I should know better

I should know better. Haven't I been down this road? And haven't I dragged you with me, just to hear you scream? (Solidarity is what I mean. Scream in solidarity.) Suffer for your art. Lesson learnt. Do what you love. Learnt and burnt. (It rhymes. Stop thinking so much.) Language is a fickle thing, swayed by plays on words. Live what you love and vice versa. Maybe I enjoy testing platitudes, maybe I am just otherwise and maybe there is a teeny tiny origami-ed singularity of... hope... living in a swamp of nihilism. Unlikely, right? Maybe it's just a stagnant pond.

I have struck out on my own, hypothetically earning money by writing. Yes, for a living. Yes, hypothetically for a living. Yes, I know. I should know better.

For those you who are new to said screaming, a publisher in Italo Calvino's novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveller explains, unasked, that a reader should never be a publisher. He leaves his claim hanging, for you to fill in the gaps. For me, it was a) realising that most of the manuscripts you thumb through are just that: a dirty thumbprint as well as an exercise in egoism - you are not discovering Yeats or Morrison; you are packaging products that are shelved and bought and shelved, and to be followed by the sequel, and b) the previous point (I got ahead of myself) about packaging.

See, words and books are the altar at which I scrutinise and decode and generally worship with the nit-pickiness of the editor I am. I am an editor and writer. In the most fundamental existential and religious sense (although I am told this is not possible, I live to be otherwise). A career is something you do to fund your existential crises - and that discord is exactly how you come to be good at your job (and, to be crass, to make piles of money you can use to line your published novels with).

Hang on. Something is out of sync in this tirade. What is it? Is it my bleeding wounds? My rampaging cynicism? My unfed facetiousness?

Bear with me, now. Perhaps this is an old song, taught to me by a long-dead bird (it may be under my bed cuddled by a self-satisfied cat named Selina the Psychopath). Perhaps I am older, bolder and uglier, better poised to defend my altar without necessarily dying in the process. This cannot be. If it is, my days and nights will run together (ok, that began yonks ago); I will hum while I do chores; I may actually finish my novel and at some point I will be... content? Sorry, I dropped my laptop as the shivers paralysed my motor skills. 

A writer is nothing without discontent. Every story has a complication or infinite; every award-worthy literary novel has complication, anti-climax and a resolution that is both unknowable and for you to find out. All writers are cynical, vaguely hostile, isolated and definitely not in any way wealthy. Or even just head-above-water not-broke. Or so volumes of novels and biographies, and degrees of terrabytes of movies tell us.

Virginia Woolf or Marianne Keyes? That is my choice? Oh deity of my absolutely fictional altar, I am just going to hide out under it for a while with you, if that's ok? I don't take up much space. Especially when I have dehydrated myself with hours of bawling.

I still protest the word plays that skip like Little Bo Peeps through this post. Partly because that is just tempting Murphy (remember last week when I left my house keys in my car, which was being serviced, or when I forgot my wallet at home and was already in a queue and had to beg the parking office to let me out, or when I left my lights on at work and had to call for a jump start at 23:00 on a Sunday evening? I have seen him in pyjamas, folks. Pyjamas) and partly because life is more complicated than seven words (which in itself nullifies that clause).

Ok, ok, since you are that insistent I will crawl out from underneath this altar and write everything and only enjoy it a medium amount of much. I will also desist from the crazy meandering of this post.  I will stop crying if you stop screaming. I will not overanalyse how much I do enjoy writing (insurance is more interesting that you think, you). I will do all of this, but I will take my imaginary deity with me. We have a novel to finish. And it needs to be complicated and unresolved.

Done counted, Nano

Say that in a stereotyped and offensive ghetto accent, and you be knowing that this is a dig at the world. Like Leonardo trying to throw himself in front of the Titanic. The Sundance Kid stopping a train. Every sod plodding from pavement to pavement. The world be schooled. By a novel - my novel  - my Nano novel - c'mon, you know it isn't that simple. Simple is a deception. In this case, a deceptive introduction to my blogpost. Read on. There's a novel in there, although it is more a sod plodding than Romeo or a cowboy.

As per my last, cobwebbed post, Nanowrimo is a month-long, world-wide premise in which to write a 50 000 word novel. That is definitely a deceptive explanation (rule of thumb: assume everything simple is deceptive. Also everything anyone has ever seen or done and maybe the universe). You (would-be author of Water for Elephants, which, yes, was a Nano novel) sign up online, where you are part of a community of coffee-addicted variations of the writer archetype. You stake out and mine your claim via a dashboard, which shows stats like your word count per day. (Yes, thanks, I get it, computer gnome. I am inadequate.)

You can ONLY start on the 1st (no head starts, fools) and finish by the 30th (late validations have to be done personally). You have to write from scratch - no existing novels and such, because we all have a lame one nursing itself somewhere. Every day you update your word count (no, not an imagined one 'cause then you are just a fool wasting time you could spend writing). Your dashboard updates the stats, so you know for example that it will take you 20 more days to finish (and you're on the 21st), and you have 10 920 words to go and an average daily word count of 3.

The overriding and oversimplified objective is to adapt to the discipline of being a writer. A real one. Not just a wannabe one with a lame novel. Contrary to legend, the trick to being a writer is like any other profession: you work hard. Especially since society in general has no respect for copyright and actively views it as an occasion to 'stick it to The Man'.

Let me duck out of Nano to explain something: Copyright, like general labour law, is a system to reward artists for their intellectual property. Without it, we rely on government subsidy and censorship is um bad. Do I need to explain?

Writers (and musicians and artists) sell their copyright, along with their book, to publishers, because (no matter who tells you otherwise) a self-published author does not usually have the resources to edit, typeset, print (if they need to), distribute, market and monitor sales of their book. In return, the author receives a cut of the sales value (net, mind, not gross). The books that do sell, pay my rent. Or not. So thanks for believing the fools who tell you piracy is a moral necessity.

You can see the link, right? I have to work harder to make less or I stop writing and find something less rewarding but more lucrative - no, that means something else is more rewarding. My argument falters like that of intellectual property pirates.

And... we're back!

To finish your novel on time, you must write 1 600 words a day. I am a trained and experienced writer, and I can usually push out 500 words a half hour or 1 200 a hour. Should I wait while you do the maths? That is about 1,5 hours a day. Hours stolen from the hours you are not at work. Stop cooking? Stop cleaning? Stop sleeping? Drink flagons of potent coffee (basically grounds)? Lookee, you really are a writer! (Here's the secret: the stereotype has always been true because writing requires discipline. More so now that everyone and their pets think they are writers. Lookee, I just pounded on these keys and then Kindle bought it and 3 people read it!)

Focus, focus.

For the first three years, I retired early: before 10 000 words (twice), before 30 000 words and before I started. Even then, I was fairly disciplined about writing for at least half an hour a day. Sylvia Plath wrote 1 500 words a day. (Ya' know before she bought into the patriarchal system and her life went avocado-shaped.) That fact has always inspired me. As you will know if you read her letters and journals, she was prodigious - far more prodigious than one novel would suggest.

This time, what with being part-time unemployed, I had an hour and a half to spare, and I was searching for a purpose. I needed a win. Also a cool pseudonym for some things I need to say. (In the end, I used my real one. Some things gotta be said and someone gotta back them up (and not back down. Fools). Adopt ghetto accent again.)

30 000 and then 42 000 were the trickiest. Around 30 000, I realised that my joke of about 20 000 words was true: my novel had literally lost its plot, it was descending into a teen romance (don't worry, I squashed this pandering to the patriarchy by redirecting her energy) and (now this is unlike me) all description had been replaced with dialogue and facial expressions. Dialogue? What newly creviced crevice of my soul is this? Luckily, I still didn't have a plot. I defy Aristotle, too.

At 42 000, I was close but so far. I started to just spew rubbish, pretending to realign the plot and develop characters and even link it to a previous lame novel licking itself right under my chair. I jumped from section to section because I couldn't remember what had happened and I didn't have time to read back. This one squashed itself, thank goodness. I had no clue how to do it myself.

Sitting in a coffee shop, on my sixth cup of the day and with the sugar of a chocolate danish animating my fingers, I pounded out 5 000 words with only a brief paralysis before the last hour and (I confess) during most of it.

As I looked to the corner of the screen, I yelped and did a dance in my chair that was mostly just moving my hands up and down, ghetto style. (I looked cool, fools. Haters.) I copied the creature and pasted it on my dashboard. I pressed 'Validate' with shaking hands (my hands shake normally. I think they are alive and trying to escape my body, digit by digit). The browser burbled and (really quickly especially for SA's bandwidth) congratulated me. I had written 50 250 words (of dialogue). I scrolled down... to claim my... badge. And... discounts on merchandise. Err...

None of the people exhaustedly trying to suppress the energy of their tiny people turned to acknowledge me, not even my impressive in-the-chair ghetto dancing.

It ended the way it began (and had never ended before). Quietly. To the aroma of coffee and chocolate croissants. I have 50 000 words, although not a novel, contrary to Nano's hopes. Please, you have read (at least this) my blogposts. You should know that I employ most of the words in the dictionary, instead of just the word dictionary. I barely even have a middle - just dialogue and facial expressions (read the sample on my profile and you will understand). Halfway through (calculate that however you like) I realised that I had a solution to the inertia of my first novel. I had the plot and it had been sitting on my nose like a freckle all along (it's difficult to pick out).

Oh, are you waiting for something? Oh, right, you want to know what the plot is. Dear fools, then you wouldn't buy the novel (or pirate it and therefore rob me of all acknowledgement of this incredible achievement) and I will continue to be partly unemployed and eventually my service provider will rob me of data because it doesn't believe in not getting money for its service and I won't have any. Thieves!

To convince you to ghetto dance with me, I dare you to Nano it up next year. Feel the muscle burn in your brain and fingers, the paralysis, the aches from sitting in a chair on your legs for too long (bad habit). Feel the Nano. And then, let's talk international property law and why I should be your very employed agent.

Nanowrimo: the countdown

What month is it? Yes, November. Yes, a countdown to religious holidays involving fake trees and gold tinsel. I bet you didn't guess correctly! Oh wait, if you didn't guess from the title of this post, please shut down your browser and never come here again. Yes, it's Nanowrimo!

For the (majority of) people who don't know this is an acronym, it is. It stands for: National Novel Writing Month. Because we are all one nation on the internet? No, because we aren't, unless you are a first-world hipster looking at everything through rose-tinted Google Glass. You can keep reading, but only if you take that headset off, because you look less like a sci-fi hero than a real-life dork and not the cool kind.

I am guessing it started as an American campaign and went global. Lack of foresight, but the alliteration works. The campaign encourages people to write by creating communities. Every November, aspiring authors log in to their accounts (most have forgotten their passwords and need to reset - not me, of course. Of course. No, not me) and fill in the details of their project: title, summary, extract and cover.

There are a couple of rules:

1. It has to be a new novel, not one you have already started.
2. You cannot copy and paste ten times to reach the word count (this seems obvious but if not, time to, yes, shut down your browser).
3. You 'win' when you reach 50 000 words. You win, I win, we all win. Like a marathon where we all get medals for finishing, at which point I'm wondering why I am putting myself through this.

We got here sooner than I expected. I signed up in 2010. I lost in 2010, 2011 and 2012. I didn't even try in 2013. I lost because a week into the marathon, I asked myself why I was putting myself through this.

Why? you ask. Why do you writers pretend writing is so difficult? We all write every day: emails, application forms, notes. Yes, you do (and may I point out, from an editor's point of view, that if you didn't have spell and grammar check, your 'writing' would be illegible. And even then people can't tell the difference between 'its' and 'it's'). I am all for you writing 50 000 words of emails. Please don't send it to me, but go ahead.

The Most Difficult Thing about writing is resisting the urge to purge the file or set the pages alight. This urge should take hold of you at about word 14. If as a first-time writer you make it to 4 000 words, I will actually read your (pending) 50 000 word email.

I have been writing, properly, for ten years. I still have to wrestle that urge and chain it under my desk. Like David Copperfield, he will free himself, but it gives me a headstart. I first tracked his movements by writing stream-of-consciousness style for 30 minutes a day. No lifting pen from paper except to turn the page (and unless you print and between words, but you get it). It takes about 20 minutes to start writing fluidly.

Where do you find 30 minutes a day? I don't know, it's your schedule. If you are serious about this, you will quit gym and write instead. And potentially die early of heath problems. Which would make you a bona fide writer. I used to write first-thing in the morning (Jessica Simpson swears by this), but I am not a morning person. Unless you count waking up at 11. So now I write in the evening.

Sylvia Plath (of whom I am such a fan that I hate Ted Hughes with a passion) wrote 1 500 words a day. She started the habit late in high school and published a number of poems and short stories in college. 1 500. That was the length of some of my essays in undergrad.

So ten years of wrestling the monster of writer's block later, I can write about 500 words per half hour, sometimes more if I don't edit. That's an hour to an hour and a half. Sorry, how long did you say it took you to write 4 000 words? Because it just took me two days.

In other words, writing is a discipline. Write the same amount of words at the same time in the same place. Be prepared to do this for years and years. Train yourself to wrestle that monster. In addition, you will need to do research and be prepared to burrow into the bits of yourself you wouldn't stare down in a lit room. Or maybe you get it right first time. It happens. I hate you.

We have bumped into Nanowrimo again. It is November, after all. One of the functions of Nano (apart from creating a community) is to train you to do all of those things above (I don't need to recap do I?). I have gone through periods of writing religiously (I mean that word seriously - if I had a single belief, it would be in words) and of letting the words build up until I am a little volcano. So Nano is definitely worthwhile.

But a week has always been my limit. If you do the maths, you need to write about 1 600 words a day to finish on time. Remember: an hour and a half. I used to work a lot. For various reasons that even therapy won't fully explain. Identity, self-worth, self-destruction. That is a bleak path, dear reader. Now I know better, although knowing isn't always understanding. So finding that hour and a half when you work at least 10 hours a day and don't eat lunch is difficult.

So my strategy had two parts:

1. Start strong: write as much as you can in the first week.
2. Continue strong on the weekends, when you have time.

I mentioned I never made it past number 1? Except for 2012, when I wrote 28 000 words, which is about 17 days. It sounds like the home stretch, but it isn't, it really isn't.

You can see this coming, can't you? Or you've already checked my profile. Eight days in and I average close to 2 000 words per day. A fist bump and a happy dance. That is more than 15 000 words. In one week. One week, my friends, just over an hour a day. One hour.

What did writing replace? Not gym. I don't do gym. I just make promises I haven't kept yet. Well, I went out on my own, business-wise, and am planning a little sum'ing sum'ing. Stay tuned for me crowdsourcing your wallet. Technically, writing counts as part of my work day. Since my work day is 10 hours, I am just retrieving a couple of them.

While I work, that monster has a seat next to me, but he is on the edge of it, watching the words spill on to the electronic page. Sometimes he helps me find a synonym. He also reminds me to eat lunch.

I think this is the year I am going to win Nanowrimo. I have no illusions that this novel is publishable. The story is going nowhere and comprised mostly of dialogue. I can't think of names for most of the characters and unravelling the pronouns would be a full-time job. But it is giving me more insight into my first (and real) novel. (Which is, oddly, the premise of that novel.) The novel will have six dedications and Sylvia Plath is the first and Nano the last.

A pair of brackets is not just parenthesis

Something happened in my previous post. Something Happened. (By far my cheesiest and favourite opening lines ever.) In other words, I had just finished reading the book Something Happened by he of Catch 22, Joseph Heller. Is it coincidence that my psychoanalytic reading of Alfred Hitchcock's movies and my reading of the psychoanalytic book Something Happened coincided? Am I interested in both because I am psychoanalytically minded? (Now my favourite introduction and perhaps my best SEO-worthy.)

This is not a review and neither is it scrabble, so keep reading you!

As a writer, I am prone to using parentheses to insert a comment, joke, stage whisper or red herring. Maybe that is why I have found myself adopting the voice of the main character of Something Happened. Which somehow makes me a relation of Joseph Heller, I guess, who first adopted his voice. (I think this logic makes us married. I should look into his estate.)

Bob Slocum, the main character, uses enough brackets to move the keys from the top-right to the center of the keyboard, replacing 'f' and 'h'. He even uses them to begin (and break) paragraphs. Sometimes it seems as though these interruptions have rhyme and reason. That's a red herring. Sometimes the parenthesised comments are short: "(So who else does he have?)" And sometimes they are long: "Somehow the time passes (doesn't it, without help from us..."

Towards the end of the book, I lost a partner-in-bracket and had to move on.

My parentheses are usually jokes, sometimes self-deprecating ones. Occasionally they are instructions to you to keep reading. You. In the last post, I used the brackets to relay missing information. My sentence structure was otherwise quite normal. Conventional, I mean. Not normal. Something abducted my colons and semi-colons and long complex sentences used to convince the reader that My Point is within spitting distance. (Spitting distance?! That is not a term I'd use. I do not and never have, not even in diapers, spat.)

The legend of Oedipus is something I try to avoid contemplating, as with most of Freud's juvenile phase theories. (Of course, it is difficult to miss in Birds, but the birds are a handy distraction.) (Also, the sliver of the screenplay that I appropriated was, uh, appropriated. I did not write it. Wish I had, but did not.)

Slocum narrates the novel, in stream of consciousness. It doesn't take a horoscope to predict that a large part of the novel is about Slocum's fears. The ones he admits to and those he doesn't admit to thereby admitting to them. (With this novel in my back pocket, I'd argue that anyone's unconsciousness stream would filter into fear and the need for security. And the consciousness stream would be an algae mound repressing said fear. And somewhere in there, hunger, in the shape of fish. Too far?)

Even his humour has nestled in here. More hardy, less irreverant. Less unpredictable. (That's a joke, too.)

This has happened before. I get the tone and style, but never the award-winning books. Yet. (One day, I am going to have them write on the cover of my book, "The next Virginia Woolf/AS Byatt/Carson McCullers." And you will get the joke. But you won't laugh because it will be true. Because the Booker Prize council said so.) This is different from feeling like you have been abandoned in a book after you have closed the cover. This is like a habit. This is what comes from identifying with a character (which is oddly what Slocum does: he adopts the gestures of people he has been around). Arrgh! I must be living in a book, where all my thoughts are pirated from others.

That's it, folks. This post is about redemption. To confess to the above (initially I thought I was just confessing to appropriating a fictional character's voice). Soon I will forget all of this, until I re-read this post going through my archives (after the award-winning book in which I inherit the title of a ghost), and wonder who is appropriating the voices of my characters. And then I shall sue them for copyright infringement. After I invest in a patent troll.

We are now Beginning our Descent

I will try to keep the lyrical references to People's Act of Love to a minimum. Although, search engines pick up terms that are repeated a certain number of times. Perhaps I should spell it incorrectly, too, to be safe? Sorry, Peoples Act of Love is the worst I can do. Don't push me. As you should have guessed, as the intelligent reader you are, We are now Beginning our Descent is written by the author of People's Act of Love, the author I wish to be and the book I wish I had written.

Lyricism done. Almost.

Right, I almost forgot: the author's name is James Meek. The photo on the inside back cover is a black and white head shot of said author with glasses and a widow's peak staring into the reader's nose. Pretentious. As befitting the author of a literary wonder (I could be referring to his other work, Drivetime. Unfortunately I'm not. I'm using up my rations fast).

I'm not the only one obsessed with said wonder. The first paragraph of his biography lists the awards that book has won. More importantly, he was (long-)listed the Booker Prize, which you may or may not know is The Award that would Define my Literary Career, long- or shortlisted, or just listed, perhaps in the same paragraph. (Short of the Nobel. Obviously.) Oh and translated into way more languages more than one person could logically speak.

In the second paragraph we get to the meaty bit. Meek was a journalist, one of that sadomasochistic breed called war reporters, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Which is the topic of the book. We are now Beginning our Descent is about a journalist stationed in Afghanistan soon after the World Trade Centre attacks. After a few pages, we realise that he is blind to many of his own feelings and suspect this will be a major plot device. You know, because of the author's subtle-ish focus on these blind spots. (Yes, that oxymoron is intentional.)

It just occurred to me: was Meek perhaps a cannibal or castrate in Siberia, or a very high and very drunk disaffected youth wandering around the United Kingdom? That's ridiculous. But, if we would have to choose one, it would be the least likely, being the former. But ridiculous. Right?

These reporters are not exactly stalking tanks (although at one point they direct one, but that's not quite the same), but they are driving to bomb sites to witness the destruction of people's lives. Coverage of which, it could be argued, is necessary to heighten people's awareness of the trauma of war. Or just redistributing the trauma. Because there's not enough of that to go around.

Anyway, as you can see, I have an Opinion about this. Which, to be honest, Meek does address briefly in his book. All muddled up in the journalists' own confused and camouflaged traumas.

That's it. We are now Beginning our Descent has this in common with People's Act of Love: My own reflection of the trauma implicit in the stories. Pinpoint reflection because I am not suggesting that anyone could understand - a sub-conscious understanding, because to know about something is not to understand - trauma like war without experiencing it. (Aside unlike the reader, the journalists choose to edge a bit closer, bringing us with them, in one of those repeating Russian-doll illusions.)

We are now Beginning our Descent is not on the scale of its towering sister, but I felt an echo of the shaking of my soul that it began. Perhaps if it had been longer, ideas rounded out or stretched more, one character in particular developed in terms of her strengths and not the flaws that made her dangerous (although, I grant you, this could be seen as another plot device, but is easily distorted into an anti-feminist statement).

Argh, almost every strength and every flaw in this novel can be justified by its themes! Meek is a very smart -manipulator - I mean, author. Events and characters are linked in a roiling mass of cause and effect. How neat! But not all of it sits right, opposite me, on the couch. I feel unsatisfied, because this mass can be mopped up into a pretty algorithm. Unsettling but ultimately pretty.

Ok, you and I both know it, I hate a satisfying novel. A novel should be tragic. Argh! And this one is! (To me.) But, here it is, it's predictable. Not the characters, but the novel. The symbolism maintained, tended like those ridiculous sculpted animal-shaped bushes. A handbook in extended metaphor and resolution. On the backs of the types of characters Meek now characteristically writes. (Should this be a flaw? Perhaps not, but I'm the reader and I don't know the man and my word rules around here.)

This post doesn't really say anything useful, I now realise, except that this may or may not be a good book depending on your reading rules - again, this says nothing! Clearly I am not myself if words fail me like this. One last try: I enjoyed reading the book, the unveiling of various emotions and one scene in particular that bursts on you mid-novel, and I empathised with the main character. I feel an echo of existential crisis. But this is no People's Act of Love. And perhaps there never will be.

Until my own. ;)

Who's afraid of Samuel Beckett?

Way back when (yes, it was a long time ago), I was an undergrad discovering (literally mining, it felt to me as it feels to every young'n) the works of great (and minor) authors who described parts of my world. Grand, twisted, confusing, unfair, ironic if irony were unstructured, but poetic. (See previous post.) Like medication wrapped in a plastic capsule, the world is easier to swallow when mangled into black typeface. That was when I rediscovered my desire to write.

Every great writer (I hope?) has to first be a bad writer. (I'm ready to fight for this illusion.) The assignment for that  month's creative writing workshop was to write a one-act play. So, I wondered why one might hate a colour. A colour is like a number - innocuous - but still, I do not like the number 7. Even numbers have a pattern (please, tell me you know what that is) and so do primes, but odd numbers in general?! Their only pattern is that they aren't evens!

Can you explain your own reactions to innocuous things? And I'm not referring to favourite colours, which are based on preference, aesthetic. I'm talking about a judgement on something that is by nature exempt from judgement. So, is my explanation above really an explanation? Or is it hidden within the black typeface?

Dear reader, the point is a-coming. Hang in there.

The protagonist of my play is afraid of the colour red, as above. She is in the queue of a bank (clearly not the red one) and breaking the rules of All Queues: talking to people around her, with no reason; commenting on their clothing; skipping places; revealing very intimate information; and questioning the rationale behind All Queues.

Her real motivation is to confront a man who she sees the vortex of every trauma in her life. But the plot of the play is not the plot of this post.

One of the other workshoppers (very knowledgeable but irritatingly so) was intrigued by the pattern of my characters, by the misanthropy and the tragic, self-deprecating humour. She recommended I read Watt by Samuel Beckett. I was racing on the adrenalin of inspiration and dutifully had to have that book. I ordered online and it arrived, in Russian-doll squares of cardboard and bubble-wrap.

The production specs tell you this is something different (though I could not have told you how at the time - please note this, cynics of the influence of an experience of a book). The cover is clouds of dark puce, which fold into the ghost of a man and his suitcase at a train station, facing down the tracks. The title is written in yellow caps in a stark and thin font, as is the name. The surname dwarfs everything. This is a writer of stature, it says.

The cover is matt laminated. (Expensive and a risk, because the film comes off at the corners after a while.) The paper is thicker than the usual 70 gsm and yellowed. (Thicker paper is again expensive and paper nowadays is often acid-free because acid yellows the paper.) The type and layout is old-school, and the design leaves wide margins at all four sides. (The typeface is a thick, calligraphic serif font, which takes more space than a modern, cleaner font, as do the margins. This means more pages and more expense.) The last two points suggest that this a reprinting of the original film - also suggested by the copyright date on the imprint page, which would need to be renewed with each edition.

Where on earth does one find a printing press that prints this outmoded format? None that I know of.

I'm getting carried away. You can ignore that entire paragraph if you like. My point is, this is a work of substance, immune to time. Remind you of any other author? Another author I am afraid to read? Yep, James Joyce and Beckett were friends - groan - friends!

As with Ulysses, I have not read Watt, ten years later. It sits comfortably on my bookshelf, between Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry and Alexandra Fuller's The Legend of Colby Bryant, part of a section dedicated to books I will read next. (Next being a comfortably indeterminate word.) I have a reading eye larger than available leisure time, so this shelf grows like a creature from Aliens.

At least I have read 90 pages of Ulysses, set schedules and worn the cover a bit. Watt is pristine, which is why I can wax lyrical about its specs. I pick books to read depending on my mood. But when you are feeling dark and deep, does it make sense to read something equally or perhaps more dark? In those moods (in this mood) I pick something wherein the characters kill the fantastical bad... things... (projection intended), where the moral high ground is easy to identify and where I can fixate on seemingly indestructible things like direwolves and dragons.

But this is not the real reason, although whatever sense of self-preservation I have does revolt at the idea. You know my tired complaint, the one I can actually do something about, but am afraid to. I have not published. Yet. But there's another, less obvious one. I have not accomplished. This book reminds me of myself before I graduated into the big bad world (although I would argue I already a foot in the muck and felt the promising squelch).

My play was not very good, although it has some redeeming points, but I never wanted to be a playwright. I also have never really bothered with plot except as a coat hanger for my characters' baggage. Now here is a mentor for my characters, to help me make them great - standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. But I have to accept that, at first, they won't be. They won't be giantific - they will be dwarfish - subjectively dwarfish.

Will reading Watt help me feel more optimistic or less? Will I get farther than I have with Ulysses? (Will I understand more of it? Come'n, you didn't understand 95% of it either.) Will I remember how it felt to be so sure of success that I was prepared to fail? And will I finally find some balls and write the damn thing?! It may be a while before we find out, so hold on, kids.

You've got nothing to lose

"You've got nothing to lose." I used this one on myself a couple of months ago (a pep talk is not counted as talking to myself). Although not entirely true (do self-esteem, hope and happiness count as nothing?) it is very comforting. (After all, lots of things that are comforting aren't true. Fat-free yoghurt that is still yoghurt, pure English, democracy...) And if I didn't lose nothing, if I had lost everything - gained everything - gained nothing... Read between the lines, please. What would I have done?

Cliffhanger.

No, that's not what I would have done - how do you cliffhang? There is a lack of suspense-building, you. And here I had thought we had bonded. Is that how you cliffhang? By bonding yourself to a rock?

You always get what you want anyway: I would probably have run from Cape Town to Cairo, in order to cross the Suez and get to Siberia. That's as far as I could go. I have bad circulation. Also, wolves.

The same applies to my novel. In the amount of overtime I work, I could probably have written a novel, perhaps two, and my premature memoirs (you should really have done something interesting first). And when I come home, I have been researching and compiling a proposal for... a research grant? the greatest piece of literature ever? a novella? short story? preface? Nope. To line someone else's pockets.

I'm sure it's not lost on you that I'm blogging instead of writing. (Although I count this as a half hour of writing a week.)

I have a hypothesis.

HYPOTHESIS
Success is more frightening than failure.1
1 Erratum: sometimes2 more frightening
2 Smart, right?

METHOD
A. Review the above two anecdotes.3
3 Anecdotes are admissible because I say so and because else this blog post has already ended. Which would be disappointing. And definitely not a full half hour.
B. Consider a goal of your own and whether you have intentionally but sub-consciously scuppered it.

OBSERVATIONS

• Failure is sometimes4 the easier option. You know what to expect (worldwide anarchy) and you don't have to try so hard. To fail, simply stop doing.5

4 Smart, right?

5 It's in the dictionary. 'S true 's Bob.

• Success is difficult because then what? What do you do, how and for how long? Do you deserve it? Do other people think you deserve it? If you fudge it now, you have everything to lose. And so on goes your racing mind. Which would be so poignant if you were a racing driver. Be a racing driver. Who reads blogs. About books. Nevermind. Just befriend one.
• Sometimes that everything is your life. Like the racing driver. If he did nothing, he would die in a fiery wreck.

CONCLUSION
Success is sometimes more frightening than failure.

We seem to have drifted from Siberia to someplace over some ocean (I'm not very good at Geography). Or Astronomy apparently.

See, this blog post was meant to circle in on itself: fear of success is in our (completely independent and feral) minds. So is fear of failure. But in the case of Mr Racing Driver, fear of failure is necessary for success. Or at least, the absence of the concept of failure (replaced by the fear of Murphy's Law). Now instead of maneuvering this ship (it's a flying ship, a dirigible) (no, not the Hindenberg!) around the world to land gently where it first took off (seriously, there is no hydrogen on this thing! And no you can't have any helium - I don't care if you need it to survive this flight!), I have flown this thing into the Bermuda Triangle.

Oh look, there's Amelia Earhart!

Either Mr Racing Driver is an exception, or I should stick to specifics. In this specific instance, writing the rest of my novel is, well, frightening. If I don't write it, I simply carry on as I do now, towing regret and the question of what if? behind me. (This Hindenberg carries hydrogen.) I may not lose anything, but I gain a burden. And if I do write it, what's the worst that happen? (I knew it as I typed it. Look out for that blog post.) I knew my choice was to try before I typed it. Sometimes you need to look it in the eye first and then jump off that cliff.

Is that what cliffhanger means?

Rereading People's Act of Love: The end

For years now, the protagonist of my adolescent novel and I have been pacing the streets of our imaginary, historical city (which is also the base of any 'real' city, so perhaps he and I have a chance of Pinocchio-ing it out and finding - what?), wondering what we are doing here. Where we are going. Because a quest isn't complete without a path - a 'from' and a 'to' - right? Let's follow this alleged path, like - you guessed it - like a certain young woman and a rabbit with a pocket watch. There it is - a hole in the ground within which the laws of relativity jump into the quantum realm - without unifying jack.

To confuse the issue, Calim (my protagonist) and I are sitting outside the entrance to the hole (a sudden eruption in the pavement before us, or perhaps the work of municipal workers doing something municipal, or a hole we dug ourselves). We are just sitting there, a convenient place to sit, taking a break, not saying anything, not doing anything but considering these roiling contradictions that don't unify anything, when there is a movement within the hole - we hear it more than see it. (This doesn't make any sense, I know - a movement without the rabbit to-ing and fro-ing, but quantum physics forgives many literary licences.)

It's the plot of That Book, the one that either shook my soul or resonated with a soul that was already shook. Calim hears it too.

This is the book I want to write. A book that unifies nothing and everything and shakes all sorts of shaken souls. That is a little ambitious, so I am content to write a book through which themes creep like the roots of an oak tree trapped in a pavement that was laid around it, like a noose. You know the kind, the thick-as-your-thigh roots that heave up the concrete around it and you imagine the roots as roiling, but so slowly that it would take lifetimes and clever filming to see.

Ok, this too is a little ambitious, but I like the taste of that cliche: go big or go home.

So many post-modern authors (go ahead and call them what else you will; labels are for students - this adjective is merely a placeholder) bury their themes beneath accusations of relativity, as if beating the critics to the punch. Ah, isn't relativity wonderful (I keep typing 'real-' instead of 'rela-', which spell check says is incorrect and which my brain is inclined to agree with but my heart made of spongy hope protests)? No, it really isn't wonderful. It's a plug in a drain; it's a sad replacement for the security of religion.

People's Act of Love pulls no such punches. Life is... awful. Oh no, you yell! I can't bear to write another monologue about how awful life is. Let's compromise: life can be awful and sometimes it can feel... something else. I'm getting to that part.

This novel says what I have been saying, but better. As per my previous post, it offers you alternatives and you are almost giddy with it, with these academic offers, whose academic-ness convince you of their authority. At the same time, the novel asks you to empathise with cannibals and castrates (yes!), because morality is a set of emotional decisions made rational, like it or not. Then it asks you how you can empathise with such creatures, such fundamentally weak creatures, enslaved to an Idea. You take it as a judgement when really it is a question driving you towards the truth that such things exist in all of us and that perhaps we need to pass through each of these moral states to find a way to live.

Life is awful. So grow a pair. Make lemonade. Live within society because the alternative is bleak 'wildness', but find your way to reconcile yourself with it.

I like to believe (look how I've grown!) that somewhere in that reconciliation is... acceptance? Not accepting the awfulness, but accepting that being angry and lashing out is not going to get you or anyone else out of the awful. Hoping (personal projection here) that the way you find might be able to do something, even if only to record the lows and highs.

Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, Moscow, Russia. Vladimir Shukhov, 1922. Photograph © Richard Pare 2007.

On little questions

I know I'm not the first to write about this. I know this because we danced around it in various classes at varsity. I did my readings, submitted my essays and wrote exams on it, along with hundreds (and thousands) of other students. Amateur representations imitating other 'more credible' representations about the politics of representation, and so on. A snake biting its tale, which really is all philosophy is.

Now, you see, I know this (the last bit). But knowing is not understanding. The concerns of philosophy are, for me, concerning. Which makes being a writer a little bit tricky.

Because representation raises ethical issues about the observed, the observer and the viewer. (Me being the first and last.) Let's say I have some time so I mosey on down to the promenade, sit on a bench and write about what I see. What I see is an elderly couple walking, without looking at the scenery, without saying anything. They are walking side by side, without much distance between them.

(This already is a character study, but let's carry on.)

I dub them Mrs Blake and Mr St John. They began an affair in their thirties, Mrs a widow and Mr married. Having been married once, Mrs didn't care to repeat the experiment and never pushed him to leave his wife. Ho-hum, life continues for a few decades. (Whether or not the wife knows is irrelevant because she's not the one on show. Mr loves both women.) Then Mrs St John dies. But the relationship carries on as before for a few years, hidden, to dodge the gossips. They finally come clean (about their love, not the affair), the children are gutted, and they continue much as before. Ho-hum. After all this, they know each other well enough not to have to speak. They have walked the promenade many times before and know the ocean's many moods without looking. Intertwined with themes of memory, choice, accountability and gender relations.

This is a fiction. Imposed on a reality - someone else's reality. Think of your relationship with another person. Would you want to be described like this? Even if it is made up. If some trace of you remains: a gesture or expression.

A person isn't a theme or a metaphor; you have a complex inner life and the right to that. Do you permit me to manipulate that? If so, why?

The example above is just that. My main concerns have to do with the disenfranchised; the people you see at traffic lights, under bridges, knocking on your door. Even if written in an empathetic or sympathetic voice - especially if - what do I know of their lives? Anything I write will stem from pity or accusation; they will become symbols of time or chance or human dignity. What right do I have to their lives? What right do I have to pity or blame?

But how do I continue to ignore a portion of society whose stories already are ignored? Continue the cycle, heap blow upon blow, act the hypocrite. Equality isn't food, shelter, education; it is human relationships. If you want respect, respect all you would pity or pass judgement on until you know their story.

(Again I have sidelined the point: to do with travel photographs, amateur and professional, and how they objectify the lives of people. Another time.)

There is no solution here, we say (I hear the whispers). Let's not bother, then. Let's continue with our lives without tripping over the little questions. True. We can't second guess every moment of our lives: every thought, action or emotion. But that doesn't drown the little questions. And to someone else they may be crucial ones. To me, they are.

Confession: I made it halfway through Nanowrimo...

...but I won't finish.

Silver lining: that's 17 more days than last year and at least as many words as I wrote for my real novel in three years (if I had been writing at the same pace for three years, I would have churned out close to 500 000 words, which is 10 novels - let's factor in redrafting and editing time, at the same rate, and that's five novels, which is four more than I currently have (counting together the two halves of two different novels). This maths looks wrong.

Wait! I was missing a 0. 50 novels! Shoowee.

Anyway, it looks like I'm going to break this brick wall before I break my head - not logically possible, granted, but metaphorically: suspension of disbelief. And physical logic. Maybe I'm Gulliver and the brick wall is really small. But why would I use my head rather than my foot? Or a tractor. Or a bulldozer. Maybe it's a brick wall in my novel, in which case I can just write it broken.

Just go with it.

The secret to Nanowrimo

"If you're not making mistakes, it's a mistake." Miles Davis

Who doesn't like a quote that unfolds the mysteries of life for you? Just like SparkNotes. And who doesn't like pithy epigrams, like: You have to fail before you succeed.

Ultimately, these cheat sheets are not helpful. (Prepare yourself for the insightful comment.) As any first-year philosophy lecture on epistemology will tell you, you can know something without understanding it. In other words, knowledge is not enough. (Also, SparkNotes is notoriously unreliable, perhaps to trick you into failing?)

This year is my third year signing up for Nanowrimo - National Novel Writing Month. (The link is in a nifty list somewhere over here <---.) People from around the world sign up and create a profile. From the 1st to the 30th of November, you try to write 50 000 words, in other words (punnage), a novel.

Don't bother to work it out: to finish on time you have to write 1 667 words per day. If you can write 500 words in half an hour (which takes practice), that means one and a half hours out of your day. Most of us can barely find half an hour for lunch, so this hour and a half is mythical.

Except, that depends: how badly do you want to be a writer? If not very or you're still thinking about it, give it a try. The experience is a good way to find out what your priorities are and how to manage your time. But you won't make it more than a week.

If your answer is a fire in your chest, then let me tell you about Years 1 and 2 before I tell you about 3 (although, really, the whole story's over there -----> in two nifty buttons above my reading lists).

In Year 1, I made it a week. By then I was something like 10 000 words below target and I hated the wretched piece of writing and I was so tired I swear my eyeballs were sagging. In Year 2, I made it three days. I started writing something very intelligent about illusion and hope and belief, and ended up with something that sounded like Twilight where the vampire's just some mute emo kid.

Granted, I later wove the first page of the aborted novel into my real novel.

Year 3 and I'm on target! (Ok, that's a bit of a lie: I went out last night instead of writing but plan to - will - make it up today.) I want this. So badly it burns like fire in my chest. I will wake up early, go to sleep late; I will not sleep for the last 72 hours and take leave; I will finish this year and, damn it, I will finish my real novel before my 30th birthday (in three months).

But I could not make it if I had not failed twice. In failing, I learnt how fast your motivation drops as soon as you fall a bit behind, that you cannot achieve something like this (without self-destructing) if you cannot sort out the rest of your life, and that I am first and foremost a writer, not a publisher.

I dreamt of being a writer when I was still a 'lightie' (also a ballerina, marine biologist and archaeologist). After an(other) aborted attempt at becoming a graphic designer, I realised that books were It. So I studied language, media and literature and became an editor, a copywriter and a publisher.

In the last year, almost every dream I have nurtured has unfolded: a home I love, a career, a growing zoo, friends, a sense of calm and perspective. There are two left: buying my home and finishing my novel. And I intend to accomplish the second one first.

I want the cover of my book to have this feeling

From the Book Cover Archive:

Thirteen minutes...

One of my short fiction pieces was published in itch earlier this month and people keep telling me they wish it hadn't ended so abruptly. That abruptness was intentional; people are supposed to feel like they have been thrown up against a brick wall, like I did. I had felt completely disorientated after this experience, but I realise now that there wasn't enough groundwork.

I love the idea of the city and I love writing about the city. But that love can be difficult to reconcile with my writing. I see a bizarre character, like a man carrying two streetlight poles slung over his shoulder or a man preaching next to a traffic light, and I want to write them into a story. Usually, they become a symbol of an emotion or concept.

But how do I do this without in some way stripping them of their humanity? This sounds like a purely intellectual, and therefore redundant, question, but it's not. Who am I to patronise someone by using them as a symbol? How would you like it if someone wrote about you and then claimed that you embodied sadness or the rift between the classes?

In this particular story, I assume first that these people are in some way a danger to me because they come from a different social 'class'. Then I assume that they hold some knowledge about life that makes them spiritually superior to me. As if poverty is the portal to enlightenment.

That is my conflict at the end of the story. This is the brick wall I was thrown against. But, just like the previous piece that was published, I didn't tell people enough of the truth behind it.

In Miss Lecter, I hoped that people would see a break near the end, before the teacher imparts her moral. I was too chicken and too inexperienced to tell people that anything can be turned into a religion using pretty words. So instead I took the middle ground.

Being a writer means being brave. I haven't been brave enough.