Los Angeles, I love you.
Create your own adventure
I am sat at the head of an empty table. There is a certain poetry in those words but I am not speaking figuratively, I am literally sat at a wooden table, the only one with a power socket close enough for my laptop, at a bar in Bristol. The idea is to give myself a base away from the distractions of home to start making progress with my writing. Strangely, I chose to edit a couple of old pieces to shake the dust off but it worked. It got my mind focused, my fingers on the keys, clicking the mouse. I’m normally distracted by other people talking, music that isn’t my own, but I find something nice about being in an environment that isn’t entirely under my control.
I could have stayed in bed for fucking hours today. My body aches from the gym and I can’t find a genuine energy today. Energy is a thing for me. Well, it is a thing for everyone but particularly to me and particularly at the moment. It just seems relative to everything that I’m trying to achieve, that I’m trying to be. It is easy to be carried along by routine, by others momentum, and harder still to actually make a genuine choice that comes from a genuine place.
I recently discovered the Neistat brothers. I know, I’m coming to the game late. If you haven’t discovered them yet, you will probably at least be acquainted with Casey Neistat, the film maker behind Nikes new FuelBand ‘Make it count’ commercial. The pitch of the commercial is that it isn’t actually a commercial at all; Casey took the budget that Nike gave him and instead chose to travel the world for however long the money would last. He did however film his travels, he is wearing theFuelBand and he did presumably edit the footage into an ad that Nike was happy with. Now there are voices online that employ a certain skepticism that is hard to ignore, that surely this was Nikes plan all along?
Regardless of this, I think that whichever way you cut it, Nike got what they paid for and then some. Throughout the commercial, that closer resembles a short film of sorts, I was just blown away by Casey Neistat’s energy. Again, if you are taking a skeptical standpoint, the brief may well have been ‘run and jump around’, after all that is what theFuelBandis for, but there is something far more genuine about Neistat than that. There is a restless energy that you can just sense about him, beyond the physicality. He had after all made this short film, had chosen to pursue the energy of travel, of freedom, rather than sports or everyday life. It made me want to look into him more, to check out his videos online.
His creative energy floored me. As prolific as he is indie, there is an honesty to his work, a D.I.Y ethic out of necessity and choice rather than pretension. He was, and is, doing it his way. It begged the question to me, is there any other way than that? Should there be?
This leads me back here, to a laptop on a table, one book under my belt and far too much downtime in between. I at least feel like I’m on the starting blocks now though. There is definitely something in putting one foot in front of the other and stepping outside of comfort zones that just gets things done.
Up in the macbook air.
I’m feeling so restless today. I have a fleeting, transient energy that I seem incapable of harnessing into any kind of actual productivity.
Once I finished From London To Paris I put it in the hands of a few lit agents and then went about my business. Very little happened and the business at hand wasn’t actually business at all - I returned to education after the better part of fourteen years.
A degree in Drama, and more importantly Creative writing, may open some doors for me further down the line I thought. Maybe I could teach? Suddenly there were, and still are for the next few weeks, deadlines. Essays on subjects I cared very little about that I needed to write. It gave me an opportunity to flex some muscles that I’d long since neglected but it didn’t satiate any need I had boiling away somewhere. Even the creative writing assignments, my area I thought, did little to get my wheels turning. One short story, a classroom assignment is pushing itself up for air, demanding my attention, but I don’t know if it has the legs yet.
The summer, for all intents and purposes, has arrived early and I have the better part of five months to do what I want with as long as I keep a roof over my head.
I have decided I need a Macbook air and my student loan will have to brace itself come April 26th. To a degree (no pun intended) it is an actual need. My laptop, devoid of battery, has become a desktop and I have decided that I need a sense of energy, of freedom and new surroundings, to tackle whatever becomes my next novel. My travel typewriter, recently reclaimed from my Mum’s cupboard was a nice, temporary contender. My moleskine, untouched, unruined, was another. I somehow feel obligated to wait until my hands really find their fire before breaking the spine on that though. Somehow the Macbook air, a financial obligation in waiting, seems the best option for what is supposed to be an attempt at writing in freedom. If I was a better writer I could tell you whether that was actual irony or not.
As I prepare for novel number two, I still don’t feel finished with From London To Paris. In fact I still don’t feel like it has begun. I still don’t know what the best way of getting it out there is. Do I hold out for a lit agent who will then hold out for a publisher? Do I self publish for the kindle and risk being a needle in a stack of needles? At 2am I decided it was a good idea to create a Kickstarter project to do just that, to launch online, independently but with enough finance to advertise it a little. An hour later, with my ‘pitch’ all but completed I realised that Kickstarter was restricted to Americans only. It was a waste of time but it did get me thinking about the book as a finished article again. Is it time to bite the self publishing bullet or hold out until I can walk into a book store, pick up my first published novel, be it this or another future unwritten novel, and breath in that new book smell like a grandmother smelling a babies head?
A potential cover for the book that I’ve put together.
I was looking to hire someone to make a professional, alternate version of this but it’s growing on me.
I came from a music background where everything is collaborative and for me the writing of this book is one of the few things that I can say that I have done alone.
Maybe I need to continue this ethos right through to the publishing stages too?
First page of the book..
The locals shuffled through the aisles of the supermarket, the sound of their voices and the drag of their heels enough to drive me into a sweat filled panic. It was my own fault, I had made the leap back into real life far too soon.
It was mid afternoon, eight hours ahead of what it should have been, and a broken night’s sleep hadn’t been enough to shake the jet lag let alone prepare me for the dawn of the walking dead down the bread aisle. Even my state of standing sleep hadn’t taken the edges off.
I saw a friend of mine from school at the far side of the check outs but more importantly he hadn’t seen me so I didn’t go over. He was the same age as me but looked forty easy with dark rings around his eyes that I remembered his mother having. He was holding one of his kids on his hip whilst trying to rein in the other who was sprawled across the floor at his feet. He leaned forward balancing his shopping and his kids with what I imagined must have been a painstaking and bitter skill to learn, only for all of the loose change to pour out of the chest pocket of his shirt onto the floor. Fuck that. I felt embarrassed just watching and I knew that running over to help would only make things worse. At least I told myself that as I walked away from the car wreck of his life.
I paid for my shopping with the little British cash that I had on me, money that had been sat unused at the bottom of my suitcase for the last two weeks. The two pound coin in my hand felt like clown money.
I just couldn’t shake the feeling that this was my life again now. That this was reality.
Nobody tells you that when you get back from L.A for the first time that your weekly food shop will make you want to kill yourself, but if they did it wouldn’t make a single bit of difference. You would have gone just like I did.
