“If you can’t find any time to write, you don’t want to be a writer.”

Someone said that on Twitter this morning and it kicked off a little bit of a shit-storm among the dragons here. In fact, it kicked up enough of a shit-storm that I couldn’t find any time to write today, even when I should, because I was too busy debating the rights and wrongs of a statement like this. So now I’m late on a deadline and pissed off.

So anyway, on a superficial level it’s obviously bullshit. I can’t find any time to learn to play the guitar but I still want to be a rock-star. I can’t find any time to get onto the ice rink but I still want to be an Olympic ice-hockey player. I can’t find the time to get out into the garden and have at it with a spade and shears but I still want a garden that’s slightly more penetrable than a mangrove swamp. It’s perfectly possible to want something and not invest a single second of your life in achieving it. I’ll hazard a guess that almost everyone wants something that they don’t even try to get (author of the above statement included). It’s not necessarily a bad thing and it’s not even delusional provided there’s no expectation of actually getting it. [And can we pass quickly by any pedantry over the use of any in the above – if you can't find any time in your entire life to spend a second of it typing a word on a page then you're not a writer? Well duh. Can we just agree that that interpretation is so patently both obvious and useless as a statement that it's not worth the silicon atoms it takes to record for posterity? Please can we? Because arguing over that would make me want to scratch out my own tongue].

I suppose it’s clear enough that a superficial interpretation isn’t what was intended. It’s an old sentiment expressed in many subtly different ways (“writers write” being most succinct). I guess (note guessing) the intended meaning is something along the lines of “Hey, if you can’t find the time to sit down and write reasonably often – even if not for very long – and reasonably regularly, you don’t really want to be a writer enough to. . .” Enough to what I’m not sure. Deserve it? Make it? Finish a novel that no one will ever see? What? What does “a writer” actually mean? Different things to different people.

There’s a truth in the statement nevertheless, for all I’m about to rip it apart. I consider myself to be a writer by pretty much any reasonable definition. It’s my full-time job. I depend on it to pay all the bills for my family. We have no other income source. I have several novels being published each year. I take on ghost-writing work when that doesn’t pay the bills. At the moment I work 40+ hours a week as a writer. I don’t have writer’s block because it’s a luxury I can’t afford. I have to be able to sit down and write whenever and whenever. I write on trains, tubes, in coffee-shops, sitting next to my kids while they watch TV. There are a lot of things I don’t do because it’s more important to write and often there are times when I’d rather do those other things, but I can’t afford to allow myself the hours they ask for [1]. I have deadlines, lots of them. People expect me to meet them. There are consequences if I don’t, largely to do with not getting paid. Stories have to be written in a certain time whether they want to be written or not. Sometimes they come easy, sometimes they come kicking and screaming but they have to come, whatever mood I’m in, whether I or anyone around me is sick or well. Through births, deaths, divorces, marriages, house-moves, you name it, they have to come. So if your dream is to be a full-time professional writer, and you struggle to find a way to sit in front of a keyboard and write, maybe that’s not the career for you. I guess that’s a part of the underlying meaning of that statement (note still “I guess”).

But.

It wasn’t always like that. I’ve been writing on and off for twenty-five years. In that time there were fallow times, years long, were I didn’t work on my stories at all. Was I a writer then? Not sure. Did I want to be? Yes. Should I have given up? Apparently not. And anyway, is that the only way it has to be? Of course not; and who’s to say what happens after you get your first story published. If confidence is an issue, maybe being published blows that issue away and you suddenly can’t stop. Maybe the opposite happens. Maybe you clam up. Who knows? More to the point, who am I or anyone else who doesn’t know you to tell you how its going to be?

“If you can’t find any time to write, you don’t want to be a writer.”

Writers write. As a statement that’s hard to argue against. Anyone who does want to be a writer, yes, obviously you do have to actually write to actually become one. Trying to find the time might be hard but doesn’t happen by itself. It’s good advice, I think, to try and make time almost every day, even if it’s only half an hour, to write if you want that dream to come true, but if you don’t, I’d still say you should slap me for telling you what you should or shouldn’t want. You have a right to want to be anything. I might not take you very seriously, but they’re your dreams, not mine and who am I or anyone else to come along and tell you they’re not valid. For some people maybe time really is a crushing issue. For a lot of aspiring writers, I’d suggest perhaps confidence is more the problem than time. Well maybe now it is. Maybe things will be different in six months or maybe not. Maybe never. A dream is still a dream and we’re all poorer without them. I can think of several people who wanted to be rock stars long ago. Now they live ordinary lives and play in little bands that do pubs and weddings for pocket change and that’s still for them a wonderful thing. I will never be an Olympic Ice-hockey player. I might, in a couple of years, play in a small team of incompetent amateurs and have a huge amount of fun. Many aspiring authors will never publish best-sellers but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. It doesn’t mean that a not-yet-expressed idea should be killed dead here and now. Maybe that novel never happens, but maybe out of the dream of it something unexpected grows instead.

If you want to be a writer, try and find a little time most days to write. Or make some notes or something to inch forward. At least do something about it. Good advice? Yes.

“If you can’t find any time to write, you don’t want to be a writer.” An insidious dream-killing cage of a statement. An authoritarian devourer of possibilities. Probably not meant as it comes across. Definitely ill-conceived. Don’t piss on my dreams, people and I won’t piss on yours.

[1] If that makes it sound like, gee, any other salary-slave job then yes, there are a lot of similarities. Do I wish I was doing something else? Hell no.

Yes, this is a proud-parent post. You have been warned…

A couple of years ago, number one sithling wrote his first story and I put it up because it had knights and dragons in it and also hog-roast, and you can’t say no to hog-roast. Number two sithling has a story too that he’d like to share. So here it is:

The Medusa Myth – Evan Style

by Evan

Age 7

Long ago, there lived a boy called Evan how was living with his mother. During a visit to Rome the Emperor falls in love with Evan’s mother  and kidnaps her. Evan is furious and sends a message to the Emperor demanding for his mother back. The Emperor said: NO! Only if you bring me the head of the fiercest lion in all of Rome. Evan goes to an island in a chariot and meets the goddess Diana who gives him a shield and a magic sword and flying sandals. Evan travels to another island to meet the three sisters who tell him where to find the great beast. The lion lives in a tunnel underneath an old amphitheatre in Rome. Evan uses his flying sandals again to get to Rome quickly and finds the lion in one of the tunnels. During a big long fight,Evan chops off the lion’s head and kills him. He puts the lion’s head in a bag and takes it to the Emperor. The Emperor is very surprised and agrees to let Evan’s mother go.

I believe I may have a synopsis for a short story…

So this is a bit of a counterpoint to last week’s gloom about dementia and the inevitability of people you love coming to an end. This is about wonder.

Number two sithling is a bit of a charmer and a bit of a fireball. He’s seven and lives entirely in the moment. Not all children are like this. Certainly number one was more measured even at that age, but for number two the world is either one vast apocalyptic calamity as far as the eye can see or else it’s a single massive candy-park entirely made of awesome. I rather envy him how everything is all right here, right now. He’s also disgustingly cute, with big brown eyes and the sort of lashes that women kill for and dimples when he smiles that annihilate all cynical thought within fifty paces.

It is entirely possible that some degree of parental bias crept into that last sentence.

Anyway, the sithlings and I went and found one of these leisure centre swimming pools with windy-bendy waterslides. Number one sithling has much love for waterslides and so do I, but number two was scared of them, and since he’s too young to leave on his own that’s always been the end of that. This time we showed up to find the place half empty. We could see right away that the queues were going to be really short. It took a while but eventually we persuaded number two to at least climb the tower so number one could slide. He wasn’t much impressed, but it was obvious what was going to happen next, because when you’re a younger sibling, there’s no way in hell your big brother can be allowed to be better at anything. So we watch number one sithling vanish into a tunnel and number two sithling asks if maybe he and I can slide together, and I say OK, and do we get up to give it a go, only as we’re about to slide, he lets go without me and he’s off, and I hesitate and then I know that if I follow now, he’s going to be floundering in the water right there at the exit and I’m going to hit him like an express train and it’ll be all kinds of bad. So I wait, ears pricked for the terrified wails coming out of the tunnel. Nothing. As soon as it’s safe, I dive in. At the bottom I find him waiting by the splash-pool with a bemused look on his face. No sad-clown face at least (he can still do the sad-clown face when he’s really upset) but I’m fully expecting to take both barrels of parental guilt as he demands to know why I didn’t do what I said and slide with him and keep him safe.

Instead I get the big wide eyes and the baffled what-the-hell-just-happened look, and everything hangs in the balance.

“You OK?” I ask. He nods, so bite the bullet. “How was it.”

And that’s the moment. The moment when his face lights up and a huge grin rips across his face with all three dimples turned up to ten. “It was awesome.”

We spend the rest of the of the afternoon running up the tower and sliding down. And it was, indeed, awesome, but what I still carry with me is the moment he lit up. The moment of discovery when what was forbidden or barred or too frightening to approach suddenly snap-changes into a whole new world of possibility. When I was younger, I used to think the meaning of life lay in those moments, in crossing the boundaries of my own fears, but now I think I only had it half right. It lies, truly, in watching someone else take to the wing and knowing you had a part in showing them their possibilities.

We should give each other wings, not cages. And water-slides too. Because water-slides are indeed awesome.

My dad is, was and always has been, for me, the definition of how to live a good life. My opinion is probably biased. Fact is, I didn’t know him at all for the first half of his life and now I have children of my own, I can be damn sure that the father they know isn’t the same person I was before they were born. That person apparently skied off a cliff and floated down a mountainside with a parachute. This person barely remembers. I’m told it happened. I dimly, if pushed, remember that it probably did and can dredge up a hazy recollection of some floundering in the snow beforehand. That’s not dementia, that’s just a life stuffed full of, well, stuff and leaking badly at the edges. Pretty much like anyone in their middle years, I suppose, although I don’t know. Anyway, point being that my kids will never know I did this because they weren’t there and I barely remember myself. I was a different person then and frankly their existence had a lot to do with the change. I don’t claim either me was better than the other, only that the person my children remember when they grow up won’t be the person I was before they were born. There are whole tranches of me that they’ll never see or know and so I have to suppose that the same is true of my own parents. Sometimes I wonder who they were before I came along and then my brother and we quietly pinned them to the wheel of raising a family.

With my dad, I’ll never know. He doesn’t remember any more and it was always shrouded in mystery even when I was little. He was a chemist and it was often something to do with explosives. For three years before I was born, he was assigned to the British embassy in Washington as a scientific adviser of some sort. It was all a bit Official Secrets Act and not something to be talked about. It all sounds desperately interesting and if a younger me had known about all this then younger me would have hounded him mercilessly to find out all about it. But younger me didn’t. What I do know, because I remember, is that he was sharper, smarter and kinder than I’ll ever be. He taught me chess and quantum physics, and there was always a quiet gleeful joy to growing up in a house filled with books on how to make things explode. He had a quiet strength and willingly gave himself up for the rest of us, as I suppose many parents do. It was one of those solid lives that no one ever remarks upon and has no apparent significance in the greater scheme of things and yet form, in the sum of them, the foundation on which civilisation stands. I can guess and I can imagine who he was before I was old enough to see and measure it for myself, but I can never know. Rather like skiing off a mountainside, perhaps the true story is rather less glorious than the imagined one, but that’s OK. I’ll stick with the imagined one on both counts.

I noticed, years ago, that he was losing that sharpness. Chess wasn’t any fun any more, and then pointless to even try. But he was still there, still my dad. It seemed as though he was simply happy to sit back and rest on his mental laurels, content with what he’d done with his life and pretty happy with the way most of it had turned out and pleased not to have anyone make him think too hard any more because thanks but he was done with that. I kind of quietly said goodbye to him then, told him what I thought of him, how great he’d been, how I’d always looked up to him, how he was the quiet role model and hero of my life. Here and now I’m glad I did that back when I had the chance to see him appreciate it. One of the few unequivocally smart and good things I ever did, for both of us.

Last year he started losing his memory. Badly. Not Altzheimers but some other form of dementia that might as well be. In hindsight I wonder whether the first symptoms of this was what I was seeing, years and years ago, but it doesn’t really make a difference one way or the other. It could be worse. He doesn’t really understand what’s happening to him and seems largely happy enough. I know there are people with Altzheimers who are exquisitely aware of their own fading and live in near-constant terror at their own deconstruction. I can only try to imagine what that must be like. Blissful ignorance seems so much better.

A couple of days ago we picked some vastly overripe tomatoes together. Managing that much was an achievement and I felt a little proud that we’d actually done something, and done it together. Sorting the moldy ones from the rest was a challenge too far, but that didn’t really matter. At the rate things are going, he probably won’t remember my name six months from now.

Losing those we love is inevitable. I’ve had death and I’ve had depression come sit very close by. But fuck you, dementia. In many ways I like you least of all.

I’ve noted in previous posts that I’ve spent some of the last few months working on a new and ultra-secret project; now, finally, with the ink dried and all three manuscripts off on their way to the copy-edit, I can finally reveal my next foray into into fantasy literature and the pseudonym under which I’ll be working:

Skone

A new adventure in Heroic Fantasy by Jack D’Awe

Calling upon the ghosts of heroes past such as Conan, Druss and The Grey Mouser, mixed with the raisins of  contemporary grit, Skone will satisfy the appetite of all fantasy lovers longing for a return to the simple bread-and-jam values of heroic fantasy.

Summer 2013: THE CHRONICLES OF SKONE VOLUME ONE: THE GIRDLE OF DARKNESS

For years, Skone fought in the armies of King Dubius the Great [1]. When the war was done, the great axe-wielding warrior settled in the lands he conquered for his king, starting a family and plying his trade as a baker. BUT NOW a new enemy has arisen! The hordes of the Waffeln are marching behind the unstoppable standard of the unholy Sword of Kake. Reluctant to return to his old ways, Skone stays at home and bakes, but destiny is not prepared to leave him alone. An old friend seeks shelter and is pursued by hunters. When Skone skewers a Waffeln soldier through the eye with a stale baguette, he knows he cannot refuse his calling.

The king’s army is broken, but under the banner of the king’s son, Prince Cniva [2], Skone leads an expedition to a far-off land, seeking the fable Girdle of Darkness, the only power that can stand against the relentless force of Kake.

In the final confrontation, Skone will face his greatest challenge. Can Skone defeat the Waffeln? Can the Girdle of Darkness really contain so much Kake? And coming in later in 2013. . .

Autumn 2013: THE CHRONICLES OF SKONE VOLUME TWO: THE SCALES OF WRATH
Winter 2013: THE CHRONICLES OF SKONE VOLUME THREE: THE LAST CUPCAKE

[1] That’s a good visigoth name, I’ll have you know.
[2] Another good visigoth name :-p

The Hobbit. So this isn’t so much a review as a series of observations which I’ll try to make as non-spoilery as possible but quietly assume you’ve read the book. Purists beware: your source material has been messed with quite considerably although this isn’t necessarily all a bad thing.

The Dwarves: The dwarves come across as something between a gang of Klingons and a bunch of children. Despite all coming from one place originally, they have accents that cover a wide chunk of Europe. They have a similarly absurd range of beards and prosthetics and some of their horses have been to the same rug-manufacturer that George Lucas used for Chewbacca. Despite all this, they worked perfectly well for me. They fit my memory of the book well enough and so does the humour. What I don’t remember is the apparent fact that the dwarves are all 20th level fighters under AD&D rules (20d6 maximum damage irrespective of distance fallen) and also made of rubber and Jell-O and can thus can be dropped from pretty much any damn height you like over and over again without ever picking up any kind of injury. There’s a bit where they find themselves trapped at the edge of a cliff and by then I was thinking: just jump, for pity’s sake. It’s only a mile straight down. You’ll be OK…

Length: I’ve heard it said the movie is too long and they take too long to get out of the Shire. It did feel too long but not for that reason. There’s too much pointless fighting in the second half. Which leads on to…

The White Orc: I get, I think, why this was added. It gives Thorin back-story some of which I think is true to the book and I’m guessing the white orc will become the focal bad-guy for when we eventually get to the Battle of the Five Armies. Doubtless there will be a climactic fight with Thorin that tips the battle and wins the day (I am quietly rolling my eyes). I understand the need to give that enemy a face and thus bring him in in the first movie, but he could have been a) much better, and b) much less present. One encounter with orcs and a back-at-orc-HQ scene would have been enough. Also, since when did orcs live for bloody ages too? And isn’t he a bit Voldemort?

Radegast and Saruman: The other extra material worked for me, even Radegast and his absurd transport system. Incredibly twee, yes, but it felt a part of the world (which is incredibly twee in place), though I haven’t read the relevant source material to see how its accuracy stands up. Radegast and the changes to what happens in Rivendell seemed to me to be about making the six movies into a coherent whole. Not terribly necessary, perhaps, given the first three movies are done and everyone in the world and space has seen them, but the OCD-driven story-teller in me would have done the same.

The Hobbit himself: Grumble. There are a couple of significant scenes (escaping the trolls and escaping the goblin king) where the the events from the book as I remember them are changed in a way that lessens Bilbo’s contribution. Yes, it’s more cinematic for Gandalf to show up and do his GAAANDAAALFFF!!! thing but it takes away from the Hobbit himself. Most of all, these changes felt unnecessary. I found the movie to be largely exquisitely gorgeous and I don’t think it  needs nearly as many ‘big moments’ as it thinks it does. As a consequence, in order to big-up his part in the company, Bilbo does something at the end which seems a unlikely, especially given that none of the battle-hardened dwarves do it first. Shame about that.

There’s a lot more humour than in The Lord of the Rings and it verges on slapstick. Mostly it worked for me. Mostly. Gollum is in the movie for ten minutes maybe and totally steals it. A good half hour of material was, I suspect, sneakily inserted by the New Zealand Tourist Board. I’d have been very happy to have had more of that and fewer CGI wargs. The whole thing was lovely to watch (in 2D at 24 frames/second anyway) – shame about the unnecessary added fighting and GAAANDAAALFF!!! moments.

This is one of those thoughtful posts. Sorry.

Right: in the last few years I’ve seen various arguments go back and forth about the “new” fantasy, grim and gritty and dirty and a bit nasty. Or possibly a lot nasty. I’ve seen the argument, presented in many different guises, of “but that’s how it was,” and I’ve seen the argument back of “how WHAT was, exactly” and “but isn’t that the point of fantasy – to NOT be how it was?” and I have sympathy for all three points. I’ve seen what I reckon is my favourite: “but that’s how it IS,” which I take to be an allusion to the world being an uncaring and fundamentally hostile place. Well I’m not sure it is, but it does often seem that way. One argument in particular has lingered – that the message heroic fantasy sends is that if you try and try and try and try and work really really hard to do something, you will ultimately succeed, and that’s not how the world works and to be taught that heroic fantasy message simply leads to hopelessly unrealistic expectation. I largely buy that argument but not its conclusion. I’m not going to go into it here because I’ve covered it before.

However.

I’ve also changed my work patterns lately. This is just one of those things – every few months I take to working in a different way. It’s not even a conscious choice, more a fitting work around the rest of life in a different way as the rest of life constantly warps and mutates and changes (and it does, if you have children, by the way, because what they’re like no isn’t what they’ll be like in six months, not will it ever be that way again. It’s a constant adaptation to their constant adaptation, and it would terribly nice if I ever in any way saw the next change coming with more clarity that it’s simple probability. But that’s by the by). The long and the short is that I now work out now and then, often enough to make a “workout” playlist of stuff to listen to. Thumping stuff to get the blood moving, that sort of thing. And even if I then go and listen to Berlioz or podcasts, it’s the contents of that playlist that got me thinking. There’s some newer music in it, a few tracks that I’ve grown to like in my middle years but most of it turned out to be stuff I used to listen to decades ago and it’s all angry angry stuff (good for workouts) with a subtext of addiction and depression and powerlessness and death and you knew I was a goth, right? Oh and also quite a lot of Motorhead, which doesn’t really fit at all but then maybe I was more of an awkwardly angry hippy than a goth and…

Oh never mind. Because the world may be fundamentally hostile or uncaring but it’s also fundamentally ridiculous and sometimes you have to revel in the simple sensation of being alive by listening to Killed By Death very very loudly several times.

And it got me thinking, that playlist, of who I used to be a long time ago before I knew who I was, and also that the message of heroic fantasy, of which I read a lot at the time) – try and try and try, try long and try hard and don’t give up and in the end you’ll get a cookie, well it might not really work for our exterior struggles, but for most people who have much opportunity to read for pleasure in the first place (and I say most knowing there are people for whom this generalisation will be starkly false), perhaps the struggles that matter most aren’t the ones we have with the outside world but the ones we have with ourselves, with our own inner contradictions. In those battles, we are our own champions, like it or not, and everyone else is the plucky sidekick. Maybe that’s where stories of heroes have their worth. I can try and try and try all I want to be the best son/dad/husband/wife/writer/singer/poet/lover/ninja/muse/pigeon-whispering particle physicist/whatever in the world and with seven billion other people out there there’s a good chance I’ll never get good enough to be worthy of remark. But in my head it’s just me and my demons, no billions of other people. And maybe I can try and try and try to be happy with merely being quite good at some of those things, and maybe it’s because of all those stories of bloody-minded heroes who never give up despite the odds that I can believe that one day those might converge.

So I’ll still keep my heroes, thanks, and I might even write some when I’m done with dragons.

I never used to like swimming very much as a kid. Partly because I wasn’t much good at it. I actually can’t remember anyone teaching me very much either, although I suppose they must have done. I remember not wanting to be able to swim for a long time because being able to actually not sink meant having to go and do swimming in the big pool where the water was way, WAY too cold when you were used to the little pool.

Still, despite my petulant reluctance, the ability to swim arrived like an unwanted government, born from an ugly union of the relentless force of The System and colossal indifference. For reasons I never quite understood at the time, some of my friends even liked going to the pool and even viewed it as a treat (why? And where was the appeal? Five minutes in and I’d swum half a width, touched the bottom, done a mushroom float, been splashed in my face and then I was bored because the only thing left to do was pee in the water). I never got it and rarely went, but on those few occasions that we went to a swimming pool for “fun” I remember the phenomena of Scary Joyless Beardy Men. See, half or maybe two thirds of the pool was for the likes of me to tit about in, and then there was the dreaded Line of Orange Floats that carried every bit as much weight as the Berlin Wall and for much the same reasons: over on my side was a place of laughing and splashing and playful games. Over There was a place of relentless work, back and forth, up and down, on and on without rest or sleep. The home of the Scary Joyless Beardy Men. I don’t know why I only ever noticed the men or why they generally had beards, but they were clearly Joyless because who the hell with an ounce of fun left in them would spent any of their time just swimming up and down, back and forth, on and on when they could have been doing almost anything else. And Scary partly because they were big and relentless and had beards and partly because they didn’t half get grumpy if you crossed into their Zone Of No Fun and accidentally got in the way but mostly because they were so utterly incomprehensible. WHY WOULD ANYONE DO THAT? WHY? They were what I thought East Germany was like, only they were in my swimming pool (I also quietly resented them for using up a portion of the pool so that I couldn’t swim widths. Lengths meant going into the deep bit and that was scary in an entirely Here-Lurks-Great-Cthulhu-Within-The-Fathomless-Depths sort of way).

I’d forgotten all of that when I started swimming a couple of months back, until I caught sight of myself in the mirror and there he was, a vision from my childhood: Scary Joyless Beardy Man. Only this time it was me, and so now I know that all the Scary Joyless Beardy Men that I remember maybe weren’t joyless at all. Maybe they were just thinking of far-away places and far-off worlds instead.

Once upon a time there were a bunch of bankers who had made themselves very, very rich. Granted special privileges by the highest authorities in their sphere of influence, they were frequently exempt from local laws and taxes. Over time they developed a goodly number of tricks to avoid even the laws to which they were expected to comply, mostly by doing exactly the thing they weren’t supposed to and calling it something else. Distrusted by the population at large for their mysterious and secretive ways, they made themselves indispensable to the rulers of their time, though the states they ruled were destitute with population taxed to the point of open revolt.

As a result of Barclays’s admission of its misconduct, its extraordinary cooperation, its remediation efforts and certain mitigating and other factors, the department agreed not to prosecute Barclays for providing false LIBOR and EURIBOR contributions, provided that Barclays satisfies its ongoing obligations under the agreement for a period of two years. The non-prosecution agreement applies only to Barclays and not to any employees or officers of Barclays or any other individuals.

In the case of the Templars, when Philip IV turned on them, a lot of bankers were burned at the stake. Just quietly noting that interesting fact. Not that Philip IV was any better, all things considered. The “great treasure” of the Templars was supposedly shipped in secret to Nova Scotia. This is obviously a daft notion – clearly they took it to the Cayman Islands.