Don't wanna be a cheerleader no more..

I think I've worked out why I've been having so much trouble getting effin' words onto an effin' page recently.

See, I've been looking over what I've written so far and, though I do like pretty much all of it on one level or another, parts of it do feel somewhat.. slight.

To give you some sort of perspective of what I'm talking about, here's a kind of chapter/by/chapter breakdown: Chapter 1 (which I shall post here soon) is short, sharp, and extremely dark and (I've been told) pretty engrossing. Chapter 2 is short, sharp and features our second narrator being awkwardly, drunkenly seduced, and features a truly dreadful sequence about trying to appear less drunk by focusing on a beer tap that I CANNOT WAIT to delete. Chapter 3 (back to the first narrator - I'm fairly sure at this point that I'm just going to alternate between the two) involves a man arriving at a safehouse, looking after his friend's sister and tidying the house. Chapter 4 involves our recently seduced hero and his recent seducer piecing together the night before.

Now, neither chapters 3 or 4 are finished, and 2 needs a good tweaking. And each chapter has its own merit; goddammit, I have to introduce these characters somehow. However, what's been holding me back and, to a certain extent, introducing a form of writer's block, is the thought that what I'm creating is a touch... daft. Frivolous. Throwaway.

Of course, in my head I know that this isn't the case. There's been a GOSHDARN murder (this will become more apparent when I post chapter 1). I know that there are serious scenes to come, but the slightly more light-hearted scenes are draining my faith in the project.

The solution? Skip ahead a scene or two, or three. Next, I'm going to write a couple of very serious but important and hopefully engaging sequences involving grown men talking or progressing the plot. I know what I want to come out of them, and I think it's going to work out pretty well.

If not, I'll get David Mamet to finish the whole thing.

I'm going to put a song at the end of every blog, so here's the confusingly gorgeous Annie Clark aka. St Vincent singing about how she no longer wants to be so frothy and disposable. The rest of the album is similarly brilliant.

A Booker-Nominee Approved Work of Mild Genius

I'll post a proper blog later tonight, or tomorrow morning at the latest, but for now here's that short story for which I was awarded the highest grade of my entire university career, which I mentioned in my first post.

I've just noticed that the bit that's meant to be in italics isn't in italics, so if you could read everything up to 'Why isn't he scared?' with your head tipped slightly to the side, it may help.

Enjoy, and let me know whatcha think, via whatever means possible. Can you send emails via this page? I honestly have no idea.

http://ponda.co.uk/among-ghosts

COMA SUMMER

A lot of things have happened this summer.

I stopped being a student, in a ceremony efficient enough to rival Nazi Germany where I barely hid too much hair under a stupid hat. I started writing properly for www.bestforfilm.com, a lovely thing run by some truly wonderful people whom I would gladly work for for free, which I do. I lost about 2 stone, graduating from fat tragic Doritos binger to lean soup enthusiast with a nice arse. I finally learnt how to change a barrel, despite having worked at a pub for well over a year, on and off. I finally got into Bukowski and Tom Waits, and felt thoroughly guilty for taking so long to do so.

I also started writing another novel (this is not my first attempt, but you'll get another blog about that later). Well over a year ago the lovely Trezza Azzopardi - serial Z hogger, Booker-shortlisted novelist and my creative writing teacher for a spell - did something deeply irresponsible. She decided that my final piece, a 2,000 word short story, deserved a first. The second marker, Vikram Kapur - who, not 6 months before, did the much more sensible thing of informing me that you can't have your protagonist reassess his life as a result of watching Nick Cave's video for Stagger Lee - concurred.

As a result, I got me some delusions of grandeur. Yes, I CAN write a novel. And it will be brilliant, and entirely original, and it will shake the foundations of the literary world, and people will clutch it to their breast and weep, and I can finally get that giant pool in the shape of a dollar sign.

Then I failed all my fucking exams.

They were History exams (that Creative Writing module was a temporary detour), but I still failed them. And so 3rd year, rather than a race to the finish, became a desperate battle to keep myself from being utterly unemployable. Not a lot of 'creative' writing got done.

But now the degree is done, the moderately respectable grade is got. There are no excuses now. This novel must be written. This novel must be FINISHED.

I'm about 4,000 words in. Ideally it needs about 100,000.*

This blog will be all about my thoughts while I write this thing. I promise to be funny, or at least insightful, as much as possible.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KzJE9m1GTB0
(This is the song I named the post after. It's the best song I can think of with the word summer in it)

*Brilliantly, I applied for a freelance copywriting gig for a guy who's writing his first novel, which he says is 250,000 WORDS LONG. By my estimation, that's roughly a thousand pages.