God damn. Birthdays. Who’s idea was it to celebrate this shit every fucking year? It should be a day of mourning. One year older, one year wiser, and that year always starts with a hangover worse than any that came before. I’ve been staring at the ceiling for two hours trying to work out how to get out of bed. I used to be able to do this. I remember doing it yesterday. But right now it seems impossible. My phone keeps beeping at me, like a terrorist trying to destroy my half-awake dream-like madness. I live in an attic flat so the ceiling is only two feet away from me. I grab on to it, to stop it spinning. The phone beeps again. I turn and look at it. “Alright fucker, you win.” I say, and reach over and grab it. I have the motor skills of a yeti. I unlock the phone and reality crashes through the screen. It beeps again. “Wake up you sonofabitch!” is what that beeping means.
I crawl, in my underwear, to the bathroom and put my head in the bath. I run the tap and frighten myself awake with the freezing water that pounds my skull. Dressing gown, where are you? You genius brilliant peace of attire. I find it behind the door and climb in.
In the kitchen I fill the kettle to the top. It boils. I make one cup of instant coffee, half full with milk so I can down it, and then fill the cafetiere to the top and sit down with it on the sofa. I put sugar and milk straight into it and drink directly out of the spout.
I turn on the TV but Hollyoaks comes on and blazes its tragic fucking nonsense into to mind just long enough to reinforce the fear I have of bad soap operas. A horrible disdain is awaken in me and I am, by some miracle, prevented from throwing the remote at the TV in a bid to kill the drama (it must be the coffee waking up the normal rational man that dwells somewhere inside of me) and I turn the fucker off instead, like any sensible human would.
I open the laptop and start writing about my morning. And now I’m here, typing. And who is weirder? Me for thinking anyone would find this shit interesting, or you for reading it?
It is time to attack my flat with an aggressive attitude towards tidiness. I must drag myself away from the page and clean this mess. Thinking straight in this environment of disrepair is near impossible. How do things get so out of control?
There are bowls of finished pasta strewn about. Cups of consumed coffee litter every surface. Guitars are left against walls. The bookshelf is a calamity un-alphabetised incomprehension. There are no clean spoons.
The novel has trapped me in its world of creation so much so that my world has crumbled around me. It is time to take off the blinkers and focus on reality. This could take days to sort out.
So while I am busy cleaning I have a gift for you all. I have made Tripping the Night Fantastic free for the weekend. So while I am knee deep in shit, why don’t you immerse yourself in the weird and humorous world of Charlie Deavon and his hallucinogenic and drunken foray into mystery and murder.
Good afternoon blog, and readers of blog. It’s been a while but here I am, back from the swamp of words that is novel writing. And I have some exciting news! So brace yourself. Sit back in your chair and hold on to your laptop for safety, this is bracing stuff. In a way.
I was thinking to myself, who are the greatest writers of old and how did they become popular? Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to mind immediately. Both of these chaps first released their books in serial form. A chapter a week in a magazine or newspaper. So I have decided to do the same. The Accidental Scoundrel is being released one chapter at a time on Jottify.com. The first two chapters are there now and I will add a new one on a regular basis periodically. I’m not sure it will be weekly though. In the fast world we live in, and with all that is out there to grab our attentions, I will most probably add a new chapter every three days.
After the series is finished I will release The Accidental Scoundrel as a paperback and ebook on Amazon.
Pop over to Jottify via this direct link – http://jottify.com/works/the-accidental-scoundrel/ and have a look. I would love to know if anyone has tried this route themselves or if you think this is a good idea, or even a terrible one, let me know what you think.
Currently I am listed as the most read author of the day (yeah baby!). Help me stay at the top by reading and enjoying each installment as they come!
For now though that is all, I will try and come here more often and write interesting posts about wonderful things, but until then, have a good Easter!
Show, don’t tell is the greatest and most singular lesson an author needs to learn. Anton Chekov said it best, “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”
This is a short post because the lesson is so simple (but so important). Avoid all adjectives. Never tell us your character is angry. Have him kick a chair instead.
I seem to have forgotten how to blog. It all started so well. Each week, a new post. Do you remember my first post? It was called The Manuscript Thief and was about me drunkenly letting one of my parent’s friends, Steve, take the unedited first draft of a manuscript home with him to read. This is a mistake that all new authors must avoid.
To cut a long story short he said he would go through it with a red pen and highlight any spelling or grammatical mistakes. Now, I learned how important it is to get yourself proof read when I prematurely released Tripping the Night Fantastic without seeking a proof reader. This mistake was reflected in the first few reviews. I then had to take the book off sale, make the necessary changes, and re-release it. So overall I was glad that Steve had offered to go through TheAccidental Scoundrel (formally known as A Scoundrel for Love) manuscript with a red pen.
The problem is, he vanished. Months went by with little contact. It turns out he got a job in Scotland and moved without so much as a goodbye, or a, “Here’s your book back, sorry, I haven’t had time to look at it”. No, I wasted months waiting for him to hand it back so I could make the corrections and send it out into the world. Because of this the release date of the book has been delayed by 5 months.
Luckily the time away from the novel has allowed me to look at it with fresh eyes. The errors have revealed themselves to me and I have got the book to a point I am happy with. More importantly I have found myself a new proof reader!
She is the land lady of my local pub, Kerry. And here are four good reasons for why she makes an excellent proof reader –
She keeps me at a satisfactory level of drunkenness and hasn’t banned me from the pub regardless of my frustrating and intolerable behaviour when drunk.
She invited me up to her flat recently and I was surprised to discover a vast collection of books not dissimilar to my own. She reads. A lot.
She’s a bit of a grammar Nazi (one of the less frowned upon branches of Nazism) and has proof read a manuscript before for a writerly relative.
She has a very nice bottom. Now, this point may not have much to do with her abilities as a proof reader but it is very important.
It will be a few weeks before I get it back but I do trust her to actually give it back. (Unlike Steve! Pah to you Steve!). When she does hand it back, and says something like, “Oh Andy! It was marvellous! Funny and witty and charming, oh Andy, it was just fantastic. And there were hardly any mistakes! I do love a man with a good grasp of grammar!” And then she’ll probably swoon. Or have an unprompted orgasm, or something. What was I saying? Oh yes, when I do get it back I will announce the release date and send out review copies to anyone who wants one.
In a Ford dealership in Bournemouth a metallic helium balloon, shaped like a cloud, pronounces the slogan; “Every Cloud Has a Silver Lining”. I wonder, as I dip my mop in its bucket, if they know they are quoting John Milton.
As a cleaner in this dealership I run my mop up and down the showroom floor. I look blank. It’s a job that requires no thought but also a job that gives you the freedom to think. I ring out my mop and look momentarily back up at the balloon.
As I trudge my way through this bleak room of cars, at prices my salary barely mirrors, I can’t help but look at the grinning salesman, holding his surreal balloon, and wondering if he knows it was born in the annals of literary greatness. I am a cleaner in this place, and nothing more, but John Milton is only a balloon.
John Milton was born in 1608 and died 65 years later in 1674. In that 65 years he made a massive contribution to the English language. He invented so many phrases and words that most people quote Milton daily without even knowing it.
We couldn’t disregard Milton’s impact on the English language simply because the word disregardwouldn’t exist without him. We certainly couldn’t criticisehim or be dismissiveof his impact, butinstead, the more words I discover are coined by him the moreawe-struckI become. It is simply stunning.
Seeing that balloon in the Ford dealership got me thinking about what else might be quoting him without really realising it. The idea was in me now and I had become, in that moment, a nerdy Milton spotter. Like a strange literary bird watcher. A new hobby was born. I would collect words coined by John Milton.
The salesman, and the sold-to, had finished for the day and the showroom was void of life. I put my mop away in the cleaning cupboard, turned off the lights in the building, and set the alarm. It was late, the moon was already high in the sky, the pubs were already full, but no sooner had I sat in my car and got out my note pad – quick to write about the balloon lest I forget – had I realised I was in the act of a Milton-ism now. Or was I? I wasn’t sure. I had read about John Milton only a few days before seeing the balloon and I remembered that he coined the word moonstruck. The moon was up, and I felt struck by something, a love of words maybe, it was good enough. I put it in the notebook.
I started the engine and the CD player turned on. The Best of Procol Harum was in the CD player. The first track began to play and I drove out of the car park. The song was A Whiter Shade of Pale (this sounds so unconvincing I half wish I was making it up, embellishingthe truth as it were, but these coincidences are genuine), the song began, “He tripped the light fandango, turned cartwheels across the floor”. I pulled over and opened my notepad.
John Milton’s very first poem to appear in print bore the particular seeds of influence that inspired the lyrics of the above song. The poem was called L’Allegro and it contained the following lines: “Com, and trip it as ye go / On the light fantastick toe”. Because of that we can all trip the light fantastic. Or dance, to put it simply. And, more importantly, Procol Harum can sing about it and I can add it to my quickly growing list.
I got home, pleased with my new hobby (not an exhilarating hobby but a hobby nonetheless),and began searching online for a list of words and phrases coined by John Milton to aid me in my quest.
John Milton studied at Christ’s College in Cambridge. The accompanying portrait of Milton on the Christ’s College’s website depicts a feminine looking man with long flowing blond hair and puckered lips. His eyes look sideways and down slightly, almost seductively. He has a dimple in his chin and his purple jacket is finished with a white lavish collar. It’s no surprise, looking at his portrait, that he was known at college as TheLady of Christ’s.
John Milton
On the same website I found a list of words coined by him. Wikipedia lent more examples, and a book called the Etymologicon (the word etymologicon itself was coined by Milton), which is where I first read of Milton’s influence, offered a few more. I sit here now at my laptop with my printouts and shuffle them into a neat pile.
I had neglected to turn on the light in the room when I got home, in the rush to Google him, and time had dragged itself away and made the night darker. The laptop screen cast a looming shadow against the wall behind me. Suddenly, noticing the black figure, with all its vacant doom, I turned to look at it but relaxed when I realised it was just my shadow and reality and time came back all at once. This suddenly felt like a very solitary and unadventurous hobby to add to my list of other solitary hobbies, like writing and reading. However, the knowledge that one of the first places I found a Miltonism was in a rock song reassured me.
When Milton was 30 he travelled around Europe for a year where he met many great intellectuals and influential people, Galileo, for example. I am also about to undertake a grand trip, although not one as ground braking as Milton’s; I am off to Pontins for the weekend. My note pad is coming with me.
I only discovered one Miltonism while away at Pontins and it came from my six year old daughter. She told me off for trying to dry her with a slightly moist towel.
‘Dad!’ she shouted, shivering in her swimming costume, ‘that towel is damp!’
‘That may be so,’ I said, ‘let me grab my notepad and all will be fine.’
Looking through my gathered list of Miltonism’s I have just realised another few words that could be attributed to the holiday. The restaurant food was terrible and so we mostly did all our own cooking¸ not that my cooking is any less unhealthy. The children’s adulation of the Campsite Characters (Captain Crocodile, Suzie Zebra, Meth the drug addled Monkey etc) could be described as Idol-worship. And my sister had a flutter on the Grand National but unfortunately any dreams of extravagance were shattered by a slow-moving horse.
The pandemonium of the holiday has passed now. My daughter has gone home to her mothers. Bags have been unpacked, photographs uploaded to Facebook, clothes chucked in the washing machine. I am sat in my lounge. Only the lights of the bookshelf are on and I am wearing socks and pyjamas. The TV is off but soon it will be flashing its dramatic wares at me and I will catch up on the missed TV of the weekend. But for now the whisky in my glass is fresh and my bones finally get the stretch they’ve been waiting for.
Before I turn on the TV I let myself wallow in the momentary peace that exists, so fleetingly, between a holiday and real life.
I pick up my notepad from beside me and open it to my list. There they are, 19 of them so far. I smile to myself and toss the notepad back to its comfortable seat beside me. Nobody seems to know the exact number of words that John Milton invented but the general consensus is that it’s more than 600. I have a long way to go.
Before I turn on the television I look over to my desk and the un-shuffled array of papers on it. All those lists and histories of John Milton. So many words. I pick up the remote and turn on the TV. I pick up my glass of whisky and have a sip. The erratic life from the TV lights upon me and I see myself for a moment, mured by the flickering light and the monotone nattering of the news reporter, alone in this room, not thinking it but feeling that my daughter is getting ready for bed in a far away house. I look down at my glass of whisky and then my notepad and wonder if this hobby will be devoured and forgotten as suddenly as it began; just another hobby to add to the list of bygone hobbies of my past; merely a passing interest to steal away the time, a hobby to create a bridge between loneliness and boredom. I search through the SKY Planner for the shows I have recorded and find the hours viewing that will accompany my drink. And, although I don’t know what the news story was, just before I press play, I hear the news reporter say;
God damn. Birthdays. Who’s idea was it to celebrate this shit every fucking year? It should be a day of mourning. One year older, one year wiser, and that year always starts with a hangover worse than any that came before. I’ve been staring at the ceiling for two hours trying to work out how to get out of bed. I used to be able to do this. I remember doing it yesterday. But right now it seems impossible. My phone keeps beeping at me, like a terrorist trying to destroy my half-awake dream-like madness. I live in an attic flat so the ceiling is only two feet away from me. I grab on to it, to stop it spinning. The phone beeps again. I turn and look at it. “Alright fucker, you win.” I say, and reach over and grab it. I have the motor skills of a yeti. I unlock the phone and reality crashes through the screen. It beeps again. “Wake up you sonofabitch!” is what that beeping means.
Andrew Chapman / Author and Screenwriter 