The View from Takrann

...And in the spirit of supreme irony, I blog just this once when I didn't want to blog anymore. But as there is such a crock out there in response to the rant on Robin Hobb's website (and, yes, yes, how clever of those to point out: what is that on her part if not a blog? As if that trite observation proves anything or somehow etiolates the veracity of her statement). Things need to be said.

To quote Doctor Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum's character in Jurassic Park, and substituting 'scientists' and 'scientific' for 'bloggers' and 'blogging' respectively):

Yeah, but your scientists/bloggers were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

I'll tell you the problem with the scientific/blogging power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!

The outrage expressed by many is indicative of this would-be touchy-feely post-post-modern crap that blogging typifies. This notion of some sort of interaction, a relationship between author and reader/fanbase through blogging. That this is something radical and new. It isn't. Letters and phones. Just faster. And you know what? There is no relationship. The only relationship there is results when the author completes their book (with as little correction  from any editor possible - what kind of an artist are you that you need a mass of  aid to complete  the thing and see  what  you yourself cannot - where's the vision and genius in that? Where's the growing mastery of the craft? Do not be ashamed of the statement 'I am an artist'. Because that's what artists do. Create a body of literature. ALONE. That's where the genius or not comes in). And then the reader picks it up and reads it. That's the only relationship there is.

It is no wonder that there is so much mediocre emperor's new clothes shallow prose out there when you read of writers on their blogs finishing a book in a couple of months before it goes to the editing stage. Or not facing up to the fact that info-dumping in fiction whoever does it, is crap art. Period. How can you write like that and let it pass? How can an editor let it pass? Or dashing off a story in a couple of hours. What sort of art is that? (There is the dimension of unspoken one-up-manship that blogging authors display, maybe that's why.) What manner of genius are they that they can dash off masterpieces in such a short space of time or even just works of art that are worthy of the time of day? The whole f*****g community is too easy on itself. IT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH to serve up such shallowness. Where's the layering? The intricacy? And don't cop out by saying you are just trying to earn a living. "I write. I'm a writer. [Yes, and it shows.] What's all this 'artist' stuff?"

Inverted snobbery is the worst kind and the death of culture. Don't pander to it.

Being at ease with culture

That singular intensity of vision, from which great art results, with its warts and all and for which the first criterion is not pressure to make it accessible first and foremost to the widest readership in the hope of enhancing sales, it is dying and it is dying because of the relativist drivel that blogging typifies.

Christ, are we all so insecure that we need to seek approbation several times a day or share with others the colour of our underpants and how soiled they are or the precocious nature of our children or the peculiarly singularly charming characteristics of our dogs? Who gives a toss? Someone said that blogging for them was their coffee break. Trouble is most of the coffee on the break tastes bloody awful.

The hard truth is that some writers are better than others, not different but better. By any measure of technical expertise, vision, characterisation and intensity of execution and what has been achieved before in the medium better and the majority of them are conspicuous by their absence as bloggers.

People need to cut through the crap, stop being so easy on themselves and patting each other on the back for surmounting literary twigs on the ground when there are artistic mountains to climb. But such is the climate.

Literature's self-implosion.

It is in the coffee break blogging cafe where relativism resides, where we are all touchy feely and right on and suffer the ludicrous delusion that we are all friends in some way. Ultimately you have to be face-to-face and in the flesh to be that in any tangible sense of the word friend. It's called nature and anthropology and it took millions of years to develop and if you think a few micro-chips overnight will somehow supersede that, think again. 

It is all so much white noise.

The argument that one man's poison is another's nectar doesn't cut it here. When George R R Martin remarks on Robin Hobb's rant about the vampyric nature of blogging to one's creativity and then ponders whether he should blog so much and gets over 150 replies in response, if he is unwise enough to read them all, that unequivocally effects his vision, maybe even in an infinitesimal way, but it does. As white noise. Just shut the door and pour your genius into Dance With Dragons, George. Everything else is totally, utterly irrelevant to the singularity of your artistic vision in the act of writing for which no reader or editor or anyone else has any business at all. Display to us the purity and the singularity of your level of writing genius. It is that which separates the men/women from the boys/girls and only that.

As for the rest, including blogging. To quote Dr. Malcolm once more:

That is one big pile of shit.

I confess to never having read a Terry Pratchett novel, but I was shocked by his announcement of a rare form of Alzheimer's Disease. He presented it with what I have always assumed to be the stoicism of an atheist humanist.  This Sword of Damocles hanging over an artistic intellect fills me with utter dread. May he write many more books in future and I endeavour to read some of them.

A genuinely fascinating documentary about Pink Floyd (I can find no free watch of the documentary online, sadly) on the beeb last night in which all the members took part. I was surprised at Roger Waters' admittance of regret and even remorse over their breakup, largely instigated by Waters himself. Their twenty minutes together on Live 8 was just as epic and momentous as the Zeppelin reunion in my book. I saw the Floyd moment at a party held by my downstairs' neighbours in London. The party had been going from early evening and I have no idea how much wine, punch and Serbian brandy I drank (never, never mix 'em) and myself and another Floyd fan (I have no idea of his name nor what he looks like now) sang through every single word during every single moment of the Floyd set at the tops of our voices. That was bloody marvellous. As was the documentary. Interesting to see Waters, an awkward massively talented bugger (when Gilmour related that Waters presented the band with The Wall already written, I just gasped) so regretful, remorseful, even contrite. He clearly wanted to repeat the experience on stage with the band members again. Tellingly, he looked older and more careworn than the rest of them. Who knows. I must know most of their stuff backwards. Just once more, the whole lot performing Dark Side together again. People think Zeppelin tickets were hard to come by!

There was quite a bit of footage involving Bob Geldof, responsible for getting them back together. He said he considered getting them to perform on stage again symbolic about what Live 8 was all about: despite differences, even animosity, all uniting in a common cause. Geldof also said that coming out of Punk he viewed Floyd with contempt as Prog Rock dinosaurs. But years later he listened to The Dark Side of the Moon and recognised it as one of the absolute pillar high points in the history of Rock. Amen to that.

Speaking of music, the ever-excellent Ory Chalk has just posted a new piece, Marie Antoinette on her MySpace page. Quirky, evocative, disturbing, beautiful, sensual, mysterious, her music possesses all of these qualities. And she comes across as charm herself as a person. If you follow that link be sure to listen as well to Mortal Danger, Ladywolf and Eva's Temptation (wow!) this last her gorgeously intoxicating and sensual collaboration with Lunabee.

Thank you swan_tower I have been following your lead in avoiding the temptation to write 'out of order'. I have been writing scenes here there and everywhere and after such enthusiastic surges finding myself with a massive headache (and precious little interest) in trying to 'join the dots'.  Instead, I mapped out for scene following on from scene and then writing them. Also aided by writing elsewhere this morning. Yomping through the cold and the frost to a good friend's house: table cleared and ready for me, strong coffee brewing and left to myself, no distractions, I got on. Repeat tomorrow. If I reach the 7000k mark with my latest novella by the beginning of next week, that will be Xmas present enough for me.

What I would like beyond that is a very, very good bottle of red. A decent Pinot Noir (from anywhere, one that doesn't turn out to be a watery disappointment) or a Chilean Carménère; or an Argentinian Malbec. And to write a scene I have in mind with the first snow and a splash of blood, dishonour and the seeds of doom and redemption thereby.

There is no tomorrow. Do it now.

Yep, it's raining again. Grey, cold miserable unpleasant land.

And that reworked poem reminds me why I don't write 'em any more.

The weather these past few days has got the better of me, I admit it. Nor is there anywhere right now to hole-up in comfort, knowing that where I am now is where I simply should not be. Very uncomfortable.

I am a walking poetic fallacy.

Targets for the day:
1) Stay out of talk fights. Sh**, don't talk. (Target one doomed to fail before it's begun.)
2) Write something. Non-fiction doesn't count as writing with me. Never has, never will.
3) Avoid the moving wallpaper of the tabloid news media world. The petty irony of our hubris as a species oozes from it like a puss.
4) Read some fiction, learn something. "Art is lies that tell the truth" - Picasso.
5) Music. Magenta aside (I am nothing if not eclectic) Classical and Baroque to cleanse the bloodstream. Possessed of all the beautiful decorum of a Dutch landscape or interior. Yes. If no snow, some decorum then.

And caffeine.

...Well, it cannot be denied that the winter is upon us here in the UK. The wind was playing frisbee with dustbin lids all through the night.

There is no question that the lack of sunlight affects my state of mind and my mood. Need to invest in some St John's Wort - soon - so that it will actually take effect before December is out. Whether it is a placebo or not: it works with my walnut brain.

I know that snow can bring all sorts of often serious problems. But anything is better than this damp bloody squib of grey slating rain. I can remember White Christmases in this part of the UK too, down South. I'm sure the records will nay-say my memory. But I can remember it snowing here in the winter. It hardly ever does now. You'll get a spit of sleet around April if you're lucky.

It acts as a tabula rasa, the snow. Acts as a literal white-out of many of the self-inflicted iniquities of a year*. There have been many. Too many. Well, good riddance to this one! An awful thing to say. But right now, I mean it.

*I should have saved those lines for fiction! I'm not sure it is actually productive doing this. I'm becoming so OCD about what meagre word power I have that the compulsion to hold them back grows. Even just a burst of emotion in here can write me out for the day, the mere process. Now how insecure can you be?! If I don't write fiction first thing, chances are I won't write any at all on the given day and writing anything else is like letting air out of a (hot air anyway) balloon.

...And do the dying fly.

Well, I didn't get there. My characters didn't get there and I didn't get there. I made the fatal mistake of getting up too late, when the world (here in this part of the hemisphere, GMT) had already woken and got its grubby mitts into me.

Idling about, making coffee and - most fatally of all - going online beforehand is disaster in slow motion.

I can only ever get this done if I am hermetically sealed. I get up at 6 and I get on with it for at least four hours. Then the world can throw whatever daily (and ongoing) crap at me it likes, because I have already done. The words are down. Do your worst, world. IT NO LONGER MATTERS, I've won already!

But not today.

...And think of getting to the next chapter. It has to be all about wordage in quantity today.

If a half-decent content-relevant turn of phrase during - with which I can pointlessly preen myself later and which, were it ever to get to publication (nobody publishes novellas you frickin' dummy) would be edited out anyway - then all well and good, but it has to be about the wordage. I know the point of the tale at which I want to arrive today. I have no idea what the characters will do or say to get there, but somehow get there they will and maybe meet a couple of new characters along the way.

I have set things up so that a point of view turns out not to belong to the person the reader is (hopefully) led to believe it belongs to at all. Why? Because, that's why! A work of fiction should get the synapses of a reader's brain firing, surely. Thwart a few expectations (as long as it's not randomly chance bloody silly in the way it does it) and by the words. Sod it. Back to the words again. And preening myself with would-be nice turns of phrase...

So today's writing session is not going to be about wordage at all. It's a craft lesson of another kind: making a rod for me own back.

Caffeine.

Listening to Balakirev's Tamara while writing my latest novella. The atmospheric opening is nigh perfect and I immediately thought of it when the storyline and landscape for the novella came to me. I have been waiting to put that piece of music to use in a piece of fantasy for almost twenty years!

As a piece of music, never quite the sum of its parts - it teases you with the promise of an orgiastic climax all the way through, but what we eventually get is a rather risqué romp. Although Tamara's sensuously alluring curves are wonderfully rendered on the strings. Not quite the sum of its parts, then. Let's hope the same won't be said of the novella when it's done. As for Tamara, the parts in themselves are gorgeous.

John Lennon famously said:

"Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

For me, it is like this:

"Writing is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."

It will dawn on most writers struggling to complete the process, never mind about reaching publication, that the everyday world does not give a sh** about what you are doing, does not value your efforts in the slightest. 'Tis mere frippery, a hobby, mere doodling. Sitting on your backside and picking your nose in make-believe.

That is why you must value it as much as anything else you have in your life. Otherwise it is merely a hobby, it is mere doodling and frippery. You must not submit to the fascism of the everyday and the mediocre (and in the UK where tall-poppy syndrome is endemic, that is not easy) instead, throw in your lot with the rich and strange, transform yourself. Be something other. Inhabit that world elsewhere.

Bet on it: in this incarnation you only go round once.

One thing about being deeply immersed in writing a piece, you just don't read other writers' stuff. Certainly not fantasy. You just do not want to go there.

It's like trying to recall a melody you never quite knew you had but always sensed you did and then another melody is hummed and aahed over the top of it, result: dissonance.

Yet, strangely enough, when it comes to the stuff I consider to have been penned somewhere way beyond the Alpha Centauri staging post of accomplishment, I can.

Again, not fantasy. But I can read Conrad. As a refresher course for what language could and should do, while I am writing my own earthbound fiction. And even in just half a line out of a thousand, hope to be touched by the precious substance of the stars the man just seemed to have so much of he could casually do his washing up in it.

I pour over each word. Each word. Even the 'and'. A die-hard habit from writing poetry. Perhaps that's why it takes me so long to finish a book or a novella. Olivier is reputed to have said to Dustin Hoffmann on the set of Marathon Man after Dustin Hoffmann hadn't slept a couple of nights to look right for a scene: My dear boy, why don't you just try acting?

I suppose a similar piece of advice could apply to me: stop worrying about the words so much for now and just tell the story.

Took off the top of a big toenail on the lip of the bath last night. There was blood. And cursing and swearing. Ouch. But it was a kick-start of sorts.

Not feeling at all well today, but need to grind out some words for the novella. Not writing for a couple of days I simply start to go bonkers.

I know that (this time, this one) it can be good! But the chances of getting a novella published are practically zilch. For the love of, then...

It must first and foremost always be: for the love of...

...Thirty years after the first exhibition here in the UK (which I can still remember queuing for hours to see at the British Museum) those Egyptian marvels are here yet again. That astonishing mask (topped only by the bust of Nefertiti I saw in Berlin - made more remarkable for me because its perfection was suggested as probably only one of a 'production line' of them) with its juxtaposition of straight barred brilliance and of curving lines like some premonition of digital code, so striking that only the genius infused into an entire culture could have conceived of it.

As for the mummy itself. The inherent symbolism of our fragility there for all to see as they lifted it out of its resting place to house elsewhere (sealed properly one hopes) to protect it from vibration and the human condensation created by gasps of awe, one doesn't wonder.

King Lear:

Thou art the thing itself, unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor bare, forked animal as thou art.

I later saw a quite compelling 'docu-drama' (when they had no such horrid aberration for a name) about Howard Carter many years back and with that rekindling of my memory of the original exhibition I wrote some lines of poetry - one of my very best similes! - that in over fifteen years I have yet to find a whole poem for:

Bright as Carter's eyes
Lit by the glow of candlelight
Hitting off gold
As he drank the breath of a race
Three thousand years old.

Not bad. As a couple of real pros of poetry combined put it:

These fragments I have shored against my ruin.

But I question the wisdom of putting those - to me - precious lines on public display for every tomb raider to rifle through.

Oh, the egotism of the man!

I need, one day, to find the poem for it.

Tightrope Walker explains exactly why the current writers' strike is taking place in Hollywood, clarifying the history of the whole battle, by implication, a battle for writers everywhere.

No radio
No TV (most of all no TV)
No newspaper
No desultory SWOPping on the Net
No absorption in the minutiae of worst case scenarios from: will the toast burn? To: will the world burn?
No binding of the imagination to the whipping post of self-doubt and thrashing it within an inch of its life for worthless trash.

Just the words and the music that aids the transition of them from that world into this. And that is all.

The world outside, with all its fads and its flashpoints and its perseverating nonsense, will still be here again when you look up.

There are a lot of Romes to burn and they go up in smoke over a lifetime, not a day, or a few hours. Just tend assiduously to the world that exists as reality in the fiction. Just the words.

..Which of course it does.

Having the misfortune to glance through the newspaper first thing this morning before my coffee had brewed, it was one page after another of sordid horror (that's all the endless slurry of Celeb and Reality TV dealt with, then) and the everyday trivia of yet another tragic murder vying for space with the drug-soaked idiocy of overrated pop figures. Page and time slot space driven by some sectors of the pop media with a vague inkling of another Janis Joplin or Kurt Cobain-type tragedy to actually be around to write about when it is happening. Dream on.

One story at the moment there is which is very street for the UK media. I speak not of that Whining Shambles we are repeatedly subjected to. No. With this one, the police are combing the victim's and suspects' Facebook pages for possible clues. The reporters falling over themselves to catch onto how new and yet another radical departure this is of well, of what? It is simply evidence (or not) like a piece of paper or an object in a room. But this is Facebook and 'Social Networking'  we are talking about and 'The Internet' (you can almost see the reporters making quotation marks with Dr Evil-like gestures of their forefingers to indicate the phrases as they say the words).

This sort of patronising crudity is still hot sex for mainstream reporters of not just tabloid news outlets.

The story of the UK university exchange student who was murdered in Italy in what appears to be some sort of violent orgiastic sex crime. The poor lass in the wrong place at the wrong time with some very, very wrong people. It has been all over the news. Sky News of course has been all over it for days. Over and over and over and over. As only Sky News can be. Like a dog returning to its vomit until it has licked it all dry. And it will.

There are photo shots in the papers and there is film of two of the - at present - suspects who are now being held. And when one observes that little scene, one ponders on the notion of whether the camera does or does not lie.

We all have a vibe. We are, apart from anything else, animals; and like all animals possessed of profound instinct for the purpose primarily of survival, which we have muddled by the equally profound artifice of our civilisation.

When I observed that little scene my instincts kicked in before the question of whether the camera does or does not lie. I did already have context, of course. Which can lead to the wrong conclusions.

Further to that, this little rider: to what extent can those instincts be true when they are not triggered by actual physical proximity to a scene, but by a representation of it, which is what - no matter how crystal clear - film of the event, even live actually is? I'm not talking about witnessing someone clearly being shot or beaten up on film for example and the identification of the perpetrator being clear. I am talking about gauging the truth of someone's nature by observing their movements, their facial expression, their eyes. And if close enough, their voice: what they are saying and how they are saying it. The nuances given the context of the situation.

But then of course, instincts can be wrong. The receptors blurred by any number of complications.

Had I actually been there, in physical proximity, even without full context, I venture to argue that they might not.

I personally have been fooled by someone's nature in the past, for a long time. But even then, when I look back and analyse it, I realise that I didn't want to believe what the vibe was telling me all along.

Which is one reason why we have courts of law (where ironically, very often juries' ultimate determination can be swayed by an intuited tipping point regardless of all the factual evidence.)

Not for nothing are we the most dangerous species on the planet.

We're a bloody funny bunch of animals, as animals go, and no mistake.

Just got some spam in my mail that said 'Win a Luxury Flat in London Worth 150,000!'

Now as any bloody fool knows, there is no such thing as a luxury flat in London for £150,000! Hell, there is no such thing as a flat in London full stop for £150,000! Unless we are talking outskirts so far on the periphery of the smoke that it isn't London at all.

If it sounds too good to be true...sucker.

...Fluidity.

Doing my best to overcome the HUUUUUGE disappointment of knowing I will be missing Magenta live at the Borderline in London today, a date I had pencilled into my 'Must Be Done' diary months ago, I'll grumble and mutter my way through the weekend.

The thriller isn't working for me. After writing a couple of k in which the character exited his flat, walked up a road in London thinking he is being followed then (it gets worse: he was going to buy some milk!!!!!!) walking all the way back to his flat again and literally getting nowhere :-)))))) I had a good hard, 'thunk'.

I do believe 100% in writing every day. That is what defines someone as a writer before anything else, not publication or sales figures, but first of all writing every day. A day not written is a day not lived has been my mantra for several years (and God, do I know that to be true!). But if a new project isn't working and it is a project of personal choice there comes a point at which you have to ask yourself about the wisdom of pursuing that intended project to a conclusion at that time. Yes, there is the exercise in discipline and never minding the quality feeling the width, but if there is no crackle of literary engagement with what you are doing you might be inclined to pause and ask why you are doing it. Because if page after page after page there is no electricity being generated by the process, what you've got on your hands is a dead thing. If it's crap and you know it is crap and you keep writing the crap. Stop.

I am also a great believer in a gestation period. You have ideas, which you might jot down  - in fact there are some I don't, some which are so seminal and vivid to me that I can store them within my mind for literally years, knowing that I have neither the skill nor the mood focus at the time to do them justice; and then that time will come. And as I spent the past few days getting literally nowhere with my supernatural thriller (what I did learn from the exercise is that its time has not yet come) I was taken over by one of my intended novella ideas. I was standing upon the promontory of one of the ancient outposts of Takrann and it all just lived in and through me right then and there and from the off, I had wired into the hardest thing of all to wire into: the distinct narrative voice of a given piece. The situation and the landscape I envisaged gave it to me. And once you have found that, you often feel you are playing 'keepy-uppy' with the darn thing as it unlocks scenarios and symbolism at a real lick.

Now whether the novella will be 50,000 words or not (that would make it a long novella and by some sort of vague determination that there is in these things, even a novel) is of no matter. It will be as long as it needs to be. Try as I did to flee from Takrann for a month, I could not. And I realise now that this is a very, very good thing.

Jay Lake in his How do you tell the age of a writer? Cut 'em in half and count the rings! recent Blog post muses on who is exactly considered to be a new writer in the publishing field and what are the criteria for deciding it.

Maybe in the title of his Blog post he gives his answer. The comments that follow give various definitions. There is a sense to me, certainly in the UK, in which the cult of the young among the press skews perception. A just-twenty-something getting some massive publishing deal with their first novel and successive ones is of course news. A forty-something with a first novel published for a three figure advance (which is the truth for a writer) never will be. Deal. Yet there is very much a sense of everyone else being published stumbling rather dully in the brilliant wake of the young. Editors and publishers will be looking for young talent because they want to invest in longevity and publishing mileage and some, just a few maybe, print headlines and publicity thereby. That's okay. It is good business.

I am past forty and an unpublished writer of fiction - unless a few poems count...there follows a slew of outrage from poets...so when (not if, never, ever if, WHEN!!!!) I get published I might be considered new but not young.

Lonfiction in his response writes of:

The propensity of maturing writers to eschew childish things--in this sense cheap and transparent plot devices, cardboard characters, simplistic themes*, "top of mind" prose...

and further that the age of a writer is 'more a matter of how big a story they are capable of telling, for all the multiple dimensions in which "big" can be a measure of story'.

I'm with that! I find that when so much fantasy is teen-centric it can - not always - lose something in literary sophistication. Maybe because - I hope I am wrong - the greater proportion of the teens who read fantasy and especially THE (Traditional/Heroic/Epic) want 'top of mind' prose and can't be doing with involved prose and a telling turn of phrase or subtle psychological and emotional distinctions between men and women. I mean, it's not Conrad or Shakespeare, is it? It's fantasy! No. What it is first and foremost, is literature. It must strive for excellence in that before anything else. That does not necessarily mean being wilfully obscure, densely convoluted. If you are writing for a particular age demographic: good luck. I know how hard this is, knowing someone striving over a YA novel of psychological depth and literary sophistication.

The only audience any writer of a novel has a duty to pitch to is the truth and integrity of the literary tale therein and everything that goes into the making of it, which is: the words and making them mean what they mean.

There will be teens who will not understand a lot of my stuff, they will not 'get' the subtle psychological distinctions that come with age and experience, as I did not when I was studying at university in my teens, although like them, I 'got' literature in essence as a form and thereby the artistry it employs. (This also develops with age.) I know I am making a rod for my own back by not writing 'top of mind' prose. But you are - or should be - dealing with subtlety of mind in literature that can only fully be grasped with a lengthy and rounded experience of life.

That comes with age. The years and the mileage.

I may be imagining this, I may be paranoid, but I get a sense out there that there is a notion that THE fantasy by its very definition cannot carry the weight of serious and insightful literature. I suspect this to be the case among a good many authors who do not write it and who write literature of the fantastic and among readers who poor scorn upon it either because it is same-old same-old to them or by the seemingly intrinsic bounds of its genre identity cannot be sophisticated enough. I know this is not so and I hope that I have the ability and flicker of talent to join other writers of THE out there who are demonstrable proof in literary action that it is not so.

That it is as much fantasy in content and as lightweight in potential literary merit (structurally sophisticated, a subtle human insight here, a memorable and insightful turn of phrase there) as - well - as Shakespeare is... :))

And that, although it may surprise some, a sophisticated literary work of THE fantasy and a rattling good yarn are not mutually exclusive.

I ground out the words today. Way off the projected 1666 words per day (to make 50,000 by 30th November) but I got past the goal of 5000 altogether I set myself for today. Most of it is rubbish. Correction: all of it is rubbish! But I have always intended this - no matter what cobblers is going on in 'real life' and there is - to be primarily an exercise in discipline, not quality.

But it ain't pretty.

The Iago of crapola has been pouring poison in my ear, when the light went strangely enough, for most of the night yesterday. And night comes early in the UK now because of this turning the clocks back nonsense. I think it must partly be the World Fantasy Con. I must stop reading people's ongoing Blogs about it. It is impossible to escape the feeling that it is what the 'Grown Ups' do, what the 'Yellow Coats' do, but it is never what you will do. You are not nor ever will be 'One of Them'. You are one of those types in Lord Jim 'who don't count'.

I honestly have days when I think I can write well, in concept, in intensity of description, in a turn of phrase that is vividly distinct, in credible characterisation and with interesting dialogue, shot through with momentum sustaining conflict built into it, that I could probably keep going all day if I wanted to. But always this awful nagging doubt that at the end of it all,  I simply don't have the 'storytelling gene'. And that is all that counts and make the world of difference. That there are people out there doing it, some of who may be the most insufferable shits, but they do have the storytelling gene. And they write them and they write them and they write them. And they do count. And you never will. And you can play at it and play at it all you want, but you will always be half-made.

You are the Caliban of unpublished fiction: able to appreciate the lucid beauty of water with berries in it, knowing where the quick freshes are, but always and forever inchoate in expression, unfinished. Kept in your place by a parade of magic wand-waving Prosperos.

3k since November 1st, 1000 of them belonging not to my supernatural thriller. it doesn't matter. Any word count gratefully received.

I got a pre-emptive strike upon the world this morning. Writing is all about a pre-emptive strike upon the everyday of the world. You never know what shade of crud is going to land on your doorstep. Get the wordage done before it does. Or maybe you have been smart enough to sort out your life so that the crud is filtered for you. Saturday. Love Saturday morning. Was up before 7am and writing by half-past. As for writing First Person, my tense is all over the bloody place. It's like dropping stitches. Will be a sod to go back and unpick it all. But if you obsess over it too much as you go the only picking you end up doing is picking your metaphorical literary nose and getting nowhere. 50k by the end of November is the goal. Even if only a 1/3, even if only a 1/4 of it is of any use, it will have been more than worth it.