World Cup Special: Our Song for South Africa

My friends in Cop On The Edge have written a world cup song, and here they are to tell you all about it:

Hello,

It is time to get excited. We are very pleased to be part of a brand new compilation celebrating the 2010 World Cup.

'Fast Forward', lovingly put together by those fine people at Indiecater Records, is a collection of 32 songs, by 32 bands, each writing about one of the 32 countries taking part in this year's World Cup. Our contribution is Bafana Bafana, a tribute not just to the South African football team, but to awesome South Africans in general.

Click here to listen to the songs, and you can download the album for a mere €5, or buy a memory stick with artwork, lyrics and other gubbins for €10.

This will be the first of a veritable gush of releases coming your way from us this summer as we finish up our studio adventures, but it will definitely be the only one to namecheck Desmond Tutu.

Love

The Cops

--

www.myspace.com/copontheedgemusic

www.facebook.com/copontheedge

A quote for the election

'There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by. It was called the People. Find out where the People have gone. I don't mean the square-eyed toothpaste-and-hair-dye people or the new-car-or-bust people, or the success-and-coronary people. Maybe they never existed, but if there ever were the People, that's the commodity the Declaration was talking about, and Mr. Lincoln.'

John Steinbeck

Three activist links for Monday 19 April 2010

Big Gay Flashmob

Activists take the battle for equality to Conservative head office. Just tremendously cheering and rather effective too, if the media presence evident on this film is anything to go by.

Brilliant website where you can borrow and lend stuff in your area

Birmingham Friends of the Earth keep the pressure up on Birmingham International Airport

Lovely to see this sort of coverage in local news blog The Stirrer.

Who'd like an activist choir for Birmingham?

This is a totally awesome idea which has come from two different directions.

I recently saw What Would Jesus Buy, the docufilm about anti-overconsumption activist Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping, which had this great faux-evangelist choir backing Billy.

Then, I got a flyer about a new project in Stafford coming out of the Transition movement there - a Greenshoots choir for people who enjoy singing and want to make a difference. And I quote:

"We want to share and learn songs that inspire and uplift. These will include songs from around the world with positive messages of peace, love and freedom

If you are interested [..] email greenshoots@transitiontownstafford.org.uk"

So, who'd be up for something like this in Birmingham? I'm at best an indifferent singer but I love the actual activity of singing. So, c'mon singers; musicians; arrangers - what do you think?

Fellow Euro-city hoppers sought for summer

We interrupt this service for a more personal request: would anyone be interested in doing some Euro-tourism in July or Autumn?

Two places I saw a little of in 2009 that I'm keen to revisit in 2010:

a) Brussels (and Belgium) more generally
b) Copenhagen (and maybe a few other places in Scandanavia besides)

So if anyone fancies an extended city break (by train, naturally), then just drop me a line.

Adding magical elements to an Enlightenment world

I thought I'd set the ball rolling with some posts about world creation and I'd welcome your thoughts on any of the below. I don't want to create a perfectly imagined world - I'd rather be writing a novel with my limited time, frankly - but thinking about how the world works will at least give me a springboard for filling in the many blanks.

First up - magic. I've been giving some thought to how magic might work in this alternative Regency literary universe and come up with a few ideas.

Post-Enlightenment 'civilised magic' is compelled to recognise the limits set by eighteenth-century rationalism (Hume, the Encyclopedists etc) and Newtonian physics. This means that it focuses on magic which:

a) Affects human states - suggestions, illusions and hypnosis, physical and mental enhancement.

b) Protects the 'rational' universe against the incursions of irrational forces such as ghosts and other fantastic creatures - banishments, exorcisms etc.

So, in level 1 D&D terms, that would mean that Sleep, Phantasmal Force and Detect Magic would still be viable, even if Magic Missile (which requires creation ex nihilo) would not be.

The more in conformity with physical laws the magic is, the less likely it is to cause problems for the practitioner.

In addition, there would also have to be strict legal or cultural prohibitions on the use of magic to control the minds of others.

Affects which while in theory not out of bounds - true invisibility as opposed to misdirection, delayed ageing, physical transmutation, reanimation (the headless chicken effect) - require a lot of energy, complex rituals or other appropriate McGuffins. Hence the need for magicians to work together.

Being able to do anything outside these limits involves finding loopholes in the eighteenth century understanding of the way the universe works, but they only work once. Hence the increasing unreliability of alchemy, traditional magics etc. down the years.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the paradigm barrier, other creatures (of form to be determined) in turn seek loopholes to find their way into the physical universe from which they've been barred by logic.

At the moment, I'm envisaging magecraft as a hereditary gift rather than a learnable trait, one which may have been bred into certain aristocratic lines but contains a good deal of randomness in terms of where and in whom it turns up (eugenics is so dull and takes me to some politically uncomfortable places).

So, any reflections? I acknowledge something of a debt to Mage: The Awakening here in my thinking, but hopefully not an overwhelming one.

To my mind, the three big unanswered questions are how magic then intersects with class, gender and religion in this universe.

Will 'civilised' magic have moved towards greater professionalization and openness to middle class applicant? Do tensions result?

Is magic a permissable profession for women?

What's the position of the Established Church, Catholicism and Dissent towards magic?

More on these issues to follow in later posts as I turn towards the society I'm writing about.

Magpiemoth starts writing

I've said to a few people that I'd use my convalesence this week to refocus on my writing again. And I have - but not in the way I expected.

 

A quick recap: last November for National Novel Writing Month I bashed out 20,000 words of a first draft about geeks on campus. I was pleasantly surprised that it didn't suck as hard as I thought it might. Even if I didn't make the 50K word target, that was something.

 

So I thought I'd revisit the work and the topic in 2010. What I've found, however, is that I don't want to write anything too overtly autobiographical right now - I can always come back to this at a later date.

 

No, I want to write something fun! Something playful! So it's back to the idea from the previous year's abortive NaNoWriMo attempt - Regency fantasy. Tolkien meets Jane Austen with side orders of Georgette Heyer and Ann Radcliffe.

 

The plan is that I'll start writing in May and provide a chapter a month to anyone who signs up with Just Giving to donate to Friends of the Earth (any amount is fine - it's the donation and the resulting guilt trip for me that counts)

 

I'll also provide ongoing freebies via this blog - world creation notes, short stories, vignettes, maybe even artwork - who knows?

 

So, watch this space over the course of April as we begin to fill in the blanks.