On Sunday I spent a few hours playing sound-man for Anne as she shot some interviews at the London Model Engineering Exhibition. It was exactly the kind of show you’re picturing in your head; finely detailed replicas all measured with laser precision (they actually use lasers to measure the parts) and presented by chaps (and a few chapettes) clutching cups of tea.

It was wonderful. Alexandra Palace was filled with buzzing and clattering as trains, planes and ships, displayed with pride and… well, just lots of pride actually. The good kind.

I realised wandering round that the setup was incredibly familiar; it shared all the smells and murmurs and chatter of a comic convention. But the beaming faces and eagerness to talk about work with new people felt a world away. Very few were tucked behind tables and those that were were busy making things whirr about, delighting people.

Maybe it was a generational thing; by and large the exhibitors were in their 50s and 60s, a lot more confident of their abilities than the (generally) younger comics crowd I’m around so much. But I got the sense that it wasn’t just that.

Speaking to Mitch from SMEE was a treat. He beamed about the work of his friends and fellows, proud to show the work he’d spent many thousands of hours on. He was humble about his achievements as a model maker, but not entirely self-effacing, understandably proud of work he’d contributed not just to the show, but to films like X-Men First Class, Lost In Space and Harry Potter. He was brilliant. Even better, he was brilliant while wearing a SMEE-branded workshop coat.

It was a welcome reminder that it’s not impossible to talk about print and storytelling with that kind of passion.

Anyway, I didn’t get many good photos but Anne’s film will make up for that when it’s ready.

I’ll be developing some of the themes that came up during my Playful talk, namely how the veneer of narrative is becoming increasingly important to even the sketchiest and most impulsive of hacks. Which is a verbose way of saying ‘I’ll be talking about words and whimsy’.

I’ve been invited by Birgit Geiberger, one of the wonderful people who made Utrecht such a delight last autumn, and the good folk at XING. It’s going to be fun!

Cafe. Amsterdam Schiphol train station. I have ordered a tea and am sat at a tall table in the corner to write a few notes and wait for a train. The screen, positioned at head height by the table, is buzzing and I find it an irritating distraction. So I switch it off.

About five seconds pass before I start to worry that someone will arrest me. Or tell me off. I worry I am somehow breaking the rules. I switch it back on and immediately feel like an idiot. I continue writing my notes, warmed by the glow of a sandwich I will not buy.

For my part, I’m hoping to make this year a little bit more about me. Paper Science will come to a natural stop with issue #7 – it won’t be gone forever, but a hiatus feels healthy – and I want to spend the next few months writing pitches for some longer-form comics projects. Whether they’re accepted or not, I want one of those to be robust enough that I take it full-length by the end of the year. That’s one thing.

Secondly I need to remember how to write about what I do. Not things like the club or the Lego stuff, where blogging is an expected output, but things like product launches and documentation. I take too much of what I do for granted.

And I’ve got to get better at collaborative projects. I treat too many things like briefs, and it’s important to get out of that mindset. The Thought Bubble residency only worked because I threw in with the collaboration, and I need to do more of that.

Again, it’s really good to get Quinn‘s and Anne‘s take on how best to develop skills and focus my work. I think there’s a narrow line between these meetings being productive ways to discuss what we’re facing and them simply being an opportunity to whinge, but we’ve kept well clear of anything especially ranty or self-obsessed so far. It feels good.

Stating goals too seems to make the whole process more manageable and more significant. And that’s probably the lesson from this meeting;

Lesson Ten: State your objectives.

Remember when I said this? I meant it. For a year I’ve been folding references about Doctor Who into talks, essays and chat. I got a sonic screwdriver built, bought a bow tie, and had the finest compliment I could ask for paid to me (thanks Matt!).

These little minifigs were the final part of it. All eleven Doctors, made with Lego. They’re not perfect (One and Ten need better hair, Four’s missing his scarf, Seven is just rubbish) but they do the job, and that job is to be tiny little totems of an incredible year.

A quarterly newspaper, my first large scale talks, the Thought Bubble residency, baking my first banoffi pie… 2011 was great.

But 2012 will be better. I should know – Time Lord, remember.

During the talk he spoke of Shuttle as an ugly, weird thing, a thing ill-equipped for many of its specialised tasks but able to do an okay job of just about anything it was pointed at. I can’t remember the exact turn of phrase, but Kevin spoke about the demands made of Shuttle’s construction by dozens of separate parties to suit tasks from scientists, military tacticians, communications agencies and easily-lobbied politicians; it was always going to be such a doomed and lumpen thing because it was trying to be so many things.*

Shuttle couldn’t move forwards and into the future, Shuttle couldn’t be built on or improved. Shuttle was the servant of too many masters, too many demands. It simply did the jobs it could do for as long a period of time as it made sense for it to, before being mothballed and left to the archivists.

I found myself unconsciously muttering the word the other day. “Shuttle”. I was using it as a watchword for myself, a kind of shorthand. “Shuttle”, the project that lacks focus. The thing that has the capacity to get uglier as time moves forwards, to be too locked and restricted in its delivery to be built on or trimmed. The thing that will maneuver like a brick, take an incredible amount of energy to get going, and will likely offer little return for all involved.

Saying that word to myself is a note to focus the demands being made upon a thing.

* It’s worth noting that Kevin was far more romantic about Shuttle’s memory and purpose than my interpretation/recall implies

Radio Roundabout was fun. Thanks for having me again RIG!
Looks like Dan definitely didn’t bootleg it and upload it to Soundcloud.

That meant that research and social networks were fine, but things like draft emails, starred massages, Dropboxed docs and etherpad-style text interfaces were well out.

And that’s how I make a lot of my notes now. Scattered .txt files flung throughout the internet.

I wouldn’t mention it, but there was a lot of talk about print and digital throughout Thought Bubble, a lot of talk about notes and texture and The Feel Of Things. But for every scrap of paper I have with an idea scrawled in pen I’ve now got five scraps of digital detritus. Just as disposable, just as significant, just as hard to replace.

On returning from Leeds I found my FRSTEE waiting for me. FRSTEE was built by the folks at RIG, and it’s a little snowman ornament that uses your Twitter data as the basis for its shape and details.

It’s not unrelated to the things I couldn’t access. I like the idea that toys like FRSTEE might evolve into rosary-like totems of notes and scribblings, cairns for the pathway your digital notes might be mapping. There’s a space somewhere between the back of a train ticket and the innards of an Oyster card that offers us room for such fragmentary reminders of the things we ought to remember.

James has talked about this in relation to ebooks…

These records—souvenirs—are important because they serve as touchstones, aides memoires, and visual quantifiers. They remind us of where we’ve been, keep experiences in our minds, enable us to learn from them through reinforcement.

…but I honestly didn’t get what he meant by that until I found myself reaching for a textfile I couldn’t access, in a library filled with dusty hardbacks and microfilm.

I’ve spent the last week in Leeds, scripting comics and talking about stories as Thought Bubble Festival‘s Writer In Residence. It’s been fabulous.

My script for Kristyna Baczynski, the festival’s Artist in Residence, is in production, and the four blog posts I wrote (one, two, three and four) are online to read too. Kristyna’s a fabulous illustrator, and it’s been an absolute pleasure to piece a short story together with her and see skecthes and thumbnails become six pages of comics fun.

And it’s great, it really is. Exhaustive and surprising, it mapped my memories of reading the book perfectly; you’re stunned by the still-vital eruption of Gang of Four in Chapter 7, delighted by the New Pop ZTT finale, a little disappointed by how easily Joy Division blend in…

It exacerbated the problem I had with Reynolds’ book though. See, I was born after the era he documents, and the music I fell for ten years ago wears its debt to postpunk so openly that I don’t need convincing of the era’s importance. Which is really what the book is – a long argument that this was a Genuinely Important Period In Pop.

Of course it was. If it hadn’t been I wouldn’t have anything to listen to now.

And by making that argument so comprehensively Reynolds casts the net very wide in terms of musical touchpoints, which makes the whole thing a little too saggy for my tastes. I felt that in a stretch between Chapters 17 and 21 yesterday – “The Black Hit of Space” to “Perfect Way” – where parts of it all just blended until Siouxsie crackled to life on my headphones and all was right again.

But both playlist and book are wonderful pieces of work. I’d recommend giving both a try, even if you don’t have the time in your life to, as Phil suggests, enjoy them together.

One day, when I have an awful lot of time on my hands, I’ll make a playlist for Words And Music.

Unrelated image above taken at High Arctic last weekend, which is also brilliant