'Fool' Said my Muse to me

Over the last few days, I've been working on getting the site's layout back into shape. But standing in the kitchen earlier, just listening to the background noise of thoughts running through my head - thoughts for a new comic idea, thoughts about how best to spec my character in Dark Souls - listening to all of these thoughts, I remembered something I wrote two years ago. It was for Splendid Fred back when it was a magazine rather than a theatre company, about the importance of writing down these random ideas. I also remembered another post I wrote way back about the importance of keeping myself writing, and now I look at the empty posting calendar over there and feel a bit guilty. So here I am to flesh out one of the ideas at the sink: I have gotten myself a little lost. I have a project I started, you see; a fantasy novel with a big idea and a grand, sweeping scale. And unfortunately, it's such a big idea that it's crushing all the fledgling little ideas that could have been with it's weight. Everything about the book is hard to write - the third person style, the world building, the plot weaving... And it gets me to thinking that right now, the biggest obstacle in the way of me right now is me. I mean, I can write. This is readable, and you're reading it right now, so I'm writing. Blogging is easier because it's just me being me. And yet the last few times I've sat down to do so, I've mentally thought myself out of it because I feel I should be doing some 'proper' writing, or I don't have any ideas or subjects to write about. I do, it's just that right now I'm letting them escape while I'm at the kitchen sink, or in the shower or on the xbox. Or, I look at minor inconsistencies in the layout, like the impossibility of convincing the site that there's a margin (or there's supposed to be) between the next page button and the list of pages. Which really doesn't matter at all if there's no actual content on the page to look at. Hence the long gaps in the posting history. But I'm going to start trying again. Again. End on a poem:

Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That She, dear She, might take some pleasure of my pain, —Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain— I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe, Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain, Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain. But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay; Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Study’s blows; And others’ feet still seemed but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite— “Fool!” said my Muse to me "look in thy heart, and write!" - Sir Philip Sydney http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/7274/

So yeah, it turns out that history has already covered the subject of getting so stuck trying to write that you forget to write.

1,500 to go

The next time a tutor tells me not to leave things to the last minute, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to listen to them very carefully. Then when they're done talking, I'm going to nod understandingly, gather up my notes, and then leave them in my bag, play Mass Effect 2 and leave it all until the last minute. Because let's face it, I'm an idiot. We're all idiots, for the most part. People learn by their mistakes; so really, even if you're a mature student, university is the best place to make them (mistakes that is, not students). This is the last week before FYP deadline, so my plan really was to have the work done and redrafted by this point so that I could throw myself at the dreaded 2,000 word rationale. But no. Life holds too many exciting and interesting things for that, and you're only young once. In fact I'm not even young, so there's that. Anyway, I sit 500 words away from the minimum word count, and easy 15,00 words away from a decent word count, and the rationale as well. Soon I shall be finished, and then there's just the regular essays to be getting along with. Also an icecream van turned up while I was writing this, in the middle of a student infested cul-de-sac. Devious.

I do not write, therefore I am not

Let me clarify something. I call myself a writer, but do so with absolutely no authority. I have never been published. This ethereal pissing into the wind is about as much a form of publishing as the crazy guy shouting on the train is a form of media personality. But if anyone asks me what I want to do (and in my third year, they DO), I answer without hesitation "A Writer." I want to be a writer. I'd rather be a writer than anything else. A day job is just the thing I do to pay the bills until the Guardian notices me and all of a sudden I'm having lunch with Charlie Brooker and Danny Wallace. They both secretly hate me of course, but smile politely because I'll name-drop anyone. But we are currently being bombarded, the other half and I, with a steady stream of brochures full of management babble about how they want graduates to work for them. It's all 'realising potential' and 'maximising productivity' without ever actually saying what it is that you (or even the company) actually DO. Really. There's one company in there who's page I read three times, and I still have no idea what their end product is. But it all sounded very decorative, regardless. I'm just very suspicious of people who offer you £35,000 and a gym and don't tell you what you have to do. I'm fairly certain that's how hitmen start out. Paranoia aside; is the entire upper echelon of the working community now made up of terrified postgrads throwing bollocks at each other? Thinking up more and more convoluted sentences to cover up the fact that they don't understand the management babble they were replying to in the first place? So maybe that's it. The writers have lost. There are no great novels any more, just marketing copy and a population too caught up in baffling and sesquipid turns of phrase to realise it means nothing. These people exist to manufacture, hype and trade networks of bollocks, and the money's all so knotted up in that level of tittybollocks that there's nothing left for the people who actually do some sodding work round here. I don't include myself in that noble category, by the way. I'm a writer.

Father's day

Having the luxury of having a dad myself, it seems a little churlish to have a go at something like father's day, but really it's emotional blackmail. I call my dad once a week. We send each other texts and emails constantly taking the piss, and at the end of every text, visit and email I remind him I love him. You see, my dad's my hero. Sod off if that seems flowery, but a man who worked from the age of 20 to 50 to provide for his kids is a real man. Getting up day after day and week after week; doing it not because he wanted to, but because he had to. THAT is tenacity. It makes me ashamed that I lack the same brass and get away with the life I do. Compared to his life it's a fucking doss, and half the time I still can't be arsed with it. So when I wander into a card shop and look at a rack of people browsing the 3 quid bits of folded paper and picking the first one that catches their eye so they can pop it in the post to some guy they never see anymore, it makes me a little resentful. I don't want to send a card. People who don't care send cards. So to me, sending a card puts me on the same level as the people who can't be arsed - placating a complaining relative with a shitty, overpriced piece of card and a quick scribble on the way to the postbox. So I got him a mug instead.

A Brave New World

"The telephone is a fantastically rude invention - it's like someone bursting into your office, banging on your desk and yelling 'Speak to me! Speak to me!" Stephen Fry said that, and he knows stuff about things. Me, I have an abusive relationship with phones. A while back, I was sitting watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer (yes I know) with a friend ten years younger than me (yes, I know), and one of the characters had failed to meet the other at a cafe at a prearranged time. She asked why she didn't call the missing person's mobile, and I explained that it was filmed in the late nineties, not everyone had a mobile then. I didn't get my first mobile 'til about 99, and it was a brick. But the point is, she sat for a second, processed this information, and then asked possibly one of the worst things you can say to someone ten years older than you: "What was life like before mobile phones?" Well for one thing, we were fucking organised. It seems impossible to impress on anyone younger than 25 the baffling notion that I don't want to be available to them 24 hours a day, and that this is in no way a slight on them. For years I've apologised, made excuses and avoided talking on phones and come away feeling like I'm the antisocial one, as if by not immediately answering people's calls and texts I'm personally slighting everyone I know. But sod you all. I was just drifting off for an afternoon nap when my phone clattered onto vibrate beside me and woke me up. What was it's message? An urgent request for kidney donors of my registered blood type? Something's on fire? Zooey Deschanel is wandering through town and she's totally getting them out for anyone who asks? No, it was a stupid sodding chain text, the same one I've recieved three times so far today. I've had enough. Don't get me wrong, I love my mobile as a compressed piece of technology. The fact that it's a decent digital camera (well, mine is), an mp3 player, web browser and java platform all packed into a pocket sized shell is great. It's handy. It's the nearest I'll ever get to owning a sonic screwdriver in this lifetime. But every time the damn thing fulfils it's primary function by ringing, I feel that moment of irritation, of interruption. I know it's going to ring, and if I cut it off the caller's going to try again in a few seconds assuming a network fault. If I leave it to ring, it'll only go off with a voicemail in a bit, and then there's the inevitable 'tried to call you' text that follows, and the texts that follow THAT if you don't answer. You can't win, and it's not even your fault - you HAVE to deal with a ringing phone, even if it's just to throw it in a ravine. It's not just mobiles though. Xbox Live - now that I've accidentally paid for Gold again - is starting to get the same. I go online to play something single player, and if I've accidentally left the network cable plugged in, I get bombarded with requests to play multiplayer. At least I used to have the excuse of being a silver subscriber, but now people know I'm gold, they won't leave me be when all I want to do is load up Dead Rising quickly and smash zombies with hammers. We have so many exciting new avenues open to us now to irritate the shit out of each other, and it's done something fundamentally terrible to our society. It's the bloody invasiveness of it all that gets me. Peripheral hangers-on in a group at the pub could be ignored or avoided, or fobbed off with promises that you'll get back to them later. But now they're on your Facebook - they have to be, or you'd get a successive stream of whiny messages and requests until you add them. And then they can see and involve themselves in everything you do, which just makes their presence even more invasive. MSN, Facebook chat, mobiles, email... It's like we've armed all the bastards with sharp sticks and then wonder why everyone keeps getting poked all day long. And I realise: It's not a brave new world at all. It's a sodding annoying one.