As the school holidays approach and I embark on my annual sorting of my notes and resources ready for the new school year, I’m going to take a moment to reflect on why I do this.

By this I mean maintaining three websites. That’s this blog, this site about my writing and this tech/education site. Sometimes the boundaries between the three blur which is why I’m in the process of migrating them across to Obsidian. I’ve started with my teaching notes (hence this post) and I’ll be moving on from there. Expect much more about that another time.

I began to blog about 15 years ago, principally to advertise my books, but it quickly became more than just that. After a couple of years I started my tech site. You can read why here: https://tech.tonyballantyne.com

But that’s not the full story.

I’ve written about blogging as way of getting started as a writer and way of maintaining enthusiasm as a writer, but that’s not the real reason why I blog.

I’m not an influencer. I don’t do product placements. I don’t charge for the resources on my sister sites. I don’t have adverts. I get a lot of requests from people asking if they can monetize my site and I always reply no. I don’t really do social media apart from for genuine social reasons: to keep in touch with old friends.

So why go to all this effort?

The reason why I write is because I enjoy writing. That’s why I’m a writer. And that’s why I do this. The reason why I wrote this post was because it made me happy. It also reminded my just how much I enjoy writing.

And now I’m going to make myself a cup of tea.

If you’re reading this in the northern hemisphere, have a good summer!

I feel like I’ve spent too many posts recently talking about bad writing. It’s taken Pat Mills’ Iconoblast newsletter dropping into my mailbox to prompt me to comment on good writing instead.

As Wikipedia says, “Pat Mills is an English comics writer and editor who, along with John Wagner, revitalised British boys comics in the 1970s, and has remained a leading light in British comics ever since. He has been called “the godfather of British comics”.”

He’s certainly been a great influence on my writing. If you’ve not heard of him I’d recommend you take a look not just at Slaine, Charley’s War and Nemesis the Warlock, but his writing about writing. (paid links)

Pat Mills is a prolific writer both through natural talent and necessity (Comics don’t pay well).

Principally, he knows what makes a good story. Part of being a writer is developing a feel for this, and you do this by practicing your craft. But Mills has taken this much further. I remember the reader’s polls that used to appear in comics when I was a kid. I didn’t realise then how much the results of these polls shaped the stories that appeared. It’s fascinating and instructive to discover just how much Mills studied the feedback from these polls to tailor the stories to just what the readers wanted.

But rather than me telling you about this, take a look at his post on the stories in Girls Comics.

But what about your artistic vision? Surely it’s important to tell your own stories in your own way?

Well, that’s very true. As Charlie Parker said, learn the changes and then forget them. But you have to learn the changes first, and Pat Mills is a master.

Reharmonization is a musical term for changing the chords in a song while keeping the melody the same.

Jazz musicians do this a lot. There’s also been recent fashion amongst young singers for slowing down fast songs and reharming them in a minor key. One example that sticks in my mind was a reharmed version of John Travolta and Olivia Newton John’s “You’re the One that I want.” The original song had the happy urgency of teenage longing. The new version, at least to my mind, sounded like an obsessive stalker sitting in his van late at night, waiting for his target to walk by.

The minor reharm can be a lazy way for a musician to pump a bit of emotion into a song. I think it’s a good way to describe the process by which writers invest their stories with fake emotion.

The minor reharm is often evident in TV series and box sets. You notice it when characters’ emotions are magnified to fill screen time. They argue and fall out for no reason other than to provide enough plot to take the episode to the break.

This is not only lazy writing, it’s not even accurate. People don’t fall out so easily in real life. When I was growing up in the ’70s, many of the sit coms revolved around farcical misunderstandings. Many of the TV series I give up watching nowadays depend on the same thing, except without the humour.

Of course, the minor reharm is not exclusive to the TV. You see it all the time in stories by authors who should know better. Rather than give examples it’s probably more instructive to refer to Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. Here the minor reharm that was the gothic novel is parodied to glorious effect.

If you’ve never read it, give it a try. You’ll be astonished how modern the tone feels.

I got to the door quickly and he’d already walked away, he said he didn’t think I was in, a little more patience would be good.

The above is a review of a parcel delivery. I came across it when I was asked to rate my experience of that same person delivering a parcel to me.

I hate those reviews. They give people the illusion of power in their lives. It allows them to take out their frustrations on the world, venting their self righteous anger on the even more powerless. They should pity poor old Ron (I’ve changed his name), struggling to fulfil a job list way too big for the time available. Me? I got my parcel undamaged in the time slot I was given. That’s all I feel entitled to say about the transaction. I certainly didn’t feel I was entitled to a chirpy conversation from a colourful member of the undeserving poor, as another reviewer did.

Why I had to review the poor guy I don’t know.

Actually, I do. It’s not about feedback, it’s about divide and conquer. It’s a distraction. Don’t blame the delivery driver, blame the company that put them in that position. Give them all five star reviews and let businesses sort out their own houses.

Just to be clear, I’m not talking about all reviews. Writing is fair game for reviewers. By all means say what you like about my books, good or bad. What you read in my books is all my own work. I stand by what I’ve chosen to put there.

But a parcel delivery guy has very little agency. What exactly are you reviewing?

Astrud Gilberto died this week. I started writing the below post last year. Now seems an appropriate time to finish it.

Getz/Gilberto

I was going to play this album as I had dinner (Lamb chops, humous, tzatziki, halloumi, pitta bread, salad, nice glass of red wine) in the garden. What else do you play when it’s this hot?

The album wasn’t on Spotify.

I went to Amazon to buy it and found it wasn’t available as a digital download (update, it’s available now, a year later. It’s also back on Spotify). I suppose Verve were pumping the price up/protecting their legacy and revenue stream when I originally wrote this.

I didn’t give up and found an HD version for £1.79. That version seems to have been recorded directly from the record: you can hear the scratches. I suppose some people will like that. For some people the object itself is as important as the content. Many people prefer books to ebooks for example, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I’m not one of those people. I’ve got all my CDs ripped and stored on my NAS and backed up in the cloud and on HDD.  I’ve told my children to make sure they take copies when I’m gone.

I don’t think they’ll listen to my advice. I didn’t keep my father’s vinyl copy of Getz/Gilberto: it was too old and scratched. I suspect it would have been as good as the HD version I bought.

Even so, I’m sure my children will hold on to something tangible. Despite my comments above, I can’t bring myself to get rid of my vinyl records, even if I never listen to them. People become very attached to formats. I’ve read that people have even started buying cassettes again. I’m sure it won’t be long before you can buy Collector’s Edition CDs in original Jewel cases on 1405g plastic to be read with a 44kW laser.

That’s why I think that even if we could transfer a brain onto a computer, something I talked about at length in my Recursion Trilogy, we would never quite believe in it.

Ask anyone who knows anything about music and they’ll tell you: if you want to learn to play your instrument properly you need to learn your scales.

Few people do, and we all know why that is. Scales are boring. No one learns an instrument to play scales, they want to play tunes for their own enjoyment and to impress their friends. You don’t become the life and soul of the party by playing the scale of G major.

It wasn’t until lockdown that I properly applied myself to learning the scales on the piano. I wish I’d learned them earlier. For a start, I’d have been more impressive to my friends sooner.  Of course, now I’m a good (though immodest) player I don’t care what my friends think. (I do care what other musicians think, though)

Why am I writing this? I never listened my own advice, so why would you?

It’s because of this:

Platitude
A remark or statement, especially one with a moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or thoughtful.

I have a friend who says that Self Help books clearly don’t work. If they did, there would only be one, not shelves and shelves of them as you see in bookshops. She’s probably right. But it occurs to me that maybe there are so many books because they say the same thing but in different ways.

Maybe sometimes the message goes in.

Face it, there’s no secret to life. Eat less, exercise more, be nice to people and learn your scales.

And if you want to be a writer, start a blog.

On Monday night I watched Vermeer: the Greatest Exhibition. This is described as “a narrated private view of the largest Vermeer Exhibition in history, currently held in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.”

The painting that really caught my attention was the Milkmaid. As the narrators explained, Vermeer had given depth to the painting by the use of shadow. Light entered the room from the window the left, shadows can be seen on the woman’s left hand side (the viewer’s right) and in the left corner of the room. The contrast with the light on the woman’s right hand side gives the sense of space. The narrators were at pains to point out that Vermeer painted light, not colour.

The thing that really caught my attention, the thing I’ve been thinking about since Monday, is the wall behind the woman. The narrators mentioned the wall: that blank space that added to the depth of the picture.

The thing about the wall is that it wasn’t always blank. X-ray pictures of the canvas revealed that that Vermeer had originally painted a patterned wall. (I can’t be sure, but looking at the picture now, I think the tiles you can see at the bottom right of the picture extended much further up). There had originally been items on the floor, too. Apparently Vermeer always did this, continually revised the work as he painted.

I thought that was important. He followed his instinct, changing things as it went on.

Most importantly, he didn’t feel the need to fill the canvas with detail. I keep looking at the woman’s left hand side now, seeing the line of shadow that runs down against the wall. And that makes me think about figure and ground, and the settings of stories, and all the things I write about on this blog…

One last thing. Isn’t Wikipedia wonderful? Not just the words, but all those pictures available to look at for free. I make a regular donation to Wikipedia, I use it so much.