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.

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...

5 reasons that old school thrillers rule!

I had a mild moment of panic today, thinking through my plot:  It's all very old-fashioned.  By this, I mean that there's bangs and car-chases, phone-calls and dossiers.  Not much goes on in cyber-space, which is where I would, personally, take great care to commit most of any crime I might happen to get involved.

I wondered why this is, and pondered for a minute if it would make an agent throw it back at me, it all being having done so many times before.  Then I decided that no, it wouldn't, for the following reasons.

1) Things that go bang are inherently more exciting than things with keyboards and USB ports. And things with keyboards and USB ports that go bang after someone's put a bomb in them just plain aren't as exciting as a red convertible blowing up, or an evil henchman's black limo.  It's true.

2) Computers are dull.  I know this, because I made my living working in IT for quite a while. By extension, the internet, while a great extension of our social tentacles, is mostly unexciting too, in the thriller sense. The knowledge it contains, the people who inhabit it - they - you - are exciting, but as a fabric or an entity - it's dull. 

3) Thrillers inhabiting computer-world are shit.  Read Digital Fortress by Dan Brown, if you can bear it.  Case closed.

4) The Conspiracy theory has never been more relevant.  After all, never before in the history of man have the workings of commerce done more to try to prove that maybe, Marx was right, as demonstrated by the last two years of banking crises, and the associated amoral bleating of the super-rich.

5) James Bond, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher - battle scars - yes, RSI in their mouse-finger - no.

I could add to this another personal reason, too - I grew up in Germany during the last days of the Cold War.  I remember school trips to the East German border, massive Allied exercises that took in most of North Germany, and just what a proper enemy the Soviets were:  they goose-stepped, had big parades of missiles, and their leaders were ugly and had no dress sense.  Mrs Thatcher almost looked good in comparison, for christ's sake.  No school like the old school, I say...