The sign of an Englishman (or woman) as every man, woman and child who calls themselves ‘English’ drinks tea and if they have taste, they’d have it with crumpets or scones (scohnes or scons?) Yes, I love my cuppa, if you were to read draft 1 of The Delusion Wing and I can definitely say, YOU WON’T BECAUSE IT’S AWFUL, you’d notice my characters share the same love for tea.

“I see I can help.” He gets up, “give me a moment, I’ll sort the tea out.”

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wraithwood:

So, at the moment, instead of writing writing (the creative kind which isn’t rping) I’ve been researching. I did manage to get some done, and have found out, that I actually rather like my new character and he was far easier to write than I thought he would be. This is all good.

I did do some…

There’s nothing greater than finishing the first draft of your novel, and at 2am, as I distinctly remember it, the urge to shout “woohoo!” at the top of your voice prevails, followed by the prompt realisation your house mates are asleep. However, that was two years ago on 30th November. That’s two years of procrastination, two years of reading a novel you feel is a piece of junk, two years of taking your ideas and rethinking them, two years with moments where you question your ability as a writer. And you’re only up to draft 2 of chapter 8, draft 3 of chapter 4 and draft 5 of chapter 1.

Not exactly a productive two years. But you can’t rush these things, I picked up a book that claimed, “with this method you can have your novel redrafted within a year ready for publication, and only work on it during your weekends.” But that’s not necessarily realistic. However, what I’ve changed has taken a lot of extra planning, which I’ve only really started in the past year, realising it needed to be done.

I am of course talking about my novel, The Delusion Wing (title may change). This year has been a good year for editing, but it’s quite a big overhaul and it’s taking more work than I originally anticipated, but when you’re not happy with something you have to fix it. I’ll flat out and say it, draft 1 is a load of rubbish! Nobody is allowed to read it, ever! I can’t bear to read it myself, but somehow find the strength. The good news is, I’m happier with the new material, there’s a number of changes I had to make, such as setting, plot, atmosphere, description, characters and even technology. It’s a dystopian sci-fi, but instead of looking into the future, as it was originally (I even went as far as coming up with plans to set it on a completely different planet, but the logistics just failed), now it’s a parallel reality to our own. In effect the plot considers the effect of indoctrination on a social level inside of a theocratic society.

There’s a lot of things I could have done: picked an existing religion and country and write a historical piece, but that’s in a way naming names and prevents me from having so much as a creative license. Then there’s setting it in the future, which required inventing a new religion, which was the original plan, but then I sat down thinking, “but there’s 2 billion Christians, 1.5 billion Muslims and so on in the world, how would this ‘new’ religion convert so many people?” One thing certain religious groups fear is atheism and it has been given a bigger voice today, so I thought, “what if the majority of society become atheists and religion becomes unpopular, then certain people end up falling for this new religion”, but it seemed like a stupid idea to me, if atheism was the majority, would there be people who’d seek some kind of faith? Or would it be a social agreement that faith in deities is no longer a viable answer?

My other idea was to think of the colonials, you had Puritans moving away from an ‘immoral’ society to start their own one off and that’s where the planets idea came in. None of those ideas I liked and I didn’t want to be ‘anti-religious’ and what I wanted was for a currently existing religion and culture to be overwritten by a new one, showing the loss of ‘freedom of religion’ (a civil liberty), which was part of my original ideas. Christianity, for example, took over from the pagan religions.

So, what did I settle with? Have it so paganism thrives and have it so the Viking culture is the one that grew - changing the course of History from about 900AD, after all, they became a literate society and were great explorers, so it’s not a ridiculous idea. This means the world as we know it is a very different place, leaving me to start world building. This leaves room for this new religion, which takes symbolism from different religions (sometimes it happens when one culture assimilates another) to win the hearts and minds of the people, as well as strike fear into their heart.

As part of the overhaul, new architecture and new technology and you probably can equate it to the 1920s, just thought of differently. It has also meant I’ve had to think of how their homes would be set out, architecture would be different and I did my research into Viking homes, the idea of having a fire in the middle adapting into the central hearth, which provides heating for the house (or quite literally, a central heating system), but also a stove.

It has worked out to be very interesting and have allowed me to be quite creative, I’ve even created my own sport, called Bjarndyrknot (or bear-ball), which is kind of like rugby and wrestling combined into one sport. I’ve worked hard into thinking about how it’d work and how to making it fun, interesting and a challenge. What I haven’t done and something I want to do, is find a group of 10 volunteers to play the game and I’ll referee. It might even be fun to start up a bearball club. ;) It’d be in the name of research.

Now, I’ve sat down with my wonderful collection of markers to continue editing this piece of junk. Rants may ensue.

Hello everybody,

Your humble prince is one week away from attending Young Storytelling Of the Year, my submission form has been sent and I am just practising my story and hopefully it’ll be great! And I’m sure I’ll have a good time, I’ve got friends and other storytellers to support me, as well as a rival, my good friend Mr Barker, so it’ll be interesting. We’ve already set out a plan, we’re all going to Festival At The Edge regardless if either of us win. It’ll be fantastic.

I have chosen to work with Thor’s story about him dressing up as Freyja to retrieve his hammer from the giant Thrym, I’ve practised getting my voice range and tried many other exercises to manipulate my space and how I animate myself - as well as thinking of different ways to construct my story and my delivery. I’ve practised in front of different audience, included a Spoken Word event at our University, which had an interesting mix of Storytelling and Performance Poetry, ending on Kate Tempest at the main act. Simply put, she was awesome.

I will be prepared, so anyway, instead of giving a detailed blog post, I’ll just go off to practise!

Cheers,

Hear Odin roar, your Little Norse Prince

My fellow Vikings, I am working on towards entering the Young Storyteller of the Year competition, with support from friends and associates. Watch this blog for new info.

I am going at this in pure Rocky Balboa montage style, it’s Rocky IV and I have to face the Russian, he’s a brute, but I have with me true American patriotism and that sees anybody through a difficult time…well, perhaps not American, an Englishman who’s patriotic for the Scandinavian homeland, who cares about the country you come from?

Currently I am working on the actual story I want to tell - I’ve got 10 minutes to basically show off a range of skills, so what I trying to do is get these elements in: Music, singing, humour, emotion and audience involvement. The story I’m doing is about my friend Thor and it’s a pretty funny one I think, so that’s the humour sorted out, I’ve played with it quite a bit to get it to work my own way, so hopefully that’ll show originality, I’m buying a bongo for the music and well, singing is my weakness. I can’t sing, but, it doesn’t matter, I’ve got 2 verses and 1 of them is for the audience to sing along. And the emotion? Hanging around with Thor all the time allows to catch his short temper quite easily. I’ve just got to practice this in front of an audience and see what their reaction is. I wonder? Will it be any good?

I have some more events lined up to. We did a Mummers play in December, with some storytelling performances - I am of course, talking about our storytelling group and it was good to see the new members getting involved. I think some of them need work in order to entertain an audience. I think the venue was a problem. It’s a coffee and the event was as well advertised as the last one, so we only had a handful of people interested, the rest no doubt just came in for their coffee. We didn’t both them and they didn’t bother us. I think it made it more difficult for the new members, but in some ways, I think it’s a better learning experience that way and it wouldn’t be good if you didn’t learning anything. Some times venturing into the deep end helps you become a better swimmer.

The event coming ahead is Studentship Festival, an event my University holds each year and their is a Spoken Words night. I am currently learning what our situation for that one is. They want us to do something, but we’ll find out what.

2010 will hopefully be a good year in terms of storytelling, I still need to get some videos on to YouTube. Perhaps I’ll start doing some workshop. Well, keep an out for them at least.

Thank you.

I’m going to post things I’m learning along the way as a storyteller, I hope you can follow. So I’ll keep this up to date with each new article about what new things I’ve picked up. So far:

Banish evil thoughts. You’re there to do your best and not worry about what people think.
If a person is there to watch, they’re there to watch you. If they weren’t interested, then why would they be interested?
People don’t always look interested, but those who don’t look interested might be the ones who compliment you at the end of your show. Audience members can be annoying like that.
If you want it to end quick, so will the audience.

This is simple story, perhaps a little short, but we had a module in our first year at University dedicated to Storytelling and naturally it was interesting. I enjoyed the videos of storytellers we watched and we eventually go to think about basic storytelling performances ourselves, some didn’t have the confidence, but I found it increasingly enjoyable. Old stories and the classic myths as well as the tales of my Norse brothers, it grasped me. I quite liked tales done in other languages, because it was body language that also told the story and that left me room to experiment and thus I created a Norse-English creole that none would understand to tell a story, I learned that it wasn’t the best idea, because I couldn’t pull off the body language well enough, but it gave me a scope for the future, a story to be told entirely in Old Norse, by giving myself that goal, I could exactly turn down storytelling and I had already help set up the society, so here I am trying to do my Norse brothers proud. So I am working on my favourite Norse tales and playing to an audience.

I now lead the storytelling group, thus I set up workshops in order to help them work up to getting onto stage and performing in front of people, and am quite enthusiastic about it. This lens should be a vehicle to bring out my storytelling exploits to the world.

Hello,

Allow me to introduce myself, I am the Little NorsePrince. What the Helheim is this blog about? Storytelling is the obvious answer, I should hope at least. To give you a bit more background, our all-father, Odin, goes out doing all of his godly business and all of the great heroes sitting in Valhalla remain un-entertained after their daily battles, now, our Norse speaking brethren normally have a storyteller to tell them great stories of times past, but alas, no such storyteller has stepped up to the mark. It’s my time to start out as a storyteller entertaining people here in Midgard before I can even try myself worthy for legends.

As I sit here at my laptop in Asgard, I am a excited to share my experience to you all and offer some food for thought. I know what you’re thinking, “there’s no internet connection in Asgard”, but this is quite untrue, it might be the case of Utgard, as nobody has though to develop computers suitable for giants (I smell discrimination here). The guys in Asgard are quite up-to-date and welcome people from the modern world, such as myself - after all, most gods are techno-phobic. Last week Thor was playing Viking: Battle for Asgard of his Playstation 3, he was amazed - I hear the last time he played a console game was when Golden Axe was released - so things have come a long way since then…Thor seems to moan that hammer are superior to axes. You wouldn’t believe the number of viruses I had to remove from Frey’s computer a couple of months ago, I just don’t know how he does.

Anyway, I digress, storytelling is an art form I greatly appreciate and is perhaps a little unnoticed by Midgard’s society today, though our Norse brethren and I are but a few enjoying the Storytelling art. Storytelling is what we had before literature, so many of the old tales entered classical literature and still inspire writers today. Even in England, there are groups practicing this ancient art.

But now that I’ve introduced yourself and this blog, please drop in and say “hello”, or what the Norwegian say, “hallo” and let me know something a little about you. Also, positive ratingsmeans I put you in good word with my good friend, Odin, it’s not a bribe, honest!

Thank you for stopping by to take a look at my blog and hope you enjoy reading it. Feedback is encouraged.

Yours sincerely,

Little Norse Prince