Author Archives: James - Page 92
How I write poetry
Before I started studying the Open University's A215 Creative Writing course I had never tried to write poetry, even though I've written several short stories and novellas. For TMA3 of A215 I had to write 40 lines of poetry. How I write poetry With one exception, which was my first attempt, all of my poems start as a freewrite on the subject, title or prompt. Normally I discard the first paragraph of the freewrite because it is overly literal, I use words and phrases from the remainder to form the basis of the first draft of a poem. Unlike my prose, where I typically draft in scrivener, the poetry starts on paper or a basic text editor. Subsequent drafts use the track changes feaure in a word processor. This allows me to see how each poem develops. Each draft is its…
Poetry Station
my desk for writing poetry I am busy crafting poetry for the third assignment of my Open University course A215 Creative Writing. Or rather I am indulging in a little displacement activity right now. However I will be back to work in a few moments. You will see from the picture of the table I'm using as my desk a number of things. Most useful being Stephen Fry's The Ode Less Travelled which is a very good introduction to poetry that I heartily recommend. Next is the video camera that I've been using to record myself reading the poetry out loud so that I can listen back and refine it. This is my own take on poetry being about the sound of the thing, much more so than prose. I think that's what makes poetry harder for many people…
Book Review – Flames in the Field by Rita Kramer
Flames in the Field: Story of Four SOE Agents in Occupied France by Rita Kramer My rating: 3 of 5 stars While this has lots of fascinating information about SOE Operations in France in WW2 it needs a better editor. The nature of the story, primarily of the secret operations in German occupied France in 1943 and the SD penetration of the SOE network, is one of many parallel threads and the uncovering of a mystery. So this makes it hard to just write a linear narrative, and the author has done a pretty good job of writing very readable prose that clearly explains what is going on. However there are a few places where the ordering of the material goes backwards within a few paragraphs and crucial pieces of information are given out of order. The book shows an…
Review – The Lego Movie
I went to see the Lego Movie this morning with my eight year old son. We both laughed out loud at it. A lot! It was seriously funny for most of the movie, some of it was slapstick and some of it was pretty geeky side jokes. Either way we had a whole lot of fun watching it. As the theme song goes, 'Everything is Totally Awesome!' The premise of the movie is a pastiche on the ancient prophecy tale where a hapless youth discovers he is the chosen one a little earlier than he's ready to deal with it. A mentor sees him through it and good triumphs over evil in the end. In the case of the Lego movie this sees a standard construction worker (Emmett) become the master builder who will save the Lego universe from the…
Chaos Monkeys
I spent a chunk of Friday in an alpha training session on clouds. Much of it wasn't new, but there were some insights into designing stuff for clouds as opposed to fixed infrastructure. The netflix chaos monkeys came up, and it made me think. It isn't the first time I've come across the chaos monkeys, but it put an image in my mind of a chimp in an old fashioned data centre pulling cables out of a patch room and the unplugging servers from the network. Add in a bit of the cliche cleaner who pulls the plug out of the critical system to power the vacuum cleaner and you're away with the mental image. In the cloud no-one has to hear you scream. If you spaghetti cable all the boxes together and make them all redundant by synchronising data…