Ideas, when you get right down to it, are bastards. Without them any artistic venture simply cannot get off the ground. Without an idea what do you write about? What do you paint? Not only do you have to start somewhere, but you’ve also got to actually go somewhere. Without an idea you’ll just end up sitting at your desk twiddling your thumbs and resisting the urge to trawl the sordid nether regions of the internet. But as I said ideas are bastards; they are things of whimsy and caprice. They’re not something that can just be summoned or called upon at a moments notice. Ideas aren’t something you can simply manufacture, trying to is equivalent to a blacksmith trying to hammer a sword out of the wind. A good proper idea is a rare gem, something forged in the bowels of the earth of countless millennia, something which you’ll have to shift a metric fuck-ton of shit just to get to.
Tag Archives: Ramblings
Keepers of the page
When talking about books and writing there always seems to be one little thing that is forgotten and pushed to the back of the discussion. Perhaps not quite shunned and ostracised but certainly ignored for other more weighty matters. It’s like the person who stands alone in the corner at a party; not because they’re a social leper, but simply because everyone else is too busy with other things. I am of course talking about bookmarks.
Bookmarks are those little stalwart vanguards of the reading world. They held your hand when you cried during that romance novel of yours, they stood resolutely by your side as you struggled your way through that big, high-brow classic that hasn’t aged too well and doesn’t make a lot of sense, they never left your side when you were reading that trashy novel you bought at the airport which everyone said was great but was actually really shit. They didn’t judge you. They were with you every step of the way. They did all this without expecting any recognition nor thanks, because they’re inanimate objects and such a thing would be impossible for them, but they were still there! Despite the fact that we don’t give them half the credit they deserve, bookmarks are extraordinarily important things. They are a simple little device which holds our place for us, it lets us remember where we were. They are our anchorage amidst an angry and uncertain sea of words. Nearly everyone has one, even if they don’t read. They’ll be some in a box somewhere gathering dust.
Abominations of Technology
In my last post I briefly touched on the subject of e-books. Well, I didn’t so much touch upon it, as glance at it from a great distance through a pair of high-powered binoculars. Something akin to a stalker of conversation points; it’s like birdwatching but metaphorical. That and my tea is in a mug as opposed to a Thermos. There’s still sandwiches though. Sandwiches with pickle.
Now I suspect I should attempt to capture the aforementioned lesser-spotted speckled conversation point with my net of bilious words and angry grammar lest it dash off into the bushes or get eaten by a cat. It is at this point my metaphor begins to shake violently and collapse in upon its own absurdity.
So e-books then…
Size doesn’t matter
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…
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.
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 