There's nothing quite so satisfying as the following things in life: 1. Knowing you were right about who the killer was.
2. Seeing the girl who owns the dragons outwit the 'big man' using her brain and not the dragons - well, for a couple of minutes at least.
Beginning to clear my machine down of the shrapnel that has been the horror book today. So much unused material (mostly because it was slightly off subject) deserves a much wider audience for all kinds of reasons. Like this from Chris Kutcha who I never even got around to emailing about anything, but it's still a great piece of pop art:
Moving nicely onto the desk next, I had better wrap up Raised On Radio which is sitting on the corner here looking at me with sad eyes because in little less than two months I also need to deliver the next book in the series of pop-culture tattoo books. I have a choice (I think). I can either go for sci-fi & fantasy or comic books & animation. I'm not sure it matters which, they're both as vast as each other. There's a little voice inside telling me to do both together and see what builds momentum the fastest - which is kind of sensible.
•••
So, my head is still full of monster 'stuff' right now, and I have learned things from putting it together. Some of it is pretty intriguing if you look at it from a - how can I put this? A spiritual perspective perhaps?
Let's assume (correctly) that here we all are sitting on planet earth and from this moment forward, none of us has a clue as to what the future will bring. Not really. We have dreams, goals and things we think we should be doing if we could be bothered but I think we can all agree that life has other plans for us much of the time. Those other plans probably consist of a reasonably even 50/50 split of good/bad events. The pessimistic will focus on one side, the optimistic on the other.
Here's what I found - Bela Lugosi turned down the part of Frankenstein's creature because he thought he would be unrecognisable beneath the make-up. Thus the part was offered to Boris Karloff - who chewed it up and spat it out the other side. The key thing here is that nobody actually gives a damn about what happened behind the scenes - even though I find it a neat curio now - only what actually happened.
So it occurs to me that really, if you're looking to get on in the world, it doesn't matter what your plans are, what your intentions were or even if you're talented (and 'everybody says so', not just your mum) but can't seem to get a break with whatever it is you're doing. All that counts is what you did. And I think that's as it should be because every single one of us probably had a million good ideas today that we did nothing with.
So how do you crack the code? How do you break through to the other side?
I may have figured it out after all these years. You're not the one who gets to decide - I have a feeling I read this phrase somewhere recently, but I'll claim it as my own for the next thirty seconds. You can want and want all you like, but you don't get to decide. Not even if you own your own business. Everybody else gets to decide - and that's not something you can control. You simply have to be there doing your thing when the opportunity to advance yourself arises. If you're good at what you do, you stand a chance of moving your chess piece in the right direction... or perhaps not. But what is absolutely certain is that if you're not doing your thing, you don't stand any chance at all.
Here's my new friend Boris on the subject:
"You could heave a brick out of the window and hit ten actors who could play my parts. I just happened to be on the right corner at the right time."
And that my friends, is quite likely to be the wisest thing anybody has ever said...
