Sometimes...

...I have a good idea and I think, afterwards, that I should put it in my book as a musing of my protagonist. Some I do, and others I keep for myself. I don't know how I decide in to which category they fit. 

'You know, you could be pretty if you didn't scowl so much'

The network wasn't big enough for the both of them. I know how these things work - Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip had to die so that 30 Rock could live. Admittedly I hadn't actually seen a single episode of the latter - I didn't need to to know that I wouldn't like it as much - but then I saw Tina Fey's Palin skits on SNL and thought that if Aaron Sorkin can let it go, then so can I. And, you know what, I do like it. Really like it, in fact. So much so that I stopped watching half way through the first episode until I had the whole box set. It arrived this morning. See you in 21 days. Or ten-and-a-half hours.

Tulips from Amsterdam

Because a project I was due to work on has been delayed, I now have this afternoon free. I should, perhaps, be using this time to catch up on paperwork or, heaven forbid, maybe even write, but as the weather is nice I am going to plant up the tulip bulbs (that I suspect were rather cheekily sneaked through customs) instead.

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend

As I may have mentioned, there are builders working on my parents' house. They are skimming the spare room at the moment, and so a whole library's worth of books are now stacked precariously up and down the landing. I never thought I'd see the day when my mother's house looked so chaotic and bohemian.

Anyway... I was wondering what I was going to read next as part of my read-one-book-a-week-that-isn't- for-work regime and happened to notice this on top of one of the piles. I could have had my pick of John Steinbeck, Wilkie Collins or Henry James, but no. It was the 1984 edition of The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole that jumped out at me.

I read it in the '90s, when I was barely a teenager myself and I'm pretty sure it was the first 'grown up' book I ever read - that is to say it was the first one I picked up of my own volition that didn't have a picture of a pony on the front. I remember being vaguely scandalised whenever there was a mention of nipples or sperm (that sheltered upbringing in the Cotswolds obviously worked) and therefore torn between reading it shamefully under the covers at night with a torch and publicly flaunting the fact that I had been deemed mature enough to read it, by doing so in a place where people would be able to see.

I suppose it's ironic, really, that I picked this book as a bit of light relief after The Believers, thinking it to be its complete antithesis. It is sold as the adolescent ramblings of Adrian:a slightly pretentious, precocious and sex-obsessed 15-year-old, but really it's all just a smoke screen, and he is simply the conduit through which Sue Townsend can impart her not only witty but clever observations about politics, belief, and the dysfunctional family. The two books are, actually, startlingly similar.

A review on Amazon says that the points 'Adrian' makes are just as relevant today as they have ever been, but I don't agree with that entirely. Yes, some of the themes are timeless and universal, but I reckon if a teenager read it today, they would struggle to get a handle on it. Perhaps it's the constant references to (then) current events - the boys I babysit for didn't know who Princess Diana was, let alone the significance of her giving birth to a boy in 1982 - but I doubt it could ever mean that much to anyone born after about 1989. If girls, in 2008, really are giving blow jobs at 12, then why on earth would they want to read about the sexual frustrations of a spotty 15-year-old?!

Having re-read it, ten years older and if not exactly wiser then at least a little less naive, I'm certain that a lot of the innuendo and euphemisms would have gone right over my thirteen year-old head. And I couldn't be more pleased that they did.

Day 3

This week the house has had more tradesmen in than the yellow pages. The list includes, but is not limited to:

4 builders

3 tree surgeons 

3 glaziers 

2 Sky technicians

2 decorators

2 window cleaners

A man with a pressure washer who cleaned the patio

A plasterer

An accountant

and

An IT consultant.

The constant interruptions, disconcertingly loud crashes and having to break every hour to provide tea, hardly make it the ideal conditions for concentrated effort. However, I can't deny that there is a sort of things-getting-done, progress-being-made atmosphere in the house that is usually absent. 

*UPDATE* - I've since been reliably informed that there were six individual Sky technicians, over four visits.

Karlology - Karl Pilkington

"Where have you put all the dinosaurs?" I asked the old security man. "Dinosaurs? You won't find any dinosaurs in here, you want the Natural History Museum."
Turns out I was at the V & A. I don't know why they have all the museums so close together...If another meteorite hits Earth and wipes out civilization, then in billions of years time, when humans grow back again, some archaeologist is gonna be well confused when they start digging round here and find human bones, dinosaur bones, bits of old Chinese art, polar bears, fish and computers all within a 1-mile radius.

I was given this for my birthday yesterday and I finished it this morning. It's not short at around 220 pages, but a lot of space is taken up by a large typeface, quotes, photographs, and Karl's magnificent illustrations. 

Karlology, the follow-up to Happyslapped by a Jellyfish, is a collection of essays about Karl's trips to various museums and exhibitions in a bid to garner more knowledge and perhaps some wisdom. 

There is, still, some debate as to whether or not 'Karl Pilkington' is a real person, or if he is a comedy construct - an allegation that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have both strongly denied. I'm still on the fence, if I'm honest. I'm sure there are certain aspects of his character and personality that he plays up, but for the most part believe that it would be impossible to script such elaborate digressions. 

It's his self-awareness (along with the knowledge that he makes massive amounts of money) that stops any sneaking feelings that someone with below average intelligence is being exploited for laughs and japes. I used to get this niggling feeling of sadness in the pit of my stomach whenever they would tickle him with a fact and wait for him to say something improbable. Now I'm just sad that he only puts out one book a year.

Firstly...

First blog entries are always tricky, so let me just say this - 

It occurs to me that writing a novel is much like having a baby. 

You're just going about your life and then, quite without meaning to, you've conceived an idea (see - even the terminology alludes to pregnancy) but you haven't decided what you want to do and it's too early to tell anyone for fear of jinxing it, so you revel for a while in the secrecy of it all. After a few weeks you start to feel emboldened, tentatively tell a few friends, and before you know it people you've never met come up to you at parties and talk to you about little else. They laud you for having the courage to go through with it, and then tell you about a friend of theirs that did, and who has never been quite the same since. Months later and you suddenly find yourself past the point of no return. You're struck by the realisation that, one way or another, this thing is coming out of you and that when it does, you'll have to show it to people and hope that they don't think it's ugly. To top it all, your friends who haven't been through it don't understand your new lifestyle, say you've changed and then declare you mad when, come the following year, you announce that you're going to do it all again.

I'm past the ideas stage, but thinking about my lack of any real progress too much still makes me feel guilty and vaguely nauseous. For ages - on the advice of an author friend of mine - I didn't tell anyone. The potential embarrassment of having to admit later that I couldn't find a publisher or had simply given up, prevented me from doing so. I've been writing (or at least trying to) for eighteen months now, and rather than continue to tell no-one, I've decided to tell potentially everyone. As I'm intensely afraid of failure this is, for me personally, quite a stupid brave thing to do. My hope is that it will force me to be more disciplined - that when I'm sitting at my desk, staring at a flashing cursor on a blank word document and really struggling to produce anything new, it [the fear] will give me the impetus I need to carry on. If only to save face.

However, this blog won't be all about the writing process, rather it will be about my life at the time of writing. I'm not really one for full and frank disclosure - that should probably be known now. Inevitably, my posts will reveal far more about me than I would like, but be assured that I won't be conveying every little detail of every day - very boring patterns would soon emerge if I did. I work in publishing so it will likely have a bit of a literary bent from time to time, but mainly I just wanted somewhere I could freely put down some of my thoughts and observations without being censored, and, hopefully, without censoring myself.