January 2008 Archives

Today, unexpectedly early, I had the day all author's wait for and wait for:  the first copies of my next book came off the press. 

The printers (mine are in China this time) send you the first two right away, so before anyone else, you get to hold a hard copy of the book you've worked on for so long.  It's finished, it's done, it's in your hand.  Imagination made real.

And mine looks great.  One more time, it's called The Knife of Never Letting Go, comes out in the UK and Australia (and Ireland and New Zealand) on 5 May, and here's a bit of what the cover looks like (the sleeve is clear acetate with the red stuff printed on it).  I'm soooo pleased with it.  Walker have done a fantastic job.

And again, to have it in your hand.  Any author who doesn't still get excited by it doesn't deserve to be writing.

Saw the ultra-hot ticket of the season yesterday, the Donmar Warehouse's Othello.  It's the one with Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello and Ewan Macgregor as Iago.  It's totally sold out (just look on eBay for how stupid the ticket bids are getting), but you can get day tickets if you queue.

And you should, it's excellent.  It's very long, and the first half especially gets that Shakespearian feel where you're watching people in costume wave their arms about in a different language.  But it slowly builds, the second half ratchets up, and the final scenes are quite remarkably powerful.

The praise has all been, justly, for Ejiofor, but the real surprise is Michelle Fairley as Emilia, Iago's wife.  Shakespeare gives her almost all the rage in the final scene, and she blows the walls out of the theatre.  Who is she?  And why isn't she acting in everything?

See it if you can, if only to make your theatre-going friends green with envy.

...is a film that just might be great.  I saw it yesterday.  Bloody as hell, extremely violent, but then things start to fade and talk comes to the fore.  The final moments (a fine actor telling a story) are extraordinary.  It gestures towards apocalypse, towards the unravelling of everything, and if you listen carefully to the final words, they deliver a message even bleaker than what's gone before. 

And yet it's also completely entertaining, gripping from first to last.  I eagerly await There Will Be Blood, but No Country For Old Men is a hell of a thing.

In a depressing segue, Heath Ledger was originally offered the Josh Brolin role.  He turned it down to take some time off.  What a pity, eh?  What a stupid, pointless death.

And with jaw agape, I've so far read two glowing reviews of The Vertical Hour at the Royal Court.  If you pay money to find out what a load of tedious, irritating horseshit it is, don't say I didn't warn you.

Why do we pay any attention at all to the stock market?

This isn't a glib question, nor is it one that lacks financial understanding (though I do glaze over when the words 'mutual' and 'fund' are put together).  But, really, come on, now, the stock market?  It's as greedy and emotionally unbalanced as a three-year-old boy and just as given to petulant mood swings. 

For something that is almost completely theoretical (as in it's only the perceived value of a company; Who's doing the perceiving?  And why should they be trusted if they perceive AOL to have more value than all of TimeWarner?), it's given ridiculous weight as an economic barometer.  It's like trying to predict the world agricultural outlook by how fast a field of sheep run from one side to the other.

It's meaningless, folks!  It always has been.  So it's tumbling a bit, so a few billionaires lost a few billions that they'll easily earn back next week.  So what?  Go read a book and send your spare money to Africa.  Honestly.

Do you exercise?  If you're a writer, why not?  I'm serious.  Oh, yes, fine, authors aren't exactly known for their physical fitness, though Norman Mailer used to be boxer (but that was because he was an asshole and not a writer we should take seriously).

I run.  I run rather a lot.  I find it immensely helpful with writing.  It's rhythmic, meditative, and you don't have to talk to anyone, i.e. the perfect venue for solving plot problems, restructuring, fixing logic questions, etc, etc.  It's good for you, too, obviously, mitigating the widening of the rear end inevitable with hours in front of the computer.

Also, metaphysically (or perhaps, the exact opposite of metaphysically), I don't think it's a good thing for a writer to be too separate from their body.  Elsewise, how would you write with your gut, your heart, your blood, your libido?  If you're just writing with your brain, your book's going to be a chilly place.

Just finished Anne Enright's Booker winner The Gathering (which I have in non-Booker advertised first edition; I've been a fan for years now) and though I didn't find it as satisfying as, say, What Are You Like? it's still very much a novel written from the stomach and the gall.  Good stuff.  Next up, Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Valley.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you must avoid David Hare's The Vertical Hour at all costs.  I've seen some less-than-stellar plays in the last year, but this is the first I've left at the interval.  It's that bad.

Where to begin?  It's smug, for one, but also untruthful, in the simple fact that I don't believe that these characters would say any of these things in these situations.  The acting is terrible.  The scenes are endless.  The comedy is of the most irritating playing-to-the-choir type.

And have I yet mentioned that, of all the theatrical experiences in London, the Royal Court audience has always (and I mean always) been the wankiest?  What is it about Chelsea that does that to people?  Even the badly-bloused twits who needed to get past me and my friend to their seats didn't even say, "Excuse me."  They said, "Hello?" as if we were servants caught dipping into the sherry.

As we fled to Sloane Square tube at the interval to get away, we were behind a man apologising to his date for picking such a shitty night out, which tells you all you need to know.  Avoid, avoid, avoid...

Two more iPod eps for you from my own private collection:

First, the end of the world:  Apocalypse Please by Muse ("this is the end, this is the end, of the world!"), Black Hole Sun by Soundgarten (an acceptable substitution would be Chris Cornell's Preaching The End of the World), (I'll Love You) Till the End of the World by Nick Cave (see previous entries for the Nick Cave Rule), It's the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine) by R.E.M. (of course), and to round it off, The End of the World by Pet Shop Boys (in which we learn that in fact, "It's just a boy or a girl/Not the end of world", which is a relief).

And then, inevitably after apocalypse, death:  We get there by knocking on Death's Door by Depeche Mode, meet The People Who Grinned Themselves to Death by the Housemartins and The Dead Girls by OMD, mourn over the gorgeous Death of a Scientist by Mull Historical Society (about the still-unexplained death of David Kelly), and have a knees-up at Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boingo (but not the extended remix, which sucks).  Bonus track here, naturally, is Nick Cave's Death is Not The End (which, once more, is a relief).

I must say, I have exceptional taste.

For those cro magnons out there who still regard theatre, and especially musical theatre, as one endless, over-the-top, campfest for homosexuals, well, okay, sometimes you're right.

Saw La Cage Aux Folles at the Menier Chocolate Factory, and loved every spangled minute of it.  Yes, after reporting my delight at all the sniffy, serious theatre I've been seeing (all true), there's still room to love a big-hearted show about trannies.  Douglas Hodge is great, so's the chorus, and you should have just heard the gently grey-haired matinee audience when Una Stubbs came on:  "*whisper whisper* it's Una Stubbs, I love Una Stubbs *whisper whisper*".

It seems I'm still young enough to not know two things: that "I am what I am" actually came from a show and that I haven't the foggiest idea who the hell Una Stubbs is.

Next week, I'm back to sniffy theatre with the new David Hare at the Royal Court.  Also, I'm currently:  1) bummed that Hilary won NH (she can't win, Obama can), 2) bummed that Green Bay beat Seattle, 3) reading Gods Behaving Badly by Marie Phillips, and 4) falling behind on watching the complete Sopranos on More4.  Oh, and yes, still working on that second draft...

Right, it's the New Year, so it's probably time to start plugging my wares.  As I may have mentioned once or twice, my new book The Knife of Never Letting Go is released 5th of May here in the UK and in September in the US.  Try it, you'll like it.

The way publishing works, though, I finished that book back in June and have been working ever since on the next book in the trilogy.  I finished the first draft just before Christmas, took a break, and have just begun serious work on the second draft. 

Second drafts are where I've always considered the real writing begins.  You're no longer facing the agony of a blank page every day; you're facing a huge heap of words that are now waiting to be sculpted into something that looks like you knew what you were doing all along. 

My first draft was 123,000 words.  The second draft will probably also be about that, but I'm the only one who's ever going to know how many of those are still the same (answer: not many).  If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times:  writing isn't for wimps (I've usually said it far more vulgarly, but it is a young adult novel). 

The next six months for me will be all heavy lifting.  How about you? 

I'm ready to start, that's for sure.  I've got a second draft to write for a book that's not coming out for 18 months but is still on a tight deadline.  I could have started on Thursday, but you know how things go, you've got email to check, bills to pay, iTunes to download...

Over the holiday, I saw one good play of note, the wonderful National version of Much Ado About Nothing, which is a delight, genuinely funny (really, in that way that Shakespeare NEVER is onstage) with a light touch and great performances from Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker.  Word's getting out, there were people standing at the back, so book now!

Also saw the ridiculous 3-D Imax homoerotica of Beowulf, with its ludicrous nude fighting scene.  The 3-d worked okay, but nothing much changes tonally until the big dragon fight at the end.  And it's WAY too violent to be a 12A, seriously, you should write to the Classfication board.

And in celebration of the New Year, the latest in a continuing series of iPod eps.  Today, God:  God Is A Real Estate Developer by Michelle Shocked (tart folk-pop), God is In the House by Nick Cave (see earlier for necessity of Nick Cave in all eps), God Loves Everyone by Ron Sexsmith (a sweet, relaxed song of tolerance) God Moving His Face Over The Waters by Moby (who is really irritating but it's a good instrumental), and the lovely spooky Erasure version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.   Enjoy.