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.