I’ve now received my copy of the BBC DVD collection of the complete plays of Shakespeare. I’ve had a copy of the book on my shelves for many years and never read one play from it, but I can see myself slowly working through these videos.
Anyway I’m starting alphabetically with All’s Well that Ends Well. This has a sexual encounter at the heart of the story, although the scene itself is not shown since they didn’t do things like that on stage in 1600. This puts Flo Swann’s comment into context. If I want to retain the sex scenes I need to work out how to make them integral to the plot rather than just a spicy add-on.
That’s a worthy challenge!
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Reader Feedback 1 Comment
Time Crystal has been read! I’ve now received a review from the first ever reader, Flo Swann. The good news is she sort-of liked it and thought it had the potential to be a plot-driven page-turner. The bad news is that she wrote a three page report of things she didn’t like.
Among the major revisions she suggested was to remove all the sex scenes. Her comments ranged from YUCK through AWFUL to DREADFUL. I have previously worried that these scenes might offend some readers. Oddly enough she had no problem with four letter swear words.
I’ve almost decided to take these scenes out and tone down the whole sexuality of the characters. Previously I’d been set on making the plot character driven, but Flo introduces the idea of a plot-driven story, which is new to me and definitely appeals because creating character has always struck me as the most difficult part of writing and the thing I’ve probably spent most time on in the past five years. If I can get away from this and concentrate more on the story that has to be a good thing.
Flo also wants to remove all references to toilets. “The whole latrine discussion is pointless. The reader doesn’t care–when you read sci fi you don’t care how the characters are going to keep hygiene! Ditto the shopping trips–we don’t really care how they’re eating.”
Now this I’m not so sure about. When characters face a disaster which takes them back to the stone age they could easily be wiped out by a spread of infection. Maybe I need to make this clearer? No, I guess I just need to bring it into the plot. I need to show why the characters, and therefore the reader, should care about hygiene.
And even with a plot-driven story still the characters need to be clearly defined and to develop during the story. As Martha Alderson says: “…no matter how exciting the action, [a story with only Dramatic Action] lacks the human element. Such an omission increases your chances of losing your audience’s interest; readers read 70% for character.” A reader wants action but also character.
So the plot must be at the forefront of everything from now on, but with characters influencing and growing with the plot. Good trick if you can pull it off!
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ATLAS,
CERN,
Inaccuracy Leave a Comment
The major “inaccuracy” in Time Crystal, that is, the major things which are describe which do not actually exist, are
- the covered Walkway from the Globe to the ATLAS Control Building
- the ATLAS Observation Room
Both of these items were in the original plans for the ATLAS buildings. In the story Wyken Seagrave imagines that by 2012 both of them will have been constructed, but at the time of writing the story (2007) neither exist.
A minor “inaccuracy” is that the Mercator software does not exist. This is described in the SciSoftA entry in this blog.
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ATLAS,
CERN Leave a Comment
In the novel Time Crystal SciSoftA is Alex Karolyi’s Hungarian software company. It’s web site is www.scisofta.com. It was this company that wrote Mercator, the software that allows ATLAS scientists (and visitors) to retrieve event data and create images on the screen.
In reality there are several pieces of software in ATLAS that do a similar job.
Details of Persint can be found at https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Atlas/PersintWiki
Information on Atlantis is at http://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/atlantis/
Wyken Seagrave imagines Mercator as a combination of these two pieces of software. The view they characters get in Volume 1 in the ATLAS Observation Room is supposed to be like Persint while the view in USA15 is like Atlantis.
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Reader Feedback [3] Comments
Since I’ll be printing reviewer’s copies of volume 1 in November it makes sense to offer them more widely. I therefore invite you to subscribe to a copy. I’ll have to charge to cover my costs.
Please note that this is not a publication of the book. No ISBN is attached to this work and the final publication might differ significantly from this version, depending on reader feedback.
How do I get my Copy?
A reviewers copy of Time Crystal Volume 1, written, printed, bound and dedicated by Wyken Seagrave, costs US$29.99 including First Class Postage in UK or air shipping to the rest of the world. These books will be available in December, just in time for Christmas. We are taking orders now so we can judge the print run.
Printed the first two copies of Volume 1 over the weekend. The first was posted to George Westbrook. She’s going on holiday and needed some reading material and she couldn’t take an A4 copy so I used Pagemaker (an ancient Adobe piece of desktop publishing software) to create signatures of sixteen pages which I then stapled and hot-glued into a cover I printed. The cover was a little thin so on the second copy I added some blank pages at the start and stuck them to the cover. This also helped to prevent them falling out. The end signatures are typically less well-glued than the centre ones.
Printing these signatures was a nightmare when a blank page went through and I couldn’t work out where to restart printing. Worked it out eventually but not something I want to do very often. I figure the copies cost me about $10 in materials, which compares well with the $40 most printers would want to print that volume of books.
I was quite happy with the result. It’s important because
a) the printed article has a different look and feel than when seen on screen.
b) I’m probably going to offer 50 copies to a sample of seventeen-year-olds for their comments.
Then I started proofing one of these copies and then had the problem of how to update the copy with the new pages and I got in a terrible mess trying to stick the revised pages back in and ruined my beautiful book. I then printed the whole thing again on A4, much easier and quicker, and began proofing that. Came up with some good ideas, such as putting a separator between changes of Point of View.
I also started thinking about fonts and decided the book should be printed in Agency FB and Perpetua. Agency has a nice angular shape which suggests the angularity of Crystal. Perpetua is similar to Times New Roman but much more condensed, so cheaper to print. This will be useful to print samples and if (heaven forbid) I can’t find a publisher for this masterpiece.
Last friday was the 31st of August. On that day in 1969 I painted a not-very-good picture, infatuated with a married girl called Pam and waiting to go to Nottingham University where the not-very-good picture was subsequently shown in a student art exhibition. The key feature of this picture, as I recall, was the hard circle of paint skin lifted from the surface of an old oil-paint tin which I had found in the garage (which I had helped my father build) and stuck to a piece of hardboard. All pretty grimy.
Last Friday was much brighter. I took my wife to Upton on Severn, Worcestershire. It’s a pretty and undeveloped town with a tower that still bears the scars of the 1660 Civil War when Oliver Cromwell took the town. She found a charity shop open so she was happy.
We went because I wanted a map of the Pre-Alps and there is a wonderful map shop there. The walk I had planned along the River Severn was disappointing. We didn’t go far upstream along the Severn from the rusting bridge. The walk is un-used, barren and sterile. We went back over the bridge and walked downstream but, apart from the magnificent views of the distant Malvern Hills and the evidence of the recent flooding caused by global warming there isn’t much to see.
We came back to Coventry via Stratford and we stopped off the Dirty Duck for a plate of chicken salad and chips. Afterwards we walked up to the The Courtyard Theatre where they were playing Twelfth Night and the interval drinks were set out all round the bar waiting for anyone who cared to drink them. I bought a copy of the BBC DVD of the play in the shop and tried to watch it on Sunday evening.
For these past many years WS hasn’t communicated with me. The effort of understanding him never seemed rewarded. I couldn’t see the point of studying him. After watching the DVD three times I’ve changed my mind. I think his plotting is interesting although of course it’s all very dated and driven by unlikely character motivation. Why, for example, would the Viola pretend to be a eunuch and serve the Duke? Such a high-risk strategy is unexplained yet it is key to the plot. If I’d been writing it I would have found a more plausible explanation, perhaps the Duke’s eunuch had just died and there weren’t any more on the island or whatever.
When I was seventeen I spent a lot of time studying King Lear when I should have been learning physics. Anyway I was sufficiently impressed that I’ve ordered all the BBC DVDs, 37 of them for about US$6 each, so I can finally work my way through them when I’m cooking dinner.
He also has the asset that he has the same initials as me! WS.
