YOUR BRAIN IS A TOOL. PLEASE LEARN HOW TO USE IT BEFORE KNOCKING WALLS DOWN.

Well, it's happened. The votes have been counted, and apparently Britain wants out of the EU. Well, 52% of Britain does anyway. Or maybe not, if this article is anything to go by.

As someone who voted Remain (after doing some research and concluding that, while there were advantages to leaving they were outweighed by quite a lot of disadvantages) reading this made my jaw hit the floor so hard I still have the chin-bruises.

Let me just get this right... there are people out there who voted for something they didn't want, purely because they believed enough other people would vote for the thing they did want? Others saw their vote not as, y'know, an actual vote that could change the future of this country, but a way to tell the politicians of this country "You can't tell me what to do - look, I'm deliberately voting for something I don't actually want to happen in reality, just to annoy you! Yeah, chew on that, losers!"

Do they not realise how voting works then? Are we going to have to start introducing IQ tests for people before deciding whether or not they're actually capable of rational thought? I'd like to say this applies equally to those who voted Remain and now 'wish' they voted Leave -  because it does - but let's face it, they're unlikely to be feeling the same levels of guilt about it, since they actually got the result they now realise they wanted all along.

"We weren't given enough information," is the number one excuse offered in their defence of voting for something they've subsequently decided was a bad idea. Well no you weren't, if by 'given' you mean 'lovingly spoon-fed into your open mouth while you lay supine on your couch like an overgrown baby bird.' If your only source of 'information' is whatever daily newspaper you favour, then you are basically being told what to think by whatever fat-cat magnate owns that newspaper, and  believe me, his reasons for wanting you to think that way have nothing to do with your welfare or future. I'm sorry, but this is the age of the internet, the smartphone and all manner of  WiFi-connected devices; "there wasn't enough information" just doesn't cut it as an excuse anymore. If you want an unbiased opinion you gather more than one from more than one source, and if you don't know something you go look it up. That's the way the modern world works. (I bet if you wanted to know the name of the actor who played the guy standing next to Littlefinger in that scene from Game of Thrones in order to win the entire box-set you'd know how to Google that shizzle, wouldn't you?)

Before you come at me, this is not a hate rant at everyone who voted Leave. I accept there are plenty of people who did so for their own reasons that have a direct effect on their lives; I've spoken with long-distance lorry drivers, fishermen, people living in areas dominated by warring eastern European gang communities and others who've had to live with consequences of being part of the EU that I have no experience of myself, and I accept my point of view is not going to cut it balanced against their personal experiences. You guys had the right to feel the way you did and to use your vote the way you did.

No, the people I'm annoyed with are the ones who switched off their brains when it came to making possibly the most important decision about this country's future in decades, and are now bleating about how they'd have voted differently if all the vital information they now realise they needed to know could have been magically piped into their brain - preferably while they were sipping a cold one and watching Take Me Out on telly. And, because it didn't happen that way, it's so unfair and and totally not their fault that they voted for something they don't want anymore and actually, now they think about it, never really did. Well, wake up and smell the coffee, because you made the mistake, guys - not the newspapers, the tv or the internet, but you. You can't undo it, so the least you can do is have the decency to own it. Media is just food, and your brain is supposed to decide what type and how much of it you're going to eat. Y'know, like when you have to choose between, say, a sandwich and a packet of lard.

The other people I'm annoyed at can be found in the Comments section of the article referenced in this post. A lot of them (although not all) appear to be pro-Brexiteers who chose that path because they are in fact raging bigots with outdated Little England fantasies about restoring Britain to the days of Colonialism, but I'm sure that's just an entirely unrelated coincidence...

Anyway, these particular individuals seem to have contracted an unfortunate neurological disorder. Whenever they encounter someone with a point of view that doesn't match theirs, they are completely unable to discuss things rationally, but can only spew out toxic personal insults, questioning the other person's sanity, intellect and even right to exist as a human. These are most likely the same individuals who are now wandering randomly up to anyone of an ethnic minority they see in the street and snarling at them, with gleeful venom, to "pack their bags" and "go back home." (This includes, by the way, black, Asian, Indian and Pakistani people who were born in Britain and even whose parents were.) They're probably also responsible for making up the laminated cards with "go home" written on them and then posting them through the letterboxes of the Polish communities.

Sadly the most dominant symptom of this neurological disorder is the delusion that the entire purpose of the Leave vote was to restore their entitlement to be xenophobic assholes as some sort of constitutional right - heck, even make it cool to be a frothing-mouthed bigot. Since they are immune to reasoned argument, and derision seems to provoke them into fits of uncontrollable rage where even expressing intelligible thoughts becomes impossible, expecting them to change their behaviour and eventually adapt to living with other humans who Aren't The Same as Them is probably unrealistic and demanding more of their fragile cognitive abilities than they can cope with. And God forbid we should treat them with the same contempt they reserve for 'immigrants.' Hate on a group of people just because of who they are, what they believe and how they live? Jeez, that would be really unfair...

The brain is a wonderful, precious thing - and the human brain in particular has evolved into a thing of eye-popping complexity. Unfortunately, while you can justify not giving a chainsaw to a child, you can't restrict which humans get to have a brain purely because a proportion of them are never going to learn to use it sensibly.

And that's where us writers come in. We have to use our brains every time we write, so the responsibility is even bigger on us to use it wisely and for the good. If this referendum (and the 'Bregretters') has proved anything, it's that many, many people in this world soak up written information as passively as a sponge soaks up water, without questioning it or even looking for deeper meanings, while others only absorb the bits that sound like they agree with what they already think. All of which means we need to think harder about what we put out there.

We can make a difference. We can create stories, poems, movies, songs and art that challenges racism, sexism, genderism and all the other nasty isms out there. We can include what we currently call 'minorities' in our work in a way that's so natural and 'normal' the very term 'minorities' becomes redundant. And most of all, we can send out the message that hating people just because they're 'not like us' is not okay - in a way that the spongebobs can soak up without realising they're doing it and the bigots can't twist to suit their own agendas.

So write from the heart and let's fill those voids. And help those who complain there's 'not enough information.'

5 THINGS I WISH SOMEONE HAD TOLD ME ABOUT WRITING WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER

If you are a young writer today - twentysomething, teenager or even younger - you've picked a great time, let me say.

So much information, literally at your fingertips, not just about writing but everything ever in the whole world! So many forums and societies of like-minded folk to belong to, many of them free or at least pretty darn cheap! So many blogs written by real, actually famous authors, sharing their wisdom and experience and giving you the opportunity to 'talk' back to them! And if you want to show the world something you've written, these days you don't have to go cap-in-hand to one of the Big Six, begging them to please please take a look at your stuff, or pay some vanity publishing company squillions to make you a cardboard boxful of your masterpiece to store in your garage for eternity. You can publish it yourself via Amazon, or post it online at sites like Wattpad and Smashwords or a tonne of others.

All of which means that most young writers today are a darn sight more savvy about getting their work out there than I ever was as a young 'un. Back then, the internet was probably something you caught fish from other countries in, a tablet was what you got from the doctor when you had a nasty infection and a blog was the noise someone made when they threw up (yep, it was that long ago.)  Proper famous authors were an elusive species, enigmas that kept themselves to themselves and only emerged from their magical hobbit-houses blinking in the sunlight for occasional interviews with magazines, radio and television - and even then, they weren't speaking to you, they were speaking to the interviewer. Writing advice and encouragement? Pfffft. Pretty thin on the ground back in those Stone Age times.

Put away your tiny violins please, I'm not wearing my flat cap and waving my cane at you. This isn't going to be a grandma rant about How All You Young 'Uns Have It So Easy These Days - far from it, actually. Because while there is a lot more information and support being passed around for young writers today - and hurray for that - I feel there are some things that aren't said very often, and should be. They're the kind of things most of us oldie writers have learned through experience - the long and often painful way. Some of us are starting to talk about them, a lot - Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog, for example, is a champion of the knowledge that should be screamed from the rooftops but rarely is.

And that's the motive behind this post. If I had a time machine and could go back to my teenage writer-self to give her a list of Things You Need to Know Already about Being a Writer, this is what I would put on that list. It's the stuff I wish it hadn't taken me twenty-odd years to figure out.

1 - Finish what you start.

So easy to say it sounds like a no-brainer the second it flies out of your mouth - but so much harder to do in reality. Especially when each day brings new ideas fluttering through your head like butterflies,  oh so pretty and enticing... so you put aside the thing you're working on to chase the new, shiny-pretty thing. Until that one gets old and another shiny-pretty flutters by...

Before you know it you've got a drawer or hard drive full of half-finished pieces, languishing in eternal limbo. Oh, you have good intentions to come back to them again - someday. But someday never comes. (It doesn't, trust me - I've got half-finished novels that I started a full fifteen years ago, still sitting there crying "Pick me! Oh please pick me!" every time they see me poking my face inside their little folder-home. They're still waiting, and are likely to be doing so for a long time yet.)

I'm not saying I never finished anything I wrote when I was a young writer. Short stories? I finished quite a few of them (even got a few published.) Lyrics? I finished loads of them (even managed to write a full set for two stage musicals.) But short stories and lyrics are 100-yard sprints compared to the marathon that is a full-length novel. That takes some serious endurance, and when the finishing line is still too far ahead to see with the naked eye it's easy to believe it's not there at all, and just give up.

You have to believe that finish line is there - even when you can't see it. And the only way to motivate yourself to keep heading for it is to....

2 - Treat writing like a job.

I loved to write, I really did. And because it was something I loved doing, I very quickly fell into the trap of believing it was something I should always enjoy doing, every time I deigned to plop my creative ass in front of a computer or notepad. Whenever I felt inspired I would let the words pour forth and create magic! And when I didn't... I'd play World of Warcraft instead. Or watch a film on telly. Or do pretty much anything other than writing. After all, what was the point in trying to write when I just didn't feel in the mood for it? I couldn't possibly produce anything decent that way, could I?

However much you love it, writing is work. Hard work, if you want to be any good at it. If you only want to write as a hobby, to fill your free time amusing yourself with no serious intent for others to ever read your work, by all means write only when you're feeling the good vibes. But if you want to be published at some point - well, you won't achieve that in the soft play area, kiddo. You gotta pay your dues, clock up the hours and work your way up the ladder, like you would in any other, real-world job. Writing whenever you feel inspired is easy - but writing even when it feels like the last thing you want to do is what separates the dreamers from the doers.

So you have to treat it like a real-world job, which means agreeing your contracted hours and allocated duties and showing up accordingly, on time and ready to graft. You don't have to show up every day, or for a full-on 9-to-5 day, but whether you go full or part-time it needs to be regular and a 100% commitment - even if it's only for your half-hour lunch break Monday to Friday. Sick leave, domestic disasters and holidays are of course allowed - but not ducking out because you're just not feeling it today.

I know, I know - you're a creative and it just doesn't work like that. And you're right, it doesn't. At first. But the longer you force yourself to stick to it, the better you become at sticking to it - to the point where you'll eventually start feeling antsy and vaguely guilty if you try to skip a session. And that's exactly what you're aiming for. If I'm making it sound like I'm trying to suck the fun out of a writing career... well, good. Because that's the reality - writing isn't always fun. Sometimes it's a slog and a chore. But still worth it - always worth it.

3 - Track your progress.

But yeah, I still just made it sound like a massive, fun-sucking chore, didn't I? So what's needed is a little motivation to keep you running on that hamster-wheel, and showing you just how worth it all that effort truly is. And nothing does that better than numbers, baby.

So set yourself targets and aim to meet them; daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. But make them realistic - nothing ridiculous that sounds great but you have no chance in Hell of achieving, because that's worse than having no target at all. Start with time first; resolve to sit down and write for, say one whole hour a day. Then do it and record how many words you wrote in that time. Do it a few more times until you can get a clear average number of words per hour you could consistently produce, and then look at your timetable of hours per week you've set aside for writing (as per Number #2 on this list) to work out how many words you're likely to produce in total. Then commit to achieving it, week in, week out (barring ill-health and domestic emergencies, obviously.)

Review your targets every once in a while, and if you're showing a pattern of beating them/not meeting them, adjust accordingly. You should be always aiming to challenge yourself without over-reaching to heights you can't achieve.

You can record your results in a spreadsheet if you want, viewable only by you. However, if you like the idea of joining a group of like-minded folks, indulging in a little friendly competition and mutual support, there are doggone flippin' fabulous sites like MyWriteClub, where you can set your own writing goals and indulge in online 'writing sprints,' in real-time with other writers. You can see your word count racking up as you write, along with other fellow 'sprinters,' and send and receive congratulatory messages in Chat. Writing can be a lonely old business, and nothing motivates like mutual support.

However you choose to do it, it's seeing those numbers in black and white that will spur you on and keep you writing. The average novel is 100,000 words, which might sound huge and impossible to reach if you've never written anything that large before. But once you start seeing that you're regularly banging out even 5,000 words a month (which is not much more than 1,000 a week - pretty doable with a regular writing schedule)... well, it doesn't look quite so daunting, does it?

4 - Save EVERYTHING you write. Yep, even the terrible stuff.

Here's the painful truth; in the early years of your writing journey, what you produce will not be good. You might not believe it now - you may be able to think of a few pieces you've written only recently that are actually pretty damn good and the best you've ever written, thank you very much - and I will say "Suuuure, forget I said anything then," and pat you on the head.

But then you will dig them up a few years later and read them again, and you'll realise I was right. Without me ever even reading them, I was right. Because even if you're already a bloody marvellous writer right now, you're still not as good as you will be in, say, a years' time, or five years' time - provided you keep practising, and learning, and striving to improve, of course. And part of that process of learning and improving is... writing an awful lot of crap first.

But in order to know what your own, personal interpretation of crap is, you have to give yourself the opportunity to perceive it as crap - and you can only do that if you can actually see it years later, in all its brown-hued glory. For all those future-moments when you doubt yourself as a writer and worry that you'll never make the grade, going all misty-eyed over the turds of your past is a wonderful thing. It gives you hope. There it is, the proof that you really have levelled up from the wooden-penned noob you once were.

Another reason is that it helps you discover who you really are as a writer. You may find that it takes you aaaaages to complete a novel for the first time. As in, years of false starts and aborted attempts that never get beyond Chapter Five (sticking my own hand up right now...) Or you may find every novel you do write gets universally rejected for the first few years. In both cases, this is often because you haven't figured out what 'your stories' are yet - the stories your writer-soul desperately wants to tell as opposed to the stories your wanting-to-be-a-published-writer-brain is saying you 'should' tell. Those clues to your writer-soul will be hidden in all your previous work, like a psychological treasure map; recurring themes, characters that share distinctly similar personality traits, and familiar questions that keep cropping up. It might (no, scratch that - it will) takes years of collecting, but only by trawling through your previous works and gathering up those pearls will you finally discover the parts that make you the writer you are.

5 - There will be times when you absolutely freakin' HATE writing. And that's totally okay.

I absolutely love Redemption, my current w-i-p. Love the story, utterly love the characters - even the bad guys - and love the progress I'm making with it.

Except of course on the days when I hate it so much I want to drop-kick it in the 'nads and punch its stupid drooling-chimp face. On those days, it feels like every word I type is the incoherent ranting of a drunk who's had a DIY lobotomy, and my whole plot is a stinky pile of recycled barf that's already been done a million times before a million times better and why am I even doing this anyway, because no-one's ever gonna want to read this festering heap of garbage...

I've felt the same way about short stories and lyrics I've written too (to this day, there are lyrics I wrote for one particular musical number years ago which I can still flip between loving and hating on a day-to-day basis, depending on my mood, the weather, heck I dunno...)

And you will have days like that too - days where you'll look at whatever you're writing and think "Why am I even bothering? This is truly awful, and titanium-coated proof that I'm never ever going to make the grade as a writer." You'll want to rebel. An urge to throw the work aside and stomp away in a massive huff will overcome you, and you might decide to give up on all of it - screw writing and screw being a writer, it's too damned hard for too little reward!

You'll come back though. Maybe in a day or two, maybe in a few months time. But you will come back, because the real writers always do.

And when you do, don't feel bad about that thing you did when you were angry - you didn't mean all those things you said, we know that. We love our spouses, kids and other family members to death but that doesn't mean they don't occasionally drive us screaming, spitting mad - and it's the same with writing. You're allowed to fall out with it sometimes and lock yourself in your room, refusing to come out until it sorts its stoopid attitude out. It doesn't mean you don't have the stuff in you to become a 'proper writer' (hell, if it did there would be no writers at all in the history of ever, since even the great and the good will have kicked their toys out of the pram at least once in their lives.)

Sometimes taking a step away from writing for a while will even be necessary. Life has a funny way of randomly throwing steaming piles of brown stuff at you, whether in the form of periods of extreme stress, traumatic events or debilitating illness (either physical or mental.) In those circumstances, your health and well being has to come first. If stepping away from writing is what you need to do to get through whatever you're going through, then of course you must do it. No-one will condemn you or 'question your commitment' (and if they do they're not worth listening to.) Writing's not going anywhere. Unlike some kinds of people, it's a faithful love, and will be waiting for you when you're ready to return to it again.

So there you have it - that's the list I would give to Teenage Me. All I have to do now is figure out a way to post it into The Past...

Thing is, would I even have listened anyway? I remember Teenage Me. She got advice on a variety of subjects from lots of older people, and while she was very polite and smiled and nodded in all the right places, I knew deep down she was thinking "This is great, but you don't know me." I wasn't arrogant enough to think I knew it all, I just felt their advice could only work for the smart and confident - for those who had their shit together. And I didn't believe I was any of those things as a teenager.

So if you're a young writer, I wouldn't blame you if you felt the same way about my list. I'll admit there's plenty on here I wouldn't exactly have been thrilled to hear back then either - it sounds like a lot of work and heartache at times. But I'd still hand them to my younger self anyway, because I've had enough years of learning the hard way that they do make sense, and if I could save myself that bother I would. And I'd quite like to save you that bother too, if I can.

Just sayin'.

BAD WRITING AND BAD WRITERS ARE NOT THE SAME THING

This week I read the article 'What Makes Bad Writing Bad?' on The Guardian UK website. If you are at all insecure about your abilities as a writer this rather high-handed pontification will not help matters, so I suggest you proceed with caution when it comes to reading it for yourself.

From just reading the title, it would be reasonable to assume it's about the things that make bad writing bad. wouldn't it? You know, the usual suspects; adverbs, passive voice, filtering, repetitive phrases...

Spoiler alert - it isn't. Somewhere along the line the author decided instead that it was certain kinds of people who made these grievous errors - and they personally were the 'things' that made bad writing bad. His issue wasn't so much with the way words were laid out on the page, but with the personality and motivations of the person who was putting them there.

I will concede he did make one or two good points. It's certainly true, for example, that any writer who believes they have nothing more to learn because they've become Masters of the Craft are generally full of something, and it isn't good writing. But overall I feel he swung his Bat of Shame in a pretty broad circle without much regard for who he might have been hitting. If you are an aspiring, as-yet-unpublished writer - or even an already-published one - I challenge you to get through the entire article without feeling at least a little bit stung by the end of it, because it's cleverly worded to stab little needles of doubt into the sensitive writer's self-esteem.

Aspiring to write boundary-breaking fiction like influential authors such as Jack Kerouac, Margaret Atwood, David Foster Wallace and Maya Angelou? You're probably a Bad Writer then. Been working for a few years on the novel that's been burning in your brain, and can't start another until you've got this one out of your head? You're probably a Bad Writer too. Writing a novel that explores certain ideologies and issues that are dear to your heart? Yep, you guessed it - you're a Bad Writer as well.

Now these declarations might make sense if every author who's ever written anything that fits in any of those above categories has always produced something bad. But that clearly isn't true, as - ooh, I don't know, several thousand classics and bestsellers over at least a couple of centuries will testify. Yes, these things can certainly be done badly by writers who lack the necessary skills - but that in itself shouldn't be clarion call to all writers to never even attempt to write what their heart wants to write. The problem is, this article doesn't make that distinction; it takes what it regards as 'bad writing,' looks for the genres and motivations most commonly associated with it and then brands everyone who writes or wants to write that stuff as 'bad writers' before they've even begun.

Bad writers don't realise they're bad, is the takeaway message from this article. They keep on writing their terrible stuff, convinced it's what they're meant to do, that their instincts are right and they should keep on writing, no matter what everyone else says. Bad writers believe in themselves and their writing ability when they really, really shouldn't.

And isn't that the very head-demon most halfway-decent, good and even great writers fight, every day of their writing life? That, actually, they're not as good at this writing lark as they think they are, and they should just quit their narcissistic dreaming and get back to the Real World? How many of us have heard those same sentiments echoed out loud by the naysayers among our friends, families, teachers, peers and work colleagues?

I bet you can picture the looks on their faces as they say it too. That half-pitying, half-contemptuous look that says "I'm just trying to make you see how much of a delusional loser you really are, because I'm smart enough to predict your eventual humiliation and kind-hearted enough to warn you about it in advance." Ironically, they're often not so kind-hearted that they'll be happy for you if you prove them wrong - in fact, their little hearts will shrivel with secret fury if you dare to defy their cutting non-expectations at some point in the future. Because here's the secret those people don't want you to know; if you're a creative person who's actively chasing your dream, you break their world view and that scares the crap out of them.

Society at large is not encouraged to 'think big.' If you want a guaranteed system for Making It in life, you work your arse off in a normal, steady job that pays a regular wage for practical skill sets that can be applied to everyday life - skills like retail, office-based, trades, hospitality, catering and managerial skills. Not only that, but if you're really serious about supporting yourself and then later on providing for your family, this is the path you should be committing your energies to. That's how you get respect in this society - playing the game by The Rules.

But while a large proportion of society accepts and abides by these Rules, that doesn't mean they're always happy about it. Even people without a single creative bone in their body have crazy dreams about the kind of life they'd live instead, if they didn't have to do their duty in their job that Pays The Bills and Puts Food on the Table. But they bury those dreams, shoving them aside for the Greater Good, and the only way they can do that without tumbling into a pit of inner misery is to convince themselves that they're doing it because the way they've committed to - the sensible, real-world-thinking way - is the way that works. That taking the rule-breaker path of following their dreams and sucking up knockback after knockback - probably for years and possibly forever if they never succeed - is the choice so life-wrecking and impossible it shouldn't even be contemplated. They need that to be the absolute truth in their life if they are to keep trudging down their safe but humdrum life of stability.

And then someone like you comes along. You, the creative, who hasn't locked her dreams away in a box marked 'Unrealistic' and stuck to The Rules like you were 'supposed to.' You're taking all the risks they're too afraid to take and - well, you may not have achieved all the things you've dreamed of achieving, but you also haven't died or been left destitute and friendless either. You're making chasing your dreams look... kind of attractive as a life strategy. You even look like you're enjoying the process, damn you! You're breaking everything - if you can do it and not get swallowed down a hair-clogged plughole of disaster, that means it might not be wrong for them to try it either... You're making everyone who takes the safe path look like wusses, you troublemaker!

You must therefore be stopped, before you convince others to follow in your footsteps and make those too scared to try feel even more resentful for choosing to stick with their safe life choices. And since rejecting and ridiculing what you do clearly hasn't been working so far, because you still insist on doing it anyway, the only alternative is to go personal and reject and ridicule what you are.

And that's how you get from 'Bad Writing' to 'Bad Writers' in a single web article. It's  also why you can swap out 'writing' and 'writers' for 'art' and 'artists, 'performances' and 'performers...' You imply the two are one and the same, a symbiotic relationship where each 'partner' feeds off the other to survive.

And no creative person on the planet is immune from such a judgement - if the kind of person who judges creatives in this way decides they don't like the way Stephen King writes his stories, they will judge him a Bad Writer until the day they die, in spite of a cosmic crapload of evidence that this can't actually be true. That's not to say he hasn't produced bad writing in his career - the man himself has owned up to that on more than one occasion. But doing anything badly is part of the process toward becoming good at it; every one of us once had to have bums regularly wiped clean by an adult because we hadn't figured out toilets yet. Imagine if, instead of being encouraged to keep trying, we'd all been branded 'bad children' and told to give up on our dreams of ever being able to control our own bowels?

So yeah, when people tell you they don't like your writing... they're entitled to their opinion, and you're entitled to make up your own mind whether you want to try and change it or not. If people tell you what you've written is 'bad writing,' the same applies, but it might be worth your while taking another look at your work and seeking some other opinions to see if there's any truth in what they're saying.

But anyone who tells you you're a 'bad writer?' Unless you're stabbing them in the eyes with your pen, abusing people on social media or committing crimes that have nothing to do with written prose it's a meaningless criticism. No writer in the history of forever was ever born a 'good' writer. We all suck in the beginning, and no two writers' journey from 'crap' to 'okay' to 'good' (and maybe even 'great') are the same, or take the same length of time to travel. That person who produces 'bad writing' now might bang out a kick-ass best-seller in a couple of years' time - or ten years' time, or maybe it'll take them twenty or more years to finally crack it. Meanwhile, another writer who wrote fantastic stuff in his early twenties might struggle to maintain that standard as he slides into his thirties, spend his forties in creative doldrums and then suddenly have a resurgence in his fifties and beyond. You could try and slap the 'Bad Writer' label on both of them - but you can't make it stick.

Even when your writing is bad, it is not because you are a bad writer. Remember that in your deepest, darkest moments of self-doubt. Mistakes are things, not people.

4 Ways 'The Book of Human Skin' Changed How I Write Characters.

It's a well-used mantra, quoted by everyone from Stephen King to Chuck Wendig to Neil Gaiman - as well as writing a lot, writers must read a lot too. Stephen King even goes so far as to say that if you 'don't have time' to read other people's books, then you'll never have the skills to become a decent writer.

But have no fear if you think you 'don't read much.' I used to think that too. Whenever I heard the advice 'read widely and read lots,' I used to curl up inside and think "well that's me stuffed then - the last time I read a 'classic' was in an English Lit. class in sixth form." But then I looked at my bookshelf, crammed with books I'd collected over the years and covering all subjects imaginable - fiction and non-fiction. I remembered all the science and history magazines I like to buy on a regular basis. And then I realised my Kindle, which I got three years ago, currently has over 200 books stored on it...

Because the good news is that you're not confined to intellectual, classy or 'recommended' reading when it comes to broadening your horizons. All reading is good - and not just fiction in the genre you write in, but in the ones you don't and even the ones you couldn't in a million years. And sure, the Classics are named so for a reason, but the mass-market bodice-rippers, quirky chick-lits and rip-roaring thrillers are just as valuable for adding credits to your Experience Bank. Non-fiction is just as useful; books about science and history and nature and stuff are pretty much acorn factories for the research stash you'll rely on at some point in the future. So are books that cover the craft of writing.

But best of all, you don't have to be sniffy about the quality of the books you read either. A badly-written book can teach you just as much about good writing as a well-written one.

One book that taught me a lot about writing characters is The Book of Human Skin by Michelle Lovric. I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it to other writers and readers alike - as much for the things I didn't like about it as those I did.

Set in eighteenth century Venice and Peru, it tells the stories of Minguillo Fasan, collector of books bound in human skin and self-appointed torturer of younger sister Marcella, and a Peruvian nun called Sor Loreta who does for religion what the Ku Klux Klan does for race relations. The tale alternates between the POV of the aforementioned three main characters plus two supporting ones - Marcella and Minguillo's manservant Gianni and Doctor Santo - Marcella's 'love interest' (well, kind of. More on that later...) So you have five POV characters altogether - some of which were a joy to read, while others... not so much. Here are my top takeaways on writing characters, learned from reading this book...

1 - The greatest villains think they're heroes.

There were two villains in this story: Minguillo Fasan and Sor Loreta. They were without doubt the best characters in this book, even though they were, at least on the surface, very different from each other.

Of the two, the absolute, stand-out best was Sor Loreta. From the moment we first 'meet' her as a child, it's clear she's several beads short of a rosary, and as her story unfolds she just becomes more and more deranged. The only thing larger and more terrifying than her obsessional religious piety is her monstrous ego, believing as she does that she is quite literally the Bride of God, representing His will on earth. But what really kept me glued to her portions of the story - and longing for her next bit when the other characters got their turn - was the feeling that I, as a reader, was the only one seeing her for what she truly was. Everyone else in the story seemed to be either blind to her wickedness - totally taken in by her sob stories or a conveniently-timed 'miracle' she performed - or, if they did have suspicions, pretty much dead by the end of the scene (covertly by her hand, of course.) Even she believed she was a virtuous holy woman who was simply carrying out the will of her God - she did not, for one second, consider anything she did to be morally wrong. For example, she drowned a young nun in a bathtub of ice-cold water believing she was purging that nun of her sins (and therefore saving her soul.) So the question that burned in my head every time she made an appearance - and upped the ante on her evilness even when I thought she couldn't go any further down that path - was "Is anyone ever going to catch this psychotic woman out and stop her?" Because - and all credit to the author for achieving this - it never looked like anyone would, right up until the very end of her story.

In fairness, this was also true of Minguillo. But his attitude was different; he knew the things he did were considered evil by the rest of society, and he cared not a jot about that. In fact, he even taunts the readers about it, asking them directly to reflect on what it says about themselves that they are so interested in hearing about his evil exploits. This is a hard trick to pull off in a villain without making them look like a moustache-twirling pantomime character - "Oooh, I'm so eeeevil, muha ha ha haaa!" But for Minguillo it works because, while he might 'know' he does immoral things, he believes he has just reasons for doing them. Disliked and ostracised since babyhood because his debilitating skin disease has left him permanently scarred (and therefore physically unattractive,) he has decided he is an undeserving victim of a judgemental society, and all he is doing is exacting payback for wrongs done to him (whether real or imagined.) In that sense, he's as much of a 'hero' in his own mind as any morally-upright pillar of society.

And that's the key to making a really memorable villain. You actually can go into the shades of grey about whether a hero considers himself a 'good' or 'bad' person - as long as that villain is convinced he's entitled to be that way regardless of whether or not anyone else in the story universe agrees with him. If he believes that doing callous and immoral things to those who've behaved in a callous way to him somehow 'cancels out' the immorality of those acts, the reader will accept that he can be as bad as he likes while still believing he's on the side of 'right.' We may not agree with their mindset, but we can understand it, and - sort of - empathise with it. Even if we don't want to.

2 - Heroines with the patience of a saint just try your readers' patience.

Minguillo's little sis Marcella was the heroine of the story - although it has to be said, that really depends on what qualities you think a protagonist should possess to be considered 'heroic.'

If your idea of a strong female character is a woman so passive she practically floats through every injustice done to her like a leaf in a raging river, who sucks up her suffering so quietly and patiently her cheeks are permanently Velcroed to her tonsils and who never does one single, goddamn thing to stand up for herself ... well, you'll love Marcella. Yes, Marcella's superpowers were her jaw-dropping beauty and a saint-like disposition that would make Mother Theresa look like a mardy old battleaxe. 'Crippled for life now because Minguillo smashed my legbone into toothpicks? *Sigh* I do wish sometimes he wouldn't do things like that, but, y'know, I'm so blessed to be so pretty and have so many friends when he's so ugly and unloved I probably shouldn't complain...'

 Aaaarrrrggghhh! By the time I'd got halfway through the novel I bloody hated her - which made me feel oddly guilty considering the only people who seemed to hate her more were the two main villains in the story. I don't know how or where the author got the idea that making Marcella a simpering, uber-placid paragon of virtue would equate to being a tower of strength and resilience - if anything it had the opposite effect of making her look weak and, quite frankly, dumb. Thanks to her brother she was permanently crippled, then packed off to a lunatic asylum and finally banished to a convent - at some point in her miserable life she should've got at least a tiny bit cross about that. Not left it to everyone else around her to do on her behalf, while she just smiled inanely and carried on being Minguillo's human punchbag. In fact that was the other annoyance with Marcella; she never did a thing to help herself at any point. But then again she never had to, because all these legions of people who randomly fell in love with her for her pure, sweet passiveness were practically falling over themselves to fix every problem in her life, big or small. Everything that wasn't either a villain or an inanimate object not only decided Marcella was the most wonderful creation in the universe since time began, but often discussed the matter at great length with the other characters, while wringing their hands at what such an unworthy mortal like them could do to ease her suffering and fill her life with the ponies and rainbows she so richly deserved.... it's okay, you can have a quick break to throw up now if you want....

So yeah, Marcella will forever be my go-to example of a Mary Sue in fiction. If they ever invent a Glossary of Writers' Terms, they should probably just stick her name in as a catch-all reference. I will never, ever write a character like her in my stories, I promise. Unless of course I intend for her to die before the end in some horrible - ideally comical - way.

3 - Sometimes the colloquial accent DOES matter.

As I mentioned previously, one of the secondary POV characters was Gianni, loyal manservant of Minguillo and Marcella (although inevitably he was far more loyal to the latter than the former.) Let's note that his name was Gianni, and not, say, Wayne or Deano. This was because he was a rural Italian peasant living in eighteenth century Venice, and while it's fair to assume that his lack of formal education and general peasant status means he's not going to have a wide vocabulary and immaculate spelling, he's still going to sound - well, like he's lived in Italy all his life...

So why then, did he 'talk' like a Mitchell brother from EastEnders? I'm not much of a historian, but I'm pretty sure there weren't many Cockernee geezer-peasants around in eighteenth-century Venice.

I get what the author was trying to do. She wanted to leave the reader in no doubt that this guy came from a poor, unsophisticated background, where he would have gone into servitude as a child instead of learning the three R's like the rich folk. And yes, one of the best ways to highlight that is to have that character use bad grammar and spelling in his 'diary entries.' But there's a hidden danger with this technique, and it comes down to how readers pronounce those errors in their head as they read them. Everyone does it as they read - they hear what the character is saying as an actual voice talking. The problem is, anything where the words are being 'heard' differently because of the way they're written is going to translate to that reader as some sort of accent - and if that accent is geographically wrong for that character it jars. (That's also why characters in historical novels don't tend to say things like "Whatevs, babe, catch you later, okay?" Unless they're terrible historical novels, of course.)

The lesson I learned from that? If you really must use mis-spellings and shortening of words to convey a character's social status, read your dialogue out loud to hear what it actually sounds like as a voice coming out of a person. I don't know if the author actually did that for Gianni, but if she had I'm sure she couldn't have failed to notice he sounded more Essex Man than Italian Villager. In this case it may have been better to just go with the bad grammar rather than mis-spellings, which are after all phonetic errors (and how on earth do you translate an Italian peasant's phonetic errors in his native language into written English anyway?)

4 - He's called the Romantic LEAD - not the Romantic ON A LEAD.

Now we come to the other secondary POV character, the gentle and caring Doctor Santo (and the one guy given the actual job of being Marcella's Love Interest, even though God knows every other non-villainous human in the book probably tried out for it at the audition stage.) And I'll admit, the takeaway I got from him may well be a lot to do with personal preference. 

Not every romantic lead has to be a badass, I get that. They don't all prove their love by punching out the lights of every evil schmuck who so much as raises a hand to the love of their dreams, or by figuring out ways to protect said love from said schmuck - or even by alerting someone in authority who could do something that this evil schmuckery is going on. Instead, they - um, wring their hands and agonize from a safe distance, refusing to do anything that might jeopardize their position with the evil schmuck in case he blocks access to their lady-love? Especially since they haven't even revealed their true feelings to her yet, because oh my god, how could they ever be worthy of the love of one so perfect and beautiful..?

Mmmmyeah, sorry, but that's why Santo didn't exactly light my fire. If there was some sort of Saint-Off going on in this tale, Marcella and Santo were definitely going head-to-head for most of it. Santo starts off as Minguillo's doctor, treating him for his terrible skin condition, but ends up treating Marcella's smashed-up leg after Minguillo has a game of whack-a-limb with it, which is when Santo first falls hopelessly in love with her. So, his secret crush is permanently crippled by one of his own patients that he already knows is a horrible person - and how does he feel about that? Nope, not angry, that's not what he says. He tells the reader he feels 'sad.'

SAD? 

As in "Darn, that's really put a downer on my day?" Well, cheers for that moral support, hero! He also gets his knickers in a knot because, no matter how 'sad' he feels about his crush's appalling treatment, there's 'absolutely nothing he can do to help her' - and certainly if it involves harming so much as a hair on the head of Minguillo. Of course there bloody is you fool, you're a doctor. Here's how it goes: "I have this tincture for your skin condition, Mr Fasan. We've had some great results with it in other patients, but unfortunately the side-effects include stomach cramps and uncontrollable diarrhoea... you might as well just strap your arse to a toilet for the forseeable future. Sorry about that, but thems the breaks." (Hey, medicine wasn't that advanced back then - he could totally have got away with that...)

Even at the end, when he finally - finally! - starts doing stuff to free Marcella from her dreadful existence in the convent and get rid of Minguillo once and for all (like, after more than three-quarters of the way through the entire book) he beats his breast and agonizes about it as if it means he's turning into the Antichrist. Dude, I know the woman you've fallen for is more angelic than Gabriel, but let her win that contest and get this shizzle done, will you?  At least as a couple they're pretty much made for each other. Proof of that comes when they finally escape to a grotty little shack together, along with manservant Gianni, who asks what on earth they'll all live on now they have no money and Santo has no patients any more. Santo and Marcella's answer - spoken, of course, in unison? "Love!" Uuurrrghh, you bloody idiots..!

Like I said, maybe this is just me, but I like my romantic leads to have a bit more agency. To get more than 'sad' when the love of their life has the crap repeatedly kicked out of her, and to not feel the need to go off and have a cry after doing something that makes a really evil person die in a very long-distance, indirect way.  I mean, look at it this way - most of us wouldn't jump on a chance to actually kill an utter bar-steward in real life, for oh so many reasons. Which is why we like it when fictional characters do that stuff for us. It's cathartic, in a vicariously safe way - "You be the champion mate and we'll be... right over here in the corner, cheering you on every step of the way! Yaaay, go you!" No-one actually dies in real life, but we still get those feel-good vibes from Justice Being Served. 

That's your job, hero-characters. And if you can't handle it - well, maybe you'd be better suited to the plot equivalent of burger-flipper at McDonalds. 

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I realise this may sound like I didn't enjoy reading The Book of Human Skin - but I did, and I would certainly recommend it to others. Its shortcomings were more than made up for by the gloriously-drawn villainous characters (along with many interesting minor characters) vividly-described settings and well-researched historical details that made the story feel real. If you like your historical novels on the dark and twisted side, this one certainly ticks the boxes.

Which novels have you read that have changed your writing in fundamental ways? Who are you favourite good guys and bad guys? Feel free to leave a comment below.

6 Clues to Spotting Your 'Screw You' Piece

The creative impulse often starts early.

Have you ever seen - whether on purpose or by some cruel accident - the Tommy Wiseau film The Room?

It's been a staple on many a list of Worst Films since - well, pretty much as soon as it first unleashed itself on an unsuspecting public, I would imagine. I'll admit I haven't see the entire film, just a collection of clips of some of the best/worst bits - but believe me that's more than enough to convince me its place on a Worst Films list is richly deserved. Here is a link to one such collection of clips, if you're brave enough to watch it (heads up, it's Not Safe For Work. Heck, it's probably Not Safe For Life.)

Were you brave - did you watch it? It just about walks on that narrow tightrope of 'so bad it's brilliant,' doesn't it?

Normally a stinker of this magnitude would prompt the question "How in the Hollywood Hells did a film like this ever get made?" However, in the case of The Room that's answered in the opening credits because, as you may have noticed, as well as starring Tommy Wiseau it was also produced and directed by... Tommy Wiseau. Oh, and the writer of the terrible script? Tommy Wiseau again. I wonder if he did the catering too..?

But this supreme example of multitasking also offers us an insight into why this film was made - and I don't just mean so Tommy Wiseau could try out four different career paths at once, in the hope of striking lucky with at least one of them. Because the more I thought about what happened in the story, the more I understood what else was going on behind it.

The Room is Tommy Wiseau's 'Screw You' Piece.

Every writer worth their salt writes a Screw You Piece at least once in their lives - it's pretty much a rite of passage. I wrote my first one when I was fifteen, as I've mentioned in this blog previously (and yes, it has since 'mysteriously' vanished from existing in anywhere but the Cringe Corner of my brain. Best place for it, believe me.) But what exactly is a Screw You Piece?

Filled with the fire and passion of a writer high on a bucketload of long-suppressed emotions, it's a piece of fiction where you pit a thinly-disguised Mary Sue of yourself against LEGO-people representations of all the shysters in your real life who ever Done You Wrong - and you take them down, baby. You destroy their lives and everything they hold dear... in fiction! Except it's really bad fiction that no sane person would ever want to read!

I'm willing to bet Tommy Wiseau got his heart stomped on by some girl he was totally in love with back in his teens. I'm thinking the most likely scenario is that he developed a huge crush on this girl - probably a super-popular, cheerleader-type - which may or may not have been unrequited. No matter either way, because at some point she chose to go out with his best friend instead - a high school jock-type, probably - and broke poor old teenage Tommy's heart in the process.

In the grand scheme of tragic stories that doesn't score high on the So-What-ometer; every angst-ridden teen has gone through something like that at some point. Most have a mini-meltdown in their bedroom for a few weeks and then get on with life again. But for the fledgling wannabe writer there's another way. You can sit on those all-consuming emotions for a few years, letting them bubble and stew, until the moment you're ready to let them burst forth like a Krakatoa of Vitriol. Because then they will have morphed beyond their original pain and lack of fairness into a terrifying monster of global injustice! With laser-beam eyes and everything!

How many of you writers are out there now thinking "Well I've never written anything like that. I don't think..."? How can you know? Well, here are some handy ways to spot if your story is a Screw You Piece...

1 - The Hero is a kind and wonderful human of infinite idealness...
He's a friend to everyone - even the stupid and smelly people. You can tell this, because everyone he meets constantly reminds him he is (unless of course they're horrible evil people, but even they only hate him because, dammit, they wish they could be more like him.) And how can everyone help themselves, because the hero is constantly proving just what an all-round awesome human he is, whether it's buying perfect presents for people, dispensing smart, insightful and compassionate advice and support to everyone (no wonder he's the guy everyone in the story goes to for that sort of thing!) or just regularly being kind to random animals and small children. Oh, and he also gets all the best lines. It's almost like... ooh, I dunno, the reader needs to be really really sure that this guy right here is the one we should all be rooting for...

2 - ...Even when he isn't.
Especially in those moments where he does things that, if some other dude did them, would be the act of a total douchebag, but because it's him it's totally justified because otherwise the plot won't work right and anyway he's the goddamn good guy, remember? He can't do anything wrong, it's against the Laws of Screw You Stories. Look, he's patting that dog's head 'cos he's an all-round cool person and he's gonna get screwed over by the evil people soon so you have to love him pay no attention to the dick behind the curtain...

3 - ...Or alternatively, even when everyone else isn't.
Everyone around her stabs her in the back, says mean and completely unfair things to her, uses and abuses her and just generally fails to treat her with the respect and compassion she so richly deserves. Even the supposed good guys who are supposed to be her friends mess up, goddammit - although, to be fair, they only do it by accident because they're slightly less awesome people than she is. But does she retaliate? Does she stoop to their level and give them a taste of their own medicine? Nooooo! She endures it all with a patient smile and the wisdom of Yoda himself, because she knows that by being so painfully morally superior to everyone else in every way she will be The Better Person, and readers will marvel at her saintliness and know that she is The Chosen One of this story!

4 - The Evil Evil Antagonists are Evil with a Capital EVIL!!!
The antagonists of a Screw You Piece aren't your run-of-the-mill bad guys. Forget about three-dimensional outcasts or damaged individuals who just happened to take the wrong path in life - a Screw You Antagonist has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, because their role in the tale is to be pantomime villain naaaassssttty, bwah ha haaaaaaa! They don't just punch fluffy kittens in the face; they tell the fluffy kittens they're ugly and their mother never loved them, then they sleep with the fluffy kitten's boyfriend and then they kill him afterwards and then they tell the fluffy kitten they just slept with their boyfriend and killed them... and they do it all while laughing gleefully because they just love every second of being so evilly evil..! Ha ha ha ha HAAAAA! *cough, splutter.*

5 - The Hero wins big - and the Villains lose bigger...
But it's all going to be okay in the end for our poor, put-upon protag - and I mean really, super-duper okay. Whatever the Grand Prize at the end of the game show was, they've got it, and in spades. Meanwhile, the villains lives have shattered into so many tiny pieces of despair they're practically a dust cloud - but you're not allowed to feel even the teeniest bit sorry for them because they totally deserved it, remember? How far is reasonable, d'you think, in making sure readers really get the message that Evil Villain has been well and truly crapped on? Well, it seems there's an actual formula for a Screw You Piece. For every disproportionately wonderful thing that happens to Awesome Heroine, an equally disproportionately terrible thing must happen to the Nasty Villains - oh, and bonus points if things of great value to the villains are taken from them and given to the Heroine instead, like a sort of karmic swap shop. So Saint Heroine of Awesome doesn't just get the guy, she gets the villain's guy, and while she becomes rich and famous and somehow even more beautiful and popular, Evil Villain becomes destitute and loses her looks and all her friends, then succumbs to some horrible disease that kills her, and when she dies no-one comes to her funeral and stray dogs come and pee on her gravestone, and then two years later it's concreted over to make way for a multi-storey car park... well okay then, maybe not that last one. A touch too harsh, perhaps.

6 - ...Or alternatively, the Tragic Hero's Tragic End is so tragic even the villains are gutted.
But you could of course be going for full-on melodrama instead. In this scenario it's the beloved hero who loses everything - usually resulting in heart-rendingly poignant death. This can either be in the form of suicide that they are driven to thanks to the evil villain's evilness, or as a result of a selfless sacrifice, made to save an unsuspecting bystander from an evil scheme the villain had planned for the hero. Either way, the demise must be a direct result of the hero being a super-awesome person who was just too awesome for this harsh, cruel world and the villain being a heartless douchebag who deserves to burn in Hell for eternity in the next life. Oh, but not before they've done some suffering before then as well - in the form of tortuous guilt. That's right - the Emperor of Nasty who once got borderline orgasmic pleasure from torturing the innocent hero is now  transformed, their eyes finally opened to their own horribleness. "Nooooooo!!! He's deeeaaaaad, and it's all my fault! I never meant for it to end this way - aaaarrrrgggghhh, WHAT HAVE I DOOOONNNNE?" The takeaway message the evil villain must be visibly seen to take away is "See - look what you did, you bar-steward! Look what you bloody well did!" In real life, of course, such a villain wouldn't give a flying monkeys - in fact he'd most likely view it as 'mission accomplished' and buy himself a celebratory beer. But in the world of Screw You Fiction his character arc must now do a sharp u-turn - and bite him in his own arse.

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Whilst all of the above are exaggerated examples, they still form a blueprint for the typical Screw You Piece. And it's clear now what the purpose of such a piece is - a blunt weapon of revenge for the wounded author, hitting back at enemies from the past. If you weren't able to kick them in their actual balls at the time, why not belt them in their fictional ones a few years down the line - and capture that moment forever while you're at it? It doesn't even matter how vindictive you get, because after all, it's not like you're actually walking up to these people and hurting them in real life, is it?

And as a writer, you should write these pieces. You should pour them out of your injured soul and spread their blood and guts all over the page, in order to heal from them and move on from the scars they left on your heart. Not for nothing do they say writing is a form of therapy.

But the one thing you almost certainly shouldn't do is publish them. Because good fiction - the kind of fiction readers want to read - has rationality at its core. Sure, it may be chock-full of emotional events, but the sequence and motivations for those events come from a sound structure of logical cause and effect. And the vengeful heart is not rational or logical - it just wants to lance the blister of pain and let all the nasty gunk out. It feels damn good when you've done it - but it's best done in private. Do you really want the whole world watching the process? And then - even worse - turning away in disgust and saying "Ewww, that's gross?" Because that's what you do when you present a Screw You Piece to the world. Isn't it bad enough that you went through all that pain the first time around, without having everyone laugh and make snarky comments about it years later, and possibly for the rest of your life?

Poor old Tommy Wiseau.

How 'Alien' do we want our Aliens?

There's a wind of change a-blowing through sci-fi at the moment - one that relates in particular to extra-terrestrial life and how it's depicted in fiction.

Science fiction has been around for at least a century, but it wasn't until the 1950s that aliens and UFOs made an impact on the genre. Back then man had yet to land on the moon, poor old Pluto was still a planet and the Milky Way was thought to be The Whole Universe rather than just the astronomical equivalent of a zip-code. So there's no need to beat up ourselves or the sci-fi authors of the time if the depictions of aliens were... a little primitive, to say the least.

Now of course, thanks to space exploration, ever more sophisticated telescopes, satellites and probes and the brain-melting theories and experiments of various NASA boffins, we know so much more. And like the kid who grows up and discovers Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny aren't real, we've all had to adjust our ideas of how proper alien life might have to work in order to actually exist.

(Unless of course you're a conspiracy theorist, in which case carry on believing whatever bullcrap you like and by the way, that tinfoil hat is just so you, dahling..!)

As a result, some sections of the sci-fi community have been railing against the 'standard' alien so beloved of fifty-odd years of popular space fiction, saying that not only is it now known to be nonsensically implausible but a sign of 'lazy and unimaginative writing.' Those who continue to write aliens as little more than humans in neon body-paint with innuendo-inspiring appendages are doing the genre a huge disservice, and they need to stop it, like, now. Get with the (space) program, dudes, and dig deeper for the Weird!

I get that. No honestly, I do. Even in the fairly recent past there have been aliens so badly conceived as to be insulting to a human of average intelligence. Here are just two of the worst examples:

Independence Day - A super-advanced alien race with motherships the size of a suburban town that travel beyond light-speed and are equipped with building-melting lasers have invaded Earth, and even as we speak are merrily destroying key world landmarks they researched on the way (because you don't want to look like a total noob blowing up a McDonalds in Ohio and a Pizza Express in Slough, right?) Oh noes, we're all gonna die! Thank God then, that their inter-galactic fleet of Death Spaceships are still using Microsoft Windows as an operating system, and in their rush to pack enough laser-ammo to LEGO-brick the White House forgot to renew their McAfee subscription! Otherwise that little trojan virus that geeky guy slapped together on his laptop would've been useless for singlehandedly wiping out their entire armada!

Signs - Just imagine for a moment how the Project Planning Meeting might have looked for the uber-powerful, faster-than-lightspeed-spaceship-owning aliens in this particular movie:

ALIEN #1: So... which planet in this little corner of the Milky Way shall we invade and plunder then?
ALIEN #2: Well, how about the one that's over two-thirds covered with a liquid that's pretty much lethal to us?
ALIEN #1: Oooh, sounds like a plan!
ALIEN #3: Um, not wanting to come over all Health and Safety on you guys or anything, but it seems that this lethal liquid is so prevalent that it regularly just falls out of the sky - sometimes for like, days at a time...
ALIEN #2: So..?
ALIEN #3: Well... shouldn't we perhaps consider wearing some sort of protective clothing while we're down there? Y'know, in case that happens?
ALIEN #1: Where are your balls, soldier? If we're gonna go down and invade a planet swirling in stuff that kills us on contact, we're gonna do it butt-naked! 'Cause that's how we roll!

Yes, the above and other examples like them are spectacularly stoopid, and the writers could and should have done better. Yes, now that we have all this new knowledge about how other worlds unlike our own might work, we need to use it to inform our stories about alien races and take them to new levels. Innovate, don't imitate and all that. But at the same time, I feel some of the calls for change could be argued as sacrificing 'authenticity' for story, and we should review each on a case-by-case basis rather than impose new standards across the board. Changes like:

I'm a sexy alien and I know it.
 It's a popular trope - randy alien gets the massive hots for sexy earthling (or sexy alien-of-a-different-planet-to-the-other-alien) and they end up making sweet lurve, sometimes to the point of producing an adorable little hybrid-alien baby to boot. Captain Kirk certainly got close many a time, although fortunately for the Starship Enterprise he also had commitment issues when it came to putting a ring on it.  But could such inter-planetary dalliances ever happen in real life?

Well.... the getting the hots and making sweet lurve part isn't impossible. Humans are certainly kinky little devils who can get all fired up over and doing the most disturbing things (look in any murky corner of the internet for proof of that. On second thoughts, don't. You may be scarred for life.) But, like a union between a human and an animal will not produce a humanimal, the chances of procreation between two different alien races resulting in offspring are close to zero. So hybrid alien babies and plots involving aliens 'spreading their seed' among other alien races (including earthlings) are now considered uncreative as well as unrealistic erotica. (Compared to the other - um, 'realistic' erotica out there? Like, for instance, Dinosaur Porn?)

S'okay, primitive humans - my people memorised the Rosetta Stone on the way here.
In the ultimate example of long-distance language courses, most aliens who rock up to Earth can instantly speak whatever the local lingo for the area happens to be, often quite literally like a native, right from First Contact. Sometimes the explanation for this miracle is little more than a vague hand-wave and a 'just because' from the author, and other times they wheel out whatever name they've devised for the old 'universal translator' thingy (i.e. some technological gizmo/super-weird creature-pathogen possessed by the aliens that just magically translates everything everyone ever says to everyone else forever, instantly and in real time.)

You don't need to be a scientist, rocket or otherwise, to know there's no way this could work in real life, simply because the data still has to be collected, and to do that the different alien races need to spend a decent period of time interacting and then extrapolating that data first. Even websites like Google Translate won't help you instantly converse like a local with someone whose language you don't actually speak - and that's before you take into account that alien worlds may have things, ideas and states of being that have no equivalent in context on Earth, and vice versa.

So again, the feeling is growing that universal translators and instantly multi-lingual aliens are a lazy way of getting round the inevitably real-life language barriers. Especially if these aliens don't even use verbal language to communicate in the first place. And why should they? After all, we're the odd ones out in that sense right here on earth (yes we are - sorry Cat Lady, but Tiddles does not understand every word you say and you do not speak Meow.)

Oh hey, you're just like me - but blue, with random tentacles!
I saved this one for last, since it's potentially the biggest can of worms.

If we've learned anything in the last twenty or so years, it's just how crazy-weird and wonderful other planets are - not just in our own solar system but light years away, in the farthest reaches of the Milky Way and beyond. A frozen waterworld moon! Planets where it rains liquid methane! Planets with storms that last hundreds of years! A moon covered in volcanoes and lava lakes!

Obviously, us puny humans would struggle to last five minutes on worlds like these, so it stands to reason that any sentient natives of those worlds aint gonna be using much of our physiology as a blueprint. We are also carbon-based organisms, because there's a lot of that element on earth and carbon bonds well with lots of other elements, enabling complex structures like sentient life to exist. Other planets with crazy chemical make-ups nothing like ours would have to use other elements with similar properties - silicon is the most popular one touted as a next-best - which means they would probably look and even function very differently to us. And why would creatures on a waterworld need legs, or breathe air? Why would creatures who get their energy via photosynthesis (like plants here on earth) have a digestive system - or even mouths?

So the new, up-to-date message from many quarters of the sci-fi market is clear; writers of alien worlds need to start thinking out of the Star Trek costume box for today's ETs. We're a lot less dumb than we used to be about What's Really Out There (well, except maybe the aforementioned conspiracy theorists) and the guy in the rubber suit won't fool us any more - not even in books. We want proper, faithful depictions of scientifically plausible aliens, and we want them now.

But... do we? Really?

Remember when NASA announced they'd found evidence of life on Mars? The whole world did a collective squee and tuned in for more, panting to know what these critters looked like, what they did, could we bring some back to earth someday and breed them to keep as pets? Until the pictures emerged of these pudgy little worm-y things that NASA told us were so small that this view was actually them magnified about a hundred times, and these ones had probably been dead for about a billion years anyway...

At which point the world did a collective 'humph' and stomped off to - I don't know, play Star Wars Battlefront probably ("at least that's got shootable aliens in it!") Big red buzzer for the non-interesting aliens!

And that's the risk fiction writers take when they try to create 'scientifically realistic' aliens. Sure, they might be spot-on, factually accurate recreations of life that could exist on the fantastical planet of their imaginings - but would anyone want to read about a race of sentient snot-balls whose only form of expression is to spit snot-globs and change colour? For 200-plus pages?

No. So we're going to have to boot our imaginary aliens further up the evolutionary ladder - to be, at the very least, on a developmental par with us humans. And luckily, the boffins of the world have been thinking about that too, and devised a wish list of key characteristics such a species would need to possess in order to dominate their environment the way we do:

Sensory organs - all the better to see, hear, touch, taste and smell. The last three can be achieved a number of ways, as is the case on earth, (a snake 'smells' with its tongue and its skin provides the sense of touch, for example) but for seeing and hearing the requirements are more specific. For complex tasks like building stuff, throwing and catching and manipulating tools in general you need stereo vision - that is, at least two eyes next to each other, facing forward. Meanwhile, binaural hearing offers the greatest chance of survival, enabling a creature to not only hear sounds from all around them, but also to pinpoint the direction of that sound. This is why most highly evolved creatures on earth have two ears - one on each side of their head.

Opposable digits - Aint much civilisation gonna happen without these. This requires at least two twiggy appendages that can move independently of one another while also being able to function together as a unit, where pressure between them can be controlled (enabling gripping and releasing.) This is why apes, monkeys and humans can do complex things with tools, while dogs and manatees just try and eat them.

Highly-evolved socio-communicative skills - No man is an island, so the saying goes - and the same would be true for ambitious aliens. You want to get shizzle done, you need teamwork and an ability to communicate your plans that goes beyond pointy hands and grunts. The reason we can make the wide range of complicated sounds that constitute 'talking' is all to do with the configuration of our tongues, teeth and larnyx, and - get this - our upright standing/walking posture plays a part too. An ability to pass on complicated, non-instinctive information when we're not around to do it personally is also a bonus - which is why us humans invented writing, music and art. But first we needed big brains, and once we'd got one of those it took priority over muscles when it came to feeding our bodies. This is why most of us aren't naturally as huge as an elephant, pumped as a silverback gorilla or as fast as a cheetah; all the fuel that would go into priming the muscles required for those traits gets diverted instead to our massive brains. It also means they'd need to eat actual food to survive - particularly, but not limited to, proteins or something with protein-esque qualities- so no purely photosynthesising life-forms if you want them intelligent, I'm afraid.

So taking all of the above into account, it would seem the ideal alien for interesting and believable fiction would need at least five senses, forward-facing seeing organs next to each other, hearing organs on either side of its head or body, at least two opposable digits, flexible tongues and larynxes, an upright posture, a digestive system that can utilise proteins or an otherworldly equivalent and large brains at the expense of being pretty small, slow-moving and not overly strong.

Wow. That sounds a lot like... us!

You could argue that of course we'd believe that, because humans have proved throughout history that we think we're smashing, the best things ever invented. But even if you're not a scientist, it's hard to argue that the characteristics listed above aren't a massive advantage that mark us out from all the other creatures on our planet. So writers can feel justified in continuing to use them as a starting point in creating their own aliens. And there's still scope for turning up the weird. Why stop at just two eyes, for instance, when you could have three, four or even multiple mini-eyes like a fly? They might need an upright posture - but who says they have to have legs? And when it comes to how they procreate - well, that's between you and your inner therapist, my dears....

So when it comes to creating aliens that won't get the pointy finger of 'outdated cliche' thrust in their face, there's no need to panic; there are plenty of scientific reasons for them to not be so wildly wacky they no longer resemble humans in any way. But there are other reasons too, and they are to do with why we read stories in the first place - about anything, not just aliens. We want to read about shared experiences, to step into another's shoes for a while and walk their path through life, and to do that we need to see how, why and where those characters are like us. We want to laugh, cry, rage, fear, love and hate with them as they lead us through their story.

And it's darn near impossible to do that with a non-talking, quivering blob of goo.

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So what would you add to an alien to level it up from Rubber-suited Guy? What cliche do you think should be taken away? Feel free to put your ideas in the Comments below.

How Not Writing Your Novel Can Sometimes Help You Write Your Novel

It's the Easter school holidays here in UK-Land now. Which means...

*drumroll and fanfare - probably played on a kazoo...*

'Excuses-for-not-writing-of-the-busy-mum-variety' - time!

Put down that tiny violin please, it's not necessary. I worked through my guilt in the week leading up to this one, so by the time it arrived I was already down with having a week 'semi-off.' This is partly because my husband also had a week off, so I knew it was pointless trying to adhere to my usual writing targets. I'd just get my inner Gollum on when I couldn't meet them - "we didn't mean to be bad, preciouss... You failed ussss! Ussselesssss little hobbit!"  So.... it's fine. Really. Not a problem at all.

As well as Easter, Spring has also... sort of started. It's a bit hard to tell here in the UK, what with random raging storms and torrential rain still rearing their spoilsporty heads (I have at least two friends who lost their greenhouses in Storm Katie this week. Yep, we've started naming our storms too, just to make them feel that bit more important.) But the calendar says it's here, and for me that means getting my allotment ready for this years crops - so yeah, lots of digging over plots and sowing and potting up of seedlings. But there's something about losing yourself in the rhythm of digging and garden-pottering that gives your brain time to ponder over the mechanics and machinations of a novel-in-progress, and I've solved many a twisty plot-knot while up to my elbows in mud and weeds.

Equally, while I may not have contributed as much to the actual word-count of Redemption this week, I have found another way to work on it that's really helped me in ways I could never have imagined, so I thought I'd share it here.

I first discovered this strategy by accident a few weeks ago. Neither my husband nor my son enjoy accompanying me on a food shopping trip at the best of times, never mind on a Saturday morning when there's serious gaming time to catch up on, so I usually end up going into town on my own and leaving them to it. However, this week I went in an hour earlier than I normally do, and took a big notebook and pen with me in a rucksack, so I'd have an hour to myself for sitting in a nice cafe and scribbling with a coffee and a snack beside me. I've done this several times in the past, and even talked about it previously in this blog as part of a process for unsticking a stuck bit in your novel. This time I didn't have a specific problem with anything in Redemption, but I did feel as if my progress was slowing down a bit, so, without really thinking about it too much, I opened my notebook, stuck the date at the top of the page and started writing about it.

I started by writing about the scene I'd just finished writing; what I'd changed from my outline and why, how I felt about that, and what else I might now have to change further along in the story as a result. Then I wrote about the scene I was going to write next; where I would stick to my outline and where I might deviate from it and try another angle. As the debating and deliberating occurred in my head I wrote that down too, transcribing each little internal question and argument along with the mental responses that followed. It was part free-writing, part journalling - and indeed, by the time I had written a full A4 page in this manner it did look very much like a diary entry. Along the way I was able to make crucial decisions and answer nagging questions I'd had in the back of my mind about those particular scenes, which I was able to tackle as soon as I sat down in front of my computer to work on them.

So, when next Saturday rolled around, I decided to do the same thing again. By this time, I was at the stage of writing a scene that would need to change as a result of the scenes I'd changed last week. Not a problem; I had all my scribblings from last week's diary entry as notes to help with figuring out those changes. Again I wrote down all the internal debating as well as the solutions I came up with, even if they seemed trivial or irrelevant (or simply repeating what I'd written in my previous entry.)

And as the weeks have passed, I've found this to be exponentially more helpful with each new journal entry (I'm doing at least two a week now, even if that means doing some of them at home rather than in a comfy cafe.) It's not just the nuts-and-bolts decisions and outline alterations that have been useful to record; expressing the doubts and questions still to be answered has been just as useful too. Particularly since the act of writing them down seems to ignite a kind of slow-cooker process in my brain so that, by the time I come to write the next journal entry, the answer is at least half-formed already as I address it again.

When I worked as a software technician for an avionics company they had a standard practice that was very similar - the Project Log Book. Each employee had their own, and was required to record details of whatever code they were working on, progress made and things that still needed to be done to complete it. Of course this was a software environment where only the dry, technical data was to be recorded - putting in your feelings about what you had to do and internally debating whether it was the 'right' thing to do would have been somewhat frowned upon. That may have been why I didn't take the Project Log Book ethos all that seriously when I worked there (mine wasn't just written emotionally, it was filled with silly/cynical cartoons expressing those emotions.)

But now I can see how the basic idea of the software environment Project Log Book, combined with the freedom afforded by a diary format to express the accompanying emotions, can be invaluable to a writer. Done regularly, it offers deeper insights than an outline, helps you devise a plan for each writing session before you sit down to begin it and - best of all - creates a record you can look back over, to observe thought patterns for those particularly troublesome parts of a work-in-progress. And unlike random scribbles jotted down on the nearest piece of paper as and when inspiration strikes - which are just as useful in their own way and not to be dismissed - this type of W-I-P Journal works best as a one-stop location where all decisions and feelings about the project are recorded and collated over time.

Try it, is all I can say. It may well help you as much as it's helped me.