h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Hi Boots
I already read the first. I've just scanned the second.
It needs some patient thought before useful comment.
But it's very good indeed.
(Then again, you knew that already )
Keep it up, Soulmate.
We aren't going to get off on Mutual Appreciation, though.
We both need the same thing. An audience. A big one.
How're we going to get it?
Back Soon
Pin

(You met the SYWM? I can't remember. His views on obesity are...different...)

may have a contact on radio 4. Can you write short stories to order? Silly of course you can. Will see what evolves and post. From what I gather they would be interested in humourous pieces but it's early days. Don't think we're on the midnight express train out of here yet!

PS sorry so rude. yes have met SYWM actually mentioned him in previous posts...no Boots that's the kind of remark the gapee comes out with. off for a fish supper!

Hi Boots

You after criticism? I'm going to assume yes.
(You sounded a bit wistful over there with The Sheep Look Up.
You believe in yourself now, because you're among the best half-dozen writers here. You don't need advice from anyone on style)

What are you trying to say, though?

It's curious that this latest piece brings up Bridget Jones, because that's what it reads like. To me anyway. Maybe not stylistically, but the world it inhabits.

Is that the genre you want to write in?
A lot of your stuff seems to fit that mould : own experience, self-deprecating, wry.

I can only speak for myself, but I wouldn't be satisfied with that. This is a training ground, yeah? We've got to push ourselves, try make something out of challenging subjects and unfamiliar styles.

What are you trying to do here, Boots? Is it about practice? Is it about building confidence? Is it about creating a portfolio? Is it just fun?

Whatever it is, I find myself thinking you should look to increase the variety. This is another really good piece, and it probably proves you can do more like it to order. Time to try something different?

There, I said it. (Some friend he is...pah!)
Pin

With friends like you I don't need a Christmas card list!
Why am I here? Honestly? I'm not sure. Probably a bit of all the reasons you stated...and because I lost my password and clicked on the wrong button. (was actually checking out radio plays at the time)
I do know that I am never going to be a mind changing writer, lacking
both political passion and literary committment (or vice versa) and blessed with very few original thoughts. I love humour and obsrvation, even as an actress I preferred comedy roles and, again thanks to my thesp origins, I enjoy writing to order...no doubt laziness. My vocabulary is poor, my grammar non existant...I should leave. I shall not. Like you Pin the main driving force is the desire to be immortal! We both want to be published and claim our crumb of the literary tombstone. Your lateral creativity is finely honed... Ravager (my Wedell) is already a fan. (I loved your setting of 'the sheep looked up' in a news report). My skills are far more limited. However I shall go and create a new identity, don my alternative marigolds and embark on a hard days toil. I know I have to write and am immensely grateful to the likes of you and Waz and Ben for taking the time to both read and remark on my poor offerings...Don't think your'e getting a Christmas card though!
Take care and thanks
Boots

A1002088 OK

Oh wow.
Speechless.
Back soon
Pin

You know, Boots, I really don't know what to say.
Maybe I needled you more than I meant to.

You want comment?
It's different, obviously, and powerful. It's got poignancy too.
The Christmas context time-slips it from the immediate future and makes the suggestion of a long-term threat very effectively. There isn't much subtlety beyond that, though.
So you were set a challenge and answered it, yeah? You went to extremes to find this (I hope so, anyway, because it's too bleak for anyone to carry as mainstream imagination).
I've tried to think about how I might have written it. Probably from the bomber's standpoint, which would give a sharper detachment of the emotionless efficiency from the carnage it produces. Sketching the victims heightens the horror. Choosing banal and slightly unsympathetic ones is clever - maybe that emphasises pointlessness. A more obvious set, with women and children and an inference of wasted innocence wouldn't seem as real. I think I'd have tried to describe a more pathetic and less overtly shocking aftermath.
Then again, I doubt I would have written it. Something this harrowing maybe provokes revulsion, rather than encouraging thought.
I don't suppose you're thinking in terms of a wider readership? Just a little lesson for me, I'm guessing. I don't think the Post would like it, particularly just now, and I doubt you'd want to show a dark side as dark as this either.
Still, you've proved a point, and I'll be more circumspect with the goading in future.
Pin

(Go to be offline for about two days now. Maybe a good cooling-off period? All hell will break loose in the interim, it seems, but I doubt that the real hell will be portrayed as graphically as your imagined one.
Can I borrow your line?
Take care yourself, Boots)

Hi Pin hope you had a good two days off.
Confession time. Actually an old outline circa the last conflict reworked...hence the Chritsmas theme (You may have pricked me but my natural laziness prevailed!)
Regretably am capable of carrying incredibly dark mainstream imagination when the world depresses. They say that comedians...I use that in the loosest sense, have a dark and melancholy alter ego.
I do not believe that war/terror or any of its players are emotionless, and they are rarely efficient. Having over the years seen the aftermath of all (trust me it is shocking) in hospitals, on the streets and creeping insidiously into the lives of both the victims and the perpetrators, I am convinced it only helps to spread the seeds of polarisation and feed the self perpetuation of hate and mistrust.
One of the Offsprung is intent on going to Palestine. Mehinks this knee jerk reaction owes more to youthful passion at injustice than to intellect. She has never seen the reality. She's seen the news reports and the Hollywood comment but never the reality thank G*d. Wars are all things to all people. My mother had 'a wonderful war' (her words not mine) To put those two words side by side doth not sit well in my head but makes perfect sense to her.
I read a book by Clive Barker on holiday once (Have never been able to track it down in this country)...a grown up version of the 'thief of always.' It filled me with revulsion but stays with me to this day as a salutary reminder of desolation, pointlessness and the nature of man.
However...you are right. The piece lacks any kind of sublety. Alas I did not even choose the banal characters...not nearly clever enough, they chose themselves. If memory serves me right it was a fond desire to write a novel that caused it's morose arrival but, having killed off three quarters of the cast in the first chapter and with ambitions of an equally reviling demise for the sole remaining protaganist planned for chapter two, decided that I was singularly unsuited to the genre and stuffed it into the 'should never have bothered' box.
Have removed from site and am off to look up 'circumspect' and do battle with the council over the closing of the sheltered housing scheme....keep the pressure on...my masochistic side embraces it!
Take care
(never down for too long) Boots

PS also had a major problem with the tense and grammar it semed to be drifting into past then history then pre neanderthal. Know any sites where I can brush up on this failure? (see done it again!)