Writers are Weird: Writer’s Routines (Part Two)

An eclectic bunch of Brits today, and this time I don’t mean me. The great, the surreal and the genius!

Will Self is an elaborate and intricate writer so you would think that his prose would need complete silence at almost monasterial levels. However, his approach is even more complex than his writing. Apart from working on a manual typewriter (quaint yet what a pain in the ass) as early in the morning as possible he works on multiple drafts at the same time. He waits until the first draft is 80% finished and then draft two and subsequently draft three. He says it gives him a, ‘grasp of the totality of the book’!
He goes onto to talk of battling the loneliness of the writer, which he believes is alleviated by the following of Rituals. He smokes, the more noble and ritualistic pipes and cigars and drinks Coffee, tea and what he calls strange infusions! Knowing Mr Self’s colourful past, that could mean a number of things. Overall, he states, you have to have a  healthy appetite for solitude and if you don’t, you have little business being a writer.

C.S. Lewis constantly lamented that he rarely had a “normal” day but he always aimed to have a standard day that was repeatable, building up the illusion of routine, even if he failed to live up to it. He would choose to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at his desk by nine, there to read and write until one (oh and if a cup of good tea or coffee was brought to him around eleven, he was very appreciative). As you can see from his exacting timings, lunch should be on the table at one precisely! By two (at the latest) he would be on the road for a walk OR a talk, never both at the same time as he did not like to be distracted from his concentration on specific pleasures. He would arrive back from his walk at four-fifteen and would take tea in solitude. He liked to read and eat as the same time (as do I) but never poetry, which he saw as blasphemous! He preferred ‘gossipy, formless’ books which could be opened anywhere. Whereas I imagined he was reading the thirties equivalent of National Enquirer, he was actually devouring Boswell, a translation of Herodotus and a History of English Literature. Light reading then…
At five he was back at work again until seven. Then an evening meal and at last people were allowed to talk to him (or failing that light reading).  Bed was no later than eleven and he would fall asleep dreading the knock of the postman as he despised correspondence and saw it a burden. His ideal life was quite solitary so he was ideally suited towards his literary intentions.

Charles Darwin, as summarised by his son Frances had developed a rigid that seldom changed in his later years, even when he had visitors. He felt that a half an hour of conversation at a time was all that he could stand, because it completely exhausted him.

0700 – Up and off for a short walk (somewhat of a theme occurring)
0745 – Breakfast alone (again, a theme)
0800–0930 – Worked in his study which he considered this his best working time.
0930–1030 – Went to drawing room and read his letters, which were usually volumes from supporters and detractors alike, followed by reading aloud of family letters.
1030-1200 – Returned to study, which period he considered the end of his working day. END! Wow. Well I guess the guy figured out evolution so he was due some downtime in his latter years.
1200 – Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, usually alone or with a dog.
1245 – Lunch with whole family (his main meal of the day). After lunch read The Times of London and answered his letters.
1500 – Had a lie down in his bedroom or on the sofa and smoked a cigarette whilst he listened to a novel or other light literature read by Emma Darwin, his wife.
1600 – Walked again.
1630–1730 – Worked in his study usually clearing his affairs.
1800 – Rested again in bedroom with Emma reading aloud.
1930 – High tea while his family dined.Sometimes he played backgammon with Emma, usually followed by reading to himself whilst Emma played the piano.
2200 – He was usually in bed by 2230 but slept unusually badly.

So this instalment of the LitBrits shows that they like their routine and rituals, their traditions, if you will. This probably says a lot about the former Empire dwellers. Next time we will look at our more contemporary cousins and the best sellers.

Writers are Weird: Writer’s Routines (Part One)

Sorry, but it’s the truth.

Most are weird good, the type of weird that brings a smile to your face and an expedience to your typing. The kind of weird that your loved ones smirk at but sometimes don’t get, but they’re cool with it. But your pets are sometimes confused as hell when you’re wearing a wig and a baseball cap and dressed in a t-shirt and shorts with slippers in the shape of Scooby Doo. However some are weird WEIRD. I have tried to make a full and frank account of some of them here. Feel free to add your own habits and weird little things so we can compare and contrast and then nervously change the subject and then pretend we never said anything.

W. H. Auden was perhaps one of the first writers to uses stimulants as a  “labor-saving device”. He habitually used speed and swallowed Benzedrine every morning for twenty years. He balanced the somewhat uplifting effects of these amphetamines with the barbiturate Seconal when he wanted to sleep (as well as keeping a glass of vodka at the end of the bed if he woke up). Having such a haphazard approach to narcotics, he saw it as as a pragmatic approach to his workload that sometimes led to physical breakdown and mental collapses. Not to be recommended unless you have a very sturdy constitution.

Stephen King is probably the most prolific Horror writer of our generation so surely there is something to learn from his habits. He seems to put a lot down to routine. “There are certain things I do if I sit down to write,” he said. “I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning,” he explained. “I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.” So it seems a certain amount of compulsive tendencies may help upkeep the writing habit.
“It’s not any different than a bedtime routine,” he continued. “Do you go to bed a different way every night? Is there a certain side you sleep on? I mean I brush my teeth, I wash my hands. Why would anybody wash their hands before they go to bed? I don’t know. And the pillows are supposed to be pointed a certain way. The open side of the pillowcase is supposed to be pointed in toward the other side of the bed. I don’t know why.” Yep, definitely a freaky need for routine and order but then ho can argue with his portfolio. Also, I guess you have to admit that the process of writing needs selfish isolation sometimes, who can completely switch off the world around them to concentrate?

Finally for this part of an ongoing series a well known figure more for his leadership rather than his  writing prowess, Winston Churchill. HIs daily routine changed little during even the war years. He always awoke about 7:30 a.m. and stayed in bed waiting for his gargantuan  breakfast whilst he read his mail and papers. And then, get this for a great gig, he stayed in bed for a couple of hours working whilst he dictated to his secretaries. Then, it gets better, at 1100, he arose, had bath and perhaps took a walk around the garden in anticipation of his whisky and soda to his study.
At 1300 he usually joined guests and family for a three-course lunch. It seems like it was a boozy lunch too, his wife Clementine drank claret and Winston Pol Roger champagne served at a specific temperature (with the obligatory port brandy and cigars). Lunch ended about 1530 and he went back to his study to work or, if the mood took him, played cards or backgammon with Clementine. At 1700, after another whisky and soda, he had a nap for ninety minutes. Amazingly this little siesta, a habit he had learned from his time in Cuba, allowed him to work 1 1/2 days in every 24 hours. At 1830, he woke up, had another bath and dressed for a 2000 dinner, which was the focal point and highlight of Churchill’s day. The talk of the day, usually dominated by Winston, was probably more important that was on their plates. Depending on the guests drinks and cigars went into the the wee hours. The guests retired and Churchill returned to his study for another hour or so of work.
So there you have it, part one of this ongoing series shows that writer’s routines are weird, even weirder than you. (So far).

27 Writing Quotes, 1 for Every Occaision (ish)

A quick and dirty list of some of my favourite writing quotes for you to use in any article, post, diatribe, speech, dedication, mantra or bellow to the heavens. Hope you enjoy and feel free to add your own in the comments!

Ambition
1. Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C.S. Lewis

The Aging Writer
2. With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.
James Thurber

3. If you can’t annoy somebody, there’s little point in writing.
Kingsley Amis

4. I have been commissioned to write an autobiography and I would be grateful to any of your readers who could tell me what I was doing between 1960 and 1974.
Jeffrey Bernard.

Research
5. Get the facts first. You can distort them later.
Mark Twain

Honing
6. The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.
Mark Twain

7. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. Ray Bradbury

8. Every writer I know has trouble writing.
Joseph Heller quotes

Deadlines
9. I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.
Douglas Adams

10. Writing is pretty crummy on the nerves.
Paul Theroux

Procrastination
11. For a moment, nothing happened.Then, after a second or so, nothing continued to happen.
Douglas Adams

12. The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.
Agatha Christie

13. Cats are dangerous companions for writers because cat watching is a near-perfect method of writing avoidance
Dan Greenburg

Getting It Right
14. A good novel tells us the truth about it’s hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
Gilbert K. Chesterton

15. The secret of good writing is to say an old thing in a new way or to say a new thing in an old way.
Richard Harding Davis

16. The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.
Tom Clancy

The Truth about Writing
17. A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
William Faulkner

18. Let’s face it, writing is hell.
William Styron

20. For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.
Ernest Hemingway

21. I love being a writer. What I can’t stand is the paperwork.
Peter De Vries

22. The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
Cyril Connolly quotes

Criticism
23. This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
Dorothy Parker

Getting Paid
24. The free-lance writer is the person who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps.
Robert Benchley

25. The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.
Tom Waits

Companions
26. A catless writer is almost inconceivable. It’s a perverse taste, really, since it would be easier to write with a herd of buffalo in the room than even one cat; they make nests in the notes and bite the end of the pen and walk on the typewriter keys.
Barbara Holland

27. A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
P. L. Travers

The Flow!

OK, that’s enough putting it off, we have to sit down and get on with it.

However, now that I have explored what it is to have ambition, be inspired and then become a procrastinator, where do we go?

Where can we go?

Productivity isn’t something that you switch on and off as a writer, you have to achieve the zen like state of ‘Flow’. We’ve all experienced it, that feeling that you may never finish typing because the words aren’t just flowing out of you they are somehow jumping out before you barely think of them. It’s that glorious feeling that you are blissfully slightly out of control but, like a poker winning streak, you shouldn’t mess with it, you should just go with it. Officially, Flow is the operative mental state in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing with an energised focus, complete involvement and feeling of complete success in the process of the activity. It was discovered by a guy defined Csíkszentmihályi and he identified  nine factors that accompanies the experience of flow:

1. Clear goals – clear attainable goals allow our crazy, wild expectations to become tangible, something to aspire to. The smaller the goals within a wider context, the easier it will be to view progress against your big dream.
2. Concentration – see my previous posts about distractions! It’s not hard to be 100% focused but there are steps to take to be able to maintain concentration to be able to slip in your creative trance.
3. According to our massively monickered friend, within the feeling of flow a loss of self-consciousness leads to the feeling of the merging of action and awareness. Think of it like being the Bruce Lee of writing and waving your fingers at the empty screen before writing.
4. You may experience a distorted sense of time like when you sit down, effectively black out and come around to see a couple of thousand words and a empty wine glass. Or bottle, but that would perhaps explain the black-out.
5. After briefly flicking through your newly filled pages, you will find that it’s mostly good stuff. The total immersion you experience you to connect to the words that you’re writing and allow it to bring out your best.
6. You will also surprise yourself by writing some of your best stuff. Stuff that you probably didn’t even realise that was in you. It may start to sound like some sort of religious experience and I suppose it is if you worship words!
7. Although a great deal of the process of this feeling may feel like you are out of control, you are actually very much so. It is all within you in the first place, this is just a method of controlling your output. Like putting your volume up to 11.
8. The actual feeling of performing the act of creating is intrinsically rewarding, so the flow become self fulfilling like a your own solar panel. The more you work, the more you want.
9. Once you have become become absorbed in your activity, and your focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, there is an action awareness merging that effectively turns you into a writing superhero. I suggest you have a superhero word such as, “Flame On” to really get the full effect.

So there you have it, that is ‘The Flow’, my take on a serious, psychological topic with my own little twist on it. So, get to it; “FLAME ON”!

PS Sorry I haven’t posted recently, I’ve been a bit ill, better now though!

Procrastination

Right, we are now inspired to produce scribblings of the finest prose so we must get to the keyboard and begin. We’ve finished the school run and kissed our partners farewell until the evening so we have the rest of follow our inspiration wherever they may lead us. The day lies before us like a glorious canvas and we have many vivid colours to spray around like Jackson Pollock on a particularly inspired day. Let’s get going!

0910 – Well, whilst I make for the computer to boot we may as well open the post whilst I wait for the coffee to brew. Oo look, we may have won some sort of lottery, all we have to do is send back these three envelopes and we have a 1 in 3 chance of winning something. What could it be I wonder?

0930 – Well, I’ve made the coffee and have got the envelopes ready to post, let’s get to it! Hey, wait a moment, that Lottery could be scam, I’d better check the internet to see if it’s been reported….it seems to be fine but there are a lot unscrupulous people out there, maybe I should do a story on that to warn people what’s out there. Where’s my notebook? I should write that down.

0945 – Right, that another idea captured for later, excellent, I have a production line all set up now. All I need now is to get some words down. DING. Oh, some emails, what’s this? I’ve won the Nigerian Lottery again. Twice. Great, I can retire. I wonder who actually falls for these things? Anyone? Maybe google knows. Oh yes, it seems like quite a few people have fallen for it, maybe it’s a good story, I should write this down. Good, another story captured. And what’s that? Extend my what?! No thank you where much. DELETE.

1030 – Well, the notebook is filling up quite nicely and it looks like the sun is coming out. Magnificent! What a great day to be creating. Hey, you know what, I bet it would be great to sit outside and write. Yes, let’s do that.

1130 – Hmm, I wonder why my wireless doesn’t reach out there, it’s a shame as it works right up to near the garden table and then cuts out. I must remember to look into that. Back to the indoor desk for me then. Still, looking out of the window the day does look magnificent. Look, there’s a squirrel running around with half an apple in it’s mouth, where’s my camera. I am going to have to put this up on my blog.

1200 – I really need to redesign my blog, it looks OK but it doesn’t really bring across my true commitment to writing. Let’s have a quick fiddle with it.

1230 – Wordpress can be really awkward sometimes, how do you create a page with a separate RSS feed for my published articles? OH MY GOD, the squirrel is back and what does he have this time? Is that a Twinkie? The squirrel has a full Twinkie in it’s mouth! Where did it get that? WHERE IS MY CAMERA?

1300 – Seeing that squirrel eating a Twinkie has made me hungry. I do worry about squirrel nutrition habits now but I suppose it had an apple before the Twinkie so maybe it’s a balanced diet. OK, time for lunch.

1430 – Delicious lunch now digesting and dinner baking away for the kids, we are domestic Gods and Goddesses! What, what’s that smell? Did I put the oven on the correct temperature? Let me go check.

1445 – All fine, it was just a little spillage on the oven base. It always wafts the smell through the house when that happens because of the fan assistance technology. So the brochure tells me. SO THEN, to writing! Where was I? Wait, I’ve only written 20 words? How can that be I’ve been working at this all day! Oh, someone’s at the door?

1530 – Two guys made out they were looking for Jesus and wanted to know if I had found him. I hadn’t. Turns out they actually had and wanted tell me all about him and I felt too rude to tell them ‘no thanks’. I have a pamphlet showing me how to find Jesus now, should I ever feel that I lost him or need to demonstrate to further callers that I have at least the method rather than the compulsion.

1540 – Wow, is that the time? I need to go pick up the kids and drop them off at soccer practise and swimming coaching. Then chess club and ballet. Or is it science club and a sleep-over tonight? Actually, I think it’s a science club sleep-over as they have to hand in their projects by tomorrow. They’re all staying at the Johnson’s as they have a huge garage to work in for their experiments. Right, where’s my keys, let’s get going.

1545 – I really could go for a Twinkie right now, where did that come from?

Where does Inspiration come from?

OK, so now you have your ambition and a clear idea of what you want to write and why you want to write it. You also have in mind what that success is going to look like; be it money, prestige, intellectual plaudits or even becoming attractive, you know know what it is you want. And now you want your writing to take you there. So, you sit at your keyboard with an expectant grin and and a heart full of hope and you begin typing.

Then you stop.

Then you start again for a while and then you stop again.

Then you realise it’s a little harder than it looks.

Then you look out of the window and there’s a dog rolling on it’s back, but wait that lawn sprinkler might get him, yes it’s…

Damn it! You’ve just spent 20 minutes looking out of the window, you HAVE to get back to it.

So then, what is your inspiration? Where does this story / book / post / article / tweet have it’s origins? What is it that made me think I could just spew out a few thousand words just by sitting in front of a computer and idly typing.

Where do I start?

A ha! My notes! My fabulous notes! This is where inspiration is stored when you’re out and about, or cooking dinner for the multitudes and this where the seedlings of my mighty oaks have been sown. So you look back at your notes and you have things written like, “Could an old woman really live in a shoe?” and “Would an Irish Setter have an Irish accent if it could speak?”

Hmm, not exactly the seeds of ‘Catcher in the Rye’.

Many writers over the years have despaired over the lost notes, the forgotten inspiration that would have been their masterpiece. Hunter S. Thompson documents the flip-side of this when he awakens from one of his archetypal stuporous episodes and reads through his notes that he had taken following a mescaline, booze and acid fuelled night. “Kill the mind and the body will follow” he darkly muses, what could this mean? He never found out and one can only wonder at the magnificence of the scribbling that never even made it through his weird and twisted nights.

This goes to show that inspiration can strike at any point and you should be ever ready, ever vigilant. Your notebook or note taking device should never be more than a reach away. The snatched conversations you hear at lunch could be the missing dialogue you’ve been waiting for for the last year. The idle, lazy advertising copy that you hypnotically stare at on the train could be the words that inspire your first viral post. The fortune cookie could be the first line of the book that features on Oprah’s reading list. And why is this so? It’s because inspiration comes not only from the big things it comes form the mundane, the revolting, the sick, the striking, the offensive, the weird, the unexpected, the lethargic, the, well, anything. What is it that the cartoon characters on the cereal box say? What did your first child unexpectedly say as he toddled off to school? What does the guy in the traffic jam look like and what is he saying in the protracted phone call he seems to be having? And why is that woman running and laughing through the rain when she clearly isn’t dressed for it?

When I realised that the inspiration for what I wanted to write was going to come from the things that were happening around me, the things I noticed and the experiences that I had, I kind of ‘switched on’. Suddenly I started to notice the most bizarre things like the nervousness of commuters around pigeons and the choatic effect that a sudden downpour will have on the unsuspecting (it’s great, it’s like someone shouted ‘INCOMING!’) Life, no matter how mundane it may seem is full of the intricacies, and it is here that you will find gold.

Here is a quick example of charming dialogue. This is a verbatim conversation I heard between two cleaners. The first cleaner was a young English girl with a slow London accent that sounded like she was considering every word as it left her mouth. I’m being slightly charitable as she was obviously quite dim. The other cleaner was a bored and disinterested Polish girl probably wondering why she was not using her degree in Astrophysics.

English Cleaner: “There’s a shop in Isleworth that sells nothing but Polish goods you know.”
Polish Cleaner (very disinterested): “Oh. Really?”
EC: “Yeah.” There was a VERY LONG PAUSE and then she said, “Devon is the best place in Britain to buy Cheese. There’s LOADS of farmland there so it’s very pure.”
PC: “Oh.”
EC: “I don’t like MANY cheeses, but I do like Cheddar, our National cheese, and Philadelphia.”
PC: “Yes?”
EC: “They brought cheeses from around the World to my school once and there’s this one cheese that has GREEN bits in it!”
PC: “Green?”
EC: “YEAH! I refused to eat it. I do like Cheddar though as it is, as I say, our National cheese.”
PC: “Yes.”

I was furiously writing this down as I listened from my workdesk whilst almost crying with laughter. Mundane? Yes, probably.

The start of an Alan Bennett screenplay, who knows?

What Are Your Ambitions?

Can you remember the point in your life when you thought, “I want to make a living from writing”?

Whether it be paid blogger, an article writer, a journalist, a novelist or screenplay writer; was there an actual clear as a bell lightning strike from the creative heavens?

It’s difficult not romanticise yourself gently placing down your finished copy of ‘The Great Gatsby’ and staring off toward the setting sun, breathing the words, “I hear your words Mr Fitzgerald and I answer your call. I will take up your mantle and write the next great American novel.”

When your realisations set in, what were your original ambitions? A best selling novel? A blog followed by tens of thousands? A syndicated column in the New York Times? Money? Personally, when I realised I wanted to make a living from writing I envisaged myself, within a matter of months, regaling the New York literati with heady tales of teenage life in South Wales. I actually imagined myself chatting with the author of Catch 22, “Oh yes, Joseph Heller, you could say that times were moving fast and urgent decisions were to be made. The lure of literature was too strong, I had to succumb to my muse. I didn’t write this book/article/blog post, it demanded to be channelled.”

The reality, unfortunately, is probably a lot more mundane. You’d probably just finished an average novel with a poor, rushed ending whilst on your third glass of wine and tossed the tome casually to one side cursing the time you had wasted on it. Or maybe you went slightly crazy over the grammatical errors in a three thousand circulation free ad newspaper. You maybe considered sending a four page letter cataloguing the myriad apostrophe catastrophes throughout the rag then shouted to the heavens, “GOOD GOD! I could do so much better than that. You know what, I am going to start a blog, TONIGHT.”

Of course, now the ambition touch paper had been lit and you now have the obsessive compulsion to began scribbling down your observations and thoughts on every scribeable surface and then storing them in the least obvious places imaginable. For example, you wake up on an idle Tuesday and decide to post a blog entry. But wait, where are those dialog sections I transcribed from memory in the toilet of a Gas Station? Oh yes, I wrote it in nail varnish on a napkin and put in my sock. And where are the notes from my chance meeting with Robert Downey Junior in a hot air balloon over the Serengheti? Oh yes, they’re in my impossibly complicated filing system that consists of a twenty seven shoe boxes at the bottom of my spare bedroom closet cross referenced by importance, saleability, cleverness, funniness and neatness of handwriting. Oh, and if you can’t find that one five line note that completes the masterpiece of your third personal blog post, your YouTube comments would become especially vitriolic that day.

My own journey was a lot more simple. I was a pretentious teenager for all the wrong reasons. I had read a little Voltaire, a lot of Twain, loads of Shakespeare, a pinch of Heller, far too many trashy newspapers and watched too much TV to have a balanced view on reality. Also, I read a LOT of comics which obviously deeply affected my attitude toward every day situations. With these influences fuelling my somewhat erratic to approach toward my future intentions, I inwardly began to shape my destiny. Or destinies, I should say. At any one point in my younger days I imagined myself to be a professional Soccer Player, a TV and Film Actor / Director, a Model (that’s where my imagination really fooled me), an architect, a doctor, an Archeologist (thanks Indiana Jones), a Smuggler (and yes, thanks Han Solo) and a Journalist. And all this was before I had actually left my bedroom and ventured to my sanctuary, the library. As a teenager with too much time on his hands, varied and bizarre information sources equal unchecked ambition and rampant, misguided egomania. This was followed by the crushing realisation that you were not, in fact, superhuman but simply a teenage boy with a feverish imagination desperately in need of an outlet.

So writing it was, and writing it remains. And whilst my ambitions have become certainly more tempered as the years have passed, my passion remains undimmed. As does my belief that one day I will discover my real superpower.

My Pitch

Good day to you all and welcome to my first real post.

Thank you for the messages of welcome and good luck, it was very much appreciated and immediately made me feel part of this fine community. However, to all of you that didn’t wish me well, I ask you all in turn, why do you hate me already? I am a very fragile person and prone to spilling out my insecurities and personality disorders directly onto the page. If you don’t automatically love me and my writing I am liable to write great screeds of self loathing, angst ridden poerty that isn’t funny at all and then it’s only you, lovely reader, that will suffer. And besides, there’s plenty of time for building up an informed and deep seated resentment of me once you know me a little better!

Only kidding, I promise no poetry. Not even a limerick. I do not promise no literary breakdowns however, that will probably happen at some point.

Anyhoo, in Deb’s annoucement post she mentions a pitch letter I sent to her to try and secure the advertised position of ‘Humorous Blogger’. I had remembered the University application letter of a Scottish person in regards to his entrance consideration and thought it the ideal format for an application. Whereas his was basically a stream of conciousness of the surreal made-up things he had done (precision tennis raquet throwing, speed tromboning and the like), all mine are based in fact and have a personal, sketchy origin.

I hope it goes someway to introducing me and I guess, in a strange way, it’s my pitch to you as well.

Hello Deborah,

I am replying to your search for a humorous blogger for the originally fun intended ‘Freelance Writing Jobs’ blog. As you stated in your ad, I would like to help you bring the funny back.

I believe I fit your requirements for a number of reasons. I have written for a number of blogs (Londonist, The Offside, AmChron etc.) and been generally well received as a funny writer but the remit has always been a little narrow and unrepresentative of my true passions; Comedy and Writing.

I would love to write about the strange foibles of writers and their routines (i.e. WH Auden was effectively drugged up his entire writing life!), odd writing tips (i.e. slip the key under the door after you’ve locked yourself in to your writing space, hope someone finds you), quirky popular genres (Star Trek Erotic Fan Fiction focussing on Kirk and Spock’s romance) etc. etc. ad infinitum.

At this point, I presume, you may like some more information about me. Well, I am British (Welsh actually), lofty, less than dynamic and I am often seen staring at ornate houses or making strong Gin Martinis and Rum Sours. My past is not chequered but I have failed as a soccer player, a paper boy, a charity worker and a wine waiter. All still haunt me.

I am trying to write books, situation comedies, stand-up routines, articles, blogs, scriptures, missives and sometimes humorous emails. I manage time relatively efficiently and I can tread water but distance swimming is a problem due to poor coaching as a boy. I have been able to ride a bike for many years now, a skill that gives me a sense of tremendous well-being but I remain fearful of its awesome power.

I curse openly, freely, sometimes loudly, but always heartily and with the best intentions, much like a pirate I’d imagine. Effing and jeffing, as it is sometimes known here, is recognised as a skill, right or wrong; and I am seen as more of a man by some and as a slob and illiterate by others. The latter are correct but both, in all senses, fascinate me.
At times I have displayed astounding catching skills and cat-like reactions, at other times clumsiness beyond conventional physical understanding. I am able to play no musical instruments but can recognise 95% of them by sight alone. I am an efficient climber of trees. I like to cook and regularly ignore cooking times and chopping
instructions. I would be considered a maverick in the rigid and conforming hospitality student circles. I do not have criminal record, nor do I want one, thank you.

I like to think of myself of a protector of the people but would be considered a coward and a blaggard by those same people if I ever stated my view. I can twirl a staff like a Kung Fu expert but however impressive it looks I have painfully found out it is not an essential life skill.

Ants astound me as they are organised enough to have possess armies (which is as unsettling as it is impressive). Armadillos strike me as nice guys, bears as misunderstood and jelly fish as just downright
irresponsible. Dogs and children trust me, cats respect me and monkeys are strangely calm around me. I believe they sense my acceptance of our shared ancestry.

Constant exposure to the radiation of the Sun has not facilitated any superpowers (except the ability to find the perfect name for things, I am currently sitting on Lenny the leather chair) but may have contributed to my loftiness. I can hit many objects with sticks and bats to an advanced level. I can throw. I like shopping.

I balance, I duck and weave, I dodge, I frolic, I gambol, I skip, I dance the funky chicken (badly) and pay my bills on time. Long phone calls make my ear go uncomfortably hot.

I have a fair idea where Elvis is.

I hope this gives you a view of my mark as a writer.

Kind Regards,

Simon J. James

An Intriguing Lead – Drug Kingpin Seeks Ghost Writer

Hello all, will introduce myself fully very soon but Deb sent me this over and I had to share it before it gets pulled by Craigslist. Happy Wednesday to you all.

Ex N. Idaho Drug Kingpin Needs Writer (Financial District)

Writer Wanted For Ex North Idaho Drug Kingpin: Looking for someone to write life story, unique story, unique Individual. Story consists of dealings with Colombians,Cubans, Mexican Federallies, 16 years in prison hanging out with mafia members from the Phildelphia Scarfo gang, Charlie Iannache, Anthony Pungitore, Gene Gotti-brother of John Gotti of the New York Mafia, being successful jail house lawyer. Story begins with the consequences for a boy with a gifted IQ who deals with uniagnosed ADHD and the path he takes in life through taking over the underbelly of the drug world,prison,self inflicted extrodinary rehabilitation efforts to his succesfull entrance back into society. This isnt some run of the mill drug dealer story! I SHOULD BE DEAD A HUNDRED TIMES OVER. GOD HAD HIS HAND ON MY SHOULDER TO GET THROUGH IT. ps: All Statue of Limitations are finished and all prison time completed. The story just needs to be told by a gifted writer. TO SEE 6 PAGE SYNOPSIS GO TO: http://bobbyconvict.blogspot.com If interested, please submit writing proposal/compensation plans. I would prefer to give the writer a portion of proceeds, but would pay the right writer to do the story. Follow up to the book would be self help videos/books for children-parents-educators-inmates to not go down the path I took, or to change an inmates life through education. please email me at: write4me87@yahoo.com