Tony Ballantyne

Customer Service

I spoke to the bank the other day.

Well, I say spoke. I was messaging a chatbot. I asked to speak to a human, and got put onto someone called James (I’ve changed the name, you’ll see why later on).

James was not a good customer service representative. His mind was clearly elsewhere. He didn’t read my questions properly, he just posted standard answers based on the first couple of words I wrote. He was so unhelpful I began to suspect that James was just another chatbot, and I said so.

James took offence to this. He said that he was real human, and I should have known that as he’d introduced himself as James. He then spent some time trying to justify his previous answers.

The conversation became increasingly petty with James trying to score points over what he thought I had said (he still hadn’t read my questions properly). I thought about just ending the chat but with patience I eventually got the answer I needed, I said thank you and goodbye and broke the connection.

I could imagine James turning at that point to the person next to him and complaining about me. I certainly wasn’t happy with his attitude.

Two minutes later the satisfaction survey arrived.

Do you know what I did then?

Nothing.

I might not have liked James’s attitude, but I like these surveys even less. Maybe James was having a bad day. Maybe he was overworked and I was just one call among many. Maybe I was a little tetchy having to speak to a chatbot and I was a little short with him. Whatever the reason, a bad conversation is not the worst thing that can happen in a day.

I hate the way that every transaction nowadays is reduced to a five star rating and a comment. Those surveys aren’t about improving the customer experience, they’re a way for our corporate overlords to keep us workers in our place by turning our fellow proles against each other.

I’d had a tetchy conversation, nothing more. If I really wanted to complain about James, then I would have complained properly. There’s something really rather pathetic about firing off one of these surveys after the event as a way of exacting revenge.

Anyway.

I just heard that Gordon Goodwin has died. That’s a sad loss. Amongst other things, he was the leader of Gordon Goodwin’s Big Phat Band, one of the great modern big bands.

I’ve written this listening to his Big Phat Christmas. Why not give it a try?

It’s beginning to look a lot like…

… Bad Christmas Movies

My family love bad Christmas movies.

I don’t mean bad Christmas movies like Love Actually where they have the time and budget to allow the cast to do their thing and then to edit the thing properly at the end. (Many things irritate me about this film, but I love the scene where Rowan Atkinson takes forever to wrap a Christmas present.)

Nor am I talking about bad bad Christmas movies where cast and crew are are just going through the motions.

No, I’m talking about good bad Christmas movies. The sort of movie which has all the ingredients, they just don’t have time and budget to put them together properly. The sort of film where the script talks about the evil Bolton Brothers who run an evil business, but the budget only runs to one of them showing up on screen.

What I love about these films is that they understand what the audience wants and they try to deliver it.

There’s a female lead who hasn’t had a relationship for some time.

She has a best friend who tells her to put herself out there and so she heads off to a small town (possibly her home town, possibly a town in New England or Scotland, occasionally a village near a castle in a small Kingdom in Europe)

The clock starts ticking, counting down to Christmas day.

The lead meets a Prince, a Lord or a Duke in disguise. If none are available she’ll settle for a handsome carpenter who is good with kids.

For some reason there will be a baking competition.

On Christmas Eve, it will start to snow.

And then she will realise she has met her man.

I have no problem with films that follow a structure. The first stories I placed were romances, sold to UK women’s magazines.

I learned a lot by writing them: if two people are going to fall in love in a romance, you have to make them attractive both to the reader and each other. Beginner writers, when confronted by something difficult (and getting your characters right is difficult) have a habit of dodging this by changing the structure.

Changing the structure can be fantastic, but not in this case.

I saw a film called Hot Frosty recently.

In it, a lonely woman builds a snowman who comes to life. He’s a good looking guy, totally ripped with great abs. The other women are jealous of this Hot Frosty.

And all I could think was, why don’t they build their own snowman? What if they did, and the town was suddenly filled with hot snowmen? What would the regular men do?

But this wasn’t a bad SF film. It was a bad Christmas movie. People watching this film (and I include myself in this) didn’t want internal logic. If they did they wouldn’t be watching a film where a snowman came to life.

If you’re looking for some ideas on what to write over the coming weeks, then I would recommend the following: write a straight love story. Or given the time of year, write a Christmas love story. Learn the structure and follow it. It’s excellent practice.

The Arctic-Alpine Pea Mussel

I heard the Arctic-Alpine pea mussel mentioned on Radio 4 earlier this week when they were discussing the three thousand species in Wales that now exist in five places or fewer. I don’t want to diminish the struggles of the pea mussel but I couldn’t help but think it might not be so endangered if it weren’t quite so picky about its choice of ecosystem.

Or maybe not. Thinking about it, I suppose there are lots of cold streams in high up places. The name tells you something about the creature.

Rather like the glutinous snail, which I heard mentioned on the same program. At first, I thought I’d misheard this one so I looked it up. It wasn’t mentioned in the accompanying article, but after a little more googling I found an article about the snail here.

Reading about creatures like these doesn’t make me wonder why writers bother to invent aliens and fantasy creatures. There are very good reasons for this which I’ve talked about elsewhere, and I’m sure I’ll talk about in the future.

But it does make me wonder yet again why writers make up names.

If a group of glutinous snails have just slithered down the ramp of their flying saucer and demanded to be taken to our leader, why would they confidently announce that they were the K’Kzzlia?

They’re snails. They don’t have tongues and teeth. They wouldn’t have the ability to make K and Z sounds. They do, however, have the ability to build a machine that can translate their language into English (assuming they’ve landed in an English speaking country). So why doesn’t that machine just introduce them as the Glutinous Snail People of Betelgeuse 5?

I hate made up names. They’re overused by beginner writers to lend an air of exoticism to their world building. They end up just confusing people. Worse, they muffle the drama.

I quickly become bored reading stories where Oolma rides a Vlurp through the gates of Mlzra in search of the stolen Glevar of the Throom. Wouldn’t it be far more exciting to say that Emma rides a horse through the gates of the dungeon in search of the stolen daughter of the King? Call your smeerp a rabbit and have done with it.

The thing about most exotic names is that they aren’t actually very exotic. I thought that Suidobashi in Tokyo sounded enchantingly strange when I stayed there. It turns out that Suidobashi just means aqueduct bridge.

And as every expectant parent poring over lists of baby names knows, everyday names can have some rather exotic meanings.

For example, Tony means “priceless one” or “highly praiseworthy”.

That seems about right to me.

Three stories from my fascinating life

This week my wife and I finally watched the last episode of the TV series Edge of Darkness. We watched the first five episodes back in 1992 but were away in Paris visiting a friend when the sixth episode aired. We returned home to find our flat had been burgled. The video recorder containing the tape with the last episode was one of the things taken. How times change. Nowadays we can watch the last episode when we please using catch up.

The BBC have been repeating the series over the past three weekends on so we finally caught up on Sunday.

Was it worth the wait? Definitely. Here’s a link to the series that should work if you’re based in the UK. I’m aware that the majority of this blog’s readers are in the US. If someone can drop a link in the comments (if such a thing exists), that would be great.

Thinking about video recorders makes me feel old, though not as old as standing in a shop last night whilst my wife bought a new laptop. The (admittedly very helpful) assistant went out of her way to explain to us how computers worked and how easy they were to use. She finished by asking my wife what she was going to use it for. My wife has been using computers since the 80’s when she learned to program. Nonetheless, she smiled sweetly at the assistant and said she hoped to use it to email her children.

Lastly, let’s talk about avocados. The first one I remember eating was when I started work and my flatmate prepared us avocados and prawns for dinner. I watched her eating and copied her as I wasn’t sure what to do. Which leads me to when I was in a cafe today with a friend.

The waiter apologised for the fact they had run out of avocado substitute and only had real avocados available. This cafe prides itself on its ethical approach to avocados (I don’t have any strong opinions about avocados, but it’s a good cafe) but it did make me wonder, why did they have real avocados? It would be like a vegetarian restaurant running out of plant based burgers and so offering beef ones as a substitute. Why would they have bought beef in the first place? And who would they expect to buy it?

Anyway, I’m off to eat guacamole dip while watching youTube on my iPad. Until next week.

How we used to write: part two

The image attached to this post is of the notebook I used to plan Twisted Metal. You can see the map of Shull I made to keep track of where everything was, as well as some of my reminders from when I was editing the first draft. Sticking out of the book are notes I printed out from the internet about mineral composition and some old newspaper articles.

I’ve included some other images below. One of them contains the original sketch of a teardrop ship that features in The Recursion Series and the Fair Exchange series.

I don’t use handwritten notebooks any more, everything is collected electronically and stored on Obsidian. It’s a lot more convenient, it allows me to place links between different parts of my worlds. Having everything stored in the cloud means I can browse my ideas on my phone, I put links directly to sources rather and I can work on prose and copy and paste it straight into the MS when its ready.

But even so, there is something special about a handwritten notebook. The book records the passage of time in a way that is more interesting than simple date stamps. The different inks, the stains, the coffee rings, the crumbs caught in the pages, the dog ears. The fact that you started at the beginning and worked through to the end (sort of…)

I still like notebooks now, but I’ve weaned myself off them. I have an artist friend: her notebooks are wonderful to look at. But she draws beautiful illustrations and has wonderful handwriting. Looking back now, I can barely read my own notes.

What do they teach these kids?

There used to be a question asked of trainee teachers: why do we teach Shakespeare and not Pinball?

It’s the sort of question that got a certain sort of politician angrily demanding that the lefties be kicked out from the teacher training colleges. The question annoyed me too when I first heard it (although when I was asked the question they said video games, not pinball).

But when I began to think about it, I realised that it was an excellent question. Possibly the most important question in education. It wasn’t so much about Shakespeare v Pinball, but rather about the value we place on different skills and knowledge. Why do we have the curriculum that we have?

The realistic answer, of course, is to make people employable.

One hundred years ago we taught people to add up columns of numbers. We were preparing clerks to work with ledgers. Nowadays students are taught how to use calculators or spreadsheets to solve problems. Different jobs, different education.

When I was at school the girls learned cooking and sewing, the boys woodwork and metalwork. Later on, girls could opt for what was called office skills: how to take shorthand and use a typewriter. My wife, studying 200 miles away in Wales, bucked the trend by taking A level physics and chemistry.

To put this in context, I was 9 when the Equal Pay Act came into force, meaning that women were paid the same as men for the same work. 15 years later, when I started teaching, it was taken for granted that girls and boys studied the same subjects.

When I started reading SF, just about the time of the Equal Pay act, I was led to believe that machines would do all the jobs in the future. SF promised humans a life of leisure. That prediction seems to have been half right. Nowadays, it seems, machines are indeed doing more and more jobs, but we humans seem to be working longer hours for less reward.

Which brings me to the news of the UK government’s curriculum review, announced yesterday.

The media made much of the fact that students would learn more about AI in the future. That makes sense.

But there was one rather heartening announcement that wasn’t really mentioned in the news reports: that changes to league tables will mean arts GCSEs “will be given equal status to humanities and languages, recognising their value in boosting confidence and broadening skills for a competitive job market.“

Note that phrase, competitive job market. Like I said, education is all about making people employable.

But who cares? The arts have been slowly ground out of state schools over the past ten years. I think it’s a good thing that students will have the chance to start writing, painting and composing again. If the AIs are going to be doing all the jobs in the future, then at least students will have something interesting to fill their lives.

Maybe we can start to realise the second half of that 1970s vision of SF. Because I’m not sure it’s going to be that pleasant a future if we don’t…

Why Loving Unfashionable Art Can Lead to Success

I rather like Andrew Lloyd Webber’s work.

On the rare occasions I mention this most people feel the need to tell me they don’t like his music. There are two possible subtexts to their comments, either they’re telling me that I’m wrong in liking his stuff, or they’re telling me that they have better taste than I do.

Anyway, I recently read and enjoyed Unmasked, his autobiography. It gave me something to think about.

Near the beginning of the book, Lloyd Webber describes how he was always uncool. He liked musicals when they were out of fashion and, in particular, he liked Rogers and Hammerstein when the critics were slating their work. (I love Richard Rogers’ music even now). As a child, Lloyd Webber’s other interests were Victorian Art and Medieval architecture, both also desperately uncool at the time. At one point he describes the moment he first heard the Beatles and he realises that his street cred had just gone into negative.

Even so, he still loved musicals. You’ve got to really love something to keep pushing yourself on whilst everyone else is turning their nose up at what you’re doing. If you’re just doing something because you think it’s cool you’re never going to be more than half-hearted about it at best.

That thought led me to wonder if people who like unfashionable stuff are more likely to succeed. Not because what they like is unfashionable, but rather because the fact that it’s unfashionable doesn’t bother them.

I love SF and have done as far back as I remember. My mother was a fan, and she introduced me to Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov, as well as Star Trek and The Day the Earth Stood Still.

I can’t say my friends ever laughed at me about it when I was a kid, but it wasn’t a popular topic of conversation back then. I was an SF fan long before I was a writer.

But I think I realised while reading his book that I’ve never loved SF as much as Lloyd Webber loves musicals.

He always loved musicals, he always wanted to write musicals and so he set out to do just that. True, he had the family and connections to help him succeed, but he was single minded in that pursuit.

Good for him.

P.S. The image attached to this post came from Pexels free photos. I searched for cool and stylish and that’s what came up. I don’t want the model thinking I’m calling them uncool. Far from it. That’s their thing. Let them do it.

And through the wire…

A few years ago I bought myself an expensive phone, a change from the cheap ones I’d always used until then.

I would have been delighted with it apart from one thing: it frequently failed to charge.

Searching online, I found lots of other people having the same issue. Naturally, there were lots of opinions on where the fault lay. The OS, the manufacturer, the fact people hadn’t updated their phone. But in the middle of all the complaints one message kept patiently popping up: it’s all down to a faulty bunch of cables. Replace the USB cable and everything will be fine. I tried everything else before taking this advice, and guess what…

I had a similar experience when I replaced my 12 year old PC. I was having trouble burning DVDs (don’t ask) and I thought that maybe I’d pushed the old hardware as far as it could go. I bought a new PC and everything was fine. Problem solved.

It wasn’t until someone asked for a kettle lead to plug into the PA at a gig I was playing. I lent them my old PC lead. We turned on the PA and heard nothing but crackling. It turned out that, like with the phone, it wasn’t the device that was faulty, but the lead.

I was reminded of this at recent writer’s group meeting when critting a story. The world building was excellent, the plotting tight, the characters interesting. But the story wasn’t working.

The trouble in this case wasn’t anything to do with the story itself, it was the sentences themselves. Reading the story out loud (an old trick) revealed just how convoluted they had become. The writer was so intent on delivering all the ideas they had developed they had lost sight of the actual words they were using.

Stories like this remind me of playing the cornet. As they say in brass bands, it doesn’t matter how great your technique is when you’re blowing on your instrument, if you’re not making a pleasant noise, no one wants to hear.

When things aren’t working, whether with machinery, or stories, or indeed life itself, we have a tendency to blame the big obvious things and to forget about all those other less glamorous mechanisms that keep things running. Quite often we lose sight of the really simple changes that can be made in order to improve things.

Have I mentioned going for a walk recently?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

Should you start your novel with a fight?

It’s a good idea in one sense. I read a lot of opening chapters by beginner writers (and to be fair, some very experienced ones) that are nothing more than pages and pages of world building. This is particularly true in Fantasy and SF where the world they are describing is unknown to the reader.

World building is great fun if you’re a writer, it’s deadly dull to the reader. There is no conflict, no action, no story in other words.

So yes, why not start with a fight? It gives you a chance to show off your writing chops, examining the emotions, building the tension, having the bad guys seem to be on the point of victory than the hero turns it around at the last minute and wins through…

Except it usually doesn’t work. To care about a fight, you’ve got to care for the people taking part, and if this is the start of the novel and you’ve only just met them, then you’re not emotionally invested in them yet. You don’t really care who wins.

It’s not so bad in a historical novel when you may have an inkling that you’re on the side of, for example, the Allies and not the Nazis, but what chance have you got in a Fantasy novel where the Alfari are fighting the Volana? (And why have you used those words for their names?)

Even worse, what if the bad guys aren’t bad guys at all, but animals? I’ve read a surprising number of stories which begin with the hero successfully fighting off an attack by wolves (or smeerps). I’m not sure that killing a lot of wolves establishes a character’s hero credentials. Wolves aren’t evil, they’re just doing their job. And all the hero has done is save their own skin. All I’ve learned from such a scene is that the hero is good with a sword. I’m reserving judgement on whether I have any sympathy with them.

If you’re dead set on having a fight at the opening, make sure you establish whose side we’re on. You could give clues of course. The opening of the original Star Wars film does this well. It uses visual clues to establish who the bad guys are: the really big bully spaceship chasing the little one, one side wearing masks and killing without mercy. Then there is the use of trigger words like Empire. Empires in these sorts of stories are nearly always evil. This works, but it’s difficult, and it goes to demonstrate the following point:

It’s really hard to start a novel. Your aim is to establish who is who, what they want and what’s stopping them. A fight may seem attractive, but it’s not the easy option.

How we used to write: Part one

Who remembers this?

(The featured image for this post is an old Interzone rejection letter.)

I’ve been clearing out my study following my retirement from teaching. Amongst my files I found all my old unsuccessful submissions from the late 80s and early 90s to magazines like Interzone, FEAR and BBR.

I lost count of how many submissions I made. At least 40, probably more like 50.

Things have changed a lot since then. Nowadays most submissions are electronic. Back then the finished manuscript had to be printed off (my first MSS were printed out at work as I didn’t have a printer) and placed in an envelop containing a stamped address envelope (or an international reply coupon if I was sending it abroad) for the reply. I used to mark my manuscripts as disposable, meaning I didn’t want them returned. I would print a new copy each time so that editors didn’t know they were third or fourth in line for a submission. I’m sure they would have guessed. Who doesn’t send to the highest paying markets first?

After the MS was posted, there was the wait for the reply. Weeks writing a story, weeks waiting for a reply, opening the envelope and then the bitter knife in the guts feeling of disappointment when the story was rejected.

For a couple of years all I got were standard rejections. I couldn’t understand why my stories weren’t selling. Reading over those old MSS the reason is obvious. The stories weren’t very good. There were some good ideas there, if I say so myself, but the actual story itself was lacking if not non existent. I couldn’t see that at the time, but that’s what I had to learn, and it’s something that I only learned by practicing. By writing and submitting, writing and submitting.

After a while I stopped getting standard rejections, I started to receive nearlys and almosts, and comments on how to make the stories better. (It’s worth noting that Interzone in those days nearly always provided constructive feedback). That was progress, but it was still bitterly disappointing. The longer the wait, the more likely it seemed the story had finally been chosen, but then the gate would squeak, I’d hear the snap of the letter box and I’d run down to see the envelope and open it and… all that hope crushed in a few seconds.

Things are very different nowadays. There have been occasions when I’ve submitted something online and received a rejection (or acceptance) sometimes the very next day. Rejection still hurts. There seems to be something very unequal about the investment in time and the suddenness of the “No, thank you.”.

But that’s the nature of the profession. Rejection, like it says in the letter, means the story isn’t suitable for the publication’s needs.

That’s it. The story isn’t suitable. I’m very grateful to the people over the years who’ve told me exactly why my story wasn’t suitable. I’d like to thank them here.

I listened!