Dire Emergency Situations #36

Whirl reclines in the bath, traces his toe round the tap like a fledgling ballerina negotiating the dance equivalent of a bicycle stabiliser.

The doorbell rings.

Odd. Who can this be at a quarter to six on a cold November night?

Son-of-Whirl calls up the stairs. ‘Dad. There’s a man. With a parcel.’

Of course!.

The surprise Christmas Xbox from Amazon...

Too Much Mint Sauce

Bear with me a second, people.

It’s 7.32pm, I’m stuffed full of mushy peas, and I may be about to come over all logical. Or ill.*

So here’s how it is.

“Chalk and cheese”, right?

Like Vinnie Jones and Bonnie Langford. Celtic and Rangers. Black and white. Cannon and Ball (actually, no — they’re both equally crap). Willy and front bottom (I know, I know — Cannon and Ball threw me. And now I’ve just thought of Little and Large too, which is more disturbing. I wish I’d never started this. But yes — them. Equally crap. But the words ‘little’ and ‘large’, still like chalk and cheese, yes. So I’m back on track now...). Fire and water. Barbie and Ken. Okay, you probably get the idea now.

BUT

What’s the opposite of “chalk and cheese”?

Can’t just be ‘similar’ or ‘identical’, can it? To describe sameness using perfectly ordinary words while conferring upon differentness the most florid of metaphors would be to unbalance the Universe, surely.

Oh, but here’s the truly brilliant thing. It’s 7.39 now, and those peas have had a little time to diffuse through my stomach wall directly into my brain. I only mentioned them as a frippery, but it appears I knew the answer to this vexing conundrum (the chalk and the cheese, not my bulbous adenoids) before I’d got halfway through that second sentence.

It’s “peas in a pod”, isn’t it?

Great. Problem solved. I can get back on with my life now...



* Logical **

** Captain

Glad

It's rarely I put pen to paper
with nothing inbetween
and yet — this inky darkness,
so resplendent, so unseen.

Enow! I am a pirate Lord
(with a beard
and a crew
and an octopus)

rattling my sabre heartily
'gainst grimmest writersblocktopus.

Set sail, me hearties —
Clods of salt,
may ye lick from fever lips!
Bernita rejoins the flotilla.
Let cry thee
with thy WIPs!

When zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz Is Not For ‘Sleeping’

For someone who doesn’t drink a lot of coffee, and actively thinks every branch of Starbucks should be raised to the ground and replaced with an olde worlde tavern draped in vines that sells only flagons of the purest stout, I’ve drunk a shitload of the stuff today.

Thank heavens for the dishwasher! It’s obliterated an accurate cup count like the bottle-gobbling litter bin by a drunk’s park bench.

As a consequence, I whizz round the house with the manic energy of a Punch man choking on his swazzle. I’ve hoovered, ironed, peeled some potatoes, shaved, watered the cactus, been up in the attic (twice), scanned the cat for viruses, peeled the carpet, hoovered the cactus and replaced at least half a dozen light bulbs that didn’t need replacing, but oh, it was such fun, such fun, such fun!

Now, I wait for the next exciting thing to happen. The hairs on my hands curl into piggy tails and ping onto the desk. My teeth spin like seats on a walzer. The veins on my neck pound at the walls.

Write a list!

Write a list!

Write a list!

Tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea tea

Whoops! Just Discovered Another Flaw With My Plot!

Morning Music

Goodness knows how I missed this one when it came out.

Comes with not having my ear to the musical ground anymore, I suppose.

Anyhow — I heard this yesterday afternoon following one of my less-than-good days. And it whupped my ass back into shape.

Substitute your own number if you're not 19. Or just remember when you were, and you did that stupid thing.

Then go and wish Janey a happy birthday...

Some Thoughts On Writing

This post got me thinking about the Inner Editor — that irritating fiend that lurks inside me and gobbles up all the protein from my numerous mid-paragraph muffin breaks like a tapeworm coiled round my guts.

I wanted to post something in the accompanying comments trail, but the inner editor worm-thing’s constrictions squeezed only drivel from my keyboard (another great ‘ink & pen’ analogy ruined by the onward march of technology, btw).

In the comments there, the Inner Editor conundrum (and for those of you who don’t know it, it’s like Rubik’s cube crossed with the dire essence of a phantom Sudoku puzzle) was raised by the spookily chirpy JaneyV and picked up on by guest blogger Nate Graziano (who normally resides here).

I won’t reproduce the conversation verbatim as the words are not mine to quote willy-nilly, but the distilled essence of it is here...

Nate: Nice hair.
Janey: Nice beard. But what bothers me is this. I try to stall my inner editor so I can get the first draft out. Difficult, though.
Nate: Yes. Best to get stuck in and draft. You're still at the discovery stage. John Irving, I know, plans everything out first, but to me, that’s not so much fun.

(If either of you are reading this and don’t appreciate my paraphrasing, here are some other lines you can insert:

“Some days, I’m possessed by a literary wanderlust I can’t control.”
“Obama should grow his fingernails long, like an Eastern potentate.”
“I love the way haddock crisps up when tossed gently in a wok.”
“Get lost, Whirlochre!”

:) )

I have moments when I’m plagued by the Inner Editor, and I think I may have figured it out. What follows is not a hard boiled thesis on the craft of writing, nor a hissy dissing of others who favour different methods. Just a few thoughts I’m having now.

Most of the time, I think I’m with Irving. I separate out the thinking and the writing, casting for plot and character as I idle through laundry or tackle the hordes of alien invaders that battle daily to seize control of our tiny dimension from the portal over my bathroom mirror. Editing thoughts is easier than wrestling with gerunds and spatchcock advectival nethermewoes in a linear progression of words, and by thinking through the essence of what happens, beholding the images that hopefully one day will burst forth unaltered and still vivid from the page in spite of numerous subsequent chops at the language, I can arrive at a shopping list of things to write about. So, a while ago, I had this...

Haloumi and Dann-Glarr throw Orb Lorfd into the waste disposal. leg and a wing. He screamsto reveal plot thing with clock then is gone. H reconstitutes quiche and dg is a pain. H in boots“Might I suggest that thing you call moussing?’

Nonsense, badly written, and full of spelling mistakes, I know — but it crystallises the picture I have that flashed into my head as I ironed, without the tedious business of having to write it all out as a line-by-line narrative. When I have something like this, I can re-run the scene, and add in further detail, with no heed paid to the Queen’s English, and no need to be witty/pacy/descriptive/killer/etc. It’s as anal as trainspotting.

After I wrote that outline, I changed a few things, but it remained the same writer’s building block in essence — a summary of what I wanted to write ABOUT. Having an ABOUT is very useful when you’re trying to summon the words — like a showroom dummy for a pile of clothes. I find it helps to have a lot of work done before you put pen to touchscreen. Creating too much of a scene or character as you’re simultaneously involved with the psychomechanics of typing or scribbling, and trying to pin amorphous blobs of think-stuff to the blank page or document with hard fixed words is to engage in two different processes at the same time, I think. Chinese circus acrobats can do this kind of multitasking seemingly effortlessly, often with four different parasols and weird shaped vegetables grown only in the Yunnan Province — and maybe some of you can do this too. But I can’t. And as you saw from the last post, I’ve got big feet. And would look ungainly in a spangly acrobat’s uniform.

So my choices are twofold. Either I can write blindly and churn out loads of stuff I may end up not using, or I can find myself something to write, and layer on the detail, refine in subsequent drafts. A lot of the early stuff from my WIP was generated using the first method and I’ve got all sorts of stuff lodged into the fabric of the book like shrapnel that’s proving a swine (oink oink) to unarticulate/excise. With method two, I’ve produced clearer stuff, and quicker too. But the downside, as Nate noted, is that the potential for spontaneous fun is diminished by this draconian approach. Unless — you imbue the thinky-generaty moments with fun (and if you’re in any way theatrically-inclined, you can impro the voices, walk the walk — you’d be surprised what shocking stuff comes out); and in the draft notes like the H&DG one above, add frequent comments such as FUCK ABOUT WITH THIS, MUCH SWEARING or SOMEONE MUST DIE.

Hmm, a roundabout post, this. And not entirely nailed. In coming clean (or filthy as a heifer’s backside) about aspects of the writing process as I see them, I hope I’ve not bordered too much on the supercilious. As I said, I’m not in command of The Golden Rules Of Writing (though this radio-controlled beetle swarm — such fun when unleashed on my heighbour’s teenage son...).

Just to say, on reflection, I don’t think I’m a Dorothea Brandesque writer-into-empty-space. Looks like I’m a megalomaniac Stalinist overlord with shit taste in shirts and an addiction to linguine. But I think I can live with that.