No Rest For The Wicked...

CLICHE, cliché, cliché... and yet how very true... who on earth thought up the saying deserves a pat on the back or a knee in the ..**** (well that's wicked)...

I never feel I've gained sufficient rest for the "demands" of my jam-packed soul-empty days...

Suffice it to say I feel exhausted; I won't go on about that...

More to say I have THREE potential writer's projects about to go. OK one, my memoirs is "going" except, as you may well have surmised, it really has stopped. Autobiographical writing is so very much harder than fiction, I can tell you...

Picking over any modern novel you'll soon realize there's a certain strict protocol to constructing a scene and it pretty much works out as a third/a third/a third. That is, almost any chapter of fiction will tend to break down into a third dialogue, a third description of action and a third character-introspection or explanation. That's very roughly so, but speaking from experience when I have written fiction before, once you get the knack of the protocol of telling a tale (and I can only speak for myself): it comes very easy.

The memoir writing did not. Partly because I refused to "novelize" my own experiences: that is construct long-past events into neat scenes (which nearly always involves conflating experiences together, simply for the sake of neatness), then re-inventing dialogue to fit. And slotting the whole lot together into a fast-flowing narrative. In the novels I've attempted yes there were times I feel I managed this. But the memoirs are naturalistically told, ie raconteured in a more blog-like fashion, so what I recall I write, what's less relevant I race through and what's sticky and tricky I attempt to explain. Still, well over 25,000 words in (a good minimum third of a book) I don't feel I truly have the hang of that manner of writing... And I'm still not 100% sure I'm into the whole business of self-exposure on that potential scale ~ my whole life to the "whole world"... So I don't know.

As for the other two projects one is a historical tale so unready I can't tell you what it's about. And it would obviously require much research. The last is my fictitious tale of junkies and addicts, the one with that great mythic hellhound Gwendolina, still locked up in the kitchen to this day for her doll-chewing misbehaviour ~ and baying at the striplight. The rule is ~ most especially for the new and inexperienced writer and this is how I count myself ~ write what you know. This is what I know, and if it comes easy, it's surely what I ought to be writing.

I have one draft of such a book already done but it has such glaring flaws ~ not on a line by line basis, but inherent in the plot itself ~ that the entire tale requires rewriting. What I actually did in my first draft was to break that cardinal rule write what you know, spin off into other areas not adequately researched, and came unstuck.

So I do have things brewing up my sleeve (my sleeves are always smouldering, always festering, always seething out smoke; always have been. Sometimes they fulminate so vigorously they emit volcanic lava...)

So that's me. And as for yesterday, that was another thing I have to contact someone else to be able to do ~ someone I don't actually know. But if they like my idea they should hopefully let me do it. I hate posting "oo, it's secret" but none of this stuff should remain secret in the long run. Unless I garden-out or whatever the expression is. Veg out? Lunch out. That's it. I'm thinking rocket salad here...

Righto I'd better go and squander yet another afternoon... my attempts at room reorganization have turned neat stacks of things into a pigsty explosion of upended furniture upon tartan-bagged robos and falling piles of paperbacks etc...

So I'd better go. In answer to some queries of a few days ago, my robos are fine. They have ceased squabbling, thanks to living again in the same lightbulb box. They trot around quite happily at random times of day and night (seemingly no rhyme nor reason to when...) And they still love me (more to the point seem intrigued by me) at some times; flee in utter terror at others! And that's about THAT...

So bye for now!