John's Newsletter of Nouns #30
A possibly weekly email about what's been going on in my brain
19 - 25 June 2023
What a sublimely normal week. I reflexively reached for my little work time tracker widget to remind me what I've done these seven days before realising: oh wait, I don't do that outside of work. What in the heckins have I done this week then?
I rewatched the first two Pitch Perfect films, the first because Amazon Prime's interface finally showed me a film I wanted to watch and didn't have to rent or buy it, or it somehow be on a different subscription. The second I watched because I'd had the taste of acapella by then; the third and final film though is, in grand Prime tradition, only available if I cough up more money. They get you hooked then tighten the screws. As one of my friends remarked, Pitch Perfect is a lot like Dodgeball in that they both take an absurd, niche activity and spin an entire self-serious world around it. I also rewatched Taken with Liam Neeson; like John Wick the first film is tight and gritty and, similarly, each sequel degrades in quality. Starship Troopers rounded out the week and holds up remarkably well for its age, though I don't remember the fascist uniforms ("are we the bad guys?") being quite so overt when I watched it as a teenager.
I also finally completed Returnal, though I somehow glitched the final boss into not appearing, replacing that end of game triumph with a grimy sense of having inadvertently cheated. The new game plus secret ending did demand I beat it "properly", though I do wish I hadn't already known the mid-game rug pull because the story is phenomenal and pushed me towards several YouTube videos digging into the minutiae of it.
And story is what I want to natter about this week.
Writing stories
Specifically my writing of stories because frankly I find it easier to talk around it than actually do it.
I have written stories for as long as I can remember. Since my dad brought home a bulky work laptop and I could see the words I typed on the monochrome screen (along with playing the original Space Quest), or the old typewriter we had where I filled up page after page until the ink ribbon wore out, or the line-by-line word processor/typewriter hybrid that superseded it, meaning I could fix sentence level errors and didn't have to use quite so much Tipp-Ex. I wrote about my cats - Buster and Felix - and the peculiar sci-fi adventures they got up to. I wrote about a fictional hamster called Cherry (my hamster was called Kitana). I wrote a 12 page "short" story for my fourth year English class that had my teacher publicly lament to the class how long it took to read; I wrote a more palatable 8 page psychological horror story for my fifth year. I wrote smutty fanfiction now (thankfully?) lost to time. I wrote an unfinished story that used the names of people I knew that landed me in trouble with the school guidance counsellor.
Then around university I just... stopped. Writing, stories or otherwise, was no longer something I did with my time. I started blogging and then reviewing anime shortly afterwards but up until the past few years over on ceetea.uk, I hadn't written any fiction. It's not that I don't have ideas any more - the meditative dive into my own fictional worlds is still so pleasing - but now I have an inkling of what's involved in writing something longer than a short story. My first and thus far only attempt at Nanowrimo has a lot to do with that, nothing like being faced with a word count to reach and no idea of the narrative nuts-and-bolts to get there to really humble you.
Because that's always kind of been the goal - to write a novel rather than just scene exercises. There's a book in me somewhere - at the moment it's called "Aberrant Matter" and it's a sci-fi story about the end of time - but committing it to written word is such a knowingly daunting task that I haven't started it. Fundamentally that's a cowardice borne of my belief that by writing things down things - characters, places, events - they gain a tangibility such that I can almost feel them ossify on the page. But equally it's a fear that even though I'm relatively confident in my ability to put one word in front of another, being able to construct a compelling narrative might be beyond me. In short, can I even tell a decent story?
In the ether of my imagination are situations, dialogues, monologues, events, timelines, and grand gestures, but the connective tissue of a story between the narrative skeleton eludes me. My guess is that I haven't read enough bad fiction. The problem being that poor writing almost always grates against me like stuffing chalk into my joints. My science fiction reading started with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, then moved to Iain M. Banks and China Mieville; outside of sci-fi a lot of my reading was Terry Pratchett then a long (and continuing) stint of Haruki Murakami. To say nothing of non-novel writing that I deeply admire - everything from Hannibal to House to Ghost in the Shell to Arrival to Ruby Sparks. How do I even start when I foolishly put myself in their shadows and demand I match or ascend beyond them?
The answer is of course to just start and keep going. No one nails it first time. The blank page has never held any kind of fear in me because it's easier to just not look at the page and do something - anything - else. No one is really waiting for me despite lovely people reading and apparently enjoying what I do write, and it's easier to imply my muse is fickle than say, well, everything I have done up till now.
I have tried to come at this problem sideways: translated Japanese light novels were one attempt. By design they're consumable and ephemeral but the verbose, adolescent writing is laborious at best but can easily sink into worrying jingoism or discomfitting squick. I tried out audiobooks shortly before the first lockdown, but not having the work commute put paid to that idea. I'm trying them once again, this time bolstered by various podcasts like Between the Covers which is a series of very literary interviews with writers. That kind of writing, genuine literature as an art form, definitely isn't what I aspire to which does raise the question of what I am aspiring to? That old interview-style question of who am I writing for? Alongside that I have some serial fiction podcasts: The Harrowing, The Magnus Archives, The Black Tapes, Limetown, and The No Sleep Podcast. That latter one really started the examination of my physiological reaction to bad writing.
I remain unsure as to whether they are helping or hindering. On the one hand they are different to what I would usually read and the varying writers and voice actors lets me hear in between the lines, more easily identifying the clangers. On the other, just listening to the lush, gorgeous prose of The Phoenix Empress by K. Arsenault Rivera and narrated by Caroline McLaughlin is enough to make me quail when I think of trying to even approach it.
Part of me, especially recently, wants to abandon my unassailable predefined notions of "quality" writing and just write the trashiest vampire erotica. I do love me some sexy vampires doing sexy vampire things. Think of the all the impeccably dressed background vampires in a film like Underworld and it's that without the shooting or blue film grading. I've even got a pseudonym picked out ready. But then whenever I read sexy vampire novels (and I've read... some) I lament their quality. Mine would be impeccably researched, grand and involved and dang it that's not the point John.
So I spiral, and prevaricate, and in those creatively fertile minutes between waking and sleep I think of all the spectacular things I could perfectly write. And I inevitably fall asleep to that comforting delusion or attempt to capitalise on the feeling and eventually go back to bed demoralised. It's getting towards that time of year though, when in the receding wake of my birthday something or someone tweaks my confidence enough to commit to putting another short story online.
Paraphernalia
- After watching Pitch Perfect I binged some Anna Kendrick interviews, the best ones I found were from Vanity Fair and Hot Ones, I also had no idea the "cups" thing had a whole music video
- Why Natural Latex Matresses Are So Expensive - these never even came up while I was researching mattresses, so floppy!
- How To Survive A Space Battle - the survivability onion
- Ishitan Furniture - Building a Bird Table - meditative
- I'm Blue (Da Ba Dee) on multiple bass guitars
- Roxanne but it's just Rocks, or there is the non-TikTok version
- Switchblade Battleaxe - I'm not a huge fan of Hacksmith's videos, their build tech seems brilliant but their videos are mostly just goofing around which seems like a waste
- ATV Tank - Colin Furze starts another bonkers build, the screw tank he built was great and this looks just as silly
- How Flood Tunnels Work
- I've started rewatching The Ascent of Money which was on Channel 4 originally, I remember it being an excellent financial history series and the first episode bears that out
- The Deep Sea - an interactive webpage showing how deep and weird the oceans are
- Technical debt as financial debt - I like the connectivity between these
- Terracotta streaming service - a lot of really good Japanese and east-asian films on there for a very good price
- Magnets colliding in slow motion - bonk
This was hand-crafted by John.