Theakerly thoughts: resolutions, controllers and page sizes

Thought 1. The first in a new series: questions I have been asked by the radio. What resolutions have you made for 2015? Thanks for asking, radio, but none this year. There are things I’d like to do, like writing and publishing reviews more quickly after reading books. I’d like to get back onto my “small plate diet”, once the Christmas goodies have run out. I’d like to say no to more things, so that I can take the time to enjoy doing the things I choose to do. But no resolutions this time.

Thought 2. Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction #50 is far too long. It’s taking me forever to get it done, and I got distracted for a while last year by helping out on the BFS Journal again. But it’s on the way, don’t worry. Proofs should be with all contributors this weekend.

Thought 3. I have been having great fun of late after hooking a wired Xbox controller up to my PC and using Xpadder to interpret its commands, e.g. using the triggers to page up and page down when proofreading. It’s very groovy in Word, where I’ve hooked up the controller face buttons to my favourite editing macros. For example, pressing Y highlights the next word and adds a “Look up and check!” comment to it.

Thought 4. I’ve been struck lately by the weirdness of doing so much on-screen editing work on an A4 page, when pretty much nothing I work on in Word ever gets printed out from there. (I’m not a fan of Normal view.) So when reading subs now I change them to a landscape 13 cm x 29 cm page to snugly fit my screen, and working on other stuff I default to A5. Free your mind, dude!

Thought 5. One day I’d like to meet a doorstep evangelist who doesn’t condone the killing of everyone in Sodom and Gomorrah. #kickmurderoutofreligion

Thought 6. A few years ago I had an email chat with an author who admitted using Fiverr to pay for reviews of her book, All My Love, Detrick. She told me that everyone makes mistakes, and the important thing is to learn from them. Well, the book is now up to 296 five-star reviews and 105 four-star reviews. Wonder how that happened?

Theakerly thoughts: what's making me happy?

This time I’m going to concentrate on what’s been making me happy this week, in honour of the segment at the end of Pop Culture Happy Hour, one of my favourite podcasts. Please just take it as read that my adorable little family is, as ever, making me happy, and that I am thoroughly enjoying my day-to-day work. I just don’t tend to talk about that kind of stuff in detail on here. Because you’re all vultures who would steal my life if I let you.

So, what’s been making me happy?

Expanding my daily to-do lists from ten to twenty items. At the core of it is still the ten big things I need to get done each day, but the other ten give me credit for all the daily stuff that needs doing – dealing with email, my morning pomodoro of writing, taking the kids to school, collecting the kids, and, erm, weighing myself. It’s good. Instead of the morning run being a frustrating obstacle to my tasklist, it’s now a nice simple job to tick off. Best of all, my weekday scores now produce a percentage. (91% last week!)

The Logitech k480 keyboard. Admittedly it’s a bit plasticky, and the T and Y keys on mine don’t work very well (a replacement is on its way), but this is going to be my best friend during November. A groove along the top lets it hold a tablet, and a dial lets you pick between three Bluetooth devices – which might not sound that amazing till you realise that to achieve the same thing with the Apple keyboard you have to power off all the other devices with which it has previously been paired. Really looking forward to taking this out and about for my November novelling sessions, and writing away on my iPod.

The backlog of reviews is finally starting to melt away. Well, it’s down to twenty. Twelve if you only count things I was given for review, and not things I read and began to write about. My goal for issue 50 is to completely clear the backlog, even if it means re-reading some of the books. A pomodoro (25 minutes) of writing each morning isn’t a lot, but it’s a lot more than nothing, and applied to short stuff like reviews it moves things along quite nicely, without getting in the way of anything else.

The new Aphex Twin album, Syro. It’s a lot like the Analord records, and those come very close to my idea of ideal music, so I’m very happy with it.

The youngest of our family gave me some sparkly dinosaur stickers to stick on the side of my PC.

Using my old Kindle again. Reading about the Kindle Voyage make me realise I’m kind of sick of the Kindle Paperwhite, and its damnable lack of buttons. I’m leaning towards the view that touchscreen ereaders are an abomination. The Paperwhite works better than any other I’ve tried (a Sony and a Kobo), but still, it’s a relief to get back to reading on a device that switches pages with a button press.

Nanowrimo is coming and I have an idea! This usually doesn’t happen until October 30. And I learnt a lot from taking part last year, which is going to help a lot in shaping my plans. Even though it was my umpteenth time taking part, it was my first serious attempt in a while, and my first finished novel in a good few years. I wrote a bunch of blog posts about my experiences last year (here, here and here), so I’ll be studying those carefully in the next few weeks. One thing I remember very clearly: don’t start a novel with someone flying through the air over the ocean alone with no way to talk to anyone, because what the heck are you going to write about? This year’s Nanowrimo starts on a Saturday, which is pretty much ideal for getting off to a good start.

If something’s been making you happy, let us know in the comments!

Theakerly thoughts #7: Library of Birmingham, impromptu interview, Goodreads battle-shelving

Thought 1. I took our children to see the new Library of Birmingham at the weekend. I’ve got mixed feelings about it. It’s a good-looking building, inside and out, though one can’t help imagining what it might start to look like once the cost of keeping it looking so nice kicks in. It feels rather like a London building that has teleported to Birmingham. It’s odd to walk into a library and not know where to find the books. The open plan means it’s quite noisy, more like visiting a popular museum than a library. One fluff is a row of spinning red reading chairs lined up along a long desk, even though the desk is impossible to reach when sitting in those seats. I hated those chairs at first, but sitting in them later completely converted me, and now I want one for my office. I got the children to crawl underneath looking for a manufacturer’s name, but they let me down. So if anyone can point me in the right direction, please do!
     The library does have plenty of nice places to just sit and read, and I could quite easily see myself popping down there to get some reading done. It doesn’t feel like there are any more books than in the old library: see my photo below of the woefully understocked (or perhaps just extremely popular) horror section. The new children’s section is nice, but out of the way, and the circular desk surrounding the staff discourages queuing, which encourages squabbling and irritation. The series of huge steps at the back will be brilliant for storytimes, though I overheard the staff saying they were too busy to actually have any, and its large rectangular plastic cushions were being thrown around and used to construct forts and rafts rather than sat on. It’s exciting to see the range of cultural activities planned for the library overall, and I hope that doesn’t stop once the launch period is over.

Thought 2. My post offering authors a few points to consider before getting stuck in over a review has been pushing up our page views like no one’s business, and a writer turned up in the comments who had done just that, with us, a couple of years ago. I took the opportunity to interview him about his reasons for doing so, and I think the answers give a useful insight into the way some authors persuade themselves that this really is the right thing to do. The conversation left me with the feeling that there’s little point advising anyone not to attack a review. If they want to, they will, they’ll draw a line wherever it needs to be to put the review on the wrong side of it. And people who aren’t inclined to get huffy about reviews will nod at the advice and just do what they would have done anyway. Can I really claim my self-control is any better on this issue when I’ve never been confronted by a review with which I really wanted to disagree? (Well, apart from this, arguably, but I’d suggest that doesn’t count as a review.) I’ve had pretty bad reviews, for example a two-star one in SFX of my second self-published novel (here it is), but I can hardly say, look, I didn’t start an argument with the reviewer, because I didn’t want to argue with him. In fact, I thought the review was spot on, and if anything much kinder than the book deserved!

Thought 3. Goodreads have tightened up their rules on certain matters, in particular prohibiting the battle-shelving of books, making quite a few people really unhappy. For example, if an author has done something to earn the opprobrium of militant readers, they might till now have found their books added to shelves like “not-in-this-lifetime” or “author-to-avoid”. You might expect me to be against Goodreads on this change, but I do get it. For one thing, leaving stuff like that up could get them into legal trouble. For another, the people using those battle-shelves were almost always people who hadn’t read the books and who had no intention of reading them. So visiting a book written by a dodgy author you’d see little about the book itself, but dozens of comments about the author, and that was unfair to the books. Even complete gits can write good books.
     I have more sympathy for people told by email that loads of their reviews had been deleted as part of the site’s purge of this kind of thing, but anyone who has been on Goodreads for more than five minutes should know that such things are a fact of life there. Rogue librarians wrongly deleting or merging books, questions over whether single issues of comics and magazines should be included in the database (you could easily write a review of something only for the item to then be deleted), the sudden withdrawal of Amazon’s metadata at one point: this stuff happens all the time, and if that’s the only place you’re putting your reviews (no for me) or tracking your reading (yes for me) you’ve got to regularly download a spreadsheet of your booklist or risk losing it. Click on Export to a CSV file on this page.

Thought 4. “And f— you again, Aaron Sorkin, for hiring Constance Zimmer, Olivia Munn, Kelen Coleman, Natalie Morales, Alison Pill, Chasty Ballesteros, Hope Davis and Margaret Judson and leaving their fucking clothes on.” Ugh. It is 2013, right? Between that and this, I’m done with AICN. Looking forward to watching The Newsroom, though, which just arrived from Lovefilm.

Theakerly thoughts #6: audiobooks on Kindle, author firewalls, Mike Barrett

Thought 1. I’d forgotten how much I liked listening to audiobooks on my Kindle v.3 (the grey ones, now renamed Kindle Keyboards). Unlike an iPod it has little speakers that are fine for speech, and there’s a headphone jack for playing the books out to stereos, speakers and headphones. The older Kindles are even compatible with Audible files, and keep your place in them. Best of all, you can’t do anything else with the device while you’re listening. I have a bad habit of playing an audiobook on, say, the iPad, then wondering what else I could do while listening, and five minutes later turning off the audiobook because I’m reading a newspaper article and not paying the book any attention. You can’t do that with the old Kindles.

Thought 2. Ironic that the staunchest defender of an author who dived into a comment thread to set a reviewer straight is the same fellow who said this last May when explaining why he doesn’t review self-published books:

“We don’t know how you’ll react. The erratic behaviour of the author mentioned in [another article] is a strong illustration of why we don’t read self-published authors. We don’t have a firewall between us and the writer. Books from publishing houses that don’t have any self-published books give a level of detachment between what we write and the reaction we’ll get.”

So last year it was all about firewalls and detachment from the author’s reaction, this year “I welcome author’s [sic] comments” and those who don’t are bullies. Perhaps it’s different when the author is relatively famous.

Thought 3. During the all-too-brief time I edited Dark Horizons for the British Fantasy Society, some of my favourite articles were those by Mike Barrett on the history of fantasy and horror publishing. Some of those articles, plus several others, have now been collected in an Alchemy Press collection, Doors to Elsewhere, with an introduction by Ramsey Campbell. The articles were carefully researched, educational and well worth your time. More information here.

Theakerly thoughts #5: Left Behind, PCHH, Simon Amstell on Wait Wait

Thought 1. Received our first ever payment from Amazon in respect of Kindle sales. I think we finally reached a magical £20 barrier, and it only took three years or so! The future is bright!

Thought 2. I’m beginning to wonder whether, if one purpose of genre societies is to give people involved in that genre something in common, the mistakes they make can actually be a good thing. Writers are happy to have something to talk about, about which to be interesting and clever, even if it makes them mad. The logical consequence of this is that societies should actively plan to do something controversial on a regular basis!

Thought 3. Ranjna and I have finally started to get into Breaking Bad. In the same way that it’s hard to get Ranjna to watch dramas made in the UK, it’s hard getting me to watch dramas without aliens or spaceships. I try to kid myself that Breaking Bad is set in the early days of Borderlands, before things got really crazy, or maybe a retro town in the Firefly universe. Lawrence of Arabia was much more fun when I imagined it was set on Arrakis.

Thought 4. We watched Left Behind: The Movie last weekend. It’s an odd film about an attack on the United States of America (and, though not shown on screen, the rest of the world) by the shadowy head of a religious organisation with its roots in the Middle East, who kills over 125 million people directly (I think that was the number), many of them children and babies, all of them entirely innocent and wiped from the face of the earth in an eyeblink. Untold millions more are indirectly hurt and killed, for example as a result of planes and cars crashing after their drivers are killed. Astonishingly, the film sides with the quislings who think the best course of action is to start worshipping the mass murderer! Hopefully the second and third instalments will show us some real American heroes who won’t stop fighting till they end his atrocities forever.

Thought 5. I love shredding my to-do lists. Partly because it’s so satisfying to be done with the day’s work, and partly because we have lovely orange Niceday to-do pads that make very attractive strips, but also because there’s absolutely no need to shred them at all, and I love the idea of someone patiently piecing them together in the hope of finding some useful personal information.

Thought 6. I also love Pop Culture Happy Hour, the podcast from NPR, which I started to listen to a couple of months ago. It’s refreshing to hear people talking intelligently about their love of television, movies, games, comics and music, without the specimen-on-a-slide feel that you get when similar subjects are considered in, say, the BBC’s Late Review. They talk about what they love, but don’t ignore the things they find problematic. They’re also really decent about avoiding spoilers, which makes it listenable even for those of us in the UK.

Thought 7. Still on podcasts, Rambling Through Genre, Episode 8 features Lizzie Barrett, one of the jurors on this year’s British Fantasy Award for best newcomer (also known as the Sydney J. Bounds award), which comes up briefly, though Lizzie is appropriately discreet! The sound quality is poor, but Lizzie and the hosts have lots of interesting things to say. Well worth a listen. Elsewhere, Lizzie has suggested that such awards might be better judged anonymously to lessen bias, which is an interesting thought, one that might become practical as more publishers submit work for judging electronically. It would be harder to make it work with paperbacks, which often have the author’s name on every other page. It would also, as Lizzie mentions, mean nominations couldn’t be announced until the judging was done. But certainly an idea worth bearing in mind, and a good thought experiment.

Thought 8. I hope not to become a word count bore, but my plan to write 250 words a day seems to be working out. I’ve kept the chain going for over three weeks now. Admittedly, many of those words have been going into blog fluff like this, but the reviews are stacking up too, as well as a few bits of fiction. By the time we reach November I hope my writing muscles will be all set for NaNoWriMo, which I haven't won once since standing down from being an ML. I’m also finding it quite therapeutic; where things are bothering me I can write something about them here. Some thoughts may not ultimately be suitable for publication (there were originally thirteen thoughts in this post!), but it’s healthy to write them down and get them out of my system.

Thought 9. I was listening today to Peter Sagal’s appearance on NPR’s trivia quiz show, Ask Me Another (podcast 222, from 5 September 2013), and he was asked about the worst ever experience when hosting his own NPR quiz show, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!, which is like a laid-back, avuncular version of our own News Quiz. Turns out it was the time they had Simon Amstell on as a panellist. Can’t believe I missed that one. Sounds like a classic example of Amstell’s comedy of awkwardness. Apparently he made fun of the show’s beloved topical limericks and the crowd turned against him! Peter Sagal said Amstell had obviously never heard their show before (how many people in the UK have?), but you can’t imagine they’d seen anything of his either if his approach came as a surprise. Peter Sagal did say he found it very funny. I hope I can track that full episode down, but there are highlights here.

Thought 10. I’ve been listening to the five new Pixies songs so much that I’m beginning to worry about wearing them out, so I’ve mixed in a few Black Francis/Frank Black/Grand Duchy songs that are in the same vein. “Black Suit” is the one of those that I’d really like to hear the Pixies record or perform. Always makes me think of Matt Bomer in White Collar.

Theakerly thoughts #4: TTA reviews, 2000AD, holidaymakers

Thought 1. My review of Alison Littlewood’s new book Path of Needles appears in the forthcoming Black Static #36, and my review of the star-studded audiobook World War Z: The Complete Edition will probably appear in Interzone #248, out at the same time. So look out for those! Thanks to book review editors Peter Tennant and Jim Steel for giving me the opportunity to strut my stuff on a respectable stage. Lifetime subscriptions to both magazines are now available, and very much recommended. How much I wish now that I’d taken out a lifetime sub to Interzone when I was a teenager!

Thought 2. Another magazine I wish I’d subscribed to sooner is 2000AD. Though I’ve read dozens of the collections and reprint magazines, and subscribed to the Judge Dredd Megazine (for about a year) and the 2000AD Xtreme Edition (until it was cancelled), I don’t think I’d ever read two issues of the original comic in a row. Somehow I missed out on it as a kid which is a shame because I would have loved it; I adored the work Pat Mills and John Wagner were doing in Doctor Who Weekly. The last one I remember buying must have been a decade or so ago, since it featured a Spice Girls in space strip! I wasn’t impressed enough to buy another issue. And while I loved the Xtreme Edition, I found the Megazine a bit of a drag, the strips too short, samey (just by virtue of being all Dredd-related), and slow to progress (because it was a monthly). (I do however treasure the pack of Dredd playing cards that was supplied set-by-set over four issues! I use it at work, for measuring/rewarding my progress through long proofreading jobs!) But when Clint came to an end last month I realised I was going to miss the experience of reading comics as serials, so I bought myself a year-long sub to 2000AD, and I am really enjoying it. It’s not just the content, though that has been interesting, varied and much more suited to grown-ups than I’d expected, but also the experience of having a brand-new comic delivered through the door every week, seeing the stories develop, waiting for cliffhangers to be resolved. Arriving on Saturday morning makes it a great reward for the week’s hard work. Super. If I have the money spare when the time comes around, I’ll definitely be renewing my sub.

Thought 3. It’s been a year now since I deleted my Facebook account. I do miss the gossip, squabbling and drama. Have I missed anything good?

Thought 4. Do holidaymakers really prefer print? This article on the Telegraph's website says they do. But hang on a minute, do you really think they do? Doesn’t that just seem bonkers? Between us, my family read somewhere between twenty and thirty books during a five-day holiday this year. We would have needed an extra suitcase to carry that lot!
    And if you read the Telegraph article, a couple of things become apparent. For one thing, it’s only in the headline and lede (which are not usually written by the journalist) that it’s claimed holidaymakers prefer printed books to e-readers.
    The claim in the article is actually that the “the feeling of holding and thumbing through a real book was the main reason that 71 per cent of travellers said they would pack one over a slimmer, electronic version”.
    The main reason they said “they would”, not that they actually did!
    Read on and you discover the source of this research: Heathrow Airport’s retail director!

Theakerly thoughts #3: female avatars, Abrams, worst son ever

Thought 1. The new MGMT single “Your Life Is a Lie” has taken a little while to grow on me, but now I’m loving it, and singing it till my family begs me not to, albeit with slightly altered lyrics (”Your life is a lie / I like to eat pie / Aeroplanes fly / You’re making me cry”). It must be hard when your first big single is such a definitive rock statement. Where do you go from that? Well, I think they’ve found some interesting places.

Thought 2. Apparently it’s a thing that lots of men don’t like playing games with female avatars, to the point that the female Commander Shepard in Mass Effect and its sequels has acquired a separate label: FemShep. Supposedly only a small proportion of men play as her. This baffles me, and not for feminist reasons. Quite the opposite: lecherous reasons! If I’m going to spend thirty hours in a third-person game staring at a character’s bottom, I’d rather it was a female bottom! And ideally my wife’s! In pretty much every game where I could choose a customized character (Mass Effect, Oblivion, Skyrim, Saints Row the Third, etc), I’ve created one that looks an awful lot like Mrs Theaker. Okay, so sometimes I give her green skin, or blue hair, but that makes her easier to spot in the thick of battle. So I find it really weird that dudes are so adamant about playing as blokes. Perhaps they need to identify more closely with the player character than I do. Maybe they play online more than I do, and prefer an online avatar that will closely resemble them. Or maybe it’s a variety of homosexual panic: playing as a female character means you tend to attract romantic interest from male characters. Well, whatever. Doesn’t matter what those guys think of Commander Ranjna Shepard, they still owe their lives to her bravery!

Thought 3. An old thought, this. A review begun a long time ago but out of date before it was published. My thoughts from last year on watching the first few episodes of Person of Interest:
     Long-time readers will probably have guessed that I disagreed with Howard Watts’ scathing assessment of J.J. Abrams’ television productions in his review of Alcatraz, in particular when it came to Lost, which I’d rank among the very best programmes I’ve seen. Many people have an inflated idea of how many mysteries in Lost were left unanswered, possibly because they were answered as the programme went along with little fanfare, and so the masses who turned up for just the last episode thought they hadn’t been answered at all. In fact, there’s an irritatingly stubborn and just plain irritating idea abroad that the last episode revealed the whole programme to have been set in purgatory, which of course it didn’t. (The “purgatory” bits were a sequel to the events of the island, not an explanation for them. Their main purpose, I felt, was to show us the characters in different situations, letting us distinguish which of their characteristics were the result of circumstances, which were innate.) Alias and Fringe were brilliant at times, and even Felicity had its moments!
     I didn’t get around to watching Alcatraz (it was still piling up on the TiVo when it was cancelled), so I’ll defer to Howard’s opinion on that one, but I have been watching Person of Interest, Season 1, executive produced by Abrams, but created and written by Jonathan Nolan, co-writer of the Batman film trilogy.
     John Reese (Jim Cavaziel) is a war veteran living on the streets recruited by mysterious, wealthy Finch (Michael Emerson) to intercede in situations where someone is going to die, the twist being that he doesn’t know if the name he’s got is the victim or the murderer. It’s been excellent so far, the premise a successful cross between The Equalizer and Quantum Leap, with potential for one-off stories and longer arcs. Maybe it’s just my knowledge of the programme’s writer talking, but it’s not at all far off a Batman television series, albeit with the money transferred from Batman to Alfred, as Reese monitors each situation from the shadows before unleashing his violence skills at the crucial moment. He has some marvellous dialogue, my favourite from episode one being the warning he gives a crooked police officer: “I don’t particularly like killing people, but I’m very good at it.” One to check out, even if subsequent episodes tended more to the procedural than the exceptional.

Thought 4. Because the person who writes an FAQ has to write down the question as well as their answer, FAQs can sometimes provide an interesting opportunity to consider the difference between the questions that are being asked, and the questions someone thinks they are being asked.

Thought 5. Another old thought. Two hundred words on the subject of Once Upon a Time, that I decided weren’t suitable for publication as a review, given that I’d only half-watched the half of it that I watched:
     Once Upon a Time, Season 1 (Five) hasn’t been essential viewing for me, but the three female quarters of our family love it, and each casting announcement for season two (Mulan, the Little Mermaid, Captain Hook, and so on) has been a big deal for them. Superficially very similar in concept to the comic Fables, with fairytale characters living in our world (in this case in the town of Storybrook), it has played out very differently, with much of the focus being on events back in fairyland, which has the odd consequence that the programme’s lead character (Emma Swan, daughter of Snow White, sent to grow up in our world Superman-style) only appears in its best bits as a baby. Structurally it’s very similar to Lost, with the flashbacks focusing on a character at the heart of that episode’s current-day story, with revelations about that character’s history toying with your expectations of how that story will resolve. My favourite episode so far featured Grumpy the dwarf, born from a giant egg, and his doomed romance with a fairy (played by Amy Acker). The present day stories were at first a bit ordinary and repetitive when contrasted with the invention and magic of the fairytale stories, but as memories of that other world return it’s all becoming more interesting overall. Worth a look.

Thought 6. I’ve bought a wired Xbox 360 controller and the Xpadder software to let me use the controller on my PC. Not to play games, though maybe I will eventually, but more for when I want to lean back (or stand up) and read something on the PC screen without being tied to the keyboard and mouse. It’s taken a bit of customization, but it’s working quite nicely now. As with many of my previous brilliant office innovations (battle board, laboratory coat, daily scores out of ten), the family have mocked me for it.

Thought 7. Noticing that today was the first day of September, I realised that meant last month was August. Then thought, hang on, isn’t my mum’s birthday in August? No!!! I’m the worst son of all time. But every item on her Amazon wishlist is now on the way to her. And now I need to pluck up the courage to phone her.

Theakerly thoughts #2: Netflix, broads with swords

Thought 1. I am loving the new My List option on Netflix UK. I can see why Netflix were against its introduction at first, on the grounds that if you are adding films to it to watch later, that means you don’t actually want to watch them now, and quite possibly never will, especially after you get tired of seeing them in your list every day. Books that have just arrived are always more exciting than those already on your shelf. So I won’t add any films to it, but it’s brilliant for television shows, creating what we’ve always dreamed of: your own custom channel.

Thought 2. In yesterday’s Theakerly thoughts I mentioned a con that had decided against having an official policy on sexual harassment, and it turns out they’ve been just as unimpressed by the idea of panel parity, and responded rather bluntly to a writer who asked if it might be applied to the panel onto which he had been invited. And today we hear they’ve invited a feminist writer to appear on a panel called “Broads with Swords”. Gah!

Some parts of the UK scene do seem to have a mediumly old-fashioned view on these things, i.e. they’ll agree of course that sexism is a bad thing, but disagree with the idea that any action is required. The problem for those parts of the UK scene is that the internet is bringing them into regular contact with more progressive elements, whose use of social media tends to be rather more adept.

After John and I attended a convention panel last year on sexism, he noted wryly that the eminent writer who pooh-poohed the idea that anything should be done had kept a microphone to himself for the entire panel, leaving three women – including the panel moderator – and one right-on fellow to share two between them, meaning he could break in at any time (and did), while the women on the panel had to negotiate before speaking.

Thought 3. Don’t think from the above that I’d consider myself a good feminist. My wife would assure you that I have a long, long way to go. But dudes, we should at least try. Or at least try to look like we’re trying.

Theakerly thoughts #1: games for kids, cons, French Kindle

I don’t know whether this will be a new regular feature on the blog or a one-off embarrassment, but a tip of the hat to Peter Tennant’s “Thoughts for a …” posts at Trumpetville for the format I’m copying. The appeal is that it gives me somewhere to write down these thoughts, things I can’t put to any practical use elsewhere, but I’d like them out of my system so I can think about other things! Let’s clear my cache.

Thought 1. It’s funny how many games whose content makes them totally unsuitable for children feature mechanics that make them utterly perfect for children. Saints Row the Third features obscenity and violence by the bucketload, but it also lets you create a totally customised player character of either gender, dress them in a variety of wacky clothes, choose from dozens of fun hairstyles, and then pick four cool friends to run around with. And there’s a kitten car! Tekken 6 is all about smashing each other in the face, but give it to a toddler and they’ll soon discover that every single button on the controller makes something unique and interesting happen on the television screen. Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare does feature zombies, swearing and lots of unpleasantness, but you can also have a really nice long ride on a selection of horses. In Borderlands 2 you regularly meet mutants who are keen to cut you up and eat your entrails, but the jump-in, jump-out co-operative split-screen mode works perfectly, death brings instant resurrection and missions don’t reset when you die. There was justified controversy when the mechromancer character was described as having a “girlfriend mode”, but the idea of a character specifically aimed at less confident gamers is long overdue and very well implemented (you customize your robot and it does most of the fighting for you). And yet when you play games specifically aimed at children they are nearly always (the very best Lego games being the exception), unpleasant, unresponsive, counterintuitive, maddening and just plain awkward to play. No wonder kids want to play our games! The creators of children’s games need to look harder at adult games and see why they work for children. And the creators of adult games should consider creating cut-down cleaned-up kids versions. In the meantime, I’ll keep letting our children have a supervised go, with the sound turned down, on selected portions of the above games.

Thought 2. John Scalzi’s pledge regarding sexual harassment at conventions was a typically clever and principled move. Over a thousand people then co-signed his pledge, but how many of them meant it (which Scalzi clearly did), and how many signed because they want to be seen as one of the good guys? It’ll be interesting over the next year or so to see how many people will stick to the pledge if conventions refuse to post (and be prepared to enforce) sexual harassment policies. Hopefully that won’t be an issue, because most conventions will see the sense in the request, but at least one convention has declined to post a policy on its website, and though it may well be probably completely unrelated, one prominent publisher, a co-signer of the pledge listed as an attending member on the con’s website, has recently said they won’t be there after all.

Thought 3. Matt Hughes, one of my very favourite writers at the moment, has temporarily reduced the price of 9 Tales of Henghis Hapthorn to next to nothing. I reviewed it here, but at that price you should really just buy it!

Thought 4. Because I like games, I’ve always liked gamifying my work. Earlier this month I used a dusty copy of Lord of the Rings: Risk to set up a battlefield in my office. The idea is to focus on whether jobs are on my desk, or off my desk. A figure is assigned to each job, and stuck with blu-tack to a card with that job’s name. Figures representing the jobs on my desk are placed threateningly in Eriador (near The Shire), figures for the hobby jobs (BFS, TQF, TTA reviews) on my desk get as far as Arnor (Bree, Rivendell), while the figures representing jobs I’ve got off my desk lurk in Rhûn (the lands beyond Mirkwood). Needless to say this has provoked much ridicule from my family, but I’ve found it jolly useful.

Thought 5. I wonder if there would have been such a fuss about “former child” Miley Cyrus’s performance at the VMAs if she hadn’t looked like she was having such a laugh! The outfit and the routine were kind of tacky, but it was meant to be. I remember taking one daughter to see Miley’s Hannah Montana concert film in 3D, and being appalled by a scene where Miley states flatly after an accident that she won’t do a dangerous lift again, only for her mother to say, yes, you will. I don’t think she would put up with that now.

Thought 6. I read a blog post a month or two ago by a writer who had been writing and working for free for various big companies – contributing to blogs, reviewing, slush reading, I guess – and in the post he talked about how upset he was that none of them had given him paying work. I felt sorry for him, but it seems to me that if someone’s already working for free, giving them a job would mean you don’t get that free work any more. You might as well hire someone whose skills you can only get by paying for them. I don’t mind writing for free – it’s my hobby, and it’s good to have an outlet. But I won’t write for free for a company that is making money out of it.

Thought 7. Not sure when they appeared, but I’ve only just noticed all the new French books in the UK Kindle store, and I’m a bit giddy about it. It looks like all the big French publishers are on there now (Folio, Gallimard, etc), and what’s more my Kindle has at some point acquired a French language dictionary (much better than a French-English dictionary, since it encourages you to think in that language rather than waste time mentally translating). I’m currently reading La Vallée Infernale in Tout Bob Morane 1 on a Kindle Paperwhite and it’s been brilliant to tap on difficult words and get instant definitions. Shame to hear modern language learning is in decline in the UK, because there’s never been an easier time to do it. When I was first learning French at school, the first book I remember being given to read was a Sartre play! Much as I loved it, I’ll never understand why they didn’t start us on the equivalent of a Ladybird book and let us work our way up.

Thought 8. Ben Affleck as Batman! No one saw that coming! Except all those articles a while back that said he was in talks to star in and direct a JLA movie. He’ll be brilliant. Batman being in Man of Steel 2 suggests the thing I was most troubled by in Man of Steel (you know, the bit towards the end) wasn’t a poor film-making decision, but rather the set-up for a fascinating second film, an event with consequences, like the destruction of [spoiler] and [spoiler] in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek. If anyone could send Superman to the naughty step, it’s Batman.