I finally decided on a better title for the previously titled Scarecrow short story - it shall hereafter be known as Eternity Ring, which is something of a shift in suggesting what it might be about but it suits it a lot better. All will become clear. Currently running edits on it and doing layout stuff. The cover might look something like this - file under pending - I'll see how I feel after I've lived with it for a few days:
Estimated time of arrival? Mid December.
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Now and then, you can stumble across something so far out there and so jaw-droppingly up there on the scale of ‘thumbs up’ that you want to show/tell everybody you meet. Apologies for the incredibly bad English there but that’s how it came out.
The first port of call is this video clip that Rhiannon pimped at me after school today. She showed it to me because it was freaky but it’s so much more than that. See for yourself.
If you ever thought the world was going to hell in a sea of averageness, that should restore some of your faith. Simply wonderful.
Similarly eye stretching are these pics of frozen light-houses.
Frozen lighthouses? Not something you hear about everyday but here they are - larger than life. If I had shot these, I suspect I would spend the rest of my life wondering exactly what the hell I was going to do next that meant anything.
Nature.
No matter how far out on the edge of life you think you can get, Nature laughs in your face every second of every day. You can find more of this lighthouse magic right here.
All of which leads me to this:
Last week, I bought a book that changed the way I think about many things. It took me so far down to the bottom that I pushed everything that was in front of me to the far side of the table and considered never looking at any of it ever again because there was - quite frankly - no point in even trying.
A few days passed and that very same book took me from the place it had squashed me under a rock and raised me to the far side of the universe from where I could look down on everything and think that maybe it was way too early to be throwing in the towel. Which is a good thing because I rather think that Guillermo Del Toro would be pretty sad if he thought his book had that kind of effect on somebody.
This is the book.
It’s a monster in every way. It’s the Led Zeppelin of books. You look in at what’s going on behind the curtain and you absolutely have to say to yourself “I will never be this good” - and for a while there, I believed it in a bad way. Then I came down from the bad trip and figured, “what the hell, this is something to rise to”. That sounds wrong… what I'm trying to say is it's like you’ve been wandering around the bottom of a mountain for far too long and somebody yells down at you from the top “You wouldn’t believe what I can see from up here” - and the guy is right. You can’t believe what he can see because first you have to climb the mountain and by the time you get to the top, everything will have changed anyway.
Or something like that. It’s good to be put in your place every now and again. I could live without it happening too often though.
On the plus side, all of this is much better than looking at a bunch of stuff that’s nothing more than average and thinking it was a high enough bench-mark to set yourself.
Harsh but fair.
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I started compiling my 101 x 1001 list a couple of days ago. I’ve decided to publish ‘most’ of it here aside from a few personal items on it (and that’s things that I want to do with the kids mostly - I haven’t told them about it yet so I guess I might meet some resistance on that front). I was telling somebody about it and he suggested I document it all. Video what was worth videoing, record what’s worth recording, photograph what was… you get the picture.
There’s a part of me that could get excited about the prospect of doing that and another part of me that’s a bit reluctant to start heading down a path that I can’t keep rolling once it’s in motion. On one hand, I like the idea of running something up that might be similar in spirit to The Roth Show - which if you’re not keeping up with regularly, what the hell’s wrong with you? On the other hand, I’ve never been super comfortable in front of a camera - maybe it’s time I started fluffing those pillows to make it comfortable and see what happens. It’s not 1973 anymore. I don’t think being mysterious in a ‘Led Zepp/media blackout’ kind of way is going to help much when you’re trying to make a name for yourself without any outside assistance. Maybe the Diamond Dave approach is the way to go.
Who am I kidding? Without the backing of a big publishing house, of course it’s the way to go.
Big gulp.
•••
To wrap this up today, I thought I might cut all my hair off and buy a Hugo Boss suit - maybe reinvent myself for the new age. Why that would make a difference I have not a clue, but it might be fun for a little while… I think I will wait just a few more months until Hector gets tired of hanging from my trousers though.