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.

Falling in again...

Even though my non-fiction project boasts the magnificent word count (thus far) of a mere 340 words, it's done the job.  By taking my mind off the story completely, in the last couple of days I've been able to go back to it afresh - reinvigorated and full of insight.

How I go about it from here is a matter of some slight concern.  Do I reread the whole thing, mark it up and then trawl through my notes in a thorough, scholarly fashion?  That doesn't sound very like me at all.  Do I throw the whole first draft in the bin and launch into writing the whole thing again from memory, the point of the first draft being only to help me understand the story more deeply?  I know there are writers that do this, but it seems to me that by doing so I'd be in danger of forgetting those rare passages of prose in the first draft that stand tall. 

For now, I'm settling on rewriting each chapter one at a time.  I haven't marked it up because I know the major changes I want to make.  Marks on paper seem to set things in stone, and I'm curious to find where else this story goes in the rewriting.  It's a curious mixture of refining and further exploration.

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.

A change is as good, etc.

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

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

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

Finishing lines

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

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

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

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

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.

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?