All this talk of building blocks got me thinking about DNA. When you break it down, all life on Earth is made of just a few basic proteins. Yet its variety is staggering. It’s the same with stories. Are writers really just recycling the same plots over and over again? I don’t know for certain. Even if they are, there’s no denying the resulting smorgasbord of stories resembles the biosphere of a rainforest in its complexity and diversity.

What really interests me is how these theories help the writer. It’s possible to take, for example, Campbell’s blueprints and use them to construct a myth of your very own. If George Lucas is to be believed, that’s exactly what he did when writing the original Star Wars.

But can it really be as simple as that? Well, yes and no. Constructing stories in this fashion is all very well. But the line between blueprint and cookie-cutter is a fine one. Rely on theories like this too much and all your stories will start coming out the same.

“But wait,” I hear you cry. “Isn’t this exactly what happens with popular music? There are only so many chords, but there are still plenty of songs.” Yes indeed, it’s a good analogy, one that Damien makes in his post (it’s also illustrated to hilarious effect in Axis of Awesome’s Four Chord Song which is, well, awesome).

All well and good. But I’d argue that you can no more use a blueprint to imagine a story than you can study a test tube full of proteins to imagine a Venus fly-trap or a Colobus monkey. The key word here is imagine. Creative writing isn’t about putting building blocks one on top of the other. It’s about heading out into the great beyond and seeing things that nobody’s ever seen before.

So do I think all these theories on fundamental story structure are nonsense? Not at all. I think they’re fascinating and highly relevant. I just see them as a way of studying stories rather than writing them. Granted, it can be pleasing when, as you’re writing, you realise your narrative is chiming with something out of Campbell. But that’s just an echo. You still have to rely on your own voice to make the originating sound.

One final thought. If stories, like life, really are made up of protein, we can consider them an essential food group. Consumption of literature, therefore, is vital for our continued existence. Now that’s a theory I can get behind. Feeling peckish anyone?

Talking of electricity, in this latest story, my wise-cracking gumshoe comes up the business tycoon who runs String City’s power plants. You don’t want to know what he uses for fuel. There’s also a beautiful woman who happens to be half-bird. When she sings, for the sake of your everlasting soul you’d better hope you’ve got your earplugs in. It’s a tricky case, mostly because it hinges on that most mysterious of things.

Love.

Syren is published by 40k Books.

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• Jedi Journal (edited by Don Shay)

When I first set out on this retrospective odyssey through my back-issues of Cinefex, I remarked on the journal’s clutter-free format: no editorial, no advertising (not in the early days at least), just the facts, ma’am. It’s a simple concept, and a versatile one too. In the issues I’ve reviewed so far there’s been a creditable mix of articles ranging from coverage of then-current blockbusters, to retrospectives on prominent practitioners, to reports on the growing impact of computer technology on Hollywood. The single extensive article in issue #13 rings the changes yet again in that, although edited by publisher Don Shay, it hands over the actual writing reins to the VFX artists themselves.

The artists in question are ILM’s Richard Edlund, Dennis Muren and Ken Ralston, each of whom supervised a more or less equal share of Return of the Jedi‘s visual effects. According to this issue’s introduction, they each ‘recorded a month-by-month account of the work as it developed and changed.’ I don’t know if the journals were written exclusively for Cinefex, or if Shay negotiated access to material that was already being produced; either way, the format promises an intriguing insight into what really went on behind the Star Wars scenes. Does the resulting article live up to that promise? Let’s find out.

It’s Richard Edlund who kicks things off with his initial round-up from February 1982, before ILM had really got going on the project. Edlund – who summarises his role at ILM as ‘architect of the whole photographic system’ – gives us a technical run-down of all the equipment upgrades that have been made ready for Jedi. These include tuning up the quad printer that was built for The Empire Strikes Back, revamping the motion control system and refining the field motion control technology used briefly on Raiders of the Lost Ark and more extensively on Poltergeist. He’s particularly excited about the new multiplane matte camera, which he describes as ‘a real locomotive.’ Edlund’s descriptions are a little like those exploded diagrams you get in technical manuals: precise, in-depth and ever-so-slightly obsessive. If you were handy with a spanner, you could probably build a complete visual effects facility just using his notes.

Edlund goes on to discuss videomatics (an early form of pre-vis using crude models and hand-held video cameras) and muses on whether they’ll get to do the lasers and light sabers with CG (they didn’t). There’s a real sense of anticipation here, of an experienced team building up both resources and energy for a big push. And a sense too that Star Wars is something special. As Edlund puts it, ‘the real raison d’etre [for ILM] is Star Wars‘ – the implication being that all those recent little projects like Raiders and E.T. and Poltergeist were just warm-ups for the main event.

As the article progresses, Edlund’s reports are interleaved with those of Muren and Ralston, creating an overlapping narrative of the pressure-cooker environment that ILM became through the course of the production. As well as detailing their own work, the three men refer frequently to what their colleagues are up to. Occasionally this leads to repetition – the only flaw in this otherwise effective format – but that’s more than made up for by the immediacy of the text.

One of the things I enjoyed about this issue was the number of times I read about problems that had never really occurred to me before – for example, establishing and maintaining the relative sizes of the various spaceships, particularly as they fly through the Death Star tunnels. The models are all built to different scales, and there are variants within each type (the X-Wing variants, for example, range in size from eighteen inches to four feet). The tunnels themselves are different again. It’s all about trajectories and angles and focal distances and, according to Edlund, it takes ‘a certain amount of schoolboy math’ to calculate the correct size ratios. ‘You’d think that there’d be a mathematical relationship,’ Edlund adds, ‘but it’s just too subjective for that.’

The development of the speeder bike sequence makes for a good read too. Using puppets for the bikes and figures was an early decision, inspired in part by the success of the E.T. flying sequences. But the team’s plans to use a miniature forest for the background plates (more learning from E.T.) soon proved unworkable. Dennis Muren lists the various ideas they considered and discarded. ‘We even looked into a jet-pack – one of those things you strap on and it takes off,’ he says. How cool would that have looked on the ‘making of’ documentary?

Eventually they found a way of generating high-speed footage in the Eureka woods using an undercranked camera on a Steadicam. Muren describes the process of plotting the inevitable bumps in the resulting plates frame by frame on a Moviola, then programming those imperfections into the motion control camera, so that ‘the bikes didn’t look they were just pasted onto the scene.’ He also notes that the speeder bike shots in the trailer ‘just don’t work without sound effects,’ and cites this observation as the reason why in the final film the soundtrack makes extensive use of effects and is devoid of music.

But it’s not just opticals; there’s plenty about the various animation effects too. Actually, it struck me how comprehensively ILM had left stop-motion behind at this point. Puppetry and go-motion were very much the order of the day, and it’s clear that this was not only a conscious decision for those concerned, but an exciting one too. Talking about the Rancor sequence, Muren says, ‘The footage we’re getting is just amazing … I’ve never seen anything like this before.’

Three men talking about one of the biggest effects films ever made cover a lot of ground, and I’m only here to scratch the surface. Needless to say, through the course of the article we learn all about the production of those big matte shots Edlund was craving, and the long, long shifts spent by Ken Ralston and his crew filming endless spaceship elements for the final space battle – and going stir crazy enough to replace some of the tiniest, most distant craft with ‘tennis shoes, wads of gum – things like that.’ There are horror stories of processing labs chewing up film and frequent references to the ILM facility being a ‘nuthouse’, especially as the final deadlines loom. And there’s a name that keeps cropping up: George Lucas.

In the documentary From Star Wars to Jedi – The Making of a Saga, Mark Hamill comments at one point that, during the production of Jedi, ‘George was everywhere.’ That’s true of this article too. ‘George … knows every frame of the picture,’ says Edlund, ‘and he’s over here at least twice a day for dailies.’ Referring to the space battle, Ralston remarks that, ‘George has really been working himself to death on this film.’ And Muren tells us that, ‘by the time he’s through, the whole film will have a very definite rhythm that’s all George’s.’ It’s telling that the film’s credited director, Richard Marquand, gets barely a mention, while George’s name is on pretty much every page.

(I’m going to take a quick aside here and note that I’m writing this article in the same week that George Lucas has claimed to be retiring from big-budget movie-making (I say ‘claimed’ because people with his level of fame say this kind of thing all the time). In fact, he seems a bit jaded with the whole business. In an interview with The New York Times, he’s quoted as saying, ‘my movie, with my name on it, that says I did it, needs to be the way I want it.’ The remark is his response to all the bad press he’s had over recent years regarding his persistent tweaking of the Star Wars films. I’m going to stick my head above the parapet and say I’m on George’s side. Do I agree with all the changes he’s made? Of course not. Do I defend his right to make them? Absolutely. Nor should we be surprised by his actions, when the very commitment which made the original trilogy so popular (strike that, which enabled him to make the films at all) was evident from day one – and nowhere more evident than in this issue of Cinefex. The truth is, Lucas has been badly served by many of his so-called fans … but, wait, I’ve just caught myself heading badly off topic, so I’ll save the rest of my thoughts on all things Star Wars for a future post. For now, back to Jedi!)

By and large, the tripartite approach to Jedi’s effects seems to have been a smart move. It certainly got the work done. And by all accounts the three supervisors responded well to the arrangement: in his entry from 16 February 1983, Ralston comments that ‘it’s neat at this point … seeing how Dennis’s sequences cut to mine, mine to Richard’s, and so on.’ Later he notes that ‘there’s been a nice kind of competitiveness on this film.’ When planning the production, was George aware that such a healthy rivalry would develop at ILM, no doubt to the benefit of the film? I’m sure of it.

The pictures that accompany the article are no less compelling than the text. I like the spread on pages 16 and 17, which show the Rancor puppet in its miniature set. It’s a classic set of images showing large numbers of grown men crowded round a cramped model under blazing lights. As always, animator/puppeteer Phil Tippett somehow manages to look simultaneously uncomfortable and serene. And there are some great shots of the matte painters at work on some of those grand vistas, including the Death Star docking bay and the Ewok village.

As for my own memories of Return of the Jedi … well, I saw it in London within a week or two of its first release. I’d heroically avoided reading the novelisation so, although I’d seen a heap of stills and trailers, I came to it quite fresh. I loved the Tatooine scenes, felt it slumped in the middle, tolerated the Ewoks and was totally wrapped up in the grand finale. As for the effects, I remember being more than satisfied, particularly with the forest battle and the chase through the Death Star. Most of the original effects still hold up well today, proving that ILM had reached the peak of the photochemical art. At the beginning of his first journal entry, Edlund says, ‘an effects facility is like a Stradivarius … Once you’ve come up with a design … you’ve got to learn how to play it real well.’ The difference is that Edlund, Muren and Ralston are not only the fabricators of the instrument, but also the musicians who play it. When faced with the monumental challenge of Return of the Jedi, that particular trio made a hell of a lot of sweet music.

• Cinefex
• ILM
• Lucasfilm
• Star Wars

It happened like this. After a delightful weekend reading Dashiell Hammett stories, I got the urge to pull up my collar and go sleuthing myself. The result was a story called The Wooden Baby, in which a down-at-heel private investigator takes on a curious case involving a fairy changeling.

The Wooden Baby was my attempt at mashing together the two genres of crime and fantasy into a squirming hybrid. I also wanted to find a way to distil the classic gumshoe archetype down to his essence. This interest in the archetype, by the way, is one of the reasons I haven’t yet told you the fellow’s name. I certainly never intended for that one story to develop into a series. But, shortly after I’d written The Wooden Baby, something peculiar happened … read the rest of this article on the 40kBooks blog.

In this latest novelette, my paranormal private investigator gets tangled up with a rain-soaked femme fatale keen to cloud his judgement, not to mention a bunch of angry Titans who just want their casino to turn a profit. Trouble is, it’s not just blackjack they’re playing. As for the werewolf in the hat … even he’s not everything he seems.

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Kate Bush sprang to the attention of both the public and yours truly with her first single, Wuthering Heights, in 1978. In many ways, this iconic song defined Kate’s manifesto: personal, experimental, haunting, literary. She’s been all these things consistently throughout her career. But the one thing she remains above all else is a storyteller.

Wuthering Heights tells the story of a ghost roaming the Yorkshire Moors in search of her lost love. It’s Emily Bronte’s tale rather than Kate’s own, but it’s a tale nonetheless. There are echoes of it conceptually in several of Kate’s later songs, including Watching You Without Me (Hounds of Love) and, from this new album, Lake Tahoe, in which the ghost of a Victorian woman emerges from the water to seek her pet dog.

Okay, so Kate can do gothic and ghostly. That alone doesn’t make her a fantasy author, but we don’t have to look too much deeper to find the rest of the proof we need.

All we have to do, in fact, is consider the bulk of the songs on 50 Words For Snow. Apart from that ghostly lady I mentioned, there’s a duet between a woman and a falling snowflake, a story of a night of passion with a snowman (who melts, leaving – naturally – a damp patch in the bed), an ode to the Yeti, a tale of immortal lovers meeting over and over again through eternity … do I need to go on? If you like folklore, or read books by authors of fantasy or magic realism – people like Neil Gaiman or Jonathan Carroll, maybe – this is familiar territory.But more than that, this album has the feel of fantasy. Listen to it, as I have, many times over, and tell me you don’t agree.

Glance back over Kate’s earlier work and you’ll find any number of other fantasy tales: an experiment to make a weapon that uses sound to invoke terror, haunted ballet shoes that possess their owner, a woman who learns how to become invisible, another woman who falls in love with a swan, then turns into one … have I made my point yet?

It’s this fantastic literary slant of Kate’s that keeps me coming back to her. Oh, and there’s the astounding music too. In this respect, she continues to evolve in extraordinary ways. The songs on 50 Words For Snow are, for the most part, long and dreamy affairs, with Kate’s vocals woven artfully through everything from choirboy sopranos to a surprisingly powerful baritone from Elton John and even the plummy tones of Stephen Fry. There may not be many melodies you can hum in the shower, but there’s the same richness and power Kate achieved with her last album, Aerial. It’s that manifesto again: personal, experimental, haunting, literary.

Still think I’m wrong about Kate’s manifesto? And the fantasy author thing? Well, just remember that if 50 Words For Snow doesn’t sound like a conventional collections of pop songs, I don’t believe it was never meant to. 50 Words For Snow, like all the other Kate Bush works that came before it, isn’t a pop album at all.

It’s a storybook.

After wrapping the dragons, I found myself circling back to an idea I’ve had knocking around for years: a fantasy/horror novel called The House on Memory Street. I revealed a little about it in this blog post from October, and made a decent start on the manuscript. But things have moved on and the project’s currently on hold. The reason for that goes back to the summer, when I sent my agent several pitch ideas for new novels. Just a few weeks ago I learned that a publisher has expressed interest in seeing something more complete than the outline-and-chapter-samples we sent out. In this context, ‘more complete’ means the whole damn book. So that’s what I’m writing now. I’m keeping quiet about the story – you’re not even getting the title – but I can tell you it’s one of those ideas that crosses a couple of genre boundaries. First draft should be done by March. So again, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be patient.

Concentrating on novels and pitches has taken its toll on the short fiction. I did manage to write a new novelette called The Voyage of the Plastic Beagle which I’m very proud of but has yet to find a home. Another story called Rusalka has found a home. But the sale’s not officially confirmed so you’re going to have to wait before I tell you about it. Again.

If all this wait-and-see is all too frustrating for you, let me tell you the good news, which is that my series of fantasy detective novelettes The String City Mysteries has now started rolling out of the powerhouse that is 40k Books. If you’re a regular follower of this blog you’re probably sick of me banging on about it, so I’ll just direct you to the first story in the series: The Wooden Baby. It’s available as an ebook from Amazon and iTunes, or direct from the publisher, and the second story – Dead Wolf in a Hat – will be following along soon.

Stepping aside briefly from fiction, back in May I posted the first of my blog articles about the visual effects journal Cinefex. Since then, I’ve written so many of the things I’ve had to start collecting them together in one place. And here they are. I’ve been blown away by the popularity of these articles – special thanks must go to my new friend Don Shay for his unlooked-for support and enthusiastic commenting. Rest assured the series will continue into 2012, starting with issue#13 and Return of the Jedi.

So what else is coming in 2012? Well, publication of the The String City Mysteries has caused me to dust off another manuscript I wrote recently. It’s a novel set in the same strange metropolis – and starring the same dimension-dabbling detective – as the novelettes. The working title was (not surprisingly) String City, but I think that needs to change. Also, the first chapter’s a mess. With a little work, however, it might turn into something good. I’ve also got a simmering pan of ideas for a sequel called Big Picture. If that one comes together, it’s going to be a real doozie.

That’s all for now – for this year, in fact. Thanks to all of you who subscribe to this blog. Don’t forget to tell your friends. Many of you follow me on Twitter too, so thanks again. If you’ve gone a step further and actually bought one of my books, then you are officially my best friend in the world. Yes, I mean you. I’ll be posting here again early in January. In the meantime … Happy New Year!

Alien is on my mind right now because I’ve recently seen the trailer for Prometheus, which is being touted as the prequel to what I usually cite as my favourite movie of all time. Prometheus is looking pretty exciting – not least because Ridley’s back at the helm. And yes, I’ll be the first to admit I’m an easy mark. I’m as susceptible as the next man to such fan-pleasing teaser shots as the Space Jockey rising out of the floor of the alien derelict, and the derelict itself appearing to topple from an unexpectedly upright position into the prone state we all recognise from the original movie. At the same time, I know there’s no guarantee the movie itself – by which I really mean the story – will be any good.

I was thirteen when Alien was released. It was the first film I got really obsessed with. Before it came out, I bought the novelisation, the excellent Scanlon and Gross Making of Alien book and scoured magazines like Starburst and Starlog for any preview photos I could find. Afterwards I bought the mind-blowing Giger’s Alien. At the time, I was convinced I wanted to be a film set designer, and all this stuff was just solid gold. Not to mention unbelievably cool.

I had to get my dad to sneak me into the theatre to see the film (Alien had an X-Certificate, so I was officially too young to be exposed to such corrupting material). Fortunately I was tall for my age and had chosen my bulkiest coat to wear. I vividly remember the signs in the foyer warning us about the strobe lighting and advising pregnant women to give it a miss. Talk about anticipation. The film more than lived up to my high expectations, and I’ve never been disappointed during the many repeat viewings I’ve enjoyed since, on both the big and the small screens. For me, that damn film just always works.

So, when I contemplate the idea of Prometheus, I do so with both trepidation and hope. I’m in my forties now, but that thirteen year-old kid is still inside me. I know that prequels and sequels frequently – perhaps usually – disappoint. But James Cameron’s follow-up to my beloved Alien proved to me that sometimes miracles do happen.

Aliens was a film I absolutely was not looking forward to. A military shoot-up from the Rambo II guy? Are you kidding? The whole idea was sacrilege. Then, some time in 1986, I found myself strolling through London’s Piccadilly Circus only to be brought up short by a window display in Tower Records. Staring out at me through the glass was a mannequin of what could only be some kind of super-evolved Giger creation (I later discovered it was a full-size replica of the Queen’s head and torso). I let go of my snobbery, and when I finally saw the movie I loved it to pieces.

As for Alien III and Alien Resurrection, I like them both in their own ways (check out the intriguing extended cut of the former, which gives you an insight into what the film might have been had David Fincher been given free rein), but they’re not a patch on their illustrious predecessors. And Prometheus? Only time will tell.

My attachment to Alien, strong as it is, has changed over the years. I called it an obsession. It certainly was to begin with; in some respect it still is, although I can’t summon those intense teenage feelings I experienced back in 1979. Still, the film feels like something that shaped me – perhaps because I was a teenager when I experienced it for the first time. That’s why the idea of Prometheus makes me feel just a little bit tingly, in the same way that on Christmas Eve – even now – I feel a little bit tingly too. Because, as old as I get, there’s still a part of me that believes – when the mood and the season are right – that there are fat men who slide down chimneys and glossy monsters skulking on haunted-house planets lost among the stars.