A Play on Words

Back in December 2021, Wordle started to explode in popularity, with a reported two million daily players at one point.

As a fan of word puzzles, I thought this would be right up my street. However, I’m also someone who dislikes hype, so it took me a long time to start playing. In fact, it was January 2024, exactly two years after the game was bought over by The New York Times.

I’ve now enjoyed it for 108 days straight. Around a third of these were guessed on the fourth try, with a 23-26 split between the third and fifth tries respectively, and ten that went down to the sixth guess. There have been days when I simply haven’t reached the answer, leaving me with a disappointing 94% success rate and no way to make up for it other than continuing to win until the losses are statistically insignificant.

The other word puzzle I play of a morning is Full Rainbow, which gives visitors three minutes to unscramble a seven-letter anagram. Sadly, it’s not possible to open an account to keep track of your score; you can only use the same browser and make sure not to clear your cookies. Instead, my personal aim is to be in the top 50% of players for solving it quickly.

I’ve always enjoyed word puzzles, and I was even an early adopter of sudoku before it took off in 2004. It’s probably no wonder, as my gran avidly completed the puzzles in Take a Break each week, while my grandad preferred the daily cryptic crossword.

I’m convinced he would have enjoyed Wordle because a similar deduction technique can be used for solving crosswords. For example, whenever there’s a ‘K’ at the beginning of a word, it’s unlikely to be followed by a ‘U’, or if it’s near the middle or the end of a word, there is likely to be a preceding ‘C’.

At the time of writing, Wordle gameplay remains free of charge. There has long been speculation that this might change, although it has become almost a loss leader for the paper’s subscription puzzles. Until then, I’ll keep playing, with a view to restoring my score to an acceptable level.

Eight Weeks of Writing Group Independence

Every Tuesday, I run a writing group with a pal. Until eight weeks ago, the group was affiliated with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo).

We broke away to form an independent group after we felt the organisation was not working in the best interests of its members. You can read a previous entry exploring the reasons for this.

In the weeks following the announcement, we fielded a few questions from members, largely to reinforce that the new group would feel as familiar as we could make it. Only a couple of people have left, but no more than would have happened anyway.

In short, it’s been something of a velvet divorce.

I’d been running the group for about nine years, while my pal came on board about two years ago. We feel we know what works with our members and what doesn’t, and this secession allows us to take our own actions without needing to toe the line of an umbrella organisation with their own differing priorities.

There are still aspects we need to work out. For instance, we have an outstanding question of how to attract new members without being overwhelmed by new recruits. This, however, is not an urgent problem and we’ll work it out in due course.

The End of the Renga

Back in 2020, I was invited to take part in a collaborative project started by the poet W N Herbert, known to us all as Bill.

His idea was simple. He would create an email list containing a group of poets. Then each month, he would send out the first stanza of a new poem and incorporate suggestions from those poets for a second stanza, then a third, and so on. The complete poem would be posted publicly by the end of the month.

From the start, Bill introduced us to the renga form. We did play somewhat fast and loose with its complex rules and conventions, but we mostly stuck to the alternating stanza length: a three-line haiku followed by two lines of seven syllables each.

Here’s part of a recent renga. Depending on the contributor, some parts were written in standard English and some in Scots.

Then two days ago, he announced the project was at an end. It seems this always intended to run for four years, but in the initial excitement of being asked to contribute, I hadn’t read that part.

I haven’t always had the time and/or inspiration to contribute, but I always made a point of reading the constructed renga when it was sent out. The next stage is to think about publication; Bill has a lot of experience in this area, so it’ll probably happen.

Meanwhile, I look forward to hearing about whatever project he has planned next.

Plagued by Plagiarism

Back in 2015, Sheree Mack was accused of plagiarism by another writer. The claim was that her story The Tracks was based upon A Mercy by Judith Turner-Yamamoto. The publisher New Writing North believed the accusation had merit and pulped the remaining copies of the Mack story.

It subsequently emerged that other writers had similar concerns, coming to a head that year when Mack published what was described in The Guardian as a semi-apology on Facebook, admitting to “slackness and carelessness”. The same article also covers other notable examples from the writing scene.

And so everyone moved on and the matter died down, at least until a few weeks ago, when Sheree Mack was announced as a headliner for the upcoming Timber Festival. She will appear alongside Simon Armitage, although there’s no suggestion that he’s guilty of copying work.

I’m a member of a poetry page on Facebook that has members all over Scotland – and a long memory. A couple of the members have written to the festival urging them to think twice about her inclusion, while a few others have given first-hand accounts of hearing her stolen poems, one of which was in front of the original poet.

The festival has responded to the effect that they believe her actions were a one-off occurrence. This means the appearance at Timber is expected to go ahead as advertised.

It’ll never be possible to stop plagiarism, but the wider question is what we can do about it when it does happen. There probably needs to be a test case before a solution can be found.

I can see a parallel between this incident and the hip-hop scene of the late 1980s. Around this time, music sampling was becoming increasingly common, thanks to the rise of solid-state storage that allowed songwriters to loop sounds without the need to splice tape.

With no precedent to stop the practice, many tracks of the era simply borrowed bits and pieces of other tracks without credit or payment. Pump Up the Volume by M|A|R|R|S is a textbook example, containing 29 identified samples and many more unidentified ones.

The scene started to put its house in order at the start of the 1990s when Gilbert O’Sullivan objected to the rapper Biz Markie using Alone Again Naturally in a new work. Their record labels went to court and the judge found in favour of O’Sullivan.

From that point on, record labels were careful to clear any samples before using them in a recording. It’s far from a perfect solution, but the framework has been in place for more than 30 years at this stage.

I can’t immediately foresee a situation where such a case will happen in the poetry scene; it’s more fragmented and less commercial than the music industry.

Until that changes, a publisher having to pulp a few books isn’t seen as a great loss in the big scheme of things, even if it’s a massive deal for those who have had their poetry stolen and/or reworked without permission.

Ideas Coming Out My Ears

Occasionally, I sit down to write this blog on a Tuesday only to find my tank of ideas is empty.

At the moment, I have a different problem. I have a list of subjects, but I can’t find a way to start on any of them. For example, today’s entry was meant to be about the problem of plagiarism among poets, but I couldn’t move past the first line.

Instead, let’s pick this up next week, once I’m able to articulate one or more of these ideas.

Discussion Questions About Discussion Questions

On Sunday evening, I reached the end of the Richard Osman novel The Man Who Died Twice. I always like to read over the acknowledgements, and then I turned the page to find a section titled ‘Discussion Questions for Readers’.

Most of the questions give away plot points, so I won’t repeat those here, but there are a few only tangentially related to the story, such as ‘Have you ever been lonely in a new town?’ and ‘What is an acceptable name for a pet, and what is unacceptable?’

I’d never before seen this feature in a novel, so I asked around to see whether others had. While some pals were – like me – surprised to see this outside of an educational setting, others reported discussion questions appearing in other books, such as:

• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
• The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, both by Taylor Jenkins Reid

These titles were all published in or after 2012, and I’d be interested to find out whether any older novels also have this feature.

One respondent reported debating with herself whether such questions encourage critical thinking or are merely there to spoon-feed reading groups. I’ve considered this question myself, but I have no conclusions so far.

It’s not clear whether the discussion section was the initiative of the author or the publisher, but I expect you’d want to test the waters first. My edition boasts ‘The multi-million-copy bestseller’ on the cover, so I expect Penguin Random House knew by this point that its readers would want to discuss the title.

Although I really enjoyed The Man Who Died Twice, perhaps I haven’t seen a discussion section before because I simply don’t normally lean towards crime fiction, cosy or otherwise. However, I will keep an eye out for this in the future.

Sky Writing and Railway Reading

Yesterweek, I talked about going to Dublin for a few days and what I would bring to read and write on the three-day trip.

The flight there takes about an hour and five minutes from Edinburgh. I used the journey there to write six postcards, which I would then post on arrival, and tackled some other writing on my return. As predicted in that last entry, the cashier was indeed rather bemused as she handed over my stamps.

On the second day, my pal and I took a train to Belfast and back, taking around two hours each way, I split my time between writing in my notebook and reading my magazine.

It was helpful to have this time, but it would be more helpful if I were able to recreate this experience at home without the expense of travel. I’ve heard the suggestion of listening to ambient train noises as I write, but I also rationally know I can step outside my door at any time; not something you can do on a mainline railway.

If you’ve any suggestions on that front, I’m all ears.

Sky Writing

If you’ve flown with Ryanair before, you’ll know the company doesn’t have a generous baggage allowance. So when I head off to Dublin for a few days tomorrow, I’ve had to be selective about what I bring for reading and writing for the journey.

I’m definitely bringing my laptop, which will sit alongside my plastic A4 document holder. This comfortably holds my A5 paper diary and a commercial-sized paperback. My current read is The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman, and it’s the first time in a long time I’ve wanted to read a whole series.

However, I’m going to visit a pal from university on her birthday weekend. We typically swap cards by post, so I’m taking the opportunity to hand it over in person and I’m including a book, which will take up the other half of that document holder. As such, I’ve decided to take my copy of Writing Magazine to read instead, as it’ll slot nicely into the holder.

This gives me just enough room left to slip in some postcards. I know these went out of fashion with the advent of the text message and they’ll likely arrive home long after I do, but I specifically wanted to send some. I’ve already stuck on the address labels, so it’s just a matter of writing the messages and taking them to a post office, no doubt to the bemusement of the cashier.

Nice NaNo-ing You

Long-time readers of this blog will know I’ve been involved with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) since 2010. This is a not-for-profit initiative that encourages members to draft a 50,000-word novel every November.

In 2015, I began to organise our local Dundee & Angus region. A local leader is known as a Municipal Liasion (ML). Each ML needs to sign an agreement every year promising to enforce the code of conduct, hold regular meetings, and so forth. In fact, we already go over and above the agreement by holding meetings every week, not just during November.

I always like having a second ML in charge to help me make difficult decisions. This turns out to have been a prudent move.

Late last year, a member of NaNoWriMo staff in California stood down after making a racist comment about a colleague. Separately, the organisation was slow to remove a forum moderator who was sending inappropriate material to minors.

As a reaction to this, a new Interim Executive Director was appointed without warning, who then released a draft ML agreement with several adverse clauses. These included requiring us to verify our identity with a US company that doesn’t comply with GDPR and preventing us from speaking to MLs in other regions. There has also been a general air of disrespect in replies from this Director, which I haven’t experienced in a decade and a half of involvement.

There are a lot of aspects to this story, but that’s a summary of the main points.

As the situation with NaNoWriMo worsened, the other ML and I started serious discussions about withdrawing our affiliation and becoming an independent group. Our format had slowly evolved over the years, adapting to what members wanted, and we felt we could retain this aspect without external oversight.

Around this time last week, we sent a long bulletin announcing our independence and offered the opportunity for members to ask questions.

The news seemed to go down well. By this time, the MLs from most of the other regions in Scotland had also decided to step down. If anything, the decimation of NaNoWriMo has brought us closer together.

The next discussions in our local area will be about what to do with this newfound freedom. We’ve already amended our terminology to distinguish ourselves from our former identity, registered a URL for future use and discussed holding a summer writing event instead of a November one.

Whatever happens, we remain convinced that withdrawing our NaNoWriMo affiliation is the right action to take and we look forward to the year ahead.

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

On Saturday, I made my annual visit to StAnza in St Andrews, billed as Scotland’s International Poetry Festival.

I’ve been going for around a decade, but my commitment has varied from year to year. Sometimes I’ve been to as many events as possible during a day trip, and sometimes I’ve booked accommodation so I could stay for the late-night slam.

This year, I made a conscious decision to buy just one ticket for the Breakfast Poetry show. As part of the entry fee, the audience is offered light refreshments and a coffee. In the afternoon, I planned to take the opportunity to catch up with my pal Robert who lives in St Andrews.

My advice for going to StAnza – and poetry events in general – is always to carry a notepad and pencil. I always find little nuggets of information that would otherwise be forgotten afterwards.

I’m glad I did because I was trying to compose a poem for my monthly Wyverns group using the prompt ‘Stars and planets’. I’d been turning over two ideas but they’d been coming out as short stories.

But as I listened to our guests Rachel Mann and Yomi Ṣode, it started to come together. It’s hard to quantify, but just being around other poets can help the process along. I was able to complete the piece that morning.

The following day, I typed up the piece and sent it to the group. The meeting had already taken place a week before it normally does because of a scheduling conflict, but I did received generally positive feedback by email.

I don’t yet know what my next festival will be, but I’m looking forward to finding out what’s on.