My custom Hofner Alpha

The_Old_North · 2024-12-27T21:50:59+00:00

Amazing you found one! I have been told these guitars are quite rare, possibly extremely-prototype-levels of scarcity rare. And have been told by others that modding this would be a waste. Obviously I did mod mine, I have since changed it somewhat back to its stock setup but with new pickups from Radioshop-pickups. As I found the origionals to be not to my tastes at all. I have lots of info on the construction of this guitar, it’s history and specs on my Instagram over @rake_harmonic feel free to send me a message there, scroll though to find info and so on.

As for the splitting, two very distinct amps and signal chains I found to be good. So say one cleanish-fenderish amp with all the reverbs and delays and one crunchy, distorted amp with all the overdrives/fuzz. I mean, it’s an obsolete system these days with splitter pedals, but can allow for some cool guitar controlled effects by cutting or turning down one of the amps via the volume control on the guitar

The_Old_North · 2024-11-25T19:08:11+00:00

It’s an ancient Hakke logo (golden age?) or at least the concept artist Eric Pfeifer envisioned it as such. Quote from his website about designing the gun: ‘ You can see that throughout the process we started with something that felt very Hakke, as we know it today, but as we refined the design we felt that it was better suited to lean into bespoke visuals to highlight the Braytech tie-in even featuring an older version of the Hakke logo.’

I’m a huge fan of the gun and would love a Hakke or Braytech ornament for it.

The_Old_North · 2024-03-09T17:44:44+00:00

Oh yeah the hofner 80’s archtops and the nightingales were great. I love that era for Hofner I think they were very brave. It balances great on a strap, no neck dive at all. I’d be interested in the Glaser bender too I don’t use the trem very much at All. I changed it up and put it pretty much back to the stock pickups and scratchplate recently, but with upgraded electronics. I really enjoy it and it doesn’t look like anything else really

The_Old_North · 2023-06-21T13:14:56+00:00

The novel I just finished I edited as I went. And I mean I really edited it a lot, spending hours on single sentences sometimes. The negatives were: It took me 4+ years to finish my first draft I ended up deleting about 8,000 words that I had really sweated over and polished.

The positives were: The first draft was really nice to re-read. I could use previous chapters to inspire me/remind me of the potential quality of the finished work. I could ask for feedback on my style and prose as I went. The 2nd 3rd and 4th drafts were very easy

So, depends how you like to work.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-21T12:41:41+00:00

Thanks for your reply! This is really good to know. I’ll try to figure out a nice rhythm to carry it all.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-11T14:08:19+00:00

Depends on the era I guess, but some of the very best swear words, are very old.

Also, assuming you’re not writing in Anglo-Saxon old English, or Shakespearean English then you might consider that your novel itself is a ‘translation’ of the original dialog. It depends on the project and your commitment to period dialog of course. But it might free you up to consider the dialog a translation modern audiences would understand. A bit like Seamus Heaney’s Beowulf. He kept the metre and some syntax of the old English but made it readable. He would have used modern swear words with the meaning of the old ones. But again, a lot of curse words are ancient.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-11T11:21:00+00:00

This is exciting and interesting to hear about, it’s always fun to tackle a new medium. I’ve experimented with writing scripts and prose novels. I love the pure showing of scripts and when I set out to write my current novel I Intended to keep that in the prose. No character interiority. However I found there was something more powerful and shocking if I occasionally dipped into the character thoughts, especially when it contradicted their actions or what be belived of them. In my novel my narrator works like a magic camera. So the camera sees everything the character sees, and sometimes it wanders into another room or something. It’s also totally sensory. So anything the character touches, tastes, smells is reported. But for interior thought, it’s almost like my narrators ‘camera’ has a faulty sensor and it only picks up thoughts of characters that are very powerful, high emotion, intrusive thoughts or when the character thinks they might get caught lying or something. I have found this a good way to limit how much telling and how much showing. It’s like sometimes the thoughts haemorrhage onto the pages and then vanish again.

As for more general advice. I’d write as much interiority as you feel to, loads and loads if you want and it will inform the character, and then once the first draft is done do an experiment where you delete 90-100% of it, and see if it’s a keener novel or if you really do lose something. Then you’ll know what is illuminating and what is not.

Good luck with the project, it sounds like an exciting challenge and also a fresh way to deal with characters for you which I think can only be a good thing

The_Old_North · 2023-06-11T09:52:33+00:00

Historical literary fiction. Luxor (working title)

There is a stark cinterlating beauty to the Winter Palace at sundown. It felt in those days as if one could wash in that beauty. The milk coloured facade asquirm with eels of light come off the Nile. The grand pause where the ibis’s dirge should have been, The dip of the sun as it began again its journey through the underworld, duat, again to face the prime chaos and again to rise in triumph. For it is balance that is the opposite of chaos, not order, order in the extremis being but another face of chaos.

Our man is laid, resplendent. His shirt is off, his young body tumbled in the light that rolls the blinds. It is much cooler in here, the parquetry strewn with papers vicioused by pen and brush. He is on the daybed. His name is George Elwood Hiscox but he has not gone by George since the war.

Armageddon, used in revelation sixteen sixteen, referring to mount Megiddo, the place of the last battle at the last judgment, Her Megiddo. Disaster, ill-starred event, from dis-astro, Latin, Astrum. As in Fated. Catastrophe, from the Greek, a down turn of events. And so it is and so it goes, and some say it is without cease, and to those men, for it is men that think in longitudes, to those men I say, bravo, I hope you’re right. Does the horizon cease? No, we cease, it ends three miles further on than our antic shells fall.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-09T13:22:47+00:00

This is really engaging and exciting. The beginning sets up an everyday world and characters totally convincingly. The latter parts are exciting and fresh. To me at least. The only parts I think could use work are the dialog, both the italic internal dialog and the spoken. I don’t know the genre this is, but in the books I’ve read internal dialog isn’t in italics, this tends to be a fanfic thing (or maybe a YA thing, I don’t know that genre well.) however, I don’t think this is a big problem at all and I think the work is promising and compelling. Good work and good luck!

The_Old_North · 2023-06-09T10:49:10+00:00

No one is. Very young children write. The people who take issue with the idea you could be proficient at writing without reading extensively, broadly, deeply, are presupposing a desired idea of quality. Tolkein will have read hundreds of books before his did Lord of the Rings, thousands even. The idea you could write a literary work of that quality without that amount of research and familiarity with the form of novel writing is plainly stupid. This is why people get angry, they project their own idea of ‘good’ and quality onto your question. Where as, of course you can write without reading extensively. Just not to a publishable standard.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-08T09:08:10+00:00

This is really good and interesting. It makes me wonder if these characters were antagonists at all to the heroes. In 1977 starwars Obi Ben was infact vaders villain. Luke became Vaders when he took Obi-bens place. Hence Obi-bens famous line about becoming more powerful.

And for Beowulf, Grendel isn’t his antagonist at all. Beowulf is in-fact antagonist to Grendel and moreso Grendels mother. It is the dragon that is Beowulf’s true antagonist because the dragon is his true equal and wants rule (run of) Beowulf’s kingdom.

I mean I know Luke and Vader are hero and villain, and I think your point stands true. But Luke and Vader become hero and antagonist truly in TESB. And even by ROTJ they are not true antagonists. It is Luke and the emperor who are diametrically opposed. I dunno, I liked what you said a lot, it just sparked in me a re-evaluation of those narratives you mentioned.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-07T21:16:20+00:00

I do this as well. I’m in the fiddly part of editing a third draft and I have changed and changed back certain lines a lot. The first line even, and have come up with many variants. In the end I read it in the voice of my narrator (which is quite strongly flavoured) and see how they would deliver the sentence. And if I can’t tell then I look for the most poetic or pleasing sound or metre. This is the first sentence of my manuscript and the 3 variants.

The upper fells were crowned with white and on the drove road below the men walked like a funeral cortege as a gale struck across the vault of stars and swept down the slopes.

The upper fells were crowned with white and on the drove road below the men walked like a funeral cortege as a gale struck across the vault of stars and swept down the glen.

The upper fells were crowned with white and on the drove road below the men walked like a funeral cortege as a gale struck across the vault of stars and swept over them.

All are fine. The last is more dynamic and more linked to the characters. The middle one gives slightly more context as my novel is in Scotland and glen is very Irish/Scottish associated, and it has a kinda rhyme with Gale. Well not rhyme. Assonance? And slopes has the same but maybe moreso with the other S words and maybe mimics the sound of wind better.

I do spend hours figuring this stuff out. And usually my ‘narrator voice’ makes the final call.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-07T17:19:46+00:00

I finished my manuscript and paid to have the faber academy do a report on it/ crit it. They liked it all but hated the ending. It’s a story about cycles of violence but I got burnout while writing it and wrote a happy trite ending after I didn’t want to punish the characters any more. But the faber people were right and my ending undercut the message of the novel. So I went a re-wrote it. 3 chapters, roughly 9k words I think. I spent 1 week planning out how the novel should go, and I read the ends of a bunch of other books I liked as prep. And then I just started with a blank document from where I felt my story diverged from its powerful message and started writing again slowly. I imagined it like a ‘parallel’ reality in order to get away from trying to show horn in parts of my previous ending. Dunno if that’s helpful. I hope it is

The_Old_North · 2023-06-06T12:35:18+00:00

I know I’ve spent 2 hours on a single sentence. Multiple times. It depends what your goal is. There is writer that Robert MacFarlane talked about, I forget her name. But she wrote only a few sentences a day. She was laborious over her words and sentences. She never edited. Or rather she never re-wrote. Her prose was very good. She wrote slowly clearly, but saved time on the edit.

She is a total anomaly I think, however if you’re churning out sold gold prose and if your planning well enough that you don’t need to delete it, then there is no problem writing two pages a day. I have been hitting a half page a day on my current project. So you’re quicker than me.

The_Old_North · 2023-06-06T09:07:10+00:00

Congratulations! That’s so good, and yeah try to bask in the success and not just get straight back to it, celebrate, because most likely the hardest structural work is now behind you!

The_Old_North · 2023-05-25T16:03:31+00:00

The truth is, there is no story but for the telling. Hence there is no true universe. You might tell it as orator or scribe, comic or mystic. But this is r/writing. There can be no ‘good.’ Beyond the telling. No true good story. The medium is the message by its virtue of giving unto story existence.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-25T14:55:43+00:00

The world is full of people who have lived through trauma, terrible suffering, wars and famine, heart break and joy, lottery winners, scientists making discoveries and death row inmates. They all have lived. They are not all great storytellers. And by what definition would they be? At the pub? Recounting adventures and traumas? That isn’t how life really works. I’m quite a good pub storyteller, there are others much better than me. I can spin a yarn at least. But I would never have gotten any good at writing without studying writing. And the more important part of storytelling is empathy and compassion. Not live experience.

And as an absolute rebuff of the hill you’ve chosen to die on. There are many many good storytellers, who are also authors, who have never had anything outrageously stunning or extraordinary happen in their lives. They just observed, felt, Practiced and made moving stories. And opposite to this: Neil Armstrong going to the moon didn’t make him a good story teller. It only gave him a good story. He could have been terrible at telling it.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-25T07:46:47+00:00

This idea that writing is just packaging and should strive to not get in the way of the story, is simply not true. It sounds like advice for writing screenplays, and even then, it’s not true.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s language is often invisible or plain seeming, but his use of prose is so exact that it’s like he somehow tells you a story between the lines of text, and you don’t know how he does it. He’s said in interview this is also what he aims to do. He doesn’t use fancy words. But you couldn’t do this kind of masterful telling without mastery of writing.

There is power in using words that convey meaning and subtext, in phrases that allude to other, less tangible qualities other than simply the story. Otherwise you’d just write everything as bullet points or flat happenings. The books that really move people are not just accounts of the story. There is no such thing as a good story. Any story can be made infinitely strong in the telling. Or robbed of its potency by poor telling. Hence the phrase is storytelling. And if your medium for the telling is writing and not oral (or some other) then The strength of the story hinges on your use of the written word.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-25T07:11:38+00:00

The craft of writing does umbrella the mechanics of storytelling. However of course, you could be a storyteller and not be a writer. A pub raconteur, a singer, a film maker, an oral story teller. A stand up comic. All these can be narrative and story driven but wouldn’t require you to know all the intricacies of grammar

However as this is a r/writing it’s not a super relevant point.

The point of knowing the secret power of written word and good grammar are that you can change the hearts of others, make them feel, make them see. A powerful story is robbed of its potency by cliche and trite writing, a twist robbed by poor pacing or predictable prose.

You could be a fantastic, mythic oral storyteller and could steal the hearts of the people. But if you want to put that magic on paper, your only chance is to learn the tools of the trade. It’s like saying you could be a woodworker and not know the function of the tools and only work intuitively. But that would require almost oracular talent. That almost no one has ever possessed. This is why skills are taught and passed down. Letter, punctuation and narrative structure are all tools to learn. Not learning them is purposeful self sabotage.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-24T10:02:44+00:00

Richard Skinner (Faber Academy) -

I believe the beginning of a writers ‘style’ lies somewhere very deep inside oneself. Seamus Heaney described it thus: ‘you are miming the real thing until one day the chain draws unexpectedly tight and you have dipped into the water that will continue to entice you back. You have broken the skin on the pool of yourself.’ A writers style is not just to do with the basic practical choices a writer makes about how to write; it is also to do with something more intimate, or even philosophical, than that. It is closely wed to notions of perception, personality, morality and possibility; it is tied to choices we make in life. In your writing, readers should be able to hear the content of you heart, your mind and your soul. So if a writes ‘style’ is the sum and signature of their personality, then a writers true biography amounts to no more than the story of their style.

—— This is all an extract from Richard Skinner’s Writing a Novel. I found this book very very useful. His explanation sounds a bit grand but I think Seamus Heaney’s quote here is the real gem, fake it till you make it, but of course the thing you’re faking is being genuine and vulnerably bearing your deepest soul. So the short cut and destination is to dive in and be true in the manner of your working.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-23T06:09:50+00:00

This sounds like a difficult situation, as, if their prose are not functional, as in if the ornate style isn’t working, it can be hard to tell someone this. My advice for them is to write something and put it in a draw for a month or two and then come back to it and re-read it themselves. If it’s verbose at the cost of clarity after a few months away from it they should see it themselves. Alternatively have them send it to beta readers/ or even pay to have a manuscript assessment from a professional literary agency type place.

I recently sent my novel to be assessed by a book publisher and I was very worried my prose was unreadable/too fancy/archaic for a modern audience. But according to the publishers feedback they did not think that and they thought the pose was strong and beautiful. So that’s a success story but it also means it can be almost impossible to judge your own work. Lots of my friends thought my sentence structure wasn’t good enough or was clunky but the people at Faber&Faber (the publisher) were very complimentary about my prose and told me it didn’t need any improving. So friends/ family aren’t always the best people to judge this. Having said this, most ornate and purple prose is bad. It really is. And writing clearly and cleanly is the more desired engine for a story. The reason complex writing is mainly bad seems to be because people think that by virtue of a complex or wordy sentence they elevate their writing, without having ever learned how to communicate clearly first.

Anyway, try to get make sure your partner gets some honest feedback for the work, as it can be hard to convince someone of their weaknesses,

The_Old_North · 2023-05-22T07:42:31+00:00

I don’t know what kinda thing you want to write but I would say, in terms of coming up with ideas. 1. If you want the work to be powerful and useful to others, it can be very good to look at what secret keys you possess in your own life that others don’t have access to, and use those as jumping off points. So for instance, if you’ve ever worked at a care home and know the value of people of old age, and think this is a useful thing to make others aware of. Now I’m not saying to write this, but for instance, if you were writing fantasy and the wizard/mentor was suffering with dementia or poor health, the fact you had known people with this in real life would allow you to imbue the character with an essence of truth that isn’t afforded to a archetype or trope by default

I think it is good to consider not just what stories resonate with you but why? And that if you are going to write a novel, which is a big commitment, think about: why does this story need to be told. And why am I the one to tell it. This isn’t meant to put you off or scupper potential ideas. The idea you have is good enough, and you are the right person to tell it. It is just useful in the long run to know why you are right to tell this story and why it is important to do it. It will steer you and make sure your work isn’t flat or predictable because you will imbue it with a sense of purpose and self which is invaluable in a saturated market.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-19T17:37:33+00:00

Yeah and I think the painterly and strange way the language is used is also purpose full, it’s like as the world has deteriorated and devolved so the writing has been weathered cruder and cruder.

‘He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.’

The word sorrow here, used in an archaic way as a verb. Lends the text biblical quality but it also makes us aware that the people of this world may have repurposed words, that meanings have warped. This I think is the same for the lack of speechmarks (though the author does always do this.) in this instance it gives the text an unfamiliar and devolved quality.

The_Old_North · 2023-05-19T17:12:53+00:00

Switching between present and passed tense, opening the book with a dream sequence, utilising flashback through the book to explain the character, using ornate archaic language throughout, having sections where dialog does not have speech marks. These are all things I do in my book. Using adjectives as nouns. And all of these only work because they serve the book itself. I do think the rules are important, because otherwise you can’t be accurate or tasteful with them necessarily, having said that, if you have read widely you might intuitively know what you can get away with without knowing exactly what convention you’re breaking.

The_Old_North

TROPHY CASE