Review: Under The Dome

Under The Dome
By Stephen King

Three hundred and thirty six thousand words.

That really needs it’s own paragraph. This is one monster of a book, and a great story. I’ve been up, night after night, until the hours are late and my eyes are dry, glued to every page.

In brief, this is the story of a small town cut off from the outside world by an inpenetratable force field they come to call The Dome. No one can get in to help; no one can get out to escape. For one man, that isn’t such a bad thing. As he tries to take dictorial control over the town, the body count mounts.

There is something about this book that feels like it was written in the eighties alongside The Stand and IT. On the downside, the characters aren’t as well drawn as the kids in IT, and the story isn’t as impressive as The Stand. It also feels way too long. There are a lot of sections that could be trimmed or cut, and having finished it, the story that stays with me doesn’t reflect the size of the book.

The other thing that got me was the mystery aspect: what the dome actually is and why it’s there. It felt like Series One of Lost when they find the hatch. In fact, there’s a reference to Lost in the book, so maybe King’s a fan.

I’m not giving any spoilers away, but at first, when I discovered what the dome was, I was hit by disappointment. However, once I realised the point the author was getting at, it all made sense and gave for a very satisfying conclusion.

Overall, a great story. Was it too long? I don’t know. Some sections felt like waffle, and it was good to reach the end, but it was also sad that it was over. I’d have happily continued reading for another 300 pages.

The Messiah is Coming – next Wednesday

I saw my first Kindle the other night. I’ve had a good play with the Sony Reader and the Sony Reader Touch, but with Kindle sales being so impressive, I prepared myself to be blown away. Instead, I was quite disappointed. I’m not saying it’s bad, because it’s not – the screen is crisp and clear, the navigation is intuitive and it’s got free Global WiFi to buy new books no matter where you are. It just looks so ugly. It reminds me of the early ASUS netbooks, with their teeny tiny screens and fat borders. It feels unfinished, or maybe just not designed well enough. Saying that, if someone bought me one, I wouldn’t be upset!

But there could be change on the horizon. Next Wednesday, Apple release their new creation: The Apple Tablet. Some are calling it the iSlate, other names include The Messiah Tablet and Jesus Tablet. This could be hype, but the general consensus is that it’s going to be a major leap forward in technology. Officially, Apple are keeping very tight lipped about the whole thing, so until Wednesday, it’s down to the internet’s Rumour Mill as to whether this is going to be an e-reader, an ultra slim, keyboardless Mac, or just a big iPhone.

Personally, I’m hoping it’s geared towards ebooks, because I would love, love, love an e-reader. I’m just not convinced by what is currently available. The Sony Reader and Kindle look great, but they both feel slightly clunky. If e-readers are going to take off on a mass scale, they need to be something people really, really want so much more than something they think they make like. Apple have a history of doing that, and delivering design quality that knocks the competition sideways. And not just by funky design colours and smooth corners. Apple seem to really think about usability, functionality – having the thing do whatever it is you want it to do.

I once bought an MP3 player that looked amazing, felt great, and offered all of the features of an iPod. But when I finally bought a genuine iPod, I realised the difference between a greasy burger and fillet steak.

Roll on Wednesday!

I can type again!

I haven’t written much for a few days due to a slight mishap at the beginning of the week.

We were making fruit salads at school. But as knives are dangerous, a responsible adult was needed to prepare the fruit into sizeable chunks.

To cut a long story short, the children in 5L now have first-hand experience of the dangers of knives, and that slicing the sides of a pineapple, as fast as you can, while talking to the kids on the nearest table, is a bloody stupid thing to do.

It wasn’t really such a bad cut, but the school sent me to a walk in centre where I was given a dressing and then a big bandage-sock thing over the top. This made typing on this tiny netbook pretty much impossible.

Anyway, I took the dressing off today to show everyone. It looked like this:

I think they were a bit disappointed, expecting something more like this…

Probably because I’m prone to exaggeration, and to me, a simple cut feels like my arm’s been chopped off.

When I was a kid, I spent far too many hours studying the make-up effects of horror movies (such as the rubber hand above), reading the likes of Fangoria, Gore Zone (horror fx magazines) and everything I could afford by James Herbert and Stephen King. The teachers said they would warp me.

Could my exaggeration about a minor cut be a sign they were right?

Nah – all blokes exaggerate. Just ask any wife of a guy who’s had the dreaded man-flu. Or what they cruelly term, “a cold”.

Snow-tastic

I thought I’d justify the whopping £12 I’d spent on a pair of boots for winter by venturing out into the snowy wilderness just down the road.

Penshaw Hill is a usually a popular place for anyone with a sledge or a placky-bag as soon there is so much as a dusting of snow.

Nearly there!

But perhaps with the snow being here for over a week now, it’s lost its novelty, because there were only a few people up there.

Climbing the steps was a bit of challenge, trying to guess what was a step and what was snow. But it was worth it. The view of Herrington Park, with the sun reflecting off the fields of snow was fabulous.

All Fired Up for 2010

In their free time, medieval monks used to write comedy scripts and naughty limerics.

I’m hoping to hit the ground running in 2010. I finished writing Tank’s Field last night. It’s got a slightly younger feel than my regular YA stuff, but it was a story I just had to get out. In many ways it helped blow a lot of cobwebs away – a nice big brain clean out so I can start a new project fresh and uncluttered. But here’s something to think about: because my main genre is Young Adult fiction, I don’t know if Tank’s Field will ever see the light of day, and I’ve known that from the outset. In all honesty, it doesn’t really bother me. I learned a long time ago that writing for the market is frustrating and unsatisfying. Whereas writing for yourself, but keeping those same standards, is a lot more fun.

I don’t mean that to sound like sour grapes. Not the case at all. What I’m getting at here is that once you finish your manuscript, having left it to mature for a while, edited and polished and can’t take it any further, from that point it is completely out of your hands. The only thing you can do is get going on the next novel, because that’s what makes you feel good. Writing can be hard work – no doubt about that – but should be fun. After all, it’s what you do in your free time. If it isn’t fun, find something else that is! That’s what free time is for.

Which is probably why I’m buzzing today, because I get to start a new project – a story that’s been bouncing around in my head for over two years. I’ve avoided it for two main reasons – firstly I thought it might be too ‘adult’ for the YA market. Well, that’s writing for the market, isn’t it? One good reason to put that little worry aside. Besides, most of the YA fiction that I enjoy reading is stronger, darker, better fiction than most of the stuff in the adult bestseller chart. The other worry was just confidence; worry that I won’t be able to do the story justice. This is probably why writing something shorter, for a slightly younger audience, was a good move. It’s like a summer holiday – a whole lot of fun before cracking my knuckles and thinking, ‘Right, here we go!’

Good feeling.

New Title, New Domain

There’s been a small change to my blog. Santa Claus gave me my own domain name – www.colinmulhern.com – for Christmas, so I’ve linked it here and knocked up a new title.

Nice pressie. Maybe Santa knows something I don’t.

Bloody Mary

I was hit with a real sense of nostalgia today when a few of the boys in Year 5 (9-10 year olds) told me of their fab new game.

‘It’s called Bloody Mary,’ one boy said. ‘We do it in the toilets. You stand in front of the mirror, then turn three times and say “Bloody Mary,” for each turn. If you do it right, you see Bloody Mary in the mirror and get scratches right down your back.’

‘Have any of you done it?’

One replied, ‘Yeah! I did.’

‘Did it work?’

He checked his mates’ faces before answering. ‘Not yet.’

The reason for my nostalgia was twofold. When I was at school we had a game just like this. We told each other that if we said the Lord’s Prayer backwards, while looking in a mirror, we’d see the face of the devil. It was a kind of a rite of passage. Most of us of were too scared to do it. Those who did… well, we never knew whether to believe what they said they saw, but the plain fact that they had done it made them somehow different. Not just a little bit braver, but wiser. They’d gone through something and come out the other side. And it felt like they had the upper hand.

Twenty six years later, I wrote that all down, changed a few details, and called it The Devil’s Prayer. That seed of an idea, the idea that boys need to face their own fears to gain maturity, grew into a novel of the same name.

So if people ever ask where ideas come from, in my case, it’s the daft things I did – or was too scared to do – as a kid.

Colin Mulhern

Maturing Scripts

When it comes to submitting manuscripts, there is a real temptation to battle against time. One strategy is to write a first draft as fast as you can, do a quick edit and polish, and send it out. But that isn’t always the best approach. When it comes to polishing a script, time is on your side.

The alternative is to put the script in a drawer (or back it up and leave on a hard drive) and let it mature.  This is pretty tough to do because there is a real sense of elation in completing the first draft of a novel. Depending on the length, and how fast you write, that can mean anything from two to six months work. Once you type that last line you get swamped in the illusion that you have a novel, all ready to make you rich and famous.

You don’t. You have a first draft of a story.

It’s an outline, a rough, a sketch of something it can aspire to be.

The easy option is to send it to an editorial agency, along with a few hundred quid of your hard-earned cash in the hope that like it enough to give you the objective feedback you need to turn a story into a novel.

Or… you can shove it in a drawer, let the thing mature and see what happens. In the meantime, work on something new.

I recently finished the first draft of a new novel. I’ve been editing and polishing along the way and spent a long on plot mechanics at the beginning of the project, so when I hit that last line, I was quietly confident that all I really needed to do the copy editing (as best I can) and send it off.

Instead, I took my own advice and let it steep.  I forgot about it, began typing something new. Two weeks later, right in the middle of the night, a thought popped into my head about that finished script. It was such a simple idea, something I’d never really considered before. But this simple idea made other ideas fire, and then  conversations take off. For the next hour I had scenes playing out in my head and realised something about my script that knocked me sideways.

It was a bit like someone who thinks they are looking at a vase, only to see two face for the very first time. The end of my manuscript was only halfway through the story. That one tiny thought had made me see how to make it so much better: how to develop it further and take it to the next level.

I did something I very, very rarely do. Usually, I let ideas bounce around for a few days. But the scenes that I’d come up with that night had so much detail and plot devices that it was too big a risk going back to sleep. Besides, I didn’t think I could. So I got up, went downstairs and scribbled as much of it down as I could remember.

If that script had been in the post, I’d have a bit of dilemma. But it isn’t. So I can get to work, and turn a draft into a novel!

Colin Mulhern

Art Tastic

Some jobs are just way too much fun to be called “work.” Being a Teaching Assistant in a primary school certainly comes in that category.

I’ve done more art and creative play over the past few weeks than I have for years. It kicked off with the announcement of an Art Exhibition. This involved the whole school. I was given the job of organising the Year 5 and 6 classes which was crazy, because the time allocated was so tight – but we pulled it off.  The exhibition filled the hall and had artwork by every child, in every year, plus day-care.

Then, for Children in Need, we had a Creative Day. Activities were set up in classrooms throughout the school. These included bookmarks, headbands, badges, paintings, puzzles, 3D models and cake making.

Next came our Winter Displays. One for Key Stage One, and one for Key Stage Two. I got the Key Stage 2 board. This meant finding a group of kids from each year group in Key Stage and giving them jobs. To do the display below, we had to cover a 2 meter sheet of giant-bubble wrap with glue and tissue paper. Behind it are fairy lights (LED – they give off no heat) on slow fade, with the silhouettes on black paper in the foreground. We still need to add a bit of glitter to spice it up a bit more, but I couldn’t wait to post.

Colin Mulhern

Review: Space Captain Smith

Space/Captain Smith
By Toby Frost

I picked this book up at a publisher’s fair. Reviews liking it to Hitchhiker’s Guide, Red Dwarf and Black Adder. Being a fan of all three, I couldn’t resist.

Set in a very British future, where the empire has been restored and stretches across the galaxy, Space Captain Smith is the comic-adventure story of a third rate captain who gets the job of taking a passenger from one planet to another, not realising the whole thing is a set-up, that he’s just a decoy to encourage the alien Ghasts to come out of hiding and attack.

It starts out pretty good and there are a few laughs along the way. The writing is tidy and uncomplicated and generally entertaining, but – and this is a big but – there are far too many hiccups that pull the reader from the story.

Modern references in science fiction novels are dodgy ground. If a reference can be justified by tying it in with the plot, a good writer can pull it off. Example: Red Dwarf had a great episode involving Stauffenberg’s briefcase (the attempted assassination of Hitler) and it worked well because a) Rimmer was so sure he knew his twentieth century history, and b) the audience knew he didn’t know a damn thing about history, and realised before he did that the case contained a bomb. The situation was central to the comedy, so the joke was relevant.

But when modern-day references come out of the blue, just for a cheap laugh, everything falls apart. I can’t believe in a sci-fi world when the author is dropping one liners that turn my attention away from what I’m supposed to be enjoying.

I put up with a couple of these hiccups, but when a scene opened with a reference to Nick Cave, quoting lines from O’Malley’s Bar, it was too much. Personally, I think Nick Cave is brilliant, and I love the Murder Ballads album, but I’m not so blinkered to believe that renegade space cadets will be discussing his lyrics 500 years from now. It just doesn’t do it for me – plus, the point he was making was only relevant to the song. It was nothing to do with the story.

I did try to read on, but was hit on the very next page with mentions of Jim Beam and Jack Daniels.

Sorry, too many other books out there.

Colin Mulhern.