I promised myself that once I had finished all my new editions, updated my website, etc, etc (all those things a writer is supposed to do that isn't writing), I would go and stand on a beach and look at the sea.
It didn't matter which sea.  The one closest to London was preferable.  I haven’t actually seen the sea for over ten years.  The last time was in South Africa, the year I saw my mother before she died.  The beaches here aren’t a patch on South Africa’s South Coast and we weren’t even on a particularly nice one.  Port Edward isn’t anyone’s idea of a Fab Holiday, but for some reason, my parents liked it.
The closest beach to central London is Brighton.  This was not the sea I wanted to see.  After much investigation (i.e. measuring the shortest train journey), I settled on Margate.  The idea of Margate tickled me pink – there’s a Margate on the South Coast too, along with a Ramsgate (I don’t think there’s a Brighton….), so I thought it would be hilarious if I went to the original Margate.  Ironically, both the British and South African Margates are considered to be somewhat tacky and are both extremely overcrowded in summer.  (Port Edward was a bit further down the coast, closer to the Wild Coast, and much more isolated). 
 
So off to Margate I went.  I thought it was horrible when I got there:  tacky beyond belief.  But the sea was green.  And then I got lost in Old Town.  Then I found a bookshop in an old bank.   I got lashed with wind and rain for about a minute.  I heard a few waves splash up against an ancient promenade.  I saw huge tankers and ferries edge their way across the horizon.  I saw the sea from the upstairs gallery in that awful Turner building.  Then I had an early lunch at The Mad Hatter’s Tea Shop and fell in love.  By then the tide had gone out and I got full of sand walking along the seaweedy tide line.  At last, I stopped walking and just stood on a bit of slippery rock and looked and looked and looked.
Because that’s all I wanted to do:  I wanted to look at the sea. 
 
Obligatory holiday snaps to follow.

Last Wednesday I sat down for the first time in four months to do some Real Writing.  Having spent the summer working on my website, my brand, my new editions and a million other admin-type things, it was a relief to sit down and so some Creating for a change.
The first day didn’t go well.  I hadn’t expected it to.  It isn’t always easy to get back into the saddle, after all.  Earlier this year, I had written most of a new Exodus Sequence short story, what will be the second story in the second volume.  Thinking that the story had failed, I abandoned it, planning to return to it later.  Upon rereading it, it didn’t seem too bad after all.  The main character was entertaining and funny.  Since the story is primarily a character sketch, that was quite important.  So it was with more confidence that I approached it on Thursday.
Imagine my delight to discover, at the bottom of the Word document, something called “Focus.”  I clicked on it to discover Writers’ Heaven:  nothing on the screen except the document with a black background instead of that pale grey glare you usually get when using Word.  No ribbon.  No taskbar.  Suddenly I was exactly where I wanted to be:  inside my short story.  I was focussed, just exactly as the new document view intended.
Now imagine my horror when, on Friday, that Focus view was gone.  I couldn’t find it anywhere and couldn’t either recreate it, though I did try.  I googled it.  I studied the Microsoft website.  Then I got into a chat box with someone from MS.  By this time, I was in tears.  I was actually sobbing.  Well, shit, you might think;  what’s she crying about.  Some stupid gizmo on Word that vanished.  But it was just the last straw, I think.  I have spent the summer battling.  For quite a while, I was at war with KDP.  Our emails burned with politeness but weeks went by with an agonising problem I couldn’t solve (more about that in another blog).  The battles with editing, with new covers, with getting things to fit, with streamlining almost thirty manuscripts………
Losing my Focus gizmo was that proverbial straw and I was the camel’s back.  Through all those months of slog, all I wanted to do was write.  I wanted to escape to my funny little universe that I’ve created.  I wanted to feel like myself again.
In the end, though the MS support person tried really, really hard, we couldn’t find the Focus gizmo and couldn’t recreate its brilliance.  I realised finally that something like this had happened before:  after a major update from MS, I got a brilliant new thing on Word – only for it to disappear the next day.  You know what this is?  It’s a way to make you realise that your Word is old and shit and that you should go off and spend a million dollars a year on Office 365 because THAT’S  where that Focus gizmo is.  It doesn’t exist in the cheap MS Office for Home and Student 2016.  It was a fucking carrot. 
Realising that, I closed down my computer, made myself an enormous cup of tea, and started again, wanting to just wrap up a sentence or two.  Deciding to experiment first, I opened another document, clicked a few things and discovered I COULD recreate Focus mode.  I can’t get the black background, though the dark grey is quite nice.  I can get rid of the ribbon and have figured how to get rid of the taskbar (temporarily).  This is great.  It means I can now write without distraction.
It’s not as good as real Focus mode, though.  Focus mode is achieved with one click.  One more click and you’re back in normal mode with your pretty blue ribbon at the top, so it’s just a temporary thing.  By creating this dark grey background, it means that ALL documents I open now are like this.  Even Excel, which surprised me. 
To achieve this, go to Options/General and select Dark Grey for your Office Theme.  To get rid of your ribbon, there’s a weeny arrow called Ribbon Display Options at the top of your document.  And to get rid of your taskbar (while you work), right click on it and select Taskbar Settings, then Automatically Hide the Taskbar in Desktop Mode.  All these things are easy to get out of, too.  Just hover your mouse and everything reappears.
So this is how I’m focusing on my writing.  Grey mode.  It’s a bit like being on a Federation starship in reserve power mode. 
As for actual writing and getting to the end of the story…..that’s yet another tale for another time.
 
(You can read about that here:  https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Gray_mode)

Finishing the Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy is a mark of honour, rather like being able to say you’ve read War and Peace or all seven volumes of Proust.  With ten years between each volume, I can’t say this series has set me alight.  This doesn’t mean it isn’t brilliant.  It is.  The descriptions of Mars;  the understanding of colonising or terraforming a difficult plant;  the politics, economics and emotions involved:  all are a work of genius.  Yet it remains dull reading.
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It’s so long ago (over twenty years) since I read Red Mars that I don’t remember much of it, aside from some woman having a lot of babies.  Green Mars was marginally more interesting but Blue considerably less so.  It also feels MUCH longer.  While the science is fascinating, the story isn’t.  This is no doubt because there is hardly any story, or, at least, the one that unfolds is in such broad strokes that it leaves you utterly uninvolved.  There isn’t a single character that is likeable.  Some of them are truly awful.  Mostly it doesn’t matter what you think because you can hardly tell the characters apart anyway, and even if you do manage to remember a character from one novel to the next, it doesn’t matter either because there is absolutely zero plot.
Quite a lot of the writing isn’t about Mars at all but extremely lengthy digressions into subjects like quantum mechanics, memory retrieval, the super-elderly, a planet-wide flood on Earth, and the extremes of overpopulation as a result of the never-gonna-let-you-die treatment, as well as excursions to other planets that feel like doorstop fillers.  While all these subjects are interesting by themselves, they aren’t part of any plot.  Oh, wait, haven’t I already said?  There is no plot.
Some people go to Mars.  Stuff happens.  Most of them live.  Some more arrive.  They live too.  Or die.  Whatever.  Blue Mars indicates water and while the thought of oceans of Mars is just wonderful, this delight doesn’t come off the page at all.  Robinson’s writing is flatter than flat.
I really wish I could say I had enjoyed this trio of books.  They are, after all, highly regarded and have won all sorts of awards.  While the trilogy is truly visionary, it’s also too impersonal to achieve greatness.  I found myself skimming many pages and not actually missing anything.  I did the same with War and Peace (there are some very long, dull tracts in it) BUT the difference is that you have an emotional investment in the characters.  You love them.  You want to know what happens.  You care who they marry and how many children they have.  I didn’t care about any of Robinson’s characters.  As a result, I didn’t care about Mars or any of the other planets, moons and asteroids being terraformed.  I would say that this is probably not how you want your reader to feel.
If this was an endurance test, then by finishing the series, at least I can say I have passed.

The title of this post makes it look as if I’m about to review the entire Star Trek universe.  And by golly, it’s an enormous universe!  The original series, the next generation, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise.  Not to mention the movies, starting with, um, Star Trek: The Movie (although actually it was called Star Trek: The Motion Picture) all the way up to the original series reboot.  Not to mention the new TV series, Discovery.  And then there was the animated series, about a gazillion spin-off books, and Star Trek Continues (about which I confess I know nothing).

What I’m trying to review is Star Trek.  The movie.  But not the Motion Picture.  If you follow me.  You’d have thought they could have come up with a slightly more interesting title than just, you know, Star Trek.  Star Trek: The Beginning would have worked for me.  Or Star Trek: An Alternate History, because that’s pretty much where it was heading.

I saw this when it first came out and found myself zoning in on things which ultimately don’t matter.  Things like:  oh, look, he looks just like Spock!  Hang on, the Enterprise never looked that smart and high-tech.  That’s a Romulan?  He doesn’t look like a Romulan.  Blimey, look, it’s the real Spock (getting on a bit, isn’t he…..)  As a result, the plot of the movie pretty much went in the one ear and out the other.  I even managed to forget, when watching the two sequels, that we were on an alternate timeline (history having been changed and all by the events of the first movie).  The whole movie kind of disappeared into my memory banks, forgotten.

So it was an absolute delight, watching it again, to find that it’s actually a really good movie!  The plot is terrific, the character development superb, and the visuals just stunning. 

The faces are also more familiar now:  Kirk’s dad is played by Thor, his mum by Snow White’s daughter. This makes me positively howl with laughter.  All my favourite universes colliding in one movie:  Star Trek, Marvel, Once Upon a Time.  Not to mention Lord of the Rings:  that’s Bones as Eomer, the sexy one with the long blond hair, a spear, a scowl and a horse.

By the third Star Trek reboot movie, Chris Pine is starting to look more like William Shatner when he was young than William Shatner ever did (i.e. he’s better looking now that he’s a bit older).  I loved the second one with Benedict Cumberbatch but the most enjoyable one so far has to be the most recent, Beyond.  So it’s with great sorrow that I recently read that this reboot series of films has been cancelled.  Just when I was really getting to like the characters.  It doesn’t help that the young actor Anton Yelchin, playing a brilliant Chekov, was killed in a car accident.  RIP.

As a lifelong Star Trek fan, I have to be grateful that Gene Roddenberry’s universe has prevailed. I was fourteen when the original series turned up, already old and creaky, on South African television, itself a very late starter, launching sometime in the 70’s.  I was instantly captivated but hardly ever got to watch it due to the inconvenience of life. 

Live long and prosper, indeed.
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However, even if you aren’t particularly into the whole Star Trek thing, this movie is still a good one.  Catch it if you can.  I think this universe is going to start going where I may not follow.
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