and start listening to the people around you. I can't offer a magical solution to the world's problems but I do know that if one side (and it does generally only take one side) doesn't stop throwing rocks at the other soon, the future I'd like to see may never happen.
Pleasant dreams, Sleepsville.
[Note: Throughout this article I've referred to the 'developed' and 'undeveloped' worlds. I use these terms simply because they represent popular belief, not my own. I could just as easily have said 'the west' and 'the rest of the world', but even that doesn't paint a true picture.]
Hi folks. I hope you've all been checking the news while I've been gone. If you have, and you pay any attention to UK news, you may have seen the BBC report on the new Anti-Smoking poll conducted by ASH. I read the article, and to be honest, my initial reaction was to pass it over; anybody in the UK (as well as the States and Australia, from what I can tell) will have lived with anti- and pro-smoking propaganda for the last few years (mainly anti-). Then I decided to check the research; you should always try and confirm the validity of any claims you see in the press, especially where percentages are quoted. Here's why...
The article itself opens with the words "The majority of people in England and Wales..." and then goes on to explain that "...73% of the 1,000 people [ASH and Cancer Research UK] surveyed said a ban should be applied without exception." Excuse me?
Since when does a survey of 1,000 people represent a majority? It's not even remotely a viable cross-section of the population of England and Wales? Last time I checked, there were over sixty million people (59mn according to 2003 government statistics, 61mn according to the CIA) living in this country, and sure, that includes Scotland and Northern Island, but I'm pretty certain that 59,999,000 of those people aren't all crammed into those two places.
I think that's what made me hunt down the findings of the survey itself. It wasn't that difficult, to be honest. ASH even publish the results on their own site, here. I read through the report, deliberately ignoring the multitude of opportunities it offers to rant, and finally looked at their figures. If you don't want to look for yourself, then I've encapsulated them below. I've also translated them into accurate statistics. Aren't I nice?
Anyway, the figures actually represent 996 people surveyed by telephone in Great Britain, accounting for 0.00166% of the nation's population (assuming a pop. Of 60mn). Of those, 25% were smokers...
Okay, here's the first problem. The statistics are already biased 3:1 in favour of non-smokers. On top of that, the small number of surveys returned is barely a blip on the chart as far as a national indication goes. To poll even just 1% of the population, they would have needed to return 600,000 surveys.
Moving on to the breakdown, we're told that in Q5 (what were Qs 1-4? I've e-mailed ASH for a full copy of the report but as yet no response), 73% of the poll returned an answer of yes when asked if they'd support a proposal to make all workplaces smokefree. If we convert that into proper numbers, that's 727 people, or 0.00121% of the nation's population. Hardly the majority the BBC reports it as, is it?
The one that really makes me choke is the results to Q6 (I really want to see the rest of this report). The figures are presented in such a way as to suggest that 57% of the population would still patronise bars and clubs as often if they enforced a no-smoking policy, while only 12% would patronise them less. The actual numbers are a little different.
For non-smokers, the percentages are fairly predictable; why would a non-smoker start going to a bar less often if it was smokefree? The only reason I can think of is if their friends smoke and want to go somewhere else. I can follow that logic, so the figures (2% would go less often, 2% undecided, the rest more often or no difference) make sense.
For smokers, we see a different picture. Amongst the 249 smokers who completed the survey, 42% of them (that's 105 people out of 996) said that they would patronise a smokefree establishment less often., while 52% (129 smokers) said it probably wouldn't make a difference. Only 4% (10 of them) said they'd be more likely to frequent such places more often.
The point I'm making is that these numbers, when you look at them, don't represent anything other than the planned result. The survey itself was conducted by two organisations who have an interest in seeing smoking banned. It's a politically motivated survey. Science has already gone a long way to proving that any test carried out with an expected result will be biased by that expectation; it's called the Observer Effect, I believe. And when the test is so small as to be non-existent, the results pale to insignificance.
I'd like a nationwide survey conducted on this subject. I'd like the British government to do its job properly for once. Aren't we supposedly a democracy? Aren't the people allegedly the ones with the power in this country? If this report is used as the basis for any government policy, ever, it would be a mistake, and any decision made based on this or other similar reports (such as the famous 1992 EPA Report on Passive Smoking, which I must admit is very boring, very long and very much pure BS) is made with biased, inaccurate information.
So, the next time you read a news story that says that 95% of all clouds are aliens, you might want to do the research yourself, and decide if the figures make sense.
[Just for the record, I am a smoker but I support a ban on smoking in workplaces. I do not support a blanket ban on smoking in all public places as this impeaches civil liberties. For the same reason I do not support a blanket ban on the use of motor vehicles, even though pollution from car exhausts causes more harm to the environment, our children and my lungs than I could by smoking twenty a day for the next fifty years. Find another scapegoat, Sleepsville.]
Sorry. I'm listening to Pink Floyd and I couldn't think of anything else for the title. So sue me.
So, where have I been? Why did I suddenly disappear off the planet? The simple answer is real life invaded my bubble of fantasy for a while. Everything's sorted out now and I'm back on broadband; I can't even begin to explain how much I've missed my fat pipe.
So, for those three people who care, what's been happening in my life? (I promise that I will be back to my usual rants this weekend; I'm editing them this evening.)
Firstly, I'm now single and living in my own place. It took me a while to find somewhere but I'm there now and it's good to be settled. I've basically spent the last twelve months getting ready to travel and now that I'm not doing that any more things seem less urgent somehow. It's cool. The snakes (all five of them) have settled in, and right now they've got company; I'm looking after two cornsnakes for a friend. Life's looking good on the home front.
In terms of writing, I've finished my fantasy novel (yes Carl, I'll get a copy e-mailed over as soon as I can). It's been a painful process for the last few months, and I found that the hardest part was admitting that it was finished. I've not yet printed it out, but I have got a writer friend ready to proof-read it; she's already being positive about it, so that helps. In related news, I may also be getting published before the end of the year. The best I can tell you right now is that I'm working to a deadline on a short novel in the cyberpunk genre. If I can get it finished on time then I'll be in print by November. I'll be honest and admit that it's looking good to go; I'll tell you more as I find out. (Yes Tony, it is the one I was telling you about.)
On the job front, I've not got one. I am going to need to find an income soon (the writing thing won't make me rich, but it will help) so some of my freetime's going to be fading away. I've been effectively a man of leisure for close on nine months now, and I've gotten used to it. Getting back into the workforce is going to be strange. I hope I don't melt, or something.
Anyhew, that's all for now Sleepsville. I hope you've all been good while I've been away. I'll write again soon, I promise.
Hey hey people. I know that I've been more than silent just recently - I've been damn near invisible. Quick apologies to anybody who has been following my ramblings, and an assurance that I will be back on form very soon. I'm limited to a dial-up ISP right now, but should have trusty old fat-pipe back within a fortnight. Yay!.
I have a few rants prepared to upload as soon as I've re-immersed myself in the world's madness, and all being well some news on the writerly front. More on that later.
To those who've been adding hits to my counter; thanks muchly.
Speak again soon.
MJE
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