Having a break with...

"QUOTE...UNQUOTE" - Nigel Rees (UK 1978)

        I found this one ... yep, you're right - on the chuckout bench of our favourite Charity Shop. and a small collection of these sort of thigs is handy for a quick break. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that (which is actually from Chaucer in about 1386, but I didn't find that one in here).

        Did you know that the great Humphry Bogart's first dramatic acting words  were the memorable lines - "Tennis anyone?" (I mean, we all have to start somewhere!).  And what about the also great Clark Gable's very first words on screen - "Water? Do I need it? I had to shoot my horse!" Not exactly 'Gone With The Wind' or 'The Misfits', but a quid is a quid, the rent had to be paid.

        Okay, what can I say - a not bad scavenging of quotes, squelches, asides, comebacks, rebuttals and rejoinders, worth a browse if you see a copy on the chuckout bench of your local.

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

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Paradise lost

         I've always liked music - as a teen in the mid 50's it was Big Band Swing, Dixieland, Rock'n'roll - but in the 1970s I fell into the 1970s and a whole other world opened up - the world of Folk / Rock  / Country, and I never really left. It was rich and varied, but best of all I loved the ballads, the stories so many songs of the time told, their narrative, their images, their stories of life and discovery.

        But this guy had one story that was a close parallel to one of my own, of total loss to "Progress" of the landscape of his childhood memories. But he was a singer / songwriter I seemed to miss at the time. Or so I thought.

        About a week ago I overheard someone say "When I was a child..." and they dived into a bit of nostalgia (I love nostalgia!), but it switched on an old memory of a simple 3-chord song I used to do, but obviously had long forgotten. And it mulled around and around and bit by bit some scraps put themselves together and I found "...my family would travel, down to Western Kentucky where my parents were born...", but couldn't remember the singer or the title. So I started Googling - as ya do.

        John Prine (1946 - 2020), was something of an inner circle "icon" member of the US music scene in the day, but I never fell over him till now. Except for this one song. More digging and I found that John's ballad is of the loss of his parent's home town of Paradise (you wouldn't be game to make up a name like that!) in Western Kentucky, the place that held treasured childhood memories for John when he visited his grandparents.

        I loved this journey through John's life and childhood. I hope each of these tags (YouTube and Wiki) will give you  - as a writer and reader of stories - something as well.

THE TRIBUTE

PARADISE

JOHN PRINE

PARADISE LOST

        Cheers...

                 Trev

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Quick check on the past...

         As a quick break from fiction I took this Xmas gift down and had a leaf through. Okay, technically I was born in 1938 but only just, but this one is my first full year on Earth. Which I don't remember a whole lot about, so worth a look.

        It's one from an Aust series of "Born in ..... ?" and mainly uses newspaper content of the day, this one mostly from UK and Aust, and just about all concerning the hot topic of the time - WW2, will there even BE a WW2, and preparing for WW2.

        We (Mum, Dad, elder brother, and me) were living in a country town way out in the bush all year, but interesting to get a blow by blow of events big and small (I never knew that the primitive beginnings of the breathalyser was back in 1931), and both domestic and international, with so many ordinary people trying to come to terms with something that was about to change their lives.

        It must've been a strange time to live through, with so much political back and forth as Hitler relentlessly took over his neighbours. And our long time Prime Minister dying on the job in April added to the turmoil of trying to cobble together an Army just in case - it makes for disconcerting reading. (And did you know that as early as 1939 it was being proposed to confiscate the cars of drunken drivers? Nup, me neither, thought it was a recent thing.)

        The book has a pretty gloomy ending, but at least the Letters To The Editor still contained such as a complaint about players who chatted during a game of Bridge! I mean, deary me.

        Upshot anyway has been for me to get my priorities sorted and drag out my WIP novel and get stuck in. Before the next 1939 comes around. (But a music discovery also added impetus.) More on this project shortly....

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

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Short stories over time [2]

         This is turning into quite a decent exercise, watching the evolving styles in short story writing over 100 years, but just as fascinating is the subject matter.

        I skimmed the Introduction by the editor, but can't see a lot of explanation for her choices, other than looking for the best quality of the day, (not always finding it?). The thing is, there's a really heavy bias towards the last two decades, suggesting she couldn't find a lot of "high quality" in the older stuff? Like, nothing in the 1910s, but 32 in the 1980s, and another 32 in the 1990s. And check below...

1920 to 1929

        A whole TWO stories (both from 1928), and like most of the prior ones, each in a rural setting, albeit now more on the fringes of urbanisation, felt like at the edges of larger country towns. But both were at the Good level, easy to read, very little "dated" language, wouldn't have been particularly out of place in the 1970s.

        But why only two? Surely there have been plenty more.

1930 to 1939

        There's four in this decade, two of them Good, two of them a lot less than. One of the Good ones was set, in my guess, back in the mid 1800s, about white colonial settlers out in the pastoral frontier, trying to wrestle the land from the native population. All very confronting and uncomfortable and extremely non-PC. Which is probably why it was included.

        The other Good one is set in an (underground) mining community, which - in Aus - was always a thousand miles from anywhere. But at least it does reflect the increasing consciousness of mining Company liability for its workers.

        The other two stories - one by a "name" - were set in suburbia but were pretty nothing. In my opinion. I'm bloody sure there were better ones in the day

        I'll give it a rest for a while before I dive into the seven from the 1940s and the three from the 1950s. But so far have to say I'm disappointed by the selection process.

            Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

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Short stories over time [1]

        First up, if you love creative writing, get a copy of this and put it on that shelf in your study, no matter where you're from, as it's a rich source of the human experience over time.

       I have to say that it's hard to work out how the editor went about this massive exercise, of picking 100 Australian short stories, from 1900 to 1999, from Federation to Millennium. Maybe I should read the Foreword and/or the (damn long) Introduction. But I don't tend to. Always too impatient to get into the meat of it.

       I thought about that whole alpha By Author construction again, and decided no way I was going to let that put me off this great opportunity, to wallow in story evolution. So I did what they should've done, laboriously pencilled in the page number of each story against the chronological list (which has no page numbers! - I mean, f'godsake people!) and launched into it.

        Upshot is, as 100 short stories are going to take quite a bit of wallowing time, I decided to do it in order, in decade bites, starting with.....

1900 - 1909

        Only five stories made it, 2 of them Good, 1 Unreadable, 2 Great. All are set in the day or the recent past, of colonial Aus struggling to grow up just after Federating the States into a new Commonwealth, but four of them are set in the bush, well sprinkled with bush "characters", as was the way of a great deal of Aus Lit back then.

        The Unreadable is set in Melbourne, a dry, looong-paragraphed, overwritten account of some new arrivals. It got less than a minute. One of the Greats is the classic Henry Lawson's "Loaded Dog", which I've read at least five times over the last 60 years, each time finding a dry laconic Aussie laugh in every line. The other Great was one of Tom Collins's (set in a scrappy gold mining area), and one of the other two was an extract from the Steele Rudd material of the day, looking back - tongue in cheek - at life on a new "Selection" block on the outskirts.

        So, all about what I expected.

1910 - 1919

        Nothing made it apparently. I would've expected to see at least one from WWI, or of its aftermath. Very disappointing. I must go looking for one.

        Stay tuned for the Twenties.....

            Trev

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What to read next?

        After all those Peculiar Children, I needed to get back to the basics of creative writing (and my favoutite genre)  - the short story.

        I ratted my "Waiting To Be Read" shelf, took down a small 1959 English collection designed for schools that I found in the chuckout tray at the OpShop. At the time I thought at that price it was worth a look, especially as the five pieces in it were from heavyweights of their day - Joseph Conrad (a story published in 1909), D H Lawrence (1909), Saki (1914), Katherine Mansfield (1921), E M Forster (1928), and Graham Greene (1954).

        I guess it was designed to shape the literary minds of older English school pupils in the 1950s, but geez I struggled with each of them, as they were all too long, too dated, too many big paragraphs, too dry, spent much too much verbiage describing things oh-so cleverly in unnecessary detail. But it was the way of the day.

        Consigned it to the Re-donate pile, pulled down "The Penguin Century of Australian Stories", a collection of 100 short stories, from 1902 to 1999, by Australian writers, mostly of some note. Look forward to getting stuck in. But the very first thing that struck me, was that it's arranged in alpha order by author, when I totally expected to find it chronological - y'know, a study in the changing styles and themes over 100 years. But no, once again it's being said that the author is more important (okay, my interpretation) than the content.

        Stay tuned....

                T.R.E.

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A good (peculiar) read, but....

         Just finished this, a sort of a journey through Time and Imagination, a Mystery / Adventure / Horror story for 13 to 18 year olds, a bit like Harry Potter meets Alien meets The Terminator, just enough of everything to get any teen reader percolating, and as I said before, probably designed for the TV market, with an ending left hanging ready for the sequel, or a whole series.

        One reaction was that it was like watching a literary idea evolve - well, a storytelling idea, as this novel is more about getting the action down than being about good writing. But don't let that put you off, if you'd like a bit of Hunger Games type genre, give it a shot. And don't let the 2016 movie and its mixed reviews put you off. I was told by a table of close relatives who have read/seen both, that the book is better.

        There's an interesting interview with Ransom Riggs at the end, opening with the totally predictable - "Did the photos or the story idea come first?" Answer is (as I suspected) the photos, collected up by Riggs and some geeky mates from Op Shops, Markets, and rubbish bins(!) over a period, and as Riggs went through the slowly increasing horde (he claims about 100,000 passed through his hands), the odd ones of children stirred his imagination and he started sketching out story ideas that fitted, and this book is the outcome.

        I was marvelling at the whole unique idea this morning, and it occurred to me that it was a very similar thing back in 2008 when I did that Explorer Bear picture book epic for Smudge, when she was 7. Maybe Riggs saw that online? Gave him the idea? (Yeah - right!!) Ah, ya never know.

        Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

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Currently reading, something ... different !

"MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME FOR PECULIAR CHILDREN"
         - Ransom Riggs (2001 USA)

        I actually found this in a roadside library, nearly passed it over as I don't read a lot of fantasy. But it has led me in slowly and subtly so now I'm hooked, about a third-way in, and I need to know what happens next.

        My initial guess was that Riggs (check the Wiki page below for the whole story) had a few old black and white photos, which fired his imagination, he then rounded up a heap more, and decided to weave a story around them. Clever idea. Not only that but he's put the photos into the book as they are mentioned, and it's damn hard not to look ahead to see what the next one is. All of them odd or even a touch weird. And thereby hangs the tale.

        It starts off sort of "Adult" but it soon gets to feel more like it's pitched at the Young Adult market, say 13-20 year olds, with it's delving into the mildly fantastic. Not that this detracts in any way, it's a good read, so far, well put together and worth the time. No surprise that they've already (2016) made a movie out of it, as it screams Netflix.

        More soon....

            Cheers....

                    T.R.E.

RANSOM RIGGS

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A.I. postscript...

         Sucked in a bit by all this A.I. stuff, I jumped into an exercise relevant to authorship and all that.

        I put up Copilot and asked it to "Write a 100 word review of 'The Prologue Of Jemma Raglan by T. R. Edmonds' ", and got just about the warmest fuzziest feelgood geez-I-must-be-brilliant 98 word review you could possibly ask for. Who needs the real thing!

        But then I added the word "critical" to "review" and got quickly deflated by what came back, shooting holes in just about everything from style to content.

        I know that A.I. simply draws on available data, both online and from "reading" a mountain of printed matter, but what it puts together is what it "thinks" you want to hear, as it offered to do an even more critical review if that was what I needed (not likely!) and I know that such reviews don't actually exist in the real world.

        So, the whole thing smacks of shortcuts for schoolkids who have to do reports and analyses and don't have the brainpower or go-get-ness to do it the old way. Using your own brain. Godknows what their education will be like, or how many things are put up for marking that sound suspiciously similar.

        Anyway, curious about copyright breach, I asked for an extract from my "Myths, Sins... " novel, and it came back, politely declining (even sounded a touch indignant that I'd even asked) because "...the book doesn't exist publicly..." and set about making up some sci-fi crap about a dodgy renegade machine (that actually came as being a lot like A.I. !!) to make me happy.

        A footnote to all this - quite a while back I toyed with Copilot and simply asked "Can you write a short story?" and back (it's damn fast!) came a 100-150 word bit about a lighthouse keeper. Which wasn't too bad. But curious where it may have got it from, I Googled several unique key words from it, and it took me to this site below...

STEVE'S STORIES

...and a story which reads remarkably similar. Hit the "Stories/Content" tag at the top of the page. What do you make of all this? Did AI steal from Steve, or is Steve simply cranking out A.I. stories by the bucketload? It's a funny old techno world out there my friend.

        Cheers....

                Trev

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Disappointing end....

 "SO LATE IN THE DAY" - Claire Keegan (UK/Ire 2023)

        Crestfallen.

        After so much excellence, this one - looking at it in context of the other four - comes across as an opportunistic exercise by the publisher, cashing in on the momentum of her being hot, but I found it unsatisfying, just a bit of blatant bloke-bashing (and okay, this guy needed a bit of bloke-bashing), when heaps of her writing is so much better than this, and surely Faber could've waited for something loftier.

        It's about 9k words, but put out in a bigger font and a down-sized book size, looks more like it's going to be for the ten-year-old market. Just about expect pictures.

        She writes this one as the main male character - a wishy washy adult Dublin accountant - but can't help doing it really from his partner's point of view, a strong-minded French live-in, but I just came away feeling it missed its mark, whatever that was. The writing is good, the story trivial. In my opinion. Waiting with breath held and crest fallen to see what Keegan does next.

        Cheers....

                T.R.E.

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