Author Archives: Christopher Johnstone

It is strange that objects can engender such powerful moods. Whenever I move house or sort my things to reduce clutter I have found that objects can be bringers of eerie and unplaceable sadness. Sometimes other moods too, but most often, sadness. Continue reading

We’ve lately had a couple ‘filler’ releases by authors of great big series where the fans are eagerly biting their fingernails and waiting for the next instalment. Patrick Rothfuss’s The Slow Regard of Silent Things is a spoiler-free story about Auri – the slightly otherworldly and rootless waif of the university. George R.R. Martin’s The World of Ice and Fire is a massive and detailed world-book actually cut down from 300,000 words of ‘sidebars’ he wrote on the history of his world for the project. It is apparently full of weird and wonderful bits of information and a lot of tributes to a look of people. The Muppets are hidden in the book, as is Mervyn Peake if you look hard enough. Also, you won’t find out anything about what happened at Summerhall… the conceit of The World of Ice and Fire is that the book has been written by a historian from fragmentary notes of an earlier historian and a conveniently careless ink spill has blotted out the particular piece of history relating to those events. Continue reading

Traditionally, Jack-o’-lanterns were carved from turnips, not pumpkins. Pumpkins are a new world vegetable, so of course prior to colonisation of the Americas there were no pumpkins in Europe. Something else was needed for one’s vegetable-based horror skull lamp needs. Continue reading

On the weekend I attended one of the regular Trampoline events in Melbourne. The event is an ‘un-conference’, where no talks, discussions or workshops are planned, but instead the attendees get up and offer to talk about this topic, or lead a conversation on that topic and the day’s content is filled in on a big board. If the idea sounds intriguing, it is, and the event works much better than I’d have ever guessed with a lot of really fascinating discussion and thoughts tumbling out of the day.

In one of the last sessions of the day, one presenter played the short film Humans Need Not Apply by CGP Grey.

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about characters and characterisation recently. It’s something that I’ve always felt has been something of a weak point in my own writing and it’s something that I’ve been focusing on trying to improve. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot is how characters are defined not just by their own personal foibles, quirks, traits, preferences and personality, but by their relationships with other people in the story and their relationship with social groups, institutions, social rules, laws and traditions. I think that in genre fiction especially, the background of societal setting is often disregarded and this leaves the characters and the world feeling somehow ‘thin’ and ‘tepid’. To start off I started putting together a list of ‘social settings’ to help me think this through. Continue reading

Lester Dent was an American pulp fiction writer who was known for his tightly plotted works. His best known character was probably Doc Savage.

Dent worked to a very strict formula for writing pulp stories. The formula is quoted below (via Dirty 30s). What I think would be a fascinating exercise would be to play around with this… gender swapping the main character would be interesting… or putting the raw plot structure into an unexpected setting perhaps?

I very much like how the formula works with Menace and Suspense. I think of them as plot drivers along with other elements like Mystery, Excitement and Triumph.

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