Assassins
If you missed yesterday's post, this won't make much sense - but now, I know more than you. Not much but enough to mean I have taken a step forward. Exciting times - I'm looking forward to seeing how this 'little' project will turn out. For the foreseeable future, it shall be called Project X.
Meanwhile, if you'd like to save yourself a couple of hours and add them back to the end of your life, last night we instigated some 'down-time' and went to see Now You See Me 2 (based on the fact that the first was actually pretty good) and I wish we hadn't.
By the end of it, I felt cheap... like the whole crew involved in the movie sat around a table, decided to make a movie that flashed and banged so they could get away with writing a wafer thin plot and weak script. To make it worse, when it came to releasing the movie they forgot to add those flashes and bangs - so the end result was just a ticking in my head that whispered how I could have been doing something useful at home while I watched an entire cast of people who should have known better waste their own time as well.
So when I did get home, I watched this - 13 Assassins - which is not a waste of time in any way at all. In fact, aside from the work done on Project X above, it was probably the best use of a couple of hours so far this weekend:
Rule Yourself
Today (well... a few days ago actually but saying 'today' makes me feel more current) a friend of mine who I admire very much as an artist (and lives on the other side of the Atlantic) suggested we work on a project together. A big sweeping project of devastation and awe. So I agreed.
We have no idea what that project might be, when it might happen... in fact, right now, you know as much about is as we do but later today - or maybe sometime over the weekend - we will know more about it than you and that will be considered a step in the right direction. It's really exciting having somebody else in the ring with huge production values in their soul. What can we achieve if we put our backs and minds to it?
Not a clue but I guess we'll all find out soon enough.
That's all I've got today and maybe for a few days - back to work. I'll leave you with this for a while:
The Wild Life
Why aren't the Elves doing their job? I've followed all of the rules about staying up and falling asleep with your head on the workbench with an unfinished pair of shoes in front of me but nothing. I guess I'll have to do it myself then. So be it.
This is one of those entries which is as much for my own sanity as anything.
Submissions are out in the world, which is a good thing. While I wait, there are other things on the table (these are the things the Elves are being lazy with) and time will judge them as it judges everything.
Sometime next week, a 'thing' that I've been working on with 'someone' for the Big Bear Rescue project should see the light of day. Everybody is really busy and it's been pushed too far onto the back-burner for my liking but this particular octopus arm appears to be coming up for air and I'm looking forward to unleashing it. Thou shalt not be disappointed... well, not if you like bears anyway.
Meanwhile, we've found a new place to take Hector. It's like walking him on a Lord Of The Rings movie set:
This week, I also found what I consider to be one of the most important sentences ever written (by James Baldwin) about writing:
The importance of a writer is continuous… His importance, I think, is that he is here to describe things which other people are too busy to describe.
Nobody (aside from you) will know how much I needed to hear that this week. It struck right at the heart of a whole bunch of things I've been wrestling with recently... and oh, how I wrestle. If you're a writer - or any kind of creative - and you have these wrestling days, you are not alone.
(George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Never wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it" - which is a completely different thing altogether but still important. Trust me on that. I grew up with pigs around the place.)
Running back through my photos here, I see I didn't post my close encounter with a lemur. Not so much an encounter perhaps as an 'adoption' - by her not me. There I was just hanging out at the zoo checking to see how Brutus and Clarence (the two rescued circus lions) were doing - and she came bounding over to me and... well...
That was about the best I could do with one hand - my left hand at that - but I got rescued and we also came up with this... there's a baby lemur somewhere under there too
In my never ending quest to find, umm... not so much 'better' ways of doing things but absolutely more minimal and sexier ways of doing things, I found this watch built by a company called Slow. It has just the one hand, makes you think about time differently and is, frankly, as cool as the breeze. I kinda like this one:
It's about as far removed from a smart watch as I can imagine - aside from not actually having a watch. I might gift myself one as a present one of these days. I mean, how late can you actually be for anything?
Finally, on the subject of The Wild Life, I had to cancel my proposed trip to NYC this coming weekend - but all is not lost - there's a substitution in the wings somewhere in the mountains of Massachusetts... and that could prove to be a real kick in the pants.
Footnote:
I forgot to mention, I have begun work on this:
Cover art (the drawing is by Thomas Serginson) is pending a review and agreement of terms (and other boring stuff) but you get the drift...
Insert smiley face emoticon if you wish. I would.
How To Do Business. Lesson 1.
Don't you wish you had big brass balls like Mr Kubrick sometimes?
Creem Magazine - Rock n Roll Over
Creem - my favourite magazine of all time, without exception (except for maybe my own) is making something of a comeback. I can't quite figure out what the website is up to out there but in associated news, Scott Crawford is making a documentary about the iconic mag - I don't use the word lightly - and has a kickstarter fund set up here to help out with those annoying things like legal fees and production costs.
Here's the trailer:
If you know what I'm talking about, consider throwing a fistful of coin into the arena - if you don't know what I'm talking about but are a Music Lover With Taste, throw in a fistful anyway. Without Creem, the landscape would not be the one we look back at with love and affection.
One of the great things about Creem was they did whatever took their fancy, any time they chose:
And looking back, that's exactly how you build a legacy that people talk about decades after your luck has well and truly run out. Just for the sake of nostalgia, here's a shot of my hero Lester Bangs with some youngster who looks like Bruce Springsteen:
Even loading up these images makes me smile and my heart sing...
And that's pretty much all you need to know. Get it on.
The Ukiyo-e Project
It's not often I have a great spillover from the day-job to the soul-job, but today I strike gold. Ukiyo-e is something really special and over at ukiyoeproject.com you'll find a solid bunch of people desperately trying to keep the art alive. If you have no idea what it is, Ukiyo-e is a traditional Japanese art - a multi-colored wood-block print. It was first appeared and became popular during samurai era, between mid 1600 and 1700. “Ukiyo” means current events and “e” means painting. Thus Ukiyo-e means paintings of current events. People during the time obtained news of the society as well as the fashion and travel trend from Ukiyoe. Many Ukiyo-e depict then popular beautiful women, land scape, sumo wrestlers, and Kabuki actors. You may have already known and seen famous Ukiyo-es by Hokusai, Sharaku and Utamaro.
But as with all art forms from another world ago, it's struggling. To pass the adequate skills of Ukiyo-e, artists need serious and long-term commitment for training and the number of successors is decreasing. The main problem is there are not enough jobs to keep them going. Therefore, the masters can’t afford young apprentices who are willing to learn. Today, there are only about thirty printers and only nine wood carvers. If the current situation stays the same, the 350-year-old Ukiyo-e techniques will be lost within 20 years.
Ukiyo-e is now facing the crisis of extinction.
Which brings us to the present day and the Ukiyo-e Project where they're working on making the art form relevant to the present day - and what better way to do such a thing than by mashing up the past with a little bit of rock n roll... like this:
They have a store right here - you know what to do.
Interviews I Never Took Part In...
Over at Serpent's Tail - one of my favourite publishers at work in the world today - there's a great interview with John Dufresne who has new book out called I Don't Like Where This Is Going, which has the best designed cover I've seen in months. It looks like this:
I'll be cracking the spine on that later this evening.
Anyway, I thought the questions were so good, I found myself reading his answers and then thinking about my own responses to the same questions. What better way to fill in a day when you haven't posted for a while...
Who was the first fictional character you fell in love with?
Aside from Anne in The Famous Five (does she count?) that has to be Emil from Emil and the Detectives. Probably because of his sense of right, wrong, justice and perseverance. Qualities that crop up time and again in all of my literary heroes as the years have ticked by.
You’re throwing a dinner party for fictional characters. Who do you invite?
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Edgar Donahue and Mountain, Russ Tobin, The Saint, Charlie Parker and The Woman In Black. I'm sure we could all learn something at such a gathering.
Are there any books that still haunt your dreams, even years after reading them?
Clive Barker's Imajica. When I'd finished it, I knew I would never write fantasy as grand or sweeping as that and immediately put the idea of doing so out of my head. Forever.
Is there a book you wish you’d been the one to write?
Imajica for the reasons given above. Clive Barker has been tarred with the horror and fantasy brush forever now but for me, Imajica is high literature but there's only way to find out if the words I speak are true.
Where do you write, and how do you feel about your workspace?
I like to write outside which is quite 'expansive' and is never the same surroundings from moment to moment. I feel privileged to have 'outside' as an office, but I do also have the dining room table which has no distractions where I tend to do any work that needs tending to on the MacBook.
What is the most beautiful book you own?
William Blake: The Divine Comedy (Taschen). It reminds me what can be achieved when you ignore your surroundings and set your mind free. Everything is wonderful about it, from the paper it's printed on to the ribbon down the spine. I probably look at it every day to give myself a reality check.
Which author, living or dead, would you most like to spar with in a Slam-style literary death match?
Raymond Carver. Could be fun in the extreme - or not.
And which author would you grant immortality so their books never stopped coming?
John Connolly. He is my JK Rowling. On the first day of a new Charlie Parker hitting the shelves, I'm queueing at midnight for it - the next day or two are then abandoned along with everybody being notified of my intentions not to answer the phone or indeed, do anything else.
Who’s your biggest non-literary artistic inspiration?
Kiss took up a lot of my time when I was younger, they're a hard influence to shake off - not that I want to. In '77, they were The Infallible Gods... and then they fell. Hard. There's a valuable lesson right there.
You’re the coach of one of the teams in Monty Python’s Philosophers’ Football Match. Who’s your star striker?
Alan Watts:
“Advice? I don’t have advice. Stop aspiring and start writing. If you’re writing, you’re a writer. Write like you’re a goddamn death row inmate and the governor is out of the country and there’s no chance for a pardon. Write like you’re clinging to the edge of a cliff, white knuckles, on your last breath, and you’ve got just one last thing to say, like you’re a bird flying over us and you can see everything, and please, for God’s sake, tell us something that will save us from ourselves. Take a deep breath and tell us your deepest, darkest secret, so we can wipe our brow and know that we’re not alone. Write like you have a message from the king. Or don’t. Who knows, maybe you’re one of the lucky ones who doesn’t have to.”
What fuel do you use to sustain yourself when you’re writing?
Tea, coffee, cigarettes (which is how I came to enjoy writing outside). I try to eat properly these days to make up for it. I don't write in silence. Music is always in the background and doesn't disturb me at all. I know some people can't concentrate but it's an important fuel for me.
Tolstoy famously wrote standing up, and Cormac McCarthy writes all his novels on an old Olivetti typewriter. Do you have any unconventional writing habits?
I handwrite almost everything with a Waterman or when I'm on the road, I write on my iPhone to keep the number of things I have to carry around with me to the absolute minimum. I also like writing by candlelight but four years on, I still haven't finished the particular book I was writing by candlelight, so perhaps I should abandon that.
An English composer once said that a live orchestra generally gives a 40% accurate rendition of the symphony he hoped to write. How do the novels you actually write measure up to the ones imagined in your head?
I would like to think it was a better percentage than that. I have this conversation with writer friends far too often. The thing that finds its way to the page is never what's in your head - get used to it or get used to being disappointed in yourself.
*This question feels like a cheat being as very few people have read my novels yet but just rolling with the spirit of it.
If money were no object and you suddenly lost the desire to write, what would you do with your time?
Travel - though I would struggle with not writing about it. I guess writing is how I like to take photographs.
What would be your menu for the last meal of your life?
There used to be a cafe in Whitstable called Olivia's where they made a toasted sandwich filled with bacon, brie and pear chutney. It was the best sandwich I've ever had anywhere on the face of the planet. Not much of a meal granted, but it would make my last moments worthwhile.
*See below. I took a picture of it - that's how good it was.
If you had to spend the rest of your days in just one place, where would it be?
Again, all responsibilities aside, Keystone in Colorado but only when it's not in season for the skiing fraternity. During those months, I would head for Florence or Copenhagen.
The Last Supper...
The Chant Of The Lizard King
How many stories have you told yourself today? Told yourself the one about how you're not good enough yet? That's a good one - maybe it's your favourite because it's the one you tell yourself as soon as you wake up. How about the one where the script is a line or two your folks threw out at you one day. That's also a good one - one of my personal favourites if I'm honest. We've all got them. You might not think you do, but you do. Let's not forget the off-kilter ones either - the ones in which all the messages to yourself are positive, crazy huge fist in the air positive and yet, every time you shoot your arrow, somebody moves the bar.
Stories are all we consist of. There is nothing else. Some are true, some are false but it doesn't really matter because you will believe them all anyway. Think about it. The tribe you've chosen to belong to - and yes you belong to a tribe, it may be a religious tribe, a political tribe, a musical tribe, sports tribe, dieting tribe, shopkeeper tribe... and you can probably hoist the flag on multiple tribes you belong to without even knowing it - is a group story.
Point of this piece? I've begun to look for the space between the cracks - for the silence in which I'm not telling myself anything at all - because I'm quite liking the idea of telling myself a whole library of different stories. Not in a 'turn your life upside down' kind of way, but I'm certainly smacking my hand down on the reset button and today, that consists of listening to The Doors at a volume that suggests I should call the police on myself.
If you do something with conviction for long enough, you don't even have to convince yourself of the reality of your situation. The lie will simply take over... and that's a good thing. Fake it 'til you make it but you had best make sure when you start the lie that it's a good one and worth spending all of the minutes of your life chasing.
Notes On Being A Lion
As ever, I got up this morning with the lark. A very particular lark in fact who doesn't like to get up quite as early as the other birds. He finds around 8.30 perfectly acceptable and that's fine with me. This lark knows the big picture.
Today is Saturday. In the nineties when I was living in a house with some of my band mates (which now seems like a life somebody else used to lead on my behalf) Saturday used to begin with a bag of chocolate donuts, a never-ending stream of coffee, cigarettes a-go-go and all of us sitting around the coffee table trying to figure out what we needed to do next to get The Gods on our side.
Such offerings were obviously of no use to The Gods - maybe they were expecting a blood sacrifice just like in the good old days.
Anyway, while I was out with Hector this morning looking for Hobbits, my mind was wandering like it does and I came up with a list of things I should work on today it looked like this:
1. Grow a different kind of beard. I don't have a beard that people with beards would call a beard but neither do I have a blank face. In recent months, I've toyed with a 'style' I don't think has a name. Chris Cornell favours it and so do I - I think it's because it's easy, but that said, one wrong move with the razor and you're looking at erasing your whole face to put it right. Actually, I kind of like this - scrap that. I'll roll with it.
While I'm feeling happy with my face, a guy comes out of the woods with a lead and a collar. He asks if I've seen a dog running away - and I think, if you're going to carry the lead and the collar, the dog will run away. People can be so dumb.
This puts me off my stride and the list of things I was going to work on evaporates. The guy with the non-dog came along at the right time. Maybe The Gods just needed a few years to accept the fact that a bag of chocolate donuts is equal - if not superior to - a blood sacrifice, because this is a well-timed intervention. I don't need a list of things to work on today at all. I don't need a list of things to work on any day.
Does that lion I so often reference construct a checklist of very important items in order to validate his role as a lion? No. He doesn't. He simply is but I'm pleased this lion also took a few moments to care of his facial hair before facing the day.
If I wasn't so busy thinking of ways to be clever, I'm sure I could be quite smart
The Glass Book Of The Dream Eaters
There you have it. After much drama, Ace Frehley has left Kiss - you might need to revisit the words from yesterday to recap at this point - but he is gone. He is unmasked, out in the world all by himself and nobody recognises him without the make-up on. The people who love him are waiting to see what he does next but they're going to have to wait for him to write and deliver the songs that will appear on his new album. It might take a while - months or years even - by which time most of the people who love him will have forgotten they loved him quite as much as they think and when they finally spin that record, it won't sound a whole lot like the thing they expected but they'll give it some props anyway... because it's Ace and that's what you do.
Meanwhile, Kiss will press along and pretend that Ace still had a hand in the making of The Elder before settling into a new groove which will include disrobing themselves of all the thing we loved them for. More members will leave. The new Kiss looks nothing like the old Kiss but if we all wait long enough, over the next few years they will bitch about each other, fleetingly become friends again, bitch some more until eventually, anybody who could remember the good old days will be too old to care and nobody can remember what they were fighting about in the first place.
Occasionally, we will look at the new Kiss and smile. Occasionally, we will look at the new Ace and smile. Mostly though, we will wish everybody could have just gotten along because when it was great, it was the best ever - but we will also forget that people get older and people will always change.
Some people did not notice any of this because by the time they were old enough to appreciate such things, they were listening to Soundgarden.
My big small person disappeared off the radar today as she went on a trip to see Rihanna. I got a message a little while ago saying that she only sang for an hour and twenty minutes which was closely followed by another message saying all she could think of while watching Rihanna was how much better Panic At The Disco were going to be later in the year.
Which says it all perhaps.
Meanwhile, it was the last night of The Skool Dance Show for my not so big small person. I picked her up when it was over and she shared her wisdom of the events of the day with me. That would be both the events of the 'Kiss' debacle detailed above and the Dance Show. She talks so fast these days, I can't keep up and it should scare me but it always ends with:
– What's for dinner?
Once again, it's good to see that some things are a constant on The Spinning Ball.
Anyway, over the last few weeks - maybe months - every time I find myself in a bookstore, I find there's on book in particular that won't leave me alone. It's called The Master and Margarita (Mikhail Bulgakov) and it happens to have a good cover too - so I picked it up. Translated Russian fiction which is a satire of 1930s Stalinist Moscow is not normally my bag but being as it mostly features The Devil and his associate - a talking cat - I figured I'd make an exception. Some things really do need to be in your life - particularly when they include such lines as:
"The most amazing combinations can result if you shuffle the pack enough.”
I'll report back sometime in the future, but to balance the equation, I also picked up a copy of You Can Do It, Charlie Brown which was published around the same time and in its own way, is probably just as smart.
It's odd how you can say as much in one small square that uses about six words as you can in 100,000 don't you think?
We didn't see Cerberus today either. That makes two days on the run - and it wasn't raining. I hope he's not dead.
In between all of this, I did some work. Proper work... pen and paper work. And then I sat in the garden with a coffee and concluded that if by the end of the year, the English speaking Western world is being led around the garden by Trump and Johnson, I would go all Hunter S Thompson on them because such a thing is far too good an opportunity to miss.
A Day At The Races
Today began the same as every other day around here. I opened my eyes and found I was still alive and for this I was thankful. Not so thankful that I headed out into the garden, got down on my knees and wept buckets of salt water for granting me another day on The Ball Of Dirt, but I was thankful enough that I made it downstairs and filled the kettle in honour of the day that lay in front of me.
That's how we should begin each day isn't it? With a glint in the eye for what the next 24 hours might bring and a heart full of fire to bring It to The Table of the Gods.
"Hey Bearded Ancient Ones! Come check out what I've got cooking in my pot for you today!"
I might try that out tomorrow. Today, a mug of tea raised in their general direction was about all I could come up with.
I strapped Hector up for the morning walk and together we went out to see whether or not The Gods were still at work in the world because yesterday, it looked like they had abandoned their post in favour of a Party on the Patio.
It was raining when we left the house, which is a really British way to begin a story, but it was tipping it down. Neither of us wanted to go out much but that's what we do - every morning. No excuses, no reticence. We get ready and we go and today, I had a headful of work to figure out along the way:
I've got a magazine to start wrapping up, a book to finish writing, a hunt for an agent and/or a publisher to conduct and a thousand other little things all dangling from little pieces of string from the ceiling. I know, I know - I can see your heart bleeding all over the floor from here, but you know - these things mean as much as to me as your own thousand plus collection of things hanging from the ceiling do to you. That's the way the Ball Of Dirt spins.
We walk past the dogs behind the gate that like to fight each other when we go past. It's peculiar behaviour but it happens every morning and every morning, we stop, look at each other, look at the fighting dogs and carry on with our walk. I consider it's a microcosm of the world in general. There's always a couple of dogs being noisy at each other somewhere. A favourite saying of mine drifts past the back of my eyes like one of those banners towed through the sky on the back of an a glider:
When you listen to the world, it doesn't have to shout at you.
A few feet on from the fight of the day, there's a fork in the road. One way goes downhill, the other goes up. Hector always chooses the road that goes up, probably out of habit now but on the few times I've tired to tempt him down the easier path, he stops half way down and, deciding we've made a wrong turn, backtracks until we are going up the hill. There's likely something in this too but the rain is bouncing off my face and I can't figure out exactly what that might be. Probably something to do with taking the high road and being able to cruise along the low road when the hard work is over. That's usually how the world talks to us. It only has a certain amount of metaphors to play with - if you push it any harder than that, it tends to get confused and that's when things start getting really fucked up.
Anyway, we pressed along and because it was raining, there was no sign of his buddy who sits behind the gate at the top of the hill, no sign of the dog a few houses along who thinks he's his buddy but isn't really because he looks like Cerberus and not even a single cat loitering in a garden to sneak up on. That's right, when the rain is being evacuated from the sky, there are very few constants you can rely on. Where are all your friends now? Inside, looking out of the window, dry as a bone and dunking biscuits, that's where.
Almost an hour later, we arrive back home. He gets dried first. Two towels. Then I dry myself. One towel. That's all you need when you've been hit by the rain. A towel. It doesn't need to be the end of the world. Doesn't mean you need to stay inside and wait for it to pass. All you need is a towel.
There's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes.
I hang the towels up to dry (in the house - only a fool would hang them outside in the rain) and remember that I'm supposed to be in New York in three weeks. Three weeks today in fact. I have booked no hotel yet and no flight. I should probably do something about that.
A man who doesn't book his flight and hotel isn't going anywhere.
I like that one. It won't go down in the annals of history but it's mine and that's what I bring to the Table of the Gods today. Something for The Gods themselves to consider while they're stoking the coals on the barbecue and waiting for the sausages to cook.
My eldest daughter calls me up just before lunch. I forget she is old enough to do grown up things now. Scary. She doesn't know how to vote in the European stay or go argument - I don't know why she is asking me but I tell her what I do know:
Back in the early 1980s, Ace Frehley decided to leave Kiss. He might have thought he had enough collateral to make a really good go of it by himself and he did leave. This was something of a blow to Kiss but with or without him, they were still Kiss. Turns out that Ace didn't have enough to make it on his own but Kiss were never the same from that point onwards either. Nobody won and nobody lost because both sides said they had won even when both sides had lost. If both sides had won, they would simply say the other side was lying.
Such is the way The Gods like to make The Ball Of Dirt spin. Distraction tactics. The longer we are kept occupied with concerns about rain, politics and dogs with heads that are too big for their body, the longer they get to sit in the garden and sink a few more Desperados.
Which is actually not a bad way to conduct your life at all.
The Reading List
Finished this earlier in the week. Great French noir from back when French noir was king… picked up at Hatchards at St Pancras train station who have a healthy stock of titles from Pushkin Vertigo and is a very nice bookstore indeed.
Dragonfly
Further pushing the envelope on this weeks String Theory post, I also started work on a book I've been tossing about like a salad for over a year. God only knows how long it will take me to finish it but work has begun. It's called Dragonfly and is a bona fide stab at seeing if I have the mental stamina to take it all the way to 80,000 words without skipping a beat in the plot.
There will be crime and there will be detection - if I do my job right, we might not be able to tell which is which. There may also be supernature. In all likelihood, we shall not speak of this book title again for quite some time but I may feel the need to use this place as a confessional if things get rough along the way.
Being one who hand-writes, I decided I should instigate a new notebook for said project, so I put together a nice blank hardback with full dust-jacket to make it Very Real to write in. A hulking great 500 page thing that looks a little like this:
Now all I have to do is fill in all the pages with some words. It can't get much simpler than that.
Sometimes I think I have too many unfinished books on the plate but today is not one of those days. Today is a day in which I say YES! Let's write all of these books. Let's see just how far I can push myself...
I am in writing mode and that's good enough for now, though I still haven't fixed my Waterman (if you missed that news, I dropped it nib first on the floor which rendered it officially dead) and have begun 'The Work' using a Parker ballpoint - which is not as horrendous as I thought it would be. Not the same by any stretch of the imagination but no... not bloody awful either.
In some other news around here - if you're subscribed to blog posts by emails here, you'll probably have missed me posting up a few of my favourite interviews with tattoo artists - what's there right now is not all of them by any means - I'm backtracking through the back issues and plucking them out once a week... and behind the scenes on that front also, I'm toying with a much larger project that's totally screwing with my head on how to deliver it. If I can't blow it up out of all proportion, I think I would rather kill it stone dead with a hammer. Time will be the judge of that little monster.
That's all I got. Go do something amazing... like tell your kids it's OK to have seemingly dumb ideas about the things they want to do with their lives when they grow up... or take the dog for a midnight walk - which is exactly what I'm going to do, even if he doesn't want to.
That will teach him a good lesson about waking me up early.
String Theory
Finally - The Other Piece Of Work is complete. Two major projects down within a few weeks of each other is a good place to be in any world - and this week I've also wrapped up two magazines which (bar some admin kicking about) leaves me with that valuable old resource called Room To Breathe.
Not wanting to stop the roll I appear to be on (even if that roll is only visible to myself) and with The Two Big Things sitting in publishing limbo, I figured this might be a good time to do something visible... and being as these things like to hang out in pairs these days, there will be two of them:
The first will be completed by the end of May and is a short novel called The Man Who Lived Again which will be released digitally as a 'kindle single' - not sure what they call them over at iBooks when there's no suitable marketing psuedo-rhyme available, but it will be available there too. Along the same lines of The Eternity Ring in its length and pacing, the tagline for it is 'What If Everyone You Had Ever Loved Was Waiting For You Somewhere Else', which is as much as I'm going give you right now but a cover is in the pipeline and I'll post it as soon as it's finished.
The second will be completed when I run out of things to say on the subject and is my old unfinished friend (because I threw the first draft away and started again), Raised On Radio, which will be available both digitally and as a softback through Bad Hare. It's kind of a follow up to Black Dye White Noise but probably has more in common with Nick Hornby's 31 Songs. There's a possibility I may also put out a limited edition hardback of it but I'll cross that bridge later. Nice idea though.
It's good to be busy - there's still a lot of notebooks kicking around here and I have no idea what may come next. One thing at a time.
That's all I got today. Maybe that's enough.
Be A Fucking Lion
Yesterday (which was Tuesday, in case I don't get around to posting this when I intend to) I headed out to see Chris Cornell at the RHA. Simply wonderful - I should review the show properly but to dissect it into words would be to cheapen it for myself, so I'm not going to. If you cared that much, you should have been there. You missed a treat:
I've decided that when I grow up, I want to be Chris Cornell.
These pics come from the hand of Christie Goodwin who you can find here: christiegoodwin.com - nice work in the extreme.
With the fire of Cornell at my heels, Wednesday kind of came and went in a blur of catching up what I missed doing because I was there. By Thursday (which is today - or at least it is at the moment) I felt inspired to do something which came loosely under the banner of 'useful'...
So I adopted a lion. I have not abandoned the bears but I figured, if you have a bear, what possible difference could a lion make. If you're in the mood to make a difference to the world - and you can even for a measly £2.50 a month - run your face over to Born Free and chip in.
Make a difference. What else have you done today?
Finally, this - from the immortal Robert Crumb:
Je Suis Alfred E. Neuman
That Other Piece Of Important Work I've been talking about? I'm getting there. I printed it off today to start bringing it to a close and it's looking good. I don't think I've written anything better than this in my life so again, don't expect this anytime soon because I'm going hunting: Hunting for the best home I can find for it.
This is a good place to say a big thanks to those who sampled the proof copies I made available a year or so ago - things have changed within hugely and it's all the better for it. I'm talking of course, about The Family Of Noise.
So, being as the two things I've been burning up grey matter over during the last few months are going to be in agency/publishing limbo for a little while, as soon as I nail down the last full stop at the end of The Family Of Noise, I shall turn my eyes towards releasing another book of short stories.
As luck would have it, I began to collate that collection quite some time ago, but I won't pre-empt anything with a date. That will also be ready when it's ready.
I can't remember where I found this but take a look at this fine rejection letter (not to me) from the annals of time.
Dear Lord, how I would love to send something similar out when it came to the day job but somehow, I don't think many would get the joke.
I miss MAD magazine - and I'm not talking about the shadow-type thing it's become in the last twenty years either. Here's some Don Martin gold from the early eighties - right before it began to run out of steam:
Maybe you had to be there - but I don't think so.
Finally, here's an addition to the Places I'd Like To Sit And Write One Day series. I'm seeing a recurring theme of isolation, trees and water developing:
Checking In
The Really Important Thing I've been working on recently is now complete. I may be saying this more for my benefit than yours, so sorry about that if you expected anything more. This means it's time to move on to The Other Really Important Thing That Was Waiting In The Wings and finish that as well - pretty smartish. That will make two major things wrapped up and should release my head from the purgatory state it's been in for far too long.
When will things be available to read? When they are ready. Thank you for your patience if you happened to be rapping your fingers.
Hector got a haircut this week. Here he is on the decking that's seen better days. Note to self: do something about that some day...
Also on the photographic front, I should begin making plans to head out to Switzerland soon and pay a visit to this town and train station they named after me:
...that's what I told the kids anyway. I guess they won't believe me when I tell them such things for much longer.