The Bondens - altruism and self-interest

In a supreme (and horribly expensive) act of altruism the Bondens have, as announced, caused a shower to be installed in their main bathroom. This will meet complaints of shower-loving guests that a pre-existing shower is no use because it is located in the en suite bathroom and gaining access means passing through the Bonden bedroom. Most people prefer not to deal with the Bondens prior to 9 am.

Altruistic because the Bondens never take showers. Mrs BB bathes but follows a routine that is not widely explained. BB himself does not exactly bathe: he runs water, lies in it, reads for an hour, then gets out. This practice has always horrified residents of the North American continent but most are willing to compromise their high hygiene standards. Visits to chez Bonden may run the risk of bacterial infection but there are compensations, as the third part of the montage suggests.

The too-low wash-basin in the en suite has been replaced by a unit strangely resembling a Hammond organ. BB’s vertebral discs are no long at risk. However the nanny state feels it must protect its low IQ citizens from scalding their hands and hot water flow from the mixer tap is down to a dribble, by law it seems.

NOVEL Seven chapters (out of twenty-two) have now been subjected to preliminary editing and many words have taken off into the ether. The experience is salutary. Time after time verbosity takes exactly the same form – even in adjacent paragraphs. To edit one’s own stuff is an exercise in self-humiliation.

Fly on wall reports

BLOGGER’S RETREAT, yesterday. The Newport-Paddington leg of my inward journey lasted two hours, just time to write the following but without refurbishment.

To call him square as once a Frenchman did
Was slanderous - he had a baby’s lines.
His stomach made an unrestrained bid
To match his mango cheeks and, from the vines,
Sketched on his nose, hung sweetish rosebud lips.
Sine-curved, his textiled bulk and mincing hand
Moved primly on well-polished tripping tips
Proclaiming rosbif in an alien land.
And on his head a condign, bulbous crown
An overarching stroke to this cartoon,
A melon, bowler, derby, curved surround,
The perfect stigma for a male balloon.
Basil, a herb, a feature of Red Square
Deserves affection more than I can spare.

The subject is (was? – de mortuis…) a mutual acquaintance of fifty years ago and I was able to read the sonnet to Plutarch as the champagne was being opened. Afterwards, chicken bhuna, chicken korma, poppadums, several chutneys, two types of curried vegetable and a pint of Kingfisher each.

An agenda had been prepared (P’s reponses in italics): Is my delight in inserting multi-syllabic words in sonnet lines justifiable? (It’s old-fashioned.). I worry about my verse being unintentionally obscure. (Fight hard against this. Aim for clarity. And yet...) Can vivid scenes in the novel be used to disguise lack of plot momentum? (In a word, yes. But it depends on the vividness.)

Because I offered it hypothetically P spent some time on “Is it legitimate to parachute in a character for a single scene and not to refer to him/her again?” P gave a qualified yes but urged me to consider later indirect references. However a woman at an adjacent table, who’d been listening, said very firmly: “Yes, the author is king.”

Instead of going the short way (ie, over Waterloo Bridge) to the pub in Roupell Street we went down Fleet Street and examined the Blackfriars Bridge – Embankment intersection to check the geography of the most crucial scene in the novel. At Roupell Street, two pints of Breakspear each; discussed Lucy's prepositional infinitive. P gave me The Penguin Book of German Verse and lent me The Anthologist by Nicholson Baker.

Question of etiquette

Good conversation is like Pass the Parcel – in reverse. The parcel gets bigger. Good conversation rewards because the benefits are not foreseen. But is it mechanistic, even heartless, to consider a tiny bit of planning?

This is serious. On Wednesday I meet Plutarch at the Blogger’s Retreat and I am conscious I failed to take full advantage of our last encounter. There were just too many topics I wanted to discuss. I raised an important point, ravished it somewhat and then passed on. I was impatient and eventually breathless. Not Plutarch’s fault; he’s politer than I am.

This time there are four vital subjects. For me, that is. I don’t have the flexibility of mind to allow for Plutarch having his own agenda. I fear it is, to some extent, sauve qui peut. Would it be impossibly anal of me to conduct a form of chairmanship in my head; to look at my watch and say “That’s twenty-seven minutes spent on Pretentious Versification. Round-up in ten minutes.”

I hear voices as far away as Virginia and Prague telling me it’s a horrible idea, that I should be open, spontaneous, gracious and all the other qualities that a West Riding upbringing did not equip me for. But don’t forget the Graham Greene moment – the ice chip at the writer’s heart. Plutarch may go back to TW feeling he’s attended the Unite annual meeting. But he’s got a blog to attend to. And he’ll have new material.

NOTE: The above men are younger than Plutarch or me (or I).

Dogged to death by data

I blog for fun, I run the Belmont Rural website as a Sisyphean labour. Beforehand I edited the quarterly Belmont Voice for three years and it generated a parish-wide storm of apathy. When I closed the mag to start the website the parish, collectively, burst into tears. “Too late you inert bastards,” I said to myself.

That was five years ago. Website progress was glacial. I interviewed people, learned to unknot Dreamweaver and nobody cared. More recently I started blogging, then resumed the novel. At a time when I could have usefully closed the site it took off. Now emails pour in keeping me away from novel revision. I flew a kite about whether Belmont Rural deserved to endure and, alas, I got lots of email support.

With projects like these it pays to take a long-term view. I started Voice because I was a retired journalistic smartyboots and wanted to wipe the face of my neighbours. Amazingly it attracted advertising which allowed the parish council, who financed the printing and distribution, to cut their budget. Reader response (other than the aforementioned bout of sobbing) was zilch and I found myself on a treadmill of deadlines.

Websites aren’t governed by deadlines and there was the technical attraction of starting up from nothing. However, once websites become popular they can overwhelm you. This morning, when I should have been carving Chapter Three (which some of you have read in its embryonic form) into something more readable and which is as hard as anything I’ve ever done, I had to break off and instruct a website emailer on verse scansion so that his “poetic” contributions didn’t grind my teeth.

Like WW I contain multitudes and they’re getting me down.

Editing progress: May 2, 2010. Rather alarming. Untouched, the MS totalled 99,407 words. After four chapters this has shrunk to 97,964. If this slash-and-burn average is maintained the total will drop to 92,204. You may well ask why I wrote all this unnecessary stuff anyway.

Improvements need to be bought

Dateline: 28/4/10. Cinderford, Gloucs. Freed from pounding out the novel I return to my roots. The comments will fall away but I took up blogging to fill in a techno-void. Rhyming couplets are OK but nuts and bolts hold things together.

My four-year-old car is here at Winner’s Garage for only its second scheduled service which will cost at least £800 (actually £768.83). There’s nothing wrong but they’ll be replacing the cam-belt (the cogged strip that snakes round the gears in the pic) which means pulling the front of the engine to bits.

The belt drives the camshaft which opens and closes the valves to admit fuel and allow exhaust fumes to escape. In olden times (still the case with some large US engines) the shaft was buried in the engine and valve contact was by rackety push-rods. Now the shaft sits on top of the cylinder and is rotated via a plastic belt. Much more precise, greater engine efficiency, but at a price. Over time the belt stretches and the tensioners no longer tension. Left to its own devices the belt may slip a cog or break, a valve no longer synchronised touches the piston and excessive derangement ensues. A replacement engine for my car costs over £2000.

Nothing comes for nothing. An overhead cam engine is a great improvement on a push-rod engine but plastic belts don’t last for ever; similarly with chain drives. Sounds like a conspiracy, doesn’t it? Meanwhile the world waits for an eternal belt.

A giant step for WfW

Novel: started in early October, finished today. Last chapter (4992 words) plus the previous 21 chapters comes out at 99,407 words. Say 320 words to the book page and I have a 310-page book. “Finished” is a nonsense. There are weeks of editing at all levels. I do not know how it reads end to end, whether it is has rhythm, vitality, surprises and all those intangibles whereby a string of words becomes a novel. Most important, do my two precious creations live?

The blog suffered. In defence, much blog stuff appears in the book which follows two people working in manufacturing industry and – unfashionably and possibly indigestibly – there is much engineering detail. Whether it finds a publisher or not, or whether I publish it as a vanity project, it discharges an obligation I feel towards engineers. They are my heroes and I feel bitterly that so few people give a toss about them.

The plot outline changed. The second main character eventually occupied half the story and chapters intertwined. Eventually the characters meet for a final chapter intended as an elegy of their professional concerns and their natures. Only recently I realised the plot structure resembled a rather more famous work – the progress of Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through the dense pages of Ulysses which culminates in Molly Bloom’s wonderful soliloquy. Entirely sub-conscious, I swear.

Along the way I started writing verse but cannot think why. In my opinion writing verse is easier than writing a novel: one is like torturing a beetle, the other like riding a python. This opinion is worthless if it turns out both are done badly.

Cleanliness and delight

The BBs both read through their ablutions and are not shower people. The unused shower is in the en suite and therefore denied to guests. To ensure their cleanliness a shower is being installed over the bath. As the photo shows (awkwardly shot prone on the bathroom floor) further readjustment will be needed since the bath is equipped for readers not showerers.




MORE ABLUTIONARY EXPENSE Imperially I am 6 ft 1½ in. tall; metrically that’s a nigglingly precise 1.8669 m. The en suite hand-basin is 800 mm high, standard for such fitments and well below that part of my body indelicately referred to as my groin or crutch – take your pick. Rinsing my face I must bend down like a croquet hoop. This irritation will shortly be addressed so here’s the “Before” pic.

TOUCHED BY JOY For months the final chapter of the novel (carrying two contrary options) has been clear in my head. But getting there from the penultimate chapter was a blank. I spent three days thinking. An idea and, more important, a technique based on event compression arrived and I rushed upstairs to turn them into words which were a delight to write. Time to rush downstairs to the exercise bike and to plug myself into the Ulysses audio. As luck would have it I’d reached the Castle of the Winds section (officially Aeolus) where Bloom visits the newpaper offices and the text is presented as series of cod news reports topped by headlines – which the actor-reader shouts aloud. Nostalgically hilarious. Double delight so I am twice blest. Bless you all

Novel progress 25/4/10. Ch. 22: 3890 words. Chs. 1 - 21: 94,115 words. Comments: Final third of final chapter remains. Or will it do a Topsy?

The axe, laid aside, is taken up again

In 1951 a five-line paragraph about a jumble sale appeared in a Bradford newspaper and I was paid 1d (one penny) a line for it. That thrill of having work printed has never gone away.

American Ikaros is about Kevin Andrews author of The Flight of Ikaros, described by Patrick Leigh Fermor as “One of the great and lasting books about Greece”. I didn’t write it, Jinks did. I edited it over two years. But what is editing?

Many think it is checking spelling and adding (more likely, taking out) commas. It is of course cutting but it is also deciding not to cut. Jinks chose a structure in which certain chapters stood chronologically outside, and even overlapped, other chapters. Aiming for clarity I was against this; familiarity eventually persuaded me. On the other hand Jinks has an individual tone of voice and cutting ensured it wasn’t obscured.

Editing is an endless dialogue. Here’s part of an email I sent Jinks after receiving my copy: “I tested it by half-closing my eyes, opening it randomly and reading the first passage I encountered - asking whether it could be the work of someone who wrote professionally. It passed this highly subjective test easily.”

I didn’t do this for money, nor because I was attracted by the story which, half-written, arrived as a right old mess. I did it because I knew I could withstand the two-year grind which is something only an editor could appreciate. The half case of burgundy was welcome but not necessary.

MEANWHILE Editing AmIk suggested I should be writing my own stuff. The draft of the novel is 2000 – 3000 words from completion. Then I’ll edit it. Always distrust first efforts as we editors say.

Novel progress 21/4/10. Ch. 21: 0 words. Chs. 1 - 20: 90,849 words. Comments: Final chapter now starts.