Welcome to my blog which is posited to be the episodic unfolding of a writer’s life at a crucial time. Crucial to him of course. No-one else really gives a shit whether he finds an audience (and an income) or not. An oddity of a blog is that readers (when they appear) arrive in the middle of things and then can’t be bothered to scroll back to the beginning to find out what’s been going on. For example, how many of you know that in Episode 18, I advertised my novel, BOGGY STARLESS AND THE DRUIDS OF GLASTONBURY (written under a different name) which is available on lulu.com for a mere £9.99?
Or that the reason this is called a ‘Self-Help Reality Novel’ is because, having decided that age dictates that this is a now and never situation, I thought I needed to utilize all the tools at my disposal, including whatever benefits I’ve accrued from years of psychological experimentation with drugs, meditation, newer age type thinking, Rebirthing, Avatar, The Path of Least Resistance, and various other techniques and advices, to make the best effort I could to produce the results that I want.
Should you have followed the story from the beginning, you might appreciate why today, rather than digress as I am wont to do, and prefer to do, onto tangential matters such as Dean Whitbread’s desire to diminish the power of the word, and concentrate on providing a progress report on the self-help side. When I made this leap of commitment to genuine effort, my plan was to spend May to September preparing the ground and then from now, my first week of self-employment as an ‘Author, Course Teacher and Thanatologist,’ upping the ante with a view to being well-established by the end of next year.
Plans, I can do. Enthusiasm for my plans, I can do. Heigh-ho, let’s get stuck in, I can do. Stick at it and finish it, I can do. At this moment I’m not sure what it is I can’t do because slowly, with years collapsing between paragraphs, work appears, creation happens. Job done. It’s the stage after the creation which seems incomplete because with the exception of a few stories and articles, and now Boggy, nothing has actually turned into a book because in manuscript form it has gone off to agents and publishers where it has been inspected, often commented on, sometimes praised and occasionally almost given a contract, but never actually published.
Now we don’t need intermediaries to publish, although they could certainly help, to give us permission to be what we want to be. Thanks to lulu.com, any author can cheaply put themselves in print. Believe me, that’s fucking amazing.
Deciding to write this blog once a week, was an act of discipline and a statement of intent not to forget what I was meaning to do and not to find myself in two years’ time finding a list of projects which I never got round to completing. So far writing the blog has been very useful in surprising ways. Until writing tonight, for example, I’d been concentrating on producing and not really noticed that there’s a sort of post-completion step that I seem to be missing.
Before looking at the techniques that I have, or have not employed, I do feel that something’s dawned on me in relation to creating. The title of Harry Palmer’s book, ‘Living Deliberately,’ sums up the Avatar philosophy. In myself I’ve always felt a little uncomfortable with the idea of living deliberately, of making choices, of defining, because it appeared to contradict what I believed more deeply, viz. that any self is an illusion and anything it ‘chooses’ is equally illusionary. I still believe that. What’s changed is that I have begun, or think I have, to disentangle my creations from my identity. Robert Fritz is very good on this (cf). Also I realized, and bear with my here, that although I believed I wasn’t really a person, ‘personing’ continued and that person was unable not to create – because creating is in the nature of personing – and would continue to perform the five-fold act of creation either unconsciously, through habit and repetition, or consciously by thinking of something it wanted to create and creating it. Instead of feeling guilty for focusing on particular goals (without undue attachment), I now see creating as an invaluable tool for mental health.
I’m now going to turn you over to Jack Heston, my inner American (cf Episodes 2,3,8,11).
Hi! As usual I’ve been left to clear up the dogends of John’s mind. And only 250 words left to do it in. Here’s my report on the current status of project positivity and focus.
OVERALL SUMMARY.
The original goals remain in place but there are more of them and they are more specific. There remains, however, a lack of definition about the final objective. Plans are in place but there are gaps in the plan. In terms of ideas, there has been an abundance, which is both good and bad; the bad being a sense of overwhelm and loss of focus as to what the next thing to do is. The various strands of my abilities appear to be coalescing in a way I didn’t expect. Writing 17,000 words of Sad Sam wasn’t in the original plan and took a few weeks of my time away – to what end I don’t know yet. On the other hand, I loved writing it and am certain writing a novel that works for me is the best feeling. Without Chris Wade’s intervention, I suspect Sam would have remained unwritten. Already I’m gagging to write two more novels.
Another surprise is that I now feel I can and want to teach Avatar again.
I suppose I should admit that John is smoking like the veritable chimney. I will work on him. He also keeps complaining about the lack of time. I’ll work on that too. How many minutes are spent rolling cigarettes and emptying ashtrays? I am pleased with his commitment to the job, however, though I can see that his struggles with the technology are a problem to be resolved if his efforts are to be properly productive. All in all, we appear to be on track. And, all being well, they’ll be a time when John creates an opportunity that will require him to face his threshold condition and to step out of his room and of himself to create his creations in the real world. I don’t think he’ll be able to do this. That’s when I’ll take over and establish myself as the proper captain of the good ship Heston.
Be seeing you.
WORDS, BASED ON BOWIE SONGS, WRITTEN FOR THE ELDEST SON, CALLED TOM MAJOR. HE WASN’T IMPRESSED.
This is Major Tom
Calling Daddy John
I’m floating in a tin can
Spaced out on your afghani man
Five years of stardust
‘N Rock ‘n Roll wanderlust
This is Lieutenant Tom
Can you hear me mum?
Everything’s hunky-dory
In this lovers’ story
The boys keep swinging
The boys always work it out
This is ground control to Colonel Tom
Lets dance, put your helmet on
We can be heroes
Though just for the day
We’re absolute beginners on a drive-in Saturday
Junked out on heaven’s highs
Cracked by Crowley’s lies
The lad’s insane
Booze, pills, and cocaine
Ziggy’s sixty-four
And can’t play the guitar any more
This is ground control to General Tom
Time falls wanking to the floor
And time will trace us all
A word on the wind from your dad and mum
They love you Major Tom
They love you Major Tom
By the way, before I forget; David Cameron’s confession that he is a KGB spy is very timely for me because I have the complete low down on Maggie T’s own career as a Russian agent as revealed in my story ‘Sex with Maggie T’, the memorial edition of which will be issued later this year, I hope. (It all depends on the OCR machine.)
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