Tuesday, March 03, 2009

Wish I Could Find a Good Book To Read

LIFE'S NOW FLOWING thanks to the exciting new pen I bought this morning. It's called a UniBall Vision Needle in black, fine point, "waterproof/fadeproof" by the Mitsubishi Pencil Company, I love UniBall rollerball pens, I wrote an entire first draft of a novel in one... hang on what am I saying "one"? It was "only" about 70,000 words (ie would have filled out 200-250 pages as printed) and yet I got through at least twelve of these Mitsubishi rollerballs! The waterproof ink is a must, because in the great tradition of Hemingway and Steven King I'm constantly "tippling" as I write (even if it is just tea these days ~ though it always used to be white cyder...)

Hang on who am I trying to kid? I still drink white cyder, just considerably less of it. When it got to the point when I was imbibing an entire week's alcoholic "units" every day of that week and having alcoholic blackouts and I came to realize that, for months on end, I had drunk nothing but alcohol ~ not a single soft drink apart from the very occasional chocolate milk. I used to gaze longingly at the chocolate milk and Coca Cola as I queued at the till with my cyder ~ but no way was I about to waste my money on them... I used to quite like coffee. Tea, once a constant companion and punctuator of every day became a distant memory. I didn't have the tea, nor did I have any sugar (and I've tried and tried to resort to sugarless tea, as I used to drink it years back but simply cannot abide it). I never bought milk (never had any cause to ~ unless it was a rare week when I'd indulged in a tub of chocolate Nesquick so I'd have chocolate milk galore... In the end I didn't even own a kettle.

Sometimes, in the very thick of all this drink drink drink Id find myself drinking straight from the tap (often semi-conscious in the early hours) in sheer desperation for some rehydration...

I wasn't the "worst alcoholic" by any means and the period of relatively heavy drinking was quite short. What lasted longer was my rather ditzy attitude to soft drinks, which seemed a waste of money compared to alcoholic ones... All this tea drinking I do now, complete with chocolate cream hobnobs dunking seems awfully civilized in comparison!

Yeah so this new pen of mine has made life complete. OK seriously though it did impress me in that I spat out an entire paragraph of my novel without feeling it. I gazed back at it, all spidery scrawl and tiny letters and thought: wow! Perhaps the magic's in the pen and not me...

On a further inspirational note I went out just now and randomly bought four books of liberating fascination from a local charity shop. Liberating fascination? I mean they open (well hopefully open my) mind... These are: Agatha Christie Curtain: Poirot's Last Case; James Lasdun
The Horned Man, a thriller set in the alienating mysteriousness of Manhattan. It's the sort of book that might be brought out by Albert Knopf in the United States edition. Next I got a tome entitled How To Draw Anything by Mark Linley. The slightly over-eager lady behind the till informed me she had bought this one new. "It's quite good, really it is. But I still can't draw anything. Anything at all. No, I can't draw for toffee!" And she flung back her head and cackled unnervingly... The last volume is called Give Me Ten Seconds and it's the autobiography of John Sergeant, the BBC's top political correspondent until he retired in the early 1990s. His most famous episodes were an on spec interview live with Margaret Thatcher live during the Nine O'Clock News. He caught her as she exited a meeting in Paris during the leadership challenge that marked the end of her days in power... and being labelled "Winnie the Poo set to music" for his efforts at the passa doblay and other cha-cha type inconveniences during his stint on celebrity Strictly Come Dancing.

I'm hoping one of these tomes might inspire me if the pen doesn't. Well the pen's meant to capture my inspirational flow of words for this great novel I'm penning slowly... very slowly... as we speak. Hey that's a lie. Not as we speak. About one paragraph a week at the moment. So I did a week's writing in my kitchen on unpackaging that UniBall pen this afternoon...

All Righty I'd better go. Carrot-Nose Roborovski says hello to yous all. (Oh the indignity of being a rodent and having to bear such names!) She's working (or being worked on) a trick where she'll grasp savagely hold of the chopstick and get lifted about 300 robo-feet pawdangling into the great blue yonder...

(Why does that make me think of Tiscali Broadband?)

Oh I know, because before Virgin Media took them over, cable tv's broadband was, I do believe, named "Blueyonder"...

Righty ho, in the words of my childhood letter-writing days, I "must run and catch the post"~!!

STOP PRESS
My blog hop's taking me to waters hitherto unchartered, ie blogs about finance either to do with clearing debt or (more interestingly to me) making pin money.
Here's some
Debt Chronicles http://chroniclesofdebt.blogspot.com
Fabulously Broke http://fabulouslybrokeinthecity.blogspot.com
Debt Free Kid http://debtfreekid.com
2 Nickels Making a Dollar http://2-nickels-making-a-dollar.blogspot.com
and
True Adventures In Money-Hacking http://trueadventuresinmoneyhacking.blogspot.com
and
Budgets Are Sexy http://budgetsaresexy.com
and
Wide Open Wallet http://wideopenwallet.com

13 comments:

  1. Try Conan the Barbarian.
    Seriously.

    Or John Le Carre. He's quite cool. Reckon you'd like him.

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  2. Here is one I am almost done with. Its good so far. Land of Echoes by Daniel Hecht... Enjoy if you read it.. Tweets

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  3. Im a Uniball girl too :)

    Try to read the James Clavell Asian saga: Noble House and Taipan (set during the Chinese opium war and English taking over) are great.

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  4. Thanks for the blog shoutout. I've never been much into rodents, but that little one is pretty f*ing adorable.

    And what's the "blog hop" thing you've got going here?

    Cheers,
    Wren

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  5. I've read too many books in my life to recommend one, especially a good one.

    Alex says Meooooooow to Carrot-Nose.

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  6. God your moods vasillate! I don't think I spelled that properly because a total shit arse day has drawn me to drink. I like a good pen . .I have my father's Water somthingorother . .I only use it for Christmas cards and poignant notes . .let me know if you run out of reading material. I have five books that have been on my bedside table unread for almost 2 years. Do you think I could train the mouse that insists on 'cruising' past me while Im on the puter? *goes to grab chopstick*

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  7. CRUSHED: o yeah LeCarre's good. I had one I never indulged into, but I reckon it would've been a superb read...

    TWEETY30: Daniel Hecht seems vaguely familiar but I cannot place the name...

    ZHU: how odd you say that I saw a film adaptation of one of those only last week. My one complaint was in the over-antiquated brown filters they put on every shot and the 1950s technicolour look they gave the movie; it kind of killed any action.
    I've never read a James Clavell but I know they were extremely popular in the 1980s. Plus I luuurve Chinese-Japanese stuff. Plus he did a novel called Gaijin, which means "foreigner" in Nippon-go...

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  8. WREN: Oh Carrot-Nose is very pretty and friendly... you're welcome for the shout; I'm glad I found your realm of credit-crunchy blogs. Never expected to come across anything like that until I did...

    NICK: Carrot-Nose says Honk!! back!!

    BAINO: aye I vascillate like a... well a professional vacillator. I'm not sure if this is the write spelling har-har!
    I think you're talking about Waterman fountain pens. They're meant to be really good, up there with Parker and Mont Blancs...

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  9. I hope your new pen inspires you! :)

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  10. How about Tweak by Nic Sheff? Or a Beautiful Boy by David Sheff? they are books that will make you think.

    I use a fountain pen of the old variety that has a bulb to pull the ink up. It inspires me to write.

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  11. Hi Gleds;

    I don't have anything profound to add; just wanted to say hi and let you know I'm still an avid reader...

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  12. AKELAMALU: AYE it has! And it's far easier to scribble with than my old "fineliner" waxxy-tip £3 monstrosity from the next shelf down in WH SMith...

    SYD: I used to have a fantastic fountain pen by Lamy. They are the all-time best. As if 10 years good wear makes them already write to your hand from the moment you bust open the 21st century packaging...

    DEADBEATEN: cheers!

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  13. Personally I love reading Ludlums. It may sound cheap but I just love the stories. Takes a few pages to get hooked on the story (about 10) but then you can't stop. It requires absolutely no intelligence which is why I like them so much I think ;-) Trying can't hurt.

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