2016 Wasn’t All Bad — If You Picture It Like This

On top of everything else that happened in 2016, it wasn’t a great year for my blog posts. I’ve managed to update the blog at least once a month for the past few years but since my post on the EU referendum at the end of June, I’ve only managed one more — an overdue review of Isabel Costello’s debut novel (albeit a long one).

Looking back, despite my best intentions, I’m still not exactly sure why I’ve not managed to keep up the previously modest level of posting activity. It’s probably prioritisation by default as I’m still writing and doing just as much interesting stuff in between. There’s also been various developments with the novel that I’m not really able to publicly blog about on here.

But one thing I’ve kept  doing, mainly because it’s nowhere near as time-consuming as blogging, is taking lots of photos.

So in the spirit of a picture telling a thousand words here’s a photographic run through 2016 with a bit of commentary along the way

Perhaps one reason for being distracted from blogging is that I’ve spent the past year working in Soho. For example this place is just around the corner…

Beer Porn @ Brewdog Soho
Beer Porn @ Brewdog Soho

…and even though it’s no longer the groovy Swinging Sixties, there are enough spontaneous ‘happenings’ around where I work for me to have grabbed the odd evocative photo, like this one…

Swinging Soho July 2016
Swinging Soho July 2016

I walk past this iconic place almost daily (it was interesting to see it featured in The Apprentice this year)…

Liberty at Night
Liberty at Night

…and along here often too (and at the moment it’s worth walking to the end of Carnaby Street to the pop up shop set up by the V&A Museum in association with their You Say You Want A Revolution Exhibition).

Carnaby Street
Carnaby Street

And there’s plenty of things to be distracted by nearby — like the amazing Christmas angels in Regent Street…

Regent Street Angel, Christmas 2016
Regent Street Angel, Christmas 2016

…or just weird London scenes like this.

Oxford Street, Summer 2016
Oxford Street, Summer 2016

Sometimes it’s been restorative to occasionally get away from it all and lie (albeit briefly) under a tree on a patch of grass in one of those rare summer lunchtimes.

The Best View of London on a Summer Lunchtime
The Best View of London on a Summer Lunchtime

I don’t say much here about the ‘day job’. Until late 2015 that was partly because I might have been taken out and shot if I said too much! OK. That was meant to be a gross exaggeration about working in a government ministry but the way Theresa May’s government is treating its civil servants then perhaps it’s not. Nevertheless, I have a hazy recollection that I may have signed the Official Secrets Act, not that I had access to much secret stuff but I did work almost literally at the heart of government. I walked daily through the doors of a large ministry — one that was often on the front page of the newspapers — and shared lifts with cabinet ministers.

While I wasn’t exactly Sir Humphrey, I was given invaluable direct experience of the the way government works.

And in terms of writing benefit, I gained insider knowledge of the criminal justice system, through working with the police, HM Courts and Tribunals system ( even doing some work for those seditionary “enemies of the people” in the UK Supreme Court).

It’s all fantastic material should any of my future novels head in the direction of crime or politics.

The organisation where I now spend most of my nine-to-five working hours couldn’t be more different.  I won’t go into specific detail but it’s a media-tech company (hence the Soho base) and uses a lot of clever technology to encourage people to pay money to look as absurd as the people below…

The Future of Entertainment?
The Future of Entertainment?

(Apparently the gun isn’t on sale yet.) Actually, the VR (Virtual Reality) experience is so immersive that these people won’t care how they look from the outside. I’ve tried VR and it’s convincing. I predict that the technology could be on the cusp of going mainstream. And don’t take my word for it — creating a VR game was another activity to be featured on this season’s Apprentice.

2016 produced some unexpected recognition for my writing — non-fiction this time.

I was elected (or admitted or whatever they do) to full membership of the British Guild of Beer Writers. It might seem surprising to some that this organisation even exists but it has a few hundred members, including household names and virtually every author of a book on beer or pubs or contributor on the subject to any broadsheet newspaper or TV or radio broadcast.

I was elected to full membership on the basis of published examples of my writing (which I don’t tend to talk about much on this blog) so it’s a huge honour to be in the company of so many illustrious and expert writers in that field.

Here’s the image that adorns my entry in the BGBW website directory.I’m hard at work at the beer tasting side of the job!

British Guild of Beer Writers Profile Picture
British Guild of Beer Writers Profile Picture

Being a member of the guild let me rub shoulders with the movers and shakers of the beer writing world at their awards ceremony, including the odd, hairy beer-loving celebrity.

Two Hairy People
Two Hairy People

But even though my blog posts may have slipped off the radar, I’m still writing a lot of fiction, even on holiday in France (see below).

Writing by the River Dronne in France
Writing by the River Dronne in France

I could get used to that lifestyle.

With various things happening with The Angel (which, as it’s a book, have been invariably slow moving, I’ve been hard at work on another novel. A heavily adapted version of the new novel’s opening even won a prize in the Winchester Writers’ Festival Writing Can Be Murder crime writing awards this year.

I’ve kept in touch with many writing friends, enjoying their successes, for example, with winning stories at Liars’ League and other writing -related developments that can’t be blogged about. I’ve also kept up my involvement with the RNA (see previous post) and received another great critique from their New Writers’ Scheme.

By providing a series of non-negotiable deadlines every few weeks, my membership of a writing group in London has proved invaluable. I’ve propped myself up and carried on writing well into the early hours on several occasions by working on a piece from the new novel. In the summer I carried on once or twice for the whole night — going to bed (briefly) once that sun had risen.

The standard of my fellow writing group members is generally excellent (one reason why I burn the midnight oil to try to make my submissions at least presentable) and we’re very fortunate that the group is run by someone who’s a professional writing tutor at City University and novelist.

The group’s feedback is excellent — both illuminating and honest — although not usually as brutally frank as the comment below.

Honest Feedback
Honest Feedback

I’ll save details of the current work-in-progress for another post. However,  the next few photos might give a clue about some some of the things I’ve been doing that could act as background research for the world of the novel.

Here’s a shot of a pile of books waiting to be read…

Books for Research 1
Books for Research 1

…and below is another example of my methodical approach to shelving books (Owl Song At Dawn is an excellent novel published this year by my old City University creative writing tutor, Emma Claire Sweeney, who organises Something Rhymed — see earlier post).

Research 2
Research 2

I’ve not been to any music concerts quite as jaw-dropping at Kate Bush’s Before the Dawn (whose recording of the shows was released a few weeks ago and allowed me to relive sitting right in front of the spectacle — and the sonic battering of Omar Hakim’s drums — listen to the extended version of King of the Mountain on the CD and you’ll know what I mean).

But during the year I’ve been to see a couple of other giants of music from the past thirty or so years. Most recently I saw Nile Rodgers, also at the Hammersmith Apollo, who performed an incredibly energetic set of hits by Chic, Sister Sledge, Diana Ross and others (several of which I heard a few days later being played from loudspeakers in Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland) and he also played an obscure favourite of mine, Spacer, originally by French singer, Sheila B.

Nile Rodgers, Hammersmith Apollo, 23rd December 2016
Nile Rodgers, Hammersmith Apollo, 23rd December 2016

Seeing Bruce Springsteen live has been one of those bucket list items I’ve always wanted to experience so I took my opportunity when he played Wembley Stadium in June along with 80,000 or so others. Elsewhere in the stadium were Bruce fans and writing acquaintances (and tweeters) Louise Walters (whose second novel is published imminently) and Pete Domican.

Springsteen’s stamina and his rapport with a stadium audience are awesome. He played from around 6.30pm to just before 10pm, non-stop. The sound where I was sitting in the south stand was fairly ropy but I was more dumbfounded by the behaviour of the people in the (not very cheap) seats around me. As can be seen from one of the earlier photos, I like a pint of beer, but many of the mostly middle-aged, middle-class audience seemed to treat the Springsteen show like a visit to a very expensive pub — possibly reliving their rose-tinted memories of some student bar. They constantly shuttled to and from the very expensive Wembley bar and then, inevitably, to the toilets. While loudly declaring their devotion to ‘The Boss’, some dedicated fans danced with their backs to the stage and got so drunk they either had to leave before the end. Some wouldn’t have remembered it anyway.

Springsteen,Wembley, June 2016
Springsteen,Wembley, June 2016

I was a little dubious in advance about another music-related experience in the summer — visiting the Latitude Festival in Suffolk in July. I wanted to go mainly to see Grimes: who’s nothing to do with the music genre grime, but a hugely innovative and original musician from Canada whose music defies any easy description — being both catchy and experimental — and mainly, but not exclusively, electronic.

It was described as one critic as being simultaneously like everything you’ve ever heard reassembled and remixed in a way which sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard before. That strikes me as something interesting to aspire towards in writing.

What massively impresses me about Grimes is that, with the exception of a couple of guest vocalists, she writes, sings, plays all the instruments, produces and engineers her recordings. I never get bored listening to her most recent album, the brilliant Art Angels . ‘Don’t be boring’ is another great rule of thumb.

Her live performance was equally original and self-reliant, accompanied by only a couple of dancers and her recent collaborator, Hana, on guitar (on left in photo below).

Grimes at Latitude, July 2016
Grimes at Latitude, July 2016

While waiting for Grimes, I had an unexpected opportunity to see Slaves, a two man guitar and drum modern-punk group. While the group themselves would be unlikely to dispute that their music is the opposite of subtle, their performance was amazingly good humoured (with songs about commuting like Cheer Up London or fat-cat bankers ‘Rich man, 
I’m not your bitch man‘) and created such an engagement with the audience that the FT reviewer described it as ‘life affirming’.

Before Slaves I was blown away by an electrifying performance by Christine and the Queens. Along with Art Angels, I must have listened to Chaleur Humaine (Christine and the Queen’s debut album) more than any others this year. I went to one of their two shows at Brixton Academy in November for a repeat of the live experience.

Brixton
Brixton

I’ve always had a fondness for French electronic music (Air are another of my favourites). When Héloïse Letissier (Christine is her alter-ego) announced ‘Welcome to the French disco!’ at the start of Science Fiction, one of my favourite tracks, it seemed an appropriate riposte to the narrow-minded bigotry and xenophobia that has scarred other aspects of 2016 which far too many despicable politicians and newspaper editors  spent much the year cultivating.

Christine and the Queens are inclined to do unexpected cover versions live and I had the spine-tingling moment of serendipity when they covered Good Life by Inner City, at the time of its release in the late 1980’s a much-underrated track, but one of those tracks everyone seems to know — maybe because of the almost improvised vocal line that wanders where it’s least expected? But I guess Christine and the Queens may have picked it as an antidote to all 2016’s other shit?

At the other end of the socio-political spectrum to Slaves’ music, I’d been wary of Latitude’s reputation as the Waitrose of music festivals — with rehabilitated hippies regressing to the behaviours they liked to say they indulged in their youths. And, indeed, during the day there was indeed a scattering of baby-boomer types trying to press-gang their extended families into enjoying the festival in a conspicuously worthy way.

Boomer grandchildren were transported around in flower-garlanded trolleys like this one…

Starting Them Young at Latitude
Starting Them Young at Latitude

…and as it got later the place became more like a pop-up Center Parcs, except the vegetal aromas in the forest weren’t coming from wood burning fires. Eventually as the night wore on and the older people retired to their luxury tents the sound-systems and DJ sets attracted large, bouncing swathes of  younger people, like moths to the flashing lights.

Wandering through the woods I came across a series of artists’ nstallations — and immediately recognised the brightly-coloured faces of David Shillinglaw’s work (whose studio I visited a couple of years ago with Love Art London). He’s an exceptionally friendly person and showed me around his unmistakable collection of positively painted sheds, which transformed into a music sound-system after dark.

David Shillinglaw at Latitude 2016
David Shillinglaw’s Exhortation at Latitude 2016

I’d visited Latitude for the music but was most impressed by the festival’s showcasing of all types of art. When I first arrived I stopped off at the the literary arena to listen to an author interview with the Bailey’s Prize winner, Lisa McInery. It was a nice touch to have a bookshop on site.

Coming a few weeks after the EU referendum result, Latitude was a refreshing distraction that emphasised the pleasures found away from the poisonous and vindictive political atmosphere. Ironically, the industries represented by Latitude — art, music , comedy, dance, theatre and literature — are those in which the UK is an undisputed world leader (reflected in much of the content of this blog over the past few years) but seem undervalued by the closed-minded, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, expert-dismissing philistinism of the pro-leave bigots.

The opposite of a huge festival like Latitude is the proverbial gig in the back of a pub. I spent a fascinating evening in July on the Camden Rock’n’Roll Walking Tour, led by Alison Wise. Covering the amazing musical heritage of a relatively small part of London between Camden Town tube station and the Roundhouse near Chalk Farm.

I was especially pleased that we stopped off in several pubs on the way. Each pub had a strong association with one of Camden’s music scenes through the last few decades. The Hawley Arms was Amy Winehouse’s local (with the likes of the Libertines as regulars), The Good Mixer was where the leading Britpop bands hung out, the areas around Dingwalls and Camden Lock have many punk associations and the Dublin Castle in Parkway launched the careers of Madness and many other early eighties bands.

Dublin Castle, Camden
Dublin Castle, Camden

And here’s me with Molly from Minnesota (the only time I’ve ever met her) inside the Dublin Castle in a photo taken by Alison at the end of the tour.

A Pint with Molly from Minnesota in the Dublin Castle
A Pint with Molly from Minnesota in the Dublin Castle

It’s surprising how many of Alison’s tours round Camden and elsewhere are filled by tourists from overseas rather than native Brits or Londoners. Even though I’d worked in Camden for five years a while ago I still learned a lot from the tour — all relevant for writing purposes too. Alison also does Bowie Soho tours and album cover pub crawls which I’m sure are excellent.

I’ve read a lot of books over the year, although nowhere near as many as I’d intended. I’ve worked my way through a lot of musical biographies and autobiographies, including Chrissie Hynde’s frank Reckless, the bizarre Paul Morley prose of Grace Jones’s I’ll Never Write My Memoirs and the beautifully written (and non-ghosted) Boys In The Trees by the wonderful Carly Simon.

A few Sunday Times bestselling blockbusters have also made it on to my reading list, mostly out of curiosity to understand the reasons for their success. After having read them, in most cases, I’m not much the wiser.

So I’ve been busy, enjoying lots of new experiences and taking many more photos than those above. It’s even more worthwhile then those experiences to settle into the subconscious, interact and collide and spark off little bits of unexpected inspiration I can later use in my writing. And to help the process, there’s nothing like  taking a bit of time out and reflect.

So the last photo in the post was taken on a long walk between Christmas and New Year s the sun was setting over the Chilterns — a hopefully prescient, peaceful image to usher in 2017.

Deer Against the Chilterns Sunset
Deer Against the Chilterns Sunset

The Blog That Wouldn’t Crunch

This blog has been a bit quiet recently — and for a change it’s not down to my indolence or procrastination. Over Christmas I had a serious technical problem. When I tried to upload photos, processing (oddly called ‘crunching’)  never completed, which was puzzling. Then I was exasperated to find WordPress wouldn’t allow me to create new blog posts at all.

I dangle my techie toes in the water by using the open source version of WordPress on my own webhosting space (rather than the WordPress hosted version). This means I’m very thankful to all my fellow geeks who produce this software for the benefit of the community and little monetary reward but it also means I’m my own tech support. Or, more accurately, it’s a case of furiously trying to type the right terms into a search engine to get a vaguely relevant answer.

Sometimes this yields nuggets of pure and practical wisdom. Other times, like on Christmas Eve, I end up proving that a little knowledge is a very dangerous thing.

In a time-pressured panic that became increasingly desperate, I found myself breaking every methodical techie rule in the book — the main rule being that whatever you try, it’s more likely to further screw things up than fix them. So the first law is to make sure you can undo your mistakes.

I cut and pasted little snippets of PHP (that’s the scripting language WordPress is written in — but that’s largely the extent of my knowledge) between my computer and my FTP transfer program and opening up the control panels on the mySQL databases.

I deleted something on the WordPress settings page that I had the awful feeling afterwards that I shouldn’t and I thought I’d wrecked the whole thing.

I gave up trying to fix it to finish off preparations for Christmas dinner (see next post). I also noticed amid all the self-inflicted errors that on one control screen the database size for the blog had been exceeded and was showing at -47% of its capacity (apparently that means way too big). I made a mental note that this would probably need sorting out — but at least the site was still online.

Come Boxing Day I decided to ring the hosting provider to ask about the database size. Yes, I’d exceeded the maximum and wouldn’t be able to add any more content to the blog — which wasn’t very good news.

Fortunately I could move the blog to a new database that I could create which was ten times bigger — 1Gb rather than 100Mb, which is still only 0.3% of the size of the hard drive of the natty little netbook that I just bought for under £200. 1Mb still seems pretty stingy but I guess no-one wants to be loading up vast amounts of data from web sites so it’s probably good discipline. The database itself was too large for me to upload using the hosting provider’s tools so they had to do it for me.

So eventually, with the blog’s content all copied over, I updated my WordPress files to point to the new database and prepared myself to work through all the other problems — but, amazingly, everything worked. I could upload files AND create new posts — so my fiddling hadn’t done anything terribly disastrous. In fact the last post that I made, on the Shoreditch Blonde beer, was largely to check out whether the site could still be updated. All the problems were not of mine or WordPress’s making but because I’d exceeded my database limit.

This illustrates another law of technology that contradicts the statements above about screwing things up — that the biggest problems are often caused by something quite simple but which is hidden (or not looked for) at the time (usually down to the software’s terrible usability). And the big things can be relatively easy to fix. I still managed to break Google Analytics, though.

So that’s a very techie explanation of why the blog’s been a little quiet recently. When I thought I couldn’t add any more content and started thinking about the perils of trying to export the content elsewhere I suddenly realised how much investment in time (and a not inconsiderable amount of money in IT costs) I’d put into creating this blog and how I’d be very despondent for it to be somehow broken, especially with the novel nearly ready (as I’ve perpetually said during 2012).

The two works are virtually intertwined and I’m hoping that this blog might be a useful and perhaps entertaining resource for anyone who shows interest in the novel.

And seeing as I earn my ‘day job’ crust from things that are IT related, I was pleased I managed to blunder through and fix my problems (and blunder and trial and error is the way most IT professionals work to fix things). It’s the sort of job that James in the novel would take in his stride, although there would be a lot of swearing on the way. (Maybe I should have him dabble in Kim’s site? But that would be another 1,000 words I don’t have room for.)

I suspect that I’ve run into problems by loading so many pictures on the blog recently — such as all those of the Olympics, London and the Shard. But now my space has been increased I can stop worrying for a while about my multimedia excesses.

So stand by — the next couple of postings will be photographic banquets.

‘The Geiger Counter of Olympomania is Going to Go Zoink Off the Scale’

…as Boris Johnson inimitably said last night in Hyde Park — before his brilliant put-down of Mitt Romney. Well, my Olympomania Geiger counter has been building up to Zoink steadily over the last few weeks but Boris’s ‘Are we ready?’ speech seems to now catch what seems like a suddenly enthusiastic zeitgeist.

London 2012 Olympic Torch
The Olympic Torch on Birdcage Walk — carried by (I believe) Jon Sayer.

Last night the Olympic Torch came within a hundred yards of where I work for the ‘day job’. It was due to arrive about 6.20pm and there was no way I was going to miss it. Expecting big crowds, quite a few people buggered off out of the office early. In that respect there seems to be two types of people. Those that prefer to preserve their routine from disruption as much as possible and those who are intrigued by the novelty and the new experience. I’d suggest that writers, and creative people generally, would hopefully fall into the second group.

I waited on Birdcage Walk (on what a policeman disconcertingly described to me as a grassy knoll). I saw from distance the bizarre spectacle of the Secretary General of the United Nations handing over the Olympic Torch (I knew it was Ban Ki Moon as I was watching the live TV pictures on my iPad coming from a helicopter overhead ).

In a slight touch of serendipity the torchbearer in my photo is (I believe from the BBC

London 2012 102PF Flags
The Olympic Flag Flying Over Where I Do the ‘Day Job’

commentary) Jon Sayer, a Scout leader who rescued someone from a swollen river, who comes from Todmorden, a  West Yorkshire town near where I was brought up that has a passing reference in my novel.

I avoided the tube and walked direct to Marylebone Station, passing by Buckingham Palace and having to detour round the torch’s route into Hyde Park — and the atmosphere was fantastic. People were standing on bollards and hanging off lampposts to get a view. A group of Brazilians were parading with their flag around Wellington Arch. Although London in the summer is normally teeming with foreign tourists, there seemed to be a huge number of overseas visitors flocking towards the parks and there were many international TV anchors in position in front of Buckingham Palace.

London 2012 Big Ben
Big Ben Olympic Ready

Perhaps because I’ve been working in Westminster in the  writing-time-sapping ‘day job’ for most of the last year, I’ve become fascinated by the way the Olympic preparations have gradually come together — accelerating over the last month and especially over the last week or so.

It’s not so much the big symbols like the rings on Tower Bridge but the small, mundane but essential and attentive details that  have almost had me welling up. For example the lurid bright pink venue signs in the tube stations or the direction signs back to tube stations that have been sprouting on street corners and all over the parks.

(Is that because I try to cultivate a writers’ habit of close observation or that I’m a sign-nerd who did A-level Geography and interested in aspects of place and setting (see my interest in geosemiotics).

It’s also slightly touching to see the Olympic ‘pods’ with their ambassadors in Olympic T-

London 2012 Queen Anne's Gate
One of the Suddenly Ubiquitous Pink Signs

shirts who’ve been put in the parks and on the streets to point visitors in the right direction — although Blue Badge guides they appear not to be.  And the incredible politeness of the soldiers drafted in for security seems fundamentally British. I chatted to some in St. James’s Park on Thursday. These people were probably in Afghanistan a few weeks ago — now they’re pointing tourists in the right direction for Big Ben.

Even though it’s been coming for seven years, when I see the signs to ‘Olympic Park’ I almost have to pinch myself, having memories of watching past Olympics from what have seemed mostly exotic and/or obscure places. I remember visiting Barcelona after their games and constantly being reminded of the Olympics and once I had a tour of the Munich Olympic stadium and a meal in the aerial revolving restaurant there that still had resonance thirty years after the event.

Of course, the Olympics also fascinate as a sporting as well as cultural and symbolic festival. I was on holiday in Scotland during the Beijing games and, having had a tent wrecked by the Scottish weather, spent much of the rest of the time watching Olympic coverage, which became compulsive after a while.

London 2012 Soldiers on Whitehall
Not Helmand Province

It’s a shame that access to the Olympic Park itself has been so restricted. I’ve had a few glimpses of the stadium and facilities from Hackney Wick and Stratford but I’m sure that people might feel a greater sense of affinity with the Olympic Park itself had it not been cordoned off with extraordinary secrecy. But maybe that’s the point — impress us with the shock of the new?

But perhaps impatiently wanting to go and visit the area shows how the locality has been transformed – would anyone have been so excited about visiting Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Newham or Waltham Forest seven years ago?

There have been plenty of British cock-ups to justifiably complain about — ticketing was a

London 2012 Cenotaph
Two Contrasting Examples of Nation Against Nation

hopeless fiasco. I spent years working on booking systems for airlines and it was inept to use a concert system like Ticketmaster for such a volume of traffic. And I can’t understand why I got no tickets at all on my first attempt when I’d applied for some football tickets — that haven’t even been sold now.

Bizarrely, I ended up with tickets for one of the most sought after events — not the athletics that I also applied for — but the infamous beach volleyball. (My excuse is that I was working through the list of sports alphabetically, not realising I could only apply for three the second time round. And the sessions are for both men’s and women’s volleyball, which no one mentions, of course.) I go on Sunday and I’m also hoping to see the start of the women’s cycling road race as it heads through Hyde Park Corner and Knightsbridge and then go to the London Live Event in Hyde Park.

London 2012 Mall Finish
Cycling Road Race Start and Finish on The Mall

The corporatism increasingly jars with the growing feeling of excitement, which is all the more genuine for arriving seemingly spontaneously. Why can we only pay with Visa? McDonald’s and Coke are the ‘preferred’ food and drink. The brand infringement rules are draconian. But most of these restrictions come via the IOC and we’ve had to accept them, although we police them in our assiduously British way.

And the mascots are ludicrous, although I feel their names have some uncanny personal associations for me (see post from over two years ago). But that’s also a key national characteristic — the resigned humour that comes from the absurd and ridiculous.

London 2012 has already had one real-life moment of stunning absurdity worthy of the

London 2012 Triathlon Finish
The Triathlon Stadium on the Serpentine

brilliant Twenty Twelve satire before it has officially started — when the South Korean flag was displayed against the North Korean women’s football team (and Twenty Twelve had just sent up women’s football). I can imagine the Hugh Bonneville character’s shambling attempts to defuse that row.

It’s predicted that a billion people will apparently watch the Opening Ceremony, which I’m looking forward to for the music as much as anything else — rumoured to include Muse, the Clash, Queen, the Prodigy, Mark Ronson and Amy Winehouse, the Specials, the Doctor Who theme, bizarrely, ‘God Save the Queen’ by the Sex Pistols. It’s appropriate that the ceremony will also featuring the world’s greatest living songwriter, Paul McCartney, who contributed so much to London’s profile in the 60s.

I’m looking forward to see how the opening ceremony contrasts the Britain of Blake’s green and pleasant lands with the gritty, urban post-industrial Britain of some of the more contemporary artists. My novel also contains many themes derived from the differences and similarities between the two extremes (the London of the City, Shoreditch and Hackney and the rural Chilterns).

I do have a few reservations as there hasn’t been as much hype for a televised public event since, er, the Millennium River of Fire.

As mentioned in previous posts, I’m kicking myself that I’ve not managed to get my novel that, in parts, out into the world by now, as in parts it certainly celebrates London – and some areas close to the Olympic Park. So it’s a slightly selfish hope of mine that the Olympics builds interest so readers want to know more.

Tower Bridge Olympic Rings 110712
Tower Bridge with the Olympic Rings

What stirs the profoundest emotion in me is that the Olympics that goes beyond the corporatism and even the sport itself that shows something about the human spirit. The Olympics are a symbol of generosity and hospitality. We’re welcoming everyone else in the world to our city for our games — either in person or via television — to say ‘this is what and who we are and we want to enjoy sharing it’. It’s our London – it’s the city that we’ve all created and we’re going to throw a huge party.

The enormous global prestige of the Olympics is perhaps difficult to appreciate, even a few hours before the opening ceremony. But hearing the news in 2005 that London had been awarded the games was one of those ‘I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing’ moments. I was in a meeting conference room in Greater London House in Camden and someone got the news on their BlackBerry. Everyone in the meeting was stunned because we were so conditioned to losing — London and the UK just didn’t win anything like this. It didn’t happen. But it had — and it was literally unbelievable.

Now it’s here. As the cover of Time Out says (and I agree) it’s the greatest time to be in the greatest city in the world and I feel extraordinarily proud.

London 2012 Time Out
Time Out Welcome to London

My Other Magnum Opus

Apart from the two novels in progress I’ve also authored a more prosaic volume over the past fifteen months or so. And — spit on me now — I’ve decided to self-publish it. I don’t have much capital so it’s only a print run of two — but it’s available in both hardback and softback binding (see photo below).

My MSc Dissertation
Available in Both Hardback and Softback -- My MSc Dissertation

At 17,000 words (not including appendices) it’s a slightly shorter read than the creative works in progress but at least it is finished, although it’s not yet been marked.

For anyone who’s interested in the title it’s:

IT Governance Design: An Application of Problem Oriented Engineering to Enterprise Architecture, TOGAF and SOA Development

When I did the literature search I didn’t find much other work in this general field and my supervisor has raised the possibility of presenting my findings as an academic paper at a conference in Barcelona in the autumn — and now they’re suggesting I consider carrying on my study with a PhD. If this is a hint that my dissertation has earned me a pass then I’m on course to end up by 2013 with three Master’s degrees — an MBA, this MSc and an MA in Creative Writing (although there’s a long way to go with that one yet). Continuing studying seems a bit like overkill but they say learning is lifelong these days — and maybe it will entitle me still to a discounted subscription to The Economist — so there may be some plus points.

The printing and binding process does show how relatively simple it is now to get work into print — I found a specialist thesis printer online and submitted a pdf through their website — although the economics aren’t very good for short-runs — it cost me a lot more than a typical Amazon purchase. Maybe I should produce a Kindle version?

There are some interesting comparisons between the MSc dissertation and creative writing. Enterprise Architecture, the specialist area of IT that I concentrated on, is all about being able to sift through the detail of business process and IT systems and then to arrive at an abstracted, high-level view of the ‘big-picture’ of how everything connects and interacts (if, indeed, it does). It seems a relatively simple discipline but, the literature and evidence suggests, that not many people are able to do it — it’s all about pattern recognition.

In many ways a novel writer needs similar skills — to sustain plot, theme, consistent characters that interact together and so on — but a novel is harder because all the underlying structure is then hidden again under descriptions and dialogue (assuming that the author approaches it in anything like a methodical way).

I was also lucky with my dissertation as I had a lot of guidance from my supervisor and my specialist advisor. My supervisor was a very conscientious and dedicated Italian woman whose fluent but distinctive way of speaking English has helped me along with Kim’s dialogue. (One thing I’ve learned from having had conversations in English with probably hundreds of Germans and other Europeans is that there really isn’t much that marks out a fluent English second language speaker from a native English speaker — except that the second language speaker is usually more precise.) If you have a good supervisor as a mentor and follow their instructions and put the work in then you’ll probably do OK in a dissertation. The same can’t be said for a novel, which is a far more risky and speculative undertaking.

Reviewing the Literature

There are two reasons why the blog has been a little quieter than usual recently. One is that an element of my ‘other life’ intruded – hopefully the side that will continue to pay the bills in future.  I had to submit an assignment for my Open University MSc in Software Development. I’d set aside a fortnight or so to concentrate on this but I ended also producing going on for 7,000 words of ‘The Angel’, which diluted my efforts somewhat.

I ended up sitting at the laptop in the end from 6am one day until 2am the next morning to try and complete the assignment before the deadline.  The way this OU course works is to build up the final dissertation of about 15,000 words in incremental assignments so you start off with a proposal and then add the literature review and the draft research before submitting the whole thing at the end all polished up and with a conclusion.

What I had to complete was the literature review – which isn’t an enjoyable account of a few choice novels read recently but an attempt to track down academic literature relevant to your subject and assess its contribution to the body of knowledge. My topic is Enterprise Architecture, which is basically how one organises the many IT systems within an organisation to work effectively rather than, as usually happens in practice, allowing IT to re-inforce the warring sectarianism and factionalism within any large organisation.  The term ‘architecture’ has been appropriated by the IT industry to the annoyance of some of the building variety but the analogy transfers quite well. (And I believe that the same sort of skills used in this line of IT work transfer well into novel writing — being able to see the underlying structure of plot, pace, character and so on which lie beneath the surface detail and complexity — I think some of the feedback I gave in the City course owed something to these skills.)

In this area, where IT interacts deals with the corporate strategy of an organisation, it’s quite difficult to find any contemporary academic literature in the first place. This is probably because, despite IT all being based on the work of very clever people in universities, many contemporary practitioners are militantly anti-academic – wanting to prove) how macho, hands-on and problem solving they can be to ‘the business’ (a meaningless and self-loathing term that is used to elevates the status of anyone in a company NOT in IT the IT department as doing the real work).

In ‘The Angel’ James is motivated to leave his City job by this sort of philistinism. Despite his outward gaucheness  and blokey good nature, he’s actually a very bright chap – he has some Masters degree in Finance – his (ex-)job is in the application of clever computer systems which few people (including Will, his boss) can understand. He wants to learn – except now about art and cookery – and he’s pretty appalled by the crass anti-intellectualism of those around him.

So I’ve been finding recent academic papers in my area from places as diverse as Venezuela and Taiwan and I’m a little guilty of not really reading them properly – just finding a quotation which illustrates a point I’ve wanted to make. Doing the novel writing course has made me aware of the main criticism I’m likely to get from my supervisor for what I submitted – the narrative coherence could be improved.

There are a reasonable amount of references and it’s all pretty much on-topic but there’s probably far more work require to relate these to my own argument and research question (and the vagueness of exactly what it is what I’m meant to be analysing in my own research is another bigger flaw).

Even so, this is exactly why the OU structures these dissertations as it does — so when you make a cock-up of the first attempt you have plenty of time to improve it before the eventual submission deadline. Hopefully!

It’s an interesting time management challenge to juggle a serious MSc project and trying to complete the novel started on the City course — a distillation of the question about what I need to do to make a living against what I think I’d like to do.  However, I read a few writing magazines on holiday which gave some information about average published novelists’ earnings suggests that no matter how successful the writing goes, the day-job is likely to be needed for a while yet.