Dead Ends

Write, people, write. Writing will get you to the other side! Once the juices have begun to flow, words will emerge fully developed, much like a cake from a well-heated oven. Once again, to write well you must first write, and I never get tired of saying that. Never let the chocolate monkeys of fate get in the way, but plough on in what you're doing and finish. You can't move on properly and open the next box until the old box is either empty or sealed up for dispatch. Interestingly, the chocolate monkey reference has just given me an idea...

The last few days have been interesting and not just because of the revelation of the Plain Chocolate Digestive Detective, which is my favourite one-off concept so far. Gosh, even if it is really inspired to a great extent by Jasper Fforde and Douglas Adams and even Mitchell and Webb a little, it is still mine. There will be more PCDD, even in the shadow of Night Trials seemingly having written itself into a dead end. There are methods for getting out of dead ends but they're either awkward or explosive. Ultimately, in story terms you can
1) Wait a really long time in-story so that things can build up again or fizzle out completely,
2) Bring an external power to bear, effectively hijacking the narrative and adding energy,
3) Reverse what you've just done and hope no-one minds too much.
Working out what to do with 'Night Trials' will be interesting as it was my first story and is the lease planned and most erratic in quality due to being the first. It will make a good assembled short story, though.

In my limited and small way I have now utmost admiration for the great Wilkie Collins and his serialised fictions. Even though I've only read the stories in their 'adapted to novel' forms, his power of prose and writing to the serialised rhythm is undeniable and outstrips even his friend and contemporary Charles Dickens. Dickens too wrote most of his works originally as serials but he lacks the showmanship of Collins and tries to write more about issues and the world of his time. Collins wrote to hook his reader and bring them back for instalment after instalment and with that method in mind wrote both 'The Moonstone' and 'The Woman In White'. They are both incredible novels to read for the first time, and some of his other novels are almost as good without being quite as natural.

So, as linux continues to plague me in my work computer travails and giant cheese beetles plague the gas giant Veronda, it becomes necessary to negotiate my way out of a dead end and somehow finish the story 'Night Trials' in an entertaining manner. Entertaining, not interesting, or provoking, but entertaining. That is the challenge! Also, the challenge is to get used to a KDE desktop on the work computer as I finally shot my Gnome and put him out of his misery. Oh, that brings to mind an excellent episode of 'Due South', which is a show I think everyone should watch at some point (but not the revival season, as that stunk.) In any case, it is time to hold up my finger, finish the pancakes and say 'I stand corrected'.

O.

PS 'Due South: The Man Who Knew Too Little', season one, excellent.