Little token of affection from the London Tube

I bet London's transport network is a field day for epidemiologists (sp?) worldwide. The kind of nasty you can pick up because your neighbour coughs his or her lung out over your shoulder is impressive. Now, I do have the typical Taurus (I've been told) constitution; very hard to kill, generally, but my weak area is the whole breathing apparatus plus sinuses. I went to work first day with really bad sinuses, then they cleared up over a few days, and then my boss's boss fell ill. Then my boss. Over two weeks, it's been closing in, and I've done my level best to fight it off. Everybody's coughing and sneezing - same on the tube, bus, train.

It was only a matter of time. And the problem in my job is that I have to be sharp enough to catch a missing "bn" for "billion" in a financial edit (it does make a difference when editors mess up). What I edit every day requires me to be 100% sharp. Even 80% would do it (as long as I'm not the last pair of eyes on the edit). Today, I'm down to 50%, which means enough coherence to read a bit and go to the supermarket to acquire some soup (and remember to take the change). And write a quick blog update. But otherwise I'm woozy and headachy and surrounded by used paper tissues. It's a sorry sight.

To add insult to injury, the slice of vegetable quiche I found in the shop tastes like cardboard. Which is probably more my fault than its maker's; taste buds are on holiday while my brain's dribbling out of my ears. So I'll stick to mainlining hot tea, coffee, orange juice and cough syrup. Sounds like a balanced diet to me.

Yesterday, the rest of the plot for my space opera came together - which, as usual, led to a discussion with my partner. Now, bless him, he's patient and supportive, but he's incredibly focused on plot, and unless it's an awesome plot, he's all "bleh" about it. Anything. Books, films, and definitely my (or his own) writing. The gods were having a laugh, teaming me up with a 100% plot person. So, after some digging on his part, I told him the plot for the space opera novella I'm working on. And then we had a bit of a shouting match over the ending. He wants me to end it where my very specific ideas have run out (very much the dark moment in the story, where things look really bad). Whereas I do like to get characters out alive and halfway happy. I do think the main character kinda deserves it, too.

So there's the argument between a plot-driven reader and a character-driven author. The author wants to reward the characters for a "good effort" and all their struggles by showing them a way out after the big "oh shit" moment. The plot-driven reader can't care less about the characters and is totally focused on the twist ending - up to the point where he really only wants the twist and no real "afterglow".

I'm not yet sure how to resolve the issue. When I tell him that I don't actually *have* a clear ending, I get "yes, you do! You told me the twist, and every word after just weakens the impact! You'll ruin a perfectly good story" as a response. No use telling him that I'm still 10-15k away from the ending, and books change as I go along, with pieces falling into place before me like in a jump-and-run arcade game (anybody still play those?).

I honestly don't know; my brain's too mushy to work out a solution to that issue right away. In the end, I'll have to trust Mister Muse to put the missing pieces into place. It's not like I can sell a gay sci-fi story to the mainstream, regardless how kick-ass the twist is. If fantasy readers are unready for gay characters, then mainstream sci-fi is probably the last bastion of the "clenchies" as I like to call the "YIKES, GAY CHARACTERS!" homophobic fanboys out there.

On a side-note - the friend whose book I was proofing/helping to edit when I wrote the last few updates has landed a Big Name agent with it, so if anybody kept their fingers crossed for my friend, thank you. The goods vibes helped. :)

Riots in London, or #LondonRiots

Last night, some people tweeted me whether I was ok - apparently there was rioting going on in London. I told them that I was fine and way, way removed from the violence in what I thought was only London Proper (I'm living in a commuter city just outside) and that, besides, my city is so sleepy and frankly rich - I call it "pork belly town" in my less charitable moments - there would be no rioting.

Chuckling a little to myself about the over-cautious, but very sweet attitude from my friends, I stood at the train station, grabbing my coffee and breakfast, when a visibly tired guy with tattoos on his arms - think type firefighter/battle-hardened copper - ordered TWO large coffees for himself, saying "what a night".

Curious as I am, I asked him what had gone on, and he said "The riots. They trashed the High Street." (To my US friends, "the High Street" is the quivalent of the "Main Street" - basically the main shopping street).

So, yeah, the riots happened in my city, too. I'm about ten minutes' drive away from the area, in a sleepy, very suburban area with terraced houses, which all look exactly the same. There's protection in uniformity, I guess.

So, looking at the news reports, I'm not surprised. Croydon and Lewisham - where the violence started and then washed into "my city" are deprived areas. I feel unbelievably queasy in both cities, and that lingering feeling of discontent and... coarseness, for want of a better word, has kept me away from the area ever since. The joke is that the only reason to go to Croydon - origin of trashy fake blondes and a weird, coke-snorting supermodel - is the IKEA store.

Lewisham has an excellent Indian restaurant, but the restaurant is in an area so ugly and down-and-out that basically, you want to go there in a largish group, ideally all male, and get the hell out of the area when it gets dark.

Now, I've lived in a socially deprived area. For 27 years of my life, I've lived in social, government-subsidised housing, but not once have I felt threatened there. I don't feel threatened even now - I have a very good sense of location and can usually tell well in advance if there's a threat anywhere. I'm good at judging moods. Both Lewisham and Croydon give me the creeps in a "I don't want to be here" kind of way.

My sensibilities are very much middle-class - but I'm a "kid made good" story. I come from those areas. I got educated, I worked hard, I left my "social class" and became very much middle-of-the-road middle class, with a little house and a little garden and a little pension, and a little business, and little aspirations to just get "more" of all the good stuff I have and generally be a nice, upstanding member of society. On the other hand, I do understand that same anger. If my life hadn't worked out, I could be there, throwing stones and torching police cars.

Britain has some huge social issues going on - the mobs of violent youths roaming the streets at night can only be understood if you've read Clockwork Orange. Youth violence is something Britain has just got used to, and it's frankly scary. I *like* staying a home, writing, but if I didn't, I'd stay home because the streets aren't safe, they don't feel safe, and I just dislike drunken people throwing bottles and shouting obscenities, only interrupted by them vomiting their cheap beer everywhere.

There are things I miss about Germany.

No more ballet for me

Yesterday, I saw the Bolshoi Ballet in the Royal Opera House. I've seen some ballet in my time, always had a strange love for both classical and modern dance, thought I'd seen a good show with "Cinderella" a couple months ago.

Well, the Bolshoi makes every other ballet company I've seen look like lumbering idiots. Art can be a deeply spiritual experience. I swear I spaced out watching that, fell into a trance of sheer wonder.

"Spartacus" is so different, too. Martial, raw, testosterone-drenched, which works incredibly well with the famous Bolshoi male dancers (they are quite famous for producing the best male dancers, without matching that quality quite on the female side... I'm not sure I'm quite there yet, the women were fine, Phrygia was heartbreakingly etherial, Aegina imperial and sensuous). The sheer athleticism of the male leads was breathtaking, though. I've never seen anything like it. Quite likely, I never will again.

Art purges the emotions. Shock and awe, running us through the palette of emotion to cleanse us and leave that zen-like glow of peace and harmony with the universe. Sometimes, you just become one. Art to me is the real religion, that group experience of beauty and purity. The Bolshoi got me there, yesterday, and held me there for three hours.

It happens sometimes when I write, or read, when suddenly the universe becomes a place in one's soul, vast and yet entirely mine. And then I completely understand any other artist, too, who devotes his life to get there, and take other people there.

So much grace left me exhausted with beauty. It's that "I could die happy now" feeling.

It also ruined any other ballet for me. After I've seen what it can be like, I'm simply not interested to watch any ballet that's not the Bolshoi or as good as them. And I'm so grateful to have seen them. In terms of birthday presents, this will be very hard to beat.