I Want to Move Everywhere

I want to move everywhere and when I see a job post advertising a position in Nanjing, that is suddenly my next destination. When I get an inkling that there could be a life for me in Central Africa, I have an uncontrollable urge to go there. This is a ridiculous urge. I want to tear across the sky at great speed, I want to move over the Earth like a plague of locusts. I will rip up the ground with my beating feet and seep into the cracked earth.
I will flood out whole riverbeds
I will be a rolling drop of water on a leaf washed down a waterfall
I will be a moment that cannot be captured
I will be dead for a thousand million years
Let me live first

80,000 Words

Apparently I need to write 80,000 words. No one is asking me to and I have paid writing work to do instead, but I need to write 80,000 words for free. I don't know exactly where this impulse has come from but it did spring up suspiciously soon after I read that an average novel is about 80,000 words.

I've wanted to write a novel since I was about 11. Once you've gone this long without succeeding you begin to suspect that you're a loser. You could safely say that I'll probably never write a novel. Even now as I write this blog post about needing to write a novel, I know that I probably will never write a novel.

Certainly the strategy I've employed thus far, of biding my time, while enjoying inspirational thoughts that occasionally spill over into frenzied sessions where stay up all night filling pages in notebooks that never get looked at again and wake up finally the next afternoon with a cold, isn't working.

I've had ideas for books. Several novels of mine have been talked about. Pretty much only by me, admittedly, but I have done a lot of talking, enough to make up for everyone else's indifference. These days I get the sense that it'd be best to keep quiet. I don't so much have my tail between my legs as no tail at all, which is especially embarrassing as I've gone gone round telling everyone that my tail is the best, but it's in the post, so you can't see it just yet.

Having laboured, in an idle fashion, over manuscripts for The Sunflower, In the Spiders' Nest and countless other incomplete opuses, I feel a different approach is needed. My grand tactic is to stop messing about. I will write a novel. And I won't mention it outside of this blog. Instead, I'll simply get on with it.

The fact is that at this point it doesn't matter if I write a good novel or not, I just need to get the monkey off my back. As such, I'm try to think positive and that means focusing on the fact I'm only 80,000 words from the finish line. All I have to do is knock 800 words off that target every single day and I could be done in a hundred days. I'll be done writing by December 4th. Actually, hold on, that can't be right. Let me check. Turns out I wouldn't be finished until December 21st. I was so far out that it calls the whole project into question.

Anyway, if I allow myself 30 days to edit the mess I've created by December 21st, I'll be completely done, with a novel, possibly a very bad one but still a novel, on January 20th.

Let's do it. No more needs to be said. There's no time to waste. I need to think of a plot.

I'll probably post updates on here. If you ask, I'll even upload some glimpses of the, sure to be, awful drafts.

Wearing a St Christopher Pendant, Possibly Like a Fool

My sister gave me a St Christopher. I asked if I could have one. She chose one and it's fine. I have already gotten over its intense shininess and my unfamiliarity with the sensation of wearing what amounts to jewellery around my neck. I am almost never self-conscious about it any more. Forget it's there. But I still have to ask myself why it is there.

I wanted it as an affectation. I don't even know what I believe, or if there even is any point believing anything. Our thoughts on the issue one way or the other are hardly relevant. And even if you do have an opinion, articulating it, even to oneself, seems like an exercise in futility. We could never know anything anyway, not with complete certainty. We have to rely on our own perception, and trust our senses, even, in the belief of people who tend more toward the fantastical, trust some innate, may-as-well-be-make-believe sense, which arises from who-knows-where. Our perception could be some film printed behind the eyes and laid out for us like a poisonous sustenance from birth.

Anything could be possible. There is almost certainly no god. Not in the conventional sense. And almost certainly not in any other sense either. So wearing a bit of metal is pointless also. Yet I like it. It is my St Christopher. I know it has no magic power, but I like the story of a giant man ferrying the needy across a river. The idea of selflessness is definitely worth observing.

But none of those things matter really. It is an affectation. If a character in a movie can wear one, and my life proceeds apparently in as much of a whacked-out mode as any movie, then I feel I can wear one, too. Lying on the grass forever would also be an option. Baking in the sun, devoid of motivation, sweating furiously from action that drives on always trying to speed up the end, that is also an option. I am generally unsure how to face this life.

Yet still, I like my St Christopher. It is my own affectation. My shiny bit of metal. Jewellery round my neck, and I am almost unselfconscious about it, though not quite. Forget it's there, sometimes. I should thank my sister for it.

"I like the St Christopher!"

How to explain the way it makes me feel. In life you don't often get a chance to witter on as if someone is listening. And even when you do get such a chance, unfamiliar nonsense, as if spoken by someone else, comes out. Unless of course some, again alien, inspiration appears from the back of not doing anything at all and you say something you agree with, surprising yourself.

"I like the St Christopher" will have to suffice, but probably won't do the trick.

Hiding

When this wind came in, we had to hide. But it happened too soon to go and close the door, the one that swung about and let the cold in. When you're cowering behind the furniture, in a fort you've made as quickly as you can, like being forced back into childhood out of necessity, you know that going out there, and not just outside the fort but around the whole house practically, is out of the question. It would be better with the door closed though. It would be warmer for one thing. We're hid in here against the wind, seeing just a slice of the grey skies moving outside, and having a door open goes against what we're doing. Sarah kept saying so, kept repeating it. That wasn't helpful and could get annoying. Still none of us went to shut that door. This was a wind that dropped into you and compressed your hope until there's wasn't anything useful inside. This wasn't just a drop in pressure, this was the world eating itself, and when you're just a passing flicker of something on the surface of a world that's eating itself, you don't feel safe. This was a wind that took away all the joy and ease that was there before. We were paralysed, not even able to help ourselves. Sitting there thirsty and cold, what were we supposed to do?

First Pointless Literary Exercise

We’ve come through the winter and spring is a wonder. Those cold months can start to be romanticised now. Certain glimpses of nature, hard to appreciate at the time, come back as reflections of awesome beauty. Frozen trees sum it up; branches white with frost, stood still in a quiet world.

We went walking in the woods. I remember having painfully cold toes and a constantly hunched back. Muscle strains came from being so tense all the time. Walking around the icy lake, we were flanked on one side by white woods, the odd leafless sapling poking up out of the snow.

Now birdsong and sunshine are miracles. It seems we spent week after week in an anti-social fug, indoors with computers and TVs. Not so different from now, but with the added perplexity of endless night. All that darkness bored me stiff. I’m waking up now, a little late.

This aim of this first pointless literary exercise was to see what I could write in five minutes. In this arbitrary amount of time I could have simply typed as much as possible, but decided to split my time into about three minutes spent putting down random ideas and two minutes spent editing them.