Old Hunger

2003-07-30T21:20:00.000Z

Daniel's hearing is perfect. More than. It's gone from slightly less than par to Daredevil keen. Am now terrifiied that I've exposed him to some terrible mutagen that will balance the advantages gained from his new super senses with unsightly extra appendages or an abaiding love of soccer.

The Kat has found out I'm blogging again (thanks Fi!) - everybody look casual.

G'Night.

2003-07-30T01:28:00.000Z

I resorted to getting Daredevil out on VHS. Much posturing, some lovely imagery, plotline...existed but was purposefully ignored. The players faffed as players will - pointlessly facing off against each others' egos rather than addressing the machinations unfolding about them - but somewhere a GM was running the plotline in his personal downtime and the ramifications kinda fell into place without the heroes needing to contribute. Was odd. Dodgy CGI, but I really don't care about such things; which is why I shall not be bothering making an effort to see Hulk. God I hate the Hulk. In every incarnation, though this one seems the worst of all. Damn CGI. Damn it all to hell. It gives life to that which was never meant to live sometimes. It is the most Promethean crime of all time.

(Movie aside: Please baby Jesus, regem angelorum, make Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen not suck.)

A friend has decided to start phoning me at home suring the day to ask me "what I am doing?" Correction - what am I doing to be productive as and of that moment? He thinks it's terribly direct and efficient way of getting me out of my funk of despair and making me create somehow. He'll have a long wait. My ideas are cold and stillborn; slugs of flesh where they should be spirit. And unquickened I am become unwilling. I am in need of a miracle, a revolution. I'm not writing at all now, and it's a bit like a drawn out heart attack.

Daniel is thriving all the while. He walks now at 10 and a half months. Falls quite a lot too. I dread that he hurts himself in any major way as I'll never be able to make medics believe one child could be so bruised without my help - not with a bank of damning evidence like this blog to increase the level of suspicion. And I can hardly blame the cats, whom he is most often chasing down with homicidal affection when the majority of his stumbles occur. He's off to an audiologist tomorrow; he's failed three hearing tests in his right ear for high pitch tones. Something called a gromit has been threatened: plastic tubes inserted into the inner ear somewhere. I refuse to understand since I can't stomach the idea of having him anaesthetised, and ignorance breeds obstinance and intractability. I shall have my bridge and none shall pass.

I'm off to Donegal for the long weekend come Thursday; me and the mini-me, Katrina having to wait 'til the weekend proper as she is working. My mother and father's 30th wedding anniversary. I'm the only one who cares, it seems. I tell a lie, the Kat cares too, but then she's had to fork out for the gifts. We sign our life insurance policies into Daniel's trust fund Thursday morning just before he and I head off - am suddenly aware of how valuable I am dead to a woman with a working knowledge of the post mortem examination. How much do I wish that I'd spent less on this anniversary now?

Whine, whine, whine. My journey of expression and growth is going well, don't you think?

People keep these damn things to whine in - that's what the internet is for. Born of a military communications network designed to share fiery pain with one's enemies, it seems it's lost none of it's core philosophy in civilian translation.

Daniel's crying.
Moments later, he's stopped. One of the beats of my heart these days; painfully arrhythmic. The question is whether, as these sporadic beats get less and less regular, the heart will start beating for itself again instead of him or stop altogether.

...

Maybe I should stop reading Camus before bed.

G'night.

2003-07-19T14:47:00.000Z

In a text-book case of Typical, the universe saw fit to punish me for the measliest thought crime ever committed last night.

Logged off here to go Tut! and Tsk! at Daredevil, opened the DVD box from Xtravision and lo and behold! 2 DVDs! Little understanding that it was a two disc set, even though this was printed on the front, methinks "Aha! They've given me two of 'em by mistakes miladdos! What if only one of them made it back to the store? Eh? Eh?"
So, obviously, neither of them would read on my DVD player. Fucking universe! I mean, it wouldn't have even worked anyway, coz the assistant would check to see that they were both there when I returned it, coz she'd have the wit to check the box like it tells her to on the front! Or it could have had me nick the second CD, the one without the film on it for full on wages if sin irony. But no; I whom the fates most despise gets me whole movie taken off me. It should at least have had the decency to wait and see if I actually committed the crime first! I may have had an eleventh hour pang of remorse and seen the error of my ways and decided to follow the path of righteousness and found Jesus and formed a circle and destroyed it with love an all that.

Take comfort, Marcus Cole; it's general hostility and unfairness remains fixed and resolute.

2003-07-18T23:29:00.000Z

Why has everyone moved over to livejournal?

2003-07-18T22:10:00.000Z

The Kat's away.
The mouse is online which, given the kind of geek the mouse is, is as close to recreation as we'll get.

I've just stopped on to check my mail and ... do this, apparently. Am about to watch Daredevil on the Kat's urging of "pick something you couldn't watch if I was there." Makes it sound like like some kinda alternate porno. Actually, since I'm only really watching it for Kevin Smith's cameo I guess it kinda is.

I read all of the collected issues of Mike Carey's Lucifer over the weekend. I highly recommend it. It's like reading Gaiman without ever having to wait for him to get to the point. Also, while Carey is in truth as much of a navel searching lover of occult conceit as Gaiman, he never allows his esoteric researches clutter or derail his plotline like they did in Sandman and certain other NG comic scripts (The Last Temptation, for example). So, double plus double plus good: find, read, loosen belt and belch appreciatively.

Why does "Haunted" (Sky1, Thursdays, 9pm) suck so much? I'm trying to stick with it but it's doing very fucking little towards finding its stride. Or a plot thicker than tissue paper. Or any character consistency. I hate the bad TV months.

Right. I'm off to scorn Affleck.

G'Night.

2003-07-17T01:12:00.000Z

Barry White died.
Nobody seemed to notice. My friend Dave had to tell me.

(Incidentally, Dave meet Gar. In the next life you'll be sat back to back - like Gump and Bubba only smarter - on a cloud, keeping each other awake with finding more books in common than there are recipes for shrimp.)

People come and people go, he clichéd, soft-shoed even in the heaviest footfall. Here's to his first, his last and his everything.

It's abominably late and hot and my son can be heard whimpering in his sleep above me. I write under the stairs, where all the bad boys end up (clearly it's movie reference night). Daniel has ear-ache and he's had a long day. With a long night to follow no doubt, as the whimpers get sharper and the sleep shallower. I wait below; as I wait all day these days, waiting to see what he's going to need of me next. It's a routine that makes one feel as shallow as a fitful sleep: as a dream sleep. As an imaginary man.

I found my blog again. And here it is. And so am I.
I haven't been anywhere. I tell a lie.

We went to Mexico. I drank in never-ending jungle from the top of Chichen Itza and shared saltwater with an infant dolphin. I suffered too much sun and not enough Katrina with only a week to fit it all in. And then time, after its fashion, contracted to take the time away quickly and then expanded to make the memories remote. Usual programming since then pretty much.

Eamon, who is now a puppy that lives in Daniel's bed, lent me Camus' The Plague to read. It sort of sits adjacent to a long list of books I'm trying to get through at the moment - it should be last but I keep slipping a bit of it in each time I sit at this damnable machine. I couldn't imagine reading it at all when he first produced it, but I'll be damned if the child didn't push a button with his infernal text. The image of the old man who lures the street cats with shreds of paper dropped from his window to the ground below, just so he can spit on them with vile glee, is a particular favourite.

I am currently writing the summers of my childhood. It's going quite well thank you. There are trees and fields and bullying cousins and a whole section of the early 1950's that occured for the first time in the mid 80's that I honestly lived through. Seriously, ask me sometime; Enid Blyton may be my creator. Needless to say the devil is there too. I'll nurse my obsessions, you nurse yours.

My life is that of the man who knew if he took one more sick day from work, his boss would chuck him out on his ear, but the sun was low and the air was sticky and the only oasis of cool was in his own house, because he never opened the curtains and dark'll do that for ya if you tend it well enough. So he phoned in fired and opened the curtains a crack, to sit by the front window and smoke and peer through the venetians and appreciate, from the safety of the indoor arena, that it was a damn fine day out there.

Interpret as you see fit. Was I a man who dreamt he was a blog or a dream who blogged he was a man?

G'Night.

2003-03-31T22:07:00.000Z

Pop quiz - Geek lyrics in popular music (however obscure). Interpret as you see fit.

Mine is,

'One day I will find the secret, to your social chemistry.
Then I'll print it on a T-shirt and it'll make you want to be with me.'

Bare Naked Ladies, Some Fantastic

Who's got one?

2003-03-30T19:03:00.000Z

Life, in passing:
Danny discovered a couple of days ago that he can say dada, so he chooses to do so all day. He and the Kat celebrated their first Mother's day together with his first trip to the zoo. Small species of monkey rock. I now weigh 14st 11 and have had to buy all new clothes. A dear friend who slipped into the neverwhere outside of 'life with the baby' reappeared by chance in the street. He's been ill, emotionally, and we never even checked up on him. He was one of a number of mates we affectionately referred to as our 'kids'. We're very heartsore and sorry about this. He comes to dinner tomorrow so we can start to make amends. Look to't, gentle reader, where seats lie empty round your table that once were taken.
Life, in passing, is all about regaining ground with a vengence before it's passed.

The written words are stacking slowly but sure, line on line, row on row. Thank the fates for the insightful Mr. Honan - if it were easy everybody would be doing it.

2003-03-28T19:36:00.000Z

Heaven's empty now
So's Hell, it's said
Devils stalk where Angels fear to tread
Angels bide while
Devils hide in well lit places
Devils still have Angels' faces

2003-03-26T00:50:00.000Z

I cannot walk barefoot on the sand.
A lifetime of cold grass to bear my weight,
Which cannot bear the burning dust.
These issued boots are damp within, with fear and fatigue,
But at least they're not dry.

I cannot breathe the air; couldn't even if I weren't under orders not to.
I breathe my own sweat and spit, and fear and fatigue.
The air I breathe is stale, chemical - tasting of rubber and metal.
The air I breathe is ironic,
But at least it's not dry.

I cannot open my eyes to the sun, to the desert glare.
I fix my gaze on dark figures, dark skins, dark looks.
My eyes drink in the coldness they're surrendering -
Their eyes the only things around me not on fire.
My eyes are burning, with fear and fatigue,
But at least they're not dry.

2003-03-17T19:34:00.000Z

???

...

???
I'm screwed. Until after QCon.
Why?
The Kat says she's going.

No, wait. Let me get this in order.

Didn't we have a lovely day, the day we went to Bangor?

Me, the Kat and the Little Man went to sunny seaside Bangor for the day - it being St. Pat's and a fine pre-summer sun-day - to show the baby the boats, to take in the salty air and for the opportunity to hit Replay, the province's premier game store (and only; though it's still the best on the island as far as I can see).

The Kat, unusually, was actually the driving force behind this particular retail component to out excursion; unusually, because she would usually prefer to drive metal spikes through her toenails than hang about for more than a microsecond in a 'silly/games/boy's' shop. This is not to give the impression that she is anti-gaming - as you all know from previous postings, she is in fact a gamer, although firmly in the closet. To date. But, she had this guilt thing about her getting lots of stuff recently and poor old Damien not so she wanted to take me to this shop and buy me some nice boy things. So we went. And somewhere between going in and coming out, then going back in, buying more stuff and coming out again, my wife was switched. One minute she was pushing the baby about at the back of the store disinterestedly, apart from enthusiastic urgings to 'buy anything! Anything! As much as you like!' Then I look down, lift a copy of Call of Cthulhu d20 and the second volume of Keepers Companion, look back up and she's abandonned ministrations to the baby in favour of showing me T-Shirts. White Wolf tees: one for Hunter: The Reckoning (her fave WoD game) and another for Mummy: The Ressurection (mine). And she's buying them, for herself primarily she tells me, 'to wear at a con.'

I do not rise to the bait. I go back to perusing the gaming goods that are the real focus of my attention, but all too soon I'm interrupted again.

'Why don't you get these?' She's looking at the new boxed edition of Dark Ages Vampire, which I've never played and have not really considered in the past. I make non-committal mumblings and show little interest and think the topic has passed. We head to the counter and she pays for her two tees and my two books. We head out of the shop. We stop; I'm moping about wanting half the stock inside.

'Buy the Dark Ages Vampire.'
'No.'
'I'll buy it, then. For myself. I'm going to run it. For you.'

...

'Pardon?'
'I could get Dark Ages Vampire, learn it, you could learn it with me, run it for me untilI get the gist, then I could run it for you.'

...

???

...

So I bought DAV. We went to the Marina and she read me the Legend of Caine as if it were some dark legacy left to us by a distant, long dead relative, a secret passed down to us to share and keep and pass on ourselves one day.

...

Tonight she comes down in her Hunter tee like the Kat who got the cream by strangling the cow and slicing it open with her claws. And she says...

She's going to QCon. (She hates cons)
She's going to game. (She had always refused to game with strangers)
She's considering the Vampire and Cthulhu competitions. (Competitions? Competitions?)
And she wants to learn to GM. (I come from a world very similar to yours...)

No LARPs or CCGs. She's very much a traditionalist.

She wants us to get her mum to take the baby for the weekend so we can... ...go to parties.

QCon parties.

With gamers.

This is one of those episodes of Sliders where they think - Fuck getting home, this parallel is better!

But now I'm screwed, because I can't go to sleep, in case I wake up.
At least until after QCon.

2003-03-15T18:23:00.000Z

Hypnoval. Insidious mind-altering substance. The anti-fear serum.

I have a terrible, crippling dentist anxiety (not a phobia). Bad experiences and bad headology have combined to leave me unable to remain with any one practitioner for more than a few sessions before all confidence is gone and I must press on to the next sadistic jaw mangler, only to have the damage of the former further compounded by the latter.

This journey so continued until two dentists ago, one M. McElholm decided that a course of poorly understood meditative techniques would afford her a platform of trust from which to launch a truly insane engineering project on one bad tooth. I had a bad tooth. I went to her to have it removed as quickly as possible before I could think too much about it. But just being in the room was making me shake so much I couldn't get the breath to speak so she took me into a meditation suite, please!, made me lie on the floor and then used my fear to talk me out of the extraction and into the hugely more expensive reconstruction of said bad tooth. Because every one of them is fucking evil, that's why. Flawed and painful (with double anaesthetic) reconstruction led on to 'high spot' reshaping and polishing (also painful under anaesthetic) which later progressed to removal of the expensive filling (at further cost to me) and root canal work (there is no more woeful suffering) to re-establish a sound foundation for the Reconstruction Mk II: Das Cybertooth - more metal than man.

Which shattered under its own insane mass.

Near destitute and mentally in pieces I ended up at the pain clinic of the City hospital, begging them to remove the bally lot but also hystrionic with fear at the prospect that they might just do that very thing. They wouldn't - I was to unstable. I had to get a referral from McElholm to my current dentist, whose approach to me is to remain silent while I have my spaz, and then try again when I've exhausted my panic button finger with over-pressing. It's not a bad tactic. But even she could not tackle the magled mess of the much-kryptonited Tooth of Steel!

So for months I've been left with this gaping hole in my head, a few jagged pillars of dull metal and blast blackened bone reaching out of it, waiting for a referral to an oral surgeon. Oral surgeon. The new black of modern torture.

I finally had my appointment yesterday morning. The clinic was select and looked it, no 'useful' informative Public Health posters about tooth decay and mouth cancer here, oh no. Here were well appointed furnishings and wood flooring, art prints and throw rugs and recessed lighting, frosted glass. The magazines were current, and popular. They called me by my first name, not Mr. Kelly.

I had an X-ray of my whole skull taken - the single most sci-fi moment of my life. You stand in a circle not unlike the transport spot from an episode of Next Gen, then these two convex panels swing out and around your head for a few seconds and your internal support structure pops up instantaneously on the computer screen in front of you.

Trust us Damien, we are of an advanced race of Dental Ancients, committed to treating you with Enlightened Molar Morality...

When the surgeon came down he was warm and friendly and immediately showed me the letter he'd had about me, pointing out the bold text 'extreme anxiety'. He knew I was afraid. He was going to explain everything to me in advance. He wasn't going to proceed if I didn't want him to, even this late in the day. He wouldn't pressure me. He would stop. He was my friend.

He would sedate me.

I wouldn't be asleep, but I'd be mostly asleep.
Huh? Isn't that a bit contradict-
I wouldn't be aware of what was happening, let's say. It'd be like having ten vodkas - I'd like ten vodkas wouldn't I? He'd certainly like ten vodkas.
...
You can't smell vodka on the breath, or through a mask.

How long will the sedation last?
It would be out of my system in about ten or fifteen minutes, he'd be finished in 5. If I was feeling up to it after a while in their relaxing recovery suite, I could even walk home. None of the stuff would remain in my system.
Very straight forward.
Lie back.
Little scratch.

No more Damien.

The Kat woke me, coming into the bedroom with shopping. She and her sister had headed down town with the baby to give me peace to get some rest. She assured me I looked much better, less stressed. Was my mouth sore?

What the hell?

Where was the recovery suite? The dentist? The walk home?
The swirly-black-spielbergian special effect that denoted the subspace anamoly generated by the experimental prototype x-ray scanner that had catapulted me hours forward in time?

Hypnoval.

I'd had the injection. I remembered this.
With hindsight - No, without hindsight, it must have acted fast. Very fast.

And yet some time later I convinced this man - while still visibly trollied on oblivi-juice , at least to the Kat's eyes - that the stuff had had no effect and I needed another shot. Which he gave me, while I proceeded to beat at him for 'put pain stick into Damo. BAD!'

I remained awake, apparently, through the slightly brutal if uber-speedy extraction, complaining only once of some discomfort as he had to snap my roots apart to get them free of my gum. I then spent three-quarters of an hour in the recovery suite, where I was able to confidently answer queries as to where I was and who my wife was with 'DENTIST' and '?...Nurse?' respectively. I apparently hung about downstairs while the Kat paid the bill. I walked, but only as far as a taxi. I presume I behaved myself as we drove home; no stories from this section of my adventure have been forthcoming. We got home and I was ushered upstairs before I could afflict myself on my sister-in-law or infant son. As she put me to bed, I assured the Kat that I'd have dinner ready for them all by the time they returned from shopping. Then I went to sleep.

I don't remember a single moment of any of it. Hypnoval's particular contribution to pain relief is to make you forget. It's an amnesiac. I am genuinely freaked by this.

On one hand I had been terrified by the prospect of sedation that did not require unconsciousness - I had scenarios running in my head where I'm still awake and feeling it all, but too physically weakened and disoriented to alert anyone. Relieved that this was not the reality of the drug, I must also admit to the genuine emancipation that a wiped memory of what must have been an upsetting procedure has given me. Relief piled upon relief piled upon relief. I've un-aged 5 years in the space of twenty-four hours. And yet, I've had my memory wiped. And before any of you point at instances of drunkeness and the like - that never happens to me. For all the benefits and doped-up hilarity afforded, it's genuinely creepy. Not even flashes, stray images, vague sensory remnants. Nothing. Walking, talking, seeing, hearing, people, places and pain; all gone. Erased by chemical means.

You know when you get used to a thing in fiction so that even though you might suspect, or even be explicitly aware, that it or its equivalent exist in reality, you never imagine you'll ever need worry about being exposed to it?

Hypnoval. I mean the bloody name...

2003-03-11T00:37:00.000Z

In Dublin, at the weekend, Nick took me to the streets you wouldn't want to live on; Jobstown, Ballymun, the Liberties. I snapped them all up, took slices from cakes already bitten away to crumbs. You should have seen me in Ballymun - we pulled up outside this block of flats and I photographed the outside. From inside the car Nick asked me if there was anything else I wanted to get a picture of. I looked into the shadows of an entrance into the column which housed the wide and lowered staircases up the front and desperately wanted to go down into in and take a shot from within looking out. But I was afraid of the children. They weren't even near us, they picked their precarious way, carrying their bikes over the discarded piping and scaffolding tubes that lay about the building sites that would one day yield up more 'modern affordable housing' - as the title of the contracting company proclaimed it to be. I got back in the car. In Jobstown we saw a school built entirelty of giant green cubes, all in varying shades of radioactive death. We passed a handful of chickens tailing a rooster under the wheels of a lorry. For all the promises I only saw one horse. And it was in a proper field an' all. I noticed how flat faced most buildings in the city are; sheer cliffs of redbrick to the front, sloping only to the back. Confrontational looking. Raw for their uniform flatness, as if they'd been dug that way by the scree-filled passing glaciers that had carved out the cold streets. Dublin still seems such a cold city to me. I don't like it for itself.

It was good to see people, though. I hope I told them so. I said a great deal and little of nothing. I played the saviour - which is my favourite role - and the jaded clown with tiresome ease. I also said some things to you individually and you all that I am - in the light of sobriety - perfectly pleased about. You will be great, and I'll have known. You are worth saving. You're even worth the embarrassment.

Implicitly.

That said, alcohol sucks and costs way too many Weight Watchers points. I was down 15st 3 when I arrived in Dublin, and I'm still 15st 3 today. I should be less. I hold you personally responsible.

I missed Daniel properly for the first time. I made a very big deal of his good mood when I finally got home. The Kat made a big deal of me and I made a big deal of her. We almost had pizza, but didn't.

This is far more of a diary entry than I usually like to post. The weekend needed marking; with any luck it's sowed the seeds of a renewed vigour in my writing. I was in need of the contributions of little things; a different view to the one from my window, different coins, different accents, different sofa against a different wall. Not major changes and no lengthy partings - just those five minutes out the back alley where you send the livewire to cool their heels. I needed to see broken things, broken places. It spoke to ghosts I'd not yet perceived but could feel on the periphery of awareness, and it settled them, for whatever reason.

Thanks to all for a great weekend. Although, next time I'd like to stay in Cafe En Seine longer.

2003-03-07T00:05:00.000Z

I know I only seem to come here to whine, but the whine makes the words come. It's the whine of an engine that may yet go somewhere. Which is an explanation and aspiring apology.

2003-03-07T00:00:00.000Z

Sometimes I wish I could draw, or play music. We should trade in our passions of novel and novelty for ones where the perfection of expression is predetermined; where aspiration can see its goal - however remote. I think there must be great solace in the knowledge that, even if the finished article isn't all that attractive, the sweep of each inscribed curve was found with relaxed ease, or that each disparate note was described in the appropriate tone for the appropriate duration. I want to be happy with playing the same tune over and over. I want to draw familiar faces again and again, copies of copies of copies and feel more and more accomplished each time. Of course I'm reducing the depth of their arts - I don't understand them because I have no passion for them. 'I think it meet I set it down that one may smile and smile and be a bloody, damned villain.' Words. Smiling, bastard words.
Right now, I wish I could write.

2003-03-02T16:39:00.000Z

Success is relative: it is what we can make of the mess we made of things.
T.S. Eliot

Unsure I plod, and in plodding I become more sure footed. Dubio ergo plod, plod ergo sum.

On a sunlit Sunday such as this, baby sleeping, the Kat in full kitchen mama mode and my book and computer crutch-like on either side of me, it's hard to be downhearted. Emily Dickinson was once misquoted but fairly approximated as saying that the nectar of success is sweetest only in the direst need, appreciated only by those who have yet to achieve it. I'm misquoting, but it's a fair approximation. I do not, on sunlit Sundays, need to succeed in finding voices for my stories; such a need needs a Monday.

:)

Style has always been the middle child of my affections, but having so long prided in it's elder Plot and roundly spoilt it's younger Adventure, I am now forced to admit that it is estrangement from this meso-progeny that cuts the deepest. My stories project behind my eyes as quite un-silent movies, playing late shows on a TV with the volume turned down and the remote missing. And though I lip read as best I can - and even get all the words right sometimes - without the properly cast voices delivering the lines the impact is nil. Such is the overall poverty in a paucity of style. Subject matter is external to the man, someone else once wrote, style is the man. Oscar Wilde called it the 'signature in anonymity'. Sorta. Or actually didn't. He rambled on the point - my wording gains from brevity.

The quest, then, is for a voice. A natural voice, which is what I honestly lack; I wouldn't be speaking in these other voices if I had one of my own right now. Blaise Pascal wrote, 'When we see a natural style, we are quite surprised and delighted, for we expected to see an author and we find a man.'

Oh the temptation, with such fine automobiles all slowing obligingly to enquire, to accept a lift. But I plod, for what more natural progression can there be than in the one nature fitted us with?

(And failing that, Plan B of blatantly ripping off the comments made by my mates in a bar next weekend is prepped and ready to go.)

2003-03-01T01:53:00.000Z

You know that thing about the infinite troop of monkeys and the works of Shakespeare? I think the inside of my head's like that.

Though I have silence here tonight and space and will, the promising beginnings of my day's work snatched this morning refuse to pay out any further in the wee small hours. I have a group dialogue I want to add but the conversation won't sparkle. I'm thinking of actually trying to orchestrate the conversation with a group of friends sometime and see if the scene can't be pIagiarised from beer mat notes and vodka memories. I don't have writer's block, per se; I have this awful gaggle of goose-necked ideas blocking my narrow pathway, all essentially short legged birds, full of spite, trying to be that bit taller than each other and hinting that if I could just pluck them all and stuff the down into the story, I'd have pillow full of genius to sleep on. And I'd get a rest. But they won't be plucked and geese don't fly solo and while they have plenty of bite, they have no teeth between them. Fuck you Mother Goose, you're a wildly inappropraite symbol of storytelling.

See how many metaphors I have to go through in the average moment?

An infinite number of monkeys can produce the works of Shakespeare. My finite plethora of geese can only serve to nip me in the ass.
I'm off to bed.

2003-02-27T22:11:00.000Z

I once had occassion to do a week's detention during the summer holidays, between my third and fourth years at school.

Without going into details I wrote something during a history class that was other than the summary notes I was supposed to be taking. I was doing it to impress lads in the same row as me. It did. One of them laughed.

My history teacher came over and took my notebook. Due process later my father was on his way in and my form mistress was looking at me and waiting for me to say something. I had nothing to say. She was repeating the phrase 'As if butter wouldn't melt' over and over; to this day I can't hear that phrase without my mouth going dry. Some days later I'd let Shaun F_ lead me into the boarders wing so I could beat the guy who laughed over the back with my clasped fists. My one and only victim ever, if you don't count my brother and frankly I've listened to him bitch about how I left him with palour of the optic disk so often my guilt in the matter has long since atrophied - much like his optic nerve BOOM BOOM! Anyway, I greatly doubt you're reading this, but if you are Colm Richardson, I'm sorry.

Having little else worthwhile to say about the 25 days since I last blogged, I thought I'd draw on my experience of being uncomfortably silent and do some spontaneous good with it. If the universe would like to credit me with a bit of karma for the act, I could use a hand with the whole elegant phrase deficit thing - I'm proving less effusive than I was in history class.

Oh, Sadhbh - muchos congrats on the prize to Portugal. The Kat is taking me to Mexico for a week. 5 star, all inclusive. We're also having a stop over in London beforehand.

Yes, I am this petty and childish.

This is why those with nothing good to say should shut up.

2003-02-02T02:05:00.000Z

Madeline hears the Bohemians say she's restless and crazy; which isn't so far from the truth. She's the essence of youth, the flower you place on eternity's grave. The romantic who isn't afraid of the beat of her heart - she raises a glass to your art, and when she gets drunk she says,

Oh! Give me the ocean. Give me the sea. Gather up everything I even wanted and give it me, please.
Give me the ocean. Give me the sea.
Gather up everything I ever wanted and share it with me.

Share it with me - All About Eve.

Jules, whom I don't know but you might know and who likes the theatre for the cheap and shadowed seating (and that's almost all that I know about her) makes an amphitheatre of my blog this evening by slipping daylight over my show and going Greek chorus on me. Hey Jules.

She wrote me that she reads this stuff sometimes and thinks I'm making too much effort to escape somewhere when I write, when there's a world of story in my intimate experience; a language of emotional events that I'm already fluent in and could touch people with if I'd only speak the tongue I was brought up in. I've been thinking about it, almost to the exclusion of aught else, for an hour now. And I don't have an answer for you Jules, but I'm still grateful for the question. I thought I'd say that here, since I'm a man of theatre by nature, rather than mail you directly. I hope you don't mind being dragged on stage for a while. It serves to re-invigorate the thrill of spying every once in a while, to highlight the risks of getting caught. Everybody point an insubstantial finger at Jules for me please.

All I can say is - there's a point beyond which a person who believes in a design for life must question whether simply trusting to that design is enough to maintain its integrity. It becomes necessary not simply to love but to know why you are loving and what good love does you. Loving anyone is easy and loving everyone is easier, but taking a very few people and loving each of them for a bloody good reason is hard. We do not touch each others' lives simply to avoid being alone, we do so to ride the coat tails of the infinite. I could write of my feelings for my loved ones for a year and a day without pause and it still wouldn't make you into me. But if I can catch hold of the hem of infinity and pull a thread back to my own life from there, you might very well get to see a whole lot more of me than you read in here and in a fraction of the connection time. We look at the sky and it dwarfs us, we let the tiding of stars pull us loose from our moorings and we despair - few of us think to turn to watch the eyes of our companions as they are looking above and see the same sea of stars, itself dwarfed therein. The things that bind us to one another are very important to me; it's just that I think it takes demystifying the universe, highlighting their comparative greatness to drive that importance home.

I think my big questions are also intimate, indeed I think answering them is necessary to let the intimate connections persist. So if I seem distant, Jules, I apologise; it's not that I don't like the people. I'm actually trying to get a view of everyone at once.

2003-01-30T02:12:00.000Z

Okay, bad enough to bang on in one post, stretching it over two is criminal but...

It's about motives. It's that notion that fiction has to make more sense than life that is driving me mad; and probably by inference that life should make more sense through the act of remaking it. Take Neil Gaiman.

As I said recently I'm really enjoying American Gods, and I really enjoy all the stuff of him I've seen to date. At the weekend the Kat bought me The Last Temptation as a treat and I spent a happy hour gorging myself on the gorgeous art, the slick dialogue and the tongue in cheek Alice Cooper lyrics. But, those things aside, there remains in it, as in everything of his that I've read, a question of motive. Gaiman never seems to worry as to why his characters would enter into the dramas that he weaves about them. They seem to stumble into hell; which is possible, but not without at least noticing it's getting warmer on the path downwards. There is a lot of Why? left hanging in a Gaiman story; not, as you would imagine, in the pursuit of the resolution but in the first principles of his stories. And it absolutely grates on me. Explicitly, he creates characters who stretch the reader's belief too far in expecting them to accept that anyone would just go with the flow of events that are unfolding. And I hate that. It's not quirky; it doesn't speak to a world so removed from our own that one cannot be expected to have a reasonable response to it. It reeks of 'say for argument's sake,' but without the argument. I know it sounds finicky, but it genuinely undermines the emotions you're supposed to feel for these characters. It undermines their solidity.

Which is why I'm beating my head against a wall with infinity; because I have to know that I can grasp what it means for the universe to be infinite so I can make one character - whose vista is from the advantage of First Cause - believable, and what it means for it to be finite so I can, conversely, do the same for another character. Grasp it enough to see how one could believe it enough that one could act on it. That I can let them walk into that argument and feel confident I understand why they are there.

The easy answer is that I shouldn't be trying to write characters who are so much more intelligent than I am.
But then a crowd of sheep worrying fundamentalists wrote the Bible and it never seemed to bothered them.

2003-01-30T01:26:00.000Z

I've been away. Trips outside the head and back in again, a card shuffled top deck to mid, to bottom and then palmed to pocket and sleeve and back on top again to surprise and delight. Aren't you delighted?

I've been wrestling with infinity, which is the kind of battle that can take ages. It rages yet. Cosmology is a topic which, when taken seriously, can prove damaging to one's mental health. I have often worried about the future (I'm the type which is A type) but only up to the point where I dust out. Then Danny comes into my life and the future stretches into his dust and his children's dust and more dust and more dust and so on. (Up to a point - my great great great grandchildren can take care of their fucking selves already, freeloaders!) But these stories have proved my undoing, as is ever the case with me. This is not the first time I've tried to write something that questions the Prelude to the First Cause. Perversely it's the very fact that I am so remote from both the beginning and the end of the universe, and their inherent cataclysms, that makes me despair about the whole thing so completely. And because I haven't the merest grain of expertise in matters quantum, mechanical, astro or physical (apart from being a great little mover, grrr baby yeah!) and will never be in a position to fathom the piss-poor explanations of the pertinent academics my despair is destined to be endless. Infinite. Unless you believe the universe is finite. Which I'm not sure about.

I'm currently making my way through Everything Forever, which is pretty good; easier to follow than most of the other sites I've trawled lately. Those with an interest in time travel should especially peruse.

Not least for all this and other reasons my written output has been spartan. Juggling junior is still proving a difficult task; concentration is still hard to maintain even when he's not demanding attention and wrestling with these research issues means that I'm churning out loads of notes but very little fiction by comparison. And it's so unnecessary! I can freely admit that I can't understand the half of the physics I'm spending so much time reading, so why do I waste so much time thinking somehow the jist will just gel - like learning to play the piano by hitting the keys often enough and not worrying about the notes I'm hearning?

(Interestingly, this was not so far removed from how my piano teacher introduced me to playing the piano: following a technique employed in Japan, where the pupil to piano ratio is dreadfully high and children learn to play first on painted boards, learning their fingering and scales as motor routines long before they ever get to touch an instrument and hear the actual notes. Needless to say, I cannot play the piano at all.)

Thing is, I don't need to understand the physics; it's not a story about physics. It's a story about infinity, which is more than physics, is outside physics. Is more than mathematics and faith combined. It's something you either buy into because it's within your means to or you don't. And yet...

Ignorance is a curse. And the old adage about staying silent and only being thought ignorant rather than speaking and removing all doubt is all well and good, but what if you're the kind of person who desperately doesn't want to be exposed as ignorant but can't shut up either?

How do other people just plough into their works? How can they just coast?
I feel like I'm making excuses a bit; wasn't I the one who said overcooking the plot would kill the final article? This is overcooking - and books burn easy.

The universe is infinite, but your patience is finite, so the story and I are progressing just fine and this is

Fin.

2003-01-20T01:44:00.000Z

Ping!

Back on radar Eamon.

Yes, spry but somewhat tardy I finally show up for an update. Well, the week was a bitch, and my optimistic assessment of the amount of work I'd put out proved a gross over-estimate. Danny and I spent most of the week playing face-to-face to keep him happy, with the few bouts of sleep he was willing to resign himself to taken up with getting dressed or keeping on top of his endless supplies of dirty washing or acts of very uncivilised eating. I have churned out some stuff, but it's very rough and so riddled with notes and speculations, that reading it takes twice the time it took to put it down to begin with. But it's coherent to me and that's all that matters. Additionally, the universe has decided to wade in on my side for next week and, with the Kat pulling with it by demanding I leave all housework worries to the weekend, I feel confident about a better showing in the second round. While pre-ordering Potter 5 I discovered that an obscure kabbalistic text which plays a large part in the background to one of my main characters has just been published in its first complete, although flawed, english translation; and Amazon tell me they put my copy in the post yesterday. So much yay! Queen's library holds a rare copy, printed in Germany before WWII, in their special collection which sparked the whole idea years ago. I spent ages waiting to get a session in their little locked room with it, but as it is in hebrew I couldn't do much with it except enjoy the artistry of the amulets and angelic writings. So I'm really looking forward to picking this edition apart for the dark meat I can use in my story. I'm sure it'll be far from what the purists would accept as a decent translation, but since I want it for popularist fiction it'll do me just dandy. My chin is still up, therefore, though I won't be promising huge volumes of work come the weekend while Danny's schedule remains as demanding as it is right now. In time he'll be able to amuse himself on his own more; things'll get easier. At least until he can walk. Plus I get the weekends to do what I want which is cool too.

I do need to brush up on my kabballah (aka kabbollocks) again this week, which sucks as it's wantonly - Nay! - criminally esoteric raving monster looney gibberish. I also need to resolve the moral implications of an infinite God - and an infinite universe by inference - before I can write about the motivations of the 'good guys'. I also need to work in more guns and sex. And kitties. Satanic kitties.

Reading Gaiman's American God's, at long last. I really like it. The dialogue is almost perfect, as is the pacing. I could very easily fanboy this man, if such a state of being were not so much effort for so little reward. I'm very into reward.

Also trying to decide on a holiday location for well earned break from baby for me and the Kat. Where get's good sun in March? No African suggestions, please, we've done Africa to death.

2003-01-12T22:47:00.000Z

That Soon.

The day before the day before we all went back to school,
We planned our final hours with solemn piety.
We'd greet the dawn that day, as we had never done the summer long,
And honour the end of Holy Days with variety.

But when the morning came into our eyes it was already yellow aged.
A million chores bespoilt the time the more, 'til it was noon
And we'd only half the battles won. Filthy Autumn forces finally won the war
And the Summer really was all over. That soon.

Katrina goes back to work tomorrow. She's beside me now, singing 'A man's best friend is his duck' to Danny and waiting for me to finish typing and make her some supper so she can get an early night. She's not looking forward to it. Neither am I. Neither would Danny be, if he could spare the time to think about it. So much drool, so little time.

We'll be fine - but the golden days are over. We were convinced that we'd kill each other. 18 weeks in each other's company almost 24/7? With an infant screaming? Definitely not enough oxygen for two...But it's been the most enjoyable time we've ever spent together; novel stresses of parenting notwithstanding. Maybe it was the trench solidarity or the desperate need for adult company when all our friends disappeared, who can tell? It was very cool though. A unique opportunity in our relationship. It'll be a long time coming round again, I know that. I'll miss it.

But the new era begins manana AM. Danny conveniently takes a long nap in the middle of the day, anywhere between 2 and 3 hours, and that's going to be my main work time. I'm feeling pretty confident that I can get more done in that time than anyone would think. You'll hear either way tomorrow evening. Wish me luck.

I have a bunch of new ideas, which is always encouraging; if you set nothing down in a day but tail ends and scrap paper work then it's not been a waste in my experience. And of course I begin with my ethos of loose discipline, at least in the early stages, which stops me trampling my spirit when the first few pages come fumblesome; as they inevitably will.

There goes the Kat to bed, too tired for supper, telling me I'll be brilliant. How much is tomorrow gonna suck?

Just me and the wee lad here now; typing one handed is hard enough without the Prince of Squirms to contend with. Apologies in advance if this ends abruptly or continues with half the words misspelt or insensible - how useful to finally have an infant to explain away what - until now - could only have been attributed to chronic lethologica; a very poor trait in an aspiring...um...shit! whatchamacall'em? blokes what do stories...

Also expecting Holden tomorrow afternoon for a script meeting for our film Tooth. Looking forward to that. Film is so fucking easy these days - everyone should be making films. Games cons should do trailers, with celebrity guest endorsements. That'd reel 'em in, guys.

Danny is getting really tired, so I should put him down. Thumb wedged firmly in his cheek, he growls at me in tones of malice and I know the jig is finally up. I always hope these things will have more content, to belie somehow the very little it takes to take up my days. But there you go: Slim pickings is all I have at the moment. Keats wrote,
'A hermit young, I'll live in mossy cave, Where thou alone shalt come to me, and lave Thy spirit in the wonders I shall tell.'
Good thing he died at 26. At 28 I'll be damned if I'm sparing any of my hard won wonders just so you lot can have a wash.

I'll give you instead what little solid wisdom the day gave freely to me - You could get a nasty suck, if you muck about with a duck.

G'night.

2003-01-08T00:40:00.000Z

Okay, I do all the internet quizzes, but never reveal the results. But I want this one so, in the best fashion of symbol magic everywhere, I am:

I Am

Which tarot card are you?

I shall dispence with the thaumaturgical requirement of engaging in a sex act while you look at it, but you know I'm thinking about it. Dirty little Damo.

2003-01-04T01:24:00.000Z

Hey you.

Happy 2003. I hope you all get...

Spartan offerings from me of late, apart from easy digs at Eamon ('bout ye Field Marshall!). Still wallowing in family time. The Kat returns to work on the 13th, so the new work schedule begins as of then as well. With a return to regular blogging too I shouldn't wonder.

The boy is big: http://uk.photos.yahoo.com/zealthorn/

He's a bigger handful as well, but I'm not going to let it daunt me. He sleeps at least four hours during daylight hours, and four hours a day is nothing to sniff at. Not that I'l get that to write in every day; lots of other fingers in pies this year. Will (fingers crossed - a neat trick with pies on the ends) be doing a couple of modules for the Open University soon which will eat plenty of time when the marking of papers starts in earnest. Am also making movies, finally, with my mate Holden - Tooth starts shooting in a couple of weeks. Next stop Cannes. Add to these double resolutions of losing tons of weight and getting back into regular gaming and, much like Calvin and Hobbes have found, The Days are Just Packed!

Looking over my shoulder as I type at a trailer - Gangs of New York is going to be simply ridiculous. And not in a good way.

Am in sterling form this year so far. Bloody tired - as Danny adjusts to solid food and sleeping in his own room - but happy, honest tired that leads to amiable, tussled grumpy and jovial bad temper. There is a very real distinction in my mind anyways. Self-deprecating, once kicked, is very embarrassing in hindsight.

Let me give you an example of how my concerns have changed. The Kat, having deftly deposited the baby in bed, is in the kitchen right at this moment getting me a glass of cola. No ice. Note that; it involved a lengthy exchange before the order was finally off to be filled. At first I wanted just cola, then cola with ice because I enjoy melting and sucking on the ice cubes afterwards, but then I remembered that the ice takes a great deal of the fizz out of the cola so I decided to recind the ice order. The Kat, ever helpful, offered to bring me ice separately in a glass, or dressed with a side salad on a platter, 'coz I likes side salad y'see...And all this genuinely concerned me for a good two minutes. And as I muse on it now, ice cold but ice free tumblerful dripping gaily before me and the Kat perched like one of her feline namesakes at my elbow, very bemused at this passage, I realise that I have fuck all else to worry me. No other dark thoughts crowding out the little things that otherwise colour the edges of the day. Cool, eh? The coke still isn't as fizzy as I thought it would be as it goes; could have had the ice after all.

(The Kat is not amused at that last bit.)

We take down the Christmas decorations tomorrow, I've just been informed. I've had a kick ass Christmas, which I haven't been able to say since I was a wee lad. And I didn't expect to have one this year either, spending it with the Kat's family instead of my own. But they made it more than welcoming; made me feel like one of them more than ever I did before. Plus I got some bloody excellent stuff. A John Rocha shirt, tons of Terry's chocolate oranges, American Gods, David Bowie's greatest hits, LoTR special ed., a gorgeous new watch, Billy Connolly's DVD, new CD walkman, CK Obsession (my signature pong), Simpson's Guaranteed Mad Cow Free Choc Chip Cookies, whisky chocs, CD holdall, new diary and Simpson's socks - which I am dead pleased with, 'coz unlike the rest of mankind I rarely get given socks and really could do with more. I also haven't had the opportunity to boast about my Christmas prezzies since I was a wee lad either so Yay Krimbo! - it just keeps on giving. Plus I gave good gifts too, which makes one feel extra shiny.

So, that's the update. Dunno when the next one will be in, but I check mail - or the Kat does - nearly every night now, so you never know...
More will come. I think of a number of you in particular, especially of late. I might even mail one or two of you soon. Failing that, I'll be heard here and something will give it away that I'm talking to you in particular. The Kat is purposefully refusing to be Gnomic tonight. So I may as well be.

Kaftan.

2002-12-27T23:35:00.000Z

My 10 year old brother in law wants to know if I believe in telekinesis. I told him I doubted whether there was any such thing. It depressed me terribly.

Half attended at my right ear a Canadian cult who assert that life on earth was seeded by an advanced alien culture are announcing that they've produced the first human clone. I'm smirking at them.

Will I ever be able to watch a science fiction movie will a clear conscience again?

Disturbing signs of my feet touching the ground in weary old clichéd ways, some awful Dad syndrome that urges me to Do It Myself and flick over from Buffy to catch the news. The local news at that!

Is this how Wargamers are created?

2002-12-13T20:31:00.000Z

It's Christmas eve.
My in-laws are all already abed and only the Kat and I are up, surrounded by tinsel, waiting for the baby to settle. Just us. Not even a mouse. Santa waits above, holding his breath to help lull Danny as quickly as possible. He's on a schedule.

I know what he's brought me - and before any of you say it: I've been a very good boy, actually. I'm getting a breather for Christmas. A personal pause from the sound of my own voice. A future un-yoked from my paranoia and whinging. A New Me come New Year.

Not long ago I was pizazz, but I pissed on it. Thank the bells for Christmas, that such things come back for a second chance. The Kat is tired and has a long year ahead. It's gonna be kick ass for me to be somewhat more like the pillar I used to be in the backwhen. So that's what we're getting for Christmas. Yay me!

I'm chilling the season away as of today; big pushes and effortful change is the stuff of New Year's anyways. This year's motto needs to be 'I will not sweat...'

I wrote chuff all recently. I'm reading Clive Barker's Abarat. I like it. Mostly. I saw TTT. I adored it. I cannot stomach the idea of reading the book, having finally chewed my way through the barbed mire of Fellowship, so I can't comment on the divergences from the original plot. I thought the film plot was cracker. I'd like to know why I'm wrong from someone who doesn't froth. And doesn't feel the need to name every poxy bit of landscape.

Shan't rant. 'Tisn't the Season.

Anyway, Merry Christmas boys and girls.
And Santa Clause for the children. Celebrate.

2002-12-04T04:42:00.000Z

We're home again. Actually we have been for some days now but I had nothing to say until now. To you, that is. Going back to parents for the holidays in about a fortnight, which is kinda a shame as the Xmas bells here get jinglier by the day. We bought a new tree. It's a seven foot monster that takes up half the floor space of my sitting room. It's fucking magnificent and my little boy looks like even tinier beside it. It's going to be the first truly mythic item of his childhood. I am well pleased.

Our house rings day and night with Christmas music also, of which I'm not usually a fan, but we got a nice choral CD today which is very warming to the soul and have generated compromise with Christmas fairy wife by sourcing Japanese dance music versions of well known Krimbo classics by one Osamu Kitajima. No shit; seek this guy out, it'll put a whole new shine on the holidays for you. Hehehehe!

The Kat has discovered she's a Neo-Pagan. Not entirely sure what kind of Neo-Pagan, but the specifics aren't that important it seems. I think if you could imagine the kind of Neo-Pagan Margaret Thatcher would be you might get close to the Kat's expression of same. Neo-Pagan meets Neo-Fascista, heavy on the feline familiars. A young Esme Weatherwax with Ogg sensibilities. Yeah. No more Pratchett for a while, eh Damien?

Anyway, she is sick and tired of seeing herself referenced here apparently, apart from wanting you all to know that chaos is in, and unbalance is the new black. It's chalk and chalk rather than chalk and cheese, salt and salt - down with pepper and vinegar - chocolate and chocolate and chocolate. 'Tis the season of excess and the lopping off of the even hand. All very gnomic. 'Nuff said.

How did you all fare with the NaNoWriMo thing, those who undertook it? Hope it went well and you came near to, if not passed over, the finish line in time. We in the very slow lane salute you. Maybe next year.

I'm pussy footing here, because it 3.45am and I'm not sure if I really have that much to say. The Kat, shhhhhh don't tell her I mentioned her here again, says I shouldn't be making entries if I've nothing in my head to impart, but I find it comforting. Do you remember when, as a child at school, you used to mix the poster paints together, one at a time, to see what colour you'd get next? Getting all the pretty marbled hues but not being able to leave them alone? Stirring on until you eventually got brown no matter what you did, then trying to defeat it with more and more slurps of white, in the hopes of being able to start again, but giving up over a pool of grey brown? Well, this is like that; except the marbling gets preserved. It's all brown in the end, but up close you can see the veins of yellow and red and green running through it. Later I'll pick all this apart and take the bits I like somewhere new. Everything's a resource to me these days.

The film making plans are back in place. PJ Holden, comic book artist extraordinairre, has reinvented himself as digital camera techie director guru guy and his bouncy enthusiasm has infected myself and the Kat to the point where we have agreed to throw in our lot with him and dabble in movies! It also gives us a new shared interest to explore which is always gravy. Gravy, the Daily Mirror informs me, is teen speak for 'very good.' They felt the nation should know. They're so money.

I can't sleep. I hardly slept last night - I had a Danny 'breathing' scare earlier in the evening and it haunted me all night - then had a full day's shopping today, walking round the city centre. And I'm tired, sort of. That is I'm listless and weary, but I can't muster any of that breathy heaviness it takes to get to sleep. I know when sleep isn't going to come. It's a feeling that makes me loiter at my bedroom door but not go in. I can't abide my bed when sleep won't come; it's more than uncomfortable. The duvet changes shape and stops lying flat no matter how I brush it over. What little light there is begins to clump; too bright here and too dark there, leaving me nowhere to point my face and feel at ease. All my pillows are the wrong height. The Kat's breath turns to ice and I can feel it tickling my skin with its chill, even when she's facing the other way. I'm usually up on my feet again and back downstairs within twenty minutes of lying down. Sitting on the sofa in my t-shirt and shorts, TV on but muted. Now that's replaced with the internet - which is at least a bit more productive. It does force you to have to read my drivel though, for which I apologise.

Sorry.

When the fanless, convection cooled iMac was released I wondered Why? Why risk the over-heating - which it does, I can tell you - for the sake of that little bit more silence? Tonight I get it. The fan in my machine whines worse than a freshly smacked ginger step-child. That's the white noise in hell.

If you've somewhere else to be, I don't expect this to get any more exhilirating any time soon, I assure you.

Still here?
You poor git.

The Kat's going to kill me in the morning. No bed, no insight to excuse the crime, no means to salvage the wasted 'net hours from our precious monthly stock. Going to kill me. Should the PSNI flounder while casting about for a motive...let your conscience be your guide, but remember she has a little child to support.

I really want to sneak upstairs, check his breathing and sneak back down but I have to tell myself no. I'll never get him to settle for me if I can't relax around him. It's very frustrating.

This is the end. I'm really wasting bandwidth, which I'm reliably informed is a modern crime and Oi's a good boy Oi am!
Have a good wherever whenever and I'll try to post a point anon.

'Night.

2002-11-27T00:30:00.000Z

Rewriting. Rewriting like revolution in possession of history.

Gar doesn't get it. I think I know why. I can fix the kid-speak bit, that's a good point and needs no qualification. And the whole thing needs the context of their being there added to the beginning asap. Old rules dictated I should not edit as I go and move to the next bit - maintain momentum, discipline in the ranks. Screw dat! Mercenary rule. Doesn't get it? By Hades he will...

I'm staying with my inlaws, which is a welcome set of extra hands during the day and they even do meals. Brava! On to my parents' tomorrow, which will be the same only I won't have to say thank you. And there'll be booze at my folks' as well. You have no idea what kind of depraved alco-wannabe being a new parent turns you into. I've always been a real lightweight, and would never think of having alcohol usually. But see now? Now that I feel I can't because I want to keep my head to watch him? I'd even drink cider. I would!

Anyway, all is well here. I finished Pratchett; his best ending even, but only coz I is a fuzzy old romantic. Not that I want to admit that too loudly - the Kat and Nick's idea for my dry spell was that I should start churning out 'Black Lace' novels. He's just naive, but she should know better; look where me having ideas like that got us last time! I remind her of how she did last Xmas with my parents, our first ever and we were the hosts as well, while she was laid as low as possible with morning sickness. Morning sickness that took the title 'morning' as a vague guideline only. Black Lace has now been replaced with M&S cotton and a good book - damn you Mr. Pratchett.

Remind me never to quote '2000 words' again. I could strangle that bloody Pullman! It sounds like nothing, I fully expected to be generating twice as much and allowing myself the odd day off - I need not repeat the reality. Well let this be the last of Pullman's 2000 along with all my other instruction manual approaches to writing. It's bollocks; and I get to say so because I really tried. I made the plans, I worked the plots, I took the exercises in the coursebooks. All bollocks. Writing is a guerilla activity, and as such dependant on the amount of enemy fire you're under at the time. Keep low, keep you're weapon dry and run like fuck for the thickest swathe of grasses you can see. YEEHAW!

And I wonder if I should just shut up about it all? I mean it's a well flogged horse, even in a blog about horse flogging. It's of no benefit to my vocabularly to always type the same spartan mob of words, that's for damn sure. The Kat bought me a bok of obscure words, ala Colm's mot du jour, because 'for someone who claims to be a writer, you don't know much about English.' Glare. Brood.

Syzygy.
Look it up.

Speaking of la belle damme sans merci, she wants to check her email and I'm only treading water here as it is. There's a second PC in this house, but it's in my brother-in-law's room and he's sleeping. Tomorrow is a school day after all. Damn. No matter - I'll find a corner and log the time mentally.

Rewriting. Always rewriting. Even myself.

2002-11-22T02:54:00.000Z

Spitfire tick-tock, my days dash by like they're being chased by messerschmitts.

Seven hours downtown finished off the last of the Christmas shopping, leaving only our gifts to each other still outstanding. Danny tried to charm all who stopped to stare by howling at them - perversely it worked. More graciously, though, he left the Kat and I in peace to enjoy our first proper meal out together since he was born and the caraffe of wine that accompanied it. He did wake before the end, but only to join us in our mochas - his was a latté. Seven hours well spent. Spent being the operative word.

All the same, as the day-gone-night slips into the dead hours, I don't know where it went. Like the passing of the Crow; Caw, caw, bang, fuck, I'm dead. We rise so early, we set so late and yet there's not nearly enough inbetween. How was it I could fit my life so easily into short spans before Danny came along, when I had other things to include - a job, a social life, shed loads of telly - which I don't include anymore? Am reading Pratchett's Thief of Time at the moment - could it be may days have become so particularly unproductive that it has prompted esoteric and occult forces to harvest the time I wouldn't otherwise be using so as to donate it to inventive multi-taskers feeling the pinch? So that's how those NaNoWriMo bastards are doing it!

Well I want it back, see! Had very good idea for current piece of work that I couldn't act upon last night as I bundled the struggling, wriggling, jiggling, squeaking Emperor Tiddle-I-Po to his bed. Fully intended however to set about working on this new angle today and eagerly sought a moment to do so. But when I got there, boys and girls, the cupboard was bare! I mean, throw a dog a frickin' bone here!

(Thank you for calling the universe - your call is in a queue and will be answered as soon as one of our service operators becomes available.)

Off on the grandparent trail tomorrow - a long weekend with my in-laws in Omagh and then on to my parents in Donegal until the following week. We cannot wait to share the load. We're still at that stage where the only people we even vaguely trust to watch him are our parents, so this trip is going to be one of the few genuine holidays we will get for the forseeable. This will probably cut down the number of blog posts I can make, though my father-in-law is quite the internet fiend, but there are computers at both locations and I'm damned well going to use them. This story isn't going to get away like the others did. They learned the pattern of my fledgling attempts at discipline and planning and used that knowledge to bend like the reed and escape the bonds. So I'm back to writing by brute force alone and it's bloody brilliant. I can see the sense in this NaNoWriMo theory, although the time limit is bollocks. Either tell a story or write an exposé; but you're better off accepting that you can't do both.

Sticking up an excerpt from my beginning, still very rough and missing a big chuck from the start, as indicated. Comments welcome, as ever. (Yes, Gar and Fi - I am still using too many clauses, but I recognise that now. That is, the Kat recognises it and sits there at the keyboard pointing it out until I agree to edit ruthlessly later. She has already suggested I include footnotes in my works for those who don't get my so called nuances. Charming.)

---

Daddy had finally stopped screaming and Ben was glad of it.

He could still hear the thrashing from inside the ward, but the screaming was the bit that had frightened him. His father hadn’t screamed at all when it was happening at home –only when he’d been put in the hospital bed. But he was quiet now. Ben decided that it would be okay to have another tentative look inside. He turned, his little hand still gripped in his mother’s, and strained up on his toes to see in through the window. His father’s bed was surrounded by doctors and nurses, just watching like him, but intermittently obscuring his line of sight in the process. Ben sighed in a hiss. It was very frustrating. His mother’s grip on his hand was getting tighter, starting to hurt. He tried to pull it loose, but she just grabbed lower down on his wrist and gripped tighter, hurt him all the more. He mewed uncomfortably at her, but she was only barely paying attention to him. He turned his own attention back to the glass.

There was Dad!

They’d put something in his mouth, like a rubber bone. He couldn’t scream round it. That was a good idea. The thrashing had become slower too. His whole body still slammed back into the mattress though, half torn and soaking now from the violence it had endured. It was heavier now, the fit, with a lot more force, but still slower. His father’s face was purple with the effort as his limbs twisted to get away from the rest of his body bouncing on the bed. Ben looked over and compared it to the face of the doctor nearest the bed. He seemed interested, a bit confused maybe, but not particularly upset at what he was watching. Ben decided the man looked brave, that’s what it was. He was watching bravely. Don’t worry, it’ll be over soon. Mum and I have it all arranged. He looked back to the bed but just then a nurse walked in front of the glass, blocking Ben’s view entirely. Move, you big fat moo! he willed at her, but she didn’t. Ugh! He thought for a second about banging on the glass to draw her attention and shoo her, but he reckoned his mother would snap. He laid his free hand softly on the glass and waited. He knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to just make her move; reach inside her and make her go over to that table over there and tidy some needles until it was all over. He really wanted to do that. His finger even began to trace the sigil idly; round and fat like her big fat bum. But then his mother would hit him, he was sure of it, and drag him away before anyone noticed. And he didn’t want that. He wanted to see it when the devil came. He sighed in frustration again, his trapped hand working half-heartedly against the persistent grip. He’d have to wait.

Karen felt Ben squirming again but she couldn’t lift her stare from the prone form on the bed, from her husband’s violence exposed at last for all to see. But with a twist; now he was the victim of that violence, and at its cruellest too. He had never found that kind of strength to put behind his fist before. He thrashed in the hospital bed like a man of half his age, flushed in the tattered white sheets and drenched in sweat, all the tendons in his neck distended. Maybe he’d been pulling his punches all along. God, could he have hit her any harder? Or maybe he’d just wasted no more effort in putting her down than he absolutely needed. That sounds like you, alright, you lazy fat bastard. She watched as the consultant took a syringe from a nurse and introduced its contents to the line into Colin’s twitching arm. A second dose of anti-convulsant. It wouldn’t work. The thing about a curse like this wasn’t about how much damage it caused, or how much shame; though they were vital components. No, the most important thing was the time it took. It would only be hours, but that would be enough. Even as his mind withered from the fit, the terror that it might never end would stay with him to the bitter end. When it finally took his mind away completely, it might very well seal it in a place where that terror would last forever. That was the point. Pump him as full as you like, she thought, he’s in this for the duration. But Jesus, he was strong. Strong enough to break free? Her heart skipped. Christ, is that what he’s at? Is he trying to shake free of it? No. How? She got closer to the glass, tried to get a view of his eyes. There was a way out of where she’d put him, that was the part of the deal she’d made. A way in for the angel, a means for him to claim his prize later. But Colin hadn’t the art to find it. No, only she would have been able to use it, she and –
Raziel. Raziel might be helping him, making him stronger. Oh Christ, could the devil deal both sides? She banged on the glass of the window, causing a number of the white coats – students she now saw – to look at her. Ben was doing the same suddenly and shouting ‘Move moo move!’ at one nurse in particular. Karen waved at the students and shooed them away, mouthing ‘I’m his wife’ at them. They dutifully complied. Colin’s eyes were screwed up tightly, tears leaking but not quite making it to his cheeks and down his face. Rather they just pooled in the creases around the sockets, as if trying to drown his sight. But his kicks and jerks seemed to her now to have meaningful force behind them, intent. He drove them into the mattress and pillows beneath him, just as he had done when it was her body beneath him. Was this a show for her benefit? A show of what he was going to do to her when he was free again? She felt her hand tracing sigils on the glass, had to fight her instinct to go to the doorway into his torment and make sure he wasn’t somehow waiting there. That Raziel wasn’t there. She wondered - her breathe stone cold in her throat - just how many times had Ben been sold today? It suddenly made sense. It made horrible sense. No, she chided herself, it’s just fear. An old fear that sees itself dying and lashes out. This was just the death rattle of her nightmare; she had to be strong enough to wait until she woke from it.

But he’s so strong. Please Raziel - don’t let it be him who wakes up instead.

[Scene inside the ward to come here, explaining the medical evaluation of this condition etc.]

Round a corner and down the adjoining corridor, as yet unseen by both mother and son and as oblivious to them as they to her, Max Lewis was trying to keep pace with her faithless companion and pull herself together at the same time. Her student’s white coat flapped uselessly behind her as she ran, one errant sleeve refusing to be found in her haste.

‘Wait for me you cow!’ she hissed, but Marian was already at the doorway, working on steadying her nerves. Without so much as a glance in Max’s direction, and with what little confidence she could muster in a moment the other girl heaved open the heavy ward door walked in alone, letting it close behind her with a slow, controlled hiss. Bitch! thought Max, hotly. Oh sure, he’s going to roast you now, but he’ll absolutely flay me. Bitch! Where is that fucking sleeve?! She came to a dead halt at the junction with the viewing corridor and redoubled her efforts to locate her missing sleeve. Turning on her heel, like a dog chasing her own tail and feeling all the more nauseous in the process, she was mourning the day before it had even begun. She hated morning ward rounds, especially with Professor Carver. His was not the only old boy’s club mentality amongst the faculty, but he wore his with such ease that it rubbed the female student body up worse than any, Max in particular. Where the contempt of other male consultants was worn like an open wound, Carver’s was never made so blatant. Rather he bore his stoically, without complaint. Female medics are an insult that medicine should feel keenly, his patronizing stare seemed to say, but bear with dignity. So she knew when she finally made her way in there - late and hung over from a seemingly endless line of jelly shots the night before - he’d rip her throat out at first, as readily as he did with the male students, but then he’d purposefully cut himself short. He’d silently remind himself, and everyone around him, that such things were to be expected from the female students, it was just their nature. It was somehow less than chivalrous of him to make an impossible issue of it. He wouldn’t go so far as to apologise, but his tone from then on would sound apologetic. And in that would be the real dressing down; ‘You are disappointing Miss Lewis, and in that measure you have once again failed to disappoint me.’ Bastard. Where was that bastard sleeve?

Inside out.

The thought stopped her short. Of course it was inside out. But obvious or not, the assertion stopped her panicked spinning and she began to slowly remove the sleeve she had succeeded in getting into with a view to locating the one she had not. But then she stopped again. Inside out, the thought had come to her. Not occurred to her, not been realised. Come to her, as if from outside of her. Inside out, the thought had said. But Max had not said it, even to herself. It wasn’t her voice she had heard, her internal accent well known to her. She pulled the coat away from her body completely, carefully unfolded the screwed up right sleeve and turned it out the right way. Then she put the coat on properly, took her stethoscope from the pocket and hung it round her shoulders. But she didn’t continue on to her ward round. She couldn’t move. I just had a thought that I know wasn’t mine, she told herself. It’s ridiculous, but that is absolutely what just happened. She couldn’t describe the feeling as eerie, it had been too abrupt, but she felt something like shock, only less uncomfortable. Stop this, she told herself, but she didn’t mean it. No explanations followed, her mind just sat blank for heartbeat, as if it had been slapped. And then a moment later she found the wherewithal to look around her again, to remember where she was and what she was doing. She took a couple of steps toward the ward door. A small commotion down the corridor drew her attention as she walked. A woman was dragging her child away from the ward window, shaking him vigorously to make him hurry. She shot furtive glances at Max as she did, distress lining her bruised face. She was a sight - her ill-fitting clothes and shambolic gait only adding to her miserable appearance - a sight enough to draw the stares of the nurses at their station. But it was the little boy who Max was really looking at – and he at her. He gaped at her, like she was something alien, something he’d never seen before. He resisted his mother’s attempts to remove him, but only half-heartedly; he couldn’t spare any attention from Max. For her part, Max was too distracted by him to tell her feet to stop walking. She was round the corner and at the ward door before she even realised it. She stepped back almost immediately; but they were gone. She searched the corridor for some evidence of which way they’d went, but there was no sign. Her gaze finally fell back on the nurses at their station. There were three of them; two chatting to each other while a third divided her attentions between the phone at her ear and the chart on the desk in front of her. She didn’t see Max standing there, looking lost, but the other two did. They followed her searching stare for a moment before turning back to her.
‘Do you need something, miss?’ one asked.
‘I was just looking for that woman and her child.’
They looked about again.
‘Where was she?’ asked the same nurse as the second rose to look down the corridor properly for the phantom pair.
‘The woman who was just here – bruised face, with the little boy? You were all looking at them.’
All three nurses were looking at her now, faces puzzled.
‘Sorry, dear. We didn’t see anyone.’
‘We must have missed them.’
‘Do you want me to have a look about for a woman and a little boy at the lifts?’ asked the standing nurse.
Max was silent. Then, ‘No thanks. Doesn’t matter.’
The nurses all smiled at her tolerantly then quickly forgot she existed and went back to what they were doing, the latter response being more in keeping with the relationship Max and her fellow students usually enjoyed with the nursing staff than the former. But as she turned back round the corner to finally make it into her ward round with Carver, she knew their rare helpfulness wasn’t the real oddity. The pair had been there and those nurses had seen them. They seemed to have forgotten the pair had existed as well, only a lot more efficiently. Oh for God’s sake Max, she scolded, this is what a hangover feels like, now get in there before the damn thing is over and he puts you on report. She opened the door, a dozen eyes turning almost instantly to note her arrival, Carver at the centre of them, his face registering his disdain while his eyes filled with self-satisfied laughter. But she felt the eeriness. Carver’s disparaging lecture couldn’t get a proper grip and slid over her today. She was distracted with the abiding image of the battered figure in the corridor and the little boy on the end of her arm. His memory haunted her. Because in her memory his startled lips mouthed something she was too far away to hear, but she was certain it was ‘inside out.’

---

2002-11-20T02:24:00.000Z

Time spent between the tears and the dreams is where you learn how much you love him.

He's upset because he's hungry and you know he doesn't understand, but you lose your temper with him anyway. You say things about him you'd never think to so much as utter about another person; at least if you suspected they might be in earshot. And then in due course he's distracted by the feed, gagging with the leftover sobs but gagged, blessedly, all the same. And you shut up too, with a sigh.

That's when you gag on your own relief; when you actually hear what you said, see it recorded in the other person's silent surprise. How could I say that to him, don't I love my child? And you look at him, but his eyes are closed and don't see your twisted look of remorse. You mew at him, things you think sound comforting - but they sound hollow to you.

Then a break in the feed comes - to wind him - and you sit him up straight. The gas burns and distends and he's crying again. You go out of your way not to admonish him this time, which is the surest way to bring everything you could say into sharp focus against the fatigued muddle that is the rest of your thoughts. You're so tired, again.

It's not that I don't love him, I'm just so worn out; I can't force a show of affection every minute of every day. It's not natural.
Damn right, says the nasty little fuck in your head, the way you feel about this kid just ain't natural at all.

Feed again; closer to full this time, his eyes get heavier but his own tiredness makes him crankier. There was a time, early on, when he cried without tears. It freaked us once - we'd love if it was still the case now. Feed again. Almost full. Full.

Not yet asleep, but knocked out by the bottle, he sags over your hand. His breath heaves as you wait for that final burp. And you sag too. Eyes close, heads droops - and you touch. His face against your chin.

Tonight I dimly realised that I'd not shaved in two days and my face much have been like a pin cushion against his oh so very sensitive skin. But I couldn't take him away. My other hand curling round his waist felt as right as any embrace I've ever had. Eyes still closed, I found his cheek to kiss him. And I listened to him breathe. Listened.

I don't often listen to him breathe. I listen for him breathing all the time - I wake from dreams so completely sure he's dead, that I for a long time feel no need to reach over and touch him to check, or hold my breathe to makie sure to hear his. But then I do; I hear a snatch of that rapid rush of air and then smother it with a sigh of my own, with the pummel of my heart beating. And when he's quiet, when he's asleep in the respite times - I can't waste those precious moments with romantic gestures like mooning over his sleeping form. Those times are for the Kat, whom I miss - for all the constant hours we spend together at the moment - and who misses me.

But in that moment, I listened to him breathe; full and heavy and vital. And held him against my skin; feeling the little chill to his - a trick of contrast from the lately heat of his tamtrum. Curled my hand round his waist, the tips of my fingers pressing into his full stomach to help ease it.

I love him. I love him to pieces.

He's upstairs with his mother as I write; satiated for only a little while, he woke to fresh demanding that his tired Daddy couldn't rise to. The Kat took him up so I could have ten minutes to empty my head into this passage. Into the ether go the guilt and elation alike; I need my fatigue scoured clean and uncomplicated so's I can deal with it as efficiently as possible. My days, my routines, depend on it. I have to sleep if I'm to write anything decent tomorrow; my promising start stammered and stuttered into silence today. That can't become a habit, and a fresh start again tomorrow means shedding the stresses of today.

But loving him remains. As strong as the love for her that took all these years to weave and braid and blossom and bear fruit.

Between the tears of self-doubt and the dreams of sleeping dreamlessly.

2002-11-18T00:26:00.000Z

7pm to 11pm. You can set your watch by it.

He does this thing, in defiance of the 'books'. Babies, they say, love to look at faces. Danny, conversely, is always looking away. And it's never at anything engaging either; blank walls, shadowed corners...The Kat thinks he's haunted. I think there may be a fairy nipping him. Something makes him cry. Unconsolably. From 7pm to 11pm. You can set your watch by it.

We're so tired. And we're so uptight. So he gets more uptight.
Tonight he screamed for a bottle, sucking on anything in sight 'til he got it. And then he choked on it and spat it out. And then promptly screamed for it back. And choked. And yearned and screamed until he was unconscious and the Kat was drained and pinned beneath his exhausted form. And I? I sit and do my blog. About the baby. In the respite time - in this silent sliver - my head still hears the baby.

I wrote today though. For an hour and a half. It was great. It didn't yield a long piece but it was meaningful. And good. It was really really good. Interestingly it was a scene I had written before but never made work, but it came out well this time. A three-way contribution to the same ongoing scene, seen from the points of view of a child, his mother and an unrelated character. Messy when I've tried it before, but I like what I did today. I think the brevity might even be the key. Quick shifts in the narrative from one char to the next, coming more often, rather than letting the whole scene play out for each character reads better than repetition; which is clever but knows it and makes you too aware of the medium over the message. My problem is that I too often let the word play overtake the content. Look at the 'set your watch by it' repetition above. Maybe I should have been a poet - God knows I'm a dab hand at the penniless part.

But no, I like what I did today. It bodes well for the future.
Which is where I'm headed now - it has my supper in it too.
I like supper. It bodes well for my tum.

2002-11-17T01:23:00.000Z

I confessed to stealing from the well of her wisdom.
The guru just shook her head and lamented my lack of understanding.

'The piece of wool has two ends,' she chided. 'And it must be pulled into a tighter knot before it can ever be unravelled.'
Then she patted me on the cheek and went about filling the washing machine. Bugger.

Nick came and went and was lovely in between. I paid great attention to all he said and waited for the inspiration to hit. I didn't spot it. But I'm as calm tonight, Danny fatigue notwithstanding, as I've been in a long while and have come to this blog entry without a moments pause. Maybe this is his more benificent gift. Launch and sail is the new philosophy. The Kat annouced that tomorrow will be working day for me and my words. Well, she is the guru after all.

Thinking of revisiting the gilded cup thingy and doing it in a more serious tone as a starting point. I have had a faustian thing in the back of my mind for years now and this might well be the time to step into it. It too had suffered from over plotting and too many components, but after such a long time I've lost the memory for the most of them and as long as I leave them lost it might well thrive given breath and will to move.We'll see. The gilded cup revision is a good exercise in itself even if it doesn't lead to longer - if I think of it in those terms I can fly through it and see what comes after without feeling cheated. It's all good.

It's a question of accepting a life in flux and pushing for the collapse. Consider Schroedinger's cat. Cat in box. Poison in box. Close box. The cat’s reality sits in limbo until the box is opened then it collapses into one of the two states, alive or dead.

Start again. Imagine you’re the cat. In the box. Sadistic human somewhere outside. What do you do?
Avoid the poison. Obviously. So you’re reality is continuing then; with you sidling away from the poison before temptation gets the better of your cat sized brain and instincts. So where’s the flux?

It's where it’s always been. Outside the box. Only the box is preserved from it. The collapsing reality is the one outside the box.

Though life continues outside the box as readily as it does inside the box, the cat isn’t wondering about the human. The conflict is a human one and the cat is divorced from it. So it persists in being real while the menters a state of flux. The cat is the one with the power, see? But the cat could be dead. You could be dead. So, what does that tell you? The cat is redundant. The box is what causes the flux. Because there could be anything in it. That’s the key. Objectifying the unknown.

Imagine you’re another guy, coming in after the first guy. And the first guy tells you about putting the cat in the box with the poison and the whole 'is it dead? thing', okay? So now you (guy number two) are in flux too.

But what if there’s no cat?
He lied. He made the cat up. Box is empty.
Infinite flux.

So open the box. Stop speculating. Piss or get off the pot. Don't plot. Write.

And then stop.

2002-11-16T00:32:00.000Z

I've been trying to write something all night with no success, not even a flotsom's worth to fill a space here. Daniel has been crying, the TV distracting, relatives on MSN still revelling in the novelty of our sudden arrival online. I am frustration, poised on the point of the needle but too busy dodging the dancing angels thereupon to guide the sucker into a vein. Stop, says the Kat. Take two minutes and clear your head. The words will come, they're in there. Its like a ball of wool, she says, that's tangled. Find the end and work back.

What a fine sentiment, thinks I.

Of course I promptly steal it. Sit. Type. And there you go; we have words.

I love to write. I don't think I made that clear before. I've intimated about compulsions I recall and even made it seem that writing was some final truck-stop on my highway to fulfilment, an if not here then where? sort of thing. But I should have said, first and foremost, that I love this.

But I hate having to let go to do it. I used to scoff at accomplised author's assertions that half the process of creating was letting the spill of the text determine the content and the message in its fullness. I could never trust in getting any meat to the reader by just loosing the stream of consciousness at them and hoping that somehow the salmon of wisdom got swallowed along with the rest of the pond scum. I always told myself that not one word would slip my fingers until the plot had been hooked, reeled and gutted to fine fillets ready for frying. But you have to swim, I find. This is my deep end sink or survive time.

So today's realisation (and this is what? Epiphany 25 or something by now Damien? You wanna steer clear of Damascus son - you'd starve for the want of being able to get up the road to the chip shop without a vision from Heaven) is that I should forego trying to make the stories I've been plotting within an inch of their lives come together when they're not exciting me and leave them until I feel I have words for them. Words being in short supply at the moment I want to say screw it to the pursuit of discipline and a writing work ethic and salvage what little there is for whatever swims by and catches my eye.

You have to love it to write it.

So I have no idea what will be started when I finally take to the keyboard with a will again. My mate Nick is coming to visit me tomorrow, or later today as it is now, and I have great hopes he'll push some kind of button and I'll be possessed of something. I toyed for a while with making a spectacularly ambitious late entry into the nanowrimo challenge and seeing what the 'toss them in the air and see what God keeps for himself' school of wordsmithing might yield, but that's folly. And too governed by show. No. Secret stories, I feel, are what are calling to me at the moment. Quiet, mischievous things, that play round the house, but don't wake the baby. I shall see what talking to Nick brings out from under the stairs and then I'll entertain them properly after he's gone.

Must also listen more closely in future to the Rare and Gnomic Sayings of the Kat, for she has a logic all her own that succeeds where lesser philosophies, like common sense, fail. Find the end and work back. Ingenius. Look to the outcome, and the straightest route to it would be the sensible one to take.

And the desired outcome is what? A fine sentiment, thinks I, of course.

2002-11-15T00:18:00.000Z

You can't see the scar on my palm anymore.

When my hands are warm I can just make out a redness in the centre which I know is where the burn was, but you'd have to be me to see it. The old moon has waned completely, then. All it can do is start anew from the other side.

So I'm back. So to speak. Online again at least. The wise and inscrutable Kat hopes this may constitute a break in my martyr'd isolationist mentality; a lift to the flagging spirit much humbled by the task of living with a newborn. I've been more than a little pathetic. I may dwell later - we'll see how things pan out between us again.

The writing is squarely in the bin at the moment, but with any luck this new and concerted return to the keyboard and monitor will prompt a blazing return to form as well. Many of my colleagues, if not my friends, warned me that I'd not be able to get anything done with a new baby in the house. I scoffed. I was wrong. That so many of you are bashing through the nanowrimo challenge whilst I flounder in production hell is no great spiritual salve either.

Haven't you missed my whining? My sage and savoured whining. Mmmmm.

Well pine no more. I am become the New Moon. Prepare to feel my wax!

Danny thrives - bright and immensely strong, muscled and athletic (in infant terms) as neither of his parents ever were, his chief weapon is a disarming smile that rather scuppers the righteous indignation we feel during his daily colic sessions. 7pm to 11pm especially, and you can set your watch by him usually, sees us in a constant marathon of floor pacing as he screams himself unconscious, only to rouse minutes later and begin the cycle again. Soul destroying doesn't begin to cover it. And yet when he's calm and smiling and mewing at us you'd swear we'd just been dropped on a mediterranean shore having never before seen daylight. To say that we are in thrall is no poetical fancy. Photos soon, when I get myself settled again on a new bit of Net.

Story ideas come and go; I have so many sparsely dressed first lines clogging up my machine now that I don't know what I want to say anymore. I am more than a little disillusioned with myself, and it's going to take a fair whack of textual output to put that right. I had put my computer up in my attic workspace but it has had to be brought back down to the living room if I am ever to get back into the habit of putting word after word again daily. The practicalities of even going upstairs while the baby is down below would beggar belief if not for the benefit of experience. Creative times is hard...

And yet, just getting to the end of this post is like pulling that wellington boot out of the sink hole it's in. I had forgotten how much momentum getting one of these off one's chest gives you. Riding bikes, falling off logs...you get the imagery. But I did do a little scoping of other people's logs before embarking here; reminding myself how the not-quite-dialogue between mutually admiring introspectors was metred and paced so as not to snag on the tempo. People have become more comfortable than I remember, less aware of the cameras as it were. I, as ever, am very aware of you reading this. So it's the cold entreé you're getting now - meat course to come later.

I'll tell you what it feels like, though I'm loathe to being reduced to drawing my metaphors from Star Drek - I feel like the post-Genesis'd Spock; all movie spin-off on the outside, but original series on the inside.

I did not write 2000 words today, Phillip Pullman. But I am hopeful about tomorrow. More hopeful than I've been in weeks. I got this whole post out - took a while, and it's hardly an epic, but it's coherent for the most part. And sincere, at least in conclusion.

I missed you. I'm glad to be back. Talk to you again tomorrow.

2002-08-30T11:39:00.000Z

Dad?
Yes?
You have a thing on your hand. There. Like a C.
That's a scar, love.
Did you have an accident?
No. I was visited by the moon, once. That's the mark of the waning moon.
What's waning?
Going away. And then starting again.
Oh...Wait. How could you hold the moon? It's too big.
Oh you'd be surprised what I can get into my hands. And what I can get out of them.
You're being silly, Dad.
Okay.
Are we going home soon?
Very soon. I've just a few things to finish first.
A book?
Things for a book, yes.
Can I play on the computer while you're finishing?
You can have a go on that one, I'm using this one.
Will we be long?
Not long. You'll need to switch it off when I tell you.
Will we be coming back here again sometime?
Might be.
Will there still be computers?
There will. What do you want now?
Can I go on the Internet?
If you stick to the one site. Where do you want?
WWE.
Wrestling? But you don't watch wrestling.
I do.
Where?
In our house. You be in the attic. Mum allows me.
But wrestling is crap!
No! Wrestling is brilliant! I love wrestling!
But it's not r-
What?
...It's not the kind of thing you should be doing to other people, though. Your friends or that, you know? We don't hit people.
I knoooow.
Okay. Do you need me to find the address? Oh.
I know it. I've been to this site before. Everybody has.
I see. But we're not going to be long, okay?
Okay.
And it goes off when I say.
Okay.
And I'm just here so no-
O-kay!
....Dad?
Yes?
Did you really hold the moon in your hand once?
Yes.
Was it heavy?
No, love. You barely weighed anything.

2002-08-30T11:20:00.000Z

The last day.

This is the end, my only friend, the end.

I hate the Doors. It's really trite and shallow music to my ears and his voice - well it's not to my taste. But the sentiment holds; this is the end. Of a proper era and everything. But not of the blog, I should hope; it will return at some future date. It's been 60 days since I started, not a very long time if you're a grand scheme kinda person, but long enough to be listening to me on a regular basis. So it's not an end to everything, but it is the end, nonetheless.

And I'm still looking for that killer ending. Putting the 'first line first', which I used to think so impossible, has been greatly served by this exercise. It has paid for itself in that respect alone. But I remain without that 'sit up, take notes and sit down' sign-off capability that serves as the signature at the bottom of great writing. Starting is the labour, finishing the art. I need something like JMS turning off the lights on B5 before they blow her to shit without the terrible finality, but stopping short of spoiling the Buffy death scenario with the Toonsville resurrection device and painting the whole next season in shades of blah and mope. It's a puzzler and no mistake.

The final batch of files are copying to another machine that I can blow them onto CD from. I've got to mail a pack of folks and let them know my usual mail account is now obsolete, apart from when I send the 'birth notice', and that my subsidiary account will be unattended for a fair while as well. Then I'm going to reformat this machine and be done with it. It's my final rebellious act. Mine is the only machine running a PC emulator package to talk to our PC printing server which is locked away downstairs. With it gone, and the rest of the MacOSX machines here incompatible with the software, it's gonna be one of those mild but constant annoyances that wear people down. It'll be just like I never left.

I feel like I'm treading water now. I'd better go. It's not that you haven't been great, but I have some very special people to be with and I really need to be getting about it. I'll let you all know when the new life arrives. And I'll let you all know how it's going somewhen down the line.

I'm off to be a writer. And I'm off to be a Dad.

No killer ending. And why the fuck should there be? Screw you Jim Morrison!

This isn't the end after all.

2002-08-29T15:23:00.000Z

I know these are hodge-podge postings, but I'm still leafing through old files to see what can be discarded and what can't and more trifles spill out the deeper I rifle. Like the following quote, from a lecture I gave on scientific writing. No, seriously, I did.

Respecting the Audience

The reader for whom you write is just as intelligent as you are but does not possess your store of knowledge, he is not to be offended by a recital in technical language of things known to him. He is not a student preparing for an examination & he does not want to be encumbered with technical terms. His sense of literary form & his sense of humour is probably greater than yours.

Shakespeare, Milton, Plato, Dickens, Meredith, T.H. Huxley, Darwin wrote for him. None of them are known to have talked of putting in 'popular stuff' and 'treating them to pretty bits' or alluded to matters as being 'too complicated to discuss here'.

If they were, they didn't discuss them there and that was the end of it.

-H.G. Wells

2002-08-29T15:11:00.000Z

Content Meant

I've come to feel content, the highest form of happiness,
Where peace and constancy grasp the heart with unexpected power.
Contentment, rich in content, rich in meaning, seems more or less
All the soul can take, for with it happy tears in steady showers fall.

No passing rainy season passions impress their drama on me now,
I am forever chained to misty climes, and autumn lands of joy.
Where bounteous layers of imagination, like many piled up eiderdown,
Are lain upon my companion's bed. I am the constant happy boy.

I have the winter of my joy, so quick was summer frozen out,
And I go nowhere without a heavy overcoat's embrace.
Heavy drifts slow every step, and I am left to watch my life play out;
With time enough to see the play of light on every face.

I am content.

I really never thought that I'd be satisfied
With peace and warmth and company - most certainly never time.
I ached to stop, but could not stand to wait inside.
I'd never then have had the patience to stop and find a rhyme.

Nor any content. But nowadays I am all content.
The highest art of happy here displayed. All content meant.

2002-08-29T14:01:00.000Z

Sally sat in the barley field, and ignored her mother's cries. She stared at the mice as they shuffled back and forth near her feet, wanting to go round her but fearing to. She pulled her heels in closer to her folded body, but they still didn't trust her. She was smoke to them and they knew about fire. They scampered from nowhere to nowhere in fear. She felt like that sometimes. The smell of the smoke was all through her dress and her face was striped with tear slicked sooty marks. Her hair had turned grey, like an old woman's. She wished she were old; and old woman would be excused her mistakes because she was old. She wished she could put it all back. Sally bowed her head, waiting to grow old. She didn't and wouldn't.

Her mother's screams were getting closer now - she felt she should run, but of course she couldn't. She just curled up more and then rolled to her side, lower still than the barley tops, so low she could sink into the earth. The mice ran off at the sight of her falling and she felt so alone she could cry. But she mustn't - mustn't make a sound. Her mother's feet tramped the stalks all around her, in circles, in sways, in stumbles and scrapes. Her crying was louder though, harsh and imploring. She begged and she swore. She was nasty to God. Sally curled up her fists and she wished she'd be quiet and shook. The crying was burning her ears. She wished she could put it all back.

Then her mother went quiet, suddenly, as if Sally had wished it away. One wish of three. She wished away the fire. She wished back the barn. But the smoke still came rolling in from the west, and with her mother so quiet now she could still hear the crackling and crashing and calling as the frame gave way; the men pulling it down to help smother the flames. She caught strains of her mother again - a low moan, tired and soulless. It was worse than the crying and swearing had been; it no longer drowned out her own cries from inside. I can't put it back, mama, I don't know how. I'm so sorry I can't put it back. She risked looking up, over the barley tops; barely barley, still young and green and only half-grown. In the rolls of the smoke her mother was rocking. She wasn't alone.

Sally's father had found her, had followed in silence - a scrap of charred skirt in his blistered right hand. He was crying as mother had been, but all silent, on his knees with his wife. Rocking. His whisper joined with her moan, mixing like some terrible song. She's dead love. She's dead. She's burned and she's dead. And he took her into his arms, though she wouldn't be held or comforted, and they struggled and cried like that. Sally started to cry, more silent than any could know. She wished she could put it all back - put back all the things that she'd taken away. Their smiles, their peace, their hearts. Their daughter. But she couldn't. She was smoke to them and they knew about fire.

The mice had returned, to risk entering the smoke again on their way to the mess of the barn; spilt grain and scorched vegetables, a bounty that may never come again. Sally decided to do right by the mice at least. With the wind coming in from the west, and the flames choking out at the head of the field, she let go and blew away.

2002-08-29T10:43:00.000Z

Penultimate day.

Cadbury's chocolate Buttons turned up in my lunchbox today. The Kat is gonna be a great mum. There's even a cat on the packet. 'Paws off my...' it reads playfully underneath. Smile.

An excellent night's plot-holing last night [my Big Bads of story 2, who are predictably not the Real Big Bads, finally got their agenda straight last night and cleared up my slap dash ending. I now have a very good set piece ending, as opposed to the smaller, more personal confrontation that will now come just before the end piece instead. All good] led onto a poor night's sleep, but which is the industry standard for me, and a treacle slow morning to follow. But my chocolate levels are at peak now, thanks Kat, and the day can only open up from here.

Asked how he became a writer:
In the same way that a woman becomes a prostitute.
First I did it to please myself, then I did it to please my friends, and finally I did it for money.

Ferenc Molnar as quoted in Jonathon Green's Contemporary Quotations (1982)

2002-08-28T13:51:00.000Z

Pub quiz last night. We kicked ass and took names, storming to victory with a clear six point margin. 6/6, 5/6,5/6,8/10,12/12,5/6 and 5/6 for a 46/52 event record. Nobody clapped for us when our win was announced - we are hated and feared and LEGEND!

Dog's hangover today. No headache, thank the Great Maker, but the sickly creeping fatigue o' doom. Was fine when I woke, then it wore on me steadily. Very off key today as a result.

Also scored my best ever score in Scrabble™ against the Kat last night, although she still trounced me. But she's a professional. Am considering a revised writing plan, where I carry on with the plot and just leave blanks where the big and clever words should be and then she can come afterwards and fill them in. It's bound to be ______.

[Time passes]

Took a break to clear my drawers. I'm taking surprisingly little with me - certainly much less than I had anticipated. All if it frivolous too; at the bottom of the last and least used drawer I found Tomb Raider for the playstation. I didn't even know I had it. Also a copy of the Boomer Bible. A moment of bibliomancy yields the following entry:

'PSONG 3
1. What is worse in life than losing money that you just knew you had: It isn't in the jar, or my wallet, or under the matress.
2. I feel terrible, like a man who has lost everything; it was there just yesterday, and I've already looked everywhere.
3. My heart cries out in pain: O Money, come back to me.'

Not very heartening for a man three days from losing his gainful employment. I spot another nice quote of the page facing:

'But history keeps on going,
No matter who gets hurt,
And that's the way it will keep on going,
Until the world ends.'

Close the funny book: The funny must be evaporating.

Errand to run. More anon.

2002-08-27T16:07:00.000Z

Today I have been useless.

I've not cleared the office at all. I think I want my final day to be hectic, that this will somehow make an event out of it. Who knows, maybe I'll do something tomorrow.

Left my final library book back - not the one they've overlooked, I've decided I am keeping that. Stopped in Queens' bookshop on the way back up to the office and pined over The Writer's Handbook 2003. I've barely leafed through the 2002 copy I have. Senseless want - I'll only want next years copy as well when the books are ready (fingers crossed). Aspiring authors - buy the handbook after you've got something to show for it. D'uh! It's the talismanic appeal of it; that this tome somehow generates other books simply by the judicious rubbing of the pages, like some Aladdin's lamp. I have the +2 Amulet of Authorship and someone has artificed a +3. Drool, gibber, want. Senseless. Sad.

Have spent a large part of the day seeking alternative titles for my group of adversaries in second story of three currently in the fire. They are essentually the Illuminati, only demons, but I don't want to use Illuminati. Am trying to avoid Legion, but keep coming back to it. Also considering Circle of Locusts, Circle Inprimis and The Dryhten, because Anglo Saxon is the voice of the streets. Head. Wall. Pound.

Meanwhile, story number three sits at an impasse because apart from being quite creepy it lacks enough dynamism. From departure point A there is nowhere to go but B. This is the premise I keep telling myself. My response comes back as: 'shitty premise.' Its root problem is that it's moralising. It wants to highlight the tragedy of losing someone when you're a kid, but all it does is come off as a chastisement of grief. And you can't moralise in these stories; number one crime. Children's literature is not about opinions; there are no platforms to stand on. Everything has to open to exploration and choice. They have to feel they can anchor themselves where they want, within reason. Its a bitch when you want to say plain things, though.

Home time; Kat time.
Manâna.

2002-08-26T12:06:00.000Z

The final week.

A professor came into the office today wanting a paper scanned and asked me, in a genuinely concerned way, if I 'had any plans?'

Is there no hope at all, you poor terminal bastard?

The surety that my life is over clearly pervades the building. There's a certain sense of sciamachy in trying to refute this united front of pity, so I'm not bothering. I shall go to their gallows grinning like a snake and they'll continue to not understand, right up 'til they see the No Vacancy sign pop on the gates of the hereafter.

Enough of that. My machine is pruned to the bare applications, my drawers tumbled round me as I pick through six years of accumulated detritus and ephemera. I'm looking down to my left at assorted copies of 2000AD (the Holden issues), 35mm slides of x-rays of someone's pelvis, beads of real ivory (veggies and 'vironmenters can shut up before you even start) and the usual assortment of software and memos and salary slips, pens and highlighters and post-its. I'm definitely keeping the 2000ADs and the post-its. I have a solid block of letters I faxed to the Kat while she was working in Africa for 3 months,

'I miss you. It's very weird watching TV without you. There's no one to feel embarrassed in front of when I laugh too much.'

Everywhere else is littered with photocopied papers I've half read and put aside to finish at a later date. Piles of my own half-assed understanding, like standing stone monuments to my essential ignorance in all things. I'll be dumping them then.

More post-its. Reminds me, I'm thinking of going back to Pullman's post-it plotting board idea - my snippets of events and ideas are in a total mess in my notebooks now; non sequential and incomprehensible. Have decamped my computer and what-not from the lounge to my attic office and I'm thinking the stubby, slope-topped wall beside me would make a perfect storyboard. Ingenious, what? Must steal even more post-its.

My brother flew in from London yesterday and he and my parents came to see us for evening before heading back to Letterkenny. First I'd seen of him in almost a year - he'd spent over six months in South America from last winter 'til the beginning of the summer this year. He had a zillion photos and each took ten minutes to explain. But the best one was taken at the great salt lake in Bolivia. Over 600 square miles of salt; brilliant white and featureless apart from the odd conical spike, surrounded on all sides by rock and scrub and twenty foot cacti. An almost unimaginable contrast on its own, and fairly remarkable, you'd have to admit. But then add to it, right there in the middle, an emu. A real, live, shaggy-as-shit and in colours to match emu. Someone brought the poor thing there as a chick, my brother told me, and now it can't get off. It survives, quite well as far as I could tell from its not insubstantial girth, on the offerings of the tourists who come to the lake and approach it.

I have to tell you, I looked at these panoramic shots filled with endless distances of white, mirror perfect in places - reflecting the sky like a pale inkblot - with this scraggly mound of emu so dark and incongruous and ridiculous against it, and the planet seemed just that bit more Discworld.

The world is getting more fictional, and I'm off to write it. Later.

2002-08-26T11:06:00.000Z

True story. The Kat reads in a magazine at the weekend of this little kid who has been told how 'not-nice' it is to call people stupid.
She is not to call people stupid. She is not to call things or places stupid. She is not to use the word stupid.

Then she hears the song 'Something Stupid' at the hands of Robbie and Nicole, and really likes it and wants to sing it, but being a good girl, edits and rewords it to avoid saying the bad word. So her version goes, and you need to sing it for the full effect,

'And then I go and spoil it all by saying something bugger-shit like I love you...'

I simply cannot wait to be a Dad.

2002-08-23T15:29:00.000Z

Another three blog day! S'funny, 'coz I ain't a bit bored neither. Looking back on my last triple barrel blogging it was amidst a generally industrious day also. Maybe blogging is more active than I thought.

Got past the plot hole, and was even able to rope in a reference to Egyptian microcosmology at the same time - always a welcome bonus in my book. In my book - HA! Fingers still want to keep going though - hence blog. The disjointed tone of these posts has been the by-product of on screen brainstorming, pardon if you will.

As is all too often in my writings, angels figure heavily in this one, and I'm a bit wary of how the license I take with religious icons and religious beliefs could impair the acceptance of the story afterwards. Philip Pullman may be able to include gay angels and an assault on a heaven ruled by a senile pretender in His Dark Materials, but Phillip Pullman I ain't, and this ain't no exercise in stark realism either. Neither is it meant to span the divides of readership so completely as he has done. This is a children's story.

One presumes there is a line beyond which fantasy ends and blasphemy begins for a lot of people, no matter how innocently that blasphemy is couched.

Bugger it. I know what I want to say and I know I'd let my child hear it. And above all the things I ain't - I ain't unique.

4.20pm. I could slip off early. Slip! I could walk out without a second thought's more like. The Kat is at home resting, I could be there curling in behind her for a nap before we head out to the cinema this evening. She wants The Guru, I want Reign of Fire as well. If she's well enough rested we'll see both, which is kick ass.

Alive, alive, alive. And it's the bloody weekend to boot. Out the window a dull haze hangs about the lower horizon, greying the landscape to well above the buildings across the street and over the crest of distant mountains. But further up, in stark contrast, the clouds are a dazzling white and are pooled in a wash of vivid blue sky. A new backdrop is being lowered for the next scene.

Have a good weekend all.

2002-08-23T13:30:00.000Z

Just back from long lunch with the Kat. I return to the office without even acknowledging I just pissed off when I felt like it, let alone offering an apology for it. My line manager is off on leave and I have no other superior. And I quit next week. I am a law unto myself and I like it. Those of you to whom I have explained my line of work in the past will be thinking, 'But you did practically nothing all day as it was.' Now I do absolutely nothing. Go me.

Anyways, am stuck on a plot point; something I both loathe and love in equal amounts. Does anyone else get that? When something seems like such a huge fuck-off wall and such a really cool huge fuck-off wall at the same time? I analyse these things down to the nth degree and they never seem properly resolved and I have to butt at them in frustration for days and it's such a rush. Har har har!

All in all I'm having a distinctly 'alive' day today.

2002-08-23T09:27:00.000Z

While sorting through my old files I came across this, and wanted to show it to you.

Paul Holden drew this piccie for me some years ago, as a gift for the Kat. Her name is Dr. Max Lewis, nicknamed 'Death on Two Legs', and she was the Kat's Call of Cthulhu character in an epic two and a half year (real time) campaign. Her experiences ranged from personal rollercoasters (proving herself an equal in a man's world and a peculiarly male profession, falling in love with and marrying a man she could not approve of, losing a child she never really had only to meet him through a twist in time as a man and having to watch him tortured and maimed for the sake of her own actions) through to mammoth concepts that no one should ever have to consider (finding herself the personification of death, responsible for the ending of the world, and having to help others to find a way to kill her for the sake of the universe). She has from early on been a talismanic character for me; the very avatar of endurance, resilience and invention. She is one of the ghosts of my imagination that keeps popping up everywhere, sometimes as other characters, all too often just as herself. She is the anthropomorphic personification of my idea of a good story - emotional, personal, maddening and funny, driven by adventure and a need to overcome the odds.

Anyway, she's one of my 'very cool things', which makes her an appropriate stellar addition to my blogspace vista.

2002-08-22T12:10:00.000Z

My days seem to know that I'm leaving them. But what's more, these few work-a-day hours left in this box seem hell bent on walking out on me before I can walk out on them. I have to keep slipping out on errands and for trips that I never would have had before; running hither and yon after a conspiracy of coincidence that takes me away from the office for longer each day. I don't know if it's because my days wants me to reach that poignant moment where I leave for the last time and it'll somehow be all the more tragic and sentimental and then I'll be sorry, or just that they don't want me to think they care. But my days are off with me, that's for sure.

Another story was born last night. Too many ideas and plot sketches, not enough prose. But that's the only kind of scent you get in the air these days; these scraps days. Scraps of aroma hung between this life and the next. All tendrils, part fowl, part flesh; part ending, part start. These are my in-between days. The left hand moon is still visible on my right. I really don't think it's going to scar with any kind of permanence.

Sadhbh's in a far away place today, so is Colm. Everyone's gone a bit quiet and dark - not mean but meaningful. Murmur, demon of philosophy and questioner of the dead, stalks the halls and networks of my path to the brighter days - lion faced and hungry. Even when you can seen your destination at hand, the path stays treacherous.

I'm not in bad form, but I'm not content. I have things I have to do, mundane and annoying; I could easily blame them for my mood. I have a feeling, though, that there's something bigger casting a shadow; as Gaiman and Pratchett point out in Good Omens (fave book of all time) - sometimes you can't spot the shadow and you don't think it's there, but that's just because it's so big you can't see it covering the earth. My days are casting shadows over all my waking hours. They murmur like the demon. I think it's because they know I'm leaving and they simply can't understand it; how it is that anyone can be allowed to go.

2002-08-21T10:44:00.000Z

Back to work today after two days off; Monday to see Gaiman and Tuesday to see my black and white offspring to be. My baby news update is that the big day has now been brought forward again and will likely be in 2 and half weeks. My kid is breach, with both legs sticking straight up in front of his/her face, like some olympic diver in mid tail-spin for a plunge that will never come. They say if s/he hasn't turned over in 2 weeks they'll either want to manually turn him/her or deliver by section 2 days later. The Kat and I don't want the turning, and this kid is never going to turn, so section it is. Months ago I couldn't take the waiting. Now that I want him or her to get as well browned as possible they're hell bent on serving up this baby up rare. Time is a reciprocal function of the effort you put into controlling it and no mistake.

The rest of this week and the next is all I have left at this screen. I need to begin the arduous processes of harvesting what files remain that are not cloned to my home machine already, of going through my drawers and cabinets and seeing what I want to take with me and what needs dumped, of stealing every single piece of stationery I possibly can. Then I wipe this disk, shut down my work email account and go home to my new family and days of nothing to do but watch over them and write my stories. How's that for a happy bloody ending? This, should you have mistakenly thought you'd seen it before, is what smug looks like.

The blog will go quiet until such time as I get the net at home, which will be a very bloody long time if I have my way. It's a habit I need to snuff. It reduces the usefulness of one's computer. I'll pop on after the fact and post the outcome, though, for those likely to get a good laugh at seeing my 'bunny-in-the-headlights' introduction to my first-born in glorious technicolour.

In the bar, late Monday night, I rather stupidly burned my right hand. A bottle sat in the middle of the table holding a candle, and though the candle had since burned down and out, the glass lip was still super-heated and has left this neat half-moon shaped mark in the middle of my palm. I'm not sure if it'll scar when the blister receeds, but it looks very cool at the moment. It's the slimmest crescent and a very pleasing colour. It's a waning moon, an old moon; a finishing and discarding moon. It's a left hand moon on my right hand. If that's not a bloody sign I don't know what is.

Taking a break here. The Kat has made me a lunch of olive and oregano crackers with cream cheese, cherry tomatoes and seedless grapes, with one of her home made apple, currant and cinnamon muffins to follow, and I've held back from them as long as I can. More later when I've finished picking the crumbs from the bottom of the box.

Look closer - into the facets themselves. See how the smug catches the light? See how it shines?

2002-08-16T12:10:00.000Z

Concentrate kids, this one weaves like a drunken monkey.

I am allowing my walkman to have too much sway over me. It's symptomatic of a growing passivity to my character that I do not like. I was even called suggestible recently! This sucks the monkey. But anyway, my walkman did my thinking for me again this morning.

I use up batteries like hayfever sufferers use up paper hankies and am forever plundering one device to power another. Usually my walkman is top of the hit list. Without batteries in it my walkman loses its saved stations and reverts to tuning all the presets back to the default wavelength. Until recently, that is. In the last few months it resets four of the five back to 108.0 but inexplicably sets the last to BBC Radio 2!, not a station I have ever deliberately tuned into myself. Which, needless to say, annoys me hugely every time, until I listen to it in passing and there's something I really like playing on it. The only acceptable explanation for this is that my walkman is setting me up and trying to control my thoughts. Today it made me listen to Dido's Thank You and think about hope.

A dear friend hates this song, he told us once during a long car journey to a convention, because it wimps out on the depression. That it could be a really great song about despair, maybe even one of the classic 'songs to open a vein to', were she not to ruin it by turning to the gooeyness of love to salve all wounds. This opinion I realised - strolling in the rarity of sunlight to the beat of the tracks most singular drum beat - annoys me even more than Radio 2. People should be horsewhipped out of the habit of ignoring the good in every situation. They should not be allowed to look at the bedroom floor of their lives and take in only the chaos of upended drawers, torn photos and make-up smeared detritus, but rather have their chins raised to look instead at the half-naked six year old, all face powder and poster paint, bouncing on the bed in their vest and pants who caused the mess in the first place. They should be forced to listen to that child laughing for at least ten minutes before they grab hold of them and drag them off for a bath and an early night.

Optimism is a bitch to keep up, I know. And trite clichés like this are ten a penny. But I put in someone else's blog some days ago a quote from George Bernard Shaw, 'All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling', and the sentiment has stayed with me. I know nobody wants to be told to 'cheer up' 'hang in there' 'it'll get better', but they presumably don't want to be told 'yes, you suck, you're fucked and it's about time you died already' either. I hate evangelists, and don't mean to sound like one, but I love a fucking optimist more and today I feel that I am one. Quelle yo-yo moi, eh?

The new book idea is going well, got two thousand words of a plot sketch finished last night and have begun narrowing the scope of thematic elements to make for a cleaner execution. I'm thinking this one will write itself much more easily than The Hungry Boy too. This one is a more action driven plot and not so personal to me, so I'm hoping for a good deal more momentum when I set to. THB, I know now, will be a slow journey, though richer and more interesting now I've settled myself into the more sedate pace. The short story flirtations are on a back burner while I gain some ground on both the bigger projects. It's all good.

It's all good. I took a real phase of saying this after picking it up from Huggins and Nisbet (if you don't know who these two are it doesn't matter) a couple of years ago, then stopped when I felt I'd flayed it utterly through overuse. Might go back to using it more often again, 'coz it's a more worthwhile sentiment than the majority of clichés you get in my posts. A Lesson even.

'Course if the Kat ends up strangling me for saying it all the time again you all have my permission to take that as a valuable lesson as well.

2002-08-15T12:37:00.000Z

Repeated my bibliomantic fieldtrip a little while ago - 1541, 13, 954, 9, stretcher, meow - which led me here (once I'd discarded the first two dead and commercial links), a net published book called 'Beyond the Road's End' by Mary Catherine Fish, and a chapter called The Pool. The book chronicles Mary's experience of losing her husband Tom to a brain tumour, and 'The Pool' is the chapter in which he dies. Her strength and calm throughout this final experience made me doubt her humanity on first reading, but then I went back and read the beginning of the book where her terror and anger is palpable and insane, and was doubly struck, then, at the peace she was able to make with herself and her husband when he finally passed away. Life after death may controversial for the deceased but is a certainty, however brief, for those left behind.

The Kat remarked on the obvious reason for my reaction to the film 'Deterrence', which I wrote about a couple of days ago. The baby is coming and suddenly taking any comfort in the idea that the end of the world is unlikely to occur in my own lifetime is slashed and torn by thoughts of his or her lifetime going on after mine (I'm assuming here that the meteor is going to miss). Same thoughts are with me again today. The Kat and I have discussed the eventuality of one of us leaving the other for reasons having less to do with Gary Oldman and Alyssa Milano coming to their senses and more to do with the fragile mortal coil. Selfishly we wondered what we, the one left behind, would do. We never thought that we'd be busy patching the hole left in a littler someone's life.

What a horrible thought - that it might be easier now to get over losing your partner because you have a kid. That the gap is set aside or plugged by your child. I'm sure it doesn't actually work that way. I don't think it could work like that for me and the Kat at any rate.

Morbid blog. Maybe I won't make a habit of this, Gar, after all. There's something to be said for seeking the arcane wisdom of the universe only on rare occasions. It fits better with the image in my mind of a slow moving bulk when I imagine the passage of time. I often wonder how people who write horoscopes think they can get away with writing different predictions every day. Fortune can't be that frenetic. As such, asking the universe for more future before you've resolved the bit it showed you yesterday can only be honestly answered with a consideration of one's own death - this being the only absolute certainty left until you make a move to redescribe your destiny.

I really shouldn't have been surprised then that today's message was 'You again? Already? No way! Drop dead!'

2002-08-14T15:46:00.000Z

Dull day.
Nothing to do.

Think of a number at random, a big one. 345
Think of another, under twenty. 16
Fetch a dictionary, a big one. Go to the page of the first number and look up the word of the second. In the Oxford dictionary and thesaurus that comes out as crunch
Repeat.
765
12
Hmmm. inculcate - urge or impress persistently.
Put both words into Google ensuring results contain both words.
Look for meaningful message from the universe. Contemplate until clock off.

First match: the Eastern Consortium for Classical, Christian Schooling - Newsletters -
'Crunch time...Inculcate. The values you began the year with ought to be the same values you end with.'

Now there's a profound statement, in a blinkered kind of way. Doesn't shave much of the glum off my day though - the pall you began the day with ought to be the same pall you end with. Change is bad, mmkay? Do not revise your ideas, do not deviate from the path. Growth is just a nice way of saying cancer.

Or, no news is good news. Endure my friend, endure, for you are better than all this. Don't let the day wear you down. You woke up hopeful, go home the same way.

Having another go...

1000. 4. 399. 15

mummy. dharma.

Gloria. A christian Xhosa child who has an empathy for Buddhism, its teachings and its practices. The unity of christian belief and that of others.
'No fuss. Nothing special.'
KWAN SEUM BOSAL: 'Please save this world from suffering.'

I'll shut up then.

2002-08-13T15:10:00.000Z

Three blogs in one day, how bored am I?

I've given two MSc stats tutorials as well. How efficiently bored am I?

I should be making plot notes for new book idea that came up at the weekend, but I'm trying to wean myself onto using my dictaphone for notes as the preferred method of brain burp recording when junior turns up and I can't spare the time and free limbs it takes to write ideas down on paper. Writing with pen and paper is a protracted and physically painful process after so long at a keyboard, all day every day. It also results in unintelligible script, defeating the purpose, if I don't take my time over it - a luxury I can't affort with the uberbabe in my arms. Dictaphone is the sensible alternative, so old dog learns yet another new skill. I can't use this method at work, though, needless to say.

5 weeks, roughly, left until the due date. My mother is convinced it'll go early. (Cue mental note re: future parenting tactics - do not come out with things that my child cannot do anything about and can only serve to scare my child.) Currently breach positioned, the Kat and kid kitten may be facing a caesarian section, which would bring the date forward by a week to the 12th (very important this date, don't want child to be born on September 11th or Friday the 13th)and which destabilises the numbers completely. Pregnancy is all about numbers; how many weeks, what are the dates, how many pounds and inches, how many kicks today, how many fingers and toes, how far apart are the contractions, how many hours was it, how many stitches, how long will it take for the drugs to kick in, do you have any idea how long it's going to be before I let you so much as kiss me again? Anyway, I am counting the days - it's between a minimum of 30 and a maximum of 37 to go, not counting today.

I waver between confidence and doubt about my future performance as a dad, depending on the time of day and the hue of the sky. I like to tell myself I'm good with kids and have a background of researching child development and have a lot of sensible notions of my own as well, but then I also know I'm only about 5 years old on the inside, incredibly selfish and prone to doing whatever is necessary to get my own way, and scamming an infant who's in awe of you is going to be very easy. I'm also very clumsy, drop and burn things all the time and am very poor at keping quiet when people want to sleep. And I can't drive and I'm not rich. These last two items cause me the greatest concern about becoming a father and I know I'm not going to be very good at resolving either of them.

There you go Colm, that's my parenting speech as it stands today. I can't be more illuminating than that until after the fact.

Have just been handed box of choccies by appreciative postgrad, the sun's come out and I have a window of opportunity to leave work an hour early. All youse bitches wishes youse was me.

Mañana muchachos.

2002-08-13T10:07:00.000Z

My fable now has its own drinking song. As Gar would put it, it's a bit florid.

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,
The night is gone, but the day's not dawning,
For I've a thirst 'neath the pale moon light
And 'til I shed this curse there'll be no morning.

An ale house fine I hit last night
And sought some favour of the Master,
He said 'Without coin you can go and shite -
You could buy the Devil's wine the faster.'

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,
The night is gone, but the day's not dawning,
For I've a thirst 'neath the pale moon light
And 'til I shed this curse there'll be no morning.

So I takes me songs round the local bars,
To sing for the coin to oil me whistle.
But I make a sound like a horse's arse
With me throat so dry and full of thistles.

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,...

So I put my faith in Lady Luck
And took to dicing, cards and checkers.
Did I win much? Did I fuck!
Owe what I don't own to some country feckers.

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,...

So I sells me arse to a sailor boy,
To make some money on the double.
But I'm so dry he has no joy,
Demands a sixpence for his trouble.

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,...

So I asks the devil to sort me out,
Says he, 'D'ya mind the drink coming second handed?
'Coz what they put in, you could soon take out.
Spare your arse, me boy, and be my blood bandit.'

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,...

Through the alleys black I sought the neck
Of some sodden souse lying nice and handy
But I'd the shakes so bad I never thought to check
And killed the only sod drinking halves of shandy.

Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,...

At the gallows steps, as they took me shoes,
Made me last request of the Master's daughter.
'Sorry, 'tis after hours and I can't serve booze -
Would ya like a Coke or a mineral water?'

Final Chorus: No day dawns, no daylight,
For my life is done and that's the end of me.
They'll hang me high 'neath the pale moon light
And I'll be cursed with the thirst for eternity.

2002-08-13T09:38:00.000Z

I watched the film Deterrence last night.

Sean Astin plays a small part in the film, that of racist yokel Ralph trapped in the same storm locked diner as the incumbent president of the United States during a nuclear crisis. I had seen the title amongst Astin's other films while trawling for info post LotR, but paid it little heed. War films, especially those of a political flavour, are not to my taste. I have alluded before to my jealously guarded ignorance of all things policy and politic; let me reiterate how globally that ignorance ranges. About as far as Tomahawk cruise missile can fly on a full tank of gas and the will of Allah. So Deterrence, on the face of it, was not going to be for me. But when I saw it coming up on Sky Movie Max I lingered, intending just to wait a few minutes into it to spot Astin. Have you ever done that? Watched something just to see someone in it? I do it all the time - a bizarre extension of fame spotting where you know you won't be disappointed. I was at the premieres of Star Wars TPM and X-Men at the Odeon in London - I know what it is to be the fan denied a proper view. I digress.

The plot of Deterrence is simple - in a horrendous storm the as yet un-sworn new president gets trapped in a diner in Colorado, forced to wait out the tempest there as the shadow of nuclear war threatens to become an absolute reality. President Walter Emerson is Jewish and Iraq is, as ever, the aggressor. Politics mixes with religion and the media perception of a man whose first act as leader will be the only one he is remembered for during his time as the most powerful man in the world. Its a complex game of cat and mouse, of chicken, of chess. But trapped along with the leader of the free world and his staff are a rag tag group of local citizens who are the witnesses in the dark to what they can only see as the Apocalypse.

Okay, so I'm not going to tell you the outcome, because I really want you to go and try to see it. The whole piece is set in a single location. All action is restricted to this one set, one sound stage. It's very theatric. Now, at one point, President Emerson and his chief aides head outside, to speak in absolute privacy, but the camera doesn't follow them. At the time I couldn't think why - the action revolves around this little man who suddenly runs the world and who is doggedly pursuing genocide in the face of recrimination from every side. Why leave him?

Because this film, being about that pant-wetting fear we thought had passed us by with the last generation, does not happen in front of you, but to you. They're all sitting, for want of anything else to do, in that one room. So am I, alone in my sitting room. And that little man, who may presently bring down a nuclear winter on them all, on me, just walked outside into the snow and left me here powerless. He had no right. 'Unfortunately I'm the only person who does have the right' he pointed out calmly.

I think I must have been frightened, at various points, about the possibility of nuclear war when I was little - everyone was to some extent, even if we didn't understand it all. That's precisely what I felt last night. Like a child again I couldn't resolve the jargon, couldn't tally the economics with the conflict, didn't follow the chain of events that were pulling the story further and further away from the direction I wanted it to go. And then he fucking walked outside! And I have never before been made so starkly aware how little influence I have in this world. The advent of the net made us all think we had grown global voices; voices that could only multiply in strength and volume, the waves growing deeper and more resonant rather than fading as they echo. Even as those voices got steadily more drowned out by the commercials blaring in the background we imagined that our sphere of influence was just getting wider and wider. Then a story like this reminds you about the net from which our net was woven, and you are left hushed and holding your breath.

I got completely taken over by this film and I felt I had to recommend it today. Really try to catch it. Watch it alone if you can. Maybe you're more savvy than I am, au fait with the currents such events must follow with the cold inevitability of a snowflake in a driving wind. Maybe it won't scare you like it scared me. But, if like me, you leave the events of Hiroshima unread on the shelves of history and the reality of September 11th in last years news footage, this film is for you. Because you are in need of a damn good scare.

2002-08-12T10:42:00.000Z

Death is not the leveler.

People get different deaths; there's nothing indicative of individuality to the variability, but there are broad classes of experience borne of an individual's personality and background. You can buy a painless end with enough cash, once you've fended him off with it for long enough. You can buy a painful one for someone lesser than you think you are. You can take death into your own hands with, or without, enough balls. You can broadly choose chance or certainty. It's not as much of a surprise as it used to be, and it's the loss of that level of respect that takes some of the humility out of it.

So death is not the great and humbling oneness after all. Death is not the leveler.
Stupid is the leveler.

Everybody got stupid - I got stupid, you got stupid. He, she, it got stupid.
Some people got more stupid than death can erase, which is one hell of a lot of stupid.

Monday morning, still in the stupid job.
Somebody kill me.

2002-08-09T16:16:00.000Z

An up and down day, floods of hectic and eddies of inward turning idleness make Damomo a tense boy. Weekend thankfully looms with the promise of 'sleep and sleep and sleep' according to the beloved Kat. Max and Sam, our cats of the more conventional feline variety, will undoubtedly have other ideas about this.

13 more working days remain of my university career. My contract extends into the middle of September but I have a dozen odd leave days left over and I'm bloody well taking them. It occurs to me that I won't have 'net access after this point for quite some time, probably until after Christmas, so had better begin transferring this process onto a private version for my home machine. Will be odd just writing to myself. Then again I'll be cutting my own kid's cord in a very few weeks, it will give me a heads up on that experience to cut this one before then.

No internet. No email. No blogs, no comics, no lists. I can feel you all curling at your screens. It's odd. To drastically reduce one's level of exposure and yet come away feeling naked for it. I guess it's just another layer if institutionalisation I need to slough off. I came to Queen's at 17, straight out of school, and never left. 'Til now. The Kat was sitting beside me today when I worked out how many days left I had to kill. She took one look at my face as I announced the result and thought I looked sad. I denied this reflexively. Intellectually this is the truth, I am absolutely delighted to be out of it. Even emotionally this is true, I feel elated and excited at the prospect and experience only emotions of relief when it's mentioned. Physiologically I'm having a debate in which only sensory points are admissible. And my tummy hurts.

I think it likely you might find traces of my presence online, sporadically, after my child arrives. If only to save me the expense of indigestion medication.

But either way, I'll still be around after the weekend. Hope you enjoy(ed) it.

2002-08-09T11:13:00.000Z

Why is the number of saved souls in the Book of Revelations so small?

There's a model of human altruism -itself a working model for the abstract of good - called minimax. This theory proposes that human relationships are governed by the trade-off between maximising the rewards of our relations while minimising the personal costs. We work to strike a balance - rejecting greater rewards for smaller ones because the expense of effortful pursuit is too high. It marks us out as an evaluative token economy. I think its a fairly sensible model, but it undermines my faith in making a universal good. Good would urge us to strive to be as selfless as possible towards others in the hopes of being treated as selflessly as possible by others, the 'Do unto others as you would have done unto you' of christian standards. But it stands to reason the most sensible thing for an intelligent person to do, should this utopian ideal arise, is be a selfish prick; this minimises the costs and maximises the rewards to their extremes. Thus being good gets harder the more good people there are around you. The chance of getting into heaven for the individual exists in a direct but inverse proportion to the number of good people alive at any one time. So that heaven ends up mostly empty must be predicate on the prevalence of goodness in society reaching such high levels that large numbers of intelligent people switch behaviour all together to maximise on the goodwill. Even if they had been complicit to the establishment of a society of good beforehand they now damn themselves by betraying those principles. So, the reason for so few people getting to heaven at the end of Revelations is that too many intelligent people will try to be good over the duration of human experience. Were we, in general, either thicker or more selfish the number saved come Judgement Day would be much higher. Therefore, as a responsible member of my community, the best contribution I could make towards ensuring the eternal life of my descendants and the integrity of heaven is not to pay so much attention to being a good person myself, as any kind of example, but rather to focus on producing offspring that I can rear to be stupid, obedient and able to confess to being a sinner at the drop of a hat.

And that's how I passed my marriage guidance course for the Catholic Church with a distinction in my final thesis.

2002-08-08T14:39:00.000Z

Tom called round with the elusive Paul in tow yesterday evening. Magic!If you Blog them, they will come.

Paul left again shortly, though, to continue work on Jedge Dredd, so I cracked a beer, Tom produced some wine and we sat that way 'til almost three. The theme of the evening turned out to brevity.

Brevity of expression and brevity in the time taken to express. Brevity of lives and eyesight. Brevity of careers and brief summers spent with friends. Brevity of tolerance for clever language that says nothing. (Go learn what a pantoum is. Hate it with us. Appreciate it, but hate it.)

After that we OD'd on BlackAdder 'til the Kat went to sleep, bigged up Ali G and british sitcoms, came down hard on W.B Yeats and Tom Clancy and commented very briefly, out of humility, on Philip Larkin. We decided we'd have had very brief lives by our own hands if they'd been anything like his, though.

We rehashed our mutual experiences and relationships like so many nights before, except I was reduced to categorising it all as juvenile. Tom was more forgiving and sentimental. We drank on. He's going to send me the things he writes and I'll send him mine. At a quarter of three my eyes were sliding about in my head and I had to sleep. Tom stayed up watching TV 'til the very small hours (Chinese TV being somewhat restricted) and left briefly after I got up for work. The Kat and I had a brief weepy moment, then she was gone too and I still had to shave and make my lunch with little time to spare.

I should probably stop there - brevity being the soul and all that. But since we've repeatedly established how particular I am about my healthy portions I'll carry on.

I can't decide today if I'm more hopeful or less so after talking to Tom. I'm inclined to think the former, my mood today being more energised than my few hours sleep would credit, but I wonder if that's just residual fuzzies from spending time with him. SoYouWanna.com assures wannabe's like me that a great many hacks are making a more than healthy living writing stuff that wouldn't even figure in the academic banter of the would-be big thinkers come big sayers. Dither less and get on with it, they charge. One of Tom's great advantages as a writer was always that he could produce his best stuff at high speed; slim hours of stage time springing forth, fully formed, in much the same time frame. I've always since tried to bash as much out in one go, after his example, and try to pile it up into a taller shape afterwards. Unfortunately I got my inability to throw text away from emulating Tom also. I'd have been better mopping up his massive vocabulary and expert eye for the appropriate word at the time. On top of this his years teaching academic english to chinese speakers has given him flawless structural skills as well. You are now watching me get more hopeless in real time.

Och, I wouldn't be me if I came out whineless. But on the whole I was heartened by my evening with my friend; that he was there at all meant the night was always going to be a success. And all food for thought comes fat free and fibre rich, even the stuff that looks like tapioca.

The 'most likely to's' of my life haven't yet. They're none of them inactive, they just haven't done the likely. Yet. It occurs to me my old friends may have a bunch of likelies they would have readily applied to me which I haven't got around to either. yet. See how my 'yet' is smaller than theirs? That's me attempting to diminish the 'paths more travelled by' that my friends would imagine I'd have taken instead of them. I, for my part, continue to urge them all to come back onto the overgrown trail with me. I'm wearing Yet? (noting the ?) on my t-shirt; assuredly expecting them to get presently to the amazing things they were destined for.

The probable point of last night is that I am heartened that I am myself trying to take the same unlikely path. And more so, somewhat juvenilely, that we seem to be progressing at the same rate.

2002-08-07T12:47:00.000Z

The Kat just phoned to complain that I didn't blog yesterday. She had just taken a few minutes break from her ghoulish laboratory and wandered online for something to read over her coffee, only to be disappointed. So, on the off chance she might pass this way again before the end of the day, I thought I'd whip out me old lyrical and give it a quick waxing.

So where was yesterday's blog?

Well, it was missing partly because I had an unfair universe day. That the universe is unfair is a suggestion made in Babylon 5 - the greatest sci-fi show of all time - where JMS reminds us that were the universe a fair place, all the bad that befalls us would definitively be richly deserved. Much better, therefore, to comfort oneself with a belief in the utter randomness of its malevolence. So anyway, it got goddamn random on my ass yesterday. After two weeks of letting an abusive work situation go uncorrected I finally blew my top in the wrong direction and took the head off an unwitting student purveyor of said abuse. She, a postgraduate with years of primary school teaching experience behind her, gave as good as she got and neither side walked away unharmed. So that ate a lot of my day. Also my scheduling was out of synch as I had to leave early for a baby scan - perfectly proportioned and almost six pounds already with six more weeks to go, thank you very much - and I tend to blog late in the day, usually just before I go home. That way I get the maximum amount of time to think about what I want to say. And therein lies the real reason I didn't blog yesterday.

I try too hard. I warned myself of this a while ago and even admonished myself for it in an earlier entry, but it would appear I'm not getting the point. It presents itself most clearly in the last two things I put up - both trying so hard to be liked that they follow paths whose grasses are already trodden flat and bled of what green was in them. Both too showy and hung with too many baubles. And I was going to do a blog precisely about this topic yesterday afternoon, but then I decided that I also try to hard in my blogs and writing badly about my writing badly was only compounding the problem in the most farcical way possible.

So why the hell am I blogging today?

Because I want to be a writer. So what the hell else am I supposed to do? And this is the way I sound, at least for the moment. And. like mimicking foreign accents, I'll never pick up a new tone without continuing to speak. I'm trying to keep my sentences shorter, though, do you see?

Anyway, on to today and a mish mash of musings.

Am currently engaged writing background history for a LRP group going to the Gathering this year, which is surprisingly fun. Not that the Lorien Trust world is particularly high fantasy as I minimally understand the term, but I had imagined being more annoyed by having to write in this vein, having been a strictly 20th century setting man up to this point. But it's nice easy stuff and writing specifically for people is always easier, so it's progressing quickly.

Two new story ideas have presented themselves for possible development, the latest borrowing an image from Mr. Gaiman, if no one minds. I think it's going to be quite girly - consider yourself warned.

Tom of the Enormous yet somewhat Neglected Talent is coming over to visit this evening and drink with me, while the Kat stares forlornly on, and I'm hoping to suck his brain dry of all language capabilities and spend his resources on myself. Another cheering idea to brighten my day.

In related talented friends news, my mate Paul Holden has a new Dredd commission for 2000AD he's working on, presumably the reason he hasn't mailed me in ages and we've not shot the proper test shoot of our short film project. Comic fans should pop over if interested in seeing the process of drawing the strip unfold. That and I want him to get famous. He's only tiny - barely three foot eight. Poor little thing. Paul is also the main artist for local games company Crucible Design, makers of the 23rd Letter, Zombi and SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO. I would also like Matt, Leslie and the gang there to get famous too, as it goes. For 23L fans the Project Sourcebook has just been released, full and freely downloadable from their homepage.

Lunchtime nearly over, need to put me lyrical away again and unlock the office door.

Hopefully more later.

2002-08-05T16:16:00.000Z

An awfully close day, as my mother would put it.
(There exists a popular assertion that any discussion of the weather, regardless of any meteorological vagaries that may seem newsworthy, is a veiled initiation of sexual relations. Some of you will have thought of this upon reading the above observation. You may all consider yourself goosed.)

Warm days are for fussing through, wiping at brows and the sides of noses, tugging at collars and finding fault with everything. Have begun this entry too many times, too many being defined as more than one. Got constructive words from Gar, which is cool, though the pill was bitter. But I'd rather be medicated than die, if you get my drift. The Kat read the fable and very sensibly wondered why the wife never showed signs of vampirism, if imbibing were all it took to damn her husband. I countered with a hurried line about the devil's intent. Plotholes are like potholes, though; you fill them in, but they continue to sink.

Fi (site address withheld, pending the lifting of offical sanctions) continues to offer useful pointers and resources towards improving my English, and echoes Gar's advice about taking a breath between brain burps. Profound thoughts spoken plainly as a life guide reads like speaking softly and carrying a big stick. Difference being that anyone can get hold of a big stick.

I said goodbye to my oldest friend, Paul, on Saturday as he moved permanently back to his home in London. Wendy Cope wrote a very poignant poem once about summers being cycles of airports and goodbyes. Everybody is familiar with the drift of friendships. Presumably no one is used to it, though. Steve came home from Holland briefly and left again last week. Tom is here 'til the 13th - we're packing in time where we can. These people's names, being strange to almost all of you, slide understandibly past as you scan the line. But they're precious to me and yet I kind of feel they're sliding from me as easily. And then I wrote this stupid poem for the baby, which I showed the Kat, with lines about him or her being 'on the telephone / Full of news and far from home / Change almost gone, will get some more / Will definitely phone again before'. The sudden upset it caused is still hanging around my keyboard like uncaught teardrops clinging between the keys. Daren't type to much in case they spill inside and do irreparable damage. So I'm a bit at odds, overall, with this screen today. I'm going to invest the rest of today's keystrokes in my PC at home, whom I do not resent as much.

I'll have gotten over myself tomorrow, presuming it gets less close.

2002-08-01T10:09:00.000Z

In response to the suggestion that I am 'too soft on Satan', this morning I offer the following anecdote. We should be very clear on this point, kids; Satan is a very bad man and you should all have nothing to do with him. Just say no, m'kay?

There. Balance redressed.

The Gilded Cup: Being a Cautionary Fable on the Dangers of Compacts with the Devil who is both Deceitful and False

An ugly man, and portly, lived in the mountains where, for greater love of beer, he had never known a wife. And this concerned him greatly. Having not the mien to rectify the problem, he decided he should tackle his woes by other means, and so he sold his father's farm and all his livestock for all the ready cash his neighbours would offer, and for a short while became a man of ample means.

He immediately sought out a good deal on some fine clothes, got himself a free ride as far south as he dared without blowing the scheme before it had a chance to play out and then hired a carriage to take him, a wealthy northern estate holder, about the towns of the lowlands. There he found women aplenty; compassionate souls willing, despite his hideousness, to let the mountain man spend himself with them in his feather beds of silken throws all broidered and tasselled with gold. And of course they loved him. But in short order the man was best beguiled with one particular creature, fresh and lusty, whom he married in a rush.

But not long after rushing her again on their wedding night, he was forced to tell his new bride that he was not, in fact, a wealthy landowner, that, indeed, his wealth was very much a finite affair and that soon, as it happened, they would be destitute, with nothing between them but their love for one another. The bride was heart scalded by her husband's duplicity in the manner of dethroning her maidenhood, and told him to go fuck himself. But the marriage vows are sacred and she was forced to stick with the cretin until - she hoped - the effort of transporting his fat arse would make his heart explode, whereupon she might look about again. She decided that it would be necessary to keep the bastard well fed, therefore, and returned pragmatically to whoring around the inns and pleasure houses of the surrounding countryside. Her husband, without the means to return to the mountains and with nothing to return to anyway should he somehow make the journey, was forced to take on the role of a sullen drunk; first squandering the rest of his meagre fortune, then drinking what cut of his wife's coin he could wrangle by making a pathetic nuisance of himself at the tables she would be dancing and laughing on. He was laid very low of spirit, lamenting his misfortune so utterly he had not even the wherewithal to recognise his own culpability in the whole affair.

Presently the devil came to him to offer the usual necessities to be free of his temporal woes, coupled with the usual spiritual considerations about eternity, though these came as no surprise to our portly hero and were, as is usual, ignored. Soul proffered and accepted, Ol' Nick asked the chap what he sought in return, and in a very singular moment, wherein he forsook a lifetime of cupidity, he replied that all he wanted was his wife to himself; alone, forever. Ol' Nick, not usually known for his generosity, was rather taken aback by the simplicity of this request and pressed the man to consider his offer more deeply.

‘Don't you want anything else?’ he asked.

‘Not as I can think of,’ answered the mountain man. ‘I just want to have my wife at home and for us to be together again, forever. I love her you see. Every cheap and tawdry bit of her. She's my shining buttercup, my whiskers on kittens, my stew and dumplings. I could eat her all up and then eat her all up again.’

‘I see,’ said Satan. ‘How very sweet. Your simple honesty is to be commended. But might I also commend it to you that you are an ugly fat porker whose wife actually hates him, despite his obvious devotion to her, and you'd be a moron, on top of all your other inherent disadvantages, to miss out on this golden opportunity to do something about that. If you like, for example, I could throw in a slimmer body, the means to immortality - always a popular feature - and the sympathetic attendance of your wife every day 'til the day you die, which, since you would very soon be immortal, would call for the dawning of a very rare morning indeed by my measurements. Anyway, think about it for a minute why don't you?’

The mountain man gave this some careful thought, bargains with the Prince of Lies being notoriously trap laden by all accounts, but in the end could see no downside to this arrangement and signed up for the deluxe package.

‘Excellent choice,’ crowed the Prince of This World and explained how the man might affect his change of fortune. He gave him a gilded cup, which he instructed the man to half fill with his own blood each morning before dawn, half fill again will beer, and give to his wife for her breakfast before she went for her morning tumble. The mountain man took the cup, bid the devil farewell and made for his humble apartments to look him out a good sharp knife.

His wife eventually returned well into the dark between days and after teetering over to the cot where her husband slept to spit on him she retired, hiccupping, to her boudoir alone. Upon hearing her snores growling through the thin walls, her very much awake husband slipped into the kitchen with his gilded cup and the sharpest knife he could find and, finding a smidgeon of hereto unforeseen courage, opened a small wound in his upper thigh by his own hand; the location borne of wishing to choose a spot on his body his wife would never knowingly look for evidence of his truck with the dark forces and figuring anywhere near his groin to be a very safe bet in this regard. This was a painful affair and, unfortunately, somewhat protracted – the mountain man’s cut and courage both being altogether less than sufficient to the job. In the end, with dawn fast approaching, our rotund would-be magus was forced to be more aggressive with his magic and in a moment of panic plunged the knife blade whole into his fleshy limb. This brought forth a baleful cry from the self-mutilating mountain man, but it did also bring forth a more than adequate flow of blood, more than enough to finally half fill the all too easily underestimated gilded cup, hereto after referred to as the gilded goblet, the better to impress of its size. Still squealing like a stuck pig, and looking much the same, he stumbled to the larder where he had earlier secreted a bottle of beer and where, to his merit, shaking as he was enough to spill more than a fair measure of the booze, the man from the mountain managed to fill the goblet to the brim.

There promptly came a second bellow in reply to the first, no less of pain but addressed more in anger, as the rudely awakened wife barged into the little kitchen, swearing like the sailor under whose tutelage she had undoubtedly spent the evening and ready to strangle our already bedevilled protagonist.

‘Kill…you…useless…fat…’ she told him plainly, adding that ‘Ugh! Pain! Cut it offo’ya! Bastard!’ should he disturb her slumber again.

Dizzy with pain and the loss of a great deal of blood, her husband could only sway, mumbling and sobbing, waving the gilded goblet under the nose of his distressed shining buttercup. His wife was eventually distracted as the fumes of the strangely congealing alcohol reached her bleary head, and being but a delicate female, near o’erwhelmed by the vapours and in dire need of fortifying her now shattered nerves, she snatched the liquor from him and pinned it. His task completed as the devil had set it, the husband could only roll his eyes and submit to the whims of oblivion.

Late that self same evening, the husband awoke drained and wan, but comfortable in his wife’s bed. Casting about him he discovered his love by his bedside, a look of tearful concern on her flushed face and a cool towel gripped tensely and dripping forlornly into a basin in her lap.

‘Oh husband,’ she cooed, ‘how fine it is to see you wake, for I did fear so terribly that you were lost to me and I should be heart cracked and driven to throw myself from the chapel in despair.’

‘Pardon?’ croaked her husband.

‘Oh husband, how fine it is to see you wake, for I did -’

‘Yes, yes I got that,’ interrupted her husband. ‘I just though maybe I’d dreamt it.’

‘Oh no, my love,’ she mewed, ‘though ‘tis true you have been so plagued by nightmares since you did swoon in the kitchen this morning, I had feared you possessed and suffering at the hands of the devil himself.’

‘Has someone been talking to you about –’ began the husband, but his dumpling was on a roll and not to be interrupted again.

‘Such a fit of thrashing shakes has wracked your poor frail form all day, she continued, that look – you are half wasted away!’

And it was true. The mountain man’s body was but the half of what it had previously been in bulk; his gut - the only part of him capable of standing proud remaining - full sunken into his body again, leaving but a honey pot paunch where once a mead barrel had hung. This must be devil’s doing, mused the man to himself, and he smiled, but his wife was none so pleased.

‘It is plain to me,’ she said gravely, ‘that you are sick. Very probably with shame at the wicked ways of your wanton wife and worry for my sinful soul. I am sorry, my darling - I have been a bitch. But I swear I shall make it up to you and I shall begin by devoting my every waking moment to making you well again.’

And so she did. She quit her whoring the very next day in favour of work sewing lingerie, which she could do at home, and spent the day beside her sickly spouse, tending to his every need, bringing him his meals and his piss pot, but by the evening his condition was no better; indeed it was worse. He had lost even more weight; the last of his belly had melted and his ribs were beginning to show. He had eaten a horse’s measure, and yet still looked like he’d never eaten a horse in his life. A doctor was called for, who poked and picked and told the wife to ‘feed the poor bastard, he’s starving.’ Larder empty and at a loss she turned to her husband as the night drew near to morning.

‘How did you get so fat to begin with, my beloved?’ she asked bewildered.

‘Beer,’ said her husband, flatly, and in more ways than one.

‘Right,’ said the wife, ‘then we shall have to see that you get all the beer you can drink from now on in,’ and she went directly to the inn to wake the innkeeper.

The husband, wide eyed at this unexpected bonus to the devil’s services, took the opportunity to crawl from his bed and get the goblet and knife from the kitchen, where they had been long forgotten, and scuttle back to bed. There he took to his leg again; unbinding the dressings his wife had put on it from his last endeavour with the kitchen knife and prizing open the wound once more to milk himself for another half measure of blood. He was woozy and weak by the time his wife had returned, but he still had the sense to hide the goblet beneath the bed. Seeing him sunken further into illness, his body even thinner than it was before she left, the wife almost dropped the bottles of beer she had in her arms, but managed to lay them intact by the bed while she wept into her husband’s bony chest.

‘There there,’ he chided softly. ‘Be not so wanting of hope. Let us have a beer together and see if that doesn’t perk me up a bit. Here, let me pour for us and we shall have a toast to my good health.’

Reaching down he fished out the goblet of blood, which he, shuddering, topped up with beer and handed to his wife, bringing the bottle itself to his own lips.

‘To my very good health,’ he toasted. And to the very same they drank.

Thus began the routine of their days; she ever-present and attentive to his every caprice, except when she had to nip out for more beer, while he got weaker and thinner day by day from filling her drink with his blood. But, though all but drained of life, the man from the mountain was deliriously happy; his dumpling was his constant faithful companion now, and would be forever, since the devil had promised her attendance ‘til the day he died but had also promised to make him immortal as well. And besides all that he had an ass so skinny he had to blow a raspberry when he farted for want of some butt cheeks to flap. Everything was as Ol’ Nick had promised and the man from the mountain was finally content.

A week after the first night of filling the golden goblet, the man from the mountain was so happy with his lot in life that he had sent his wife out early to get the beers in and they had been drinking for many hours by the time it came to fill the gilded goblet. The wife was very merry by this time and the man felt it safe enough to bring out the goblet in front of her without her having the sober sense to suspect his actions as being of malign intent. He kept her laughing and distracted with jokes and mimicry as he unbound the wound and set the goblet lip beneath it to catch the spill of blood. But no blood came. He worried at the now quite dead skin around the gash as he sought to get the flow started, but to no avail. He slid the knife all the way in again, even jiggled it about a bit, but the leg it seemed was dry. So he stabbed the other. Also dry. He stabbed his chest, his arms, even his skinny ass; from nowhere could he coax even one drop of blood. His alarm quickly spread to his drunkard wife who, booze confused as to what was happening, asked that he explain his strange behaviour.

‘I need blood for my cup,’ he told her frankly, not thinking her sensible enough to remember the comment later.

‘Oh, my sweet,’ she said smiling drowsily, ‘take mine. I would give it you gladly to make you happy and well.’

He was about to agitatedly tell her that it had to be his blood, when he was suddenly struck by a thought. To make him well, she had said. Indeed, there was the answer. He could take some of her blood for himself, to refill his spent stock, and then bleed it out again as his own blood for the sake of the spell. Excellent.

And so, smiling, he took his wife’s arm and made a healthy incision, which she being so sodden felt not at all, and fastening his lips there, began to suck out her blood. He had told the devil he could eat her and eat her again. How prophetic those words had been. He would do so for real and happily, for she was as sweet inside as out he found; like nectar. Really, really very sweet. Quite delicious, in fact. Very, very bloody good.

The husband was intoxicated, so overwhelmingly good was the taste of his wife’s blood. He drank and drank, feeling his skeletal form growing strong from the life that flowed into it, his slack muscles becoming swollen again, his skin flushing with health and his eyes regaining their shine with a primal urgency. With a roar he freed himself from the powerful draw of the draught and leapt from his sickbed with a vigour he had never known before. He caught sight of himself, naked, in the mirror and marvelled at the sculpted form that it displayed; Adonis-like in its splendour. Then he gasped to see the wounds on his body where his impotent stabbing had failed to yield blood seal themselves, like flower buds closing with the passing of the day, leaving his youthful skin smooth and incorruptible. He felt the surge of immortality rise within him and he spun to share of his joy with his darling wife.

She laid, a crumpled husk, upon the bed; dead eyes rolled back in her head, drained lips but as thin wrinkles in the parchment of her face. The man from the mountain cried out in horror and despair. How could this be? She was to be with him forever, unless there should dawn a rare day that would bring him the release of death. This had been the devil’s promise, now belied. Unless…
Unless this might be the…but surely not. Not just as he’d…
And then there dawned a rare morning, whereupon the vampire was consumed entirely in flames from the sunlight that poured through his bedroom window. The fire spread and razed the whole building to the ground, reducing everything within to ash.

Everything, that is, but a gilded cup, its inside stained with beer and blood.

2002-07-31T15:42:00.000Z

I have decided to adopt self-regulated immortality because I hate Solitaire.

Because it's a game of chance. I hate that. Frustratingly, the Kat actually loves it for exactly the same reason. I've just been trying to convince her to become addicted to this little game called Trolls I have on my Mac - you have to navigate out of the way of your enemies while simultaneously making them run into each other and explode, the difficulty in doing so increasing with the number of enemies per round - but she has turned her nose up at it because there wasn't an element of chance to it. I almost told her there was - as you are forced to teleport to a random location when cornered and risk landing in a worse spot than you began - but I censored myself reflexively. And so, the Kat sticks to her Solitaire. More often she plays a very similar game on Sky called Out Patients about making suit independent runs out of limited availability cards; success in which is again governed by the luck of the draw. I hate that. I so hate it.

I love Freecell. In Freecell all the cards are laid out to be seen and considered in advance and in each of the 36K odd combinations it is always possible to win; the challenge is to find the winning routes. I love that. I love a game you can win on merit every time, the rug that never gets pulled out from under you.

Because I am, and no one was more shocked to discover this than me, a control freak. I have always been a paranoid soul, bless, but never knew it ran to needing the world to run to set routines and reliable pathways; I always felt I was a lover of mystery and the novel experience. Turns out that I actually like to collect secrets in order to complete the picture and connect the disparate - one of life's esoteric jigsaw puzzlers.

This new side to me, I have decided however, is undoubtedly the foundation for my need for solid plot and 'things done for a reason'. Tom Clancy famously said that,
"The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." I like that. That's my kind of writing. I deplore loose ends in books, unless they lead to more books where they get tied up. This is why I need to believe that the gap of ignorance between myself and my creator is so narrow, what Fergal calls my omnisophistry, because to settle for the 'might never know' option in life is beyond what my crawling skin can take.

So anyway, I hate Solitaire. Meaning, as a worrying aside, that I also hate dice - which in a roleplayer is a difficult flaw to overcome. I hate random. I hate the idea that the universe may have come about from chaos. I hate David Lynch films. I hate the lottery.

Me and Tom Clancy reckon the world should make sense and finish sensibly. And while Tom is free to decide for himself, I feel it's an issue I need to make a stand on. Life should resolve everything.

And I, for one, refuse to die until it does.

2002-07-30T09:13:00.000Z

No cigarettes

It's two in the morning and I have no cigarettes.

It's far too late and I have no cigarettes.

The shops are closed and I have no cigarettes.

The petrol station is too far away and I'm already in bed and I have no cigarettes.

I can't sleep though and I have no cigarettes.

No! I can't be arsed and it's too bloody cold and I have no cigarettes.

I'm not getting up in the middle of the bloody night again and I have no cigarettes.

I am so tired I am aching, so why am I standing? and I have no cigarettes.

I am completely pathetic and I have no cigarettes.

I hate bloody cigarettes and I want them out of my life and I have no cigarettes.

I don't even think I want a cigarette and I have no cigarettes.

And I leave the house at 2.05am to get cigarettes.

2002-07-29T10:10:00.000Z

Up stomps Monday, bold as brass,
Kicks precious weekend in the ass.
Snaps his specs and steals his cash -
Weekday kids are cheap white trash.

I have begun to acquaint myself with the subtleties of infant thinking, in preparation for the arrival of Kelly Sprog v1.1™. A good way of acclimatizing, I think, is to adopt these strategies myself, that I may better understand the reasons for them and find them less frustrating when they are used on me. Observe:

My short story didn't get me any attention, which I need all day every day. In an adult this would result in a termination of the activity and the pursuit of a differing strategy. Not so in the infant. I shall wail on until you come a pick me up. So you can expect another story very soon; a longer, though no less pulpy and derivative, effort called Spine Stories.

I'd never thought to bother with short stories at all when I began to write. They are the Everest of literature; a hugely masochistic undertaking that largely gets you no credit coz 'quite a few people have done that now, yeah.' And I think (or thought) people dislike(d) them, dislike(d) the minimal payoff from their investment. I have certainly found many to be very frustrating reads. Its that very notion of the snapshot story being the beginning and end of the experience, when our interest in snapshots is rooted in the desire to see beyond the edge of the picture and into the scene surrounding.

I remember a friend who had a real thing for ephemera, all those intensely personal items you find at house content auctions or tatty little antique shops that buy job lots. His last purchase that I saw was a diary from the turn of the century, almost entirely blank except for a single one line entry near the beginning, wherein the anonymous author reports 'going to Mrs. X's' (I forget the surname) and follows with a shopping list. The days he spent speculating on the day at Mrs. X's; why this person was going there and what terrible deed could have befallen them that meant the diary went uncompleted, what kind of person would befriend someone with a name like Mrs. X, and what kind of generous soul they might have had to do her shopping for her. All this sort of thing. The obsession being to complete the canvas from the brushstroke one has, rather than appreciate the simpler form and line.

The short story strikes me in much the same way, filling in the before and after becomes the drive on reading the inbetween, and reciprocally, the intention of the short story writer in modern examples becomes more and more about obscuring those views and making the point of the activity about giving the reader just enough so that they can puzzle on it for as loing as possible. Last week's offering, no matter how ineptly, is guilty of this in a small way. Its a bit too art for arts sake, the sort of writing I was bitching about all too recently.

Am I beating this 'tell a bloody story' drum too hard? I, naïvely, suppose that the crime novel works on the same premise; to contain enough conscious evasion and deflection, on the part of the author in communication with their audience, to make the reader take part in the process of divining the ending before it comes. My wife, when asked by a visiting friend this weekend past, if I was a good GM (for those of you not au fait with the details of my roleplaying obsession, this refers to the person who tells the story) she replied that I was, but I did tend to go on a bit. My NPCs were prone to making very long speeches and the like. Some of my players apparently enjoy taking this time to catch up on their reading or balance their checkbooks. I, it would seem, follow a bardic, skaldic school of storytelling - stories which are hard in stone and perennial. Immutable. And being in the position now to describe them as such, well, I don't need one of them dropped on my head to wise me up let's say.

So, I am writing another short story, as I said. Stories as dialogues are something I've been evangelising for years through roleplaying, although apparently without feeling the need to practice what I was preaching. I include my Gaelcon 2001 scenario here as exhibit A for the prosecution - the single greatest undertaking in 'thou shalt walking this fecking line or be damned' gaming the world has ever seen. Also here is part one of a short story I began and abandoned last year thinking short stories a distraction from the Big Job. It exposes my very real difficulty with writing in the first person. I'll hopefully be putting more of this up as time goes by as well and, still desperately seeking attention, would greatly appreciate anybody's thoughts on how they feel a story is different when delivered from the point of view of someone in the midst of the action. I think my main problem is divorcing my story limited omniscience from the supposingly uninformed protagonist. Love to hear anyone's suggestions.

By the way, if you do read this and the one to come, and have maybe read the one just passed, I don't want you to think that everything I write is about the devil. Although quite a lot of it is at the moment. Which it wouldn't be if people would just get over the whole 'Your parents actually called you Damien, didn't they know that...' thing so's I could get off the prozac. M'kay? I was born in 1974, the film wasn't released until 1976 at which time the antichrist was six years old and I was only two. There is no bloody connection and the next person to suggest otherwise better hope they never have to take a glass lift anywhere again.

2002-07-25T10:34:00.000Z

Until such time as I get a better place to put such things, presuming more (and better) will come, a short story is here. Any comments on what's good or bad about it would be very gratefully received.

2002-07-24T10:41:00.000Z

The Last Word

If, just once, you'd let me finish what I'm -
You'd realise there's no bloody point in us -
I've phoned a cab. Here. Take my keys. I'm not -
In a couple of days my lawyer will be contacting you in -

I'm filing for -

because I can't take any -
I'm sick of fighting, tired trying, and now I want it -
All we do is count each other's faults. Well, I'm fed up keeping -
What love we had is dying and it's not going to -

I know how cruel I seem, I can't do this and be -
You can't stop me walking out of here no matter how you -
You can shout me down, cut me off: It's not going to change my -
I'm leaving. Whether or not you hear me say -

goodbye.

2002-07-23T15:59:00.000Z

Here's a turn up for the books (general) at expense of the book (specific - Hungry Boy). The needs of the many...

A short story came to me out of nowhere with a kick like a mule; nothing remotely original, just an idea with compulsion to be written without compunction. And I've been at it for a while, brief as it is going to be. But the end of my *snigger* working day looms, my evening reunion with all my old mates that I've anticipated so long is near at hand and home, beautiful wife and beloved bambino-in-a-bump beckon through the same office window that is letting a rare blossom of sunlight in, reminding me to look up 'open air' on the internet and see what it is. And yet I am loathe to save and exit. I have that brilliant rush to set about it and thrash the thing out, which is very hard to ignore. This is the way I felt when I began the now hidden Book The First, a feeling that remained with me for weeks and churned out reams of text with minimal effort. I wonder if you can imagine how heartening it is to get a burst of this, how heady a drug writing is when the shit is pure and uncut. My short term protagonist stands, chest bleeding, beneath an occult sun, grinning madly and you can easily imagine who he's meant to be. I see him turn to -
Tomorrow.
Pardon?
You 'see him turn' tomorrow, you get your coat on today. Well?
...
Five more minutes.
No. Go home.
I'm at a good bit, I'll forget it otherwise.
You carry a notebook around with you for precisely such an eventuality; write it down as you walk.
Fine, but I have to do finish my blog before I go.
You're stalling.
I'm not, I do my blog every day.
You're just stretching this out thinking I'll get comfortable here and forget you, but I'm leaving this minute and you are coming with me.
SHAN'T!
Damien.
NO!
Coat.
NO! STORY!
Damien.
NO! I HATE YOU! I want to - please - no...I want to.....NO! Lemme go pleeeeease......no! I'm not fini

2002-07-22T14:05:00.000Z

Tom has come home from China. Tom - the ghost of madness past. The ghost of madness yet to come.

Tom wrote plays when I was in college; soaring and searing conversations in pain. In Nazi concentration camps, in the fortress-like basements of government facilities and the regency appointed sitting rooms of peers and judges Tom would loose his madmen; self-part-self portraits in such exquisite torment that no matter how controlled and menacing he could make them they always seemed to be screaming at you the whole time they were on stage. Men with tin hearts, men blinded by their peeping intrusions, vampires and killers and tramps. His characters, trapped in increasingly ridiculous worlds, were all walking-wounded, with nowhere to bleed but out.

I was mesmerised by this guy, by the stories he brought out, and he remains one of the most dramatic and abiding influences on my creative pallate. His then-mind was an ocean; impossibly wide and deep, and wracked by storms in the far out solitude of those who can't see the shore. He wrote his person into his plays - personal memories and images - so that even when his streaming text would arc seemingly senseless, it remained sensory and understandable if you just felt your way along it, though your fingers were cut to ribbons as you went. What he wrote caught you up like a hurricane and thrashed you around; he was writing, it seemed, just for you and though he loved you, he would hurt you and mean every word of it. I've never since read anything with the kind of raw, honest power that my friend could summon at will. These kinds of people I admire with endless enthusiasm; the fluent in passion. People who speak with voices electric. Most of you, I know, will never have read a word by Tom, and you have no idea just how much you have missed out on as a result. I keep hoping he'll set that right some day soon. Sadly, however, so many of the scripts of these early stories are long since lost and Tom was never one for keeping copies with any sense of posterity. You can't be a screaming maniac and be attentive to your filing.

But the Tom of now, the returning Tom, is no longer screaming. He, without saying, gives me the sense that his homecoming might be a return to shore, a harbouring of the pain he has harboured within as long as I've known him. That he might moor it and settle on dry land again. I speculate here; our first conversation after four years without hearing his voice was stilted by the effort of recognition, of trying to skip back into a cadence, the steps of which may either be forgotten in parts, or out of rhythm with the people we are today.

We spoke on the phone, arranged a time to meet for a drink while he's here. I've yet to see that face again; that smile that once grinned icebergs and going down with the ship. Tom teaches English in a chinese university now and they don't get much in the way of ice with their climate.

I'm really nervous about meeting up with him again. I've been so exicted about the prospect of seeing him, I never presumed he'd be one whit less electrified than he was in the mad old days. Then his was the voice and I never presumed. Now he's finding his land legs and I've got to tell him I intend to be a writer. Me in my dinghy, on seas he made green in the first place. There is more to my desire to see a very dear old friend than to have his blessing to set sail out there, but I'd be lying if I said it didn't matter for someone like him to want to see me vanish beyond that horizon and to point out a star or two to navigate by. Tom has the stuff, the magic, in spades. That he never told the world is beside the point, another humbling point for the whore in me. No matter how the waves have calmed I know they still roll into and out of him with a lunar constancy. I never had that, and I'm afraid he might be able to tell. And Tom was never the one to hide the things that hurt.

Thomas Mann famously said that,
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
Everything about doing this is an issue about overcoming self-doubt, even the heroism I hope to write about sources its themes from overcoming oneself. J.K Rowling once corrected herself making a facetious aside about not knowing why she so desperately wanted to be a writer, instead saying that she couldn't understand why everyone didn't want to be a writer. I have to agree, in part, with that - I think most people would be pleased to be writers, if only they could please themselves as writers. All the Toms of my experience are catagorised by not being pleased with themselves, and while it's the cliché that a writer is rarely satisfied with what they do, it is rarely considered what kind of pain that can cause one. On Tuesday, when I meet Tom, I may very well find it finally sank his Titanic. Which wouldn't bode well for the dinghy.

Tom has come home from China and I am all at sea because of it. But at least I'm out there.

2002-07-18T15:45:00.000Z

Just back from gym. Get me. Am enjoying chocolate shortcake biscuit to celebrate. My own little form of peaceful protest against the body nazis - you can lead the tub to exercise but you can't make him thin.

Meant a couple of days ago to advocate a film which I caught on BBC1 by sheer luck - Boys on the Side. Must be the greatest chick flick of all time. The ending leaves me, I have no qualms about confessing, in hysterics of tears. Whoopi Goldberg is singing Roy Orbison's "You Got It" to the woman she loves and I'm a heaving sobbing wreck. Every time. Its not a pretty sight. But it's a stonking movie and well worth hunting out. Seriously.

The first time I saw it was one weekend I brought the Kat to my parents' place in Donegal. Declining their offer to go out for a drink with them we decided to hire a film and did our now famous Push-Me-Pull-You-Pick-No-You-Pick trick (we now only ever go to Xtra Vision alone). In the end I relented to BOTS but was hell bent on hating it. In this I failed. It's very funny, very well written, sexy and as mentioned earlier poignant to the point of coming packaged with anti-depressants and the phone number for the Samaritans. But most of all it reclaims the word cunt, yes cunt, as being for women, by women and nothing to be feared by women, ever again. Fine, doubt me. Arch your brows and doubt me. But do find this film.

Ante-natal class again this evening. A tour of the labour ward. Like I haven't put my legs through enough today. They let you have a snooze at the end - well a relaxation session, but you don't want to pay any heed to that old guff. My bloody calves are burning, something called a deltoid is having a spagetti western style death rattle and I'm having my kip godamnit.

G'night.

2002-07-18T12:08:00.000Z

Why a kids book? Case for the defense.

I avoid the reflex defense of retreating to the phrase "book for young adults." It is my experience that people like to settle onto the shorthand of things so we'll stick to "kids book."

It's the kind of easy to see the short-term window of opportunity as a fairly good reason to board th bandwagon; kids are reading more and the market is on the up, the books are shorter, quicker to write, JK's millions, a readership that is maybe more accepting of the license you take with people and places and times, she's got millions I tells ya MILLIONS!, the likes of Neil Gaiman (Coraline) and Clive Barker (Abarat) lending the whole thing some underground chic with their dark offerings, so much money she can swim in it, etc.

Phillip Pullman, blessed be his name, says that the importance of literature which, if not precisely written for them, does not exclude children, is that it is forced to deal with those fundamental issues that we butt heads with; all of us, all our lives. (I'm paraphrasing, a word which here means "climbing on my soapbox while holding some other poor bugger up as a human shield." 200 XP for the kid's lit reference there.) Stories about life and death in their realities and finalities, the relationships that mark us indelibly, the signature relationships, what it means to grow up, how we are taught to love and fall in love. What really hurts, really frightens, what instinctively matters. And about how when you address these issues passionately, without exluding children from the process, you have to be honest and clear and unambiguous.

Writing this way, I have found, makes you focus more on your story, makes you pay more attention to the foundations of plot and character and event. It removes a lot of the artiface, a simplification you aspire to when you are speaking with passion about something; that it'll come out plain and immutable. I want to write that way - less concerned with the veneer or the connotations and more about the concrete adventure and emotion - letting what succulents that the language may bring to the feast come by happenstance, and be all the sweeter, rarer for it.

It is simply that when you do this, in this climate, you end up with a "kid's book". They being the more discerning audience, probably.

That they and adults alike are reading them more now may reflect a growing desire for literature that returns to the emotional, perennial human events that we all dwell on throughout our lives, but tackles them not in a speculative or objective way, but directly, opinionatedly, without being too wry or detached as "adult literature" can often be. Books which avoid being skeptical beyond practical wisdom. Adventures, resolutions, unapologetic stories that go into the dark but always come out the other side. Aspirational stories.

That's the bandwagon I'm on.

And if millions happen come with it, well, I shall just have to be gracious about it. Mmmmmmmmillions.

2002-07-17T11:04:00.000Z

Came to work dancing.

For months now my walk-to-work soundtrack has been drawn from various CDs I made a while back from my collection of MP3s when I thought I'd be computer-less after the job ends. As it turned out the Kat then bought me my lovely new home machine and I was able to salvage it all, but I digress. Point is, I forsook many years of dedicated radio listening for the luxury of only listening to music I liked. That was until yesterday, when I decided my radio walkman was more portable and practical for my foray to the gym (shudder) than the Kat's CD player. And so for the last two days I've been back to listening to the radio; playing Russian Roulette with Gareth Gates' new single. "It could happen to anyone of us" he squeaks ominously - and I believe him. This danger aside, the lightening effect on my mood has been electric, salving the wounds to my ego brought about during the gym session and putting a spring in my aching step today. I had, it seems, been in a musical cell, a blue mood cell, but now I've made parole as a reformed character.

Flippancy aside, the change in my mental entry to the day has been profound, sparkling, but this new spark, coupled with a worrying observation from the Kat this early AM, forces me to take a timely look at the way I am working and how it'll have to change with the coming months.

She asked me, as I was making my protracted flounder towards consciousness, whether I was spending more time on these blog entries than on The Hungry Boy. I - pillow grumpy - scoffed at the notion and mentally waddled away from it, but as I sashayed through the office door this morning, button bright as I haven't been for ages on the back of a bit of Sarah Cox, I become concerned with just how much novelty I seem to need to thrive.

Gar made a related observation some time ago about the reason for the brevity of his writings at the time; the need for dialogue. He said,
"I say something, and someone else reponds. I then respond to their response, usw. In fiction, or in blog posts like these, there's no real dialogue, there's no other party to reply [to] my initial volley."

Got a short little span of attention and oh my nights are so long: Paul Simon. I walk to work to the same music, evoking the same emotions and images that I've tagged onto it, to sit alone in this room and face the prospect of walking the same fictional landscape sitting immobile before me. And immediately I am immured (thanks Colm) behind a wall thick day of foot shuffling fecklessness. I am putting more into these posts - because they're read. And responded to, by people who know me, however tenuously. I think this is why my first go at book writing spilled out so readily; the impetus of Kat waiting at the other end of the endeavour, the need for exposition. But ironically, it was the subsequent volume of text that this motivation produced that put pay to itself in the end; as my storybook became my novel the point at which the story would be read and become a dialogue became more distant, and immediately finishing the work became the task Herculean.

Now that I walk along the imagined storm coasts of my childhood, which make for the setting for Hungy Boy, I am fearful of the creative lonliness that lies about my benighted cliffs and lighthouses. Like my central character I feel alone there, and as much as his life is dictated by the torrential emotions of that isolation so my ability to tackle his story is mired by the floods of doubt that swamp the story fields and roads between. How very metaphoric. I am either beginning to question my capacity to devote myself to such an isolating lifestyle or just too short of attention to stay at one task long enough to see it through. Like the small child who discovers that any effort will bring praise and a reward, I am hurriedly scribbling all over the page as fast as I can so I can run up to mum and claim my gold star and cookie rather than taking the time to stay within the lines. Its not enough anymore that I just write at all, I need to stop writing often and badly for attention and get down to writing well. On my own.

In 9 weeks, or thereabouts, I'll be a father. At home. And I'll be a whole hell of a lot more isolated than I am now. And I'll need to be able to sit in those few hours of peace between feeds and changes and bring this story and any more that the universe sends me to fruition. My ideas need to run from form to function, rather than being the art for arts sake that these postings seem to epitomise.

I'm not dropping the blog - I still stand by its beneficial effects of keeping me writing, keeping me articulate. But I can't just fill space with noise as I walk-to-work through life anymore. At the same time I can't rely on the universe always talking back and saying something new like a radio commentary on how great it is I took the time to phone the station at all.

This post scans poorly, scrappily, but I want it to stand that way. If it's clumsy it's because it suffers from the lack of veneer that I try to put on things to hide their lack of substance and it should remind me of the perils of that; a lesson I have to teach myself all too often since I decided to take ths path seriously.

I came to work dancing today. Now I need to prove to myself I'm fit enough to endure dancing every day.

2002-07-16T15:47:00.000Z

Blogger screwed up my template so I picked a new one, hence the different look today. 'Nuff said.

I weigh 17 and a 1/2 stones or, very roughly, 112 kilos if you are of a metric state of mind. Finding very little advantage to being this big (short of supplementing my arsenal of - as identified by Ms. Tobin - "wit that can kill a mile away" with "a gut that can kill up close") I decided to take, for the first time in my life, to the gym.

That I know my weight in kilos should not be construed as any indication of a progressive curriculum of primary education in my dim and distant past - I was still schooled in pounds and ounces in the rural hinterlands that spawned me, modern(ish) as I am. No, this conversion was one I was forced to undertake today so that when I next return to the gym I can have my sensitive bulk objectified for public consumption more precisely and see my pathetic efforts at calorie burning calculated to within a razor's width of accuracy. And avoid the horrors of my first workout.

Recall if you will the comedy staple that was the "Speak your weight" machine that could comment poisonously about its client. The reason so much mileage could be made out of this gag is because this terrible object had no basis in reality, giving us all free reign to laugh at the victims without fear of becoming victims ourselves. Well titter ye no more, 'coz they've built something worse. Far more subtle and sophisticated in its cruelty is the modern treadmill.

You see you can't just get on it and run...jog...Fine! Walk. Briskly. Point being that as a novice of the fitness suite I didn't want to do myself any harm before I got round to doing myself some good, so I wanted to take advantage of the recommended speeds, inclines and durations suitable for the signature slob. I was terrified about standing up there, svelt to the left of me, slender to the right, and seem as foolhardy as I was fat. Having the thing choose my workout for me was to be my lifeline of confidence that would get me going and then I'd be too busy feeling the burn to feel the thin slit eyes burning into my fat ass. Excellent! Up I step onto the rubber road and confidently light up the unnecessarily oversized display. Fat Burning or Cardio? mumble...fat mumble burning mumble... Age? 28. Weight? ...Weight?

I had to tell it what I weighed. I had to type it in so it could light up on a screen in front of me for the world to see. Only I didn't know what I weighed in kilos, so I tried to leave this stage out and move on but the thing obstinately froze and blinked its impertinent question again. So I guess wildly. By "wildly" I mean I drag up that magical number from a dozen American cop shows which, in my mind, is meant to identify the beefier but by no means truck sized assailant - 200. Except they mean pounds and I've been asked for kilos. An individual weighing 200 kilos, the treadmill smugly informs me and the obnoxiously cardio-conscientious women either side of me, should not be on a treadmill. Possibly Sir has made some sort of error. Perhaps Sir would care to either choose a smaller number or return to the herd before ivory poachers stumble onto his tracks. I picked 120 this time, again still not understanding the very real difference between pounds and kilos. This number it accepted, which was a relief but, ironically, because I now mistakenly thought I'd grossly underestimated my size, I was silently terrified the thing would push me beyond what I could physically achieve and I'd fall off the bastard. Oh, would that I could have chosen in this so much lesser humiliation.

With my weight factored into the calculation the machine was able to indicate the heart rate I should be maintaining over the duration of my workout to safely burn maximum calories - in this case 125 bpm. Sensors gripped on the handlebar of the display would monitor this and ensure I neither greatly exceeded nor dropped below this ideal rate. 120 kilos in old money, for those who still think that way like me, is just under 19 stone - not a huge discrepancy from my actual weight, but enough to warrant a noticeable drop in fitness, because this thing began to plod along like a diseased sloth. At the same time, to my left and right, the tapeworm twins are belting along - a blur of lycra and leer held at single points in space, ever moving and going nowhere. So I stab at the speed guage and pick up the pace, then add a hefty incline to give me an excuse as to why I don't break into a run myself, keeping instead my not-insubstantial set of man tits relatively static with what I am enthusiastically telling myself is "power walking." Much more satisfactory. I bead sweat to the required degree, put the sneers of my companions out of my mind and get down to the reason I came here in the first place. I'm burning that fat. I'm feeling the burn. I'm breathing like an athlete and my heart rate is finally up. To 174 bpm, which is comfortably taxing me. Unfortunately its probably bringing on a myocardial infarction in the 19 stone man the machine thinks is trying to kill himself on its rubber road to nowhere. It cannot in all conscience allow this to happen and so it begins to alarm, to warn me of my impending doom. Me and all those skinny bastards around me.

Remarkably I still intend to return to the gym. I am Jack's unforeseen masochism.

2002-07-16T12:28:00.000Z

An Honest Man.

Break the surface.
Take a breath.

I will wear my love outside, where people can see it
And ask, in plain English, for the things that I need
I will love without caution, when and wherever I see fit
I won't drown the words and I won't drown the deed

I will wear my hate outside, out where it can shame me
Be it blind, be it dumb; still it will get its say
I'll be wrong more than right and they'll all rightly blame me
But I'll swim in my hate 'til I wash it away

I will wear my first face on top of my second
Try to spit out the truth while I’m wording the lie
Make each word the last word by which I'll be reckoned
And take one honest breath every day 'til I die

2002-07-11T08:25:00.000Z

Day 9 in the Big Blogger House, and Big Blogger calls Damien to the Diary Room:

The Schrödinger's rat from the psychology laboratory is out of his cage!

Only a very brief post today as I am NOT IN THE OFFICE - HUZZAH! what with being off on leave until Tuesday the 16th because of Silly Season and having only popped into an out of the way computer room at the Kat's workplace to check mail before devoting myself to a long weekend of political protest - more on this in a bit.

First, an apology for the Big Brother reference at the start. I don't want to comment on its actual content and progression, as I am not a fan, but that only makes it all the more important that I do comment on how much I resent the continual assertions from others that as a psychology graduate with digital TV I must really love the chance to observe people all day long in just such an oppressive environment. I just want to assure any such people reading this, that if I wanted to revel in the public discomfort of halfwits, I'd settle for kicking them in the balls.

So anyway, as I say, can't stay long, everywhere shuts early today to give people time to make it home before curfew. Along similar lines to Big Brother I can't comment excessively on the issue of the 12th, again not being much of a fan, but more out of not being very clued up on the ins and outs of it all. That's a conscious choice though - I cherish my political naivety; it marks my outrage out as being actually honest.

I cannot fathom how blokes in fancy dress out for a glorified walk should give anyone a reason to resort to violence, no matter how moronic the Orangemen's behaviour en route should be. And as ever, I find patriotism, a 'worth fighting/dying for' mentality and all other such angry red marks from the leather strap of Tradition repulsive in every way. Like all inflexible things their seeming permanence is founded in bile and bloodshed and ultimately worthless as a result. The only jacket you can't shed at a moments notice for another is a strait jacket. Nations, crowns and flags will fade, ideologies will be forgotten.

I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works ye mighty and despair.

There is no device for perpetual motion. Let them march if they want to. One day weíll all stop walking and it'll be for good.

End rant. You're rolling your eyes and thinking limp wrested liberals like me just love to pontificate while perched on the fence doing nothing about it all, but not so. My counter protest is ready.

Tonight the 11th night bonfires will be lit all across the city; towering infernos under which guns will be fired, largely in the directions of these people's own homes, burning cars will block the roads to protest against people being denied the use of public highways, freshly painted swastikas and banners proclaiming white supremacy will be unfurled with much aplomb to billow in the smoke next to Israeli flags and the multifaceted irony of this whole image will be entirely lost on the neanderthals who source their precious christianity in the biblical small print while dancing, as paganistic as you like, around their ritual flames.

Meanwhile, the Kat and I will be tucked up under the covers with our cats, our unborn child and all the junk food we can lay our hands on for a lovely long weekend.

Make Love Not War. Never let it be said I wasnít a man to act on his principles.

2002-07-10T16:11:00.000Z

My grammar sucks.

The savage little artist in me would like to argue that it hardly matters in the face of raw storytelling genius, but the less-than-genius rest of me is perfectly aware that it does. I cannot readily tell when an em or en dash is appropriate, where the correct usage of the semicolon over the colon is indicated or where the punctuation in dialogue should appear in the plethora of variations that are possible. In which case, my little book of creative discipline assures me, I would bloody well need to start learning. So I am back to school, readers. Back to school readers.

Much as my grammar sucks, un-sucking my grammar sucks even more.

Further, I am "very inexperienced" when it comes to formatting my text for submission. Full justification, though neater, is wrong, obscuring as it does the precise number of uniform spacings per line. Also wrong is paragraph separation with extra lines, tabbing the first paragraph of a new section, not tabbing all other paragraphs, demarking section or scene changes and widow and orphan control. All the guidelines I have been so anal about following myself, not to mention penalising my students for not following when they have submitted coursework to me, are precisely the opposite to requirements. "You should go immediately," the book tells me, "and make these your default settings; you'll find it laborious to apply after the fact." Meaning "don't make things any harder on yourself than they already are, stupid. You're already at a mental disadvantage." Grammar is the great leveller of the literary world; its fluency the quiddity of the genius at word.

A bit depressed, he understated. Pointlessly, if truth be told. I just feel like I've been sent to my room without supper.

My office has two doors; one opening to the main corridor through which I enter each morning (I use "morning" loosely; read as mid-morning, sometimes afternoon) and leave each evening, which stays locked, and a second door opening into the first of my two labs, which stays open all day, that is while I'm here. This second door is the one I ripped off yesterday evening. Today they came and nailed it shut until proper arrangements for a replacement can be made next week (this week being Silly Season up here). They wanted to know how it happened, though they really didn't - they just wanted me to know how displeased they were that it had happened and that they were going to have to sort it out. And how, accordingly, I could just stay in here and think about what I'd done.

So today both my doors are shut. I'm in the box, alone, feeling somewhat like Schrödinger's rat -kinda like the cat, only with everyone rooting for one outcome over another.

I cannot wait to be free of this office, this desk and chair, this screen and keyboard. I want to go home.

I told my mother I was packing in my PhD in favour of writing children's books. It went better than my fears had painted it, although I was shaking by the time I'd put down the phone. She wasn't delighted, but she didn't give me that 5 seconds of silence before carrying on, seemingly unphased, that would have told me her free hand was at that very moment ripping out her own womb in shame. I think it in the nature of the difference between men and women for women to fear incurring the anger of their mothers, while men fear only their disappointment. And when you're a career path momma's boy, this makes for no idle fear. Thankfully there is psychiatric treatment in the form of a good marriage. Katrina says I should wise up. And who am I to disagree with my doctor?

More outlining tonight. More whining tomorrow. I am told that St. John's Wort is a natural form of prozac, but the Kat says I can't have it. Won't say why...but who am I to disagree with my doctor?

Who indeed.

2002-07-09T11:18:00.000Z

Late in the day post today.

Intranet servers died, statistical results were chased, conference presentations were babysat, I ripped my office door off the wall with my bare hands in a fit of pique. I did not make that last bit up.

It's a semi-demi-devil karma day if truth be told. I did progress on Hungry Boy - took a fit of outlining, earnestly, albeit in stark contradiction of my Pullman philosophy, but in my defense I have had a spate of good ideas for different slants on things I'd previously incorporated and it was time to step back and review. Will continue this tonight. Presuming I don't go to my pub quiz.

Every Tuesday I go to my pub quiz, and have done for about two years now.

I had, before this, very definitely hated pub quizzes, finding them an unreasonable imposition on those seeking a drink and a chat without being hushed and subjected to the heckling and cackling of middle aged women doing cold turkey from bingo. So, having huffily agreed to accompany Katrina and not seem like an unsociable git to my friends who were long term devotees, I attended my first session, mithering just within hearing range all the way until...we won. Two crates of beer. So, next week, and somewhat less mournfully, I went again. And we won. Two crates of beer, a bonus bottle of wine, and cold hard cash, baby yeah!, in the Double or Nothing game that followed. By the third week I was looking into the vast fortunes that could be won playing Bingo and, musing thusly, went with a veritable spring in my step and a horse-sized thirst for my cut out of two crates of beer to the Lavery's Pub Quiz. And we lost. To "Jackie's Jumper" (we are "The Mounties" - we always get our can). Incensed, I went again, to redress this injustice with a sound mental spanking of these upstarts. We lost. To "Jackie's Jumper." And they were smug about it. That made it a hate crime. And since then I have made it my personal mission to bring those Nazi scum to justice! They may never find out who betrayed Anne Frank's family, and even if they do, the suspects are all since dead - but every Tuesday I lay my pain at the foot of the bar and make Jackie's Jumper pay. We win more than we lose, but we still always lose to them. And so I go back. And back. And back...

It's not writing this book isn't important to me - it's the life plan, the one true ambition, the only missing piece in my world - but you surely understand I have to make them pay. Anne expects it of me.

So I may be further behind tomorrow. Again. But the world will be safer. And so will the beer.

G'night.

2002-07-08T10:40:00.000Z

The third excuse post. Todays excuse: flu.

I had flu all weekend. Still do. Painful sinuses give me the illusion that I can smell the white glare from the screen. It smells like blancmange. I really should quit referencing Gar's site in these entries, and as soon as they stop being so flarghing good I'll definitely be getting around to it.

Evil McNasty Blogger refused to publish my post from Friday, so it too has only just gone up today.

So, am now a grand total of 10,000 words behind my Pullman target, 12,000 if you count today's requisite quota. I did sit to work finally yesterday, but discovered a set of notes I had prepared for the weekend had disappeared and after 500 words of treading water I pulled the plug and let my enthusiasm drain away. However, I intend to maximise on the mojo of the blog process and having warmed my fingertips up here I am determined to set to work like a demon and regain some of that lost ground. That or comfort eat, but certainly there's intent of some kind going on.

On Friday night Katrina offered to take me to a newly opened lap dancing restaurant for some booty and fries, with added pleasure of pulling faces at the Free Presbyterians protesting outside. I declined her offer. Later a couple of friends came round to invite us to dinner and Katrina tried to interest them in some soft porn with their meal and the guy's wife agreed with her. And I still declined.

I say this in advance as I may wish to use the excuse that my brain is entirely dysfunctional should I experience another less than productive day.

More anon - carpe diem and all that jazz...

2002-07-05T11:58:00.000Z

Second evening of not doing the requisite 2000 words of Hungry Boy since the new regime began.

Today's excuse - ante-natal classes. AKA Parent Craft, although they are very careful to point out that they certainly aren't claiming to have the audacity to tell someone how to be a good parent. (Sigh) Midwives really have no idea how inappropriate political correctness is when presenting to a group of men who desperately want to be told exactly how to be a good parent, and a group of women who desperately want said midwives to stop dragging the proceedings out with softly softly small print, get to the point and SAVE THEM GODDAMNIT!

Katrina finds them particularly frustrating, what with being a doctor and all. She tends to sit and glare balefully at everyone throughout the evening, jaw working slightly, as if she's fighting the urge to spontaneously launch into a sinister and monotonic description of the infant autopsy (Katrina is a pathologist, a career to which she has aspired since she was a child, she tells me. And you thought a little me would be bad...) I think that I find them so interesting frustrates her even more. But I do.

They're very animated and tense, these sessions - everyone hanging on every rushed word the midwife comes out with - so any attempt at humour, no matter how lame, becomes the single funniest thing in the world. They all laugh. We, all laugh. In unison and in key, like a well drilled platoon. Uniform volume for uniform length of time. Military regulation. And I think that's a good metaphor for what we are all going through at the moment - the New Parent Boot Camp. And not just in relations to these sessions - they're just the weekly parade ground inspection - no, I now see my whole life becoming a routine governed by a military sense of discipline. Me! Me, who extolls the opinion of Einstein that "he who blithely marches to pipe and drum was mistakenly afforded a large brain by evolution where brainstem and spinal column would do." Me, who swore that my parenting technique would harnass the creative maelstrom of domestic chaos, with routine (by which merely mortal children thrive) used only as the subtlest of arts. Me - aka Commando Dad in training.

Actually more like Vietnam Vet Dad in training, since my current unquenchable desire for orders and regimens is matched only by my bottomless well of fear about every little thing - she sneezes and I'm radioing base for the army medics. Is this the kind of father I am to become? Like all parents to be I have made the traditional vow to rear my young in a way as diametrically opposed to my own upbringing as possible, but on reflection of my track record to date - before the job's even mine - I make my parents look like Ma and Pa Walton.

So anyway, no 2000 words.

The 2000 words target I have taken from Philip Pullman (author of the His Dark Materials trilogy amongst others and one of my celestial pantheon of pot bellied buddhas, along with the likes of Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Sting (okay, they're not all pot bellied. Shut up) and Kevin Smith, the All Bob. You so want to be in my religion - we could kick major Jedi ass). Pullman, whose work, though not unflawed, seems effortlessly beautiful and sincere, asks no more that 2000 words of himself a day. He also has the decency to be utterly crap at making proper use of the many "useful techniques" that are supposed to make writing a novel easier - like post-it note plotting.

Post-it note plotting is where you write a sentence describing every discreet scene or event in your book on a post-it note and then put them all on a big white board. Then you arrange and rearrange them until you have the running order of scenes, after which, the theory goes, the book writes itself. The more realistic "after which", as Pullman correctly points out, is that you tear the whole thing up and just start writing it blind and cursing your ineptness. Thank heaven for inept genius, as all the wannabe savants of the world sigh a communial sigh of relief. Pullman also takes a bloody long time to write his wonderful books as well, another precedent I am glad to be able to point to in times such as this, with my 2000 words worth of whitepace pulling faces at me like some snide pierrot mime.

(See how I just got you all on my side there as well, knowing as I do how everyone hates mimes? Cunning as a fish, me.)

Speaking of Whitespace read this, which Gar doesn't like but I really do. Read, or re-read, all known Gar therein. As I found occassion to remark to someone yesterday, quite a lot of people tend to be deeply intelligent. Gar, I find, is also wide. Which, if you know Gar, is quite an ironical statement. Hello Gar.

More anon. Lunch beckons.

2002-07-04T11:16:00.000Z

I exposed the imp in my blog and it abruptly lost its mojo.

(Now that's a first line!)

Did not work on the book last night. I have no excuse other than watching TV and playing FreeCell, sweet FreeCell, was preferable, and I do not intend to give myself a hard time about it. Especially, as it goes, since I rate TV as, for me anyways, one of the more intelligent ways to keep your creative juices bubbling, more so than books even. But you gotta be smart about it. I watched Six Feet Under. I am very very smart.

God I love this show. Last night the dead Mexican made me sit up and thank the heavens for writing like this. Screw books! Read everything you can lay your hands on, they tell you. If you want to be a writer snatch up every bit of printed text that passes under your beak and peck its i's out. Bollocks. I reckon you read just as much and as selectively as you always did and then double your TV intake. I mean, by the time you come to know you want to write it's because you are pretty well informed about what you like to read. What you don't like to read isn't going to do that much to refine it. Watching TV lets you take the public pulse, which is something far too many writers are useless at and yet remains precisely the thing to make your voice rise above. And it does just as much to stimulate and inform your vocabulary as books will, and more holistically too, providing you pay proper attention. And watch Six Feet Under.

I like my dialogue with tone, my plotline development in pictures. That kind of informed diction makes for better fiction. So say I.

James Herbert's "Once". Do not read this book. I was given it by the good lady because I like horror, she likes me and we like to have a good giggle over text based porn. And since I was knee deep in sidhe research for The Book, it seemed even more appropriate.

It was not.

Not scary, not sexy, not researched, not plotted, and not worth using even as bog roll. Herbert has sourced his knowledge of fairies and fairy faith from a dictionary, citing as he does simply all the names for fairies he can find and leaving their description at that. His knowledge of wicca arrived to him on a one page pamphlet from the local christian mission house and his working knowledge of sex he has gathered from the kind of video emblazoned with the message "Only the Hottest Amateur Lesbo Action!". His plot, by contrast is so straight and short of content that its inspiration can only have come from what he found in his shorts while researching the sex scenes. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

Speaking of the fallen, poetry, my whim of yesterday, continues to die as a serious form of communication. I bought a book of poetry recently, as I have oft done before, by one of my all-time-faves, Wendy Cope. Little bit of spiritualism, little bit of weird, great fat lardy lads full of funny. She's great. Seek her out. But even the faux-bookish goatee grunt behind the counter in Dillons gave me a look of disdain. Bastard. Still, it's not his fault - though he remains a bastard.

Poetry publishers are making a mockery of wanting to write and communicate poetry. I say this as a published poet myself. Oh yes. To date my poems have been published in almost ten different anthologies in the UK and in a "major new work" called "Under a Quicksilver Moon" in the US and 32 other countries. All this success, and I've only ever submitted three poems for consideration in my life. My UK publisher is Anchor, to whom I sent two poems years ago, and who still keep sending me contracts to sign to allow my "exceptional talent" to be brought to the public's attention. And, since I would obviously like a copy of the latest anthology for my own collection plus whatever extra copies friends and family will require for their coffee tables, could I send £8.99 per required copy along with my signed Author's Agreement. My US publisher is The International Library of Poetry™, who in addition to wanting to sell me a copy of "my book" (an honour I share with over 200 other "poets of international standing"), are pleased to inform me I have been nominated to present my poem, or anything else I may want to read - my TV license, a bank statement, the words "Help Me" tattooed on the inside of my eyelids - at their Annual International Conference, where I will also receive a silver bowl, engraved with my name, identifying me as an award winning Poet of Merit and Lifetime Honoured Member of The International Society of Poets, a gold medal and various other giftsª, all at the rock bottom price to me of $4000.

Think I'll keep by future publications to this medium; it's undoubtedly the only honest means of getting people to read poetry left.

To whit, another couple of Kelly specials, get'em while they's hot, they're lovely:

Love and Late

Slow and lowly,
The spirit out of sorts.
Sorry, guiltily
Skirting Heaven's courts.
Tearful eyes
Too lately knew remorse.
Unmild and exiled,
As Heaven's only recourse.

You wait upon love;
Your desires it cannot pace.
Love shunned or outrun
Quickly turns its face.
I Presumed -
Beyond what friendship tolerates.
Forgot, never thought,
So untended, love escapes.

Word Worn

Connotations bring pauses,
Give cause for concern.
All the twists on my words,
How they're worn, down to invalid points by
The slip of the tongue,
The rubs and the scrapes
Of the arguments borne out where they hang,
And I'm hung
From the words that are worn on the face -
Purple prose purple bruise stain.
My lines cut the lines on your face;
Some laughter, more pain.

And finally, should you still be reading and interested, this is the poem from the US anthology that has made me so acclaimed over there,

Hothouse

You have taken to talking to the house plants.
I note that you have named the big cactus after me
And a variegated something or other after your mother -
Might I suggest a nice daisy to cross pollinate with your therapist?

You seem to find it effortless to be friendly to vegetables -
Exchanging coffee pot pleasantries over your breakfast hangover -
Than to befriend me, with whom, of late
You share the rooting pot in a rather sodden, vegetative state.

And it's very telling, I think,
That you should choose to send your sanity off picking wild flowers
Precisely when the relationship between the cat and I has reached the point
Where all he does is dig in what little flowerbed I’ve made for myself.

For all you care.

I'm sure his rhododendron namesake would die immediately
Were you to pepper the soil, even a bit, against him,
Much less take my side as he’s
Remorselessly banging on about me not having enough respect for his intelligence
– Hah! –
While he thinks nothing of taking a casual piss on my work.

No, you just keep weeping over that thorny weed you call mother
While he wraps you that bit further around his little finger.
Paw. Whatever.

More anon.

ª contents may differ from those shown.

2002-07-03T16:13:00.000Z

Rhymes are Tough

Struck down by rhyming,
With godawful timing -
I'd just started writing The Book.

No poem makes money,
No matter how funny
Nor how long the bloody thing took.

Short of greetings card rubbish,
You won't get it published.
To be labelled a poet's a joke.

Still, enough of my woes -
Here's a present with bows,
And a cake. Happy Birthday. Don't choke.

And in a similar vein...coz I is in da mood...

Christianity's Grand…

Sin and debauch,
Reflect and reproach
Yourself, down on your knees of a Sunday.
Confess and repent,
Regret and resent.
And then straight back to sinning on Monday.

Amen.

…But Jesus Sucks!

Teacher says that Jesus loves me.
Don’t believe a word of that!
All the World is His, and still
The bastard takes MY cat.

And my granny, and my puppy -
They're in heaven sure enough.
I really don’t think Jesus loves me,
But he loves my bloody stuff!

Friends and Lovers

Friendship is a two way street.
Sex takes a one track mind.

Good friendship looks you straight in the eye.
Good sex needs a love that's blind.

Great friendships age like great old wines.
Great sex won’t live past thirty.

The best friendships keep a clean slate.
The best sex is dirty.

Smug

All too often, being right
Will not make things better.

Like if God's really dead,
Nietzsche’s just deader.

All above are ©Damien Kelly, 2002.

2002-07-03T14:26:00.000Z

In a dark addendum to my dribbly wax of lyrical earlier, I now find myself suspecting there may be more to the seeming magic of starting a blog than meets the eye. Reality is being overwritten to suit my literary needs today, and if it is the blog doing it, as I fear it may be, then I fear I may have made some kind of satanic pact without realising it and my very soul is doomed.

Queen's library has for no good reason listed a book I have out on loan, and desperately want to keep for research sake
- (P.A. Smith's "W.B. Yeats and the Tribes of Danu" FYI, a bloody superb and wank free overview of the Tuatha De Dannan and fairy faith in general in Irish mythology and their impact on irish literature, and many times superior to all the New Age crapola you'll find about Irish gods and the sidhe on either the net or tree hugger guides to same - just in case you are into that sort of thing) -
as having been safely returned and available for loan to anyone who can find it on the shelves. Which will be no one, coz I have it here beside me. I phoned the issue desk in disguise to double check and they confirmed, yes they have it, come and get it. I checked my own account and it's been cleared from it. Which means I must own the copy on my desk, coz Queen's have theirs...

And now I'm freaked - is the blog some evil homunculus just behind the screen tempting me onto the path of ill gotten literary gain? I am haunted by Neil Gaiman's answer as to why his new children's book, which I was put onto by The Child Catcher (many thanks) is called Coraline, "It was from typing "Caroline" and it coming out wrong" - a fortuitous accident on his computer for a book that people are now calling it "a masterpiece" before it's even published. 'Puter gremlins, coming to steal the souls of children's storytellers in some pre-teen Faustian nightmare. I can see the plot of another book forming...

...and that's what scares me.

2002-07-03T12:57:00.000Z

When you first decide to be the next huge thing in children's literature, there is a rite of passage one goes through in order to give one the confidence to begin. A rite that could very well be the death of your intent forever.

You might, mistakenly, believe that this would be to invest in some decent equipment; a new PC, lots of notebooks and shiny new biros - and while it is true that you do get around to this, it is not the first thing you do. Neither is getting into the habit of writing something every day, which you also begin sometime later, or boning up on your library and research skills, another necessity for the future.

No. The first thing a new writer does is buy a copy of the Writer's Handbook for that year and begin choosing publishers.

And then agents, though it'll never come to that, undoubtedly when your chosen publisher snaps up that first book they'll recommend a decent agent at the same time. Then you begin looking at Literary Consultancies and open a tin of beer and by the time you are trying to decide which magazine has a sufficiently low subscription rate that they're less likely to be choosey about the quality of submissions, while simultaneously hunting the cupboards for carbohydrates, sweet carbohydrates, you're about ready to slide your copy of the Writer's Handbook onto the bookshelf, tightly jammed between two other books you never open anymore, and not write a word for at least a month.

Such has been my experience, idly spending my royalties before I'd written a word. This is the All Bad. It means, for example, that you never write the first line of anything ever again, because you can't bring yourslef to begin with anything short of that killer line and so you end up typing up the centres and working, oh so slowly, out to the beginning and end, only when what you should have said straight off sounds proud enough - a not insurmountable handicap, but no matter how soundly you might win the war you end up remembering the battles lost and risk never writing a confident word again.

In hopes of regaining some ground after your inital slip, you do the unthinkable. You buy a book on how to write books. And you hide it. The Creative Writing coursebook - in your mind it makes you look to anyone who might see it like the nuclear power plant technician, seated at his console, hand wavering above the blinking bulbs, leafing panic striken through his copy of "How Not Make Go Boom - For Dummies." This too I did. And am pleasantly surprised at how useful it's been. Yes, it's full of well meaning waffle about how it doesn't just happen and, much as I flick through most books to only read the bits I like, I only skim these bits. But I had no idea how bloody useful writing exercises are for keeping you going through that daily grind of "I need to generate a page of text today simply to keep in practice" which is a stone cold killer of a routine to try and get into. And one of the best suggestions has brought me to this - Keeping a diary.

I've never kept a diary in my life, that much must have been obvious from the outset of yesterday's post. But from day one, i.e. yesterday, I've seen the benefits.

I'm committed to something that helps ensure my daily writing quota, and in a form that dissuades me from the kind of anal mid-way editing habit that I suffer terribly from and which is the bane of good flow, and essential to keeping your story alive in your head I have found when I was writing the first Hidden Book (so called coz no one ever gets to see it again). You can't fix the crap as you go along, a nasty lesson to teach yourself, but a sound one; you have to tidy your mess only after you've finished making it, and the imagined urgency of making a diary entry that is supposed to reflect the here and now outpaces this tendency - a more than fringe benefit if you're prone to being as anal about what you say as I am. It does make your sentences come out too long, though. And with awful grammar, not my strong point at the best of times. Another thing my coursebook will be good for.

But the main benefit of the blog seems to be just seeing the words hang just beyong the window pane. Even if I never tell a soul that it's out there, my mind tells me that it's still outside the bedroom, but in a way that allows Anne and me to stay nice and safe behind the walls. If anyone cares to look up, they could see it, and that further gives it a completeness, regardless of how off the cuff or thick tongued it is in its delivery. Which is very energising. I wrote another 2000 words of The Hungry Boy last night, almost assuredly from the motivation I got doing this yesterday. I have no idea how much i'll get through today, but I already have two pages of new notes made about my main character's otherworldly abilities, that give me ample content for a middle paragraph or two to be stored away for later days.

I'm trying to think of that killer sign off. I don't think anything will come to mind. But I did write the first line first, which is half a battle won.

Actually that's not a bad ending either - well done Blog. Good dog.

2002-07-02T14:22:00.000Z

I feel very Anne Frank.

Behind the bedroom walls, clutching the tell-tale diary, about to be exposed; horror within, horror without. Who the hell conceived of a diary the whole world is supposed to steal and plunder? Probably a neo-nazi. Which brings me back to being Ms. Frank. What I am not is best motivated towards being Mr. Frank and Honest about My Changing Life™. Think of Anne, Damien. Big brave boy.

In 79 days I am scheduled to become a father. This comes on the cusp of my turning 28 and four days after my gainful employment ends. After six years in the Same Crappy Job™. Ending, at the same time, ten years, almost to the day, of being a part of the university community; enter student stage left, exit teacher stage right. Ten years, I now recognise, of wasted time.

I have to qualify that last statement by saying that my personal life during this time, up to and including the present day, remains second to none - my wife is my best friend and the centre of my whole world and my other friends, both close and distant, could well have been handpicked from an Elite Friends Task Force - but with reference to the imagined ladder to personal success and fullfilment, I was the comedian that carried his around on his shoulder from one slapstick near miss to another, never actually taking a meaningful step.

So here I am, ten years of psychology later, and I'm 28, overweight, vaguely balding and penniless. I've had a very good time getting here, I'll grant you, but I didn't get where I was going. And so, dashing headlong at the point, there begins the New Journey™.

I'm writing a book. While avoiding becoming a cliché, if possible.

I'm writing a kids book called, tentatively, The Hungry Boy and in essence, as the title might siggest, this blog is largely going to be about...that. The stumbling "...that" is because I am avoiding saying "about this experience" or "about the process." These phrases lead to sounding like a wanker. I cannot explain why I think that is without sounding like a wanker. Which makes me sound like a wanker. World, meet paranoia - paranoia, this is the world.

Paranoia - genuine embarrassment - about doing this, or more honestly about admitting to doing this and enjoying the prospect of doing this and not being much good at anything other than doing this and then possibly failing at doing this, has effectively stopped me from ever trying to do this since I was a teenager. Much like it has everyone else to my mind. I'd expand on this and enjoy a bloody good rant about it, but if I dwell on it I give up the first step on my New Ladder™ to my insecurities.

My mother will disapprove, while former colleagues will think me the feckless dreamer I have long feared they do anyway. My friends will nod and insert suitable stock supportive phraseology as appropriate. Katrina will tell me I can do anything and be fully prepared to silently catch me every time I fall. I'll never finish it. My child won't be amazed by me. These are the sum total of my main fears as I set to switching from this window to the window with Chapter 1 in it.

That's all the background you need, I think. Dwelling is the little death, he borrowed lightly.

More tomorrow, when I will studiously avoid this use of ™.