Welcome to my blog. Thank you for visiting. I hope your stay will be a pleasant one. According to my trusty writer’s guide you have a short attention span and if I don’t quickly get down to the meat of the matter or promptly dazzle you with my song and dance, then you’ll be off, taking with you your precious reality-making attention particles, without which this project will wither and die. Oh, and it told me to keep my sentences short in case you get distracted between lines.
Now if we were to meet in our embodied states maybe you would call by for a cuppa and we’d get to know each other in the English way. I could you show you around parts of my world. We’d establish a rapport, build a relationship, then later in the evening (a glass of wine perhaps? a smoke?), defences lowered, barriers negotiated, we’d reveal ourselves.
So, think Big Brother rather than X-Factor; fingers off the buzzer, please. You can vote me off as many times as you like but I’ll still be here. The weekly episodes will be relative short, say 1,000 words. I’ve made a deal with myself to continue broadcasting this literary reality show until the end of next year, so if you’re not into introductory stuff come back later in the series. Don’t miss the opportunities, however, to be gifted the occasional free short story or interesting article.
What will you find in this blog which was called, before space limited, "I'S NOVEL ABOUT HOW THE WORLD'S YOUNGEST BEST-SELLING AUTHOR (FAILED) ACHIEVED REDEMPTION AND MODERATE SUCCESS AT THE AGE OF 60 - HE BLOODY HOPES"!
Without wishing to totally undermine the whole project by beginning with my doubts I have to admit I can pitch this in two ways:
a. As the title boldly disclaims, an inspiring blow by blow blogged account of how a man turned his life around at the last moment and amazingly achieved his childhood ambition to be a well-known and wealthy enough author - A Reality self-help novel set over the turnabout 18 month period. A Reality Self-Help novel, what do you think? More still, you will have first access to much of the work of this author.
b. A diversionary collection of tales concerning procrastination, self-delusion, misplaced ambition, good intentions blighted by character defect, untruths, gossip and whingeing,
disguised as
autobiography, eastern and western metaphysics, valid and important information, humour, indirect social and spiritual activism, opinions on life, death, dying, writing, Glastonbury and the ‘alternative life’, new age teachings, children, grandchildren, gurus, relationships, drugs, politics, nature, the body-minded brain, the state of this body, Boggy Starless …and anything and everything it takes to sabotage the goal I have set to free myself, namely, completing the aforesaid project while freeing myself from a limited situation in life (i.e. unemployment, lack of money to do what I want to do) by the power of my writing.
Elucidation & Context
I moved house recently and in the process came across two boxes of my writings - novels, short stories, essays, film and TV scripts, poems, etc. produced slowly and intermittently over a lifetime. As I put these mostly unpublished and unseen works into storage, I recalled how at the age of 13, having just read Tolstoy, I conceived the ambition to become the world’s youngest best-selling author.
Doesn’t all disappointment leave a mark?
While struggling with the lock of my unit, ultimately only pretending to secure it, my mind conjured up the heartening story of a man, aged 58, in ill-health and despond, suddenly deciding that despite previous failures he’d make one last attempt to realize his childhood dream to earn his living doing what he loved most, writing.
Now I love stories, novels especially, reading and creating them, nevertheless I still become disconcerted when I remember they are not real, they are made-up. It’s all very well becoming enthused up and inspired but if what’s uplifting us is fabrication, lies in other words, aren’t we being slightly fooled?
Undoubtedly we, humans, have found the need to use myths to understand, to explain and to function in our world. Maybe it is these myths that have got into the shit we’re in. We’re now in an age that is uniquely global and unmediated in its communication. Are we going to spend the time fibbing, fantasizing, theorising and mythologizing or are we going to report the facts as we perceive them to be?
Anyway my point is that I decided I didn’t want to spend my time pursuing that particular story idea. During an unintended period of contemplation about the plot of the novel I wasn’t going to write, I mislaid the key to the storage yard and became trapped in there because I couldn’t open the gates. Over in their office the staff watched on their CCTV cameras for twenty minutes and then came to rescue both me and the key which, the camera showed, I had tossed into a skip along with some rubbish.
“Thank God for reality TV,” said the manager as I left.
So there we have it. Wouldn’t it be better, I thought, to tell a true story? A story of ‘Reality’ –using ‘Reality’ in the TV Reality Show sense – complete with both the over intimate details, and the subtext that we are witnessing the transformational journey of a fellow human being (though admittedly there is the further subtext, i.e. the losers, the majority, are on a journey from nowhere in particular to nowhere. That’s life, that’s drama).
Reality, therefore, is my genre. And thus the plotter of my story.
All I needed was a 58 year old unemployed man who was on the brink of half-heartedly, disbelievingly, reluctantly, goading himself into attempting to cure his financial malaise while simultaneously abandoning inertia, disappointment, and possibly sense, in favour of making one last effort to create the identity and production of a ‘successful’ author. For him would come the unremitting gaze of the witnesses - first me, then you through the lens of my weekly edited updates – who are not impartial and may often be malicious.
Where would I find such a man?
Oh look, we’re out of time already, my 1,000 words have gone. The closing credits have
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