Monk Quixote

Hello blog — long time no see. All the cool kids have moved on to twit­ter and tum­blr and other lrs, but I wanted to res­ur­rect this blog to help me get my head around my new writ­ing project and occa­sion­ally vent a lit­tle. I find that if I vent in pub­lic fora I spend far too long wait­ing to see if any­one has read it. By writ­ing it here I can be pretty sure that nobody does, but every now and then some poor bewil­dered soul might stum­ble in and start talk­ing to the drunk tramp in the cor­ner. I doubt any­one is read­ing, but if you are, and feel so inclined, a lit­tle wave hello in the com­ments is always appre­ci­ated. Or tweet me @monkquixote.

So — to work. A lot has hap­pened since my last post. Mojo has come and gone, had a lit­tle dance, left some uncatholic doings and gen­er­ally laughed in my face. ‘Ha ha,’ it said, ‘you think you have the tenac­ity to write at vol­ume, but you haven’t met my friend Duende’. Seri­ously, the lit­tle imp gets every­where. Jobs to do. Lists to write. Angsts to slice. I even went as far as research­ing what mojo actu­ally means — or at least what some oik on wikipedia says it means. That was/is ded­i­ca­tion to mojo. It didn’t/doesn’t help that I am more famil­iar with the Canary Island sauce mojo — gar­lic has lit­tle place in writ­ing endeav­ours. Unless you’re that Twi­light woman.

But I digress. I have shelved Monk Quixote the novel for now. And I have also shelved The Onion Man which was partly MQ attempt 2, and partly my attempt at a more seri­ous nar­ra­tive style. I used semi-colons and every­thing. Pos­si­bly incor­rectly, but that’s not the issue; the impor­tant thing (see what I did there) being I tried to write a kitchen-sinker-get-me-on-Faber type book. I per­haps took it too lit­er­ally — it did start in the kitchen. And it was much bet­ter ‘writ­ten’ than Monk Quixote. How­ever, in its only indus­try runout, I once again wrote a mud­dled syn­op­sis and couldn’t pro­duce  a strong enough plot on paper — so that too has been put in a folder some­where (although I have added onions to my recur­ring tropes — cur­rently seag­ulls, crows, cats (angry and fluffy efforts), num­ber plates, fixed bear stares and star­ing bears).

So I’m writ­ing some­thing new. And I’m writ­ing mainly to please myself. My old­est piece of fic­tion — in the sense that I’ve been nib­bling away at this story for 20 odd years (some of them more odd than oth­ers, although all equally as old — time being reg­u­lar SI units after all. Are they SI units — one of my physi­cist friends will be along in a minute to cor­rect me. Pun not intended, but hey, we’re on a roll here). I’ve started the story many times over the years, but I never quite had the courage of my con­vic­tions. Who on earth would want to read about talk­ing cock­roaches, llama police­men and men­tally dis­turbed chil­dren? Well, so far, at least one per­son does. Cor­rec­tion — two (I like it too) — and for now that’s all that matters.

I’ve spent an awful lot of time not writ­ing things that I didn’t think peo­ple were going to like or writ­ing against type or wor­ry­ing about saleabil­ity, mar­kets and tastes — and yes, I’m still wor­ry­ing a lit­tle about all of these, but fun­da­men­tally I think that if I am enjoy­ing my writ­ing it will show on the page, and that may (may!) be enough to get peo­ple to turn to the next one. My nat­ural style is mor­bid com­edy, absurd satire, and occa­sional pathos — occa­sion­ally there is the dim dying embers of political/philosophical thought (but less as I get older). So that’s what I’m writ­ing — or rather ‘how’ I’m writ­ing. Not every­one will like it — even among the tiny group that have read my pre­vi­ous full length efforts — in fact some peo­ple will pos­i­tively hate it — but I guess that’s also what will hope­fully make it indi­vid­ual, unique — more ‘me’.

The hero is still Tom Esher — part Arthur Dent/Marvin, part Tim from Spaced, part mis­an­thropic Char­lie Bucket — and some of the char­ac­ters from other sto­ries have been recy­cled, but then it was always my inten­tion to have a series of nov­els tak­ing place in Tom’s Uni­verse. I can see a sequel to this one, and then another — and then pos­si­bly a new ver­sion of MQ down the line. I’m enjoy­ing myself a lot more. Some of what I’m writ­ing is pure non­sense. I have to make it eas­ier to read than on the blog, so there’s less word play and gen­eral ars­ing about, but it’s quite sim­i­lar in some regards — but with dia­logue and stage direc­tions. I worry I write too much dia­logue some­times — that I’m really writ­ing a screen­play lite, but any­way, that’s for another day.

Some of what I’ve writ­ten is macabre. Some, I hope is touch­ing. And some is gra­tu­itous writ­ing in of ref­er­ence points and char­ac­ters that I want played by spe­cific peo­ple in the movie who in the cold light of an edit­ing pen will prob­a­bly get removed (or I could release an Edgar Wright style — this is what this cereal packet rep­re­sented type extra on the e-book). You’ve got to dream, after all.…

So, we live again. We dream again. We fight on. We fight on to win. I will write a bit about process and story arcs in the next blog post. But for now… can you hear The Hum?