What began as a seemingly normal Saturday - for most of the day actually - culminated in an hour of weirdness around 8pm. First of all, a link to a review of Too Hot For Dogs issue one came in from Evil Genius Comics Blog - you can read the review here. Am most please with that and I take my hat off to Charlotte - I didn't think anybody stayed up later than me to get things done, but apparently I was wrong.
My estimate of finishing Russell T Davies' Doctor Who - The Writer's Tale in a single day was the worst estimate in the history of things being estimated. It will take me at least a week to get through it and at least another week to digest it all. Suffice to say, the damn thing is brilliant. So, I'm standing in the kitchen and the devil sitting on my shoulder - the one that keeps whispering 'fake it til you make it' - shouts louder than normal. So I figure I'll text Mike.
Verbatim, here is a transcript of my text:
"I've just been asked to write an episode of Doctor Who by Moffat. Am very excited"
A thousandth of a second later, Mike's calling me up. I decide to ignore it and send another one just behind it that says:
"Thanks. Just wanted to know what that would feel like. Sorry, but it felt great all the same x"
To which Mike replied: "Did you bump your head?" I spoke to him just after this and the odd bit was that he believed that it was the sort of thing that could happen to me, which I thought was very nice - as in, some people could text you that and you'd just delete it and know it wasn't true, but he wasn't entirely sure. To be honest - Mike is probably the only person that I'd believe it of too. So now he'll have to find a better gag to play... let the game begin! (If we sit really still and wait quietly, we might see a Mike saunter past and leave a comment tomorrow...)
Not ten minutes later, JJ calls me up. This one didn't so much surprise me as punch me really hard in the mouth. When I finally got to bed last night, I wasn't really tired, so I dropped my pod on and lay there with a pen in my hand scribbling notes about whatever came into my head. On one page, I wrote the following:
"Wonder where the hell that Baby Dynamite tape is with Paperhouse on it. It must be somewhere in the house."
To give you a little bit of background on this, I've discovered that I write best creatively when I'm doing something else that hasn't been planned (natch), so about a week ago, I picked up my guitar to start writing again. Paperhouse and another song called Naked with Jezebel where the last two songs I ever recorded in a proper studio back in 1995 - and probably two of the best and definitely most commercial I've ever written but the last time I heard them or even thought about them was at least ten years ago. I thought it might be nice to revisit those songs and relearn them as a place to start again from - did I have a copy of it. No. Nowhere to be seen. Not since sometime in 1995.
Like I said, J called - and he says (this is pretty much word for word): "Got a second? I was looking in this box of old radio tapes just now and found this tape with a sticker on the front that says ' wrote you a song'. You'll never guess what was on it..."
With a god standing on either side of me, my response was "Paperhouse?"
"Yeah - how'd you know that?" So I tell him the story and we fell into an odd silence in which we both stood in our respective kitchens 300 miles apart with frowns on our brows. Not sure what to make of that really.. good story though.
