Living under a Lockdown - Andy's Journal of Professional Crastination

I've been at home for a week, and I think it's time to write down my thoughts about this pandemic. As things were beginning to shut down at university, I elected to go home while I still had the opportunity to do so. This was after a stressful week, as this crisis has happened on the tail end of the University and College Union strike, which had resulted in all but one of my classes being cancelled. This also meant a lot of uncertainty over deadlines and catch-ups, along with the societies closing down. In the space of a week, my social life just up and vanished. So I decided to go home and spend this period of quarantine with my parents, believing it would be safer than spending it on my own.

I'm enjoying the indulgences of home, such as hot baths, tea with milk (I don't buy milk at university because I drink more coffee than tea, and have that black), and the collection of wine and gin. I cook evening meals twice a week, and have to be a bit more creative since having pasta every day has ended up being...untenable. It's actually nice to be cooking different things. I mostly live off pasta at university. I'm not a picky eater or a substandard cook, I just don't feel like putting much effort into meals when I'm only cooking for myself.

I've got assignments to do: two prose pieces, two scripts, and a research paper. Term hasn't actually ended yet, but most workshops are online now, and I'm having tutorials with my lecturers via Skype. And the earlier this week, the university announced an extension for all deadlines. So, I'm doing what I do best: Procrastinating.

I've subscribed to Disney+ now that it's available in the UK. I'm watching through The Mandalorian, and have also recently started watching Gargoyles. I might do a Franchise Review of the Toy Story films at some point in the next month or so. I'm also watching a new series of The Great British Menu. This year's chefs are competing to cook at a banquet celebrating British children's literature. It's a nice stroll down memory lane, with chefs producing some truly creative dishes inspired by stories from their childhood. I'm currently keeping track of how many desserts (specifically desserts) are inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I imagine there'll be a lot, and I think it will be cool to see Willy Wonka's creations de-fictionalised.

On the gaming side, I was going to do another play-through of Naughty Dog's Uncharted series. I finished Drake's Fortune, but then I went home. And I had to leave the bulk of my stuff behind, including the PlayStation 4. There goes that plan, then. But I do have my Xbox 360 and GameCube. I set that up and have been revisiting TimeSplitters 2. I might revisit Assassin's Creed III, mainly to help find inspiration for a tabletop role-playing game setting I've found.

Speaking of tabletop role-playing games, I've joined a lot of gamers in moving their campaigns to online platforms like Roll20 and Discord. I'm running a series of scenarios using my favourite Savage Worlds role-playing system, but am also joining some other games so I can experience the system as a player as well as a GM. Furthermore, I'm writing some supplementary material for running games in a comic fantasy setting I'm developing. It'll serve as a non-academic writing project.

All-in-all, I'm trying to keep busy. But I'm feeling down that I've had to prematurely go home, where there isn't much to do even when there isn't a pandemic. Especially with events being cancelled. I've got Swanwick in August, which I've been looking forward to since last year. That's the highlight of the summer holidays, where I get more social contact in one week than I do in the three months I'm not at university. Plus, I'm running a workshop this year, which gives me something to work on when I finish my assignments. We'll see.

Stay safe, and happy writing.

Word Crawls

Things are pretty quiet at the moment, as most of my classes have been cancelled because of the UCU Strikes (for the record, I do support the strikes). Although it is Sod's Law that the one workshop that isn't cancelled is a 9:00 am. Anyway, I've been trying to pass the time by working on some of my assignments, and stumbled across an interesting writing challenge: Word Crawls.

For those who don't know, a word crawl is a collection of writing challenges which involve a short word count goal, a time goal, or sometimes both. The other day, one of my writer friends tweeted a blog post from the group behind National Novel Writing Month. The post discussed a Harry Potter-themed word crawl. It looked fun, so I decided to give it a go today. I've been asked to bring a draft for an assignment in the workshop that was cancelled, and decided to partially apply that.

This particular crawl was based around the events of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Each challenge is building the narrative of a young wizard on their first year at Hogwarts alongside Harry Potter. Initially starting with a simple warm-up task to write 100 words, the crawl was broken down into five parts, three of which I went through.

Part 1: Diagon Alley

The first challenge in this part is meant to represent a visit to the Gringotts wizard bank to withdraw funds. This consists of a ten minute writing session, which awards Galleons (gold coins) based on how much you wrote in the session. You should keep a note of how many Galleons you have, because you can pay them to skip challenges later down the line (this gets more expensive as the crawl progresses). Unfortunately, I only managed 130 words, which is worth just one Galleon (and ten words off getting two).

Following on from this is a trip to Ollivander's to buy a wand. This is a simple word count challenge, based on a die roll. I rolled a one, so that's another 100 words. And also means my wand's core is made from unicorn hair. Being a Dungeons & Dragons player, I did make a joke about what die to roll.

The third challenge in this segment was a 15 minute writing session representing a search for a pet. The options are a cat, a rat, or an owl. And including the chosen pet in the story grants an additional Galleon. I probably should have left that to a Twitter poll, but I settled with an owl because it seemed like the most fitting for what I was working on.

Part 2: The Hogwarts Express

The train ride to Hogwarts is represented by a simple exercise to get your word count to the nearest thousand. But if you need to write more than 500 words to reach the milestone, you receive an additional Galleon.

There is only one other challenge in this segment, but you have to pick one from a list of four (or pay a Galleon - meaning that in narrative terms you're paying a bribe not to buy sweets). To make things more random, I conducted a Twitter poll in which I innocuously asked what confectionary from the Harry Potter universe people wanted to try. The overall winner was the Chocolate Frog, which brought with it a simple five minute writing session (from chasing down the frog). That came off as something of a relief, because one of the other options was Bertie Bott's Every Flavour Beans. And the challenge for that involves trying to write 500 words in five minutes in a challenge known as the "50 Headed Hydra" (in the narrative, you're trying to get rid of the taste of the earwax-flavoured bean you just ate).

Part 3: The Sorting Hat

The first challenge in this segment involved a simple ten minute writing sprint, representing time spent socialising with other first year students while waiting in the main hall of Hogwarts. Nothing much to that one, really.

Anyway, the next challenge is another one in which you have a choice of four. As the segment suggests, this represents what house you're being sorted into (your house also allows you to skip certain challenges without paying any Galleons). I consider myself a Ravenclaw, because the Wikipedia page claims the house values intelligence, creativity, learning, and wit. Their challenge is simply to calculate how many words you need to write to get to the next thousand, and then write them. That one took the bulk of the session.

The third challenge represents you socialising with other people on the table and your house ghost during the welcome feast. The exact challenge is one known as "The Three Digit Challenge", in which you share the last three digits of your word count with another participant, and they have to write that much. Because I'm a lonely stick-in-the-mud, I simply paid two Galleons to skip this challenge.

As I applied this challenge to 2,250-word short story, I opted to wrap things up there. However, I still had fun with it, and might try it again with a bigger project at some point in the near-future.

If you want to give this a go, the full details can be found at the NaNoWriMo forum here: https://blog.nanowrimo.org/post/176063372241/harry-potter-word-crawl-year-one 

Until then, happy writing.

City of Vice

Credit to IMDB

Some ideas can be lost in the vestiges of time. While I was looking for inspiration for an upcoming assignment, I was watching "Policing London", an Extra History serial about the history of law enforcement in London during the 18th and 19th Centuries. Reading further into it, I was directed towards a TV show called City of Vice, a period police procedural originally broadcast on Channel 4 in 2008.

Taking place in London in 1753, we follow Ian McDiarmid as Henry Fielding. Once an accomplished playwright and the author of Tom Jones, Henry serves as a magistrate for Westminster with his half-brother John, played by Iain Glen. In a bid to curb the activities of criminal gangs operating in London, the brothers assembled a hand-picked team of parish constables led by Saunders Welch (played by Francis Magee). Known as "The Bow Street Runners" after their headquarters at Bow Street Magistrates' Court, they would become London's first organised police force. The show follows them as they solve a different crime each episode, while also trying to convince their sponsors in Parliament that they're up to the task.

The show is mostly presented as a drama, but they also try and maintain a factual element. The grim depiction of London uses a visual style almost reminiscent of Hogarth's painting. Transitions between locations are handled a "travel by map" sequence using a map of London published by John Roque in 1746. As it zooms in, it becomes a 3D model before finally converting to an establishing shot. While the CGI looks fairly cheap, I still think it's pretty neat. The dialogue's pretty good, and the Fieldings are well-established characters. Henry has a great voice as he narrates. While suffering from gout, he tries to crack the cases, but his reputation is also marred by his past as a writer and a scandalous marriage to his housemaid whom he had gotten pregnant. Meanwhile, John is blind, but said to recognise a large number of known criminals from voice alone.

What's a real shame is that there only five episodes. I would have liked to see more, but at the same time, they wouldn't have been able to carry things on; Henry Fielding died in 1754, and that would mean losing Ian McDiarmid, who pretty much carries the series. You can find all five episodes on YouTube quite easily, and I recommend that you check them out.

Happy writing.