Writing

This article is actually a warm-up, just to get a decent flow of words coming from my fingertips before I start work properly. You see, today I’m about to attempt something I’ve never actually done before: a short story to submit for publication. Sure, I made several abortive attempts at a novel, but the simple fact of writing twenty times the material makes the process rather different. That said, I don’t think I’m going to be able to just bang this one out.

Normally, I tend to prefer a certain amount of naturalism with my short story writing. I don’t tend to need to gloss chunks to force the story out (as I did with bits of the novel), so my second drafts tend to be tweaks rather than whole re-writes. However, this time I have a concept and direction, but no plot. This means that I’ll probably end up keeping the dialogue from the first draft as a script before writing a full second draft around what the characters say and then amalgamate the two for the prettiest versions of the description. And I suspect there will have to be major structural changes between the two drafts, too.

The daft thing is, I’ve never been great at deadlines, tending to do last-minute blazes as the final date looms. Once again, I have the exciting new experience of starting a project a whole month before it needs to be submitted, if only because I suspect it will take me that long to write what I fully expect to be four drafts.

The plan is this:

Draft One: Wordvomit. Just get the plot on the page. My dialogue’s at its best on the first run, but the rest is probably best left as blunt-instrument description. It can be pretty later.

Draft Two: Using the dialogue from Draft One, take the badly-written plot and rewrite it properly with nicer descriptions and better structuring.

Draft Three: Tweak Draft Two and exchange any descriptions that came out better in Draft One. Ask my best critical friends to read and comment.

Draft Four: Rewrite to resolve any problems perceived by Draft Three’s readers.

As I said, this is my first attempt at actually dealing with any kind of publication process, so I don’t have high expectations. You probably won’t see it in print. But if it does get to the print stage, I’ll put up links here and on facebook for you to get your grubby mits on the anthology it’s included in.

Hopefully, this will serve at the very least to get me back into the habit of writing, and mean that I start putting my head above the parapet a bit more online.

Just Like Living in Paradise

I get frustrated with myself for letting this turn into an infrequent depression blog, but I need an outlet and I never seem to have the motivation to write at any other time at the moment. I may well disconnect Nevermore from my facebook account, because I know that I’m more timid than I used to be owing to the fact that so much of my audience comes from people I have to look in the eye these days.

Anyway, the reason I’m saying this is because tonight is looking like a Bad Night. In fact, I’ve started doing regular PHQ9 and GAD7 tests in the last couple of months, and my scores from this evening confirm that it’s been a bad fortnight as a whole as far as my brain is concerned. I get this a lot – euphoric feelings crossed with depression symptoms leaving me happy and smiling when I’m actually at breaking point. And tonight I’ve crashed. That voice is whispering in my ear, trying to tell me that my whole life is pointless, despite my protestations that I’m clearly achieving something (and I’d achieve it a damn sight more quickly if you’d just shut the fuck up).

The thing is, I am alone right now. Or, in many respects, I may as well be. I live with my mum for reasons discussed in previous posts, but I genuinely can’t talk to her about a lot of my psychological shit. (Or shouldn’t, though I do have my moments of weakness.) In an nutshell this is because a lot of my problems boil down to things from my teenage home life, and she’s damaged by this stuff as well because culprit A is my dad. So any discussion about my problems tends to turn into a depressed monologue from her. This isn’t helpful to either of us. So when it’s 2 a.m. and I feel completely unloved and unlovable, I have nowhere to turn to but here – where I can cry in the dark and not feel like I’m imposing myself on someone. If somebody reads it, that’s a bonus. If somebody even gives a shit, that’s a bigger bonus. At least I have the satisfaction of getting the words out in a place where nobody has to listen if they don’t want to.

So here goes, and forgive me for babbling: I feel paralysed. There are things I need to do, and things I want to do, and I’m too fucked up to just prioritise them and get on with it. I feel agitated and restless, but I can’t bring myself to actually do anything because if it’s too important I can’t bear the sense of responsibility and if it’s too trivial I keep thinking about all the important things I need to do. I need to fucking SLEEP and get my life in order because my whole day goes to buggery if I’m tired, but here I am tired but too scared of not sleeping to be able to sleep. And to put the top bloody hat on it, I’m having trouble believing that any of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis at the moment would give a flying fuck if I died tomorrow.

There. It’s done. I think I’m going to finish writing one of those songs I’m still working on and bollocks to it if I’m a zombie tomorrow.

Determination

Right. Yes. So I keep making rash promises. I said back in January that I’d begin blogging properly again, and you’ve now had over two months of silence from me. I owe you an explanation.

Firstly, I got sick. The was a throat virus going round that knocked me out of the game for a week (I genuinely couldn’t speak for several days), and has lingered in the form of an annoying dry patch even up to now. As I got well enough to start working again after that, my old nemeses reared their ugly heads.

Firstly, insomnia. Insomnia destroys me because I tend not to have whole sleepless nights – I get three to five hours near the end and a consequent reluctance to get out of bed. And then a day of fatigue throws my appetite, so I eat utter junk willy nilly just because I recognise that I need to eat at some point. And then I have no desire to do anything and no motivation to do anything other than go to my paid job. Insomnia has been plaguing me until about a week ago.

Then comes my tendency to get overwhelmed. I laid out what I wanted to do with my time a couple of posts ago, and that plan hasn’t changed. But when you’re dog tired, facing half an hour of exercise followed by a piano lesson and a language lesson is too much. Even though doing these things helps me wind down for the night, I only have the energy to go to bed and lie staring at the ceiling. So I try to do those things in the day. And when they are added to my writing plans and my domestic tasks, suddenly I can’t decide which of the ten very important things I should do first. Thus I hide from it all by spending hours clicking uselessly at facebook.

My tendency to indecision stems from my childhood, namely a father who would find something else for you to do if you were visibly doing something he didn’t think of as ‘productive’. I often can’t face doing what I want to do because I feel pressured to do something else that somewhere in my mind I think is more important to an outside observer. The thing is, I’ve known about this problem since I was a teenager and knew how to combat it: mentally give myself permission to do what I want to do at a given moment. i.e. I want to read a book right now, so bollocks to any expectation that I should be doing the vacuuming.

The last couple of nights, I have read rather than forcing myself to bed. It’s 2.30 a.m. and I am writing a blog. Sure, this is chaos, and not the routine I set out for myself, but it’s better than trawling random fan pages for lolcats. And if I can achieve this post, simply because I want to, I can do everything else.

From Ashes We Rise

A big part of any of my drive to deal with life’s dissatisfactions is to reconnect with blogging. It’s been my hobby for over eight years now, and I suppose I associate it with a certain amount of good in my life. I’ve come into contact with some fantastic people through it (Lemonsquash, Boso, and Mikeachim to name but a few), and as a regular reader you see people change and grow. Blogging has changed over the last few years, going from personal diaries right at the start of Web 2.0 (and how long has it been since you heard that phrase? Last time you logged into MySpace, I’ll warrant…) to a highly networked “blogosphere” where some commentators get more attention than payrolled newspaper columnists.

Am I jealous? A little. I like attention. But then, I acknowledge that my writing on Nevermore is scatterbrained and mediocre, and that I leave overlong hiati whenever things start to unravel in my life. Furthermore, I’ve never worked to gain respect in a particular sphere – I don’t specialise. I am, at the end of the day, just a vanity diarist

If I really wanted to commercialise (at least in the sense of pursuing a readership), I know exactly which posts pull in the readers from beyond my own facebook links: Doctor Who reviews. I did keep a separate Doctor Who blog for a few years, but decided to merge it back into Nevermore as it was easier to manage one blog on a single platform. I could just become an expert Whovian, reviewing episodes and my latest DVD purchases, and maybe Big Finish and 2 Entertain might start sending me free stuff, but I value the voice I use to shout to the wider world too much. I really do want to whinge about my problems to anyone who cares to listen, rant about political things that upset me, and tell stories about things in my life that amuse me.

So what will I do instead? Well, my life has not been my own for about four years now, and I’m just starting to claw things back. There are things I value about who I used to be, and blogging ought to make a comeback as one of my hobbies. That includes getting out and reading again. Many of my old favourites have stopped blogging, but in a world of vanity publishing there are many more to discover. Soon, I may even update my links page to reflect who I’m following these days. The reviews will begin again, time permitting, and I think I’ll stick to my old self-imposed deadlines and word-limits. You never know, one day somebody might ask me to write for a magazine, so the ability to produce consistently would be a useful skill to have.

You’re going to be hearing more from me. Nevermore is back from a two-year wander in the wilderness. Aren’t you lucky?

New Year’s Resolutions

Normally I’d finish off the year by putting up a review headed by links to the first post of each month. 2012 doesn’t seem worth it, however, as I’ve blogged that little. I’ve averaged a single post in two months in some places. My first post last year now seems almost ironic, especially since I said I was going to make it “The year of the Rob”. As it happens, while last year was no disaster by any means, it was more of a very troubled period of setting up. I wanted to get my finances stable by getting a solid job, get Harlequin’s Kiss established on the Birmingham pub circuit, and generally get my life in order after what had been a very difficult few years. Instead, I’m living in circumstances with reduced financial commitments and I can see the path forward for the band, but I’m still very deeply dissatisfied with my life.

What does that all mean? Well, it means I’ve bought the time to find a job I actually want, so financial stability doesn’t have to come hand-in-hand with my soul being drained away. As for the band, we have openings now that could mean we break Birmingham and Leicester at the same time if certain cards are played right. This is positive, and means we could gain some momentum rather than just ambling along. As for my life in general… well, that’s another story.

By now, I should speak French and Farsi fluently, and be able to play the piano. I can’t do any of these things, and that boils down to sheer lack of effort. This will be rectified. I’m out of shape. The only way to rectify this is to eat less, stop eating shit, cut down on drinking, and exercise more. This is surely doable. I don’t normally do New Years resolutions, because they are frankly ridiculous. Take your life in hand now, whatever “now” is! But the settling down of the factors that have been stopping me taking my life in hand has roughly coincided with the start of 2013. Today my new life begins. Monday has to be my rest day from certain things, due to time issues created by rehearsing that night. But I will force myself to bed and set Tuesday morning’s alarm according to my new regime. Tuesdays to Saturdays I will be spending 20 minutes with an aerobics video and 45 minutes with my own exercise routine. Every night I will practice the piano for 15 minutes (working up to half an hour when it becomes habit). I will work through my “Teach Yourself Farsi” book by a section a night and learn four new words each day (feel free to challenge me on what today’s words are). And, with any luck, all of this will make me feel like I’m becoming the person I should be.

Happy New Year one and all! And I hope you can make what you want of the year, too.

The Rise of Harlequin’s Kiss

To happier things, if only because Nevermore is running the risk of becoming “Rob McDermott’s Infrequent Depression Blog (TM).”

I haven’t mentioned Harlequin’s Kiss for nearly a year, and the last place I left the story was with us recovering from the big split-up but still minus a drummer. Well, things have fortunately changed for the better on that front – we’re now a functioning band and beginning our careers on the Birmingham pub circuit.

The tale of the new era began last February when, after a slog of auditions, we finally picked up one Andy Kelly on drums. Things have moved more quickly since then, but not in the usual way bands develop, as far as I can tell. All this time on, we’ve not got proper demo’s yet, but that hasn’t stopped us. You see, we got very cynical about putting material together, keeping our blues tracks in practice while working on some rockier riffs we had in the vaults. Add to the mix a classic rock cover and a modern pop one, and suddenly we found we didn’t need other people to give us gigs – we could fill out an hour ourselves! So off we toddled to the pub round the corner from the studio.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. Your mate or a family member has a band, and they do their first gig, and you go along to support them and they turn out to be shit. Well, that’s the scenario we were all expecting, the band and the audience alike, to a greater or lesser extent. Some of us as musicians hadn’t been in front of an audience for a while, so any one of us could have choked – and if I’d done that it would have been a complete disaster. As it happened, we blew the roof off the place, got offered a gig in Leicester on the spot, and have been constantly asked by the pub’s regulars when we’re coming back.

Then the setbacks happened. We spent two weeks recording demo’s (the mixing is still in progress), then took a forced two weeks off as André (the guitarist) had to move house – and it was a big move. It was two months after that that we finally got back on track and set about preparing more gigs. So we’re working on a Christmas party at the Gunmaker’s Arms on Bath Street on December 14th, and we’ve played our second gig in the back room of the Lamp Tavern in Digbeth – eagle-eyed readers may remember that this was where we used to rehearse a couple of years ago. We’ll get some material for you to listen to up soon, but in the meantime you should come and see what the fuss is about for yourselves.

I Can’t Get No Sleep

So my major concern over the last week has been a serious bout of insomnia. I know what’s coming when it happens, because I’ve lived through the peaks and troughs of my health for years now, but I’m still not entirely used to it. Sometimes I’ll go through phases of serious fatigue, where my body demands that I sleep for twelve hours of a night while still telling me I’m tired afterwards. This I can combat with coffee. The worst is when, no matter how tired I get, I can’t sleep for more than three hours at a time. I lie down, I sleep, and then I wake up again. Well, the wisdom that everyone will trot out for insomnia is “do something else for a bit, if you can’t go to sleep” so I try to get up. While I’m laid out in bed I’m wide awake, but as soon as I try to get up, I feel like I need to lie down again. So I lie in bed for about seven hours each night, but only sleep for three of them.

As you can imagine, this isn’t the greatest state to be in when you’ve just started a job, even if it’s a job you’ve done before for several years. My old cinema (for I have returned – I’ve got to fuel my rock ‘n’ roll ambitions somehow) has changed the till system recently, running the things off an entirely different program to the one they had when I last worked there. And after a day of being shown round the basics, I was fool enough to want to handle money on a Saturday afternoon. Cue a young colleague from the last recruitment drive laughing at me because I was stressing out while it was only medium-busy. Little did she know that I barely knew what day of the week it was, or even my own name.

I’ve only just come out of a six-week situation of oversleeping, but I put that down to my body’s desperate attempts to make me actually stop moving and rest after the house move. Other fun symptoms included two attempts at having a migraine, inexplicable late-night vomiting, and all the strength draining out of my muscles for several days. Maybe the insomnia was my way of getting back to normality, or perhaps just another phase in the ever-more-frustrating cycle of my biology.

Such musings aside, last night I finally crashed. I’ve slept for a glorious nine hours (Nine! Praise the Lord!), and I feel somewhat drained. Hopefully, this is the end of it for a while, but I can’t be certain that it’s not either a temporary reprieve or the beginning of my return to a fatigued coffee-zombie state. Beeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaans….