It’s 2am for me right now, and whilst I’ve shifted into a nocturnal creature due to being off work I sort of would prefer to be asleep and getting a stable day/night relationship reestablished than doing this. Nothing goods from writing emotive blogs, emails, letters late at night. There is a fallacy that I have often prescribed to in which the written word is somehow the cleaner, more clinical and considered method of communication. There is an immediacy concerning verbal conversation, there is a subtle nuance to tone of voice and body language which I’m not good with so I like to write.  That is rendered bollocks by the fact that when the urge to say something somewhat cathartic comes about all I do with writing is confuse and convolute matters. I can’t utterly refute the notion that this might not be the fact that forms of communication have failings but rather the failings lie with me and how I interact with everyone in the world. In fact an exploration of that very notion is at the heart of the aim of this blog as I considered starting it.

I was going to write about writing. You may have noticed I say I’d like to write and get published as per the pipe dream I mention as a way to validate the current state of my existence and to use to ward off the mind crushing prospects of my current reality.  I’ve been writing quite a bit with a view to sending to a publishing house these past while. It isn’t going so great, ideas don’t stick, my writing sucks and I mismanage timings and what not (a long time prioritising a novel idea that I subsequently rejected has robbed time I would’ve devoted to other ideas). Writing with an eye to publication is odd, there is a set of considerations about style, tone and content which need to be met with regards the prospect of a sale. I was going to write this blog about writing because I can’t get the tone right for the idea I’m on now. I like the idea allot, I desperately want it to work and pull it off, the plot whilst not revolutionary is solid and the characters are spot on but I want there to be a flavour to it which I’m not feeling in what I’m writing. I have lines of dialogue, turns of phrase in the narration that hit the right notes but a cohesive tune doesn’t exist just yet.  So I was going to talk about that and what not but I got to thinking, which, whilst not unheard of, is always without fail dangerous for me to do.

When I was writing the Space Soap Opera “Bride of Kharn” earlier this year, after somehow lucking out and getting publisher interest from a submission I made (which alas went no further than a polite (yet unhelpfully vague) rejection), I realised that rather than being an aspiring writer, I was actually more akin to a pragmatic fantasist. (If we’re being honest (read hurtful) deluded, deluded person probably fits better than “pragmatic fantasist” but I’m trying to manage my portrayal to come out of this with face.)

What do I mean by this distinction? Well for one thing whilst I do read about writing and storytelling, most of that has happened after the resolve that I could maybe make a hash of selling  and a lot of that happened after Bride of Kharn was sent off to the publisher and I was running high on the self-delusion it wasn’t terrible (if you are one with critical faculties this self-delusion the ability to psyche yourself up and belief in your creation is necessary as otherwise you will submit nothing to anyone at all).  I am no student of the written word (outside of formal academia), what I am is someone who reads a fair amount of books and comics, watches far too much TV and probably spends an unhealthy amount of his alone time thinking and living scenes and stories in his head (some of which I write down somewhere just as a way to express them). If this was the matrix I’d not take any pill I’m happy to depart from reality of my own vocation without chemical assistance.  Now I live with a creative process, an urge to have stories and characters and things in my head that are not real but I find enjoyable and for whatever strand of reasoning you wish to pin on me (depending on cynicism levels I can talk myself out of writing by  undermining the reasons I have for doing it)  I have done things with an eye to bending such a thing towards achieving the goal of publication. It’d be really trite and crap to say “it is my gift it is my curse” and suggest that I have a spidermanesque responsibility to turn my imagination into some sort of content for a wider audience to (hopefully) enjoy, but that is pretty much the best way to put it.

Which leads me to an interesting crux in this whole crazy thing. If writing (or indeed all art) is about the creator communicating an idea or emotion through their work to elicit a response in the audience and I mostly write/imagine to serve my own needs and desires surely there is a gap whereupon all my endeavours are doomed to fall through?

I don’t have an answer, I think “I’m communicating this to people” is always on my mind when I write with regards stuff I’m sharing. (Well not so much this rambling babbling nonsense but no one apart from you reads this blog anyway and to be honest I’d rather you stopped so I wouldn’t feel guilty about not updating.) Which is often why ideas get dismissed or I get frustrated and annoyed at my lack of abilities to achieve the objectives.  I won’t say I have a talent with regards the writing, when I was fresh out of school maybe, teachers and the like said I had but talent suggests an inherent skill which I clearly am lacking in. I like making distinctions, mind numbingly petty distinctions, real pathetic “why are you being such an arse making such an arbitrary distinction” sort of shit. I’d say I have a set up in my mind that is well suited to the task of writing. I read allot, I write a bit and I think constantly and imagine all sorts. It is something I can do, but I need to work at it to do it well which is fair enough and the same boat as every other published author and hopeful scribbler the world over, I am nothing if not ique (as opposed to un-ique).

What worries me is that there is this gap. When I started this blog post I was alert to the fact that there was a very real possibility I could go into some sort of really confessional sort of place but I’ve been writing for an hour now and achieve over 1200 words so the pressure on my mind to make things up and vent them at the internet is released somewhat. This is great because I don’t want to be that guy. You know the guy who has an audience for his works and thus does a bit to cultivate a web presence and then decides to get married and seems to think this audience will put up with his thoughts and emotions about that. I love that guy, I’m part of his audience, he can post a link that leaves your computer stuck on goatse forever and his audience will think it rocks. It is all good despite the snide tone I took, I can’t be that guy if I wanted to, I have too much hair and not enough badassery.

However that aside aside,  maybe there is something fundamentally wrong with me that will undermine all these efforts. I relate to people as an outsider primarily. I have socialised online over in reality since I was 14 years old and that is now a decade of keeping people at bay in reality. I don’t talk, I don’t emote to people. What I do do is cultivate the experience where I can reckon that cathartic writing of emotions in say an email may not help matters but other than that nothing really. I’ve found myself in the catch 22, where I don’t know what is best, I want to be there personally to help and comfort and offer intimacy and immediacy to someone who is upset but if I am there I’d want to be apart and communicating via a screen where I can consider what to say and bide for time and know I will be saying something likely better than I would make up instantly. That said that catch 22 only exists because I was emotionally invested in achieving a “cheer the person up and comfort them” result, where upon you could say I’d avoid such tripfalls if I stopped becoming emotionally invested in other people.

There is likely a running theme if  you know me and/or read this blog that I am a mess. I accept that I am under no compulsion to fix that. I am reasonably content brooding in the dark and distracting myself with my own creations and I don’t think anyone wins if I was to draw from specific examples of my existence to explain how fucked up I am.  When I started considering this blog and it took me to this point I got upset and obsessed about those events and my shortcomings and what not, I then distracted myself by writing this damned tirade of meaningless nonsense. That is certainly a degree of win. I’d summarise what I was trying to establish and communicate but I’m not sure what that is. In fact without a painful exploration of why I am why I am I don’t know how much of a way of explanation this is.  Still I am aware of a disconnect, I wonder if it is fatal, I’ll publish this anyway because I know the audience for this is typically my friends (or acquaintances with which I am friendly as a more accurate distinction?) and there is surely a decent argument with regards the disconnect with the world that I probably not as friendly and open with them as friends possibly should be. I don’t know, I only really am comfortable talking about stuff that never matters and most of you as my friends I met online where the use of the written word and the mediums on which our friendships take place (often forums) mean I can try to cultivate a wittier, more worthy of friendship persona than I likely have in reality or am expressing here. Perhaps this will lead for me to be terribly alone and abandoned by everyone?

Part of me kind of hopes it does to be honest. If I’m going to have friends longterm I probably should do better than you, you are already getting a bit annoying.

##1##

I daydream that I am a helicopter,
That way you cannot break my heart.
Also I can fire rockets,
explosions are awesome and satisfying,
so unlike my life as man.

I stir from my fantasy and you are talking,
delivering the minutiae of your life conversationally,
every word is illuminating like UV light,
you talk and the room is covered in blood.
You’ve never been so beautiful,
I want to explode you so bad.

##2##

Statistics say that you’re more likely to be raped by a familiar person.
Why would I want to meet your family and friends when they’re violent sexual deviants?
Why are you so upset?
The conventions of society mislead you into thinking that look in your mother’s eye was love.
It’s time you learned better.
I will not wear pants or go out to dinner with your mother.
Nor should you.

##3##

We’ve all seen the movies.
The killer is already in the house.
You should really stop being passive aggressive,
like the moat and the lock on the door,
it’s a hinderance only to those who want to help you.

Yes, I’ve got a big knife,
don’t take that tone with me,
we’re the only people here, one of us has to be the serial killer.
Getting angry doesn’t make it less obvious in retrospect you know.

##4##

You should really think about the children.
The future of the planet and the generations to come.
Achieve some perspective before you act.
They’re so fucked.
Isn’t life so much more awesome in comparison?
Let’s go and burn everything.

Yeah, so I’m not writing for this blog with the sort of fictional nonsense that is at the heart of my best intentions (I quite like world hunger, all the intentions I have with high quality value judgements attached are self serving) so instead as I am now a day into my 24th rotation around a radioactive space thang I am going to pull an introspectivey thang. (Another one you ask yourself whilst I use the running commentary of the parentheses to assure you that this one won’t be so angsty and self-mutilation suggestive ). I was asked on my birthday if I felt older or wiser. My response was that I age incrementally and that as such I do not notice the change. It’s like my weight, I gain it (or less likely) lose it gradually, it isn’t a massive noticeable change that occurs upon standing upon the bathroom scales.  This makes it hard to make value judgements and offer insightful talk with the “what is the sum of my life” tallying.  Still I didn’t have as much terrorism or torture 48 hours ago so some noticeable changes are about. (Is that weak joke going to become a runner throughout this unplanned ramble? Don’t bet against it).

Later today I start working at a different supermarket. Same chain, different town. I imagine that’ll play out a bit like an overly flogged dead horse of a movie franchise. Ultimately the same old shit with tedium inducing cosmetic changes. I got asked if I was looking forward to it allot over the past week, I had a long-winded response about the linear nature of our experience of time, suffice to say, I can’t view the event in retrospect yet. There are good things about this though, it’ll be a cheaper commute to work and I’ll be able to have more free time as the journey to and from the workplace is shortened which should one would help translate in more time writing stuff since a while ago I kinda resolved stronger than before that selling my writing would be somewhat fulfilling.

Backstory time boys and girls. We’re going to fill in blanks many as friends of mine (random strangers reading this blog, hello, you’re now my closest friend) would already know. Earlier this year one of my admittedly stab in the dark submissions to the Black Library (I like writing (read thinking of stories), the IP that the Black Library deals with is engaging and fab (I am a warhammerer) and what not but it’d be hard to argue that I am due to be published properly so it’s always been a “submitting can’t hurt”-longshot type of hope attached to the submissions many of which haven’t been fantastic) got some interest and I ended up as one of four or three writers asked to submit full stories based on the pitches received. That was kinda a big deal for me,  still not a done deal but suddenly it seemed my wistful darts thrown blindly into the darkness in a hopeful manner was near some sort of target. It was exciting, it was cool, I had to reread my submission, replan the story as I had forgotten what I pitched and I got to struggle with the words in a way that was frustrating but fulfilling because it kinda now counted and ultimately the process was cool and I think parts of what I produced are probably amongst the best things I’ve written.

Anyway all that build up to it and the news wasn’t that favourable. The original promise of my submission wasn’t met (don’t ask me what that was, I’m as clueless as anyone)  which is disappointing if not unexpected, the full thing (as I sent to the editor) alongside further in the thread my pitch (so that the two can be compared) is here (on a thread that I find frustratingly under commented upon to be honest) and I just await the chance that Christian Dunn editor at large may find time to offer up some feedback to me before I finish off the current spate of submissions.

This hasn’t knocked my confidence or my resolve greatly, I’ll still be thinking of stories, it’s how I’m wired. Might as well be writing them down. The whole process has made somewhat clearer that I am a fantasist first and foremost and a writer through a knack of debatable size. Communicating the things I think up is the issue and whilst the written word is the medium I’m most comfortable with (you should listen to me talk, actually people have died, perhaps try not to if you value your life) making things work and be efficient and cool is something that needs thought. It isn’t easy and I don’t want it to be easy, I want to get it right so it’s fine.

Thus I’m now sort of working towards submissions for the current submission window which closes at the end of July. I’m distracting myself with things at the moment, probably still not over the hump that manifested the angry post the other day here. It’s useful stuff, I got myself “the seven basic plots” by Christopher Booker and whilst I’m not yet a full third through it is useful stuff. Whilst one may quaff at the concept that there are only seven stories, I think and upon reading some of the book feel more confident with the notion that storytelling is like music. Plot points are the notes, there are some recognisable general things, waltzes and the like where the plot beats happen in an order and a timing that is identifiable. As storytellers and writers we have to identify the notes and put them in an order that works. It’s not light reading though and it is wasting time arguably from the submissions but it is giving me some thoughts about the chapter outline for the novel pitch(es).

I have a novel idea I intend to submit. It’s cool, it has unorthodox knights, underused gods and fantasy goodness. I have others but they’re further back on the burners, I only have a finite amount of time to submit this year after all. Anyways the premise is down, the characters (not all named, must do more research) are formed and points A, B, C all the way to Z are in my head and noted down. Putting it into chapter summaries, working out what happens each chapter is the tricky part I feel. This is what I think the seven basic plots can help with, giving ideas of how to put things and when and where to do it within the narrative. Food for thought, but this musing is killing time I should maybe be using to do short story pitches or writing sample chapters for the novel pitch. The balancing act between these demands on time is probably a greater concern and worry than my thoughts on if the feminist tones developing in the novel are something that needs identifying in the pitch and if it’s a subplot or just background noise (before you all balk at the feminism and go “but it’s a clichéd fantasy world loosely drawing from historical europe so the position of women isn’t a thing that needs addressing” rest assured, I actually hate women and would hate to empower them through my stories but it fits and works with the set up I use and offers interesting things to play with for the characters so I’m for it). Not something easily resolved but that’s the quandary I’m grappling with at the moment along working out a pacing for a new 40k army (traitor guard with lots of converting) and other personal nonsense.

So that’s where I am now. I’m working on some stuff writing wise, not as efficiently or quickly as one might have hoped but I’m still slogging away and I am confident in my ideas. I have cool ideas, the ideas and plots aren’t my problem so much I don’t think (which again makes me consider if I’m wasting my time reading the seven plots book in time I could be writing) it’s more my actual standard of narrative and writing that’s my weakspot. Which is something I’ll only better by writing and with the gathering of some opinions on stuff. I dunno it’s all go now anyways. I best sleep soon, I may not work Sunday mornings anymore but it is fairly early and I am reasonably tired. Not much more to say other than an invitation for folk to engage with me and discuss stuff, be it Bride of Kharn (proper title was Skull Tithe btw wandering folk), chapter summary ideas or anything really I like chatting and any viewpoint could prove useful.

Tomorrow I will do some waterboarding to make the initial weak joke worth it. Don’t worry your pretty little heads.

You may faithful reader of my wordage realised that I haven’t blogged recently despite refreshing this project to start again with the intent to blog more. This is partly because I’m a failure. I have a story in my head for episode two, it’s a love story, it has ritual murder and suicide. It’s not finished, it hasn’t decided if it wants to be darkly funny or just plain grim or it hadn’t when I last approached it which was some time ago.  I’ve not achieved much this month. Sure there have been “Real Life” developments, my dissatisfaction with elements of my current employment finally came to a head and I put in for a transfer to a store nearer my place of habitation. This’ll save me an hour a day at least in commuting which is quite decent and give me more time to do other things, and carve out an existence outside of the monotonous hell of working for money. I also traded in a car I liked driving for a smaller car that isn’t a bad drive and has neat features but isn’t so much me. It is however saving me over £400 a year on tax to have this new car and does twice the mileage on a tank that is cheaper to fill than previously so it is over all a win for my bank balance which is good news and to be honest I didn’t really like the other car that much anyways. I only ever realise my preferences in retrospect and even then I never like anything enough for it to really make me rueful of my decisions.  I’m not really a fan of having wants, likes and desires. Holding them seems like an arseholish thing to do, there is a sense of entitlement when holding one of those abstract things too dearly which doesn’t run right with me. The Rolling Stones sang “You can’t always get what you want” and that’s pretty true, you make do so over all the new car is a win, and winning is good.

However in the secret shadow life of crazed fantasist turned writer of words there has been no progress. I am in a fucking bad mood, a dodgy state of the head that has lasted for ages. It is getting in the way. When I’m good I get by with 4-6 hours sleep, going to sleep around 2am that gives me a decent chunk of morning before I leave for work sometime afternoon. However whilst this initial 6-8am wake up happens anyways when I’m not in the best of moods I’ll cheat myself out of the morning and stay in bed until 10am. That’s been happening allot. No matter what I intend to get on with it doesn’t get done, I won’t get home from work until almost 10pm, by the time I’ve fed and watered myself I’m not in a working mood, I’m tired and I feel semi-socialble and with all my friends and loved one existing predominantly online for me to interact with, well that’s the evening/night eaten away to the procrastination amplifier of the internet. This happens regardless of my mood, though if I’m enthralled with a project the project takes precedence for research and writing and playing around with.

Civilisation IV is what happens when I’m in a bad mood though, it cuts me off from the friends and folk, and I can just widdle away my time playing a game. It’s fun, it has me avoiding talking to people which is always a plus because my tolerance for interaction is low when I’m in a bad mood. Heck its low anyways, it’s why I do it on the internet so I can take time before responding, don’t have any bodylanguage issues and I can blag a semblance of human decency. It’s why I’ve socialised online since I was 14 years old, which means I’ve been actively retreating from real world interactions for almost a decade now. That’s some failing in my personal being there. Christ mightn’t be fictional but when I think of things like that it is clear I am quite pathetic.  So yes, I’ve played quite a bit of Civ4 the past few weeks. In the meantime short stories and novel pitches have stopped, they exist as loose collections of notes and really sketchy drafts requiring tightening, which should’ve happened over the past 4 weeks were it not for me being ridiculously pathetic. The blog hasn’t moved. Heck I’ve managed spates of an hour or two of productivity and it’s waiting to be polished and moved online (Lucy on the bolthole did a decent “Lets make an Ad Mech codex” type thread and I have a page of notes on the Skitari with suggested rules and fluff and background and what not which I’m fairly happy with but haven’t put onto the computer or posted up on the forum or done anything with despite my intentions to do so for the past three weeks almost.

What this isn’t is writers block, I get ideas, I have sat down and written for 20 minutes or so at a time before giving up. Not everything I write is good, mostly I don’t like it and it doesn’t get published anywhere and I just write more of something else. This blog was meant to up my “getting stuff out there and garnering feedback” rate especially considering Bride of Kharn is out there being judged as a complete entity and it is my desperate attempt to justify the shitty position my life is in with “but I’m making an effort to do this writing thing which I enjoy and I don’t think I’m terrible at so it’s OK that my job is rubbish and I live with my parents and all the other issues that plague my confidence with my life exist”. This is me being a fucking pathetic creature who can’t muster a steely reserve of self discipline when he’s experiencing a period of low mood. I’m in a bad mood I don’t like my writing as much anyway, so I give up and retreat into pathetic courses of action that achieve nothing. Lack of achievement cheats me out of any buzz which I can use to build momentum to get on with stuff. It’s a viciously retarded circle of behaviour/emotion that I find inexcusable. I know from times doing “courses” on mental health following some of my previously dodgy times that blaming myself isn’t helping but it’s my natural state of being.

I don’t know why I’ve written all this, the royal wedding is on and I’m striving to avoid that. I couldn’t play civ4 as I have to leave for work in 5 minutes and I can’t keep track of time during gameplay. I’m avoiding my fiction projects because of the reasons I hope I’ve expressed in my undoubtedly incoherent ramble of fucking pathetic gloomy self-esteembashing nonsense. I just felt like a ramble, for the past week and a bit I’ve wondered if airing these thoughts, if just typing them out and articulating them no matter how ham-fisted those articulations are would help. This is me seeing if it does.  Hopefully this weekend I can start working on stuff properly again. I’m not saying I’m going to produce stuff that will sell, it’s been a fair old while with no talk back on Bride of Kharn, I may not be there yet but I’m a fantasist, I think up crazy stuff all the time. Part of my avoidance pattern had me drafting up a list, thinking of conversion possibilities and budgeting for a new 40k army, it’s completely hypothetical but dealing with that was preferable to dealing with the real world. It seems making “writing stories” a real thing has backfired a bit in making it another thing to find fantastical methods of avoidance for but I’m still thinking of story ideas, I still get inspiration for bits and pieces every bloody day. It’d be a shame not to exploit the one thing approaching a talent I have I reckon. So I need to get working on it which means I need to steelify my reserves of self discipline really. If only I had a fucking clue how to do that.

Sorry for this post, I’ll try to keep my feelings and what not to myself in future.

So here I am starting a fresh from here now. I deleted all the whiny/political/personal stuff that overcame this place before. To be honest I know too many people on the internet and have already had (by now really old) early attempts of blogging about stuff ruined by parents who stalked me on the internet and then emailed me about stuff I wrote to really be comfortable with spewing forth too much of my soul onto the internet like spunk onto a tissue (it’s 12:31am all my metaphors for the next hour will involve masturbation).

Anyways I wrote a little ditty, today, nothing special but I kinda still like the thought of having somewhere to publish the random bits of floatsom, jetsom and whatever it is the navy calls it when someone wanks over the edge of a ship (I didn’t think through the declaration involving masturbation in all metaphors I made the paragraph above, not that’d you’d have guessed. I am just ruining all the magic aren’t I? Well you aren’t in disneyland anymore dorothy and I’ll leave you to fit in a good wank between disneyland, kansas and Oz because if I were to make a third explicit one in this post it would set a filthy tone for the rest of the blog). Extraneous Episodes if you will, most of these will be unedited and raw because I’m a lazy fucker. It’ll be handy cos I do kinda like writing but don’t publish enough of it or get enough feedback or what not and what not and those who know me may know that I occassionally pitch send things at some editorial types and this one time, this one guy totally asked me for the full story and then I wrote the story and I am still waiting to hear back about it and most of the time I forget about it until someone I know decides to ask me about it which I mostly hate not because it brings on nerves but mostly because I don’t like the people I know and dealing with them and their stupid lives and innane questions which are born out of genuine interest in my life IS THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD EVER.

So the writing thing is kinda important so yeah this is going to try and get a bit more closer to it’s inital conceptive purpose. But don’t be worried if whiny/political/personal stuff comes up,  I had a fucking personal tangent and a half earlier, you may have noticed, it’s the one where if you know me (and likely you will if you read this near the time of it’s publishing before I become super-mega-famous because of that sex-video) I’ve likely been slightly mean towards you (don’t take it personally and blow it out of perspective you bastards). Yeah that one. No it wasn’t my finest moment. Fuck you, if you don’t have anything nice to say Fuck off.

Yes that was one half of an imaginary conversation I had with a hypothetical stand in for you my audience member. A fun game would be to try and think of clever witty things to say on your half and see how the conversation scans. If you think you have a good one, put it in the comments please my dearest audience.

There should be some sort of snappy ending to this but I am rubbish so there isn’t.