Tag Archives: Ramblings
Last week I was bemoaning my writing woes. How I felt like I was basically smashing my head against a brick wall. It was less than fun. It’s not a nice feeling, sitting down to do something and then eight hours later discovering that you’ve managed to achieve the sum total of naff and all. So I came up with the cunning and ingenious scheme of breaking the 5,000+ word novella I’ve promised down into ten tasty, bite-sized chunks of 500 words a piece. I’m now sitting pretty at just a few hundred shy of 2,000. So I’d say it’s been a moderate success, even if only 2 of the 10 slated sections have been done. I’d like to attribute this moderate success to my ingenious plan, but in truth I think it’s because of something else entirely. I think it’s due to the fact that my life is profoundly ass-backwards. That is to say, ludicrously disordered and showing an arrangement grotesquely counter to the conventional.
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2 Comments | tags: Ass-backwards, Breaking it down, Creative Block, Ramblings, Word Counts, Writer's Block, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
On Wednesday I got a yearning. A yearning to be somewhere other; a yearning to get the world under my feet and to keep walking until I ran out of road. To get out into the country and lose myself in a place where there was no one else. Even at the height of noon, the sun was a wan and sickly thing, barely punching through the swaddling of fog and ice, the temperature never rising above zero. It was the kind of weather which leeches the colour out of everything and leaves the world a perfect glass twin of itself; another, more perfect world; a world where hedges are draped with a filigree with frozen cobwebs; were fat wood pigeons and collared doves peck at frozen earth and shaggy coated horses nibble at the knife blades of frost coated grass.
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Leave a comment | tags: An Unexpected Journey, Cold, Ice, Out and About, Ramblings, Walking, Weather, Yearning | posted in Ramblings
So here we are. It’s Monday again and I’m shattering this radio silence. I’m shattering it like a milk bottle in a tumble dryer filled with bricks. A great many things have happened over the last couple of weeks, none of which I might add were entirely planned. But as Helmuth von Moltke the Elder’s adage goes “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Whether the enemy in question is myself remains a matter of debate. The lease on my old flat was due to expire at the end of February. Rather understandably I wanted to try and find a new place to live sooner rather than later. I had originally booked this coming week off from work to do house hunting, but a quick speculative jaunt to look at a flat 2 weeks ago, just to “get a feel” for the market again set wheels in motion. Terrifying, terrifying wheels. Now 2 weeks later I’m in a new flat, I’ve moved, I’ve unpacked, the internet is even up and running. So that’s a load off my mind, I can take a deep cleansing breath and no longer have to worry about my central nervous system tearing its way out of my body screaming “I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANY MORE! LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”
So that’s nice.
- I possess many things…
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2 Comments | tags: Cold, Illness, Internet, Moving House, Packing, Ramblings, Reporting In, Unpacking | posted in Ramblings
Remember, remember the fifth of November; gunpowder treason and derp. A quintessentially British celebration of the complete and utter failure to instigate revolution. You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for Guy Fawkes. Most of us only have to deal with our mistakes for a couple of years at most, but poor old Guy is still being burnt in effigy over 400 years after his particular little misstep. On the up side it has become a marvellous excuse to set things on fire and dick about with what are essentially improvised explosives. When I was a kid we even used to cook jacket-tetties by wrapping them in tin-foil and just hoying them into the base of a bonfire. We were very sophisticated up north. I’ll be spending this Bonfire Night as I do may others, occasionally peering out the window at other people’s fireworks and dearly hoping that none of the bangs are actually gunshots. They rest of my time will be spent beavering away at a new short story I’m writing. It’s a fairy tale for submission to Homespun Theatre’s upcoming eBook.
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1 Comment | tags: East of Sun West of Moon, eBooks, Fairy Tales, Fantasy, Homespun Theatre, Ramblings, Submissions, Writing | posted in Writing
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.
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3 Comments | tags: Fatigue, Illness, NaNo, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
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
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Leave a comment | tags: Blogging, Blogging is Hard, Ramblings, Writer's Block, Writing, Writing is Hard | posted in Ramblings
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.
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4 Comments | tags: Etiquette, Gaming, Internet Etiquette, Ramblings, Shoulder Tapping, Twitter | posted in Ramblings
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.
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2 Comments | tags: Bachelor Party, Edinburgh, Mischief, Ramblings, Shenanigans, Stag-do | posted in Ramblings
I will be the first to admit that I am not a particularly sporting man. There was a time, in the dim and distant past, when the concept of sport was not so utterly strange and alien to me. A time when I was roped into games of football and cricket. There was even a time when a much younger, thinner, more agile and seven stone version of myself used to play rugby twice a week. Needless to say this did not end well. Agility, speed and above average height could only take me so far in a game where I regularly faced off against people quite literally twice my weight. People whose sole purpose in the game seemed to be to inflict severe and most grievous harm upon my person. I played scrum-half, the pain magnet and the opposition forwards always had murder in their eyes. Three days laid up in a hospital bed with a severe concussion somewhat put-paid to any further sporting aspirations in this field. Once I moved away to university sport vanished almost completely from my life, being replaced with the delights of reading, computer games and so many other delightful distractions that had been so frowned upon back home, my time forever being scrutinised under the judging eyes of the sport-maddened loons I called family. It was therefore with some trepidation that I approached Wednesday afternoon. For you see, Wednesday afternoon was Sport’s Day
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3 Comments | tags: Exercise, Fitness, Mechanical Bull, Ramblings, Sport, Sports Day | posted in Ramblings
I am nothing if not a 
creature of habit. In many ways this has its advantages. Things follow a fairly structured and preordained path, I generally know what I should be doing, when and how I should be doing it. Routine is comforting, it keeps me occupied and it gives structure to my otherwise feckless and directionless existence. It does however have its disadvantages. Some of these are obvious: that the routine may lull me into a rut from which I cannot escape, or that should someone decided that it’s high time to have me assassinated the strictly regimented framework of my life will make it a laughably easy thing to achieve. The greatest disadvantage I’ve found to it comes more from personal failing, the times where the routine has holes and gaps, places where it is incomplete. When the weekend finally rolls around and these holes are most abundant, it all tends to go to pieces. At no time is this more evident than it is on a Sunday afternoon.
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Leave a comment | tags: Exhaustion, Fatigue, Ramblings, Sunday Syndrome, Sundays, Tired | posted in Ramblings
The Rogue Verbumancer 