Author's Note

I like the meta. Stuff about stuff, about how it works, how and — even better — why it was created, fascinates me. I prefer the mythology to the making of. I'm not really interested in how, technically, a certain shot was achieved, but I love to hear how wired / juiced / hungover the cast and crew were when they filmed it, who was screwing / not talking to whom. I love Author's Notes and the context they provide. I love reading which celebrity friend the author was staying with when they wrote a particular work. There's something undefinably glamourous about writing done in foreign hotels rooms, in secluded rural retreats, in rehab. Even a simple dateline — say, London, April 1969 — is enough to provide that little frisson of hermeneutics.

Recently, I've been writing more than ever before. Or maybe it's fairer to say that I've been finishing more, managing to get past the first paragraph without giving up in disgust. (Not sure why this is. There's just a chance I may have found my muse.) This leads to another problem (because it wouldn't be me if there wasn't another problem) — getting read.

(Digression: writing which is never read: is it Zen, like the sound of one hand clapping, or are we talking more along the lines of trees falling in a forest with no-one there to hear them? Discuss.)

I've been posting to Writer's Cafe (my profile's here, since you asked), which seems far less tacky and/or filled with emo teenagers (like I can talk…) than any of the alternatives, but is still far from ideal. The main problem seems to be that members are more interested in writing their own stuff than reading and reviewing other peoples'. Which I can understand. I feel the same way. And it turns out that writing constructive reviews is hard (harder than, say, just re-writing that person's piece yourself, which is what I feel like doing most of the time). The fact that the site's review system doesn't allow for any kind of back-and-forth — it doesn't work like a standard blog comment thread, for instance — doesn't help.

(I'm lead to bemoan, once again, how easy those who practice other art forms have it. It only takes seconds to get someone to take a look at a drawing, or listen to some music, while reading, on the other hand, well that takes time and requires concentration and ooh! look! kittens!)

So I'm going to start posting links to things I write here, along with a little bit of background explaining how particular ideas came about, in a vain (double meaning, there) attempt at grabbing a few more eyeballs. Unfortunately, I won't be able to offer much in the way of exotic writing locations. (The early pieces were written while living in a rat-infested garret in Whitechapel, by which I mean a top-floor studio flat occasionally visited by a couple of mice. Boy, I miss those little guys. Best audience I ever had.)