Saturday January 5th 2013

My neck has locked in, I'm getting tension headaches, and I'm feeling far too fatigued. It's clear what the cause is: it's time to go back to work. I'm loathe to moan too much about going back to work, since it's already January 5th, and I remember only too well working at pubs and clubs and suchlike, having to work straight through the holiday season without a break, and being intensely nettled when a customer both moaned about having to go back to work, and, at the same time, sneered at me because they assumed, wrongly, that I'd just had a week off. On the other hand, this happened so often that I guess I don't feel so bad about whining that I had to go back to work today. It was painful.

Apart from anything else, I ended up having to cycle in driving sleet. That's the problem with this time of year; the weather is still dreadful, but you no longer have Christmas to look forward to. I was getting close to my destination when a car stopped, a friend got out, and offered me a lift. I ended up declining, because I really was so close to where I was going, but I was struck by the two acts of kindness. The first act of kindness was, obviously, the offer of a lift, but the second act was the fact that she took time to overtake me slightly, come to a stop, and get out of her car to attract my attention. You know, as opposed to what most anybody else would've done, which would have been to inch the car very close to my bicycle, and then suddenly hit the car horn, thereby almost making me veer off into the ditch. I've genuinely lost count of how many times this has happened. I know people are just trying to say hello (at least, I hope they are, the possibility that they're deliberately attempting to drive me off the road isn't one that I'm really willing to contemplate right now), but I wish they wouldn't, or at least find a more effective method that driving up really close, and then suddenly hitting their horn. It's really rather scary. Since car horns are meant to signify a sudden and immediate risk of danger, it is, to say the very least, somewhat startling to have one blaring in your ear without warning while you're cycling along.

Of course, the car horn is very rarely used for its original purpose any more. More usually, it's used to signify anger when the driver doesn't agree with the way another road user has used the road, to bully the car in front when it's taken longer than 1.6 seconds to react to the traffic lights changing, or, oddly, as a replacement for the words 'hello' or 'goodbye'. I don't get this. It's bad enough when someone parks their car outside a house a hits the horn to alert their friend, and therefore everyone else in the street, that they've arrived, but the thing I've never been able to understand is when somebody hits their horn in farewell, making a big BEEP sound as they drive away. It makes no sense , since it seems to suggest that, as they left the house, they simply forgot to say 'goodbye': you know, that they were day chatting with their family in the lounge, when they suddenly got up wordlessly, walked out of the house, got into the car, and finally looked up to the window at the front of the house to see the confused faces of their loved ones peering questioningly at them. Of course, they think. I knew there was something I'd forgotten. There's no point in going all the way back in now, of course: rather than bothering to vocalise a farewell, they hit the car horn. This is obviously the only rational explanation for their actions.

Nanowrimo, Day 4: I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

Whenever I'm not working on the Nanowrimo novel, it's defeating me. I can't see a way through it, the plotting seems simplistic, the characters badly sketched out, and, most crucially, I have no idea what I'm going to do to progress the story further. It's so easy to get a bit scared off, and run away. Gibbering. What tends to happen, however, is once I've managed to force myself in front of the computer, with the understanding that I really am going to write something, no matter about the fear that it could well be terrible. Writing without looking back is remarkably focussing to the narrative flow. 

However, I'm saying that on what's essentially my last day off before returning to work. It's not really, I was doing the youth theatre yesterday, and I had my improv class tonight, but that's not like a full day at the office. It'll be interesting to see what I come up with - if I can come up with anything - after 8 hours of an exhausting job. My parameters of what's acceptable about the fear of writing something that's terrible may well have to be widened. 

I've had a concern that while I know most of the events that occur in my novel, I don't really know why they're happening. There's not yet a logical catalyst to everything kicking off. Certain things have begun to slide into place today, but it's still doesn't quite make sense. I'm having to make. Y characters work against what they'd logially want to do in order to make the story work. That's not always a great way to work, but given the time constraints, I don't have much choice. Now, one of two things will happen: either my plot will simply snap, because it just doesn't want to go that way (which, despite what you might think, is actually a good thing, because it means that the characters are developing strong personalities), or that I will have forced myself to have thought of a good reason why my characters are doing things they don't want to do. In my downtime, I've been re-watching old episodes of 24, and quite often, Jack Bauer (or someone else) is acting under duress, being forced to act the the bad guy for a greater good. That's begun to stir things in my imagination as to why my main character is having to act the way she is. If nothing else, it's a good enough reason for me to claim that watching box sets comes under the banner of 'research'. 

I'm hoping to hit the 10k mark before the weekend, well, ends. In the very strictest sense, that's not going to happen, because at the time of writing this sentence, it's about three minutes from midnight, but I'm going to play the Christmas Eve defence, and say that it's not Monday until I've slept. I figure I've got about a hour before fatigue takes me like a six foot mugger in an alleyway. My main stumbling block this week is going to be finding my 'macguffin'. While it isn't - and shouldn't be - the actual motor to the narrative - the way all the characters act will inevitably be influenced by whatever it is. But, bottom line: in the past four days, I've produced nearly 10,000 words more than I would have done otherwise. By the end of the week, I'll have more words in this story than are currently in my entire short story collection. And for that, I can only be grateful. 

Nanowrimo Word Count: 9347

Your Number's Up

They've changed the lock on the bike shed at work. Well, I say bike shed. In reality, it serves all manner of purposes, including housing the snow plough that they finally invested in a couple of years ago to ensure the place never again had to be shut down because of a particularly heavy snow fall. And, of  course, it's worked like a charm: the place has indeed not had to be shut down because of heavy snowfall. But that's mainly because we haven't had any. 

They've changed the padlock, but not the code. This should be a good thing - the padlock will no longer get rusty in rain, or do whatever it did in very cold weather which meant that it just gave up and refused to move like a sulky teenager who's locked themselves in the bedroom with a bag of Doritos and a box set of Girls. Now that the padlock has been changed, everything should be shiny, new and effortless, and the whole putting my bike away thing at the start of the day, and the retrieving my bike at the end of the day thing (both very similar things) should be events that are so mundane that they don't really deserve to be called events. 

If I'm honest, they still are mundane that they don't need to be called events, and certainly not of enough interest to be written about on any public forum (such as this blog, for instance), but at the start and end of each day, I find myself getting needled, rattled and frustrated. These are three feelings you really don't want to be having at either end of the day. You kind of expect them during the day, that's part of the deal, that's why you have endless cups of tea and migraines as coping mechanisms, but the simple act of getting or leaving your bike shouldn't be a source of frustration. 

It's particularly annoying at the end of the day. I have exactly nine minutes to get out of work and catch the train. If I miss that train, it's nearly always impossible to get the following train, because that one is stacked with excitable college kids and gently glowering building site workers. There's not even enough space to claim 'standing room only', and even when there is, most of the kids elect to do this curious thing where they're going to stand in the doorways of the train for the entire journey, even if they're on the train for fifteen stops and forty minutes. Even if, after a while, entire carriages have eventually become empty. It becomes difficult to get on such a train if the doors are blocked in such a fashion, and downright impossible if you've got a bike in tow. People who are needlessly blocking train doors get curiously uptight about letting you on with a bike. 

All of this becomes of paramount importance when I'm trying to get my bike out of the shed. If I can make the nine minute journey to get the earlier train, I manage to get the connection that's pretty much empty. It feels like I'm getting a train in the middle of the afternoon, only used by mothers on their way back from toddler group, and youngsters on their way to sign on to the dole. It's a different world. It still depresses me that it took me the best part of five years to discover that it was possible for me to make this connection. But in order to get to this train on time, I need to simply - get - my bike. No fussing, no messing about. Certainly no enraged tumbling around of the numbers for the twentieth time as I attempt to unlock the padlock from the bike shed door. 

Because the problem with the new padlock is that it doesn't quite work. I should be clear here. If we judge a lock purely and solely in its effectiveness as just that - a lock - then it's a fine lock. A dandy, there are very few locks that are more secure than this lock. The cast of Ocean's Eleven would be befuddled, confused, and finally exasperated by this lock. It wouldn't be as great a film, but it might certainly be on par with Twelve and Thirteen. The aspect in which the lock fundamentally fails is the whole un-locking part. It just doesn't. It refuses. It doesn't refuse entirely, of course, but confusingly, you have to wriggle the numbers around slightly so they don't quite match up in the correct order. Once you've managed to guide all the numbers in exactly the correct position (by which I mean the slightly wrong one), the lock will effortlessly and easily slide open. Like it was meant to in the first place. I don't have time for this sort of thing. Literally, I don't have time. I have a thirteen minute journey to cycle in nine minutes. The amount of time I've got for screwing around with this padlock is one minute, tops. 

But here's the thing. The really frustrating thing. Because, being me, the frustrating thing can't just be the frustrating thing - there has to be another frustrating thing on top of the original frustrating thing, just to put a highlighter pen to the whole, general frustration of the thing. Because, despite the fact that the new padlock is stupid, ridiculous, and unhelpful, despite the fact that it only works if you nuance the tumblers in some secret way that is only clear after doing ten years of mystical chanting and Zen like meditation - despite all that: I'm the only one who has a problem with it. Everyone else who uses the bike shed on a regular basis - and there's at least six of us - have no problem with the padlock whatsoever. 'You just have to wraggle it about a bit,' they declare, cheerfully. WRAGGLE IT ABOUT A BIT?!? I rage, in my head. This is supposed to be a security measure, this is supposed to be the thing we rely on to ensure our bikes don't get nicked. Surely it can't all depend on things being wraggled about a bit? 

I don't have time to say any of this, of course. I have a train to catch. In less than seven minutes.

It's Connected To The Arm Bone

Managed to do something painful to my shoulder the other day. I was trying to get something down from the top of the wardrobe, and I slipped. I put out my hand, slipped a bit too much, and my hand slammed against the wall, while my body ended up staying pretty much where it was. Bone ground against bone. All a bit painful. I looked it up on the internet, typing in 'Have I dislocated my shoulder?' (and google can get a bit disturbing with what it offers you as you're typing in those first few words). While it's still - a couple of days later - reasonably wince-making, it doesn't appear that I've done anything to worry about, although I'm very aware that my body is doing extra work to stop my shoulder being quite so painful, meaning that even writing this blog entry is something of a exhausting chore. But that's okay; I'm reasonably confident that it's probably something of an exhausting chore to have to read it, too.

I haven't won the lottery this week (actually, that's a lie, I won eight quid on the Euromillions, you may have seen it reported in the national press) so it looks like I'll be unable to avoid returning to work next week. This is something of a worry, since I've felt this week that my mind has been finally clicking into place with regard to all the creative stuff that I've had on the boil since, well, forever. A good few of the short stories that I've been working on are almost complete, by which I mean they're a couple of drafts away from their final incarnation. I'm very aware that once work hits back in again, I might end up being too physically and emotionally exhuasted to work on anything. I'm always in awe of those people who have full time jobs and families who still manage to create thier novel, play or whatever, although I'm fully aware that procrastination and re-runs of Fraiser are the real enemies here. In a good news/bad news situation, I'm about to lose one day of work a week. Good news: this means I'm no longer working seven days a week, four weeks a month. Bad news: significant hit on my already meagre funds. Good news: a full day when I can actually catch up on the writing that I always say I can't get around to writing because I'm working seven days a week. Bad news: I might be lying to myself.

Another thing that I've been managing to work on this week is surgery on a play I wrote last year, called Four Play. It was part of the Brighton Festival Fringe, and seemed to be very well received, even if everyone agreed it was too long. I need to lose about forty minutes from it. Now, it's not just the precious writer part of me that found this difficult - I'm quite happy to hack out huge parts of anything I write, but there's a technical aspect to Four Play that means that I have to consider very carefully logistics of timing even when I'm editing out just a few lines. But I've had a few ideas this month that would seem to allow me to do that - I just now need to re-write the damn thing in the full knowledge that the next draft (and quite possibly the one after that) will be an incoherent mess. But it looks like something good might come out of it, and as much as anything, I should really acknowledge and thank the vast amounts of encouragement that I've received from those who saw, and were involved with, the original productions. More news on that as it develops.

The two other things I'm working on at the moment are a one-woman show, and improv classes. The one-woman show is written by, and starring a friend of mine, and it's the first time (as far as I can recall) that I've been a 'director for hire', which has its own, unique series of pressures. Luckily, it's being produced with the New Venture Theatre in Brighton, which I've always found to be an encouraging and nuturing atmosphere.

The other thing - the improv classes - aren't being held at the NVT (although I will be running acting classes there next month). It's been a while since I've been directly involved with improv, although it's really how I began to perform when I was in Brighton. (like most drama students, once I got my degree, I immediately stopped acting for about five years). I will be producing an improvised play next May as part of the Fringe, and it's going to be helpful to start up a 'boot-camp' for those actors interested in getting involved before the auditions kick off. Although, in truth, the workshops are as much for me to get my game back on as they are for any improvisers wanting to improve their skills.

As usual, details when I know exactly what's going on (I'm just waiting for the venue to be confirmed). I'm aiming to get a couple of the short stories finished (by which I mean final draft finished) by the end of this week. The aim is to enter them for writing contests (something that I've never done before), and once I've got enough, put them together on a kindle collection. Hell, if everyone else is doing it .

A Day Off. Sort Of.

Within the finishing line (for me) of Edinburgh this year, as I'll be leaving in a couple of days. I've enjoyed it more than I did last year, although it feels more like hard work this time round - the reviews I've been writing have felt like more of a struggle, particuarly in the instances where I've attempted to review things that are somewhat outside my 'comfort zone'. There have been a couple of things this year that I knew I was never going to review, simply because I liked the performer too much. I'm thinking specfically here of the likes of Daniel Kitson and Josie Long, who I happened to see on the same day. I knew that I didn't want to review them,  just see them as a punter, because I wanted to simply watch them without the need to make notes, and also (this may the more important point) there comes a time when it's entirely pointless to review performers you already expect to like and be positive about. There are a couple of acts this year that, keeping that in mind, I suspect I have written my last review for.

However, I feel like I've become a true Fringe veteran today because I 'almost' had a day off. In years past, I would feel like I was wasting a day up in Edinburgh if I wasn't seeing five or six shows. Considering it takes about five years to truly get a measure of the city, and there can be less than three minutes between shows, this way madness lies. But today was somewhat relaxed, and I had no desire to complicate matters. I still had one show to review at the end of the night, but the rest of the day was fairly empty. Which is not to say that I didn't fill it with a couple of shows anyway - Richard Herring's Talking Cock (actually the first time I've seen him live), and earlier in the day, Angela Barnes and Matt Richardson on the Free Fringe. Both shows were great fun, and both were crammed to the rafters with punters. It's very delightful to see such huge audiences attend shows headlined by performers you have at least a nodding aquaintance with. I'm sure I'll be boring people with 'I knew them' type anedoctes in less than a year.

The other way I know I'm a Fringe veteran actually started a couple of years ago, but I thought I'd gotten over it. However, it kicked in again today (or was it yesterday? It's the Fringe, I have no idea). It's the point where, as an audience member, you begin to take as keen an interest in the sightlines and lighting rig as you do the act on stage. I get frustrated by this, this niggling hope that at some point I might have the chance to bring a production up to the festival. Of course, at the moment, without recourse to a lottery win, this seems to be pretty much impossible.

These latter days of my Fringe visits are the most cruel - surronded by thousands of creative people, relaxed after a couple of weeks off, my mind begins to start actually having a couple of good ideas that might genuinely work as Fringe ideas, and just today I had an idea how to rewrite my Brighton Fringe play from a couple of years ago to get it to a Edfringe-manageable time of at least a hour and a half. Nobody seems to have told my head that in a very short time, it'll be back at work. It seems a shame to let it know ...

The Long Walk

I was late for work today. Not by a great deal, but enough to make me tetchy and nervous. That's the thing when you rock up late to your job, you imagine (at least, I do) that everybody else is sitting in judgement, darkly commenting on your inability to do basic things like know the time. No matter that when it happens to someone else, you really couldn't care less. But it makes no difference: I still assume that my work colleagues have less than flattering things to say about me when I'm late. Actually, I assume that they have plenty of stuff like that to say even when I'm early, which probably points at some underlying paranoia stemming from the fact that my parents didn't buy me a BMX bike when I was a kid, and is probably more a complicated series of neuroses than we really have space to get into here.

Actually, talking about bikes, it was a puncture that caused my lateness this morning. I cycle to Hove station, and then cycle from West Worthing station in, well, Worthing, to work. Both cycling bits of the journey take just under ten minutes each. However, if I find myself without a bike, and have to walk, both take about half a hour each. That's a hour added to my morning journey, which isn't the best way to start your working day.

The closer I got to work this morning, the more frustrating this became - to be so close to my destination, a route that usually takes only about eight minutes, but to know that it was now going to take the length of an episode of The Big Bang Theory to get there, was pretty annoying. I began to wish that I could be taller, so that I could take longer strides, and have at least an outside chance of arriving on time. This would have advantages and disadvantages. True, I would get to more places more quickly, but once I'd arrived, there would be more people asking me what the weather was like up there.

A few years ago, I knew an extraordinarily good looking woman who happened to be reasonably tall - around six feet. The combination of these two factors meant that men who were attempting to hit on her in night clubs were fairly unoriginal in their approach. 'You're really tall!' they'd declare happily as their opening gambit, presumably under the impression that she hadn't spotted this physical anomaly for herself. After a while, her reply ended up being equally unoriginal: 'I know!', she'd answer, in the tone of voice one normally reserves for conversations with toddlers and victims of recent head trauma. She's married now, and I'd be willing to bet that the man who won her fair heart did so by the simple expedient of managing to find something else to discuss when they first met other than her height.

If we're honest, however, a hour at both ends isn't the worst hardship that can be added to my working day. I'm pretty sure both my parents had to walk even longer to get to school each day. Of course, this was rural Ireland in the 1950s, and they didn't get to catch a train for the middle portion. While we're at it, the train can be a bit of a strain, too, when you're carrying a bike. Even when you restrict yourself to those sections of the train that are specifically designed to carry bikes. People seem to delight in standing directly in the doorways, thereby getting in the way of everyone else trying to get on or off the train. This is even more exasperating when you've got a bike in hand, since many people seem to think that, as a cyclist, you absolutely shouldn't be allowed on board.

But, anyway. I shouldn't moan. I need to save my energy: it's nearly home time, and I've got a long walk back.