By the Time I Receive My Passport, I will be Out of Date

I am sitting here waiting… and waiting… I have no option other than to sit here and wait… and wait… because Secure Mail Services are delivering my new passport sometime today. That is sometime between 9.00 a.m. and 5.00 p.m.

They can't be more specific than that because they actually don't give a fig that I and everyone else they deliver to have to sit around all day waiting… and waiting…

It would be impossible, of course, with present day communication technology being as primitive as it is, for them to be any more specific.

On the other hand, if you have something delivered by Amazon you can track its passage from start to finish. Obviously this is an aberration.

The BBC recently tracked an Osprey migrating from South Africa to its breeding nest in Cumbria every inch of the way. This too is an aberration.

But Secure Mail Services know you have no option other than to wait as they are delivering a document of fundamental importance.

Their slogan should be "Let them eat cake. Let them they wait…" (And the government wonders why the nation is becoming increasingly obese when it's all down to the Passport Office and their courier of choice.)

On a more positive note, my writing progresses. Admittedly at the same pace as Secure Mail Services, nonetheless, it progresses. However, the paradox is the more I write, the less I seem to accomplish. My book is shrinking!

I shall explain.

This may sound tangental but I read on Caroline Smaile's blog that she gave a writer's workshop last Saturday where she discussed how she writes. She gives an example of an item that inspired a whole scene, a photograph, and talks of memory recall being colour coded.

My book, the one I have been working on longest, started off as a huge blob of clay that I bought one day. I started to play with it having no real object in mind, pulling it, extruding it, generally exploring what was possible. I left it. Came back to it and decided I didn't like the overall shape but there were a few details I could work on. And so it continued. Eventually I could see, in a myopic manner, some sort of definitive shape appearing.

Unlike my old career as an advertising copywriter where one spends half one's life trying to distract yourself or a process of thought to look at the problem from a new perspective, writing has to be methodical. Routine and discipline, as I have mentioned before, are of the essence.

It is within this process that I discover the creative spark is generated. I find that as I am writing, I will type a line that expresses some thought that has arrived unbidden. Though often unwelcome, it seem, on reflection, necessary, even inevitable.

It is unwelcome in the sense that the new thought has consequences that takes the scene in different direction from the one to which you had initially imagined it was heading. And as one scene changes, even marginally, it will invariably affect those preceding and succeeding. The last time this happened I actually laughed out loud as I just knew I could not pretend it hadn't happened but would have to deal with it.

Consequently much of what I have already written will have to be consigned to the recycling bin. Hence my book appears to be shrinking. (However, I did say the recycling bin; much of the material can be rescued with more work.)

I fear I can hear the tutting of more experienced writers as they shake their collective heads at my hopeless methodology. My only excuse is that it is my first book and I wrote my MA dissertation in much the same fashion and I got a distinction. So there!

Snail Mail Image (with slight amendment) copyright of Gregg & Tracy Spender

Mr Smug Bites Off More Than He Can Chew

I have just been flicking through the blogs of other members of the Novel Racers, though I am not sure I am still an official member, when I looked in on JJ's blog. She is, to quote, a 'British woman in Bangkok: living, writing, drinking tea.'

She recently returned to England for a break during the course of which she met up with fourteen other Novel Racers. What courage! I would feel totally inadequate in such a gathering. I feel faint just thinking about it.

It is a peculiar calling to write. In many respects it is nothing more than a childlike desire to show off. A desire to hear the oohs and ahhs, the sighs, gasps and laughter at all the right places. Above all, it is the desire to hear unalloyed praise and prolonged applause.

The last thing you need is someone else hogging the spotlight. And the last, last thing you need is to meet fourteen others all harbouring the same desires yet neurotically trying to disguise the fact.

I would dribble. I would become hopelessly drunk. I would behave completely inappropriately. They would have to replace the carpet.

JJ nobly claims she was astonished at the generosity of published writers.

Think the worst of me, but if I were a published writer I too would be generous to the unpublished. I would be lavishly extravagant with my generosity. With the aid of a crane and bucket, I would ladle out massive portions. People would stagger away and die of my generosity.

I, for my part, would return home to swell up and explode from a surfeit of smugness - having uttered one single, fatal, wafer-thin, patronising comment too many.

Return To Sender

This is an error. I was learning how to post YouTube stuff and found I had posted Mr Creosote (see above) twice. Now I find I cannot delete this post but have to fill the space with drivel.

Then I remembered I had done a doodle that seemed singularly appropriate for the post that follows. Et voila!
While on the subject of posts that have been misdirected, does anyone have any idea how you delete a post you don't want or have created in error?

Amy's Story Illustrated

I thought I would post the final, well final all bar a bit of fiddling, versions of two of my illustrations for Amy's book.

They took me all Sunday to complete but I hope, now that I know the effect I want to create and how to achieve it, the others won't take me so long.


However, as most of the story takes places under the sea, I can foresee further challenges.

As a postscript, I was discussing the disappearing view of the sea at work with a colleague, a new building that is being erected has finally obliterated the only patch of blue visible from our offices, when he made some comment that has given me the plot for my next Amy book.


This is important as Danny, Amy's father didn't feature in Amy Book One, a weakness of which I was always aware and slightly embarrassed. I don't mind teasing him occasionally, okay, all the time, but excluding him altogether was unfortunate.

But now I have a plot in which he can star with the young Amy so the balance should be restored in the Danny/David relationship. (Well, until Manchester United beat Chelsea in the Champions League Final as I support the former and he the latter.)

HB B 2B 3B 4B 5B 6B

Does anyone else enjoy drawing? If so do they find it a struggle to know when to leave well alone?

I completed two more pictures for Amy's Story last night (see my last blog), which, incidentally, still has no title. I then looked again at the drawing I posted last time.

Oh fateful!

Hmm! I thought, Mum's hair looks like a bad hair day. More like a badly fitting helmet day. So… rub, rub rub… fiddle, fiddle, fiddle. And I am still not sure whether it is improved or not.
I shall have to leave it to stew for a time and come back to it to see what I have achieved. Or not.

In the interest of objectivity, I post my two latest drawings. (Or should that be vanity? No, OBJECTIVITY. It does help to remove the subject from oneself to see it clearly. IT DOES. IT DOES. IT DOES.)

One is of granddad, i.e. me, meeting Mum and Amy, the other of Mum and Amy swimming underwater. As before, no background detail has been added.

Happy Birthday Amy!

It's my first granddaughter's third birthday today. Amy. Dear, round-headed, Amy.

For her present I wrote her a short story, least it started off as a short story but gradually extended itself to 6,000 words.

It was an interesting exercise.

A very particular audience. A story that I had in my head from start to finish. So it was simply a matter of describing what I could see in an appropriate way governed by a desire not to talk down or even at Amy.

So I included words that she might not understand.

I remember being read Peter Rabbit as a young child and adoring the word 'soporific' which appeared on the first page, as far as I remember. I had no idea what soporific meant but it sounded wonderful, then, once explained, sounded onomatopoeic.

I have never forgotten soporific.

I feel sleepy just repeating it.

My big problem has being to illustrate it. Children are difficult to characterise. I made many false starts. But yesterday, at lunch break, I walked past a gallery and saw a big crude, forceful painting of a child and thought "Ah ha!'.

I had found my style. OK, someone else's style. But now mine.

For I intensely dislike the simple reductionist style of Disney. Again, from my childhood, I remember the illustrations of Beatrix Potter, E. H. Shepard and John Tenniel.


They were illustrations that illustrated. For the function of an illustration, to my mind, is to add to, and not just act as literal translations of, the text.

What they heighten is the dark side of the story. They create an atmosphere, which, though inspired by the words, create a setting for the words.

They are pictures you can visit and revisit and always find something new.

My drawing is just of Mum and Amy, Amy peering up at the dizzying height of Brighton's Victorian station, without the background detail yet added. (I ought to add that Mum is very pregnant. Her second is due in mid-June. Otherwise she would, of course, be slim as a very slim pencil that has recently been on a diet.)


The problem I now face is colour. I am not a brilliant colourist. I might have to call on the talents of, Sue, a dear friend who has recently discovered she has a talent, a real talent, for watercolours.

Of course,some, the cruel among you, might say I am not a brilliant illustrator. But I like it.

A Rose by Any Other Name is … Plagiarism?

I was discussing art with a work colleague who is an artist. Most of my colleagues are artists of one form or another; painters, writers, musicians or singers. It's the kind of job that attracts artists. It is very flexible. All you have to do is commit to a minimum of 21 hours a week. There are three shifts a day; morning, afternoon and evening. Each shift is three hours with a 15 minute break after the first hour and a half.

The fifteen minute break is very important. We smokers all assemble outside, to one end of the revoltingly ugly building we occupy. It was opened in 1963 by Mayor Toopompoustobetrue and Chairman of the Planning Committee, Councillor Backhander. We smokers are not allowed to place ourselves in front of the building, not even on the pavement. This despite the fact that we pay to maintain this public thoroughfare with our local taxes. Perhaps we are perceived as raising the tone of the place.


We smokers are now the healthiest individuals on the workforce. Every break, no matter the weather, we troop outside to face the elements. Come rain, snow, blizzard, or gale with a chill factor of 20 below freezing, you will find us huddled around warming our fingers on our glowing cigarette butts. And, unlike our prissy non-smoking colleagues, who remained glued to their computers throughout their break, wasting their precious eyesight in order to see who has posted yet another anonymous picture of another nonentity on their Facebook, we converse.

So, as I said, I was discussing art with a work colleague who is an artist. He was telling me that he had been commissioned to paint one of the Stations of the Cross for a vicar friend of the family. The Stations of the Cross, for those who are not Catholic or High Anglican, are fourteen pictures depicting events in the Passion of Christ from His condemnation to the placing of His body in the tomb. Of the fourteen, only eight events are referred to directly in the Gospels, the others being accrued or mythologised over time. Paul, my painter friend, has decided to paint the Resurrection, not a conventional scene in this context, which got us into a discussion of the role of the Stations. I, having been raised a Catholic, thought his idea excellent for, if you are a believer, the death of Christ is the necessary presage to His Resurrection. And it is His Resurrection that is His final triumph, indeed, one can argue it is the whole purpose of His life. I ruminated on my belief that the traditional role of the Stations, i.e. the depiction of Christ's death, was a means of subjugating the faithful by weighing them down with guilt. (We sinners, of course, being responsible for His death, or He would have… er… lived to a great age and passed peacefully away in a hospice?) Hence the absence of the Resurrection. It offers hope to all and no ruler can possibly allow his subjects to live in hope. Fear, imaginary or real, as we know from current times, is the proper way to keep people in their place. (As an unnecessary postscript to this paragraph, I am no longer a believer, neither is Paul.)

However, I am drifting from the point on which I want to expound.

I was discussing art with Paul, the artist, as I might have mentioned, when we got onto the subject of content, style, Carravagio, and plagiarism. The latter topic particularly interested me. Paul quoted some well known artist, whose name temporarily escapes me, as saying something along the lines of 'Steal everything'. This, of course, is now totally acceptable in most arts. It is called sampling in the music business and irony in art. But it seems still to remain taboo in writing. The only author I can think of who openly nicked others' work was William S. Burroughs of Naked Lunch fame. (As part of a writing exercise, I wrote an existential piece that stole brazenly from Burroughs, Miller and Kerouac. It leaves you breathless but was fun to write.)

So, during the course of this conversation on art, and, in particular, on plagiarism, it occurred to me that I might have found the solution to a block against which I have been head-banging with one of my books. It concerns death. As already intimated, I do not believe in an afterlife, least not the way I was taught, however, I find myself with two subjects who have died yet insist on haunting my novel. I give nothing away. The book is not of horror, Goths, spirituality or the like; in fact, it is hard to say what my book is of. Much sweat mostly. I can say it is not a totally serious book. That said, I do not want it to be frivolous so have been searching for a way to underpin it with a thoughtful theme.

Death seems appropriately grave. But how to approach the subject in these secular times bookended by fundamentalists of one belief or another? It becomes more difficult if one's belief is, at worst, vague and, at best, lost in very complex philosophical ideas. The last thing I want to inflict on the world is a didactic work masquerading as a novel, Sartre's Nausea being a case in point. So, I thought, why not nick the ideas of other novelists, past, present and dead, and play around with them? I accept, of course, this is not a novel idea. However, as one thought inevitably followed another, I pondered on the idea of lifting lines on the subject wholesale from other writers. Why not? Context is all. Placing lines written in another time, of a different place, inhabited by other characters, into my novel will create a new interpretation, a new elucidation on the topic.