You tell yourself you know which way things are going. Then, you find out exactly how wrong you are…

I’m not going to go on for too long- but basically, we’ve semi-decided that we’re actually going to go at the flat problem all guns blazing, and try to sort it out as soon as possible. After much stress and upset and worry and gnashing of teeth, I think it’d be better to try and tackle it now, then just let it fester. We’re going to try and talk to the Landlord tomorrow, or as soon as possible, and at least thrash out some kind of amicable agreement. From there, we’ll start advertising, trying to get people around, and getting our stuff out as soon as is humanly possible. The next few months are likely to be chaotic in the extreme… but somewhere, in the harried storm that currently lurks within my head, I know that this is the right thing to do, and that some stress now is better than nine months of guaranteed stress, misery, and not living where we want to live. We’re going to be existing by the seat of our pants, but something tells me it may be worth it in the end…

I just realised that one thing I haven’t updated recently is the current situation with the flat. After some thoughts and discussions, George and I have finally decided that while we would love to take the gamble and move out early without a financial safety net… it’s too much of a risk. The plan currently is that George is looking into getting a job down in Hampshire, because as soon as that happenned, we could put the plan to move early into effect almost immediately, and if we end up liable for some of the rent, we’d still have enough to survive (We would probably, at least initially, be moving in with George’s Mum and Dad. It’s not a perfect situation, but it will also help an awful lot having a firm base from which to find a place to live…). This could happen incredibly quickly- it might not happen until April- or we might be here until June. We do, at least, know that the refurbishment situation is not our problem, whatever the Landlord says, and there are certain advantages to being here till next June- most particularly, it may give both of us the chance to improve our driving skills before we move to the Hampshire countryside, where we’re not really going to be able to survive without them. George needs to get her licence, and I need to improve my confidence considering that I drove once a couple of months ago, and that was my first time in nearly ten years. Refresher lessons are on the cards, and finding money for that kind of thing may be a little easier before we take the big-scale gamble of moving.

Of course, another advantage of not moving out till next June is that George wouldn’t have to immediately get a job, and would instead be able to, at least for 2 or 3 months, throw herself full-time into work on the art business she’s currently running with her mother and sister. It’s a source of major frustration that she’s so far away at the moment, and I wish there was more that I could do to make things right. But, we both know that the current plan is the only workable one- we’re doing okay, but we’re not exactly flush with cash, and are still wincing from having to pay back the council £2,000 of benefits and losing £4,500 in the Highbury debacle. We do, at least, have a workable plan, and things to investigate, while knowing what our situation is has turned out to be something of a relief. After some talks, we’ve also decided that there’s not an awful lot of point in talking to the Landlord until we have something to talk about- if we’re in the situation where we’re moving, then the refurbishment is his problem, not ours. I’d be quite happy to keep conversations with him to an absolute minimum, and it seems sensible to wait until the situation is no longer hypothetical.

Whatever happens, in twelve months time, our lives are going to be very, very different.

(Gulp…)

The trouble with constantly saying “I really want you to be brutally honest”, is that sooner or later, someone’s actually going to be brutally honest. Over the last three weeks, I’ve had feedback over the book that has been extremely helpful- but has also pointed out some serious problems. At least three people haven’t gotten very far in before telling me it isn’t in a good state, which is, to be honest, true, but it’s one of those instances when artistic feelings suddenly go into tragic mode, and the idea of weeping in your garret sounds like a welcoming one. This is, at least, opening my eyes to exactly how bloody difficult it is to write a novel, and I’m getting the feeling it’s rather like making a film in some respects. You go through lots of organisation, effort and hell to shoot the thing, get to the end, feel a sense of huge satisfaction- and then realise that all you’ve got is raw footage, and if you just slashed it all together you’d have a twelve hour movie. Essentially, you then go through the process of making the film again in the editing room- and that’s close to what I’m going through.

For much of the weekend, I was carefully going through the opening chapters- the area where most people ground to a halt and which- gulp- is currently the strongest section of the book…- and realising there are ways of shortening, of refining, and of saying what I’m trying to say in a smaller, more compact space. It’s a shock to realise that you don’t have to tell the audience everything- that it’s slightly similar to a comic book, in that much can happen between the sentences as long as you choose the right words. Leave the right gaps, and the audience will fill them in for themselves. Once I get this week over and done with, I’m getting on with some serious work on the book, as I’m determined that the next time I send it to someone, they’re not going to want to give up halfway through. I’m going to learn, and I’m going to get this together, mainly because I’m certain of how good this could be if I can just get it to work. Feverish editing, and then, as long as I haven’t gone mad, I’ll get on with the next one which, at the moment, is looking like it might be a left-field version of my long-gestating SANITY CLAWS idea- madness, conspiracies and all-out weirdness in present day London. There is much to be done…

Another interesting side-effect of having fjm over for dinner last week was that it’s really forced me to have a very firm think about certain aspects of my ideas. There’s something about talking about your story concepts to someone who’s tremendously brainy and knows a ridiculous amount about fantasy and science fiction, and one particular idea that came up was that I might be worrying too much about character, at the expense of the actual science fiction nature of what I’m trying to do. It’s a difficult balance to strike, and some of it is stuff I’m only going to find out by writing, but fjm also pointed out that one idea I’ve got- a Young Adult reality-bending spy story called Flipside- is currently playing more like a psychological thriller that wouldn’t actually go down well with kids, as it’s actually an inherently anti-fantasy story that presses a reset button at the end. It was one of those moments where I had to say “Bugger- they’re right, aren’t they?”, but after a little thinking, I may have come up with a solution. I am very interested in the idea of exploring the dangerous side of fantasy- the idea that it’s one thing imagining battling international spies, it’s another to actually do it- and I like the central concept of the story, so I think what I need to do is increase the stakes- and not press the reset button. Instead of a return to the status quo, with the teenage hero having learnt important lessons for everyday life, he’s actually going to have to learn to cope with and rise to the challenge of the strange new world he’s found himself in. I want it to be a mixture of stylised spy fantasy and gritty reality, a world that may be surreal and strange, but one where there is genuine risk, the laws of physics are roughly the same, and where violence damn well hurts. I always preferred kids stories and movies where there was genuine danger and it wasn’t just camp nonsense- oddly enough, one of my favourites, when I was in my early teens, was Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, mainly because of the fact that it simply had kids in it but wasn’t a kids movie. (That, and the fact that- despite the very shonky storytelling, and the fact that it’s obviously two seperate movies welded uncomfortably together- it’s the Mad Max movie that really captured the weird, semi-mythic sense of a Post-Apocalypse world that I found so unutterably cool as a teenager. As I’ve recently worked out, I often didn’t give too hoots about the story as long as someone was actually trying to assemble a cool and interesting world.)

I think, however it might make me go ‘wah!’ inside, it’s good for me to get honest feedback- it might occasionally smart, but it”ll be worth it in the end.