Thanks, Old Sport!

I watched the sports results the other day. Big deal huh? It is if you've never seen them in your life.


On that particular day I was barely watching the news, it was just a wash of pictures and sound- names and events that lead to horrendous outcomes. This is what happens when you have ingested too many toxic ideas. They infect your mind and turn it into one big seething single minded organism . This organism is too greedy to let any other information in - it wants you for it s self.


The voices of the newscasters , the rhythm of their speech and the downwardly inflected words had a slow , deep, swing. Concerned, authoritative, and seemingly without bias. All the tools needed to bring you stories of tragedy and ramped up pandemic paranoia. Gradually the plangent sway left my ears. Now they were full off chirpy high tones , quick and reassuring. the name of the football clubs , players with Russia, Brazilian , and Spanish names. Tennis players from Sweden and the Czech Republic, all sounded curlicued and complex, flat constants and accented vowels all running into each other.
Like a surreal poetry- musical and diverting, I was in the room again. It had some how acted as a kind of aural antibiotic.
Saturday afternoons maybe spent a aittle differently from now on.

Feelin' just like Dylan...Thomas that is.

Got my first paid job as a writer last week. I'm scripting four information films for the Department of Health at Birmingham Uni. They're having a drive on recruiting people to some of the less well known areas of the National Health Service. Fancy becoming an O.D.P anyone?

I worked from recordings of people that have roles in each of the departments and tried to construct the ideal candidate for the ad. Listening to The Mental Health nurses, the Learning Disability nurses, they all do amazing jobs helping people coming to terms with their mental and physical problems. Hearing what they do on a daily basis made me feel like a selfish good for nothing waste of enzymes.

It got me thinking about other writers who were in similar situations and made me wonder how they felt. Dylan Thomas and Laurie Lee both worked for the Ministry of Information during the war, scripting films on getting people to join the home guard or becoming balloon operators.


Both contributing to the war effort, fighting the biggest most horrendous problems of their day the only way they could. If I were Dylan or Laurie , that's how I would justify my role...because that's how I'm justifying my role.

Let's think about it. Working in a hospital these days would seem to most people as good as jumping into a dustbin and licking the inside clean. The largest threat to the world is a trillionth of a millimetre in size and lurks on every surface that you can touch. Swine flu, MRSA, Avian flu... according to "those in the know" these are considered the new threats to humanity.
If this is true or not the jobs are there and need to be filled. So, it seems like we'll have to look back to those bad old days of the war and take a piece of their advice..."Keep Calm and Carry on".

Twister

There is something that writers, writers creating a novel, that is, can do that scientists have been trying to achieve for years. Lean closer and I'll tell you...ready?

When a writer starts out on an idea for a novel, gets down the bare bones, the frame work , the scaffold of words, and throws them down on a page in some semblance of order, they inadvertently create , or you could say summon, a tornado

"Eh? What bollocks. "I hear you shout.

Nah, hear me out - that twister you brought into the world sucks in every bit of emotion , tiny passing thought, big ,sticky, tenacious thoughts, quirks of personality , random observations, perversion... anything in its path, up into a strange , chaotic blur of matter.

And it's not just confined to the page. It follows you- standing at the bus stop it will appear whipping up a frenzy down the road. At work gurgling and big in front of Jane from accounts desk. It flies around , following your every move sucking up what it can from your immediate surroundings.

It's bloody scary, not to say exhausting dancing about the mouth of one of those things every day, holding back from being slurped into oblivion. Over a matter of time maybe a year, maybe two, it starts to shrink , then one unquantifiable day, it vanishes. And what your left with is a mesh of broken words, and ideas picked up from the places you've been. Sentences strewn, dazed ,lolling across the page, needing urgently to be rearranged and tended to.

The tornado I created has left me now . I no longer fear oblivion and the unknown. Now the hard work starts . Now I'm cleaning up and trying to make some sense of the mess.

Conkershoes and Sandy.

I try and rest from writing the novel on Sundays , writing anything really. But I found myself supping on one of those weird Sunday afternoon cocktails of existential bleakness washed down with a guilt and anxiety mixer. I couldn't justify not writing ( nothing on telly on a Sunday afternoon is there.)


So I wrote the first instalment in a collection of children's stories about a couple of characters I've had bouncing around my head for a while, called Conkershoes and Sandy. Conkershoes is Billy Conks who has been dumped at his eccentric Grandma's big house by the sea for the summer. With no other kids to play with and rubbish weather he starts reading the books on pirates and explorers that fill the shelves of his bed room. Eventually the rain clears, he looks to the bay and spy's a small pirate ship bobbing in the surf. From it jumps a boy who makes his way up the beach and knocks on Conkershoe's window. Dressed like a pirate; the boy has an eye patch, a hat with three points and a cutlass hanging from his belt. He introduces himself as Sandy and he has made it his job to pick up messages in bottles that people have thrown into the ocean for help. Then he invites Conkershoes to come with him on his magic ship and join him in his next adventure.


Having never written a kids story before it was a task I started with a little trepidation. What 's the tone of the piece going top be? Do I have to impart some kind of message to the kids? How weird can I get? These questions acted like some sticky coagulant seizing my arm up, I was unable to put pen to paper.
I thought back to my favorite kids shows and realized that logic and and causality seemed very slight considerations where the Clangers were involved. I needed to get on with the story and just let things happen. Leave reality at the door and let the subconscious take over. Gradually I felt my arm loosened and as soon as the nib touched the paper it didn't leave it for at least an hour. When it did I'd finish the story.
It was a joy to leave the murky underworld of drugs and violence for a while. it was like a holiday. In my head I'd been stuck in Birmingham in the winter of 1999 for the last year. That isn't a good place for anyone to be in for that period of time.
So, if the credit crunch it biting down big time on ya soul and you can't afford a holiday, grab a pen, some paper and take a trip into your subconscious. Its cheap, the journey is pretty short and the destination is constantly changing so you won't ever get bored. Bon Voyage!

Earthquake!

Most people know of the book "The Corrections" by Jonathan Franzen. It's that book , you know , huge , thick thing, everyone was talking about 'cause the author was mouthing off about Oprah Winfrey using it as her book club choice . The Hoo hah surrounding it brought him riches and baubles aplenty and plonked "The Corrections " in line as another contender for the "Great American Novel".

Well ,he wrote a couple of novels before that; "The Twenty Seventh City" and "Strong Motion".
Strong Motion is a particular favour of mine. For a few reasons-

I had written the first three chapters of my novel and come to a grinding holt. I couldn't see where the hell the story was going. Which meant that I didn't know my lead character enough. So I pushed the keyboard away and banged my head on the desk in frustration. This had happened before whilst forming the idea for the book, the cold steel door came slamming down in front of my inspiration, so I turned to my book case. I wanted to hear a voice that I could recognise, that would say "See, it can be done like this. Look and its good!" But non of them coo-ed that warm reassurance into my shell-like. So...I brought a load of books from Amazon on the cheap , new-ish authors and titles , classics and crime fiction ( a genre I'd never read).

When I started reading "Strong Motion" I almost gave a sigh of relief. In his story about a Seismologist and a Radio ham discovering an ecological cover up, Franzen had showed me that you can have great characters , psychological insight, good dialogue, experimentation (one chapter begins being narrated by a raccoon) and have a cracking plot.

What made it work was Franzen's confidence as a writer. I believed nearly every word (its not a master piece by any standards) and admired his ambition. It does ramble in places and I 'm sure he meant it to, but despite these little glitches I finished it with a smile on my face and experienced the feeling that great art can inspire when it touches you; you are not always alone.

Time out of Mind.

Having a gander at the posts I've put up here over the last week, I realised just how many howlers there were boring away into the body of the text.
Since becoming a member of the National Academy of Writing in 2008, and keeping to a daily writing regime the silly mistakes (as my school teachers used to call them) have been occurring less and less. Dyslexia is like an accent. You can suppress it as much as you like , but sometimes it will just pop up and reveal the real you. They only way forward is to keep focused and practice, practice , practice.

It used to be something I was uncomfortable about. And I won't lie, I ain't too jolly about it now . But dyslexia , has given me a few gifts that I would never had received if I hadn't been so close to it as an adolescent. I think my mind works a little differently because of it.
When looking at a page of words your non dyslexic approaches the piece head on , word after word lining up to make a cohesive sentence. Well, for me I would hop and skip down a page, picking up the words that made sense, jump backwards and link them up to the words I didn't understand. Then and only then did the earlier, incomprehensible sentences become significant.

Now when I delve into stories and plots I harvest ideas, shuffle them, throw them in the air and watch as they fall. Before they hit the ground I grab them and make sure they land in the right place.
Dyslexia has made me look at the order of things and forced me to manipulate that order so it would make sense to me. That can only be beneficial, I should think, for any writer.
So heres to booter spolling then.

Only the good die young...

Not really. This week has seen the loss of two great and , I think under appreciated British genius's . The writer J.G. Ballard ,78 and Cinematographer /Director Jack Cardiff ,94.
Both had their own unique vision and showed us the world as they saw it- but what different visions they were.
Cardiff gave the films of Powell and Pressburger (most importantly Black Narcissus and The Red Shoes,) a look all of their own. Strong colour and light flooded each frame, suppling those movies with a luminous , hyper real texture that is rarely seen in other films of that period. The themes of the stories may have been dark and tragic but they never looked it. Ballard had a hyper-real way of looking at the world too. Unlike Cardiff , there was little room for light and colour in his grey and terrifying near futures. A vision equally valid.
Both their world veiws are essential and forever preserved in the great pieces of art that they left in their wake.
R.I.P Chaps.