A change is as good, etc.

Almost as soon as I put the book on the shelf I felt lost.  Not lost in the sense of doubting what I'm doing with the story - no, that needs time to ferment, time for the scars of its writing to heal; but lost, as in my day-to-day life immediately and suddenly lacked any kind of purpose.

So, inevitably, I picked up another project.  In the interests of keeping everything new, I thought I'd try something I hadn't before - non-fiction.  As yet, I haven't penned a word - I've sketched out ideas for chapters, trawled the catalogues of the city library, and immersed myself in the first of many books to be read.

I'm making this project as unstructured as I can - it's very deliberately for me.  Without wishing to give too much away - which will, if past experience proves to be true, be a much almost completely unrelated to any finished article - it seems serendipitous that my degree certificate arrived today (sixteen years and four months after graduating), and I now officially have a degree in Marine Biology and Oceanography.  Although it really shouldn't have mattered - it's only a piece of paper, very late, commemorating a very definitely underwhelming academic performance - I can't help but feel a tiny bit of pride, and that reconnecting in this way seems a very right thing to do.

Finishing lines

Today, I have a hangover and no guilt.  Yesterday, I wrote a scene and quite unexpectedly, realised that was it: that was where this story was going to be left.  The first draft is finished.

I should be quite pleased with myself.  Intuition tells me I should even be slightly ecstatic, but I'm neither of those things.  What I am, actually is:

1. Aware of just how many holes there are in this draft: characters who have changed in the writing, sacred objects that have been unused, others that have appeared from nowhere, motivations missing and backstories lacking.
2. Ever so slightly (all right, that's a downright lie...make it completely and utterly) grateful that today and tomorrow, I don't have to get up to wrestle with J. and M. and D.  That they can be best served by parking them in a drawer for a month, and thinking about something else.
3. Desperate to pick up all the strands of my life I've dropped during the writing of this, and
4. So this isn't wholly negative, I'm also confident that this is something I can pick up again after the school holidays, and more crucially - I also reasonably confident that I'm going to want to.  Just because the writing doesn't sizzle and crackle off every one of these damn pages right now doesn't mean it doesn't, or won't.  Familiarity breeds contempt, and sometimes it's hard to see the good in my own work when I've been staring at it for this long.  Logic tells me there's some good stuff in here.

So right now I've backed everything up to every flash drive I own, and an internet space too.  Confident in the knowledge I'm not about to lose it, I intend to forget about Dark Milk completely for the next two months.  And although large parts of me are fed up to the back teeth with it, there's another deeper part of me that can't wait until the first day the kids go back to school, the kettle boils, and I slip back up to the sleep-out.  I know that tired old threads will seem brand new, and the game begins again.

Delays, denouements, and down-time.

After a few weeks in which I've really hit my straps - there hasn't been a single day in recent memory when I haven't hit my target of 1250 words for the day - I've eased rather than ground to a halt.  This, for once, is not for any bad reason, but rather because the myriad tasks that I've pushed to one side to make time and head-space to write has, by the looks of it, all gathered together in a quiet corner of the pub, had a group moan - probably fuelled with cheap Lambrusco, I think - about how badly I've been treatin' them, and set out on a jilted crusade, demanding to be dealt with.  And naturally, there's a time to fight alcoholic ex's from the battlements, metaphorical axe in hand in the shape of a mobile phone and the number of a good lawyer, and there's a a time to surrender and be breathed on. 

My capitulation comes because the noise of battle threatens to distract me from where I am, which is right in the middle of the story's climactic scene.  Not only do I want to devote this part my full attention, but it also feels as though the simple achievement of arriving here at this point now gives this child of mine a certain invulnerability.  If I hide it under the duvet and put the lights on a timer, no-one'll know if I've nipped down the pub for a swift half while leaving the kids at home.  Do they do Lambrusco in pints?  Outside Malaga, I mean - obviously.

You would be correct in thinking that part of me at least, is rather pleased with another part of me.  Pride and falls and all that: this feels like a small step on a longish ladder, but still - a definite one.  So I've decided to take Jay out of school on Friday and head off down south in the bus, loaded up with cameras, frisbees and fishing rods, just me and him, for a boy's weekend of doing nothing much in the Catlins. (Such has been the run of surf lately that leaving the boards at home is looking like it might be something of a blessed relief: my shoulders feel old.)

It seems much longer ago than the few months it actually has been that my first planned trip to the Catlins got frustrated.  I'm not sure if I shared the exact reasons for my canning it back then, but suffice to say I won't be watching Bill and Ted and then like, totally melvining my daughter at 7 o'clock in the morning.  Explaining to the osteopath exactly what I was doing when I put my back out has never been harder and I'll be eternally grateful that she treated me rather than doing as any sane person would have done - picking up the phone and calling for security.  

I can, in fact, only spot one small fly upon the horizon: the title of this blog.  I went for a surf this morning in my 4/3 and I was uncomfortably hot.  The summer rubber is coming out again (phnaar) - a day that for a while there, I thought I'd never see again.

Life is really quite good.

Flying down the lines

I set myself a deadline to finish the first draft of this story:  I want something in my hand that covers the whole thing by the time the kids break up for the southern summer.  I phrase it like that because there'll be no way that what's in my hand then will bear too much resemblance to the finished product.  There's just too many areas that I've flagged for thinking about later, but which somehow I can't consider now while getting this story out.  It's like a long, long vomit in a new bathroom; and the builder can't hand it over to the customer until he wipes up the mess. 

You want literary metaphors, I give them to you.

So this is why my blogging has been on the slow side: the slow, grunting birth of this story (imagine that however the darkest recesses of your mind see fit) and, incidentally, some quite decent surf.  I tell myself it's ying and yang - I can't create while the shoulder muscles twitch to paddle, the body is the window to the mind, and a thousand other similar platitudes.  It seems to be working for me right now, so I'm more than content to keep fooling myself - and possibly you - that a good surf, taken whenever it's on offer,  is almost an essential part of a writer's day.  If you surf, and if you write, I urge you to do everything you can to perpetuate this.  Even if you don't, what's it going to cost you to whisper it?

Thanks, Anton...

I came acros yet another writing rule, yesterday - if there's any such thing. It's attributed to Chekhov, and roughly states that an author should take the first three pages of any story, screw them up and chuck them in the bin.  The beginning of the story is where you are after you've done that.

So now I have something else to aim for.  Apart from writing a book of which I can be proud and which, hopefully, other people will get to enjoy too, I'm now faced with the challenge of writing a story that doesn't require the first three pages throwing away, just to be contrary.

It's not going to be this one though.  Although I'm still enjoying it immensely, still making good progress, I'm already concious of the amount of rewriting it's going to require just to hang together at all.  That, I suppose, is the price of starting out on a journey with no idea of where it's going beyond the end of the next sentence.

As in life, it has it's own rewards.  And, obviously, a price.

Cruising through blue skies...

I'm having fun this week.  Life, as is it's wont, has decided that for a while at least, it's going to be easy.  So I've scored fun surf a few times, had a couple of windless bike rides, and ploughed on apace with one of the works-in-progress, the story aimed at the 11-14 reader.

One of the reasons I've been having so much fun with this has been the way in which the characters have presented themselves to me.  One of the main protagonists seems to resemble nothing more than Joan Collins with supernatural powers (which she may well have anyway), and I love Joan Collins.  How couldn't you?  Well, maybe if you were gay, and/or under eighty, or repelled by fake tan, and I'm not sure her arch-enemy in the story is any of those things.  Think of Christopher Cazenove, with slightly madder hair and an evil smile.  When you've got those two on your side, how can you not have fun?

The story's got its roots in Greek mythology, namely the story of Jason and the Golden Fleece.  The research for this has been pretty interesting:  Heracles, for example, finds his way into the story aboard the Argo, as does Thesseus, he of the Minotaur fame.  Something that I don't think will translate with authenticity is the sheer level of violence of the times: you want revenge on your cheating husband?  Murder the kids.  Remarry, have another argument.  Murder the kids again,then said spouse (natch), then maybe lop your brother's head off too, just to shut the moaning grandparents up.  It's mindblowing.  This is the same culture that used to chuck every other baby off a cliff to appease the gods.  It's amazing they left it to India to invent the vindaloo, really.

So I'm having to tone that down a bit.  But you can rest assured that whenever the opportunity presents itself, I'll be turning Joan's dial up to eleven.

Sick...

Waves today out along the coast.  Unfortunately, I've been hammered by the flu, so although I took a board out looking with me today, the fear of getting cold and sick again kept me out of the water.  I've lost about half a stone in sweat and vanished appetite, so jumping into sub-ten degree water is probably not high on the list of things I should be doing.  There were some guys on it and having fun though, and I took a few shots.  It's definitely harder trying to take decent surf pictures with a compact as opposed to an SLR - shutter lag, struggling to make out an LCD in daylight - still, got a couple of frames to make something of...

Plenty of grunt on offer today, for sure.  Beautiful blue skies and sunshine, and the headland at Blackhead is still just about big enough to keep the north-easterly off it.  It's vanishing surprisingly quickly - it's been quarried out for road stone. I can't help but think it's a little unnecessary to take an entire headland out.  

Smooth as a baby's bottom.

And here's the token arty attempt.  I can't wait to get back on it.

The surfing's not the only thing that's suffered.  Along with my physical energy, my creativity seems to have been well and truly sapped.  I keep resolving to get up at stupid times of night and write - just to harden the creative muscle, as it were.  (Stop sniggering at the back.)  Unsurprisingly, bed always seems to win.  Perhaps it's indicative of just how drained I am at the moment that I can't even link those two thoughts together properly.  Best stay away from pen and paper then, because it's never good to look back at past efforts and realise that yes, it really was utter crap.

Picking things up, putting 'em down...

It's a well-known technique for writers - putting a work aside, and then coming back to it with fresh eyes, motivation, or ideas.  After a couple of fallow months I got around to picking through the thriller again, and I'm feeling quite good for doing so.  I've been playing around - as I've mentioned in a past post - with a early-teen/young adult story which is, I think (and to continue the agricultural allegory,) in the fullness of time going to be quite a fertile row, or whatever.  But to labour a point, it needs fertilising, and to lay fallow itself.  Annoyingly, I don't seem clever or inspired enough - any of the time - to be able to string together a whole book's worth of good ideas without putting it aside at least once.  So that one's out to pasture, and the thriller's come back into the stable.

Maybe it's the genre, or maybe it's because parts of this story have been kicking around my head for so long, but I haven't had too much trouble getting the words out, and it makes me wonder if the reason I put it aside was a blockage of another sort - perhaps an emotional one on my part: an I'm not good enough kind of blockage, perhaps.  Think of it like a golfer getting the putting yips, perhaps - either way, it seems apparent that I can only write constructively on a project when the drive and inspiration together outweight the self-doubt.

Putting things aside in another way, I haven't been surfing since I got back from the 'naki.  I've had some truly beautiful, cold bike rides up and over Mount Cargill, heading out towards Blueskin Bay with snow-capped mountains on the skyline.  I've been looking for surf, mostly found none but once or twice blown it out because I can't be doing with getting cold on a miserable day.  Maybe I'm just going to have to mentally put my surfing aside until the elements align, and just pick up the bike instead and see what happens.

How much swearing is acceptable in a children’s book?

I've been up against this one for the last couple of days: just how much can a writer swear - and when - in a children's book?

Obviously, I'm not talking about picture books for the under fives here. I'm thinking more specifically of the type of reader that number one daughter is: Twelve years old, reading ahead of her years. A Twilight fan par excellence, (books which I tried to read but gave up – I went through my own teen angst, thank you very much. I don't really feel the need to read four whacking great volumes of someone else's, vampires or no), she's also a fan of the Cherub series by Robert Muchamore (which has a certain level of bad language) and the Bartimaeus trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, which doesn't, instead showcasing the fact that you don't need to be swear to convey rude or insulting language. Alright, the Cherub series has its protagonists drawn from children's homes in working class areas, and there are probably few enough linguistic angels there, so I can understand Robert Muchamore's including a few "naughty" words. But elsewhere in children's literatureliterature: how much is too much?

My own feeling is that in reading matters, we should(with a few caveats) leave it to children to be self-censoring. If my daughter picked up The Wasp Factory I might feel obliged to offer her a few words of warning before she got too far ( and I'd probably express my own forthright opinion on the book at the same time..!), but I wouldn't take it out of her hand. The pace of reading is, I think, sufficiently different to watching a film or a television programme, and the level of involvement required – a book requires reading, in a way that other media don't – makes it much easier for us to put a book we don't like down. And to make a massive generalisation (which pointedly excludes The Wasp Factory, by the way!), gratuitous sex, drugs and violence seem to figure much less prominently on my bookshelf than they do on my TV screen. I'm not saying that they're not there and/or equally/more compelling or graphic, here: if anything, quite the reverse. Just closer to their proper places in life.

But in books specifically for children?  I wouldn't be too happy with my daughter having writing designed for her that included f-bombs, the c-word is definitely out, and bugger - that favourite Australianism - greatly offends at least one of my close friends (who I certainly wouldn't describe as overly prudish) and is not, particularly, a word whose true meaning I'd like to explain to my twelve-year old on a winter's night just before bedtime.  Almost anything else would seem to represent something that most kids will have seen coming out of themselves since birth...

Thoughts and opinions welcome!

Them there school holiday work breaks...

Yes, the dreaded school holidays are with us again, and like thousands of parents the world over, I've been dredging the innermost reaches of my brain trying to figure out new ways to get the kids cold, tired, or otherwise to a state of exhaustion where they might give me five minutes peace.  This is a quest in which I've largely succeeded, but needless to say - by the time I've got them tuckered out, there isn't enough left in the tank to contemplate writing a blog post most days, let alone mount an assault on The Novel.

I have, however, had one minor result that I am - in the spirit of depthless generosity - going to ascribe to this fortnight of toil.  I managed to wake up this morning, after a night of unusually vivid dreams, with almost a fully-formed plot in front of me.  I flicked the kettle on for tea, and while I waited for it to brew sketched out the outline, ready to revisit once I've recovered.  Dreams like this don't come on their own - no.  They require the imbibing of copious quantities of alcohol and blue cheese, and my children - the little darlings - have given me plenty of motivation to seek solace in the arms of either the bottle or indeed, barely controlled fungus cultures over the last ten days.  So this story's going to be all theirs.

Snow and the lack of Surf

Yes, the surfing's been completely proscribed by the aforementioned school holidays.  I did take the family off skiing, up to Mount Dobson, a small field in the Mackenzie Country which is almost all beginner and intermediate terrain and which has terrific views over to Mount Cook and Lake Tekapo.  It also looks like a great place to break myself into going a bit more backcountry - lots of moderate off-trail runs accessible by relatively easy hikes, so I may revisit there on my own account if it looks like there's some really nice fresh snow on the cards.  What struck me about Dobson though - apart from the complete lack of school holiday crowds - was what a terrific place it was to just be, in the most hippy-dippy, quasi-Buddhist horseshit sense of the word.  The facilities are - well, basic is being generous - but somehow that just adds to the experience.

Of course, no school holidays or ski trip would have been worth its salt without the obligatory rising-of-the-swell.  The east coast, it seems, was all time during the time we were away.  But with the cold spell we've been having, and  legs heavy with the after-ski burn, somehow I didn't mind too much.  Yes, the clarion all of the warm north might be growing stronger, but there's days down here that are just pure magic.

Fresh tracks...

There's an old saying, which I'll paraphrase as "the body is the window to the mind", from which comes the oldest writing "do" in the book (so to speak): show, don't tell.

Right now, this window's feeling pretty broken after the first skiing of winter.  I'm certainly not in any state to pick up what I was working on - it's written in a way that demands my full engagement.  So instead, I'm casually jotting down in a notebook exactly how I do feel, for next time I have to show  my reader an utterly exhausted shell of a man who, on this evidence, is just about to have his skiing arse well and truly handed to him by an upstart daughter.  

It's a curious mixture of physical pain, mental exhaustion, definitely a sense of encroaching age, all tinged with parental pride.

I'm sure that I'll get something else out of looking back at being in that environment on such a wonderful couple of days, too, but in the meantime I'm off to finish my notes, do some yoga, and just maybe - just maybe - get enough fitness to delay the arse-kicking for another trip at least.

Second drafts and letting go

I'm really enjoying revisiting this novel-in-waiting after the thriller stalled.  Partly, that's because it's such a completely different type of book:  thrillers are all about plot and tight, sparse language.  If your prose interferes with the page flipping, inhibits the pure story-telling, then that's bad.   The story I'm working on at the moment is much more about the carnival of language, as my Creative Writing lecturer at Massey puts it. 

An exercise I've always enjoyed is trying to write like  foreign languages translate into English. Translated Spanish and Italian novels , for example, have this wonderful quality to them - I can't really describe it as anything other than a lilting music.  Books written in or by Indians - whether in another language first or in Indian - have their own music too, a curious mixture of sub-continental flare and a tight, correct use of words.  (I wonder what a linguist would say about that: if British Colonialism is the common ancestor of modern Indian English and English English (for want of a better word), why is it that the Indian version seems to be so much more correct?  Has the presence of other languages in the country slowed the evolution of the language, or do they contribute in some other way to keeping it more correct?  I digress, wildly.) 

This story's set in Italy, rooted in a time at the end of the first world war.  So it's an interesting exercise trying to find the right voice - there's not only geographical considerations, but historical ones too, and it contributes to me using language in a way that I, at least, am loving, which in and of itself drives the story in ways I hadn't planned or foreseen.

Which does present its own set of problems.  Because I'm so proud, really, of some of the writing I've done, it makes the whole business of re-envisaging areas in the story rather bereaving.  This side of editing is one I suspect many novelist struggle with:  after all, carrying out a complete revision of a short story is one thing, but investing the time and energy to completely chuck out a whole novel?  The thought of it would make a strong man weep.

Maybe I'll get to the end with a better understanding of what's going on with this, look back and decide to chuck it all out and start again. What's fun though, is letting the language alone be the driver.

Oddly enough, I'm finding that working on this is also rekindling my confidence to go back and tackle the thriller again when it's time. I can't help but feel that maybe at the end of the day, they're all parts of the same puzzle.

Dangerously close...

The cold water awaits.  My injury is now at the point where I can contemplate getting back in there - in fact, I've tried once.  I paddled out down the coast, thinking here was a nice, if a little junky, two foot day to ease myself into it, when in fact it was probably pushing five and with a strong side-shore sweep. I haven't worn hood and gloves for years, and I don't mind admitting I got totally freaked: way heavier that I was expecting, the eerie silence of a neoprene enclosed head and, in my gloves, feeling too far removed from what was going on around me, and ever conscious of my back.  I lasted about ten minutes, and never caught a wave.  But after a month out you expect the first few to be crap, so I wasn't too fussed.  On the upside, I was pretty snuggly warm in my polypro hoodie - if I pick and choose my days through winter, I should manage to keep the motivation up.  The Osteo has got me doing core exercises for all I'm worth, so hopefully some of the benefits of that carry over into my surfing, if I remember what that is and how to do it.

The bus is almost back together, but I'm none the wiser at the moment as to what exactly is causing that CV noise, because it isn't the CV's.  I took them apart, inspected them minutely, and there's no real discernible wear at all - not bad for joints made in August '72, as these are stamped.  Ah, the days before built-in obsolescence, when they used real metal and real rubber, and built things to last.  I'd be interested to figure out exactly what the bus's carbon footprint will have been over its lifetime - cradle to grave - build costs and recycling costs chucked in.  Even though the fuel economy isn't exactly fabulous, I bet the figure's still better than if I behaved as the auto industry would have me and recycled my car every five years.

The writing is progressing in fits and starts. I can see no finished story at the moment, rather I seem to be putting together discrete, loosely-related sets of chapters that will, eventually, find a common tie - something to bind the whole together in one recognisable story.  It's another way to work amongst this infinite variety of stories.

Slowing down and waiting

I seem to be waiting a lot this week:  waiting for my back to get better, waiting for bus parts to arrive, and waiting for clearer decks all round so I can get on with some writing, and on a more positive note, waiting for the NZ ski season to really get underway.

My back is improving slowly, although I'm still unsure as to whether the last episode marked a permanent shift in the severity of the spondy - it certainly seems to be more prominent at the moment, but that could also be because the spine's still being pulled out of alignment by muscles in low-grade spasm protecting the injury.  I'm still keeping up the cycling and yoga, though - bizarrely - as I get fitter, the cycling seems to be more a hindrance than a help.  My current theory is that as I get fitter I tend to spin the pedals faster, so using my hamstrings more, which then shorten and place tension on my spine.  Maybe tomorrow I'll just go for a steep uphill grind and see where that gets me.    I still feel a way away from surfing, although I seem to have arrived at a certain level of sanguinity (?) about the whole thing now, as I'm managing to stay fit (ish) in other ways. 

The bus has decided that 107,000 miles is as far as at least one and possibly two of the original CV joints are going to go.  Driving under load the clanking resembles nothing so much as a knight in armour out for a morning jog.  So I've got that particular delight awaiting for me, just as soon as the parts get here.  Doubtless I'll find something else to do while I'm under there too, although I'm shocked that, just for once at WOF time, I don't have a sidelight bulb out. 

I'm still enjoying working my way through this previous half-finished novel I talked about last time.  It's a nice retreat after the thriller, not least because it doesn't have the same restrictions on prose that the thriller genre does - I can walk round the whole carnival of language and take it all in if I want.  It's fun, challenging, and going well. 

And last, Coronet Peak opened this weekend.  I'm wearing my ski boots of an evening to bed them in, gazing longingly at my K2's in the corner.  The kids are nearly fully equipped - when will they stop growing? - more snow is forecast for this week, and I reckon the back will stand up well to a couple of days skiing as long as I don't push it too hard, and the chances of getting the opportunity to do that with an 8 year old in tow are slim.  Bring it on!

I drink to forget...

The temptation to get absolutely stone-cold skull-fucked every night of the week has never been stronger.  After two rounds (more accurately, two bouts of twelve three minute rounds, Queensbury rules, etc) with the Chiropractor, my back still feels rubbish, although I'm prepared to admit that this may in some small part be contributed to by my insistence of cycling 170k in the last few days.  Cycling's usually an activity that helps the back get better, and I may - just possibly - have erred in my thought that more of the same delivered quicker might supercharge the healing process.  So I still feel at least a week away from being anywhere near ready to get back in the sea; a sea which is cooling all the time.  And of course, once you've had time out during a cooling period, getting back in - and on a regular basis too - becomes that much harder, as if the time out instantly turns you into a giant cold-fearing pussy.

The thriller too, has ground to a halt.  Part of me thinks good thing too, it bloody stinks, although this doesn't in any way diminish the temptation to get wildly pissed on that account.  I've started revisiting another novel that I ran out of steam with a few months ago, and I'm pleasantly surprised by what I find: even if I say so myself, some of it's really rather good.  Having something good to work with might just be the kick up the arse I need to get something constructive done, so I'm now comfortable putting the thriller aside for now and working on this.  Who knows, when I get round to looking at the thriller again, perhaps a few months in the wilderness of my hard drive will have knocked it into shape - is that how these things work?

Now, if only it also worked for my fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae...

It never rains but...

It pours.  An hour before I was due to jump into the bus for some me-time down in the Catlins, I decided it might be a good idea to have a quick play with number one son.  Within five minutes I was flat out - my back decided that eight o'clock in the morning was too early for such shenanigans, and so not only did I not go to the Catlins, but I've also spent the better part of this week walking like a question mark in and out of Chiropractors.  And it's pissed down, all week.

Being flat on my back you'd think I had nothing better to do than write, but uh-huh.  It doesn't work like that.  Misery loves company, so my muse fled out of the window along with my disappearing surf trip.  Only in the last couple of days have I even felt like making progress.  I'm still in a semi-stuck phase, but I can definitely feel an unglueing going on, even if I'm only managing 500 words a day.

At least the surf hasn't done its usual trick of absolutley pumping while I've been out of the game.  A huge rainstorm and howling southerlies have swathed the south island in rain and snow this week and kept the surf utterly forgettable.  The forecast looks good for next week though, and I'm just come from spending an hour on the stationary bike (my road bike on a turbo trainer, a true invention of the devil) and some gentle yoga.  With a bit of luck and some more hard work hopefully I'll be in shape to hit the water again just as it comes good.

A hump in the road

Everything is slowing down.  I haven't posted all week, but worse, the novel is stuttering to a crawl.  700, 900, 500 words in a day: it's a far cry from the good progress of a couple of weeks ago.  I think the slowing down is for two reasons. Firstly, I've reached a crossroads where several things could happen and I can't decide what to do, and the reason I can't decide what to do is because of the second reason, which is that the story in its current form feels waaaayyy too linear for my liking, and this is frustrating because this is always going to happen given the way that I write - chronologically.  The mixing around of time lines and viewpoints etcetera comes in the second draft and is (as far as I'm concerned) an editing job rather than an imaginative one but right now it's interfering and REALLY PISSING ME OFF.

Part of why I'm slowing down is that there's an irresistible urge to meddle creeping up on me - to chuck more spanners into my hero's path.  This may or may not be a good thing, but I'm reluctant to do it if I know part of the reason for me wanting to do so is that I'm - well, essentially getting bored of telling this story in its current form.  It has to be right for the story - I think it is, but I need to clear my head on this - on my reasons for doing what I'm doing.  Authoring is supposed to be an act of giving, after all - not one of getting sidetracked solely for my own entertainment.

So off to the Catlins I shall trip this weekend.  I've fixed a couple of leaky pushrod seals and fitted a new dipstick boot, my loving wife has supplied me with a roast chicken flavour dehydrated sick-in-a-bag, and I've caved in and bought a hooded undervest thing for keeping out the cold water.  The swell forecast looks reasonable, the weather not too horrible.  Hopefully my laptop battery will last through a long evening and I'll break the back of this blockage before the reconstituted roast chicken gives me a blockage of another kind entirely. 

Oddly, given the progress on the writing front, I seem to be much happier down here this week.  I had a wonderful surf the other day at small Murderer's and had a couple of hilly bike rides over towards Blueskin Bay where I felt genuinely contented, for a bit.  The impending arrival of the ski season is starting to give me the odd heart flutter, and this morning I saw a Hector's Dolphin playing in the harbour at the end of the drive. Yes, I'm missing my friends up North, but the urge to run back with my tail between my legs screaming "take me!" has faded.  Give thanks, Taranaki.

Getting ready for roadtripping...again

I had another OK day of writing today.  I'm still at a point where I'm going over what has gone before - no teasers yet - but where I'm laying foundations for what's happening next.  Seeing as how I really haven't mapped this bit out, it's exciting, although slow writing.  The plot as it stands so far is pretty detailed and intricate - there's a lot of historical references, which I hope both add interest and authority.  The need to appear authoritative isn't a vain thing in writing, it's essential - it establishes the trust the reader has in the author; and also, as Flaubert said, God is in the details.

I picked up some oil and bits today for servicing the kombi.  I'm planning a roadie on my own down to the Catlins sometime in the next couple of weeks, should the surf and weather co-operate.  The days are pretty short and the nights long, so it'll probably be a one or two night deal, I think.  I'll take the laptop and write while the battery lasts.  My writing career began travelling: I consciously started pursuing this writing dream when I worked out at sea as an observer on Spanish fishing boats on Newfoundland's Grand Banks.  Over four months I penned the bones of what is probably the world's worst novel.

I vividly remember taking this photograph after a morning's writing; on the morning of the first day of the new millennium, feeling the ache of missing my eighteen-month old daughter and wife. I finished that novel two years later, and it occupies a proud position on my bookshelf from where it never moves.  It sits there taunting me really - I am your work.  As a motivator it's quite powerful:  there's a strong sense that in this awful work is something I have to atone for. Yet I'm equally proud of it: it's the stamp that marks the beginnings of my apprenticeship.

The first sketches of that novel were done a couple of years before, on my own again in a plain pension on the small island of Graciosa, just off Lanzarote. In between picking urchin spines out of my feet and trying to stem the flow of blood from scalp wounds - all marks of honour from tackling a heaving left-hander five miles daily walk away - I started writing out characters.  I would never have thought then that Graciosa would be the birthplace of something that would stick with me and possess me like writing - trying to tell stories - has done ever since.  Funny and powerful things happen on the road.

So when I travel solo I always look for and make room to discover new things in my writing.  Hopefully it'll be the same going down to the Catlins.  I'm timing this because I think that I'll be running into blockages soon, and the trip might just head those off.    But before then, I need to change the oil, adjust the valves, fix a couple of leaking pushrod seals and change the dipstick boot, a task which promises to have me swearing in new and interesting ways.

Slowly goes it...

It's definitely shaping up to have been something of a slow week.  I think I'm going to have averaged about a thousand words a day, which isn't really where I want to be but progress is still progress.  I've been distracted by many things: money worries - which aren't immediate yet but who I know are lurking somewhere over the horizon, my wife's job interview, solo care of the kids for a couple of days, and staying up together with all the things I've been selling off on trademe / ebay - so that the first worry stays less immediate; and also that when we come to move back to Taranaki we take a whole let less crap back with us.

As far as the book goes, it's been a relatively easy last couple of days as I'm at a point where I'm essentially recapping what has already been.  I'm feeling the breadth of choices I have from here spreading away in front of me like an ocean: wide, intimidating, and constantly shifting.  If it's not to labour a point too hard - which it is - my confidence in my literary sextant is wavering somewhat.  Best hurry up and get lost, I think.

I've finally accepted that I won't ever build another darkroom and put all my film stuff up for auction, so I've been playing around with black and white conversions in Photoshop to see if I can get anywhere near what I can do with my hands.  Not yet, but I'm excited by the potential.

I've also been trying to evaluate freelance web writing opportunities like suite101.com.  Some people seem to say OK things about this sort of thing, but it seems to be a second income strand rather than the main one which I know I'm going to need before long.  Still, I won't get anything if I don't try, so they're on the to-do list for once this first draft is done.

And finally, the surf's crapped out.  I had a fun wave down the coast yesterday, all to myself.  That little right point is, I think, going to be my salvation while I'm here.  The work I've been doing on my core strength seems to be paying off - I feel like I'm moving lighter and quicker than I've done in - well, years really.  I've frightened myself too, with just how quickly I'm losing pounds now I've decided to watch what I'm eating.  I think I may have more to come off than I thought, although judging by the way it took me ten minutes to get my claw-like hands to cooperate in taking my contacts out when I got out of the water, I'll be burning a few extra calories staying warm real soon...

Flying along...

I rediscovered my writing mojo today.   I sat down at nine and got up at quarter past eleven having written a whole chapter - it felt almost like a stream-of-conciousness style vomiting of words onto the page.  It came as a surprise because I was reluctant to settle, kept on finding other things to do to avoid starting - usually the precursor to a bad day.  After two slow days it was nice to get something feeling like rhythm going again.  I've hit 30,000 words now, which is kind of a milestone in that it marks the end of the beginning, and the starting point for where other projects of mine have run into trouble.  I think I'm clear for the next week at least on where I'm going - after that I guess we'll just have to sit down and grind it out.

Didn't surf today, even though there were good waves on offer.  It felt more important to crack on.  I got out in the afternoon for a "relaxing" cycle, which took the form of a 500m climb (over about 6 k), followed by a descent that bordered on the terrifying, given the cold and greasy roads, then a half-hour bash into a howling headwind.  Yes, I reckon I lost weight today, fo' sure...