Urban Magic

The Power of Public Copyright

Posted on Wednesday, July 28th, 2010 in Misc., Writing | 3 Comments

Was anyone else really, really frightened when they heard that the BBC was making a 21st century version of Sherlock Holmes?

Was anyone else really, really relieved to discover that actually, it was good?  Oodles of fun, and strangely both respectful and innovative.  Full marks!

Authors, you see, are starting to be dead long enough.  When a writer dies, a clock starts ticking, and 70 years after their death, an alarm bell sounds that proclaims ‘here is their work!  Have it for free and go crazy…’  Thus in the last 12 months the world has gone a bit Sherlock Holmes-tastic as across the globe people wake up to the realisation that not only can they now go treading all over these characters, but they can make them do kung fu too and get away with.  Thankfully, in the case of Holmes it’s currently been a mixture of huge fun and surprisingly reverent… in a strange sticking-to-the-spirit-if-n0t-the-plot kinda way… although needless to say no movie will ever exceed Basil the Great Mouse Detective for sheer adventurous/detecting kaplunk.  (Not a real word.  But a good one.)  But hang on in there and soon other estates will start coming up too as authors start being dead long enough… D.H. Lawrence (be afraid), T.E. Lawrence (also be afraid, but in a better way) and George Orwell (respect) could wake up in the next few years to discover that their amorous characters are conducting epic love affairs against the background of world war one in the Arabian Peninsula while totalitarian powers chase them with rats through an underbelly of socialist dissent…

Let’s just hope that Steven Moffat is there to catch them when that moment comes…

A Coven of Black Leather Jackets

Posted on Monday, July 26th, 2010 in Writing | 3 Comments

I am a fantasy writer, and I know this because I own a black leather jacket.

Every profession has its own uniforms.  Soldiers were khaki, police wear blue and black, doctors wear white, techies wear steelies and writers are no exception.

Romantic novelists, according to my Mum, wear skirts and floral-pattern silk scarves and don’t tend to have such good parties as the crime novelists.  Thriller writers incline more towards the blue jeans-and-shirt end of the spectrum and, I am finding out, fantasy and science fiction writers wear black leather jackets.  And either have very big hair indeed, or almost no hair at all.  (I’m afraid I fall into the big hair category.  My hair doesn’t have to be long to be big; there are strange and repellent electromagnetic forces at work somewhere in all this lot.)

What most fantasy writers aren’t, it turns out, are female or under 35.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic female science fiction and SF writers out there – figures like Ursula le Guin or Anne McCaffrey spring immediately to mind – but the industry is largely dominated by blokes.  I was surprised to find myself the only female and under-35 attendee of an SF event a few weeks ago, and even more surprised to discover that while I stood out like an iceberg in the Sahara, at least I had, as if by magical instinct, brought my black leather jacket.  Perhaps it’s a genetic condition – all those who are born with the disposition to write fantasy/SF are also immediately destined to be the owner of the obligatory coat, without needing to be told.  In much the same way it seems all people are born knowing the chorus of ‘We All Live in a Yellow Submarine’ but not the verses.

It’s a curious thing, being an unlikely candidate for membership of the black-leather-coat-coven.  Writers are generally a grouchy bunch anyway, since while you may talk to your peers in merry and jovial tones of monsters you have written and rights you have sold, the thought is always lurking at the back of your mind… you’re the bastard who nabbed my shelf space…

Remarkably, it’s even possible that writers hate writers more than they hate publishers, which is an achievement since no matter how successful you are as a writer, and how well you’re published, the second you get a single editorial note from your publishing house the certain and irrevocable realisation dawns upon you that actually, your editor is a philistine nit who can’t understand the brilliance of your life’s work.  And if you happen not to be no.1 in the bestseller charts right here, right now, then it has nothing to do with the words you’ve written… it’s because the publisher isn’t trying hard enough, damnit!  And worse, it’s because they’re trying too hard with that writer there, that ungrateful bastard whose wouldn’t recognise a coherent sentence if it danced the polka on his bellybutton wearing stiletto heels, your bloody publisher is wasting there time on him and you’ve got to stand at a party and hold a drink and smile… keep on smiling… at that… bloody… useless… writer!!

And so on.

Me – I don’t know many fantasy writers.  Instead I have something of the opposite problem to the one described above.  In my work as a lampie, and more commonly in my condition (now ended, yay!!) of being a perpetual student, not even the black leather jacket seems enough to let people actually believe a word I say, when I say I am a fantasy writer.  It is, perhaps, unfortunate that I am forced not only to admit to being a writer, but a fantasist too – and thus open to mis-understanding.  I mean, for a start, admitting that I’m a writer isn’t something that comes up commonly in conversation.

“So, you’re the lighting technician?” quoth your average theatre profession.

“Yes, I am,” I reply.

“How many watts can the dimmers take before they trip?”

“2.4 kW, but personally I think they’ll bite the dust at 1.8.”

“Really, really, that’s interesting… uh, incidentally, you aren’t a fantasy writer, are you?”

… is not a line of conversation that ever really crops up.  And that’s absolutely fine with me, since, let’s face it, admitting that I dream of dragons will probably not enhance my street cred in the world of well-kept spanners and steel-capped boots.  Keeping strategically schtum seems the way to go.

But every now and then the day ends and we all go down to the pub, or there’s a lunch break and so-and-so is talking about their hobbies and what they do for fun and someone asks me and… well… I can either lie (‘Yes, I like white-water rafting and keep a yoyo collection’) and try and bluff my way through the conversation, or I can own up to the fairly simple truth that I sorta like writing books for a living.  First few times I admitted to this I expected a barrage of questions and a reasonable amount of shame  – ‘you do what?  What books?  Why?  And you call yourself a lampie when you’ve betrayed the sacred cause to have another career on the side?!  Get back to Mordor, loser!’  But actually the truth is far more mundane.  90% of people I admit this to, ignore it.  Blithely skip over the sentence to the point where I sometimes wonder if I’ve uttered it.  Which is sometimes a bit of a blessed relief, as it saves having to explain the whole psudonym, writing-business.  And sometimes is utterly befuddling.  I mean, as hobbies go, professional novelist is, if nothing else, a conversation starter and I’ll be the first to admit that socially, I’m pretty damn rubbish and any starter will do.  (I write much better than I speak.  And tragically, write other people much better than I write myself.  Sigh.)  But generally polite moving-on is the order of the day, and I sometimes leave wondering whether the thought in the mind of the person I’ve admitted this to isn’t ‘yeah… fantasist… says it all…‘

Perhaps its not.  Perhaps it really is just that daft a profession that really, there’s nothing to be said.  Or perhaps not even a black leather jacket is enough to earn a reputation for writing… perhaps the time has come to go to the next level of fantasy-writer nerd-tastic, and I should learn how to back-comb the hair, or maybe just shave it off entirely, and see if that makes the difference…

Graduated!

Posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 in Lighting, Writing | 4 Comments

So, I’ve graduated from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.  I should add, I’m not sure what my final grade was – I mean, I think it was quite good, but as the piece of paper I was given didn’t say (nor did anyone else’s say, if you’re wondering) then only cunning mathematics and a whole complex system of philosophy may hold the answer to that question…

You may notice I’ve started a new category in my blog – Lighting – in honour of the fact that from this moment on, my cunning life-plan is this: to be gainfully employed in the world of theatre lighting as much as I possibly can and in those (surely far-between!) moments when not being employed in the above manner, to while away my sorrows by writing as many books as there are bytes on my computer.  And maybe a few plays and graphic novels as well, just as soon as I’ve cracked the art of getting my character names to capitalise nicely.  (You’d be amazed what an art it is…)  As life plans go, I’m sure my Dad would be quick in pointing out that it’s not as good as being, say, a doctor – at least from the point of view of his supported old age.  But it will, with any luck, combine the two things I love – theatre and writing – into one gainfully structured life from two utterly chaotic ones, since I firmly believe that no writer can just be a writer and not go a little mad, and likewise, no freelance lighting technician can just do lighting and not go equally bonkers.

With which said…

… deep breath…

I am a freelance lighting designer and technician based in London.  When I lit Pericles I went in too steep and didn’t consider the potential of cross-light enough; on Midsummer Nights Dream my cold profile cover was too narrow (although I’d argue that was the fault of the kit list, not necessarily my focus!) – on the Tree I think the cover was a bit too wide and I really should have thought harder about the follow spots.  On A Lie of the Mind I went too shallow – BUT!  Birdies are cool.  Let no man even attempt to deny it – birdies are entirely, utterly brilliant.  On Macbeth my profiles were focused too hard, but I have learnt that there are other ways to animate a scene without using wheels and that toplight is startling in sensible doses; strobes are cool but sunfloods can be curiously programmed with a little cunning.  If stuffed a two-point cover can do the round but beware low grids, tight walls and tall actors.  On Into the Woods I learnt that a ten minute fade is no shameful thing; from the National Theatre I learn that parcans can be brilliant and a 5k at 15m is surprisingly dim; that window gobos have nothing on profiles well-focused; that sometimes bounce is useful if you just charge straight at it with a cry of kill and sometimes it’s a right pain in the backside, especially if you’re sat uphill.  I discovered that you really should check if your birdie bulb in a practical is 12V or 240V before testing this too empirically; always keep your 3-5 pin converter with the glaciator; Mac IIIs can invert their face panels if you’re trying to read them upside down in a darkened grid, there is no such thing as too much L200, neither is there such a thing as L120 that isn’t high temperature if we’re being serious about this.  NEVER give your gaffer tape away, and always label your screwdriver.  Tea is good.  Biscuits are better.

All these mistakes I have made in the last… oh… three, four years?   Good news being, is that I am very unlikely to make them ever, ever again.

Censored??

Posted on Friday, July 16th, 2010 in Writing | 3 Comments

So, some few of you may have noticed a certain silence descended over my blog for a while about what I’m actually doing with my life… besides, that is, writing…

And one or two may have noticed that for a period of roughly 12 hours, a blog entry did appear explaining what I was doing, before vanishing again.

And then silence.

Well!  I am here to explain quickly that I can’t actually say what I’ve been doing with the last… oh… seven and a half weeks.  It turns out that the places I’ve been working at – mmmnnn and mnnmnn  – have policies prohibiting discussion of their work.  (Although I can say that after 2 years studying technical theatre I am, in fact, not a spy.  Although, obviously, if I was a spy, I’d still say that, thus leading, arguably, to nothing but confusion.  Which would of course be part of the plan.)  But as this is a universal policy to be applied to all, and as I’d really like to be employed again, I’m afraid I must honour it.  Therefore!  I’m afraid I am in no position to tell you what an absolutely excellent time of things the last seven weeks has been, or of the fantastic things I’ve seen and learnt… or even to heartily recommend that you see mmmnnn and mnnnn. I cannot sing the praises of mmmnnmnmn or suggest that you go to see mm mmnnn for that moment with the 3000W strobe at the end of Act 1.  I can’t tell you how the mmmmn department have absolutely excelled themselves for the end of mmmn’s mnnmn or what a shame it was when the dragon got cut from mnnnmnn.  In no way am I permitted to tell stories of adventures around the fly gallery of mnnmnnn or the secrets of programming in mmmnmnnn.  I cannot tell you of men duelling for all sorts of things in mmmnnn or of high ideals being cut down in mmnnmnn.  I can’t even tell you how many chocolate brownies I ate during the tech of mnnnmnn.  Yeap – there’s no getting round it.  I am gonna have to belt it.   Entirely, utterly and, quite possibly, mistakenly.  But very adverbially.

Although!  It seems to me that, though I have this bubbling authorial indignation at being told to keep schtum and carry on, if nothing else, all of the above is a wonderful, brilliant exercise in that great principal of narrative suspense…

On which note…

Theatre rocks.

And that’s about all I have to say on that.

The Further Adventures of Horatio Lyle

Posted on Friday, July 9th, 2010 in Writing | 18 Comments

Did I mention I have a pseudonym?

Oh yes, Kate Griffin is not my real name… however, since my real name is hardly a state secret, being fairly easily accessible on this website, I’ll keep this brief and say hello!  As Catherine Webb I write books for kids and young adults and as this is my damn website and I’ll use it to say that my latest Catherine Webb book – the Dream Thief – was published a few days ago.  And I’m not saying that if you like Kate Griffin you’ll like Catherine Webb (that’s probably one of the most schizophrenic sentences I’ve ever written, and let’s face it, writing characters like Matthew Swift that’s saying something) – but you might!  And you’ll never know until you’ve gone out there, bought a copy, or maybe several, of the Horatio Lyle series, and a few for your friends just to make sure you’ve got a decent sample to do comparisons with, and found out.

In case you’re wondering, the Horatio Lyle series is about a Mr Horatio Lyle (go figure), a Victorian inventor/detective who spends an inordinate amount of time dabbling with mysteries, stepping on toes, only some of which are human, causing trouble and blowing things up.  Admittedly he never plans on blowing things up, but there just comes a point in every chemical-toting scientific detective up against the odds and great evils in a city at the height of the industrial revolution when even a decent upstanding citizen has to say ‘ah, to hell with it’ and reach for the nitrates.

In Praise of Neil Gaiman

Posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 in Writing | 4 Comments

This was going to be a very long blog entry about Neil Gaiman.  It was going to go off on a great sweep, covering Sandman (greatest graphic novel I’ve ever read and, in fact, the graphic novel that convinced me that it wasn’t that shameful to be caught in that particular section anyway, despite being a girl) and Neverwhere (greatest London novel I’ve ever read – although in answer to the questions that will come, no, I read it after I wrote a Madness of Angels).  It was going to wave you in the direction of Stardust, Coraline, Mirrormask, and suggest a detour via his short stories – who knew that you could experience a drop in body temperature in so few lines?  It might have paused for a second to mention the works of Dave McKean, illustrator, collaborator and all-round visual genius.  It was probably going to linger on the Graveyard Book, which I only managed to nab a copy of this week and haven’t put down.  It was, all things considered, going to be an epic entry full of wonder and praise and general admiration for the complete works of Mr Gaiman, possibly running to several thousand words and a touch of verse.

But you know what, let’s save time.

Neil Gaiman.

Read him.

Now.

My Local Library

Posted on Friday, July 2nd, 2010 in Writing | 2 Comments

Okay, so this is probably my most tragic blog entry ever, but I gotta say, since I’m passing through… I love my local library.  Actually, that’s not strictly accurate.  I love a wide range of local libraries, and currently hold membership cards for at least three boroughs in London, not including the University of London libraries where you will still sometimes find me with my alumni card trying to work out exactly what went on in the French Revolution.  (Russian Revolution – walk in the park.  French Revolution – not a clue.)  So I’ll admit – I’m a member of many different local libraries on the basic principal that you can’t always get what you want, but if you’re willing to walk an extra ten minutes and look at the bottom of the trolley, you might just get what you need.

I guess the Barbican Library was where I first started turning into a fantasy writer.  I had violin lessons in the Barbican every week (in answer to the inevitable violin question – many years, and badly) and so every week was to be found waiting for the lesson in the fantasy section.  By grade 2 I’d done A-G, by grade 5 I’d made it from A-S, and by the time my violin teacher realised I might actually be more suited to the viola, I’d gone all the way down to the bottom of the shelf and met Roger Zelazny, on who much praise has already been heaped.

At university I got into the habit of borrowing as many books as I could carry, dragging them back to halls and renewing them on a daily basis before the other buggers could get their hands on my essay material.  Everything I know about the Algerian War of Independence I learnt in the bath.  (My hall of residence had wonderfully high water pressure combined with a fantastic boiler, and I was learning karate at the time and thus baths seemed the logical learning environment.  On an entirely irrelevant note, I freely admit that for the first six weeks of learning karate, if someone had tried to mug me I probably would have been too physically shattered to even try and put up a fight…)  Simultaneously, when being forced to take a subject that wasn’t history as an external option, I would go to my local library for ‘dummies guides to…’  Thus, my room ended up full of books on the Korean Civil War, Piracy in the 1500s and graphic novels.  (All praise Neil Gaiman!)

In my final year at university, I found myself back in the Corporation of London, where my initial love of the Barbican Library developed, and discovered that box sets of shows like West Wing for £1 a week were really the only way to try and muddle through a dissertation and stay sane.

Now that I’m Domestic Woman, complete with my own (terminally ill) basil plant and council tax bill, my local library has become if anything even more important.  How to books, computer and printer access, leaflets on recycling in the borough  (tragic but useful) films, comics, hardbacks I can’t afford to buy, music galore, ads for free haircuts, cheap swims, local parties and classes in taekwondo, books in Farsi, kids learning how to sing ‘the wheels on the bus’ – popular history!  Say what you will for studying history at LSE, there does come a point in the middle of every essay on the economic policy of Charles V that you dream of a book about sieges and adultery, and imagine the face of your historiography tutor crinkling up distressed at the two words… ‘popular history’…

So yes…

… I love my local library.  And if we are indeed about to have, well, pretty much everything slashed in half during the economic recession, I really hope that my library isn’t one of them.

Derby Alt. Literature Festival

Posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 in Writing | 1 Comment

Just a note to say that the Derby Literature Festival is happening over the coming weeks, and, happily enough, there is an Alternative Literature Festival, honouring all things SF/Fantasy/Horror, and I will be there on Saturday along with the excellent Mike Carey and a crew from Orbit, doing the non-conventional authorial thing!  Come join if you are around.

http://www.artsderbyshire.org.uk/whats_on/events/altfiction__derbys.html

To Lincoln

Posted on Sunday, May 16th, 2010 in Cities and Adventures, Writing | 3 Comments

So, I should start out by confessing… I have no idea where Lincoln is.  My knowledge of the UK beyond the M25 is very much defined by mainline railway stations.  I can just about muddle by in cities like Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bristol and Cardiff, have a vague understanding of where Exeter, Norwich, Dover, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds are, and can sorta wave you towards the Lake District if I really have to, give or take a few hundred miles.  Then there are cities like Durham, York, Reading and Coventry, all which exist in my mind as train announcements indicating a place that I am passing through on the way to somewhere else.

Lincoln is none of these.  For a start, imagine my shock to get my ticket and discover that I actually had to change trains at no less unlikely a place than a town called Newark North Gate in the middle of ??? in the vicinity of ???.  Changing mainline trains – already this had me a little unnerved.  And it’s no ordinary train you catch at Newark North Gate – oh no… it’s a one-carriage train, a sorta go-kart for Network Rail, a thing with probably the same standing capacity as your average double decker bus that clatters through a flat landscape of fields, level crossings and occasional industrial sprawl.

My trip to Lincoln was justified by going to the Lincoln Book Festival – where, I gotta admit, I had a very lovely time and ate more chocolate mini bites than the mind can comfortably conceive.  It was also my first trip as Kate Griffin, which led to a certain amount of confusion at the hotel as I tried to work out and explain exactly who I was and why my signature seemed to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the name on my check-in card.  (If anyone has any legal views on the thorny question of whether it is against the law to sign a hotel check-in card with a perfectly fine and honest signature, one that just happens not to be the same on your passport, then please let me know.)

I’d been advised to take a taxi from the station to the hotel, but looking at google maps I had one of those rash moments of confidence that goes ‘I know what to do!  Find the cathedral and walk towards it and everything will be fine!’  And let me add, navigationally speaking, everything was perfectly fine… found the cathedral, found the hotel no problem… but I was a little let down by my history degree.  I should perhaps have looked a little closer at the map and thought ‘hum… a medieval city… a cathedral… a castle… now what do I know about the building habits of medieval lords…?’  Alas, this reasoning failed me, and it was only as I slogged up the aptly named ‘Steep Hill’ that the recollection of just how much those pesky medieval architects liked being uphill of their enemies struck me.  My survival of the Steep Hill experience owes more than a little to the magic of ventolin inhalers.

Lincoln (she says from her sagely 24 hour experience of the place) seems essentially to be divided in two.  At the bottom of the hill is a fairly average reasonably-sized town, complete with shopping centre, clothes shops, more charity shops than the eye can perceive (and as a fan of charity shops, this pleased me) chippies and one-way traffic systems designed to send any driver into apoplexy.  Arriving on a Friday evening at around 6 p.m. the lower part of the town was oddly silent – shut doors and closed shutters, empty pedestrianized curling streets inhabited only on the odd corner by the traditional feral youth that is quaintly more observable in someone else’s town than your own.  Leaving the same way on Saturday afternoon it was all elbows go to push through crowds of shoppers, that seemed to have poured out of every crack in every brick to fill their bags with goodies.

As you head uphill a change begins to take over the streets, subtle at first and then growing more and more noticeable.  Shopping chains give way to art galleries selling bowls of semi-precious stone and pictures of flowers caught in heavy cold winds.  Second hand bookshops start peeking out with large sections on local folklore and history.  There’s the obligatory not-quite-magic-shop selling brightly coloured dreamcatchers, incense and smelly candles; little shops built in straight on steep cobbled roads offering cream teas and home-made pots of chilli; shops offering home-made stationary and antique shops selling five different kinds of three hundred year old grandfather clock.  Suddenly you look around at the top of the worst part of the incline and over your shoulder you’ve got a view above the buildings towards green countryside and there are cobbles beneath your feet and suddenly everything is a little bit Yea Olde and Traditionale Crafte, albeit for the most part with the sensible good taste not to proclaim itself that way.  And of course, there’s a cathedral.  What I think Eddie Izzard would probably describe as a huge sod-off cathedral.  It’s a sneaky thing – from the station you could half believe that you weren’t going to bust an artery getting there, and from the rectangle where on Saturday there is a farmers market you might almost think that it’s actually quite a modest cathedral, and once you’re inside and looking down the length of it you realise that actually, this is a TARDIS in cathedral form and if you did pay your £5 entry fee there’d probably only be a 1/20 chance of you coming out alive.  It’s a proper gothic monster, all vaulted roof and leering, tongue-waggling stone faces carved above every arch.  Some cunning wag stuck an organ bang smack in the middle of it so as you stand at the entry point, you can’t actually see the back wall, even if there is one.  And if you’re still feeling unconvinced as to Lincoln’s historical credibility, then there’s a castle not two hundred yards away, just to make the point, albeit with a lawn for playing croquet and having tea has grown.  Around these two monuments is a street sprung up heavily with restaurants of every cuisine… although sad to say as I wandered towards the theatre where the Book Festival was happening, all I could really think of was fish and chips.

Anyhow, all things considered… an awesome 24hrs somewhere between ??? and ??? in the city of Lincoln!

Waterstones/SFX Event

Posted on Wednesday, May 5th, 2010 in Writing | 1 Comment

This is just a heads up to say that this coming Monday, 10th of May, Waterstones and SFX are holding an event together at the Waterstones Piccadilly from 5.30 onwards, in honour of reading science fiction lots!  Many authors are rumoured to be there, including one of my all-time favourite writers, China Mieville, as well of rumours of some other exciting people… and with my best nerdy face on, I’ll also be there from 5.30 angling for those little sausages on sticks and bits of pineapple and cheese…

Anyhow, details at this website…

http://www.sfx.co.uk/2010/05/05/compo-win-a-ticket-to-our-author-party-in-london/