Who's Reading this Stuff?

There is a cellist with bad knees, an outpost of literate marsupials, a ghost-train full of twitching corpses, an assemblage of mugshot cowboys waiting for the chorus, and maybe one lonely guy on the island of St. Kilda left behind during the Great Evacuation and has inexplicably got a wireless signal, thanks to a beam ricocheting off a piece of passing space debris.  Yes, these are the people reading this author's paranoid mental exposee.

Is there anybody else?  Yes?  I know you are out there in the States, the Netherlands, Germany, France, the UK, and Russia.  A whole crowd from China one day obviously stumbled across my twitching, typing cadaver by accident and swiftly moved on.  So who are you?  Leave a little hello, hi y'all, guten tag, bonjour,  or whatever.  And then maybe I can get you to persuade your friends to drop by as well and we can have a global literary whammy!

Almost forgot - and who was the one person from Serbia who dropped by?  I saw Djokovic during the first week of Wimbledon and I did megaphone a soundtrack of my blog address at him, but I'm sure it wasn't him... most likely... almost certainly...

Pushing back the Cuticles

Do you ever find yourself in that situation.  You let loose a word innocently out into the smoggy, smoggy world and the uber-conversationalist opposite immediately, through some associative process or malfunction of the social gene, hooks it up in their me-me-me claw and tells your their life story.  This kind of practised lexical-drone can gun down every word you say and in return bless you with an infinite number of life stories.  So you sit, pushing back the cuticles, developing embarrassing itches, tugging at your cheek which has suddenly mutated into some kind of rubber mask, so that you can yank that skin out about three feet.  You develop x-ray vision, you hear voices in your head as well surround sound, and your fingernails have never been so clean.

That's what's happening to me today -  which is why I can't think of anything to write about.  Sorry.

On the other hand, I've eventually sold my flat (USA = apartment) in Bath.  Didn't rake in a security van full of oncers (USA = greenbacks); mainly, because it was quite elegantly small.  You know... not big... like a shoebox with a door and a toilet.  Nonetheless, out tonight to get bubbled up.

HUD YE ON MA CUDDY!

World is full of feet-draggers and stool-sifters.

I have a modus vivendi.  Some stuff requires rational thought and near-as-dammit reasonable solutions. Other stuff is all about immeasurable, abstract nouns - sympathy, kindness, appreciation.  In between, there is a very civilised path called benefit of the doubt.  This way allows for logic and romance.  It encapsulates the human, so why be one when you can be both?

Yet, you look around and you see the planet is walked on by a whole bunch of feet-draggers, stool-sifters, candy-bombers, tick-tock-watchers, love-manglers, psycho-entrepreneurs, scrotum-straighteners, hotscreen-addicts and warthog-followers.  They want to pull you down, push you around, persuade you to their way of walking and talking, force you to think this and swallow that.  For J. H. Slaggenbottom's sake, give yourself a break! Give us all a break!

A Penny Whistle in the Wrong Mouth

A skirling, screeching sound-scar is inhibiting work.  It's a penny whistle in the wrong mouth.  The melody-wrestler is adept enough; it's the repetitive swirls, twirls and pavement burls that are having a blocking effect in the cranial area, as bad as some kind of radio signal jammer.  I'm tied to my machine and can't slope off.  All the ideas are jumping up and down to be noticed but communication between hemispheres is as dead as a hairpin.  If I could afford it, I'd give the whistler some dosh to find a spot further, say, half-a-mile, from my window.

Ping!  Cartoon, low-energy lightbulb!  I'll invite him in.  Opening the bronchitic door for the first time feels like an audition; it hasn't been my routine recently, my pathway of desire.  The light, sharp as a razor, is a pleasant experience but smacks the pale blue and yellow eyeballs like a torch on a cro-magnon cave-wall.  Is it my face screwed into a crumpled newspaper full of bad news or possibly my staggering gait?  Because, for some reason, he backs off, grabbing his bag, pocketing the instrument, and declining my offer as if he were a stretcher case suddenly reincarnated as a whippet.

Oh, well.

What do I know about Cowboy Songs?

I don't feel qualified.  Country and Western in the UK is some bleak moorland on the outer, unreachable reaches of west Wales or the most westerly point in Scotland - Ardnamurchan Point.  C & W is about shooting the dog because your girl loves him more than you.  And can you blame her?  You've been two-timing and five-and-diming with her for too long, you no-good, sliming, outrageous rhyming son-of-a-gun.  I don't even know what a son-of-a-gun is!  I can face-tape a fair few chords together, however, and I have a verse or two.  Here is a sequel to the first:

Your smile is catching light from a star
I could be reaching out too far
All I need is the touch of your love...

Oh no!  I need a last line.  Help!

Avoiding a Guilty Reflection

When you walk the back streets, expect to step into a roomful of backbiters.  No mirrors - all avoiding their guilty reflections - who snatched the lyrics?  Some hug the walls, faces like irregular patchwork, stitched together by apprentices; others browned with macaroon bar skin; some just pram-free but learning the trade as fast as hot laxative.  Such a relief to escape with my minor blemishes intact and a wallet full of memory sticks.  Without them, I'd be like a bride without a trousseau, a satanic figure perched on the Isle of May without a blue stane to chuck at Crail kirk.  The words aren't just a livelihood.  They're also an identity, a contact with the parallel country you call home.

Touchkeys, black cables and all ports are on call.  A graphic pad and a source of energy are essential tech.  I broke the tender chains so many years ago and stepped, rock by rock, into a waiting body double.  Luckily, he was exactly my size and had been hanging around for half a century on some hammocking porch waiting for me to swing by.

But punching out the nicknames, the word-topiary, the hound's-tooth paragraphs are fine until someone throws a contract across the table.  Merc-masters, overdogs and muscular stand-ins barricade the doors and apply the mind-screws and stubs of legal documents.  And all I want to do is write and live.

Edinburgh: Land of Georgian Granite

Heading north and hands will be too full to blog.  Edinburgh and beyond.  Like many UK cities, there used to be so much fagsmog (UK English: fag = cigarette) the men, with their ashlar voices and honeyed fingers, were able to create topiary out of it, or take it home in bagfuls to be shared with the bairns. (Scottish English: bairn = baby / child.)  Nowadays the bronchitic and bedridden sing in a flinty way and dance rustily in the street to the sounds of the Festival and Fringe events.  It's a sparkling city at any time, even through the mesh of wet, grainy greyness that lashes off the North Sea.  But in the middle of August, it dresses up in its best frock and boogies.

So, all packed, apart from finding another suitable case for all the notebooks, scraps of paper, pens and backup pencils I'll need in between trigger-happy conversations, squeamish one-person shows in which the act often outnumbers the audience, and exhibitions that are just the cat's pyjamas.  You better get there yourself some day.

 Another couple of sleepless nights to get over, however, ever since the drawling approach a week or two ago of the stetson guy with the hand-me-down look.  That suggestion of his that I do a country-and-western lyric.  I've been trying to avoid it, but at around 3:00am last night - I mean, this morning - into my unsuspecting head came: A major, a rising bass to D flat minor, followed by A7 and the wailing words:

You are an angel on a highwire
Am I in danger of aiming too high?
All I need is the touch of your love
And, Baby, I will learn to fly.

There's more, but does that sound like c-and-w to you?  If so, send your favourite band my way and they can have it.

So have a lovely time while I'm away.  Check back in a week.  Adios!  Hasta la vista!

OK, I'm up!

Bad night and noisy morning, the seagulls pressing the corners of the aural landscape ever closer.  Still, daylight is a wonderful adventure, full of sleepily optimistic ideas to be sifted through and discarded or embellished.  It's always the same with these mental scribbles flashing through the velvety fuzz of semi-consciousness in the middle of the night.  Wonderful abstract edifices rise up and colourful men and women pull themselves out of the prosaic sludge of the world to make themselves credible, only to open the curtains at daybreak and reveal the whole shambles as utter crap, as meaningless gab.

Still, at about 5:00am I did get a useful conversation, that has been able to brave today's morning sunshine, out of Wull Ritchie and Jimmy Fens, two guys from a Scottish story.  Tonight, I hope that any afterthoughts on their part are continued in a whisper.  I need to catch up on my sleep.

Too many imaginary characters keeping me awake.

It's just a snailtrail after 4:30am here in the UK.  I should be tucked up in bye-bye land with my plasticine face squodged into a pillow mould, but I've been matchstick-eyed awake for the past 2 hours.  Too many imaginary characters inside my head are keeping me awake.  Loud-mouthed conversations, arguments about killing them off in chapter 6, counter-arguments by their mates suggesting they should have been killed off sooner - who needs enemies?  The worst of it is, at this time in the morning with synapses clicking away like the old telegraph system or the points on Casey Jones's railway lines, people from different books are starting up shouting matches like neighbours across a fence.  Help!

If I get some of these conversations down on paper, instead of writing this blog, perhaps I'll crawl back to bed before the pigeons start crooning their half-finished melodies down our Georgian chimneys or the seagulls, which come up-river only because there are so many (lovely) tourists here they think it's the seaside, begin their first-light squawk concert.

Just don't expect too much of me tomorrow - I mean, later today.

A Friend is Bored on Saturn

It's not possible, is it?  Nobody could be on Saturn.  If they were, they wouldn't be bored for very long as death would be immediate.  Thirdly, who writes and has friends?  Also the phrase is nonsense - an anagram of boundaries and frontiers - and so is arts on the underside of brain.  I can't help playing dodge-ball with words.  But no apologies.  The boundaries and frontiers of words is where I want to go.  You can stumble over the cliff-edge into nonsense, I know, but foxtrotting on the crumbly edge is fun.  Is that what you do as a writer?  Push at the door?

What I do is bang at several doors, at an entire corridor of doors, at once.  There are the grammar books  to be published in October; The Badgers of Beechen Cliff  which might require the use of a megaphone; the rock lyrics calling out to the world in a tiny voice but with a driving bass line; as well as two adult novels half-finished, two children's stories complete and a picture book series.  I'm also in the process of having my rights reverted on some long-forgotten children's books, published eons ago by Orion and Barefoot Books.  What I will do with them then, I don't know yet. (Little Eagle Lots of Owls, The Emperor Who Hated Yellow, etc., etc.)

I never have writer's block.  I don't know what that is.  My displacement activity is to abandon one story until Jim, who lives in a parallel creative universe, sorts it our for me and whispers the new coordinates, while I get on with another story or a bit of illustration.  Perfect set-up.

Jim, I can't thank you enough.

HaHa-time for Illustration

Neurons are on the warpath, fighting for attention, because I've just been cajoled (as if I needed cajoling) into producing colour (yes, real, Rajasthani Georgia Brown COLOR!) for a series of English books.  I thought they would have to be black-and-white to keep costs down.  It means more toil, but without the hardship.  What can be better than being handed a modest shedload for what you like doing anyway.  So, this weekend, I'm filling pantomime slippers with bubbly, aim the flame-thrower at a regiment of candles, draping the patio with fairy lights (I once designed for Quandt Originelle in Hamburg - look up their Wild Animals and other designs by Jim Edmiston) and inviting my partner and some people I optimistically call friends for a small period of assimilation of alcoholic moisture.

Still casting half a tearful eye at the orphaned lyrics at the end of the table, but maybe some kind foster band will rap at the door and whisk them off to happy-ever-after land.

Have a lovely weekend.

Yippees all round.

A bit of a jolly day yesterday.  A toffee popcorn kind of day; a day when you get all of the stratacelli in your mouth before it melts on to your sneakers; a day when some of the fragmented pieces fall into the right jigsaw spaces.  This is not about the lyrics contracts - all that: in accordance with instructions, your reference dated as per section 5, and reasonable care not to make a misrepresentation, blah, blah, blah.  No.  All of that is still an Eton Mess floating with a bird's eye view of my head, like some culinary drone yet to be invented.  (Have you noticed the blueberries in the muffins watching you as you walk around the deli?)

No, this is another worthy project stuffed deep inside the back pocket. It suddenly appeared like a magician's rabbit, wide eyes popping because straitlaced backer numero uno suddenly pulled out of concordat because of a financial injury - asked for a bank loan and the manager socked him on the nose. Now lovely, handsome but serious with intentions to match and with a fine sturdy leg, backer numero deux has stepped in jauntily with a shiny offer of a deluxe publication and sufficient moolah to market the thing. Yippees all round, I say!  It's what's known as a silver lining.

Blogless Tomorrow - Encounter with Moneybags

I doubt I'll be able to blog tomorrow.  Possible first step in getting inky mitts on a new contract with new company.  Meeting set up (possibly through this blog), expectations kept down.  It's a long-shot as the tic-tac men used to mime.  More harrowing temper tantrums on Friday.

Hit the Zeitgeist Right on the Nose

Gigged last night with beer buddies, minus percussion section on philandering leave and rhythm guitarist either in France or drowned at sea.  First public outing for new song.  Feels like putting head in stocks during a glut of summer fruit, but got to the end unpilloried and with fingerbones intact.  Broke a nail thrashing away at the E / A / D strings but never mind.

Then an unheard-of thing happened.  (Well, that's not true.  The last time it happened, I was sixteen and my friend, Dave - still need to apologise to him, by the way - and I had climbed into the church through the toilet window for the afternoon rehearsal; we played our own compositions in the evening; he stopped playing acoustic guitar halfway through a song because a girl he fancied offered him a polo mint and nobody could hear his strumming anyway because he wasn't amplified, which brought that earlier career step to an abrupt ending; then a member of another band came up to us and asked if he could buy some of our songs, but we said 'I should coco' because we were going to hit the big time in a matter of nanoseconds, not that those existed in those days.)

The almost-unheard-of thing that happened was this.  A guy in ankle wellies and a stetson made of straw walked over and said he appreciated my lyrics, especially I'm a lookalike companion...etc., as it 'Hit the zeitgeist right on the nose.'

Naturally, being a gentleman, I smiled bashfully and apologised.

Then he suggested, with unconstrained enthusiasm, I write some country and western numbers.  Knew there'd be a catch.

A Fire Risk Survey Confirms I'm Unlikely to Self-combust

Fire Risk Survey: all writers should have one.  You can spoon your words into a bucket from the moment the lark rises until some fool shoots it with a Colt 45, and that is fine.  Unfortunately, your harmless, imaginary eavesdropping of your fictional characters' conversations and your stroll into their landscapes will soon overstep into the boundaries and frontiers of the real hardnuts.  You start to write smiles in the wrinkles of your publisher.  You picture taking the editor's jowls in both hands and shaking them like crazy.  And, heaven forfend, you begin to see yourself living by direct debit.  But that's the outposts of reality, John.  That's not your desk, your biro and your post-its.  That's the parallel, bleached universe of colourless bottom lines.  You're just a maker of stuff.

Now the lyrics are homeless and contractual etiquette and guys with big hands insist that they stay that way. Shame!  Self-combustion, it seems, is not an option.

In Limbo but not the Dancing Kind

Would it be easier to choose an alternative life path?  Burger knitter, for example.  Back end of a pantomime horse; that is, a non-speaking part.  The trouble is the words keep coming.  Drag a comb through my hair (not that I have any) and verbs tumble out.  There is punctuation in my muesli.  And I never even go near alphabetti spaghetti.

Now I'm holding a couple of pages of sweet lyrics, written with a particular guitar acrobat in mind and they are no longer required, no longer fit for purpose, no longer jumping and jiving off the paper.  Cruelty, thy name is broken promises.  All the loot I was planning to blow on worthless items: perhaps squander some of it on a timeshare in a pacemaker - the heart sort, not the old Gerry variety - or buy a macrame set, you know some rocking, edge-cutting thing.  Have to consider options or find another client.

Suggestions, please, on a postcard or some currency of high monetary value.  If my back wouldn't give out, I'd limbo to the front door and pick it up off the mat with my teeth.

I Fear I may have Blown it

Impersonating respectability is hard without your own accountant.  Picture an offstage amoeba about to shapeshift into a politician, or a sponge insisting it's not spineless - that's me.  I write.  I only sign contracts; I don't necessarily know what to do when the go-to man goes for the get-out from the get-go - whatever that means.  So a late-in-the-day phone call from the publisher says she hasn't eyeballed enough fat to part with the breakfast vouchers.  Assurances that the lyrics are complete and that they are perfect for her client aren't enough.  But where's my advance?  The question behaves like glue on my fingertips preventing the final adjustments leaving home.  Raging doesn't appear to help.  I try swearing therapy - it's helpful but not in the business sense.  The conversation ends strangely, with the sound of plastic hitting a wall.

The second section is here.  What am I going to do?

I heard a husky saxophone

Between the street talk and the drone

Mugged by a school, I am a runner with no shoes

Crowbarred a waiting window – welcome city blues

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave

You’re better by yourself

If you find some air to breathe

Don’t tell nobody else

I’m a digital companion

I’m a passport with no place

I’m a double of an old friend

I’m a copy of my face

A Seagull Ride to a Dream Buggy

Seagulls and buggies - that's what it feels like.  Gliding into dream.  Everything slides, more trombone that garbage chute, into place.  The lyrics have been hammered like rock on steel, put through a scrapyard crusher, ripped to pieces and jumped on and still something remains, because it's true and hits some spot or other.  Don't ask me whose or which one.  But it does.  I'm happy because it now exists.  Will it feed me?  I don't know.  I'm beginning to wonder.  No silhouette on the horizon.  No pigeon has come from the publisher who has seen the first drafts.  Here is the first of three parts.  Be nice.  Don't crumple the paper.  No coffee rings.

I left the boy of nineteen years

Melting the tender chains with my own acid tears

Walked past the women buying bread and making tea

Brushing crumbs from their mouths and babies from their knee

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave

You’re better by yourself

If you find somewhere to breathe

Don’t tell nobody else

I’m a lookalike companion

I’m a trick of time and space

I’m a double of your best friend

I’m a copy of my face

Lyrics as Rough as a Gravel Drive

Polishing awaits but the lyrics are almost on the road.  No monkeys at the door and no one chiseling away at the painted bricks on the windows.  Brow-sweat at a minimum.  But palpitations are never more than a fingernail away.  You only need to look at the scratches on in the wallpaper.  An advance on royalties should have hit the welcome mat but I'm down to thin yoghurt, sour dough crumbs and wild raspberries.  Perhaps the publisher didn't overtake the monkey.  Perhaps all that imagination has slid off her lap and fallen into file 13.

It's rock 'n' roll poetry - a bit of Byron, a lot of Zappa and a hint of Incredible String Band, without the comfortable cardigans.  Starting to doubt everything now.  Just an email, a text, a smile, half a smile, anything you can spare.  My empty hat is on the pavement and shoes are hurrying by.

Art on the Underside of Brain

I'm jumping between hemispheres this morning.  Like some unlucky tongue-tied parrot, can't quite formulate the last few lines of lyrics, while, at the same time, I'm trying hard not to add up the fame, fortune, media minutes and pointless, carbon-footprint-laden, material possessions that will surely come my way.

You feel like a castaway when the postman doesn't even knock once.  With publishers, no bad news doesn't mean good tidings.  And news is considered good-ish when the readies are in the bank.  Even then they can send round a pair of heavies, a lawyer and a pick-up truck, enter the vaults and snatch it out of your cheque book (or check book if you have money stashed you-know-where.)

So I'm dredging the underside of my brain to see what treasures lurk.  There is a pile of nasty stuff here: mildewed ideas, broken promises, embarrassing comments.  Then I spot something.

I left the boy of nineteen years
Sidestepped the catcalls and the jeers
Jacked myself a car and danced around with my big mouth
Pointing to the north star, turned the wheel and headed south

Whether, Baby, you stay or leave
It's better by yourself
If you find some air to breathe
Don't tell nobody else

I'm a digital companion
I'm a passport out of place
I'm the double of your old friend
I'm a copy of my face

A Love Match but What About the Monkey?

Is it the fact that badgers and prickly fleabags kept me awake all night with their arguments over gastropods and territorial rights.  'Quoting Carlyle will get you nowhere!' I want to shout from the bedroom window. But there's another stalemated picture in my eye.  The first non-digital meeting with the publisher has unraveled me.  My heart bursts at the thought of the creases in her neck, the sweetness of the turn-ups on her trousers and the absence of metal parts.  My cactus clock is ticking away.  She'll realise about now that she doesn't have the full lyric.  Saved by the monkey.  What a driver!  And cute to boot.  The question is: can romance blossom while missing words and an attractive monkey stand between us.  Better to stick a password on the door and paint bricks on the windows.

I'm balancing a hod full of terracotta acrylic and on my penultimate row of bricks, parrying insults from the local muffins, when it comes to me:

Jacked myself a car and danced around with my big mouth
Talked about the north star, turned around and headed south

Publisher's Monkey with Jemmy

The publisher shoehorns a monkey under the door, which gets jemmied from the inside.  Oblique strategy - has to be admired.  Would be if I weren't a hadron and a quark away from the wire.  She - the publisher man - is of an uncertain age and temperament.  Sunbeams and carwax on the outside; eels and bolts on the inside.  The crinoline creases of her neck twist and vibrate like a quaking jug in a Richter 8 tremor as she arcs over my writing shoulder.  'I have a studio on my back,' she says.  'The studio has guitar boy on theirs, and the boy has a contract on his.  We haven't squeezed him dry yet.  What we need from you has to come straight from his heart.  And the moment is now.'

So I whine and fake and shrug and sigh in different vocal ranges, fold the words into a paper aeroplane (or airplane), seal it with ground glass and cattle hooves, scribble NOT TO BE OPENED TILL I GET THE BUCKS and fly it through the open window of her loitering profitmobile.  The monkey revs up and shoots off, leaving her to dilly-dally after it.

Some time has been won.