DID GOLDILOCKS HAVE A POINT?

I think it’s fair to say that she overstepped a great many boundaries in her casual exploration of a home that wasn’t hers, but Goldilocks maybe does show that we have to consider conditions for the best results.

I’m a sports fan and it’s not exactly a new suggestion that how many different things link together can have a huge effect on the outcome of any game or match. We see it regularly in Wales when there are international rugby matches being played in the Principality Stadium and there comes the choice of should the retractable roof of the stadium be open or closed?

If the roof is closed, the weather outside stays outside so any wind or rain which would otherwise come bundling down are taken out of the equation. If the roof is open, all the weather, good or bad, comes to play as well. If you’ve set up the way you want to play around there being very little expansive passing and running and it be more of an attritional slugfest, the chance to have the roof open and the rain pouring in is a must, but if the opposition are looking for that kind of game, then keeping the rain out could gave you that slight advantage of running the ball about.

Tennis has different court surfaces, racing reports on the state of the ground at the courses and any number of other examples of ways the activity outcome is more than just the individual are everywhere in sports but it’s everywhere else too.

Anyone need to turn the radio down when you’re parking so you can concentrate? Have you got to have a certain pillow to get the best sleep? Have you got a particular shirt you have to wear on a night out for the best ‘results’? Are you able to get work done with the radio on?

I can’t write without there being background noise.

I enjoy having music playing but I can be out and about at a coffee shop and the background hustle bustle can be enough to keep me ‘in the zone’. I suspect that it comes from the fact that since I left college, all of the jobs that I’ve had either in the fitness industry or in recruitment, meant that I was always functioning in an environment where there was loud noises going on. Add in that I used to cycle to work so grew used to the huge road noises and it just grew that I was used to being concentrated under certain circumstances.

Goldilocks tried out options until she found the one that gave her the best results and she was able to sleep with a full belly and maybe that should be something that we all embrace. If we’re doing anything, if there are modifications that could give an improved performance, shouldn’t we always be looking for them? Try things on for size and keep the stuff that works.

We’re all looking for the best way to go through each day and get the best possible outcome, even if we don’t think we are.

Here’s to the best for all of us.

Stay safe all.

SEARCHING FOR THE VOICE

We’ve all seen on the news at some point, people being interviewed about a particular situation or incident, where they explain their issues and discuss how they and people like them are searching for the chance to have their voice heard. This can very often mean that there are concepts or groups connected to a much larger subject that have been overlooked or even ignored, and those associated with those concepts or groups are fighting for their input not to be missed.

All important stuff, but a conversation for another day.

Today, the idea I want to poke with a stick is more literal in terms of dealing with the voice and is something which I fold into my characters when I write.

What makes a good voice?

So, first things first. Who’s spoken to me in the real world?

If you have, well done, good to have you along.

If you haven’t, what do you think I sound like?

Do I read like I have a deep voice? A squeaky voice? Quiet or loud? Soft or hard? What about my accent?

A few years ago, while trying to resolve a payroll system issue with someone from Head Office, when a conversation that had been going back and forward via instant messenger was stumbling just too much, I asked the other person to just give me a call and we could talk our way through it. When I answered, after a slight pause, her response was priceless.

“I didn’t expect you to sound like that.”

I asked why but it was just that I sounded different to what she’d been prepared for.

We create whole personas in our heads about what characters on the page are that seeing and hearing them differently can be jarring. Your favourite characters are, despite being shared with the whole world, very personal to us so if they don’t match up for whatever reason, it can be enough to drag us out of the story.

Writing characters for any story means that there’s going to be the need to have people interact so how they sound is vital. Imagine Darth Vader and the power that just his voice is able to convey. Dave Prowse was an amazing Darth Vader and was able to create nuance and emotion even under all of that armour but add James Earl Jones’ voice and you end up so very much further.

Now imagine Darth Vader sounded like Brick Top from Snatch.

A very different character indeed.

Voices are a vitally important aspect of how we can draw opinions of people but voices aren’t universally seen in the same way though.

Some hear a deep basso voice and find it compelling and powerful, but others find it sinister. A higher pitch voice could be less intimidating for many but it could also be perceived as weak. Add in different accents and things get even more confusing.

In the UK, a high level member of Parliament has received abuse on line due to her accent, with trolls claiming that she sounds ‘thick’ because of it so accents are things that are noticed but in that regard, just remember that Arnie wasn’t the one to do the German dub of The Terminator despite being able to speak the language. It was deemed that his accent was too rural and not in keeping with a killer robot from the future.

The right voice for a character can be a tough thing to find as an author because we can’t actually hear what these people are saying but when I write, I have these people speaking to me as I go. I try to make sure that if they do have things to say, I have the best chance of getting it on the page correctly so everyone can hear their voice.

Stay safe all.

WHAT ARE WE MISSING?

I share my home with two cats. Sausage and Pippa are very different little characters but none the less, they make up a huge part of our home.

I’ve built up a collection of tales about the two of them as any pet owner would, and I’m sure they’ve created a list of their own about me but I’m not going to dive into them here. Rather, this post starts with a recognition of something most of us will have experienced with pets, the way they seem to look just past us on occasion.

All the experts will tell you it’s because cats have amazing eyesight and that they’ll pick up light reflecting off the smallest dust mote so there’s nothing to worry about but that just shows that the world we inhabit has elements which are beyond us in terms of our sensory ability.

So what’s going on around us that we aren’t aware of?

We can perceive light in a specific range and the same goes for how we pick up sound so straight away, beyond the upper and lower ranges of that, without methods of scientific involvement, we’re cut off from what’s happening, and that’s far from even considering the ideas of ghosts or monsters..

As the years have gone by for the human race, we’ve been constrained by our ability to interact with reality around us. A rainbow comes from light being refracted but that knowledge didn’t exist after the very first instance of one being seen by a human. Wider research beyond the norm meant that there was deeper understanding of what the usual white light we saw each day truly was.

But then we have colour blindness which limits the way those people can understand what they’re seeing and allergies to different foods can cause death in small numbers of cases which shows that even within the realms of the norm, there are going to be risks and peculiarities.

The human race is all the time attempting to explore and understand reality but the more we learn, the more we recognise that of the layers of knowledge we have uncovered, there are so very many more to go. We all look around us and see the world we inhabit but understanding that the boundaries of that world, beyond infrared light or infrasound, out to the edges of reality and then even further, could hold endless wonders and terrors that we haven’t even considered.

And those things could be all around us even now.

Maybe we should pay more attention to the cats.

WHITE NOISE

How do you feel about the quiet?

I have been known to enjoy a little bit of silence along the way but when it comes to relaxation and wiring my mind for the best results, having something in the background is the way to go.

Writing away, if I’ve got music playing in the background then I can make sure my thoughts are moving in the right direction. I don’t know why it works this way but I’ve tried to do both and the results of my working in silence are just nowhere near as positive.

It’s not that I dislike the silence but my mind does seem to have an easier time working when there’s something happening in the background. I find it much easier to work in a coffee shop than I do in a library and have spoken before about doing huge parts of the work on so many projects in a pub. I’ve worked in gyms for years and they’ve always had loud music and machine sounds blaring away so it could be that it’s just something that I’m used to. That said, I also use a fan to help me sleep, for both the cool breeze but also the noise.

The background ‘hum’ of the world going by becomes collectively indistinct and it means that my mind can’t get distracted by any individual noises or speech. If you have so much sound bubbling along quietly, it just becomes a soup of blended junk that means you can wallow through the relative emptiness and allow your mind to minimize any chances of interruption.

It’s easy to think that silence is the best way to go but a bit of background noise can really help build the focus.