The Power of Play

Spielzeugmuseum photo by Andreas Praefcke

I’m not one for writing “what I did on my holiday” blog posts or plastering Facebook with vacation snapshots, but I’m making an exception for my recent visit to Salzburg’s amazing Spielzeugmuseum (or toy museum in English). Actually, the word “toy” was a bit of a misnomer, because although it did feature loads of toys, the museum’s emphasis was firmly on play. Everywhere you looked, children were playing, doing awesome stuff like:

The Museum of Me - The Lost Years

I hadn't expected that the shameless trawl through my archives which is the Museum of Me would turn into an annual event, but here we are for the fourth instalment! So, Merry Christmas, and I hope you enjoy the lunacy that I've dredged up from the deepest recesses of the internet for you (and if this instalment doesn't put you off, you can also catch up on parts one, two and three of this monumental series)

I'd implied last Christmas that there wouldn't be another Museum of Me this year. That was primarily because I'd run out of decent content to present, and I didn't want to descend into barrel scraping. But there remained two major gaps in my personal archive, both of them from around the turn of the millennium.

One of those gaps was my epic biography of Mark Tastic (something that I mentioned in my Evolution of Max post earlier this year). I knew that I had the basic text of this, but had lost all the photos I'd taken of my friend Peter in the titular role. The other missing item was my wholly unprecedented foray into home cinema satire. Called Reverse Spiral, this column ran for about 9 months in the early noughties, on a very popular (but now long defunct) DVD website.

A few months ago, I made a systematic search of all my old backups, in the hope of finding any trace of Reverse Spiral. I didn't, sadly, but in a long-forgotten folder on a long-forgotten hard disk, I found the fully-illustrated saga of one Mark Oswald Geronimo Tastic:

It's That Man Again

I should say up front that Mark's biography isn't for the easily offended - in fact, it contains something to offend almost everyone. At the time, I think I envisaged it as a sort of anti-Forrest Gump, or how Martin Amis might write after a lobotomy ;-) Fifteen years later, many of the references are dated, and (in a post Operation Yewtree world) a couple of the jokes cut closer to the bone than I'd intended. But it also prefigures the London riots and the unstoppable rise of Simon Cowell. I wouldn't (and probably couldn't) write something like this now, which is why it's worth presenting in its original form.

Who is Mark Tastic? (1999) - Click image to open website in a new tab

The biography was intended for inclusion on a website spin-off of my CheeseCrank fanzine, which should explain the references to that publication and its editors A.C. Wilton and Bartholomew CheeseCrank. It's puerile, sexist, thoroughly debauched and also rather amusing. Enjoy!

The Internet Never Forgets

And now, onto the archaeological find of the year. My search for Reverse Spiral had yielded nothing, and it seemed that the site would continue to exist only in my memory. But then I discovered an amazing resource called The Internet Archive. Since 1996, the non-profit organisation behind the archive has been crawling the internet and saving the results. With 435 billion web pages in the archive, it seemed like there might be a chance. After typing the URL for the DVD website, I found some captures stretching back to the year 2000. But what about my section of the site? With baited breath, I clicked the link.

Suddenly, there was Reverse Spiral. I can barely express how excited and happy I was at that moment of rediscovery. The archive wasn't perfect, or complete, but it was something I could work with. A great deal of work, as it turned out. Although The Internet Archive contained a lot of the web pages, many of the images were not present. Thankfully, the glorious Crayolavision of How DVDs are Made survived almost intact, because I don't think it would have been worth reading without them. For other parts of the site, though, I've had to reconstruct the pictures from memory with only the image filenames to guide me. Here's an example of the work I had to do on Ask Agony Ninja:


For all that fiddling, I'm really pleased with the results, and I hope I've maintained the slightly amateurish feel that the articles originally had. Sadly, a number of the pages were hosted on a separate site and seem to be lost forever, which unfortunately means that you won't get to search the Anne Widdicombe Film Censorship Database any time soon. Perhaps that's a blessing.

Reverse Spiral (2000-2001) - Click image to open website in a new tab

I've added a short glossary at the top of the site, which should help with some of the technical terms that crop up. For instance, the name Reverse Spiral comes from Reverse Spiral Dual Layer (RSDL), which is a process used to fit twice as much data onto a DVD. See, you've learnt something already! I'd also like to stress that the letters sent to Agony Ninja did genuinely come from users of the site. Reverse Spiral was wildly popular in its day - How DVDs are Made was read 2,875 times and the most popular article (which was too damaged to present) received nearly 6,000 views. It's nice to think that a few more people will now get the chance to read it.

Nick.

Why You Should Support Stew Magazine

I’ve taken a break from the Stew Magazine short story I should be writing, because I wanted to talk about the Kickstarter campaign that’s just launched.

Stew Magazine is looking for £18,000 in crowd funding over the next month, to ensure the magazine’s survival and continued growth. That the magazine has reached the end of its first year is down, in no small part, to Ali Fraser. As editor and publisher, Ali’s vision and drive (together with the creative skills of the many, many contributors) have ensured that six terrific issues have reached hundreds of kids during 2014.

Here's where you come in, because we now need your help to continue into 2015 and beyond. I’d like to offer just a few reasons why you should pledge your cash to Stew Magazine:

• It’s a lovely product
  I wish that this blog post could come (Willy Wonka style) with a free copy of Stew that you could hold in your hands. The magazine is professionally produced to the highest standards, with beautiful full-bleed colour layouts printed on thick matt paper. Every issue feels substantial and yet very accessible – you’ll want to read it and keep it. Ali has a great eye for selecting illustrators with a range of styles and then combining their illustrations with the text in imaginative (but not gimmicky) ways. And it even smells good!

• It’s advertising free
  Stew is all content from cover to cover, so you can be sure your kids are getting brain food rather than being trained to be mini consumers.
• It tackles difficult subjects in an accessible way
  Along with all the fun games and articles, Stew has taken a fearless approach to non-fictional topics like human rights and scientific ethics. Even though I write fiction, the magazine’s independent status has emboldened me to tread similar “edgy” ground. Just in the last year, Stew has included stories by me that address subjects like female empowerment, child labour, the end of the world (twice), the effect of technology on personal privacy and the secret conspiracy behind all those free gifts on other kids’ magazines (OK, that last one may be a tad more fictional than the others). As a writer, the freedom to explore the issues that matter to me (and by extension the reading audience) has been priceless.
• It’s serious without being worthy
  Although Stew isn’t afraid to tackle difficult issues, its content is neither sugar-coated nor moralistic. Today’s kids are smart enough to consider the issues for themselves and make their own decisions. In fact, that’s the only way we can ensure the future is a better place than the world of today.
• The contributors deserve to be paid
  Now, I’m not suggesting you should do this specifically to pay my wages – I have a decent day job and am lucky to be in a position to freely give my time to Stew. But many of the illustrators are students or recent graduates who I’m sure could really do with the money. And beyond the physical act of payment, there’s a moral imperative to protect and nurture creativity, to value our efforts in the face of outside pressure to devalue what we do. I know Ali has been keen for a while to start paying proper commissions, and this campaign will enable him to do that.

So, for all these reasons and more, please visit the Stew Magazine Kickstarter campaign and make a pledge, no matter how small. Your support will help us to publish many, many more issues of this excellent publication.

Nick.

You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here...

I’ve found myself drifting back towards actual bricks-and-mortar bookshops recently, both in a “use them or lose them” way and in the hope that I 'll discover something completely unexpected (my continuous diet of kids’ fiction over the last few years having started to feel a little constrictive).

Thus, it was while browsing the graphic novels in Waterstones recently that I chanced upon a book called Marbles by Ellen Forney. I don’t know what it says about me as a person that when I picked up a graphic novel memoir by a bipolar bisexual cartoonist, I knew I had to buy it!

Blood, Glorious Blood

I was writing another unspeakable scene in my zombie opus when it suddenly occurred to me what a gift blood is to writers. Everything about it is so dramatic - the colour, the taste, the sound it makes hissing from a severed artery - and active - it spurts, it drips, it gushes. We can easily imagine a character's life ebbing away as the blood leaves their body and forms a shallow pool on the coconut matting.

Would things be so exciting if our bodies were driven by clockwork and bulked out with sawdust, or if we were robots who could be incapacitated with a single bullet to the wrong circuit board? Blood provides a wonderful shorthand for the rushing vibrancy of life and the fragility of the human condition.

Buying Undiscovered Voices

Just a quick note to say that if you would like your own copy of Undiscovered Voices 2010 to treasure (or keep in the loo), that they are now available for a mere fiver each from the UV Website.

I don't get any royalties from this, sadly, but I do get a big smile every time I hear that someone's read it. Which is much nicer, but harder to spend.

Nick.

The Gender Gap

It's impossible to spend much time writing for children before you notice the massive discrepancy between men and women; writers, agents, editors - women greatly outnumber men at all levels of the industry. Does this give us a vision of what life would be like in a matriarchal society? And is that such a bad thing? I've been procrastinating on this subject for months, lest it get me into trouble, but here goes anyway...

Help! I Can't Stop Proofreading

There are a number of things of good things that writing has brought to my life, like providing a sense of purpose and improving my ability to empathise in everyday situations. Unfortunately, it seems that as my writing gets better, so my intolerance to other people's bad writing gets worse. This occasionally manifests with me closing a blog page or putting down a book with a snort after just a few sentences, but mostly it comes out in the form of proofreading.