A Boy and his Blog!

It looks like things might be turning around for the Nintendo Wii. I stumbled across the news on a gaming blog that A Boy and his Blob is being re-released.
I remember playing this when I was, like, 8 years old. Good times!
It was about a boy who just kind of came across this blob thing from space (they didn't really worry too much about story back then) and he found out that he could feed the blob jellybeans and it would turn into a ladder, or a hot air balloon, or a hole, or all kinds of great stuff! It made no sense, especially when you consider how you learn that a blob from space even likes jellybeans. What old school games lacked in story they made up for in sheer ridiculous difficulty! I remember it being really, really hard. They don't really do that with games nowadays, but I hope they don't make the remake too straightforward. (Remember Battletoads!?) And I'm glad to see they seem to have kept that old sense of whimsy and haven't tried to 'grow up' the series. Like, I'm thinking you don't feed him a napalm jellybean and he turns into a flamethrower or anything.
The graphics on the Wii are looking great. Throw in some story and I think you've got a winner. Of course, I don't actually have a Wii, so... Hmm.


The original Boy (and his Blob) embarking on his poorly scripted original adventure. Back when kids didn't need wimpy things like faces on their video game characters, just a litte black dot to see by.
I actually remember being fully impressed by the backgrounds in this game when it came out


The new Boy. He has a Blob too. And a face! Spoiled!!

Space Bread

This week I found out that, according to an astronaut, in space you are not allowed to have bread because the crumbs float around at zero gravity into your eye!

Now that I am learning Chinese I could try and become a Chinese citizen, train as a fighter pilot, get on the Chinese space programme, boom! Space.
But I would miss bread too much.



Doo-doo-doo-doo, space bread!

On the Road... the wind in the sand in my hair...

I've been doing a lot of travelling recently.
In the last two weeks I can cross off Auckland's North Shore, Katikati, Waihi and Raglan as places I have now visited and escaped from relatively unscathed!

Personalised plates: they're pretty popular nowadays, and people are getting a bit reckless with them, in my opinion. Obviously there aren't as many options as their used to be unless we start inventing new, retarded words to put on them.
I propose that personalised plates, like the text messages of the semi-illiterate, are a kind of linguistic rorschach test. I will give you an example.
I witnessed the following personalised plate a few weeks back:
NDLGNS
I take it as a challenge to my manliness to try and figure out what these plates mean, so I put my brain to work. I decided that the car was owned by an IT company, and the plate said NeeD LoGiNs?
But I was wrong. And my wrongness incensed me, because my answer - to me at least - made perfect sense. So I sought a second opinion.
Having written the offending license plate down, I showed it to Miss D. She pondered for a while and came up with NeeDLeGuNS, which would be a perfect plate for someone who loved Halo too much.
What did the plate really say? iNDuLGeNSe (sic)
Obviously!

Impending Separation...

As part of the Chinese Language scholarship I was awarded in August, I leave for China in a little under two weeks.
Such an event requires meticulous planning. Think about it: I'm going to be away from my iTunes for over a month!
I've downloaded a couple of full albums (Fall Out Boy and Nickelback) and some single tracks (Flyleaf, Escape the Fate, Story of the Year, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus). I've also put the best tracks from some of my favourite artists (Foo Fighters, 311, Weezer, Fun Lovin' Criminals) into playlists - call them my own 'greatest hits' collections, although usually the songs I like best are neither singles nor hits.
I hope it's enough to tide me over...
The new Fall Out Boy album, Folie a Deux is well worth a listen. I'm digging the riffing of America's Suitehearts and the retrospective outro of What a Catch, Donnie at the moment. There's an element of extra value in any Fall Out Boy album because half the tracks require you to guess what the heck their title means.

On the trip to Beijing I will be accompanied by the lovely Mrs Powley. Please check out our adventures at the following blog:
www.chicketychinathechinesechicken.blogspot.com
And pass it on to anyone else you know who might be keen to tune in and see if I survive. I won't make any bold promises about how frequently I'll update (this time!) but I'm only there for three weeks, so I'll have to be on the ball.
Merry Christmas to all. Yes, even you.

The Problem with Music Videos...

Back to music this time.
So I love music. No doubts there. But they don’t make it easy, do they?
I find it hard to watch music videos nowadays, because of two things that wind me up immensely. I think you’ll agree that both are an equally dangerous blight on the music industry. I have included links to all the videos so you can be similarly outraged, if that is your thing.

#1 – The Product Placement
Is it not enough that we have to contend with ad breaks every 8 minutes on TV? Now we have products shoved in our faces during music videos.
Instead of ‘Say (All I Need)’, I’m surprised OneRepublic didn’t name their single ‘LaCoste provide footwear for our whole band. Thanks, LaCoste!’ Who knew shoes were so essential for rocking!(Check the video at 1:34, 2:08, 2:43, 3:07, 3:14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pye5Uh6XqZc

Katy Perry’s new song goes one better – she not so surreptitiously endorses two products in her latest video ‘Hot N Cold’. (Diesel sunnies at 1:49, 1:57, and a Nokia phone at 2:54, 2:56-58, 3:03-3:06)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-LhyAVzDBI

These are not bad songs. Is it really necessary to plug luxury items to make enough money to be a super-famous music star? These are not bad videos. But every time I see them I cringe at what is just blatant product placement. I’m a little embarrassed for these artists, you know? It’s like watching Big Bird tell you that “today’s show was brought to you by the letters B, I, and new Coke Zero! Same Coke flavour, no sugar!” It just isn’t right. The video should showcase these bands’ talent, not their marketing savvy.
Of course there’s no such thing as bad publicity, apparently. The mere fact that I’ve devoted about an hour of my life to writing this probably goes some way to proving that point. Oh dear, it’s probably time to move onto…

#2 – The Pussycat Dolls
Did you know if you take a lump of clay, form it into basic woman shapes and then ask Satan enough times, he will make you some Pussycat Dolls of your very own?
They’re like the punch line to a bad joke. “Hey, Bill, you’ll love this one. How many models does it take to sing a pretty average pop song?”
“Well, Ted, shouldn’t it take just one? Maybe two if they wanna do some harmonies or something. No more than three, surely.”
“Then what the hell are five sixths of the Pussycat Dolls for?”
“Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! You kill me, Ted.”
‘I Hate this Part’, their latest effort, has skyrocketed them to new levels of ridiculousness, as Nicole, the ‘band’s’ lead singer and possibly the only one who knows how to string a melody together, harmonises with herself. Five women in the video, but only one sings. She even has to play the piano at the same time. If I was her, I’d be pissed. And if the music industry is in as dire trouble as we are led to believe, then stop paying the four useless ones!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rN4f0J6oQA

As you know, every Pussycat Dolls video in their short history of mediocrity ends with them stripping off at least one layer of clothing. This video ends with an unexpected downpour of rain that soaks their remaining skimpy outfits. This is the visual equivalent of the one semitone key change in every Westlife song ever. You hope it won’t happen this time, but you’re really not surprised when it does. “Oh, now they’re wet,” you say. “Yawn.” It’s so completely expected that you can’t help but sigh when they meet your basement-level expectations.

We are on the brink of disaster here, people. Sooner or later the Pussycat Dolls will start endorsing their special brand of hooker-wear in their music videos. And that will be the end of the music industry as we know it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and it doesn’t get much more vacuous than that.

My Sky Shaped Box

I read a book the other week called Heart-Shaped Box. I was intrigued by the title, which I assumed was a reference to the Nirvana song. I was sort of right, but sort of wrong too. This is fine, because it was a fantastic story.
In this book, a man is pursued by a ghost that he purchased off the internet.
In one scene the protagonist notes that the ghost is visible and dangerously active while the sun is obscured by cloud. But it cannot stand the light, and when the sun breaks through the clouds the ghost is rendered intangible and ineffective by it.
To me, this rang true as a great metaphor for Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). While I am by no means one of those people who jumps on the internet to self-diagnose themselves the minute they have the sniffles I have wondered for some time how much the light of the sun affects my mood, my desire to hide myself away from the world.
There are days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey. There are other days when I feel like I am lord of all I survey so long as all I survey is the inside of my house with the curtains closed and the doors locked.
Bring on the summer sun!

Failure

It's been a while, but I'm busy so stick it.
As you should know, I am the author equivalent of the waiter/actor: the teacher/writer.
One thing I wanted to try with this blog - and I assume I can do this but I'm not sure - is to post some of my writing that is otherwise just gathering dust somewhere (well, intangible bit and byte dust, since it's all new-fangled computer writing. I like my friends to read my stuff, but damned if I don't get sick of e-mailing current versions all over the place. Hopefully this will be easier. If it works.
As an apt starting point, I thought I would try posting my story of failing as a writer that I failed to sell to the School Journal.

One Word at a Time: Behind the Scenes of Writing a Story

Do you want to be a writer? Have you ever had an idea and thought, ‘that would make a great story’? I have. So one day I wrote that idea down in a notebook. Two years later I had a complete story.

Here is my story about the journey of writing a story…

The idea for my story actually came on Christmas Day. I was watching a Christmas movie on television, and it wasn’t very good, to be honest. But it made me think about the hard work Santa has to put in on that one night of the year. ‘How does he do it?’ I wondered. I thought I could do a better job of telling that story. Thinking about that one little idea eventually led to a story called The Santa Problem. It’s about Antarctica, elf fights, secret agents, and all kinds of other crazy stuff!

Part of the fun of writing The Santa Problem was researching all those different things I wanted to put in the book. I researched all about the history of Santa, reindeers and elves. I did a lot of research about Antarctica, how to get there (usually in Air Force planes. Cool!), how people survive there, the weather conditions. Did you know that the sun goes down in Antarctica for about two months over winter? That’s right; imagine spending June and July in total darkness! Or did you know that the temperature gets so cold that the wind could freeze the skin off your face? Or that Antarctica has mounds of earth-covered snow or ice called Pingos, kind of like reverse volcanoes? These are all fascinating facts I found out while researching my story, and they all found their way into the story somewhere too.

From start to finish it took me two years to write The Santa Problem. I wrote in two ways: if I was at home I sat at my desk, with my cat on my lap, and typed straight onto my computer. The most important thing for me when I sat down to write out an idea or a chapter was that I was not interrupted. I listened to music so it wasn’t too quiet, but my friends knew that I wouldn’t answer the phone if I was in the middle of writing. If I was somewhere else, like on holiday, I would write into a little notebook and copy my work onto computer later. There were months at a time where I didn’t add a single word to the story – sometimes I was busy with my real life, or I just didn’t have any idea what was going to happen next – but I thought about my story every day. Sometimes I would hold an idea in my head for weeks, rolling it around and thinking about it from different angles. Writing the story wasn’t easy – there were many times I wanted to give up, when it seemed too hard. But I found that once I had started the story it wouldn’t go away. I had to know what was going to happen, I was so interested in where my story was going! It’s a great feeling.

When the story was finished I gave it to some of my friends to read. Because the story was intended for Intermediate age children I also gave it to some of the children in my Year 7 class to read. They actually went through and corrected quite a few spelling and punctuation mistakes! (See, teachers make them too) One girl even suggested an idea that I worked into my story. It’s definitely a good idea to talk to people you trust about your story, and really listen to their feedback.

Finishing the story doesn’t mean that the hard work is over. If you want to have your story made into a book, you need to find a company willing to publish your work. Publishers get hundreds or even thousands of people sending them stories every year, so they barely have time to read them all. They definitely don’t have time to tell you what they liked or didn’t like about your story. So the first step in this process is to post a copy of your manuscript to a manuscript assessor.

The job of the manuscript assessor is to read your story and give you professional advice on what publishers will like about your story, what you should change, whether there are parts of your story that are unclear, that sort of thing. They write all of this information into a big report that they send back to you. It is kind of like handing in an assignment to a teacher for marking. Like a good teacher, a good manuscript assessor will make you feel good about your work while pointing out honestly what needs to be improved upon. The manuscript assessor also provides you with a letter that you can send to publishers saying that you have had your book checked professionally.

Each publisher has a different set of rules for how you show them your work. Most publishers want a hard copy (printed on paper) and only between one or three chapters. They read those ‘sample’ chapters and decide based on that if they think they can sell your story. So picking those sample chapters is a big decision. Do you send the first few chapters? Usually there is a lot of setting up in those chapters for events that occur later, so they may not be the best choice. For The Santa Problem, I chose three chapters that introduced three of the main characters. I figured if the publisher likes those characters they will like the book as a whole.

One publisher liked my sample chapters enough to request the whole manuscript. That was really exciting.

I haven’t found a publisher for The Santa Problem yet. I’m going to keep trying. It’s a well known fact that J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, was rejected many times before having her work published. But even if The Santa Problem never gets published it was worth it. The experience of creating something from start to finish taught me a lot. If you ever have a great idea for a story, I hope you write that idea down and remember it. That idea could be the seed inside your mind that grows and flourishes into a story of your own.


Let me know what you think. I personally believe that the lesson of not succeeding has great merit for children, especially when they're - let's just admit it - spoiled.
And I'm out.