A Ciabatta is Born, and Dramatica

Baby Rebecca got the message. Congrats to Jack and Heather! Lots of pictures here. Cal and I were rooting for you to name her Ciabatta, but Rebecca will do just fine.
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Anyone who’s ever thought seriously about narrative would do well to check out Dramatica. It’s a theory of story unlike any I’ve encountered before.
Its premise is that there is a specific type of story, the “grand argument story”, that has a particular resonance. This type of story is a representation of a human mind turning over a problem and coming to a conclusion. It teases out all of the elements that must be included in order for a story to become a grand argument story.
I found it incredibly insightful. I have believed for a long time that narrative is something that is, to some extent, hardwired into us; that certain stories have special power and meaning. Dramatica is an attempt to identify the structure of those stories, so that writers can create them.
I won’t go into details – there are a lot of them. There’s a free-to-download Dramatica book in pdf thats a few hundred pages long. They’re really trying to push the software they came up with for sale – the software takes the theory and turns it into an operation, asking questions and making suggestions to build up a grand argument story. The theory itself is free.
I find it fascinating to consider that the narrative structure that humans are attuned to is a metaphorical representation of behavioural problem-solving.
I’m not sure how this links to the Joseph Campbell myth-structure stuff. I think they would fit together well, but I’m hardly an expert on either theory.
So. Yes. Dramatica. Check it out. Within the task it sets itself it makes a lot of points that resonate. I’m currently working through a novel plan that I was stuck on, and it’s giving me plenty of ‘of course!’ type moments, which was the goal. I wouldn’t use its approach for all my writing, but it’s a good tool for the arsenal.
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I really want to write a substantial response to idiot/savant’s piece on ‘false consciousness’, because it’s good and something I have opinions & thoughts on. But, as usual, it’s nearing 1am and I still haven’t sent out the email for this week’s Ottakars club thing. So. Sleep instead. Night all.

Post-Con Exhaustion

I crashed out on the couch and lost consciousness for an hour after getting back from work. Haven’t done that for quite some long time. It was good. Yay for the nap couch.
Roleplaying convention “Conpulsion” was good. I sat on the front desk a lot and turned away grumpy yahs. “Yah” is the word for the upper class folk in general, and specifically those students who are at Edinburgh Uni with substantial financial backing from mummy and daddy, or anyone who looks like they fit that profile. (They’re related to “neds” in a matter/anti-matter way.) The student union building was closed (end of term) except for the con, but the memo hadn’t got to a lot of people it seems. Most of them were lovely, of course, but it’s the grumpy and rude people that stick in the memory. Hurrah!
(Graffiti in the university toilets remains a good way to read the psyche of the nation. Aside from the inevitable cottaging graff, the walls are covered with nasty yah-vs-“slacker” and Scots vs English abuse. Class and nationalism still divide this country with a power I keep underestimating.)
The con itself was similar to last year – big, balkanised, drunken. I didn’t make it to any of the games, but I did okay with the ‘hanging out in the bar’ part. It was notable as the con debut of recently-released game AState by local boys Contested Ground Studios, a source of much merriment and celebration because the CGS guys are brilliant and genuine and the game is very worthy indeed.
A personal highlight was being recognised for ‘services to roleplaying in Edinburgh’, mostly in reference to the Ottakars Roleplaying Club, on account of a bunch of write-in nominations by attendees. A huge surprise and I was really touched so see so many people I respect giving me such a show of support. Wow. A really good feeling.

Baby – NOW! (& more on Palestine)

Spare ye a thought for Heather who has a baby inside her that is stubbornly not appearing.
Note also that it’s not too late to have some input into the name of the Elder progeny; check the list on Jack’s blog.
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Cal & I went to another Palestine thing last night, focused on the death of Tom Hurndall. Tom was 21 and English and a photographer, and he was shot in the head by an Israeli sniper in the Palestinian town of Rafah last year. He died from the injury a few weeks ago.
Speaking were a Palestinian guy who was on the scene and witnessed the shooting, and Tom’s sister Sophie who has been part of the family effort to pursue justice for Tom, and for the Palestinian people.
It was pretty harrowing stuff. Hearing from someone who was there what the circumstances of the shooting were was eye-opening – I thought I knew the story but really all I knew was the ‘escorting children to safety’ line. The detail goes, Tom was with over a dozen internationals (including several photographers and reporters from Reuters and other media channels) and they saw three children pinned down in a street by Israeli military fire. Tom went out into the line of fire wearing his reflective jacket and carried one of them back to cover. Then he went back out for the other two children. He didn’t make it.
It’s the fact that he went into a fire zone, and then went back in, that startled me.
What is happening right now in Palestine is an abomination.

Productive Morgue

I am feeling particularly productive. In advance of Conpulsion I’m trying to pull together some material for OGL Horror, a roleplaying book published by Britain’s Mongoose Publishing and written by my vague acquaintance Gar Hanrahan. It was a cool book and I’m enjoying playing with the ideas within. If all goes well I’ll get them published in some form, and if all goes really well I might get paid for them. But we shan’t count chickens, etc etc.
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If you haven’t read Cal’s story yet, go do it. I think it’s cool, but I am entirely biased.
And while I think of it: Cal is a wonderful girlfriend.
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Watched League of Extraordinary Gentlemen over the weekend. Cal was sick so we got out two DVDs, and i had a card that got me a free vid with any chart rental. Of course, we didn’t want any chart rentals, but I picked up LXG anyway because some people do seem to like it. I can’t see why. It’s dire. It takes a special kind of foolishness to take such a good idea and mung it up, but they manage. Only bright spot: Stuart Townsend as Dorian Gray, who stole every scene he was in and most of the ones he wasn’t in.
The other video was the charming All the Real Girls, a great indie romance-drama-thing. Just see it like we did, with no preconceptions – you won’t regret it.
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Which reminds me, we stumbled on a strange lesbian-lovers-in-boarding-school flick late night that had Mischa Barton in the narrator role, and that made me watch some of the first episode of new US wannabe-guilty-pleasure The OC because she’s the lovely girl with the bad boyfriend in that. It was *so strange* seeing the face of little kid Devon from the astonishing movie Lawn Dogs being used to deliver wry 90210-style dialogue, let alone to make deeply felt comments about the mystery of lesbian love. Purpose of this paragraph: find and see Lawn Dogs, it’s great. *Especially* the ending, despite what the critics say.
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And I discovered today that my NZ-rock-gods-to-be Two Lane Blacktop have split up. Sucksville. Their site is gone too. Bigger sucksville.
At least Idle Faction are still together.
Edited to fix the name of the DVD. D’oh!

Why Leon Must Become A God

In the mid 90s, a Kiwi girl named Petra Bagust became the hot chick of the moment with a large section of New Zealand’s disaffected but rising geek overclass. The TV show was Ice TV, pitched at 12-14-year-olds but rapidly winning a larger audience with older teens and twenty-somethings thanks to the odd and often absurd wit of Jon and Nathan, the other presenters, and particularly their willingness to openly mock BH90210 which screened as part of the show. Alongside Jon and Nathan was Petra, who was pretty, smart, and frequently able to keep up with the boys in the madness stakes. Every 90-degree-er’s ideal girlfriend, in other words.
(Petra has since fallen from the early glory, and now presents a host of lifestyle and travel programmes that completely fail to tap into the lunacy of those early Ice shows. She’s growed up, one supposes.)
Most of you reading this will have heard of Leon, fellow nomad, boy of the bread, old and trusty friend, the donkey to my moose, and the guy i set out travelling with 16 months or so ago. Well, one afternoon, in the late 90s, Leon was with friends at a museum in the south of New Zealand, and he stumbled across Petra. She was filming a segment for whatever TV show she’d landed on – this was in the waning days of Ice, when the other options were just opening up – and naturally, Leon went up and had a chat. Like most Kiwi personalities, she was perfectly happy to chat away. She even co-operated above and beyond when Leon asked for a signature for me – she wrote me something akin to a short letter, complete with sexual innuendo and a secret piece of information that “no-one else knew” (and no, I’m still not gonna pass it on). I was stoked. It made me laugh.
Leon is currently working backstage on ‘When Harry Met Sally’ in the West End, starring 90210’s Luke Perry (everything connects!) and Buffy’s Alyson Hannigan. (Luke was in the Buffy movie! Everything Connects!!!)
I’ve been a Buffy fan since the start, watching the first ep broadcast on the brand-new NZ channel 4 on the advice of Phil Wakefield in the Evening Post newspaper. I wasn’t convinced by it at first – good, sure, but missable – and it was only as the weeks rolled on that it became apparent what show creator Joss Whedon was doing.
What he was doing was making one of the best TV series in the history of the medium. Seriously. It is narrowly beaten by Freaks and Geeks in my personal list of modern greats, edging out Homicide and Twin Peaks.
Key to that success was the performance of Alyson Hannigan as Willow, nerdy sidekick and audience-identification figure. At least, she was in episode one. She changed a lot over the show’s seven seasons, to say the least.
Hannigan also found a measure of fame as Michelle, the flute girl in American Pie, a good film that became a huge success based solely on one killer line she delivers with great style.
And so I spoke to Leon. “Do with Alyson like you did with Petra and I shall make you like unto a GOD!!!”
So he did.

So now I’ve got to make him a God.

Where’s my prize?

I picked 14 of 19 correctly in my Oscars picks. 15 if you cut me some room for rooting for Keisha against all the odds, and count my second choice of Charlize.
I was outfoxed on Tim Robbins over Benicio, LOTR’s screenplay win over American Splendor, LOTRs costume win over Pearl Earring (I stand by the choice, Oscar likes the period dramas), and LOTR’s editing win over City of God (boo! City of God shoulda won that one!).
Yay to all the Kiwis involved. What a massive number of trophies coming home to New Zealand this year… cool bananas. I can only imagine the good vibes swimming around Wellington right now. Good on ya mates.
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Some Amsterdam writing up has occured in my travel email. If you haven’t subscribed, well, you should. It’s hardly a high-traffic email list (about one every 2 weeks last year) and you get more of ME! Which can only be a good thing. Subscribe by sending a blank email to morgueatlarge-subscribe@topica.com, and you’re done.
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Crufts was just on TV. It is wrong. Dog shows should be about dogs running around sniffing things and jumping up at things and splashing through things and generally making chaos. That is the fun! Show dogs are not fun.
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Actually got off my behind and submitted Fell Legacy to a real live publisher. Worth a shot, anyway. More news as it comes to hand!!!!

[morgueatlarge] The Nether Regions

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent March 2004]

Long time no email, but the reason is that little has happened. As Europe starts to thaw, though, the travel bug starts to kick in, and that means some emails should be swinging out from Edinburgh in the nearish future.

Cal and I are just back from 4 days in the Netherlands. We hopped across Saturday morning to Schiphol, the only destination in Europe served by Edinburgh’s airport – quite an education to see how many places trains from Schiphol can reach inside of an hour. But we were heading to Amsterdam.

Going to Amsterdam is like going back to University. You enter a world that is entirely set up to provide you with excuses to get very drunk, very stoned and very laid. The bare facts of sex, drugs and, er, more sex and drugs are treated so matter-of-factly that you might as well be living in a hostel. And the whole red-light district is really not that different from half-price cocktail night at Zebos. (Non-wellingtonians – Zebos is a prime haunt for underage drinkers in NZ’s capital city. At least, it was two years ago. I might be out of date.) There’s even some serious stuff going on (museums) which you can drop in on for a couple hours each day, before the fun starts.

Of course, University wasn’t like that for most people. For most, as far as I can gather, it was kind of like walking through a carnival with hardly any money, seeing all the banners and watching all the rides and occasionally splashing out and trying something, like say taking a look at the monkey with the head of a fish, an having an even chance it was way less interesting than the huckster out front made it seem.

Where was my point again?

So. Amsterdam. I’m not gonna talk in this email about the prostitutes and drugs, mostly because I didn’t try out either. Suffice it to say that everything you have heard is true, and that no matter how many times people tell you that everything you have heard is true, you won’t quite believe it until you go there and see for yourself.

Instead I’ll talk about the Anne Frank house. (And he changes the tone of the email with a single giant wrench!)

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I’ve still not read Anne Frank’s diary, but I was familiar with the contents – family in hiding, Nazis discover them, horrific ending that is hard to summarize without seeming inappropriately flip. Anyway, in preparation for this visit I read a little bit about it, still not the actual diary (though I plan to, still, yes, I know I know) but quotes and notes, enough to know what was going on and who the people were.

I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.

The queue is long, and the place is full. It’s like a mourner’s procession, or gawkers slowing at an accident, but it’s both more profound and more sinister than that. The participation in the Anne Frank House experience is an integral part of its nature – it is a shrine, now, and Anne’s sad fate has become a conscious and conscientious symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust, and indeed the horrors of human nature. As you pass through the narrow rooms it is impossible to forget that this is what Anne’s diary recorded, above all – the nature of living, as a human, in a difficult world. People getting by, morning turning into night. Her account is both all-encompassing, because it is about every human, and devastatingly unique, because of the specific circumstances in which she wrote.

From my journal:
“I spent the whole time feeling as if my heart had turned to wood and was trying to float to the surface. A strange jolt to come through a door and see the room Anne lived in, all the images of film stars still glued in place on the wall. It won’t be easy to forget. A good thing.”

A horrible place. Another reminder of the black rents the Nazis carved across the continent just a few short decades ago, rents that will take a few more generations to heal – if they ever do.

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Some travel irony for you:

Hotelier in Rotterdam: “I think all Europeans should learn their mother tongue and English. It is stupid that some don’t! I hate the fact that we all have to learn so many languages. It’s those peoples like the French, they are so arrogant, only wanting to speak French!” Name of hotel: Hotel Bienvenue.

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I may not have sent out a morgueatlarge in a while, but I post on my blog every few days now. Getting the hang of it, slowly, although still prone to longwinded political-type rants, so fair warning of that. Currently at the top (March 3 entry) is a photo of me in Rotterdam, if you like that sort of thing.
Blog is at: http://www.additiverich.com/morgue/
Go read it.

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Happy birthday to my dear papa!

Peace to you all

~`morgue