Category: Uncategorized

Thog

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August 2021

Time to refocus this blog on the activites I’m currently engaged in – linocut, bookbinding and occasional art. I’m hoping that in doing so I will reignite my writing mojo. But we shall see.

A couple of displacement activities this week – new arrivals in the paper department (from GF Smith) and collating all my linocut blocks and remaining prints of the last 18 months. This led to a rather pleasing reminder that I’ve created quite a few prints, and that in turn led me to look at the shelves and try and assess the number of different binding (styles) I’ve done.

• Pamphlet binding
• Flatback multi-section
• Multi-section case
• Bradel
• Disappearing spine Bradel (Cockram)
• Library style (English)
• Library style (Tarrico)
• Jean de Gonet (Tarrico)
• Crown / Star (Kyle)
• Drum
• Longstitch
• Japanese (variation)
• Crisscross / Belgian
• Shrigley (Elbel)
• Onion (Elbel)

Which was another pleasant surprise, although I think I’m only competent at perhaps three of these (and some I’ve only done once).

The point really is that I haven’t been doing a great job of documenting my progress in any formal sense, and perhaps posting will encourage me to be a bit more ‘formal’ about it. We shall see.

An interesting conundrum from last week’s visit from Major Author – do I want to be a ‘writer’ or a ‘storyteller’. The implication being that ‘writers’ are usually not commercially successful, only admired by their peers, but they may collect a few baubles along the way. Whereas a ‘storyteller’ will have a career, audience, and money.

I went into the talk thinking I wouldn’t agree with anything Major Author would say (almost as a matter of principle). I thought I would find it good theatre (I did) but dismiss the author’s way of doing things as easily as I have dismissed their work to date. I certainly don’t agree with the distinction between the two (writer/story-teller) – but perhaps I’m being naive.

For the most part, the talk went as expected – lots of grandstanding, a little boasting, light on detail and strong on personality. And yes, that was all there. But then they went through a writing exercise they’d undertaken. And the embarrassment gene kicked in and I thought it was going to be shoot under the desk time. But it wasn’t – at all. The seriousness which MA took it (both in having done the exercise – ‘drive’ being one of the key impressions of the night – and also the care with which they explained how they’d chosen words or phrases) really drove home three things:

• Every word matters
• Keep the reader wanting more. Never leave them satisfied.
• And most contentiously, don’t always know where you’re going to end up. That is what the second / third/ Nth draft is for. In MA’s own words ‘if I know where I’m going, I will give it away – I will spoil the surprise.’

As someone who despairs at ever finishing this specific draft, the idea of ‘wasted’ words fills me with dread. We had Other Major Author in the week before, and they’d cut 130k words from the latest draft over the course of a year. Madness!

But… but… but. I’ve been examining my manuscript, and been thinking about my process and ‘what kind of writer do I want to be’ (simple answer – the published kind)? And I’m slightly horrified to find myself more and more thinking along Major Author lines. Not that I suddenly start writing sagas or poor-boy-come-good-against-the-odds type things, but there is a lot to be said for their basic approach. Write and enjoy yourself. Entertain people. And make it work in the second draft. Or third. Fourth etc. Think about how you’re ending each para, each chapter. Revise, revise, revise until it works (MA also did this with their speech, and it’s something I’m well aware I do with my ‘jokes’) Make dialogue do the heavy lifting. Think hard before wasting time and effort describing things. If you need to simplify your language to get someone to turn the page, then do it….

I have bigger issues – principally whether I’m writing science fiction (well, cyberpunk or some new form of cyberpunk that allows for social networks – cyberspunk (HA!) or soc-sci-fi?)  – or whether I’m writing dystopian literary fiction.

I’m trying to write accessibly, but maybe the plot itself is too far out? I’m trying to write a funny story, that is also gripping. I’m not sure the two things are compatible. It’s certainly a hard sell…. Decisions, decisions….

Am I a writer? Or am I a story-teller?

…despair.

You sit in Starbucks and go through the routine. First, you will have slogged your way up the High Road at ‘How Early?’ O’clock in order to try to snaffle your favourite writing space in the coffee shop – the one where you can be easily distracted by the hundreds of nearly-but-never-quite accidents at the junction; the spot where the simple human drama of people parking illegally and then running back to their cars to avoid a ticket (oblivious to the CCTV now trained in their direction); the chair where you can see the queue best (and evaluate shoes and haircuts), where you can hear the sofa-groups that form impromptu behind you, and study your fellow mac-worriers (there’s rarely any war going on, let alone work) from the back of the class.

The tiny victory of beating a certain gentleman to that spot. The tedious weekend tussle with research girl who never stays for long. The frantic scramble when the certain gentleman leaves, as you know he always will (his schedule varies, you are sure, just to irritate you). The knuckle-eating misery of waiting for ‘some random’ to finish their phone-call / extra hot extra wet caramel soy machiavelli machiatto / fruit toast, blissfully unaware of the importance of The Seat.

And then the routine can begin in earnest. Pull the laptop out of the bag and twist – it is never in the right way. Walk around the table and plug it in. Take headphones out of centre pocket. Leave draped to the left of the machine. Never, ever, ever to the right. Order your drink. When the baristas recognise you and start to offer you ‘the usual’, get paranoid and change. Or change out of spite, or a pathetic pretence at free will. Always answer ‘yes’ to butter and jam, even though you like neither. Wait for your drink. Add sugar and stir three times. Pick up two napkins. Try to deposit all these items on your never-level table without spilling any.

Update your spreadsheet. Writing is all about spreadsheets, at the end of the day. Better get used to it now. Watch your average output plummet. See the projected completion date slip further and further into the land of futility. Tap at the screen in the ‘hours remaining’ column, and kid yourself that you can pull the same kind of shifts you did ‘in the old days’. The ‘old days’ being any time before this spreadsheet began. On no account check the accuracy of that statement. This is about present and future despair, not regret.

Listen to the same song as you take your first sips. Ponder on the consistency and composition of fruit toast. Stare out of the window. Wonder why you ever chose such a terrible waste of chord changes as ‘your song’ for this novel. Stare out of the window.

Eventually, you may start your Scrivener session. You will hope that you left some words straggling over from the last one – otherwise you will have to read what you wrote yesterday (and that way madness truly lies). If you are lucky – very lucky- you will catch a flier, and something you saw or heard or thought about or the colour of someone’s dress or a random tweet will worm its way into your fingers and occupy them for a while. You have no real idea what it has to do with the plot, characters or price of fish, but hey, you’re writing – be pleased.

And then the nagging begins. The little pecks on the shoulder. The doubts. A child falls over outside the window. Or an old lady holds the traffic up to have a chat halfway across the junction. A bus, steaming like an overweight pig, slumps sideways across the junction, waiting for other, less piggy, vehicles to cede ground or nip impatiently past.

And *bouf* there it is. Focus gone. Concentration wandering up the street with someone’s heels or peculiar mode of transport. @Ememess wrote about the feeling in Only Forward – the sensation where you’re dreaming and you are tricked into falling awake. It is that same feeling.

You must keep dreaming. You must keep being somewhere else. Because if you look up, all you will see is reality. And all you will feel is that nagging, clawing, bitching and biting sense of despair. And you update your spreadsheet. The numbers change but the doubts grow. You pack away your things and pretend to be happy.

Tomorrow, the fear will return.

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?

Hello blog, my old friend. I have – with equal degrees of non-success, kept a blog for going on 10 years now. I have never really built a rhythym of posting, or a readership, or really got what I wanted out of it.

Initially, I wrote a blog because I was lonely. And it’s difficult to see self-indulgence when the mirror has no back. Before blogging I belonged to various mailing lists and a couple of telnet-based chats. I wouldn’t join in much – just occasionally writing screeds of tightly wound nonsense, usually while drunk. Blogging was part of the same thing, really – just barking at the moon. Someone! Please! Pay me some attention!

But not too much.

At various times I tried to write poetry or short fiction via the blog, but it didn’t really work out. It’s also not much of a substitute for letter-writing (I used to write epics up until my mid-twenties – probably until I started working online, in fact). I never really worked out who I was writing for, or to.

The most ‘successful’ period of the blog was when I simply used it as a statistical diary. A web log, in the formal sense. How many words written, miles run, idle thoughts wasted. It did at least serve some sort of purpose, and it is vaguely amusing for me to review it once every couple of years (I’ve taken most of my old blogs down over the years).

I keep a blog – and this domain – purely because I still live in the perhaps naive hope that I will be published, that somehow documenting the process will be worthwhile – or from a marketing viewpoint, necessary. But again, this lack of clarity of purpose leads to a lack of engagement – from me, from my non-existent readers. And as a writer if your heart’s not in it, then why should you expect a reader to care?

And blogging itself – well… the internet winds have shifted – first to social networks, now to twitter, soon to short alliteral grunts via facetime or somesuch, who knows? An augmented reality feed straight into your neural cortex -> Walk down this street and see it as Paris Hilton sees it! Think like Justin Bieber. Taste like Neil Gaiman. Etc.  I’ve been there at or near the beginning of most of these ‘phenomena’, but not really established a use, or a niche, or engaged much. I just kind of wander in, reserve a username, fumble about a bit, and then realise that my online life pretty much mirrors my offline life.

For someone who has made a living from being a creative generalist (damned with faint praise) and generally solving problems in some form of creative fashion, I have been remarkable uncreative in my online activities. I have not started memes. I haven’t made pretty pictures which other people have stolen without attribution. In fact, damn it, I don’t think I’ve even had any of my blog posts hoovered up by some emo high school student and shared as her own angst. And everyone has that claim to fame….I have not become a guru. I have not become anything much.

When I left my last employer I had some re-career training, trying to re-focus into a copywriter, or features writer. Anything with the word ‘writer’ in it. Except underwriter. That would have involved an even longer hiatus. Anyhoo, I had a very pleasant day writing with a journalist (I was the only person on the course) who asked me what my specialism was. And I couldn’t really answer him, beyond the life and times of me (and even then, my friends, parents and ex-girlfriends have quite different versions of that topic). I know a little about a lot, and what I don’t know, I know where to find. I can’t pretend otherwise.

So anyway, next year, as Del Trotter would have it, there will be change. And blood. Possibly, depending on what I get for Christmas. I will find something to be good at. And, if necessary, tell people about it.

Otherwise, I think it’s probably time to let this blog persona go. I’ve just done a cursory edit on the above (is it just me that always expands things when they’re editing? I’ve never known a shorter second draft, but I digress) and I realised I was vaguely enjoying myself. I like putting one word after the other. Playing with rhythym. Tangentalising. Making nouns into verbs. And word soup.

But that’s what the novel is for. I haven’t written any of the second novel since May. I’ve been busy doing nothing and being generally inefficient. In fact, I’d like that as my epitaph – ‘generally inefficient’. Perhaps there is a little of the Dougals Adams spirit left in me after all.

This blog. Generally inefficient.

Be excellent to each other.

I haven’t written any fiction for eight weeks now. I am a creature of habit and routine – and fragile ones at that. ‘What I do’ is shaped over sequences of days – three, usually. After three days of doing something I feel ‘this is what I do’. And then, if – as I frequently do – I forget to keep going, I ‘reward’ myself with a break, or a distraction. Only to find that the break and the distraction are now ‘what I do’.

This is hardly a unique situation – most, if not all, people will feel like this at some point, and it’s a recurring theme of my adulthood. There are so many things, both current and past, that feel like I only ever did or do them to use up time. Not all of them are ‘fun’. Most are not exactly life-enhancing. At least now I’m generally happier they are not so overtly self-destructive or plain doofus. But like all habits, they become hard to break through sheer repetition.

As an aside – it’s probably the lack of an over-arching religious drive, or meta-habit, that causes this. If I were driven by God, or greed, or injustice or whatever, I imagine I would compartmentalise my life better – use one part as fuel for the other. Whereas in actuality it all bleeds into one mush of confusion and conflicting emotions. I have too much time and headspace to fill with empty little rituals and muscle-memory actions.

Speaking of muscle-memory…I sometimes wonder what the mental equivalent of a physical injury is. I don’t mean mental illness, or depression etc. But bruising, or sprains, or you know – the stuff you just learn to deal with – for example, most years I will have several weeks when I can’t run at all due to an injured ankle, or knee. I get cross, and tetchy, and heavier. I lose the will to run. I lose speed, and the love of running. And there must be an equivalent for the brain, but I have no idea what the symptoms look like. Or rather, feel like.

I suspect my head is mildly sprained at present. And that I am not quite treating it right. What is the equivalent of RICE for the head? I’m currently dosing with audiobooks and films recommended on lovefilm.

Anyway. This is just to say – to my one reader (and myself, if I am not that reader) – that I think it’s about time I stopped this nonsense (blogging, following, tweeting – generally drowning in a soup of trivia) and got on with some serious living. I can see my fortieth birthday looming over the next hill, and while I feel – and act – like a small child, the fact of the matter is that significant numbers of others don’t. And those others get publishing deals, or become VAT registered, or simply learn to be happy disconnected – untainted by the ephemera of other people’s lives. I need to busy with myself, not the lives of others.

So, let’s see how it goes. See you when this/the next novel is complete.