The Doctor is Out

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I woke up this morning to find my world covered in a thin layer of snow, and to discover that Dr. Hunter S. Thompson has died. None of the breakfast news shows seemed to be covering this story. I found the news in my e-mail Inbox.

I’m really not sure what to say.

It’s true to say that if it weren’t for Hunter, I never would have become a writer. At the very least, not the writer I have become.

I first stumbled upon the words of the good Doctor in my early teens, when I bought a copy of The Great Shark Hunt. I loved it. It blew my mind. I can’t claim that I understood all of it, steeped in Americana my young mind was unfamiliar with, but his snappy, unique prose grabbed me by the throat and hasn’t let go since.

Whilst my peers were covering their bedroom walls with pictures of pop groups or football teams, I had sneakily cut a photo of Hunter out of a library book and framed it. Taken by Annie Leibovitz for Rolling Stone magazine, it was a black and white photo of a hotel room, littered with overflowing ashtrays, empty whisky bottles, discarded papers and a battered old typewriter. Hidden in the middle of the photo was a comatose Hunter asleep in his bed.

Underneath the picture, I had typed: “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me. – H.S.T.”

I used to look at that photo every day for years.

I used to think “Yeah. I’m going to be a writer one day.”

Reading Hunter’s words reminds me how far I still have to go.

Part of me still thinks that this is yet another classic Hunter prank, and that any minute now the news sites will be retracting the stories of his death.

The other part of me knows that that probably isn’t going to happen.

Double Secret Probation

Dammit.

John Vernon was one of my favourite character actors of all time. He has just died at the age of 72. I won’t eulogise him at length here, as no doubt better writers than I will do that admirably in other places. All I have to say was that his distinctive voice and gravitas made him one of the most recognisable faces in Seventies cinema, and one of the all time great movie heavies. His C.V. is a list of some of the best movies ever made: Point Blank, Dirty Harry, The Outlaw Josey Wales, Charley Varrick, and, of course, Animal House.

They say there are no second acts in American lives. Now, that ain’t true. In the Sixties, and again in the Nineties, Vernon lent his gravely tones to a variety of Marvel cartoons, as the voice of Doctor Strange, Dr. Doom, the Sub-Mariner, Iron Man, and tireless Hulk-hunter General “Thunderbolt” Ross.

I just want to remember him here for some of his greatest lines. Take it away, John:

(Dirty Harry, starring John Vernon as The Mayor!)

Harry Callahan: Well, when an adult male is chasing a female with intent to commit rape, I shoot the bastard. That's my policy.
The Mayor: Intent? How did you establish that?
Harry Callahan: When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alley with a butcher's knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn't out collecting for the Red Cross!
The Mayor: He's got a point.

(The Outlaw Josey Wales, starring John Vernon as Fletcher!)

Senator: There's a saying, Fletcher: To the victor belongs the spoils.
Fletcher: There's another saying, Senator: Don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining.

(National Lampoon’s Animal House, starring John Vernon as Dean Vernon Wormer!)

Dean Vernon Wormer: The time has come for someone to put his foot down. And that foot is me.

And his most immortal line ever:

Dean Vernon Wormer: Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son.

He’s got a point. Rest well, John, you’ve earned it.

Pai Mei

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Douglas Adams

According to people who know about these things, yesterday was the most depressing day of the year. Don’t take my word for it, look here.

But I had a little treat yesterday that lifted my spirits in the most unexpected way. As usual, I’m getting ahead of myself…

To my mind, the worst ailment to afflict the freelance writer is insecurity. Any writer who says otherwise is, probably, a liar. We all work in a vacuum. And variations on the same thoughts flood our heads: “I’m not very good at this.” “I can’t do this.” “My old stuff was better.”

I think I know when I’ve written something good. I’m pretty sure I know when I’ve written something bad. But all creative types have moments when they are convinced that they suck.

Neil Gaiman once asked Will Eisner why he continued to write and draw and tell stories. Eisner answered that he had once seen a film where a jazz musician kept playing because he was still searching for the Note. That’s why Eisner kept working. He was striving for perfection, to finally create something that pleased him, hunting for that Note.

I guess we are all like that. Always looking for the Note, no matter how good or bad we are.

I’ve gone off on another tangent, I know. Bear with me.

In a moment of boredom, I Googled myself yesterday. I make no apologies for this. False modesty be damned! I bet ALL writers with work out in the world Google themselves occasionally.

I found out that a prestigious London university is using the two chapters I wrote for a lovely book that was published last year as course materials for one of their Film Studies degree modules.

Feels a bit weird. Just when I think, "I'm not very good at this writing thing", something happens to convince me otherwise. At least for a while.

Ironically, I could never get onto a Film Studies university degree course when I was younger, and years later, the students are turning to my texts for wisdom. Odd.

The never-was-a-student becomes the not-quite-a-teacher. Wax on, wax off.

All Time Low

The other day, I wrote about how little I have to do in my day job. I’ve finally tracked down the evidence to back this up. There’s a call logging system here, where I’m supposed to record the work I’ve done and the amount of time it’s taken. Obviously, I don’t log every single tiny thing I do, but this is a pretty good indicator. When looking at these figures, bear in mind that I’m at work for 7 and a half hours a day (not counting lunch breaks here), 5 days a week. Also, I started working in this job towards the end of August last year. And now, those figures in full:

August - 4.166833337 (Yes, that’s just over 4 hours. Just over half a day's work.)
September - 0.25 (I know. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s 15 MINUTES of work done in my first full calendar month working here. Scary.)
October - 14 (The highest monthly output so far. All the more impressive because I had two weeks paternity leave in October.)
November - 11.83333333
December - 11.16666667
January (so far) - 9.933333333

Which brings me to a total of 51.35016667 hours work done since I started in this place. Which is just under 7 days work in total. George Costanza would be proud.

So, when I say I’m bored, I’m not bullshitting you.

And a bit of site news: You may have noticed that the Links section on the right-hand side of the page has now been expanded from bloggers I know personally to include blogs I visit on a regular basis. I heartily recommend each and every one of them. Happy surfin’.

Tic Tic Bang

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.” Red Smith

As part of my ongoing drive to become a Better Writer, here are some irritating writing tics I’ve identified in my work that I want to eradicate in 2005:

1. An annoying attachment to alliteration. Obscenely overused and unbelievably ubiquitous.
2. A stunning, towering and epic over-reliance on adjectives and superlatives.
3. I’ve never met a deadline I liked. Time to make friends with some of them.
4. Probably linked to my innate ability to procrastinate endlessly, but I seem to start a lot of things that get abandoned or left alone, never to be looked at again. Time to start wrapping up some loose threads.
5. Over-use of some dodgy metaphors and similes. I rely on them like a pimp on his stable of hos.

No doubt there are more unruly kinks that I need to violently pummel into submission, but I think this little lot will keep me busy for now.

Some links to read:

Why being anonymous on your blog can be a Good Thing, and why Waterstone’s have just bitten themselves in the ass.

The e-mail scammers get scammed. “When all above seems a great test, Get on down with the Holy Red Breast.”

No Static At All

What a week to start the year.

The whole tsunami thing is still blowing my mind. Utterly depressed to see Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake make the front page of The Sun today in lieu of actual news. You would have thought that everyone’s worldview would have shifted a little bit in the last week. You would have thought wrong.

The death of Will Eisner continues to make me sad. I know he was very old, and I never knew the man personally, but I’m taking it quite badly. Which is adding surprise to my sadness. Read The Will Eisner Reader the other night. Started Last Day In Vietnam yesterday. Determined to work my way through every Eisner book I have on my shelves in the coming weeks.

I can’t get Steely Dan’s FM out of my head at the moment. It’s been bopping around between my ears for days now, and no matter how many times I play it, I can’t seem to exorcise it. Not sure I want to, to be honest. I’m quite enjoying the feeling of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker jamming in my frontal lobe.

The wind has been screaming outside my office window all day. The BBC website says: “Gusts of 80 to 90 mph will uproot trees and cause structural damage to buildings. Driving will become extremely dangerous.” Treacherous wind.

Time to prepare for my evening. Got a press screening followed by beer and chat and ting.

And I’m exhausted. No change there, then.

Beef Jerky Time

Billy Ray Valentine: Merry New Year!
Clarence Beeks: That's "happy." In this country we say "Happy New Year."
Billy Ray Valentine: Oh, ho, ho, thank you for correcting my English which stinks!
(Trading Places)

Back to work. New Year, Same Ol’ Dickheads.

I had to get through the familiar seasonal refrain from the phalanx of fuckmooks for the first hour or two of the day. You know the one. It goes like this:

“Good Christmas?”
“Yeah, it was alright. You?”
“Yeah.”
“New Year?”
"Yeah."

Repeat ad nauseam.

Meanwhile, here’s my first nominee for Utter Bastard of 2005.

Performance Appraisal

Well, I’ve done everything else, and seeing as it’s the last day of the year, I suppose that its time to look back at my personal 2004.

Helluva year for me. I finally crawled out from under the soul-crushing rock of my previous job to claw back a sliver of dignity with a new job. Hugely tedious, but at least the stench of self-loathing no longer sticks to me.

I passed my driving test, after almost fifteen years of intermittent, half-arsed attempts to get round to it.

I gained a phenomenal little girl. (Surely THE highlight of my year).

This blog started. (Surely THE highlight of your year).

After a 2003 where not a single word of mine was published out there in the world, 2004 gave me a handful of magazine articles, a new role as the Film Editor for a widely read music website, and, my professional highlight to date, a really very excellent book was published with lots of wise and whirling words straight from my keyboard. Particularly proud of that one. Kudos to me.

On top of that, my healthily-polluted ideaspace kept spitting out ideas for comic books and movie scripts that I have diligently scrawled out with an eye on completion in 2005. The long-mooted Film Deal may well come off next year.

Personally, 2004 has been happy and successful.

Professionally, after a remarkably fallow 2003 when I lost all the momentum I had built up in the preceding years, 2004 reignited my writing career. Now I just need to keep building on that for 2005. I need more paid writing commissions for next year, I need to consolidate the contacts I’ve made this year, and I just have to keep on becoming a better writer. And I need to write a proper treatment for the Big Movie to get the wheels greased on that project at last. Amongst many, many other things that I can’t think of right now.

Ze clock, she is ticking.

AKA Year in Review: The Books

And so another Christmas comes and goes. I won’t go into any great detail about it here, seeing as, barring the odd superficial difference, Christmases are the same all over. I ate far too much. I probably drank too much. I’m positive I didn’t deserve the quantity and quality of presents I got. I will say, though, that it was a treat to have my first Christmas with little Buttercup. Even at the tender age of 3 months, she got a real kick out of it.

Anyway, enough of my yakking. Nothing can stop the AKA Year in Review, and the time has come to shoot a dirty look at my heaving bookshelves and eulogise the words of wisdom causing the wood to creak. Onwards!

Percival Everett – Erasure – A well-respected black author, who writes worthy but virtually unread academic tracts, is incensed at the soaring popularity of ghetto fiction. With a desire to put a gun to the genre’s head, he assumes the nom de guerre Stagg R. Leigh and pens My Pafology (later retitled Fuck), and then looks on in horror as the book becomes a massive success, as his life unravels out of his control. A great book where the storytelling is more important than the story told. Outstanding.

Newton Thornburg – Dreamland – Another well-deserved re-release from the long-forgotten crime writer behind the undisputed genre classic Cutter and Bone. First published in 1983, Dreamland is another tragic, elegiac knife in the guts of modern America, as money, drugs, porn, booze and corruption cause seeping lesions on the overfed white meat of Los Angeles, destroying lives indiscriminately. Strangely beautiful and sadly still relevant.

Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita – The fabulist masterpiece about the appearance of the Devil and his minions in Moscow, as they turn the city into a heaving lunatic asylum. I read this under duress, thinking I would hate it. I was wrong. One of the finest books I’ve ever read.

Susannah Breslin – You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? – Breslin’s reports from behind the open sets and sticky lenses of Porn Valley were astonishing, so I was really looking forward to this first collection of short stories. I wasn’t disappointed. Harsh, terse, sharp little stabs of fiction to disturb and unsettle, peeling back the flesh on the modern American psyche. Go grab an insight into her first novel here, and see what one of the freshest voices in fiction sounds like.

Hunter S. Thompson – Kingdom of Fear (Loathsome Secrets of A Star-Crossed Child In the Final Days of the American Century) – Conclusive proof (not that we needed it) that those who believe that the Good Doctor is past his prime are wrong, wrong, wrong. His power to take unerring aim with well-chosen words is undimished, as he slices away at the short-sighted evil fucks dismantling the world piece by piece. Still the Daddy.

George P. Pelecanos – Hard Revolution – The Greatest Living American Crime Writer. Fact. Another piece of history clicks into place as Pelecanos looks back to Washington D.C. in the days surrounding the assassination of Martin Luther King. Pelecanos has yet to write a book that wasn’t stone brilliant, and this is no exception.

Don Siegel – A Siegel Film – I forgot I even had this book until I dug it out of a box that had been sitting in the corner of my office for the last year and a half. The man behind Invasions of the Body Snatchers and Dirty Harry writes his memoirs in a disarmingly honest, funny and entertaining way, slapping down all the fools he was forced to tolerate over the length of his impressive career.

Christmas Rapping

Hello-ho-ho. Saint Nick here.

Some of you will know me as Santa Claus, or Father Christmas, or Kris Kringle. You know, the portly fellow with the large sack that he unloads on you with a hearty laugh. Like Ron Jeremy.

AKA has kindly invited me to contribute to his blog for the day. I was unfamiliar with this Sucker Punch before now. What a potty mouth he has on him! I might have to put him on the “naughty” list this year.

Anyway, I was just chilling in my crib, listening to some Kurtis Blow, and AKA wanted me to say a few brief words on the eve of Christmas.

Firstly, those fraudulent impostors who pretend to be me in those built-up Shopping Areas of Rampant Commerce in cities all over the world. They are rubbish! They are besmirching my good name in order to sell you more tawdry cheap baubles! Let me clarify something for you:

I don’t smell of wee and Special Brew like those scallywags. I can smell those rancid stinkers from the North Pole!

Also, I fail to understand this excessive consumerism. You should be spending Christmas loving your families and laughing with your friends, not working yourselves into a sweaty, destitute frenzy by suckling on Mammon’s teat with your unnecessary spending!

Anyway, I must go. Rudolph has messed on the rug. And reindeer poop stains, don’t you know.

Don’t get broke, don’t get sick, and don’t get angry. To all the readers of Sucker Punch, have yourselves a very Merry Christmas.