Alice in Wonderland Premiere

Eleanor Tomlinson, who is starring as one of the Chattaway Siters, (roles invented by TIm Burton for the film) was looking gorgeous at the London Premiere this week. Why does this concern me? Well, she is the sister of my Godson, Ross Tomlinson, (see this post) who is also an actor to be watched.

Eleanor, who was such a sweet child, has gone from strength to strength. She was in the Illusionist and Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging. Look out she has a great future ahead of her.

Bright new day in the studio

The Huge silver birch tree that grows over, and shades, my studio came down today = well, most of it. It started raining at lunchtime, so they’r coming back on Monday to finish the Job.

Now the sun has come out and with all the branches gone, It is really bright in my studio – or is that because I cleaned the windows yesterday. Either way, it’s very bright in here now and there’s going to be a whole lot of gardening to be re-planned.

Criticism – don’t take it lying down – Shoo Rayner Writing School

I’ve posted a vid on Youtube about criticism. I got two pieces of criticism on my drawing school site that made me think. One was not nice and one was brilliant. How can the bad one, (from someone who is obviously ignorant and thoughtless) be so crushing and the good one not quite make up for it? Here’s some advice for those who don’t pick up the pen for fear of being criticised.

Two for joy

Magpies in love

“One for sorrow, two for joy…” or so the old country saying goes. These two were canoodling on my neighbours’s roof at lunchtime. Spring must be in the air – I can hear the birdies getting twitterpated all around me. I suppose the two for joy bit could be because when they are in pairs and a’courtin, it is a sign of spring and that must be joyful news in itself.

The cold weather seems to have broken, but they’ve brought a very grey, miserable rain with their joy.

Best bit of advice for a writer

Here you are, the very best bit of advice for writers… ever.

As always, if you like it, please rate it with the stars in the top left hand corner or why not subscribe on YouTube?

Ideas

It’s a bit weird writing stories when I know that the covers are already sorted out! I’m revising the third story of Axel Storm at the moment. Actually, I’m pretty much re-writing it. I decided to change a major part of the series, which has put a different slant on all the stories. It’s made them all much better, but does involve a lot of re-thinking.

I struggled with this story, Jungle Fortress, all last week. I’ve been waiting for the last stone to fall into place. It did, last night as I was falling asleep. I woke in a panic this morning, wondering if it had only been a dream and that it was nonsense or that I couldn’t remember the idea.

Phew! It drifted back to me and it makes sense too. Better get on an write it now

You are not a gadget – Jaron Lanier – part 2

I’ve finished reading Jaron Lanier’s You are not a gadget,.

The positive ideas he said would be at the end of the book never really arrived. He has to split his mind in two to be able to start questioning, never mind get answers. He views art and humanity from a humanist viewpoint and technology from a computationalist viewpoint. The two views never meet as, I suspect, Newtonian Physics and Quantum Physics will never meet. Lanier has a vision of the future where we all become octopi on lsd.

It doesn’t excite me, I’m afraid. It’s hard enough being who you are, let alone pretending to be someone else in an online environment. He’s done a lot of work in Virtual Reality. He says that the brain soon responds to a new body and learns how to operate extra legs and make up for physical limitations.

I’m sure the brain would happily exist in cyberspace if it could, but what would that do to the concept of Humanity. The one thing that Lanier holds onto is the idea that Humans are special. We are not computers. We are something higher than that.

I can’t help but feel that the internet is changing that – smoothing down the individual, banging square pegs into round holes, making everything blend into gloop so that online culture becomes no greater than the giant, stupid, soap opera of Facebook or YouTube.

I’m beginning to think that the internet is a disease that has infected us. Did you see Avatar? That scene where the tree sends fungal-like filaments over the bodies as it scoops up the life force? I think that is what the internet is doing to us. Every time we connect another root is sunk into our brains, making it harder and harder to disconnect.

What would happen if you went offline? Can you? Your phone is now the internet. There are things you cannot do offline. How would you check train times, plot routes, find stuff out? Libraries are getting rid of non-fiction, because no one uses it anymore.

If I disconnected would the world stop around me? How hard would it be? Would I be happier? Would I ever work again? How could I let everyone know how brilliant it was if I couldn’t blog about it?

We are so hooked and hooked-up we can’t stop. It’s worse than an addictive drug, there is no cold turkey other than becoming a monk in an isolated Tibetan monastery. It’s all around us in the airwaves. We cannot escape.

But we might, one day be disconnected – and then where would we be?

I am not a gadget, but I am beginning to feel like one. Someone or something is pulling the strings, making me write this load of nonsense. I could have gone out and done something useful instead – made a cup of coffee, fixed one of the many things in the house I’ve been ignoring for too long, but no – something is calling – needing text entry. I don’t think it is me feeling I have to do it – I have no idea who my reader is. I really do feel that I’m providing data for something bigger than me. Perhaps I should just be happy with that thought, but I’m not sure if that bigger thing is good or bad and whether I want to be associated with it.

I’m a children’s author, for goodness sake, I should be exploiting this blog to make people want to buy more of my books. Instead I’m making them think, “he’s a weirdo!” let’s buy someone else’s books instead, someone who knows how to play the game and appear soft and cuddly and non-threatning.

Perhaps the internet is not there to be questioned and thought about. Perhaps it really is just a communications device to be exploited for our own ends. Just an enormous advertising billboard onto which we can spray our bits of graffiti or slap up our posters saying, “Buy me now!” Then we can take the money and run off to a beautiful desert island and end our days in the sunshine.

Google – Angel or Devil?

Google claim to be “the Good Guys”. Maybe they are – at the moment. When that amount of power is focussed in one place, you can bet your bottom dollar the bad guys will want a piece, if not all of the action.

At the moment, Google makes so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it. So what it does, is create new little bits to further colonise the web and other communication technologies, so that in a couple of years, when a some nerds from Stanford come up with a “Google Killer” idea, the web will be owned by Google and they won’t get a look in. Google has learned not to let itself fall into the same trap Microsoft did.

If Google were making real things or selling food or any other utility, they would have been broken up into pieces by now, but somehow, we are perfectly happy to blindly let a real Big Brother outfit take over our lives, because they keep telling us they are the “Good Guys”.

If they really are the good guys, then they should stop fiddling about with operating systems and phones and apply their considerable power and inventiveness to the problem of content.

Google is a parasite. It makes its money by exploiting people like me – the creatives, who spend our lives having ideas, using our brains to move the human condition on. Google sucks up what we do, mashes it up and sells advertising on the back of it. It pays us nothing for our work and claims all the profit. That is either theft or slavery. The very word content demeans the work of creative people. The Mona Lisa is content to a web technologist. Picasso and Shakespeare mere content providers. Content is just a nebulous medium that can be focussed by aggregating technologies to sell advertising to finely chosen markets.

I’m beginning to feel a bit jaded about the wonder of the web. No one makes money as a creative person on the web. Certainly not enough to live on. It makes communication faster and easier, but is that a good thing? When I was young, you could send a postcard in the morning and it would be delivered by tea. Isn’t that really enough? we used to pick up the phone and actually talk to people at the other end – wasn’t that better?

I find myself glued to my communication devices these days. The day goes by and I’ve done nothing but blog, sort through spam and obsessively check my youtube and website stats, this because my publishers tell me it’s not enough to have ideas, to write and illustrate and visit schools and libraries and perform at festivals anymore, I have to blog to create and maintain my market. Woah! Isn’t that the publisher’s job? I blog away like mad, but I don’t think it makes a blind bit of difference to my market, because I don’t address my blog to my market. If I did, there wouldn’t be any point in writing the books, as I’d be giving all my creative work away to the kids who aren’t the ones who buy the books anyway.

Meanwhile, as you read this blog, you and I are putting a journalist out of business, because you really should be reading carefully considered, well-written work from a paid-for journal and I should not be dashing this off for free, but submitting it to a journal who would pay me for my time and effort.

If Google really are the good guys, they should put all their energy into one project – online micropayments.

I’ve removed creative projects from the web because I did not get paid for them while they were online. As they were free, they took away from sales of real books from which I earn real money. Now I can’t be bothered to work on all the great ideas I have because I can’t afford to do them, because I know I won’t get paid.

If I got a micropayment every time someone looked at one of my projects, then it would become worthwhile to start putting projects together, or it would be worthwhile for publishers to gravitate towards online delivery. The way things are going, in about five years time, there is going to be a blood bath in publishing unless an equitable way is found to pay people for the work they do online. As far as I’m concerned, my good will and the fun of experimentation has worn out. Like everyone else, I need to eat and in this system, that means I need cash, not the promise of a new paradigm in a generation’s time, when I’ll be 90 and having to stack shelves at the supermarket.

I tried setting up a secure area of my site to provide quality content. But I could not guarantee the security of it and I found myself turning into a systems administrator – I shouldn’t have to do that. The business guys will tell me that I should be entrepreneurial and set up my own content delivery business, but then I’d never be creative again – I’d spend all my time employing others to do the creative work, while I did the paperwork and programming. I have a publisher to do that. It’s a weird twisted re-cycling argument that technologists and web business people don’t seem to get.

Since the web began to take hold, my workload has at least doubled. If only my income had done the same. I may have stayed in the same place – I think I’m probably going backwards in real terms.

The internet is turning into a place that is purely commercial, a system for screwing money and free labour out of the plebs, (that’s us) by legal or illegal means. Will we continue to walk blindly down this path, or will we revolt or will the good guys come to our aid and create a future that we might want to be part of?

Double Speak

British Gas are advertising price cuts at the moment. A concerned voice says, “We understand how difficult things have been, so we are making things easier for you by cutting our prices.”

This is not quite true. What they mean is that the price of Gas has come dow to the point where they ca’t justify passing on the savings anymore. Do I want to change to British Gas – I don’t think so.

We had a leaflet through the door for Harry Tuffins, who are taking over the local Somerfield Store. The first hundred shoppers will receive a tin of Cadbury’s Roses for only £1.

Huh!? What they mean is the first hundred shoppers will have the opportunity of purchasing a tin of Roses for only £1 – that is quite different to what is suggested and actually shows a very mean spirit. Many of that 100 may well decide not to take up the offer and so less than 100 tins will be sold for £1.

It doesn’t make me want to pop in and see what they are like. I know already – tricky deals.

Day off

I’ve been so busy since Christmas, I’ve decided to do nothing today – and so far I’ve succeeded. I went to have a look at a really bad auction, just a load of old rubbish and now I’m going to slob out in front of the TV.

There comes a time when your brain needs a rest!