It’s Starting To Look A Lot Like … oh, you get the idea.

To St. Luke’s Church in Chelsea last night, for the Coro Christmas Concert. This is starting to become a seasonal ritual for us, and as it usually comes around the end of Birthday Week puts us in the mood to put up the tree and decorations, mull some wine and slap “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Winter Solstice Vol. XVIII” on the CD player.

I’ve called it a carol concert in the past, and this is a disservice. There are carols in the setlist, giving us mere mortals a chance to bellow along with the exquisite tones of the choir (and believe me, they will leave you standing when it comes to the last verse of “Oh Come All Ye Faithful” and they pull into fifth gear. It’s like being in an Austin Seven pottering along quite happily thank you, and all of a sudden a E-Type Jag smoothes past you and disappears into the distance. No effort. Just sheer bloody class and power) but the emphasis is more on music for the season, and they take on a broad remit. This year’s programme took on everything from a Vaughn Williams piece, to a 13th century hymn, In Dulci Jubilo, to my personal favourite, Riu, Riu, Chiu, a 16th century Spanish peasent song whose call and response structure put me in mind of Gaudete. Sterling work from the debonair, handsome soloist on this one too. (Will this do, Simon?)

Readings this year were by Harriet Jones MP herself, Penelope Wilton, who did a fantastic job with poems and short prose pieces that ranged from the humorous to the quietly melancholic.

This is one reason I always enjoy Coro’s Christmas do. They’re never afraid to include reflective, and sometimes downright sad pieces in the evening. Take their reading of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.”

“One day soon, we all will be together
If the Fates allow,
Until then we’ll have to muddle through
Somehow.”

It’s hardly Rudolf The Red-Nosed Ruminant, is it?

In short, great fun, and it’s always good to try something to add a little sharpness to the sugary glop that Christmas music can so often be.

Talking of sharpness – next year, guys, either get the heating fixed in St. Lukes or lay on some mulled wine. it was frickin’ freezing in there!

Birthday Week

Woo yay I’m officially older than I used to be. As time has wandered on I’m tending to find that I’m blurring the boundaries around the cursed day itself, and spreading the celebrations across a full week. This year’s Birthday Week has been full of treats, and has pretty much dulled the blow of the dread four-one.

To start then, one of the most eagerly anticipated comebacks of the year, a band who’d been away for far too long hit the UK. We were one of the lucky few to get tickets for their gig.

No, not flippin’ Led Zep, although we are talking about a band whose drummer also died suddenly and too soon. We caught Crowded House at Wembley Arena last Sunday. We’ve been part of this community for a while, and it was a huge rush to see the boys in full cry again. The last time we saw Neil Finn was as part of the Finn Brothers tour, the night after Paul Hester, the mercurial Crowded House drummer, had been found dead in a Sydney park. That evening was part wake, part celebration, and one of the strangest concerts I’d ever been to. Bic Runga, the support act, kept bursting into tears during her set. Hester’s place was taken by a mike stand and snare drum stage centre, a tribute to his place in the band.

This time was a much more celebratory occasion. Most of the outstanding Time On Earth album got an airing, and of course all the hits, which I roared along to with abandon. This is part of the fun of a Crowdies gig, of course, and if you don’t get chills from a full Wembley Arena flawlessly singing Four Seasons In One Day with no input from the band whatsoever (in fact they’ve been known to put down their instruments and just listen at this point in proceedings) then you’re dead from the hips down. A joyous, transcendent evening. 

I spent the dread day itself at work, and as we’ve been so crazily busy lately it span past without me really noticing, which was just what was needed really. I was taken out for beers at lunch time, and a straw poll came to the conclusion that I looked 36, which helped matters considerably.
Dinner that evening was taken at Myalacarte, a great new restaurant local to us that prides itself on seasonal British food. It’s friendly, reasonably priced and the food has the yum factor cranked up nice and high. The Aldershot pork chop I tore through was rich and unctuous, deeply flavoursome and the perfect choice for a chilly winter night. Especially with the Laphriog I had instead of dessert. Central heating for grown-ups.
I took a day off yesterday, indulged in a big fat lie-in, and a quiet solitary potter around town, which sounds deeply sad, but suited my mood no end. A little self-indulgency goes a long way towards giving a guy a feeling of quiet pleasure. 
And somehow I ended up browsing in a couple of guitar shops and well, erm, it wasn’t planned or anything but I did have some birthday money, and the guy was offering such a ridiculously good deal that I would have kicked myself otherwise and you know how it is…
Everyone, meet Ruby.

She’s a Vintage VR100, a punky plank I’m planning on thrashing mercilessly. Simple, stripped back, a no-nonsense grin machine. And even Clare approves of the choice. I’m so happy I could just fall over.

Finally, a couple of sites that deserve your perusal. My good friend Dr Timothy P Jones has started a blog where he turns the news stories of the day into poetry. This site is getting better by the day, and I’m waiting for the day when he responds to my challenge to summarise the Daily Sport.

Finally, a new quarterly magazine of fantastika is about to launch, and could use your support. Get yerselves over to Michael Knost’s website, and sign up for Noctem Aeternus. It’s free. It’s got a new Ramsey Campbell story in issue one. What other impetus do you need?

Tonight, a carol concert in Chelsea, and the Christmas deccoes go up tomorrow. Looks like tis the season…

John Clute and models of fantastika

Fantastika was a word I thought I’d find being used much more frequently this year. First brought up by Warren Ellis (of course), it describes the supergenre that encompasses SF, fantasy and horror. When “literary” authors dip their toes into genre fiction (or in the case of Margaret Attwood and more recently Jeanette Winterston, dive in fully clothed, and then claim that what they have written is not SF because SF is rubbish about cloning and robots and space aliens) they are adrift in the seas of fantastika, and it is a thoroughly refreshing dip. Being a writer of fantastika means that you can play with all kinds of genre conventions, and twist them into new shapes that better suit the story that you wish to tell. In my latest (work in progress) book, I’m happily throwing all kinds of junk together, mixing magic with an arms race involving petrol-driven mecha. It’s enormous fun to write, and hopefully will be as much fun to read.
Anyway, co-writer of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, John Clute, has come up with a road map for fantastika that’s instantly got me thinking anew about the structure of my book. It’s a fascinating read in it’s own right, and claims a new and unexpected writer to the fold.

(ganked off Warren Ellis – who else?)

Back From The Dead

Hey, you. How’ve you been?

I know, I know. Don’t sulk. It’s been a tough month. I’ve posted when I can, and I feel I’ve neglected you some.
Still, it’s been worth it.
First things first.

Yeaaah, bitches. How you like me now? Fifty large in one short month. It was, as last year, a triumph of discipline over the urge to dork around pointlessly on the internet. it always felt good to load up new stats on the Nanowrimo page, and this year i got around to posting on the forums, making a few friends, keeping the challenge going. The astonishing thing was how much some of these guys could write. At the ThankGodItsOver regional meet last week, there were people sitting by me who had managed three times my total. Six figure writing stints. That’s somewhere in the region of five thousand words a day.

I managed four and a half one long Sunday, and ended up knackering my wrist and my keyboard. I know my pace, and I’m sticking to it.

i found the best place for non-distraction head-down poundage was the 7.10 from Reading to Paddington. A slow train, with no access to the net. Perfect. On a good day, I could have a thousand words done by the time I hit London.

So, I’ve done the fifty, and I’m only just halfway on the first draft. I’m having a tiny break, then continuing at a slower word count. With luck and a fair wind I should be done on the first draft by Christmas, a polish in the new year, then start setting up to market it. Just in time for Nano’s Script Frenzy in April.

Lord knows where this masochistic streak in me came from.

To all those that made their targets this November, to all those that fell along the way, to anyone that just decided to pick up a pen or sit at a keyboard and give it a go – brothers and sisters, I salute you. The quest to quench the creative urge is the most honourable one of all, and one that deserves a toast.

To the words, my friends. To all those damn words.

A creature of habit

My days are quite structured now.

I rise at 6AM, shower, have breakfast, peruse the headlines. At 6.45 Clare gets a cup of tea and a kiss. I am on my bike and cycling to the station by 6.55. I park up, snag a cappuccino no sugar from the AMT cart, and wander to platform 9 where the 7.10 to Paddington is waiting. I have a favourite seat, tucked right at the back in the corner, and because the train is almost empty at that point I have no problem getting it. 

This is my principal writing time of the day. In the hour it takes that slow train to reach London, I will have done the best part of a thousand words. 
At Paddington I take the underground into work. I no longer read the free paper as a way to kill the travel time. It annoys me too much. I read a book instead. Currently it’s Charlie Brooker’s Screenburn. It amuses me.
I then work all day.
On the train home, I will hopefully manage another 600 words. If I get on a train where I can’t get a seat, then that’s a half-hour wasted, so I pick my ride back with care. Once home, I will cook the evening meal, spend some agreeable downtime with Clare, before picking up the tail end of my wordcount and posting to the Nano forums. Then my brain will usually shut down. I will be in bed by 11PM.
Repeat until December 1st.
Ah, the creative life.