Nearly every morning I get up and read or write. Some mornings I read first: some pages from the Bible or something else improving, some poetry, some chapters of a novel and some comic books if I have time. Leviticus, Wordsworth, Dune and the Defenders, since you ask. I am well aware how that sounds. I long ago stopped worrying how things sound. I have been playing the Rilstone persona for so long that I am not really going to stop at this point. I have a horrible feeling that I have become a “local character”. Some mornings I write first. I plunge straight into my desk and start to type. Sometimes that can go on all day. Sometimes I have to go off to The Day Job. Sometimes I even interact with other humans.
I was recently sent a terrible piece of fan fiction, with AA Milne’s signature pasted onto it, in which Pooh and Piglet just sit with Eeyore in silence because that is the best thing to do with someone who is depressed. But AA Milne’s Eeyore is not depressed. He’s perfectly content by himself in his gloomy place. He sometimes wants company but is overwhelmed by it when it happens. That’s the genius of Milne: Piglet is apparently timid but really brave; Pooh is apparently stupid but really wise; Eeyore is apparently miserable but actually happy. I have no objection to fan fiction but I think it should have something to do with the source material and I don’t think that you should paste the original author’s signature on to it.
Reading for an hour or two feels spiritual and relaxing and sets me up for the day; and I can only churn out the sort of nonsense that I churn out if I am continuously cramming other people’s nonsense into my head. Even if the nonsense is only old 1970s superhero stories. Affected campus Christians used to talk about the importance of having A Quiet Time every morning. Affected Buddhist writer Natalie Goldberg says that she quit meditation and made writing her Practice, with a distinct capital letter. But quite often, once I start reading, it is hard to pull myself away from the famous author’s words and start generating words of my own. But if I pull myself from my bed, sometimes as early as 10am, still in pyjamas, and make myself an Aeropress and start to run my fingers over the keyboard, thoughts like “It is a beautiful sunny day and an unspoilt morning and I am wasting it typing” comes unbidden into my head. [1]
I gave up the literal Pomodoro method, but I try to record time spent reading and time spent writing and time spent doing chores and time doing nothing in particular on a spreadsheet. I have found that whatever I do, I spend about a third of my “writing” time not actually writing; which is almost exactly the amount of time the Tomato system wants you to factor in as breaks. Sometimes I think that I care more about hitting time management targets than I do actually writing.
Now, for example. I’ve been meaning to re-read Dune since the second movie came out; and after quite a slog through the first million words or so, I am up to Paul and Jessica with the Fremen; the fight and the funeral and the long cutaway to the Baron’s heir in the arena and I am quite gripped. I am wishing that I was consuming that instead of typing this. But, as Natalie Goldberg said what else is there to do? [2]
I used to say that I didn’t outline. I am, in the jargon, a pantser (a pyjama pantser) rather than a planner. In point of fact I spill nonsense, very fast, onto a page, and then edit, and re-edit, and re-re-edit, until I feel ready to abandon it. Which is probably the same thing as planning, only less efficient.
Or sometimes the subject is so big I just publish the text stream and hope that next time I will fail better.
I think that playing RPGs killed any chance I ever had of telling stories. Once a week I stand up in a pub and sing a folk song. I can’t hold a tune or stay in key but people clap anyway. It feels great.
Father Mackenzie, writing the words of a sermon that no-one will read. It’s the closest I will ever come to an autobiography and oh my god I’m writing it on toilet paper.
Once I actually start writing I can’t stop.
So, then, that’s my process: why did you ask?
Every morning since the bad thing happened I have been just about to write this piece. And every morning since the bad thing happened, I have known what the first sentence is going to have to be.
“So. We lost.”
And every morning since the bad thing happened, I have found myself writing something else. I have, admittedly, been working on a substantive Work In Progress at the same time. More than usually niche; but at the same time, the first thing I’ve worked on for some time that I could imagine a proper grown up publisher taking an interest in. [3] It has never felt like quite the right time to start.
“So. We lost.”
Partly, of course it is too big a question. Why did we lose? What could we have done differently? What happens now? But I think mostly because it is obvious what the second sentence has to be.
“So. We lost.
How then, am I going to live the rest of my life?”
It was, if I remember my history, twenty three years from the Beer Hall Putsch to the Berlin bunker.
And even if we assume that January 6 2021 was Nov 8 1923, that still takes us to 2044, when I will be about to turn 80. But I think we are looking at a longer historical process. In the UK, the arc of history was bending in a broadly liberal direction for about thirty years (from Attlee to Thatcher) and it took another forty years (from Blair to Brexit) to turn the ship around. I think it will take that long again to make another course correction. I don’t think that there will be any return to the values I grew up with for at least seventy years.
There was a brief period, from about 1930 to about 1980, when medicine was making huge strides; where illnesses like Polio and TB which had previously amounted to death sentences became preventable and curable. My mother had a big vaccination scar on her upper arm. I had a nasty scab on mine for some weeks when I was twelve, and I think there may still be a patch of very slightly discoloured skin there. I cannot remember what “BCG” stood for. Not Battlestar Galactica, certainly. I have a dim memory of measles and mumps: I think chickenpox passed me by. That I should live to see the day when vaccine denialism is a mainstream political position.
This led many people to think that all diseases could be done away with; that cancer and Alzheimer’s would one day be curable with a little pink pill. But I understand that medical thinking has changed, and that doctors now think in terms of living with cancer as opposed to curing it altogether; that very many conditions are life-shortening but not terminal; that one might some day have a cancer in the way one might have diabetes.
I remember the AIDS epidemic and Mrs Thatcher’s giant tombstone and everyone agreeing to say “condom” instead of “durex”. I understand that HIV is now a condition which can be managed.
I don’t think there is any point in asking how we turn the ship around, come to terms with our disastrous result and make sure we do better in the next leg of the tournament. I don’t think there is going to be a next leg of the tournament.
During lockdown I read James Joyce and William Gibson. I found Joyce much easier. It was a truism during the Cyberpunk boom (which ran from the early summer of 1984 until the late spring of 1985) that corporations—“megacorps”—would supplant governments. At some point, the US or UK administration would make some new law, guaranteeing a minimum wage, say, or mandating minimum safety requirements for workers, and some company, McDonalds, maybe, or Microsoft, would simply refuse to comply. Why should we obey your laws when our burger bars have more money than your entire nation?
Who remembers the grown up version of 2000AD in which young people were conscripted to fight for McDonalds interests in South America?
Science fiction only ever gets it nearly right. Douglas Adams Hitch-Hikers Guide was like the internet in one way; Gibson’s cyberspace was like it in another way. Cyberpunk spotted that financial power was more important than political power. It didn’t foretell a world where single individuals would be richer than entire governments. Burger King with nuclear weapons: yes. Ikea colonising Mars, conceivably. Scrooge McDuck amassing the hard cash to purchase Greenland? We never saw that coming.
I don’t think there is a cure for Trump. Not in our lifetimes. I think we will have to learn to manage the condition. To live as much like a Narnian as we can even if there isn’t really any Narnia, and hope that at the beginning of the twenty second century, there is something left for our grandchildren to work with.
It’s a long shot: because I am not convinced that our new masters intend there to be any rubble left for us to crawl around in. In the past we have had leaders who deny the climate crisis and leaders who don’t take it seriously enough. We have had leaders who were prepared to play Russian Roulette with nuclear weapons. But power may now have passed to people—a person—who would welcome Armageddon: whose fantasy is to strip-mine the world, take control of its resources, and to depart to Mars with a few thousand white heterosexual cis men, to create a new species with the concepts of “empathy” genetically engineered out of them.
Alan Moore said many years ago that he once believed that it would take a small nuclear war to turn England into a fascist country; but in fact, all that was required was offering council tenants the chance to buy their properties. We are well beyond that point now. A few oligarchs have worked us up into a palaver about small boats and drag queens and the signage on public lavatories and as a result we have ceded absolute power to Davros.
1: For as long as I can remember I have slept in jogging pants and old sweaters: how therefore, do I own three sets of PJs?
2: I don’t really think she is affected, although she is probably a writer and definitely a Buddhist
3: Proper Grown Up Publishers: If you want to take an interest, contact me on rilstone@gmail.com
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