thoughts – Tony Ballantyne

The Queen’s Gambit

Mitchell and Webb once did a Medical Drama sketch, where two fictional screenwriters explained that the emphasis in their new series was on drama and not medicine, as “you can get bogged down too much on the so called research.”

This resulted in a show with doctors shouting such things as “This patient is poorly! Bring me the medicine! No, you fool, that’s the wrong medicine!”

I was reminded of this sketch whilst watching The Queen’s Gambit recently. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a series about a female chess prodigy who goes on to become World Champion in the 1960’s. Apparently the matches played on screen were meticulously researched, and reflected real games played back then.

But that doesn’t matter. I don’t think most people watching would follow the play – I certainly couldn’t – but that doesn’t matter because what made the show so watchable was the way the drama of the games was communicated.

I was gripped by the ebb and flow of the matches, by the pace of the game: the way players would make a series of moves quickly and then spend ages pondering the next one. There was drama in the expression on their faces, even in the way they moved the pieces…

But that was just the games themselves. Painstakingly recreated they might have been, but they weren’t the story.

David Hepworth, the music writer, gave this advice – Don’t write about the music, write about all the things around it.

I think that’s true of all writing.

Would the Queen’s Gambit have been as good if it had been about draughts or backgammon? I don’t think so. Maybe you could have made the tournament scenes themselves as exciting, but the drama was heightened through the 60s setting, the Cold War tension and the single minded devotion of the characters in studying past games. The story wasn’t about the chess.

It’s often said that the essence of drama is conflict. Many beginner writers misunderstand what this means. A fight doesn’t make a story exciting. Why the people are fighting, that’s what’s interesting.

On a separate note, I saw Hamnet last night. That was two hours of my life I’ll never get back. The only bit I enjoyed was the last ten minutes, and that was because it was a scene from Hamlet.

But there was a bit where Shakespeare was sharpening his quills whilst awaiting for inspiration to strike. I felt happy when I saw that. That was the Elizabethan equivalent of me messing around with my emacs config file on my computer rather than getting down to work.

Finally, it’s getting harder and harder to share these posts. The algorithms on social media sites favour internal content, not external blogs like this. If you’ve been relying on say Facebook to send you to this site then you’ve probably not being seeing many posts recently.

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It’s the dishonesty I can’t stand

I don’t know if you’ve ever used the Vivaldi browser, but take a look at this announcement for their latest update:

We’re launching Vivaldi 7.8 today, and honestly, this one’s different. While every major browser is racing to cram AI assistants into their products, Vivaldi is dropping a middle finger to that entire approach.

Good for them. Dell have realised that users don’t care about AI too. You can read about that here.

Pages used to be a rather nice little word processor that I occasionally used on my iPhone. Apple have just updated it to try and make me take out a subscription to their Creator suite. Two things:

1) I don’t want to use Apple Intelligence when I’m being creative. The pleasure is in the act of creativity, not in the output. You might as well pay someone to have sex for you.

2) Apple say that Pages will continue to have a free tier. No it won’t. Pages was never free, any more than iOS is free. You pay for them as part of the cost of the device. It’s the dishonesty I can’t stand.

If you want to use AI, fine. Personally, I don’t want AI anywhere near my computer. My thoughts are my own, I don’t want my thoughts rewritten by AI. It’s not what the markets want, either. Here’s what Analog says about AI

Statement on the Use of “AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT

We will not consider any submissions written, developed, or assisted by these tools. Attempting to submit these works may result in being banned from submitting works in the future.

Most other publications say something similar. So if you’re marketing a word processor, don’t pretend that it’s going to help me write saleable stories. It’s quite the opposite.

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Newton Aycliffe: The Town of the Future!

There’s an article in the Guardian about my home town, Newton Aycliffe. The shopping centre is owned by a billionaire businessman. Over half the units are empty, the ones remaining are mainly owned by the big chains. Local shops are left to die.

This wasn’t really news to those of us who came from Aycliffe. When I was growing up it was often said that the rents for shops in the town were higher than those in Oxford Street, London.

I wrote about Newton Aycliffe in Midway. The ownership of the town centre wasn’t the only example of a monopoly. You can read in that book how television aerials weren’t we allowed on roofs and so we had to rent televisions from the same company. That company owned a huge TV mast at one end of the town, it funnelled BBC and ITV to homes via cable. The picture quality was poor, but if this was your first television, how were you to know that?

This was the 1970s. There was no internet, many people didn’t have cars. Our closest big towns were Darlington and Newcastle. All we knew of the world came from newspapers, television and the radio. And books of course. My mother was the town librarian. All we knew was what was all around us, and so that seemed the natural order of things.

Looking back on my childhood it seems like I grew up in one of those towns you get in SF movies. At first, a seemingly idyllic place, but things aren’t what they seem. There are dark forces at work, hidden in the background. Walk by an open door and you get the occasional glimpse of something strange lurking in a room. You see mysterious trucks rolling along the railway at night, there are lights in the sky…

Newton Aycliffe was supposed to be the town of the future. Quite an appropriate place for an SF writer to grow up in, I suppose. When I was a child I imagined aliens and evil supervillains everywhere. But as you’ll see from the article the truth is both far more mundane and ultimately depressing.

As is so often the case, something built with the best intentions ends up being exploited by those whose only motivation is profit.

‘You’d be ashamed to bring someone here’: The struggling billionaire-owned high street that shows Reform’s road to No 10 | Communities | The Guardian

Inspiration Thursday!

I just spent a week in Marrakesh, hence this post.

The picture shows the Jemaa El-Fnaa Square in the centre of the Medina. You can see the Koutoubia or Kutubiyya Mosque in the background. There are far better photographs of the mosque online – I just looked back over my camera roll and this was the best I had. But hey, you don’t look at this blog for the pictures.

According to Wikipedia, construction on the mosque begin sometime in the 12th Century. The name Koutobia derives from the Arabic word meaning booksellers, as this was main activity of the vendors in the square at the base of the mosque. The three golden spheres at the top of the minaret represent Islam, Christianity and Judaism and are intended to show that all religions are welcome in the city.

While in Marrakesh I happened to pass the mausoleum of Sidi Abou Fariz Abdelaziz Tebbaa. According to the notes written outside, he ranked high among his contemporaries in science, knowledge and honesty. I was impressed that this was how they measured his worth.

I’ve been thinking for a while about doing a series of posts on an “Inspiration Thursday” theme. I don’t know if this could be the first.

Write a story set in a world where people are respected for their knowledge and their honesty. Where books are valued and different religions are tolerated.

Granted, such a world seems pretty far fetched at the moment, but apparently it was not always the case. We are talking SF and Fantasy after all.

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.

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.