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?

Spring shoots...for a day.

After what seems like an epoch, I finally packed the family and the camping gear into the bus and headed off for a night away.  We were going to go camp at Kakanui, but there was a blustery north-easter blowing, and I decided that discretion being the better part of valour, (and in the interests of a good night's sleep) to go camp in the shelter of the forest instead.  It was getting late by the time we pulled into a deserted campsite, and we'd just outrun a long, low cloud bank into the last of the evening sun.  Food, bed and books - that was about it.

In the morning the forecast sun was hiding above said cloudbank, which had advanced further north during the night.  So after breakfast we packed up and headed inland, up towards Kurow.  We checked out some mental rock formations, the Elephant Rocks, where parts of the first Narnia film were shot. 

Long lazy lunches, ice-cream stops, and a minor emergency involving a frayed throttle cable and a hunt for the right sized hex key ensued - a typical day back in the kombi saddle.  We cruised back down a coast with surf not quite worth getting wet for and found the beach camp where we were going to stay, where my wife took a leak and came back wearing an expression that said very clearly, "We are never staying there..."  

A few miles down the road we found another site which was wonderful - all good intelligence for the summer ahead.  New Zealand is, at times like this, a very easy place to be.

Dusting off the sun-cream...

It almost feels as if winter has passed:  there's been more that one consecutive day when I haven't had to have the heating on for more than an hour in the morning and the surf report is telling me that the water temperature has now risen to a balmy 10.4 degrees.  Some of the snowfields are delaying opening until later in the day to let the spring snow soften, and my garden is looking less like a weed-strewn liability and more of an asset.  Hopefully, this will mean someone will buy it.

Of course, now the house is on the market the south island has never looked lovelier.  At the weekend I fired up the bus and drove thirty kilometers up the coast, on a winding minor road perfect for slow travel by dub.  The swell wasn't really doing it, but there were glimpses of perfection.

The forecast looks good for this weekend, too.  It's still on the cold side for me to persuade the rest of the family that a night in the bus is a good idea (although I'm dropping hints almost daily about the effectiveness of merino and the joys of late-night beach fires), but day trips can now be undertaken with the almost certain knowledge that "day trip" might now mean "day trip" as opposed to "drive for an hour, jump out of bus, freeze ass off for ten minutes then spend an hour in a cafe trying to get warm again while everyone glowers at Dad."

So I'm looking forward to a weekend out and about somewhere in Otago.  It might not feel like home, but there's no denying:  it looks bloody good.

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.

Mackenzie madness

I've been for what will probably turn out to be my last ski trip of the year, a jaunt through the Mackenzie.  Myself and a friend from the 'naki had a cruisey road trip, with good snow at Ohau and fair to middling spring corn at Mt Dobson.  Before this trip I'd just kind of touched on the edge of the Mackenzie, but this time I ploughed right on in.  It was one of those high-expectations-get-totally-exceeded type things.

I'm not even going to try and write how cool it was.

Although the Tasman valley and glacier was up there.

Mount Cook peeked through the clouds just so I could check how cool that was, too.

And after all the grand-scale mind-blowing alpine vistas, there were some fresh spring lakeside colours that were just - well, cool.

And it wasn't even that cold.

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.

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.