Cat simulator

Didn't get much writing done tonight and Terry Cavanagh's Chat Chat is to blame, (aside from a few wedding preparations). The purpose of the game is to be a cat. That means exploring, sleeping, screeching, napping, catching mice and depositing them in a bloody mess on your owner's doorstep. As seasoned cat watchers we found this all too familiar.

National Not Novel Writing Month

I've done a bit more on the novel today. In the initial writing phase I was hoping to get as much done in as short a time as possible and signed up to National Novel Writing Month in October. Call it cheating but I'd decided, in order to capitalise on my enthusiasm, to get a head start before November began, especially as I had a few weekends away in November. I wrote intensively and ended up feeling knackered. When November rolled around I switched into poetry mode and didn't write a single word of prose during NaNoWriMo, picking it back up in December just to be awkward.

Now my feeling is that a little and often is the way to go. It gives things the time they need to develop naturally. Even so, I can see a few distractions on the horizon: other projects, various computer games, reading and a busy social calendar. But that's fine; distractions are the fun part of life.

Words and wisdom

After a run I spent the morning reading Seneca: On the Shortness of Life, Consolation to Helvia and On Tranquility of Mind. I played some guitar in the afternoon and came up with the verse and chorus of a song that could work for Distant Signal. I'll pick it up tomorrow and see if there's anything there.

Something led me from Seneca to Edward Conze's translation of 'The Diamond Sutra', where I found this:

"Wisdom will use terms always in such a way that the original meaning is revealed. And men were wise long before they became clever. This linguistic correlate of Jung's collective unconscious is surely worthy of greater attention than it usually receives."

He goes on to quote I.A. Richards, Meaning of Meaning:

" No one who has used a dictionary - for other than orthographic reasons - can have escaped the shock of discovering how very far ahead of us our words are. How subtly they already record distinctions towards which our minds are still groping. If we could read this reflection of our minds aright, we might learn nearly as much about ourselves as we shall ever wish to know."

This is one of the reasons why poetry can have such an effect on us: it links words by their submerged part.

A rethink

I'm going to refocus this blog to concentrate more explicitly on the projects I'm currently involved in. The blog should benefit from a narrative arc as things progress.

• I'm 30,000 words into the first draft of a novel.
• I'm roughly halfway through writing a book of poetry.
• I'm getting ready to get back in the studio with Distant Signal.
• I'm sitting on a bunch of recordings that will eventually make up the next Uffmoor Woods Music Club album.
• I've got a stack of books to read.

I'll still post about places, art and ideas that interest me whilst trying to be a bit more open about what I'm doing.

Double rainbow on an industrial estate