Tag Archives: Ramblings
So this weekend was Queen Elizabeth II’s diamond Jubilee. Now that you’ve read this blog post’s title I can already sense some of you clenching your backsides. You’re thinking: “Oh fuck it’s going to be a massive rant against privilege and inequity. He’s going to bore us senseless with tirades about democracy and all those other republican wonders. Oh fuck, I’m not political, why am I here? I don’t want to read this.” Well you needn’t worry. I slated this blog post for writing about a fortnight ago. The confluence of these two things is nothing more than a coincidence. I’m here to write about something else entirely.
I recently experienced a bit of a domestic tragedy. One of those little blips in life which makes you hiss through your teeth and mutter things along the lines of “fiddlesticks” or a plain and hearty “bollocks.” These domestic tragedies are not truly sad or terrible, but they get in the way of the smooth and straightforward operation of one’s meat-vessel within one’s functional life-scape. To cut a long story short, my mouse stopped working.
Squeak?
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Leave a comment | tags: Computers, Domestic Tragedy, gadgets, Mice, Mouse, Ramblings | posted in Ramblings
Life is never easy. It’s an ongoing battle, a 
struggle. It is cruel and it is cold. Life is hard. It is made ever harder by being filled with hard choices. Choices where the answer is not readily apparent, forever occluded by the uncertainty of the future. Alternatively, in rare cases, the answer is clear and obvious, but through its choosing opens you up to any number of hardships and unpleasant consequences. For me the hardest of choices comes every morning. It is the choice as to whether it’s worth getting out of bed. Should the day finally arrive when I decide that it isn’t, that is when I know that I have lost. It will be the day that I finally throw in the towel and surrender to a genetic predisposition toward sloth-like laziness. To be swallowed by my own crushing personal inertia, an unwillingness to move or do anything. The bottom of an energy well from which no amount of coercion can roust me. But until that day I keep getting up every morning, fuelled by an empire shatteringly unstoppable quantity of spite and a blind, unrelenting, stubbornness that would put most tectonic plates to shame. I do this because it is habit, for I am nothing if not a creature of it. But most importantly I do it because I know that nothing worth doing will ever be easy. If it is easy then it’s probably not worth doing. As it is with life, so it is with books.
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Leave a comment | tags: Books, Gormenghast, Hard Books, Hard Choices, Mervyn Peake, Ramblings | posted in Ramblings
All things have a beginning 
and all things have an end. This is one of those inalienable facts of life, existence and creation. Ultimately everything in transitory, forever on a journey between these two markers. It’s a bit grim when you think about it. Depressing. I’ve been having a bit of a mope these last few days, one of those ennuis courting with malaise in a downward spiral of misery. I’m sure if it could be visualised it would look awfully pretty were it not for the fact that it makes me feel so downright awful. So forgive the somewhat maudlin tone on which I’ve began. Of all the bastards and traitors I have ever known my own brain is the greatest amongst them. But that is a matter for another time. This latest plumbing of the depths of my own self-absorbed mopery got me thinking about the aforementioned end of all things, specifically stories, tales, yarns and suchlike. Endings are fantastically important things, if they’re handled badly or poorly executed, then pretty much everything that has come before them is rendered ultimately pointless and irrevocably tainted.
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2 Comments | tags: Endings, Fin, Ramblings, The End, Writing | posted in Ramblings
This week sees me pass something of a 
milestone. Ali over at 12 Book has decided to go off gallivanting and galumphing across Europe; she’ll be gone for about a month. To fill her blog in her absence she asked for guest posts. I wrote one. It goes up on Wednesday 25th of April. In years to come when the world is a blasted ruin and we all live in caves or cardboard houses, when the sky bleeds acid and the very air is a noxious and cloying poison, Ali will look back on this day and say “That. That right there, is where it all began. Where it all started to go horribly wrong. That was the first, big, mistake.” Probably. I suspect that it won’t come to that though. Probably…
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Leave a comment | tags: 12 books in 12 months, Blogging, Guest Posts, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
It rained sometime during the night. The world’s been distorted into shades of wet greys and everything has a slight sheen to it. The sky’s still an ominous shade of grey as if it’s threatening to drown the world again, whether this proves to be an empty threat or not remains to be seen. Back home rain made everything seem fresh and clean, but down here? Everything seems just as dirty and foul as it did yesterday when it was dry. It’s like a particularly hideous ornament has been polished up because guests are coming round. Polished or not, they’ll still hate the damn thing. I’m once again sitting in my grotty old desk chair, it’s made of faux leather. It’s got a great big tear across the seat where the seams have split, leaving a ragged maw with atrophied lips and misshapen teeth of grey sponge. I’ve tossed a grey tartan blanket over the top to hide the worst. It’s made of acrylic and I like to snuggle into it when it gets too cold. It’s always too cold in my house. I’m choking down factory milled bread slathered in hydrogenated vegetable oil made to imitate churned bovine lactate, this is turn is coated in the black, tarry dregs of a brewer’s vat. It’s all being washed down with a tepid, brown liquid that might once have been tea. I’m a product of the lower middle-class, struggling under the yoke of a disconnected government of rich-elite who hate their population. The divide between the rich and the poor widens daily, inflation spirals ever-upward, the economy’s in recession and the living wage of the average working stiff isn’t going up. The powers that be are trying to introduce plans to monitor all forms of electronic communication. Dystopia doesn’t seem so far away after all. Or perhaps I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. I don’t think anyone can argue that living in a dystopian world would be pretty awful. But why is it that dystopian fiction is so popular and so prevalent?
Girl with bow and arrow - The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games came out last week to some pretty rave reviews. As of yet I haven’t heard anyone say a bad thing about it. I was even thinking of going to see it this weekend so that I had a better idea as to what everyone was going on about. But it was cold outside so I stayed inside where there was tea. It is the most recent in a long line of dystopian films to grace cinema screens. We’ve had The Matrix, Blade Runner, Mad Max, Logan’s Run, the list goes on, spiralling all the way back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. The world of books is littered with similar pieces, from the comic-book worlds of Transmetropolitan and Watchmen, to the familiar fields of Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New world and more or less everything that Philip K. Dick ever wrote.
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2 Comments | tags: Dystopia, Fiction, Films, Ramblings, The Future | posted in Ramblings
Well here we are then. This Friday the blog turns one. I’m not entirely sure how that happened. I started out on my journey into the seething maelstrom of the blogosphere with no destination in mind, no plan, no back-up, no ideas worth a damn. I left myself at the mercy of whatever fevered and diseased thoughts popped into my head, flying my blog airship by the seat of my mind-pants. Because my mind does indeed have pants, for it is a decent and upstanding mind that does not believe in gross public mental-nudity. Over the year the blog’s evolved from a rudderless catastrophe to a blog where I talk about writing and share what I create as I vainly try to make my way into a world saturated by a million other wannabes. The blog is still a catastrophe, but it is, at least, a directed and focused catastrophe.
I honestly didn’t think I’d make it as far as I did. I thought I’d try my very bestest the churn out a post a week, on something, anything. I expected to make it a couple of months before losing patience and motivation; the blog-ship would start to list dangerously, it’d start to lose lift and I’d start sinking through the foetid clouds like a big, fat stone made of cloth and iron. Finally crash landing in the great blog-graveyard beneath the swirling mists of words, the place where the discarded shells of old blogs lie strewn across the landscape, their corpsey husks half buried in toxic, black mud. This didn’t happen. I’m still going, fifty-seven posts and I’m still going. Sure, there was a blip in July but I was moving house and had no internet. As soon as I had internet I fixed that, I kept going. And I sure as hell don’t plan on stopping.
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6 Comments | tags: Birthday, Blog, Bon Anniversaire, Highlights, Ramblings, Thanks | posted in Ramblings
You never realise how much you’ll miss something until it is gone. Something which had previously been mundane and common place leaves a yawning void. I have been recently betrayed by my keyboard. In that, the letter “c” has completely ceased to function. Now I’m in the purgatory of a depleted alphabet until such time that I get round to buying a replacement. But of course it can’t replace it with any old keyboard. Oh no, it will have to be the same model as the one I’m currently using. A model which is plagued with the inherent problem of letters ceasing to work. In the case of the keyboard before my currently one it was the cluster of “b, n and m” that stopped working. Why do I remain so faithful to this fundamentally flawed lump of technology? It’s because after using this type of keyboard, with its ever so slight curved arrangement of the letters, since 2005 I find it extremely inconvenient and discomforting to use anything else. This was the keyboard on which I taught myself to touch type, I know where the keys are, I can feel every tiny, little nuance it has and I so love the distinct clack of the keys, when the fury of the writing is upon me it sounds like the bastard child of a thunder-storm and galloping hooves. But in the interim I must make do.
It taunts me
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1 Comment | tags: copy-paste, keyboards, Lipograms, Ramblings, The letter c | posted in Ramblings
Tomorrow sees my annual migration northwards, home, to see the family for Christmas. It will involve a hike across the dangerous wastes of urban Berkshire, a cramped and nervous passage through the subterranean catacombs of the capital, before finally giving myself over to an arduous 4 hours of train based conveyance. I hate trains. I’ll admit I like the idea of trains, I just don’t like using them. I’ve loathed them ever since, at the start of 2005, I was forced to stand for 5 hours from Newcastle to Birmingham. That was pretty awful. The price is brain meltingly extortionate too. Even though I could in theory fly home, the very fact I’d need to spend about £80 to take anything larger than a small back-pack with me is something of a turn-off.
So I’m heading north. However, unlike many tales of high fantasy there won’t be any magical adventures or feats of daring do. There’ll just be a lot of boredom, interspersed with the frustration of being completely incapable of getting anything even resembling a signal, never mind about mobile internet, on the east-coast mainline. It will be a tough journey.
But the prospect of this mighty and arduous journey got me thinking; “Why, in fantasy, do all the terrifying horrors of war, banditry, barbarism, or appearance of gribblies from the beyond and general wholesale evil, always happen in the North?”
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1 Comment | tags: Fantasy, fantasy archetype, fantasy stereotype, Innkeepers, Ramblings, Rangers, The North, The South | posted in Ramblings
As you may or may not know, I am from the North. Specifically the windswept and rainy coasts of Northumberland, England; a place that, I am wont to remind people, is north of the wall. It’s a fuzzy and grey place that isn’t quite Scotland, but isn’t quite England either; it’s a county that the rest of England tends to forget. A lot of people don’t really think there’s anything north of Newcastle other than a vast expanse of nothingness, they’re not far wrong either. There isn’t anything that could be even remotely described as a city and the largest town has a population of just shy of forty thousand. The population density (as I have mentioned before) is only 160 people per square mile, making it the most sparsely populated place in England and forever meaning it plays second fiddle to its neighbouring sibling of Tyne and Wear. You may be wondering where exactly I’m going with this. Being from Northumberland very much defines who and what I am. The things is though, it never used to. Continue reading
5 Comments | tags: Accents, Geordie, Northern, Northumberland, Ramblings, Regional Identity, Regional Pride | posted in Ramblings
This will be my last post on the topic of NaNoWriMo for this year, as last night, when the sun had gone to bed and the fingers of frost were clawing at my window I did what I had long thought impossible. I finished.
Well I say finished. More accurately I passed the 50,000 word mark. The titanic wordascope that I have been plugging away at all November is by no means ‘finished’. Those fifty thousand words in their extant form consist of a prologue, chapters 1 to 10 and the finishing chapter, number 29. Nineteen chapters that were planned sit in an unwritten limbo. I have a beginning, I have an end, but the middle? That’s not even started yet. Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNo, NaNoWriMo, Plans, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings
The Rogue Verbumancer 