Author: ivan

I’ve been thinking a lot about voice recently. I get criticised, when anyone cares to make any observation at all, when I write things that aren’t ‘Ivan’. Like my last post, which I had intended as an exercise, and was supposed to be about the fear that was crippling me from writing anything new, but instead turned into something darker and more reptilian. But at the same time, it became more wordy, more showy… less me.

And I’ve been called out for it. I understand that. I get it. There’s something self-indulgent about bringing attention to your word choices. Oddly, I think it’s not so obvious if I make words up, rather than choose an ivory-enamelled one.I need to put that toy back in the box. Or find a different game to play – by using more points of view, or introducing more than one narrator per story.

Most of my writing for the past year has been very strongly first-person narrative, with a lot of interior monologue. The thing that has most affected me as a writer recently, is Daniel Day Lewis’s monologues from There Will Be Blood. I haven’t felt such a – ooh, I don’t know, visceral is such a stupid word – but it’s a rumbly feeling in your stomach when the bass hits just right and your inner cat wants to purr while your head is trying it’s damnedest to warn the heart for lies. I didn’t explain that well, but listen to Plainview speak again when you get a chance. It’s simply brilliant characterisation, and a highly distinctive voice. Larger than life, grotesque, even, but totally believable.

Most of my stories feature a child, or child-like, narrator. Often they are around the 8-10 year old mark. I don’t really know why – perhaps I’m working something out in my head. They rarely have a nice story to tell.  And when they’re not physically young, they are emotionally immature. But if I get away with it with a child, so far, adult readers are  finding it harder to ‘forgive’ an adult character’s flaws, which they are happier to do for a child’s. Or at least, that’s what I’ve found. You can use a word that’s too old for a child, or they can be too astute or even too mute, but when I write a ‘flawed’ adult, I’m finding that my readers are much more judgemental.

I wonder why that is? Is it simply not writing believable enough scenarios or characters? Hmm. Perhaps I am asking the reader to suspend too much disbelief, to ignore too much of their own experience. I’ve never really thought about it that way, but I guess I ‘read’ crime, SF and other genre fiction with different expectations from when I read literary or commercial fiction. Is it as simple as observing more conventions?

I frequently use naivety, ignorance or plain self-absorption as the catalyst for plot and character interaction. Usually, my characters grow or learn something – become less flawed – but sometimes the reader doesn’t see them as flawed, they see them as caricatures, or stereotypes. Or doesn’t understand how such a character functions in a ‘normal’ setting. I’m writing too many aliens, and not enough monsters.Monsters can be credible, no matter how grotesque – but the reader needs to believe in them for the effect to work. Aliens are just that – alien.

And an adult who behaves like a child, after a point, becomes an alien.

Not really sure where I’m going with this thought, but maybe I need to do a little less playing with words and character, and do a little more ‘work’. If I get the believability right, then the reader doesn’t need to decide whether to come to ‘play’ or not – they’re simply there in the room with Tom, and his choices.

Did any of that make sense?

*A fictional response to a powercut.*

Light. Then, nothing. An electrical snap and darkness folds around me. Instantaneous, uniform, enveloping… punishing, the light snatched away in a…what is the opposite of a flash? A sump? An implosion? A thwuck?

My senses strain. To touch, to feel, to smell, to see… to hear.  Yet there is nothing. There is only absence. An unnatural stillness. A silence where the body plays the lead part in the orchestra. Breathing, too loud. Blood fizzing and popping through my ears. The rustle of fabric as I struggle to control my urge to twitch. To freak out.

The silence closes in on me like a predator.  The darkness does nothing. It merely is. Smug, all-powerful, crushing. A bully to beat all bullies. Together, they are nothing personified. No – bigger than that – geomorphic, catacylsmic, universal. Yes, that’s it – they are the universal nothing. A nothingness. The nothingness.

I am scared. I no longer trust my body. All it tells me is that it is neither cool nor hot. My muscles refuse to move, locked. There is nothing to taste but the salt in my saliva, and as for smell, well, whatever that is, logic dictates that it must be me. Perhaps the signals from the senses are somehow  trapped between nerve ending and brain.

I wonder if I am paralysed. I wonder if I am still attached to my body at all. I wonder if I am dead. If I am part of the nothing.

But is it really nothing? I feel stupid even asking the question. Of course it’s nothing, Listen. Even the voice in my head is nothing. Tiny, insignificant, too small and feeble to ever reach an echo of another thought. There, it drifts off into infinity….

The nothingness does nothing. Says nothing.

I am, by nature, inquisitive. Imaginative, sensitive, impatient…  melodramatic, even. Yet I cannot imagine this nothing. And then I realise… this nothingness – perhaps it is only nothing  because I do not want it to be Something. I try not to want. And yet. There. It starts. A thought hatches and starts to uncoil like a snake in a basket. The nothingness starts to change. Subtly, almost imperceptibly. But enough for my new pair of snake eyes to see. To taste on my tongue. To hear in the pressure behind my ears. The nothingness is evolving, forming patterns. And yes, there is something, maybe, hidden – or cloaked – in the world outside my head.

Shh-hssh-shh-hss. I am confused as to whether it is the snake in my head or the nothingness outside that starts to hiss. I hesitate. The world – for I am convinced it still exists – indeed, I must believe, or I will fall into basket and never climb out, of this I am sure, is not silent. It is the sound of static, of electro-magnetic pulses. Of rhythyms and organisms beyond my understanding. White noise against a wall of black. An impenetrable tangle of noises and frequencies.

The noise triggers something in my vision, and I see snow. And floating orbs of purple and green and yellow and red. It is magical – no longer scary.

But then I imagine the source of these sounds. I imagine the insects and moulds and bacteria, inexorably destroying my body, my room, my house, my world, from the inside out. I imagine the radiation soup my brain is frying in – my bedroom, like most, a living, bleeping faraday cage of information, ubiquity and always-onness. The static shriek of earth as billions of machines screech at each other the desires and emotions of standardised instruction sets of bone and muscle, encased in fat and pressurised just so, so that we cannot escape to the stars or the depths, but spread ourselves and our ideas like a virus across the blue and green and white and red. All tending to brown. To dirt.

The dancing field of colour becomes outlines of tickboxes and thumbs and faces and logos and avatars and photos. And all the things I will never see, never own, never feel, never think. I try to blink, but the icons are inside my head, not out there.

I find myself longing for the darkness again. I cannot find my ‘off’ button. I do not want my brain to be always on. Always connected. Always in the way of a thousand billion streams of information, lies, likes and dislikes. My snake turns on me, dancing to someone else’s tune.

I am lost. An explorer across the stars, marooned in a human hell that they could not wait to die to build. And I am afraid. So afraid.

I try to remember childhood platitudes. ‘The only thing to fear is fear itself’. And ‘that which does not kill me, makes me stronger’. And I understand with a heart-crushing certainty, that I am alive – that I must fight.

And I realise that the answers are in me. I am programmed for this. I am a biological machine with almost endless capacity for self-deception, but my prime directive, my reason, my soul, my will, is in my genes. In my instinct for survival. I must find shelter. Or build one. I must find food. I must find others like me.

So I will build my hut, my cave, my island. I will learn to walk in the dark, or in the chaos of the light. And I will eat the static, and learn to like it. I will eat the bugs and the waves and the science and the fiction. I will find my blind and deaf companions. And I will teach them to read again.

And I will not fear.

I got a little bored of the design of the blog, so I’ve tinkered a little. Hopefully I haven’t broken anything. I’m also going to try to change what I post about, as I struggle to entertain myself, let alone anyone reading this, some days. The endless angst of an unpublished writer is hardly edifying stuff. And I’ve changed the background to remind me of what I aspire to be – an artist – and the reason why I want to write – to entertain, amuse, and one day hopefully, inspire.

The picture in the background is a black and white copy of a painting my uncle gave me in 1991. You can’t see all of it, but it’s a snake wrapped round a frame. I was going through a tough time at university, emotionally, physically and financially. He was living with my dad at the time, having finished one adventure and sqaubbling with my dad while he scrimped the money and energy together to embark on his next craziness (he was working as a forest ranger for half of the year, and artist-cum-cigarmaker for the other half).

He also gave me a tape of Polynesian music, and the two weeks I spent observing my dad and his brother squabbling furnish several anecdotes that feature in Tom’s Universe – both in Monk Quixote and the forthcoming Tamaduste.

The snake is actually fire red, the frame is a golden yellow, and the picture within the frame is an unpenetrable royal blue. Is it the sea? The mind? Is the snake benign, or evil? Is the frame saying something about life? Or is it simply a brightly coloured doodle to amuse a depressed nephew? It is without a doubt the most posession I treasure most. And that’s because as well as being beautiful, he wrote a little dedication, which I’ll translate from the Spanish:

To Iván with the hope that he finds an answer to his troubles, now and in the future – and balance, harmony and happiness.

Which is a lovely thing to receive – even more so in the winter of my 19th year. The Polynesian music, taped over an old C&W compilation, I was less enamoured of. Although he’d drawn a parody of Lucky Luke on the cover, so it was still pretty amazing. Sadly, I threw all my tapes away at the end of one house move too many in the middle of the last decade.

He’s an interesting and talented man, who should have made a lot more of his gifts, but like most of the Salcedo family, his duende got the better of him on many occasions – seeming to prefer a life of conflict, passion and isolation over conforming. He’d paint the most amazing things, on all sorts of surfaces – driftwood, cardboard boxes, rocks. His style ranged from fauvist to miro, usually with a strong political bent.

I haven’t spoken to him for years, but thanks to the internet I can see that he’s made some tentative steps online. Here’s a portfolio of some of his digital work (vastly inferior to his paintings):

Lolitas.

Anyway, for me, this change is a signal of intent. More art, less internal noise. I hope you like the change.

I’ve been watching, reading and listening to a lot of craftsmen and women recently, in a – so far successful – attempt to remind myself what it is I want to achieve with my writing, why it matters to me, and why it might potentially matter to others.

I’ve finished reading both DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little and David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten. Both, as far as I know are first novels, and both have a lot of personal history in them – although it’s far more hidden away in the latter. Pierre creates a wonderfully evocative place inside the hero’s head, and you can ‘hear’ the care and love that he’s put into every paragraph. Some of the lyrical and stylistic tics are simply brilliant, and there’s a real sense of an author having fun with what they’re doing – the important lesson for me is that it rarely spills over into self-indulgence, and while the plot is more than a little far-fetched, I think you’d have to be a pretty soulless reader not to want to find out what happens.

Mitchell’s work is very different, effectively a series of short stories with common threads and echoes running through them. I loved the differences in the voices (something I’m not very good at – I tend to write ‘me’ or sociopaths), although I felt a little let down by the ending. It felt like a ‘clever’ book, rather than an enjoyable book. But again, it gives me something to aspire to.

PS Is it just me or are those Google Books links just plain scary for anyone who wants to earn a living from copyright material?

Musically, I’ve taken advantage of Dada’s (the shop that took over Fopp in Chiswick) absurd pricing policies (double albums by jazz greats for £3) and I now have over a day’s worth of Brubeck, Basie, Coltrane, Ellington, Art Blakey, Compay Segundo and all manner of other compilations. It makes a pleasant change from the white noise or madrigals that I usually listen to while writing or working. And the craft in there, the joy in performance, the bloody-mindedness of the time signatures, riffs, fills and breaks – all of it is deeply inspiring. The only problem with the music is divorcing the experience from the only context I’ve ever really experienced this form of jazz in before – black and white film noir or screwball comedies. Although the idea of screwball noir is quite appealling.

BBC4 recently screened ‘Kings of Pastry (website is a bit poor, but never mind)’, which is a superb exploration of obsession, desire and craft – in this case, French patisserie chefs aiming to be recognised by their peers as the best in France in a competition that only runs every four years. The level of dedication, preparation and skill displayed is extraordinary… I like to think of myself as a good cook, but the things that these chefs create out of flour, eggs, sugar and chocolate is just astonishing. And the moment that one of the chefs breaks his six-foot sugar sculpture after three days of competition is just heartbreaking. The only downsides of the film is that most of this lovely calorie-fest gets thrown away at the end, and that smell-o-vision still hasn’t been invented.

I’ve also enjoyed watching the ‘Mastercrafts‘ series on BBC2 (well, actually, on iPlayer), where various enthusiasts are trained for six weeks in traditional crafts such as green-wood turning, stonecarving, thatching, smithing etc,. While not all of the skills are as telegenic, or appealling, as each other, the format, and voyage of discovery that the participants went through was similar for all the programmes. I guess part of this is down to presentation, and editing, but it was a joy to see the masters at work, and a genuine pleasure to see people – particularly those who struggled at the beginning of the training – producing a beautiful object – and most importantly, a functional object too.

Again, this has resonance for my writing. And it’s probably no coincidence that after a few weeks of feeling thoroughly miserable about my prospects, and contemplating going back to full-time employment, the creative juices have started flowing again. Which unfortunately manifested themselves in the usual way (awake at 2am as reams of dialogue are enacted in my head) so I am now far too tired to think.

I’ve also watched a shedload of good films recently – Alice in Wonderland, 21 Grams, in the Loop, The Changeling, Hurt Locker, Wendy and Lucy (ok, ok, not Wendy and Lucy) and also seen Ghost Stories at the Lyric – which is thoroughly recommended, although it is a horror show more than a play about ghosts, I’d argue.

So. A veritable smorgasbord of influences. Let’s see if I can turn all this ‘art’ and ‘craft’ into something productive. And yes, I’m late on a short story submission. Because I haven’t crafted it enough, why did you ask…

Scene 1: The 237 bus on the way back from Westfield-bloody-Westfield.

The speaker is younger than he sounds – a weary edge to his voice that his face doesn’t match. His skin is clear and smooth, his beard the right kind of straggly. He wears a plain black rasta hat that covers his dreads and ‘smart casual’ clothes – they’re smarter than what I’m wearing, at any rate. He is wearing a tan leather bomber jacket and smart jeans. An orange plastic bag dangles from his wrist with the word ‘Dazed’ printed on it in black. I try not to assume it’s a vinyl record. In truth, I have no idea, but it looks like it might be a shirt. He clumps up and down and then up the stairwell again. He groans at the number of the people on the bus and and peers over the top of people’s heads into the traffic outside. The overstuffed bus caterpillars forward in a roadwork-choreographed slow dance. He phones his friend – gender unclear – and proceeds to have a fifteen minute conversation that repeats on a loop:
‘Ya mon. Ima ona two tree sebben. The two tree sebben to Ounslow Eat. Issa totally serious mon. I never seen nuttin like it. The bus issa totally full of peepul. And the driver is doing crazy ting. It done gone right where it no spose to. T’traffic is something fierce mon.’

I try not to think of the Lilt advert, and remind myself that it’s ok to laugh at people sometimes, as long as it’s for the right reasons. Part of me wonders whether his performance is part of an elaborate wind-up.

He wanders around the same few phrases and I try to tune him out. And then he says:
‘Ya babe. I got a red one and a green one already. Leave the pink ones to the battyboys.’

Or at least that’s what I think I heard. I experience a familiar feeling of paranoia, as I debate the rights and wrongs of listening in to someone in public, and whether or not I’m judging him by what he wears, or the colour of his skin. But ultimately, I’m judging him by what he says. Or rather, repeats. When the person on the other end of the call says something, he sucks his teeth and clicks his tongue. Perhaps this is a reinforcement ritual – some kind of aural language mirroring. Involuntarily, I find myself mumbling something and making an ‘un huh’ noise of my own. Am I reminding myself of who I am? What my cultural noise is?

He shouts at the driver when someone makes a break for it – abandoning the top deck with little or no hope of making it to the exit before the bus should pull out. The rest of us ignore this display of civic-mindedness, and resume our attempts to ignore the inch by inch report of the progress of the bus we’re all on together. Eventually he repeats himself to a standstill, and he brings his call to a close. He scans the night traffic for clues as to the driver’s right or wrongness, but he doesn’t seem any more at ease.

A space opens up and he walks past me. He is wearing camel-coloured work boots – Timberlands, I think. They look nice. I’d like boots like those. For some reason, the cleanliness of his boots matters to me. My stop arrives and I inch down the stairs. As I reach the bottom of the stair well, three words ring out again… ‘two tree sebben…’

Scene 2: an afternoon screening of The Hurt Locker at Brentford Watermans, cashing in on its success at the Oscars. Although ‘cashing in’ is somewhat moot, as there are only five other people in the screening.

I am confused by a table full of cups and biscuits and coffee jugs as I enter the arts complex. It feels like a meeting. But I am not invited. I admire the dedication of the man on the box office who asks me to pick my seat from an empty cinema. He mishears me, and gives me the seat he wants to give me anyway. I feel vaguely unhappy I do not have a seat-selection system for situations like this. Perhaps he senses this.

Downstairs there is the familiar smell of curry and an appalling blend of bhangra house or something blaring over the PA. Three men, who look like refugees from the Irish bar down the road, drink tea and make themselves scarce when I arrive. Perhaps they ran out of free wifi. Perhaps they don’t like company.

I console myself with a bag of stale popcorn and some alcohol free lager, although it takes three attempts to make my words ‘salted popcorn please’ produce the desired result. I am early, and I eat most of the bag in the foyer. I try to make a joke with the usher as I say I’ll hold back the crowds as I gave him my ticket. He ignores me.

Unacknowledged, I feel rebellion stir within me, and I do not sit in my dedicated seat. I try not to compare the tiny size of the screen and comfortable hearing level with the behemoth that had presented itself as ‘Westfield Vue 7 Extreme Screen’ the other day. I muse that there are probably the same number of staff on duty. It’s just the two thousand other patrons and smell of hotdogs that’s missing.

They arrive after me and sit about four rows behind me. An old couple, I can’t make them out in the gloom, but one is male and the other female. I’d like to think that they’re on a date. Or making the most of publicly funded art venues while there still are some for them to enjoy. Little bit of politics. Well, it is The Hurt Locker. I can only hear her – his responses get lost in the carpet and the chairs and the ‘ta da da da dadadududas’ in front of me.

‘Oh. I thought some of those people having lunch would be coming in,’ she says, in a ‘my brain freezes if I do not speak’ kind of voice that describes the weather, the behaviour of cats, the state of the neighbours garden, the timeliness of buses and the occupancy rate of local civic amenities.

Mumble.

‘Well, there’s not a lot of us in, that’s all I’m saying. And you’d have thought with it winning those Oscars and everything…’

She has a London twang and my shoulders will tense up over the next two hours as various plot-related stage whispers bounce back and forth between them. There is particular confusion over the mis-identification of a boy (a booby trap sewn into the body of a dead young Iraqi – as grim as it sounds). They do not appear to understand that the mis-identification is part of the you know, ‘thing’.

Despite the annoyances, I’m glad they’re here. I hope to think I’ll still be going to the cinema, or whatever takes its place, in forty years time. And I hope I’m annoying young’uns. Or aliens. Or young aliens.

I do not see their shoes.

Scene 3: recycling lorry screeching down our road this morning.

I swear I hear the distant sounds of girls screaming at a pop concert. And then I hear the breaking of glass and slamming of bins and boxes on pavements. A mechanical, melodramatic sigh is followed by the guttural throb of a diesel engine rumbling forward a few yards, followed by more girls screaming.

It’s a recycling truck. Its brakes sound exactly like a pop concert. Or, more likely, I have rather odd hearing. I imagine a throng of screaming girls following the truck around and throwing knickers and other non-recyclable items at the workmen as they dig their way down suburbia, reliving endless dinner parties, Saturday morning paperfests and kid’s own choice cereal boxes. I absent-mindedly wonder what other irritating noises could be improved by similar mis-direction, until most everyday noises I can think of are replaced either by clown car klaxons and the gentle phut of a smoke machine. And then I remind myself that if the truck’s brakes were properly maintained there wouldnt’t be a noise at all – so this pop concert aural hallucination is in fact a sign of the decline of Western civilisation as we all know it. Which brings out the clown car klaxons again.

Clowns wear big shoes. I’ve not met a real clown since 1976. He scared the bejaysus out of me.

What did you hear today that spoke to you in some way?

I’ve been swimming in a sea of numbers for the last few days – which makes a pleasant change from staring at words and willing them to coalesce into something interesting. The upside is I get to make graphs, and I’m experimenting with new forms of data visualisation (I blame the Grauniad, myself) although for the most part I am sat in my uncomfortable ‘exectutive’ chair, scratching my head Laurel-style and squeaking ‘yes, but what does it all mean?’.

I know I was enjoying myself because I lost track of time (and *polite cough* I started talking to myself, compared myself to a maths-nut-eating squirrel, and took on the voice of Dr Staticon – the infamous serial graphulator of Olde Numbers Towne, Des Moines (Alabama). You haven’t heard of him? You should have – he left a square root sign on all his victims and only ever ate Pi. Ok, that last bit was a little predictable, but what do you expect? Matrices and catalytic converters, I mean quadratic… hydramatic…systematic equations?

In other news, the sun’s been out. No, it hasn’t gone to my head. It’s been covered in numbers. It’s well known that numbers are better than hats. Especially the number three. I also had a dream that I was in a meeting with Boris Johnson, current Mayor of BoTown and quite possibly the only Tory I wouldn’t mind having a chat with, mainly because I’d imagine he’d stand a round. Although on that basis, I should probably focus my drink-with-a-tory musings to 15 pint Hague.

In non-sun, three or Dr Staticon news, I have still to hear from my #1 preference agent. But I have booked a trip to the location of novel number three (sorry, I didn’t realise the numbers would repeat like that), which I’m quite looking forward to. But not as much as I’m looking forward to Friday, when I hope to finally get a new short story down (called ‘Geordie’ for now).

Anyhoo. Wibbled on about nothing, and cleared my head of graphs, bubbles, columns and all thoughts of consultancy, suntan-seas, squirrels, nuts and square roots, square balls and square pegs. It’s like a carriage return for my brain. And apologies if anyone actually reads any of this. But you can make the noise now, if you like – if you remember manual typewriters that is.

And so to bed.

I’ve been struggling a bit for motivation recently – I haven’t written anything new for a while and I haven’t been running in almost a month. The burden of freedom is choice – I hope someone more eloquent (or leoquent, as I originally typed – I had a vision of someone with Leo Sayer-sized hair ‘lalalaing’ at their keyboard) said that at some point and I’ve just assimilated it. Otherwise, I’ve got a cork up my backside. Anyway, one of the unforeseen problems of being self-employed is that I must make my own horizon, chart my own path. Sometimes I can see for miles, other times it feels like I’m standing at the mouth of a labyrinth.

It’s funny how weekends and bank holidays become meaningless. Even the hours in the day lose their impact – it’s really a matter of how much others expect to interact with you (says the wannabe hermit).

The major writing dilemma I face (the running one is simply manning up to running in the rain/snow/sub-optimal mud/road/tarmac mix) is over Tom’s Universe. If, as seems increasingly likely, I can’t garner any interest from agents – let alone publishers – then I need to make the classic poker decision – stick, twist or fold? Do I simply send the same material out to other agents? Revise what I’ve done? Or start something new? I’m not really sure which is harder (I’m usually drawn to the most unlikely or difficult course of action), but for once in my life, I’m just a little fed up with it (writing) – as the song suggested by Meg in the previous post joyfully proclaims in the chorus, ‘give me a break, for fuck’s sake’.

There are so many ideas and stories in my head that sometimes I get stuck as to what to write next. Everything seems to be in a constant state of drafting – and the queue gets longer and longer. Should I spend some time on my short stories? Start the next novel to take a break from Tom? Try and find someone to work with to create a ‘game’ story / app? Am I really a writer, or am I simply pretending to do this while the more socially difficult work (getting and retaining clients) is neglected? Ultimately, rightly or wrongly, as anti-social as I become, I can’t call myself a writer until I’m paid to write. (And yes, I know I do copywriting and other corporate writing, but that’s simply not the same – for a start it’s simpler, and it’s more lucrative).

I had hoped that finishing the novel, or sending it off, would make me feel like a writer. But it doesn’t. I still feel like the amateur I am. I know that sometimes I write well, and sometimes I don’t. I know that sometimes I expect too much of my readers, and other times I’m folding a paper aeroplane in 27 steps (did you ever do that as part of a training session – write instructions for how to perform a seemingly simple task? I was never very good at condensing those into the ‘right’ number of steps).

Anyhoo, I don’t mean to moan. I just haven’t written anything (anywhere, not just in this blog) for a while, and I needed to get the fingers moving – I will probably simply unpublish this entry later.

I am very lucky. I have a very supportive wife and friends, and despite my best attempts at doing no marketing whatsoever, I do have a little trickle of paying work that keeps me in rye bread and roobois tea while I sit on my increasingly large arse and contemplate my navel. Hmm. Maybe a run is really the best option now. Although it is raining….

Perhaps it’s the winter blues.

Ok. Enough. I think today is the day for some new shoes – a new short story in the series (as opposed to the four in draft). Although Colm Toibin would apparently disapprove (the Guardian’s Top Ten Tips for Fiction were some chicken soup for the soul on Saturday). And while we’re at it: The Delgados – If this is a plan

When I was younger, I had a ‘rejection song’ – for those times when the bottom of a pint pot wasn’t quite dark enough, or there was still an ounce of joy (see previous post) hiding meekly in my boot, or under an armpit or something (not so much  ‘ode to joy’ as ‘eau de boi’, but I digress). For most of my ‘lost’ years when I should have been in lectures or practising some coruscating wit on my tutors (students were, and are, sheep, for the most part) it was ‘Is she really going out with him?’ by Joe Jackson (no, not Michael Jackson’s father, the other Joe Jackson – the talented one).The genius of this song is that the chorus is a genuine ‘pint aloft’ celebration, while the verses are ‘smack the pint pot on the counter’ miserable (and you can do it on or off the beat, depending on how much tequila you’ve drunk). You can even, if the need arises, scrum down and spray the words at your fellow neanderthals in a shuffling ruck near the quiz machine.

C’est la vie, c’est la guerre.

I guess, looking back, I didn’t really have many problems in life, so I decided I should simply concentrate them all on the girl with purple hair not liking me enough to make kissyface, or at least not liking me so much as she liked other boys (and more memorably, girls – although tuppencelicking merely added to the ‘ecstacy of the agonies’ or whatever teenage male hormones become. Sweat and zits, mostly.).  As the initial jaunty chords of Joe’s magnum opus blared over the jukebox, I would narrow my eyes and scowl meaningfully over at the corner where the cool kids sat, and perform some kind of astral projection, willing the lyrics to reveal some kind of epiphany to the girls that my personality (if there was one at the time) simply could not. Meanwhile, the girl with the purple hair would make a discreet exit and go somewhere infinitely cooler with her boyfriend. Who, you know, probably had a car or something. Or didn’t spend every night getting smashed into oblivion while listening to adolescent anthems in the SU bar.

Sigh. Music to bring you down. The forgotten album of forgetting. I had an entire ‘festive top seven’, as I termed it. Seven slices of miserable pie to share with the rest of the bar, all for the princely sum of £1 and a little pride. What’s that Arthur? Oh yes, same again please….

Anyway, the point – today at least. My mail today was self-addressed – my first grown-up ‘rejections’. Jobs come and go, house near-purchases can sting a little, even relationships-gone-wrong lose some of their bite after a while. But today I received my first Rejections (capital R) in a long time – from literary agents.

I have been expecting them – statistically I think I should eventually rack up around 22 (although I only have one more query out in the wild at present).  And I can snatch a crumb of comfort from the fact that the agent I really want hasn’t rejected it – yet. But it’s coming, I suspect. And opening these letters reminded me of coping mechanisms of the past. And how I should really prepare a ritual song for situations like this. It’s a little more forgiving than chocolate.

But what should this song be? What, dear reader, should I greet my ‘it’s not you, it’s me’ form letters from literary agents with?

I need something angry, yet veined with self-doubt, and perhaps some form of subtle rebuke hinting at their inevitable recognition of my genius. (Yes, a different form of genius from Joe Jackson’s. Although perhaps I should simply put all I have learnt while sitting on bar stools watching purple-haired girls make kissyface with other purple and non-purple-haired folk into song-based form, and make millions. Millions I tell you. Although now that I think about it, I am the most likely target market. So I would have to sell the song for a million pounds. Which entails having a million pounds to spend on a song. Which might require selling some books first. It’s complicated, financially, I guess. Which is why I never had a car to attract purple-haired girls in the first place. Though, I could always afford £1 for the jukebox).

So anyway, if you can think of any suitable songs, do suggest them in the comments below – I’m genuinely curious (and it might cheer me up a little)….

I have been listening to Ikon: Music for the Soul and Spirit (Harry Christophers & The Sixteen) a lot recently. When I’m writing fiction, I like to listen to instrumental music – preferably with a lot of white noise – such as Mogwai (and I have to confess here, that like drinking Highland Park, this is inspired by Ian Rankin’s habits – but a little bit of mindless hero-mirroring never did anyone any harm. It’s not like I go around trying to grow beards, eat dogfood or make wasp factories or you know, act mostly harmlessly, or anything. (‘Mostly harmlessly’? Seriously, Ivan, sort your -lys out.).

The white noise element – loud, shapeless or distorted guitars – helps to empty my head of other imagery so that I can focus on the scene in hand. It’s one less distraction in the process. If I could, I would probably write in the dark. Although being unpublished, I cannot afford the special ‘see in the dark’ eye transplants that I hear all the top authors are getting nowadays. I’ve also just realised that I  tend to chew a lot (gum, I know, disgusting habit, but it’s healthier than biscuits) when I’m writing.

Together, these sensory deprivations/restritions all add to the blank canvas for me – the act of listening to the same thing, chewing the same taste etc all helps to create the environment for me to focus on creating new sights, sounds, tastes, smells…

Occasionally, I break my own rules with music with vocals in other languages – the only rule is that it can’t have easily identifiable English words in them – in case I type them by mistake. So I also listen to a lot of Scandinavian music, like Sigur Ros. I also tried branching out with The Necks, remembering a recommendation from someone whose opinion I value, but it took too long to arrive (as noise), and distorted the writing flow.  I sometimes wonder if you can tell what I was listening to when I wrote a particular piece. I think you can, but then I think a lot of things about my writing that aren’t obvious to other readers. In my head, most of what I write is full of many coloured threads, whereas most readers just see black. And matt black, at that. C’est la vie… c’est la nuit.

Je digress.

Where was I? Oh yes, ‘joy’. When I’m doing my freelance work (which tends to require a pedantic, analytic mindset, rather than what I feel is ‘creativity’ (others may disagree))  I tend to listen to classical music – or opera if I’m feeling very Morse-like (he is the Uber Pedant, at whose feet we proto-grumpies all worship). I’m a bit of a classical ignoramus (in all senses), so I forget what I do and don’t have, or what composer I like etc. I’m one of these dreadful people who tends to associate the ‘better’ classical pieces with adverts or moving images, so associations and memories tend to blend into one another, regardless.

I guess this simply reinforces the idea that listening to classical music is, traditionally, a form of penance, or devotion.

Which leads me to Harry Christophers & The Sixteen. I’d forgotten how much I like choral music. It can be both deeply soothing and yet uplifting at the same time. And it has obvious appeal for anyone who has an interest in monks and monastic life (more on this in the blog, soon). Choral music is aural tea, basically.

Somewhere in the Ikon collection is a song that repeats the refrain ‘Joy’ several times – with each part of the choir singing it at a slightly different cadence (sorry, I forget the technical term for this, but it’s effect is like a wave of ‘Joy’ with different frequencies – peaks and troughs of sound that ripple around the room). It gives me goosebumps. An amazing surge of endorphines rush around my body and I have the overwhelming urge to join in (but for the sake of my neighbours, I don’t).

It makes me think of cliff tops, and druids, and darkly lit cathedrals and the sea and the birds swirling and viking warrior parties returning from a raiding voyage, and…so many other things, all wrapped up in a few precious seconds. It’s just magical. For those few moments, time stands still in my head and I am lost in a maelstrom of images and feelings.  I can see, touch… smell things that aren’t there – like an intense narcotic experience.  It’s a beautiful piece of music.

And you know what? I’ve listened to the collection umpteen times since, and I can’t find that refrain again. It’s an auditory hallucination. Has that ever happened to you? There’s something peculiar about music – this doesn’t happen in the other senses (I think, am I wrong?).

Of course, in writing this post, I’ve had to check again, and I have finally found the segment in question – it’s two minutes into ‘A Child’s Prayer‘ – and is nowhere near as impressive as my memory of it. Funny that, isn’t it? I almost wish I’d not found it, now.

Becayse, it’s there in my head, clear as a bell. ‘Joy’. Perhaps someone’s trying to tell me something.

Join in, everybody – ‘joy!’.

One of the things I like most about my writing ‘career’ is that I get to wear what I like while I’m ‘working’. Being a man, this usually equates to the bare minimum of dignity, no concern for cut, style or even cleanliness of the garments, and fasteners, if any, must be loose and preferably elasticated. This is to accommodate the classic ‘writing’ positions – standing to stare out of the window, leaning back in the chair to stare out of the window, chewing religiously while staring out of the window or shuffling up and down stairs to the kettle without upsetting the wife or neighbours too much (we have that modern curse – large expanses of glass – covering 50% of the kitchen exterior surface).

Today is a little different. I am wearing my Not Quite West London But Close shirt, and some khaki pants (sorry, trousers) that get worn once every 18 months because they are hideous enough for me to notice that they’re hideous (which is a lot of hideousity. Hideousness? Hidelity?) As an example of how little I notice these things, I have, in my time bought and worn the following: three monks’ habits (the longest of long stories), am aberdeen-angus coloured blazer/jacket (sans horns), a nuclear-yellow long sleeved shirt from Banana Republic (I loved it, but eventually spilled purple nail varnish on it – another long story), tweed trousers at least four inches too short (another very long story), a rubberised macintosh (from a second-hand shop, no fetishism intended – I ripped it to bits in a moped accident), compression socks (for running – similar to those Paula Radcliffe wears although I suspect my feet and calves are twice her size), lycra shorts (for the gym, worn under another pair of shorts for modesty – thereby defeating some of the purpose of owning said item, although they do feel nice – but again, no fetishism intended) and umpteen fluorescent or otherwise gaudy items emblazoned with the Fetcheveryone logo for running, plodding and pootling in.

So, as you’ll observe, I have little ‘taste’ in clothes, and a blissfully under-developed fashion sense – to the extent that one of my mother’s favourite stories about me is the time she refused to be seen with me while out shopping together, as my holey jumper made me look like a vagrant, or that she was neglecting me. I had to shuffle along six paces behind. Which suited my teenage self fine, I suspect. Although I couldn’t really see through my fringe, so it was all moot anyway.

But put me in a suit… and instantly I feel uncomfortable. Partly it’s a size thing – I’m built like Spongebob Squarepants (nice legs, with a slab of butter for a torso. Ok, so that’s not Spongebob, but if I said Butterbob no-one would get the reference), but it’s mostly an attitude thing. I was a film student, briefly, and so I learnt about ‘tippage’ (the act of casting people who look like the profession they are portraying) and know the barest minimum (barely above pub quiz) about existentialism (something to do with Sartre and jumpers for goalposts). And whenever I put on formal trousers, or worse, a tie, I feel like a fraud. I feel like I’ve jumped class, or abandoned punk or something – although truth be told I’m the most conservative non-comformist you could find.

I have a similar problem with sunglasses. I can’t wear them. My pavlovian reaction is ‘ooh, look at me’, whereas the intent of the item is usually the exact opposite. I feel like I’m lying. I feel compelled to take them off and show the world what I’m feeling. Apprehension, mostly. I’m pretty apprehensive about most things. I used to think I was miserable, but now I mostly think I’m apprehensive. It’s progress, but only if you count it on some infinite scale of Marvins.

And I’m sitting here, with a fresh haircut, smart-ish clothes and feeling much worse than if I’d slipped on my Very West London Darling jeans (bought under duress, and with much flustering of the shop assistants in Gant with my utter cluelessness about the proper seat-riding/bottom positioning of ludicrously overpriced denim leg coverings). Because it feels like I’m trying. And I hate that. I like to be flip, and cynical, and think ‘yes, I could have got that/done that, but you know, next time I’ll try’. And the smart clothes, to me, are a very public sign of trying.

And why am I dressed up? Well, I have a meeting. A Nice Person has offered me some paid work (potentially), and it would be fun and interesting to do – and more importantly take my mind off waiting for the rejection slips to come back from the agents I queried (it’s funny, I’m almost willing them to be rejections – so I can wear them like a badge or something. Again – it’s a ‘trying’ thing). And with typical inverted snobbery, I have dressed up to meet my expectations of them – without really knowing much about the company. I do that a lot, and it’s something I thought I’d grow out of.

Anyhoo. Here I sit, trying but not trying; researching, but not learning; typing, but not writing.

Waiting, and yet not waiting.