The potato famine and aviation fuel
I was listening to my friend Lesley Riddoch's podcast this morning, and she spoke, inter alia, of plans to produce 'green' aviation fuel at Grangemouth.
Lesley doesn't need me to teach her lessons about the potato famine. She knows as well as I do that the problem was not lack of food. She know as well as I do that in each successive year of the famine, Ireland exported record amounts of wheat.
Continue reading →When does the charge start?
I've been skeptical about whether the replacement of all the world's motor vehicle fleet with equally heavy, equally powerful, electric vehicles in time to make any meaningful difference to climate change was practical for a while now. I don't think we've the resources to do it: I wrote Where's the steel? four years ago.
But just at present I'm working on preparing a 'Local Place Plan' for Auchencairn, and the grim absurdity of the idea is striking me even more forcefully.
Continue reading →Documenting a fictitious building
Yesterday, I posted to Mastodon in response to the question 'Do you write or imagine a backstory for your secondary characters?' that 'I spent 2,000 words last night writing detailed backstory of a significant BUILDING that I also have sketch plans of (which is also something I usually do – you cannot consistently write about a building without knowing where everything is'.
I thought it would be interesting to post that documentation as a blog post.
The Residence
Continue reading →Motivation
As I wrote in Intermission, Merchant was conceived to be structurally a romance; a romance patterned on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, in which a man proposes to a woman, she rejects him, circumstances push them together in adversity which allows her to get to know him better, they marry.
And that's what I started to write. It's what, in fact, I did write; having written it, hated. It was a bourgeois novel; it gave its heroine no honour and little agency. So I started to tear it apart, and reconstruct it.
Continue reading →On Publishing
The problem with creating narratives — writing stories, essentially, although it is a bit wider than that — is reaching an audience. If your narratives, your stories, are not read, or listened to, or otherwise appreciated by someone else, then creating them in the first place is essentially just masturbation. Or, if that word is too raw for you, then busy-work.
To write stories — to hone your skill at writing stories — you need an audience: you need an audience which does not just consume, but in some sense feeds back — whether that's through reviews, or through money. In a capitalist society, having money is nice of course; but if you've been reading this blog at all, you'll know that I'm not a believer in capitalism. I believe that the world would be a better place if we all just gave stuff away, to those in our communities who needed or wanted it.