Falldog

Over the last month or so, I’ve been re-listening to a lot of Tori Amos. I guess I had sensed in my waters that a new album was just around the corner. ‘American Doll Posse’ was announced this week, to my General Joy (a joke for three people there). The new photo accompanying the announcement on her website – possibly the cover, it’s hard to tell – sees Tori dressed in a glittery dress, hands open in a Christ-like fashion, one holding a battered leather-bound Bible, and with some I-think-we-can-all-guess-what-type-of-blood dribbling down the inside of her leg. Nice. But at least there are no suckling pigs, so we can all sleep easy.

To this: Hooray! I’m very pleased she’s back. Over the last couple of years, I’ve begun to realise that she’s probably taken the place as my favourite musical artist, the one whose music I love re-listening to the most, the one whose new material I get most excited about. Her last two albums – ‘Scarlet’s Walk’ and ‘The Beekeeper’ – have been huge, glittering epics, delicate and lovely, melodious and slippery. Just wonderful things. What they don’t have is any of the spiky, shrieky edges of the pig-suckling ‘Boys for Pele’ album, or any of the dark distorted corners of ‘From the Choirgirl Hotel’. By which I mean, what they have is the ability to be played in the car without the Mrs kicking off.

Anyway, those two albums’ fine craftsmanship, coupled with the fascinating read of her biography ‘Piece by Piece’, have cemented what could be called a worrying obsession with Tori. And how, exactly, does this makes itself known?

Remember the story of the fan who saw Gary Numan on stage and vowed to herself, “I will marry that man…” – and then did? (A creepier thing in the world of pop I really don’t think there is.) Well, that’s kind of like me and Tori. Kind of.

Anyone who’s been following the miserable witterings of my Mrs and I will know that we’re keen to move away from London in a couple of years, and that Cornwall is top of the list of places to move to.

Tori Amos lives in Cornwall, you know.

My criteria for a home in Cornwall would therefore be: a space in which to write, a nice garden, a nice view of some countryside and maybe even the sea, and Tori Amos next door. These stipulations may not be compromised upon.

I daydream about dusting the living room to the (loud) strains of ‘Cornflake Girl’, hoping she’d notice, pop over and say hi. Or reading ‘Piece by Piece’ in the back garden on a summer’s evening, when I know she’s having a barbecue. Or of knocking on her door and asking to borrow a cup of sugar. We would be friends, you see, and perfect neighbours. I could babysit her little daughter while she and her husband are down the Tesco. I’d watch their cat (she must have a cat… or at least a piglet) when they were away on tour. I’d listen to all her new material and let her know what I thought. I’d even sing on it, if she wanted me to. Or if she didn’t. Loudly, from outside the recording studio, if necessary.

One day, this will come to pass.

Maybe I should phone Mrs Numan and get some pointers.

I see that the pop stars are out in force again, threatening to solve the problem of global warming with a series of concerts rather straw-graspingly called Live Earth.

Now, call me a cynic, but wouldn’t it be better not to have the concerts, and so conserve a great deal of electricity, not to mention all the carbon dioxide pumped out by jetting the bands in for their performances? Or is this a cunning ploy to get all the potential viewers around the world to turn their tellies off, and so cut down on emissions that way?

I find this kind of thing loathsome, but there is a particularly hideous twist to this one. The concerts are to be held in the UK, US, Brazil, South Africa, China, Australia and Japan. Oh, and – this being all about our poor, delicate, unprotected environment – the news report mentions another venue, too…

“There will also be a concert in Antarctica.”

Pardon? That would be the last bit of Earth humanity hasn’t trampled all over, yes?

Still, Live 8 solved the problem of world poverty, of course, so you can’t blame them for trying.

Am I the last one to realise that they sound a bit like Sonny and Cher?

Many apologies for being so quiet so far this month. I’ve been achieving very little, but being very busy while (not) doing it.

Well, there’s no other explanation for this.

EDIT: And, connected only if you agree that Mr Cruise is a [a more vulgar version of the word in question], this beggars belief. Hoohaa!

Writing should be a pleasure, not a chore.

People who say that are delusional lunatics who have no hope of ever getting published. This is what I have decided. This from Liz Williams’ LiveJournal, talking about the progress of her current novel:

I’m aiming at 2K minimum over the next week or so, which should see this book done by mid-Feb. I have short fiction stacking up, and proposals to write, so this needs to be fitted in. But it’s getting done. I’m not hammering it now, as we have a lot of work-related and social stuff coming up and you know, having a life is pleasant.

“Needs to be fitted in.” “It’s getting done.” “Having a life is pleasant.” Not the comments of someone for whom the act of writing is a blinding orgasm of rhapsodic creation. I often suspect some people think that’s precisely what writing is: the tippy-tip-tap of the keyboard, a shining golden light, a gasp, a cry, and then a perfect little creation is left behind, the writer glowing and breathless in the aftermath. Pah.

It’s true, when I’m in the zone, writing does take me somewhere where the work seems to do itself. On those occasions where it’s really transported me, there has been a definite “coming down” period, a need to earth myself before I’m properly myself again. But that isn’t pleasurable – I’m not at the keyboard, smugly smirking at how much joy the act is giving me.

Perhaps, I sometimes think, people think the pleasure in writing comes from tinkering with words, playing with different choices, different orders, different shapes. If that’s what you dream of, do a bloody crossword. ‘Playing with words’ is irksome and sometimes frustrating: while it may be immensely joyful to just trip out that perfect turn of phrase, more often that not you’re stumbling around the cobwebbed corners of your vocabulary, searching for that perfect word which is just out of reach, somewhere in the dark.

As I remembered (I would say ‘realised’, but I knew it all along, I was just willfully ignoring the fact) yesterday, throw some hard work at writing and the results start to show. I had lunch with a friend, who was being very kind about my writing, while I was being very down on myself, criticising myself for being bad at coming up with ideas… Then, I verbally slapped myself about the face: I’m not bad at ideas, I’m bad at turning ideas into stories, and that’s because I’m lazy and quite often won’t work at doing so. Instead, I’ll hang around in hope that a story will just creep into my head without me noticing – but my brain is too sluggish nowadays to do that on its own, but its not so incapable that it can’t do it with a bit of effort.

So, that’s precisely what I did. The night before, I’d found a scribbled note of a short story idea that had slipped my mind, and which I quite liked. So, I got back from lunch, sat down at my computer, took that idea and (with the help of the increasingly invaluable Scrivener – nothing I write at the moment is happening without it, even blog posts*) worked it into a story.

And it was work. And it wasn’t pleasurable. But it was, at the end, when it had form and shape and new ideas and aspects I’d never imagined, immensely satisfying. It was the satisfaction of a job well done, of a difficult thing wrestled into submission.

That, I think, is where the idea of ‘writing as joy’ was born. The pleasure comes from the satisfaction of the finished result – and there is little more satisfying in a writer’s life than nailing (with vicious hammer blow after hammer blow) a story into the shape you hoped and, if you’re lucky, more than you hoped. But even that is only half the story: then, a writer has to take that framework and plaster it with words, finding exactly the right language to bring the bare bones to life.

I’ll let you know how that half goes.

* This may explain why we’ve had one or two longs posts recently…

Mystery solved. That thing in the case for the second Scissor Sisters album last year? That wasn’t what it claimed to be. I’ve just found it, and it’s inside the sleeve for the new Mika album. Quite where the Mika album is, though, I’ve no idea.