January 2009 Archives

It's Twelfth Night as I write this and it has been a memorable and twinkly Christmas.  I'm writing this so as to avoid getting the ladder out and taking down the Christmas lights from the roof.  Normally I go in for serious displacement activity to run away from writing not towards it, but I don't really want the Christmas holidays to end this year, so much have I enjoyed them.  When good things happen I feel like screwing a brass plaque to the wall somewhere: this plaque is dedicated to the wonderful Christmas 2008.  But then you'd have brass plaques all over the place, and in a modest house that would be even more ridiculous.  Than ours is already.  So instead of a brass plaque I'm saying it here.

We even got snow yesterday, which still counts technically as a White Christmas.  Well, a light dusting and just enough to get the sledges out and hare up to Bradgate Park, which is what we always do whenever there is a sprinkling of the white stuff.  But the rush to get out into the snow led to a scary James Bond moment which I wouldn't want to repeat too often.

Perhaps I've had James Bond on my mind since I went to Calgary for the WFC before Christmas.  There I met - and appeared on a panel with  -  the inspirational David Morrell (who in addition to everything else he has written has penned one of the best practical no-bullshit books on the market for aspiring writers.)  Anyway David kept telling the audience that I look like Daniel Craig, which I just can't see.  Harrison Ford, I'll take, but Daniel Craig will always be the depressed Geordie from the brilliant TV series Our Friends In The North.  But there you are, the creator of Rambo says I look like James Bond.  So I made the mistake of gleefully relaying this unlikely 007 connection to the savages, for which trouble I've heard nothing but abuse, mockery and small-minded derision. 

Witness the following. 

Bradgate Park is a miraculous freak of the English countryside in Leicestershire, nearly a thousand deer-park acres of heath, bracken, and outcrops of some of the oldest boulder stone in the country, nay the world I'm told.  Intersected by the river Lin it has a ruined Elizabethan mansion haunted by poor Lady Jane Grey. Twas her childhood and only home.  The park is characterised by fantastical gnarled trees and brooding, craggy rock; and when there is snow it has the best sledge runs in the county, pitching downhill from Old John, an eighteenth century folly resembling a giant beer tankard.

I parked the truck carefully enough at the sloping Old John car park. Sue and the savages clambered out with the sledges and we made for Old John.  I was fumbling in my pocket for change for the parking ticket machine when I happened to look back over my shoulder to see, about thirty yards behind me, the truck rolling backwards down the hill.  Hell, I thought, I've left off the handbrake.  Sprinting past the astonished looking savages, I had to go some to catch up with the truck, my feet skidding and slipping on the ice. 

I noticed that the wheels weren't turning and the truck was simply slithering backwards down the icy hill.  The real problem was that it was sliding directly back towards the busy road.  I thought if I try to get behind it to stop it, the thing will flatten me, so instead I decided to try to jump in.  Of course in films they conveniently leave moving vehicles unlocked, but not here.  Not in my case.  Alas.

So the truck is increasing in momentum and I'm running alongside it, feet slipping, trying to find which bloody pocket I'd put my keys in.  (You know: gosh, I was sure they were in my right hip pocket, but no, how about my left breast pocket, no, not there either and etc...)  Somehow I found the keys and thumbed the remote, got the door open and swung myself into the cab.  Phew!  I grabbed the handbrake to drag it on.   Problem: the handbrake was already fully on.

No phew, then. I stabbed the footbrake but that didn't do anything either.  The locked wheels were just sliding back faster and faster over the ice.  Now the truck was running pretty fast backwards towards the busy road, but with me in it.  Like in all good narratives, things had got bad and then they'd got worse.  I still had my keys in right hand so I got them in the ignition and started the engine.  Somehow, with the back of the vehicle inches from the road and the oncoming traffic I got some traction.

I parked up in a safer spot and at an angle to the slope.  I strolled over to Sue and the savages.  'Bloody hell,' Sue said.

'That was a bit too much like James Bond,' I said.

'Joyce Bond,' said Joe. 

'What?'

'Well, you looked a bit girlie.'

'What?'

'That made me feel sick,' Ella said.

'No,' I said, still smarting from that girlie remark.  'Don't worry about that.  You have to laugh about little things like that.' 

There was a tree adjacent to the car-park.  I wondered if I could nip behind it to throw up without being seen.

I didn't have time.  A minute later someone else parked exactly in the spot I'd abandoned.  A woman we know rather well got out of the car, locked it and started walking towards us, waving.  I was about to warn her when her car, too, started rolling backwards.  I had to watch her repeat the same show.

Anyway, after all that we had a wizard prang afternoon with the sledges zooming down the snowy outcrops, which were far less dangerous than the bloody car park.  It was bitterly cold and yet there was brilliant afternoon sun to flood the snow and light the frozen streams and the lichen-covered rock.  The river was sold and gulls went wheeling in the light, trying to find a break in the ice.  I thought you can't get better days than this.  Well, not counting that dastardly unpleasant moment with the truck.

Many good things to look forward to for 2009.  Night Shade press are bringing out "How To Make Friends With Demons" next month.  If you've been keeping up with this irregular blog you'll already know that this is the same book as Memoirs Of A Master Forger by one William Heaney.  If I happen to get a second royalty from you because you've inadvertently bought both editions, well, I'll feel obliged to hang onto the money until I see you.

I continue to collaborate with Emilie Simon on the lyrics of some of the songs for her next album.  She's started recording. It's going to be great. http://emiliesimon.artistes.universalmusic.fr/

Later in the year I will have another YA book called The Devil's Ladder out with Faber, plus my first foray into non-fiction, a memoir about goalkeeping with Mainstream Press, which will be published in the summer months.  Plus I've begun a new adult novel, which I won't talk about.

I'll also be working on the computer game Doom 4 for ID Software.  I've been playing Doom for some years.  Okay, here's a secret: I don't actually tickle the keyboards into simulating lines of deathless prose for the full eight hours per day.  No.  The creative batteries do run low at moments, it has to be said, and to recharge them I might walk the dog; pluck the lute from the wall (okay, guitar); read lines of the Sufi mystic Rumi; or I might casually mangle a few demons in Doom.

Over the years I've been grassed up by the savages more than once, who, with their ears pressed to the door, can hear the blast of explosions and the groans of demons atomised before my cannon fire; whereupon they instantly report me to their mother.  I can hear their excitable voices on the other side of the door:  mum, he's not writing he's playing computer games!  Now, since I've been hired to contribute to the storyline of Doom 4 I can say what was always true anyway.  I'm working.  You see, for a writer, lots of stuff that doesn't look like working is actually working.  Looking out of the window, for example.  Balancing a pencil on the edge of the desk in order to find its exact fulcrum. Playing Doom.  Lots of things.

Now that we've got that cleared up, I wish you all a fantastic 2009 full of insight, inspiration and reward.