I picked up a copy of Ronin Ro's biography of Prince yesterday - Inside The Music And The Masks. It's shaping up to be really good. I'd never heard of Ronin before but he seems to have his shit together and on closer inspection, I see he's been putting in the time at Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Playboy, which doesn't automatically make him great but I'm liking what I've read so far. Must investigate further. (Edit: And now, having investigated further, this will be the only book I ever buy of his... still, Prince is Prince. It would take a monumental effort even for a schoolchild to mess up that story...)
Yesterday morning, I was telling Mike over at the Void about how brutally punishing these "You Are Your Own Gym" workouts are. To which, he suggested that I might want to combine it with some yoga.
Not any old yoga. Man Yoga. Yoga from the mind of Diamond Dallas Page. That's right - he of The Diamond Cutter. Take a look at what's on offer here (not that I'm in quite as bad a shape as some of the grizzled veterans captured on video). It not only looks great. It looks hard and great, so I've scheduled into tomorrow afternoon. I tell you - it looks hard but I'll bet quite a large sum of money that it will be a lot harder than it looks too, at least for a few weeks.
So, with a combination of being my own gym and some knackered old wrestlers yoga plan (which is pretty much why I'm knackered anyway), things are looking up. Next stop? Triple Iron Man Challenge! Or maybe I'll settle for simply not feeling like a sack of hammers everyday. That sounds more like it. Anyway, looks to me like there's quite a number of discs to get through and Mike has loaned me the first one... this one could run and run.
Meanwhile, I've spent the last three nights putting together a proposal for an agent. I'm down to a shortlist of three (can I afford to be picky?) and take it from me, it's damned hard work analysing your work with a business mind. I don't think I'd much like to start a piece of work after I'd written a proposal - I think you'd lose the brilliance and fire of your idea and wind up trying to shove a square peg in a round hole.
I've also started work on Project X (more about that in about 6 months when it's complete), had a great idea for Project Y (which I don't think will ever get off the ground simply because of the concept behind it) and... well, I don't have a Project Z. That's a good thing at this stage of the game.
I almost forgot - travelling back in time like all groovy Time Lords do every now and again - I picked up a copy of The Amazing Joy Buzzards graphic novel 'Here Come The Spiders' at the weekend. I don't know why it slipped through the net when it came out but it's really good. Make that Really Good. Loads of great inventive and original material in it - and because it's slightly on the indie side of the tracks, gets away with a whole bunch of stuff that they never would otherwise.
This week, I've also gone back in time and I'm listening to Stephen King's On Writing again... well, actually I'm listening to it for the first time but I've read it before. If you're in the writing groove and sometimes wonder about exactly what the hell it is you're doing, it's always worth coming back to this place as a solid point of reference. It's never boring and always gets me back in the right mood whenever I hit those brick walls we all encounter every now and again.
Sometimes I wish I could read Stephen King for the first time again - stay up all night long ploughing through Pet Sematary or Salem's Lot and hoping to get at least half an hour of sleep before you had to get up for school - but then I think to myself, better just to concentrate on trying to be the person that some kid says that about in the future.