Fire!

I’ve been watching the news from home and it’s all incredibly grim.

Here I am, camped out in a country where the biggest concern is lots of cold in conjuction with lots of cold wet stuff, looking back at my nation where heat is destroying entire swathes of the countryside.

In the time since I have been here, the temperature in southern Australia has been above 40 degrees celsius – I believe that is around 106 degrees Farenheit.

Train rails have buckled in the heat, the power grid has shut down in places from sheer demand and fires have been burning everywhere.

Today 108 people are dead in Victoria alone and entire towns have been reduced to ash. It’s truly awful.

It seems somehow worse that I am here trying to write a novel in which the main event is a raging bushfire. My first instinct is to stop immediately and come up with some other catastrophe – it all feels rather like I am exploiting someone else’s misery and misfortune.

This is despite the fact that Australia is a country designed to burn. Many of our native plant species have adapted so much to its incidence that they cannot germinate without fire. The trees have bark filled with flammable oils, bark designed to shed easily and blow away when alight to spark further fires many miles away.

Fire is part of the national profile and one that is going to become more common as climate change continues and our weather patterns become drier still.

Is it wrong to use this as part of a story line or is it realistic to do so? Am I being exploitative or simply facing facts?

Mind you, the story isn’t written yet and it’s hardly going to hurt anyone in that state, is it?

I live in a town which was hit badly by bushfire 5 years ago. In many ways it’s still in a state of shock.

I wish everyone back home well.

S.

And in the next exciting episode …

Life is an amazing experience, isn’t it?

So full of twists and turns and very few warning signs like, “steep drop ahead” or “slow down, hairpin bend.”

My trip is back on, although to a very different part of America for now. I’m waiting to hear from a friend in Ohio as to how soon I may darken her doorstep, occupy her spare room and turn into a dark and brooding, quasi-artistic presence in her home.

I’ve been watching the weather forecast for the area and, mercifully, it’s quite a bit cooler than here. Although there is no snow on the horizon. Anything cooler than Australia in mid-summer is good as far as I am concerned. And we’re having a cool summer too.

I think I may be turning into one of the world’s first international climate refugees.

Preparations proceed apace. (What a concise sentence, and in such multi-syllabic pretension too..)

I have finished my tax stuff (Yay!) for the business, my reading pile is diminishing and I have a stack of suitcases with things in them on my sofa bed. I say they have “things in them” because, while they are not empty, they are certainly not packed.

There is no order to the contents. I simply think of something I really should take with me, open the lid of the nearest case, and pop it in. I’m not quite sure what one should pack for a 6 month sojourn in foreign climes, so I’m making it up as I go along. Neatness and method can come closer to my departure date – whatever that may be.

In the meantime, my book wants to be written. I find I have little screenplays running in my head whenever I take a moment to actually listen to what I am thinking. I am so tempted to sit down and start NOW, but that would be silly. It would leave things undone here and then I would fret about those the whole time I am away.

Those and the cat.

More later.

S.

Respect your readers

I am back, bleary-eyed and listless, from the Emerald City. Those who don’t reside in Oz may know it better as Sydney.

It is a phenomenon in its own right and one to which I shall dedicate no further words… because I didn’t see much of it really.

What I did see quite a bit of was the Olympics. They are — apparently — mandatory viewing in all public areas. Well, the swimming, certainly. It’s a cultural expectation that all Australians be exposed to as much pool-side vision as possible once every four years.

Now, while I am no sports fan (being inherently non-competitive and fatally co-operative in my nature) I must confess to like watching the swimming. Probably because it doesn’t involve a ball. And it’s over really quickly.

I can safely report that all airport lounges and gates (as well as hotel dining rooms and restaurants) have a box in the corner for the diversion of this nation of armchair sportsmen.

No, really.

What caught my attention, however, was not the record-breaking performances of the home side, but the appalling quality of the subtitles going live to air for the edification of the deaf.

In order to allow our aurally challenged countrymen to also experience immersion in the Olympic spirit, sports commentaries, interviews and chit chat amongst various sporting types (with broad shoulders, gleaming smiles and carefully tousled hair styles) is being transcribed into subtitles for their viewing pleasure.

This is obviously being done by someone completely unfamiliar with the Australian accent. The resultant sub-titular gibberish is now a serious medal contender in the Chinglish replacement stakes.

The transcribers should be slated as replacements for targets in the firearm events.

Honestly, if a scribe is unable to understand the vernacular that they are listening to (and which is the native idiom of the intended reading public) then they are unqualified for the job at hand and should be given the flick.

What is the point of transcribing hours of conversation – to be displayed two lines at a time – if the resulting text means absolutely nothing at all? Isn’t this just adding insult to injury? I feel that it displays a complete lack of respect for the intended audience and reeks of grudging compliance with someone else’s rules.

Was there a requirement that the official broadcaster also provide sub-titles for deaf viewers? (My lack of interest in the Olympics is the cause of my ignorance here.) If so, who was the bright spark who thought that having any arrangement of letters appearing at a constant rate qualifies as providing comprehensive sub-titles? Why are separate syllables appearing as different words in a nonsensical string?

The great Aussie diphthong appears to completely confound the scribes: towels at one stage were referred to as toe rails. I don’t know why. And I don’t think it is a case of voice recognition software run wild either. The wording doesn’t change to reflect context and there is no inherent sense in much of what appears.

While it did all provide me with much involuntary hilarity and quite a few belly laughs, I wonder what our deaf sports fans are making of it all? Is it a case of roads to Hell and good intentions, or simply an exercise in condescension?

How does this audience feel when they realise that the network executives don’t actually care about the quality of the product they are airing purely for their benefit? Would they rather get nothing than this dog’s breakfast of errors?

This provides an object lesson to all writers. Remember your audience, realise the limitations and provide written work of a consistent quality which actually gets the message across.

A message which does not communicate is no message at all.

Time to sleep.

S.

Destroying my website

Well, I had planned to write on writing again quite a few days ago…

I got distracted.

I bought myself an HTML editor and became caught up in the mystique of creating my own site using the magic of a very simple program and the wizardry of FTP.

I got the first two parts right.

The new site looks fabulous! So much more subtle and elegant compared to my old site’s reliance on the host’s templates.

You won’t be able to form an opinion right now though. I screwed up the third part. My site now says it’s a private directory to which permission is denied.

I feel the need for something chocolatey and bad for me – and possibly a quiet weep somewhere inconspicuous…

more later.

S.

Thinking about how you write.

I read an article this morning about classes in penmanship being run for senior students of high schools in New South Wales.

Keyboard Kids lose the art of handwriting

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Apparently these teenagers are so accustomed to keyboarding, texting and so on that their handwriting is illegible – and they now need it for their senior exams! Oh dear.

What fascinated me about this piece was that it discussed the links between handwriting and other aspects of a person’s development; socially and intellectually. I’ll deal with one of those issues in this post.

It was pointed out that “Handwriting is an important expression of a student’s personality.” I’m sure we have all known a person who insists on dotting their lower case letter “i”s with a circle, or a smiley face or a love heart. Perhaps we even ARE those people.

We have seen our grandparent’s beautiful cursive writing, wondered over the copper-plate script of earlier generations (while trying to decipher it) and tried to get our own writing good enough to be allowed to use a pen in class. I know that I take particular delight in watching my 3 year old nephew biting on his tongue while he is trying to drive a crayon on paper.

Mind you, I also chuckle watching his 69 year old grandfather biting on his tongue while trying to drive a car – but I digress.

There is something about having total control over a writing implement that says you’ve officially made it to the status of individual. You are your own person when your handwriting is clearly recognisable as yours. When you can address an envelope, leave off the return address and know that the recipient will identify you as the sender before they even open it… well, that has a kind of magic to it.

It’s like writing “Hello, old friend” in invisible ink.

I know that there was a time in my life when my penmanship skills disappeared completely and it devastated me. I had carefully schooled myself out of the university scrawl I had acquired during my Masters degree and regained something that was really quite nice. I could even do the same left-handed!

Then my hands stopped doing what I was telling them to do and I could write no more. There were no elephant stamps for me for quite some time. Even now, each time I pick up a pen, there is a dread moment of suspense before I learn if I can write that day.

But what of the young adults who have never learned the power of a handwritten word?

Those kids who send love notes by text message instead of a chit of paper tucked furtively into a book somewhere?

Who hear from their grandparents frequently by telephone, instead of wonderful, seasonal, multi-page letters that tell all the news and require concentration and dedication to write?

In my view, no word-processed document can convey deep sentiment. It’s an impersonal and almost bland method of sending a message when compared with a hand-written note.

Of course, that’s just my opinion. Still, it would be interesting to know what our young teens would think if they were suddenly deprived of access to all keyboards and had to communicate handraulically instead. Would they even bother?

Till next time,

S.

The inaugural address …

You know, the written word used to be a sacred thing.

It was honoured, revered and respected. There was a magic inherent in the entire process of one person recording some thing on some medium and then another person being able to recover that message or ‘thing’ at another time and another place. The ability to take arbitrary symbols and use them to communicate was literally awesome.

Magic.

We seem to have lost that sense of wonder. Today, language is being assailed on all fronts. Grammar is neglected, spelling rests on the writer’s whim and punctuation is ignored. As a result, meaning is obscured, language tortured and true communication endangered.

Why do we make it so hard for ourselves? We have the tools to make our meaning clear. They’ve been developed over millennia, through many great civilisations and remain free to use by all!

This is not to say that there is no room for innovation; a language that refuses to change and adapt will soon be abandoned. However, there exists a foundation which has stood firm for many generations.

In this blog I will be talking about what I see happening in the written (and sometimes spoken) word. Some of it will be reflections on the beast and – no doubt – some of it will take the form of rants against verbal vandalism. There will probably be quite a bit of the latter actually …

See you soon.