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Archives for February, 2015
Could You Write Five Million Words?
Five million words. That's about a hundred NaNoWriMo winners worth of words. More than most authors will publish in a lifetime. Yet it's not far off what you need to write to become a good writer. Ten Thousand Hours There's a theory, most famously expounded by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, that you need to spend about ten thousand hours practicing a skill before you get to the world class level. He cites The Beatles and Bill Gates amongst others as examples of this. There's more to success than just putting in the hours, but it certainly counts for a big chunk of it. So what counts as practice as a writer? You'd think this was obvious, writing stuff, and maybe a bit of reading. However I'd disagree with that, or rather modify it a bit. What I think makes you increase…
Twenty Years on the Internet
(Photo credit: Wikipedia) It's so long ago that I've forgotten the exact date, but I first used the internet in February 1995 when I was working as a local system administrator for the UK Energy Efficiency Office. I had a second-hand 386 laptop with a 9,600 baud modem in it and I mainly got usenet through a now long defunct CompuServe account (with the snappy and memorable as my email address). My primary use of the internet was for work, I was finding out about Novell NetWare admin and Groupwise as the mail client + server software. However there were no official internet accounts, and no way of getting sign off for one. That said, everything was done in-house, with the odd specialist contractor to add expertise. So I just got on with using one of the free CDs that…
Book Review – Silesian Station by David Downing
Silesian Station by David Downing My rating: 4 of 5 stars Second in the series, and it ends where I expected the first to end. It starts a few weeks on from where the previous book left off. In late July 1939 John Russell is returning to Germany from America by boat with his son. Definitely an interesting read, Downing has clearly done his research well. There is a fantastic period feel to it. Especially the embuggerance around the travelling to and from Poland. The places and the people are very well described, and the latter are well observed and seem real. The danger in the air from unguarded comments is real for these characters, and they are mainly circumspect with strangers. I was also pleased to see how Russell's film star girlfriend develops too. She starts the story with a…
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Book Review – Shakespeare on Toast by Ben Crystal
Shakespeare on Toast: Getting a Taste for the Bard by Ben Crystal My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed this. It definitely lives up to the title and shows Shakespeare in context as something to be performed and watched rather than read in a classroom. The language is laid bare and clearly explained in a way that I found easy to absorb. I particularly like the explanation of how Shakespeare used metre to give stage directions and show emotion. It probably helps that I've only recently finished an undergraduate creative writing course a few months ago. So now I get poetry in a way I didn't a year ago. That said this book explains it much better than my dry academic texts did, which is really the whole premise. Ignore the academics, snobs and critics. Instead listen to…
Edinburgh’s Camera Obscura
I was in Edinburgh visiting family at the weekend and amongst other things we visited the Camera Obscura up at the top of the Royal Mile. Despite many visits to Edinburgh I'd never been there before. My expectations were of a panoramic view in a classic Camera Obscura. The attraction is so much more than this. The whole place is packed full of optical illusions, most of which you are invited to directly interact with. Two of my favourites, which unfortunately I don't have pictures of because I was too busy enjoying them, were the mirror maze and the vortex tunnel. The mirror maze was a series of mirrors mounted at 60 degree intervals as you looked at them. ( from above they'd be at 60 degrees from each other). Although quite a small space from outside it was very…