It’s getting to that time of year again
. The time when people all around the world abandon all semblance of reason and common sense and decided that it’d be a thoroughly great idea to lock themselves away for a month and write an entire book. 50, 000 words in 30 days. An average of 1666.67 words a day for a while month. It’s something that I recommend that everyone tries at least once, just to see if they can. I tried it last year and managed to “win” with a whole 6 days left to spare. It made me feel like a god, albeit a fairly minor one with a very, very narrow divine portfolio. It also left me exhausted and wanting to hide under a rock and cry for a bit. It was one of those experiences. And then a year rolled round and I found myself looking at an on rushing November and having to make a choice. To NaNoWriMo, or Not the NaNoWrimo.
Category Archives: Ramblings
NaNoWriMo
Blogging is Hard
If anyone ever tells you that writing is easy you should punch them in the face. Hard. If anyone ever tells you this they are either: a) lying; b) wrong, or; c) an idiot. Alternatively they could be one of those few, truly gifted individuals for whom words simply flow out of their minds and their hands like high pressure geysers of idea flavoured water. If that is the case you should still punch them, if only to make yourself feel better. People can harp on about how the struggle to write is a character building journey which makes the end result all the more rewarding. You should punch them too, because no amount of empty platitudes are going to detract from the fact that you and not them, still have to slog your way through to the end. It’s like telling a soldier not to worry, they’re fighting for freedom and democracy and justice and that in the end, it’ll all be worth it, to which the soldier in question is more than entitled to respond with “Well that’s nice and all, but I’ve just had both of my fucking legs blown off! You are not helping! Don’t just stand there! Help me stop the bleeding!”
My own personal foray into the world of writing really began with the inception of this crass and tawdry corner of the internet; my first tentative steps into the blogosphere. That was five hundred and ninety-nine days ago. This is blog post number ninety-nine and I will tell you now, it’s not gotten any easier and I still have no fucking idea what I’m doing.
- A Map of The Blogosphere – Matthew Hurst
Recommendations
I’m on the wrong side of a four and a half 
hour string of train journeys. I feel like a cheap, badly constructed replica of myself, like I’m made out of cardboard and regret. A pale and shadowy simulacrum, a husk of a man. Everything aches, I can barely summon the energy to stay awake. My mouth tastes of stale spit, a taste that reminds you that you’ve been on the move for too long, that you’re badly dehydrated and in dire need of a decent meal and a cup of tea. I crave sleep like a mad junkie craves the sweet ministrations of his favourite intravenous cocktail. I am not a well man. I am a tired man. I’m still trying to shrug off the cloying embrace of a hangover and the experience of sleeping in a friend’s spare room and a bed that is not my own, a thing which has never sat well with me. I like the comforting familiarity of my home, my seat of power. Being away from it for any length of time leaves me drained. Needless to say this is not a state conducive the rationalised and coherent thought or blogging in general. So in lieu of any thoughts from my own fevered imagination I thought I’d share with you some of the blogs that have really tickled my fancy recently.
The R-Patz Factz
In the waning hours of the fifth of September I received an email from a contact in deepest, darkest Scotland. I do not usually get emails from this contact. Our communication is usually limited to bizarre and esoteric insults on twitter, which despite our best efforts are likely to come across to outsiders as either vaguely homoerotic or evidence that we will very shortly be festooned in the innards of our latest victim. The contact in question is the venerably bearded Andrew of Blair, known to twitternauts as aagb1884. A screen name which begins with a collection of letters more reminiscent of a dying wail (or confused jizz-noise) and ending with the year Colchester was hit by a magnitude 4.8 earthquake.
Mister Andrew has recently completed work on an eBook with an associate by the name of Danile Lilley. He was curious as to whether I would be interested in reviewing or plugging his most recent fictional endeavour. Since agreement would result in me getting a book for free I could hardly refuse. I told him I would whore, pimp, sell, flog, wax-lyrical, preach and praise it and that I might even, if push came to shove, think about reading it. So this blog post constitutes me being all professional, reviewing the fictional works of others. After being called an asshole by a comedian who didn’t like my negative bloggings about his show I’m becoming dangerously professional. Well, at least as professional as you can get while wearing jim-jams stained with bits of last night’s dinner and perching on the corpse of what used to be a chair.
Sports Day Redux
Way back in the bright and skin-meltingly hot days of mid-July I wrote about my battle against the unforgiving and merciless nature of a mechanical representation of uncontrolled bovine violence. How I took on a mechanical bull and ultimately lost and the price I paid for delaying my defeat. What I neglected to mention was that the entire thing was called off half way through due to a massive downpour finally arriving. It had been threatening to do so the entire day but finally decided to wash us out right in the middle of our “fun.” The ground quickly turned into a thick, soupy quagmire of dirt. My team were slated for a game of football, I was genuinely looking forward to the game, what with the conditions having finally made it to what I would call “proper” football weather. But Messrs Health and Safety weren’t too keen on this plan so everything was called to a stop. Naturally ten minutes later the rain had stopped, but we’d all packed up by that point. The decision was made by the powers-that-be to reschedule the entire thing and finish it off properly. So that’s I did this Wednesday afternoon, as once again me and my workmates set out for the company sports day.
A Matter of Etiquette
For the past three days I have been playing computer games. Although the term playing seems to me like something of a misnomer. Something more along the lines of devouring, consuming or main-lining seem to be more appropriate. It was not without some considerable effort that I managed to pry myself away from the clutches of the virtual world to write this. I staggered from my desk, blinking in the searing light of the foul and malignant Day-Star; my head s whirling maelstrom of agony and confusion, feeling as if my brain was made out of a bad, rough, kind of cotton-wool that grew up in a broken home and whose only way of interacting the world is shiving people in the kidneys in darkened alleyways; my eyes burnt and felt as if they were pointing in different directions while attempting to crawl their way out of my orbital socket to freedom. I spent a good fifteen minutes trying to reorientate myself to reality. Asking the really big questions like Who am I? Where am I? What time is it? And Why is there a magnetised pen on my fridge door? What is this foul witchery?! I shall not suffer its like in this house!
The salient point is that this massive gaming bender reintroduced me to one of the things which really winds me up and generally cause my soul to burn with the furious light of a thousand particularly angry supernovas. It’s not the fact that people on the internet are dicks, that’s a given, it’s more the fact that their dickery seems to breech some fairly basic rules of social etiquette.
The Last Hurrah – Tales From The Fringe
Today’s the last UK public holiday before Christmas. The last time we get a state-mandated three-day weekend, and it’s all we have to sustain us through that gulf of nearly four months. I’ve always found the front loading of the year with public holidays a little ridiculous. Obviously I don’t feel like that during the first six months of the year when I’m getting all that extra time off. I only feel like this when the end of the year rolls around and the prospect of a free long weekend dries up. I shouldn’t really complain though, I’ve still got sixteen days left of my yearly holiday allowance and through the tactical deployment of days-off, haven’t worked a full week for nearly two months. What I can complain about is the fact that I’m manfully attempting not to drown in my own mucus. Unsure as to whether it’s hayfever or a rotten summer cold I’ve been double fisting handfuls of cetirizine hydrochloride and ibuprofen in a frankly vain attempting to stem the tide. As I write my nostrils are plugged and capped with rolled-up strips of kitchen roll to stop the flow of watery snot long enough for me to write this post. But enough with my unnecessarily graphic descriptions of my personal maladies.
Today is the last day of 2012’s Edinburgh Festival, subsequently I think it fitting that today I draw my Tales From the Fringe to a close by recounting my last day at the Fringe; Sunday, August 5th, the arse end of JP’s stag-do and our weekend of debauchery and self-inflicted liver damage.
Edinburgh; well known for its dapper, cycloptic, cat-beasts
A Town Called Spank! – Tales From the Fringe
I’m back from a Kentish wedding, a wedding which I would swear took place on the surface of the sun. Being from the grim and icy wastes of northern England I am still not yet inured to the blistering heat of the late southern summer. To put it bluntly, I was sweating buckets. My heart really went out to the groom, the best man and the usher, all of whom were kitted out in full formal dress, waistcoats, cravats and all; while I sat comparatively smugly in a shirt, without a tie and with my sleeves rolled up. So JP is finally married. I thought I’d take the time this week to continue regaling you with some more Tales from the Fringe and the aforementioned JP’s stag-do.
We did not wake up easily. It came in fits and starts. All of us swaddled in that early morning darkness that gives you no real idea of time. Devoid of a clock you all lie there half awake, playing a deranged game of sleep chicken, not wanting to be the first to wake up, not to be the one impolite enough to wake everyone else up, yet all the time vying against the boredom of just lying there and the gnawing hunger in the pit of your gut. A bloke and friend of JP named Matt was the first to really cave, but under the pretext that he was off to see some triathletes who would be passing through central Edinburgh that morning. Myself and the two Richards dragged our carcasses out of bed shortly after. We had all had perhaps only 6 hours of booze fogged sleep. After spending nearly an hour trying to wrangle all of our rag-tag group together we sloped off in search of a breakfast composed primarily of fat. As any Venerable Sage will tell you, a proper old-fashioned fry-up has magical powers.
Rich: “I’ve seen things man. I’ve seen things…”
Saunas and Bears – Tales From the Fringe
As I write this the sun is setting here in Slough and the oppressive heat of the day is leaching away into a slate blue sky. Outside the wind felt warm and stale, providing nothing in the way of respite from the baleful rays of the Day Star. Even safe within the confines of my home with the curtains closed, the heat left my brow slick with sweat. I tried to sweep my hair away from my forehead but only succeeded in making myself look like a cockatiel. This has been a lazy weekend. Even had the heat not been so strong as to sap the strength of any sane man it would still have been a lazy weekend. I need a lazy weekend. I need a lazy weekend bad. For last weekend was not lazy, it was not relaxing, it was a hectic roller-coaster of gross and improbable mischief. I was north of the border in the ancestral homeland of Scotland; in its fair capital of Edinburgh; visiting the Fringe. It was an experience to say the least.
Jaypes and Shenanigans Ride Again!
When this post goes live I’ll be somewhere in the vague and misty reaches of northern England, on a train returning from a weekend of gross and improbable mischief. This is of course assuming that I am, in fact, still alive. This is not something I can at the present moment guarantee since I am intending upon approaching this weekend with reckless abandon, fully intending on giving the coroner no choice but to return a verdict of death by misadventure. The source of this noble quest of self-destruction? A stag-do in Edinburgh. I have to date only been on one other stag-do and it was not what most people would categorise as a stag-do. For most people the prenuptial send off is all about wild, unrestrained and highly irresponsible debauching. The stag-do I went to involved us all traipsing round to by friends house, getting roaringly drunk and playing boardgames. Not that this was necessarily a bad thing of course. The lucky gentlemen who is to be the focus of the festivities in my good friend JP.
The Rogue Verbumancer 