Up on a hill, as the day dissolves

Why did you take that first sabbatical?

"Well, I was stuck, really... in a funny way. Stuck with more offers to do things than I've ever had before. Some of them were interesting but the momentum problem was going to arise... It would be 'just one more' and then 'just one more' after that.

"The reason for doing it was that I thought I should spend some time alone. I spend nearly all my time with other people... what I'm involved in is a social art, I'm a social kind of person anyway. Yet I find that if I can live through the initial tedium of my own company, which usually lasts about four days, I find it very interesting to be alone. I start thinking in a way that's extremely acute. I'm thinking about different things, I think better and faster, and I'm much more courageous in what I think because as soon as you forget the society that you're part of, it's much easier to move against its norms."

-- Brian Eno interviewed by Richard Williams for Melody Maker, January 12 1980

All tomorrow's parties

Futureworld (1976), Logan's Run (1976), Rollerball (1975), The Stepford Wives (1975), Westworld (1973)

The Wanderers

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 per cent in the 1970s to 50 per cent in the 1990s, probably because we measure ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation...

At the onset of the the Culture of Personality, we were urged to develop an extroverted personality for frankly selfish reasons -- as a way of outshining the crowd in a newly anonymous and competitive society. But nowadays we tend to think that becoming more extroverted not only makes us more successful, but also makes us better people. We see salesmanship as a way of sharing one's gifts with the world.

-- Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Penguin, 2012)

(Pic: Gustav Courbet)

I followed her through the crowd to the corner that had been left empty

Mostly when I think of pacing, I go back to Elmore Leonard, who explained it so perfectly by saying he just left out the boring parts.
-- Stephen King

When I was working on The Names I devised a new method -- new to me, anyway. When I finished a paragraph, even a three-line paragraph, I automatically went to a fresh page to start the new paragraph. No crowded pages. This enabled me to see a given set of sentences more clearly. It made rewriting easier and more effective. The white space on the page helped me concentrate more deeply on what I'd written.
-- Don DeLillo

I dig film noir. The great theme of film noir is, You're fucked.
-- James Ellroy

The cigarettes, the magazines all stacked up in the rain

People have been enjoying City Lights very much. Ta muchly -- it's nice to get nice back from the web. I've written the second part of the story. I just haven't typed it up yet.

Stephen Stratford is writing. You know he will be in the home stretch when he Twitpics bourbon or reaches for an awkward metaphor like "zebra hunting."

In the last month I re-read Woodward and Bernstein's All The President's Men and watched the movie (yet) again. Screenwriter William Goldman is always good on the writing process:

"One of the things I love to do when I work with young writers is to disabuse them of the notion that I know what I'm doing. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm writing a script now, and as we are speaking, I am looking at my computer, tearing out my hair, thinking, well, is this horrible, or is this going to work? I don't know. Storytelling is always tricky."

I been reading many comments from authors about their mid-career anxieties -- what's the point, maybe it's all over, etc. Writers feel that every day, even the Nobel Prize winners. Writes Kevin Rabalais of Ernest Hemingway:

Once the 1930s rolled around, many critics believed he had seen his day, and by 1954, the year of the aeroplane crashes and Nobel announcement, he had become, for many, a parody. Following his suicide, Time magazine reported on the life "which led Hemingway himself not only to some mechanical, self-consciously 'Hemingway' writing, but to a self-conscious 'Hemingway' style of life". That life grew increasingly desperate after the crashes from which, writes [biographer Paul] Hendrickson, "he never really recovered in either his body or mind".

Writing is a lonely full-time job that doesn't pay very much. But the solitude of the task is balanced by the way fiction taps into and feeds the continuum. In the New York Times last year Pixar's John Lasseter summed this up in a story about Steve Jobs summing it up:

Steve Jobs and I were very close, and early on when I was making "Toy Story" we started talking and he said, "John, you know at Apple when I make computers, what is the lifespan of this product, two years, three years at the most, and then about five years, they're like a doorstop. But if you do your job right, these films can last forever."

On hiPod-rotate: Fiona Apple's Extraordinary Machine. In 2005 she explained the four-year break between her second and third albums to Rolling Stone:

"The first couple of years, I didn't have anything left in me to write about. That was a good thing, because it meant I'd done my job on the last batch of songs. I was riding a wave of independence. I wasn't trying to write; I just figured if the songs came to me, they came to me, and if not, 'Oh, well, it's been fun.'"

That's a pretty lovely way of thinking about it.

2012: The Year in Review (WIP)

1. Escape From New York (1981)
2. Die Hard (1988)
3. Fleetwood Mac, 'Over and Over' Tusk (1979)
4. How to check your drinks for roofies. Kind of.
5. William Gibson, Zero History (2011)
6. Richard Price, Lush Life (2008)
7. Quantum reality.
8. The limits of intuition.
9. The far side of the moon.
10. "Accused Picasso Thief Pleads Guilty" Article @ NYTimes. (This will become important later on.)
11. Woody Allen's first version of Midnight in Paris was a 1971 short story. 
12. Modern polling research. 
13. Boss (2011) 
14. Diana Krall, 'Let's Face The Music and Dance,' 1999 (Irving Berlin, 1936)
15. Eve Arnold
16. Janwillem van de Wetering, The Corpse on the Dike (1976) ("I can never hit anything after I have been riding my bicycle; it seems that the vibration of a cycle affects the muscles of my arm." pp. 46-47)
17. 1970 Camaro data. (This will become important later on.)
18. "Alien lights on Pluto" article @ Time magazine. (This will become important later on.) 

(Pic: Oscar Wilde's tomb, Pere Lachaise 2012)

Got a weird thing to show you, so tell all the boys and girls

A friend of mine works in an office where all the systems keep crashing. Email doesn't work, applications are losing data and user log ins fail. IT suspects the problems stem from their recent upgrade to the new version of Word.

Putting out my short stories on Kindle (here, ici et voila) required coding HTML and graphics, zipping and uploading it to Amazon, checking in two different applications and adapting to the quirks of same. Publishing on Smashwords would have required updating manscript(s) in Word. At which point I thought fuck that, and returned to my (new) writing. I don't have time for that shit.

I wrote my first novel in Word 4. On a Mac Plus with an external 30 megabyte hard drive. Word 4 was brilliant. Word 5 we were told to avoid. 5.1 was tolerable: more features than you needed but the keystroke to capture and move a paragraph up or down was useful. I think Word 6 was not Mac native code – Apple was a dying company, and Microsoft ruled the world. I lost track of the next versions. I became so frustrated I briefly attempted working in Claris Works. (A benchmark of desperation.) Then I discovered Final Draft and started working in that.

Final Draft is not perfect either but it is simple. One font, thank you; one page layout, automatic page numbering (top r/h corner), para and linespacing preset (1.5, with a line break after each para), and that's it. You write in scenes (or chapters) which can be viewed as index cards and, most wonderfully, moved around in chunks. Prints one way, too; saves to easy to locate back up folder. There are some production planning features for real screenwriters which I don't require. I block out a treatment in FD (automatic scene numbering) and then write in the app or in Text Wrangler and drop them in. Just like typing.

Word could do all that, of course: the problem is getting it to do just that and no more. 'You can configure it,' as my friend Paul Reynolds loved to goad – we would bang on about Word the way other men talk about sports – but no matter what macros I deleted or features I switched off, something else would pop up: an auto address complete, a custom ellipsis, a line that demanded to be Helvetica bold italic underline, the pod bay doors that wouldn't open. That's why I started working on laptops: they're easier to throw across the room.

I still have a copy of Word on my computer and flinch when I have to open it. I don't know anyone who enjoys using the application. It puzzles me that after decades of computers and software becoming better, faster, sleeker, simpler that Word only gets harder, more tangled, more complicated, less reliable.

Tachism

Camden fox outside the Jazz Café; Bridget Riley wall painting at the National Gallery; not Banksy (but wouldn't it be cool if it was?), Fortess Road.

Random

The mystery novel must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law courts. Contrary to popular belief, this has nothing to do with morality. It is part of the logic of the form. Without this the story is like an unresolved chord in music. It leaves a sense of irritation.
– Raymond Chandler, 'Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel' (1949) Raymond Chandler Speaking

In our everyday life we are usually trying to do something, trying to change something into something else, or trying to attain something. Just this trying is already in itself an expression of our true nature.
– Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind

My only weapon is my pen, Oh and the frame of mind I'm in

Because noir and crime fiction has had such an influence on my work (mentioned briefly in context here) I'm always interested in other writers' thoughts on the genre. In an old interview at Beatrice.com Kazuo Ishiguro discusses the form of the English post-war detective novel:

RH: In allowing Christopher [in When We Orphans] to grow up and become the celebrated detective he's dreamed of being since a child, was it fun for you to-- I don't want to say parody, but let's say tweak the conventions of that type of fictional English detective?

Ishiguro: Yes, it was fun just at the basic level of a reader wanting to be entertained. I do enjoy those detective mysteries. Now, over the distance of time, there is a certain kind of quaintness that comes from that style and the atmosphere of that past age. But in a way, it was my way of trying to seduce a reader, you know, evoking a certain kind of atmosphere, an old world, Edwardian atmosphere. But I did have other reasons for choosing that kind of cozy detective story as a thing to parody or pastiche. I was quite keen to look at that view of how you deal with evil. In those detective mysteries of that time, there was a certain view of what evil is and how you deal with it to expunge it. Those mystery novels written by people like Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, or Dorothy L. Sayers often give you an idealized harmonious community, usually an English village, that would be absolutely tranquil if only this one thing hadn't gone wrong...which is that somebody's been murdered. The evil is always very clear and easy to identify; you just don't know who the bad person is, and that's the mystery. So the detective unmasks this one element and everything goes back to being beautiful again.

What struck me about that whole genre is how it flourished immediately after the First World War. In other words, it was a very poignant escapism on the part of a generation that knew full well that evil and suffering in the modern world wasn't about a master criminal or a clever vicar who was poisoning people for somebody's inheritance. They had had the trauma of experiencing modern technological warfare in a world where nationalism and racism had gone bananas. They had seen a vision of the world that their leaders couldn't control, where bloodshed and suffering seemed to be unlimited in potential, and they very much wanted to escape it. I mean, they knew full well that the world wasn't like those novels, evil wasn't like that. But they wanted for a time to escape into that vision of how simple life could be if all you had to do was point to the person who was committing evil and the problem would go away. So part of my reason for being attracted to the whole detective thing was to say, "Well, let's look at someone who believes that everything that's gone bad in the world, in his personal world as well as the larger world, comes from an evil criminal element that needs to be unmasked. Let's bring him into the chaos of the 20th century and the brink of another world war. Let's see how he copes. Let's see how long he can hang on to his little vision of how to deal with the problems of life."

My new novel has a crime at its kernel but has spun off to embrace another subject entirely. Such digression drives publishers crazy - to rejection, even - but it suits me just fine.

The Girl Who Played With Phwoar

A major production and Maria Sharapova? Fortune has smiled on my home country. I love Masha because she's emotional: she has to lose a little bit before she can start winning. Which is risky when you're playing for three sets and fatal with a bung shoulder but she's been looking pretty good this year. I can barely watch her play now - my nerves can't take it - but I'd have her over the Williams winning machines any day.

L.A. Dies on the Roof

Dreaming far away from today

Just saw a double decker bus skid. Yay for London. Driver non-plussed (hand on chin, blinking a little, well it 'appens dunnit nuffinktoworryabout). NZ GST increase means the monthly fee for storing my belongings is going up. Hey, as long as no-one opens those hat boxes, I'm happy. BT connection still not connected but if I stand holding my iPod in a corner of the flat I can hop on to a free signal. The old Powerbook G4 is still lovely to write on but it lags in signal reception, and video. Hence back to the local cafe in the mornings. When I was working earlier this year they would practically reserve the same table for me. Kid sitting next to me has a cold, the f*cker.

I'm scribbling notes for draft four. You didn't want to hear that, did you? Anyway, all done by end of October and then blowing the hatches for somewhere sunny to get my head together. Or rather, take it apart.

Other young man in cafe without cold reading over my shoulder. It's only when you're flicking through your laptop in a cafe that you realise how much porn is on it...

Hot sauce

(Curse of the Crimson Altar, Fondue Cookery, Le Samouraï, Pellegrino - the builder's friend.)