Fifty Shades of Meh

Yes, I read it. Partly out of curiosity to see what all the hype was about, and partly out of professional interest to see what made this such a self-publishing success.

The main thing I learned was this. All that stuff they tell you about having to be a great writer and practice your skills and persevere and be original if you want to be successful? That's bullshit. This is mediocre at best. It's not truly appalling writing, but it's not in any way good. There are tens of thousands of much better writers publishing their stuff on Smashwords and the Kindle store. There are many people writing much better stuff in the exact same genre of "billionaire BDSM erotica". So what made 50 Shades so insanely popular?

What you need if you want to be a successful writer is first and foremost, luck. Luck can transform a mediocre book like 50 Shades into a major success (and pave the way for all your future books to rocket to the top of the best-seller lists). Or luck can doom a literary masterpiece to obscurity. Success has nothing to do with the quality of your work or the effort you put in. It's just a roll of the dice.

Frankly, it bored me. It's the modern equivalent of a Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins or The Red Shoe Diaries or 9½ Weeks: absurd romantic fantasy with some kink, aimed at bored middle-aged housewives and young women looking to be daring and guys looking for something a bit pervy that they could get away with. (And those were phenomenally successful too in their day, despite being mediocre.) Half of the appeal of those was because they were known to push the edge of what was acceptable in the mainstream, it was cool to say you'd read or seen them. You didn't have to like them - it was more about showing how sophisticated and open-minded you were.

To be honest, it wasn't as bad as I expected. It just doesn't deserve to be the poster child for self-publishing. It doesn't send the message that self-publishing is the way for great writers to be discovered. Instead, it tells us that no matter how poorly you write, you could, if you're lucky, be a success. That's why we have a flood of truly crappy books thrown into the e-book lottery by untalented writers hoping they've written the next 50 Shades. And the depressing thing is that one of them probably has.

The Muse

“The professional does not wait for inspiration; he acts in anticipation of it. He knows that when the Muse sees his butt in the chair, she will deliver.”
 - Steven Pressfield

Goodbye, Hukilau: why I'm no longer running a digital publisher

As of this weekend, I’m no longer in the e-book publishing business. I’ve enjoyed it, but I don’t see it as something that’s worth pursuing any longer, and I've handed the keys to Hukilau over to someone else.

There are two main reasons for this. This isn't a blame game or an excuse: it's just the way the market has developed, and it's both a curse and a blessing.

Reason 1: writers don’t need digital publishers any more

When we started Hukilau, it wasn’t easy to get an e-book published. The tools were arcane, the formats were obscure, and the submission processes were tortuous. You could go it alone, but you needed to be pretty tech-savvy and persistent just to get your book into the retail channels. We offered people the opportunity to side-step all that. They gave us their books in whatever format they had, and we’d get them out onto the Web sites with no effort on their part. It was a useful role, and it bridged the gap between the author and the retailer in a simple, understandable way. 

Now, though, it’s dead simple to publish your own e-books.  There are a range of really simple formatting tools around, and places like Smashwords will even accept your Word file, so you don’t have to know anything at all about e-book formatting to get your book onto Kindles, Nooks and iPads the world over.  It takes literally ten minutes to put your book on Amazon or Smashwords after the first time you’ve done it. There’s simply no need for a publisher to get involved.

Incidentally, I don’t think of places like Smashwords as publishers in the traditional sense. They’re distribution services for self-publishers. They don’t curate their content in any way, or promote anything they handle – the two things that in my mind define a digital publisher. What Smashwords and their ilk provide is a public conduit that allows anyone to get their books onto the major retailers with minimal friction. It's a great service, but it's not the same as a publisher.

Writers make better promoters than publishers anyway

When it comes to promotion, it’s become clear that self-promotion by individual authors is just as successful as publisher promotion for the majority of titles. Unless the publisher is prepared to pay out for a major marketing campaign and start putting ads on the sides of buses to attract new users, there’s very little they can do anyway. Readers are more interested in what their friends, other readers, bloggers, and the author themselves have to say than any PR from a publisher.  

This is nothing new – the vast majority of successful authors have always been the ones with a gift for self-publicity. What’s new is that there is now a huge and vibrant community that allows people to promote themselves for free. Most authors would do better to spend their time getting active on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, the blogosphere, and Goodreads for an hour or two a day, rather than signing up with a publisher and hoping they will be able to magically create interest.

And let’s face it, publishers just don’t have the same level of interest in a book as the author. A publisher wins by having a large enough catalog to make a decent aggregate income. Most of the individual books in their catalog just don’t matter. Publishers are looking for the big winners and will be happy with small returns from the majority of their titles, and they won’t spend time pushing something that’s not doing well. They’ll just move on to the next new book. Authors, on the other hand, care passionately about every one of their books, and will give them as much attention as they can.

An author has to ask, “what exactly can a publisher do for me that I can’t do better and more cost-effectively myself?”  Looking at it from an author’s point of view, I have to shake my head and answer, “I honestly don’t know.”  I can’t see any reason to give away a sizeable chunk of my earnings to someone simply for submitting a document to a Web site and listing me in their catalog.  If I’m going to go with a publisher, they’ll have to provide me with editing services, cover artwork, and promotion.

Under those circumstances, I didn’t feel it was right to continue offering those services to authors under what felt like false pretences.

It’s actually a pretty amazing state for authors to be in. You don’t need publishers any more. The world is out there, and you have everything you need to get your book in front of people. So go, publish, and make your dreams come true.

Reason 2: there’s no money in it

With all the amazing sales figures we’re seeing from the e-book market, you’d have thought digital publishing was a lucrative business. Sadly, it’s just not so.

Let’s look at a few hard numbers. 

In our recent promo, we shipped nearly 10,000 books in a week. At our usual $2.99 price point, that would break down as roughly $3,400 to the retailers, $3,300 to the authors, and $3,300 for us.  Less our running costs, the three of us would have made $1,000 each. That’s not bad for a week’s work, and if we’d been able to sustain that every week, we’d have made a passable living.

But that’s a tough order. 10,000 books a week, every single week. Half a million books a year, if you prefer. Given that 90% of books sell fewer than 1000 copies, you’ve got to have a sizeable catalog to make anywhere near those numbers – even if we had 500 titles, every one of them would have to be in that top 10%.  Realistically, we’d need more like 5000 titles. That would mean shipping 20 new titles every single day for a year, which means they wouldn’t get any personal attention from us. We’d just be slamming them out, hoping we’d accidentally get some hits. And as I said above, who needs a publisher who doesn’t care about their books?

A little side note here to illustrate how hard it is to make 1000 sales of an e-book. During our promo period, we took several top spots in various Kindle categories. It took us just 80 downloads to get the #1 spot in a major category like Music. It took a mere 70 to get the #1 spot in Movies. 350 downloads was enough to get one of our titles into the top 25 non-fiction as a whole, and 120 downloads put us just outside the top 50.
In other words, only 24 non-fiction books had shipped more than 350 copies on Amazon that week, and only about 50 books had shipped more than 100 copies. Those numbers are tiny. There are a lot of books being shipped overall, but not very many of each individual book.

But isn't that just bad business planning?

You could argue that we could increase our prices and then we wouldn’t need to sell as many books.

But here’s the rub. When I said we shipped 10,000 books in a week, every single one of those was free. When we tried selling those books at $4.99 and above, we made almost no sales at all outside friends and family. Most of the time, we were talking single digit sales per month, sometimes zero. We dropped the price to $2.99 and did a little better. Even at $0.99, we got next to nothing.  The only books that were selling in respectable numbers were those by known authors which were already available in print, where e-books were a cheap, convenient alternative.

It wasn’t due to the quality of the books. They were good books. They got good reviews. People liked them. People told their friends – who then didn’t buy them.

The problem was, as we effectively proved, that you can’t compete with free. There are so many good free titles on the market that most people won’t even pay a dollar to take a chance on an unknown author.  Seth Godin recently argued that mid-list authors shouldn’t expect to get paid. And if they don’t get paid, their publishers don’t get paid either.

But there are plenty of people making money from selling books, aren't there?

Yes, there is money to be made selling e-books, no question about it, but the majority of the authors who are making sales fit into one or more of three categories:

1. big-name authors who already have a following in print; 

2. people writing series who have built up a devoted cult following from previous books; and 

3. self-motivated, self-published authors who are hustling their butts off day in, day out, to build up a following. 

First-time casual authors just aren’t making sales, no matter how good their books are, and the type of author who goes to a digital publisher - almost by definition - isn’t the kind of author who’s prepared to put in that kind of effort on their own PR. 

To make money as a publisher, we’d have to have a legion of authors in those three popular categories, or else we’d be forced down the Smashwords model, where we ship thousands and thousands of books every month, and are content if we make a couple of bucks off each one.  The former was highly unlikely to happen, and the latter isn’t why I wanted to be in publishing.

The future of digital publishing

I don’t think there’s a role for the kind of publisher that we originally set Hukilau up to be. However, I do see two types of digital publisher surviving.

Print publishers with a digital arm will still be important. In fact, I’d argue that any print publisher that doesn’t have a digital arm will soon be about as successful as a film studio that only distributes on VHS or a record label that only does vinyl. Readers will soon expect to see every print title in digital form, and having a print edition of a book removes the stigma of it being “only” an e-book.

And then there will be the niche publishers who pick a very small genre and stick to it, regularly releasing a constant stream of very similar titles to cater to loyal repeat customers. A few thousand regulars spending $10 per month on average would make for a comfortable little one-person publishing outfit that could provide a reasonable income for a small stable of fast-writing authors. The erotica publishers have proved this market very effectively. I can imagine the same would work for small publishers focusing on steampunk, historical detective stories, world cookbooks, military history, dystopian sci-fi, or similar subject matter. It’s not about selling good books, it’s about finding a market with an insatiable appetite for a specific type of book, and feeding it non-stop. It’s a good route for new authors, because it introduces them to a community that’s already pre-disposed to what they’re writing, it’s good for readers as it fulfils a need, and it works as a publishing model.

Outside those two areas, however, I believe that self-publishing will render traditional publishing models obsolete in the digital market. In many ways, it already has. From a small publisher’s standpoint, that’s a tough problem, and my reaction, after a lot of soul-searching and analysis, is to quit the business. 

I don't regret what we did with Hukilau. We helped some people get their books out there, and I was part of a new, exciting development in a medium I care passionately about. But now, it's a different world, one which is ruled by the authors - the people who've traditionally had a shitty deal from publishers. And that, my friends, is a Good Thing. A Very Good Thing Indeed.

Liberating the authors

From an author’s point of view, right now is a golden opportunity. However, you’re now competing against a million other self-published authors instead of twenty thousand published authors. You're no longer joining a small and exclusive club when you get your book out there. According to some figures I've seen, more books were published in the first week of January 2012 than were published in the whole of 2009, and it's only going to accelerate. 

The great thing about self-publishing is that anyone can now publish a book. 

The problem with self-publishing is that anyone else can now publish a book.

Good luck!

Novellas and short novels

One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of the novel submissions I get sent for Hukilau feel like they're too long, as if they've been padded out to hit the publishers' sweet spot of 80,000 words, when in reality they'd be better as short novels, or even novellas.

Print publishers don't like short books. They take about as much work to create and market, but they don't generate as much money. And readers like to buy big books so they feel they've got their money's worth. When I was first reading, I was used to novels of 150 pages. Now most publishers won't even touch anything under 300 pages, and some genres seem to demand even more.

E-books, on the other hand, don't have that sort of prejudice. I'm wondering whether e-books are going to spark a revival in shorter forms.  Any thoughts?

Grab Vol 1 of my new book - free!

It's been nearly a week since I released my new book, and for some inexplicable reason, I haven't yet mentioned it on my blog. Oh, that's right, I've been hard at work on Volume 2, which will be out in a few weeks.

I'm writing a book about how to use Moviestorm as a film training tool: as Phil South puts it in the introduction, it's like a pilot learning to fly a plane. Using a real plane all the time is way too expensive (and dangerous), so you train in a simulator. That enables you to log plenty of hours, practice the difficult maneuvers in safety, and become familiar with all the basics. It's the same with filmmaking: it's complicated, time-consuming and expensive, so why not use a simple, easy animation tool to practice with?

Each book in the series consists of a set of 15-20 simple exercises that you work through. You have to film the same thing in several ways, focusing on how to use a specific technique. It's all self-guided, so after each version, you review your work, see what was good and bad about it, and do it again. Of course, I recommend using Moviestorm to do this, because it's quick and easy, and you can do it without needing anyone else's help, but you could equally well do it using any other animation tool or even in live action if you have the time and enough willing friends. Most importantly, the skills you practice are relevant to any film medium, not just to machinima or animation.

So far, reviews and comments have been extremely positive, which is immensely satisfying.

“Spot on. The exercises are set up in a very logical, progressive way.”

James Martin, University of North Texas

“Excellent - great for schools and colleges alike. The tone of the writing is perfect - neither patronising or too authoritative.”

Jezz Wright, Blockhouse TV

“I really liked how you tell the reader to try a shot with and without each technique to be able to actually see the difference they make.”

Dan Horne, film student, Full Sail University

Volume 1 covers camerawork; the upcoming volumes cover staging, editing, lighting, sound, and so on, and will be released monthly. They're initially available free in PDF form via Moviestorm. When all five volumes are complete, I'll compile them into a single full-length book with some additional material and release that commercially for Kindle, Nook, and other e-readers.

I'm doing it this way for four reasons. First, after discussing this with Moviestorm, we figured it would be good to release something early to gauge the reaction, so we decided not to wait until it was complete. The book naturally divides into several sections, so this was an easy way to do it. I'm having a lot of meetings with film teachers and film students at the moment, and it's useful to have the book on hand and available for them to download.

Secondly, I'm taking a leaf out of Roz Morris's book. She recently released her novel My Memories of a Future Life in four weekly parts before the whole thing was available. While this was irritating in some ways - mostly because I wanted to read the whole story - it did enable her to get a lot of publicity, effectively doing five launches instead of one, and keeping the momentum going throughout. I'm hoping the same will work here, but without the "I want to know what happens next" factor.

Then there's the argument about proving the point. If I can generate a lot of interest in the free version, it makes it easier to pitch to a print publisher. Several film schools have said that they see this as potentially a useful textbook, and that's a market I'd love to get into. A few thousand downloads and some useful feedback would be a great way to prove to a specialist publisher that the book would be worth taking on.

And lastly, Moviestorm were happy to pay for the rights to distribute the PDF free as a marketing tool. Sure, it's likely to impact my sales when the completed thing becomes available, but it's money in the bank right now, and I'll have made more from it than many self-published authors, and I can't argue with that. What's more, the version I'll be selling will be expanded, revised, and formatted for a range of devices, so there's still a reason for people to buy it.

Please do go and grab a copy, pass it on to your friends, and let me know what you think.

Download Making Better Movies with Moviestorm, Vol 1

The Yellow Flowers

That, as you probably can't see, is the title page of the manuscript of my novel-that's-been-languishing-in-a-trunk-for-twenty-years. Twenty-one and three quarters, if you want to be precise.

I wrote it one December while recuperating from a motorcycle accident. I was ruthless with myself. Every morning, I wrote a chapter, tapping away on my Amstrad word processor with one hand, and didn't allow myself lunch till it was done. Then after lunch, I rewrote yesterday's chapter. Then on Saturdays, I re-read everything I'd done in the week, and on Sunday rewrote it all. The book was finished in three weeks - about the same time it took for my shattered hand to become usable again. (Sadly the bike wasn't so lucky. That was scrapped.) It's unashamedly inspired by Stephen King's The Eyes of the Dragon - not so much the plot, but the tone.

No-one told him the yellow flowers were for the princess, but then, no-one ever tells you anything when you're ten. Gareth was sitting in the loft of the barn, swinging his legs over the edge and thinking gloomy thoughts. To make matters worse, his mother had spanked him in front of the whole Court, and everybody, except of course the King, had laughed at him.

I nearly got it published too, but I turned it down.

Why? Looking back on it, total and utter stupidity.

It was a young teenage fantasy romance, exactly the kind of thing that was huge in the very late 1980s. I submitted it to just one publisher, who loved it, but said that they wanted to do it as a trilogy, because fantasy trilogies were what you did back then. I thought about it for a couple of days, and decided that I didn't really see how the story could continue from there, so I suggested to them that maybe I should write two other unrelated books instead. They said no, and that was the end of that.

Wait, I did what?

A leading publisher offered me - an unknown author - real actual money for two further books as a start of a series, and I said no because I wasn't inspired? These days I'd take that deal instantly, and then figure out what goes into the next two books. Hell, I'd send them a proposal for a trilogy of trilogies. And merchandise. And spin-offs. And versions for every medium ever invented and a few new ones. That's the kind of deal that most aspiring authors would kill for.

As I said, total and utter stupidity.

A couple of weeks ago, I was reading through some fiction submissions, and thinking we should do more novels. (Did I mention I'm part owner of a digital publishing house?) And then I remembered The Yellow Flowers. You know that moment where it dawns on you that you've been even stupider than you realised? It was one of those. I've got a novel of my own sitting right here ready to go. After all, it can't be that bad if someone was prepared to offer me an advance for it and demand more of my work.

So here it is, no longer in a trunk. It'll doubtless get some re-editing in the process of getting re-typed, and then I'm damn well going to publish it. And this time, it'll be The Yellow Flowers, Volume 1.

No shit, Sherlock!

I recently watched Sherlock, the recent BBC modern era take on the Great Detective. It was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next series. One thing that bugged me, though, was that Holmes's apparently incredible deductions are so often completely fallacious. (Mind you, the same was true when Conan Doyle wrote Holmes, so nothing new there.)

Here's an example. Holmes deduces that a dead man cannot have shot himself. He has a bullet wound in his right temple. However, everything in his home suggests that he is left-handed: he places his coffee on the left of his chair, he slices his bread from the left, his pen is on the left of his notepad, and so on. Consequently, if he had shot himself, he'd have used his left hand, and the wound would be on the left of his head, ergo someone else shot him. Genius!

Well, sorry, I call bullshit.

I'm left-handed. I slice my bread to the left. I place my pen on the left. I generally drink coffee with my left hand - but frankly, I'll put my coffee whichever side of the chair is more convenient. But, Mr Smarty-Pants Holmes, I fire a gun with my right hand, as shown below. As, indeed, do many left-handers. I also play guitar and violin right-handed, shoot a bow right-handed, and use a computer mouse right-handed.

Yes, Holmes turned out to be right, but for the wrong reasons, and in spite of his faulty logic.

I so often find that Holmes writers must be like people who design IQ tests. Holmes puts forward a logical theory based on what he observes, but that doesn't mean it's the correct one. For example, he deduces that Watson has returned from Afghanistan or Iraq, based on his posture and the fact that he has a suntan on his hands, and therefore he must be a soldier who has just served in a hot climate and got wounded. Again, Holmes turns out to be right.

But Watson could equally well have been serving in Belize, or an embassy in the Far East. Or have left the service some time ago and been working in a office abroad for a few months. And he could have been injured in an accident, not necessarily a combat wound. But we don't think of those possibilities when we're watching the show, we're too busy being dazzled by Holmes's cleverness.

Yes, I know they're just stories and I should just sit back and enjoy it, but that's not the way my brain works. I keep looking for other explanations of the data and alternative hypotheses. That's why I have so many problems with the aforementioned IQ tests - I can usually think of half a dozen equally logical different answers to the same question, and it turns into a guessing game as to which one the questioner had in mind.

Q: London, Munich, Moscow, Miami. Which is the odd one out?

Well, obviously London, as it's the only one that doesn't start with M. Or Miami, as it's the only one with only five letters. Or maybe Munich, as it's the only one without a repeated vowel. No, of course, it's Miami after all, as it's the only one not in Europe. Hang on, it's got to be Moscow - that's the only one that's both a city and a river. No, dammit, it is Miami. It's the only city that was founded by a woman. And it's the only one that's also a county. And the only one that's also a tribe, and a language. And the only one with a beach.

See what I mean? Just pick one: you've got a one in four chance of being right.

That's how Holmes feels to me. He's brilliant at unerringly picking the right answer out of all the possible ones, and annoyingly, he's right even when he's totally wrong. Just like these guys figuring out where the Riddler is going to strike next.

Stuff'n'nonsense #6

I'm writing this one while watching First Orbit - the movie. It's a real time recreation of Yuri Gagarin's pioneering first orbit, shot entirely in space from on board the International Space Station. The film combines this new footage with Gagarin's original mission audio and a new musical score by composer Philip Sheppard. It's over 90 minutes long, and it's as close as you'll ever get to seeing that incredible historic moment when mankind first left this planet. Sit back, fire it up full screen on the biggest device you've got, and enjoy the incredible feeling of an entire space mission. Just imagine what it must have been like for Gagarin, up there for the first time, seeing things no human being had ever seen before.

They've disabled embedding, so you'll have to just click through. Oh hang on, wait, read the rest of my blog first!

• Today is a moment I've been waiting for for about six years. My friend Damien Valentine, announced that his new feature film, Chronicles of Humanity, will be released on April 26, and will have its theatrical debut at the Little Theatre Cinema in Bath. It's a sci-fi epic featuring several of my friends, and also Felicia Day, who you may recognise from The Guild, Dollhouse, Dr Horrible, and so on. That's pretty damn cool. What's even cooler is that he funded and made the whole film himself.
  And coolest of all, from my point of view, he did it with Moviestorm. When we started creating it, we said that one day, we wanted to see a Moviestorm movie in the cinema, and now it's finally happening. Damien - thanks, and congratulations!
  If you can't make it to the cinema, don't worry, you can watch Chronicles of Humanity online as a Web series.
• One of the films I'm most looking forward to is Luc Besson's The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec. Described as Indiana Jones crossed with The Mummy and Amelie, this looks right up my street. I love the close of this review: "I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending this film, I’m just not sure who to." Me, that's who! Looks like a perfect date movie for us.

• I stumbled across this book today after seeing a tweet about it. Oh My God What Happened And What Should I Do? It's a neat book about digital marketing, well-written, concise, and informative - well worth picking up. What's really clever is that you can buy it for money from Amazon, or buy it for free if you tweet about it. Err, no-brainer. I'll have it for nothing, thanks. And because I'm lazy, I'll leave their default tweet "This Book helps you to move into the Digital era of awesomeness. Download it for free: http://bit.ly/4R9rth" instead of writing "I haven't actually read this book yet but it looks cool and it's free if I write this tweet." Cunning, huh? And they've shifted 150,000 copies that way. Made no money, true, but they've built an audience very, very fast.
• Now this is something I like. Your Taxpayer Receipt, courtesy of the White House. Punch in some data on how much tax you paid, and it'll tell you where all the money is going; how much on defence, hospitals, schools, etc. More governments should do that.
• Did you know Newfoundland has its own time zone? They're an hour and a half ahead of Florida.
• Got writer's block? Deal with it.

I appear to have done something bad to my foot, which got slightly squished during the kitten-trapped-under-garage-door incident a few weeks ago. It feels much like it did when I fell off a motorcycle many years ago - not broken, but possibly a cracked bone, which hurts like hell and isn't going away. I've now got it bandaged up, and am trying to walk or stand on it as little as possible.

At least we have a mostly quiet weekend ahead of us: the main event is Ginger and Joe's Florida wedding reception on Saturday. They got married last weekend up north, and are having a second do down here this weekend.

We're also meeting with a bunch of people to kick around ideas for future art shows in Orlando. There's been a sudden resurgence of enthusiasm, mostly thanks to Ben Sawinski, and a whole load of new opportunities have started popping up.

Apart from that, I'm thinking I'll spend the weekend with my foot propped up, either catching up on movies, reading, or maybe even writing something at long last... Well, when I say writing, I mean other than my blog (6 articles this week), corporate stuff (28 articles) and emails (178 since Tuesday). I mean like maybe a story, or a script, or some lyrics.

Oh, and if you were wondering, we never made it to the Colombian restaurant. There's still a pile of paperwork on the office floor, so we haven't earned it yet. Damn.

Now you can go and watch Gagarin orbit the earth.

Loving the ghost

I wrote these lyrics nearly 20 years ago, and found them today while going through old stuff. Here they are exactly as written. I wouldn't write them that way now. I think I had a sort of Yes-ish, Wakeman-ish feel in mind, with just a soupcon of Marillion and Lamb Lies Down era Genesis.

Loving the Ghost

Drawn into a secret world of only two lost souls
There they live among the forests and the stars.
Eternal once upon a time, they have a past that lasts for ever
Still life in an amber frozen moment.

Loving the ghost of a life that never dies
Loving the ghost of a life that never dies
Loving the ghost

He looks at her as if to say, I need to know
Is that a tear of happiness or pain upon your cheek?
She starts to reply, but the answer needs no words.
A touch from her hand says so much more.

Loving the ghost...

"The invisible abyss that hides you from me
Grows stronger as the time creeps ever onward.
Will you cross and be with me, for I dare not,
Though we both can see what lies beyond our sight?"

Loving the ghost...

Every line of their faces reaches out into the past,
As if to rediscover their final tender kiss.
But suddenly they return to their separate cold words
Where all is as it is, not as it could be.

Summer Solstice 1991

Loving the Ghost by Matt Kelland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. Feel free to make something of them. Just be courteous and let me know.

Mongoose Overdrive

Every so often, a week comes along that just throws things at you from every which direction, and doesn't stop till you beg for mercy. Well, to be truthful, it doesn't even stop then. This has been one of them.

Some of the highlights of this week have included:

• Being asked to be a judge at the Machinima Expo
• Being asked to be a judge for a design competition at Long Road 6th Form College
• Having a movie I worked on as technical consultant (Leaving the Game) get nominated for an award for technical achievement at this year's machinima festival
  
• Having one of my photos, a picture of Reality Checkpoint on Parker's Piece, selected as part of a guide to Cambridge
• Meeting a whole bunch of interesting people at a conference and being asked for help using Moviestorm in some very cool and socially rewarding ways
  
• Getting invited to do a screening and workshops at one upcoming UK film festival, and being asked to speak at another
  
• Meeting a British Vice-Consul based in San Francisco, discovering he knew who I was and what I do, and being asked to go out there and speak
• Finding my photo in a local photographer's online gallery - Gordon Tant, who took the picture of my hat that I'm now using as my avatar
  
• Doing some of the most creative personal work I've done in ages as a result of some random research turning up some extremely surprising things

Scene from Leaving the Game (American Film Institute, Kuma Reality Games, Short Fuze, Cartoon Network, Disney, IBM, Microsoft, Method, Georgia Tech, Furnace Media, and others, 2007)

It's also been a good week for catching up with old friends, and making new ones, especially via Twitter and Facebook. My son got his first job, washing up in a local restaurant, saving up so he can build himself a computer. We had some great Moviestorm movies, including the marvellous Star Wars Election 08, and it looks like I'll finally be getting around to some podcasting again. It seems as if everything I've been doing for the last 18 months is finally coming together.

More weeks like this, please. With the aid of Red Bull (and Stolichnaya) I'll be just fine. I'll sleep in November, after the Machinima Festival in NY...

Reality Checkpoint, Cambridge, 2007

Creative feedback loop

How machinima has helped me write prose fiction

About 40 years ago, I decided I wanted to be a writer. All through school I wrote short stories, and came to the conclusion that I was a lousy playwright and a worse poet. But I still dreamt of being a novelist, until I was about 17 or 18. I used to show my juvenile works to a guy I knew who was a writer. Not a particularly good one, and certainly not famous, but he was at least a professional who would give me the time of day. One day, after critiquing some points of style, he launched into me in a way that stopped me dead in my tracks.

"What makes you think you have a damn thing to say that anybody would want to listen to? What have you done in your life that makes you think you know anything at all about people? Have you ever experienced love? Loss? Triumph? Why don't you wait until you have something to say, and then maybe you'll write something worth reading?"

Ouch. Harsh, but fair. So I set out to find those things.

In many ways, even though I haven't written that novel yet, I've been a writer ever since. I was a journalist for ages, writing about subjects as diverse as African politics, cookery, music, motorsport, technology, film, and computer games. I've written material for RPGs, wargames, computer games, and history magazines. I've written more Web site copy than I can recall. I write business plans, presentations, contracts, user documentation and software specifications. I've written song lyrics, haiku, CD cover notes. (And I did that machinima book.) It wasn't always exciting stuff, but it helped me develop clarity, economy, and the understanding of how to write for different audiences in different voices - and I got paid for nearly all of it. And, perhaps most importantly from the point of view of being a professional writer, how to write fast and hit a deadline.

And recently, I've started to write screenplays, purely so that I could film them for my own pleasure. The biggest breakthrough for me was reading William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade. (If you're into films and haven't read it, do. Seriously.) His technique for writing scripts changed the way I approached everything. Screenplays aren't about the dialogue. They're about describing to the director what the audience sees on the screen, and how they feel about what they see, and how they interpret what they see. When you read a Goldman script, you can already see the film in your head. It's like reading a well-written comic script, where we writer describes each panel in detail. At one point I was quite friendly with various of the 2000AD scriptwriters, and it was interesting to compare the different styles in which they communicated their ideas to the artists.

As I started to apply Goldman's methods to my screenwriting, I started to detect an interesting synergy between the filming and the writing. As a writer, I'd begun to think like a director. I was thinking visually, about how things would look on the screen, about how the camera moved, how the edits worked, and I was putting that into my screenplays. As a director, I'd begun to understand the relationship between the way stories are carried through both spoken and non-spoken elements. I've had to think about where I want to focus my audience's attention, and how to convey emotion without resorting to simply saying how people feel. Doing voice production has made me think about how people talk, and how the same words can carry so many different subtexts through subtle emphasis and inflection. Doing sound design has made me think about the way that music can completely change the feeling of a scene.

Through machinima, I've had to understand that stories aren't about the plot, or the words people say to each other, they're about how making the audience feel that they're actually there, and that they care about what the characters are going through. Yes, it's Creative Writing 101, but knowing it, understanding it, and being able to do it are different stages of the process.

And then, this weekend, I sat down and wrote a short story for the first time in about twenty years. With some trepidation I sent it to various people for their criticisms. The comment that pleased me most was this:

"You have a knack for painting a scene, for manipulating words to the point I feel as though I just watched a movie when it's over."

What I seem to have here is a very positive creative feedback loop. Making machinima, even just unpublished test pieces, has got me thinking about a whole new way of telling stories using sound and moving images. That, in turn, has made me develop my screenwriting skills so that I could express those sounds and images through words. And now, I've taken that back into prose fiction, and am learning how to write so that my readers can see and hear what I'd want them to see and hear if they were watching a film. Which, in turn, will help me write better screenplays, and make better movies - I hope!

I don't claim to be a good writer yet. I know how good I want to be. And I know I'm still a long way from being the director I want to be. But I'm fascinated by the way that making machinima has made a real difference to the way I write stories as well as screenplays. Perhaps it's something that more writers could learn from. Perhaps it's another of those roles that machinima will one day slip into.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to read my story and tell me exactly what they thought of it. It's all appreciated, especially the tough love.

When Bad Writing Is Good

I've been reading a lot of Matthew Reilly novels recently.

On so many levels, he has got to be the worst writer in the world. I can imagine his English teacher at school throwing a complete fit when he turned in his creative writing assignments. He seems to have absolutely no regard for any of the standard rules of style, and doesn't care. He writes like a demented teenager, too busy gabbling out his story to bother with polishing his sentences, and you can almost see him underlining the most important words.

But you know what? He gets away with it. What he produces is the most unbelievably readable, fast-paced, unputdownable prose. It reads like a cross between a comic and a scriptwriter pitching a movie, and what you get are the most cinematic novels I have ever seen. You really can see everything as he describes it. The pages are bursting with life and energy. The characters are, admittedly, about as one-dimensional as typical action movie characters (c'mon, don't try and kid yourself that Bond or Indy are complex characters), but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Reilly knows how to tell a cracking story at a totally breathless pace.

You'll have to bear with me on this, because out of context, this reads like crap. But trust me, it works. Here's an extract from Area 7. All the italics, the line breaks, and punctuation is exactly as it appears in print.



Schofield turned to the President and yelled, "Okay! I grab the ladder! You grab me!"
And with that, Schofield charged across the flat roof of the cockroach and leapt off its forward edge...
... and flew through through the air, reaching up with his outstretched arms ...
... and caught the bottom rung of the dangling rope ladder!
He waved for the President to follow. "Now you grab me!" With a doubtful shake of his head, the President said, "Okay ..."
And he ran forward and jumped -
- just as the silver 747 shot forward, its engines engaging.


You can just see the individual panels in the comic, can't you? Or every shot in the storyboard for a movie? Wham! Wham! Wham! Every sentence is a visual image, leading into the next one without a pause. Close two-shot on Schofield & the Pres as he delivers his line... long shot on him jumping, insert on his feet as he leaps ... mid-air shot (cue Indy-style amazing stunt leitmotif on the music) ... insert on hands grabbing ladder ... back to two-shot, Pres in FG for the dialogue ... go to same long shot as we had for the jump ... insert on plane's engines firing up, we see the background starting to accelerate ...

See? It's already storyboarded. (Though I'd be interested to know whether you saw the same film sequence I did.)

Like I said, most English teachers would have a fit if presented with prose like this. But then, most English teachers would regard writing a comic or a movie script - particularly an action movie script - as a somewhat unsuitable way to make a living anyway.

Reilly doesn't write literature, he writes entertainment. And he's damn good at it. His plots are deliciously complex, and he's exciting to read. He keeps talking about getting his books made into films. I really hope that happens. They're crying out for movie adaptations. Until then, I'll just keep ...

... reading the novels!