Book Review – First Light by Geoffrey Wellum
First Light by Geoffrey Wellum My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you want to know what it was like as a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, then this is the book you need to read. The author was a public schoolboy that joined the RAF just before the outbreak of war. He signed up in the spring of 1939 and started training as soon as he finished school in July 1939. The first third of the book is a very detailed account of his entry to the service and the flight training. Through this we get to know the author as a typical public schoolboy, he struggles with the academic side, but has no problems with the discipline and dealing with being in a service institution. Flying is clearly his passion, and is most of the focus…
A215 – TMA02 – Rounds
This is the story I submitted for the second assignment on the Open University A21 Creative Writing course. There will be a revised version of it eventually to improve it in line with the tutor feedback. Rounds Alice clipped the name badge onto her uniform before picking up her keys. First stop today was Granny Jack's house. She needed advice before visiting Fiona, her childhood friend. Outside it was a warm, dry spring day. Daffodils bloomed and the hedge had lost its clipped rectangular shape. Alice's car was parked on the narrow roadway outside her terraced cottage. She opened the boot with her key and checked the contents of her bag before taking it out and locking up behind. She strode off along the road, swinging the bag as she went. Granny Jack was the oldest living resident of…
Book Review – Memory by Linda Nagata
Memory by Linda Nagata My rating: 4 of 5 stars I very much enjoyed this and there is a real sense of both the characters and the setting developing over the course of the story. The back cover blurb describes it thus: "A quest, a puzzle, and multiple lives: On an artificial world with a forgotten past, floods of "silver" rise in the night like fog, rewriting the landscape and consuming those caught in its cold mists. Seventeen-year-old Jubilee knows that no one ever returns from the silver--but then a forbidding stranger appears, asking after her beloved brother, lost long ago to a silver flood. Could he still be alive? And why does the silver rise ever higher, threatening to drown the world? Jubilee pursues the truth on a quest to unlock the memory of a past reaching back farther…
A215 Poetry – Coffee Cravings
Having done the section on fiction (and written a 2,200 word short story, or rather four of them, two of which were way too long) the next part of the course is on Poetry. For six weeks or so I'll be trying to write some poetry. I was finding poetry rather baffling, I've never had a problem writing prose, it just sort of rolls off smoothly. The first chapter in the Big Red Book about it, Chapter 12, wasn't really that helpful for me, I didn't think it was offering anything new over what we've already covered at the beginning of the course. Mainly it was a series of writing prompts and exercises on inciting creativity. There was nothing about what made this stream of text poetry as opposed to prose. However, Chapter 13 is quite different, and while reading it I've…
A215 On Reflective Commentaries
In finishing off TMA2 for the Open University A215 Creative Writing course I had a lightbulb moment. This was in response to some discussion on a student forum about how the marking didn't necessarily follow the quality of the submitted piece of writing. This was attributed to the subjectiveness of 'good' writing. Or rather, that it is hard to mark the qualitative aspects of stories, poetry etc on an absolute scale. Accepting that, and taking it from the university perspective. You need tutors to be consistent, and that leads to robust marking guidelines that are completely objective. This then avoids valid criticism and legal challenges that could be successful. Both of the last are a bad thing from an organisational perspective, especially a university. So what do you base these robustly objective marking guidelines on? The course materials. As a…