Earlier this week I was making one of my regular trawls through the shelves of my local Waterstones. I was once again searching for what I like to call “bus fodder”; something to read on the bus into work. I do enjoy being able to slip out of reality, into a world of sublime fiction and not have to face the ghastly horrors of the daily commute. During my trawl I saw that Patrick Rothfuss’ The Wise Man’s Fear had been released. Having enjoyed his previous book The Name of the Wind I went to pick it up and have a bit of a look at it. Upon picking the book up my initial reaction was simply that of “Christ! This book could choke a whale!” For you see, it is an extraordinarily large book. I have come to expect hardbacks to be slightly larger and more hefty than there soft-backed brethren but this struck me as something that, if push came to shove, could be used to quite easily kill a man. I’m sure the book is wonderful but since I already had four books in my hand (one of these being an equal large collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s works) and facing the trek back to work carrying them I decided to put it down and get it at a later date. It did get me thinking though…
Category Archives: Ramblings
Getting in the mood
Over the years there’s something I’ve noticed about writing. It might not be true for everyone else but it certainly is for me. I find writing requires a certain mindset, a certain state of being. You really do need to be in the mood. But the mood for writing is something intangible and fleeting. It can be upon you in an instant like a summer storm. In that time a deluge of ideas will fall upon you. Inspiration will flash like lightning across your brain. You’ll feel as if there is no single being or obstacle in the entirety of creation that can stop you from writing the greatest work of fiction that man will ever read. You’ll dash upstairs to the computer or lunge wildly to the biro by the fridge, snatching up the envelope that the water bill came in. You’ll ready yourself to slash that pen across the page like a sword across the heavens. You’ll touch it to the paper and then…nothing. It’ll be gone. Just like the storm it will have passed, there wont be a cloud in the sky and the only reason you’ll even believe the storm happened will be the lingering wetness of your clothes. There’ll be little traces of the ideas you had, the ghosts of genius rapidly fading second by second. You’ll but down the pen and it’ll all seem futile and pointless. The mood’s gone. No writing for you. Not today. No matter how hard you try you can’t conjure the mood, just like you can’t conjure a storm. Unless you’re a wizard, but if you’re a wizard you’ve probably got better things to do than write fiction. Like fighting dragons or battling that warlock in the next valley who borrowed your spell-book and never gave it back; bastard.
A Wee Jaunt
As the world shatters around me; with Japan still reeling from a trio of truly awful disasters; with the Middle East once again igniting with the fires of war and with the dread Super-moon looming overhead threatening to kill us all through unspecified and unexplained methods beyond the pale of such trivial constraints as science; I found there was only one appropriate response. One thing I should do: Go to the theatre. Sure the worlds falling down around my ears, but what the hell can I do about it? I’ve got no especial talents, nor a vast reservoir of wealth to throw at a problem until it magically vanishes in a misty cloud of goodwill and happy puppies. These things don’t effect me, I can’t fix them. So as callous as it might seem, I’m going to try my best to ignore them. Except the Super-moon you DO NOT fuck with the Super-moon. It’s a fucking moon! It weighs 73,477 quadrillion tons, travels at nearly two and a half thousand miles an hour and in the last day has gained the prefix “super”. There’s no way one man can stop something like that. Except maybe Superman, but he’s fictional so he’s not in a great position to help.
So the theatre seems like a perfectly reasonable way to face the current global situation. It’s the time of year when the university’s Gilbert and Sullivan society put on their show. This year it was the Pirates of Penzance. The source of the famous “Major General Song”. There’s something quite delightfully cathartic about G&S’ operettas. They are at once both incredibly simple and incredibly contrived. Simple in that they can all be more or less summed up as “there are some comic misunderstanding and then everyone gets married” and contrived in exactly how this is achieved. The songs are catchy, the plot doesn’t really require to think, and in my case it affords me an opportunity to watch my old house mate prance about, sing and look like a proper twat (In a most endearing sort of way). I’m also a sucker for the happy ending. Although I may profess to like things to be all grim and dark, all betrayal and intrigue, at heart I’m a hopeless romantic and like to be able to let out a guilty “awwwwww”. Even if in the case of HMS Pinafore there’s the disturbing case of what I refer to as “comedy surprise incest” at the end. As an added bonus they still manage to remain funny to this day. I suspect that G&S’ particular brand of levity has an exceptionally long half life.
In a world as terrible as ours we really need more in the way nice simple things to make us smile.
As an aside there’s also Mitchell and Webb’s delightful G&S sketch
Unhappy the land that needs heroes
Tomorrow should see the release of the latest issue of SFFS’s termly e-zine. It’s called the Zine. It should also contain the third instalment of “The Trails and Adventures of Mister Callis”. For the uninitiated, which I suspect will be more or less everyone, they’re a series of short stories cornering the eponymous Mr Callis. I’ve always been a big fan of fantasy literature, the epic tales of high adventure from the likes of Eddings and more recently the dark and seedy world’s of Joe Abercrombie and Scott Lynch. I’ve always wanted to write a fantasy story but my previous attempts have been somewhat lacklustre, dry and a bit boring to write. The difference with this is that writing about Callis is fun, it’s exciting and I continually want to do more. This does however concern me greatly. Not for the reason that I’m writing a lot for fun, that’s great. But because of specifically who and what Callis is.
Horrors within, horrors without
Even though I graduated from the warm and comforting womb of student-hood some two and a half years ago I still shamelessly hang around with quite a lot of students. I’m not ashamed of this, not yet anyway. If I’m still doing it in five years time then there might be some cause for concern. Anyway; I spend a fair bit of my time larking about with my old uni’s science fiction and fantasy society (SFFS for short). Some time in the not to distant past some one had the idea that we should make our own short film, just for laughs. The initial idea was to do some take of Lovecraftian horror. It was all well received and met with great approval. And then nothing happened. Like many ideas it failed to overcome the treacherous hurdle of effort. The terrifying barrier of actually having to do something. So it fell by the wayside and was largely forgotten.
A couple of weeks ago the idea bubbled back to the surface of my mind, like a corpse in a tar pit. I was in the shower, the shower is where I do all my thinking. After all there’s not a great deal to do when you’re soaping yourself with a cocktail of pleasantly smelling chemicals other than think. I thought that the idea of the Lovecraftian horror could be very nicely mixed with an idea for a little psychological drama I’d had a few weeks earlier (also in the shower). I foolishly went and expanded on this idea, thinking about how I could muck about with lighting and the descent into madness of the characters involved. And then rather foolishly went and told someone about this confluence of ideas.
Needless to say things quickly went downhill from there. It seems the idea’s back on track, it might actually happen, what do you mean I’m in charge? Somehow I have to cobble together a rag-tag band of misfits, to write, film and act in what is likely to be the greatest catastrophe in the history of amateur cinematography. Maybe. Despite the fact I have hardly any experience in doing anything like this I’m quite excited by the entire thing. Cautiously excited. The sort of excitement you get when you see a really, really big fucking wasps nest.
Our first meeting’s on Saturday. I decided to have it in a pub. It means if everything starts to go a bit wrong I can at least drink myself into a coma without having to move very far.
The voices inside my head
Occasionally I try to write things. Most of the time I don’t have much success in making a great deal of headway with these sorts of projects. There’s usually a brief flurry of activity as my keyboard takes a massive pounding. Before I know it I’ve got a couple of thousand words sitting in front of me. Then the bright supernova of verbiage winks out. Then there’s nothing for months, sometimes years. It’s always a cumulation of factors that seem to get in the way. I’ve got to go out. I’ve got to do something else first. I can’t be bothered. I’m ill. My computer’s covered in bees. The list is endless. Then there’s the old chestnut writer’s block. Most of the time it feels quite a bit bigger than just a block, it tends to feel more like a mountain. A mountain that is continually falling on my head over and over. I tend to find I get distracted easily as well. I just start making some headway with one idea and then another pops into my head that DEMANDS immediate work on it. Then the whole cycle starts over again.
Out there in the arid badlands of the internet there’s a motley assortment of websites and/or blogs offering tips on how to overcome these bugbears. Some of them are helpful, other just utterly shatter everything you held to be true and make you want to weep in the corner while eating all the pages out of your notebook. But all of this rambling is largely peripheral to the point I’m slowly meandering my way towards. I find that a good, solid point needs to be approached with a running start and a fuck-ton of inertia, just in case it tries to fight back. I call this the super tanker approach. Once you’ve got yourself going you’re not going to stop even if you realise later on that you probably should. On one of my many journeys across the internet badlands I found one of the aforementioned sites. One of the things they recommended was giving your writing “a voice”. For one reason or another they thought it was a splendid idea to create a little compartmentalised identity in your head which did all the writing, not you. I suspect they meant just giving it a funny accent or a couple of textual idiosyncrasies. I think I went too far.
Now I’ve got a tiny little gnome living in my head. He’s called Hieronymous P. Taber and he pumps steaming, hot gouts of “what the fuck” through my fingers. He dodders around the musty cave of my skull in a little flat cap and pale blue dungarees. His beard’s shot with that sort of iron grey hair which suggests he’s probably getting on a bit but isn’t yet past his best. The pumping’s all done by a big set of bellows that are all covered in soot and grease and no matter how hard Hieronymous tries it gets everywhere. He even carries a little tartan hanky to wipe it off his hands and face. He drinks tea out of a jam-jar and smokes dog-eared cigarettes rolled in greaseproof paper.
And that I think adequately demonstrates that I tend to over think things and how easily I get distracted.
Mind you, Philip K. Dick used to claim his writing was the result of a big pink idea laser that god shone into his brain. On second thoughts, I don’t think that helps my case.
To blog, or not to blog?
I’ve never really had a blog before. I’ve had things which could be used as vectors into the swirling maelstrom of the blogsphere, but I’ve never had anything which from the outset has been purely “a blog”. This little venture is the first time I’ve actually ventured out into the cruel world of the internet thinking “This will be a blog! And I shall fill it with words! It shall be glorious and all shall wonder at my witticisms.” Sure once I had a livejournal, but that was back in the days before facebook. Back when the wasn’t really any other options, it was the done thing. In my defence I was also still an agnsty teen, riddled with insecurities and self-loathing. To counterpoint this, the only thing that’s really changed is my age.
I’ll confess I’ve always been somewhat reluctant to start a blog. The idea has previously never sat well with me. As if blogging is something dark, sinster and slightly taboo. The type of thing you only speak about in hushed tones and even then only when your mother’s out of the room. The idea of blogging used to make me feel soiled and dirty. I suspect it was the fact that everyone else was doing it; as we all know the proletariat are as great as they are unwashed. There was also the lingering fear that when push came to shove I probably wouldn’t have anything interesting to say. That I would in fact just be vomiting anger and bile into the void of cyber-space. Chances are that’s all I’ll end up doing anyway, but now the idea doesn’t sound so terrible. Especially when some people I know actually said that if I put my angry rants into words and posted them on the internet they’d read them. But these people are my long suffering house-mates and I’ve always suspected they treat me like one would treat a dangerous mental patient: humour them until such a point as you can safely make the dash to the panic room.
My journey to the blogsphere has been long. My refusal to blog was at first resolute and unshakable. But over the years it’s been chipped away, bit by bit. As if a tiny little daemon has been whispering in my ear “you should start a blog”. After a while it just becomes too much effort to resist. And I’ve never been one for effort. Eventually the dark and malevolent force tempting you doesn’t seem so bad. I used to hold the same opinion about Twitter and eventually I gave in. Sometimes I feel like I’m working my way up hierarchy of internet drugs facebook, twitter then blogging. Those three being speed, crack and heroin respectively. Perhaps I’m being to too hard on blogging. It’s probably more like ether, not so addictive but at the end of the day “there’s nothing more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge”.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was an strange and mystical Irish-man. He informed me that no one in the blogsphere has anything interesting to say and that the entire vista of the blogworld is built on a foundation of lies and deceit. Just like everything else. I suspect he’s a manifestation of that daemon who’s been whispering in my ear all these years. After all no human could have eyes like his. That cold blue-grey like ancient lake ice, boring right down into you soul and stealing all your secrets. Or not.
So here I am over half a thousand words into my inaugural blog post. I suspect I should curtail my rambling. Truth be told I have no idea where this entire blog is going to go, what strange and unforeseen directions it will take. But I shall plough bravely on into the uncharted regions of the blogsphere, plotting my course by whimsy and fancy alone. I’d like to think I’m doing all of this in an airship, because when you get right down to it: airships are fucking awesome.
The Rogue Verbumancer 