You can put your own commas in the post title - think of it as interactive (or not) if you wish to play that way. •••
At home, Rhiannon has taken great offence at the news that there is to be a badger cull around these parts and written a letter to David Cameron about it. It's a good letter too... she even took a photo of a dead badger she found in a graveyard (don't ask) to enforce her disgust. Said badger was of course not part of the cull (at least I hope not) it looked pretty old to me. Actually, it looks like it fell out of a tree but that can't be right. The letter then goes on to give the government a royal hammering about testing products on animals as well. Be interesting to see if - and how - they respond to her logic. I hope I'm not creating a monster...
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Meanwhile, back in the real world, works continues on 'the novel' - I can see the end from here, so I've begun to type it up. A process I like very much. It feels very real and productive to simply get on with it making some edits along the way. It's got me wondering though if technology has changed the way writers write. When the best thing you have to hand is a typewriter, do you type knowing if you don't get it down great the first time, you will have to type huge amounts of pages all over again? Or is that just the way it was? Maybe that's only a question that can exist in hindsight.
I might pick up a typewriter and see what I make of it. It can sit next to the record player in what shall become known as 'The Past' - or something.
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On the music front, I've never really paid extremely close attention to Tori Amos and I'm trying to put that right because I think I've been remiss. A while back though, I got sent an advance copy of the new Goo Goo Dolls album - now it's available to the world, I guess I had better say something about it.
Having spent the best part of the weekend with the album for the second time - which is called Magnetic - it's good and bad news if you were excited about it. The good news is that there is much of it that sounds like the Goo Goo Dolls should. The bad news is that they sound like they're only pretending to be the Goo Goo Dolls. I don't think the Dolls were built for this sort of success. It's all very 'Bon Jovi' in that the songs/stories of the high times and the tales of the low times all sound exactly the same. Once you've fallen into a formula, it's apparently very hard to get out of it. I feel mean and dirty by being critical of them but with every pass I have taken at this record, I forget it's playing and can't remember anything that happened on it - my ears are only pricking up at the last track on the album 'Keep The Car Running' which is a direct repeat of what I thought about Let Love In as well.
Go figure.
I thought it might be me that was changing but I've also been listening to Queens of the Stone Age (... Like Clockwork) and that's exciting right from the first few seconds. I'm not going to say anything about ...Like Clockwork. You should go listen to it because it speaks for itself and certainly doesn't need me to chip in on the conversation.
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...and goodnight Mr Banks. The world will be a smaller place without you. I didn't like all of your work, but the ones I did, I loved and were life-changing. The sort of books that one might write a short essay about on how it changed how you saw yourself as a writer.
Neil Gaiman wrote this yesterday:
We were never good friends, mostly because we were never in the right places long enough. We were pleased to see each other. We ate together. We talked. We liked each other's work. We always figured we'd have more time.
"We always figured we'd have more time."
... "more time". Shut down your machine, turn off the TV and go say hi to the people you share your life with and be interested in what they're doing. Then, in a little while, do it again. Repeat for the rest of your life, not least because we always figure we have more time.
But we don't.