the way out

thin blood

2009-03-10T20:53:38+00:00

Stick me on a cocktail stick and leave me out for the birds. I’m running on empty. One more second in that office and I’ll have given them 40 million. I’m done now. Time to work in a local bookshop, write my prose and see the spring in from a park bench. I want to sleep well and have time to think. I want to have a lunch break that isn’t five minutes in the ladies’ loo with my head hung upside down. But there’s a credit crunch on and I should be grateful there’s a wizzy hand-drier. Publishers are downsizing, literary fiction pays pants anyway and I’m all out of beans. No steam left. Beans are over-rated. I like steam though. I’m all for evaporating stuff behind me. Whatever the heck that means.

out of print in powder city

2009-02-24T20:25:56+00:00

It’s been an extreme sports sort of day, should anyone care to make it news. Down at space office we’ve been uniting for children through the power of hackneyed phrases. Do you want your children to grow up to be contented, productive members contributing to the development of their societies? I know I do and I don’t even have any. Punch me in the eye with a rollercoaster and maybe I’ll feel more moved. It’s a tired drainage system that leaks science into the art of persuasive fundraising and spits out dry spinsters of prose. In good news, we have some. I am soon to be the proud owner of two search results on Amazon. Life does get more exciting than that, but not often. Tell Tales Volume 4 can be ordered here. Spring can be dowloaded in April. Till then, we’ll do our best to build this city, to build this city on cloud alone.

and the beat goes on

2009-01-29T15:16:47+00:00

2009 has been a tough one so far, mostly because I’ve been awake for too much of it. Despite moments of respite thanks to Paul McKenna’s hypnosis CD, insomnia continues to stir up my stress levels – or vice versa I suspect. Still, happiness arrived last week in the form of a phone call from my agent, saying she was really impressed with the new draft of my novel. A bit of work on a couple of chapters and another going over and she thinks it’ll be ready to go out to publishers in February/early March. This extremely exciting news caused me to ditch the short story I was attempting to write in the interim and settle in for a final edit. It really is just an edit at this stage. It’s incredible. A few weeks spent trying to work up material from scratch has made me realise just how far I’ve come with this book. I know it’s to be expected after three years spent on something, but the standard of writing, structuring and overall sunset voodoo is just so much better for those eternal re-drafts. I’ve spent so long with that story, I’ve forgotten now what it’s like to start with nothing. Maybe that’s why I haven’t even been able to write blog entries.

So this is my effort back in, as I sit at home on my new flexi-working arrangement, a 334 page manuscript heaped on a beanbag beside me and Bruce Springsteen helping the illusion that I’m on a road trip somewhere hot and open, not wedged into the corner of a worn-down futon with city traffic sludging past below. There are a lot of unknowns ahead. I want to enjoy it but monotony is filling up my stress bucket. My manager is going on maternity leave and it looks as if I may be stepping into her role, which will mean committing to full time office drudgery for the next year. I want to take the leap out of there but I’m just too sensible. Instead I’ll have to content myself with this passage from Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘The Rum Diary’:

“In the cab I leaned back and lit a small cigar I’d bought in the coffee shop. I was feeling better now, warm and sleepy and absolutely free. With the palms zipping past and the big sun burning down on the road ahead, I had a flash of something I hadn’t felt since my first months in Europe – a mix of ignorance and a loose ‘what the hell’ kind of confidence that comes on a man when the wind picks up and he begins to move in a hard straight line towards and unknown horizon.”

What I talk about when I'm not sleeping

2008-12-02T21:20:36+00:00

My father liked to get a grip on himself in private. This is the first line of a chapter about a third of the way through my novel. I quite like it, as sentences go, and I didn’t know how else to start writing this so I put it here. I’m very tired, deeply so. I’ve slept 4.5 nights in the past 2 weeks. It’s made me a little over-emotional. No matter how tired I get, I cannot sleep. I went for a run after work a couple of times last week. It cleared my head and made me so exhausted I was sure I would sleep, but still I didn’t. All the same, I think I’ll start running more. Kris bought me a non-fiction book by a fiction writer I like, Haruki Murakami – ‘What I Talk About When I Talk About Running’ – and this has really got me through the past week. I really recommend it as a metaphor for just about anything. In my case, I know I spend too much time in my head rather than in my body and maybe that’s the problem. You need physical energy to write. That I am sure of. Writing is exercise, the same as training for a marathon. You build on it and get more limber the more you stretch the habit. The length of a novel, the amount of time and thought you have to spend on it – it’s physically demanding. Three years in and I think I’m on the fifth draft of ‘The Missing Track’, this one following feedback from my agent. I have an agent now, since September. Her feedback has been very insightful without being directive, and I am extremely grateful for that. A lot of people say they don’t understand who agents are to decide what books should and shouldn’t be represented, the same for publishers, because it’s all so subjective. My feeling is, agents are readers, and the more you read, the more you know about books. Yes, it’s subjective, but people who read for a profession are more likely to know what works and what doesn’t. The same goes for any profession – the more you know about it, the more fine-tuned your opinion becomes. At least that’s my opinion. It doesn’t make all of them perfect, but it makes them professionals in their field.

This is just one of the things on my mind. I’ve also been listening to a lot of author interviews on the World Book Club website and am pleased to find I very much like almost all of them, am indifferent to a couple and disliked only one. Writers are good peoples. Doris Lessing, when asked what made her see white people’s treatment of black people in Rhodesia for the atrocity it was, said, “Well I read for one thing.”

God bless books:-)

london ten o'clock at night

2008-07-22T20:40:48+00:00

You can’t beat it. Oxford Street when the shops are closed and it’s not quite dark but the buses have their lights on and the sky is deep blue and there’s hardly anyone on the the road as you cross it. It reminds me of coming home around that time from Birkbeck classes, sometimes cycling, sometimes catching the bus, and always wanting the time to last. It’s the best time of day, late evening in summer. That’s when I’m not tired any more. Usually if I’m home it’s when I’m writing and I’ve gone past the gruelling warm-up stage and I’m really inside it and I’d keep going past midnight if only it weren’t for work the next day. I am not a morning person. I’m a cat person. I wish I could walk home on the rooftops. I really love this city. It would be nice to feel this peaceful more of the time.

doo wop

2008-07-21T21:53:19+00:00

I thought I’d make a comeback with a slick new site, but this will do for now. I took the blog down because I wasn’t sure I would be comfortable if agents googled me and found it. Now I don’t have the time or the technical ability to come up with anything other than a fairly obvious title, select a Drupal 5 design and make demands on K to set it up for me.

On the bright side, I’m in the mood to listen to songs with doo wops in them. I was in a shop in Covent Garden today and Hanson’s ‘Mmmbop’ came on. Remember those kids? When Kris and I have children, I think we’ll aim for a boy band and triplets for backing singers. It’s the best ambition to set your offspring these days. They can be ‘Ricochet & The Unicycles’. The shop assistant turned up the volume on ‘Mmmbop’ and had a boogie behind the counter. That’s really a moment to make a parent proud. Sincerely, things like that make me happy. Not speaking of which, reading the opening chapter of Peter Carey’s ‘Oscar & Lucinda’ made me so happy the other day I cried on the tube and kissed the pages. Thank God for good writing. I’ve read a lot of crap lately. It made me realise that of all the regular occurrences in my life, it’s bad writing and washing up that make me most tense. Wasting time makes me tense. I am on edge at the moment and this is not due to washing up. Last week I had exciting news: an agent I submitted the opening chapters and synopsis to came back asking for the rest. I spent the spare part of five days blitzing through the final draft so that even if it goes no further, I will be forever grateful to her for forcing me through the slug of the last stretch. I was really fading, bored by my story, bored by my words. It’s not much fun when you know it so well that none of it surprises you any more. But in the penultimate chapter on the ultimate day I came up with a new scene that I think held a lot of the book together and that was a high. Now a real live professional out there has it and I get to wait…

Other good doo wop songs are:

Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’
Cher’s ‘Shoop Shoop Song’
The Bangles’ ‘Manic Monday’ (doo wop songs don’t have to have doo wops in them)