It’s been a mad year, eh? In many ways best forgotten, but I’ve tried to use the abundance of free time to keep writing. I can’t say I’ve found the inspiration to do so easy to come by, but one of my biggest problems is only writing when I’m inspired. That’s why I haven’t finished the book. Yet.
So, that’s what I’m mostly trying to do — finish the bloody book. It’s my number one life priority. I against I.
In a moment of distraction I tinkered with some old words I had laying around on the theme of: Horde. I’ve got reams of stuff I’ve written ‘around’ the world I’ve created, and the people who exist there. It seems to be the most difficult part. Getting the gumf into order so it becomes a story. It’ll happen oneday.
Bitter coils of scale, the ochre of rust — death inspiral — wound around the land, lay a furrowed wake seeded with woe. Serpentine o’er the hills, faraway into the fade, her scars wend the dun earth. This sly malevolence now slumbers within the somnolence gathered around the bloody gold of men.
I really need your help right now. When I was a kid you didn’t exist — but now you are everywhere! I believed in you when you were slow and clunky and everyone thought you were a bit weird. These-days everyone loves you, and you help people all the time do all sorts of cool stuff, and make their lives better. Remember when we used to download photos of Pamela Anderson onto floppy-disk, or played deathmatch Doom in lunch hour? Seems so long ago now, doesn’t it? I was a bit weird back then too, still am — I guess. I was clunky and awkward, a bit shy, and more than a little unsure of myself. I wasn’t popular, or cool — so it was often you I turned to, when I was lonely, bored and wanted to dream. You helped me do that. You helped me dream because you showed me that everyone can dream, no-matter who you are — and that dreams matter. Because dreams give us wings, let us soar on their fabric. We were all somebodies dream, once.
What was my dream? I dreamed about ensorcelled steel, mysterious lands, and hard-bitten imaginaries. I dreamed about dinosaurs, Spitfires and wizards riding monsters. I dreamed of galaxies far, far away. I dreamed of treasure, and the haunted darkness it hid amongst. I dreamed of the envious eyes that watched those who searched for it. I dreamed all the time, so much so that all these little dreams became one big one and I began to write it down. My dream was to write — now my dream is to be read. But right-now I feel awkward and unsure again. I don’t know if what I have written is any good. That’s why I need your help, Internet. It doesn’t matter if you are nine years-old, or ninety-nine. It doesn’t matter if you are black, white, blue, green, spotty or striped; it doesn’t matter if you have one-eye or three; it doesn’t matter if you are a girl, a boy, both — or you used to be one, and are now the other — it doesn’t matter to me. I just need your help. I need you to tell me something. I need you to tell me: Do I completely suck at writing?
No-one has ever read my story. I want it to be perfect — or at-least for it to be the very best story I can write before I let you read it. The thing is no-one really reads anything I write. Or if they do, they never say anything about it. So you see, I am worried that what I write has no effect; or that it has a negative effect. I worry that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way I shepherd thoughts into words, like a karaoke singer who sounds absolutely awful yet has no idea how badly out-of-tune they really are. We can all sing in the shower, but not everyone can sing on stage. So I’ve decided to post something in an attempt to gauge how much of my life has been wasted trying to become something I may never be. I’ve changed a few details, and nothing plot related is included, but this scene is a realistic display of what I’m attempting to achieve. It’s not the most dramatic or recent writing I’ve done, but it’s the best example that won’t leave me panicking about giving too much away. Here goes nothing…
The moon hung, low and bloated. Sallow light wept from it, leaching into the surrounding dimness like the putrescence from a wound. Meril reached the end of the path that led to the cliffs, stands on shattered rock at the edge of this existence. Beyond: the ocean unending rolls away towards infinity. Above the stars seem pricked — set into the faded sheen of the aether they glitter with a quiet, miraculous beauty — as if they are put there just for her. She stands wildered, gazing up at them, listening to the thunder on the shore below; the firmament with its delicately weighted machinations is in perfect balance; fragile, sempiternal. So close — so close she could almost touch it. She lowers her gaze to look upon the violence below where the ocean draws upon the land. A great wave peels over, arching, arcing; crashes exhausted and spends over the beach in a flurry of spume that dallies between rocks and stones and pebbles in a retreating latticework and soaks away into the sand, leaving only a pale gleam and a sigh like a deep breath risen from the land. And is gone.
She watches another wave crawl in, hypnotized. It rises majestically towards a rolling zenith; it peters; tumbles — splays out like the wave before it in a cacaphonic dissolution of form and momentum; sublimes into the boundaries of the thing that resists it, and in so doing negates all boundaries; only evolves, merges — creating a new state of being. A flaring white plume thrusts high into the lucid air, hangs as a glittering slow-turning curtain, before the amorphous bloom sags, crashes down completely and dissolves into chaos. Here Meril’s world bleeds as reality sloughs away, undone by the withering power flowing out of the Schism — clashing violently with the the rest of the Astroverse as it does so. The coastline is torn between the opposing fates along the shores of this place. The fluxing forces were everywhere — were everything. She closes her eyes and feels the flow of unseen energy behind her eyes, feels the power of the wind swirling and rolling around her — as if waiting for her to step in.
The cry of seabirds upon the wind dares her to join them. If she stops resisting the gale, it will embrace her — then offer her to the raging ocean below. Whatever came after that — to this broken land and the darkness within it would be left far, far behind. A step towards the void and she is free. Release, she thinks — release! Meril watches the seabirds a mere moment longer, feeling the slow turn of the earth beneath her feet as the birds ride the wind — held above the maelstrom of energies pounding the shoreline by barely more than will alone. A sudden angry squall scatters them, shrieking high into the sky before it. And they are gone. Reluctant, Meril turned and walked back down the path. A storm was brewing.
I was gifted with an impromptu week off work recently. This unexpected boon found me writing like a demon, and fiendishly editing what feels like a well-rounded first-third of the manuscript. Things feel well balanced in the set-up and the beginning of the second-act has taken form — finally. This paradigm shape-shifts however. The work is non-linear, which was an instinctual choice rather than something I set out to achieve by design, and initially caused much grief to this journeyman — the reality of this has at last recently taken shape as if the words were soft as clay. The form of the thing has risen only out of reams of writing however, not all of it good. A lot of it abysmal. A kind of stoic doggedness has allowed me to progress beyond something which seemed for many years to be a literary white-elephant — for I lack the talent and ability of those I wish to emulate. I’ve scoured away the fluff, the thoughtless gumf, the shallow, inane glamour through constant re-writes. The thing which remains is a purer form nascent with promise. Yet as I perceive it I am aware that all I have done is nurture a seed which divulges nothing of the secret to its blooming. Work and travel conspired to tire me this week, and after a few hours of grinding progress at the work this morning, I decided to opt for the distractive pleasure of a little blogging. I’ve written more in the last five minutes than I have in the four hours since waking. Such is life. Damn frustrating sometimes — when you have time, but mind and body are not synced with opportunity.
I wish I had a mentor, someone who could offer me advice, maybe a little praise. These sinks one falls into can often be so hard to extract yourself from. Maybe they are compounded by one’s own frustrations at inactivity and lack-of progress. Perhaps I want too much? But assuming I were now to disappear with friends for the day, I would only wish I had stayed-in and attempted to forge some sort of breakthrough. For should Sunday arrive, begin and pass without any writing done I would then start the week deeply frustrated at not having managed to write more. I can see the end-result beginning to rise in the fog of my mind, I can feel it quickening and becoming real; after so many years of failure and struggle it is coming into being, I just wish I could dedicate more time to it. It is part of me, and I of it. It feels like this is what I should be doing. Therefore I have to complete it. I have to see it fully realised. I have to write it.
No surrender.
Currently listening to Nine Inch Nails and Moby’s ambient stuff. Also Chris Cornell’s Songbook and some early Bowie. Not got much time to read anything other than The Times, though there are several books in the stack purchased in the free, quiet days after Christmas I mean to re-immerse myself in, notably My War Gone By, I Miss It So, by Anthony Loyd.
Would dearly love some concrit on the work so-far. If you happen to be the literary equivalent of Rik Rubin, then please, get in touch…
They say: “you are what you eat”, which basically means, in the context of this post: ‘you get out what you put in’. That’s true for most folk – unfortunately, or not as the case may be – I am not ‘most folk’. I’m writing still, but life has a way of making that a bloody hard thing to do at times. External pressures, commitments and worries all combine into some ‘ultimate-force’ doing its best to scramble my creative whims before they’ve even flashed across the dank, echoing space behind my eyes and become a ‘thing’.
They say: “destruction breeds creativity”; or something like that, at least. They also say: “think outside the box”. They say…lots of things. I don’t need a ten-step check-list from some coffee-morning-mummies writing group to realise that at the moment my writing is starting to suck. I’ve fallen into the old self-made trap of spending too much time and thought on ‘the one’ project that is my main focus – to it’s detriment. In my last post, I wrote about the need to keep applying myself – this is still true, I just need to alter the dosage a little – and maybe have some less serious, or time-consuming things to tinker with on the side as a distraction.
The internal critic at work.
I’ve decided to set myself the task of posting at least once a week about things that I’ve come across on the internet; using them as prompts for writing exercises where I just go with the flow, as it were. I hope by allowing myself to throw something up now and then – that’s not some intricate piece of punk mythology – but disposable in nature, and that my internal critic won’t brutally assassinate before I’ve even finished writing it – I can increase and enhance my productivity (recently that guy has been holding far too much sway over my work; it’s time to take the power back). That seems to be the main issue at the moment: concentration. On a good day I’ve written maybe 2000 words in the past, which, for first draft quality are pretty bloody good (even by my draconian standards). On a bad day I’m almost retching as I force out a meagre handful of corruption in vile-looking strands that are something akin to sentences.
So, what I’m seeking is some sort of middle ground between the highs and lulls, where I’m in a productive mind-set, able to bang-out 1000 words at a time. That shouldn’t be too hard to nail – this little enforced exercise I’m undertaking will, I hope, lubricate some of the blockages, sharpen me up and help to snare the unexpected. So – let us throw wide the doors of perception…
An article about on/off post hip-hop crazies Death Grips, and some grainy live footage they’d recently released.
That started me off; I followed up with, and then settled, on this:
After which I wrote this, the first (hopefully) in a series I’m dubbing ‘Behind My Eyes’:
The sonic assault mind-fucks me. My brain is jack-hammered into submission beneath a tattooed crescendo of industrial brutality; techno-terrorists have cracked into my safe thoughts with their crazy, discordant thunderous fuzz – this blitzkrieg of sound…duh…duh…duh. My consciousness wobbles violently beneath the undulating walls of noise, my gut lurches and I drape a hot cider and chow mein sock over the shoulder of some teeny-bopping pop queen – all flowers in her hair, tanned skin and shuffling feet. This is not her space to degenerate. She was not born for such audio carnage. Why then, does she wail so loudly when the barbarians of noise fuck her shit up? All I can think of is Carrie, the Stephen King film; a girl covered in blood – and I realise I have no mortality (or morality) left; drained of all being, energy and seemingly, of substance – I float out of the pulsing, throbbing reeking warmth cocooned beneath the great carapace of the tent, out into the cool, cool, deep cool dark of the evening, to drink it all in.
I settle by the wayside as the feckless, the mindless, the shirtless and the shameless stream past on their stunted, shambling mud-blessed pilgrimages to who-knows-where? A gibbous moon swells in the sky above me and I slink back into the welcoming grass, on the fringe of all things, blinking out of the darkness like some feral creature, semi-aware that any number of wordless horrors may have been discarded beneath me by the fluttering, gurning, grinning insects swarming across this enclave of youth. I care not, and stare instead at the moon’s pulsing filament, insects battering against its scuffed plastic sheen. The bass from the tent throbs through the air, seeking me out; side-winding through the strata of tightly packed aromas and vapours coalescing into something viscous; cooking foods, dope smoke and the prevailing undercurrent of raw sewage that lingers close to the ground. A bittersweet melange, I reflect, as I draw it all in.
The moon above has begun to bore me – so I launch myself in the direction of a string of planets whose sonorous luminescence reverberates with the drainpipe-twang of electric didgeridoo; beneath them strange space-folk of many colours, twist and throb like a happy throng of Keith Haring characters. Whistles whittle at the air, which has assumed the properties of plastic – everything vibrates as one – the sound moving so seamlessly along through it that it strikes everything in unison. I stumble into a grassy shadow sprayed with glowing blooms of cow parsley, swaying in the breeze behind an ice-cream van; oblivious to this mad, wonderful schism of unbridled sensation and connection somewhere in England at the solstice of summer. This little patch – my ink-blue oasis in a sea of sound – becomes sovereign territory. History unfolds beyond its borders, in the nightshade shadows of a field in evening, I watch from outside time: the space strung with snake-lights, writhing and jostling above trails of bright grottos, people surging to-and-fro like the blood and chemicals within their veins. The ice-cream van is all to me; a bastion of sobriety. The cool of the earth rises up through my body, infusing with me, talking me out of the clouds back down to the good, moist earth. Travellers lost – and emissaries from far-away places hail me – King of the little hill – as they stride past towards ghettos of pleasure within this grand sway of vespertine revelry. I wave them by; on they go, unbridled. The rattle of the ice-cream van’s generator and the rhythmic nocturnal sigh of this ancient Isle help solidify the scenes before me. Seconds later I’m standing, blowing out Silk-Cut smoke thanks to my silver tongue; smiling and thanking unknown Samaritans with sun-scarred bodies peeling away at the shoulders; eyes pooled like liquid satin – and they slowly rove away – him leading her with frail tattooed arms into the night, smoke and throbbing aethers.
I turn on a six-pence; my Converse squeak like bats on the cellophane blades of grass beneath, spun into dirt. The madness is behind me now; the pulse and throb warps over the heads of ten thousand people, pushing the sound higher as the heat from their bodies rises into the stagnant sky. The melody is worn into separate threads, distorted by the distance, teased-out tatters reassembled beyond the mass into ghosts of song and sound. It follows me, for a way – as I flirt along the inside of a hedge, towards a blot of trees daubed across the silver screen of the sky – and then it floats away o’er bovine fields and dusky woods, towards some foreign star, to be sometime forgotten, yet happy, a memory. I fall into the welcoming stillness of my tent, and sleep the sleep of a god on earth.
It’s one of those days where the brain refuses to get into the magic zone. I poke it with cups of tea and atmospheric music, but it remains immobile and oblivious to my need to write; a bad-tempered slug that has taken up squatting in my head and refuses any attempt to get it moving again.
There are different levels of operation within this ‘zone’ – this one I’m currently in now resides below the one I want to be in, by two or three levels. I normally operate near the scratchy, half-arsed places at the surface; the superficial or impulsive. Here the neural pathways are wide, sunlit places, where thoughts mingle carelessly; milling around as they potter to-and-fro, some even slip away for an early, liquid lunch, as its Friday. These thoughts are no good to me. They are smug: they think they’re happy; their overfed and boisterous – quite happy to rudely ignore, talk-over or simply shout-down the quieter introverted sorts who, occasionally, surface for a look around, like country-folk who’ve popped into the city for a beer on a Friday night, only to disappear again for six months; realizing why it is they live in the country.
It’s this type of person (or thought) I’m hunting for now. I need to get off the beaten track, away from all these day-trippers, shoppers and tourists meandering along the promenade and get lost in the darker and quieter side of town. I need to disappear into my own head. It’s possible! I’ve done it before (maybe for too long), and hopefully I’ll do it again – just at the moment I can’t find the way off these bustling highways down into the murky, older places; half-forgotten and ill-lit. That’s where they live, see – ‘the good stuff’, as they’re known collectively, but – they’re a fickle bunch and bloody hard to locate when they don’t want to be found. They’re never in the same place twice. They often conflict – so that as you try to give each one equal precedence – you suddenly realise that as you were listening to them and trying to make allowances, they’ve both slipped away into the shadows –after picking your pocket and tying your shoes together.
Sometimes the doorway to this ‘other side’ can be impossibly narrow to squeeze through, yet the warm syrupy light trickling through the keyhole is as infuriating in its seduction as the crooning whisper promising treasure that lays just beyond out of reach. At the moment, after a good few solid days writing last weekend, the early morning and evening sessions since have proved to be awkward, stunted affairs. I’ve decided to keep flogging the dying horse as opposed to letting it slump to the floor, however. Sometimes it’s good to just leave things alone for a few days or so, but not this time. There’s a lot bubbling away on the stove at the moment and if I don’t keep an eye on each thing then I’ll lose the handle I’ve got on them; there’s nothing worse than having to lay and strike a fire, before you can reheat the grey gloop gone cold in the pan just to get the creative juices flowing again.
The thing that’s got me in a quandary is a fleeting image of a character. His name is Shadwell, a ne’er-do-well who frequents an area by the river that once was busy; full of longshoremen, sailors, fishmongers and whores. Shadwell is a … oh wait… I’ve unlocked the door. Bye!
Dark Ink 