The last weeks of autumn are always bittersweet:  The water's still warm, but cooling.  The barefoot sprint across wet grass and the foreshore prior to a morning session (and the less sprightly exits afterwards) leave feet that take longer and longer to thaw out, the hunt for missing booties is acquiring urgency.  The racing season is drawing to a close too - 6 weeks of forced downtime in the darkest months is an invitation to drink, eat, and get fat.

Such things will come to pass, and soon, but not just yet.  There's still warmth enough for after-school surfs with #1 son, still the last couple of races to hold on for, still flowers in the garden.  The low sun shows off New Zealand's famous clouds, the views of the Milky Way take the breath away.

 I'm writing, more than I have in a year or two. Word count seems to be a fairly common tool by which writers measure their self worth, but with only a snatched twenty minutes here and there to write, I've revised my expectations dramatically downwards.  I think it was Graham Greene who said something to the effect that 400 words a day should be enough for anybody, so I've set myself the goal of 300 a night.  It's little enough to be achievable, yet enough to grow something with.  And more often than not, I've found myself doing more.

Gettin' out of Dodge

The time to head to the warmth is fast approaching.  Amongst the rumble of removals trucks and the angst of broken teen love I've been trying to digest the last weeks here.  I've been lugging my camera around with me, making a point of taking at least a picture a day. Seems like a good way to say a slow goodbye.

Sunny days and creative delays

Since the house has been on the market bus trips have become more frequent: the sense of impending departure, even in the absence of any kind of done deal, has given us the impetus to try and get out into Otago more.  And it's beautiful, although I knew that already.  Wildlife, crazy beautiful beaches...

Hooker's sea lion in the dunes, Sandfly Bay.

Further up the road than I've been before...

Sandfly Bay, Otago Peninsula

The bus has been running better than it ever has in my ownership.  I'm trying to figure out exactly what I've done differently, but I can't actually see anything.  It's another example, if I needed one, of the organic contrariness of these things.  I'm convinced it's running better because I've finally convinced it I have some clue what I'm doing with a spanner in my hand (something, I admit, that has not always been the case.)  And I finally arrived at that happy point, where I looked at the service schedule in the Bentley manual (the knowledge), and found that there was not. one. single. thing. that was left wanting or of which I was uncertain. 

The writing, on the other hand, could be viewed in another way.  I've decided to put my completed first draft to one side - the second visit seemed too soon, too mechanical, too joyless - and am spending my writing time revisiting an idea that's been brewing, in one shape or another - my file history tells me - for nearly five years.  I'm putting no guns to heads, having no expectations: because the genesis of this story has been so long I'm reluctant to call it over.  The process is different too - I have no plan, I'm letting the language lead the way.  So far, I've always had something to write...so far.

Shift to winter - then somewhere else

It's been, I realise, nearly three months since I last blogged.  During that time we've had something in the way of - if not an indian summer - then most definitely an absent winter.  As I write, the ski fields in the southern lakes are still almost bare, well past opening day.  The water hasn't remained warm though: it's now at the temperature when forays into the life aquatic become dependent on it not being too big (for me in these temps, read nothing over three feet.  I've ceased to see the fun in being hit by frigid lumps of watery concrete, a lapsing in my hardcored-ness that I make no apologies for whatever) and on finding somewhere to get changed out of whatever freezing wind happens to be blowing.  That's not really been a problem this last week - there's been a run of small waves on the east coast just big enough to offer a few fun ramps in windless conditions under clear blue skies: my definition of perfect winter waves.  The only thing to give away the presence of winter, in fact, is some of the wildlife - and even that's been sunbathing.

This side's almost done.

Various factors have contributed to my lack of blogging recently, chief amongst them the hard work of getting our house down here ready to sell.  The move to warmer climes is still very firmly back on - but it would be good to get some skiing in before we go.  Are you listening, mother nature?

There's been a very definite shift in the weather over the last couple of weeks; winter suddenly feels imminent.  I drove over the hill to check Murderers this morning and there was snow on distant peaks.  The wind that whipped underneath my towel while I was getting changed at Aramoana (Murderers wasn't looking tempting) had little of summer in it either, and I pulled on a hood for the first time in a few months, looking after those ears.

I'm still looking to consistently click with the waves around here.  There's nowhere where I ever feel at home, on top of what's going on.  I've never been the best at reading beach-breaks, but I would still have expected to find a corner somewhere that I could have made my own.  It's yet to happen, just one of many things that has the warm song of the North getting louder.

I have far too many computers.  One effect of this is that I have folders with my writing in it spread around the house.  So when I pick up a different laptop - sometimes for the first time in months, for reasons too boring to go into here or anywhere - I get to see stuff that's been sitting, waiting for me.  Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad.  This time it's been good - I picked up something I'd sketched out which has a very different voice and feel to the story I've been working on recently, and it excited me.  I saw new places it could go, and the change of language is refreshing.

So I've picked that up for a while, and I'll run with it a bit longer.  I wonder how many other writers wok like this - flitting between one unfinished project and the next, sometimes seemingly never closer o finishing any of them.  Is it just a reflection of who I am - a damning reflection,at that - or a valid way of keeping what I produce - I don't know, passionate isn't the word...somehow less mechanical, truer, containing more of me?  Either way, even if only intuitively (obviously, as I can't even find the words to describe it logically!) I think it's important, part of the giving process of authoring, and for that a more rewarding, if less productive way of writing.

Roadtrip time...

Loaded the bus with the whole family and camping gear for the first time in too long, and headed for central Otago.  Hot days, cold nights, and some special places...

Above the lake at St Bathans

 

It's called the Blue Lake...

There's worse views to have upon rolling back the side door from the comfort of bed.

Another river full of trout that stayed there.  Bastards.

We went over the pig route, State Highway 85 from Palmerston to Ranfurly - an old wagoner's route from NZ's pioneer days.  Coming over some of those hills with a team of horses must have been unimaginably hard - places like Dead Horse Pinch got their name for a reason.  It's amazing how western humanity has largely become a race of total pussies in just a couple of generations.

Good times, and good dubbing country...

Curing itchy feet...

My feet have been getting itchy.  Really itchy.

Whether this is because I've barely set foot outside Dunedin in seven months - two brief weekend camping trips aside - or because the end of summer is in the air (was that it?), or because in this last crazy fortnight in NZ what's really important in life is standing proud in our minds, I'm not sure.  I know last weekend was really hard though - epic sessions going down in Taranaki with a crew of good friends out, while I drifted between so-so waves in a layer of fleece.

I got back from a trip out in the van, swept the sand and the ice-cream wrappers out, and parked it in the garage.  Next to the camping gear, and the shelf with the spares on it.  There's an oil filter sat there now, along with a four-litre can of Castrol.  I stood there and looked at my van and figured just what I'd have to do to fire it up and drive the thousand mile journey north:  oil change, valves, set the timing. Check the tyres.  Fetch the ipod and throw some baked beans in the headbanger.  Go - there's plenty of time along the way to deliver the motivational speeches that I know, deep down, keep her going.

It was hard enough not to run right on in and book the ferry then and there.

I moped around for a couple of days, wondering how I could shake myself out of it.

I surfed every day - quick blats to the beach in the car, so as not to cut up the day.  Didn't help, too much.  Now I had sore shoulders to go with the itchy feet.

Tried to write - that always makes me feel better.  Couldn't.

So I loaded up the bus - me and the dog, a surfboard, lunch, and a laptop.  I went and parked down at a nice beach, surfed some okay waves, walked the dog, and then sat down in the bus and ate.

It's a curious thing, as to why sitting in the back of the bus should be so healing.  Maybe it's the smell. (All buses smell good.  If you're an olfactory pervert who doesn't like getting their hands dirty - stay away.  You'll have to have one.)  Maybe it's some cosmic imprint left in the fabric of the thing by near-as-dammit forty years of good times going down in there.  Whatever.  But for the first time in a week the words came back, in a trickle at first, and with them some sense of - if not contentment, then a lessening of unease, for sure.

Buses is fucking great, and you knows it.

Exhausted exhausts, knackered shoulders...

The second draft is coming on nicely.  This is obviously good, but is even better because I hadn't even planned to start on it until yesterday - I just couldn't wait.  Hopefully, that's a good sign.  I'm still building a list of things to revisit - it's feeling more refined, more polished, more unified - but it's still a way from being a finished article.

I've been buzzing around a bit in the bus this last fortnight - it being the back end of the school holidays.  The weather here has been predictably unpredictable, and there's really been nothing you'd want to go camping in.  But there's been a few good day trips around and about, plenty of ice-cream being eaten - that kind of thing.  When I got back from one the other day, though, a new noise  accompanied the roll up the drive, and that's never good.  The tailpipe end of my muffler had decided it had had enough, and the rattle I was hearing was the tailpipe bidding for freedom.

Which is fine - you expect that kind of thing on a forty-year old car.  But replacement exhausts are
a) shit, and
b) stupidly expensive.
For reasonable money I could always put an EMPI muffler on, but the internet is awash with tales of how something more durable can be easily constructed from a latticework of melted gruyere and dried-on weetabix, in which case the reasonable money suddenly becomes very unreasonable indeed.

So after a quick phone around for prices, I did what any sensible person would do - I got it welded up.  It doesn't matter that it now looks a little - well, used.  It's serviceable enough for now, and it's going to be better than anything I can acquire this side of five hundred bucks, and right now, with daughter number one starting high school...that much just ain't an option.  Plus, of course, I kind of like my bus being - well, my bus.  Part of my jag about bus ownership is seeing just how far along the road I can persuade this old girl - as much in her entirety as possible - to go.

There's been a few waves on offer this week.  I've just come back from a - not exactly a slab, more a slabette - down the coast.  Shifty, kelpy and a few good beatings, one of which left me wondering if I still had a full complement of teeth. I snagged one good set wave and surfed it as well as I ever do - joined the turns, snapped the snaps, kept the speed, and it all felt easy and right in the way one only dreams of when it's all too hard (which it was for the rest of the session).  Might have only been the one, but once I've played it through in my mind a few times it'll keep me going until the next time.

Not today.  Or even where I surfed.  Same colour, though...

Inbetweens and arounds

The weather has been predictably unpredictable, which combined with a minor illness and the school holidays has seen to it that time in the water has been non-existent for the last couple of weeks.  I did find a 24 hour window of less-than-awful weather to load the bus up with children and head down to Taeri Mouth for a night away.  The temperatures still weren't kind, but we warmed up with beach cricket (with associated disputes about one-hand-one-bounce and quality fast bowling) and dog-chasing before sundown brought a cold night.  Drove back along the coast road the next morning, and needless to say - as I didn't have a board, and had children - the whole coast was pumping.  I saw people out at places that I'd only wondered might work - they do.

Still, surf or not, it was good to get away...

River water, almost as brown as the naki's...

Taeri rivermouth

Parked up and ready for the kids to have another argument.

On the writing front, the second draft is proving to be fun - even more than I hoped for.  I know it's not what some might call a towering work of literary genius - whatever, frankly - but a book I've always aspired to have written something like is The Road to Gandolfo, by Robert Ludlum.  It's utter tripe, really - but throughout the book there's just a wonderful sense of the author having fun, and it's contagious.   If I can catch a similar cold I'll be very happy.

Bumping along the bottom...

I've recently been debating - although not very seriously - whether or not to sell the bus, mostly because of the speed with which my offspring are growing.  With four and a small dog up, all required camping gear; with the heavy, german-made (and therefore heavy, like their food) camping interior that weighs more than I do, plus the antique dresser of indispensable camping accessories which my wife insists on while wondering aloud how I ever managed without them, it's safe to say that the performance isn't exactly sparkling.  After all, it only made 66 hp when it was new and even if it's still churning that out - well, you can see why it struggles, and that's before you even get to the fun part, of four people actually trying to live out of one of these things.

This weekend has reaffirmed the faith and squashed any such nascent thoughts.  I packed Jay in and set off for some father-and-son time down south, sans mother, sister, or surfboards.  It's easy to forget that the bus has always been in his life - we've always just gone off.   Spending time with Jay in the bus this weekend, I watched him unwind and chill out, and forget the stresses of being nine.

Between Kaka point and the Nuggets, finding sea lions to hassle.

Purakanui falls.  Pretty, eh?

Papatowai beach.  Spooky, cold, shadows in the water.  Can I not surf here?

Catlins rain forest.  Smells even better than a similarly themed toilet freshener.

Pounawea sunrise.  I take pictures while Jay gets to do star jumps.  Character building, see...

So we did bus things: we explored, we tramped, we read.  We forgot about modern things like computers, fuel injection, and overtaking.  I drank beer, he ate his own body weight in ice cream.  Complete strangers wander up and talk about the bus, and then other things.  I can fix any problem short of major catastrophe with my own brain and hands and the tools I carry, and problems are well - expected.  That big front window displays the whole world in glorious panorama, accompanied by the warm bus-sell that only buses have.  And we finished the trip, as usual, with the bus running better at the end than it had at the beginning -  like the bus enjoys it too, and doesn't want to be consigned back to a nice warm garage.  Travelling by bus is a journey, in the truest sense of the word.

And so, the Catlins duly scoped out for further adventuring, we returned home in glorious, faintly dirty triumph, which is of course exactly how fathers and sons should return home.  Tales to tell, hot baths to sit in, more beer to be drunk. 

Bus adventures rock, and so do the Catlins.

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.

The drought breaks!

Finally, I got in.  It's been a beautiful morning, the kind that makes you want to take a camera with you everywhere you go, right from the first pink rays of dawn scraping the tops of the hills around the harbour.  I drove up and over them to go check the surf.  Fantastic views on a golden morning.

The small swell has shifted direction slightly from yesterday, and had too much south in it to wrap into murderers.  I had a tantalising glimpse of lines hitting the outside bar, but it was asking too much for them to bend all the way around and into the bay.

So off I went to Aramoana, where I had it all to myself.  This wasn't entirely surprising - it's not like it was all-time, or even average.  It was crumbly chest-high beach break on a tide that was rising when it needed to be dropping, with the first breaths of a cross-shore beginning to blow.  But it was very user-friendly, in the world of recuperating, recently freaked-out surfers getting used to the cold again.  I left the gloves in the car, preferring cold hands and feelin' it to warm alienation.  I was too slow to my feet the first few, getting caught behind the section.  Then I locked (or lucked) into a punchy left that I could race nearly all the way in, where a little end ramp begged to be hit.  Like a punch-drunk old heavyweight with a speed ball, I kind of remembered what to do.  It doesn't matter that it was probably one of the ugliest turns I've done in years:  I landed it, and the morning was complete.  I got out.  I would have been rude to ask for more.

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.

A New Day...

I was full of trepidation this morning, after the scare of finding myself so blocked yesterday.  I sat down at 9 am this morning wondering what the hell I was going to write about.  When I looked up an hour later, I'd done a thousand words. Another half-hour and I'd added another four hundred.  Amazed, is the word. 

And yet something's changed:  I know full well from past experience that nothing is guaranteed in writing, certainly not that a stories' end will ever be told.  Yet I'd begun to imagine that this one was so different.  So yesterday was a wake-up call - never to take another day's writing for granted. 

I'm telling myself too, that I can't go back to Taranaki until this book is written, trying to use my homesickness positively.  The temperatures are dropping outside, down around the freezing point at night.  The ski season can't be far off now: once that's started it'll feel like only a matter of weeks before we're getting ready to head north again. 

Small waves again at Blackhead this morning - weak, clear and cold.  I felt cold for the first time in my 4/3, and questioned whether I'd really be able to keep the motivation to keep surfing through the depths of winter.  Fielded phone calls from friends up north last night, stoked that the drought up there has finally broken: surfing good sized waves, warm in their summer suits, well into the twilight.  It's enough to turn anyone into a wuss.  One of the benefits of taking a camera with me is that I can sit and look again at the waves I'm surfing now, in this life, in the warm.  And I really mustn't grumble, must I?

Ice cream headaches and stumbling blocks

It was a beautiful, clear morning, so I fired up the bus and headed down the coast, laden down with all the crap I need for a day out: laptop to write, camera, surfboard, wetsuit (and gloves and boots and hood and surf wax and comb etc...), thermos full of coffee, fruitcake, dog, lead, bags for the dog's shit.  It's a wonder the thing moves.

There used to be a rule I lived my life by, when I lived in the UK.  Never, ever wait for the surf to improve, because 95% of the time it'll crap out instead.  Maybe it's something about facing east instead of west, but today I preminisced (is that a word?  Should be, dammit!) that not only would the day warm up if I waited, but the unruly , dropping swell would clean up.  So I found myself a nice place to park and write, walked the dog, took a few pictures.

Writers read, don't they?  I started rereading Robert Harris's wonderful Archangel last night, and in doing so I made at least two fatal errors: One - when creating, never read anyone who writes that bloody well!  Every sentence screams think you're this good? Still think you can do this?  And in Robert Harris's case in particular: So how are you going to research this well?

So I struggled today, toiling long and hard for a measly 700 words that seem thoroughly unsatisfying, but now, in the evening, reading them again, I can see that's thanks to the other error I made:  I let reading someone else influence how I was writing.   

So Robert's gone back on the shelf for now.  I picked it up because his knowledge and depiction of modern Russia is unrivaled, within my reading, and I wanted to bravely steal some of his detail, some of his approach.  I probably wanted to steal too much, so it's going into the after-the-first-draft research pile. 

As for the surf, it was OK. The water definitely seems to be cooling down apace - my fingers felt almost arthritic after being out for a while.  I could tell that I've had three big days of writing when I haven't made time for yoga or exercise, but made plenty for cake and biscuits.  I'm going to have to pull my focus together, on lots of different fronts to stay positive. One thing, I'm learning, does not come without at least one other...or two...or three...

Unsatisfying interior adventures

Yes, that title's just one of the many reasons I should never try writing erotica.  Went for a spin on Sunday looking for inspiration.  Drove through a beautiful landscape, so different from what's outside the door, only an hour from home.

Gravel roads, beautiful hills, almost no traffic - it was old volkswagen heaven.

Except you can't go near any of it.  We drove for nearly a hundred miles through stunning scenery and saw not a fence, not a lay-by, not one foot-track - just mile after mile of barbed wire.  Finally got to a place called Middlemarch and found a footpath, but couldn't take the dog on it.  Maybe the Taeri council - if there is one - might like to put up a giant sign that says simply: Fuck Off.  It's in the subtext anyway.  If I had an ounce of her talent I'd be doing a kiwi version of Fay Godwin's Our Forbidden Land - someone needs to, before it's too late.


On a happier note, the book's been going very well.  I haven't felt any of the symptoms of running out of steam: I still know where I'm going tomorrow.  I'm annotating my first draft with comments in Word, highlighting all the little things I'm spotting as I'm going that I need to do better or find out:  do Royal Jordanian Airways, for example, serve Alcohol?  (I doubt it.)  Is all their in-flight food halal?  Have I shown my hero's back-story enough - shown that he's made of the right stuff?  (Not yet...) As it is, I'm currently confining my research to establishing the points without which I can't move the story on.  It feels like the right thing to do - to keep the flow going...

Cold winds, yoga, and writing by the fire

The run of good surf has continued over the last couple of days, although I managed to ruin one of them by getting myself caught in an offshore drift and having a thirty minute paddle back in.  My routine of core exercises and yoga's paying dividends - I'm feeling much sharper this week than the same time last.

The water continues to cool, and the weather is - well, getting colder than I'm entirely happy about, and it's really only mid-autumn.  God knows what mid-winter and spring are going to be like.  I'm staying happy by planning our return to the 'naki, thinking about the skiing, and ploughing into the book.

Usually, me and deadlines are unhappy bedfellows, especially if they're deadlines I've set myself.  For once, though, I'm keeping up with the work-rate I planned. (When I plan a work-rate, I'm usually drunk, or in a wildly optimistic mood.)  I'm not having any difficulty at all in sitting down for three or four hours straight and knocking out the words, and when I start again, the story is still coming to me easily.  This will change, for sure - every story I write has a sticky patch that becomes an elephant in the room - something I know has to be dealt with, but just can't.

So elephant-free, on I go.  Sometimes I struggle to understand why we do certain things.  For example, when I worked in IT I had a kind of epiphany, a real on-the-road-to-Damascus thing where I realised that I just didn't give a shit, and that I would have to, inevitably, change career.  I couldn't see what good I was doing in the world.  Well, I found a reason for copywriting today.  If you're a copywriter, you could stop things like this appearing.  You could stop my breaking out into giggles like a fourteen year old whenever I see them.  You would make my wife much happier...

Quarantine Island...

A few weeks ago I went to Quarantine Island for a writer's workshop - in fact, I went there to lost my writer's workshop virginity.  It's a faintly bizarre place, to be honest.  It's run by the St. Martin's Community, modelled on the Iona community and with strong links to them.  I didn't twig the faith connection until after I went there, and although it wasn't rammed down my throat or even mentioned, I was still surprised at how uncomfortable I am with the whole organised religion thing, maybe after years of living in Cornwall and Wales, where - in my admittedly somewhat biased view of the world - the Wesleyans and Presbyterians have managed to make hard lives worse for generations. 

Anyway, it's a fascinating place, and I got a couple of good pictures out of it, as well as a reminder of how fucked up I probably am when being surrounded by a room full of thoroughly nice people sworn to eternal gentleness makes me break out in a cold sweat.

Jelly-shouldered and running out of steam

More waves today. I felt tired as soon as I woke up this morning: I think I must have - quite uncharacteristically - caught so many waves yesterday that my arms and shoulders did their week's quota of paddling in one hit. In situations like this I can usually expect the sympathy from the rest of the family to manifest itself as an evening of being called upon to change light-bulbs, fetch things off high shelves, or serve tea with my feet while doing a handstand - anything for the thrill of watching me cry, in fact. I'm not the world's fastest paddler - in fact it's safe to say that if you ever find yourself being out-paddled by me, you need to get your fat arse in a swimming pool, pronto. As for me, I'm not fat. Just insulated.

I don't feel as if I'm running out of steam with the novel, exactly - more that I'm hitting the technical bits which have got to be got right, inevitably making the going somewhat slower. So my word count for the day is pretty modest and I'm going to have to find some time this weekend to ensure that the momentum that I have is conserved. I'm not working to any hard and fast deadline for the first draft, but I want to have the luxuries of putting it away between drafts, of taking breaks when it gets a bit much. If I'm going to get to the final finish line of a finished article within the year, hitting walls is a luxury I can't afford.

I can afford to run the bus, though. For some reason, after having the rear suspension set, it's decided that not only does it enjoy keeping up with the other traffic really, but that it'll do so while doing 23 to the gallon. For an old VW bus, that's almost the height of parsimony. Of course, it's made up for this by springing another oil leak, but with a sheet of newspaper and a squint I can be in denial for months - not a strategy that works for premature ejaculation. Apparently...

On a lighter note, the main highway in and out of Dunedin is closed by the city's second bomb scare in 24 hours. I wonder if it's anything to do with the latitude - do Dunedinites have the same kind of pull that leads Swedes to kill themselves like lemmings, or Finns to drink more meths than water? Well, there'll be plenty of material for another book, anyway...