Re: Confuzzled

What a fantastic link!!
I actually have this guy’s book on my bedside table (only read a couple of chapters so far) – he’s an icon of woodland living – and I think maybe I subconsciously absorbed the name Ben from him. Alternatively one of my friends at the real eco-village in dartmoor is also called Ben. There’s just something about the name that I really like – on account of every Ben I’ve known has been mature, wise and interesting.

Re: Confuzzled

I’ve found that link for the woodland home. Strangley this guy was called Ben. What is it with the name Ben. You’ve got a character called Ben. I’ve got a character called Ben… What’s in a name?

( Grand Designs: Sussex )

For 10 years, Ben lived in tents and caravans in a wood in West Sussex. As a woodsman, he needed and wanted to live among the trees, but now he wanted a house for some creature comforts. He invited volunteers to help him build one by hand, from the materials growing around him.

Re: Confuzzled

My work is much like yours in the sense that I’m mostly cranking a handle for my employer, but very occasionally am able to sally forth with the full expression of my skill and creative intellect.

It’s not, however, what I’d do with my technical ability if given the choice. I love online multiplayer strategy games (civ type stuff), and the communities that grow up around them, and at some point I still intend to build something along those lines.

As a lesser alternative I’m skilled enough to build something like Livejournal, if I’d had the idea first. Not as much fun as game designing, but probably more lucrative.

In any case, I’m not so much a web designer as an applications programmer/database designer/business analyst who happens to deliver her applications over the web as the most easy-to-deploy-and-manage delivery platform. I have no skill (and probably no talent) in visual arts, so I direct my abilities towards non-graphic intensive applications where content rules over presentation. I am not a good person to ask about the other kind 😉

Re: Confuzzled

Well I’m about to start reading “The Other Wind” the fifth book in the Earthsea Trilogy… 🙂

By the way, can I ask what you do for a living? You obviously do a lot of creative stuff, I was just wondering which parts of it made money for you.

Unfortunately the creative stuff doesn’t make much money for me. I work for Blackwell Publishing in Oxford putting around 38 of their 650 journals online in Synergy but it doesn’t really involve much of a creative input. A colleague (an artist too) once said, very accurately, that what we did was the modern day of processing peas or cranking a handle day in day out to make a small plastic widget which undoubtably had a great necessity for someone?! I receive PDF, XML and graphics for scientific journals, run a few conversions, check the quality is okay, do a bit of fixing and send it off to the web.

(Incidentally I came across this whole LiveJournal thing through and her friend who used work in the same department)

The creative side of me – which is where I’m happiest, ie. writing, drawing/art, photography, music, and the web design is pretty much all for pleasure and doesn’t earn me anything. Even the web design is mainly for free at the moment as I try and build up a portfolio of sites although I do have one client who I get some (ir)regular paid work from.

How about you? I understand you are in some computers/sofware/web developemnt type of business. If so, you wouldn’t have any advice for anyone trying to go the web design route would you?

Re: Confuzzled

You know I hadn’t actually given a lot of thought to where Ben might actually live. I’d assumed some boring understated townhouse – he hates being indoors so he probably wouldn’t pay any attention to decoration…

The passage I posted is probably going to be the very beginning of the prologue. There’s no doubt that the eco-community is ‘interesting’ and I wanted to touch it briefly before leaping back to introduce Tara who’s really just a bit mundane in comparison.

I’m glad you thought it worked. I guess I thought so too or I wouldn’t have posted it. Most of the rest I wouldn’t want anyone to see yet, which is a fair indicator of what needs work 🙂

I’m fascinated by the fear you felt when you saw I’d posted some stuff. I didn’t expect that, though with hindsight I can understand it. But then I did say “Le Guin in Dartmoor” so hopefully your expectations were not too far off.

By the way, can I ask what you do for a living? You obviously do a lot of creative stuff, I was just wondering which parts of it made money for you.

Re: Confuzzled

but then I wondered, why? Reassurance that it’s not crap?

Well you’ve got no worries there. You’ve got me hooked already.

An attempt to elicit praise maybe?

When I began reading your last comment and I realised that you had posted an excerpt from your novel, two thoughts crossed my mind. One, was pleasure that I was at last going to get to read some actual story that you had been talking about previously in your journal and dangling tidbits of it in front of me, tempting me. The other, was one of utter horror, that upon reading it it might be nothing like I had expected – and not in a this is bad kind of way, but in a I don’t understand it, how can I comment on it with any intelligence. To be blunt I was terrified. Terrified that however good it was, I just wouldn’t get it.

Well I needn’t have been.
(Note: What I’m about to say, I’m not saying to boost your ego or to artificially kind – it’s the truth. Plain and simple)

From the very first sentence you had be hooked and wanting to read more. From the second I was there smelling the wood smoke and wandering in the trees. You have succeeded and transplanting me there instantaneously into the wood, and want to read more so that I can wander a bit more in the woods.

(Incidentally, as I was reading an image came to mind of what Ben’s house was like. I don’t know if you’ve seen any of the Grand Designs series on Channel 4, but in the last series there was a guy who lived in the woods (round Surrey/Sussex way I think?) who was building himself a house out of whole trees he felled in the woods (he was a woodsman) and walls out of straw plasted with mud with wattle and dorb and power from renewable resources (including solar power from some panels nabbed off one of the Big Brother houses). I’ll see if I can find a weblink for it in a bit…

Yes that was the thing that always amuses me about visual art – does it have Meaning, or are they taking the piss? Or both, in a post-modernist sort of way, the one stemming from the other.

Still, ya gotta give people credit for the courage required to keep a straight face while selling “a small empty closet” for $100,000 and (of course) winning the Turner prize.

Then there’s the stuff that really moves me, and I can’t explain why. And someone always sniffs “nothing special…” in my ear while I’m lost in awe.

Creative Arts. So that’s one of these combined/modular courses of Writing, Visual Arts and Live Arts. There were also Dance, Drama and Music students amongst us. Basically Live Arts (contempory, mostly untintelligable and certainly inexplainable art that blends the “four expressive systems” of words, visuals, sounds and movement – if you’re not following this don’t worry ‘cos to be honest the tutors didn’t either) was the compulsory subject and then we each chose two from the other five. I chose Writing and Visual Arts. Then for Live Arts/Creative Arts Honours Project (I chose to do one of these instead of a dissertation) and then preceeded in breaking new boundaries by doing a video which started life as a script and consisted of a Beginning, a Middle, and an End. I’m convinced that the only reason why I got a good grade for it was because my Viva Tutors didn’t want to be seen to be not getting the deep underlying artistic meaning which it had to have because it was a Live Arts project – when in fact it didn’t it was just a story about a guy called Holly Wood who digitally created movies out of old movies in his bedroom…

(actually it was only 1993, so it was quite a good foreshadowing of what’s happening ten years later?!!)

( Crewe+Alsager Faculty of the Manchester Metropolitan University )

Maths, eh? I’m terrible at Maths. Which probably goes some way to NOT explaining why one of journals I’m responsible for putting on the web is a high profile/high kudos, thrice monthly, maths-heavy astronomical journal. Weird huh?

I was considering posting a passage or two to my journal, but then I wondered, why? Reassurance that it’s not crap? An attempt to elicit praise maybe? Something in me insists that I’m writing for myself, and any posting in my journal must surely be for ego.

Ironically I’d feel much happier posting a section here in the comments of your journal, rather than as an entry in my own. I can’t quite figure out my own reasoning. I’m writing a novel to share with people, so why am I so reluctant to do so?

Thin blue smoke drifted lazily from a silvery flue. There was no wind and the wood-smoke curled hypnotically up from the bender through the branches of the trees, transparent and peaceful. Nearby, someone was chopping firewood, taking advantage of the dry weather and the remaining warmth of the afternoon. An occasional voice called out across the woodland, startlingly human in this bastion of nature. A man and a woman, both in their mid to late twenties, sat dangling their legs on a wooden platform, suspended between the branches of a larch. Behind them perched a narrow treehouse, a mishmash of hazel poles and tarpaulin, held together with rope and string.

The woman, dressed in combat trousers and a tattered sweater several sizes too large, got up and opened the canvas doorway. She tied back her dreadlocked hair and turned back to the young man, who hadn’t moved.
“I’m going to meditate awhile. Don’t let anyone disturb me, okay?”
“Sure. Do your thing.”

The interior of the treehouse was interwoven with blankets stuffed behind the supporting poles as insulation, and many-coloured banners hand-painted with divine archetypes hung from a hazel spiral at the highest point. A faded and worn carpet covered most of the floor. In one corner, a small wood-burner was consuming the last of its fuel, but the focal point was at the centre, where several candles flickered and a stick of incense burned. It was here that the woman seated herself, facing south, in half lotus position. She took the incense and traced a pattern of smoke in the air, an act of reverence to any spirits present. Then she closed her eyes, and let her consciousness begin to roam, beyond the canvas walls, out among the trees, dissolving until she could no longer feel where she ended and the world began.

Swathes of colour, greens and blues and browns swam in her mind, merging and separating, growing brighter and fainter, life ebbing and flowing. Individuality fled, and there was only transcendence, the One that seemed to be many only when seen with human eyes; endless pools of light, observing the miracle of their own birth, growth and passing.

What did you study at college?

(I did maths, which I very much regret, but *shrug* these things make up the pattern of who we are.)

I’m not sure if I did choose the present tense – more the present tense chose me. I guess it comes from my college years when I was writing a lot of screenplays and television drama. Flyht decends straight from a four episode tv drama I wrote during my final year (although the story was very different) then a couple of years after that when I started to write it as a novel I just developed this style of quite fast-paced, short scenes, in the present tense with a filmic quality to them.

And the styles just kind of stuck with me. It seems to work. Does it work?

I know it’s hard to judge because you haven’t seen how the story begins but if you encountered that passage part way through chapter one – what do you think?

Why did you choose the present tense?