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No further bets. I’ve had all the reviews and commentary I can use on my first draft, and I’ve thought and mulled and pondered and teased and rubbed and rung bells and talked and thought some more. I have the revisions I want to make to the plot in my head. Having had to describe the novel to lots of people in the past few weeks I think I finally have the teaser and the synopsis reduced into words that might prompt a reader (or agent, in this case) to pick it up.

~o~

The long blurb

We all have our demons to fight; we all have our burdens to bear. Monk Quixote is the story of how two estranged men – father and son – deal with theirs.
Tom Esher’s comfortable muddle of a life is turned upside-down by the dying wish of Frank, his estranged father – a request that will lead Tom on a quest – for understanding, forgiveness, and redemption.
He travels from his safe, private, unique universe of rules and routines that exist mostly in his head, into Frank’s world – full of strange, chaotic people in unfamiliar places – where myths and hopes are bound up in near-sacred objects, talismans and books…and people drink a lot.
At the same time, he will try to juggle his job, his ‘not sure where this is going’ relationship, his ‘normal’ friends and the minimum of basic housekeeping with the amount of time he spends in an entirely virtual world – where he re-invents himself as Monk Quixote, a silver-furred hero that is everything that he is not.
Through a series of journeys, intoxications and chance encounters, Tom uncovers secrets about his father that paint both of them in a new and occasionally startling light – including discovering a treasure more precious to Tom than, well, levelling up as Monk Quixote will ever be.
By finally accepting the series of coincidences and their consequences that have led to his present, Tom learns to forgive himself for some of the choices he has made in his life. In doing so, he frees himself from some of the chains he has unwittingly tied himself to…
How much of this is deliberate on Frank’s part, and how much is simply the Gods of Irony playing with Tom, is left to the reader to decide.

~o~

So now all I have to do is take my writing axe and go lop down some adverbs, hone some characters and clear the path for my plot a little.  On the plus side, there’s relatively little re-writing. On the minus side, my track record with tweaking is not great – I am one of the few editors I know whose word count increases when they edit.

I have been listening to a Spanish language Don Quixote audiobook, so I must try not to write the word ‘castanets’ too often in my editing window. I have also just started the excellent The Three Evangelists by Fred Vargas, so if I suddenly introduce some apostles and beech trees, well, we’ll know where they came from…

Ok. Enough now. Prevarication upon displacement avoidance upon avoidance tactic. I have five days to get this draft out to agents before my 38th birthday.

Ladies and gentlemen, no further bets.

Wish me luck.

The manuscript has sat, a paper hippo wallowing on my kitchen table, for the past six weeks. I have prodded it, wrapped it in rubber bands, poked it with a pencil. I have picked at it, shouted at it, threatened it, with no result. The title page sits, unflappable, calm, presumed dead.

Various friends and family have given feedback, and I have sought solace and inspiration in the words of others. I have tried, and failed, umpteen times, to describe what it is meant to be about – and been corrected at nearly every turn by my readers. Layers are all very well, but you have to make the initial wrapper attractive – and not in a Rowan Atkinson Love Actually way. So, I’ve gone back to first principles – the book that started it all (Don Quixote – a children’s version; and just last night I finished my skim re-read of Self-editing for fiction writers, which is still the best creative writing ‘how to’ book I’ve read. Once I finish this draft I will go back to Carole Blake’s From Pitch to Publication… just in case, you know…).

I’ve been stuck. A lot of the problems with writing long-form, I’ve found, are simply mechanical… procedural. How do I find the time? The will? What tools should I use? How do I work best? How much should I (attempt to) write each day? Revise as I go or at the end? Etc etc.

Well, the same problem has hit once I finished the first draft. How much effort in polishing now, before comments? Who to send it to for first impressions? How long to wait? What to do with what people say? Learning how to receive criticism from friends has been interesting – trying to distinguish between kindness and genuine praise, learning to weigh personal preferences against each other (even if it’s just for me to say ‘no, that character/word/plotline is fine as it is’).

And now, having run out of, well, desire rather than patience, for any more feedback, I’m stuck as to how to edit. I made one unwitting mistake in software choice. I use Scrivener for creating stories, which does exactly what I want it to do and no more. It helps me create and it helps me structure. It doesn’t do page numbering, or other formatting things, so I tinkered in Pages (I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder about using Microsoft or Google tools). And, this is the bit I need to remember not to do again, I corrected typos in my Pages version.

Pages, however, won’t let me easily make the further formatting changes I need to make to ensure it’s in standard submission format –  it’s screwed up first-line indents, chapter heading spacings,  added hyphenation for some unfathomable reason etc. All of these a little harder than I could bear to correct one by one.- it’s the wrong tool for what I want to do (or my knowledge and the time I’m willing to invest is poor – either way, it doesn’t get the job done). So I tried editing on paper, but it just ‘feels’ wrong. I know – blasphemy – but I’ve only ever written or edited on screen before. Proofing works better on paper, but I can’t move things around – or write in that peculiar manner I have (I write like other people paint).

So I’ve ended up back in Word, which tastes a little like defeat, but at least it’s a pragmatic defeat. And being me, it’s given me ample time to faff, to huff, to puff and allow myself to be too easily discouraged.

And I have my list from the Self-Editing book:

1. How am I controlling time?

2. Resist the Urge to Explain

3. Don’t explain dialogue that doesn’t need it (dialogue qualifiers)

4. Check where and when speaker attribution is necessary (I’ve used it religiously, throughout)

5. Ellipsis for gaps – dashes for interruptions

6. Allow dialogue to stutter, stumble and flow with commas. (Remove some of my staccato full stops)

7. Check for repetition (of phrasing, plot, dialogue/narrative)

8. Are all my incidental characters really necessary?

But today I have run out of further excuses. Other than I’m tired. And Marek the carpenter is butchering the garden door as I speak. And I want to change the title of the novel. And I haven’t read enough of Riskglossary.com.

And.

And.

It’s a little scary, really, isn’t it? The longer you take to finish, the longer you can pretend it’s a good read, that people will like it, buy it, and that I will earn enough to live off my writing. That some mad fool might make it into a film. That I could direct. And write the music for. And win a simultaneous Bafta, Brit and Booker.

You know. Dreams. Dreams are only ever shattered by real things. If the real thing never exists, you can cling on to your dreams….

And so to bed. I mean, work. See you on the other side of the agents’ draft.

Feel free to chastise me or give me tips in the comments….

I wake and decide to go for a chilly early morning 5 mile run along the Thames. I jog along dead man’s beard pavements covered in frozen chewing gum and dog turd. I reach the river and turn towards a beautiful mouldy peach sunrise, bands of purple and orange and crimson, topped with dark wisps of cloud. Streetlights – reedy metal pensioners – sucking on an amber fag, huddle together on corners and avoid all the really dark places. The underpass is lit, and less threatening than during the day. Even the litter is frozen to the spot.

On the horizon, I can see planes stacking for Heathrow. Even they look beautiful in the sunrise, sleek black metallic swans picked out perfectly against the bruised sky. They are relentless, a factory of new arrivals, soon-to-be-memories and occasionally, hope. I wonder if each successive plane carves the path a little deeper, like runners on a trail.

I wave at nothing in particular and carefully blow my nose into a hanky while running. It is an idiosyncracy of mine, I know. But it does not feel right to make snot projectiles. Once a catholic schoolboy….

My only companions are fellow travellers in fluorescent clothing – poking in drains or sitting hunched up in misted up Transits, willing the clock to go slower. I wonder about the vans, parked up in an area of dim repute, and pity anyone who has to work this early. As for working girls, well, I cannot imagine the desperation. Or from the man’s perspective, the satisfaction. I plod on.

A car stops several times on the road alongside me – about 20 yards or so across the riverside scrub. I fancy I’ve interrupted something illicit, and that the car’s occupants are sizing me up, or are looking for clues to find me again – they can hunt me down by the insignia on my running hat. But it is just a woman  trying to get a signal on her mobile phone, leaning out of her metal cocoon wrapped in coats, gloves and furry hat. The call must be important. Or she is quite madly in love with the view across to Barnes.

A flock of geese trundle overhead, flying in perfect formation. I wonder if geese aspire to be the pilot, the navigator, or whether they’re quite happy to be ‘Right Goose Three’? I suppose they’re just happy to be alive. Flying in formation. ‘It’s what we do’, say the geese. That and ruin the grass. A lone parakeet skirrets across the sky. I hope it’s cold. Then maybe it will go home. They don’t belong here. Perhaps it could hitch a lift from Heathrow.

I pass several hardy runners. Most are resolutely doing the five yard stare, the learnt mistrust of apparently smooth surfaces all too apparent on their unhappy faces. All are plugged into their own private world, tell tale wires dripping from their ears – perhaps they are running androids, and this is their feeding mechanism? They are wrapped, like me, in layers of synthetic clothing, while doing very real effort.This isn’t fun. This is duty. Like flying in formation.

I listen to Underworld and try to ignore the pains in my legs. I move my hips forward but my shoulders slump. I try to elongate my stride but I appear to be doing a fast duck walk. I settle for old chinese lady running, all pitter patter feet and hip wiggling. A brief memory of favourite races I’ve done – marathons mainly – flits across my head like the parakeet and my eyes moisten. Bloody weather.

I’m nearly home and the light is spreading. A tower block somewhere in Mortlake is bathed in a pool of fiery gold, but my homeward streets are still flecked with frost spittle. Security guards from the brewery move as slow as is humanly possible. There is not much beer rustling in Chiswick. A woman’s hair catches my eye, ribbons of gold bobbing up and down as she marches to work. I pass and steal a look at her face. All I see are a mole and a nose. Goodbye mole-nose-hair lady.

I’m turning for home now. Schoolchildren ignore me, and the post van tries to run me over. He’s lost. The scent of de-icer hangs heavily in the air, and I can smell the thickness of the ozone near the roundabout. I make my last road crossings and into my road. I need the loo. I speed up – I always like to give the neighbours the impression I am faster than I really am. Of course this ignores the shuffling shambles they will have witnessed 45 or so minutes earlier huffing and puffing in the other direction.

But here, with 100 yards to go, I am imperious. I am a running machine. I am the joginator. And here, here is my home. My door. I switch my Garmin off. My legs respond to their digital prompt by shouting a miscellany of complaints to me in muscle and nerve language. But it’s immaterial. Here is my home. Here is my not-running place. Here is my hot shower. Here is my tea.

Yet my thoughts continue to pile into each other. No machine tells my brain to stop running. Well, not until the hospital – at some unspecified point in the future.  For now, it’s just me, tea, and the memory of a mouldy peach sunrise.

Hello blog. It’s been a while. I wasn’t very well. And real life is just so ‘gosh darnit’ real at times. The novel remains unedited. My diary remains unfull – I am practising my positive spinnery in anticipation of paid marketing work. Hence not ’empty’ – merely ‘unfull’ – which suggests that at any moment it will become full. Overflowing, in fact. So full that it may well need recycling.

Anyhoo. Some other folk have now read the friends and family draft of the first book. And they’ve been polite and said some of the right things, and some of the wrong things. I had the slightly surreal experience of five of my closest friends turn on me in the pub to deliver their verdicts on bits read to date. And the very surreal experience of two people disagreeing (not exactly arguing) about some part of it in front of me… hello! Author here!… which goes to show – once the book is out of your head you don’t own it any more.

More importantly I learnt a few lessons. I learnt that it’s not enough just to ‘make things up’. You have to ‘make them up believably’ – so if something could happen in the way you describe it, you should really check whether it does or doesn’t. I failed on two counts –

1. Not doing enough research. Simple things like timings, costs, and on to more complex things like gambling systems and whether or not there is any sand on Hastings beach.
2. Not being clear enough as to what I want to say. There are so many mixed herrings and white rabbits disappearing down holes that sometimes basics like characterisation and plot have suffered. I need to ask ‘why’ a lot more… ‘why is this incidental character here?’, ‘why does my character do this?’, ‘what makes my reader want to turn the page?’. I think I’m reasonably good at the plot movement – in the sense that there is always something of interest to turn the page – but less so on ‘do I like the characters?’ … and the end impression on the reader.

In short, I need to turn it from something that is ‘readable’ to something that is ‘talkable’. I have yet to make my readers think – they are merely along for the ride. And for the moment, they ride because they are friends and family, not because they want to read what I write.

I’ve started reading again, to try to broaden my horizons:

• Kazuo Ishiguro – Never Let Me Go . Beautifully written, with a very strong narrative voice, but I preferred the same concept’s treatment in @ememess‘s Spares, (but then I’m biased). The kind of book that people want to talk about. Hence jealousy.
• a bastardised version of Don Quixote
• currently reading Jonathan Lethem, You don’t love me, yet. Enjoying his use of language, and some of his kooky ideas, although it feels like an Hernandez Bros Love and Rockets novel. Which is no bad thing.

Having finished the beta draft. I now wait for feedback before making it a better draft and then… the crushing inevitability of rejection from agent after agent. But we fight on, we do not let the dark lady logic win – no! I’m in the middle of completing my  displacement activities top trumps pack:

• Made a list of agents I will approach, ranked, with different coloured labels;
• Made soup;
• Made a list of soups;
• (Yet to make agent soup, although I here spaghetti is better);
• Done some ironing;
• Done some irony;
• Done some ironic soup (it’s frozen);
• Checked my email about a billion times;
• Tried to distract myself on twitter (feels very much like adult tellytubbies sometimes, only ‘refresh, refresh’ instead of ‘again, again’.;
• Frozen to death in the kitchen. Ok, not actually to death, but to a point approaching death, where N is the starting point and the end is a point beyond which soup, no matter what it’s ingredients, can no longer revive you;
• Started second novel;
• Worried about second novel’s commercial potential (or lack thereof). Pondered writing novel about soup – or ironing. Resolved to call the novel ‘Iron soup’.
• Waited a bit;
• Considered making main character a soup-obsessed serial killer, for makimum cookery/crime crossover sales;
• Jiggled my knees in a really irritating manner. It’s ok, because there’s only me about. Still very irritating though. And I can see my reflection in the glass. Jiggle piggle;
• Despaired at the sheer bloody number of other authors out there. Perhaps if I can’t out-talent them, I could kill them all. With soup. I could send care parcels to various agency author lists consisting of poisoned soup. Hmm. Very Agatha Christie. I wonder how long she waited for feedback.

Anyhoo. This post is really a load of old nonsense to keep the blog ticking over and to pretend to the man who’s been running around painting various walls for the past four five hours that I don’t press Apple+R for a living.

I’ve resigned myself to the fact that  this draft – possibly this story – not being ‘the one’. I like bits of it, but there are other bits are confused, or dull, or plain wrong. And I’m beginning to see this as my ‘friends and family’ book. But at least I’ve learnt some things along the way:

• A book can be as simple as 35 scenes. That’s not scary at all. 35 writing days. Easy. (Cackles hysterically as he looks at the calendar – let’s see, novel #1 overdue by 9 years);
• You can sit in a crowded place and yet be completely alone, as long as you have headphones;
• Don’t turn round in Starbucks after you’ve been writing for hours or you’ll freak yourself out (one time it felt I was back in a university seminar – six tables immediately behind me all occupied by lone typists, but mostly it’s the seething mass of toddlers, tired-looking mums and harrassed staff that are disturbing);
• You don’t have to begin at the beginning. But you do have to end at the end;
• Don’t get too attached to your characters. They’re not real. They won’t buy you beer. Or make you breakfast;
• Trust your fingers. If you start writing a character or scene differently from the one in your head, let it flow – see where it goes first. Don’t rein yourself in too much;
• There should be a little applet for Scrivener or WP apps that you can load with your own personal cliche list. I used the expression ‘wheezed asthmatically’ three times – all of them have since been struck. There are far too many ‘arghs’ and ‘ahas’ as well. And the less said about the MMS and DA homage bits. La la la.

Hurry up people. Read. *Smile*.

Patience, souphopper… patience.

Sitting here in Starbucks feeling… numb, mostly. At around 11:18 I finished the very first tentative draft of the novel. And there’s now the anxious wait for my sanity-check readers to get back to me and tell me whether they like it or not. Whether it makes sense or not.

It’s not ‘finished’ finished. And I don’t mean ‘not finished’ in the artistic sense, either. But the story is told. What remains is detail, polish and refinement.  I’m calling it the alpha draft. Because once one sups with a geek, one learns to carry a napkin. Or something. It’s a useful metaphor. It has all the functions of the finished product. And more bugs. And swearing.

And finishing it feels…odd. Scary. Disturbing. Almost a panicky-type feeling.

I’ve been trying to write this story – and it is more or less the same story – for eighteen years. I have a WordPerfect draft of the opening chapter somewhere that dates back to 1996. There were earlier attempts on a BBC Micro. But sadly, they are lost for ever. Or maybe, hurrah! They’re lost forever!

I’ve written and re-written and edited and debated and torn up and destroyed countless first chapters. It never worked. I was never happy with it. The characterisation was too transparently based on people I was having relationships with. It was too cutesy. It was trying to be too clever. It was in the wrong tense. It was in the wrong person. It was in the wrong language… you get the picture.

It’s been torture. Mental, emotional, torture. All I’ve ever wanted to do is write. Well, to tell stories – I enjoy the odd shaggy dog moment in the pub or idle dreams of directing as much as the next slacker. But I simply couldn’t do it. I couldn’t turn the page. I couldn’t write the next chapter. I tried to persuade myself that I didn’t even want it to be published, that I just wanted to write for its own sake.

When I meet that person, I want to shake their hand, pilgrim.

And anyway, two things happened:
First, I went on an Arvon Foundation creative writing course. Now, I have an entire shelf of books that are supposed to teach you creative writing. Some of them I’ve even opened. A very select few, I have read. But creative writing books, for the most part, tell you things that you already know. The course didn’t teach me anything fundamentally new, or particularly life-changing. But, and it’s the biggest but in the world, it did so in an environment that was designed to get me to write.
And so I did. A bit. Well, for me, quite a lot. I got excited.

Those that know me, know I don’t ‘do’ excited.

Second, my wife erm, happened. Now I’m afraid she’s mine and you’re not having her, so you’ll just have to try and find a suitable substitute in the husbands, wives, civil partners and you-know-its-complicated shop.  Check for best before dates. It’s a kicker. Anyway, my wife gave me the time, space and encouragement to write. And I will always be pathetically gratefully to her for that.

Because I did it. I slayed the dragon. Ok, it’s still bleeding. And the script is not in agent-ready state, by any means. But I wrote the story down. I sat and I typed and I typed and I typed. And some of the keystrokes even came out in the right order.

As someone once said to me – time, tenacity, talent. I’ve dealt with the first two, now it’s time to sharpen the third.

I’ve listened to the same six Mogwai and Sigur Ros albums until my ears are pretty much oblivious to white noise and alien harmonies. I sit in Starbucks, more or less swimming in screaming babies, toddlers and extra-hot extra-shot extra-wet vanillagingerbreadlatte and tune out the rest of the world. Well, except for the old man with bryclreemed hair who sits behind me and reads his spreadsheets out loud. Or the american media buyer this morning who had an impressive syllable per second ratio. Oh, and the odd young man who spent an hour crying while talking to his female companion. I don’ think they were breaking up. Maybe he’d heard a really sad spreadsheet.

And now, it’s a few hours later and I simply don’t know what to do with myself. I can’t start the re-writes and amends yet. I’m too tired for any normal kind of behaviour. (Translated: really don’t want to do the housework right now).

I don’t feel like celebrating – there’s nothing to celebrate yet. I know I keep banging on about it. But it just. Feels. Weird.

Let’s hope it feels even more weird when I print off the bastard child and seal it in a brown paper prison. And with any luck, I’ll reach agents’ desks just in time for a new year’s resolution to publish more nonsense-masquerading-as-prose.

To ellipsis and beyond my friends….

My long fiction is largely centred around Tom, and the universes he creates for himself. This opens up lots of useful metaphors, and occasionally, expectations in the reader. Although as the criticism I most frequently receive is ‘what the fuck?’ (except my readers are usually a smidgeon more polite) I guess these are very dark universes. Ridden with black holes of plot. And humour.

Whatever, they need more light to show the way. A chart perhaps. Some light orienteering is permissible, but guided tours are preferable.

And speaking of Guides, I guess, at some very low wattage somewhere in the basement of my mind is the idea that I’m trying to write the anti-Hitchhiker. No benevolent omniscient narrator. No philosophy. Just confused, selfish narcissism. Less ‘where is my towel’ and more ‘who’s responsible for manufacturing towels around here anyway?’.

Oh dear. That sounds dreadful. I must have swallowed an undergraduate piece of toast this morning. I’d probably have written an essay with that title once (the towel manufacture bit, not the undergraduate toast…). I seem to remember handing in a prose poem as an essay once. Serves ’em right say I, for killing all the elephants of certainty. Give me a blunderbuss and we proles will fire holes in your ivory towers.

Or some such nonsense. I’d have a stern word with my younger self now.

Anyway. Today’s idle musing was brought to you (a) by tiredness – I wrote a lot yesterday, and I am much more nervous about the result than usual. I kept finding editorial continuity errors. Or imagining things or phrases that the reader might find odd if omitted. I even had one of those dreadful sequences when you find you are about to type out the exchange between two people saying goodnight to each other.

The problem I find, is that I imagine my scene as a film – and yet I only have the one voice to tell the story. As the action is told only from one point of view I have to manoeuvre other players around the ‘stage’ in what feels like quite a clumsy fashion.  I guess that’s why it’s called a craft. Practise the practice.

So I’ve been thinking about the amount of hand-holding I do in the book.

And lo… (b) a train of thoughts instigated by an interesting tweet from @jscarroll (Jonathan Carroll)- the God of interesting things on twitter. Seriously. He’s my (and countless others’) personal curator of the curious. Or ticket-inspector of oddness, I suppose, if this is really a train. Ahem. The quote:

Writing allows you to draw a map of your world for others to follow if they are interested.

Which is so true.  And it chimes with something Neil Gaiman says a lot (on his journal, I have yet to meet the bird’s nest in question) about why he writes.

I write to find out what happens next.

Of course the logical problem with combining the two sentences is that you end up with someone who doesn’t know where they’re going leading a bunch of people in blindfolds and hoping the lot of them don’t fall off a cliff.  Or wander around in ever decreasing circles looking for a checkpoint that doesn’t exist (one for the orienteers there).

So having started this post with grandiose ideas of author as swashbuckling pioneer, one foot firmly on the stern of the good ship adventure, I find that I am really a hopeless creature, frantically running from one checkpoint to another and hoping that I can see the next one from where I am. Like a really bad episode of Scooby Doo. Without the dog biscuits.

Or to put it another way, your hapless author is in fact, a mole, simply pushing dirt out of the way in the hope of finding either wormvana, the mythical land of vermicelli feasts and celestial mole virgins, or the sky. And hoping that neither is poisoned, or about to be clouded by a farmer/gardener’s shovel.

And all the while, being worried about being sued for the wrongful manufacture, use or distribution of towels, or items fashioned to be towels but in fact simply pages from a still-to-be-completed novel.

Fear and paranoia are not good map-makers.

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.

I think, on reflection, that I should simply cut out the middle man and change my name to Nonsense. Or possibly Non Sense.  Not my middle name, obviously, as that would be too obvious. Plus the middle man would think he’d still got me somehow, and come after his 15%. Which in this case, pleasingly would be ‘No’. After rounding.  And there is no rounder figure than zero.

Equally obviously, I could not change my Christian name – wouldn’t want to be done for pundanamealism.  Plus it would be giving in to extremists. That which is not in the middle, by definition, must be extreme. And is there any further extreme than the senses?  So simply denying one sense, or implying there is only one, true, non-sense, then I would be putting myself up for some impromptu beheading action.

We could name our children Im Promptu and Im Plausible. Assuming they were boys. Or Vanity and Verity, should they be therefore, of the flowerier gender.

Our pets would be Project Execution Plan (dog) and Mass Digression (cat). We’d also keep a swarm of pygymy (word of the day) butterflies in a bell jar. I’d train them to use their wingbeats to create soundwaves that when attuned through the correct ear trumpet would transceive as the rules of Monopoly.

As I typed this post a hollow bell sounded in my ear. Most odd. Perhaps caused by the noisy plane flying off course overhead. Off course because the magnetised pygymy ions from my Nonsense has travelled upwards in an Unlikelihood Vortex and tickled the First Officer’s moustache. (Back to Movember, I see).

Let’s hope no airliners on their way to Peru go astray over Western London. As I wouldn’t want to explain what had happened to a Pig (these feature in novel #2).

Reader, it’s going to be a long day. Let’s stop this nonsense and see what dragons/blaggards/name changing dullards I can slay today. At once. (Aside: why must all nonsense be stopped ‘at once’ – why can’t it simply be talked down from the ceiling like any old thought plane?  Or herded tenderly, like a flock of sillies?  All very anti-nonsense, it would seem.  Especially the Victorians. And Thatcher.)

A.Ny. Way. The novel’s that way ==> (not you, dear reader. Pour moi. Amuse yourself among the increasingly accurate category cloud girdle-busters)

Ahh… November. The time for splurging words on keyboards and growing moustaches. Two activities I can start, but have yet to accomplish (in the latter category I can grow some very fine individual hairs, but persuading them to huddle up in some form of hair-buddy bonding ritual appears beyond me.  Tant pis.).

So instead, I am proposing new time-based challenges for things that I am good at, and perhaps you are too.  Navel-gazing. Sighing. Forgetting the plots to CSI episodes before the Five announcer has asked her ‘where you watching closely’ question. (Actually, that’s a lie – I sometimes forget the plot during the Kia Soul adverts. Ok, ok, that too is a lie. I forget to watch the episode and then simply make up the plot.  And then wonder why there’s so much talcum powder on the floor in my house.  And why there’s a decaying pig swaddled in blankets in the garden. I digress. )

What else?  Tut-tuesday, where one ‘tuts’ a lot. ‘Pretending to watch a lot of BBC 4, but only ever actually tuning in for Wallander.’ ‘Losing the enthusiasm for running the day after entering lots of expensive races.’ Ooh! Cheese-nibbling. I do like a nibble on some hard cheese. I’m also a chocolate block nibbler.  But not a cheese block nibbler. And when I say hard cheese (old bean) I don’t mean fromage de ma tante.

Silly. It’s posts like this that give my neurons a bad name. I’m simply warming my fingers and tangents up (speaking of which, I wonder what a tangent looks like – is it like an appendix, or more like a little toe?). In the novel Tom is currently a little giggly and stoned and he is about to be told some serious shit (man). So I need to get myself into the right frame of mind. Which, despite all appearances to the contrary, dear reader, I’m finding quite hard.

Perhaps this is due to the first chill of autumn. The sky is a Wedgewood-blue, and I keep making elementary typing mistakes. The two could be related, although to keep this up I would have to know more than one porcelain maker. Denby! Ha! Fooled ya. I suppose Poole doesn’t count.  Anyway, my feet are cold and I’m fidgeting. And transposing letters and typing too many rrrrs.

I have taken to writing in the kitchen, as it’s light and I can keep an eye on my nemesis, Mr Nuts. He pays me frequent visits.  And displays a full gamut of rodent-inspired bastardry.  I like ‘bastardry’. It’s my new favourite made-up word.  I can also watch in mild amusement as the local CSI-episode cats (it’s taken me two years to realise that my neighbour has twin cats, so cunningly had they played their ‘never be seen in public at the same time’ routine.  Hmm. Or is it perhaps more likely that the sun refracted off the glass and made two images.  Or I just hallucinated it having inhaled some peyote dust that had brushed off a passing grey heron when it collided with a pygmy mosqueetle, the most unlikely insect in the universe, that only grows in tartan picnic blankets wrapped around dead pigs.  Or I simply  transferred my hostility towards Mr Nuts towards Fat Kitty and in the resulting time-space stargate banjax I created his alter-matrix cat, Dopey) edge their way along the garden wall and hop past bushy/tree obstructions with all the grace and charm of a tub of lard. Not good feline spokescats. They would be voted off the Miaow-Factor, pronto.

Speaking of being voted off, I can hear the distant bing of disapproval. Or is it a microwave? Anyhoo, mes chums and chummettes. I approach halfway to final wordcount of the novel and I must depart for more difficult mental pastures, where the grass is smoked, not green, and secrets not told for forty years are about to be revealed.