I Blame Pele

Day 5

Bummer, as we used to say in the seventies, when the world seemed young.  After accelerating my way to a consistent 2000+ words it all slumped on day 5.  Every time I tried to write something either interesting or irritating happened, starting with the postman wanting me to sign for a recorded delivery item just after I'd penned, with a confident flourish, the first sentence of the day. 

It was hard not to fling Porlock and Kubla Khan in his smiling face.  But my postman is a very literate bloke and it would have been: 'Eeeewwwwww, hark at him!  Comparing himself with Coleridge now!  Getting a bit above ourselves aren't we?'  And all that. 

Anyway the phone kept blasting away with no film deals and when a telesales geezer from Mumbai asked for me by name I told him it was very sad but I was dead and would he take me off his list?  Then there were some squeaking administrative piglets that had to be driven to market, as it were.  Things that were time-sensitive and had to be taken care of. 

            Then BBC Coventry & Warwickshire radio rang me, with reference to my book Simple Goalkeeping Made Spectacular.  The Sky Blues keeper had made a stunning save that had been compared to the oft-proclaimed goalkeeping save of the century by Gordon Banks from Pele.  Would I talk about it on air?  You must be joking, is what I didn't say.  I've got a novel to write.  There are people who read my blog.  How would it sound if I tell them I spent the next hour or so running through Youtube footage and football podcasts just so I can talk drivel on a football programme, when I've publicly stated my intention of completing a first draft in forty days. How vain do you think I am?

(Go on: insert here string of further excuses to explain where the rest of the day went.  I mean, no-one forces you to pick up the phone or answer the door or check your email.  Or analyse grainy flickering Youtube images.)

Then the day finished slightly early because I wanted to go to Nottingham to the launch party of novelist Maria Allen, one of my former creative writing students who has her very fine first book Before The Earthquake published by Tindal Street press. Good to catch up with a lot of old friends there it was, too, but I was a bit deflated to hear my old mate Nicola Monaghan - another very fine Nottingham novelist - tell me that she's currently turning out 6000 words a day.  Worse, she offered this information quite casually.  What?  I said, I've been bragging on my blog about doing 2k per day and I don't want to hear about your 6k.

So maybe I should start to sound a little less pleased with myself.  I'll see if I can crank back up to the 2k target tomorrow.  It could be worse.  Oscar Wilde is said to have swung into a bar and declared to all his writer-pals, 'Today I wrote a sentence!'  When the applause had died down he announced, 'And then I crossed it out again.'

A sheepish reckoning on day 5 can't make it any more than a deflationary 702 words.