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| ...When the Writing gets tough, the Photoshop gets going... |
The novel’s on hold. Been shelved for a month. But there’s
absolutely no problemos, because the path and plot are kinda set, and the
outlook is special. So let’s not get our frilly pink Asda knickers in a knot
about that. More worrying is Mr. Ridiculous, a side project that is only 10,000
words in after over a year. The average must be a paragraph a week! Half a page
every now and then is good going. It was always going to be slow because it’s
unique, and relies on notes. You can’t make notes up. They arrive every now and
again. Sometimes 3 a day. Sometimes none for 4 days. I text myself notes, on my
portable mobile telephone. But still, progress at the moment, in all written
endeavours, is snail-like.
Even editing the backlist, which was like a breeze for the
first 2 books, has run into a wall. Exhausturbation is proving to be as much a
headache to sift through as it was to write a draft. As Michael Douglas says,
in the writing film Wonderboys (2001), starring Robert Downey Junior of Iron
Man, Katie Holmes of Batman, and Toby Maguire of Spiderman...phew...much of it
was written ‘under the influence’, meaning a tipple of premium Dutch lager by
the way, not Valium crushed and snorted through a blunt. His unfinished script
in that film takes up a couple of boxes, and in loose pages to boot. And like the
Constant Writer Steve King says about his doorstop tome The Tommyknockers, “It
wasn’t so much written, but gutted out.”
In Exhausturbation, at a part where the story goes into the
main characters mind, describing the makeup of his psyche as an actual physical
place, very much like in The Cell (2000), guess who was shatted on by a dollop
of writer’s block, regarding this particular work, that lasted 3 whole years? Yup,
yours truly, who else! And alas, at the same place during editing, guess who
has been stuck again for several weeks? The passage is about a metaphysical
dome called THE LOBBY OF HIS PERSONAL HELL, an enormous cathedral-like
structure of bio-mechanic matter like that godforsaken sludge pit where the
robots feed off humans in The Matrix (1999). Basically, it has just dawned that
the book fleeces (rips off) movies from around the millennium...although of
course it is ten times well better than all of them combined.
Exhausturbation is so far the most difficult story to ‘make
work’. And in a way, the most exciting. It went on such a tangent that the only
way to wrap things up was to include a black hole/multi-verse/parallel reality.
This abstract diversion would give way to the kind of dreamscape prose that
would rise in The Violent Arsonist, 2 years later, although because of the long
gap, I came back to Exhausturbation after The Violent Arsonist was finished and
did the 36,000 word flash fiction collection Kixter in between (the titles
Exhausturbation and Kixter are words of my own making...voila). And that’s how
the themes of books interlink, see? Because at times you juggle and flip from one
to another, taking with you what you learn in each...
At times even I, the dude who wrote it, thinks wowsers,
gracious me, what the frig is going on in this man!? I can’t believe or
remember what I’m reading. It's a pwopa (proper) mental journey. I killed a main
character for no good reason and introduced a giant child in a force field as
big as the Marshmellow Man in Ghostbusters (1984). All good zany fun, if
nothing else! The plot literally fell apart at the seams and had to be stitched
up with alternative drink thinking. Martin Rees, eminent cosmologist and astrophysicist,
has been discussing dark matter and multi-verse theories just this morning on
BBC Radio 4, which is doubly-fitting after the meteor on Friday night, which,
for dangsakes, I missed. There was a new programme called Orbit aired on Sunday
night too, and the skies have been clear over here in Northern England, so
inklings of space are in the old grey matter, like – cliché alert – distant
jewels. Or sequestered sequins.
Does space conflict with faith? Why is there a black hole in
the middle of our galaxy? What is the universe expanding into? Are the aliens
already among us? And most bafflingly of all, joking aside, just who the flying
fook IS Carmen Sandiago? Answers in an email with the subject heading WHOCARES please. Danka.
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