I’m in the tube station leaving Oxford Circus and I see this amazing tan leather jacket ahead of me. It’s battered and faded, it has tabs and twists and buckles and it tapers at the waist with fancy stitching and I think: that is a hell of a jacket.

It’s a man’s jacket, and if I had a man, I would totally dress him in a jacket like that, and then I would have to fight every other woman off him.  With a katana. It would be like Kill Bill, every day, only this Bride would be fighting for her man.

Behold, the blood of mine enemies (Photo: Victor Kurzweil)

It’s that sort of jacket.

The jacket is keeping pace with me through the ticket barriers, and is right ahead of me going down the escalator. Time to look beyond the tan leather: who could possibly be wearing this divine article? Turns out it’s not a bad profile. Not bad at all. Crafted. Stylishly styled medium length hair. Designer stubble.

No, I hadn't met Jake again, but you get the idea.

This is all fine, but what I really need is to tell him how amazing his jacket is. It’s a compulsion – admiration for an article of clothing this special must be articulated publicly. The words desperately need to leave my lips. But this may come across stalkerish, no? Or like a really, really bad chat-up.

Dilemma.

I stand on the escalator, quite paralysed. Fortunately, it’s a long escalator. I have time to notice the folder in his hands. Fancier than your lowly ring binder, and just about as battered as the jacket, which I have managed to look away from. Artist then? Attractive prospect. Under his grip, I can just make out the words ‘Milan – Paris –  New York’.

Ah, not an artist, but a designer instead? Fashion. Probably gay. My gaydar is either broken or was never installed and there isn’t anyone around I feel it would be socially acceptable to nudge and do a ‘pssst! Dude in the jacket. Gay?’ to. Where is Trudi when you need her?

So we get to the bottom of the escalator, and he’s hovering at the turn to the central line. He glances my way – MOMENT! – but I brick it, drop the ball, epic fail. The usual sunny smiles refuses to appear.  Suddenly – and it’s taken six years – I am a Londoner. I do not make eye contact or speak.

I am an idiot.

I could have stopped, helped him out, since he’s clearly clueless of his route, and then told him how amazing his jacket is. But the opportunity is lost. Alas.

For the first time in a very long time, I do not read The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on my iphone kindle as I follow the maze of tunnels to the Central Line. Instead, I dally. I look closely at film posters I’ve analysed dozens of time. Viggo Mortensen is still in A Dangerous Method, and the picture of Kiera Knightly looks like it was lifted straight from The Duchess. Amanda Hocking – queen of the self-publishing revolution – finally has a commercially published book advertised on the underground. It looks like any number of other supernatural romance novels, but it’s there and I’m so pleased for her. I am less pleased for me though, because the jacket has not yet appeared on the stairs. Perhaps he did not need the central line, after all.

Travelling westbound on the central line, I always walk to the end of the platform, in the company of Mr Holmes, because the Queensway exit is to the rear of the train. Today though, I linger by the platform entry. My behaviour has been completely changed by the jacket.

Or so it seems.

An idea forms.

I am currently writing about two dysfunctional characters who express their emotions through displacement activities instead of traditional forms of emoting.

It occurs to me that the immediate attraction I felt for the jacket might be a defensive displacement for the attraction I feel for the man. They say attraction is an innate thing. I have very little experience on which to comment, but it seems possible I am, in fact, attracted to this man, and the jacket is just a maguffin.

I am still just hanging out by the station entry, bunched in with all the other idiots who can’t be assed to spread out down the platform, Just In Case He Comes. But since that’s looking increasingly unlikely, I allow myself the liberty of fantasy.

Who is he, my mystery jacket man?

I first try to place him in the context of one of my worlds. He’s a little too pretty for Vandal, and a little too old for Life In Me, but there’s a sort of Chris-Pine-as-Kirk edge about him. You know, the bar scene, when he’s got that slightly wild look about him and then a whole lot of FO attitude. So he fits Lien best – a knight, obviously. Probably freelance, couldn’t hold the discipline of the Order of the Coeur.

Obviously there was less blood involved at the time

What about his love life? Man like that, there’s got to be some action to note, although obviously I require him to currently be single. He left her? Maybe he has commitment issues. Not good. She left him? No, what is she, insane? Perhaps she was being bothered by her ex and he beat the tar out of the tool in a bar fight. Defending her honour and all that, but alas, she had not been so honourable in the first place, and deeply betrayed, he left her clutching the broken wreck of her ex and has been tragically yet defiantly alone since.

Which, admittedly, still leaves him with commitment issues. But hey – pot, kettle, black and so forth.

The train is pulling up. The jacket, plus wearer, enters the platform. This is destiny.

It’s the matter of a short shove through the crowd to enter at the same door. He’s taken the end seat, I’m standing next to him. I have the sunny smile on standby, and this time it’s ready when he glances up. He doesn’t offer me his seat, which is potentially a dash against my chivalrous theories – but then, this is a man who now lacks trust and possibly interest in women. Clearly what he needs is a woman who, like my good self, doesn’t really know how to be one.

Although what if I look something like his ex? Is that why he occasionally glances my way? He’s studying the tube map now. I  casually reposition myself adjacent to him, under the map. I slightly hate myself for this. I wonder what kind of woman is attractive to a man who has been a knight and tasted blood and felt the bite of cold steel and been betrayed by the one he loves. I suspect she may not have a Tardis sticker on the back of her phone, would never dream of wearing an oversized cheap Italian bomber jacket which is frankly as far from his in awesomeness as is possible and probably doesn’t have a line of coffee running down her jeans. I try to read Sherlock, because staring is rude.

I decide that this is not meant to be, after all.

At Lancaster Gate, he gets up and stands by me. Asks: Is the next station Queensway? He’s getting off at my station.

This is definitely mean to be.

We are being thrown together by fate, destiny, chaos, god, the devil, whoever. He will show me a more dangerous side of life than I could ever imagine. He lives the lives of characters I can dream only to create. He has fought for his life, for his love, for the freedom of others. He has the kind of hair that would fall attractively half way across his eyes when he’s sweating in the heat of battle, from under which he would fix all of his enemies with a stony gaze that freezes the blood in their veins and looks particularly good on action film stills.

Just like this. Oh yes.

After all of these thoughts have sped through my head, I realise he’s Italian. That’s cool, Ezio Auditore da Firenze is Italian as well and he’s the bomb.

Also a deadly assassin with the blood of many enemies on his hands, but the man can DRESS

Finally, I tell him he has an amazing jacket.

It is done. It is said. I feel relief. Now I can relax, for the jacket has been revered. And everything starts to go wrong from there.

He seems genuinely surprised – and not overly concerned – by my comment. He bought the article of my affection in Texas. Then he starts complaining about how expensive the underground is. Not an unreasonable subject by any means, but not what I expected from a disgraced Knight-cum-Assassin. Now we’re heading down the platform (does he think I’m stalking him by getting off at the same stop?) and it turns out that he’s frightened of London. Frightened by what everything costs.

The man I have imagined does not get frightened by the prospect of violent and bloody death. He certainly does not get frightened by the price of underground tickets (although, again, I admit this is not an unreasonable fear for your average Londoner).

I need him to stop talking. It was all going so well to this point.

I ask why he’s in London. He is an Italian fashion model. He travels all around the world, but London, it is so expensive. It is no good. I break a little inside. Not an artist. Not a designer. On the up side, probably also not gay. Clearly he has not smashed a wine bottle over the head of an ex in a bar brawl defending the dubious honour of his love, and therefore may not be as emotionally scarred as I had envisaged. This is surely good.

But a fashion model. Of course. He is not a prodigal son, he is no Sergei Polunin, abandoning an exceptional career in his chosen field of chivalry. He does what I do on weekends, only he makes money out of it. He does make believe. Photographs lie – believe the model in me, because I know.

He continues to talk about how hard London is as we wait for the lift, and ride to the top. He loses me at the gates – or maybe I lose him. I catch his eye once more, as we leave the station in separate directions. I wave, and grin, and it is genuine. He is indeed absolutely beautiful, my Italian fashion model, and probably quite interesting once he’s got over how frighteningly expensive London is. But he has nothing on the man I have imagined.

I walk away, bemused by the whole experience. And a couple of hundred yards up Queensway, I suddenly realise that this says a lot about why I am single. I realise also that I simply do not know how to be any other way.

1. leave the cloppy heels at home if I’m going to continue to be unable to sit for more than 40 mins at a stretch. It’s a challenge, people. 4 days without exercise and there may in fact be casualties. Cloppy heels, meanwhile, really ruin the ninja-ness of my exits (in aide of a brisk walk around the quad to not kill people), and I’m concerned that, in noticing said exits, other delegates may come to believe I suffer an unfortunate degree of incontinence. Or that I have a really awesome secret fourth life that requires constant attention to my mobile. I might pitch more in that direction.

2. quit swearing like a sailor, or

2a. develop a broader vocab for said swearing so that at least it’s entertaining if  not educational for other non-mariner folk

3. not PO anyone else. Not that I knowingly PO’d anyone at the LSF today, but I may just additionally italicise knowingly here as a thinly veiled reference to this week’s amazing aptitude, on a number of fronts, for putting foot in mouth or, worse, foot in other people’s mouths or, worse still, inadvertently causing friends to be kicked in the teeth by other people’s feet and all with the best of intentions.

That's me on the left: more wisdom from Neil Gaiman's Sandman

5. stop being so massively insecure about EVERYTHING EVER

6. remember names. Any names. A name. A name a day and that’s a whole four new names. Why can’t everyone put their photos on their damn business cards? Oh wait, is that just me… and speaking of which…

7.  pluck up the courage to actually conduct the Great Business Card Experiment. Because yes, after Moo bollocked up my business card order – and after all that trauma – I redesigned, reprinted, felt smug, and yet after one day in a room of strangers who don’t understand my predisposition to dressing up and waving weaponry around on the weekends, find myself quite paralysed at the idea of handing any of them around.

This could be a whole new Ninja Fail blog in the making, my friends. Even if I do actually offer or get asked for any cards, will I actually produce them?

Would you?

Not a risky PR strategy AT ALL

]]> http://www.adelekirby.com/2011/10/notes-to-self-for-lsf/feed/ 0 http://www.adelekirby.com/2011/10/business-card-aaaargh/ http://www.adelekirby.com/2011/10/business-card-aaaargh/#comments Tue, 11 Oct 2011 12:29:34 +0000 Adele http://www.adelekirby.com/?p=1198 The London Screenwriters Festival is almost upon us, which is an occasion on which  forcing your business card upon people politely offering your business card to every moving body is deemed socially acceptable, if not mandatory. Packs of writers will rally one another to bouts networking courage through little competitions, like who can give out or acquire the most cards.

Admittedly this usually results in the majority of card exchanges happening between fellow writerly aspirants, which is often less productive than slipping your card into the hand of say an executive, director or producer – who many of us are catastrophically incapable of speaking to in a manner that sells us as intelligent, interesting or even human. But look, we’re a shy bunch, by and large. Baby steps.

The point of course is that for any exchange of cards to occur, said cards must first exist. Which leads rather neatly to the Aaaaargh at hand.

Put yourself in the place of a Person of Power attending the Festival (and by this I mean anything from a potential fellow collaborator to an agent who might just think you’re the bomb). You’re going to spend three days being  politely harangued by gangs of quietly terrified writers, desperate to network and be noticed. You’re going to end up with a hand (briefcase and every available pocket) full of business cards and a brain rammed with new names and faces, most of which will remain in a defiant state of disconnect. Or possibly that’s just me. But while first impressions and snatched conversations can be fleeting, those cards will be reliably real and present.

Photographers, artists, actors and models and their ilk are the lucky ones – they get great cards. You have to be a right muppet to fail on making striking cards for the likes of those professions. But writers? I’m sifting through my collection from a few years back and while some are quirky and cute and occasionally clever, there’s not a whole lot a business card can say about the writer, beyond them being one – contactable by phone, email, website, blog, Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and hell, here’s even a mail address, cos you’re sure to want that.

So what do you put on the damn thing?

Sometimes I get daft ideas at inappropriate times, like while supposedly doing that important Writing Thing in a country house hotel. Say, yesterday. Supposed to be writing, but instead I’m thinking: I have lots of crazy pictures now, wouldn’t they make fun business cards?

Well yes, they kind of do. The question is, what do they say? Obviously what I want them to say to said People of Power is something beyond ‘another girl who writes stuff’ – excellent, because that’s new – and more along the lines of say ‘oh yes, this was that worryingly chipper girl who writes kickass stuff’ – or even just ‘Australian Psycho’ might pitch me ahead of the field. I’m not fussy, really.

So, my friends, I present a few rough cuts of cards that (hopefully) represent something of both who I am (I mean, they’re me, right?) and what I write (bold, dynamic and usually female-led drama, often with a fantastical twist and inevitably a healthy dose of ass-kickage).

Thus far, from a small sample group, interpretations have varied wildly. For instance:

CARD 1

According to one friend, this says her name is Bond. Jane Bond. And I’ll be honest – I quite like that.

According to two other friends though, this says come hither, I bring you porn. Not so hot on that. I think perhaps context has been lost from the full picture.

Yes, I am am grabbing the pole, people. The POLE.

Yeah, and then again… I still love it, but I can see it.

CARD 2

We have Victor Kurzweil’s Sin-City-meets-Kill-Bill mashup of cool. But really, while visually striking, what does a blade covered in the blood of my enemies actually say to a Prospective Person of Power? Are we intrigued, or actually slightly alarmed?

CARD 3

Another Kurzweil, this one has been very popular so far – mostly with people who are familiar with my writing and belief that any excuse for including a sword is a good excuse. Comments ran along the lines of ‘encapsulates your style’ and ‘hell yes’.

One or two people considered it too aggressive and my face too small. This is of less concern to me, because it occurs that people who thus far only know me via Facebook are likely to be very disappointed to meet me sans airbrushing, arms and armour.

CARD 4

Swords are of course cool and indeed, any excuse (or corset) will do. This Sean Kelly image has rated highly so far, although does it lean too heavily towards the fantastical (which is certainly the case for my novels, but less so for my scriptwriting?).

Decisions, decisions.

CARD 5

This image, an accidental gem from Peter J Sawyer (‘Hey Adele, can you pull yourself up on that pipe?’), has a few fans. While certainly striking, I do wonder myself what ‘Sure, I can totally hang off the wall’ says about my writing though, per se.

CARD 6

I did put in a disclaimer about excessive sword wielding somewhere, right? Cos yup, there we go again. Check the serious face. We’re talking deep & meaningful here people, no?

CARD 7

So within geek polling, this one of Sean’s has been a big winner, and it’s not just because of the gun.

Hands up, sucker.

It’s because I am totally Princess Leia.

You see?

CARD 8

And this is the tricky one, the joker in the pack, because although it’s been popular, it also – by wont of being a traditional portrait card – undermines the whole mission of creating a Unique & Memorable Business Card. Although it has the bonus feature of instant recognition (ok ok, sans airbrushing blah blah blah), it potentially sets me right back in the region of ‘another girl who writes stuff. What stuff? No idea. Pass.’

On the upside, this card is probably less likely to have  ‘Australian Psycho’ scrawled across the back. Speaking of which…

FINALLY… THE BACK

(sample image only)

Mostly white space, I am told, so that people can write down their prognosis – but I felt there were a few more words that needed to be said.

AND TO THE AAAARGH

So, my friends – what say you? Can you declare one of these cards a winner? Do you have a favourite? Shall I just make a collectible set, to serve all appreciations? Or is the whole idea an incoming PR disaster?

The success of my upcoming weekend of networking lays in your hands…

Number 3
Appreciating exercise as a way of exercising the imagination.

So with No1 and 2, you’re multi-tasking to maximise efficiency of a passive exercise (watching/listening) with an active exercise. But there’s definitely a split in concentration there. Exercise on its own can be exercise for both body and imagination – but that’s when Time (as in ‘I don’t have enough’) and Motivation (as in ‘I don’t have any’) raise their baleful gaze and send many writers slinking back to their desk, and probably their fifth coffee of the day which may very well require the dippage of cookies or complimentary crisps.

I know the equation. Coffee goes in, writing comes out.

Now we’ve all experienced the way  familiar activities kind of disengage the conscious brain, often leading to unexpected spurts of creativity – who hasn’t had some astounding flash of genius while doing very rote tasks like the dishes, driving or going to the bathroom? So how about we substitute those things, just for instance, with activities like going for a walk, a run, a swim, a cycle? These are just the sorts of tasks that seem to allow the right side of the brain to take a break from thinking about annoying daily bollocks, disengage a bit and deal with important things. Creative things. And if you want to pimp your creative self to awesomeness, try using thematic music selections or just lightly focusing on a particular plot, character, problem etc, because these are times where you can make surprising leaps of creativity and logic that simply wouldn’t happen sitting at a desk bashing your head against the keyboard.

So this isn’t exercising while media consuming – it’s using exercise as part of your media creation. It’s about not looking at exercise as an annoying thing you Should Do But Is Really A Big Distraction but looking at exercise as an opportunity to walk around your current project from different angles. To hold the story and characters lightly and allow your mind to play with them while you’re gallivanting around/lapping the pool.

But: TIME IS THE ENEMY, right? Ok, are there ways to try to built this into your current schedule? Instead of driving or training/tubing to work, can you cycle instead? Lose the aaaargh of transport and get your exercise and mind-space doing something that has to be done anyway (although detaching the mind and cycling in, say, London, can have some serious OH&S implications – said from experience, although that doesn’t stop me). It’s that time where you get to disengage your brain and let Stuff float up. The problems you’re grappling with sometimes solve themselves. Sometimes you discover problems you weren’t even aware of. That might not seem a win at the time, but better sooner than later, eh? And sometimes, as a bonus win, you discover solutions (ok, and problems) via realising the solution to something you didn’t even know was a problem in the first place. Get in.

And finally, more Technical Blah  to consider when re-wiring your attitude towards exercise, to see it as a benefit, not a chore:

- exercise helps you live longer, strengthens your immune system, improves blood pressure, bone density, metabolic rate and blah blah blah blah blah…

Yeah, I get it. Long term stuff can be hard to prioritise in the ever present here and now. So prioritise this: right here, right now, it helps sharpen concentration and means you can sit and throw shit at that computer screen for longer. It’s probably going to be less shitty shit too if you’ve broken up your day-job-desk-sitting and your writer-desk-sitting.

It will almost certainly look less like this.

- you spend your time creating interesting, dynamic, kick ass and inspirational characters, right? So why the hell do you get to be a sedentary slob then? Be a superhero (after all, all superheroes are just normal dudes pretending to be superheroes, whether writing, drawing, acting, reading or watching them). Pimp yourself out. Why do your characters have to do all the work? Pump some iron. Lose some weight. Eat better. Look better. Feel better. Live it. Your job is to imagine you’re other people – it’s not being crazy, it’s being good at what you do. Some days I’m Vandal, some days I’m Sienna, some days I’m Rael, some days I’m Buffy, and occasionally I get a bit carried away and dress up as Xena. Doesn’t hurt anyone and believe me, I feel fiiiiine.

I do get some odd looks on the train though.

- DON’T TROUGH CRAP FOOD WHEN SITTING ON YOUR ASS ALL DAY. You can’t possibly exercise off all the calories you can put in your mouth without even thinking. If you know you’re going to end up raiding the kitchen, make sure it’s full of carrot sticks and celery and apples, not chips and cookies. Don’t be a muppet in Tesco. Exercise control at the checkout and you won’t have to at home when you know you’ll do anything not to write that next page/scene/sentence/word. What you don’t buy, you can’t eat. It’s that easy. As a writer, you’re probably broke too. Two birds, one stone. No muppets involved.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. And do not look into Miss Piggy's eyes.

- You can learn new skills with exercise, which are not only awesome but can help with writing. Home exercise DVDs mean you can learn to dance, fight, do yoga, do kung fu and Get Awesome from your own lounge. If you’re writing someone who kicks ass, not a bad idea to know how to do some kickage yourself. Even if no-one else’s ass is ever involved.

Oh come on. Why wouldn't you?

- So maybe you can’t possibly exercise through The Killing because it requires your entire concentration. Fair enough. How about using the advert break then for something other than going to the kitchen/channel surfing/texting your mates/checking your emails/moaning about how lousy the ads are. Run a circuits regieme through the ads. 20 press ups, 20 crunches, 20 squats, 2 lunges, 5 burpees, whatever. Exercising in advert breaks is hardly the most efficient way of doing it cos your heart rate goes up then plummets back to near dead 2 mins later, but better than nothing. Be creative. Watch less BBC so that you can have ad breaks.

- After a day of sitting, whether writing or in a day job, the idea of coming home to sit again can be really damn hard to face. Been there. Here’s the benefit of weighing in with some exercise – by the time you’ve done it, you can’t WAIT to sit your butt back down. You become motivated to write when you might otherwise be diverting just as much energy into procrastinating as you could be channelling productively into exercise.

- EXERCISE ALWAYS FEELS GOOD AFTER (if you’ve done it properly. If you’ve done a half-assed effort, don’t moan about getting half-assed results, ok). Writing often bites all the way through and after because for whatever reason, it’s not clicking that day, the muse is on strike, screw it. But however much you might resent the exercise at the time, you know it will be worth it in the end*. Hold onto that.

*injuries, accidents and DOMS notwithstanding

And lastly, a word from the ever-motivational Nike…

Yes, for writers.

Though I’m a fitness professional, I hardly ever talk about the E word by choice – mostly because people seem to want to talk to me about it all the time, generally hoping for magic fixes.

Go away, there are none.

Unless you’re Steve Rogers.

Lucky sod

But when David Melkevik* asked me for a blog about exercise for writers, I thought: what the hell. Why not? I’m a card-carrying member of that rare and fortunate strain of humans genetically wired view endorphins as the greatest (not to mention cheapest) drug on the market. However after a couple of years of inflicting acts of exercise on people for a living, it has come to my attention that not everyone thinks Exercise Is Fun. But do not despair, my friends, because even if the E word doesn’t rock your day, it can rock your writing.

(*I met David at the Screen Writers Festival two years ago. We conducted a friendly competition throughout the four days to see who could produce the geekiest t-shirts. In the end, he won both the competition and therefore my continued admiration).

I understand how exercise becomes either a particularly dirty word or unachievable holy grail for writers who go from a day desk-job to a home desk-job. Where to fit it in? It can be a battle just to find the time to write, much less exercise and write. But consider that not all writing takes place at the desk. If Time is the most commonly cited Enemy of Excercise (politely skirting various versions of the other biggie, ‘I’m a lazy pillock’), how about shifting it from being a competing time pressure to being a complimentary part of the creative process?

I’ll throw out three ideas to start from. The first is how to slot exercise into your current schedule through multi-tasking. The second is how to slot exercise into your current schedule by advantageous multi-tasking which permits you to be expanding yourself as a writer at the same time. And the third is to simply be determined to slot it in, come hell and high water – and if you’re going to do it that way, the best thing is to at least be aware that there are ways you can still be using that time to aid your writing.

NUMBER 1.
Slot exercise into your current schedule through multi-tasking.

DON’T PANIC! Now I realise the dreaded ‘m-t’ word might strike fear into the heart of the men amongst us, but bear with me.

Is that ACTUALLY Matt Smith? Too much squeeee.

Writers are supposed to consume vast quantities of story media – we’re practically required to read books (fiction and craft), watch (TV and films).  And there are films we know we ought to watch, and then the films which we guiltily want to watch (*cough Transformers 3 cough*). That’s a whole lot of your life just… sitting. How about making that time doing?

T3: Let's be fair. Not a lot of concentration was actually required.

If you have a gym membership, you can watch TV off your mobile or listen to audio books/podcasts going around all the machinery, and if you have a treadmill at home, run the first 30-40 mins of your chosen film in front of your telly and stretch the next 20 mins. Get stiff sitting at a desk all day? Stretch out, dammit! Now that’s easy as pie in front of the telly or a podcast.

Reading? Audio books can let you be on the treadmill at the gym or, better still, out in the wide world running. You’re absorbing story media, which is part of the schtick of being a writer, and getting a workout. Don’t buy it? Neil Gaiman does. Early this year he had an ‘oh shit, time to drop some weight and get healthy’ revelation and he started the exercise part of that on the treadmill listening to the audiobook of Bleak House. Wouldn’t have been my choice of book for motivating me to exercise, but you get the point.

With a monthly £7 Audible membership every single audio book they have is 1 member point, and every month I get a big bastard of a book. Pillars of the Earth – 35 hours, £7.  Whole seasons of radio comedy, £7. Jonathon Strange & Mr Norell – 30 hours, £7.  And to balance your fiction, there are dozens of excellent writing podcasts, many free, many weekly, to run for an hour with. Multi-tasking doesn’t have to be painful.

So, number 2. Much like number 1, but for people who don’t currently exercise or watch/read enough. Voila – add both in, as a combination. Use exercise to JUSTIFY your TV habit. Now that’s every kind of win.

Next time – number 3 – appreciating exercise as a way of exercising the imagination, plus other motivational words of wonder.

Stay tuned.

Just speculating, but this might be why...

Later, whizzing past cars stopped at a red outside Notting Hill Police Station, I was blinded up a huge pollen-laden blast on wind and rammed into some poor sod’s wing mirror. Appropriately mortified, I fell off the side of my bike stammering my apologies.

Turns out I needn’t have worried; he was so amused by the sword sticking out from my day-glo hump he either didn’t notice or care about the mirror. Pedestrians, street cleaners, drivers and policemen – complete strangers, the lot of them – grinned at (not necessarily with me, but near enough) all the way to Brentford. It was completely brilliant.

Moral of the story: be an idiot. Run around with a sword sticking out your bag, and even London, a city often vilified for the coldness of its population, will love you.

But it wasn’t just a sword in my bag. Oh no, I had a full warrior outfit in there, complete with (admittedly not very warriorly) 9 inch stiletto ‘Athena Goddess’ sandals (also known in student house as ‘Adele’s Stripper Sandals’. Can’t for the life of me see why… ). And I wore that costume around the Sky TV site. Why? Because we have the Iron Throne of Westeros from Game of Thrones there, and I have work-mate who is a fantastic photographer.

And I have a warrior outfit.

Who the hell wouldn’t say yes to the chance to dress up for awesome pics on that?

….
…
..
.

Apparently, quite a lot of people.

In fact, on a site of thousands of staff members, exactly no-one else.

And a year ago – perhaps even six months ago – I wouldn’t have either.

I rode home thinking about this. Wondering how this had happened. How grabbing a random person to take a photo on my iphone like this:

turned into this (pre-photoshopped awesomeness, watch this space):

Best not to ask, really.

For that matter, how had a fairly lame attempt to dress up as Magrat channelling warrior queen Ynci at the March Discworld Spring Fling event in Wincanton, behaving very much like this:

Heels + bum skirt = 'who the hell are you and what did you do with Adele?' (photo courtesy of Robert Flach, aka Otto Chriek)

turned into a pro shoot like this:

I suspect I'm more of a Gabrielle, but I'll totally settle for Xena

And speaking of Wincanton, I wondered at how a random Facebook status hurrah about Terry Pratchett’s latest book I Shall Wear Midnight led to my friend Lola connecting me to her friend Chris, who is a personal friend of Terry, and who invited me along to Hogswatch last November. I didn’t know a single soul there, bar Chris by Facebook, but I said yes and went, and it led to me meeting and speaking to Terry, which led to me writing an (almost) entire first re/draft of my novel The Sinless Sword in December (Si Spencer needs to take a share of the blame/credit for that, for saying a big Yes that no-one else would have).

Hogswatch 2010 led to Spring Fling 2011 where all sorts of wonderful and unexpected things happened and may yet happen (vis ‘Do you want to be Angua in public?’ ‘Yes’; ‘Can you learn Jacqueline Simpson’s Ubervald accent?’ ‘Er… yes?’; ‘How about a duet as Angua of Anything You Can Do?’ ‘Yes!’) and, not least of all, I wondered at how having my ‘fortune read’ by Bernard, the Cunning Artificer himself:

Not sure what exactly was being 'read' here...

led to my radio play Good By You being scheduled for performance and recording at Hogswatch this November. Discworld fans, it must be said, are brilliant at saying Yes. They represent a collective masterclass in seizing every moment, every opportunity, every offer, every chance to laugh and show kindness or encouragement to another. And I am grateful, and wonder how I will ever be able to pay all their goodwill forward.

Behold, my mighty voice cast, post-reading/workshop

As I cycled, I cast my mind a little further back and wondered how, in fact, an initial fitness photo shoot – just for fun, with my friends Bev and Dave (our esteemed photographer) – which yielded a lot of very silly photos like this:

Attempted synchronised jump kick Fail No 12

ended up with images like this from Long Exposure:

Thas' ma serious face

Suddenly… I’m a model...? But… how? Because I said yes to one thing and it led to another and another? And now I have summer unexpectedly rammed with brilliant and bizarre photo shoots with several fantastic togs, like Sean Kelly, who says yes to everything mad we can jointly think of doing, like our new collection of Incongruity pictures -

Mmmmmm, burger nom

- and Dave and Victor K who have embraced the idea of taking short stories of mine and illustrating them, psuedo-graphic novel style, but using photography and photoshop?

As I cycled home last Monday, I wondered at the way a passing joke in a body pump class about how a guy from Model Mayhem wanted to body paint me as Wonder Woman turned into an actual Wonder Woman full body paint studio shoot. I mean what are the odds that the one class I tell about it, has a woman with a best friend who is also a brilliant body painter? The astronomical odds boggle the mind.

And I think: damn, how many doors have I unknowingly walked past because I didn’t look or speak or think? Or just didn’t recognise them for what they were, and didn’t say Yes?

I probably won't look like this, but that won't stop me, Tash, Sean and photoshop trying

I thought back to how a sensationally bad review on the first draft of The Sinless Sword  drove me to temporarily (and to my shame) abandon the book, instead turning my attention to a pitching competition through which I won the chance to pitch my TV series Violent Cases at BAFTA; through which I met actor Orion Lee, who offered to assemble a group of his colleagues to workshop the pilot; through which I became involved in Constellation Collectives; through which I ended up co-writing a short film to be shot this year; through which I had the privilege of working with talented actors; through which I off-handedly suggested running script workshop BBQs on Violent Cases and Life In Me this summer; which my actorly friends were unanimously enthusiastic about.

Hang on… you mean that if I can these scripts pimped out in the next 2 months, I can have a bunch of talented peeps help me workshop them to Awesomeness?

Apparently, the answer is yes.

*pinches self*

Riding home last Monday afternoon – after running around Sky in my skimpy outfit, stilettos and sword, after asking a random woman coming into the ladies to untie my tunic, after finding out that she ran the official Sky Game of Thrones website and not only wanted Dave’s pictures, but potentially also for me to dress up for a Game of Thrones stand at fantasy conventions – I tried to chase back these little threads of coincidence; I wanted to know why this year, and not any year before it, has been so outstanding for collaborative opportunities.

I wanted to know why, after years and countless hours of dreaming in my own head, and bashing away at the keyboard on my own in my office (aka the Starbucks basement), suddenly I have more projects going public than even I can poke a stick at.

Those years of grift have built a foundation and body of work, no argument. But perhaps more than that, it’s because somehow, somewhere along the way, I realised that other people weren’t going to say Yes to me until I started saying it myself – to myself, and to others.

I realised that my office was also my prison. I started to asking for doors; looking for doors; and when they opened, I had to move past this idea that people are only writers as long as they’re writing; that the writing life is must be dull and lonely; that the writer is the channel for the adventures of others.

Screw that. Jump through those doors. Say yes. There are a countless roads to Rome. If I first find publication through short stories being illustrated by amazing photographers, and I happen to be modelling my own characters, good for me. Not the usual door, but so what?

Of course the risk is that I keep saying Yes and Yes and Yes and then realise that I haven’t slept for a week and won’t be able to for another two or three… or I’m having so much fun out in the world I haven’t the time to sit down and write about it…

Is there such a thing as too much yes?

Of course.

So I remember wise words I heard recently. That it is ok to say No to protect a bigger Yes in your heart. That it’s ok to go out there and just be yourself as hard as you can, because only one person can say No to you – and that’s ok, because you’ve already made the decision to only say Yes.

- where was I?

Oh, life management. Fortunately, while we may not always have what we want (ie the unflagging ability to self-manage), life does often seem to make sure we have what we need.

For the Doctor Who fans amongst us... Doctor vs Tardis, Neil Gaiman-style

Like friends who will wade in when required, roll up sleeves and call us to task. I am blessed with a few of these. They are like a living arsenal to which I can turn when in need, and right now, my secret weapon is The Mann. Hollie Mann.

Thus far, 2011 has been a perfect example of the old adage it never rains, but dammit it can pour – it’s been the Year of Open Doors. And I’m the first to be grateful. But you must bear in mind that I run to an open door like the Doctor to a terrified scream and so have merrily charged through so many – without thinking to leave myself a trail of string or crumbs by which to find my way home – that I found myself well and truly lost.

And right there and then is where you need a Hollie to say: “You’re not coping, are you?”

Adele (thumbing through an ink-black diary, while on mobile, while on facebook, while answering an email, while listening to new choreo): “Whatever gave it away?”

And that’s where you need a Hollie to say: “Ok. So let’s do something about it.”

Now in my (admittedly inadequate) defence, I was trying to be awesome. We always try to do as we know best for any given situation, right? Who ever sets out to make a mess of life, the universe and everything? But if we’re trying… and we’re failing… there’s only thing left for it.

That’s right. It’s the big C word. Run for the hills, while you still can.

For creatures who are so adaptable, it’s amazing what we humans will do not to change. There’s another wise saying that goes something along the lines of ‘The difference between real people people and fictional characters is that characters change.’ It’s true, right? Great story telling is always abut transformation. Or, in rare and priceless cases, like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic, about characters who refuse to change, and these are inevitably tragic figures.

Sandman: "The King of Dreams learns that he must change or die, and makes his choice."

Perhaps our own resistance to change is what makes fiction so desirable: so many of us live lives carefully managed to remain much the same – just a little different – but in fiction, we can live vicariously through characters whose entire existence is designed around a process of inexorable, irreversible change. Wonderful! Through books and plays and the screen we can experience the sheer terror and drama and eventual triumph of it – without changing a thing ourselves.

So to help me, Hollie had to help me change, in the most personal and difficult ways. Change some behaviour: that’s pretty uncomfortable. Change some priorities: I started to resist. But she went deeper. She had to encourage some changes of attitude.

I got pretty bad tempered about that.

It was amazingly child-like. I sulked. I protested. I complained and argued.

She didn’t give up. We’re talking heavy artillery here. She coaxed, prodded, harangued and eventually (more or less affectionately ) bullied me through two hours of resistance; two hours of letting bad programming rule my head and run my tongue. And at some point, I broke the pattern and could suddenly see myself clearly and let me tell you: it was not a pretty sight.

My life. Your life. Annoying black bits.

So we got there. We started at values, progressed through priorities, wrote out my bastard weekly schedule, looked at what had to be there, what needed to be there, and what wasn’t there, and performed a game of tetrus, trying to fill in all the pockets of time left by my various jobs.

The most useful tool in implementing change to my life management was the WIN principle: What’s Important Now. I pride myself on  being an egalitarian, but have an unfortunate tendency to extend that attitude to everything including my schedule: “But – but – but Hollie, everything is important now!”

No, it’s damn well not! But that was an attitude that had to change. My internet addiction is also under scrutiny, but that’s a whole other story…

Shan’t bore you with the details. Short of the long: projects are prioritised. Days are carefully scheduled so that not only does everything that really is important at various points of Now have a place, but things that will never be important at any point of Now have a place also. Like… reading novels and screenplays and watching films, the lifeblood of my vocation.

Now I have a schedule that is not only more or less achievable, instead of wholly unmanaged and grossly overwhelming, but contains the potential for me to – shock horror – surprise myself by even getting ahead -

- ok, ok, baby steps.

One week in: still running into resistances. Still generally running a bit behind. Like right now, for instance. I was supposed to be in bed with (shock! horror! the luxury of it!) a book to read at 11pm. It’s now, er, quite a bit after 11.

ALERT! ALERT! ALERT!

SCHEDULE FAIL!

Hols will check in tomorrow. I will confess my sins. She will in fact already know my sins, because she’ll see what time this blog gets posted. But she’ll rally me back on track. There’s always tomorrow. There’s always next week. There’s always the WIN principle when I blow a gasket and hit the panic button.

There’s always time to instigate change.

And I always know I have a group of trusted peeps in my corner who won’t let me back away or skip out of the ring. They’ll keep pushing me back out into the big scary circus of life.

I have artillery, and I’m not afraid to use it.

[NB: little local advertising: Notting Hill now has a replacement to Miller's in the form of new cafe/academy The Idler Academy (of Philosophy, Husbandry and Merriment), which offers evening sessions from £15-25 pounds. Pity is mostly happens in the evenings - when yours truly is working-working-working...]

School of Life does however offer the monthly Sunday Sermon, which when priced at £12 does not cause my Finance Minster to require a quick lie down and pinch of snuff the way the bulk of their schedule does. Curiously set up as a sort of Humanist alternative to church, the Sermons take place on a Sunday morning complete with ‘Parish newsletter’ and ‘hymns’ (relevant mainstream songs) performed by the Choir With No Name (comprised of singers with no homes). As with traditional church you are invited to stand to sing, and arm actions apparently are included.

So this last Sunday I gathered my girls Hols and Jenna to trot along for a sermon by ‘aggressively hopeful’ writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, sermonising (not entirely comfortably) about Hope + Despair. The full sermon will turn up online on the School Of Life site at some point if you’re interested, and several of its key points will turn up at in my various fictions at some point as well, albeit at some point much further away from now. What I want to share in the here and how though is Rebecca’s differentiation between Hope and Optimism.

You see, I myself have been accused of being aggressively optimistic, and this is true, but I now wish to trade that badge of honour in for a more hope-inclined version. And this is why:

OPTIMISM – certainty – it will all work out – PASSIVE
DESPAIR – certainty – nothing can be done – PASSIVE
HOPE – uncertainty – therefore we can do something – ACTIVE

And there’s the difference. Optimism is in fact a passive position: an act of faith, if you like. A religion all of its own, or a bonus feature of a mainstream religion (God will make sure things work out. Even if they look bloody awful at the time, He knows what’s going on, the Man has a Plan and it will all work out in the end. Not necessarily for you, but for someone. Probably). According to Rebecca’s proposition, Hope is an active concept. It’s an empowering principle where you acknowledge that things may not work out – that disaster is an option – but choose to take an active role to forcibly determine the outcome of the situation.

We can’t always act. But I’ll bet – in small personal moments and global arenas alike – we typically surrender our own power to affect change way more often than we search for and find ways to exert it. Refuse to passively accept that something will/will not work itself out for the best/worst, but instead to take the power of hope and transform it into the power of action; to instigate change in your life, the lives of others and even the state of the world.

As Rebecca invited us, so I invite you to surpass optimism; to defy despair.

So this is how it

Settled into my ‘office’ (read: basement of my local Starbucks) and working away like a determined genius on my utterly brilliant novel, I took a break to engage in a witty exchange with the congenial young nerdy dude sharing my table.

It was getting intense

Mid-repartee we were interrupted by two hustlers yabbering at the top of their voices: ‘One pound! One pound! One pound, internet, please!’

With one of them pressing in on either side of me, waving Starbucks internet service brochures in my face, I knew exactly what they were after. Feeling the need for a feisty tango, I allowed the idiot on my right to take my phone under the cover of the brochure, before I snatched the paper from him.

Yes, exactly like this

For a heart beat we all froze, the two hustlers, now exposed, my congenial young nerdy companion and I. Then before the thieves could run, I grabbed that man’s wrist and smashed it hard down on the table. As he shouted in pain and lunged at me, I caught him with a vicious elbow to the face, took him by the hair on the back of his head and hissed ‘Don’t you touch my phone you miserable bastard,’ into his ear.

The man’s friend leapt forward at me; I let his mate sag over the table and turned to accept his challenge but my companion surprised us all by jumping him behind and grappling him to the ground.

‘I wouldn’t take the lady on if I were you,’ he said. ‘You’re safer in professional hands.’ He rapped the hustler’s head sharply on the tiles, stood up, nonchalantly dusted his hands off on the back of his trousers before fishing his [insert Secret Service of your choice] badge from his back pocket.

‘Agent Carmichael at your service,’ he nodded to me.

‘I like your style,’ I breathed.

‘Bit aggressive for a citizen’s arrest, but I like your moves,’ he smoothly replied with that damn congenial smile.

Leaving our prisoners groaning on the table and ground we stepped towards one another –

It was a beautiful moment

– only, of course, very little of that actually happened.

Not quite like that, anyway…

You see, I was in Starbucks, albeit about an hour later than intended, and I was talking to a man – who was not young or nerdy but certainly congenial – because that seemed easier than picking away at the mess that is my novel. Needless to say he was no more a secret agent, Chuck Bartowski or ninja than I, and was no more clued into what was going when the hustlers came over and started making a racket.

Far from calm, I was alarmed at the fuss and so distracted by the part of brain wondering ‘well maybe they do need the money, maybe they are desperate….’ to consider that perhaps they were just a pair of professional bastards who’d identified me as a soft (read: stupid) target. The smug pillocks escaped perfectly unharmed, with my iphone folded in their brochure.

Next time though, my friends… next time I’m going to get my ninja on…

Results may vary in real world

…well, that or you’ll just get another Ninja Fail blog…

Recipe? Moi?

Amongst those many people I have lived with, my cooking habits approach the notorious. Alarmingly, these habits have changed very little; Poppy, my best friend through my early teens, once fell victim to my favourite culinary past-time of throwing everything to hand in a blender, a habit I still carry out to this day, the only difference being that I now control what’s in the cupboard and because I dislike shopping even more than I dislike cooking, there are less things to hand to poison oneself and ones friends with.

It’s a method of cooking I blame my father for. He never followed a recipe if didn’t have to, or even when he did, he considered it a loose guide, like a series of suggestions just waiting to be improved upon. Why make the same boring thing as everyone else when you could make something UNIQUE?!

What happens when people meet my cooking

Consequently my attitude towards the kitchen tends to turn out things accurately described as ‘slop’, of which I make and freeze a weekly batch because the idea of preparing food every day literally reduces me to tears. Consequently, the kinds of slop I produce involve a lot of the right ingredients, but combined with no art, no care, no regard for valid rules of culinary practice and so are palatable to myself (with my extremely low standards) only.

Now thanks to last week’s re-education by Kristen Lamb I spent yesterday under the tuition of Messieurs Gladwin, Snyder and Vogel, taking their respective story beats and laying them down in the context of my book. What I was relieved to discover what that I had most of the right ingredients, just not in the right order and often in flagrant disregard to the valid rules of dramatic practice.

What I was embarrassed entertained to later realise, determinedly pushing pedals up the royal road with knackered legs that protested every revolution, was that I wrote the first draft of The Sinless Sword with exactly the same technique I approach cooking: taking all the ingredients to hand, throwing them together, and hoping for the best. This yielded the same result as my infamous slop: something made of all the right ingredients, yet palatable only to myself. And right now, that is so freaking obvious.

Laying out the beats of the book is like running a MOT on the story: checking all the elements are present, accounted for and doing the right thing at the right time, which is where I’ve been failing before.  Previous versions of chapters thrust upon helpful friends have come back with comments generally praising the writing, but absolutely baffled about the story itself. This week, I’ve had two readers actually ‘get’ the book.

Progress!

Structure is now officially my bitch. Not my prison, not a generic cookie-cutter that’s going to give me an unoriginal book you’ve read a thousand times before, but a framework that’s going to strengthen my story and allow it to fulfil its promise. If you think I’m slavishly converted here, read this from Kristen about why you are wrong. There are exceptions to all rules, but know the rules first.

And please don’t think I’ve never looked at it before now with my scripts – I’ve long been a convert to the basic elements. But between the work of Phil Gladwin, Blake Snyder and Christopher Vogler’s translation of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth, I now have 10 pages of outline beaten out with logic, pace and most importantly (at least, I sincerely hope…) resonance. My idea for the end of the book wasn’t translating through my first draft; like the magical taste that makes a dish, it was lost in clumsy, unbalanced chaos of the other ingredients. I have so much work to do from this point, but I am unbelievably excited about doing it because now I’m pretty damn sure the book will work. There are still numerous ways I can screw it up, but it’s now shaping up an awful lot closer to something people will want to read than it was last week.

[however for my nearest and dearest who might hope this means a transformation in my culinary arts, I’ll just point out that writing to structure is hugely time consuming and I am still the laziest person on the planet when it comes to meals, therefore I fully intend to devote all available time to the book and allow shortcuts to remain in the kitchen…!]

Awesome references:

Kristen Lamb’s Warrior Writers Blog

Phil Gladwin’s Screenwriting Goldmine (available hard copy or electronically incl audio)

Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! and Save the Cat! Strikes Back

Chris Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers