No Middle Name

The worst job I ever had was in a theatre, a few years ago. I had to look after Uri Geller. Where's the bad part of this, you're thinking. Sure, Geller comes across as a bit loopy, but he's not that bad, is he? It was my job to feed him and clean out his cage. The manager of this theatre, Mr. Bowyer, had a thing about psychics, mediums and the like. He'd book them for a night, get them in, lock the doors and then force them to prove their talents were real. No tickets were ever sold, they were private performances for Mr. Bowyer and a few of his larger associates. Margaret, who ran the confectionery shop in the foyer, said it was all because his wife had left him after consulting with a clairvoyant. She was told this by Doris, the cleaner, who was never one to gossip. Slander maybe, but never gossip. Brian, one of the ushers, said it all stemmed from Mr. Bowyer's father - who owned the theatre before he passed away, God rest his soul. He had been conned out of a wee...

Looks like Writing Parent is b0rked. I'll remove it from the list of links; it was a bit pants anyway. Their daily writing exercises, which weren't daily, were often along the lines of: "Take a picture, write about it." or "Think about something, then write about it". Grr. What I could do with is a RSS feed which provides different writing ideas every day. So that I could ignore it, and feel guilty. * Googles * Hey! I found one . Only it hasn't been updated since August, 2004. Arse biscuits. *More googling * Double arse burger with a side order of arse fries and a large arse cola. There's nothing. All the writing prompts/exercises sites are badly designed pieces of shit. And we all know how badly shit can be designed. Looks like I'm going to have to do this myself. *Sounds of sleeves being rolled up, pencils sharpened, papers smoothed* Right. Any minute now, I'm going to come up with something. I can feel it. *Tumbleweed. Somewhere in the di...

[This week's Creative Theme over at The Writing Parent ] I think it was Oscar Wilde that said: "To lose one parent is unfortunate, to lose both is careless." It might have been one of the characters in his plays that said it. Or it might have been someone else entirely, and at the moment I'm too tired to find out. He never extended the quote to cover the circumstance of losing all of one's ancestors in a frankly implausible time-travel accident, oddly enough, so careless will be sufficient. I'm not totally sure how I managed to do it. I was so sure I was right. It all seems so silly now. Too much to drink, too loud a discussion about paradoxes (what is the plural of that word?) in the pub, and one stupid, stupid bet. Rule Number One of the Temporal Driving Code: don't get into your vehicle when drunk, either on beer or testosterone. Rule Number Two: don't think that your logic and knowledge of physics is better than the universe's. It isn't. ...

Barcelona Sagrada Familia construction , originally uploaded by Andy Hawkins . I only recently discovered that "tired and emotional" was a euphemism for drunk . I'm so naive (you'll have to put the two dots thing above the i yourself, I can't work out how to get my keyboard to produce it). This weekend I went on a cultural tour of Barcelona. My fellow art lovers and myself took in many fine sights, most of which sold alcohol, and the rest were tanned and wore tight clothing. It was a stag do, after all. We did manage to take a look around Barcelona on Saturday, paying a visit to the Sagrada Familia Cathedral / Building Site as well as strolling past various other Gaudi creations. Take a look at some other people's photos . I didn't take my camera on the grounds that I'd most likely be too pissed to use it.

I had an interview lined up with a small firm on the other side of town. They made an exciting range of kilts, so they said, and wanted me to spit-shine their website in preparation for the hordes of uber-confident men that were currently constrained by the whole trouser thing. What the hell, it was work. Google had pointed me in the right direction, but when I got to the right area nothing looked familiar. It was a quiet part of town. Back in the good old days, when people still made things instead of just trying to sell things made in other countries, the streets would have been choked with trucks and people, the factories belching out smoke. Now everything was quiet, the shops were all boarded up and the factories dark and filled with pigeons. I was lost. I'd written the address down, cleverly thinking ahead, but not the phone number. There was a stray dog on the other side of the road that was sizing me up, working out how many meaty, bite-sized, chunks I was. A tinkling at the...

Crisis 2004 - 011 , originally uploaded by maarten_demont . "So, Martin, what was it you wanted to talk to me about?". Derek steepled his fingers and leaned forward over the desk, in what he thought of as his active-listening pose. He concentrated on projecting an air of "I am interested in what you have to say". The training course had made this aspect very clear, and he was keen to put it into practice. "...and I'd like to go through that with you beforehand...", said Martin, looking up for the first time, a slightly sheepish expression on his face. Derek resisted the urge to punch him. No punching, that was emphasised in the course too. "Go ahead, Martin". Derek wasn't sure what Martin had been talking about, or why he was in his office. Derek had been told to have an "open-door" policy, but he was sure it didn't mean you had to entertain your fuckwitted subordinates all day long. "Right, well, the board mee...

Two posts in, and the blog has already turned into a whine about how I don't do any writing. So, I'm going to use this: The Writing Parent - The 365 Daily Writing Prompts . I'll attempt one of these every day. Until I get bored. Or stuck. Move along, nothing to see here. UPDATE: Hmm. They don't seem to update their writing prompts as regularly as I hoped. Instead, I'll pick a random picture from flickr and write something about it.

I started off this post with an explanation for the title of this blog. Here's the short version: I have no middle name. Other people do, I don't. That's it. The blog post I wrote went on for about 5 paragraphs and was excruciatingly dull. So I've started again. This is something that happens a lot with me. I start writing things, realise they're really quite rubbish and either delete them or put them to one side and never go back to them. I write several different versions of the same opening paragraphs. Each one slightly different, but never quite right. I never finish anything. I tried using pen and paper at one point. This is something Neil Gaiman does. He writes his stories longhand in notebooks, then transcribes them onto computer. The idea is that this discourages you from tweaking and rewriting as you go, which is all too easy when using a word processor, and forces you to carry on until you've finished. Unfortunately, the thought that I have to choose ...

I've always wanted to be a writer. Even as a foetus, I yearned to put pen to paper. Even though I consisted of only a handful of cells, I dreamed of having fingers with which to grasp a biro and enough neurons to comprehend the concept of language. Honest. Okay. Maybe that isn't true. But I used to love the times at school when you got to write anything you wanted to. Usually this meant that the teacher had a lot of marking to do, or wanted to finish off the gin. I'd write thrilling adventure stories filled with dinosaurs, pyramids, mummies, spaceships, and aliens. Generally, they'd involve me being the leader of some expedition with my school friends filling out the parts of lackeys, minions, cannon fodder, and dinosaur chow. Sometimes they'd be illustrated in great detail and crayon. As school went on, the opportunities for writing things I wanted to write got fewer, and the need to write essays about sewage processing, Laurie Lee's memoirs, and what Romeo rea...