Monk Quixote

I had the most ludi­crous thought yes­ter­day.  Yes, even more ludi­crous than the time I pointed at my Accountz appli­ca­tion win­dow and said, ‘yes, and all these…(points fin­ger up and down screen) are my accounts’ to my ex-accountant wife, hav­ing allowed her once-in-a-lifetime dri­ving seat of the main Mac-status.  Not so much sink­ing out of my depth, as exist­ing in some kind of flub­ber­verse where mere drown­ing in your own igno­rance is not good enough, one must become one with it.  Must be hard for her to keep up sometimes.

Any­hoo. Ludi­cros­ity. Or ludi­crous­ness.  As I brushed my teeth last night (some­thing I find much eas­ier than doing accounts, although the time com­mit­ment involved is sim­i­lar) I reflected on my writ­ing achieve­ments for the day. Non­sense blogged in var­i­ous places, emails sent, a slightly pan­icky and for­lorn author (think Eey­ore on a very British speed — tea) buck­led down to work at about 3:30 and even­tu­ally tal­lied 1,952 words. Of course, if I didn’t have to spend time whit­tling notches in lit­tle sticks as I wrote, I’d prob­a­bly get more done.  Any­way, I’d eas­ily sur­passed 4,000 words for the day, in all.  And I’m brush­ing my teeth think­ing ‘Four thou­sand a day, five days a week — I could be fin­ished in two weeks’.

Fin­ished in two weeks? Reader, I nearly read the instruc­tions instead of the How To. It’s nice to dream, isn’t it? And yet it doesn’t feel that implau­si­ble. Or Im Plau­si­ble, if I’m fol­low­ing yesterday’s theme — although I should have referred to ‘the wife’ as Er Indoors. Which must be con­fus­ing for Ger­man cock­neys. Gock­neys? I digress.

So I dreamt about fin­ish­ing. And about the myth­i­cal query let­ter — the next mon­ster on the hori­zon. Funny that, almost all the fear of writ­ing cre­atively has now gone.  The fear has moved on to the com­mer­cial aspects. My lack of thou­sands, nay, bil­lions of friends all demand­ing I be pub­lished. Imme­di­ately! Damn it! Odd twit­ter fol­lower pat­terns and well, sin­gu­lar lack of non-client related inter­net pres­ence to show for my ‘efforts’ at behav­ing nor­mally (ie my oh so stel­lar career). And that’s before we get to the sub­ject mat­ter. No obvi­ous read­er­ship! One of the main char­ac­ters is made of plas­tic and never speaks, another appears first as a leop­ard and then spends the rest of the novel trans­mo­gri­fy­ing from one bad pun to another, AND the nar­ra­tor spends half the time talk­ing to him­self in ital­ics. Men­tal­ist! I mean, he tries to be funny and learn things along the jour­ney in a clumsy, albeit affec­tion­ate way — cov­er­ing him­self in bit­ter­sweet sauce lessons. But still…

So, I worry about the pitch. I have already pre­pared a for­mal pitch doc­u­ment, in Scrivener, that I tor­ment myself with every now and again. I mean, why leave wor­ry­ing about until the novel’s fin­ished when you can waste end­less hours wor­ry­ing about it now?  Excel­lent dis­place­ment activ­i­ties young Jedi.

And yet what I really want to say is that it’s a mix­tape. Or a sum of some sort:

Tom’s Uni­verse: Monk Quixote = Cer­vantes x Dou­glas Adams + Nick Hornby — side­kicks / rel­a­tive tal­ent vari­ances. Where N is a num­ber of increas­ing improb­a­bil­ity and Y is the num­ber of pints it would take to explain this.  I mean, I can’t really pitch a book to an agent as ‘Amelie for boys, with added drink­ing and swearing’?

And that got me on to Tom’s Uni­verse II: Para­noise Alley = Kafka x JM Bar­rie + William Gib­son.  Which is approx­i­mately 2/3 Michael Mar­shall Smith.  I have yet to under­stand what the remain­ing 1/3 is. But it’s prob­a­bly where the cats live.

Which makes Tom’s Uni­verse III: The Cir­cus = Roald Dahl x Stein­beck. I’m less clear on this one. But it involves Dorset, motor­cy­cles, feral chil­dren and strange women in ban­danas. Which reminds me, I must read some more Rus­sell Hoban.

Although whether to men­tion the other two uni­verses is a point in itself. Sigh.  Does one men­tion to agents that there is more of this crap, in the hope they liked the first bit of crap? Or does one sim­ply stick with the crap one’s got? Cre­ativ­ity poker.

Any­way. The point is, I’m excited. Although I’ve just read back my descrip­tions to myself and I feel like I’m just try­ing to have Terry Gilliam’s career, but in words, not pic­tures. Although he’s already had his. And I am but a flea on the pim­ple of some­thing or other.  Not a bad thing. That sort of career. But prone to mishaps. Per­haps my first edi­tion could be en route from print­ing in China and get kid­napped by Somali pirates. The ran­som demanded is the inclu­sion of the ban­dit leader’s sec­ond wife as a main char­ac­ter. And then they want to finance a film of the book. And there’d be guns. And beards. And nar­whals. Probably.

Any­way. Dis­tract­ing myself into the day. Nice to dream though.