I'd love to be able to report that Talking Bumbell is a form of sexual deviancy outlawed by the Roman Catholic Church – or even a new form of spectator spot set to make its public debut at the 2012 London Olympics but I fear it is merely a Freudian typo at my local branch of Range.
Last week I had to bury one of our dogs. Relax, it was already dead. Typically it chose to meet its Maker and move to the Great Kennel in the Sky on one of the coldest days of the year, thereby greatly adding to the effort required by me to dig a suitable grave for her (for it was a she).
Since moving to rural Norfolk 25 years ago, I have now buried 4 dogs, 2 cats and one horse – although I had the assistance of a JCB for the horse. It is a sad fact that, with the exception of parrots and tortoises, most humans outlive their pets. As distinct from Norfolk being an unusually dangerous place for animals although obviously if you are a farm animal, such a turkey, Norfolk is a very dangerous place.
Because I don't want any of the pets' graves being disturbed by rats or foxes (or for me to inadvertently uncover an old grave while in the process of digging a fresh one) I always erect a small cairn of stones (we live in a part of Norfolk that is rich in flint) on top of each new grave. This is a little ironic as it means our ex-pets actually have better marked final resting places than most of my family (and indeed most people in the UK today) whose fate has been to be cremated and then spread as mulch across some municipal crematorium's rose garden.
I happened to mention this to Jane (my wife) who said “Don't worry, when you go we'll have your ashes scattered off the Valley Bridge in Scarborough.” Nice touch as that is a scene from one of my short stories Don't Take Me to the Bridge. although thinking about it, I'd prefer somewhere warmer and would rather have my ashes poured into an old Mateus Rose bottle and then lobbed into the Mediterranean sea off Villefranche on the Cote d'Azur.
* The picture is of a nearby cross erected to mark the location of a World War One plane crash, where a Canadian pilot was mortally wounded.
Stop press: Boxing Day and I've just completed the first draft – 105,000 words in total. Now it's off for a quick celebratory drink then I'm starting on my first set of revisions/rewrite to knock off the rough edges plus a few inconsistencies and unsatisfactory bits. I may even have to kill-off some of my darlings if they get in the way of the plot.
* For the record, I started on 1st August and – despite not writing every day (I do have a day job plus I also had some serious distractions business & private-wise this autumn) this still comes down to an average wordcount of 700 words a day.
Monday 13th December – just past the 100,000 words mark on the novel !
The American's are currently getting very excited about so-called TSA porn – namely the potentially pornographic images that may be generated by the TSA's new body scanners at airports. There are currently some great – but bogus – examples of TSA porn now in circulation on the internet. This one, by the way, was created with digital software – no human body parts were exposed to radiation or any other forms of scanning. And it does make a satisfyingly creepy image.
It is only partially true that I've been engaging in displacement activity, fiddling around with the layout of this blog when I should have been getting on with my novel. In fact the redesign was partly because I thought the site needed it (the Tales from the Digital Slow Lane proving to be one of those concepts that seemed a good idea at the time but subsequently ran out of steam) and to road-test some ideas for redesigning my Ink Sweat & Tears poetry and prose webzine (user feedback suggests a Contents etc column makes more sense on the right-hand rather left-hand side of a web page as that is where readers' eyes tend to focus).
But back to the novel… After a couple of weeks of intensive editing and re-editing to have something to submit to an agent, I confess I was sick to the back teeth of the novel and needed a change of activity. But then, after a break of about a week, I found over the past weekend that I was getting twitchy about not writing and found myself returning to the project with renewed enthusiasm. Perhaps there is a lesson there, that sometimes we all need to take a break from a project – even if it is something we are doing for 'fun' ?
Progress-wise, after 18 weeks I have now got 94,000 words down on paper – which is still an average of 750 words a day – and the end is in sight, with just a couple of set pieces to go, followed by three wrap-up chapters. Maybe it will be all over by Christmas?
More progress on the short story collection! We now have a front cover and a launch venue – the FantasyCon event in Brighton on 30th September to 2nd October 2011. More details to follow however the cover was designed by The Cover Factory for Salt Publishing's new SF&F imprint Proxima Books – and yes, there is such a character in one of the stories in the collection…
Fifteen weeks into the project and I've now hit the 90,000 words mark – probably another 30,000 words to go – it'll all be over by Christmas. (Now where have I heard those words before?) And I'm still being racked by doubts: what if it is all total rubbish???
Today I'm printing off the pages (about 400 pages of A4 – don't mention the dead trees) so I can start reviewing the first draft. However this is not me voluntarily multitasking but out of necessity – a friend of a friend through the day job introduced me to a novelist, who introduced me to his agent, who said 'Yes, send in a synopsis and a couple of chapters'. No pressure there then.
Meanwhile, the short story collection: Contract now back from the publishers – Salt Publishing – and my collection of dark/urban fantasy and sci-fi short stories and flash fiction – This is the Quickest Way Down – will be out next September. Warning: I shall be totally unbearable from Q3 2011 onwards – and now back to feeding the printer.