Solo mission to Mahia

Last week was a big week.  My daughter turned 18, so it felt like the right moment to go on a solo surf trip.  I haven't really done that in years, since she was a very small toddler.  I've taken my family and forced them to watch me surf, but I haven't taken off solo and allowed myself the luxury of surfing every possible moment and consigning washing to a distant memory.  I've been eyeing a spring trip to the east coast for years:  The westerlies that devil this coast blow hot and offshore there, and spring storms in the antarctic send a succession of southerly swells.  It would be a chance too, I thought, to catch up on my Nanowrimo, or more accurately, keep the momentum going, because at the time of departure I was, amazingly, ahead of the game.

I'd planned on allowing parts of two days to get over there, but I hadn't factored in getting out of work early or the difference in speed I got from a) taking a different route over than I have in the past and b) not lugging a family of four and all their crap.  I still took part of two days, because I wanted to camp at Tutira and see if I could snaffle myself a trout for supper.  I couldn't, but it's still one of my favourite spots to camp.  A southerly front had passed up the country a couple of days before and there was still snow lying on much of the high ground.  The evening was crisp, cold as soon as the sun went down, but undeniably beautiful..

Tutira

It's only a couple of hours from Tutira to the Mahia peninsula, and it wasn't until long after I got there that I realised I'd miscalculated, a little.  Firstly, I was banking on finding something, a village store or something where I could buy milk and a couple of supplies, but there's nothing, nada, zip.  And secondly, the spots that were catching the southerly swell were big, spooky, and I would be flying solo.  My radar must be pretty good, because I was chatting to a local a couple of days later and I was told that the spot I was eying up had recently taken possession of a resident 5 metre white pointer.

Blacks, bigger and spookier than it looks.

The southerly swell was due to back off, and an easterly to kick in.  I figured I'd head north to Gisborne for a day or two, pick up some supplies, and hit the surf there.  It's an easy hour's drive, and there's good places to stay.  Lovely places to stay.

Beachfront, Tatapouri

Surf was OK, nothing special.  Headhigh and semi-organised, good enough to spend a couple of days surfing twice a day and feeling some kind of surf-fitness coming back to me.  I got a few fun kegs but nothing fabulous.  Surfing twice a day calmed the voices in my head enough for me to crank out a fair few pages of my Nanowrimo.  It's starting to acquire life and momentum, which is great.  It's easy to keep writing something that wants to keep being written.  It's like being wanted.

Typical Gizzy surf that I got, fun but nothing more.

Out of season Giz is a relaxing place to hang out.  It feels remote enough now, back in the day this place must have felt like the end of the world to those who lived here and the travellers that made it this far.  There's a beauty all its own to this part of the coast, gentle and unkempt at the same time - very different from the rainforests in my part of the country.

East Coast hillside, dawn.

After a couple of days I was ready to head south again.  I checked the surf forecast and saw that the east swell would hold for another day, the next dawn looking like it'd be it for a few days.  So I determined to head for home after a night on the peninsula.  I found a deserted freedom campsite, which really...doesn't get a lot better.  I cast out a line and watched the sunset, once again acting as a one-man fish exclusion zone. 

Spot for the night, Mahia peninsula

Yeah, that'll do.

The surf the next morning was just...magic.  Blue, sand bottomed lefts and a conveyor belt rip, a golden sunrise and ahhhh!  Surfer heaven.  A thousand miles made worthwhile in two wonderful hours before the first breaths of the sea breeze stirred. 

I headed towards home.  I'd passed the Ruahines on the way East and thought they looked like there'd be a cool spot to pass a night.  I puled into a campsite at three, which was deserted, miserable, and felt like nothing so much as the kind of place you go to get axe-murdered by bogans. 

Ruahines, beautiful but spooky.

I had an uneasy couple of hours nap, then, sort of refreshed, I looked at the map and figured I was about three and a half hours from home.  I pushed on through dusk and reminded myself again, that this year, at last, I really must get the bus's headlights resilvered.  It was a magic few days away, I fell in love with the bus and surfing all over again, and it'll be a small price to pay.  However, that's for winter.  I'd like to keep her busy this summer....

Pushing through the night with epic, epic headlights.

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.

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...

Before the storm...

This week is all about the next six or seven: specifically, the month-and-a-half long marathon that is the southern hemisphere school summer holidays.  To prepare, I'm going surfing as much as I can.  That first draft is done and stewing away somewhere within the bowels of my computer.  Research for another project is currently taking the form of pleasant evenings background reading in advance of anything harder, and playing around with a few paragraphs here and there trying to find a voice for the project.

Today, I ventured out onto the Otago peninsula.  The surf was weak, small and messy - but the sun was out and I'd driven far enough not to be denied water time by as small an obstacle as that.   I picked my way across a white beach littered with the footprints of penguins and sea-lions - the only other visitors at that time, and with a nice fat small-wave blade beneath me, I paddled out.

And jeez, even when it's small the place has got power.  The sun ducked behind clouds, the onshore came up, and shadows played in the water.  I caught a few, found a place to sit, but I wasn't comfortable.  Sometimes, you can smell teeth.

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?

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.

Not quite a lightning bolt...

It's been an odd, great week.  I flew up to Taranaki with daughter number one, and from the moment we landed it felt very clear to me that I was home.  This is odd for a number of reasons, not least of which is that I've lived in (count 'em) thirteen different places in my life, and I've not yet ever moved away from somewhere and then had any tug to it whatsoever, let alone one as strong as that exerted by Taranaki.  I felt like the blessed child - I got to surf Weld (and got waves there, which for me is seldom a given), the Patch in the sunshine and light offshores with just me and a friend out, and then drove south along the highway, stopping in at a couple of places I've never even seen before, then getting good, if hungover waves south of Opunake. 

Quite apart from the obvious - going for a surf without having to check into the thermal injuries clinic afterward - the trips along the coast really did it for me.  It's easy to take waves round every corner for granted, easy to growl at the rocks that remove fins and lumps of shin, easy to take umbrage at the amount of cow shit coming down Taranaki's watercourses.  It's less easy to explain why it felt so right.

So, after not even six months the estate agent was back in the building last night and the house is - quietly for now - on the market again.  I have a month to try and knock the garden into some kind of shape.  The days are getting longer, there's even almost occasional warmth in the sun.  I'm sure there'll be waves along too, and I'll get to see Otago at it's best.  I'm going to enjoy every moment and try and garner more memories for the rest home, which will hopefully have a view something like this.

 

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.

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.

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.

Perfect waves...

The great run of surf has continued - more waves out down towards Brighton today.  The peaks were shifting a bit, so I got a good workout out of it, as well as a couple of lil' bombs.  My backhand still feels like it's permanently in panic / survival mode, and I'm waiting for it to loosen up miraculously of its own accord.  What might help is that I've resolved to lose some weight - I'm probably carrying 5kg more than I really could do - so I've decided I'm going to cut bread from my diet and not eat anything between meals except fruit.  I've been trying to avoid empty calories at mealtimes too.  Basically, I'm trying to do all the things I kid myself that I do do, but don't.  I'm trying to cycle more  - I know from past experience it's great for losing a couple of the pounds that are hardest to shift, also fantastic cardio-vascular training for being in the water.  I did 50k on Sunday morning in 1h40, the fastest I've been over that kind of distance in a little while, so I'm not riding too shabbily.  I've also been quite good about keeping up with my core exercises and yoga regimen - the prospect of coming on here and confessing I've dropped the ball is a great motivator.

So hopefully that works for tomorrow as far as the writing's concerned, because I had a slow day today.  I got a little bit done at the weekend, but the overall feeling was one of swimming through treacle. For one reason or another I've been feeling low, and maybe that's why I've been so focused on exercise, as a way of fighting it.  Not getting my words in for the day doesn't help, so tomorrow I'd better fight a bit harder for them.

Peace,

Simon

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...

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...

Head down...

I had a long day the other day - I did a good day on the novel, took my time over a blog posting, and investigated various stuff on the internet around with the business of being a writer - by which I mean other outlets for writing that I might or might not pursue at some point in the future.  By the end of the day I was almost depressed:  there's so many opportunities that one could pursue that it's almost impossible to sift out the good from the dross.

It did do me a favour, though - I realised just how long I could spend attempting to get a handle on what other people do or don't do, the whole web content thing.  The novel will have to come first, second and last until it's completed.

So I've been cracking on at a reasonable, though not startling rate.  A horrible storm helped keep me indoors and focused, then I got frustrated.  M wife and I have also realised just how much we're missing Taranaki.  After a childhood as an army brat and having been on the move most of my life, it's quite odd to find there yes, there is a place I'd like to call home.  We've been plotting and planning how we're going to go back, and importantly, how to have the most fantastic time we can while we're in the South Island.

And I had a fantastic time today:  Murderers finally turned on, for the first time since we've been here.  Right now I have noodle arms and pumped up thighs, and I'm still seeing that little triangular section in front of me as I raced that last wave.  My backhand's still mostly missing in action after nearly four years with my pick of lefts, but it was nice to get it together and have a magic moment.