Tag Archives: Domesticity

General musings, Stars Trilogy

Unscrambling storylines


After my recent brain fart storm, I find myself scrambling round the MSS of ‘Darkness’ tidying up loose ends. In making one story / character change, I’ve unleashed a cascade effect. While this does not alter the planned ending, it has sent the intermediate story skittering off in a new direction. Whilst this is not a completely unfortunate happenstance, it’s a lot of hard work reading and re-reading to clean up the glitches. Massively time consuming.

All this, day job, and Angie wanting me to help with her Canadian History Teachers course. Just been reading the unit on accounts of first contact in British Columbia by the Simon Fraser expedition, and to be honest it’s so dry I can hardly keep my eyes open. Great cure for insomnia. Although I’d prefer a large whiskey.

General musings

The best time of the day to write


Since the 1980’s I’ve been an habitual early riser. It may sound odd, but I have difficulty sleeping in after half past six. No Alarm clock necessary. This is probably a hangover from days when I travelled and commuted the length and breadth of the UK. Edinburgh, Manchester, London, Bristol, Cardiff and all points east and west. Going where I was sent, doing the job I was paid to do, then getting home, sometimes as late as nine at night. So I got into the habit. It’s programmed into my body clock.

At six or earlier, I’m generally up and working sometimes in my dressing gown, sometimes already dressed, researching, pounding keyboard or answering emails. No-one, apart from my dog, to butt in. Peace and quiet allowing time to ease into the writing zone before the day job begins. I’ve found I can get almost a full days output done before eight, and then make ready for whatever late day or evening shift I’m on.

This is my routine, rain or shine. At the moment mostly the latter, which is very nice. And when I have what I call a ‘flow’ going, when the ideas line up neatly into pure narrative, I reckon I can lay down a good fifteen hundred words in just over two hours. So for me at least, early morning has become the best part of the day to write. It’s oddly relaxing.

General musings

Life, as seen from my deck


Before I came to Canada, I had no idea about what I now call ‘deck life’. Yet now Summer is here, that is where I find myself living and writing. If it wasn’t for the mosquitoes after nine pm, I’d probably end up sleeping out here as well. Not that there are many mossies around at the moment. They usually arrive three days after a rain shower, and there’s been no rain since last Sunday. Just in case there are any strays wafting about, I’ve lit the mosquito coils and citronella candles.

Angie is off at her yearly conference in Squamish, so until tomorrow it’s just me and the Dog, chilling, drinking beers and getting dive bombed by Hummingbirds on their way to the feeder. Watching the glorious British Columbian daylight fade from blue through a dusky violet into broad indigo bands around the horizon, and the 8:40 flight passes overhead from Vancouver. The dog in next doors yard, a curly haired mutt, barks sporadic greeting at the world, and a tiny cooling breeze strokes my feet therapeutically. Et in Arcadia ego.

It’s not all fun because there are hard choices to be made. Do I get another beer from the fridge? Or do I simply sit here listening to far off conversations, watch the odd boat go past and let the stress drip from my bones. Choices, choices. Would I like some tea and a Digestive cookie before I reluctantly go to bed? Well goodness me, so I do.

Have hardly written a thing over the past week, barely two thousand worthwhile words, but after all the travelling, I’m having a little private time out.

Technology

Packing and packaging


Packing and paperwork become a priority from today. We leave on Sunday for the UK, and all the paperwork is being double checked and then checked again. Arranging feeding exercise and watering of dog. Treats and presents for Jo and Laura. Flight, hotel and car hire bookings obsessively pored over. Scanning the small print in travel insurance. Checking cash supplies. Credit cards brought out of cold storage. The usual travel minutiae.

One thing I’m trying to get up and running before we go is some editions of ‘Sky’, ‘Falling’, and ‘Head of the Beast’ in the Kobo marketplace. From what I’ve read so far, since I exclusively hold the copy and publishing rights, I can utilise existing ISBN’s and simply have Kobo as a separate distribution platform for eBooks. My only issue at present is setting up the royalty payments. Despite repeated checks with my bank and a dozen failed attempts with Kobo, their site won’t register my account to set up the electronic funds transfer or direct payment. No doubt I’m missing a trick. Somewhere along the line. Possibly. I need to read the FAQ’s no doubt. Again. Perhaps it’s too early in the morning. Yet there’s this driven streak in me that won’t let go. I’ve started, so I’m going to damn well finish. Get it out of the way so I can enjoy time with family and friends without having to worry about it. Although I’m sure there will be something else to obsess about.

I haven’t even started packing.

Stars Trilogy

Final checks and formatting


Have got to the point with ‘Falling’ where I’m happy to release the rewritten content into the wild as an eBook. I’ve been holding back in case I get one of those ‘Distribution rejection’ e-mails from the previous volume. Reformatting is time consuming, and trying to weasel out the reason for the rejection equally so. They just send you stock e-mails about your works ‘metadata’, and never respond when you ask for details on which specific field doesn’t match the content. Although a better help section has been in evidence over the past year or so. This time, I think, I’ve got the formula right. I think. Touch wood, all that shizzle. Fingers, toes, nostrils and eyes crossed. (Don’t go there.) Hoping for the best.

Final spell check is due this evening after work. Which will take two hours, even with semi automated shortcuts. Final proofing will take another two days and eat up all the spare time I don’t have. Primary release via Lulu.com will happen probably Saturday afternoon before we finish packing and cleaning for our UK trip. Dog will be well cared for while we’re away. He’s on a vet mandated diet at the moment to see if we can shrink a fatty lump he’s developed. Special food has been purchased with strict instructions of no treats.

Sunday is a travelling day, arriving Bristol Airport in the UK on Monday. When travelling to the UK I like to arrive at provincial airports simply because Heathrow is my least favourite air terminal in the entire world. Dirty, crowded, high flight taxes and fees. Flights often late and everyone seems so bad tempered. So I try to avoid using it. Far better, and cheaper to take a flight into Schipol, hang around in relative comfort for four hours, then take a short hop to Bristol. Truro for three nights to visit Angie’s family, then up to my old home of Stratford upon Avon for a week. After that a hike over to Ireland to see the sights of Waterford and environs, thence back to Bristol and a two night layover in Amsterdam before home for tea, cookies and sleep.

Will try to write when I can find the odd quiet corner to hunker down in. If not, I’m in Bristol, Truro, Stratford, Ireland, Amsterdam etc.

Observations

One hundred and fifty six thousand words


156,000 words. I have just edited and spellchecked one hundred and fifty six thousand words. That’s rewriting, tweaking, removing errant apostrophes, changing the odd metaphor, scubble handtweek and burble. Gods I’m tired.

It didn’t help that some inconsiderate neighbour went out last night having left their stereo on until five thirty this morning. Thump, thump bloody thump, all flaming night. All this and a Sunday shift. Did I say I was tired? Fortunately I’m not working tomorrow, which is Victoria Day here in BC thank the Lord. I may spend most of it asleep. My eyes feel like they’re about to roll out of their sockets. I did say that I was tired, didn’t I? Something of that ilk. Even the dog is giving me funny looks.

I’m formatting this many words for an eBook release. All a hundred and bloody fifty six flaming thousand of them. Spellcheck, spellcheck and re-read again. Get my word spanner on the odd sentence and tighten it up. Grease a metaphor, polish a simile and take a very large hammer to any conceits. Just to make sure they stay put.

It’s another self publish, hence the grunt work. I want this up and in the marketplace before I trot off back to jolly old Blighty in June. Three weeks of playing catch up with the odd old mate, far flung family and a side trip to Southern Ireland. We’re also going to do a stopover in Amsterdam. Go do things like the Rijkmuseum, a day trip to The Hague before heading back to yet more jet lag.

Now I’m going to walk away from the keyboard to make friends with a bottle of vodka. I’ve earned it.

Observations

Orca mother and calf sighted in Dodd Narrows


There’s always a bit of a buzz in Cedar when the Orcas come through.  About a quarter past five this afternoon, I was taking a time out in the kitchen watching Time Team re-runs when a black triangular shape popped out of the sea about a quarter mile away.  Took a second glance, and there it was again.  A third time and a Killer Whale breached and blew, just south of a line between home and the Mudge- Link Island portage.

Managed to get my Skymaster binoculars on the shape as it came up again, and saw what looked like an Orca Mother and calf heading south, side by side down towards the channel between Link and Round Island. Saw one of our friends and neighbours, David Hill-Turner walking his dog, and yelled out the news. He told neighbour John, who keeps note of these things, but in the two minutes it took from first sighting to the pair disappearing southwards behind Round Island, the Orcas had moved on. Spent another half hour scanning what I could see of the water, but could see nothing further of the pair. At least from my vantage point. They’ll probably be passing Yellowpoint or the Trincomalee channel by now.

Cerberus

Writing well, but very slowly #WritersBlock


Work proceeds on the next of the Cerberus series of stories; ‘A Falling of Angels’. It’s also going very slowly. The story is at an interesting point; in the middle of a refugee camp down at the old Avonmouth docks in Bristol, England. I’ve successfully introduced the ‘Freemen’, a cult of surprisingly orderly anarchist-like monk characters very loosely based on the ‘Freemen on the land’ ideology. As far as the story goes, they work beautifully. Quality is high. The trouble is, writing is such an effort at the moment. Finding the time to relax into the tale is proving difficult.

Paid work is currently more full than part time. Angie, having taken over my office, is now sitting in front of me in the kitchen working leaving me no place to settle and buckle down to some good old fashioned keyboard pounding. The baking is therapeutic, but when you’re deep in the throes of narrative, the last thing you want is someone (no matter how much you love them) asking questions about what your tax position is, or a hundred different non writing related queries.

Writing is nothing unless it can be done, and if it is not being done then all the mental effort behind it gets wasted. I need to concentrate in order to work, but I’m finding it difficult to do so,and I don’t want to make an issue of my objections and thus provoke domestic discord. Which would bring all writing activity to a dead stop for months.

What is a man to do? No wonder it drives so many to drink.

Observations

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? #WritersLife

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Picked up poet Mary Oliver‘s question via LinkedIn this morning, and it very much resonates with what’s going on in my life at the moment. Well, not just mine but Angie’s as well. We’ve been pottering around looking at lots to build a house on, and finding that everything eventually devolves to suburbia. The whole work-eat-sleep-mortgage thing, which we’ve already done. So why on earth are we planning to anchor ourselves down to a plot of land for the rest of our useful lives? Nail ourselves to one location? Chain our souls to real estate? Go down the suburban road once more? Do the networking thing? Cultivate contacts to further our ‘careers’? Sell our souls to the machine again? We’re both over fifty and pretty active, I don’t see the point.

Would we do it for Laura and Jo? Not really, they’re all grown up and making their own lives half way around the world. As for me, to paraphrase Groucho Marx, if there were a club especially for people like me, I wouldn’t let me in. I’m not a social animal. The Bear is my totem.

So after drifting around plots and lots with various enchanting views, we ended up in the Genoa Bay Marina Espresso Bar down past Duncan. Down at the end of one floating jetty was a 60′ Gin Palace, registered in Edmonton, Alberta of all places. A gleaming monstrosity of fibreglass and stainless steel. Very palatial. A million bucks worth straight out of the yards. Beautiful lines. It looked fast and graceful, even just moored at the floating dock gathering algae next to all the houseboats.

All of a sudden, Angie gets all upset, which bothered me as it was a gorgeous day and we hadn’t a care, apart from looking at various interminable building sites. She confessed to me that this whole looking for houses process was making her unhappy, and she didn’t want to do it any more. She expressed a wish to live on a boat and cruise the coast and gulf islands for the next ten or twenty years. So as we wound through endless Canadian suburbia, we talked it over. I expressed surprise as Angie tends to suffer from motion sickness, and her on a boat? To be honest I never even thought about it as a life option. She said no, she was willing to give it a try. Life on the water. We joked about her having a ‘mid-life crisis’, well why not? Without crisis and adventure, life is dull, dull, mind strangling routine. The morass of souls, the slough of despond, a round of endless quiet desperation.

I reflected that some of my early years were spent playing around on British canals on cabin cruisers. This brought up memories like being at the wheel of a fishing boat following a gyrocompass bearing back into Looe after a days deep sea fishing out near Eddystone. Force four south westerly freshening to six. Dirty green sea under grey skies, bucking the restless horse of a Lochin 38 Hulled fishing boat at fourteen knots. Five foot swells slamming at the bows. Slewed at twenty degrees from the line of travel in the cross wind.

I have my BC pleasure craft license, know the basics about R/T drills and have a modest understanding of basic seamanship. Angie is a quick learner, and both sides of the family have more than a little salt water in their veins, so why not? We don’t really ‘belong’ anywhere, and would only be stifled by life in one place, regardless of how nice the views or people are.

The sheer chutzpah appeals. The thought of Island hopping, following the weather around the world while working online has a certain appeal. Phoning the kids from Southampton or some other locale. “Hi love, fancy a weekend off?” Hire cars when need arises, not buy them. Move our money around the globe, spread the risk, take a chance. I have more than a couple of ideas about that. Yes, so we’re having a radical rethink about how we live our lives, and today we are going to talk to boat brokers.

Observations

Leaving well enough alone. #BlogOff


This morning I was over at Guido Fawkes via Pat Nurse and came across this little campaign for a free and unregulated blogosphere. In the opposing corner, there are a bunch of over-hyped luvvies lobbying for regulation and censorship. So long as it isn’t their views being censored of course. Privacy, and the right of voicing opinion is something only they can have, and not for the hoi polloi. So long as it is an opinion they agree with, by their own slippery and shifting standards. These are the people laying foundations for the dystopias I write about. The “Do as I say – not as I do.” pundits. The people who wear their hypocrisies like a second skin, so much so that perhaps they may not realise what they are doing. Or perhaps they do. I can only guess.

Censorship stifles the voices of the many and puts too much power into the hands of a self-selected few. It disenfranchises and opens the way for gross evils that have dumped their ugly ink splodges on the narrative of history. Indeed, history is all the poorer for this. Like the angry Roman Soldier who murdered Archimedes in Syracuse, a voice stifled because “You can’t say that” is a conversation stillborn. Information lost until another mind dares to walk an untrodden path. Culturally, suppression impoverishes. Spam filters notwithstanding.

Free speech may mean the tinfoil hat brigade are let loose, barging into civilised discourse like an infinite number of hypothetical Bulls in an infinite number of Porcelain emporia, spraying virtual spittle on all and sundry, but for all that, they’re mostly harmless. Pat them on the head, smile politely and move on. Conversation is like mining, you have to shift a lot of overburden to get to the real ore. Process tons of Pitchblende to extract an ounce of Radium. So it is with communication. Stifling it serves no purpose apart from protecting the thin skinned and pompous. The least harm would be done if they left well enough alone. Not that my opinion counts, I’m just another voice in the crowd trying to make sense of it all.

For my own part I’ve been busy of late, breaking all my own rules about creative writing; haven’t penned a word in weeks. Mainly because domesticity has been raising its ever present head and saying things like “What about doing your taxes?”, “What about getting a new job?”, “What about buying a plot of land and building?”, “What about booking our trip to England this year?” and “You’re spending too much time researching – it’s time we went out.” What with a shifting shift pattern and everything else, I’ve dried up completely.

Cerberus

Inspiration comes from odd times and places #WritersBlock


What do you call it when you know where a story has to go, but aren’t quite sure how to get there? My Timelines are great at framing the content of a narrative, but quite often I get stuck on the details.

For example; in ‘A falling of Angels’ my lead character gets tied up rescuing a couple of half wild children while trying to solve a gangland crime no one else seems bothered about. Evidence is in short supply, and even his special abilities are no help. To simply dismiss it and move on leaves a stray storyline. I hate unresolved plot details, and couldn’t leave the loose end hanging. Loose ends annoy me.

Unfortunately at these times, inspiration is so often in short supply, and I end up mooning about trying to prise the narrative loose by force, which rarely works. Nothing shifts the logjam. Weeks go by without significant progress. I find myself rewriting whole sections prior to the story blockage, tidying up sentences, chopping paragraphs and doing general housekeeping on the narrative. It’s like a wall you can peer over and see the end of your tale, but can’t see the vital literary devices in between. The angles are all wrong. Like a map of your destination which doesn’t include directions from the town you’re starting at, it frustrates.

Books on writing style don’t help; they’re too general. Research and experience can only take you so far. The song has stopped, the choir has faltered to an embarrassed silence, and no-one seems sure where to pick up the chorus.

At times like these I usually dig out the cook books, do the chores, walk the dog, stare at the horizon, bake bread (Always a good one), but this time round the break came on Monday when Angie was reading me a piece on story telling and the importance of narrative from one of Daniel H Pinks self help series “Why Right Brainers Will Rule the Future”. I don’t generally read self help books myself, they’re too full of stuff I already seem to know. However, Angie likes them. So for the sake of a quiet life I do the old nod and smile. She even let me stop her and illustrate the technique she was telling me about, and how widespread its use is in advertising and marketing. While I was doing this, a stray thought kicked off about how to bodge two plot lines into a seamless whole. Completely out of context, off the wall, but I suddenly had a vision of how difficult it would be to beat up someone who knows exactly where the punch is coming from, and is quick enough to dodge. From there the idea branched back to a couple of other odd story items, and all of a sudden the choir has found the page, and there’s the door in the wall I was looking for. Wide open. Bing! Just like magic.

Now the way is clear, all I have to do is write it.

General musings

Taking Christmas off


Angie and I have been talking about our relationship, and realise there’s considerable fence mending to do. So this Christmas we’re going for a break at a nice out of the way hotel with a balcony, great scenery, nice seafood, far from the drama and excitable high pitched squeaking. No presents, no cards between us, no Internet or phone calls from the 22nd until the 28th. I’ve put a few trinkets up around the house just for the look of things, but this year Christmas is going to be a very low key affair.

The kids are in England, family is scattered all over the globe, and for a change it’s just us. No tree, no Christmas shopping, no overloaded credit cards, no heavy meals we’re only going to have to sweat off in January. Nothing like that. Just a thorough detox. Massages, mud wraps and spa treatments. A relaxing break chilling out in whirlpool baths, reading a good book with a glass of fine wine, and getting a head start on the New Year. We’ve done our duty as far as family is concerned, catering and feeding, cleaning up after, and pandering to almost every whim for years. Now it’s our turn.

The only thing I plan to celebrate this year is Angie’s birthday on the 25th of December.

Video

Playing with ideas


While Angie is recovering and driving me a little nuts because she’s bored as all get out, I thought I’d distract myself and have a little play with Windows Movie Maker. The result is the video above. Like it, don’t like it, no problem, but the song is one of my all time favourites, and the photo collages are all created from public domain images.

Sure, the sound / image synchronisation isn’t that brilliant, but with the tools available, I’m modestly pleased with the end result.

General musings

Nice to know I’m appreciated


Came back from late shift last night to find the following little missive on my laptop. Angie had been up and around, exercising her new hip, and decided that I needed a little morale boost.

Still not got the oomph back to get to the keyboard in earnest, but it’s nice to know all the other things I do are appreciated.