Red Ken and his £100m mosque

This is bothering me.

Not the mosque, not the hundred million quid, not even Ken Livingstone being supportive of the idea.

What's bothering me is that this has just sprung up again, 6 months later, on blogs and forums around twinternet, embellished with juicy non-facts like "Ken Livingstone is planning to use tax payer's money to build an enormous mosque costing an estimated 100M in the docklands", and urging us to contribute to an utterly insignificant little internet poll which is not going to make the slightest scrap of difference to whether the thing goes ahead or not. I wouldn't be surprised to find that this whole thing was started by the webmasters thee to increase traffic. (Which, by posting the link, I've just joined in with. Ho hum.)

In fact, it's not even that. What it really is, is that this urban legend has been picked up on and passed on by countless internet users - including many who should know better - completely unchecked.

This kind of gullible chain e-mailing ticks me off. Have you people never heard of google?

So, I checked. It didn't take me long to establish that their is no reliable reference to any tax-payers money going into it. Or that joining in with this madness would align me with the British National Party and the likes. Or to find that the most recent article on the subject from what could be considered a reasonably impartial and reliable source was this one. Even the Christian Broadcasting Network managed to say 'The money for the project is coming from sources in the Middle East'.

Now I don't kow all the facts about this. But I haven't posted this, or e-mailed my entire address book, claiming that I do. And until I do know sufficient facts, I'm going to keep my mouth shut, even on irrelevant web polls.

For my part, I would like to urge you to completely ignore anything you might hear about this subject unless it's from a reliable news source. And please, don't pass on those emails you occasionally get from your Uncle Fred about the latest computer virus, or how you can unlock your car with a hairdryer.

NaNo update

There's been a lot going on this week, so I haven't had time to work on it, or blog, or anything much, really.

But just before I left it, the story took a very wierd turn, when it started to become a sort of comic allegory of the Christian life. I didn't see that coming, but once it occurred to me that I had accidentally written a Christ-figure into it, and a sort of guide book motif had already appeared, the quest aspect of the story suddenly had a whole new level, and the comic fantasy allegory was born. (It now has a troll too, so I can call it fantasy. Although it is littered with sf references.)

My word count when real life forced me to abandon it was a measly 21,062. I don't think I can make up that shortfall in less than a week, however hard I try.

Still, I like the way the story went; it almost has potential. But there is one little problem.

My Christ figure. He is a real person, which kind of limits any future commercial potential for the story. If I was clever, I could fictionalise him; but much of the humour (that is, the bits that are actually funny) is derived from his catch-phrases. I guess that in the internet world of fan-fic and the like, I could probably get away with it. Who knows, I may even try.

Kentucky Fried Narnia

My NaNo has taken something of a turn for the wierder. For one thing, despite my protagomist running off with a girl and completely abandoning what plot I had, some semblence of story has started to pan out in my head. And for another - and this is the really unexpected bit - the possibility of shoehorning in a gospel message has presented itself. It's going to be a strange one, and the end result may just look like a severely distorted Narnia, but I'm going to go with it for now.

I'm somewhere in the 1300s I think. Progress has slowed due to the household being full of cold and me actually having a job. Ho hum.

NaNo lessons so far.

1. I can't be funny quickly. I'm trying to write a sort of comic fantasy, mainly so I can use all the silly ideas that would lower the tone of the sf I want to write, but it's just coming out silly. This is entertaining, and at times even funny, for me, but it is quite likely that my sense of humour is not to everyone's taste. Having said that, there are some passages which, given the proper training, could go on to become gags or even fully qualified jokes later in life.
2. I'm losing track of my characters. I think this started when I decided to split my protags up in chapter 2, and had to bring in another character because the dialogue became a bit one-sided. Now the three of them are just borrowing each others character traits apparently at random.
3. Chapter one was rubbish. At a later stage this will get rewritten so the introduction of that extra main character is a bit smoother. A lot of it will just get ditched entirely. Not yet, of course; at the moment it has the vital task of keeping my word count up.
4. I'm still just about keeping the pace - 9,510/50,000 as of yesterday.

Your first NaNo excerpt...

Per Ardua ad Chipping Sodbury
0 - Prologue

Wayne sat back in his seat looking out at the clear sky ahead of them, fingers tapping to the thumping beats of the stereo.
“Fag?” asked someone from behind him.
As Wayne turned to accept the cigarette, he noticed the person next to him picking away at the sun visor.
“Will you stop that?” he demanded.
“But my name’s not Tracey,” the man protested.
“Would you rather have your name up there?” Wayne said. “Wayne – Darren. What do you think people will make of that?”
Darren shrugged, accepting a cigarette himself.
“We’re almost there,” Wayne said. “Time to check in.”
Darren grunted, punching the furry dice while Wayne put on his headset and tried to explain where they were.
“Hello?” Wayne said suddenly. “Hello? Are you getting this? Shit, it’s dead.”
“The coathanger’s probably come loose again,” the voice from the back said. “Told you we should have got the ariel fixed properly.”
“We couldn’t afford that and the furry dice,” Darren said.
“I’ll fix it again when we arrive.”
“That’s no good now, is it?” Wayne said, staring out at the clear blue sky, which he was surprised to find was now cloudy and, of all things, pink. “What the…”
Wayne was prevented from swearing mightily when the door at the back of the cabin burst open.
“Wayne!”
He turned to see a stewardess in the doorway, teetering on her uniform white stilettos, her shock of bleached hair perfectly styled atop a frightened, pale face.
“Wayne,” she whined again. “The sky’s gone pink!”
“I know,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s all around me. I’m not blind.”
“Why is it pink?” she explained.
“Candy floss storm probably,” he said.
“Really?”
“No, of course not really. What are you, stupid?”
She looked at him, puzzled.
“Don’t answer that,” he said quickly. “Just go and… serve drinks, or whatever it is you do.”
Wayne turned back to his instruments – none of which was working properly any more – shaking his head in disbelief.
“As Essex girls go,” Darren said once she had left, “she’s pretty smart.”

Air Traffic Control at Miami Airport was even more frantic than usual.
“The Air Essex flight,” one particularly panic-striken man was saying. “I lost radio contact a few minutes after they switched to our frequency.”
“Flight SX1313?” someone asked.
The first frantic man nodded frantically.
“Lost them,” the second frantic man said. “Just dropped off the radar a few minutes ago.”
“Lost them?” the senior controller said.
The others nodded glumly.“Damn. That’s the third one I’ve lost this week.”

*

Progress so far: 4,004/50,000 words. Surprisingly good (the quantity, not the actual quality - but that's the point, isn't it?)

By the way, I know Essex girl jokes are a bit 20th Century. Sorry.

The NaNoWriMo Project

Well I was going to crack on with 'The Sequel', but I can't bring myself to write it knowing that it won't have a title in 30 days time. I know it's not that important, but it's a psychological thing for me.

Plus, I reckon the only way I can get near 50k words in a month is by not taking it even remotely seriously, so I'm going to do a comic fantasy type thing.

Expect silliness.

Hey, it might even be funny...

What do you get if you cross...

A Bugs Bunny Buggy...

with a Mini Ha-Ha?


This: