Category Archive - Writing
Midnight Mayor – Published Today!
Posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 in Writing | 35 Comments
‘Don’t give me all this hokum about the Midnight Mayor. You tell me there’s a man who is the chosen protector of the city? Who cannot die so long as the idea of the city exists, who carries burnt into his flesh the mark of the city and hears the dreams of the stones themselves? You seriously want me to believe that the Midnight Mayor is real and out there in the night keeping us safe from all the big nasties that are going to gobble us up, then the first thing you should do is tell me what these nasties are that I need so much protecting from.
- Swift, M., ‘The Midnight Mayor and Other Myths’ – Urban Magician Magazine, Vol. 37, June 2003.’
March 4th pt.2
Posted on Sunday, February 21st, 2010 in Writing | 1 Comment
We be light, we be life, we be fire!
We slither blood blue burning, we sing neon rumbling, we dance heaven!
Come be me and be free.
Me be blue electric angel.
- Anonymous graffiti, Old Street
The Dictionary of Bullshit
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in Writing | 2 Comments
This post is a shameless plug.
It is a shameless plug for my Dad.
Now… as you may have gathered from previous posts, I come from, heaven help us, a family of writers. We did not, by the way, set out to be a family of writers! Oh no! When I was 7 years old, in fact, my mother took me to one side and made me promise never, ever to be a writer.
‘It’s a ridiculous job. Unreliable, badly paid, you never get out of the house enough… be a doctor instead,’ quoth Mum.
My Mum, whose professional name is Susan Moore for anyone wondering, has pretty much done it all. Publisher, editor, novelist and ghost writer. As a child, I liked the title ‘ghost writer’ the most – it had an aura of mystery about it, the sense that here was my Mum, secretly making the words of others better behind the scenes. I learnt the secret of editing from her at a swimming pool when I was 10 years old. Climbing out of the pool to get a towel, I found my Mum sitting on the side of the pool with a manuscript she’d been hired to edit and a pencil in her hand. As I approached, she frowned at the page and then, with a single decisive stroke, crossed out the entire thing with a triumphant swish of blue pencil on messy page.
Saying this, my Dad has been the victim of some nasty editing… an entire chapter was struck by an over-enthusiastic editor from his biography of Douglas Adams, to much wailing in the house. I’ve generally been very lucky with my editors, although will always cherish the editorial query I once received to a particularly fantastical bit of writing… ‘Are you sure that would happen?’ My Dad started writing after me, to my great delight. A publisher since time began he’s always been the voice of steady commercial advise since I’ve been a kid. When I was about 12 years old, he left publishing and by the time I was 18 he was writing. What personality changes raced over him! As a publisher, my Dad had always told me that authors are difficult, wingy, moaning gits. As a writer he suddenly came to realise that 35 years of experience lied and in fact, authors were under-rated, misunderstood, underpaid and under-regarded lambkins tossed between the merciless hands of evil editors. As Douglas Adam’s publisher, he was in a good position to write the official biography – feel free to flick through the photos, dear reader, to discover exactly what I mean when I say that as an 8 year old I had that haircut known as ‘mother did my fringe’. He later went on to write the Dictionary of Bullshit and is in the process of publishing its updated version in expectation of the great surge of oily manipulation that will be the 2010 general election.  I am proud to report that I am the dedicatee of a dictionary of bullshit… as well as an avid contributor.
Anyway, point of all this is… my Dad is my Dad, and this is a shameless plug for his books, as is frankly, a good daughter’s duty as well as a sensible writer’s pleasure…
My favourite definition (reproduced without permission but in the fervant hope that my Dad won’t sue me)…
Growing as a person: This is Good. Growing as something else would not be so good.
Long Time…
Posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 in Misc., Writing | 2 Comments
So, once again, it’s been an age since I blogged.
Here’s why….
RADA! (Ate my life.) We have been putting on a production of ‘Company’ by Stephen Sondheim which featured among its many lighting features… deep breath… UV cannons, mirrorball, 18 moving lights, 2 robocolours (thank you Royal Opera House), 1 glaciator (thank you National Theatre), 150m of festoon and 300 lightbulbs (thank you Sparks) two hazers, two wireless dimming lamps, twelve practicals and…
… and you know, a set, props, costumes, actors, musicians etc. etc. etc..
It’s been a little bit bonkers. One of those experiences where you work 12 hours a day and then wake at 3 a.m. wondering what happened to supper. Boritos! How I have been dreaming of boritos! Guacamole and grated cheese! In the last weekend after the show went up, I’ve hardly stopped eating; it’s as if my body is attempting to compensate in 24 hours for the abuse of 15 days. In an odd way, I haven’t really had any major, major jobs to do in the last two weeks, just a continual series of small jobs which have added up and added up until all I can dream about is DMX and the chorus line of ‘Side by side’. (One of the camper moments in this otherwise surprisingly un-camp musical. Glowing hula hoops? Oh yes…)
And tomorrow, it all kicks off again, as we go into rehearsal for Measure for Measure where I am, again, you guessed it, Production Electrician. But! Prod LX for one of the coolest lighting designers in the country, on a play by Shakespeare The Dude, which so far promises to be nothing but an adventure from start to finish, so let’s keep those fingers crossed…
In other news, the Midnight Mayor publication date does indeed rush upon us. Currently I’m a little bit concerned that I’ll be in a focus session on the great day itself (which is, in case you’re wondering, advertised on amazon.co.uk as 4th of March) but I herein solemnly swear that upon that day I will at the very least have a take away curry in celebration. Lamb bhuna – is there anything in the world that lamb bhuna cannot make good?
It’s a peculiar thing being both a student and a writer at the moment. At LSE it wasn’t something that really bothered me, since as a student I was in classes maybe 6 hours a week and the rest of the time I was reading, writing, in the theatre or with friends who cared as about as much for my literary exploits as they did for the Battle of Lepanto. But at RADA, being a student is a relentless experience, a continual ritual that next to nothing is permitted to disrupt. A phrase was thrown at me… ‘people who do lights professionally, take it seriously, live lighting’. Well, here I am, taking lighting seriously, but live lighting? I would no sooner live lighting than I would live writing, since both are equally important to me and, let’s face it, only one is paying my electricity bill.
There’s a lot to say about being a student at RADA, none of which I will say now! It has its amazing moments, it has its absolute downers, (as radio 4 would put it… ‘and that’s like life…’) but I think all things considered, no matter how good or bad things are or may be or get, I’m ready to stop being a student now.
Teenage Snogging Vampires
Posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments
I suspect I may cause mild offense to some with this post, so let me say right here, right now, the necessary truths.
Stephanie Mayer has sold more books, is more read and beloved, than I have imagination to fully grasp. The fact that people read her books like they were sent from Mount Sinai are a testimony to the fact that they have tuned into something that most writers, myself include, haven’t tapped, and that is a remarkable achievement, whether intended or otherwise, and she deserves nothing but respect for it. Vampires can be cool… certainly of all the fantastical creatures to waltz across the silver screen, they seem to have the best dress sense and weaponry, and the vampire myth has in its time offered, and continues to offer, cool and interesting ways of telling cool and interesting stories.
But!
… and this is an entirely personal but…
I am so bloody bored of hormonal teenage snogging vampires. In fact, I am bored of so many kinds of vampire… dark, broody vampires who answer with a maximum of three words at any given time…
“How’s the bloodlust?”
“Under control.”
“Did you enjoy your book on the philosophy of Socrates?”
“Yes.”
“Are you concerned about killing your own brother in order to stop occult powers of evil sweeping across the world?”
“No. Crossbow. Now.”
In much the same way often the best way to appear smart in the face of sheer intellectual befuddlement is to nod and smile as though you are wise enough to appreciate the argument being presented, without wishing (though it is within your power) to tear it to shreds, so it seems the key to being cool vampire-style is saying almost nothing at all while looking quietly tormented by What Must Be Done. Black leather is in; cardigans are out. Blood is being drunk because of insatiable lust, and you can just bet that there’s a lot of heavy breathing and cleavage happening at the same time. I mean, I’m not a fan of the vampires = sex argument, because I think vampires if done well can = something more, but I gotta say, the recent trend is certainly towards the sex end of bloodlust, ideally with a bit of emotional trauma thrown in. Ultimate relationship challenge! Brad, I love you… but if we fall in love truly one of us will have to die…! Generally, if your vampire is wearing leather, s/he is into technology, reacts badly to ultraviolet light and has really straight hair. At the other end of the spectrum, there’s your vampire in big-flowing-robes-with-knobbly-bits, who likes intoning in ancient languages while standing in the middle of occult symbols, and will often speak in sentences of more than three words, but without any particular meaning…
“How was your book?”
“I read between its pages the firey truth of the fall of our kind, and tasted the dust of damnation.”
“So… good, then?”
“As good as moonrise to the wolf.”
“That good, huh?”
“The moon is to the wolf what the falafal is to the lonely traveller upon the suburban highstreet at two a.m.. Both hunger. Neither are grateful in the morning.”
And so on. Only without the sensible connotations. Yet this is still a generalisation – vampires have taken every possible form. If you were a teenage girl at roughly the age I was, you would have had to bury your head in the syrup sponge and custard not to have found out every detail of the events of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at any average school dinner; vampires then went through a period of killing werewolves and visa versa, they fell in love, the conducted horrible experiments, they walked in the day, they walked only in the night, they walked in the day and the night but didn’t like either, they had swords, they had guns, they had magic, they had machines. Dracula’s a fine example of this flexibility, and also, perhaps, of why vampires endure so long in our literature. The guy is just next to impossible to kill! Crosses, stakes, garlic, sunlight, even when you think you’ve got him there’s always some prat who goes and spills blood in the wrong place and poof, there you are, back dealing with an intractable enemy again. The rules are there to be perpetually bent.
A historical footnote… there was indeed a Vlad the Impaler, who was killed in the fifteenth century by the invading Ottomans, thus, in my mind, giving brownie points to one of my favourite collapsed empires… even if they didn’t make it into the literature that followed…
All that said! Like a hypocrite (and attempting to disguise my shame by admitting to it) I can see the use of vampires. I’m even prepared to use them in the world of Urban Magic. But my question is this… if humans can only take blood types that match their own, surely the same rule should be applied to vampires? Imagine how difficult it would be to haunt the night if you had to stop in front of your prey with a cry of…
“Now, trembling mortal, I shall drink your blood! But can I just check… it is A- isn’t it?”
Let’s not get excited…
Posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 in Writing | 5 Comments
Alright, I’ve known about this a long, long time, but haven’t blogged about it for the very good reason that, in all honesty, it will probably never happen.
What will probably never happen? (I hear the strangled cry.)
To quote a sage… make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait…
After all, the reasons why it’ll probably never happen are numerous and complex! The sheer amount of money involved, the constraint of time, recession, the credit crunch, the demands of the market and the audience, studio’s whims, development hell, the struggle of getting together a team, the decided lack of teenage vampires snogging, I mean, the odds against it ever happening are immense. Douglas Adams, when it happened to him, took twenty five years to get anything done and even then the budget was cut and he was, sadly, dead, by the time anything came of it. People have spent years and years of their lives hoping that there’ll be movement and then when, if it does happen, as usually it doesn’t, it goes straight to DVD with an embarrassed cough and occasionally gets borrowed from the local video shop by men in dirty anoraks who pretend its for a friend. There are many, many forces against this, which brings me back to my original thesis…
… don’t get excited.
But on the other hand, if something does come of it (and let’s face it, it’d be absolutely fantastic if something did, and I have officially promised to buy the most ridiculous pair of socks ever made by man in the eventuality) (and a new plug for my sink – thinking big here)Â … if something does come of it then people might raise their eyebrows and say ‘why Kate, you must have known about this for eons, why didn’t you say something’ and then how daft would I look?
So yes. A producer in Los Angeles has bought the film option for A Madness of Angels, and now that ink is actually on the contract, I will freely admit that I am absolutely thrilled and delighted by this development. With, of course, the caveat as stipulated above!  In pratical terms, from where I’m sat, this means very little. I will sit and carry on writing as usual with my fingers crossed and if something does come of it, there shall be much rejoicing, and if, despite all the best work of the producer (who seems, in case you’re wondering, extremely lovely and passionate about the project, hurrah!) the studios just go ‘you want to do what to the streets of London?’ then…
… I am still young, and this bodes well.
There is just one last thought I have to share on this subject, which comes from the gentleman in his life, who, on hearing about the contract, cackled shamelessly and in between his gasps of breath intoned in his most booming Hollywood movie-trailer voice…
‘Vin Diesel IS Matthew Swift!’
He then, needless to say, went on laughing.
Butin a good way.
The Protection of Children Act 1999
Posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2009 in Misc., Writing | 7 Comments
I have always tried to be as non-political as I can when writing this blog, and on this matter in particular, will try and step as carefully as possible, since this is one of those cases where not only can I see both sides of the argument, but I don’t yet know enough about it, and the subject matter is entirely emotive.
I’ve been invited back to give a talk at my old school, which I left about 5 years ago, to a group of children attending as an arts festival thingy. I’ve given talks at dozens – possibly verging towards the hundreds – of schools in the UK and elsewhere, and naturally agreed because, you know, it’s my old school. The talk is scheduled to last 45 minutes on a day like any other in February, and my plan, as it stands, is to arrive, go in, say hello to the art teacher who taught me AS-Level Drama, and the mathematics teacher who I drew with when playing chess every Wednesday for 7 years. (Except for those rare and largely wiped-from-memory Wednesdays when he utterly trounced me.) I will then, under the beady eye of my old English teacher and, I suspect, a few others, give my talk to the children, and leave.
Now…
… for the first time in my life, I have been sent documentation to fill out under the Protection of Children Act 1999. I must go into my school and under the beady watchful eye of an employee, give over my passport, birth certificate (which is in my parent’s possession, not mine, owing to a domestic bureaucractic hiccup), P60 from my present employer (I have none) and a recent utility bill showing my current address. Furthermore, in the form I am requested to supply marital status, bank details, employment status, occupancy status, mother’s maiden name, and a referee to testify to my character. The school will then pay £31 to a company called Capita who will, on behalf of the criminal records bureau, do a background check on me to ensure that I don’t have any criminal convictions, and after 4 weeks, I will be cleared to give my 45 minute lecture. This disclosure, according to the government websites I’ve been skim-reading (and I apologise if I have any details wrong here, it has been one of those browsing-the-internet-while-burning-disks weeks) will only apply once, to this one event, on the basis that the next time I’m invited to talk at a school, I may have acquired new convictions. (I have none, I hasten to add.)
Now…
… I have to step so carefully here, because in principal, I am all in favour of this law. It is the ultimate, ultimate horror, one so horrifying that we hardly dare speak or write or think of it, the thought that children can be put at risk by the adults that surround them. No parent would hesitate to take any measures necessary to protect their children, no one with a whit of humanity would expect anything less.
But if I am to deliver my passport, birth certificate etc. in person to every single school I visit, is this not the end of my ever visiting any school outside zones 1-4 in London? Is this not the end of trips to Dundee and Wrexham, of Bristol and Reading? How does this affect the Edinburgh Children’s Book Festival, or the festival in Bath? I have been lecturing at and visiting schools since I was 15 years old; had this law come into force five years earlier, would I have been bound by it when still legally a child and yet also a visiting author? For 45 minutes of supervised attendance at the school where I studied for 7 years, I must slog to the other side of town with documents I don’t even have to be vetted and cleared of crimes I have not committed and yes, I applaud the protection of children, but I also applaud reason in the execution of law, and I begin to wonder whether we are not teetering on that fine line of a law that could shut down through its sheer complexity and red tape a whole culture of bringing the world the school, as well as the school to the world.
Let me repeat; I lack sufficient information on this subject to make a final judgment, an absolute statement of too-much, too-little. The protection of children is an unspoken law, the ultimate unspoken law – that children must not be harmed and it is the duty of the old to protect those too young to protect themselves – but I question whether this particular law may not do some damage, in its effort to do good.
I welcome all comments and debate on the subject!
Vaclav Havel
Posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 in Writing | 2 Comments
I was asked, a few months ago, to say what name went with ‘Havel’ in a ‘guess that playwright’ game, and automatically said Vaclav. It took me a while to figure out why I’d said this – was it some vague hangover from GCSE history, or a lingering half-memory of ‘The Cold War Endgame’, that fatal LSE exam where I got a mental block on how to spell ‘Gorbachev’ half way through the final paper…? Whatever – we had no time to find out, since the context in which Mr Havel was named was a theatre history lecture on the absurdist movement of the 20th century, and no one seemed particularly interested in why the name was setting off alarm bells. And so for a while I ignored it, until, wandering into the library, I found a copy of the works of Vaclav Havel 1969-83 and started reading. And it all came flooding back…
Czechoslovakia (as was during the Cold War) was not a country, I vaguely recalled, that had taken particularly kindly to communism. Sure, there was the whole post-Nazi reaction that swept most of Europe where, for a good 6 months, extreme leftist politics seemed a suitable response to extreme rightist politics and so long as the socialists/communists were willing to let themselves be voted out of government on a regular basis then that was all fair and above board. But then oh whoops, the Warsaw Pact, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall, the 1956 Hungarian Uprising, secret police, one-party states and the Cold War as we all know and love…
In 1968 the Czechs had their own uprising that was, in the tradition of the time, brutally suppressed, but a theme remained in Czechoslovakia of protest via art. The central theatre in Prague was more often than not, a place of dissent, where pissed off people gathered together. Charter 77 began there, as did numerous movements with such catchy names as ‘ The Committee for the Defense of the Unjustly Persecuted’. The actors and writers were ridiculously active – or as ridiculously active as safety permitted – in protesting loudly and fearlessly against the state. One story tells the tale that in 1989 as communism seemed to crumble overnight, an orchestra set up in Prague and played the Moldau, a song more Czech than alcoholic cough medicine on a snow-shaken night, over and over and over again in celebration of a national identity that had been systematically crushed in the name of universal brotherhood. And when the world stopped turning and the state looked up between the slits of its fingers, a playwright, dissident, sometime-prisoner-of-the-state by the name of Vaclav Havel was probably a little surprised to find himself the first prime minister of a post-communist state.
But this isn’t really about the politics of Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic. The point is; I sat down and read some of the works of Vaclav Havel on the tube, and it was utterly fascinating. The writing (of what I’ve read so far) ranges from the ridiculous to the surreal, the wonderful to the bizarre, but is never anything other than utterly absorbing. With a history-loving hat on, it’s also absolutely fascinating – sort of George Orwell meets P.G.Wodehouse. You can see why he got into trouble with the authorities of the time; the sheer ridiculousness of the communist system, which specialised in disguising fear as ideology, is shown in all its absurd glory. A charge which can sometimes be leveled against the more didactic kinda playwriting is that, with writers like, say, Brecht, the story takes second place to the politics. Havel’s writing is clearly political and opinionated, but has so much more going on as well. I have no idea how you’d make it work on stage; with difficulty, I suspect; but if you could get it work, it could be well worth the ticket.
Urban Magic 3
Posted on Sunday, September 20th, 2009 in Writing | 7 Comments
So, I haven’t even really got going in talking about Urban Magic 2 – the Midnight Mayor – but feel that, since this is my blog and it is related to all things Urban Magicy, I would share the happy and joyous news that the contract to write Urban Magic 3, is currently sitting on the end of my bed! I’m not entirely sure what the publication date would be – my publisher may or may not be thrilled to know that the writing is already well underway and they’ll probably receive the manuscript in the next few months… – but it’s there, it’s happening and, barring disaster, will hopefully, some day, somehow, be on a bookshelf near you!
However, despite the desire to say lots about it, I won’t yet, since as established, I ought to really say more about the Midnight Mayor. Did you, for example, know that the thing that causes most problems in the London sewer system is not so much sewage in the traditional sense, but congealed cooking fat? Imagine what could go wrong for your average sorcerer when the underground world of London decides to take a wander on the streets above…?