A series for Lent.

I am grateful for the wind.  Particularly a northerly or north-easterly.  So cold that it slaps your face and wakes you up.  So loud it howls like a monster in the trees.  So wild that bits of tree are scattered everywhere.  So fierce you can't go out without a woolly hat, your hood up and your eyes watering.

I love a wild wind.  You don't get much of them in London.  When you do, it clears away the pollution and the filth and cleans the air so that the city feels refreshed.  The sky brightens, the sunshine lights up raindrops like diamonds and that the trees glitter.

We used to have a small dog with long flowing white hair who used to stand on the front step when the wind blew.  She stood motionless, nose lifted up, the wind howling through her long coat.  She had a faraway look in her eye.  I used to wonder where she went.

Today I stood in the wind and was transported to somewhere ancient and wild, a time before concrete and carbon emissions.  

Let the wind sweep you away!

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for editing.  Nothing I write is carved into stone.  It can be deleted, changed, pummelled into submission or reworked into all perpetuity.

Creation starts somewhere inside you - for the sake of argument, let's call it inside your head.  There, your novel, your painting, your composition (any form of art:  from a knitted sock to a rocket to Mars) is perfect.  It's a thing of beauty.  

But when you try to recreate it by writing it, painting it or designing it, it's a lump of hideous, formless, colourless clay.  Occasionally you'll get lucky (when the gods are smiling on you or you've had a seriously large shot of caffeine) and the recreation works.  Mostly, it's garbage.

This is what editing is all about:  you now have to take your formless lump of clay and work it.  You have to pummel it, chop bits out, add bits, go over it again and again.  You have to shape it and reshape it.  You have to sweat over it.  You have to research bits of it.  You have to rethink other bits.  You can even get someone else to inspect it and get their opinion, but, ultimately, the recreation is yours.

In the end, you're never going to recreate that perfect thing you created inside your head.  But you can get close.  And it takes work to get close.  With experience, you get better at it.  With time, your first lump of clay requires less work, less sweat, less tears.  

Editing isn't about fixing up mistakes.  Editing equals Art.

A series for Lent.

I am grateful I can walk. 

There have been many times when I either couldn't or was in too much pain to walk.  I had severe sciatica in my thirties that went on for several years without painkillers or any information on how to deal with it.  It's been decades but I can still remember the pain.  Everything hurt so much that I limped with both feet.

I've had back pain which made it painful to walk.

And I've had foot pain from hell. 

Screaming pain hit my right foot from nowhere.  My doctor (and everyone else) was convinced I had sprained it, despite the fact that I had done nothing to sprain it (you don't just wake up with a sprained foot.)  I was sent to have it x-rayed in case I fractured it.  After three months and increasingly stronger painkillers that did nothing except exacerbate the depression, my doctor finally realised the pain was from a pinched nerve.  Not sciatica (I would have recognised that) but just a general, you know, nerve.  I had an MRI scan (nightmare! never again!) but there was nothing weird going on in my back.  For six months I could hardly walk.  I couldn't put my foot down without it screaming in pain.  I hobbled, I limped, I cried.  I tried a walking stick but that didn't help.  However, knowing that it was a nerve in my back and not the foot itself, I persisted.  I set a target of going to Kew Gardens every month and enjoying a walk.  I walked around the squares of Bloomsbury.  After a year, it began to ease.  My fitness level had fallen to general blobbiness.  So I kept on walking until I got it back.

Then plantar fasciitis hit my left foot.  Once again, I could hardly walk.  The pain was excruciating.  I'd had it before but only for a few days, never months.  There was heel pain as well as instep pain.  Not able to walk properly, I limped, never touching my heel to the ground.  This led to  hip pain, which still, now, after two years, flares up and causes agony.  It took close to eight months for the plantar fasciitis to heal (mostly).  I can now only wear Skechers shoes (because they're spongy) with very expensive insoles to correct my feet.

When I walk now, my speed is twice that of twenty year olds, who drag along like corpses on the sidewalk.

There's pain but I keep going.  I can't run, do fancy exercises at the gym, go on marathons, attempt extreme Pilates or yoga.  But I can walk.  It's enough.

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful for my daughter.  I never thought I'd have kids.  My life wasn't exactly unfolding in that direction.  So she turned up as a huge surprise, hiccuping her way into existence.  Two weeks before she was due, a midwife, whom I thought was rather stupid, couldn't work out whether my baby had turned.  A scan revealed she was breech.  An appointment was booked to have her turned but, after MUCH consideration and NO knowledge of what this involved, I changed my mind.  Still had to hang about in the hospital for five hours waiting for the consultant so that I could TELL him I had changed my mind.  The marvels of the NHS.  But upon hearing other's experiences of having their babies turned, I was hugely relieved to have made this instinctive decision.
Because hospitals don't like doing surgery on Fridays (and weekends), my baby was born on a Thursday, the day before she was due.  I requested that the operating theatre be kept quiet and dim, with all voices low and no extraneous chatting.  Into this peaceful atmosphere, my baby emerged without a tear, fast asleep until they poked her.  A single squawk and she went back to sleep again.  She was the most peaceful baby on the (truly horrible, filthy, ghastly third-world) ward and went on to be an excellent sleeper.  
She still is!
I am also, it must be said, grateful to that rather dim midwife.  There was always a different one on duty when I had my check ups and my heart sank when I saw her.  But if it hadn't been for her lack of experience and knowledge, I might never have got that scan, never have found out my baby was breech, never had that peaceful Cesarean.  

A series for Lent.

I'm grateful I have a roof over my head.  It tends to leak.  It gets baked by the sun all summer which means the flat is insufferably hot.  It slopes and I hit my head periodically on bits that I should know are there.  I have to paint all the ceilings every year to cover up the black mould.  There's a hole in the kitchen ceiling the council won't fix.
But it's a roof.  
Consider not only those who don't have one but don't appreciate the one they have.

What do you do when your head is full of novels?  There are so many I want to write.  And I want to write them all now.  
I want to write the fifth and last novel in the Fleet Quintet so that would be, at last, a quintet and not a quartet (though for many years it languished as a trilogy....)  Ideas for this keep popping into my head.  The problem has always been how to tie up all the lose ends.  There are quite a few!  And no part of what is remaining of the story is linear.  I have finally hit on the idea of a Storyteller.  This in itself probably isn't very original but it leads to several twists and revelations.  In fact, the revelations are what draw me to the story.  I am, quite frankly, just dying to reveal them!
I also want to write the next Exodus Sequence story.  The main character has appeared fully formed in my head and man, does she talk a lot.  I can hear her voice, her accent, what she has to say, who she says it to and why.  There are two other characters, both instantly recognisable from an Exodus Sequence story called "Crashed."  This isn't particularly a sequel (the stories aren't constructed that way) but it does explain an awful lot.  In fact, there is quite a lot of explanation in this story but because it is done by this brilliant character (the one whose voice I can hear in my head), it sounds great.  I really need to start writing these conversations down.
I also want to write the next fantasy novel.  I've been trying to get the first one published for a year now, so far in vain.  It's created something of a dampener for me but I decided I just had to get going on the second one otherwise the series will never get going and I'm really keen that it does.  So out of all my choices, I picked that one and am into Chapter 2.  Commercially, it makes the most sense, despite an agent not yet picking it up.
And then there are the short story spin-offs from this "low fantasy" series.  The short stories take place in the fantasy-type realm, while the series of novels are set in the real world, so to speak.  I've loved creating both.
And then there are those present-tense literary style short stories, snippets from my own life told in the third person, a very strange experience which is proving to be amazingly cathartic.  I've written one so far and it was wonderful to get it all out - truly turning aspects of my life (which bother me) into art.  There are quite a few more where that one came from too.
And then there's that strange novel I want to write which was my first ever screenplay.  Fortunately I abandoned the screenplay idea (I'm no good at it) but the story is well-developed and would make a great novel.
And then, finally, there is That Difficult Novel, where this diary began way back in February 2015.  Has it really only been four years since I started it?!  How is that possible?  It feels like decades ago.  My Great Literary Work, this has turned into an albatross and it weighs heavily around my neck.  I know I can fix it up.  I know I can turn it into something spectacular. 
But, dear God, when?  I've got enough work to keep me busy for the next ten lifetimes.  It doesn't seem to matter that no one is reading my work.  I am more fuelled than ever.  It just doesn't die.  The fire is burning so high it's lighting up the whole sky.
It's overwhelming.
​

I am lightheaded with joy and relief.  At last my novella is finished.  This is the one that got lost several times.  The one that I started last January and abandoned.  The one that turned out to be so long I thought I'd have to divide it in two.  The one I thought I could rewrite into a serial.  The one that I thought was terrible.
It wasn't.  It's bloody brilliant. 
Of course, one always thinks the most recent thing one writes is the best ever, so that feeling may go away, but for now:  I'm just going to run with it.  It's lovely.  It makes me remember why I'm a writer.  I created this thing, this story, out of absolutely nothing.  It has people.  They have lives.  They do things that have consequences.  And behind it all is a vast backstory that would take a million years to tell.
I love it.  I love being able to do this.  I think I might just actually take off and fly.
​

The words "cold" and "London" don't often go together - not at the centre of London where I live, anyway.  But this morning it was COLD.  Deliciously cold!  It had rained so the ground was damp and fresh.  The sun came out and was brilliantly blinding.  And my face went quite numb.  God, it was lovely.  I love London like this.  It's so rare, like a precious jewel.  A diamond, in fact. 

I've been editing my new novella "Shattered."  It began life last January but I failed to finish it, a rare thing for me.  Got caught up in all those Neanderthal facts, which weren't, after all, very important in the end.  It's a bit patchy - some bits are bloody brilliant, others are rather weak and rushed, so I'm doing my best to fix it up.  I had hoped to published it this January, but it may take longer than I'd hoped to finish it.  Not that it matters.  It's not like there are hoards of people waiting for the next Exodus Sequence story.

But the combination of a wintry day and doing some writing is just lovely.  Nothing else matters much at the moment.  

​ 

My daughter told me the other day that music of the Eighties is now a Big Thing.  My response was of the "what the fuck" kind until I remembered how much I'd loved the music of the Eighties.
Joy Division.  New Order.  Siouxsie and the Banshees.  The Cure.  The Birthday Party.  The Bad Seeds.  Nick Cave.  Einstürzende Neubauten etc etc.
But of course these are not the bands that turn up on current playlists.  "Take on me,"  said my daughter, trying to think of an example, and I realised it was all pop.  The kind of pop you really want to forget.  Pretty much like the whole of the Eighties, come to think of it.  It's the one decade of my life that I would like very much to fold up and shove into a black hole, given just how truly fucking awful it was.  Everything bad that ever happened to me and everything bad I ever did happened in THAT decade.  The scars I still bear today happened in THAT decade.  Everything about myself that I'm still trying to escape happened in THAT decade.  
Except, perhaps, the music (but not the pop music).  By chance, when I turned on the telly last night, an ancient episode of Top of the Pops was playing......."Take on me."  By chance, when I walked into a shoe shop this morning on Oxford Street, they were playing......."Take on me."  
Aargh.  Was I being haunted?  Was this silly song going to follow me everywhere?  Then I walked into another shop on Oxford Street and they were playing New Order's "Blue Monday" which was so goddamn cool that I stayed for longer than I'd meant to and spent too much money.  
I still have the original 12" extended version somewhere.  I used to blast it out on the speakers whenever my parents went out for filter coffee (they were probably trying to get away from me).  Instead of rushing off to dig it out (I hardly need to thanks to YouTube), now all I can think is:  how much could I get for this ancient piece of vinyl.
And continuing with the Eighties theme, I then went to a branch of Costa I didn't know well (Rathbone Place) and discovered they have filter coffee.  Wow, rare find!  I was so delighted I had a giant cup and will now no doubt be awake for several days.
"How does it feel..........."
(And yes it does take over two minutes for the vocals to kick in!)
​

Last night I dreamed I was trapped.  I dreamed this three times and have already forgotten two of them, but the middle dream, the worst one, I can't forget.  I was in the most appalling awful building.  Raw concrete, windows of plastic-glass that could not be broken.  The view was desolate:  a wintry, industrial landscape of barbed wire and more concrete.  Others were with me, young men that looked familiar.  We were tasked to dig into the building.  I have no idea why other than that there was a huge back story to all of this I'd already forgotten in the dream itself.
But the floors were had to dig into had veins of radioactivity.  Terrified, I tried to escape by breaking the glass windows but my arm just bounced off them.  I ran through all the floors of the building until I found a broken elevator shaft and managed to climb down precarious debris to the outside.  The last bit was high but I jumped anyway, realising I could slide down on a curtain of fabric that was part of someone's stall at a Christmas market.  
It was all very jolly but I had to keep running.  The girl who ran the stall came with me, terrified too.  We ran and just when it seemed safe - we were out in the open - she turned to me and smiled, a friendly, kind sort of smile - and a cage snapped around both of us.
An ally had suddenly betrayed me.  The snap of the cage's appearance was like a silent explosion of invisible light, a change so sudden that I almost died with fright.
​It was a huge cage,  plenty of room for others.  And the others came:  rich, privileged people, all dressed in their best finery, all looking up with wonder.  I had seen these people before - at the market?  In another building?  Had they been watching us digging in the radioactive building?  At first they had just come to gawp at us in the cage but then they were trapped too, hundreds of them.
It seem were all there because someone.....

Well, who knows.  The next dream probably explained it all but I have no memory of it.

Listening to someone relating dreams is unutterably boring.  It makes fabulous sense to the person trying to describe it, I mean, you can still SEE the images so clearly.  You can FEEL the emotions (in my case, it's almost always terror or ineffectual rage).  You can see the colours, the people, the weirdness, all the laws of physics broken, the Alice in Wonderland effect in full force.  But in describing it, all is lost.  

I've turned many dreams into stories.  None of them, upon completion, resemble the dream in any way.  It's almost impossible to recreate the surreal events of a dream in a way that is interesting to others.  And you only have to witness what passes for dreams in movies or books to realise that you never dream like that.  So don't even try.

However, for inspiration, there can be no better source!
​