Eating eating eating me alive!

STUPIDLY I went and downloaded the most up-to-date PDF Broschüre for the course I have set my heart on.
I hate setting my heart on anything, because I might not get it. But I've set my heart on this. The desire to do it is eating me up inside. In fact I feel like I'm festooned with army ants and being eaten alive. I feel like a hydrogen bomb inside me is about to detonate at any moment.

This is what they say about the languages on offer, re the application process:

3.2 Zulassungsvoraussetzungen
Für das Bachelorstudium besteht in den Sprachen Englisch, Französisch, Spanisch eine Zulassungsbeschränkung (Numerus clausus). Der NC-Wert ergibt sich für jedes Semester neu aufgrund der freien Studienplätze, der Abiturnoten, der Wartezeiten und der Anzahl der BewerberInnen. Eine Vorhersage über die für das jeweilige Zulassungsverfahren geltenden Grenzwerte kann daher nicht getroffen werden.
Als Zugangsvoraussetzungen für das Studium am FTSK sind neben der allgemeinen Hochschulreife oder einem äquivalenten ausländischen Abschluss fundierte Kenntnisse in Deutsch als Fremdsprache, Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch und Grundkenntnisse in Chinesisch erforderlich, falls diese Sprachen als Fächer gewählt werden.
Genaue Informationen zu den Eingangsvoraussetzungen für alle Sprachen entnehmen Sie bitte den Merkblättern der einzelnen Sprachen, die Sie auf der Seite http://www.fb06.uni-mainz.de/261.php finden.

Well I have to read it in German ~ so can you!!

To summarize, English, French and Spanish ~being so highly popular, are subject to entry restrictions in numbers. Being as English is my mother tongue and the only language over which I feel I have some genuine mastery, I don't have much choice in the matter. But I can avoid French by not applying for it, and doing Russian instead, as I've already decided. Some basic knowledge of Chinese is required. So I'm determined to trounce the other students by achieving A Level standard (or higher) before I even start.
As you cannot fail to have noticed, I have a genuine fascination for Chinese characters. I already know about 2-300. If I could multiply this by a factor of ten, I'd have a pretty good basic reading knowledge in Chinese.

I couldn't find any entry restrictions or requirements for Russian, but would feel compelled to reach at least GCSE (lower school certificate) level, simply to underline my interest (and distinguish myself from the vulgar hoardes I'll be up against in the application process). The greatest novelists of all time wrote in Russian ~ Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgenyev, Pasternak... imagine how amazing it would be to read those in the original?!

My biggest worry of all doesn't concern waiting lists because I'm English or beating others at Chinese: it's the German language test to which I'll be subjected. I tried on before on the Goethe Institut website (admittedly when my German was clagged up with 18-years of unpractised rust) and got a dreadful score.

As I shall point out, not having a teacher here, I have focused my energies on acquiring a passive reading vocabulary. And it's working amazingly. The novel I'm reading, Seegrund, which means Lake-Bed is a thriller about a dead body found... you guessed it. In a pool of blood in the snow on the banks of a frozen lake. I was astonished to comprehend the words for river-bank (das Ufer) and corpse (die Leiche) ~ both of which I've picked up and remembered in the past couple of months. So you see reading books and keeping my amateurish German blog has got me somewhere after all. There are many expressions for which I know two or three words in German, just as I do in English. I get a real sense of achievement from this. Especially as I DROPPED OUT of a languages degree in the early 90s in disgrace and despair, convinced I would never achieve any degree of mastery over German, let alone any other tongue. Somehow, amazingly, the magic has happened.

I think my turning point came one night as I listened to BBC World Service radio. I realized that across the world there are millions of people who have never set foot on Anglophone soil, who have learned to speak our language fluently by following radio broadcasts and slogging their way through English literature, dictionary in hand, referring and re-referring constantly to every word they're not entirely sure about. So I did this and look! I'm seriously considering applying to uni in Deutschland. How amazing is that. Six months ago I wouldn't even have been able to read the prospectus...
Well enough of my babbles.

It's 5:34. The clocks went back last night, meaning darkness now falls not long after 4pm. It's dead romantic ~ like a Siberian goods train yard full of onion-picking babushkas, with immigrant workers hiding in the cattle trucks smoking Cyrillic cigarettes and babbling away in Chinese. (I must fit the two new languages into this silly fantasy.) German, Russian and Chinese are also, of course languages of the former Communist Block. Life behind the Iron
Curtain has long held an enduring fascination for me. That was a big reason why I so loved German doing at school. When I started the A-level course Germany was separated by 200 yards of watch-towers, searchlights and tripwired minefields. By the time I actually sat the exams the wall had come tumbling down and a new world order was upon us.

What the future world order shall bring, I shudder to think. It's capitalism capitalism capitalism everywhere. I'm a capitalist, but I see excesses everywhere. And greed is not always good, despite what Gordon Gecko would have us believe.
Anyway I must ping. I wonder if anyone actually read this post to the end? If so, I commend you with a 金奖章 jīn jiǎngzhāng ~ a gold medal!



PS Here's an entertainment for you: the oldest recording JRR Tolkien, author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, et al... he appears in this early English Linguaphone course in units 13 "the wireless" and 20 "at the tobacconist's"! What a blast from the past. (He was well into his "pipe-weed" as anyone who's seen the films will know...)

Link: Sprache, Kultur und Translation - Chinesisch

I will go on taking heroin till I die...

... SO YESTERDAY I SPENT MY DRUG MONEY ON BOOKS (and food). £10 got me a 972-page German tome called Der Turm (The Tower") by Uwe Tellkamp. £3.50, beautiful hardback with acid-free cream paper. Set in the former DDR... well I can't tell much about it as I'm only on page 7. But it's set behind the Iron Curtain and I have a thing about life in former communist states. The other books were give up smoking for 50p, Byron Childe Harold/etc 30p special offer (minuscule hardback) and Peyton Place (80p) by Grace Metalious, who died of alcoholic cirrhosis at 39 and sold well over 20,000,000 copies of this book about moral degeneracy in a drab New England Town. This reprint comes with intellectual introduction by some academic and I have to say Metalious's literary style isn't bad (nowhere near as bad as Jacqueline Susann's, if you're into trash fiction of the 1950s and 60s).

The rest of my tenner went on food.

I was actually hoping for Teach Yourself Mandarin Chinese book and CD set for £5 (well I can hope, can't I?) but Mandarin will have to wait till next week.

The urge to educate myself is eating me up inside. An all-consuming craving, far worse than any drug-craving I've experienced for a very long time.

Today will be a test day. I KNOW a friend who will come to me in need (he always does) and how on earth I will get out of that situation without scoring heroin I have no idea.

By the way there is a terrible drought on at the moment. The drug purity has fallen ~ even in the best stuff I've found ~ to less than a third of what it normally was. I can tell this by the way methadone holds me so much better than any street heroin I've bought in weeks.

My favourite hobby is complaining about the lousy gear. So people assume I'm being ripped off, introduce me to their dealer and I'm even MORE BITTERLY DISAPPOINTED with minuscule bags of even poxier gear!

In my opinion anything that's not China white is rubbish anyhow. Heroin is properly white, not brown.

The worst stuff that was around can't have been more than 1% pure ~ if that. And it was full of some sort of resin that re-congealed on cooling, making the stuff uninjectable unless you filtered it three times.

The root of the shortage is blight on Afghanistan's poppy crop, reducing this year's opium yield from around 8000 tonnes (enough to make 800 tonnes of heroin) to something like 2500 tonnes opium (250 tonnes heroin). The UK alone uses an estimated 35 tonnes annually (at import strength), so if there's blight next year it's curtains for heroin (hurrah!)

Hurrah, because I can be free. I feel like a pan of boiling water, seething with pent-up energy and furious steam. One day I will go out and smack the world right between the eyes, because the world deserves it.

Meanwhile I have to 1. give up heroin 2. learn fluent German 3. write several bestselling books 4. learn fluent Chinese 5. learn fluent Russian 6. get on course I've been wittering on about 7. graduate with summa cum laude or whatever the phrase is.

Then at long last I will be qualified to do something.

When I was little and heard foreigners going blubble-blubble-blubble, I thought they all spoke one language called Foreign. I was determined to learn this mystery tongue, so nobody could prattle over my head again.

Also I was affronted by the way almost all foreigners appeared to be fluent in English, giving my family, friends and I no linguistic privacy whatsoever almost anywhere in the world.

My goal is to speak at least 10 languages fluently, including Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Thai ... blah blah. If I'd only not been so incredibly lazy all my life I could be a long way to achieving this goal. As it is, I barely speak fluent English!

My goblin-bitten computer cable replacement is here! Whoopeee! Now I must run in the shower. I'm so minging I'm infectious...

The Goblin is back!

THAT NAUGHTY GOBLIN has bitten my computer cable. So I've no power.

Actually no accident happened. The cable just wore itself out. Rather prematurely, in my opinion, but I know old age was the problem, as just before it went completely, you had to twiddle it so it was in one precise position to make power come through ~ like a mobile phone charger on its last legs...

So I'm waiting on a new goblin cure...

... meanwhile I've decided to pen a kiddybook. And I'm hacking through something in German by someone called H G Adler.

Must dash, as I'm on a public computer and I shall be terminated!

The News from Britain

POP SINGER George Michael is being severely punished in Pentonville Prison for crashing his 4x4 into a Snappy Snaps photo-shop at 3am while stone out of his brains on cannabis. His third offence.
The newspapers have had a field day. Best of the feast of headlines being "LOCK ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO"!

HIS "HOLINESS" the Pope is on a State Visit to the UK. I watched the ceremonials on TV with fascination, including boring platitude-ridden speeches, thinking, "If I hear 'hallelujah' sung out in such gormless tones once more I'm gonna punch a hole in the TV set!" Thankfully my knuckles and its screen were saved when the old charlatan, who is as holy as he is young, jumped in his Pope-Mobile and wizzed off.
(Or did something like that.)
I don't know, because I fell unconscious through sheer boredom. I hope any Roman Catholics aren't too offended by my opinions. And I hope the Pope doesn't read this: perhaps he will call fire down from heaven to punish me!

ON A MORE POSITIVE NOTE, I've nearly finished my little story ~ 5000 words done. That's not as much as it might sound to a non-writer. Only about 13 pages in properly set book type. Or about 17 pages in ridiculously blown-up 300-words-a-page modern typeface.

Now I've only nine or so other tales to knock out until I've completed an entire book!

If we could talk to the animals...

... they might say something like this!

TALKING DOGS, CATS AND HAMSTER

...

BIRD TELLS CATS "YOU DON'T NEED TO CHASE US ANY MORE!"



NO BIG NEWS to report. Still working on me story. I've only done 3300 words, but I'm hoping no major goblins are in the text.

No broadband at home has helped me out in a big way. It's made me realize I've been wasting an opportunity to improve myself. To write great literature and change my life. I'm like the man who owns a Lambourghini and only uses it to drive to the corner shop for milk, sugar and a packet of fags!

Must dash ~ "darn" internet caff about to terminate me, as per usual!

Stabbed with a pear in the house of the dead ...

I AM READING NOTES FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, a cheery tome by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Devils, The Brothers Karamazov (which my English teacher dubbed "the most boring book ever written") and The Insulted and Injured ~ I'm sure the authors of modern misery memoirs are peeved to find that particularly evocative title already used up!

I had some drinks this afternoon and sat under an electronic posterboard leafing through the cheery tale, which is set in a Siberian hard labour camp.

Dostoyevsky's characters ~ murderers, alcoholics, gamblers ~ remind me of some of the junkies I have met in my time ... I'm not saying anything else.

I googled various topics concerning Siberian labour camps and came up with a page from a school punishment book, detailing how many lashes of the cane various miscreants received for such crimes as stabbing someone with a pear(!) and grave robbing~(!!!) Am I badly misreading things (you can click on the picture to enlarge)~? Or was the world even crazier in Victorian times (or whenever those whippings are from)..? ~ than it is now?? (Surely not!)



I thought I would invent some comedy crimes of my own ...

The only sample offences I could come up with were:

Allowing school hamster to grow too tubby.

Allowing goblin to chase school hamster ...

I don't think I'd have done too well making up school rules in the dark ages, do you?

COMPETITION TIME ~ roll up and give your guesses, educated or otherwise, please! Tell me WHAT LANGUAGE ARE THESE SCRIBBLES WRITTEN IN?

Answers in the commentary box, if yer please...

PS the end of my HAMMY AND THE GOBLIN tale of wonder is coming soon. I bet y'all are yawning with excitement!

The Non-Secret of Novel Writing

BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD
Not telling secrets to writing bestselling fiction.
Because she's saying "there is no formula".
Though I do agree with her philosophy that "character is plot".
All the stuff I've ever tried to write follows that maxim.
I wish I could write. I've got a golden idea that I have been scribbling down. I just feel so incredibly low down and I know even if it does get finished I won't make two brass ha'pennies out of it. But I'm going to finish this thing if it kills me. It's an original idea (not "like such and such person's work" or "in the style of someone else".
Some of the worst advice to the would-be author came from somebody I would call a wannabe, a second-rater, a "me too". This person advised you to read other authors who are already publishing stuff similar to what you want to write. O and I just... akh. No.
Anyway I've got to go and write my story. I won't get any less miserable by not writing it...



PS Do you notice how her TV adaptations are so nicely produced? That's because Barbara is married to Bob Bradford, TV producer extraordinaire...

Oriental Style Chicken Curry £1 etc

ICELAND "ORIENTAL STYLE CHICKEN CURRY" tonight. Boil int' bag (but of course). And only £1. Much nicer than yesterday's noodles, which were a bit "school dinners". Very pleasant indeed.

The me-shaped hole yesterday means not only that I felt I had a place on the shelves, but (and this really surprised me) I could find nobody else writing like me. Most extraordinary.

I deleted a big rant about the state of modern publishing, but I deleted so much of it, I deleted my main point too, ha-har!

Well the Goods Train of Entertainment trundles on, I can't go on about it. Writing's for writing. Not writing about..!

Well this is a nonpost. Tomorrow I'll tell you a true furry story about Pandable my old hammy, which is really entertaining.

The mysterious illness I have had for over a fortnight is still diarrhoeaing out, intermittently and unpredictably (as I'm sure you wanted to know). I'm so tired. I'm not in my sick bed but a sick armchair. I slept in the sick armchair, like a pensioner, all day. Ukh.



MUSICAL INTERLUDE

In the VIP. It's not called "clubbing" for nothing. A club really is a club. Like any other social group you have inner and outer circles. Nightlife is hierarchical and full of snobbery. Do you stand in the endless line, or swan right in? Do you pay? Get a comp? Or best of all, are you on the Guest List?

Then once you get in, are you just one of the common, vulgar herd, or in the "proper" room ~ the VIP room.

I avoided such clubs like the plague!

In the VIP:
WIDEBOYS & MAJESTIC (IN THE VIP REMIX) FEAT B-LIVE and BOY BETTER KNOW



The Streets: Fit (But You Know It)
He wrote an entire album about Ibiza party isle memories. Kicking off with this track ~

Me-Shaped Hole

I HAD a £1 Chinese chicken and noodles from Iceland. Boil int' bag. Hubble-bubbled away for 40 mins. Considering even a lunchtime combination box, a cheapie, is £3 minimum, for £1 this was amazing.

I checked out my nearest bookshop and found a glaring me-shaped hole where my books should be. Books plural, because I have a wealth of ideas.

Yes the project is moving at last! Like a creaky old goods train, it has shuddered to a start. The hoary old locomotive is belching diesel smoke and trundling wearily onwards ~ bringing cartloads of entertainment to the world!

Sorry I've not been visiting any of you very much at all. Nothing personal. But I must focus. I'm still not feeling too fantastic. My energy reserves are low and must be wisely invested. Talent ~ as I was banging on the other day ~ is not to be wasted!

Got to run. I hope you're all keeping well. Take care of yourselves. Just for a change, I'm trying to take care of me!

Who knows? One day this Me-Shaped Hole might be overflowing with amazing tales!

Ill (yet inspired)

I'M not feeling well. Not at all. Every day I'm in bed early, drained, exhausted and sick. Last night Valium Marilyn and I went down the pub and got bladdered enough that she proposed marriage. But I felt so bad I had to leave before ten o'clock to go to my bed.

Today I was supposed to go to counselling. I hobbled to and from my methadone chemists already and the phone rang. My counsellor asked what time I wished to come in. I said midday, then regretted agreeing to anything. I wove my way home feeling as if I might keel over any second. Then I went to bed, phoned the Centre and said I was not up to coming in.

This has nothing to do with drugs. If you remember my story you'll remember I had chronic fatigue syndrome YEARS before heroin addiction. Heroin seemed a wonderful cure for this and the depression that has dogged me for years. Heroin came second. Something Maple Syrup, for example, the druggieworker I sacked, refused to understand.

I have the feeling that this counsellor will likewise assume I'm not coming in because I was too drugged/couldn't be bothered/that type of reason.

These professionals annoy me. It's all nodding yes yes yes to all my problems. Yet when when my problems interfere with THEIR convenience, sympathy's quickly out the window.

I'm off sick and yet I'm not even allowed to BE sick. Well the world can go to hell...

None of this will stop me doing what I have to. I can write in bed. If my head's swimming that badly I have to shut my eyes, I'm still capable of typing. I can type eyes closed, by touch.

I don't want to say much about my project. It's for doing, not talking about.

And I cannot see that it will make me megabucks.

Somehow my comments (Wednesday) got on to the theme of publishing advances. As I said I really cannot think about how little I might get. Or how much writers are paid at the top end of the profession. It's devastatingly offputting.

Literature in an art; publishing is a business. I'm in the business of writing. The ins and outs of royalties, advances (if they even exist, I wouldn't know) and the blah blah blahs... these do my brainbox in whenever I turn my attention in that direction.

So I'm resolutely NOT thinking about how little I'm likely to be paid.

I am ever more fed up with heroin and methadone and addiction to them. But I cannot quit into a vacuum. Which is why I stated that I'm NOT into giving up the drugs and all right now.

As I see it, just about anything I can do will be better than nothing. Accomplishing a dearly held childhood dream might be just about the best thing I could ever do.

What's the saying...? The longest journey begins with a single step.

Whenever I think of my story, I feel inspired. I still feel horrible and depressed. Physically I feel ill and exhausted. I am going to bed early because my head's swimming. Not with drugs, with exhaustion. But I have this tale inside me of such amazingness, it DEMANDS to be told!

I have been stuck in this morass for years and it's killing me. It's time to move on.

My only hope is that this first step might be followed by another... and another...

... then one day I might look back and find myself a thousand miles away from the mire I'm stuck in now!

Reading materiell

TODAY I found a bookshop with several shelves of foreign languages. The German section was all mixed up with Dutch and Scandinavian. C'mon ~ German doesn't have struck through Øs or Ås with little halos on top!
Every single volume of slightest interest that I didn't buy I made careful note of inside the paper bag my methadone came in. Author, title, price... I'm the character Oscar Wilde was speaking of when he famously remarked on the price of everything and the value of nothing...
But prices aside, I carefully checked everything on display. What I wanted more than anything was something nonficitonal and rivetting. For a novel to hold my attention it has to be really special. Otherwise my attitude pretty much goes: this isn't even TRUE, yet you think I should be leafing forever onwards through your tawdry tale? The only novels that have grabbed me in recent times are thrillers. When I heard you could make £20k writing romance and that top writers knock out five or more a year I bought one for 20p. I seriously could not make it past page one. I have an idea (amongst so very many) for a crime series. Who knows, I might one day even put pen to paper (or digits to keys)... As it is I'm mired in my present project which is slowly ongoing. My characters are so real to me. Their story HAS to be told....
Anyway I perused carefully through this not-too inspiring selection of German books and came away with a Collins Gem German dictionary for £1. It's tiny but I quickkly realized on getting it home that my vocabulary has outgrown it. My favourite German word, klitzeklein which means teeny-tiny wasn't there, because the book is too klitzeklein itself!
Most of the novels were translations from English, whcih seemed the biggest waste of time. I want to know I'm experiencing something unique. So I chose a thriller by Volker Klüpfel and Michael Kobr called Seegrund which means Bottom of the Lake. Paragraph one I understood perfectly... because it was somebody speaking English! But I found I also understood paragraph two just as well. This is seriously freaky.
I was about to take my purchases to the till when I realized that behind me was another mixed language pile of children's picture-books. And here, finally, the book I've long been searching for ~ an illustrated encyclopedia of science. As well as all types of animals and plants, we have the Solar System, the sun, the stars, asteroids and meteorites, comets; the weather, the human body, some amazing star maps and the cutest photograph ever of a family of golden bears crossing the ridge of a waterfall, Mummy Bear glancing back to make sure her babies aren't tumbling over the side... This is the book I've longed for ever since I took up German again. It gives all the basic vocab on everything. It's dead easy to read and beautifully illustrated. My best spent £2 in a long, long while!
Though I still feel full of unaccountable gloom whenever I stop, I'm determined to keep on running so my misery won't bite me on the bum and eat me. Perhaps there's no magic cure for depression, but at least knowing that you're accomplishing something, even if it is just learning to speak over again... That does help a little.
Now I must ping. it's nearly 4am. I'm only awake due to my broken sleep cycle.
Apart from books, my best news is THE HEATWAVE HERE IS OVER! Normal cool weather is resumed! I couldn't be happier.
Wishing y'all a cheery day :-)...
PS Chogstable the nightingale is trilling and tootling his klitzekleine head off in the cherry tree outside, the feathery swine!

Tubby trotterdonkey west highland terrier

I SAW THE BEAUTIFULLEST TUBBY TROTTERDONKEY WEST HIGHLAND TERRIER outside the methadone chemists' this morning. He was so cute (surely it has to be a "he" without bits to be that lardy in a little white dog ~ he was like a beer barrel sprouting Daz-white terrier fur!)... I just wanted to take him home. Why on earth I've become so pets-broody of late is beyond me. I am telling myself to be sensible and careful as I have every intention of publishing this bestseller, becoming FAR too rich to reside in the UK and fleeing to foreign shores as soon as possible (remember I've always had this dream ~ rich or not). I dream constantly of Paris and all things French. Monte Carlo and Switzerland are both "tax havens" and both French speaking... and it would be most inconvenient to bring pets there. Of course I have to FINISH the blinkin' thing first. But a boy can dream....
Apart from (exceedingly slowly) penning this novel, I am scheming original (and not too expensive) ways of promoting my book. I am not naive enough to believe that just because a first novel is as good as I can make it people will automatically flock to buy it. No! It needs push push PUSH ~ promote, promote PROMOTE!! And if my publishers won't do it (and I wouldn't count on them to, except in a gentlemanly publisher-like way, I shall have to take charge and bring my genius to the world's notice!
Except in teenage daydreams (but of course!) ~ I have never really wanted to be famous and certainly not a "celebrity". I would like to be a famous NAME, of course ~ like any successful writer. But tacky constantly "Hello" magazine-featured, desperate to dish the latest revelations of my boring life to a queasy public-type desperate celebrity...? No thanks. When I get old (or young, for that matter) I wish to be well known and popular enough to pack out theatres with my one-man show where I'll perch on a blue velvet armchair and proclaim philosophies on life, raconteur funny (true) stories everyone will assume are far more embroidered than they actually are, because my if I wrote my life in a book nobody would believe it (another thing I had against becoming a memoirist rather than novelist)... then I shall take questions from the audience for the last hour... and everyone shall go home in their multiple hundreds feeling that's an afternoon's wages well spent. And I shall be able to go out shopping at Harrods on the proceeds. So you see ~ far from being lettuce-limp and sappy as the nasty MAPLE SYRUP supposed I actually am brimming with ambitions. I simply refused to tell a Hitleress like HER any details at all. Bitch!
Anyway ding-dong the old cow is gone! And I'm so happy about it. I've an appointment with Maple's replacement tomorrow, so I'll let you know how things go...
The drug habit IS still going, I hope you realize. I just got bored posting about it. It just feels, increasingly as winter slowly, eventually drags to its long-eeeked out end... that a new and golden dawn is rising... I can feel it in my veins, my bones, my water. I can feel it. Heroin is nowhere near as exciting as it used to be (like an injection of life itself ~ how I adored it!) Now it only makes me feel dull and tired. And I only take it out of habit. The days off are often my better days now... which just about says everything... I only wish I could take the rest of my life off. That's what I intend to do, but getting to that point seems so incredibly hard... I don't know. I don't know. What can I do except push myself forward? What can I do? "It is what it is!" as Ivana Trump likes to say.

To any fans of Celebrity Big Brother out there (Channel 4, UK television, but you can see updates here) ~ I would say my personality is a cross between nervy Ivana and the laid-back to the point of irritating Jonas-Basshunter.


And that's all I can say for today... Cheerybye all!!


IN THE NEWS: SMITHSONIAN Institute, Washington DC, USA have, for a short time the Wittelsbach-Graff Blue Diamond, reputed to be an offcut of the same giant stone as the Hope Diamond which was stolen from the French Crown Jewels after the French Revolution and cut in two to disguise the theft... Curators have but a few days to perform necessary tests on the two 50 carat and 31 (formerly 35 but it had to be recut as some idiot dropped and chipped it ~ yes you CAN chip diamonds, they are ultra hard but BRITTLE... if science establishes the stones to be related that will be an age-old mystery solved...!

Taking Notes

THAT'S ALL I'VE BEEN DOING... all night... (somehow it feels real meaningful, staying up most of the night doing something ~~ dunno precisely why!) Making copious "notes" re this erstwhile book of mine. Or: put another way ~ huge sections of upcoming chapters written out in the wrong order ahead of time so I'm going to have to fiddle to fit them in. Annoying, but less annoying than not knowing what to say when the time comes to complete my "tome". I feel constipated with bestselling fiction. If I don't get it out of me, I'll die. I can't go on like this. Everything has to be finished, so everything can change. That's all I'm focusing on. Even Maple Syrup can see the change in me. She agrees that if you can't give up heroin you can never move forward. I'm preparing the place to move to when I am totally clean. Just bear in mind I was sick both mentally and physically for years before heroin addiction totally waylaid everything about me. In American terms, if my life is a car-crash, then I'm "totalled". And I've had enough of all this. Had enough and want out. And I'm NOT moving on into a blank void, not if I can possibly help it. All I ever wanted to do in life was be a writer of novels. I mean since childhood. Yes there have been other ambitions and distractions but in truth writing is all I really wanted to do. So I reason: if I can do that, I have my distraction from drugs already up and running. I've already noticed I write much better on methadone than heroin. I don't need to take the drug to write the lifestyle. I lost more than a decade "researching" that one... My unabridged flirtations with drugs now go back about eighteen years. That particular chapter of my life has run on far too long and needs bringing to closure ASAP.
And I don't know how to end this post, except by saying: and that's that!

Illustrated: coloured notes, as illustrated at Mouserunner.Com; the so-called Fleetwood Diary, as penned by Christian Fleetwood in 1964...

Clear Space

SEE, I'M GLAD my Mum came by now. My house now seems incredibly spacious and clear... Someone asked me why I couldn't just clear up anyway ~ but I'm never any good at that. I keep things clean for someone ~ and I'm afraid my own self isn't a good enough candidate!

So now I'm sat in a chair not really watching TV, because I'm telling my own torrid tale. I keep worrying it might sell less than 10,000,000 in the first year... what a horror that would be. But these are crosses we writers must bear.

Apart from that I've nothing else to say. My creative juices are flowing into fiction... Must dash ~ I have a funeral to describe!

Famous literary agents: Morton Janklow , Lynn Nesbit (Janklow & Nesbit, New York) Ed Victor, London ...

Breakthrough

WELL I FINISHED my endlessly reupdated chapter one. Which still probably has rough bits, but it needs looking at by fresh eyes. Emailed it to someone I trust who is NOT an addict. No point just giving it to fellow addicts to read they'll probably think it's wonderful just because at last they're reading about fictional characters who live just like them. My book is written for someone stuck on a remote farm in New Zealand and someone riding the commuter train into Manhattan. I.e. normal people who are not addicts and not English. If my points come across to people like these, I've done my job.

I had a very good counselling session. I showed the counsellor the "MS" to my book, as we like to say in the trade ~~!(***if only!***)!! ~ yes and the manuscript is just as well punctuated as that.(!) My counsellor said I was a very powerful person. And spiritual. I said how do you know that and she said she can just tell ... And apart from that I don't know what to say.

Now it's back to that book and chapter two. This is where the rewriting starts in earnest as the old chapter two is just bluster and guff about my characters' past. No dialogue. No "scene" as such. It has to be totally redone. OK I'm outta here. Have a pleasant weekend, y'all!

PS do you like the picture: a blast-from-the-past Amstrad PCW wordie!

THE STRANGLERS ~ GOLDEN BROWN
Classic song about... guess what?

A Random Day

I COULDN'T SLEEP last night. So I randomly trawled my shelves and picked up a Marian Keyes novel ~ which is non-romance chicklit and I found it on the street by the way ~ a story about a literary agent and two novelists. Reading about book publishing wound me up so I was even less amenable to sleep.

But I did learn something about literary agents that should have twigged before. Basically they are essential in today's "market" ~ publishers don't even look at work by unknowns. That's the agents' job. Anyway I learned that fledglings at the agency don't even get a cut of the deals they negotiate ~ which seems most unfair. Only partners do. One of the agents who showed an interest last time was a director at his company. So I know who to approach first next time, don't I?

I also sat up drawing plans for my own book. I need to know where the story's going before I retell it. Telling the story I love ~ not knowing what to tell is torment. Hence this planning in advance.

Once I did get to sleep I couldn't wake up. I spent nearly the whole day sleeping. And now I feel like a dinosaur. And I'm depressed (for no apparent reason).

I have told myself that once my plans take off I'll have far less to be depressed about ~ which seems logical. I just hope it comes true.

On that note I must fly. I never seem to get two minutes on a computer before it's logging me off for lack of time... so I'll see yas tomorrow xx



PS A gust of wind last night hit me so strong I nearly got hurled backwards onto someone's roof!

PPS I saw a picture of Gwendolina in the paper today! She looks just like a bear named Finn who got shot for attacking a mentally ill man who climbed into its zoo enclosure... The horrible pictures are here ... Actually that brown bear oop top looks like Gwendolina too...

Ding Dong Not Merrily On Low

I KEEP THINKING of Andra, the lady who died and what a waste and how sad and poor cow. I feel guilty now. I feel shamed. I feel that my first reaction was callous. This is the thing. About FEELING. She and I both lived in the land of the unfeeling. So when something happens to any of us, it's hard to know what to feel. I feel sorry now.

NA say addicts are divided into thirds: one third do get clean; a third are killed by the drugs and the last third carry on using till they die. Even when the drugs aren't directly responsible they hardly extend life, do they ..?

I felt that I wanted to give a proper memorial and tribute to all those who died ~ the names, faces and lives behind the statistics and I suppose that's part of the reasoning behind my book. I chose to write fiction because paradoxically it's a better medium for telling truth than a living memoir can ever be. To write about real people in such detail would be a gross invasion of privacy. Hence the need for fiction.

I can't think of many good books about addiction, Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting is in Scottish but it made a good film. Kate Holden's memoir In My Skin is as much about her career as a prostitute as about drugs but it is a well-written account of the confines of addiction. But neither of these delve far into the nittygritty of life and death. And I think someone should. Hence my book.

I took Sharon Osbourne's autobiography Extreme off the library shelf and found I couldn't stop reading. I don't know about elsewhere but the publishers in Britain are going crazy for celebrity memoirs ~ even when some of the "stars" in question are barely past their mid-20s, and what have they done? Love her or loathe her Sharon Osbourne has lived a fascinating life. She's been a rock manager and promoter. If it wasn't for her, Ozzy would probably be penniless. Reading her story, I realized I had more in common with her husband than I'd cared to admit previously and that the drugs I'd been taking have dulled me and disabled me and I don't need them anymore.

For the first time ever I thought to myself, "I don't need heroin," and felt a surge of excitement. That's a feeling I want to grab hold of ~ to feel good about not taking the drug.

I've already turned tables on just about every other substance. Not only do I not want them, but I'm glad they're out of my life.

When I can finally do that with heroin I'll know I've got some way towards getting this problem licked.

Wahay!!!

Quandry

I only had 15 mins to bash in the above without thought or pause but~
I DID EXACTLY WHAT WALTER MOSLEY SAID in his guide, having written my first draft three years ago. I had assumed it was rubbish because every time I opened a page my eye seemed to fall on something trite or stilted. The fact that it was in my own handwriting was also very offputting.

Then I forced myself actually to sit down and begin reading from chapter two. (Not chapter one because I spent so long hacking it about I know it by heart.) And was shocked. The prose was not bland. The characters sprang out. The dialogue was quite good. So my ideas of scrapping the whole thing and writing another draft in parallel without reference to the first goes out the window.

I'm not someone who believes in redoing anything for the sake of it. So I think what I'm going to have to do is just keep the good bits and weave in the new stuff around that. Gwendolina, the hellhound who lies in a corner chewing a baby doll's face and snarling, for example, features nowhere at all. So I gotta put her in. I said I wanted a horrible dog in my story so in she goes!

So onwards and upwards and all that. And I've got to rush again as the computer's faulted and I'm getting chucked off in three minutes.

Illustrated: Agatha Christie, who sold two billion books ~ one billion in English, yet died leaving about £170,000 ~ under £2,000,000 in today's money. That's bad business sense for you!