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Holy Name Catholic Primary School, Birmingham
Holy Name Catholic Primary School
Primary, VA
Mr Andrew Neenan
Cross Lane
Great Barr
www.holynameprimary.co.uk
Updated: 8th May, 2018
St George and St Teresa's Catholic Primary School, Solihull
Bentley Heath, B93 8PA
St John the Evangelist Catholic Primary Academy, Stoke-on-Trent
Kidsgrove, ST7 1AE
St George and Martin's Catholic Primary School, Stoke-on-Trent
Birches Head, ST1 2NQ
St George's Catholic Primary School, Worcester
Barbourne ,WR1 3JY
St Gerard's Catholic Primary School, Birmingham
Castle Vale, B35 6LB
St Giles Catholic Primary School, Stoke-on-Trent
Cheadle, ST10 1ED
St Gregory's Catholic Primary School, Coventry
Coventry, CV2 5AT
St Gregory's Catholic Primary School, Stoke-on-Trent
Longton, ST3 2QN
St Gregory's Catholic Primary School, Stratford upon Avon
Stratford upon Avon, CV37 6UZ
St Gregory's Catholic Primary School, Smethwick
Smethwick, B67 5HX

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
3 productivity enthusiasts share their tips for managing emails at work
We spoke with 3 organizational experts to hear their strategies for managing email — so you're not left drowning in your inbox.
Laura MacPherson, Writer
15 January 2021 • 5 Min Read
Unfortunately, waving farewell to our email altogether isn't an option. Email is ingrained in life and work — and it's here to stay. In fact, the average office worker receives 128 work-related emails daily and spends 28 percent of their work week on email.
Fortunately, there are ways to manage email efficiently so we can get on with more important work. We spoke with three productivity enthusiasts who've mastered the art of managing emails at work, and in this post, they're sharing the strategies that serve them best.
1. Save time by being concise
Most people are prone to adding filler phrases or extraneous sentences to their messages. If you're following up after a phone call, for example, there's no need to say, "Thanks for the phone call this afternoon." Darius Foroux, a writer who focuses on productivity and habit-formation, adds that filler phrases using business-speak can also be confusing and sound passive-aggressive. Phrases like, "I would argue," "Per our last conversation," and "I'd like to get the ball rolling," are not only unnecessary, they can also lead to misunderstandings. Leave them out (along with all these words and phrases.)
Emilio Garcia, founder of Boundify, a B2B lead generation agency, shares that he uses Grammarly to keep his emails concise. He also uses bullet points whenever possible to shorten sentences, which also has the benefit of making reading easier for the recipient.
Another strategy to stay concise is to impose a length limit on yourself. Robbie Fitzwater, lecturer for the Clemson University MBA and undergraduate marketing programs and founder of MKTG Rhythm, shares, "I try to keep emails to under five sentences whenever possible, and I add spaces between sentences so the message can be read and understood quickly."
2. Create a system for follow-ups
Trying to remember who you need to follow up with and when can easily turn into a time-suck. It also adds to the list of things your working memory has to store. Instead of following up ad hoc, create a system that you use each and every time you follow up. A standard process will allow you to create a habit that puts your brain on autopilot. It's also helpful to use a tool like Boomerang (or Front!) that will ping you if someone hasn't responded within a certain amount of time.
Fitzwater's system is simple and consistent. He replies in the existing message thread with four options:
Would this be easier over a call for context? (Y/N)
If so would any of the times on this list work: (list times)
Would it be easier if I followed up in a week? (Y/N)
Respond with 🤬 if you never want to hear from me again!
He adds, "I try to keep it light by adding a human element to the message."
Foroux agrees with the need to keep it light. He says, "Never refer to your failed attempt to get a response. You wouldn't do that with a friend, would you?"
3. Get on the phone when necessary
Certain conversations are more efficient when handled via the phone. If you suspect that a conversation will require some back-and-forth, it will take less time to spend a few minutes on the phone than to compose and type several emails (which may need further clarification, requiring a phone call in the end anyway).
Fitzwater's rule of thumb is that if a conversation demands more than one back-and-forth, he asks for a call. He also shares that he uses video to speed up giving feedback via email: "I've been sending more and more video messages along with my emails lately. I teach, so I started doing it for my class for feedback on projects. It was really well received so I've translated it into more of my workflow."
Garcia adds that any conversation with an emotional element should happen over the phone to avoid creating misunderstandings (which drain your energy as well as waste time).
4. Take advantage of templates
Templates and message templates can also speed up time spent composing emails. There's no need to reinvent the wheel each time you write answers to frequently asked questions. Fitzwater shares that he uses about ten message templates and a few email templates to convey information he tends to share consistently, which gets him through composing replies much faster.
Tools like TextExpander can also help, allowing you to insert snippets of text from a repository of content using a quick search or abbreviation.
5. Other tricks for how to manage work emails
Beyond these four primary strategies that our productivity enthusiasts all use, Fitzwater and Garcia share a few other tricks that boost efficiency.
Use automation when possible — Garcia says, "I love the snooze feature of Gmail. It allows me to move to future dates or times emails that I can't work right away or that I've delegated."
Touch each email only once — Fitzwater shares the importance of not duplicating effort: "If I open an email, I try to respond to it right then, as opposed to opening it and letting it sit and then coming back to it. It decreases rework on my end."
Set a specific time each day to deal with email — Fitzwater is also intentional about when he works in his inbox: "Setting times each day to respond to email makes my time much more effective, and I'm not living under the tyranny of my inbox."
Focusing on brevity, creating processes, and using tools designed to speed up email management can go a long way in making you more productive — and may even improve your work relationships as a result!
Want more on how to improve email productivity? Read our IDC study on using collaborative email to make your team more efficient and productive with email.
Written by Laura MacPherson
Originally Published: 1 July 2020


text:
Tag: fanfic
General, Personal
Hustle and Bustle, and the Dangers Therein
September 25, 2020 September 24, 2020 CassMorrisWrites
Long post is long. You have been warned.
A couple of weeks ago, I stumbled across a Tumblr thread that made me incandescent with rage; I remain tweaked enough about it to make this worth posting. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen my initial rant on the topic. It involved a new trend among fanfiction writers to charge commissions for writing fic.
I went down a rabbit hole. I shouldn't have, because all it did was make me livid. Some of the arguments were so staggeringly entitled. Just breathtaking.
Y-Yes? Fanfiction should remain free. It has to.
It's wild to me that one type of entitlement seems to be responding to another. If people are really bitching and moaning because they can't find fics specifically catered to them — Well, they've misunderstood what's going on. Fanfiction is such a gorgeous thing precisely because it's born out of a writer's relationship with the original work. You as a reader don't get to demand that their relationship be what you want it to be. You go looking for what's there and hopefully find something to delight you. You are accepting gifts that the writers have put out there for anyone who wants to enjoy them.
Now, there have always been fic exchanges and such where requests may be filled, but that's still happening in the spirit of sharing mutually in excitement over the source material. Outside of that, if you can't find exactly the fic that tickles your fancy, the answer has always been: Write it yourself!
The solution is not to decide people should accept commissions for derivative work!
I feel like these are the same people who defend piracy with the "all knowledge should be free, I'm just sticking it to The Man" arguments — which are equally ill-informed, ignorant, and just a cover for selfishness. (I'm restraining the impulse to delve into that tangent for the moment, but just know, given the current shape of how writers are compensated and in lieu of a currency-free society a la Star Trek, there is absolutely no ethical justification for book piracy). Apart from the illegality, your actions are not going to hurt the people you think you're hurting. Accepting commissions for fanfic jeopardizes sites like AO3 and undermines the entire foundation that allows fanfic to exist for public consumption in the first place.
And then there's nonsense like this:
Sugarplum, d'you know why we don't have a platform like that? Why we cannot, should not, must not have a platform like that?
It violates Fair Use.
Fair Use is the legal defense against accusations of copyright infringement that protects, among other things, satire and educational use of materials. Whether or not it applies to fanfiction is, honestly, murky at best. To my knowledge, no statute has yet added fanfiction to the list of things explicitly protected by Fair Use. It's just the best defense we currently have.
Here's what the Organization for Transformative Works, the company that runs AO3, has to say about it:
What exactly is fair use?
Fair use is the right to make some use of copyrighted material without getting permission or paying. It is a basic limit on copyright law that protects free expression. "Fair use" is an American phrase, although all copyright laws have some limits that keep copyright from being private censorship.
Fair use favors uses that (1) are noncommercial and not sold for a profit; (2) are transformative, adding new meaning and messages to the original; (3) are limited, not copying the entirety of the original; and (4) do not substitute for the original work.
It's worth noting that I'm largely talking about US law here, though I believe the UK has similar statutes and understanding of derivative works. Fanlore has a lot more in-depth information, but at the base of it all is this: the current Fair Use defense depends upon not profiting from the derivative work.
Case law has seen mixed results, and when the authors of derivative works have prevailed, that has usually hinged on the critical or parodic nature of the derivative work. While the OTW argues that fanfiction is sufficiently transformative by nature, providing a commentary on the original works, that has by no means been settled into law. Copyright holders and publishing houses simply have not chosen, in most cases, to press the point. But if you start profiting off of your derivative works? If that becomes a common trend? If you have the utter gall to try and build a website based on that concept? You will be baiting them to come after you — or decide to use your infringement as a reason to screw over a content creator.
Here is my authorial understanding of the issue with copyright law and fanfiction (with the caveat that I am not a lawyer): The reason many authors still won't take a public stance condoning fanfiction and why almost no author will read fanfiction of their own works? Is because of the legal jeopardy it can put them in. If an author is considered to have abandoned their copyright, their intellectual property can be redistributed. Not defending against infringements — like fanfiction that violates Fair Use! — can be grounds for being considered to have abandoned copyright.
It is not impossible to imagine a situation where an author, "failing" to defend against copyright infringement perpetuated by someone taking commissions for fic based on their work, has their IP taken off of them and handed to another writer. Now imagine a publishing house doing that to an author who is a member of a marginalized community and handing their characters and ideas off to a more popular author (who is likely not of that marginalized community). It's not impossible. It might not even be improbable. A lot of publishing "wisdom" already purports that there's more value to be found in piling all your eggs into a basket of proven ROI. You see it in how it's the already-successful authors who receive the largest advances and the heftiest marketing budgets. Fanfic commissions, like piracy, could directly jeopardize the original content creators — but they're not going to hurt The Man a bit. If anything, they just hand the Powers That Be more tools they can use to control who gets to produce what kinds of content.
"But Cass?" some people may be thinking. "You're a professional writer. Surely you agree that writers deserve to be paid for their work?"
Well. Yes. They deserve to be paid for their work. Derivative works are not the same. And I say this as someone who's written derivative works for a very, very long time. Longer than these commission-hungry ficcers have been alive. I know the difference between work I do as a hobby and work I do as a job — The same way that if you cook a meal for your family and friends, you don't expect to be paid for it, but if a caterer prepares that meal, you'd damn well better pay them. Now, maybe your friends and family reward you in some other fashion — cooking for you at another time, bringing wine, bringing dessert, etc — but that's not payment. You're not doing it to get paid; you're doing it to share joy.
Fanfiction is supposed to be an act of joy.
I mean, it might be rage-joy, as you reclaim what you believe the source material has irredeemably destroyed. As I've said before, sometimes fanfic is a love letter to canon, sometimes it's a strongly worded letter of correction, and sometimes it's 95 theses on what canon did wrong nailed to a door. But it has always been something done for the sake of doing it, born of attachment to the original material. It is, inherently, a leisure activity. If you view it as an income source, you have fundamentally misunderstood what it is. I mean, apart from the fact that you're breaking copyright law, you have just absolutely missed the point of fanfiction.
"But some fanfic writers work really hard!"
Yes. I certainly did. Would you like to know how much research I did on pre-Norman England and Scotland in order to write historically accurate Hogwarts Founders fic? It was way more than JKR ever did into that period, I can tell you that. (She seems to think the 11th and 15th centuries were indistinguishable, to say nothing of metalworking and gem-cutting techniques that wouldn't evolve for centuries but I digress). Or would you like to know how many schematics of Federation and Klingon starships I have saved to my hard drive? The extensive family trees I've drawn? The hours spent teaching myself details about the lead-up to the French Revolution that no teacher ever though essential enough to impart? The sheer total tonnage of trivia permanently lodged in my head about a galaxy far, far away?
Many hobbyists work very hard on their hobbies. They invest time and energy and money into their leisure activities. That doesn't mean you're entitled to be paid for that investment. You've chosen to do it.
I took fic writing very seriously. I still do! I don't write a lot of fic these days, but when I do, I put as much of my heart into it as I do my original works. And back in the heyday of my fic-writing, on LJ, ohh, I took such pride in being known for what I did. It was within niche corners and small fandoms, but I won contests and cherished every comment and celebrated when my works appeared on rec lists. I sought recognition, even when the only tangible reward was a little graphic to post in my bio. I wanted people to acknowledge how hard I worked and, frankly, how good I was at it.
But I never, ever, ever sought to make a dime off of it. The very concept would have been absurd, and I knew full well that we all put those "not mine, just borrowing the characters!" disclaimers up precisely so there could be no doubt of that. (This is how I know I'd do well in a Star Trek style "prestige economy" as interpreted by Manu Saadia: I am very happy when striving to be acknowledged as the best at the thing I've chosen to do; I am unhappy that we live in a world where financial value is the only kind of acknowledgement society accepts as real).
Your hobby might be great training for a job. But it's not a job. A hobby is leisure. That distinction is actually important, not only for your mental and emotional well-being, but as a way of pushing back against certain capitalistic pressures dominating our world. And that brings me to the thing I actually want to talk about. (Yes, all of that was just build-up).
Your hobbies do not need to be monetized.
When I had this rant on Twitter, a friend pointed out that the younger generation has been indoctrinated to believe that their hobbies only have worth if they are making money off of them. The pressure to "go viral", the monetization of TikToks, affiliate marketing, IG influencers — It all sends the message that it's not enough to enjoy something and share that joy. No, you have to make a Brand out of it. If you're not getting paid, it's not worth doing.
It honestly makes me so sad.
I mean, underneath the fury I've been wrangling since becoming aware of this whole commission debacle, I'm just heartbroken for all these people who are viewing fic as a commodity rather than a freely shared gift. It's so cynical and so depressing and such a capitulation to the very worst aspects of how our society is constructed.
It ties into something else I've thought, which is that people who've been on the internet since, oh, 2007 or so had a fundamentally different experience than folk of my internet-generation. (I reference Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet for an explanation of internet-generations, which may overlap but are not synonymous with traditional societal generations). If you were on the internet in the late-90s and early-00s, especially if you are what we would now call Very Online, you sort of had to build your own experience. I started teaching myself html to build my AOL Hometown page and really refined those skills on LiveJournal. I learned how to link to an image and how to turn an image into a link. I learned about hex codes so that I could find just the right shade for my background.
That's not the way it is now. Everything is pre-packaged for you. There's no customization in Facebook or Twitter besides being able to upload a header banner (the dimensions of which you cannot control, and which will change without notice several times a year). In some ways, yes, that's easier; it's nice that most blogging sites now automatically include white space around an image without my having to set the h-space and v-space for them. But at the same time, I hate having sacrificed customization for convenience. It's so frustrating to want to change something and not have these options available to me, because the Powers That Be have decided, nope, these margins are correct, this much white space is correct, this color palate is correct. Corporations have control of our online experience. And that feels inextricable from the urge people now feel to monetize what they do on the internet.
We have confused hobbies with jobs. We have forgotten what hobbies are. We have forgotten leisure. The pressure to always be productive and performative has reached absolutely ludicrous force.
And the thing is, I am not innocent of falling into this mindset. I am deeply uncomfortable on days I feel like I've "done nothing". I post to my Patreon three times a week, and I'm constantly trying to entice new members to join up. It's part of my hustle. But I do try to maintain some barriers between my hobbies and what I do for cash. Someone once suggested that I sell my embroidery on Etsy, and I had to gently push back: No. Embroidery is something I do for myself, for the sheer pleasure of it, and something I give as a gift to people I love. I do not want that to become something I have to fret over because it's not giving me good enough ROI.
I feel there's another larger issue here, too, which is the loss of art for the sake of art. And leisure for the sake of leisure. I'm not enough of a theorist to go too deeply into that, but I suspect others have said clever things about it. It fits hand-in-glove with the increased corporatization of our world. Algorithms drive everything. Movies plots are influenced by focus groups. Everything is a Brand. And I do not believe that encourages the proliferation of good art. It makes art safe, predictable, palatable. Boring. It discourages invention and innovation.
Fanfiction has long been a push back against that corporatization. It's a reclaiming of storytelling for and by the public. Fanfic commissions are playing into capitalism's hands.
So that ties back to what I was saying before, about how, yes, you might work very hard on this hobby. But you should be doing it for the sake of the final product, for the pride you can take in that work, for the pleasure of sharing it with others. Not because you expect to get paid.
I don't want to discourage fanfiction. That is the last thing in the world I want to do. I owe my career to my experience writing fanfic, and it would make me the happiest person on the planet to discover someone had decided to write Aven Cycle fanfic, even though I could never read it. But if I discovered someone was profiting off of that fanfic, I'd be furious — not least because it would be so galling, considering the various legal and financial eccentricities of how authors are currently rewarded for their efforts. Someone else making money off of my stories could very well impair my own compensation, and nothing in the world will convince me that would be fair.
What I want people to remember is the spirit fanfiction is supposed to come from — not the hustle, not the monetization of the internet, but the attachment to the original material. Fanfiction is supposed to be something you do for you, before anyone else! And that is liberating! You can do whatever you want! No one's going to come tell you that you have to change something, tighten the pacing, get rid of that character, take out that scene, add a conversation about this topic. You are beholden to no one but yourself and your own pleasure — and how often is that true, in our modern world? Own that.
If you want to make money off of writing, I support you in that as well. Going from fanfic to pro is an increasingly common track in publishing! I've been on multiple convention panels about it. But you have to do it with your own characters and concepts, or with those already in the public domain. It's a different sort of endeavor than writing fanfic — because it is work, it is a job, not a hobby. Writing professionally means doing a lot of the large and small hard things that you don't have to worry about as a ficcer — and then you get compensated for that work. Now, the issues related to that compensation in current structures are many, but they are entirely separate from the issue of fanfiction.
And, of course, there are other options if you want to be paid to write — journalism, for instance, which is another place many well-established authors have started. I want more people to be able to make a living off of writing, I want opportunities to be open to more people and to people from more backgrounds than most traditional avenues currently support — but that does not mean opening avenues to profit off of fanfic.
tl;dr? Don't flipping try to make money off fanfic. You're breaking the law and missing the point.
Tagged amwriting, ao3, derivative fiction, derivative works, fanfic, writingLeave a comment
Hearing Voices (In a Good Way)
April 30, 2020 CassMorrisWrites
This article from The Guardian crossed my eyes the other day: A survey of authors reported that 63% said they could "hear" their characters talking, and 61% felt their characters had their own agency (although what, precisely, that means has a lot of variance).
"I hear them in my mind. They have distinct voice patterns and tones, and I can make them carry on conversations with each other in which I can always tell who is 'talking'," said one anonymous writer. "They sometimes tell me that what I have in mind for them isn't right – that they would never behave or speak that way. I don't usually answer back," said another.
It links to something I read a few months ago that fascinated me — the idea that some people have no inner voice. No internal monologue? No ability to narrate everything you do? I literally can't imagine it. My brain often has more than one audio channel running at the same time. I wonder if those people are better at meditation and yoga, because I've often thought the reason I'm so bad at them is because my brain is utterly incapable of being quiet. The internal monologue never ceases.
I am absolutely one of those who can hear my characters. Some have stronger voices than others — usually the characters who popped up without my having to craft them. If I've needed to build a character to fill a specific story need, the voice often isn't quite as strong. But the ones who come naturally, those are the characters whose voices come through loud and clear.
In the Aven Cycle, it's Aula who first occurs to me when I think about this. From the very beginning, her voice was so strong: I can hear its tone, its cadence, its tics and quirks. I almost never have to wonder about the words I write for her; the dialogue flows entirely naturally. Latona takes a little more finesse — not least because she is more likely to weigh her words and decide what she can or can't say based on who she's talking to, whereas Aula has fewer filters. Alhena, though, shy and reticent, has even more. I can also "see" most characters, as the article mentions — how they move, what their gestures are, how they interact with the environment. I've wondered how much of this is due to theatrical experience. I'm always thinking of what the "stage business" would be. All of these things add up to more than the sum of their parts: they help inform a reader about who the character is, what's important to them, how they process the world.
I don't experience what some of the authors in the article say, though, in terms of a character "talking back". They don't address me. They aren't aware they're being written; they exist in their world, and it's one I can manipulate. When something feels off and isn't working, it's because I haven't fit the pieces together properly. I operate more like what Val McDermid describes:
"I do not think they act independently," McDermid said. "They have the life I give them and no more. … I don't think I'm possessed by the characters; I just think my subconscious is good at processing data."
I love that idea, because it ties in to what the article says about how people interact with each other in real life: our brains are constantly trying to make predictions, and they update their predictions based on newly-input data, all the time. Some writers' brains, it seems, do the same thing, just with the people we've invented. Our brains collate and process that data, and just like we can tell if a well-known friend or family member is behaving oddly, we can tell if something isn't working for a character when we play out an imaginary scenario for them.
This is yet another place where fanfic can be, truly, such amazing training for a writer — because what we're talking about, really, when we talk about a character having their own agency or "talking back" or "refusing" to do something — is the idea of being OOC: Out Of Character.
With fanfic, when you're writing established characters, you've got existing data to rely on: the characters' words and actions in canon. If you're writing fanfic for a movie or TV series, you get the added bonus of the actor's appearance, voice, and mannerisms. Your brain can process all of that data much like it would a real person. It makes it much simpler to test the dialogue and actions you write against "what they would really do". There's a sort of answer key you can check your work against. It operates on a lot of levels — choices they make, actions, love interests, all sorts of things. But in terms of "hearing a character's voice", specifically, canon provides a basis for dialogue (or internal monologues) in fanfic. If you write something that goes against the grain of established vocal patterns, it's going to feel wrong.
(That wrongness can also be used within canon for comedic effect: One of my favorite things in the MCU is any time Loki impersonates someone, because you get this wonderful tangle of another actor pretending to be Tom Hiddleston pretending to be Loki pretending to be someone else. Or in Harry Potter, there was the great joy of watching Helena Bonham Carter play Emma Watson's Hermione pretending to be Bellatrix. Body-swapping scenes like that present a challenge for both writer and actor, but when done well, they are so good — I suspect in large part because of the mental jungle gym they give our brains to exercise on. And oftentimes the real actor for the character will play out the scene in rehearsal for the other actor's benefit, giving them something to check against in much the same way that canon gives fanfic that mark).
Picking apart why dialogue feels OOC is great training for a writer, because that drills down into the nitty-gritty of how words work and why. What about these words is wrong? Is it about word choice — words that are either too complex or too simple for a character, or slang they would or wouldn't use? Are you using too many filler words and verbal pauses (um, ah, look, well, etc), or not enough, or the wrong type? Is it the cadence — are the thoughts too long or too short, do they rise and fall in the wrong places? Is it more emotionally-based — something a character wouldn't admit out loud, or at least wouldn't in these circumstances? Is it too blunt, or too circumspect? How about the tone — is it too snarky, too earnest, too casual, too formal? Would this character use profane language or minced oaths? Do they think before they speak, weighing their words carefully, or do they speak without a filter?
And then, if you're the sort of writer inclined towards original work as well as fanfic, you can apply these lessons even when you don't have a canon outside of your own brain to check against.
In From Unseen Fire, I remember a scene that changed from a conversation between Latona and Rubellia to one between Latona and Aula. The information conveyed was the same, but I had to tweak the dialogue in a big way, because Rubellia's speech patterns are not the same as Aula's. Because I've spent so much time thinking about how words work (and rhetoric plays a big role in this), I can break that general sense of wrongness down further into granular parts: Aula uses more parentheticals, more terms of address; her flow is both faster and choppier, while Rubellia's is more evenly-paced, with longer thoughts; Aula exclaims, while Rubellia does not. I had a similar experience working on Give Way to Night, in a group scene that involves all three Vitelliae, Rubellia, and Vibia. The original version of the scene was missing Rubellia and Alhena; adding them in changed the balance of conversation. I had to think more critically about who would say what when, who conveyed which information, and what words they used to do so. Alhena offers information more timidly than the others in the room; Vibia doesn't waste words by cushioning what she says with platitudes or endearments. Small details, but they're what can really sell a character — and help a reader to understand them, without having to spell every aspect of their personality out in the narration.
How about you? Are you someone who hears voices when you're writing or reading? Does your brain process interpersonal data that way?
Tagged Aven Cycle, fanfic, writing, writing habits, writing tipsLeave a comment
False Starts
August 8, 2018 August 7, 2018 CassMorrisWrites
The theme this week over on the Deb Ball is "the manuscript in the drawer", and I thought I'd expand a little bit upon what I wrote over there. I chatted about this on Twitter a while back, too. I have been, across my life, a prolific writer. Since the age of 11, when I decided I wanted to be a writer, I've started scores of projects. Honestly, it's possibly hundreds — but that just sounds ludicrous, and lots of them were, like, single-page vague concepts anyway, so I usually just say scores.
The point is that From Unseen Fire is my first book on the shelves, but it's so far from my first book that I hardly know where to begin. Here's just a sampling of some of the things I've worked on in the past twenty-one years:
Age 13, a cyberpunk novel written at the behest of my 8th grade English teacher. We were supposed to write 50 pages of something over the course of the whole year. I turned in a 300-page novel. I'm pretty sure my teacher was both proud of my dedication and a bit dismayed at having to grade that mess. As I recall, the plot consisted of lots of spying and subterfuge to save a futuristic empire from a maniac warlord, or something. My parents read it and were alarmed that I knew what a concubine was.
Phantom of the Opera from the POV of the corps de ballet, cowritten with a friend. It was filled with every cliche trope you could possibly imagine — torrid love affairs, heroines struck down with blindness and/or tuberculosis, the Opera House catching fire, main characters madly in love with our not-at-all-self-insert OCs… the whole shebang. We role-played a lot of it out, too.
Something I started around age 14 that would have been sort of like Kate Elliott's Court of Fives — fantasy focused around a competition w/ rebellion knitted in. Hero's journey with female lead, too. This is one I had completely forgotten about until I tripped over it while combing through old files. I feel like a lot of "I've started to read fantasy books yet am not finding myself in any of them because it's all boys doing boy things, well, to heck with that" attitude fueled this one.
"Wings of Glory", which was something with…bird people? I don't even know. I wrote a few highly dramatic interpersonal scenes but had no greater plot.
"Fire", a secondworld fantasy that actually held the seeds of what would become the magic system of the Aven Cycle. There was a princess who did a lot of questing. This one I actually finished, about age 16, I think?
So. Much. Fanfic. Starting with a Star Wars series called "Days of the Alliance", written and rewritten many times from ages 12-mid 20s, most recently with the characters as morally-grey Rebel SpecOps. My middle and high school friends got this distributed to them via inbox. I had learned a painful lesson about sharing anything to the Star Wars section of fanfiction.net, particularly if you had the nerve to be a girl writing these things, so I kept most of this closer to the chest — but I had the delightful experience of having friends begging me for updates!
(Dear Disney: I'd still super love to write this for real; call me).
Later on, through college, the fanfic was mostly Harry Potter based. I spent a lot of time exploring Bellatrix Black, Sirius Black, and Rowena Ravenclaw, in particular. The Blacks just fascinated me in a sort of Jungian "explore the dark mirror of your own nature" sort of way, while with Rowena and the other Founders, I was determined to write a more historically-appropriate version of the Founding of Hogwarts, since JK Rowling apparently can't distinguish pre-Norman England from the 15th century. Then, post-grad-school, my attention turned towards Wizarding America, in concert with two of my besties, and we wrote a ton of material for a Tumblr Blog that was very successful right up until JK started trying to write America, which she does so poorly that it depressed us into giving up. (JK Rowling does. not. understand. this country).
A dystopia set in rural Virginia, also written and rewritten many times from about ages 16 on. In senior year of college, I re-envisioned it in my screenwriting class and ended up polishing it to the point where I felt willing to submit it to contests. It actually made it to the semi-finals of the Final Draft competition (a fairly large and well-known one) in 2011!
"Relics", a rewrite of "Fire" in my early twenties that was somewhat better but still groaning under the weight of fantasy tropes. In this version, the questing princess had a bit more of a purpose: she had to go looking for the sacred relics that represented the eight magical elements of her world. (I told you it contained the seeds of the Aven Cycle's magical system; I've been thinking about these things for a long time). This project was also a ridiculous worldbuilding timesuck. I'm pretty sure I charted the royal family tree back, like, eighteen generations. But, hey, if George R R Martin can get away with it…
(Also, looking at that map helps me pinpoint roughly when my handwriting cemented into its adult form).
A Trojan War retelling from the viewpoint of (of course) the prophetess Cassandra.
Steampunk Camelot. Honestly this one never got much farther than that general idea. Might be fun to revisit as a sort of Celtopunk project instead?
A few false-starts at Regency romances. I figure I read enough of them, why not give writing them a try? Answer: I get too bogged down in the history.
An Aladdin retelling set in the pre-Islamic Sassanid empire. This one I'd love to pick up again at some point when I can do the grad school level research required.
A high tech Trojan War set in outer space, where Troy is a space station & its walls are impenetrable force fields. Also never got much further than concept.
A story of the Fae set in Williamsburg VA in the 1760s. Another one I'd like to revive. Maybe as a short story?
"The Antares Project", a steampunk AU I've been dabbling with since '06. This is the one I blogged about for the Deb Ball this week. It has a great world (based on if the US lost the War of 1812) and fantastic cast that I adore and no plot. A lot of great scenes written. No coherent story. Sigh.
And then the two I'm *actually* working on now in addition to Book Two: the Julie d'Aubigny-inspired space opera romp, and a secondworld fantasy with star-based magic.
And that list is so partial, y'all. Just the major things that sprung to mind. If I combed my files and old notebooks, there are so, so many more kernels. There are probably a bunch I have literally no memory of. Because I keep it all — I seriously never delete anything, and I've never thrown out a writing notebook. They're all there, waiting, in boxes that are currently in storage. On my computer, the files are are all neatly archived away. But they're there. Some of them I may never look at again. Some may only get glanced at with fond remembrance for the child I once was. Some may have good bits I can cannibalize and reconfigure. Some may actually be worth reviving.
I don't feel that any of them were wasted effort.
Because the thing is this: If you want to be a writer, write.
Write things that don't work. Write character profiles you never use. Write stories that don't get past the first page. Write down hazy ides that come to you in dreams. Write ridiculous self-insert fanfic.
Yes, you do have to finish something eventually, if you want to publish, but all the false starts have value, too. It's all training.
I'm so glad I've spent so much of my life playing with words.
If you're interested in seeing bits and pieces of some of these false starts, join my Patreon! I share snippets of them from time to time — even the embarrassing juvenilia! 😉
Tagged fanfic, juvenilia, storytelling, the process, writingLeave a comment
Writing Our Own Deliverance
Once again, a Tumblr post has made me think thoughts.
This piece on geek girls/growing up female/becoming a female creator came across my feed recently, and the bit that struck me the most was this:
so we made it up. we gave barbie a cape and our spotted dog the ability to control the weather. we wrote barely-legible fanfiction about vampires who were also terribly in love with us – because we were perfect in this world, unlike the mess of what really was – we crafted entire sub-stories about how the main characters in our favorite universes were secretly girls in disguise. we made 17-year-old characters who would cut the throats of anyone who hurt them. we drew pictures of women in full, angry armor. we wrote bad poems about the girls we loved and the ones we were jealous of.
It got me thinking… Wouldn't it be wonderful, if all the women writers shared their first efforts? The heroines they created in youth, ludicrous and wonderful. The princess-superheroes, the werewolf-ninjas, the warrior goddesses. The shameless self-inserts who saved the day. The Mary Sues.
Mine started out as an Alderaanian refugee/X-Wing pilot/spy/Jedi knight who was, of course, fantastically beautiful, as tall as I never turned out to be, prodigiously talented and independent at 16 (which, when you're 11, seems perfectly reasonably grown-up), and the epicenter of a totally kickass strike team/soap-opera-worthy drama. Everything I wanted to be, I poured into her. Every story I loved, I ended up filtering through her. Over the years she was also an actress, a courtesan, a sharpshooter, a bartender, a mother, a great lady. She was whatever I needed her to be at the time. Others of my wish-fulfillment heroines were lion-women with gorgeous snarls and pitiless claws. They were warrior queens, adored by their armies, who flew into berserker rages when faced with injustice. They were femme fatales with starlit eyes and no mercy for men who did wrong. That first one stuck with me, though, and she's been reworked into a dozen heroines since.
As the world turned more violent towards me and my friends, as I learned just how ugly it can be towards women, particularly women who don't match up to certain expectations, my heroines got more violent, too. Looking back, the theme of vengeance trails through so many of my stories. Something was taken from them — a kingdom, a child, their liberty, their choice — and they would fight through anything to get it back. They would land themselves in trouble, captive and deprived of agency, and they would slaughter their way back to freedom. Bruised and bloodied they might have been, but they were always survivors, always the last one standing. And like I've said before, it wasn't as though any thing so truly heinous happened to me — but I was reacting to the permeating misogyny of culture I couldn't escape.
And I know so many other women who did the same thing. This was how we claimed space for ourselves, even if it was only in our own hearts. Even if we only shared those stories with each other, in safe small groups, on email chains or whispered over laced fingers in the dead of night, because it didn't take us long to figure out what response we'd get if we shared them more widely. But they were our characters, our stories. We owned them and we took power from them.
I shamelessly advocate fanfiction not just as excellent training for those who want to be writers, but as a worthy pasttime for anyone in need of an outlet — most particularly for young women. On the page, you can scream and rail and punch and claw and kick and do all the things you can't do in life. On the page, you can have power that the world denies you. If you do become a writer, you get better at it. Your characters cease to be perfect and all-powerful; they develop flaws and weaknesses. They fit into their worlds, rather than bending existing worlds around them. But what can still live in there is the sense of the fight.
So that's why I'd love to know, from all the female authors I adore, who their first heroines of shameless self-fulfillment were.
Bonus material: I'm a paper packrat who's kept every writing notebook and sketchbook she ever had. Proof of concept right here:
I never was much of an artist.
See? Was totally not kidding.
Pretty much all my notebooks from that era look like this.
My artistic skills got slightly better later on but only if I used something actually good as a model.
Tagged artwork, fandom, fanfic, handwriting, personal history, women in media, women in SF/F2 Comments
How Star Wars Changed My Life
December 22, 2013 December 2, 2017 CassMorrisWrites
I mentioned a while ago that I really ought to tell this story on this blog at some point, and since I'm sitting here watching this movie on my parents' enormous-screen TV, cozied up on the couch with the company of two terriers, basking in the warm glow of a Christmas tree while torrential rains fall outside, I thought… sure? Why not today?
I somehow made it through much of my childhood without seeing Star Wars. I'm not sure why. I watched a lot of Disney as a kid, but not to the exclusion of quite everything else, and I was definitely getting into live-action sci-fi by the time my age reached double digits. I was eleven years old in January of 1997, when the movies were re-released in theatres. I was already of pretty persistently geeky inclination, but it hadn't yet found its true channels. I was, at that point, mostly just an unfortunate and awkward sixth-grader. In social studies class, I sat in front of a boy who would eventually become many things to me — friend, arch nemesis, boyfriend. We were discussing movies one day before class when he turned to me with a horrified expression and exclaimed loudly, "You haven't seen Star Wars?!" His incredulity was so perfect, and tinged with such a mixture of disdain and taking-of-offense, that I promptly decided I must have been missing something tremendous. I convinced my mother to take me that weekend.
I was entranced. Despite the five-year-old kicking my seat the entire 121 minutes, I could not have been more enraptured. Afterwards, I sat there in the theatre, watching the credits roll. I'd never paid much attention to end titles before, yet there I was, thinking, This is it. This is what I'm meant to do.
I don't know that I even knew what I meant by that at the time. I'd always been creative, always a natural storyteller, but something about Star Wars crystalized it — perhaps just making me consciously aware as I hadn't been before that that sort of creation really is something a person can do for a living. But why that movie, and not something else? Something about it was magical to me, captivating and alluring. I loved the majesty of it, the galaxy-wide stakes, the sheer scope of the epic. I loved the high drama, the interplay of love and hate and friendship and betrayal. I loved the little moments of unexpected humor caught up in all ofthat. But I think what I liked best was the completeness of that universe — how big it was, how much room there was to play in, how many stories there were yet to tell. I wanted to create, and I wanted to create things like that: stories and characters that people would love, worlds they would want to live in.
In the meantime, though, I started playing in the universe already set-up for me. I started buying the novels and visiting the online forums. I devoured every supplementary material there was to find. I learned the reference guides by heart, memorized thousands of facts and details that are still locked somewhere in the recesses of my brain (and which I'm pretty sure are the reason there was no memorial space left for trigonometry). When I found fanfic and role-playing, it was really just all over. There was no extricating myself after that. The character I created then, in AOL RPG chat rooms at the tender age of eleven, became the heroine of my first novel, and traces of her certainly still surface in my current works. It was pretty cringe-inducing to start with, but I've still kept all my old notebooks — however embarrassing they might be now, I also still have a great deal of affection for those early days. I can look back and see so much growth, from the self-insert instincts and derivative styles that I think all young writers start with, progressing to more and more creativity, more sophisticated storytelling. I can see how Leia Organa and Han Solo informed not only my ideas of heroines and heroes, but of love stories. I can see how my obsession with learning all the trivia helped me to keep world-building details straight once I started creating my own universes to play in. And it's while I'll never disparage fanfic and other derivative activities, either as purely recreational activities or as training for something more. I owe Star Wars and its derivative worlds too much.
I eventually moved on to other genres and other obsessions, but Star Wars was what started it. In the full throes of captivation as a teenager, I watched at least one of the trilogy at least once a week. Now it's probably not much more than once a year — but I still return there for inspiration when I feel like my creativity needs a kick-start. It still works. Something about these movies gives me a shove between the shoulderblades. And, as today is proving, while a lot of the trivia I absorbed in those early years has been relegated to my brain's archive folders, I can still recite pretty much the entire movie start-to-finish. I've gotten sixteen years' worth of joy, entertainment, and inspiration out of this series, and I'm sure I'll get many more. After all, A New Hope's 40th anniversary is coming up soon — and it'll be my 20th anniversary as a fan. I'm sure there will be all kinds of celebrations, and I intend to find a way to take part in them.
Tagged derivative fiction, derivative works, fandom, fanfic, geekery, inspiration, personal history, Star Wars8 Comments


Adnan Virk is a sports anchor, currently for ESPN. He was previously an anchor for Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment's Raptors NBA TV, Leafs TV and Gol TV. Until June 2009 he hosted several programs on The Score, and was previously an associate producer for Sportscentre at TSN. He was also the co-host of Omniculture and Bollywood Boulevard at Omni Television.
In 1972, his parents immigrated to Canada from Pakistan. He was born in Toronto, but spent his formative years in Morven, Ontario, a small town just outside of Kingston. After graduating from high school, he took radio and television arts at Ryerson University.
In 2009, he joined Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment (MLSE) as a host and reporter for Raptors TV, Leafs TV and Gol TV Canada. He left in April 2010 to join the ESPN family of stations in Bristol, Connecticut.
Adnan is married and has two children.
This page was last modified on 30 October 2012, at 04:01.


text:
Promoting Safer Building
Supporting self-recovery after disasters
PSB2 What we are doing and where we are going with the research…
Community members providing reciprocal support for housing reconstruction, Budhathum, Dhading District, Nepal 2017
The majority of disaster affected communities self-recover.. Families and communities rebuild using their own resources with little or no support from outside agencies. Research shows that the number of shelters constructed by aid agencies within the first year after a major disaster is likely to meet about 15% of shelter needs and is often less[1]. As a result, rebuilt homes incorporate the same vulnerabilities, poor building practice and hazardous siting.
This initiative seeks to achieve safer homes and more resilient communities by developing and promoting evidence-based research and practice to support the inevitable process of self-recovery after disasters. The project is a collaboration between the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), CARE International UK, EPICentre, British Geological Survey (BGS), Loughborough University and a growing community of practice that includes NGOs, academia, policy-makers and the private sector.
The work of PSB (in co-leadership with CRAterre) has been adopted by the Global Shelter Cluster (GSC) as a Working Group. The Working Group's main purpose is to address the needs of those who self-build by understanding their recovery processes, learning from best construction practices, and improving technology transfer and public education approaches for promoting safer construction before and after disasters. Through the Working Group the research and guidance developed by the team is disseminated to a wide network of humanitarian practitioners across the globe. The 'supporting self-recovery' approach was championed and tested by CARE Philippines in their shelter programming after Typhoon Haiyan, which won the 2017 World Habitat Award.
Working Paper Self-Recovery from disasters: An interdisciplinary perspective (2017)
Report Resilience Scan January – March 2017 (2017)
Article The case for Self-Recovery (2017)
Article Whose Recovery? Power, roles and ownership in humanitarian shelter assistance (2017)
Article Mapping (self-) recovery: reflections on people's trajectories, perceptions and aspirations of recovery in the Philippines (2017)
Report Stories of Recovery (2016)
In addition to the above, the PSB team and CARE Country partners have participated in several high profile conferences around the world.
Looking at urban environments, Lalitpur, Nepal 2017
Objectives and Activities
The team is now in the second phase of its programme. The first phase developed and tested inter-disciplinary research methods, collected evidence from the field and established a community of practice. A major output of this phase has been a working paper "Self-Recovery from disasters: An interdisciplinary perspective" (2017). The second phase will build on evidence gathered from the first phase with further research focused on urban environments. It will develop tools and guidance that bridge the gap between the theory and practice of supporting safer self-recovery.
Our objectives are:
To take an interdisciplinary approach to develop a joint understanding of how scientific, engineering and construction knowledge currently support or could support the self-recovery process and how this can be improved in future.
To identify key gaps in knowledge and understanding of self-recovery after disasters to inform future research.
To build on and improve analytical methods for understanding self-recovery after disasters. Identify drivers for, and barriers to, self-recovery and inform decision-making about how humanitarian actors can intervene to effectively and meaningfully support self-recovery and construction of safer houses.
To identify and develop implementation tools and guidance needed to undertake programmes that support self-recovery of safer shelter.
To build on the growing network of multi-disciplinary actors to collaborate on research, development and dissemination of knowledge, tools and good practice.
To disseminate the findings of the research through existing humanitarian and academic networks, through the global network of CARE country offices and through workshops and conferences.
Reconstruction and densification, Dhading District, Nepal, 2017
Specific activities to achieve these objectives include:
Two multidisciplinary case studies of post-disaster responses in urban environments of the Philippines (2013 Typhoon Haiyan) and Nepal (2015 Gorkha earthquake).
Science, engineering and humanitarian symposia held in the respective countries. Particular effort will be made to include local partners.
A conference in the UK to conclude this phase of the study and discuss plans for future work.
Several discipline and multi-discipline peer-reviewed papers (engineering aspects of self-reconstruction; differences between rural and urban self-reconstruction; influence of physical environment on urban self-recovery; role of geoscience in self-recovery; recovery interventions; synthesis paper)
Further (multi-)discipline reports/articles/briefing papers for policy/practitioner audiences
Developing technical advice and support for self-recovery programmes in disaster response through CARE International's country offices, Working Group activities and other initiatives from partners in the network.
Continued active involvement in the work of the Global Shelter Cluster Working Group and the production of a protocol for arriving at adequate, appropriate and timely Build Back Safer/Better messages.
The incorporation of learning into UCL Earthquake Engineering MSc course.
Continued engagement in international and cross-disciplinary learning by participating in conferences and academic learning organised within and outside the community of practice.
[1] Parrack, C, Flinn, B and Passey, M (2014) Getting the Message Across for Safer Self-Recovery in Post-Disaster Shelter. Open House International Vol39 No3 p 48.
Tagged on: Nepal Post-Disaster Reconstruction Self-Recovery Urban
Luisa Miranda Morel May 9, 2018 May 9, 2018 Outputs of the Project, Project
← 2017 World Habitat Awards announced: Post-Haiyan Self-Recovery Housing Programme, Philippines
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