I ran the Paris marathon on April 15th. It was a great day out. I had an incredible time. It hurt. There were times when I wanted to stop. But I didn’t, and I finished in 3:29:34. (I think those numbers will be forever ingrained on my brain—they’re at least written here on this blog.) I was pleased with the time. If I hadn’t missed a lot of training through an injury that wasn’t really an injury, I could have snuck under 3:15. At least that’s what Runner’s World was predicting based on my long runs.
In one of the ramblings I prepared for a website I started building in yet another act of ‘productive procrastination’, I mentioned an art exhibition I saw at Hampton Court Palace a few weeks ago. I don’t remember the name of the artist (it was part of a wider exhibition called The Wild, The Beautiful and the Damned *WARNING* Contains painted boobies). On the wall of the hall was a painting. Looking at the face, you could be forgiven for thinking that you were looking at a photograph. (The clothes let this illusion down a little.) But the really special treat for me was seeing the preliminary sketches.
An old friend with whom I have lost touch wrote a piece about The Hunger Games. Granted, it was only tangentially about the film. Mostly it was an attack on the cynicism of the ‘self-help’ internet community and a call to discover ‘what makes you cry’ and build your life around fixing that: a noble goal. (You should read it, here.)
And now it’s been three days since I’ve written anything here (or on the story). It’s called “Creative Boredom”. I haven’t been feeling creative (or bored). What I’ve been doing instead is mechanically polishing the dissertation. It’s only the introduction, but I keep getting in the way. Overthinking. But when you’re training your brain to think, is not that the goal?
The main character is a misanthrope. And the piece is written in the first person.
I’m worried that this will turn readers off. Maybe it will turn them off me. Maybe it will turn them off the book. Maybe it will turn them off themselves. Either way, I’m concerned.
I don’t want to end up like my character. But, I think (knowing very little about the noble craft of writing), there is bound to be something of the author in every character he creates. There has to be. So there’s something of the misanthrope in me. I know that.
This isn’t the one I wrote for the 2010 NaNoWriMo. That one’s sitting under my boiler at the moment. (In the disconnection between writing and thinking that, I realized that it’s a pretty awesome metaphor that is actually true. The typescript is under the boiler in my kitchen. But it is also not on any kind of ‘burner’ at present either.) That was a fun experience, particularly the last day, which saw me write 13,000 words in one 24-ish hour period. I don’t think it’s something I’m going to have the liberty to do again this year. (Always and never are two words you should always remember never to say.)
This is a story of which 25,000 words or so already exist. I think it will not be any longer than 25-30,000 words. (I’m aiming for something in the mould of Miss Lonelyhearts, that has a plot which revolves only around a single character and the people he experiences.) I wrote the majority of this story throughout 2009 and early 2010. Another book this story seeks to ape is The Catcher in the Rye. If memory serves, I think the main character references ‘Catcher’ more than once.
I just finished polishing the ‘Prologue’. I have a tendency to be wordy, so I went through and literally deleted (more or less) every other sentence. That’s something I learned from James Altucher. It’s already made what was a little turgid much more lucid and flowing.
I’m also playing a lot with the fourth wall. I like to do that in creative stuff. Someone once said that the job of the artist is to let the art speak for itself, and let the artist disappear. Some things have that quality. For example, I don’t think Tool’s music is actually made by humans. It’s far too ethereal, precise and perfect to be manmade. It’s monstrous. But sometimes, like in Woody Allen’s films, it’s beautiful when the artist remembers that the work is not about the work, but about the audience.
In the 2010 NaNoWriMo story, In the Lifetime of Trees, I tried to do it a little more subtly, because the piece is written in the third person. By contrast, this story, which I’ve called Creative Boredom, I’m playing with the idea of making the reader a character in the book. The main character talks directly to the reader. The whole novel is a (one-way) conversation between the narrator and the reader. (In a way, it’s like Daniel Quinn’s excellent book Ishmael.)
I don’t know how much I’ll update this blog. I have a lot of writing to do (what with the PhD and all) but this will be a neat distraction. I don’t think it’ll take that long to finish. I don’t want it to be much longer. It just needs to be more cohesive, I think.
I’m writing a paper for an academic conference. It’s my first proper paper. I feel a bit like a grown up (whatever one of those is). The paper is called “Trust and Authority”. This is a short post about it.
I had an uncle who was always impressive. He was always seeking ways to better himself. He died a few years ago now, and I only recently learned this about him. Although I had suspected it; in the last few years of his life, we became much closer and I came to know that he was investing a great deal of time in (re-)learning to play the guitar.
After he died, stories came at me from his widow, my aunt and God-Mother (with whom I have always been close), about him and the ways in which he sought to be better. Many of these revolved around his daily routines, and that is the subject of this post. The ways in which you live your life, even simple things, can make you better at everything.
All the things my aunt has told me that he did—those that have inspired this post at least, he was not a saint by any means—were done in the normal course of his day. They are all very simple things too, things that I try to remember to do.
