Monk Quixote

It’s been a bit of a strug­gle to adjust to work­ing for myself, as the last few blog posts have sug­gested.  But I’m hop­ing I’ve turned the cor­ner.  Got back on the horse.  Per­suaded the horse to turn the cor­ner, drink some water, per­form a cou­ple of quick stepovers and do the fan­dango.  Mamma mia, mamma mia, can you put me on the bri­dle.  Ok.  Enough already.  The point is, things are look­ing up.One of the magic things about the week in Totleigh Bar­ton was the lack of dis­trac­tions.  Well, apart from the work­shops, cook­ing, wash­ing up, talk­ing pish and cow-spotting.  Well, since going free­lance I’ve found it much harder than I should be to keep my writ­ing time free of dis­place­ment activ­i­ties (blog­ging included).  So, on Fri­day I tried a new approach.  I tried to go decid­edly retro.

It was a writ­ing day, but I decided to go to the ‘office’ rather than spend another day star­ing at the mag­pies star­ing at me from the rooftop aeri­als oppo­site.  Although in this case it was Star­bucks. I sat by a win­dow with an over­sized mug of cof­fee and just set pretentious-mode to stun.  Mole­sk­ine, foun­tain pen, cof­fee.  Obscure book of short sto­ries in satchel.  Sadly, despite every effort to pur­chase a new nation­al­ity at the counter, I could not become French or Russ­ian.  I set­tled for the com­pro­mise of fruit toast.  Well, some­thing had to break the Penguin-perfectness of the moment.

I only meant to sit down to do my ‘morn­ing pages’.  I didn’t have a clue what I would write. And for some rea­son I wrote down ‘it didn’t look like he would be able to fix the leak now’.  No idea why.  And I ran with it.  And the pen skit­tered away on the paper and three hours later I had the first draft of a new story for my ‘Shoes’ col­lec­tion.  Eighteen-hundred words or thereabouts.

And hav­ing met F for a nov­elty cup of lunchtime tea, I then came home and ‘wrote’ it again, at the key­board.  A shade under three thou­sand words, this draft. It’s turned into an exper­i­ment with first-person mono­logue, with just a lit­tle dia­logue to break it up for the reader.  It has lots of lit­tle Ivan trade­marks, includ­ing some fairly sav­age regional stereo­typ­ing.  I’m rea­son­ably pleased with it.

And I’m par­tic­u­larly pleased as it’s my most pro­duc­tive writ­ing day ever (nearly 5,000 words) and prob­a­bly more impor­tantly in the grand scheme of things seven or so hours of fic­tion graft.  I’m also happy that the copy-editing course I’ve been attend­ing appears to be hav­ing a pos­i­tive effect on my style, although my new-found idiot-pedant copy-editor occa­sion­ally disagrees.

If any­one wants to read it (it’s called Dirty Boots by the way — drop me a com­ment or an email).

Finally, in other news, I’ve started run­ning again.  Slowly, and only on the treadie.  But two eight-plus-mile runs and a gen­tle plod in the mid­dle. So get­ting back towards the work rate from ear­lier in the year.  And I’m just three miles short of 500 for the year to date.

So two types of shorts, two tread­mills metaphor­i­cally and lit­er­ally re-trodden.  Hap­pi­ness is sheer effort.  And I have ‘dead­lines’ for both for Octo­ber.  Lots of hard work ahead.  Good.

Keep smil­ing, and keep get­ting back on the horse folks.  Espe­cially if it’s a uni­corn.  Or carved in chalk.  Or per­haps on the bon­net of a blood-red sports car.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2009 at 9:31 pm, is filed under running, writing and tagged as: deadlines, horse, moleskine, queen, shoes.. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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