The Lean London years

come to those who wait. Beer, steak, my dear brother and an unlikely Icelandic victory against Norway at the European Handball championships, have seen fit to find their way to me tonight.

In other news, a recent trip to Paris has sparked an idea for a new story. As soon as I can develop my time extendor and get to the magical 27 hours a day I will finish it. The good Lady has deemed it ‘quite creepy’.

And they’d be kind of right, as it happens.

I’m thirty-seven, apparently. And no, I must say I don’t quite know how that happened.

That being said, life at 37 is pretty darn good. Here’s a couple of things I’ve got:

- A place to live.

- A lovely Lady who lives in the place where I live.

- A place where I go a lot of the time to work. This place is more or less filled with people that range from the Tolerably Annoying (very few) to the Awesome (way over the allocated quota, surely).

- Health. While not likely to make waves by winning a triathlon any time soon or solving Arsenal’s secondary striker and fox-in-the-box problem, I’m still more or less healthy; I can climb stairs, walk where I need to, sleep when I need to and run for very limited distances. My swimming trunks modelling career is probably over, but I’m healthy enough to do something about the, ahem, winter padding as well, should I so wish.

- Schroedinger’s writing career. Nothing might happen – but something might also happen. Swords is now with about 10 publishers, according to my agent, and being deliberated over incredibly carefully in various corners of the world. Harold will also start moving soon(ish) – possibly into its first editing cycle. Time will tell.

- Time. I’ve got it, I’m using it more or less wisely, and the time I’m having is good.

And here’s a non-exhaustive list of what I don’t have:

- Scurvy. I’m very pleased about this.

- A Nemesis. While I’m intrigued about the possibility of a proper, eye-narrowing, throat-growly Nemesis, I think actually having one would be very annoying and distracting.

- A World of Warcraft account. This has improved my life significantly and been the foundation of productive time-spending. I got a lot of fun out of that game for many years, but may have stopped playing approximately a year too late.

- A sense of modesty regarding The Lady’s Work. I am very proud indeed of this – so much so that I turn into a show-and-tell marketing rep with her work whenever we have visitors. This is sometimes frowned upon,  but the general positive reception tends to save my bacon.

- Much of any serious problems at all. Basically, as the English would say, I’m a jammy bastard and I know it.

On the whole I’d say year number thirty-seven has been up there with the best ones so far.

Bring on  year number thirty-eight!

The comedy hamster has been stirring of late. I am of course wise to his siren song and in no hurry to give him the keys to the wheel just yet, but that does not prevent him from scribbling and scratching.

I fully intended to follow this up with a spoof of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven, only with a comedy hamster, but reading is a creative endeavour and I figure it would be rude of me to deprive you of the pleasure of imagining it yourselves.

Right now I’m simultaneously too healthy and not quite healthy enough.

This is actually quite annoying; I am about 12% ill. Not enough to stay home, but enough to make mornings awful and sinus-y and give headaches in the evenings. Considering the fact that I spend about 2 hours a day on the London Tube (apparently ‘Germ Cylinder’ was taken) to go to a school (apparently ‘Fresh Germ Storage Space was taken’) it’s actually quite remarkable that I’ve kept my health for this long. Now I just need to hang on past tomorrow so I can be poorly over the weekend, gaze into space and catch up on the eternal and never-ending paperwork.

And on that note, it’s time for my current absolutely favourite television show – Masterchef:The Professionals.

Another one seems to have whooshed past. So where are we?

Comfortable in the sofa and actively dodging getting stuck into an increasing number of things, that’s where we are.

However, all is not lost and sacrificed on the altar of procrastination. In less than ten minutes I shall leap forth, grab my jacket, seize my bag and vault towards the gym, where I shall huff and puff like a wheezing bag for a while. It shall be neither glorious nor pleasant to behold, but it shall happen, for such is my decree. The recent upswing in workload has all but obliterated whatever I could possibly (and optimistically) call a workout routine, and (just like I discover every eight months or so) having one of those makes life strangely easier. So an energetic vaulting is in order.

In other news, two American publishing houses have ‘parently asked for the manuscript of Swords, so that brings us up to eight people in various corners of the globe considering whether my modest Viking stylings are fit for public consumption. All of which is well and good – it does seem to take roughly seven different shades of forever, but every time I start frothing at the mouth and growling about people who don’t answer their emails I usually end up muttering “Rothfuss and Sanderson. Rothfuss and Sanderson” as I rock back and forth in a corner. It took those titans, currently standing astride the world of Fantasy, years and years to get their stuff published, so maybe my wait isn’t that long. When I’ve found a combination of time and energy (which has sadly not been that often), I’ve been amusing myself with writing short stories. It’s good fun, it leaves something tangible and it’s a good reminder that despite the publishing world’s current and puzzling lack of falling over itself to erect statues of me, I can still put some words together.

And on that bombshell I am going to leap to my feet and stride to the gym. And when I say ‘leap’ I mean power down the computer, put it in the bag, struggle to rise from my all too comfortable position and shuffle out of the house. But I will end up at the gym.

Too much. Too much to talk/write about. Not enough time. Work is kicking my ass to the extent that the only reason I woke up on Thursday morning was that my iPhone bleeped at me about it being my move on a chess website.

I went to a gig for the first time in a very long time on Tuesday. I have been gathering words to write about it since; I’m not done. It needs to be written about, but it needs to be done properly.

One thing I can do, however, is write about what I’m doing right now.

I’m doing what any man with a background in constructing narrative, making comedy and dabbling in music would do on a Saturday – I’m watching the X-Factor.

And watching the X-Factor is an interesting experience. Most earth dwellers will be aware of the format: loads of people audition in front of judges, most of them get eliminated, one winner gets a recording deal. On the face of it this is similar to most talent shows. What set it apart in its inception was Simon Cowell, who would sit and actually say what he thought about the ‘talent’. This method – honesty – was so diametrically opposed to the nature of stick-a-smile-on-your-face light entertainment television that audiences found themselves, much like Simon’s forehead, unable to move.

The X-Factor quickly grew from a television program into an entertainment and marketing juggernaut and is now broadcast into 182 billion homes throughout the galaxy. The format has spawned all manner of global stars and created its own rituals. It’s these rituals that I find interesting moreso than the blinking lights and moderately competent singing.

One thing I enjoyed was watching Simon Cowell’s role turn in his hands. A couple of series in he made the mistake of letting marginal talent through based on their conviction – the famous “how much they want it”. Predictably every other delusional mooing nutcase then started pleading, throwing themselves on the floor and trying to cry their way through the competition. Simon has since left in favour of Take That sideman Gary Barlow, who has to fill Simon’s boots as Resident Henchman. More on that later.

Another is watching the judges try desperately to let the comments to the acts shape the narrative in real time. I strongly suspect there is a chart somewhere with the roles contestants need to fill – The “loose cannon” (currently Kitty Brucknell, last season Katie Waissell), the “annoying comedy act” (Two Shoes this year, before that the two karaoke boys, before that Jedward), the shy girl, the funny boy and so on. The tokens, tags and two-dimensional character plates (not boxes) are practically flying. Seeing accomplished professionals try to swallow their pride in the name of the holy agenda and tell average karaoke singers that their rendition of a classic number by DJ Tiesto was amazing is always good fun.

Yet another is the rabid live audience. For some reason constructive criticism is always poison in their bones – none of the judges is allowed to say anything even remotely not coated in sugar. This adds to the judges’ Squirm Factor. which I quite like. To the baying hordes simply being able to go on stage and stand there without voiding your bowels is enough to deserve unlimited slobbering from the panel. That irks me a little bit and possibly cuts to the core of what the whole song and dance is about – the dream of instant, life-changing fame.

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the sudden change in fortunes and the fairy godmother with the magic wand are not new ideas. Far from it. X-Factor hasn’t invented anything – it just does it very, very well. And it’s not really a subtle approach either. I pity the writers, who have to find endless angles on “winning this show would be very good. I would really like to”. In a sense I get a bit sad when I see how many people take this hook, line and sinker – sometimes the will to power overpowers the common sense and artistic judgment of the performing artists, which creates the ‘car crash’ portion of the show. Then I remember an interview with old badass Tony Bennett, who lamented the state of the world and said he’d asked Simon Cowell why he didn’t use a fraction of his millions to open a string of 2-400 man clubs for these young acts to legitimately cut their teeth in and actually pay their dues. Cowell’s response? “Why would I do that? I’m too busy making money.”

Quasi-intellectualism aside, I quite like Marcus Collins (who sounds a bit like Stevie Wonder at times) and Janet Devlin. I hope they kick Kitty off sooner rather than later – she needs proper mental care – and after tonight’s show they kind of need to fix their auto-tuner.

I am, on all accounts, doing pretty well these days. I have a job which gives me all kinds of lovely feedback (and occasionally money, which is handy), I have a person hawking my wares in the international publishing world and I live in a house which happens to (far too rarely these days, but with improvement in sight) have a wonderful Lady in it. Add to that a good run of health and even modest weight loss and I think life, such as it is, could be a lot worse.

And looking at this, I still feel a little bit of a pang sometimes; a pang of regret. A little twinge of longing; a lack of fulfilment, a want – nay, a need.

I miss playing World of Warcraft. There. I said it.

I‘d made this master plan, you see. I was going to work as much of July as I could, then go to Iceland with the Lady, then stay at home in August to write awesome fiction and prepare for my first full year as a Proper Teacher with a Class and Everything.

The first week of August I ate my own body weigth* in minty chocolate and played World of Warcraft for 18 hours a day**.

After that week of nonsense, I looked back and concluded that this was not what we‘d call “normal” behaviour. Being lucky enough to have made it to the grand old age of thirty-six, I did some minor calculations and figured out what was going on. I had two things I needed to be getting on with – planning lessons and writing fiction. My brain decided that while one of these things was plenty scary, two of them was too much – and so it sought refuge in the blinking lights and comfortable routine of Warcraft. I decided to put writing on hold (as I‘ve mentioned before), turned to Warcraft – And I quit. I sold all my in-game possessions, liquidated my assets, gave a fair bit of stuff away and basically stashed all my characters.The  maximum of levels you can put on one character at the moment is 85. The combined levels I had amassed over …three? years of playing numbered somewhere in the region of five hundred. Luckily I don‘t have a number for the amount of man hours this corresponds to, but like with the chocolate, it‘s a lot. But – I quit. Walked away, like a boss. Part of the reason was that I needed the time and had a dashed hard time stopping once I‘d started; another part was that my trusty Dell Studio 1565 simply wasn‘t up to the task anymore. Playing a game that requires quick reactions is marginally less exciting when your computer stops relaying 12-14 frames/second and goes from 6 on a good day down to 2 on a bad day. Then the carrier pigeons start fluttering outside the windows with printed out screen shots of what‘s happening in the game, and it‘s time to stop. The third and final part in the WoW equation was that I‘d gotten to the stage that in comparison with the players I was playing with, I was not all that good at it. Warcraft has an interesting model in that it forces you more towards teamwork the further you get – and being the guy who doesn‘t put in the hours of practice and research, thus messing up the teamwork thing just wasn‘t all that fun anymore.

And what is Warcraft, anyway? It‘s just like slightly customizable Life. You do mindless tasks to receive gold which provides you with marginally better stuff to dress your character in – and then you do it again, while chatting and complaining about it with your mates.

That being said, I still miss it. Or maybe, considering that I‘ve just started working in a school mostly full of screaming children***, I just miss the opportunity to sit down in relative peace and quiet and brutally slaughter some pixels. Sitting in the teacher‘s lounge yesterday I was asked why I looked so haggard. I explained what I‘d been up to that week and heard an excellent phrase – it was suggested that I might need a ‘Brain Break’. And that made me think – I miss playing World of Warcraft.

* This is exaggerated, of course. I didn‘t weigh the sugar I consumed – but there was a substantial amount of it. Probably not quite “my own body weight” but definitely in “enough to kill a small horse”-territory.

** This is also exaggerated. Well, -ish.

*** Don’t get me wrong. They are delightful, but they’re just so … incredibly… loud…

I woke up today in what can only be described as a Foul Mood.

In the grand scheme of things I probably don’t have a right to be. The absence of The Lady is almost certainly a contributing factor; as is general exhaustion and self-pitying work hangover. But I am supposed to be a Big Boy Now, so I should be able to handle at least one and even both of these things.

No, there’s more at play here.

And it has to do with my neighbours.

About 2 weeks ago, my father undertook a book-sourcing expedition for me. He endeavoured to find Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in Icelandic, after I’d failed to do so in the summer. I need this book for school. My father, being a minor miracle worker and also connected into the deep, dark and mostly dusty underworld of Icelandic second hand bookshops, actually found it. Then, with the aid of my mother, he wrapped it up and sent it off.

And as far as I can tell, the postal service arrived at my house and handed it over to one of my neighbours.

And that’s as far as it went, because no package has been seen in the House of Snorri.

I’d write something pithy about this but I’ll have to stop right now and go take a walk to the gym. I’m too angry.

Seriously, though! I can just about deal with someone stealing the delicious food that my mother sent to me – but a book in Icelandic? For [expletive deleted]‘s sake!

I spent my day yesterday filling my head moderately successfully with work-related stuff, interspersed with an unsuccessful attempt at listening to Blackburn-Arsenal* on the radio and a good trip to the gym.

Today I shall spend filling my stomach with meat and salad in good company at the last Stevenage BBQ of the season.

Life is pretty good, I daresay.

* When Arsenal had scored their second own goal and the score was 4-2 for Blackburn I posted a simple plan on /r/gunners.

1) Turn off the radio.

2) Take a long walk.

3) Try not to kill anyone.

About 30 people thought this was a good idea.

As I skim the entries in the blog I see more and more that are tagged ‘Daily Life’ and fewer that are tagged with ‘Writing’. This makes me a little sad. Then I have to remind myself that there are reasons for this; I am working towards a goal. I could probably spend more time writing right now, but by holding back and not indulging I will create a situation that is much more beneficial for making stuff in the long run. Things need to get done before things get done, as it were.

Besides, I’ve already got the title for Book 2, so I’m well ahead of the curve.