Chad Taylor

A voice I'm hearing, sweet to my ear


Because lugging around 350 loose pages is hard I saved the Final Draft document as a .rtf, opened it in Calibre, exported it as a .mobi file and dropped it into the Kindle app. Processing the files took less time than it took the phone to sync. And then, hey presto, I was reading my new novel on my iPhone.

It's not perfect. The left hand margin is too wide (Final Draft's default page set-up accommodates punch-holes) and the chapter headings aren't linked, but for proofing purposes, it's ideal.

Every six months formatting ebook has become easier. A lot easier.

Writing -- that's still hard. And publishers, they still have to make money, so tomorrow probably belongs to Mia and her Twitter followers. But remember in BSG when Adam lends President Roslyn his copy of A Murder on Picon? I'm hoping the day after tomorrow will be like that. A little less Dani, a little more Runkle.

Except when soft rains fall, and drip from leaves


"I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.'"

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward."
– Ernest Hemingway

"I hate writing, I love having written."
– Dorothy Parker

Dreams of typing





I have finished revising and have things to type up, but I can't – I need a rest first. So in the meantime I have dreams of typists. In these dreams I hand the scrawled manuscript to someone and he/she types it up and gives it back to me and I mark up corrections and he/she types it up again on double carbons. Let's be honest, I'm not visualising Hoffman. He only types with two fingers.

(Pics: All The President's Men, The Big Store, Mad Men, Secretary.)

The Zebra Hunter Problem


As a writer I am often asked if I have anything "lying around." Coming from producers this is code for "something to be had for free" and the answer is "no." If the request has come from another writer or artist things get more interesting.

I use a MacBook Air 11" with a solid state drive. It's still amazing to me that so much thinking can fit on a chip the size of a cameo brooch. With the wifi off I can tap away on TextWrangler or Final Draft for up to eight hours so inevitably things accrue. There's the Manuscript I Never Finish which is unlikely to ever see the light of day because I never get around to finishing it. Then there's the novel I finished last year -- the first in a series -- and the novel that comes after that (all going quite well). In between -- lying around -- are some short stories, a stack of anonymous sections of dialogue, a pulp noir and another novel that split like a roux.

The split novel was frustrating. Every now and then I would go back to it and stare and scratch my head. I knew it had gone wrong but couldn't see where, or why, or how to fix it. At the same time I knew that the answer was right in front of me. Wood / trees. Nose / face.

It's what I call the Zebra Hunter Problem. You write 200 pages about a zebra and 200 pages about a zebra hunter and then wonder how to fit the elements together. Any fool looking over your shoulder can say, hey, you know what would work – make the zebra hunter hunt the zebra. And you reply: wouldn't that be far too obvious?

And you go back to staring.

Then one day, much, much later you open the file / legal ringbinder / shoebox / paper sack of Post It notes and locks of her hair and think, hey -- you know what would work?

It's not a eureka moment. It's a zebra moment. So that novel is fixed, now. It's lying around.

(Pic: Nicholas Ray / Burnett Guffy)

Strange hands in your sweater

I've made a lot of special modifications myself

I love it when you're into the eleventh hour* of a manuscript and you make one tiny, tiny little change and it's like bolting one of these in.

*Am actually in penalty time but that would be a third metaphor.

You know the drill

Workingworkingworking. Wouldn't do it if I didn't love it.

December without January

Still suffering from Mad Men withdrawal. N*vel proceeding apace. Nearly finished. I. Think. Or as someone else put it:
We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
That's Henry James quoted by Bertolucci quoted by Manohla Dargis in the NYT. And over at NY Magazine Bertolucci dissects scenes from his movies. The director's reminiscences are not easy going – his comments about Last Tango in Paris alone will probably be deemed unacceptable – but they chime with his complaint at the BFI earlier this year about modern cinema not being "menacing" enough.

Where is the real danger nowadays? Sitting in a TX booth over the weekend I had to watch The Human Centipede and really did fall asleep. Then John Carpenter's The Thing came on and freaked everybody out. (I love it when a first-time viewer asks, 'Hey – what's up with the dog?') I wonder if movies like Tango will survive self-appointed corporate censors when distribution goes totally digital.

(Image c/- GQ)

Having tea there out in the crowd

I am too old for Bowlie 2. Julian Cope is not; nor is Edwyn Collins; nor are Crystal Castles. Laetitia Sadier is not too old for it, and Mulatu Astatke was bang on. Listening to his set was like flicking through every Acid Jazz compilation and Kid Loco album ever made.

Bowlie 2 was curated by Belle & Sebastian who despite their clever selection of performers, seemed not quite old enough but they were definitely the same age as the audience. The audiences over the weekend were so fucking polite and charming even I started to enjoy myself. If you wanted to go to the front of the stage you just... went there. The Minehead festival tops out at about 5,000 and they all say please and thank you. When Cope finished his set with a hearty protest about student fees ('Before I go I just wanted to say fuck the Tories') the crowd's response was muted, either because the strange old hippie grandmother dressed like a Nazi biker swore or because the kids there know mum and dad will happily pay for their education anyway. Cope has been out there for so long he's not coming back but the point - lost on the young - is that he still sounds like Julian Cope.

Edwyn Collins still sounds like Edwyn Collins when he sings. He sits on stage with a note-perfect band; talking is hard for him, though, and I could only take three songs because I'm sentimental. On my way out I was passed by a barely-twenty couple running inside - 'Hurry!' urged the girl: 'We're missing Edwyn Collins.' My eyes pricked up.

The Go! Team have got older and filled out musically. Franz Ferdinand stayed within everyone's comfort zone, including theirs; the problem with that post-punk Talking Heads / Gang of Four style was always that the songs sound the same. FF are frozen in cleverness. I think they could fix this by doing more covers: since the first LP 'All My Friends' and 'Womaniser' are their only two songs anyone can remember.

The New Pornographers and Dirty Projectors showed the Brits how to do big bands. Enjoyed them both but didn't come out of it humming anything. Laetitia Sadier showed everyone how to be sexy. She sounds like Stereolab unplugged, which I guess she is. Crystal Castles sound like everything plugged in. If Cayce Pollard started a band, Crystal Castles would be it: anonymous, fluid, intense, brainy, fantastic. In the 21st century there is no logical reason to not sound like Crystal Castles. They are right for their age.

Peter Parker were alright. I think the 1900s were good but they might have been someone else. I have notes, somewhere but I'm too busy to write them up as I am working on The F*cking Novel. It's going rather well so I must continue screwing down the lids before any more sunlight escapes. Miss you (all) heaps. Big ups.

PS: Quote of the weekend from an Irish security guard: 'Oh, New Zealand – that's a great tax haven for movies, isn't it?'

The passage of my life is measured out in shirts

Complaining about a new seven-hour production / reading of The Great Gatsby, Time theater reviewer Joan Marcus mentions in passing that the novel is 49,000 words long. I knew there was a reason I liked it. I first read Gatsby when my brother was doing his first year of English lit at Auckland Uni. His secondhand paperback edition was a tie-in with the 1974 movie version with Robert Redford on the cover so I picked it up because I liked Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid*. (My brother is seven years older than me, so I must have been around 12.) Anyway: in; out - bang. And that's the book. Whether or not it dates from that experience, I have always associated the form of the novel with concision. This puts me at odds with almost everyone nowadays but when I look back on my book collection (i.e. visualise it in its Kane / Raiders style storage warehouse) my favourite - or rather my most enjoyed - reads are the shorter ones. Why fuck around? You focus, You get in there, you get out. Travel light, etc.

I'm closing in on the final draft of The New Thing ™ and cutting left and right. Last draft was 90,000; this one is peeking under 75,000. I keep what's been cut in a dump file and review it afterwards; no matter how good it is, it's never good enough.

* Actually I liked Alias Smith & Jones on TV but knew it was a rip-off. Not a bad one, though. I remember watching M*A*S*H* on TV and thinking, 'This would make a really good movie...'

Back to work

Deconstruction time again.

Oh Patty

I'll stop posting images from Mad Men but they're so damn good -- I love that sense of remove. In the wake of season four I've been re-reading The Cry of the Owl and visualising the period references in a different way, apart from the story. Which still works. PH nails it: she and Paul Bowles are the writers I would have liked to have hung out with. Them and Kurt Vonnegut, who sounds like everyone's cranky uncle.

Early morning, lotsa words; IHT crossword and strangers' faces at the French (yaysville); tonight The Social Network. Filmed from a first draft, folks, because movies aren't that hard. As Kurt said: don't take it too seriously. Big ups.

Tomorrow: Einstürzende Neubauten. Not so much musique concrete as, y'know, cement.

Never complain

Never explain. I prefer characters to say less. Sometimes they have to open up, though. And if I don't like the passage I can always delete it later. You put 'em in, we rip 'em out, as my local mechanic once said.

Soundtrack: The Naked and Famous, School of Seven Bells, Superhumanoids, The Ting Tings, Trent Reznor. (Are iPods encouraging us to remember music alphabetically?)

The moment you print out a manuscript it becomes redundant.

My whole damn day's parenthetical. However the exposition worked, I believe. You all have a nice day.

A B Something

Good news, everyone! While I've been away my government has created a new country. It is called Auckland, and the first skirmish has already broken out. The new Auckland is a collection of reanimated parts powered by the elemental forces created by not being the seat of government. This is going to be fun to watch...

More good news: writing by hand stimulates neural activity and gets ideas out faster. The bad: good handwriting makes you seem smarter. Mine's enough of a scrawl to draw glances from whoever's sitting next to me in a cafe. But they can fuck off.

When I worked at Comprint in Wiri one of the managers wrote in perfect copperplate script which the printers and workers on the floor admired very much. He wrote everything out in the same perfect hand: memos, phone messages. Craft, basically. Don't have it. Have to get those ideas down etc.

Also I suspect I talk to myself when I'm writing dialogue. Not out loud, more mumbling. And I tend to lean closer to the page now if I don't have my specs. I Wear Light Reading Glasses For Comfort™ but not when I actually write. And I haven't shaved for a couple of weeks now so the beard's on. So, yeah: hunched, unshaven, muttering - not the sort of person you'd want to be sitting next to, I guess.

Less crazily, for once: Marilyn Monroe's diary writings discussed online at vanityfair.com. Some notes about Arthur Miller, and Lee Strasberg, who fascinates me. I couldn't get on stage but I'm interested in how acting works.

Some of them are old

I've started writing late at night again, maybe because I need quiet and darkness for the slow stuff, with the TV set flickering in the background and the shot I promise myself when I finish, which I never do, but have anyway.

MaudNewton-dot-com has a great interview with William Gibson in which the novelist discusses the old and secondhand objects that appear in his stories:
I have a kind of vast and half-forgotten library of objects — artifacts, really, because the things that I describe are always man-made. And one of them will be summoned from the library through some unconscious or poetic process when the narrative requires it. I know that sounds precious, but I can’t think of a less precious-sounding way to put it.

I reach instinctively for something without knowing why, and place it in the narrative, and if it strikes a resonant chord with me, I’ll leave it there. There probably are times when the thing that arrives from the library proves to resonate oddly with where the narrative wants to go, and it has to be taken out and replaced with something resonates more in tune with the rest of the structure.
Pictured: my great grandfather, Bill Collard (white suit) and the crew, Waiuku, 1921.

Now playing


Revisions finished. Typing them up now. The MS breaks down perfectly into 30 chapters, which is a nice sign. Things on my mind so it's all Duffy, all the time. Duffy comes complete with Dusty Hand™.

Smoking

Hacking into the second draft. Small, global changes: when I'm finished this will really be draft 2.1. But sneakily I'm hoping it will be draft three and the second to last. This one's going like a forest fire.

A change from writing is as good as a rest which is why I can break off and write blog entries, sometimes. At least I could in the first stages when I was exploring ideas. Now the manuscript's structure has settled and I'm going deeper into it I find myself less easily distracted - I'm into the more focussed part of the process*. So I killed Twitter (still a media glory hole) and there may be fewer entries on this blog over the coming while. (Realistically, what is there to say about The Expendables?)

But just to say: there's a new Brian Eno album. Water is good for you. Space exploration is bringing us new and terrible ways to die, and John McEnroe is only becoming more cool as he gets older. Pictured: Barbara Steele. She really was like that.

* Process. Just runs like clockwork, it does.

It's just a shot away

Second draft finished. Bony and ugly but connected and rock solid, and I can start work on the next draft Monday morning. Listen for the screams.

I used to have this New Yorker cartoon pinned above my desk because it's funny, and it's true.

My friend from Los Angeles says the one thing from Californication that would never be true was Hank's taped-over Porsche headlight - the cops would pull you over straight away. I walk everywhere now anyway.

Also: drinking.

Normal service will be resumed, etc. Big ups.

Je me souviens

Now playing

Of everything that stands, etc. The Doors are the soundtrack to the Thing I Never Finish, not that I need an excuse to listen to them. In Paris at Christmas after swinging by Jim's grave at Pere Lachaise (no need to buy a map - just follow the goths and Berliners in silver-decorated stetsons) I felt the pang of travelling without a copy of L.A. Woman and bought a copy at iTunes. Nick Cave is rightly disparaging of the remix which is for little white earphones and not big black stereos like the one I have in storage, but because I'm in transit and on little white earphones most of the time it does me fine.

I can recommend the new Doors documentary When You're Strange if it's out where you are. Narrated by someone called Johnny Depp, it has a getting-things-straight-for-the-record approach and some incredible footage. They were filming each other and being filmed all the time, of course. Jim's mother attended many of his late concerts even after he sang about wanting to fuck her. That showed character.

It's late and I'm scribbling. Or rather I have been, after sleeping all day and getting up around 10pm and thinking alright, let's take another crack at this. Handwritten on yellow legal and slipped into the ring binder: Revisions To Do. Mental in tray. Etc. Into your blue-blue blues.