Sore wrists, swollen thumbs.

Yep, I'm back for a ramble, deal with it.

I don't have any wonderful insights about the computer gaming industry.  Let's throw that one out there.  I have only a little more insight about the writing industry, and given my situation, you can tell that ain't a whole lot.  As far as insights go you might as well go and ask a tree stump, it isn't my forte.

What I do have is a long history with computer games.  I remember Christmas, 1987, opening the box my ZX Spectrum +2 came in and being delighted^*.  I didn't even mind the squeaky squarky five minutes of loading for a game that I was shit at or, even worse, decided not to work at all, because I had a computer.  Over the next four or five years I built up a library of tapes, most of which lay unused while I obsessed over the games I enjoyed and were within my abilities to play ^**.

Games like 'Robocop', 'Chaos' and 'Target: Renegade' took up a great deal of my time.  Time I could have been using to go out playing with other kids or masturbating was dedicated to making shitty collections of half-dozens of pixels scoot around the screen to beat or shoot each other.  It was a golden, very pale time.

The bug was there and over the years I've had brief affairs with Nes, Gameboy (original and Advance), Saturn, Playstation, Playstation 2, Dreamcast, Gamecube and even PC.  All dependent on money and my interest.  Each in their own way fascinated and ate my time for the period they were in my life.  At least three of those were instead of having a girlfriend.  Fuckin' hell, I'm a cliche!

My wife and I now own a Playstation 3. Recently I've gone into one of my periods of not playing games.  After finishing up the last ending for 'Fallout: New Vegas' and playing the millionth team death match on 'Modern Warfare 3' I was starting to feel a little fatigued.

It happens.  Although I've felt it more with modern games.  Particularly ones like the recent two 'Fallout' games, where RPG elements are crammed in.  These elements are almost guaranteed to get me playing, but I always feel like they're flawed, the main one being promising to allow the creation of characters your way and making it clear characters need to be tailored in a particular way if you want to complete the game, "Sure you can create a super tech-savvy character, just don't come crying to me if large, angry mutants spend most of the game eating her head off."  These RPG elements also mean you have to play for a minimum amount of time in order to get your character good enough to complete the game.  And, while this is a whole lot of fun for a while it can become tiresome (the 'Fallout' games are good at staving this off, mind you).

I would love to write plot lines for computers games, as it seems, sometimes, though creators want amazing narratives, they (seem to, I have no evidence this happens) kind of leave the actual writing to their stoner mate. There are exceptions: the above-mentioned 'Fallout' games, 'LA Noire' (although it did come undone a bit at the end) and 'Portal 2' to name but three.  It was amazing to me, playing the first 'Resident Evil' with its dodgy dialogue and frustrating controls, that a game could have that structure.  This was after I hadn't played games in five or six years.  And now we're at the stage where they're pulling in David Goyer to write the next 'Black Ops' game.  Pretty cool.

And I want in on that, man.

Although, just like lots of other kids who grew up in the eighties and nineties, I'd love to create my own game.  A bit more of a problematic situation since I have no idea how to code or any of the dozens of other things required to develop a half-decent game.  One can always hope, though.

^* So many people have nostalgia hard-ons about those bastard little rubber-keyboard fuckers.  Screw that shit.  The +2 had a real keyboard, it looked slick, man.

^** Fuck those retro-gaming snobs who think the mark of a game was how impossible it was.  Fuck 'Manic Miner', it was retarded.  And you can shove text adventures up your arse, too.  I got enough frustration from games I liked playing, never mind trying to work out the right fucking command to type that didn't get me, "Pick up cup is not recognised".  Gaaaah!



Will

Will someone shut those crickets up?

It's been a bit of a quiet week really.  The most interesting thing I've done is go and vote.  That's what you call living wild, right?  Right?

Seriously, I don't know.  I was bumped on the head as a kid and I think my wild centre was knocked out of whack.

One of these days I'm going to fulfil the aim I didn't tell anyone about and use this blog to occasionally educate my three readers.  It's an admirable aim.  Certainly far better than navel-gazing or doing the circular let's-talk-about writing thing that'll come up.

This week I'd had it in my head to talk about the sad situation of the FHM sexiest woman of the year list and how dull the number one was.  Then I realised it would only lead to a depressing discussion of how the media is turning entertainment into a mediocrity contest.  And who wants to read that trotted out again?  Not me.  If I wanted to really depress you I'd dig up the sales figures for 'Fifty Shades of Grey' – although I might have dragged some controversy my way from the people who like the badly written fan-fic of badly written fiction*.

Yes, I know the truth, and unusually, I've exposed myself to a tiny bit of it, taking one for whatever team you care to name.  The writing manages to make Dan Brown seem witty and poetic.  And that takes some going, I can tell you.  I can't imagine reading a whole book of such awkward prose.  Take a look here and get something of an insight into its terribleness, or you can go look at Amazon if you don't mind the books popping up as part of your recommendations (can you stand the stigma?).  There were excerpts that I now can't find, bugger.  You get the gist.

And I've gone and digressed.  I went and talked about bad erotica.  Are you happy now?

I'm going back out onto the porch, stare up at the sky and whittle me some words.

* Which actually sounds like the start of something.  Fan-fic replicating like facing mirrors so long that it breaks through into the real world and WE CAN'T FUCKING ESCAPE IT!  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!  Hold me, I'm scared.


Will

A quick lookit.

I remember the first time I was really made aware of Weaponizer when I was accused of keeping the site to myself.  I'm embarrassed to say that I'd been following the Weaponizer Twitter for a while without paying much attention.  My silence was more to do with being dim than selfishly hogging a place for people to have their writing shown off.

When I went to the site I was pleasantly surprised at how welcoming, yet packed it was.  At the time I was doing my own fiction blog on my late MySpace page (RIP, a wee bit), but I put together an original bit of flash fiction and sent it along.  The editor was enthusiastic about this little horror tale and soon 'The Torch Skull' was sitting on the site.  Since then I've had a few other pieces, including a comic, accepted by the site.

In the just over four years since that first story appeared on the site I've got to know Bram, the editor, mastermind and driving force behind Weaponizer.

This brings me to the big news.  Bram is bringing Weaponizer to the print world.  There's a plethora of writers and fantastic artists on display within it's pages (and me, but you make up your own mind there).  I'm looking forward to the final product juggling in my grimy mitts.

On top of all that the Weaponizer site (www.weaponizer.co.uk for those who don't trust embedded links) is coming back up to speed, along with a new line up of editors taking the pressure off Bram.  It looks like a bright future for Weaponizer and I'm glad to be part of it.


Will

Fans don't care about ticket prices.

Do any of you remember the days when going to a concert was affordable, even cheap?  You could go into a shop and pay six or eight quid to go see a band you liked.  Some bigger bands, playing bigger venues, would ask for twenty, maybe thirty quid.

(For the real crusties out there, I'm sure you could get a ticket for ha' penny and a bacon sandwich in your day; it all ties in with what I'm saying, really.)

Today, in my meanderings through my usual internet haunts I came across the news that Motörhead are touring and will be hitting the O2 Academy in Glasgow later this year.  Having seen something of a trend in recent years, I decided, perhaps counter to my heart health to take wee look at the prices for the gig.  Now, the O2 Academy is middle-sized venue, which for better or worse will always inform my view of the ticket prices.  Once I'd followed the links from the official site and got nowhere, I found somewhere that gave them.  When these tickets go on sale in the next couple of days they'll be looking for a whopping thirty-one quid.  Twenty-seven pounds plus a four quid booking fee, the rise of booking fees has been a point of contention for me for a long time too.

What the cunting fuck?

That's a disgusting price for a gig in a medium-sized venue.  And, as I feared it tied in with other gig pricings.  Chris Cornell playing the same venue are a staggering forty-odd quid!  What's he going to do paint the stage in twenty-four carat gold and sit in a paddling pool of caviare?  If I paid that I'd expect at least to have a butler waiting on me all night.

I won't even go into the price tag Iron Maiden tickets had, it just makes me angry, after Bruce Dickinson's protestations that the band just want people to have an affordable good time.  A bit difficult when fans are being charged fifty quid a ticket in this economic climate (yes, I said it, I'm adult, no need to be embarrassed).

The thing is, I'm not sure who to blame for the price-setting.  How much control do the bands have?  How much is driven by the venues themselves?  There's no question that anyone who can ask for that kind of money with a straight face is a cunt.  It's just too murky to point the finger at any one entity (I did it with the Iron Maiden thing, out of anger and frustration).  I know that everyone's been hit by the economic downturn, but if you're that desperate to tour you might consider being a bit more conservative with your pricing.

One thing we should be doing is maybe telling them to fuck off.  That's right, a wholesome boycott.  Don't go to gigs by big bands and back it up with an email or (gasp!) snail-mail campaign.  They'll get the message and you'll see the prices drop.

But then that hits the wall when you come to fans.  Fans of things are great, the more fans of something there is, the longer it (whatever you want to replace it with) hangs around (or it might be horrible, depending on what the it is).  The downside is that fans are often uncritical of those things that they like, so you end up in a situation where a band charges fifty or sixty quid and the tickets vanish like vapour in a few minutes.  And then these same fans will smugly say when you offer your legitimate concerns over pricing, "You're not a real fan, are you?"

To which I have to answer no.  I've discovered that I'm not a real fan of anything.  I can't deal with things uncritically any more.  From comics, to books, to music, to films.  I look at things and weigh them up.  Of course I want to enjoy things, but I'm not going to ignore dreadful things or things just not to my taste.  I love the writing of Alan Moore, but I'm just not interested in 'Promethea' and found 'America's Best Comics' patchy.  I think Iron Maiden are a fantastic band, but I still can't listen to most of 'Piece of Mind'.  So any attempt to gouge money is going to be met with a very stern expression.

There's my little call for activism, I'll be over here, trying to be invisible.


Will

Got Any Spare Paragraphs, Mate?

Hello, I'm Fabrizio Giullare, and this is another of my long-running series on writing dos and don'ts.

Just for those who need a little bit of a catch-up, and can't be arsed looking back over the rest of my posts.  I'm the writer of a number of novels and comics.  My biggest novel has been Shepherd With Some Straw, that's currently in the process of being turned into a movie.  While my most recent novel is Claiming Benefits from the Wrong Window.  Both of which are available on Amazon.

My highly acclaimed comic work includes Little Dots, my collaboration with famed Japanese artist Yuudi Maeda and my work at Marvel on the Drooling Slugs crossover event.

Now that we've got the re-introductions out of the way, lets get down to what you're here for.  In the past I've talked about the importance of having too many paragraphs on the page, it's an annoying habit that lots of writers have that puts readers off.  I know my editor gets quite ratty when I hand her a manuscript with more than four paragraphs on a page.

"Fab," she says to me.  "Why do you need to clutter up the page with so many different paragraphs.  I've come to terms with your overuse of sentences, but this is almost too much for me."

And I have to agree with her and I find myself putting the offending clumps of words together into that glorious pattern of monolithic blocks of text that I know people love so much.  Bear in mind, this only happens three or four times in a nine hundred page manuscript – my editor is an exacting woman, and she hates to see a page with too much white space.  That's free space in which you can be telling the reader about the character's favourite hat.  It all adds up to that wonderful power of narrative that you're building.

"But, Fab, surely it doesn't entirely matter!  Surely you need to let the work flow as freely it obviously needs to!" I hear you cry.  And I answer by saying, "Watch the adverbs, buddy, there are ladies present."

I know it may seem like it's a completely arbitrary thing to fixate on, but you need to wake up and smell the bergamot, my friend, this matters.  It's on a par with naming characters Beryl or Angela – who the fuck does that any more?  It brings people out of the story that you're creating and makes them think about old ladies who smell of lavender and pee.  The same goes for too many paragraphs, except without the lavender and pee, it makes your reader start to wonder if you know what you're talking about.  A good, confident writer knows that a strong block of text on the page tells the reader this guy knows what he's talking about and makes them more eager to read what you give them.  Heavy slabs of text give your reader something to hold onto and strengthens your narrative.

I've come to terms with my editor's hatred of the full stop and she's come to terms with the fact that I'm not going to stop using it.  We both agree that plants should never be involved in a story, for any reason whatever.  This is just lazy writing and your readers will forget what their names are and probably start selling their bodies for Victoria sponge.  That's how serious getting the writing correct is, you'll ruin human civilisation.  I know you don't want to do that, you're nice guy, so behave.

Until next time, I'm Fab Giullare, saying write well!