The Quest for a Million Words

Worksheet #1

2008-07-25T15:09:00.004+01:00

Yesterday we climbed into the back of a white van to be driven to look at a flat. When the doors were closed on us, Marisa said, "This is just like being kidnapped." I think most people who are kidnapped probably have the same thought.

Our could be kidnapper was only our landlord (we're looking to move somewhere cheaper and he owns several flats). He's got a heart of gold, but I'm sure his head has a pinball machine inside it. Whatever thought the ball hits, he says it. When we first met him last year, when he showed us the room we would eventually take, he showed us a photo of his wife on his cellphone, rapped his knuckles against every painted surface and piece of joinery and said, "I did this", made a racist remark about Africans, told us all about his MS and various relapses, asked if he could smoke in the room we were about to take as our own, and ask where we came from three times. That evening, when we got back to our hostel in a converted church, I wrote a story about a couple who view a flat called 'The Landlord.' I still can't finish it because I don't know the ending.

It has been the best weather of the summer this week. They are constructing the marquees on Charlotte Square at the moment (the Edinburgh International Book Festival starts in two weeks http://www.edbookfest.co.uk). It will probably rain for the next 40 days and nights.
The seating outside the Castle has all been erected, although the Military Tattoo is still a few weeks off. I thought they were terribly prepared. Today I learnt Atomic Kitten (or is is Girls Aloud?) is playing a concert there this weekend.

All the permanent staff in my team had a meeting this morning from 8:30 to 9:30. They got bacon rolls. The rest of the morning, the office smelt like fat and tomato sauce.
On the list of things I will introduce to my bubble of NZ upon my return from Scotland, Bacon Rolls are at the top. Also on the list, vegetarian haggis (if there's any way to source them within NZ); pear cider (not especially Scottish, but I'm big on the stuff lately); saying "the now" where just "now" would do - - "I'm busy the now," "I can't come to the phone the now" - - (a better gloss would be "at the moment")...

The things I have adopted as my own after living in Australia for three years: their beers (on the rare occasion I stumble into a Walkabout Pub, a Tooheys Extra Dry wins the taste and whistful reminisce battles against any NZ beer on offer); the expression "of a ______", eg "I enjoy going for a walk of a lunchtime", "I'm so tired of a night-time recently"; double-pluggers; the Socceroos; the currency (I'm glad I kept my house deposit/emergency travel funds in Australian Dollars rather than moving it to NZD before leaving last year).

The things I miss most about NZ: feijoas, friends and family. In that order.

This post steals it's title from Geoff Cochrane's Worksheet poems.

I have been extremely tired of late. I have been short with people who are only being nice / doing their job / taking an interest. I have not been able to listen to my iPod on shuffle because all music thrown up is inappropriate and / or overplayed. I have made little oaths with myself that a rational person should not keep ("I will never read another book by an Indian author", "I will buy the next pair of jeans I try on, regardless of price, style or fit.") I have become too interested in my weight (somehow I lost 5 kgs without doing anything, now when ever I do "something" I must weigh myself). I have turned emails from my mum into poems:

I have been instructed to avoid
yawning, sneezing and chewing,
which means soft food like soup,
mashed veggies, porridge, yoghurt--

Talking is fine so long as I don’t
overstretch my right
temporomandibular joint.

(excerpt)

Jerry's Final Thought: I wonder if kidnappers think, "I could totally kidnap this person right now," before becoming kidnappers.

Status Report: Week Twenty-Nine

2008-07-21T21:19:00.003+01:00

Week Twenty-Nine – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 17,598 words (more than I wrote in the previous two weeks combined)

Average: 2,514 words per day (compared to target of 3,001/day)

Most productive day: Saturday 19 July, 3,609 words

Least productive day: Tuesday 15 July, 948 words

Year-to-date: 477,996 words (73,916 words behind target)

Expect Status Reports to appear on Mondays from here on out.

I used to draft up the blog entry last thing on a Sunday evening, tally the words (as they counted towards the week I was reporting on), then finalise all the stats and graphs... but I've finally tired of the jiggery-pokery. I'm all for streamlining these days.

Perhaps poetry is to blame...

I went to the Scottish Poetry Library for the second time on Saturday. My first visit coincided with some uni students being given a tour -- I felt like and interloper, and ended up loping out without borrowing a single book.

But on my second visit I had the place pretty much to myself.

And what a wonderful place! (Though I will say it does have a terribly squeaky floor for a building less than a decade old...)

It is run by an ex-pat Kiwi, and thanks to a deal struck with Creative New Zealand (and the donations of a few visiting Kiwi poets) the Scottish Poetry Library has a wonderful collection of contemporary New Zealand poetry. I mean, they have eight books by Geoff Cochrane (he's quickly becoming my favourite NZ poet). Having been out of Aotearoa since 2006, it was the first chance I've had to read so many of these books. [Admission: I hadn't read most of those released before 2006 either, so...].

I spent a couple of hours sitting at a table and reading through books by Jenny Bornholdt, James Brown, Glenn Colquhoun, and Mr. Cochrane... and still had to limit myself to borrowing four books of NZ poetry, as I needed to use my final two loans for something more Scottish.

I have the books for a month, but I suspect I'll be revisiting the SPL (not to be confused with the Scottish Premier League) sooner than that.

It's no coincidence that my sudden passion for poetry corresponds to a larger chunk of last weeks pie being expended in pursuit of the p-word. And for all the 5,614 words, I did manage to wind up with seven poems I’m happy with. How many I’ll be happy with when I read them again in two or three months time, well, that’s the real test.

I don't see this as a conversion to poetry. I've always dabbled. And I'm not writing any less prose / thinking any less about narratives. It’s just I’m getting quicker at spotting the sorts of things that can only work as a poem, rather than trying to force them into prose.

As I've pushed myself give every idea a fair chance at making it to the page, I've realised that ideas are a renewable resource. If you chop down ten, another ten will grow. And if you don't harvest them, you're unlikely to get much new growth from year to year.

Maybe a better (worse) metaphor is shaving your legs. Once you start to shave (so I'm told), the hairs grown back thicker and more plentiful, which makes not shaving worse than if you had never started shaving in the first place. So too with writing. If you start to use your ideas, new, thicker, hardier ideas will take their place. If you stop using the ideas, they won't settle back down, but throb away in your skull. Once you start to blacken the white page, you never go back. Or something like that.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie vs The Wasp Factory

2008-07-20T02:24:00.009+01:00

The planets aligned such that I finished two books on Friday. My lunch time reading for the week was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark - - its 128 pages fit perfectly into five thirty-minute sessions (I read a bit slower while eating, not possessing the multi-tasking gene and all). And my walking to and fro audiobook was The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

It was not a coincidence, exactly, that both books were by Scottish authors - - each was a token Scottish borrowing from separate trips to the Edinburgh Central Library - - though I didn’t realise I had Scot against Scot until well into the week.

When I finished both books on the same day it sealed their fates: comparisons must be drawn (and even when the analysis evaporates, they will remain yoked in my memory).

The few references to Inverness in The Wasp Factory (it is the nearest city to the island Frank Cauldhame and his father inhabit) were enough for a spark of recognition, a flash of appropriate terrain (though I’m pretty sure the island is fictional) from one of my road trips north.

If the setting of The Wasp Factory provided a spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie set off fireworks. The story is set in Edinburgh, primarily 1930-36, though it stretches beyond in terms of time and place (more on this later). I live in Edinburgh in 2008. Here, seventy years is nothing.

The passage in chapter two which begins, “It is time now to speak of the long walk through the old parts of Edinburgh…” takes everyone who’s important (Miss Brodie, her set of six girls, and the reader) across the Meadows, to the Grassmarket and onto the High Street. Though you are more likely to encounter American tourists (why are they all compelled to buy woollen sweaters and wear them the next day?) than a crowd of unemployed (“The Idle” as Eunice calls them), even the modern tourists can pick up the grimy vibe that the Old Town will never shake.

Then there’s Mr Lowther’s grand old house in Cramond, the clouds on the Pentland Hills, the warning that one of the girls might end up a Girl Guide leader in Corstorphine… Even the school-girl rhyme Edinburgh, Leith / Portobello, Musselburgh / And Dalkeith was its own Catherine Wheel of recognition. I’m not making a point about the worth of the book (yet), just that reading is so often enriched by what you can bring to the text.

Similarly, the reference to Miss Brodie’s ancestor Willie Brodie would have gone over my head before I arrived in Edinburgh. Sure, there’s enough in the text to understand how this points to another case of duality, but for anyone who has had a pint in Deacon Brodie’s the message is writ in neon.

These recognition fireworks go some way to explaining why I enjoyed The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie so much, though they are no basis upon which to make claims about the quality of the book.

But it is a quality book. Its structure, zipping forward and back in time, is discomforting but, at the same time, exhilarating. In proleptic fits were are told Miss Brodie will be betrayed, whom she will be betrayed by, and ultimately the minutiae of the betrayal, all before their proper time. That is, ‘proper’ if this was to be a more traditional narrative where suspense is built by keeping cards face down until all the money is on the table.

This is how The Wasp Factory works. We are presented with mysteries and questions ranging from the prosaic (What is the wasp factory? What’s in the study) to the significant (Why did Eric go crazy? Why does Frank act the way he does?) and we are given answers when the story is good and ready. One of the signs that The Wasp Factory is a good book is that the seemingly prosaic questions, the things that keep your reading from page-to-page (rather than make you pick up the book once you have put it down), are intrinsically linked to the significant questions. But once we know why Eric is crazy (the Incident of the Smiling Child is perhaps the most memorable part of the novel, though it is also the most conspicuous answer to a question posed by the structure) we do not return to the question.

Okay, fair enough.

But is this how we function in real life? Once we know that the gulf stream is primarily responsible for Scotland being more temperate than should be expected of its longitude, we still may ponder the phenomena. By saving up the best revelations for the end, a book can’t really do this pondering thing. This: Walking Round The Building To See If There’s Another Entrance/Exit.

[Aside / Great Moment in iPod Shuffle: ‘Cage Around the Sun’ by Monster Magnet just played on iTunes. It strikes me as the perfect soundtrack to The Wasp Factory, both book and song being rooted in adolescence; many confluences between the lyrics and the story (the construction of elaborate devices, cruelty to animals, “Queen Bee F***ing Cyclops” vs Wasp Torturing Eunuch…).]

The final twist of the The Wasp Factory was okay (*damning with faint praise alert*), but it is followed by the most tedious part of the novel: Frank muses about what we’ve just learnt in the dénouement and how it made him what he is. The problem is that the action of the novel has ended, there are no other doors we are waiting to see behind, so that all we have is words. The big themes that are drawn up by the narrator sound like “big themes”, which means they sound ham-fisted.

But in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, we know Miss Brodie will be betrayed by one of her set for most of the book, and (I won’t spoil it for you) which girl it is for at least half of the journey. The question of Who shifts to Why, and this is always a much trickier question.

As we dance around the thirties, weaving in and out of the Brodie Set’s adolescence, we are not solely reading for answers, we are reading for the pleasure of the book’s company. It is a tremendously funny book. I didn’t realise this until a third of the way through, then, with every page, its funniness increased. I think if I were to re-read it now, I’d find the beginning hilarious…

[Five minutes later…]

Okay, I just re-read the first few pages and I was right. “All of the Brodie set, save one, counted on its fingers, as had Miss Brodie, with accurate results more or less.” On a first read through, one assumes the humour resides solely in the counting on fingers, which might be enough for a mental grin But, on a second read through, the “more or less” is so telling it becomes the punch line (inaccuracy will consign Brodie and others to fates unbecoming the crème de la crème). And then there’s the “save one”, who we learn further down the page must be Monica Douglas, who is “famous mostly for mathematics.” But on a second reading, one knows this already, and it is therefore adds another delight to the already brimming sentence.

This is not the first novel by Muriel Spark I have read (it’s the third), though it is the first that struck me as masterly. It can’t all be down to the favourable comparisons with The Wasp Factory and the fact it’s set in the city I’ve lived in for the last ten months. It is certainly her most famous, there must be good, universal reasons for that. And I remember someone urging me to read it a couple of years ago. Though then, of course, I wouldn’t have known where Cramond was.

***

Footnote: Last week Iain Banks wrote an interesting piece for the Guardian on the writing of The Wasp Factory (it was his first book to be published, though the sixth he wrote). I'm linking to it here because a) it's interesting b) shares some similarities with my own position as manque novelist and c) I feel a bit bad for using The Wasp Factory as the contrast to a book I clearly preferred.

Status Report: Weeks Twenty-Seven and Twenty-Eight

2008-07-14T14:24:00.008+01:00

The Stats

Fortnightly Wordcount: 14,069 words

Average: 1,005 words per day (only 2,000 words per day short...)

Most productive day: Sunday 13 July, 4,382 words

Least productive day: Take your pick (Excuse: visitors from afar / driving visitors from afar around Scotland)

Year-to-date: 460,398 words (72,389 words behind target)

I missed last night's regular status report slot as I discovered it was Bhutan night on BBC4. I watched way past my bedtime, furiously taking notes -- it's a country that fascinates me and will shortly feature in my fiction. Ideally, I'd spend two months researching there on the way home (sometime in 2009), but it's too darn expensive. Luckily I believe in the power of the imagination to fill the holes left by life experience.

Anyway. You can see from the graphs above that my slide continues. Slide may be too gentle a word for it. Plummet perhaps?

The simple act of tweaking the name of this blog (though sadly it's too much hassle to change the web address) has lessened the guilt I feel about my word counts. Thinking like a Tibetan Buddhist also helps: Desire leads to suffering. My desire to right 1,000,000 words in 366 days leads to suffering when I fall short (not to mention when I write a lot but neglect other duties nice, Karma-positive beings undertake, like helping with the washing up and socialising with workmates).

But there are silly, arbitrary desires like writing 1,000,000 words or wanting to spend the night with Megan Fox, and then there are the sorts of desires that lead to books being written or single span suspension bridges being built.

I guess my love of books and bridges will keep me spinning in the wheel of existence for at least one more incarnation.

Garlanded With Promises...

2008-07-11T17:51:00.005+01:00

Apropos of nothing I started humming my high school's motto song this morning at work. Then I started thinking about the lyrics.

Motto Song

Cloistered in youth we grasp the veil of beauty
Garlanded with promises of happy days to be
There are the doors of fame and wealth and duty
Here at our hands the master key
Work at school, work at play
Uphill runs the stony path to glory
Not for tomorrow the task we have today
Nihil bone sine labore

[This is all from memory as I couldn't find the lyrics anywhere else online, but it's not the sort of song you can easily forget.]

It was strange experience singing this song two or three times a year (prize-giving and related practices) for five years. It was the only time most of us heard the words "cloistered" and "garlanded" in that time. And who talks about duty these days?

But now I feel some affection for this song, and even for the person/persons who composed these eight lines - - despite knowing nothing beyond the song itself. Perhaps it was the work of a frustrated poet, languishing in the high school English department of rural 1920s New Zealand - - and, for all the doggerel he churned out, this is all that persists? Or perhaps it was the stern headmaster and his music teacher love interest (the scandal surrounding the relationship would die down when they married the following year); her plonking out upbeat marches on the piano and him declaiming received wisdom about duty and hard work from his days in the Territorials.

This is how I imagine a lot of writer's work. It's certainly how I work. Something is stumbled across - - a remembered song, a concrete object, an eavesdropped conversation - - and so many questions are thrown up that the imagination just can't help filling in the holes.

Speaking of filling holes (a painful pun if ever there was): when I was at the dentist yesterday, I quickly slipped into my writing headspace to lessen the terror. What if you were afraid of the sound of drills (and why not?), but your father was a dentist who operated out of a clinic below your room. What would you do to drown out the sound? And off I went...

A writing headspace is a handy thing, I tell you.

It even makes research fun. At least the initial stage of research where you have an idea and you're reading around the subject, watching films and steering conversations in particular directions. This sort of research throws up hole after hole for your imagination to fill and claim the territory for your story. (The kind of research that comes after you've written your first draft and certain holes left in your story can't be filled by the imagination - - when you really need to know what sort of gun a newspaper reporter would use, or double checking how much weight you can gain in nine months - - isn't so much fun.)

The best thing I've read about this phenomenon - of filling holes with the imagination and the requisite withdrawal from life to compose false lives - is Ghosts by Paul Auster (the second novella in his New York Trilogy). A young private eye named Blue is hired by a man named White to keep surveillance on a man named Black. Black spends most of his time at his desk, reading and writing, but from his vantage across Orange Street, Blue can't see what Black is writing. Only his imagination can fill the holes in the story of Black and White. And when the imagination does not suffice (the surveillance lasts more than a year; Blue is a P.I. not a writer) he begins to interfere with Black in order to find answers...

It really is a solid piece of thinking wrapped up in a solid piece of writing. (For more of Auster's thoughts about writing and reading fiction, his 2006 acceptance speech for the Prince Asturias Prize is a good start).

The "solid thinking" stage of the writing process is the one writers (myself included) most often omit. Or they start from solid thinking and go about finding the rest of the story. For me, "solid thinking" should enter the equation after the "stumbling across X and letting your imagination run wild" stage. Not everything your imagination inserts into a given hole is a perfect fit. You need to stop and think: how does making Mr Y afraid of drills affect the rest of his character? Is there room for the character this creates on the stage with the guy gaining massive amounts of weight and the girl obsessed with another rock'n'roll suicide?

Then there's the swathe of solid thinking required upon revision. For me and the retooled Novel A, this stage is still a ways off. It's time to dive into a completely new draft. Perhaps that was why I was singing the Motto Song this morning: I was psyching myself up.

Nihil Bone Sine Labore : Nothing good comes without hard work.

Pick, Approach, Plant, Toss

2008-07-10T20:28:00.006+01:00

Okay, so it's been a while. Nine days to be exact. I've been up North with the heavyweights...
...and highland coos.

Summer in Scotland is about looking on the bright side. Windy? At least it keeps the midgies at bay. Raining? Ditto. Sunny? Makes a change from the wind / rain (and a few midgies never killed anyone... did they?).

But now it's back to work - mild mannered Reconciliations Analyst by day; mild mannered writer by night.

The returning visitors among you may have noticed the slight change in wording at the top of this page. "The Year of a Million Words" was a bit presumptive, wasn't it?

You'll all have to wait till Sunday's status report to see just how far I'm falling short.

Status Report — Half-way

2008-07-01T21:55:00.001+01:00

In this time of looking back, it’s hard not to feel a bit deflated. I have written 447,840 words in the last six months, but I have not written one War and Peace. I have not even written one John Grisham novel. I have thrown words around like Brewster threw his millions: to get rid off them rather than using them. This is me overstating things after a long, tiring day at work, but only slightly.

I would love to write 552,160 words in the next six months (3,001 words per day), but I would like to finish a novel more.

But the two are not mutually exclusive.

I am going to move the target line up to 3,001 words (from 2,732) on my weekly graphs to reflect the harder hill I have to climb in the second act. But I’m not going to pull my hair out every day I dip below this line. I still believe in the Shangri-La that is a string of 5,000-word days — once I’ve finished working full-time but haven’t yet started the long tiki tour home / when I’m working on Novel A and it all falls into place. When I picture this writer’s Shangri-La, I even have specific passages in the novel in mind: most of them involve Bhutan, which — coincidentally — is also known as The Last Shangri-La.

But enough looking forwards. I’ve decided to this as a list, if only because I’ve had this line from my second favourite Canadian band stuck in my head all day:

Memory will rust and erode into lists, of all that you gave me…

How I Spent My 447,840 Words

Short Fiction

13 short stories started and completed such that I might consider submitting for publication — 1 published (though I haven’t submitting many, that’s top of my To Do list at the moment)

9 short stories already drafted before 1 Jan have received serious attention in 2008 — 4 published

12 short stories begun but a) abandoned before completion of first draft or b) incomplete as at 30 June 2008

(164,367 words)

Novels

2 novels worked on in earnest — 0 completed

2 other novels dreamed up and preliminary research under take — 2 placed on back-burner / promptly forgotten

(86,310 words)

Poetry

37 poems — 1 published

8 Word files full of words expended in the pursuit of poetry

(17,738 words)

Blogging

104 posts on The Year of a Million Words

6 posts on my travel blog

1 guest blog entry

(101,825 words)

Other

100-150 emails of a personal nature which at the time I deemed might be of interest to my poor biographer in sixty years — 5-10 emails probably fit the bill in hindsight (36,897 words)

19 reviews of stories on Zoetrope and approximately 10 reviews of work from my writing group (23,517 words)

3 extended biographical prose pieces written with no clear use in mind (11,886 words)

1 web-based project which never came to fruition but none the less deserved 5,300 words

A Reading Life

2008-06-30T21:49:00.003+01:00

Today I started gathering my thoughts so that I may summarise my first six months of flailing away at a million words. In particular, I've been looking through my work in progress folders, which are a bit of a misnomer -- this is where work has stalled, and many of these documents will never be recommissioned. What these wasted raw materials reveal, when read en mass, is how much my reading influences my writing.

The effect is more pronounced this year, as I often sit down in front of a blank dodcument and think, "Okay, I just need to write 1,000 words in the next 45 minutes." And so I write. Without a key idea or a first sentence or a big moral in mind. Half of these sessions are fruitless (though they are not pointless; the act of writing fast everyday means the joints are oiled for those days when there is a fire in my belly and I have something smart/funny/important to write about). The other half of these sessions will bear fruit -- perhaps it is a line that will be excised and start it's own story. Perhaps it is an image that belongs elsewhere. Perhaps it is a character or the voice of the narrator that I want to spend more time with. But what the fruitless and fruitful sessions share is that they are not shy about wearing their influences on their sleeves.

When I was in the midst of Kurt Vonnegut back in April (books read: God Bless You Mr Rosewater, Breakfast of Champions, Cat's Cradle) I opened up a file one evening and began a piss take of my own serious, literary novel (that is: Novel B). Re-reading the two pages I knocked out of Faucets of Wonder, the Vonnegut influence is clear. Preface, Intrusive narrator, irreverence... it's all so transparent. If I were to return to this document again this year (which I might, I'd say the odds are 3/1), I'd scythe away most of the Vonneguttian aspects, and focus on the story behind the narrative fireworks.

But the thing is, without the fireworks, without the bank of reading behind my imitation, all I would have is a blank page.

The process of writing, for me at least, is a process of constantly overstepping the mark, of over-imitating. It is only when you transgress, when you push the story too far, that you learn anything about writing. This is why reading is such a vital part of a writing life -- you need those other voices to rattle around in your head, those imagined lives to sit across the table from you, to push you towards a vision and a voice that is truly yours.

Aside from my fiction, I should be able to look back on this blog and trace my reading life as I can my writing life -- the two being so entwined. And I have, from time to time, thrown words at the books (and audiobooks) I have consumed. But I must confess I haven't been as assiduous as I would have liked (now that I'm trying to don my historian hat). What did I think of Never Let Me Go? Why did I not finish reading Waverly? I can provide rough answers now, but the steam has gone out of these experiences - what I write would tell me more about what I'm reading/listening to now, and my own fictions I'm working on, than what I was doing at the time.

So I shall endeavour to say more about reading on this blog in the next six months -- not because I think I have much to add in the way of literary criticism, but because it is, undeniably, a part of the year of a million words (Misnomer #2).

And even though it's still technically the first half of 2008, I'm going to get my resolution off to a running start.

Today at lunch I finished Jack O'Connell's 'Word Made Flesh'. The cover blurb from James Ellroy proclaims O'Connell is "the future of the dark, literary suspense novel." I would never read a book on the basis of its blurb (I sought out 'World Made Flesh' on the basis of a recommendation somewhere online), but this particular one says more than it seems. Yes, this book is dark and at times literary (if being about books in language makes something literary), though I didn't ever find it suspenseful. But that's okay because Ellroy says O'Connell is the future of the dark, literary suspense novel - he doesn't say this is the novel. Which is like saying, "I think David Smith will be an All Black one day." This sense of as yet unrealised potential typifies my reaction to 'Word Made Flesh'. The story frequently gets bogged down in scenes which build up his fictional New England city of Quinsigamond and its underbelly but don't actually move the story on in any meaningful way. It often feels like the crime fiction aspects have been learnt by rote, and although O'Connell is doing everything in his power to up the ante (more violence, more corruption, still more violence) he hasn't yet transcended the straightjacket of genre.

I’m hanging out for the second instalment in Carl Shuker’s Three Novellas For A Novel (available to download for “Free Or More”). The first novella, ‘The Depleted Forest’, isn’t an easy read, but Shuker’s work never is. Think Pynchon or David Foster Wallace or William Gass. But as with these writers, the rewards are there for those who persevere, or just let go and let the prose was over you and the mysteries of scientific advances in concrete and machine translations of Japanese texts wash over you.

Then there’s Brave New World, Cymbeline, and Sport 36… which all deserve comment but I’ve done my dash tonight. This is, after all, the first day of my resolution.

Status Report: Week Twenty-Six

2008-06-29T22:13:00.002+01:00

Week Twenty-Six – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 15,572 words

Average: 2,225 words per day (compared to 1,459 last week)

Most productive day: Saturday 28 June, 4,006 words

Least productive day: Wednesday 25 June, zero words

Year-to-date: 446,329 words (48,206 words behind target)

I plan to write a State of the Nation on Tuesday to commemorate reaching the halfway point of 2008, so today I’ll keep this brief.

Explanatory Notes:

1) The zero for Wednesday is due to a confluence of factors: I started training someone up at work that day, while still having to get through a swathe of my own work, which left me beat come five o’clock, then had to view a flat on the other side of town. When finally home and settled, watching Turkey vs Germany seemed a much more promising proposition that eking out a thousand words.

[Aside: I wanted to spell it “eeking”, but no, “eking” is correct (the gerund of “eke”). I must have been tainted by too much Eek! The Cat as a boy.]

2) The large slice attributed to poetry is due to a) procrastination (I had to two short story competitions to enter with deadlines of 30 June, so naturally, I couldn’t bring myself to work on short stories till the weekend), and b) a loose definition of poetry (writing a massive amount of words then trimming and trimming until something poetic emerges).

My writing bubble will be burst again next week when some Germans turn up on my doorstep and expect me to drive them around this fair nation.

It’s a hard life.

Why It's Okay To Take Pictures Of The Summer

2008-06-27T19:15:00.003+01:00

After yesterday's post, I feel I should probably come to the defence of photography. After all, my brother is a photographer and I have taken in excess of 4,500 photos this year.

God, that many? Yup. I just counted on Picasa.

Sometimes photography gets a bad rap. A common claim is that it's less artistic than painting or sculpture. Any discussion of 'artistry' is a slippery slope and, in order to prove their point, people often get carried away.

Like: I remember the title character in John Fowles’ The Collector was into photography. He was also into pinning up dead butterflies and incarcerating young women in his basement. The novel was not shy about drawing parallels between the three.

[Aside/Minor Coincidence: The author of Speak, Memory (a book I read too young and is partly responsible for my obsession with memory) also liked to pin up dead butterflies. He also wrote books where not very nice things happened to young females… Unfortunately I do not know his opinion of photography.]

And I agree with one aspect of The Kinks' 'People Take Pictures of Each Other': the pursuit of the perfect photo in order to preserve a moment forever is quixotic (especially for amateur photographers) and means the photographer is partially absent from the scene itself. The photo that results does not stand in for a memory, but a remembered fiction.

Sometimes I worry that the pictures I take on my travels may be taking me out of very experience I've travelled all this way for. And worse, that they may distort my memory so that in a few years a trip to Turkey will consist of river cruises and staring up at mosaics, and I will lose the unphotographable: the taste of simit, the time I got to use Yavaşça yavaşça with our hopped-up taxi driver, or simply what it felt like to be in that place with four of my closest friends.

In some ways, writing can achieve what photography can't. It can record the internal and anecdotal – though committing these things to paper merely presents a post-factum snapshot of your already skewing memory.

But photos are useful (ah! the defence at last). Aside from something for show and tell with the whanau back home, I want a stash of photos (along with my written thoughts and the input of those that experienced X with me when we come to reminisce) because I know not to trust my own memory. I know how reckless and random it can be.

Smell may be the ultimate memory prompter (a post for a different time, perhaps), but an image runs a close second. I don’t expect my photos to prove or preserve my love for anyone or anything (and, unlike Ray Davies circa 1968, I don't begrudge photos this shortcoming) - - I don’t even set the bar that high for my writing. Yet.

Sing One Thing, Sell The Other

2008-06-26T19:36:00.003+01:00

When I first heard this song on a Sony Ericsson TV ad last week, I laughed. I thought I knew better: that Ray Davies' wrote 'People Take Pictures of Each Other' in 1968 as a criticism of the incessant snaps taken at family gatherings and their inability to truly capture important memories. He says this in so many words in his pseudo-biography, X-Ray, but a cursory read through of the lyrics makes his stance clear as well:

People take pictures of the Summer,
Just in case someone thought they had missed it,
And to proved that it really existed.
Fathers take pictures of the mothers,
And the sisters take pictures of brothers,
Just to show that they love one another.

You can't picture love that you took from me,
When we were young and the world was free.
Pictures of things as they used to be,
Don't show me no more, please.

But here was this rebuke of photography being used to advertise… photography. Specifically a cellphone that can take 8.1 megapixel digital photos. If Davies didn’t like photography forty years ago when it was a much more costly and time-consuming process, he must abhor the modern prevalence of snapshots and the every growing pictorial memory banks (facebook, picasa, flickr etc etc)… right?

Well, hold on a minute. This isn’t the first Kinks song to be featured in an ad. Let me quote from Times Online article from March 2006:

At their peak in the 1960s, the Kinks were banned from entering the United States for nearly five years because of their riotous behaviour. Forty years later, American television advertisers are paying the veteran rockers £6m to use their songs to sell washing powder, computers and pills…

All Day and All of the Night will be used by Procter & Gamble to boost sales of Tide detergent. I’m Not Like Everybody Else and Everybody’s Gonna Be Happy will feature in campaigns to promote, respectively, IBM computers and medicines sold by Abbott Laboratories. Lola, a song about a Soho transsexual, will promote La La, a company which allows subscribers to swap CDs by post.

'People Take Pictures of Each Other' isn’t even the first Kinks song about photos off The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society to feature in an ad. That honour belongs to ‘Picture Book’ which underpinned an entire HP campaign.

But again, the lyrics don’t actually endorse printing out your photos for posterity, but point to the futility of the images actually preserving emotion.

Picture book, of people with each other, to prove they love each other a long ago…
Picture book, when you were just a baby, those days when you were happy, a long time ago

You were happy and people loved each other – but that was “a long time ago.” Isn’t that depressing? It doesn’t put me in a buying mood, at least. (My printer is a Canon, if you were wondering… which you weren’t).

There are two questions here:

1. What’s up with The Kinks availing their songs for use in advertising campaigns that wilfully misunderstand the intention of their songs?

2. What’s up with HP and Sony Ericsson wilfully misunderstanding these songs?

Let’s work backwards. The reason these corporations are happy to have songs that were subtle satires of the product there are flogging is: they think we’re stupid.

And they’re probably right.

A visit to songmeanings.net (like this blog, the site is rather optimistically named) yields the following appraisal of ‘People Take Pictures of Each Other’:

I love this song.

It's about so many things, nostalgia, loss, the way life sometimes rushes by. It's funny how important photographs are, and how much joy and sorrow they can bring similutaneously [sic]

I need to be careful here, because my reading of these Photo songs as satirical and anti-photography is heavily influenced by a) my knowledge of the album (…Village Green…) on which they appeared, b) my recent exposure to the whole of Ray Davies’ oeuvre and the overwhelming number of soft satires therein, and c) my having read the aforementioned X-Ray. Without this bank of peripheral knowledge, I might have come up with a similar pro-photography reading of the lyrics.

Then there’s the fact that when you splice the song up for use in a 30 second commercial, it stops being satire, and starts being a jingle.

As a jingle, it’s pretty good. But there was once a lot more to the song.

I can offer a short, one character, answer to why the Kinks would allow their songs to be reduced to jingles:

But how’s this for an alternate hypothesis:

From the very beginning, Ray Davies had a chip on his shoulder. He thought he deserved more than he got in the 60’s and 70’s. See the way he vents his anger at the chew-em-up-spit-em-out machine that was the music industry in Lola Versus Powerman Versus The Moneygoround. While the song ‘Moneygoround’, specifically deals with the way artists are short changed (“The money goes round and around and around / And it comes out here when they've all taken their share”), it’s deeper than that. Remember, The Kinks were banned from the US for four years at the height of the British Invasion (for why: you can start here). That’s enough to make anyone feel the world’s against them. Again, X-Ray is a good place to go to hear all the ways Davies feels he has been wronged by the world.

But now that the corporations are knocking down his door to use his songs (and stuff his pockets with money), perhaps this is justice for Ray Davies?

While I doubt he’s changed his opinion of photography, one could argue that exposing the music to new listeners justifies the means. There are 12 entries on songmeanings.net for ‘Picture Book’ – almost all refer to the HP campaign as their introduction or re-introduction to the song. And, as the number of Kinks songs appearing on adverts continues to build, so too does the Kinks contemporary fanbase. There is a lot more at play here than ads, but I’d say they’ve played their part.

Or maybe, just maybe, Ray Davies has softened his opinion of photography. Maybe now that’s he’s entered his dotage, he flicks through the scrapbooks his fans have sent him and realises that, although they have their limits, photos are a useful aide memoir.

Somehow, that thought seems a little too human to be true for Raymond Douglas Davies.

Status Report: Weeks 24 & 25

2008-06-22T21:59:00.005+01:00

Weeks Twenty-Four and Twenty-Five – The Stats

Fortnightly Wordcount: 18,221 words

Average: 1,302 words per day

Excuse: Turkey and related preparation & recovery

Most productive day: Friday 20 June, 3,980 words

Least productive day: Take your pick (six goose eggs in total)

Year-to-date: 430,757 words (44,653 words behind target)

So, in the last fortnight, I have fallen another 20,030 words behind target. Gulp.

In eight days time it will be the chronological halfway point of The Year of a Million Words. However, if I write 2,732 words per day, I will only write my 500,000th word on the 18th of July. Then again, if you halve my eventual word count, I suspect I will have already written more than 50% of my year’s words… if that makes sense.

Of course, sense for me in 2008 is a relative term.

But regardless of what measure you use, this is a transition period.

It is clear that I will not be able to write well and prolifically whilst countering the twin evils of full-time employment and regular globetrotting.

Aside: when your twin evils are a job and travel, you should not be allowed to complain. Ever.

And of course, August is Festival Time here in Edinburgh, and I be attending a number of events as part of the Fringe and Literature Festivals. Some of my circled sessions for the latter include: Doug Johnstone & Toby Litt on Music and Fiction (16 Aug, 8:30pm), Carol Ann Duffy (23 Aug, 8pm), Will Self (24 Aug, 1.30pm), Andrey Kurkov (24 Aug, 6:45pm). The big names like Salman Rushdie and Louis de Bernieres I can take or leave.

One of the joys of book festivals is discovering new writers, but at £9 per session (more for workshops & masterclasses) and so many sessions run during work hours, I’ll be relying heavily on the free readings at 10am on the weekends to get my fix of fresh voices.

Anyway, the moral of the story is: Don’t expect the Actual worm to make any ground on the Target worm any time soon.

Perhaps a name change is in order?

How about The Year I Tried To Write A Million Words And Came Up Short Because of Full Time Work and Travel? Or The Year of Word Counts? Maybe The Year Of Learning One’s Limitations? The Year of Eight Hundred Thousand, One Hundred and Six Words, perhaps?

Or simply: The Year of a Million Words [sic]?

The Gallipoli Sensation

2008-06-21T19:55:00.003+01:00

This time a week ago I was standing at the New Zealand Memorial on Chunuk Bair (Çanak Bayırı). In all, me and my four travel companions spent an afternoon visiting the various memorials on the Gallipoli Peninsula. My reaction at the time was somewhere between the Kiwi history student who was quickly reduced to tears by the reality of the landscape (“It’s such a small hill. Why should so many die for such a hill?”) and my German friends who admitted the significance of this particular campaign was lost on them. I tried to explain how Gallipoli (or as the Turks call it: Çanakkale Savaşları) was important because it provided one of the founding legends of three new nations (NZ, Australia, Turkey), even if so much of this was built on rhetoric and idealism, then and now.

Minor aside: Having lived in both NZ and Australia, I’ve seen what the ANZAC story has transmuted into in the space of 90 years. Australia with its diggers and mateship, its live telecasts of Dawn Services from State capitals, followed by rock concerts on the beach and/or a beer and a game of two-up down the RSL. New Zealand seems to have had less buzz-words passed down through the years, and there is less of a circus around April 25th (at least there was the last time I lived in NZ… these things change, huh).

That afternoon in Gallipoli I posed for photos on ANZAC Cove (not sure what sort of facial expression to wear) and with the massive statue of Atatürk, took plenty of photos of my own, read all the information panels, stared at the blueness of the sky and sea a few times and thought wordless thoughts - - and then it was over. Another experience for the travel blog. Another box ticked.

But there is a slow-burning significance of this afternoon which I am still trying to make sense of. There is something beyond the tales of nationhood, military manoeuvres, and even the loss of individual life which persists, lingers in my thoughts. I don’t know what it is — I guess a week is not long enough to provide the necessary perspective — but there is something which brings the tears close when I read about the battles on Wikipedia when I ostensibly visited for the correct Turkish spelling of Chunuk Bair. Something made me sit down and write about it now.

This feeling, of being in the midst of a slowly coalescing meaning, is a gift in itself. It is something I have probably experienced before — though I cannot finger a specific example now — but it is something I have written about. Or more correctly, it is the state one of the characters in the first draft (2006) of Novel A finds himself in. Of not quite knowing the What or the Why of his emotions, just knowing where these feelings are coming from. For Mike, it is a past relationship. For me, it is Gallipoli.

So I will take this strong-but-muddled state of emotion I find myself in and twist it into something fit for an off-beat love story. What might have been a character-building moment for myself, I will use to (re)build my fictional character. That is what being a writer is. There is autobiography in all fiction; there is fiction in every life. Writing is forgetting about these distinctions for periods of furious typing.

But Gallipoli was one afternoon of a six day stay in Türkiye. I will also be using my time at the beach to help me write the second half of a stalled short story (though the beach David Leon visits will need to be in Ecuador). And there may be more stories or poems which grow from watching one of Turkey’s insane comebacks in Euro2008 or visiting a mosque. I will just have to wait. Like my Gallipoli sensation, what’s really worth writing about isn’t always clear until much later on.

Gidiş dönüş bileti

2008-06-19T21:14:00.004+01:00

I'm back.

Turkey was hot and historic and muddled and delicious and falling down and burgeoning and sad and come-from-behind-in-the-last-minutes and apple tea and roadworks-all-night and touchy-feely-waiters.

And tractors.

Six days without writing (and all that time in airports and traffic jams) means I have things to write about again. Nothing readymade for fiction. But I'm sure that will evolve.

Nirvana In Retrospect

2008-06-11T23:22:00.003+01:00

This is what I did tonight when I had the room to myself:

Watched Portugal versus Czech Republic, y’know, to unwind after work.

Checked my emails, check my statcounter, read a few other blogs.

Opened a blank document.

Went and looked in the fridge. Decided I’d cook tea.

Ate tea in front of the TV.

Did the dishes.

Decided I should also make my lunch for tomorrow.

Opened an existing story which is missing its final scene.

Checked my emails again.

Watched this video without fast-forwarding until 2mins 45seconds.

Checked to see if Switzerland versus Turkey had started (got to do my research for my impending journey).

Turned off TV. Edited existing story from the beginning. Got distracted at page 12 by Sarah Polley’s version of ‘Courage (For Hugh Maclennan)’. Rocked out.

Tried on the suit I only wear to interviews.

Thought: You stupid procrastinating chump.

Started noting down the various forms of procrastination for use in a blog post.

Returned to existing story, read a good sentence, decided it needed to be cut.

Ate an obscene amount of dried cranberries.

Removed ‘Never Let Me Go’ from my iPod to make room for ‘The Wasp Factory’.

Continued to edit existing story with the finale of The Apprentice playing on the television, turning around when ever my boy Raef said something (sadly, it was only twice).

Swept the floor of our bedroom (something Marisa asked me to do while she was away, so…)

Ironed some shirts.

Updated my list of procrastination activities.

Checked my emails. I had two. Replied to one.

Posted this.

The (Part-)Day of Zero Distractions

2008-06-10T16:45:00.000+01:00

Tomorrow evening I will be home alone. No house guest (Manchester). No significant other (business trip, East Midlands). The sense of excitement I feel for the span of six uninterrupted hours after finishing work and falling asleep verges on ridiculous.

Even though I have existing stories to edit (ah, the collection; I feel like I am swimming out to a boat that has come free of its moorings), I will write something new tomorrow. Not that I have any one nascent story in mind. But I want to conquer the blank page, rather than rub smudges from the faces of my misbegotten brood (they never stay clean for long).

I will write a post after my brief writing nirvana entitled "Nirvana In Retrospect" (to attract more grunge fans/90's stuck-in-the-muds to my blog).

Status Report: Week Twenty-Three

2008-06-08T22:06:00.004+01:00

Week Twenty-Three – The Stats

Weekly Wordcount: 17,804 words

Average: 2,543 words per day (compared to 1,894 last week)

Most productive day: Monday 2 June, 4,427 words

Least productive day: Friday 6 June, 941 words

Year-to-date: 412,536 (24,622 words behind target)

The wheels will fall off next week.

We fly to Istanbul on Friday the Thirteenth.

Six days in Turkey equals another 16,000 words to the deficit.

Looking back, I’ve been out of sorts since mid April.

I perused the 288 page programme for the Edinburgh Fringe Festival today. There are many free events and 2-for-1 ticket deals. Part of me is glad.

I have two dentist appointments in July to fix my mouth. It is difficult to think about the future.

But. It is getting to that point in the year where I must look ahead to what I will do next year: where I will travel, where I will live, when I will write. 2009 seems like such a high number.

I bought a hat today because I am getting sun burnt in Edinburgh.

Poetry has a large slice of this week’s pie. I tried writing a lot of stuff of the top of my head one day, then culling and cutting it back to a few lines the next day and sticky taping a poem together. I repeated these steps multiple times. I counted the top-of-the-head-junk words as well as the final-poem words. I was feeling democratic.

I have to chose what book I will take with me to Turkey. I am in the process of reading five books and listening one. I am not taken by any of the physical books. I am listening to Brave New World. I’m not sure if I would be more or less taken if it was a physical book. I think I will go to the library after work and look for Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut and/or Word Made Flesh by Jack O’Connell.

There is a note in my notebook this week which reads: Saruchi Tootle. I think this is supposed to be someone’s name.

I once met a man named Pascal van Mello. I wrote his name down in case I forgot it, but a) I am unable to forget it and b) I can’t use his name because he is real. Damn him.

Someone once said I had a good name for a writer. The next week she called me Cliff Craig.

I have listened to a lot of Kinks albums over the last fortnight. Nothing as good as Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround. I do like Soap Opera a lot, though. This surprises me.