Thursday 10 September 2009

A Story (With Words)

Being faced with a keyboard is one of the most terrifying and most exciting points in my day. You look at it: its potential, its words, its indifferent jumble of letters, its arbitrary arrangement, see how your fingers fit across it, spanning in one hand half the English language. And it looks at you; cold, indifferent, a sneer. What is one to do when faced with such a belligerent challenge? Write? I daren’t.

Yet the need to tame this terrible beast is great. Words must be forged. It can be futile for all I care – an impotent and thoroughly pointless exercise. This. Stabbing at keys to string the words together just to know that I cannot be bested by a set of plastic squares emblazoned with a humourless font. Nor can its stalwart ally, the blank word document, sway me either. Both will perish beneath my nimble stubby fingers as I regurgitate words from my vocabulary in a mechanical, automatic flurry of linguistic vomit.

Then disaster strikes. Inspiration evaporates like a bead of sweat in the desert. My vocabulary dwindles to less and less words. Have I used them all already? Suddenly I’m groping for a synonym, unable to catch my breath, and any attempt at looking up alternatives in Word yields only antonyms and a bitter remorse. Words cease.



So, is it finished? Was there more? Or is that all there is? If there are no more words, there are no more words. But is that completion? That depends on one’s outlook, I suppose. Is the glass half empty or half full; half-complete or half-incomplete. Sense leaves entirely now in this void where words shouldn’t be and now are. Is this part of the former, or an addendum? Should it be a footnote? The fact that it isn’t tells us something. So, the thing could not have been complete because this commentary was required. Or is this as fundamental as the original treatise? More so? Perhaps. Perhaps it is this, with which we are now engaged, that was the real meat and drink of the exercise. The rest merely foreplay to titillate one’s grammar… I can not say at this juncture. Maybe there will be no other juncture to do so. And we shall never know. Unless we were to look back upon where we have come. To read back. As dangerous as starting in the first place. Don’t you think?

Tuesday 8 September 2009

The Return of the Native

It has been quite a while since I last posted on here and maybe I've been taking it all too lightly. Lately, I have been reading numerous blogs and, as we all know, it's something that if you take seriously enough reaps innumerate rewards. So here's a commitment: to write on here more.

Naturally, a lot of it will end up being pretty mundane, given that nothing much ever happens. I mean, in the grand scheme of things. Obviously, if aliens invade then fair enough but lots of more experienced bloggers will probably blog about it first. And then the world will end.

Anyway, with the return to the blog comes the return from Edinburgh. A successful month for Belt Up all told. We garnered some very nice reviews in some very important publications (Guardian, et al) and we even got a visit from Neil Gaiman. Having returned, we are now settling into our new York residence (that's a new residence in York, not a New York residence) and you can expect our involvement with the city to blossom in the coming year. I hope so, anyway.

I have started writing a new play and I'm even toying with the idea for a novel. I'm only slightly put off by how long it's been since I wrote any prose; I tried whilst in Edinburgh and found it to be bloody difficult. You have to spend so much time actually writing before anything happens. At least with a play by the time you've finished a sentence somebody has said something. Worth a shot, anyway.

No doubt I will keep you all posted on my progress.

Good night.