The Great Outdoors

As something of an appendix to the last post about dropping material on Medium, my buddy Mr Wayne Simmons has also taken up residence there and made his first post about his workspace. I'm reasonably sure I've dropped some things on here before about where I like to work but no harm in rolling through it again.

Some of the time, I work at the kitchen/dining room table which is nothing special. Just a flat piece of wood with four legs. Unlike Mr Simmons, I have no man cave, no posters, no action figures, no paraphernalia at all and with good reason. I get distracted easily. Thus, in front of me sits a blank wall. I even moved all of the pictures that were on it to the wall behind me so I couldn't see them.

Which all sounds a bit dull... unless you've mastered the dark art of using the wall like a screen on which you project the film running in your head - which I do. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's all you're getting on that front.

However, the rest of the time, I write using a pen and notebook and I like to work here:

...or somewhere close by. There are many places to sit, write and watch your dog run free. There are also buzzards, hares, ravens and occasionally (sadly) other people with dogs but you can't have everything.

Believe it or not, I can get a lot of work done here. Words flow and that's what counts. It's a good feeling too because it never feels like work but neither am I averse to writing on trains, in the car... I guess the point I'm trying to make is I don't mind where I write, so it may as well be pretty. How disabling to have be in a certain place before you can get any work done. Thus, I have learned to be ready because it comes when it comes.

So there you have it. That's my day. If you're looking for pictures of sexy desks and workspaces - much like this one occupied by Bruce Springsteen - you're shit out of luck...

But this below - featuring Al Gore - is my idea of absolute hell. How can you focus and get anything done somewhere like this:

Where's the blank canvas to be filled? From the look of all this stuff, it looks to me like it's already been completed by other people, which is pretty much the story of Al Gore - apart from An Inconvenient Truth which is excellent and obviously made before he collected all this crap.

Seeds Of Decades

A whole week with no posts = busy.

The first thing to happen was that I recognised one of the holes in my life was that I missed writing about music so I figured I would do something about that. Not being of a mindset to launch anything as complex as a magazine right now - one is quite enough to look after thanks - I had a look around The Place (aka: the internet) to find a good place to do such a thing and made a call. You can't say jack on twitter, even less on instagram, I could post them all here but that wasn't really the point, tumblr has less attention span than both of my kids and the dog put together (which is a shame), which just left Medium to try out.

I have a love/hate thing with Medium but it seemed like a good a place as any online and so far so good. If you take a look here, you'll see that I branded it with my dearly beloved Burn logo - hey, it wasn't doing much else aside from lying around in a folder - and is populated with the album reviews I pulled together this week. As more weeks pass by, my plan is to press on with three or four a week... and that is the total extent of my plan with it for now. 

Let's see what happens. If you're in for the long haul with me, there's a BURN link up top in the navigation bar.

For the record, this first week features Cheap Trick, Nickelback, Uncle Sam and Mark Lanegan.

I finished my Father's Day present this afternoon. It looked like this and I loved it very much. As they say in places like Paris and Rome, it was "fucking excellent". The only reason I didn't finish it sooner was because I had too much work to do...

If music is the rock you stand on and you were born between 1960-ish and you can remember Live Aid first hand, you'll relate somewhere along the line, I promise.

I sat in Mark Ellen's office once with my proto-mag, Rock n Roll Babylon, when I was trying to bravado my way into EMAP on a wing and a prayer. He was very nice and encouraging about the whole thing and after reading this, I can see why.

We all stand on the shoulders of giants at some time.

Anyway, I've now moved onto this...

...which has had some good write ups around The Place and so far, is living up to the quotes on the cover. I have lot's of work still on the desk this week but I plan on tearing through it pretty swiftly all the same. 

Meanwhile, work continues on various projects and my feet are getting itchy for another road trip. Must do something to rectify that. 

Fast.

Bring Up The Bodies... And Some Bears.

What started out as a day with not much ahead of me but compiling interview questions and transcribing things recorded in totally unsuitable environments, by lunchtime, it had actually gotten pretty interesting. I found that I have a reasonable amount of essays about travel to start pushing them out a little - does that make me a travel writer? That has to be one of the coolest job titles in the world. Anyway, I thought I would try a little experiment and if you're observant, you'll see a tab up there that says Travel Writing and it hooks up to a page on the relatively new platform of Medium. It's been there a whole day now and already I'm thinking of walking away, pulling it down and bringing it back home. Not that there is anything wrong with Medium - it's a beautiful platform to work on and when it started out it was full of great ideas and writing that shone. Having come back to it today, I find that it's turning into more or less the same platform as every other on the web. In order to keep people interested and active, readers are now able to comment on the writing on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Typically, this happens a lot, so now, great writing is set upon with minute sleeve notes by people arguing over an otherwise lovely piece of work. People need to understand that just because you don't agree with something, doesn't mean you have to comment on it. The builders at Medium should have known better. It was originally a nice magazine - now it's a magazine with big margins and a pen on a string so that others can deface work or extract a tiny amount of ego for themselves from somebody else's work. People have too much time on their hands - if you don't like something, walk away. If you do, tell somebody else about it.

Everyone's a critic these days. Maybe they always have been. Maybe I'll boot up a separate blog for it but that kind of negates my rule of "find all the things you need in my own house" rule.

File under pending... but only overnight. These things need sharp decisions!

•••

Something else happened today that I can't talk about but it's very exciting - and I don't get excited about much at all. When I heard my name mentioned in the same sentence as Hilary Mantel, it made my day complete. It's probably nothing at all like anything you would ever imagine either - but it is, without question, super cool in the extreme. I shall wait until something happens before revealing anything about it but rest assured, just writing this here even for myself makes me smile.

•••

The guys at WSPA finally got back to me about my Big Bear Rescue project - and I missed the damn call. I re-left messages at all the right places to say I was returning calls but everybody seemed to have gone home by mid-afternoon. Maybe tomorrow. I had almost given up but the flame is still alight. Not quite so bright that you could navigate yourself from one side of the Grimpen Mire to the other without getting sucked in, but it's alight all the same.

Topically, this Doctor Who/ Sherlock fan made video is absolutely ton notch if it really is constructed with no assistance. In fact, amazing would be absolutely fair: