Trying to write

Thursday, house is cold, but I have a warm cat on my knee, to help take the edge off it for both of us.

I'm now alternating So Red the Rose with Meds, the new Placebo album, which, thanks be to evil album leakers, I have downloaded and can now adore to my heart's content. It's not like I won't still buy it. And would have even if it had proved to be patchy like the last two. Which it's not. Actually it's rather fab. After 3 listenings I don't think there are any real stand-out tracks on it that could compare to Bitter End or Special K, but it's a solid album without any dud tracks, so I can just loop it and be happy. It's noticeably more lo-fi than Sleeping With Ghosts, and the better for it.

My deadline for submitting my 5000 words for peer review has been put back from today until tomorrow, so I'm procrastinating, which is bad. I've spent a couple of hours on it, and there's stuff there I can submit, I'm just not sure if I should. Anyway, I'd better screw my courage to the sticky keys and get on with it. Here's something pretty, for inspiration.

-Taking a deep breath-

It's been a poor week on the novel-writing front. I've been sleeping badly, as per, and it's been a real fight to finish Buddenbrooks, a novel I haven't enjoyed. Having LB here, decorating the hall & stairs, has made me feel oddly self-conscious. Why is it that I can write in Starbucks but I can't write with a single other person in the house, who's not even remotely interested in what I'm doing? I am being a fule.

I also feel horribly disorganised on the domestic front; we now have 2 unusable washing machines crowding the kitchen, washing all over the bedroom floor, furniture in disarray due to decorating, and I haven't made any bread for ages. P put a kitchen knife through his hand last Saturday and can't play the guitar. It's all rather depressing, but -taking a deep breath- it's really no big deal and everything will be OK soon. We had a fantastic weekend in Portmeirion and we are spending next weekend in Amsterdam with G & K, who I still miss having as neighbours and I'm really looking forward to seeing them.

So Red the Rose is still pushing my buttons, and I've heard that Placebo are releasing a new album in March, so that's good. Well, it might be terrible, but the anticipation is still sweet.

I suppose it's time I mentioned my neice. If one's going to blog seriously and not just use it as a kind of global memo pad, one has a duty, etc, etc. And the neice is very cute; here she is with her ma, about 2 days old:



Isabella Arabella Falabella Sarspirilla Polyfilla Plantation Smith*, welcome to the world.

*They didn't really call her that.

Sitting in the university library... I have a feeling that blogging may well contravene some rule or another (in there between NO CHAT PAGES and NO PORNOGRAPHEH); it's all a bit wierd, since I am doing this degree in order to produce something inherently iconoclastic. (YOU CAN'T FOIST UR RULEZ ON ME, MR. THE MAN!) Anyway, I just spent half an hour looking at photos on ILX, which were all amazing in their own various ways.

I didn't have anything to contribute, as although there are photos of me on the web, I didn't take any of them - they're all wedding photos, apart from that one band photo and the snap of me at Vesuvius on my DBA profile page.

This is the thread.

Freaky-wierd; I can publish this from the university, but not view it, b/c 'underscores are not allowed'. It'll be underpants next. Oh, no, that'd be too much like fun.

There are loads of great pictures from the wedding. We had some really talented people mooching about with cameras. I think my favourite one of us has to be this one.



Credit to the Cilentii for that ofc.

Why does there always have to be a crash?

My god Japan are fantastic. A week of listening to nothing but Duran Duran, and that's the conclusion I've come to.

Not that Duran Duran are not, in and of themselves, fantastic. It's just that I'm through with being surprised by how fantastic the Durans are, whereas I don't listen to Japan nearly as much as they deserve.

It's been a funny old week. A combination of the Duran Duran gig on Sunday night and the lack of classes & fixed RVR nights (term has finished and the gank group has logged off for christmas) has kicked me into that zone where, having spent too much time alone, obsessing about things, you feel like you have a bubble of something fizzy growing in your head and you don't know what to do about it. I have written some on the novel. I've put on a lot of eyeliner. I feel like I'm about to fly apart, and it's the most wierdly wonderful feeling. I don't want the bubble to burst, I don't want it to collapse back in on itself and leave me tired (what usually happens) I just want to stay, perfectly balanced, surface tension keeping me taut and shining, fragile as a breath.

Well, we'll see. We're off to Putters tomorrow to see the family for a week, and it will be difficult to hold onto any non-familyxmashurrahcake state of mind. Thank heavens for iPods and having an excuse to be anti-social. Yay novel!

Interesting threads from ILE:

On christian conservatives: http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=5618466#unread
On gays in SF: http://ilx.wh3rd.net/thread.php?msgid=5659214#unread

I'm 9k behind on NaNo and hungover from last night. KR organised a night out for me leaving and for SL's birthday. It was good. Big shout out to the law firm posse. Feel like hell now though, and don't know how to pick up the novel again. I got up at ten today and went back to bed at two, and slept until four. Hopeless.

P has done useful things in the kitchen (painting the back door). I spent my two wakeful hours sorting out my wardrobe.

Yesterday nextdoor moved out and today a new set of nextdoor moved in. A D.O.G. was spotted in the garden. I don't know if it was visiting or if it's part of the family. We hope the former, as the cats are less than keen on their canine counterparts.

Back from Djibouti, back from Soulby, finally time to settle a little. But so much to do! I am Nanoing again of course, and behind already. BH's picture arrived on Friday and I need to decorate the end of the hall so I can hang it, and I want to write a response to it and send it up to him. And I still want to give prints to other writers to respond to, if BH is amenable.

I have critiques to do and novels to read and I need to pick an essay title for my Christmas deadline essay, and get started on it. The examples we've been given are mind-blowing. Here's the frst one:

“The modern story-teller is necessarily ‘self-conscious’, to use Virginia Woolf’s phrase, not ‘natural’. The authoritative voice that speaks to the reader effortlessly is untenable and, if novelists need such a narrator, they must contrive it. Writer and reader fell from grace, or were stripped of their native innocence, long ago.” Discuss in relation to any two of the books read this term, and in relation to your own work in progress.

Actually I have some ideas about how I could answer that one.

I'm missing both our regular nights of RVR again this week; that'll be one night run out of eight possibles by the end of this week. Very depressing. Group is in some difficulty morale-wise, and me missing runs can't possibly be helping.

I've also promised HK I'll scan the pictures she took on the Week Away and turn them into a pictorial record, which we decided should also be expanded into an article for the website. And we need to get together to brainstorm how to transmit HC's workshops to the rest of the MNG, something I also volunteered to be a leader on. I want to take some of the pressure off HK; she really had a huge job to do organising the week away.

What is the etiquette on mentioning other people in a blog? I don't expect anyone to be reading this, but it is still theoretically public. Ho hum.

Ah. They are minor characters from Hamlet, brought to the fore by Tom Stoppard. http://www.sff.net/people/mberry/rosen.htp

It's so strange not being in the office. Not having a routine. Not starting my day with a barrage of emails and phone calls and greetings from colleagues, no morning trip out for tea-and-a-scone.

It's relaxing and one has this pleasant sense of freedom. Now, how is that conducive to getting anything done?

And I have many things to 'get done'. I've done my critiques for this week and I've read Remains of the Day, but I can't follow the course notes on it. For example, "Primacy of secondary characters, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern syndrome. Political and social implications?" I don't get the reference. I see Googling ahead. Hurrah for the Interweb, that's all I can say, or it'd be a day in the library for me.

So much time has slipped away. I forgot my blog. Amber forgot her blog too. I have been writing in notebooks; I rediscovered the visceral pleasure of pen and paper, and developed a certain truculence when it came to the typed word. I have resented emails in particular, but I also gave up MSN and IRC. In Camelot, we have taken to voice comms like birds to song, and I get terribly grumpy when asked to communicate via the chat window. It seems so primitive.

So this feels a bit funny.

Funny too, that when I last posted here I was exercising myself over The Boa Constrictor, to which I haven't added more than a paragraph or two in two years but which is still my burning flame. I've taken up (and put down again) Barbarian Queen in the mean time, but made scant progress with that either.

Because I've so singularly failed to finish anything, I've quit my job and I'm enrolling on an MA in Creative Writing tomorrow. It's very exciting, or it would be if they weren't so vague about the little details, like where you turn up to and when...

OK so things are getting back to normal and I'm starting to have the energy to think about writing again. Well, I'm burning to do something now that the wedding is over and (so far) there's no move to Tokyo to organise. Intensity, intensity, something to make sense of me...

'Sleeping With Ghosts' of course fuelling the creative lust; new music one can fall in love with always sets it alight. Getting married terribly sexy, quite unexpected. Doesn't make one feel older at all, though perhaps does bring a creeping realisation that the NME will really really never put me on the front cover. Shane still dying to get the band back together. Worth it? Who knows. Hold your breath and count to ten then fall apart and start again.

P & me got married on Saturday, woohoo!

Have Orchid explain his stance on being an alien, the various levels - alien to Grace City, to New Paradise, to humanity..? When you cease to be an alien in terms of citizenship of a nation, you are 'naturalised' - the alies are unnatural by design.

Heard some good things at dinner tonight. How being pleased with £3000 fees, Mark felt like he had the fuckin moon on a stick. How Alan used to shag doors. How Kim is only with her bloke for the Ferrari and she bought a T-shirt with 'Gold Digger' on the front. How Mark and Alan once shared a bed and woke up with a stick of rock in between them and no memory of how it got there.

US astronauts get their wings when they reach the altitude of 50 miles.

Inconsistensies, anxieties and trauma: what's wrong with my novel?

a) Just how well does Shelley know her cousin's family? I have no clue, and it shows.
b) Why would they wait 3 days before calling her?
c) Where is her mother all this time; isn't there a family grapevine?
d) Would she really quit her course to work on a novel she doesn't even have an outline for? I don't think so...
e) Her cover story to Coral isn't convincing
f) If I was her I'd read all Jamie's diary entries in one sitting - maybe I shouldn't try to work them in logically, it's too constraining.
g) I don't think I've exposited enough, and still it's boring. How can I put more description in without making the reader fall asleep, wake up and shoot themselves rather than read any more of this tedious drivel?

put some additional frustrations into Shelley's life, like a delivery man that doesn't come or a plumber or something.

remember things smell!

Loosen up a bit, flesh it out, play with the order.

if I was shooting this as a film, what would I show? paint those pictures!