Something In The Water

I finished the first draft of The Man Who Lived Again today. I shall celebrate by throwing it in the back of a drawer and not looking at it again until the middle of next week. That's the best way to treat these things. Months is an even better way of finding out if what you wrote was any good or not but it's not super incredibly long, so a week should be enough.

Then I must figure out what to do with it but that can wait until it's finished for real.

Wrapping that has given me a jolt in the arm too. Seeing some pages mount up is always good for the soul - no matter how confident you might be to the outside world, those doubts can set in for anybody and if you let them take hold, they can really start a riot in your head. 

Anyway, while I'm in the frame of mind for this kind of 10,000 word novella format, I'm going to wrap up another I have lying around. This one is running with the name Just Like Living In Paradise and is in the same rusty nail format as this one was when I picked it up, so spirits are high that if I turn up in front of the paper with a pen and bleed like a prize fighter who needs to pay the rent, I can lick it into 'drawer-shape' by the end of the month... which is apparently just a couple of weeks away.

I found myself in the news yesterday and I wasn't even there! My friend Siân (horror actress, tattoo model, all round good egg and lovely person) was on Heno - a Welsh magazine show - talking about... well, I don't actually know what she was talking about because I haven't watched it yet but messages from back home kept bouncing around in my phone saying she was on and had mentioned the Big Bear Rescue project. 

Any moment now, it should go online and I'll catch up. My Welsh is awful these days. I might need the assistance of subtitles to keep up - or my mother! 

...and while I'm on the subject of things in foreign languages, this hit BBC4 at the weekend and is worth a watch:

If you go hunting for it, it's called I Know Who You Are. Highly recommended.

And now, back to work. Today I am accompanied by songs from the wonderful Sade simply because I need to listen to something unquestionably beautiful as I pick at scars with long fingernails.

Balance. Balance. Balance.

Internal Injuries

I have a torn rotator cuff.

It doesn't look like much from this x-ray but it hurts like a bad motherfucker from hell - which a great song by The Datsuns. You may send flowers if you wish. The odd thing about internal injuries is that nobody believes you're hurting because there's no blood or gore to show how bad it is... not that I was looking for sympathy here. It was just an observation.

Which makes it a lot like writing. If you haven't got a book out, you're not doing anything. Doesn't matter if you're crying on the inside over your words, planning, proofing or beating yourself up for some reason - if you have no book for people to look at, then you're probably sitting around on your behind watching tennis.

And the horrible thing is, when your book comes out, at first it will be judged by the cover (regardless) and that's the part you likely had no part of - unless you're me, in which case, it's all my own fault. 

Even worse - because we all like to see the world spin super-fast - if you do have a book out today, rejoice like a crazy person being showered with ash at the end of the world because tomorrow, somebody else will have a book out and you will be Yesterday's News.

Hey - we all helped to build the monster. 

Jeez - who would be dumb enough to spend thousands of hours being creative when all you have is a tiny window through which to launch your product at the world! A window so small, there's also every chance you'll hit the frame and your thousands of hours will simply fall to the floor.

Me for a start and if you're reading, possibly you - and I wouldn't change a thing.

Writer's write and there's nothing you can do about it. You either are one or you're not. Writer's write, photographer's shoot etc... and one day, there will be blood.

A word from the wings of my life... I am (maybe) a day away from competing a novella here. I may have mentioned it previously but it is now fast approaching that thing called 'reality'. It's called The Man Who Lived Again. Aside from that, I'm not going to say anything else about it... you can figure that out for yourselves.

More news as I get closer to the end-game - but it makes me happy to be putting something new out. It's been a long time.

This album comes out soon - in a limited edition of 500 copies too. These sessions are wonderful if my memory is holding up like it should and the live album comes from a show I was at when the band where at the very peak of their game. If you ever loved The Dogs D'Amour, you can pretty much file this under essential. You can pre-order it direct from Cargo Records right here. I hope it never becomes available for streaming. Some things you really should own in the real world and this is one of them.

INK AND WORDS

Now and again, a man needs new tools to tackle his work, so yesterday I bought myself a new pen. There's nothing wrong with my old Waterman - I love it but if you were paying attention a month or so back, you'll remember that I dropped the back-up pen and bent the nib beyond being useful for anything. I've never used anything but a Waterman for years and years and years and I was going to get another one, but the whole point of a second pen is that it's not the end of the world if you kill it or lose it.

I tell you - it's like thinking about buying a new car. With the internet in full swing, there's a whole world of options out there but I finally settled on this Duke which is some kind of German/Chinese hybrid as far as I can make out:

It's pretty heavy for a pen (about twice as heavy as the Waterman) which I like very much but the nib moves fast - really fast. For those of you aren't writers, imagine working with a pen that won't move as fast over paper as your brain is able to - going back to the car analogy, it's like getting stuck behind a truck, deciding to overtake it and finding your car is incapable even with your foot to the floor. 

And now... I shall go create something with it - or rather, I shall finish something, just to see how it fares in the real world. Another thousand words to go and I'll have wrapped up a short novel called The Man Who Lived Again. In the same vein as The Eternity Ring, this one will be going out as a digital one-shot to see what the world makes of it. Estimated time of completion? A couple of weeks... I think it's that long until the end of the month anyway. Here's a sneak: