Imagine you’re at a wedding reception, say, sat at a table that consists entirely of single people and couples who’ve only just been introduced to each other. And imagine that the following conversation were to occur:

Person 1: [To Person 2] Do you ever watch that Sunday morning discussion show thing on BBC1?

Person 2: No, I’m usually out then. Is it any good?

Person 1: Why are you out?

Person 2: Well… I go to church.

Person 1: Church?

Person 2: Yeah. Erm, I’m a Christian.

Person 1: [Apparently curious] Right. Perhaps you can tell me something. I’m just curious. But why are you a Christian?

Person 2: Oh. Okay. [Thinking] Well, I guess it’s because I feel blessed by the love of Jesus Christ and inspired to follow his teachings.

Person 1: [Looking a bit determined now] And one of those teachings is that you should do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, right?

Person 2: Yeah. It is.

Person 1: Okay. [Starts getting aggressive] So what if, say, you had a daughter, and she was in hospital dying, because she had something wrong with her heart, and she needed a heart transport, but there were no donor hearts available, and then some Columbian gangsters murdered a nine-year old street girl and stripped her body down for spare parts and her heart was being offered for sale on the black market, would you buy that little girl’s heart from the people who’d murdered her? Which would be basically paying them to kill someone else’s daughter? Would you do it?

Person 2: But… I don’t have a daughter who needs a heart transplant.

Person 1: [Really quite aggressive now] Yeah, but if you did, would you? Would you?

Person 2: [Helplessly shaking their head] Well I don’t know. Anyway, about this Sunday show?

Person 1: [Insistent] I’m just curious. I’m not being nasty. But would you? Would you do it?

Person 2: How could I know? How would anyone know how they’d react in that situation?

Person 1: [Sits back in chair triumphant, as those he's proved a point] Ah. See! And what about…

You’d probably find such an exchange bizarre, incomprehensible, even. On what possible planet is it in anyway acceptable to demand that a complete stranger provide an answer to your bizarre, random, arbitrary, hypothetical thought experiment?

And yet it happens to us vegans all the time. If I had to pull a guestimated fact out of my body’s rear-mounted, downward-firing, solid waste disposal orifice, I’d say that on about 25% of the conversations in which it emerges that you’re a vegan, one of the others persons present decides to demand that you answer a bizarre, random thought experiment, typically involving plane-crashes on Pacific islands populated entirely by rabbits. And of course, if you do try to provide an answer, the person usually takes that as an invitation to badger you about it for the next half hour, no matter how much you say, “Could we not just agree to disagree?”

(I don’t mean that 25% of people react this way. I’m suggesting that in any such occasion, there’s about a one in four chance that one of the several people present will react in this way.)

And of course, although they’re aggressively demanding that you explain to them why you’re a vegan, they’re not actually expecting you to give any kind of logical, internally coherent answers; if you do , that only makes them more aggressive, as they take that as some kind of personal attack by you, on them. It sometimes seems that the only way to make them stop is to either agree to abandon in their entirety your ethical and philosophical beliefs, or just get quite rude and tell them to shut up,  sod off, and leave you alone.

It really pisses me off, and I know from talking to other vegans that it really pisses them off too. It happens often enough that you’re sometimes inhibited about mentioning that you’re a vegan, and instead dance around the subject, as though you’ve got some kind of bizarre eating disorder you’d rather not discuss. It’s important to stress that these aren’t occasions where we’re in any way proselytising, trying to push our opinions onto others. It’s simply situations where us being vegan has merely come up in conversation.

It most recently happened to me, two days ago, at a wedding.

Him: Why aren’t you eating the starter?

Me: Erm. We can’t.

Him: Why not?

Me: Well… We’re vegans, and there’s cheese and honey in it.

Him: [Apparently curious] Right. Tell me this. I’m just curious. What would you do if you were trapped in some woods and there were only rabbits to eat?

Me: But we’re not trapped in some woods with only rabbits to eat.

Him: [Insistent and demanding, if not quite aggressive] But what if you were?

I’m always more than happy to explain why I’m a vegan, to anyone who genuinely wants to hear why. And if you’re curious about the ethical difficulties I face in my day-to-day life, that’s fine too. But please don’t then hit me with the bizarre random thought experiments. I’m not a barbarian living in the bronze age. I’m not trapped on a biologically implausible tropical island. And I’m not living in a near-future dystopia with a sick daughter who urgently needs a heart transplant from a transgenic pig. I’m a middle-aged, twenty-first century bloke on a reasonable income living in an advanced Western democracy.

And I’m also just trying to enjoy the wedding.

Marketing a book is hard. I know. I’ve done it, and not necessarily that well. But the other day I came across an attempt so stunningly inept that I felt compelled to talk about – albeit with some attempt to mask identifying details, so I don’t feel like I’m being over-cruel.

The principles of using Twitter, or any social network come to that, seem to me to be pretty basic. Be honest, be yourself, engage in genuine two-way dialogue, and don’t see others purely in terms of how you can use them and what they can do for you. Other people don’t exist for your convenience alone. They have their own needs and desires, and if you’re looking to them to help you out in your needs and desires, you first need to look at how you can help them out with theirs. Entertain them. Inform them. Help them. Then they might help you. It’s not hard. After all, those are pretty much the rules for all networking, both on and offline.

So what was this attempt that so amused and horrified me? Well below is a screenshot where I’ve displayed the bloke’s entire Twitter history to that point on the left with, on the right, the image that he was sending links to:

Yes. He’d written an entire total of six tweets at that point, only one of which was not related to his book – and that was in text speak, which in my humble option isn’t the best choice to make if you’re trying to present yourself as a serious author. He’d made no attempt to craft any kind of online persona, but had instead simply dived in with spammy type messages sent to various organisations to advertise his book.

And what of the spammy type messages themselves? Well after starting with one that did at least have some kind of message and a link to his website, he then gave up on that and just starting sending a link to an image that contained the front cover and back cover blurb. No explanation. Just a link.

The only reason I found out about it was because I follow one of his “targets” and they did retweet it, but with an added comment explaining to him that people don’t usually click on links that come from people they don’t know and which have no accompanying text.

Writing a book is hard. It takes a lot of time and effort. After all that, I’m slightly mystified as to why someone would appear to put in so little thought and effort as to how they might market it.

Some years back, the rules on becoming a citizen of the United Kingdom were changed. Where previously it was based purely on requirements such as residency and marriage, applicants now also had to pass a computerised multiple choice examination. The examination was supposedly about living in Britain, British culture, and British values, and supposedly ensured that anyone becoming a citizen was equipped with the knowledge they would require to live in the United Kingdom.

Since then, this computerised examination has become a useful tool for lazy journalists and TV programme makers wishing to make some kind of point about immigration and multiculturalism. They will get native Britons to sit down and take the test, react with mock surprise when 90+% of them fail, and then use that to prove some kind of point. The latest of these was the otherwise rather good programme “Make Bradford British”, in which they selected their participants from those who had failed the test. (The idea being to take a bunch of people – white, black and Asian – who apparently needed to learn more about what it was to be British, with their failure in the test being the evidence of this).

There’s one slight problem with this. It’s all complete bullshit. The test has nothing to do with “Britishness” and it never did. The key thing you have to understand is that despite what the government say is its purpose, the test is actually a comprehension test designed to test how well someone can understand written English.

(Social Science / Education) Education an exercise consisting of a previously unseen passage of text with related questions, designed to test a student’s understanding esp of a foreign language.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/comprehension

As with all comprehension tests, you first read a particular bit of text. In this case, it’s the government’s publication: “Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship”. The description of this book’s content includes:

…details regarding the latest changes in UK immigration law.

…full information required for the Life in the UK test including chapters on: How the UK is Governed, Employment and Knowing the Law.

…a chapter on sources of help and information, for example, libraries, the police and the internet.

Then, when you think you’ve adequately memorised the information in the book, you take the test, with that test consisting of a series of questions about the book. If you’re literate, have a reasonable grasp of English, and a fair degree of intelligence, passing the test shouldn’t be too hard, provided you put in a bit of time studying, of course.

When the test was first set up, they could have achieved exactly the same result by using a classic novel as the text – Little Dorrit, perhaps, or maybe Pride & Prejudice – which would no doubt have also produced a tidy saving on consultants. So why didn’t they do that? Why didn’t they just be honest and say that they’d decided that only people who could speak English and be able to read should be able to become citizens? If I had to guess, I’d guess they were scared they might be accused of racism.

(I should point out I have no firm opinion on whether or not citizenship should be restricted to literate English speakers, although I do worry that doing so might sometimes produce harsh and unfair outcomes. But what really annoys me is: a) the hypocrisy in not admitting the test’s true purpose; and b) the way the nature of the test is so persistently misrepresented by the media).

But maybe you don’t believe me that the test is a comprehension test, rather than a test of British knowledge. Perhaps you still feel that this is a test that any native-born British person ought to be able to pass, even if they haven’t read the book that it is based on.

Well let’s look at the questions. If the test was truly based on knowledge of culture and values that a native-born Briton would have acquired, simply by growing up in the United Kingdom, then it would consist of questions like this:

You are queuing at the Post Office, when a man jumps the queue and pushes his way in front of you. Do you:

a) Remonstrate with him.

b) Tut loudly.

c) Do nothing.

(Correct answer, B. Option A would be the actions of an excitable southern European, while Option C would be a spineless act, unworthy of the people whose empire once covered a quarter of the globe).

Instead, you get questions like this:

That a British woman has the right to divorce her husband counts as a knowledge of Britain and its values. When this right was created is a matter of specialised historical knowledge. To expect someone to know the answer to that without having first read the book that contains that fact is ludicrous.

Or how about:

Anyone? I know that the population of the UK is about 60 million. If you asked me what proportion of the population is under the age of 19, I might guess that it would be something like 1 in 5 or 1 in 4. If the options in the above question had been 1 million, 3 million, 15 million and 30 million, then it would be an answer that you might expect people to know. But not the above options, not 13, 14, 15 or 16.

And then let’s go with a third one:

At least this one gives you a 50% chance of guessing right, rather than 25%. But does anyone really expect anyone who doesn’t own a newsagents to know the answer to that? (At what age children can start working perhaps, but exactly how many hours? Really?)

How did I get at all these sample questions? Well I tried doing the sample test on the government’s website. Did I pass? Obviously not. Why would you expect me to pass a test which poses questions about a book I haven’t ever read?

Considering I based through it, got one question wrong because I’d misread it, and had don’t no study whatsoever, I thought 58% was reasonable, actually. (And I’d like to think I’m quite bright).

People just need to stop thinking about this as a test of acquired British values. And next time you see programme makers use the tired old cliché of native-born Britons “failing” the citizenship test, be aware of what you’re watching: lazy, bullshitting journalists who should know better.

I think I’ll end with the conversation I had with a co-worker, when I was discussing this very subject, and the fact that I’d failed the test. I explained my entire theory, including a sample question I’ve previously encountered which asks which proportion of the population of the United Kingdom are Welsh: 2%, 4%, 6% or 8%. (Or something like that). The conversation then went like this.

Him: I still think it’s pretty shocking that 90% British citizens fail this test.

Me: But it’s full of questions like the one about Wales. Do you know what proportion of British citizens are Welsh? Because I don’t.

Him: No. But people still ought to be able to pass this test.

Me: So what you’re saying is that you’re surprised that 90% of people can’t correctly answer a question that you yourself can’t answer?

Him: Well, if you put it like that.

It’s clearly about language. Anyone who denies that is either deluded or lying.

If you’d like to try taking the practice test yourself, you can find it here:

http://www.ukcitizenshiptest.co.uk

On Sunday, it will be exactly one hundred years since the sinking of the Titanic. Certain, best not mentioned, persons on Twitter aside, it’s an event widely recollected, with many lessons that have gone into history. The main two of these are, of course:

1) Make sure your ship has enough lifeboats to rescue everyone on board.

2) Don’t drive your ship at full speed into a known ice-field.

There were other lessons learned, such as the need for a ship’s radio room to be manned at all times – the nearest ship to the sinking Titanic, the Californian, could have saved hundreds of lives had it responded to the distress call. But it knew nothing of what was happening, as its radio operator had gone off duty.

But are there other lessons we could learn?

A couple of months ago, I found out something I’d not previously known about the disaster. My friend Jane was embarking on a craft project to weave a bookmark that recorded the death rates on the Titanic. You can read about this magnificent combination of geekiness and craft at the blog post she wrote about it.

http://jane.dallaway.com/titanic-data-weaving-weaving-project-14

So we were in the pub, talking about the death rates of the various groups on the Titanic. Her bookmark would distinguish between men, woman and children, and between 1st class, 2nd class, 3rd class and crew (the latter having both men and woman, but no children).

In general, the death rates told the story you’d expect. Within any particular group, women and children were more likely to survive than men (although interestingly, children had a lower survival rate than women, at 51% compared with 74%). And course 1st class passengers were more likely to survive than 2nd class passengers who in turn were more likely to survive than 3rd class passengers.

But there was one significant exception, which was in the group who were least likely to survive. You would perhaps expect this to be either third class men, or male crew, but it wasn’t, although both those groups did still suffer horrific casualty rates: only 16% of third class men survived, and 20% of male crew (the latter chiefly being those who manned the lifeboats).

The highest death rate certainly wasn’t first class men: 33% of those survived, almost as high a rate as third-class children (34%). No, the group that statistically were least likely to survive were second-class male passengers, of whom only 8% survived.

This little factoid got me thinking. Was there a larger lesson, from life, here?

It seems to me that throughout history, the upper classes have laid down a definition of what it is to be a “gentlemen”, or an “Englishman”, but have never felt any particular responsibility for they themselves to live up to that definition. Rules are things they define for those lesser creatures beneath them; but those rules need not apply to them.

The upper classes will sneer at the working classes for supposedly all claiming benefits, even while they use dodgy accounting schemes to largely avoid paying any tax themselves.

The upper classes will damn the working classes for supposedly being drunken hooligans and vandals, even while they themselves join university drinking clubs whose sole raison d’etre appears to be the drunken destruction of pubs and restaurants.

The upper classes have always been happy to brand the workings classes as supposedly lacking in morals, even while keeping a mistress and several prostitutes on the side.

When the upper classes defined what it was to be an “English gentleman”, that was never a definition that they felt any need to live up to; they felt they were entitled to the respect a gentleman was supposedly due merely by virtue of the status into which they were born. No, it was the middle-classes who bought into the myth, who believed the bullshit, who thought that they too could be gentlemen if they only behaved as they thought their supposed betters were behaving. It was they who paid their taxes, and were faithful to their wives, and didn’t ever get drunk and smash things up.

Looked at it this way, is it in any way surprising that while the second class men were largely upholding the principle of women and children first, the first class men were more than four times as likely to board a lifeboat?

I should clarify that I can’t and wouldn’t blame any individual for climbing into a lifeboat. To not have enough lifeboat places put people in an inhuman position. And this tragedy was turned into a farce when there were cases of men being needlessly turned out of lifeboats that then sailed away half empty, the places vacated by those men, left unfilled. My interest here is the second-class male passengers’ largely unreported sacrifice and courage.

But is this the full story? I mentioned the above thought to Jane at the pub. However, when she then looked into it further, it emerged that there was perhaps a simpler, less heroic answer, which is contained in the following extract that she emailed to me:

From “The loss of the SS Titanic” by Lawrence Beesley

About this time, while walking the deck, I saw two ladies come over from the port side and walk towards the rail separating the second-class from the first-class deck. There stood an officer barring the way. “May we pass to the boats?” they said. “No madam” he replied politely, “your boats are down on your own deck,” pointing to where they swung below. The ladies turned and went towards the stairway, and no doubt were able to enter one of the boats: they had ample time. I mention this to show that there was, at any rate, some arrangement — whether official or not — for separating the classes in embarking in boats; how far it was carried out, I do not know, but if the second-class ladies were not allowed to enter a boat from the first-class deck, while steerage passengers were allowed access to the second-class deck, it would seem to press rather hardly on the second-class men, and this is rather supported by the low percentage saved.

So maybe there is a simpler message. The upper classes will attempt to divide the middle classes from the working classes by telling the middle classes that they are gentlemen. You are like us, they will say, not like those nasty working class oiks. Work with us, they will say, be our accountants, run our businesses, we’ll do right by you. And they will, right up until the shit hits the fan, at which point it’ll be the classes of privilege and power (them) on one side, and everyone else (us) on the other.

This was perhaps the lesson the second-class men learned when they found that they shared their boat deck with those from third-class. George Osborne et al are fond of saying that we’re all in it together. Well we weren’t all in it together then, and I suspect we’re not all in it together now.

Huge thanks to Jane for inspiring this post, providing the data, and for allowing me to use the image of her bookmark.

Eastercon is the British national science-fiction convention. I’ve attending five Eastercons in total. In 2010, I volunteered for the first time as a gopher. Since then I’ve spent something like twenty-five hours gophering, if we’re counting, which I am even if you’re not. I think it’s a cool thing to do, so I thought I’d write a blog post about it, in the hope that it might encourage more people to gopher at future cons.

In general, all my gophering experience has been at Eastercon. (I did once gopher at Dragonmeet, a games convention). So what I have to say is based on the way Eastercon does it, but I suspect it’s very similar at other conventions, if not identical.

What is a Gopher? Gophers are volunteers, drawn from the convention attendees, who help out with general convention duties. Unlike the convention committee and staff, who’ve generally signed up for the “job” in advance, you can volunteer as a gopher at any point during the convention. The only requirement is that you be an attendee (i.e. member, chap/chapess with a convention namebadge) of the convention.

Why Gopher? Quite simply because without gophers, the convention can’t happen. Conventions like Eastercon are run by a “Committee” under which are a set of people who form the “Staff”. These guys put in superhuman amounts of work, both in the years and months running up to the convention and in the convention itself. But once the con starts, they simply need extra hands, some Indians to their Chiefs. Which is where the gophers come in.

How do you become a Gopher? Well when you sign up, there’s usually a box you can tick saying that you want to volunteer, but the way I’ve always done it is to go to the Gopher Hole (this is a room which will be marked on the convention map in the programme) and say that I want to volunteer as a gopher. It’s quite simple. If you’ve never done it before, they can fill you in on what’s involved, and then you get an extra gopher tag you can wear (I attached mine to my main tag).

What if I’d like to learn about it first? At Eastercon there are usually a couple of panels in the timetable that explain all about gophering. I think this year there was one on the Thursday night and one on the Friday afternoon. If you haven’t gophered before, these are an excellent way of getting involved and signing up. But if you do miss these, don’t worry. You can just go down to the Gopher Hole.

Who’s in charge of the Gophers? At Eastercon, there are two people/positions in charge of the gophers, one male, one female. The man is referred to as “Gopher Mum”. The woman is referred to as “Gopher Dad”. (No I don’t know why it’s the wrong way round. It’s just some sort of tradition –although I guess it’s a good way of guarding against potential gender stereotyping.)

How many hours do I have to work? As many or as few as you like. You only work when you’d like to work. The only (being polite/nice/decent) requirement is that if you say you’re going to do something, you should then do it, but that’s just common sense. You only work when you want to work. (So you can fit it around the panel items and events you want to go to).

What would I have to do? Again, this is up to you. Gophering is on very much a volunteering basis, not only in how long you work and when, but on what you do. You only have to volunteer for roles that you feel comfortable with. It’s my experience that you will never be in any way pressured to do something you don’t feel happy doing.

So how do I volunteer to do work? The way it tends to work at Eastercon is that there’s a grid, with the roles that need doing at any one time along the top, and the hours of the day down the side. If you fancy doing a particular job, you look down the column for that role and find an empty slot which is at a time suitable for you. (e.g. You might volunteer for door duty on the Dealers’ Room between 2 and 3 pm).

Is there any reward? Other than the warm glow of doing good, yes there is. For each hour that you work, you get paid two groats (generally, you claim these by reporting back after a period, or periods, of work to either the Gopher Dad or the Gopher Mum). Groats can be spent in the convention bar, the convention cafeteria, and the Dealers’ Room. Each groat is worth one pound sterling. They can usually also be spent on a limited edition item, of which more later.

What jobs can you do? Gophers can end up doing a whole load of different things. I’ve loaded and unloaded vans, moved things, set up tables for author signings (including one signing, where I then immediately sat down as one of the authors), and helped marshal the queues at an author signing (actually, there weren’t any queues, but had there been, I was ready). You can also man the entrances to the trade hall (a.k.a. be the “Door Nazi?” that Knights of the Dinner Table once described) and the art show, attend panels to do the time keeping, deliver drinks to panels, man the table that sells t-shirts, man the table where people can sign up for events, and so on.

Door Nazi? This involves sitting on a chair outside an entrance to the Dealers’ Room checking that the people entering: a) are wearing a convention badge (i.e. that they’ve paid to attend the convention); and b) aren’t carrying open drinks containers or food. (The latter requirement is because there’s a lot of expensive books and other items on display inside, and someone tripping up whilst holding a beer could literally cause hundreds of pounds of damage). The exception to the drinks rule is people who have a dealers badge, who are allowed to take drinks in (because otherwise they’d die of thirst, and they will be taking them straight to their own table).

Is is all work? No. One perk of being a gopher is that when you’re not gophering, you can hang around the Gopher Hole with other off-duty gophers. This is actually pretty cool in itself and a really good way to get to meet other convention attendees. This is especially good if you’re attending the con on your own. There isn’t really an in-crowd at Eastercon; it’s not that sort of event. But if there was, gophering would be a fast-track to getting into it.

Hanging around the Gopher Hole is also a cool thing you can do to help the convention. Much gophering is based around a fixed schedule, as I described above. But sometimes, someone from Tech or Ops will turn up at the Gopher Hole and say, “We need X gophers in room Y to do Z”, at which point – if you don’t have any panels you were about to go to – you can raise your hand, and say, “Yeah, I’m free.”

It might be a bit of an embarrassing, adolescent thing to admit to, but I find it quite satisfying to hang around the Gopher Hole like some kind of rapid-reaction gopher force.

I’ll never know what it feels like to be a fireman responding to a 999 call. I’ll never be on the flight deck of a C-130 Hercules coming in to land at some disaster zone with much needed supplies. But when the women at the crèche reported that their TV was broken, and a replacement urgently needed to be sent over to them… I was there. I took the call.

(With two others. And a trolley. I mean, it was a big-screen, old-style, CRT set. Have you ever felt the weight of those bastards?)

Are there any other benefits or perks? Actually, yes. There is. Each of the three Eastercons I’ve gophered at have had an offer for some kind of limited edition garment (either a t-shirt, a sweatshirt, or a hoodie) that can be purchased by groats only. This means that it’s only available to volunteers: gophers, the tech crew, the green room staff, the ops guys, and so on.

At the 2010 and 2011 Eastercons, the garment cost 10 groats, meaning you had to do five hours of work. For 2012, the price did increase to 15 groats (or 8 hours), but was it a very cool black hoodie – totally worth it! (It had a black on black design inspired by the black on black controls and dials of the Sundiver starship in Douglas Adam’s Restaurant at the End of the Universe).

So that’s gophering. If you’ve never been to an Eastercon before, I’d really recommend you give it a try. In 2013 we’ll be heading to Bradford for EightSquaredCon, and then in 2014 we’ll be heading to Glasgow for Satellite 4. And if you do go, think about gophering. It’s pretty cool, and not nearly as scary as you might think.

There often seems to be a lot of confusion about where precisely in the UK “The North” begins. I’ve just seen a particularly egregious example in which a friend who hails from the Birmingham area (strictly speaking, Coventry, I understand) appeared to be being somewhat scornful of Northerners, apparently blissfully unaware that if he is from Birmingham (or Coventry), then he is, by definition, a Northerner himself.

It’s very simple. Latitude doesn’t lie.

After spending the last three months on the biggest purple patch of my writing life, I now have a complete first draft of the current novel in progress. This morning, at about 7:30 as the train was somewhere around the Three Bridges area, I got to type the words “THE END”.

It was rather cool.

85,182 words, which is about 75,000 more than I had when I resumed work on the novel after Christmas. And yes, it has already been pointed out to me that while Scrivener records number of words and number of characters, it singularly fails to record the number of Costa Coffee points incurred during the writing process. (Probably in excess of 1500).

You can’t have everything.

Christopher Priest is an author whose work I like. While I can’t claim to have read any of his recent works, The Inverted World and especially A Dream of Wessex are on my all-time favourites list. They say you should never meet your heroes, but perhaps in the modern era that aphorism should be revised to state that you should probably avoid reading their blog, also. I say this having read Priest’s now notorious post of two days ago giving his thoughts about the recently released Clarke Award shortlist.

I won’t labour the point, but I think there is a fine line between blunt comment and honest opinion on one hand, and egotistical arrogance and plain damn rudeness on the other, and I think that in saying things such as this:

It is indefensible that a novel like Charles Stross’s Rule 34 (Orbit) should be given apparent credibility by an appearance in the Clarke shortlist. Stross writes like an internet puppy: energetically, egotistically, sometimes amusingly, sometimes affectingly, but always irritatingly, and goes on being energetic and egotistical and amusing for far too long. You wait nervously for the unattractive exhaustion which will lead to a piss-soaked carpet. Stross’s narrative depends on vernacular casualness, with humorous asides, knowing discursiveness, and the occasional appeal of big soft eyes. He has PC Plod characters and he writes och-aye dialogue! To think for even one moment that this appalling and incapable piece of juvenile work might actually be chosen as winner brings on a cold sweat of fear.

…he has well and truly crossed that line.

You can read more about this affair at the Guardian.

A chance remark today led me to remember what might well be the best school lesson I ever had. Certainly, I can’t think of something that not only taught me a particular point both effectively and efficiently, but was also wonderfully fun into the bargain.

The teacher in question was Mister Ready (pronounced “Reedy”), who taught my class for two consecutive years through what we then called third and fourth year juniors (in modern money that would be… counts fingers… year five and year six, I think). So we would have been somewhere aged between nine and eleven.

The lesson was simple, with one objective: to teach us the meaning of the phrase “Chinese Whispers”. I can’t remember why we did this; whether it was part of some wider topic or simply something that he came up with on the spur of the moment are details now lost as surely as Roy Batty’s tears in the rain.

He sat us down in a horseshoe arrangement on the big reading mat in the corner of the classroom, and explained that he was going to whisper something into the ear of the boy nearest to him. I can’t remember who the boy was, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t necessarily someone who had the most tools in his toolbox, if you know what I mean. He then explained that this boy would then repeat to the person who sat the other side of him  what he’d just been told, again as a whisper into the ear, and so on, and so on, until the message had travelled all around the horseshoe.

So Mister Ready whispered for what seemed like quite a time into the first boy’s ear, and then the message started working its way around the horseshoe. I was sat towards the horseshoe’s end, with perhaps seventeen or eighteen people before me, and five or six after. The message seemed to travel very slowly, and I recall being just a bit nervous with anticipation as it approached. I was scared that I might screw something up, and forget a bit, or have to ask for it to be repeated. Something which might make me look foolish. Of course, the further the message travelled with no hesitations, no hiccups, no repeats – the more nervous I got.

Then it was my turn.

The girl sitting to my left whispered in my ear.

“There was a great big man.”

I very carefully turned to my right, and repeated what I’d just heard to the boy who sat there. Word for word, exactly. Within thirty seconds or so, the message had reached the final person in the chain. Mister Ready asked that person to repeat out loud what he’d been told. The boy said:

“There was a big fat man.”

I remember being quite strongly surprised that the message had managed to change so in just a handful of words. After all, the whole point was to listen to exactly what was said and then repeat exactly what was said. Not passing on something that had the same meaning, a similar gist, but that had the same words. This was the sole task we’d been tasked to perform, there were only six words, and someone amongst the five or six people to my left had still managed to screw it up.

But the lesson wasn’t yet over. Because Mister Ready hadn’t yet revealed what it was that he’d originally whispered in the first boy’s ear. When he did I went from being quite strongly surprised to being totally stunned. I obviously can’t remember what is was, given that it’s now thirty something years later (frankly, I think I’m doing quite well to remember the line I passed on and the line that popped out of the chain’s end!) but it was something like:

There was a great big man.

And he was riding along the street on a bicycle.

Then xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx.

And xxx xxx xxxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx xxx.

Basically, it was a little mini story of something that had happened, a good four lines long. And what got out the other end? Merely a mutated version of the short introductory line. That lesson was a revelation. I cannot overstress just how effectively it bought home to me the degree to which communications can be garbled and meanings lost.

Well that, and the fact that some of my classmates weren’t very bright.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I use the rather excellent writers’ word processor Scrivener to write all my fiction. It’s now available on both Mac and Windows, so if you’re into any sort of writing, I’d very much recommend that you give it a spin.

One of the great things about Scrivener is the degree to which you can customise it, and the key way in which I customise it is to set it to show the point of view (POV) of each scene. The way I write (and as always, your mileage may vary, there is no one true way etc. etc.) is to break the story down into scenes, and then write such that each scene is from the POV of a single “viewpoint” character. That is to say that each scene is told through of eyes of just one character. I try to establish in the first paragraph of each scene who the viewpoint character is. And if I later need to switch POV, I break into a new scene.

Scrivener is perfect for a scene based approach, as each novel is broken up in a hierarchical format: novel => chapters => scenes. By default, Scrivener doesn’t record the POV of each scene, but if – like me – POV is a important factor in when and why you place scene breaks, it’s very easy to do so.

Here’s how. (Note: all screenshots are from the Mac version of the application, but I imagine the Windows version works similarly).

Let’s take a sample Scrivener project:

We have four scenes written, over two chapters, but as you can see, there’s no obvious way to tell which POV each scene is written from.

But if we look at the right-hand side of the screen, we can see that each scene is given a label, in this case of type “scene”. I personally don’t find these default labels useful, so I replace them with POV tags.

STEP 1: Go to the General Meta Data panel on the right and click on the topmost drop-down (which will be captioned “Label”).

STEP 2: Click on the bottom-most option in the drop-down list, Edit…

This will bring up the Meta-Data Settings dialog box.

STEP 3: Click on the add button to add a label for each of your characters (i.e. use the character’s name as the label).

STEP 4: Use the minus button to remove all the other labels.

STEP 5 (Optional): If you wish, you can double-click on each colour box next to the characters’ names, to bring up a colour editor that allows you to change the colour assigned to the character. I like to make the colours descriptive in some way, so if I have an angry character, a logical character and an emotional character, I might set them to red, blue and green respectively. I often have a catch-all category of “Other”, for minor POV characters, and this I tend to set to grey.

STEP 6: Change Custom Title to “POV”.

It should now look something like this:

STEP 7: Click on OK.

We’ve now given ourselves the ability to set each scene to a particular viewpoint. And the viewpoint will be displayed in the Meta- Data Settings panel on the right. However, this doesn’t help us gain an overview, since we still need to select the scene in order to see whose POV it is from. However, Scrivener allows us to change the display to rectify this.

STEP 8: Click on the View menu, and then on “Use POV Color In” (this will be called “Use Label Color In” if you didn’t rename “Label” to “POV”).

A sub-menu will pop out.

Make sure that Binder and Index Cards are ticked (click on them if they aren’t). You might have to click on the View menu twice, first to check Binder and then to check Index Cards.

After doing this, the left-hand binder will now be colour coded according to POV, enabling you to keep track of who’s getting “screen- time” at a glance. (This is especially handy if each of your POV characters is engaged in a different sub-plot).

The synopsis in the top-right corner will be shown colour-coded. (For the purposes of this demonstration, I haven’t entered any text for the synopsis). This is also the case when using the Corkboard to look at the chapter as a whole.

Scrivener’s a very powerful package, and I probably only scratch the surface of it. There may be better ways to handle POV, but the above works well for me. And if POV isn’t a huge factor in your writing, then you can still set the labels to something that is, and have them appear in the binding.

Like I said, if you do any sort of writing, I’d strongly suggest checking out Scrivener. If you want to learn more about how to use it, I’ve heard very good things about Writing a Novel With Scrivener by David Hewson. And if you’re interested in trying it out, you can download a trial edition from here:

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

Hope this proves useful!