May 29 2023, 20:24

Everyman

Got a nice little string of blog posts going here. Here are the May headlines:

• my father is out of hospital (eight weeks!)
• the cinema finally opened

Dad’s bounced back well. He looks his eight-eight years, and he’s anxious about his heart, but he’s happy to be home, able to make meals and potter around the house, and he’s back to sending me the occasional wry message. I’m starting to relax and let in some joy and relief. I just want him to enjoy whatever time he has left.

The new cinema was announced in 2019, and I’ve been boring everyone around me about it ever since. A monthly membership lets me-plus-one watch unlimited films, but in the opening week I was faced with Fast X (shit), The Little Mermaid (not for me), Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (possibly fun, but IP-driven nonsense) and Super Mario Bros (um). This was not how it was supposed to go.

There are throwback showings on Sunday evenings. Last week it was Heat. During the final chase, I could feel the rumble of planes in my stomach, and my wife now has the hots for nineties Pacino. He’s a very sloppy kisser on a big screen. It was all unexpectedly intimate. I’ve become used to television-sized screens for films. Last night it was Fight Club, and they gave out free wine and popcorn. What a film, but, you know, we all know the first rule.

May 28 2023, 09:11

Bluesky

I have a Bluesky account. A fellow writer on Twitter sent me an invite — it’s still in a pretty combustible beta — and I immediately feel much more at home there than on Mastodon, which has an awkward user interface and an established culture I don’t chime with. Mastodon is very... conversational. I don’t want to talk with strangers particularly, but I do want smart voices saying interesting things in as few words as possible. Bluesky is like Twitter used to be in that way. It also allows me to control who I read and, with a 300 word limit, encourages me to edit before I post and take pride in what I write.

I’ve been writing software in various guises for over twenty years. I started posting to websites, blogs and social media as soon as I started learning how to code. Sharing thoughts online, as inconsequential, personal, and abstract as they may be, still thrills me, and must be connected to the still-simmering desire I have to see my fiction published.

“To see my fiction published” is a passive statement. I didn’t write ”publish my fiction”. It matters to me that I don’t self-publish. Part of me still wants validation, but I recognise the positives of having a book come out through a publisher, as well as the downsides.

I’m concentrating on my technology career, which pays the bills. I am not passive in that part of my life. I wasn’t passive when I finished The Complex and put it out into the world. This is the phase I am in. The next novel is still in my mind’s eye. It requires a degree of focussed attention that I just don’t have available yet. Anxiety doesn’t help. I am not independently wealthy. This is where I am. The writing phase will come around again. In the meantime I will keep posting here. And now possibly Bluesky.

May 27 2023, 09:17

Author speculation

I’m reading Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarentino’s non-fiction celebration of key American films of the seventies, from Bullitt and Dirty Harry, to Escape From Alcatraz and The Funhouse. I heard about it through the Pure Cinema podcast, which is connected to Tarentino’s Los Angeles cinema, the New Beverly. The prose voice is exactly how Tarentino sounds in interviews and podcasts. I’m sceptical of his writing ability, and I admit to being cynical about his novel, Once upon a Time in Hollywood, published after the film came out.

Obviously, I’m jealous. I don’t doubt his intelligence or capacity to speak fluently about the stories in his head. It’s easy to imagine him walking around his plush L.A. mansion, talking into his phone, then emailing the recordings to a ghost writer who edits them into shape. And why not? Writing clearly happens in many ways.

It feels like cheating because I have fixed ideas on how writers should write. There has to be suffering, each sentence sweated over, whole chapters thrown away, the entire thing rewritten multiple times. There has to be a crisis of confidence and real risk of the whole thing, perhaps even the writer’s life, collapsing into a meaningless void. That’s real writing.

Yes, that’s fucked up. I don’t know anything about Tarentino’s writing process. He’s an impressive artist and this is all in my head. I’m being a dick, and not to Quentin Tarentino, who couldn’t care less. I’m being a dick to myself. This is how I keep me in my place.

May 08 2023, 07:50

Inspiration

I've read three books in the last couple of weeks to do with creative writing: On Writers and Writing, Margaret Atwood; The Writing Life, Annie Dillard; About Writing, Gareth L. Powell. With everything going on in my life, the only way I’m going to write is if I have a clear purpose and a plan. This is always true I suppose, but I’ve seen several plans dissolve in the face of reality, and now I’m wondering if the problem is more in why I write than how I’ll write.

Almost all writers have to work in a job and write in their precious spare time. A few have enough money saved, inherited or earned by well-paid partners to allow them to give their writing full attention—hell a tiny proportion actually survive on income from their writing!—but this is rare. Margaret Atwood points out that as writers, our time is forever split between the imaginary worlds of our stories and the physical world of family, chores, jobs and our health.

On Writers and Writing is full of wisdom. For example, she says writing is a permanent record of our talent (or lack of it), so of course it can be hard to start. Like a musical score, it is brought to life by a reader, and we each have someone inside who we are writing for, whether we know it or not. That could be a memory of a parent figure, a lover, a course tutor, or some version of God.

I realised that for me writing is a spiritual act; it’s an act of nature and an expression of myself. Magazines have editors who accept or reject stories. Creative writing courses have tutors to provide feedback. The publishing game has agents. It’s easy to give these people too much power. Publishing needs gatekeepers, but writers need to own their shit and write for themselves. Writing is a spiritual act, a soulful activity, if done with the correct attention.

April 29 2023, 12:17

Walking with ghosts

I walked slowly through the centre of Swansea this morning after listening to Marc Maron on his podcast talk about Sweaty Marc, the version of himself in New York from the eighties that he remembers as he walks there today. In the nineties, I was mostly lonely and lost, and Swansea was my stomping ground, but Lonely Mike doesn’t haunt me in the same way Sweaty Marc does Maron. It’s an apt image though, because I’m a little lost now, twenty-five years on. The novel isn’t coming on its own, and I’m not doing the right things to help it along.

I made the decision to concentrate on my software career this year. I started a new job in September, and I’ve passed my probation, but there are redundancies happening all over the technology sector. I don’t feel particularly safe yet. At the end of March I started on a hectic, high profile account, so it’s been vital I get to grips with everything quickly. I’ve been waking up at five am thinking about work problems. I haven’t been in a job where I’ve felt so challenged in a long time. It’s taking all my energy.

But I had a dream the other night. An elegantly dressed woman is with me and a man on a balcony in a nightclub. The man is very drunk. She whispers to him that they should go on somewhere else. She’s sober and taking care of him. I want to go home, and I think the man’s had enough too, but if I don’t go with them they’ll be alone without me, and that feels wrong in some important way.

Perhaps I need to readdress the balance after a month that’s demanded everything I have. The man in the dream is a bit of a battered shell, and the woman is trying to look after him, but I need to step in and suggest... other options.

April 12 2023, 20:31

Puzzles

At the start of the day a deployment of code went awry and at the end I was a go-between over my still-hospitalised father’s boxer shorts. Life can be ridiculous.

On Monday I went to see John Wick 4 and ate a terrible hot dog. The person serving sprinkled it with dried (!), crunchy onions. Then yesterday I watched the first half of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte. The two films serve different parts of me. Michelangelo Antonioni — I am Michael, my uncle was an Anthony who is now with the angels. He was rich, although he might have denied it. Our last conversation was an argument over Brexit. I told him it would cost the country untold damage, and we’d be back in the EU eventually. He made some argument about the unfairness of laws on unpasteurised French cheeses. It’s a sad memory.

My new work account is the mobile app of a well-known supermarket. On the train home I read A Study in Scarlet, my first Sherlock Holmes novel. All I could see in my mind were Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson. I need some sleuthing skills to unpick some work puzzles, but first I need to discern the important ones. Not all puzzles are created equal. (Hm, that reminds me of other things. Sigh.)

April 03 2023, 06:46

Matrix

Walked to Southside for a coffee. Why? I’m thinking of Gwen Bell, then Neo/Keanu. I deliberately left my notebook at home. I need some time without a pen in my hand. Re-balancing... something. Gwen, Neo and Keanu are seekers of different kinds.

I told myself yesterday to put the writing weight down. There is too much else going on to add the pressure of writing a novel. Life before art. Life is an art, yes, but you get my drift. I’m chaining myself to a rock when I need to be swimming.

Dad’s hoping to come out of hospital this week. He’s always on the back of my mind. And I started a new account in work, before I had completely finished the old one, so I’ve been doing both until today. A mind-stretching exercise and I’m glad it’s over. It’s a short week. I’m looking forward to the Easter break.

Maybe I can put some of this Neo coding energy into a character in the book. (I can’t help myself, but there’s a gap between thought and action.) If I’m stuck in a matrix, what sort is it? Writing? Capitalism? Our budget spreadsheet is a matrix. Reality? (There’s that word again.)

Keanu Reeves is in a relationship with Alexandra Grant, a visual artist, who on her website says her work asks the questions:

How do the languages we speak and the images we see form how we think and exchange ideas? How can artists and writers work to create and influence culture in an increasingly technology-driven world?

March 14 2023, 19:16

Hospitals

My father is in hospital again. Both his legs are swollen, which is fairly common with heart failure, which we’ve known about for a few years, but one of his arms has also swelled up, and he’s out of breath doing the slightest things. The practice GPs thought it was better to treat him at home, but the lymphoedema nurse was adamant it was something else. My moderately stressful trip shoehorning Dad into a VW Polo for an assessment in an inaccessible part of one hospital became an eight-hour wait with the triage team in a bigger hospital. As part of his admission he did a Covid test... which came back positive. The only people he sees are the district nurses who dress his legs, so it was probably them. He’s asymptomatic—I took him for his last vaccination in November—but after a whole day face-to-face lifting him in an out of chairs, I feel like I’m playing Covid roulette with a full chamber.

I’m letting off steam. He’s in good hands. I hope he’ll be home in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I’m working from (childhood) home, I miss my family, I’m tired, and I feel vulnerable. I can’t imagine what it would be like to be a full-time carer. At the same time, it’s a privilege to be able to look after him like this.

Hospitals are emotional places. There’s nothing like an admission ward to make you feel grateful for your health. Dad might be old and ill, but I’m still young and well. I have to remind myself because my boundaries in this are both hard-won and ever-fragile.

February 21 2023, 20:18

Content apocalypse

This is the tipping point. I’m fifty in two weeks. I’ve watched fifty percent of the 800 films I own, and even less of the books. The amount of time I have left is constricting, but the number of books and films I own keeps expanding. Something has to give.

I need a new philosophy. What I consume (bleurgh) must feed (this is family trauma speaking) whatever I am creating. I envy those who have perhaps always done this. Collecting and list-making is the hoarder’s comfort. Part of me wants to watch and read everything, to learn every language, to play every instrument, but the excess of wanting all this, never mind getting it, is enormously destructive. It’s like over-eating. It’s a form of nihilism. It’s choosing not to choose because I’m afraid of getting it wrong. Instead, I could consciously make a path and accept the consequence—choose an author, a book, that feels related to the novel I’m writing, or pick a film that speaks to something bubbling under the surface that I can’t yet grasp. Maybe it’ll be useful and maybe it won’t, but I’ll have severed my chain to the immovable boulder of infinite possibilities.

Elizabeth Filips, my current YouTube guru-crush, preaches ‘soft discipline’. She means, trust your intuition as to when you do things, and don’t get bogged down in systems and rigid structures. That same knowing-what’s-right works for picking books, tweaking a sentence, choosing clothes in the morning and improvising a meal. It requires being sensitive to how I feel and what I think, and to wonder why I feel and think that now. As a straight man who loves intelligence and empathy in others, Elizabeth Filips is ripe for anima projection. Libido flows through the anima—life force, creative energy, motivation, call it what you will. Intuition is my inner feminine.

Films are a safe way to experience the extremes of life, and books too, probably all art, but in excess they can also be a defence against actually living. It’s time to make some choices. All of my watchlists and TBR shelves make me feel like I have a plan and a project, but this leads to my father’s version of my predicament, which is thirty-eight more years of reading and TV. It’s a decent life, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want it. I can imagine other options.

February 18 2023, 18:26

Emotional weather

I’m staying with Dad for the weekend, and because he’s having some new health problems, it’s quite hard work. My mother was always the anxious one. I wonder now, in her absence, how much she was anxious for everybody, in the literal sense of taking on other people’s anxiety. Dad is getting more and more anxious as he gets older. He hasn’t come to terms with the fact that he’s eighty-eight next month. He’s doing amazingly for his age, but he’s rarely been ill, and has escaped most debilitating conditions until now.

I made a list of the reasons this is a tricky situation for him, me and my sister, which I’m not going to share here, but this weekend more than ever I find myself influenced by the emotional weather in the house, which matches the drizzle coming across the Atlantic. He’s miserable, frustrated, afraid and generally grouchy, but in between he is also drily funny, easily distracted by sports, caring and good company. We watched Bullet Train last night, which we both found gross and very amusing. These are the breaks in the clouds.

Today I’ve spent solid time with him, but also escaped to Swansea, Porthcawl and Aberavon. My part of North Yorkshire is much colder and drier than South Wales, and I forget how these weather fronts can define the days. It finally stopped raining mid-afternoon, so I went to my mother’s grave to say hello. A woman left the children’s graveyard with her hood up, hiding her face. I spotted a hawk floating over the nearby woodland. It was quiet.

I’ve still got time with my father, but this stretch of illness feels different to previous ones. I can’t tell if this is my misery, or if I’m infected with the gloom over this house. Caring for others is also a seemingly endless exercise in reinforcing boundaries.