The potato famine and aviation fuel
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.
When does the charge start?
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.
Documenting a fictitious building
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.
Motivation
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.
On Publishing
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.