Writing is going great this week (thanks for asking) but I won't set the Jinx Monster loose by saying anything else on that. It's enough to know that my head is together and work is being produced at a rate that pleases my soul. Is it coincidental that my iPhone has been on holiday to Apple HQ for some TLC and I have been without a pocket sized comms device for a little while? Perhaps.

It came back this morning. I synced it up, checked in on a few things and then put it out of the way but I guess there will come a day soon when we will have a showdown - and I kinda like the way I'm feeling about having written a lot. Maybe I should just learn to discipline myself.

Anyway, this evening, as a 'treat' for doing what I'm supposed to be doing and having kicked the hell out of the thing I wanted to get done today, I thought I'd watch a movie to celebrate. Something with monsters perhaps... but I get sidetracked when I found a film I meant to watch a couple of years back, never did and subsequently forgot all about.

It's called The End Of The Tour which is, more or less, a conversation between two writers: David Lipsky and David Foster Wallace - and yeah, that's where the title comes from - it really is fucking wonderful - even the poster is fucking wonderful:

It's on Netflix if you're of a mind to check it out.

A few weeks back, while I was working on some Big Bear Rescue things, I found this great advert:

I've never heard of this campaign before but sometime soon, I'll dig a little further and see what they like to do. Fucking wonderful advert regardless.

To wrap up... I also found this pic of the handwritten lyrics to Soundgarden's The Day I Tried To Live which I'm going to repost here just because it's cool as hell and if nothing else, goes to prove you don't need anything beyond a pencil to write a fucking wonderful song...

So in a nutshell, this post is nothing but some semi-interesting stuff I found when I wasn't doing what I should have been doing. In Writer-Land, we call that 'taking a break'.

And then I shaved.

A bad thing happened yesterday. We were fixing up Hector's dinner and had Pointless on the TV - pretty normal afternoon routine - when the show flashed up a full screen image of Chairman Mao.

Hector lost it and for the rest of the evening, gave the TV a wide berth and was acting like something awful was about to happen. I guess when you're not expecting somebody to show up in your house and suddenly, there they are (especially Chairman Mao) it can have a pretty adverse effect on your psyche.

Tonight, he is still very wary of the TV just in case that Mao fellow turns up again.

Dog's are weird sometimes.

•••

Book shopping this evening - there's a lot of good stuff around at the moment, which is also weird because last week I couldn't find a damn thing. Anyway, this is today's acquire:

I think I shall down tools, throw the big red switch and nest in a corner of the lounge with it later. This is something I've been considering a lot lately. It's frighteningly easy to become a person who feels the need to take out a magical miniature machine in order to contribute to a world that shouts and points at everything all at the same time.

Have you ever sat back and considered exactly how much a tool of your tool you have become?

I don't want either of those things, do you?

•••

Now that I've pretty much finished The Family Of Noise, I don't ever want to write a book in that way again. It's been pretty fractal along the way. The important thing is that I learned something, i.e: there must be a better way to write a book than the way I wrote that one.

Having said that - dancing stars are only created out of chaos, so don't quote me on any of that. I might just change my mind if it doesn't work.

Just thought I would drop that in the run here being as it was in my head.

•••

What else can I tell you - yesterday I interviewed Darcy Oake. We talked for a long time about many things including Harry Blackstone, the psychology of human beings and how bad your mobile phone reception can be in London - a real-live first world problem, believe me. I'll post the interview here when it's done and link it up and all of those other things but first I must publish it elsewhere (obviously) and I'll link to that as soon as it's alive and kicking too.

I also decided that I want one of these - it's a Citroen DS - because this is just the kind of thing someone like me needs to drive. It's what's known as a measure. When I can afford to buy one of these fully restored, then I shall consider myself, officially 'getting somewhere'.

It's not a 'fuck you' statement like an Aston Martin or anything. I consider it a perfectly reasonable measure of getting somewhere at around £15,000.

Which really just leaves me with this:

And this: