Nanowrimo is go!

By Caleb | November 1, 2008

Last year, I developed a renewed and profound appreciation of coffee while doing Nanowrimo. Let’s see how that works out this year!

This year, the days fall so that November begins and finishes with a weekend, and there are 5 weekends in total, which is very handy since it means less working days and hence more writing time.

To complete Nanowrimo, it’s necessary to write an average of 1,667 words per day. But I’m going to have a couple of busy weekends (such as the Whoniversal Appeal conference), and inevitably there will be some days where I won’t manage to hit that target. Which means I need to take full advantage of days like today to get ahead of the game – my target for today is at least 3,333 words (two days worth of Nanoing).

I’m starting with around 30,000 words worth of existing material. You’re supposed to start a new story, but hey, I’m a radical! I don’t play by nobody’s rules. Not when I’ve got a novel to finish, anyway.

The point is to get on and finish my first draft of This Darkened World, which has taken a bit of a backburner with short stories and competition entries and stuff. I’ve actually written around 45,000 words, but I’m having to cut out around one third of that.

The first reason for that is because I’ve realised that a lot of stuff that happens at the end of the first “act” of the novel really ought to be held back until the final showdown. Too much is revealed and too much happens too early on, so that stuff has to go and will have to be completely rewritten in its new place in the story.

The second reason is that I’ve had a much better idea of what to do with the middle section of the book. I’ve got the end of the story in mind, but had started writing the middle part of the book without much idea of what exactly to do in the middle. I had a bunch of ideas for some cool locations for the characters to visit, but not much actual plot. I’ve got a better idea now, but it means abandoning around 10,000 words of material. Oh well, them’s the breaks.

I’ve uninstalled the games from my computer, and I’ll be switching off my wifi. It’s time to stop writing about writing, and actually get on with writing!

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Nanowrimo 2008

By Caleb | October 31, 2008

After writing all 50,000 words of My Life as a Zombie Time Traveller in November last year as part of Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), I’ve decided to attempt the same thing again this year.

It won’t be an “official” Nanowrimo because I’m going to be attempting to finish the first draft of my novel This Darkened World and you’re supposed to start something new. My target is my current wordcount plus 50,000 words, or the end of the novel, whichever comes sooner (though I expect them to come at around the same point). In all other respects, I’ll be applying the same rules – I have to finish by midnight on November 30th, and I expect you all to egg me on, and threaten to mock me mercilessly should I fail in the challenge.

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The Big Day: Saturday 13th June 2009

By Caleb | October 31, 2008

Beverley and I have booked a date and venue for our wedding! We’ll be getting married at 1pm on Saturday 13th June 2009 at Tredegarville Baptist Church. We’ve got a lot of planning to sort out, and it’ll be a while before we send invitations, but it’s great to have the time and place set so that we can move on to the next stage of planning.

When I told a friend from university about it, he said something like “Oh no, getting married, you’re turning into a responsible adult, Caleb!” I responded by pulling a funny face and saying “Oh, I’m not sure about all that!” in a joking tone. But thinking about it, it would have been better to respond with something like “Yes, that’s right – isn’t that great?”

In our culture we often see responsibility as a burden to be avoided rather than an opportunity to be embraced, and in a way that’s quite sad. I was given a book on my 21st birthday, The Pocket Guide to Adulthood. It’s got short chapters giving handy hints on everything from changing a tyre to job interviews to first dates. But the subtitle is “29 things to know before you hit 30” and the Introduction assumes a reader who is approaching 30. Since when did thirty years old become the start of adulthood?

A friend said that I was pretty young to be getting married and asked if I was worried about it. It’s a big step, and so naturally there are some nerves, and the wedding itself brings with it a lot of logistical challenges, but all said, I can’t wait. I love Beverley and so it’ll be great to start the rest of our lives together. But as well as that, why waste time loafing around when you can skip ahead and get married!?

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My new Acer Aspire One netbook

By Caleb | October 24, 2008
Acer Aspire One netbookMy laptop died recently after around four and a half years, so I was finally forced to invest in a new computer. The main thing I want to use it for is being able to write on the move, and other general use such as web, email, managing mp3s and digital photos. I’m not at all fussed about being able to play the latest computer games, so I knew I could be happy with a fairly cheap and basic computer.

So I started doing some research, and was drawn to a new type of computer called a netbook. A netbook is basically an extra small laptop, especially for being able to do the basics – access the web, word processing and so on – while being very cheap and portable. Perfect.

But which to get? Since ASUS brought out the Eee PC, the first of the new generation of netbooks, loads of computer manufacturers have been rushing to join in. I read various reviews, such as the Netbook showdown, and after a lot of comparing of different systems, decided that the best cheapest netbook was the Acer Aspire One.

The Acer Aspire One A150L model which I bought has a 1.6Ghz Intel Atom Processor, 1GB of memory, 120GB hard drive, 8.9″ display, and comes with Linpus Linux Lite as the operating system. You can also get it with Windows XP, but it costs more, or with less memory and a smaller but sturdier SSD drive for cheaper. The biggest negative points about the system are the fiddly mouse trackpad and relatively short battery life, but I’ve already got a USB mouse, and I rarely use my computer for long periods of time without access to the mains, so I can live with those. And all for a bargainous £230 from Play.com!

When it arrived, it was up and running literally within two minutes of turning the machine on. All it needed was the date and time and a couple of other settings, and it was booted up and had found our house’s wifi network.

It’s almost exactly half the size of my previous laptop, and has elicited cries of “Aaaah! Cute!” from Bev and one of her housemates, the most excited I’ve seen women get over a piece of computing kit! I’ve found it very handy for carrying around – it easily fits into my bag and doesn’t weigh me down. I found that it fitted nicely on the windowsill in the kitchen, so I could put it out the way there with a programme streaming on iPlayer to watch while I cooked dinner, which is pretty neat.

When you start it up, Linpus Linux Lite offers a very simple and friendly interface, and everything worked out the box – Firefox, OpenOffice, the webcam, instant messaging. But it’s also possible to unlock the machine from its default “For Dummies” interface to get a more conventional desktop environment, and customise the machine, configuring Linux and adding new software to your heart’s content. Which, of course, I did.

Here’s a list of the programmes I’ve added or upgraded:

  • Updated OpenOffice.org to the new 3.0 version. The most useful feature for me in OpenOffice 3 is the improved reviewing and commenting tools in Writer, one of the few features from Microsoft Word not supported that I missed. The reviewing tools are great for giving feedback and suggested changes on a piece of writing.
  • Updated Firefox 2 to Firefox 3. The improved full-screen mode and page zooming in FF3 are a big help on the AA1’s small screen.
  • Replaced Acer’s e-mail, calendar and messenging software with better software, specifically Thunderbird, Lightning and Pidgin.
  • Installed Amarok media player for music and podcasts.
  • Installed Wine, a “compatibility layer” that lets me run many Windows programmes in Linux, such as e-Sword Bible software and MediaCoder converter, where I haven’t been able to find Linux equivalents, or where the Linux equivalents aren’t as good.
  • Installed Audacity audio editing software for podcasting.
  • And much more! As you can see, I’ve been spending quite a lot of time on it over the last week.

There have been some teething problems. I had some trouble getting Amarok, a similar package to iTunes or Windows Media Player, to recognise my Zen Stone Plus mp3 player. The autodetect feature didn’t work, so I had to tell it where to find the mp3 player manually, but it took me a while to find the right mount point. But it’s now up and running fine and I’ve subscribed to various podcasts, and it should now download and copy these to my mp3 player automatically.

I’ve also set it up to do various things I could have done on my old laptop, but didn’t get round to, such as setting up the Sunbird calendar in the Thunderbird email package to synchronise with my Google Calendar, which is quite nifty.

Installing new things is generally very easy – you just find what you want from Internet repositories in Add/Remove Programs, or type “yum install ” in the terminal. It’s a very good computer for people who don’t want to fiddle at all, who won’t be bothered about updating software and can happily stick to the easy default menus, and a very good computer for those of a more geeky bent, such as myself, who are happy to fiddle around setting it up as they want and aren’t afraid to use a command line. It’s not so good for people in the middle, who want to easily change a few things without getting their hands dirty. But I’ve found that the Aspire One User forums have been very helpful, and there are several blogs offering useful tips, tricks and instructions for the machine, such as Macles.

So I’m really pleased with my One. It’s ideal for my purposes – the keyboard is compact, but not so small that it’s awkward to type on, and a breeze to carry around. It boots up and shuts down very quickly, and while getting used to Linux has been a bit of a learning curve and has been a bit fiddly at times, my overall experience with it has been very good. It can do just as much as my old Dell Inspiron 1000 at half the size and price.

The only problem is that it can do so much, and can be so easily customised, that I could spend all my time fiddling with it, playing with games, experimenting with new software, rather than actually writing!

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L'Abri Film Festival

By Caleb | October 23, 2008
The Manor House, GreathamTomorrow I’m off to the English L’Abri community in Greatham, Hampshire for their now annual film festival, Twenty-Four Frames per Second, a weekend of film, lectures and discussion about film.

The films include The Lives of Others (2007, dir. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck), The Great Dictator (1940, dir. Charlie Chaplain), Grizzly Man (2006, dir. Werner Herzog), Ooit (2008, dir. Jaap van Heusden) and others. The last one, Ooit, is a Dutch film that is receiving its British première at the festival, and the director will be speaking at the festival.

I’ve been to L’Abri twice before, and really enjoyed both visits. I’m going with my friend Swithun this time, who I’m sure will be in his element, since he loves film and long, involved discussions!

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Why Christian fiction shouldn’t be moralistic

By Caleb | October 14, 2008

Fantasy writer L. B. Graham has some good comments on how Christian fiction is about mercy, not moralism (HT: Dave Bish):

Christianity is not about moralism, and Christian fiction shouldn’t be either. Christianity revolves, not around good behavior, but around God’s mercy shown to man in the death and resurrection of Christ. However, even though we know this to be theologically true, I think we struggle to remember this as we go about our daily lives, and one of the places where we really struggle to remember it is in our engagement with the arts in general, but as fiction is our topic, we’ll limit our reflection here to that.

I’m constantly surprised at how often fictional stories are judged to be Christian or not, based more or less on how well the characters behave themselves. Of course it is true that morality matters – God has taken great care to expound in some detail the moral laws which flow from and are an extension of His own character. It is also true, though, that the Bible itself is full of flawed men and women whom God used almost despite of rather than because of their moral triumphs. However, when Christian writers incorporate flawed heroes into their stories, men and women with moral failings of any significance, they are often left open to charges of having given dubious testimony to their Lord.

I’ve seen some pretty bad film and book reviews by Christians that seem to believe that the depiction of immorality is itself immoral, and come across some bad fiction that seems to be based on that idea. I don’t like the idea of “Christian fiction” as a distinct category; a Christian shouldn’t aim to write “Christian fiction”, but good fiction, fiction that is true, and beautiful, and good.

What makes fiction good is the moral context in which people’s actions are shown. That doesn’t mean that good fiction is fiction where every good action is always rewarded and every bad action is always punished, because that’s not true to the fallen world that we exist in. Sometimes we see justice in the here and now, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we see something better, mercy and grace. Our choices for good and bad have consequences, and fiction can explore the complexities of that in a world that is damaged, yet still contains much good, and fiction written by a Christian has the potential to hint at happy ending that Christ will bring, when the world as it is and the world as it should be become the same thing.

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Charlie Brooker: Nightclubs are Hell

By Caleb | October 13, 2008

Clubbing is one of those supposedly ubiquitous student activities along with drunken traffic cone antics, watching Neighbours and leaving all your work until the last minute, though I managed to largely avoid it. Personally, I prefer social activities where you can interact with people on a more meaningful level than bellowing over music while doing a self-conscious jiggle as an apology for not dancing. Give me an evening down the pub chatting over a drink any day.

So I was pleased to see that the entertainingly bitter Charlie Brooker shares my opinion: “Nightclubs are hell. What’s cool or fun about a thumping, sweaty dungeon full of posing idiots?“

Mixed in with the hyperbole and cynicism, he has some sharp observations to make about the degree of self-obsession that some people display:

The second thing that struck me was frightening. They were all photographing themselves. In fact, that’s all they seemed to be doing. Standing around in expensive clothes, snapping away with phones and cameras. One pose after another, as though they needed to prove their own existence, right there, in the moment. Crucially, this seemed to be the reason they were there in the first place. There was very little dancing. Just pouting and flashbulbs.

Surely this is a new development. Clubs have always been vapid and awful and boring and blah – but I can’t remember clubbers documenting their every moment before. Not to this demented extent. It’s not enough to pretend you’re having fun in the club any more – you’ve got to pretend you’re having fun in your Flickr gallery, and your friends’ Flickr galleries. An unending exhibition in which a million terrified, try-too-hard imbeciles attempt to out-cool each other.

That’s very interesting, and plays into my thoughts on the culture of narcissism that I’m pondering at the moment. In our culture, we’re all preoccupied to a greater or lesser extent with constructing our identity, validating our existence, through an endless parade of activity and self-reflection, and that’s played out in all sorts of ways – from clubbing, to our dvd collections, to our Facebook profiles, to our choice of clothes. Brooker describes one of the ugly extremes of the culture of narcissism, but it infects us all.

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Podcast on How the Doctor Changed My Life

By Caleb | October 10, 2008

The latest edition of A Podcast of Impossible Things is a Big Finish special, looking in particular at Short Trips: How the Doctor Changed my Life. It includes interviews with some of the writers, including the overall winner Michael Coen, and me, of course, plus interviews with Simon Guerrier, editor of the collection and fan turned professional writer, and with Rob Shearman, who went on from writing for Big Finish to write for television Doctor Who, and has written a critically acclaimed short story anthology called Tiny Deaths.

There’s also a competition where you can win one of three copies of How the Doctor Changed My Life! The closing date is 25th October, so listen to the podcast now to find out how to enter. If you’re interested in Doctor Who, or in writing generally, or just want to find out where I got the idea for The Shopping Trolleys of Doom, then give it a listen!

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My MP3 player is working again!

By Caleb | October 2, 2008
I listen to a lot of talks, lectures, sermons, podcasts and stuff on my mp3 player, so I was very annoyed when it stopped working a couple of months ago. Yesterday, I finally got it back in working order having sent it to be repaired, so I went online and downloaded around 50 mp3s to a total of around a gigabyte’s worth of material ready to listen to as I travel around, wash the dishes, potter around the house and so on.

Here’s what I’ve been listening to so far:

A good discussion of religion and politics from a Reformed Christian perspective. It avoids the “Republican = God’s Own Party” assumption that a lot of American Christians seem to make, but the contributors all seem to take a strong “Two Kingdoms” line, which keeps the Kingdom of God and the kingdoms of the world very separate.

I agree with them to a point – church and state are separate institutions, and it causes big problems to confuse the two. But their position ends up with a split between sacred and secular, public and private. Part of the mission of the church is to announce (but not enforce) the Lordship of Christ over all of creation, including the political sphere. Church and state should be institutionally separate, but both ought, in their respective spheres, govern according to God’s principles of peace, justice, and goodness.

A potted summary of Nietzsche’s view of Art and Truth, particularly focusing on his first book, The Birth of Tragedy.

Apparently, Nietzsche saw art as a way of masking the fundamental chaos and meaninglessness of life (the Dionysian aspect), a way of imposing some apparent order on events (the Apollonian aspect), but it could also reveal something of the truth of the pain and disorder of reality in a way that is bearable. He saw Greek tragedy as doing this, until Socrates came along and spoiled everything with the illusion of the world being comprehensible and meaningful, which was continued by Christianity. But with the decline of Christianity, he saw the possibility of the revival of this kind of tragedy.

Nietzsche was very perceptive on seeing the consequences of life without God. From a Christian perspective, atheistic philosophy often has an element of truth, in that it shows what life is like when God is rejected, when sin separates us from God, when we are under the curse. Postmodernism, for example, is partially true, true to the extent that sin disrupts our ability to know and to communicate, and true to the extent that these are the consequences if we reject God. But the effect of sin is not total, though it touches everything – God’s grace and providence is still evident in creation, we still bear something of the image of God, and most importantly, healing and restoration is possible in Jesus Christ.

Mark Driscoll’s sermons are generally very good, and having looked at the subject of spiritual warfare on this year’s Contagious and been very challenged by what the Bible has to say on the subject, I thought I’d listen to these sermons as a “refresher course”.

Driscoll is clear and Biblically balanced: we have a battle against the world, the flesh and the devil; the devil and demons are real, and we should take these spiritual realities seriously but without becoming morbidly obsessed with them, and always remember that God is sovereign and triumphant over them.

I’ve just started on this one, but should be a good debate! Dan Barker used to be a Christian pastor and evangelist, before becoming an atheist. He’s now co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Doug Wilson is a pastor, and a faculty member at New St Andrews College, who’s an eloquent writer and speaker who’s also debated Christopher Hitchens on whether Christianity is good for the world.

I’ve also got some Doctor Who podcasts to listen to such as WhoCast and Tin Dog Podcast, some talks by Peter Kreeft, a couple of L’Abri lectures, a few programmes from the BBC, and some sermons by John Piper, Mark Driscoll and Pete Woodcock. Plenty to keep me busy!

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