gamboling

A novel idea

2009-06-23T05:27:00.002+01:00

Sorry for the lack of updates on here I have been working furiously on my novel. I am closing in on the end and at this point I am desperate to finish the first draft. This has, perhaps unsurprisingly, led to a bit of a gap on here. I had been planning to fill it but I don't think I can. So I'm afraid you'll have to put up with me talking about writing.

So how's that going? Well a couple of weeks ago I realised that based on my structure I had about 60 A4 pages left to go (around 30 thousand words).

And I decided that 2 pages a day was about do-able. And so I decided to write 2 pages a day. Even on the first day I only managed 1 page. But the idea was to slay the monster over the thirty days - on average.

I have been posting my updates about the previous day on Twitter (@alexandronov) and if you want to check in please do. The main point though is that because I'm posting the update every morning I'm having to face up to what I have or haven't done. It has been hugely helpful. As has my friend Kris who has been replying to a seperate e-mail with great words of encouragement (a hard line to walk because if you're sycophantic I'd believe it wouldn't matter what I did, but too tough and I'd give up too).

So anyway that's the story and here's the graph.

Street party

2009-06-13T07:00:00.000+01:00

Sandra put her arm out of the kitchen window. A couple of tiny raindrops landed on her hand. IT IS NOT GOING TO RAIN. She didn’t really know who she was thinking this to. She hadn’t been to church since last summer when she’d tried to will the vicar into helping with the tombola.

Sandra closed the window and turned back to her kitchen. Rows of sandwiches were arranged with military precision on trays. There were bowls of hula hoops. Enough, by her calculation, for everyone to have five hoops each. More than enough.

There was no cake. She’d left the cake to Dorothy. A risk certainly. But a calculated risk. Last year Dorothy had brought one cake along (Sandra had made the other six). And all anyone had spoken about for three months was how nice Dorothy’s sponge was. Well, it’s all very well making springy sponge when you only have to make one, and you aren’t making the sandwiches, sorting the drink, making Matthew collect the drink, so Matthew can talk about how he’s sorted the drink, getting the council to close the road despite the objections of the Robinsons (as usual). It’s all very well making cake in those conditions.

This time Sandra had made it quite clear to everyone that she was making no cake and that it was all Dorothy’s responsibility. Dorothy was a flake and couldn’t really be trusted. In fact the only thing she could be trusted to do in Sandra’s opinion was to cause trouble - something that she excelled at. So by that reckoning there would be no cake a all. Sandra turned and strode into the back room and opened the door to the larder. There were two victoria sponges each in their own Tupperware with a third Tupperware container with some raspberry jam, long spoons and some napkins.

Nobody knew of these sponges, not even Matthew. Would, Sandra worried, Matthew know how to collect these when Sandra sent him back for them? She couldn’t have there be no cake, that would reflect badly on her. That would mean poor organisation. So she had some backup cake. It shouldn't be necessary, but if Dorothy didn’t appear then Matthew could run and fetch them. She’d have to keep Matthew off the lager until the cake materialised one way or the other.

Everyone, except the Robinsons, had removed their cars from the road as asked. She had taken Reggie out for a walk and seen that it was all done. Then she had made the sandwiches - all the other food had been done the night before. If there was one thing Sandra didn’t like, it was soggy sandwiches. Then she had attacked the hoovering pausing loudly near the children’s rooms and knocking repeatedly against their doors with the hose. And now she was ready. She took her pinny off and hung it behind the kitchen door. Now to shower. She looked back over the room. She slid open a drawer and pulled a pad of Post-It notes out and a pen. Then she wrote on a note that said, “Matthew, I know how many hula hoops there are in this bowl - don’t even think about it”. She placed the Post-It note on top of the bowl and went for her shower.

As she left the kitchen the clock ticked over and proclaimed the time to be seven o’clock.

Sweet shop

2009-06-02T08:09:00.000+01:00

A few years back, I had an idea for a new kind of old shop. Everyone harks back to the idea of an old fashioned sweet shop, don’t they? They want to see the jars of sweets piled high to the ceiling and some benevolent old man weighing out sweets with enormous scales. Cola bottles, gobstoppers, white mice, those white chocolate buttons with hundreds and thousands on them.

The problem with these kinds of shops is that they can’t work for us anymore as adults. As adults... we are too tall. We are the same height as the people running the shop. We can see over the counter, we can reach the jars at the top.

So the answer is pretty obvious to me. What we need to do is build a really big shop. The counter for the shop should be 6 feet high. Giant animatronic puppets should work behind the counter, weighing things. Puppeteers would have plenty of room to hide behind the counter.

The ceilings would have to be really tall and then up at the top you would employ dwarfs to climb around taking things off of the shelf to make it seem even further away than it is.

It would be a totally odd operation, obviously. But if you sold every kind of sweet and you had the shop in central London - Covent Garden suggests itself to me - then you could make it a tourist destination. Probably best to get the Tussauds group involved to have a steady supply of actors and so on from places like the London Dungeon and have a bit of cross promotion.

People would go into the shop just to have the experience of going to the shop. “When in London,” people would say to each other, “you have to visit this crazy sweet shop”.

The only problem is that I don’t have a name for the shop. What do you think? Something old-fashioned sounding would be ideal.

The moon under water

2009-05-27T10:25:00.000+01:00

Many years ago George Orwell wrote an article specifying what the 10 things that he thought the perfect London pub should have. Country pubs were different and he didn't go in to the details. His ideal pub was called "The moon under water".

Rather terribly there is course a chain version of these pubs now. This supposedly was the template for the Wetherspoons chain of pubs. The only thing that they seemed to listen to George about was his dislike of music. Everything else they seemed to get wrong. Wetherspoons pubs have had a complete atmosphere bypass, and I think the idea of several pubs all being exactly the same, being exactly as crap as each other and using his name would have wounded George. One line from his article is thus,"If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its 'atmosphere.'" On that rationale, would you ever choose a Wetherspoons?

Actually here is the article...

----

Evening Standard, 9 February 1946

My favourite public-house, the Moon Under Water, is only two minutes from a bus stop, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on Saturday nights.

Its clientele, though fairly large, consists mostly of "regulars" who occupy the same chair every evening and go there for conversation as much as for the beer.

If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its "atmosphere."

To begin with, its whole architecture and fittings are uncompromisingly Victorian. It has no glass-topped tables or other modern miseries, and, on the other hand, no sham roof-beams, ingle-nooks or plastic panels masquerading as oak. The grained woodwork, the ornamental mirrors behind the bar, the cast-iron fireplaces, the florid ceiling stained dark yellow by tobacco-smoke, the stuffed bull's head over the mantelpiece —everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.

In winter there is generally a good fire burning in at least two of the bars, and the Victorian lay-out of the place gives one plenty of elbow-room. There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies' bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.

Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.

In the Moon Under Water it is always quiet enough to talk. The house possesses neither a radio nor a piano, and even on Christmas Eve and such occasions the singing that happens is of a decorous kind.

The barmaids know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone. They are all middle-aged women —two of them have their hair dyed in quite surprising shades—and they call everyone "dear," irrespective of age or sex. ("Dear," not "Ducky": pubs where the barmaid calls you "ducky" always have a disagreeable raffish atmosphere.)

Unlike most pubs, the Moon Under Water sells tobacco as well as cigarettes, and it also sells aspirins and stamps, and is obliging about letting you use the telephone.

You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.

Upstairs, six days a week, you can get a good, solid lunch —for example, a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll—for about three shillings.

The special pleasure of this lunch is that you can have draught stout with it. I doubt whether as many as 10 per cent of London pubs serve draught stout, but the Moon Under Water is one of them. It is a soft, creamy sort of stout, and it goes better in a pewter pot.

They are particular about their drinking vessels at the Moon Under Water, and never, for example, make the mistake of serving a pint of beer in a handleless glass. Apart from glass and pewter mugs, they have some of those pleasant strawberry-pink china ones which are now seldom seen in London. China mugs went out about 30 years ago, because most people like their drink to be transparent, but in my opinion beer tastes better out of china.

The great surprise of the Moon Under Water is its garden. You go through a narrow passage leading out of the saloon, and find yourself in a fairly large garden with plane trees, under which there are little green tables with iron chairs round them. Up at one end of the garden there are swings and a chute for the children.

On summer evenings there are family parties, and you sit under the plane trees having beer or draught cider to the tune of delighted squeals from children going down the chute. The prams with the younger children are parked near the gate.

Many as are the virtues of the Moon Under Water, I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.

And though, strictly speaking, they are only allowed in the garden, the children tend to seep into the pub and even to fetch drinks for their parents. This, I believe, is against the law, but it is a law that deserves to be broken, for it is the puritanical nonsense of excluding children —and therefore, to some extent, women—from pubs that has turned these places into mere boozing-shops instead of the family gathering-places that they ought to be.

The Moon Under Water is my ideal of what a pub should be —at any rate, in the London area. (The qualities one expects of a country pub are slightly different.)

But now is the time to reveal something which the discerning and disillusioned reader will probably have guessed already. There is no such place as the Moon Under Water.

That is to say, there may well be a pub of that name, but I don't know of it, nor do I know any pub with just that combination of qualities.

I know pubs where the beer is good but you can't get meals, others where you can get meals but which are noisy and crowded, and others which are quiet but where the beer is generally sour. As for gardens, offhand I can only think of three London pubs that possess them.

But, to be fair, I do know of a few pubs that almost come up to the Moon Under Water. I have mentioned above ten qualities that the perfect pub should have and I know one pub that has eight of them. Even there, however, there is no draught stout, and no china mugs.

And if anyone knows of a pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, a garden, motherly barmaids and no radio, I should be glad to hear of it, even though its name were something as prosaic as the Red Lion or the Railway Arms.

-----

So what on earth was Tim Martin thinking when he used the name for his pubs?

There are some changes that have happened since Orwell's article. Almost every pub serves stout now (sadly, generally only one kind). And there is no chance of bringing smoking back to the pub. And of course sacrilegiously I sometimes like music in a pub. Not always. It depends on the general noise level. I can deal with what my father calls "Wallpaper music" when the pub is quiet. That way the pub never feels totally empty. But it should never upset the possibility of conversation.

But what do you all think? What makes the perfect boozer for you?

How I write

2009-05-25T13:14:00.000+01:00

One of the things I find so difficult about writing a novel is that you have to have a plan. Even if you don't think you are planning anything, then you have to remember that you have planned to write a novel. And even that thought can upset some kind of delicate balance in your mind. Things are different with a plan.

Surely, though, you would think that there must be some planning going on, even in a short article. Even then you are deciding to write about a particular topic. Not really. Not for me anyway. I tend to start, write, do more writing. See if I can find a strand of an idea in there and throw away the other stuff.

For example... And this is absolutely true... Last week's short story about Amber started off as an article about Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. I didn't decide at one point, to shelve the Gladwell article and start writing fiction. The Gladwell stuff went in the edit. I don't think there is any connection between the book and the short story even. As far as I can objectively tell the two are separate. I think the story had more to do with the Laura Marling album I was listening to at the time.

I got a bit stuck on stuff to write about the Gladwell book and so I noodled off onto something else. I'm guessing other people don't do the same, but I don't really know. Perhaps I am an outlier after all?

The book is interesting in that it talks about how you have to work hard (more than 10,000 hours work before you become truly proficient in anything). It also talks about how society, timing and luck are very important to your likely success. In many ways, it is the opposite of a self-help book. Too many books offer the promise of "how to succeed in 14 and a half steps" this book says, "to succeed you need to work like crazy, for ages, and even then it's not likely to happen". It is a bit of a downer, I guess. Not because that's depressing, it isn't. It's bound to be really hard to be commercially successful, otherwise it would be devalued and everyone would be doing it and then it wouldn't exist. Successful by that rationale means being surprisingly more successful than others. It's only because you have lots more money than people that your large bank balance means anything - just ask somebody in Zimbabwe what they think.

The depressing thing is that this is what is seen as successful. Being a good and decent person is success. Being happy is success. Being rich means something else.

In Gladwell's book he talks about outliers and at the beginning he talks about a town in the United States where people are the least likely to have heart disease. It's not that they eat better than people in other places nearby. It's not that they do more exercise. It is that they are less stressed. Working too hard is stressful, so is working too little (somebody is always after you for something). Most people know each other, most people check in on each other and see that they are okay. Most people learn to live with each other. They live in a community rather than near a community like most people do today. It's no surprise that we're all looking for books on how to be successful. It's just a shame that so few people get a chance to discover what success really means.

Wow that was lots different than what I wrote last time about Gladwell. Maybe this is me just trying to justify why I haven't finished the novel yet. I mean, maybe I don't have to finish the novel to succeed. Yeah, right.

Amber

2009-05-19T22:18:00.000+01:00

Amber lay on the sloping bank, her feet cooling in the river. She looked across the river to a house. A dragonfly hovered in front of her nose. Dragonflies do live up to their name, she thought. They seem so old. Amber felt old, too old to be lusting after young boys, well, young men. On the opposite bank of the river, in the garden of the house, were three such young men. They were probably about 25 and they were mowing the lawns. She had been walking along the river and one of their naked torsos had caught her attention. She hadn't really thought about it but suddenly her feet had felt quite hot and tired. Perhaps cooling them in the water might be good after all.

Amber stopped, sat and took off her shoes. She suddenly wasn't sure about the water. It looked clean enough but it had only really been warm for the last few days. The water was liable to be freezing. She didn't have a towel to dry her feet afterwards either. But she decided that it would look better if she was cooling her feet. Otherwise somebody looking might have thought she was just there watching. She wanted it to be clear that she had just stopped to cool her feet. That the lawn mowers had probably arrived afterwards and that their noise was probably an annoyance rather than anything else.

But the noise was perfect. The drone of the mowers, the slipping of the stream, the birds calling out to each other. Amber wondered if there were bashful birds? A Zeppelin-like bee came poot-pooting past. It was doing a pretty fair approximation of the lawnmowers. The breeze was making the grass tickle Amber's fingers. The sun was warming her face and chest. Amber experienced the summer version of "did-I-leave-the-gas-on?" which is "did-I-remember-sunblock-this-morning?". Which of course she had. What about her feet? The water was probably washing it off. It was supposed to be waterproof, but she had never really believed that, when the children were young she had always rubbed sunblock back in the moment they had come out of the water. She started wondering how the children were doing. Neither of them had called for a few days. What were they doing? She hoped they were happy.

Amber caught herself. She had forgotten the moment she was in. For a second she wondered if any of these three had called their mothers recently. Of course they had, she decided, they were good boys. Despite the sun on her the running river was robbing Amber of her heat. It was probably time to move on. Amber began to worry as she often had in the last few weeks. Even in the perfect situation she didn't seem to be able to live in the moment. Her brain kept cycling on.

She wondered when she last did something impulsive. Something tried to tell her that just stopping and admiring the view had been impulsive. But not really, she knew it wasn't really. She had worried what people who saw her would think. There are no bashful birds, she thought.

And with that she stood up, and threw herself into the river. She righted herself and launched herself upwards, breaking the surface of the water. She started treading water and shouting, "Help, help".

Her dress, waterlogged, had stuck itself very tightly to her body. All three of the young men who had been mowing the lawn heard the noise, downed tools, and started running towards Amber.

"Interesting," Amber thought, "I wonder what I should do next?"

"No," another part of her brain said rather firmly, "we will just have to find out what happens next. For now, it is not for us to decide."

Fish and chips

2009-05-07T07:21:00.002+01:00

Fish and chips is in some ways the English national dish, and I love it. But there are some important considerations about fish and chips that you have to bear in mind. Personally I think mushy peas are a very important ingredient. And then we have controversial salt and vinegar situation.

There is no question for me. I believe the only option is to have both; adding the vinegar first and the salt second. Some people will tell you that you want the vinegar second so that it soaks the salt in. Nonsense! The vinegar washes the salt off. No question. And that's just wasting salt. People don't die in salt mines just so you can waste some of their hard mined salt!*

I like mushy peas but it's easy to go too far with them. My friend fourstar and I can no longer eat in a certain pub after fourstar demanded peas with menaces.**

But most recently a plate of fish and chips got me in even more trouble. I was out at the pub with a bunch of Formula One related friends from sidepodcast. One of them ordered fish and chips and then I was hooked (sadly that pun was intentional). I decide I needed a plate for myself.

A short while later the food arrived. But due to overcrowding, my plate of fish and chips was hiding a terrible secret. Under half of the plate is a table, just as you would expect, but under the other half of the plate is simple fresh air.

I carefully unwrap my knife and fork from their napkiny delivery blanket. I take the fork and gently cut some of the fish away from the main body. Then I stab the chunk I have created and a the plate goes for it. It makes the suicidal leap onto my lap. For a moment I foolishly try to keep everything together on my lap before the oily fish slips down my right leg to its destiny.

I collect everything back together on the plate. I decide I probably can't be trusted with anything more. A short while later our waitress returns to ask if everything is okay. She notices that I don't seem to have touched mine.

"Ah, yes," I say, "I accidentally dropped mine on the floor. I think it's probably ruined my trousers."
"Would you prefer something else less dangerous?"
"What do you have?", I ask.
"A packet of crisps?"

I decided that while a packet of crisps would be less dangerous, the moment had passed.

* Unless of course you spill some salt in which case you must throw more salt over your shoulder to stop dragons from coming and eating you.

** To be fair, fourstar simply asked them to substitute the vegetables that came with the pie for the peas that came with the fish and the waitress refused. Fourstar said we'd never come back if they didn't. They didn't. And we haven't been back - except once by accident.

Apprentice Guide

2009-04-24T06:50:00.004+01:00

If only they issued this to the candidates before they went in...

Cakes in the cheese fridge

2009-04-23T06:30:00.002+01:00

Katherine and I have enjoyed the restaurant Domali in Crystal Palace. It’s got good food, but it's vegetarian - which is clearly wrong. We don’t really go for the food though, we are much more interested in the Happy Hour cocktails.

They have a “Dark and Stormy”* which Katherine is particularly partial to. I do mix things up quite a bit, I am always interested to see what options they have. However I don’t see this as a venue for the constant cocktails game...

Joe and I invented the constant cocktails game one time in a Giraffe on the South Bank (near the National Theatre in case you are interested in the actual scene of the crime). We had been going to a recording of the television programme QI on my birthday. Katherine hadn’t been able to come sadly. I had got the tickets for the two of us. Joe had stood in at the last minute. The night before my birthday there had been an unexpected football match. Apparently in European football things can happen that result in matches that you don’t expect to happen or something. And the Arsenal had had one more match than they expected to have - or something.

Alan Davis is an Arsenal fan of football and so they cancelled the recording of the show the night before my birthday. This meant that all of the friends of the show and hangers on and so on didn’t get to go. So all of them were given free tickets to the next night. This meant that we didn’t have a hope of going on my birthday. There were simply too many hangers on. Joe and I decided that we needed to turn those frowns upside down. And that the best way to do this was with a cocktail or five. So we headed to Giraffe.

The problem, we discovered quite quickly, is that cocktails actually come quite slowly. They involve a lot of shaking it, moving it and making it. I knew we shouldn’t have ordered a pair of Zigazigahs. So I made a bold suggestion to Joe. Why don’t we order the next cocktail with the person who brings us this one. It seemed like a good idea at the time. We did it. I didn’t realise I was starting a trend, but 10 cocktails later we knew we were on to a good thing. That is the constant cocktails game.

...Back at Domali Katherine and I ordered a pair of Dark and Stormies. They arrive, we order another pair. Maybe it is a constant cocktails venue after all. I drain mine and leave Katherine nursing hers. I need the loo. It’s upstairs. On the way I spot a fridge. It has a sign written on it which says, “Cakes in cheese fridge”. The fridge is unplugged and miles away from the bar. You imagine the situation... The fridge doesn’t work and so they move the cakes to the cheese fridge. They write a sign. All efficient. Then somebody says, “lets order a new fridge”. The new fridge comes, it’s installed, it starts to perform its fridgely function of keeping the cakes at the ideal temperature. And somebody says, “what do we do with the old one?”

* Dark rum and ginger beer, with lime juice, if you want to make one.

A slip up

2009-04-15T08:23:00.000+01:00

I once used to go out with somebody that I didn’t respect very much. This is not a very good idea. The problem is, of course, that you think you might only ever be loved by that person and this can be a bit difficult to deal with. I often wanted to say things like, “maybe you should be a bit nicer to me”. But obviously I couldn’t because if I told them anything approaching the truth - at all - then I would immediately remove the only thing they liked about me, which was my supreme ability to lie. Or at least that’s what I didn’t think.

I say didn’t think because it was impossible to realise at the time that I was as screwed up as I actually was. I knew that the one thing I had as a life skill was being myself and yet I also knew that I had to deny that if I was going to be with this person. I should have run away as fast as I could, but of course, like a great big stupid idiot, I didn’t. I just hung around waiting for nice things to happen to me in exchange for lying. Men and women are idiots. Just so you know.

I said, up there in the opening paragraph, that I didn’t respect her. But that’s not entirely true. I respected her taste. That’s the thing that’s hard to get away from in these situations. They fancy you so of course it’s hard to deal with the fact that you feel they have no taste. If they have no taste then what does it say about you?

It turned out that she had even less respect for me than I did for her. Over time I realised this. She thought I was stupid, that my friends were stupid, and that our outlook on life was stupid. Luckily we were all teenage boys so we were right!

However, with the space of time between then and now I know one thing is true. We were totally different people. I wanted to have a fun time, I wanted to make people laugh and I didn’t mind if I was made to look stupid to achieve this. And she thought that all anyone should do was make money, worry about their bank balance and worry about appearing cool. There’s nothing wrong with the different approaches I suppose. Just that we weren’t suited.

Anyway on the way to Reading Festival one year we were walking along the streets of Reading and she slipped on a banana peel. I had never seen anyone, in actual life, actually perform this comedy stalwart. And despite the situation basically demanding sympathy I am afraid to say I laughed.

Writing Diary: Day 5

2009-03-16T10:30:00.000Z

So you know that thing about Sunday being a day of rest for certain people? That pretty much was what happened to me. I just couldn't apply myself at all. In the whole day I wrote 1 page! That's it. And boy did I feel all the better for it.

So in the end I didn't do 10 pages a day on a running total. Which is a shame but I know that if I had been more realistic at the beginning of the week and said 5 pages a day I might still have not made it.

Weirdly when something is fun, like writing is most of the time then it fits into a set of fun options I have. Going out with friends, reading, movies, tv, Internet etc. It slots in as one of the options to chose from and it is more effort than the rest.

But when it was work like it was this week it was easier to do it to the exclusion of all else.

But on Sunday I had had enough of being alone. So I called Nick. I went out for beers with another friend. I sang a song and had it broadcast on the Internet while taking part in a comedy quiz show about Formula 1. And then Katherine came back.

I had a people day today. And if you've ever read writing by anti- social writers I think you can tell. They are the ones who never seem to know why anyone does anything. They are the ones whose dialogs sounds clunky. They are the ones I never want to be.

Remember one of the rules was don't despair. I beat all of my own real expectations. And that's the main thing. 20,000 words is not to be sniffed at. You try it some time if you don't believe me.

Roll on the theater diary.

Writing Diary: Day 4

2009-03-15T10:00:00.002Z

So I woke up on Saturday feeling rotten. My brain hurt a lot and I just couldn't face anything at all. Certainly not writing.

I decided that I needed some food and so I went out to get some breakfast from the place we call the greasy receipt. It is a non-greasy spoon which has a strange habit of having grease only on the receipt. Unfortunately it wasn't very appealing so I didn't finish it and I went home.

It was such a nice day yesterday that I really wanted to enjoy it, but felt I couldn't partly because I needed to write, and also because of the brain hurting that had continued all of the way through breakfast.

I bought some papers so I decided to go and read them outside somewhere. I thought of The Park, (this is actually a pub on the park). I wondered down there, had a pint read the papers and had a bit of a rest.

Afterwards I came back and decided that I really better had get some writing done. I wrote six pages. At the point that I stopped I had reached a milestone. I had written 20,000 words since I had started on Wednesday. That seems quite a lot to me. And try as I might that was the end of the writing. It was about five thirty and I just had to stop.

I watched The Comedian (the Jerry Seinfeld documentary) and Burn After Reading. And then, I just went to bed.

There was a moment in The Comedian which was really arresting to me. Jerry is talking about what it was like when he started out being a comedian. He's explaining that he used to only write on a couple of days a week, and how one day after lunch he saw a team of construction workers trudging back to work. They didn't want to go back to work after lunch, and their job was far less fun than the one he was going to do. So why didn't he want to work? He said he never looked back after this revelation.

I think a lot of creative people are like this. They want to be a writer, but they don't actually want to do the work. The only reason I'm so tired I think is that if I was keeping up this rate of output I'd be putting out a novel every three weeks. That probably seems a tad rapid.

At least I'm still up on my daily amount even if I slipped today. I'm still 2 pages ahead of my target for the week. And if I just write 6 more I'll hit the half way mark in the novel.

I just hope I don't still feel as tired as this when I wake up tomorrow. I have to go back to work next week, and see a play every night Monday to Saturday (oh yeah I forgot to mention that).

Writing Diary: Day 3

2009-03-14T08:41:00.000Z

My good friend Nick Ollivère once told me the greatest piece of advice a writer can ever hear: "If it's boring to write, it will be boring to read."

I have tried to live by that ever since. You want to keep yourself interested in your own project. But at the same time there are several competing aspects. Some things in your writing are, by their nature harder to do than others. I love writing dialogue. I could write dialogue until the cows come home. But I'm writing a novel, not a play. It's supposed to be difficult. It is supposed to be challenging. And luckily it is. That's the good news. But sometimes you get to a bit which is hard. It isn't boring, it's hard. I was faced with this yesterday afternoon. In the morning I had written 6 pages and while writing at all was starting to hurt my brain after this intensity it came reasonably easily. I didn't feel any big desire to get away from the computer. After lunch I came back to it and almost immediately I hit a scene that was difficult.

The thing is that it wasn't boring, I wanted to know what was going to happen to my hero as much as I hope you do. I wanted to know how they deal with the situation. It's easy with boring because of Nick's rule. I think to myself, "Well lets just try without the scene". It invariably works. It's a kind of magic golden rule. If you don't obey it when you're writing you'll as sure as hell obey it when you come to editing.

But with difficult it's quite different. I have thought about skipping scenes like this for a bit. Coming back to them later, but I'm really not sure. I read the magazine Private Eye and I really love it. Some other people I know love it but only read the cartoons. They get the magazine and then they read all the cartoons and then after that they never quite have time to read the content. I have a rule, I only turn the page when I've read the content. And that means that I save the cartoons until I get to that page. I read them first in one big sweep across the page. But before I can have more I have to read the content. It's crazy really because I love the content. But I know that I'm lazy. If I didn't have the rule then it wouldn't happen. I'd read the cartoons and pretend I'd read the content.

So I can't really skip forward. If I skip forward. then I'll have a period at some point where I don't want to face going back to the novel because all I have is the hard bits. The problem was that I had the hard bits on an afternoon when I didn't have much time. I was going out too see a friend so I needed to get on with it.

Time is the most crucial thing it would seem. On Wednesday when I started I was constrained because I had to travel up to London and back, and I had to have dinner at a certain time and so on. Thursday was a horrible day for writing I felt, but it was easier because I could move everything around. I had no constraint. I wrote the last two pages in the last hour before midnight. But yesterday (Friday) was harder. I had to stop at five thirty in the afternoon. At quarter to five I had written 9 pages. Now of course writing 10 pages didn't seem enough. I felt that I needed to write 13. I wanted to beat a full day of writing on a part day.

At five thirty I hadn't quite finished, I pushed on, knowing that I would be late for my friend. By six o'clock I knew I had to start getting ready to leave. I had written 12 and three quarter pages. Close but no cigar.

I left the house and I could feel that my mind was mush. I spent the evening feeling very confused and strange. My brain was just exhausted.

On my way home I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to get home and finish that page. It was hanging over me. I arrived home at ten minutes past eleven and sat down at the computer. Only a quarter of a page to write.

And it was done. 13 pages. But I have no idea if I'll be able to do anything today.

Writing Diary: Day 2

2009-03-13T07:45:00.001Z

So day 2 is over now.

If you haven't a clue what's going on you may want to check out: The introduction and Day 1.

Yesterday was very tricky. I think I had tired out my brain with the writing that I had done on day 1. And as we all know a tired brain is a non-productive brain.

The morning was pretty hopeless as Katherine had to get up early to go to the airport and so I had to get up early too. And we had gone to bed late because of the packing that needed doing. So I found myself feeling very tired in the morning. I did not, as at least one person suggested and as many more were probably thinking have a hangover.

I wrote two pages and then at around 10am I went back to sleep for an hour. This is a real oddity for me. I think I can count on one hand the times I've gone back to sleep in the daytime in the last 10 years. I don't like doing it as it makes me feel very strange - actually almost like I have a hangover. But this is a writing holiday and I was seemingly too tired to write so I figured I better do whatever it takes. So I slept. There was an added strangeness to it in that just before I had decided to go back to sleep my previous attempt to wake myself up had been to shower. So yesterday I woke up, had a pot of coffee, showered and then went back to bed. No wonder it was so very confusing.

I slept for about an hour. Which wasn't enough to stop me feeling tired, but was enough to have added the weird strange almost like a hangover feeling. I showered again, dressed and then wrote another two pages and then it was one o'clock and I'd only written 4 pages.

This was not really very good. I figured that as the day progressed I would get more tired and therefore less productive. That's what usually happens anyway, so I was quite despondent.

Although at least on the positive side that fourth page was page number 67 which meant that I had crossed the third way mark (I am guessing the whole thing is going to be around 200 pages based on the current pacing of the already written chapters and the structure I've planned).

The afternoon went better, but it was still hard going. At one point I accidentally deleted 3 pages as well. Luckily undo worked in the way it was supposed to. It was quite confusing as I'd seemingly managed to delete some, not notice and then write some more so I had to copy the new stuff and then undo back to the deletion and then add the new stuff back in afterwards.

I wrote the six pages that I needed to do to make my 10 for the day, but it was like pulling teeth. From looking at the statistics I wrote around 10.1 words per minute. That. Is. Slow. And I was writing for most of that time sadly. I was writing a sentence - and then thinking... Um... ah... What happens next? Um... ah? Um... Oh. Another sentence. And so on... for six hours. That statistic another way is 6 seconds between each word.

So after I made my 10 pages I decided to have a break and watch a movie. I watched Goodfellas. A total classic movie which I have seen many times before. The idea with these things is to provide a distraction by a known amount. I didn't want to get too interested in a movie that I wouldn't be able to sleep - or more importantly that I not write.

So after the movie finished I wrote 2 pages in 45 minutes. Now that's more like it.

So yes if you've been keeping a running total that's 12 pages. One more than Day 1 and two more than the target. That does make it sound like it is going to be 13 today, but I'm not sure.

Today is going to be more tricky as I am going out tonight to see a friend. This is my one scheduled outing of the 5 days, so I better attack the writing with relish:

Writing Diary: Day 1

2009-03-12T05:25:00.001Z

So day 1 is complete. Don't worry about all the flannel how many pages did I write?

I wrote 11 pages.

So 1 more than target.

Writing 11 pages was tough. I mean it wasn't fighting in Iraq tough. But it was difficult to achieve. And I worry that doing another 10 today might be harder.

However Katherine left pretty early this morning. And that might make things easier or harder. It's difficult to say. Yesterday afternoon I had agreed to be out of the house because Katherine was packing. And so I had...

stop snickering at the back...

I had to spend the afternoon with my laptop in the pub.

And the pub I chose happened to be the Lowlander in Covent Garden.

Here are some pictures:

Hey... I got my writing done didn't I?

So the question is could I have done more if I had spend less time in the pub? Or did the pub loosen things up enabling more writing to get done?

And most crucially, has writing 11 pages yesterday made writing 10 pages today harder or easier?

I'll tell you one thing though... There was zero correlation between how many pages I hoped to write and how many I did. I didn't write 11 just because I planned to do 10. I hoped, secretly, to do 20. And wrote as many as I could get out of myself without being silly.

Anyway... Will I write 10 today? There's only one way to find out... Check back tomorrow.

PS. Thanks to all of those who wished me well by the way, your thoughts have been much appreciated.

A writing holiday

2009-03-10T13:40:00.003Z

So. Writing eh? What larks, what fun!

Over the next few days I'm going to have my first ever writing holiday. Not a holiday from writing, but rather a holiday to write.

Katherine is off to Turkey to do some belly dancing* and so I'm going to attempt to get some writing done. I have five days off starting on Wednesday and ending on Sunday. And I am going to tell you how much writing I have done in a brief post on Gamboling each day so you can see my progress. And mainly so I can't skive.

I am currently a quarter of the way through the current novel - yes I know that's where I was last time I did an update. It's bad isn't it? I have written 52 pages and the novel should be about 200.

So obviously the answer is to write 30 pages a day and then I'll be finished. But 30 pages of A4 is quite a lot to fill. You're talking 15,000 words a day. And I'm not sure I'm up to that. My most recent speed has been 1,000 words in a month. I'd rather set myself a target that's do-able and meet it than set something impossible and miss it.

So I'm going to go for 10 pages a day. That would take me to half way. That's an achievable goal - I hope.

So, the rules:

No Internet until Sunday evening except for these Gamboling articles
and comments

Katherine doesn't go until Thursday morning so I'm not to get
disheartened if the first day doesn't work very well

I'm not to get disheartened

I will, on the morning after, tell you how many pages I wrote
yesterday

I will not try and catch up before I write that post.

[and I can nag you from Istanbul! - Ed]

And so that's it I think. Knowing that you are going to be reading this should make me hit my targets - I hope.

* Really. It's for a hen do.

Why I will be leaving Demon Internet

2009-02-28T12:46:00.003Z

I had the following conversation with Demon Internet's "customer support"

Alex has joined the session
Connected to chat server, an agent will be with you shortly
CustomerService05 has joined the session
Alex: I have been limited by the fair use policy. I would like to have the limit removed. If I was to upgrade to Business 8000 would that work and how long would it take? Thanks, Alex.
CustomerService05: Hello, welcome to Demon Customer Service you are through to Priya.
Alex: Hi Priya
CustomerService05: Please bear with me while I load up your account details.
Alex: No problem
CustomerService05: Could you please confirm the security word on the account.Your's mother's name?
Alex: Xxxxx
CustomerService05: Sorry your mother's name?
CustomerService05: Thank you.
CustomerService05: Please bear with me.
CustomerService05: The present Download usage for your service is 84.0GB
CustomerService05: You are not supposed to exceed more than 60GB
Alex: I have not received any message from Demon about this.
Alex: I contacted Technical support and then Technical support tested the line... THere was no fault on the line.
CustomerService05: Please stop downloading for next two weeks and the download usage should go back to 60Gb or evven lesser and then you can upgrade the service.
Alex: And then I asked him to check if the Fair Use Policy had kicked in.
CustomerService05: Faif Usage Polocy has nothing to do with the line test.
Alex: Which it had. But nobody had informed me.
CustomerService05: Since the service is restricted, you will not be able to upgrade the service.
CustomerService05: i am sorry for the inconvenience.
Alex: I have been a customer of Demon since 1995! And nobody from your company even had the grace to tell me that I was having a problem!
Alex: Why wasn't I informed when I got to 60Gb?
Alex: I am seriously considering leaving Demon!
CustomerService05: Since the tool is under maintenance, the notification could not be sent.
Alex: But I offer to pay you more money a month to avoid this problem and you say I can't!
Alex: Then I tried to call your customer service number which doesn't work!
Alex: If the tool is under maintenence then you should inform your users that there is a risk that they could be going over their limit without realising
Alex: How long has the tool been under maintenance?
CustomerService05: Just about 2 weeks back.
Alex: And so because of your issue I have to now have no service for two weeks?
CustomerService05: You should have monitored it from your end as well.
Alex: Why? It says in your terms of service that I will be informed by e-mail.
CustomerService05: I agree. But since we had a problem we could not send the notification. However, I am sorry, the restrictions cannot be removed.
Alex: Why can I not upgrade my account at a cost of almost double per month to an account which doesn't have the Fair Use Policy? That's the other thing I don't get?
CustomerService05: At this moment you will not be able to do that . Once the restrictions have been removed, you can upgrade the service.
Alex: Why can't they be removed? Do Demon not control their own servers?
CustomerService05: It is system managed and cannot be removed manually.
Alex: Why can't I do that? Why would I want to upgrade my service when I am not in this situation?
CustomerService05: Please stop downloading for a couple of weeks and then later you can upgrade the service.
CustomerService05: If you place the reqwuest for the upgrade now the request will be rejected in the first place.
Alex: Are you not a company with a plan to make money? I don't understand this?
Alex: I can not see the point of this restriction? I want a service, you tell me it is not available from you at any price?
Alex: So I suppose I shall be taking my service to another provider. This is a great shame!
Alex: I have been a customer of Demon for 14 years!
CustomerService05: I am sorry but we will have to follow the procedures.
Alex: I can't have no internet for 2 weeks! It's simply unacceptable!
CustomerService05: Try checking the usage frequently and once you find it is gone beyond 60 Gb then you can place the requst.
Alex: I don't blame you. I know there are procedures in place for some reason. But I would like to speak to somebody who has some discretion.
Alex: I won't want to get the new package then I need to get myself out of this situation today. That's what is so frustrating.
CustomerService05: You can speak to our Technical Suppot team on 0845 272 0040 -3
CustomerService05: That is the option 3.
Alex: Would they be able to remove the restriction?
CustomerService05: They will not be able to remove the restrictions but I suggest that you speak to them.
Alex: Thank you I will call them now.
CustomerService05: Is there anything else I can help you with?
Alex: I don't think so :(
CustomerService05: Thank you for using Demon Text Chat. If there is anything further we can assist you with please feel free to return to the textchat service. We are always striving to improve our services, in order to do this we value your comments. You can leave feedback by completing our Customer Satisfaction Survey at www.demon.net/customersurvey/
CustomerService05 has left the session

I then called Technical Support who agreed that it didn't make much sense and forwarded me to Customer Support on the phone (which was luckily quite quick - presumably because they aren't taking any external calls because the line is down).

I tried to explain to them my one central point:

Demon has two services (I care about):

Demon HomeOffice 8000 which costs £21.99 per month and has a fair usage policy.

and

Demon Business 8000 which costs £46.99 per month and has no fair usage policy.

But Demon won't let me upgrade to the account without a fair usage policy until I am back in compliance with the fair usage policy of the account I want to leave.

Demon? I WANT TO GIVE YOU MONEY. If you say no to insanely loyal customers who get themselves into this situation and instead of leaving immediately say, "I know I'll pay over double instead" you have LOST YOUR MINDS. And you are clearly not a business!

I think I shall be going to Be. Not that it solves my problem for the next two weeks.

Across the bridge - Part 1

2009-02-22T10:18:00.000Z

James dropped his cigarette butt to the floor, trod it carefully into the ground and looked around for somewhere to place it. As he picked up the butt he could feel the cold cobbles sucking heat out of his hands. His gloves didn't seem to be helping at all, or rather they weren't helping enough. There wasn't a bin and so he flicked the butt into the river. James silently cursed himself for not thinking of this first, he could have done without bending over. And somehow he always liked the way a lit cigarette looked as it flew through the year, rather like a very cheap firework.

James walked up the path towards the bridge. From the darkness suddenly came a voice, "Who's that?"
"Hullo."

James heard the noise of a lamp being unhooded as he saw a wild tangle of hair and beard revealed. Somewhere from within a voice spoke again.

"You aren't crossing the bridge tonight."
"I am."

"It ain't a question. It would be murder to let you cross. From mid-point to far side it is completely iced over. There's no way you can cross it."
"But I must cross. I am already late for an appointment."

"What kind of man holds appointments at this time of night?"
 "I do not need to prove what kind of man I am to you."
 "That you don't, I suppose."

James made to move forward but the old man's hand was upon his arm. In the low light his hand looked completely white as it tightly gripped his overcoat.

"You'll have company in the grave tonight. An old man set off just 5 minutes ago."
James realised who it might be and whispered, "Julius?".
"Did you know him?"
"Not yet," said James. He wrestled free of the old man's arm and ran on to the bridge.

The tragedy of the self mong

2009-02-08T16:30:00.002Z

I am a magpie for little phrases and verbal ticks. I don't just store them away, I also find myself using them quite a lot. I do think that some of my conversations would be close to incomprehensible to strangers.

These little phrases and oddities are the special sauce that oils the conversation. They are half-remembered phrases that evolve into a life of their own. Perhaps you would like an example?

Katherine is quite likely to call something that is broken, "busted". So first I picked up busted, then because I'm a tinker I would say, "that's a bit Charlie from Busted". Busted having been at one stage been a popular beat combo. This would be most regularly used to describe oneself so it would be, "I'm feeling a bit Charlie from Busted". Which essentially means, "I'm feeling a bit peaky". Then it started to get shortened to just "Charlie". However I know somebody called Charlie. At one point when I said something about Charlie, Katherine said, "is that Charlie from busted or Charlie from your school". Which of course means that the phrase is now "Charlie from your school."

So hopefully you get the idea with all of that. Bearing that in mind, here are some of the other phrases that have been swirling around, coming from all sorts of places.

The tragedy of the self mong

The word mong is clearly very offensive and not a good thing. If you are unaware it refers to people who have Downs Syndrome as being mongoloid in appearance. And particularly it associates being stupid or doing stupid things with having downs syndrome. When I was at school that was the de rigeur choice of insult along with spaz of course. Not good. If it's any help, as I was a weedy geek at school (versus the rotund geek that I am now) these words were mainly used about me rather than by me. I don't remember using them, but I'd guess I did. With all that said, there was another thing that people did which was to put ones tongue between ones teeth and lower lip and make an "uuuurgh" noise. This was "to mong" somebody. And again it was used as an insult along the lines of "you're an idiot". But the worst thing you could do is make this childish face and then realise moments later, generally still while you were making the face, that the stupid one who had misunderstood the situation was you. This was the tragic self-mong as the face fell realising that this insult had backfired. Although now we realise that every mong is tragic.

Small Doggy Style

This is the moment, earlier on in the process of... well you get the idea, where the man hasn't quite focused on the correct area and seems to be more interested in the leg for some reason. Well, I think I'll leave that there.

Monkey Sheets

This is what you say when the bed is a bit cold when you get in. More precisely what you say when you get in to bed is, "oooh ahhh oooh ahhh ooooh ah, this bed is a bit Monkey Sheets".

Shat on the queen

This is a phrase you can use to describe the look someone gives you when you say something which they find truly extraordinary and somewhat unsavory. For example, when I told Katherine's mother that I didn't take sugar on my weetabix she looked at me like I'd shat on the queen.

Columbo of Amazon

This is what Katherine accuses me of being, because I always want to buy "just one more thing".

On Geeks

2009-02-05T09:46:00.001Z

I have, from time to time, been called a geek. [Surely not? - Ed] It's one of those things that is liable to happen. And it happens because I am one. Sometimes I even go so far as to refer to myself as a geek. Recently, however, I have started to question this practice. I know what I mean when I say it, but do they?

Some people in the general public seem to think that the words geek and nerd are interchangeable but they aren't. At least not to me. To me, a geek is the kind of person who likes to take things apart to see how they work, the kind of person who builds something just to see if they can. But the nerd is quite different. The nerd is the completist, the train spotter, the one who isn't happy until they have all of something.

Now I will admit to certain nerdish tendencies, but it isn't my driving force. Instead I tend to get a bit bored of completing sets. I want to be off exploring the next new exciting thing. And doing that is pure geek.

A geek story from my history is that I really wanted to start a blog, but I didn't really know what one was. But I didn't research it. I didn't sit down and studiously figure out the best way of creating one. I simply wrote a bit of software that did it for me. It was terrible, but it worked. And I loved doing it. Then a reader told me that what I was doing was a blog, so I looked up the word on google and found blogger. You can still see on this site, in the older archive, the pre blogger site.

A nerd story from work is from a colleague. She is in charge of accounts and she is very precise and needs everything ordered. She is like that not just in her job where she has to be, but also at home, where she keeps a four-year forcast of her and her husband's finances. She has different tabs on her spreadsheet for birthday presents and Christmas presents. It's all budgeted for. It makes her feel better to know that everything has a place and everything an order.

I'm not saying that one is better than the other, I'm just saying that it's important to know the difference.

So are you a geek or a nerd?

Have you twigged yet?

2009-01-30T06:08:00.000Z

At the end of the weekend away at Rob's (Weakened away), Stew was unable to take my brother and I to the station and so Rob stepped into the breach.

We packed all of our stuff into the back of Rob's car, waved goodbye to the house and set off to the local station. Soon after setting off, we could hear a strange scratching and scraping noise coming from under the car. Rob was worried, could it be his exhaust? We didn't have much time before our train, so Rob decided to go for the pragmatic approach and hope for the best. We'd check it out once we got to the station. All the way there it continued to scrape. It was a strange transition, at first the noise was unwelcome - a sign that something had gone wrong. Once Rob had decided that he was going to hold on until the station the continued noise was a blessing - it meant that whatever it was hadn't fallen off.

We pulled into the station and all three of us got out of the car. Immediately it was obvious what had caused the noise. Sticking out of the rear passenger door that none of us had used was a small branch of a sapling - something about half a metre long with about 10 twigs on it. We all had a good chuckle of relief; Rob opened the door and pulled the branch out. Then he started breaking the branch into bits and putting the twigs back onto his back seat. But as he was doing this, a young boy approached.

"Why have you got a branch attached to your car?", he shouted.

We didn't really know how to respond to the question. We hadn't planned this thing, and yet that was clearly the only way that this kid could imagine something like this could have happened.

"Why have you got a branch attached to your car?", he shouted again, although he didn't need to shout as much this time as he was standing right near to us.

Rob is, I think you could say, somewhat of a hippy nature. And he decided to emphasise that style in his response.

Rob: "I think it just wanted to come for a ride, man."

Rob had, as this was going on, almost finished putting the bits of branch into the back seat.

Boy: "Why are you putting a branch back in your car?"

Rob: "It just wants to go home man. I'm just going to take it home."

Boy: "No. Seriously, WHY ARE YOU PUTTING A BRANCH IN YOUR CAR?"

The boy, it would seem, had a small number of rage issues. My brother judged the moment...

Pete: "Hey, stop giving us so much stick."

We chuckled to ourselves about this joke. The kid was clearly not best pleased.

Boy: "Don't you insult me mate. Don't you insult me you pr!@k!"

Pete: "It was only a joke, mate."

Boy: "Oh, you think it's funny to insult an 11 year old kid, do you? Think you're tough insulting an 11 year old kid?"

Pete: "No."

Boy: "My dad's a f*£king traveller and he'll do you if he finds out that you've been messing around with his kid."

Pete: "Right."

Me: "I think we have a train to catch."

Boy: "You better get on that train because my dad's going to come down here in a moment and he's a f*£king traveller and he's going to get you."

We all started to edge towards the station, except the kid who seemed to be edging towards wherever his dad was. Just as we were almost out of earshot, Pete again judged the moment correctly...

Pete: "I can't believe you two didn't stick up for me."

We all started laughing again. We are quite easily amused. This, however, wasn't wise as the kid, who presumably hadn't heard what Pete had actually said (not that it would have mattered) thought we were laughing at him.

Kid: "Right, I'm getting my dad."

We should have told him to leaf it out, or we'd call the copse.

Spare me a quarter

2009-01-28T06:34:00.000Z

It's January and I am a quarter of the way through the first draft of my new novel. That sounds really a lot better than it should. I conjures up ideas that make it seem like I might be finishing said draft by the end of April. No, it's taken most of 2008 to get a quarter of the way through the novel, which is a bit of a long time. The problem is application of course. It takes an awful lot of time to write a novel and time is something that I don't seem to have an awful lot of.

My work day is 8am to 6pm which rules out quite a large chunk of the day. Especially as my commute is another hour and a quarter on top. Writing in the night is difficult. I agree with Gunter Grass who said, "I don't believe in writing at night because it comes too easily. When I read it in the morning it's not good." So I must write in the morning for an hour before I go to work. That means I get up at 5:30. Start writing at 6am and then leave the house at seven. Normally I get home again around eight because leaving work is harder than it should be, which means I have about an hour or two before going back to bed. And because that plan is so crazy, it has tended not to work as well as it might. I could try a different plan. That's possible, normally when something doesn't work, it's best to go back to the beginning and try a different tack. But I just don't see how I can. So this plan is it. Perhaps the next quarter will be faster?

When I ever mention that I am a certain distance through a novel or a piece of work I am often asked how I know. Well the simple answer is that I don't really know of course. A page might take a week to write in first draft or it might take 10 minutes. And that page that took you ten minutes to write might change the course of the novel and add another chapter or subtract one. It is an imprecise measure. I haven't done as some have and tried to come up with a number of words for a novel and then fit that. I think that doesn't really work because every novel has a different pace and speed. I know it will be roughly a novel-length story, which is, I suppose, somewhere between 65,000 - 150,000 words. But that is a pretty big somewhere. The safest way I know is that I have an idea of all of the scenes and moments that I want in the novel. I have a list of them and to try and keep myself on track I have marked them as short, medium and long. This helps with the pacing while I'm in the trenches. Do I need to make this a fast punchy bit to get somewhere else or should it be slow and relaxed so that an emotion can be drawn out? Once I had the first few versions of those short, medium and long scenes done for this book, and I know how many of them there are I can tell how far I am through the book. That's my method. Your mileage may vary.

The second thing that people ask me is always, "what is it about"? And the answer is, "I'm not telling." I have to keep it a secret so that people don't accidentally influence it. It's hard enough second-guessing my own brain, let alone all of yours. Imagine I told you the book was about fish. And you said, "Oooh, I like books about fish, I always like it when books about fish have bits in them about the swim bladder". That sounds like a perfectly natural thing for you to say (well, maybe not quite). The problem is that while I'm writing I'm always going to be trying to get that dang swim bladder into the story, even if the story would be much better without it. And even worse, the other way around you might say, "I don't like books about fish." And that doesn't help at all.

So a secret it must be. But I feel like by telling you that it's being worked on, I might keep the pressure on me to finish it. I'll let you know when I'm half way.

Weakend away

2009-01-25T09:58:00.000Z

I've had a few weekends away recently that have caused me to feel more tired by the end of them than the beginning. This trend started back in early December when my brother Pete, my cousin Stewart and I went out to visit another cousin, Rob.*

We were off for an exciting adventure in the countryside. Pete and I only missed a couple of trains in the bar at Waterloo getting up the Dutch courage that is required when us city types venture outside of Zone 6.**

Eventually we set off with a couple of beers for the train. We hadn't seen each other for a bit so we were the kind of annoying people on trains who are loud just when you're trying to go home / sleep / slip into a coma. Luckily several others decided to join in with our conversation. We offered them beers but none of them decided to accept. This may have been to do with my continued insistence that they weren't poisoned.

Anyway, eventually we arrived and were picked up at the station by Stew. And soon we were resting in front of Rob's fire and eating pizza as they did in days of yore.***

The next day we needed to get a bit more serious about the whole weekend business and so we walked to the pub. Before we went we decided to get some wood for the fire. Rob showed us where we could get some nice sustainable wood sources and off we went.

After an afternoon in the pub playing pool it was time to go back home for a couple of bottles of wine and some roast dinner.

We decided to quickly divide into teams. Rob and I would be in the kitchen. Pete and Stew would go and get some wood.

I declared myself Rob's Native American chef**** and off the others went. Rob was explaining how much he enjoyed being out in the countryside - the connection with nature, the way that the wood in the fire was found rather than farmed. And he said, "You have to tread lightly on the Earth".

Just as these words were hanging in the air, Stew came storming back into the kitchen.

"I've hurt my leg", he said.
"How did you do that?" Rob and I chorused.
"I fell out of a tree."
"What were you doing in a tree?", asked Rob.
"I was sawing off some wood".

He slapped his leg better and headed back outside. "Don't be too much longer," I shouted.

I decided to lay the table. I even managed to fashion some napkins from some toilet paper that was available (don't worry, it hadn't ever been near the toilet). And soon everyone was sitting down to Rob's lovely roast beef. As we sat down we were joined by the house cat Gizmo. Giz was not, it must be said, the kind of cat that waits for you to do something for him. He's an off-on-his -own-and-doing kind of cat. So as we all sat down for dinner Giz knew what to do. Other cats I have met would have tried to jump up on the table or tried to move in and wait for a scrap to be thrown to them like a dog. Gizmo had other ideas. A few minutes later we heard a crunching cracking noise. We looked down and we could see the hind legs and tail of a mouse hanging out of Gizmo's mouth. As we all looked at him he looked back with an expression which seemed to say, "What are you looking at? Oh, you're so much better than I am, are you?". It was a look that was hard to disagree with.

After dinner, we decided to return to the pub where a band was performing some live music. Folk music out here isn't a concept; it is what music is. The pub was rammed with people all enjoying a great set by a band whose name escapes me. The characters were all out in force. Everyone knew everyone, except us London types who stood out like a sore thumb. There were conversations like this going on:

"Sorry I puked on your sofa."
"That's okay fella, but next time try and clean it up okay?"
"What happened to that sofa, by the way?"
"I had to throw it away, it was ruined"
"I could have sold it for you, you should have called me."

The walk home seemed a lot shorter than the walk there which was handy as it was several degrees below freezing. And when we got back we stayed up in front of the fire and talked the night away.

It was a great weekend.

* Stew and Rob are cousins too, not brothers. Everyone in this story is a cousin, except me and my brother, who are brothers, and the cat, who is no relation.

** I know Zone C is technically the zone furthest out, but that isn't really London anymore.

*** Italian yore but yore nevertheless.

**** Soux chef. Do try and keep up!

After Rothko

2009-01-24T09:26:00.004Z

Last weekend Katherine and I went to see the Mark Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern.

This is me before Rothko*:

This is me after Rothko:

*I only look quite so strange because I was trying to stand very still, as one false move would have caused my scarf to fall down, ruining the effect.

How many holes does your shirt have?

2009-01-19T05:39:00.001Z

Katherine called out to give me an update on matters of laundry, "you have a hole in your shirt".

"Oh dear, that's a shame," I answered, "I'll have to buy a new one."

This, I knew was the nice safe answer. The answer that would steer me out of danger. It wasn't the answer I was thinking of though. I really wanted to say, "that's good, otherwise I'd never be able to put it on". But I guessed, rightly I'm sure, that this wouldn't be what she wanted to hear.

Of course this got me thinking, just how many holes do I have in my shirt?

Well when it's buttoned there is the one for my neck and the one for my torso. There are the two for my arms and there are the two for the cufflinks I'm not wearing (this shirt has buttons and cufflink holes). There are also the two holes that are there so that when you roll up your sleeves you have enough material to do so. These are the kind of slits (or darts if you prefer) that run down the last quarter of your sleeves on the inside. Also my top button is undone giving one extra hole (the buttonhole). And finally the shirt pocket hole. So done up my shirt has 10 holes.

What about undone?

Well, if I roll up my shirtsleeves I don't actually change the number of holes as I gain two for the buttonholes and lose two for the slits as they are now subsumed into the sleeve holes.

On the front of my shirt I get two extra holes for the collar buttons and I lose two for opening the shirt. The head and torso hole disapear. But I do gain one hole per button. There are eight buttons on the front of my shirt but the top one was already open. So I add seven.

So when open my shirt has 17 holes! So what's an extra hole here or there? I was obviously just trying to make it an even 18. I thought about mentioning this to Katherine but I decided this might cause more of my shirts to develop extra holes.

So, readers, how many holes do you have in your shirts?