Wicked Ace Space

I've cracked it! Or, I've cracked something.

On my way home from the [place I go to sit and write on Fridays] this afternoon, I felt suddenly flooded with creativity in that way that translates to actually sitting down at the computer and typing at a furious pace - and now here I sit, 3500 words of prose and placeholder names later, in the glow of an idea that's working.

I've been kicking a novel idea around for a few years now, with plenty of worldbuilding and backstory but never enough in the way of plot or character. Well, since my retreat last weekend, I've been listening to writing podcasts (specifically Tim Clare's Death of 1000 Cuts, specifically specifically the sub-series Writing A Novel where he goes through the process of coming up with a novel from scratch, narrating out loud into the podcast as he goes), and I've been taking opportunities to write down little scribbles of exercise, like lists of character archetypes or city names, or expanding character archetypes into sketches of specific people.

And this intentional practise has finally paid off, because this afternoon one of those lists turned into an idea which may just have broken the dam on a particularly stagnant bit of plot. It was absolutely a case of letting go of some of the bits that have been fixtures of the idea since the early days, which clearly aren't serving me, and letting something new bubble up to take their place. The characters I'm dropping might get to come back in a different form later, but it's exciting to find a new angle on the setting that's got some more conflict and motivation going for it.

Really hoping I can keep this momentum up! I've got free afternoons all weekend this weekend, so I'm hoping to hammer out as many words as possible of this idea while it's fresh and exciting, before I have to go back to thinking about work on Monday!

This weekend is all about writing.

At the start of the year, I decided I was determined not to repeat the mistakes of 2023 (forgetting to use any time off work for the first five months of the year and then realising I was super exhausted as a result), so I booked myself a long weekend in March for the sake of it. Then a friend posted about spending a few days at a rural venue as a kind of DIY writing retreat, and it sounded perfect. So here I am!

I've spent today on trains and filling time between them, which has been quite good as a kind of transition space: moving through scenery that's different from my everyday, and letting myself zone out and switch off from work (which is still just as, let's say, intense as it was in 2023). I arrived just after dinner, so I've spent the evening settling into my room and idly browsing writing inspiration sites, to get myself into the mood. I've also started to make a rough plan of what I want to get done in the next two days!

( The Plan... )

I'm here until Sunday morning. My meals are all pre-booked on-site, so all I need to do is sit down and write (and also stand up and walk about every so often, in the interests of not hurting!). Feeling good about it.

And let's face it, even if I don't write anything more than this post, at least I had some time out of the city and away from everyday life. I was feeling pretty miserable at work on Monday, so hopefully the break will do me good!

After a long, not-so-summery summer, the weather has brought the heat all in one week. It's absolutely sweltering today, and it's making me long for the autumn cool that started to show its face at the end of August.

September is looking busy so far, with new hires at work, my volunteering gig ramping back up for the new term, some fun films and some exciting heritage events that friends have put me onto. But the good kind of busy: the kind of busy that's a mix of things.

Film
In exciting news, I was on the ball enough to pick up tickets for some screenings at the London Film Festival this year (unlike previous years, where I've seen the queues on the door in October and thought, oh, that would have been nice). This is a continuation of 2023: The Year of Contemporary Film, I suppose! (2020-2022 were much more about archive-diving, after all.)

I also splashed out on a Letterboxd Pro account for the year, so that I can nerd out about extended statistics.

Writing
That's right - there's actually something to report on the writing front!

I recently found a new local "get together and write stuff" social group, which I'm hoping will help me in my goal of recultivating a writing habit. So far I've been to one session, and while I didn't get anything written, I regard it as a significant first step. There's another one this weekend; but even more excitingly, today I did a fun little writing exercise in my Friday afternoon "go to the pub with a notebook" spot.

(The exercise was: write a list of things that could be in someone's bag. Then pick 10 or so things from the list and write a short paragraph about a character who keeps that thing in their bag. It's short, simple and gentle, and I had fun with it.)

Sewing
I don't remember whether I reported here about the bomber jacket I made last month - I made a bomber jacket! I'm excited for the weather to be cool enough to wear it! - but I've now got a follow-up project: I'm going to make a sort of cross-body rucksack to replace my battered Mountain Warehouse day bag. The last of the materials arrived today, and I have persuaded my printer to produce a pattern at scale, so now all I need is a free weekend.

The last three months seem to have passed in a flash.

I've been working too hard. A project that I've been responsible for since it began in 2020 recently hit a "lots to do, not enough time to do it in" phase for the first time, and I've been struggling with maintaining a reasonable balance between work and the rest of my life as a result. I've got a lot of personal investment in this project's long-term success, and it's leading me to work "just a little bit longer" and sneak glances at my email & IM out of hours. The blurring of lines caused by hybrid working probably hasn't been helping me here, either, which is a shame, because it's got a host of other benefits as a paradigm.

The result, of course, is that I've been totally exhausted for weeks, and feeling disconnected from my social life to boot! I haven't touched any of my creative projects, and it feels like I'll never get back to the headspace where I'm capable of doing so (although, intellectually, I know it will be possible eventually). I've also had a flare-up of RSI in my hands and wrists, although not yet as bad as it was at its worst in 2014.

In good news, though: I've noticed that I'm doing this. That's the first step in doing something about it. I'll admit that the RSI symptoms were a bit of an alarm bell in this respect - the one upside of them! I've started taking some active steps to fixing the situation, including:

• Finally started looking for a more ergonomic desk setup for my home office (since I'm in there 2 days a week as standard!)
• Made sure, while I was out of town Fri-Tue, not to look at my work phone at all
• Took a bit of my workday attention away from the project to focus on process improvements & training which will make it easier for members of my team to take over things I currently do, and do them effectively
• Reminded myself that I can trust my team do the things I'm delegating to them - they are competent & smart!
• Invited friends out for a drink yesterday (just to hang out, no film or show or board game, which we don't do so much these days)
• On catching myself looking at work messages this morning, turned the work phone off and shut it in the office room
• Today, dragged myself back out to the Pub Where I Write on Fridays: even though there's no way I'm going to get any actual writing (except this blog, I suppose) done today, physically going to the location is an important part of making space for it
• Bought tickets to see some more great films at the cinema, where I can't get distracted by my phone

And on that last note, I have still been managing to get to the cinema a fair bit in between all the overwork, so here are some highlights...

Film
In contemporary releases: Rye Lane (2023) was delightfully charming, Polite Society (2023) was fun, I didn't love Leonor Will Never Die (2022) as much as I'd hoped, and I had a good time with both Medusa Deluxe (2022) and Asteroid City (2023). I did catch Across the Spiderverse (2023) before it left cinemas, and while it was as beautiful and funny and emotional as the first one, I don't love two-parters, and I think it would have been stronger if they'd hit the edit a bit harder and made it something that could stand alone with a completed arc. I also made it to a hard-to-find screening of Lactopalypse, the movie of an Estonian web series, and that provided perhaps the most "wtf" 90 minutes of my life this year.

But of course the bulk of my film consumption is what could be termed "a doomed attempt to catch up with all the cinema of the past hundred years", so I've seen a lot more in the way of older films, both at the repertory cinema and on streaming or DVD at home. The top highlight here is that I went into Jeanne Dielmann, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) knowing very little about it, and was absolutely blown away; I've always thought Citizen Kane to be wildly overrated, and I don't think Vertigo is the best Hitchcock or the best James Stewart film, but if good art is about eliciting a reaction in the audience, then their successor at the top of the Sight & Sound poll is among the very best of it.

Elsewhere, I attended a screening of Girl/Boy (1972), which has an unexpectedly modern feel in its treatment of its central queer couple. I watched both Gaslight (1940) and Gaslight (1944) in quick succession (1944 rounds out its characters better, but over-explains the plot in the back half, and has a somewhat defanged final scene, likely due to censor influence). I was lucky enough to find the better of the two most famous 40s movies starring Orson Welles, The Third Man (1949), playing in actual Vienna; a rewatch, but always worth it. I finally watched my first Hammer horror, Horror Express (1972), and my first Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible (1996). And I had a whale of a time watching Auntie Mame (1958) just last weekend, having heard of it for the first time earlier that day.

Reading
I find non-fiction easier to handle than fiction when I'm overwhelmed in other areas of life, so I've been carrying on my non-fiction-only streak. Despite the overworking, I've had enough travel in the last couple of months to pack some more books in. They've basically been on two themes: film stuff and queer stuff.

The real highlight of my recent reading was How to Survive a Plague by David France, a really well-written narrative of the AIDS crisis (from a primarily New York based perspective). It took me on an emotional journey, and taught me a lot in the process. I also enjoyed Camp! The Story of the Attitude that Conquered the World by Paul Baker, which isn't 100% a queer narrative, but obviously talks a lot about the queer community's relationship with camp. I've started Queer Footprints by Dan Glass, but I'm finding the "walking-tour guide" style a bit tough going in print.

On the film side, I slogged through The Great British Picture Show by George Perry, which was a £2 find in a collection of old cinema books. It's the first thing I've found giving a history of British cinema (amongst the overwhelming abundance of books about the history of Hollywood), but it's a) outdated (printed in the 70s) and b) very dry, being more of a straightforward factual account than you would find in more modern "pop history" books. It did however lead me to an interesting conversation with my dad about what it was like going to the cinema in the 60s and 70s (one feature film a week! one screening a day, except on Saturdays! this child of the multiplex era struggles to imagine...). I've also discovered the BFI Film Classics series, and devoured Alien by Roger Luckhurst and Silent Running by Mark Kermode, both of which were nice, light trips through the behind-the-scenes of excellent films.

I've been working too hard! A big project kicked off at work this month, and I'm having to remind myself how to work effectively & well on something complex & important without dragging out my office hours too late and wiping out all the energy I need for the rest of my life. Right now, I'm just too tired.

I've bought a few things that I hope will last me a good long while: a new holdall, and a couple of merino tops that can work as base layers or just on their own. I also cleared out my wardrobe (and actually took the bag of discarded things out, rather than leaving it to gather dust in the hallway!), so it feels a bit less overstuffed (although there are still a looot of T-shirts I suspect I don't wear; I've done the "turn the hangers around" thing to see what actually gets use this year).

Film
As is the theme for 2023, I've been watching films in fits and starts: three in a day, nothing for two weeks, two in a day, and so on. Very much as the mood takes me! Since the start of February, I've been through:

Victim (1961) - a key film in British queer history, notable in its time for portraying gay people in a sympathetic light. It holds up pretty well to a modern viewing, and I'm willing to forgive it tilting a little into lecture mode at times.

The Birdcage (1996) - I didn't get on with this as well as I hoped to! I couldn't hang with the characters spending so much of the film asking Albert to, well, "not", and then never really properly apologising for it.

Rope (1948) - enjoyed this one. One of those where you can tell it's adapted from a play because the action never really leaves one room; but I have a soft spot for that sort of adaptation, because they show that films can be really gripping even with just the very basics of the format.

All About Eve (1950) - I enjoyed this! But I can't remember much more of what I thought about it when I saw it (a month ago), so I suppose it may have been just okay (and that's fine!).

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) - I've seen this before, of course! This was my first time seeing it in a cinema at an audience-participation-encouraged screening, and it was a lot of fun.

Niagara (1953) - an early Marilyn Monroe film, but not an amazing one. It can't decide whether it's Monroe's story or Peters', and it suffers as a result.

The Celluloid Closet (1995) - thoroughly interesting, and I'll be mining this for more films to watch in the future. I'm also doing my best to get hold of a copy of the book it's based on, which is sadly out of print and not available as an eBook. I think I've found one on eBay that won't have to ship from the US, though!

The Manchurian Candidate (1962) - not as good as I was expecting, from a "classic thriller"! It kept setting things up and forgetting to pick them up again later, and some key characters were lacking in plausible motivation. That said...

The Manchurian Candidate (2004) - made me wonder if I was too hard on the original! Somehow in the remake they managed to tie up half the problems I had with the original, and then invent a whole new set of their own. Truly a film that Just Kept Going (and I could definitely have done without quite so much mid-00s-style "wooaaah creepy images and paranoia and madness" filler).

65 (2023) - a film from this decade, nay, this year! It's rare that I catch films when they come out, but at the start of this year I looked up expected 2023 releases and made a note of ones that sounded interesting. This was billed as "Alien meets Jurassic Park", but in reality it was just a fine-but-unmemorable action thriller. Much less intense than the "Alien" part of "Alien meets Jurassic Park" makes it sound - it's a 12A - but Adam Driver sure did shoot some dinosaurs I guess. Clocks in at a nice tight 90 minutes at least, thanks to some incredibly, uh, "efficient" plot beats.

Reading
In an attempt to make a bit of a dent in my gargantuan TBR pile, I decided to tackle the Ancillary series. I read Ancillary Justice a couple of summers ago, and it blew me away; I reread it to remind myself of the detail, and it's still incredible! But sadly when I went on to Ancillary Sword, I found a bunch of the same issues I had with another of Leckie's books, Provenance - and as a result, didn't enjoy it very much. I still want to read Ancillary Mercy, for completeness' sake, and because it's apparently slightly better than the middle book, but I'm sadly concluding that Justice may have been a bit of an exception to the rule, which is a shame.

In my bag to go away this weekend: Ancillary Mercy, and Fair Play by Tove Jansson, which I picked up on a whim in a bookshop the other week (which is how the TBR pile keeps growing...).

TV
I'm not normally much of a TV person. I'm quite resistant to starting series of things, whether from my horrible knee-jerk reaction to people gushing over something ("well I am not watching it then!" - I'm trying to be less of This Person...) or from a dislike of being dragged along by emotional cliffhangers for 6+ hours. But I have been watching some TV recently!

I caught up with the most recent series of The Great Pottery Throwdown just in time to watch the final as it aired. I love the magic in transforming a pile of special mud into creative ceramics! And this programme always feels like everyone on it is having a fantastic time.

The best news in TV is: I finally got around to watching Ghosts (the BBC original)! A friend put on a few episodes from the start of Series 2 when we went away together a couple of years ago, and that made me realise that I would actually like it, but it took me until a few weeks ago to actually start watching it myself. I was planning to pace myself, since there are not many episodes, but of course I ended up running through them at high speed, because they are amazing! They're awesomely funny (thanks I'm sure to the chemistry of a well-established creative team - the writers and actors behind Horrible Histories, which was sadly just slightly too late for me), and they also make me cry (in a good way, here and there). Series 5 is due this year - I can't wait!

After running out of Ghosts, I picked up Derry Girls, another sitcom from the last 5 years that I just never really got around to. I'm not quite as hooked as I was with Ghosts, but it's very funny (and not too cringeworthy, which I was worried it would be); plus, the soundtrack is packed with bangers from the 90s.

Something that never seems to change is that, no matter how smoothly life in general is ticking along, every so often there will come a day where it feels like everything is falling over. Today is that day this month! Some late nights / early mornings and the switch back to working after the holiday has caught up with me, and I'm having some minor-but-unpleasant health issues, which are in turn highlighting how much I need to find a sustainable way to move my body around a bit more, and it's all just a big, tumbling pile of exactly the things that stress me out at exactly a moment where I need to be getting rid of tension, not adding more!

But! I did say, life in general is going well, and I want to remind myself of that fact, as well as the positives on this stressful day. It's my day off. It's a sunny day. I am on top of the dishes. I'm going to go out and write after lunch. I had writing ideas unplanned the other night. It's not so bad.

Film
The Decoy Bride (2011) has been on iPlayer for months and months; I finally watched it and it was a lot of fun - and exactly the level I needed on a sleepy evening. I also watched a bunch of short films by female filmmakers via BBC Introducing, which was a bit different from my usual fare. I've been having a look at lists of films that are coming out in 2023 to see if there are any worth getting excited about: I will probably watch Dune: Part Two and the Spiderverse sequel, because I really enjoyed both first installments; I'm kind of intrigued to see what they do with Barbie; and there's an Adam Driver sci-fi thing called 65 which looks interesting, if scary! I'm also considering breaking my soft "no Nicolas Cage" rule for Renfield!

Writing
I'm continuing to sound out a plot for my main project. I like to picture it as one of those timelapse videos of a sculptor at work: lots of roughing out vague shapes, and then coming back to them later and refining or moving them. I'm a bit wary of my tendency to over-refine the beginning before I have an idea of what will come later - need to get those rough shapes in place!

I have remembered the trick to getting really into writing: it's to have two or three days of doing nothing at all, so that by the end of the third day I am bored / unwound enough to sit down and splurge ten pages by hand. A little tough to replicate regularly, but I'm glad it still works!

I'm not back at work until Monday, I only have a few life-admin things to get done this week, and all my friends are back at work, meaning that now I've started to wake up again after not enough sleep on NYE, I'm free to really devote the remainder of the week to gently making the most of writing time.

I kicked it off yesterday evening by showing up to the first weekly write-together group of the year, even though I didn't expect to get anything done, and after a half hour of haltingly writing down random shit about my day, I jumped into a couple of pages from a key character's backstory, which was more fun than the alleged "present timeline" I had in mind for the story.

This afternoon, I went out to my usual Friday pub (on a Wednesday!) and spent an hour writing out something totally unrelated as a warm up - a sort of short story / scene starting from my walk to the pub and winding up in a sort of urban fantasy place. I think it's more of a scene from something larger than a short in its own right, but I actually wrapped up the scene where normally I tend to get into the middle and give up, so that was nice. After that, I circled back to the character from last night and wrote a bit of follow-on, and, my god, this is the first time with this story that I've felt like one of the alleged protagonists actually wants to go somewhere and do something. What a feeling! (I'm a classic worldbuilder: I have reams of notes about the history of this place, and I could write you a hundred go-nowhere lyrical descriptions of settings, but getting characters to move around in my little playdoh world is where I have to work harder.)

I'm calling that a successful afternoon, and am going to just chill out this evening. I'm definitely having another session (my "usual") on Friday; tomorrow, I need to be in for a delivery, but perhaps if I get some tidying done in the morning I will be able to sit down and write in the afternoon.

The weather has entered into the festive spirit; last Sunday night we had more snow than I remember seeing in this bit of the country in a good decade or so. If you'd looked outside at 10pm, you would have found me building the biggest snowman I've ever built, and generally skipping around in the cold like a six-year-old. So exciting!

Of course, morning brought a bit of reality back home, with chaos on the Tubes and all but the main roads slick and slippery with compacted snow and ice. But I can't help a little thrill of wonder at the realisation that almost a week later, there are still bits of white snow clinging onto roofs and pavement corners (and my car!). Snow! It's real!

Writing
This week, I'm exploring my point-of-view character's motivations and the stakes/urgency involved in those. This is always something I find quite tough, so I'm just having a bit of a noodle around, listing possibilities and thinking about what would be implied / where we could go with each one.

Film
Project Christmas Movies continues apace: I have clocked up Arthur Christmas, Die Hard and Gremlins over the past week. Having never seen Gremlins before... I wasn't expecting so much blood and mortal injury! But Gizmo was adorable, and I'm sure I'm not alone in being totally charmed by him. Monday will be Scrooged, and I haven't decided when/whether to cram in Home Alone or Muppets.

Archery
Sad news on this front - my shoulder is hurting in a way I'm pretty sure it shouldn't, so I think I must have been doing something wrong on the draw when I was let loose for the general member shooting sessions. Luckily Christmas makes a good excuse for a good long break; I've been resting and icing it this week, and I'm going to look up some physio exercises to strengthen it. I've also looked up the private club the instructor recommended, and I'm planning to get some individual lessons focusing on form before I go back to general shooting - I don't want to start out poorly and end up doing myself a real injury down the line!

December already, and the end of the year accelerating towards us! I don't think I will ever stop being surprised by the continuing passage of time.

It's been a couple of weeks since I wrote here: one week of holiday, and one week of a horrible cold picked up from a friend I travelled with. (I'm still shaking off the tail end of the latter, booo.) We went to Ghent(/Gent/Gand), in Belgium, and had a fantastic few days ambling around and eating delicious food.

( Notes on what's great in Ghent under the cut... )

Writing
For perhaps obvious reasons I haven't thought much on writing for the last fortnight, but before I went away I was having fun playing with the revelation that maybe I need the main character to be more of an asshole. Playing with this parallel version of the story I've had in my head has been a lot of fun, and is opening up some new routes through the idea. I still need to find a reason for the two main characters to keep interacting, but I'm trying out some side characters and chance encounters at the moment which I think will help me out there. Heading out to my writing spot as soon as I've posted this!

Drawing
It was the penultimate session of my drawing class on Monday! These last two sessions are a single sustained pose with a life model, which is super interesting. I'm not sure whether I plan to get a finished drawing out of the final session (might be nice to have something "to show"?), but regardless, I'm going to have a good time with it.

Film
Today I'm going to watch It's a Wonderful Life for the first time! I know a lot of people consider this a Christmas classic, but I only heard of it as an adult (and then refused to watch it for a while because so many people were telling me I had to see it... I get stuck on my own stubbornness sometimes, it must be really annoying to be around). This year I actually saw a couple of clips from it (thanks to the trailer at the repertory cinema), and realised I would probably actually enjoy it! So here we go - I'm going to join in with the sincere Christmas joy at last.

November continues unseasonably warm: although I've started breaking out the long-sleeved underlayer tactic, my winter coat has still only been out once or twice this autumn. It has been depressingly grey, though, so the blue skies and sunshine of the last two days is very welcome. There's some illness in my household, although I seem to have escaped thus far, so we're all a little tired and subdued (to match the weather!).

Writing
Due to some life admin tasks, I didn't manage my usual Friday writing session this week, but I did have a great get-together with a writing acquaintance on Tuesday, and I got some good stuff down that evening. Feeling a little more optimistic about the project since I last wrote; I think my little rubber-duck session on here helped unblock some tubes.

Film
Some friends and I went to see Bros (2022) at the cinema on Sunday. We hadn't seen much advertising, and from the one-line summary, the title and the poster, we had really low expectations, but a couple of us have been on a quest for gay rom-coms recently so we were determined to go. I'm pleased to say that the film cleared the bar with miles to spare! I laughed out loud throughout, and there were some really adorable moments, too.

Archery
I don't think I've mentioned here before, but I've been taking a beginner's archery course (target archery) for the last several weeks, and I'm loving it. I'm a little anxious about the transition from "beginner on a taught course" to "just a new member of the club!" which is coming up soon, especially as I'm going to be away for the first two weeks immediately post-course; but once I get past that I hope this is going to be something I keep up and keep enjoying. It's sort of meditative, and it fills a good "being in touch with my body" gap in my life.

(Oh, and speaking of bodies: my knee twist from a few weeks ago healed up nicely. Hooray! I'm trying to remember to do knee strengthening exercises whenever I get a chance, with middling success.)

Drawing
No drawing class this week :( I had other commitments that took priority. Looking forward to getting back to it next week; there are only a few weeks left now!

The recent furore over AI on deviantArt reminded me that I've got a couple of accounts over there, and it's so strange to look back at my teenage art, and even more so my teenage internet presence! I think I want to clear those accounts out and deactivate them at some point, but I couldn't quite bring myself to do it today. Isn't it weird, how all these old versions of ourselves build up online?