A professional writer once criticised a short story of mine, saying I don’t provide a sufficient physical description of characters when I introduce them. I disagreed with a lot of things this writer said, and much of them I entirely dismissed out of hand as either a profound difference of opinion, or simply as arse gravy (no, really – this person had a lot of frankly balmy notions about how to write a story. I’d be grateful to anyone established who took the time to respond to something I wrote, but this was an example of two people living on entirely opposite sides of the field). But the comment about physical descriptions stuck in my head for some reason, like an increasingly disliked dinner guest who wouldn’t leave. It probably wouldn’t have done if this person hadn’t been published and awarded several times.

I hardly ever introduce my characters with a physical description. I hardly ever describe their appearance at all. Sometimes, if it’s singularly relevant to the story in some way, I will. Most of the time however, it hardly occurs to me. My heroes and influences on the other hand are mixed. Reading my very gratefully received pre-release copy of JPod this morning (thanks Mr B!), I noticed that Douglas Coupland usually doesn’t. He might occasionally mention something like one of his characters is unable to drive with the window down because the sun on their arm affects their eczema, but I don’t think that’s the same thing. Alternatively, having just finished The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, I was reminded that Haruki Murakami often does. His novels however are a sort of 21st century, more surreal Raymond Chandler, where the femme fatale could come out of her retirement without looking faded or out of place. Hard-boiled crime novels of Chandler’s day are all about the long physical description of the female protagonist, usually from the leg up, that you hear muttered out of one corner of the hero’s mouth as he puffs an internal monoglue whilst chewing on his cigar.

I tend not to however. I prefer not to. A person’s character shines out from who they are, not what they’re wearing. Physical attributes of a person are a bit like make up and perfume, a bit like gift wrap. Plus if you’re going to give a description, you should usually give it straight away – as soon as the reader encounters that character, else they will develop their own mental image based on how they talk or act or move. Problem is, it’s not always appropriate to give an immediate physical description of someone. Sometimes it’s just boring to vomit an unnecessary catalogue of clothes and hairstyles onto a page. Other times it’s quite contrary to the way you want to introduce them.

If you leave a character without explicitly assigned physical attributes for long enough (not very long at all though) then the reader will always assign their own. This is how the brain works – it catalogues and remembers by images. There is nothing more irritating than having developed a mental picture of a person to have that then scratched away with a tardy list, not only entirely contrary to the image they created themselves, but just seems incidental and thus scrappy as a result. The whole effect jars with the reader, and shoves them back a little from something they should feel increasingly drawn into. It certainly does with me anyway. When you sit down with a novel, you automatically enter into a tacit agreement of trust with its author. The author trusts you will be patient with them, and the reader trusts the author to give them a good and credible story – that they will lead them by the hand through a world where they are steered towards one particular place, but are free to look around and focus on whatever they wish whilst they do. If you go to a gallery or museum, you do not expect to be ordered exclusively what to look at, or be told explicitly what a piece of art is meant to reflect. Art is all about personal response. It’s about using one’s own imagination to empathise and comprehend what the artist has created.

Message is everything. It’s the atoms, the oxygen, the Holy Ghost of a creative work. If the point of a story is all about people living without focus, living half-lives in a ghostlike state of routine, duty and tired acquiescence, then I think a bare minimum of the aesthetic is an intentional preference, if not an ideal. It’s about voice. There is no formula for making a piece of art. There is no checklist of components to assemble. Life is simply not created in this cold and clinical fashion.

And frankly it’s all, fundamentally, about imagination. It’s all about ‘show don’t tell’. If you must have a physical description of everything and anything that appears in a novel, then you probably shouldn’t be reading a novel. You should probably be watching television.

I very rarely notice a person’s physical qualities when I meet them. Sure, I might notice they have brown hair and are between 5’5” and 6’ – unspectacular average statistics like that that tell you absolutely nothing about who they are and how life has shaped them. But the things I notice tend to be those that make them shine out as an individual. As a character. They might look somehow sad whilst they’re concentrating. They might have a scar close to their left eye – just a tiny one but deep enough to have marked their face for the rest of their life. They might smell somehow like warm cotton sheets. They might speak with a quiet voice, perhaps one used to being spoken over if it spoke too loud. They might have beautiful hands or intensely sexual ears. They might eat with their mouth open or pick their nose unashamedly. They might whistle when they breath. They might stare somehow deep into you when they look at you. They might, just maybe, be something more than a pair of faded jeans and a grey hoodie, a short crop of brown hair and a pair of hazel eyes. What does that tell you about a person anyway? It tells you nothing.

This is all a rant. This is all a loud and irritable attempt to justify myself to this voice in my head that won’t go away. This is me asserting myself and saying “I know how to write something, I know how to make a complex and holistic and harmonious universe from free thought, and I don’t need a list of physical attributes to introduce the people who live within it if I think it’s unnecessary.” This is me articulating a reply to that tiny seed of cancer that was sewn in my head several years ago that I quietly gave food and filthy water to, simply because the person who told me is a successful and established author and I am not.

This is me taking on self doubt, one demon at a time.

Why do Swiss Francs look like leaflets handed out at a Gay Pride March?

I heard ghosts this morning.

I’d heard them before, but I thought at the time I’d been dreaming – half awake and imagining things. I seem to spend more and more of my life in such a state. But I’d been awake a good ten minutes when this happened.

These were ghosts. Real ghosts.

I knew the sound wasn’t anything “everyday” because of the sheer noise. It sounded like scores, hundreds of horses maybe, trotting down Swain’s Lane and dragging heavy carriages behind them. My bedroom is about twenty metres or so from the lane, but this sounded like it was right outside my window. The volume was like nothing else.

I had a clear image of them in my head – white steeds, the steam whisping from their nostrils as they stomped across the damp tarmac, their hooves growing muddy as they hauled the carriages behind them. It lasted only thirty seconds or so, seeming to stop as abruptly as it started – fading very quickly into silence. This would have been about 7:30am.

Having heard this before, I had a quick look on the internet for any records of this. I didn’t find much, but I did find reference to the sound of horses’ hooves and carriage wheels heard in Pond Square (directly at the top of Swain’s Lane) by a Terrence Long in 1943. This was however tied in with the peculiar local myth of the Phantom Chicken of Pond Square. Don’t laugh. It’s true.

Further information on activity surrounding North London’s very own Hellmouth can be found here.

The only occupant of 10 Downing Street in my lifetime that I actually liked has died.

is finally finished.

17,389 words.
29 (A4) pages.

It needs a final read through, but there’s no way I’m going to attempt that now. I feel like I’ve just given birth. Or would do if the “labour” hadn’t lasted the worse part of four months.

Still, it’s done. Just eight more to go now.

Why do I seem to be the only person who thinks clowns are sinister hellish creations from the very depths of Hades’ depraved imagining?

Behold the terror of Nigel the Clown. They let children near this demon. And they look happy. These kids are clearly wrong in the head.

Oh yeah, and look, Grotbags.

The Age of the Cyberman has begun.

My favourite bit about this is actually Troi. Evidently someone had the same idea that a friend of mine and I had several years ago - that Deanna was in fact a stoner psychologist who barely scraped through a third in sociology from the University of Abertay Dundee and was assigned to the Enterprise through an administrative error.

Further hilarities regarding the amount of times she took her driving test were added after watching Star Trek: Generations with a bottle of vodka.

What? All right, all right, yes, I’ll go write something now. Right now. Okay.

was a very silly title.

It was just an arbitrary string of nonsense words I like I threw together one morning like a car crash. I didn’t expect it to have the resonance of an Enid Blyton novel or a Victorian children’s TV magazine, if the Victorians had indeed had TV.

It probably explains why I’ve been so entirely indifferent to this virtual little online cyber neverspace as any form of serious journal. I don’t really seem to keep a journal at all anymore - I haven’t made a written entry in my little red book in months, and recently my dedication to my 100 words has begun to wane somewhat. I generally don’t feel much interested in anything or indeed interesting enough to write about my life lately. My passion for the things I supposedly care about seems to be trickling away, replaced more by a deep frustration and unhappiness with my job, an odd and recurring human hangover of loneliness, and a near obsession over my seemingly constant total lack of money. Money, ugh. How vulgar.

Last night I found, (with some delight having previously thought it to have been lost forever), the CD of sounds, voiceovers (I was always too terrified to do my own lines live each night) and music for the mutually unloved, uncontroversial and critically ignored 2002 Edinburgh Fringe box office smash (well, it was slightly more of a chip or smear upon the glass than a smash), The Ministers of Satan. For anyone who saw it, they may recall it wasn’t quite Shakespeare. It was puerile, scrappy, always over-ran and 75% of the time had an audience of around 10 people. We even had two or three walkouts.

But it was fun! It was one of the most buzzy, active months of my life. It was doing something I loved doing. And if it wasn’t all worth it for the handful of 4 star reviews, rubbing shoulders with the not that rich but still quite famous or the night we sold out which coincided with the evening the Perrier reviewer was in the crowd, then it was for the atmosphere and experience of being there. At the time I was also working on my first (and ultimately totally stillborn) novel. John and I would screw around on our time off on The Royal Mile, singing songs to American tourists about Jenny Bond selling her underwear over the internet, or disappear round the corner for a pint of Guinness and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps, quoting Spaced at each other till midnight and showtime. It was just a time and a place where my brain was constantly burning with creativity and potential, and I was loving every minute of it.

So what am I doing now? What happened to that person of potential and hunger, who felt himself in the right environment and company for him to grow and become the thing he most wanted to be?

He’s just someone who stresses about his job. He’s someone who no longer finds the time to write, and even when he does, questions it, and ultimately walks away in frustration that it’s just no good. That he just isn’t talented enough, or ambitious enough, or ambitiously talented enough. He’s just someone who drinks too much, who smokes too much, who spends too much money he doesn’t have on things he doesn’t need. And just look at what his former co-writers are doing - how dedicated they’ve remained to their ambitions and how happy it’s made them.

So voila the new title.

I always glibly remarked that The Boy Who Could But Didn’t would be the title of my autobiography, should I ever overcome the eponymous paradox of doing anything interesting enough to warrant one.

It’s become more another visual kick up the bum to stop me pissing around. Did Mary Poppins sit on her bum watching Buffy when there was work to be done? Of course she didn’t. She sang a little song, snorted something hallucinogenic and got the job finished.

So why does it seem so difficult to do the things we want to do? Is it because we have to get past ourselves first? Do childish dreams get harder to chase as you get older?

… and do I sound like Carrie Bradshaw now or what?

Maybe that’s why I haven’t made it.

but I do.

It has a sort of sweet vulnerability to it.