I just got a call from the Landlord- and the situation with the flat is over. There’s a small question mark hanging over some remaining council tax, which we may end up having to pay- but he’s officially said that we don’t have to send any more rent and can tear up the tenancy agreement.
And there I was thinking that today wasn’t going to be a good day…
Honesty time. FLIPSIDE has ground to a halt. I’m not saying I’ll never do anything else to it, but… for the moment… it’s on hold. I’m heavily entrenched in rewrites on THE HYPERNOVA GAMBIT, and getting closer with every step. I’ve also got an idea for a group of seven interlocking short novellas, all dealing with archetypal story forms- Comedy, Tragedy, Overcoming the Monster, Rags to Riches- and all set in a weird, semi-Victorian world. If it works, it’ll be called TALES OF THE HARLOT, and I’ll be doing it just for me, for the moment. At the least, I need to get THE HYPERNOVA GAMBIT out of the way. It shall be done- oh yes, it shall be done…
In other news- after a very tense week, George and I finally managed to sort out various problems at the weekend- and while the situation with the flat may be somewhat annoying, we’re going to continue paying, simply to get the thing over and done with. We’re also talking more about everything between us, as the last six months have been non-stop risk and change, and there’s a certain point where you have to slow down and tell yourself- “Hmm- if we’re still alive, maybe we’re doing okay!”
I’ve also been driving more. We got the car back, and I’m just getting used to doing the ten minute trip to the workshop on my own, but Thursday is going to involve me both driving into Alton and (shock. horror) parking. The world may not be ready yet…
It’s come around again- I’m sitting in the study in my Dad’s house, typing on the laptop, and I’m going to be heading back to London tomorrow. Once I’m back, I’m straight into four days of subbing (the traditional Christmas issue brain-mash), and also into a two week countdown to the point where my life completely changes. There’s an awful lot to do- I’ve placed myself in charge of ‘shutting down’ our life in London, so there are people to call, things to cancel, things to transfer… the list is going to be pretty big. Hopefully there’s going to be lots of chance for social interaction as well, and I don’t want to let the stress get the better of me. Change is good. It may be scary and tumultuous, but it’s also good.
A phase of my life that’s gone on for an awful lot longer than I ever expected is going to be ending soon. I moved to London in November 1995 with a rucksack on my back, a suitcase, and two weeks worth of accomodation sorted out. I didn’t really have a choice at that point- I had to make it work. It was very, very tough, but I’ve made it through the last eleven years- and I’ve had a wider variety of adventures than I was expecting. I went to America. I became a freelance writer. I got married. None of that was stuff I expected to happen, and I don’t know what the next decade or so has in store for me- but as long as I can keep myself and George as happy as possible, and I can keep writing, that’ll be enough.
Last time, when I left here and went back to Cornwall, I instinctively knew that I needed to get out of London. This time, when I go back, we’re actually going to be doing it. It’s going to be financially very rough for longer than I’d like, and there’s a whole host of problems facing us as we try and set ourselves up down there… but I know that this is what I want. The timing may not be fantastic- and I might be the kind of guy who’d rather wait and avoid stress than have to face it- but I know that this is what I want. All that remains is to do it.
Gulp…
I’ve arrived in Cornwall, after missing my train down (I was stunned to find that, thanks to traffic being responsible, I was simply handed a particular piece of paper, told to give it to the guard, and wasn’t charged a penny. Getting a new ticket would have cost me £70, so I was especially pleased), and this experience was made even more fun by one of the most spectacular colds I’ve had in a while. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days sneezing my head off, and while I was very productive book-wise yesterday, today turned into a day of Lemsip-provoked slumping, and listening to the Doctor Who audio discs I need to review for SFX (One of which was fairly rickety, but the other of which was extremely good). Productivity needs to return to something resembling normal tomorrow, as I’ve only got two weeks down here, and I don’t want to spend all of them sniffing and being miserable. The first five chapters of the book are now shorter and more streamlined than they’ve ever been before- but I really need to move onto the dangerous chapter 7-10 zone, the area that’s caused me so much trouble before. If I can get through this, I can get most of it done. My aim is to have a polished version of the book that’s ready to send to people by the end of the year, and hopefully ready for agents and publishers pretty soon after that.
Now all I’ve got to do is figure out exactly how to survive the financial turbulence of the next few months.
No news on the flat. The Estate Agents are at least showing people around, but we’ve got no bites yet. Funnily enough, I’m feeling fairly philosophical about it. Our new house is, however, going to demand that I get back into driving pronto, as neither walking nor bike-riding is an option.
Change is good. I have to remember that. Change is good…
(My ‘TV Eye’ looks at American television will return soon. I also want to do something on the Sixties Doctor Who DVDs I’ve gotten recently- THE WEB PLANET and THE DALEK INVASION OF EARTH. I’ve just got to concentrate on the book at the moment, as there’s a frightening amount to do. At the least, I saw last week’s HEROES today- top notch stuff, and warming up for some seriously big stuff to happen over the next couple of episodes. Also saw GALACTICA, which was an improvement on last weeks, but still suffering from the ‘let’s keep all the episodes self-contained’ phenomenon that really doesn’t do the show any good.)
Am currently working my way through season 1 of VERONICA MARS, and can now understand why I’ve been hearing so much about it. I’m only six episodes in, but it’s already going in some dark and intriguing directions.
More soon…
Just a quick update on the housing situation, which is pretty bleak and doesn’t look like it’ll be changing anytime soon. After weeks of a small number of calls most of which were either estate agents or people who didn’t understand what the words “six month let only” means, I shifted the Loot advert into the “Short lets” section on Monday. Result? An almost instant phone call from a girl who sounded pretty keen on at least looking at the flat, and then kindly neglected to call back. Otherwise, it’s been so quiet you can virtually see the tumbleweeds drifting past. The flat is now also being advertised by the Estate Agents, which may (or may not) be an advantage. We’re also still waiting for the bathroom heater, and a collection of other problems to be fixed, but the Landlord, in his infinite wisdom, was active enough to put the electricity bill through the door, an act which almost had me marching into his shop uttering pithy epithets along the line of “Is this a fucking joke?” before I thought better of it. Keeping this situation amicable is probably sensible in the long term, but I’m not sure how long I’m going to be able to do it. Living in a flat with no stuff isn’t exactly pleasent for the mind or the soul, and I’m hoping beyond hope that something will happen soon to help us out of this situation.
Once again- if there’s anyone out there who knows of someone who wants a flat for six months, or just knows of a good way of publicising it, let me know. Eternal gratitude awaits…
And here, if anyone wants to look, is the Loot ad for our flat.
Here’s hoping for some good news soon…
I’ve almost got to the point where I can’t remember when my life didn’t involve cleaning, polishing and putting things in cardboard boxes. The current status is that half of our stuff has gone down to Hampshire, and hopefully Julian (George’s brother- and my brother-in-law, which is still taking some time to sink into my head) will be back with the van this Wednesday for all the extraneous stuff that is currently lurking under the stairs. George’s Mum also came up on Thursday, stayed the night, and helped us do a gigantic blitz on the house with the result that it’s almost time to tell the Estate Agents that it’s time to start showing it to people. Getting used to the bare walls, the new structure of the furniture, and the general insane cleanliness of everything is going to take a while, and I’m trying not to scream my head off with stress at the prospect that we might be like this for a while, depending on how the whole ‘replacement’ things go. There’s a friend of Julian’s who might be a possibility- but it’s one of those possibilities that sounds suspiciously too-good-to-be-true, so I’m trying not to get too jazzed up about it.
Trouble is, our first explorations in the world of advertising the flat haven’t been massively succesful. We’ve had one person who left a message saying she was actually interested in looking at the flat, but she refused to answer her phone when I called, and didn’t call back. Apart from that, it’s been mainly Estate Agents, and the occasional confused person who hasn’t been able to understand that the whole “This flat is available as either a 2 bedroom or a 1 bedroom with lounge” equation means that there won’t be a lounge if you rent it as a two-bed. I’m suspecting something may have gone wrong with the publication of the Loot ad- we haven’t had a single call in the last forty eight hours, which is exceedingly strange. I’ll look into it on Monday- we need this to be as visible as possible.
On a suggestion from fjm I targeted the ‘Cotton Room’ at the British Library, which has a noticeboard, and this involved me signing up for a Reader’s Pass and actually visiting the place for the first time. Huge, expansive, and not good for my vertigo, with various walkways and a central collumn of big-scale books that occasionally had my head swimming. Nevertheless, I tracked down the right room, and pinned up a note. Don’t know if it’ll do any good, but I think being pro-active is the only thing that’s going to stop me from going mad over the next few weeks.
Another aspect to this whole situation which is both fantastic and potentially a source of galactic-level frustration is that George’s brother Toby is moving out of his house in Hampshire on November 1st- and George’s parents are going to try and hold onto it and pay the rent until we can get down there and get settled. Now, obviously, this isn’t the kind of situation that they’ll be able to do forever, and certainly not until the end of June 2007. It’s a massive weight off my mind knowing we have somewhere to go, but it’s a new problem that there may only be a limited window. I think, at the moment, I’d give anything just for a clue of exactly how long this is going to take. Stress has been swimming through my head for a while, I’m having trouble sleeping, and the only thing I really want to happen is to get this place sorted. I’ve had enough now- we’ve done our bit, all we want to do is hand over the controls to someone else and just leave. I do believe that if we could get someone to the point of looking at the place, they’d be very likely to say yes- it is a big, roomy flat. It’s just not somewhere we want to be anymore.
So, if anyone reading this knows of anyone looking for a one double-bedroomed flat (or a two double-bedroomed flat without a lounge) in Zone 3 for six months, at £800pcm (excluding bills), and which is available virtually immediately, please drop me a line. And if anyone knows of any other ways of advertising, publicising, or generally spreading the word, I’d be extremely grateful.
A few things have happenned to me which haven’t been House related, but I’m buggered if I can think of them for the moment…
(More interesting, less housing-related blogging will resume shortly…)
It must be something about significant times in my life- I end up having vivid and head-scratchingly weird dreams. During last night’s surrealism, I was having a phone conversation with the late Douglas Adams, and he was talking about various endangered species such as the Kakapo Parrot of New Zealand, which is mentioned in his book Last Chance To See, and I brought up the book– and then, there was an awkward pause. That was the point where I remembered (in the dream) that I was talking to Douglas Adams at a point in time before he’d actually written the book, hence the extreme confusion and awkwardness. Quite why my dreams are so multi-layered and have such insane levels of internal logic I don’t quite understand. But, at the least, it’s making my night life interesting.
The packing is proceeding at a gradual but enthusiastic pace. Tomorrow is another one of our intensive days, when George is off work and we try to get as much done as possible. By the end of Wednesday, this place will be largely empty, and life will enter another phase.
Tick… tick…. tick….
I think all this mulling over of New Who and my love of stories and how I’m feeling that I don’t want to watch Season Three simply because I know it’ll mostly annoy the hell out of me (Thanks to various quotes from Russell T. Davies, the fact that the show’s going to be mostly Earthbound (and presumably largely set on council estates) again, the new companion’s four-strong family, and the general patronising attitude of “Oh no, we’re not really sci-fi- we’re more emotional, more popular and BETTER than that…”) is starting to get to me. I had a dream last night where the new crew of the TARDIS turned out to be the Doctor and about twenty five people- who were then joined by even more, including the Peter Davison version of the Doctor, and Batman villain the Joker dressed in Wild West garb! Plus, the chameleon circuit on the TARDIS had started to slightly work again, but was making the exterior look like a rough, shack-like approximation of a Police Box constructed from old driftwood. Then, it all ended with the Doctor checking BBC1, and finding out that the episode had actually ended about twenty minutes previously. My brain is a strange place to be, sometimes.
Elsewhere, the atmosphere of propulsive “Oh my god, put everything in cardboard boxes!!” energy has been slightly derailed by the fact that the move of stuff on Wednesday isn’t actually happening now until next Wednesday. An organising mess-up has meant that nobody’s available to help, so we’ve actually got a bit more time than we expected, and in a weird sort of way I’m actually glad. We can’t relax and go “Hey…”, but it should give us enough time to get most of what we were aiming to do actually done. The tension is a little less, and we’ve also found the intriguing free-ad website Gumtree that might be an aid in getting someone to fill our place.
Getting used to bare white walls again is going to be hard, though. George and I like to imprint our personality on a place, and soon there’s only going to be traces left. We can cope with it- it’s just going to be very strange. Here’s hoping that this doesn’t have to last for too long…
Packing is never good. It’s a process that always seems to automatically expand past any limits you set for it- despite how much time you start with. It never seems to matter. If you’ve got a week, it’ll end up taking two. If you’re getting it out of the way in 48 hours, you’ll still be staring slack-jawed at random mounds of cardboard 72 hours later. Now, try to imagine packing when you don’t know exactly when you’ll be seeing your stuff again, or when exactly you’ll be moving out. Welcome to my life.
The last two days have been very, very tiring. The space under our stairs now strongly resembles the Goods In area at George’s workplace, as there’s a massive pile of boxes- and almost all of them seem to contain books. We’re getting on top of it, but tomorrow I’ve got to try and pack up the contents of my desk. I wanted to get all the cleaning done by Friday so we can start showing the place to people- the adverts will be going in tomorrow to appear in Loot later this week, and in Time Out early next week. The big move will be happening on Wednesday- and after that, we’ll be locked into the spartan lifestyle for as long as it takes to get this place filled. I’m halfway between feeling massively confidant that it’ll all be over soon, and terrified that this is going to stretch on for months. Whatever happens, we’ll be primed to go soon. If anyone knows good ways of spreading the word on this, let me know- the more people know about this, the better I’ll feel. Oddly enough, the one thing that really got me tearful and focussed all of my general packing upset was the idea that we would have to pack away the small collection of colourful rubber ducks that live on the windowsil in the bathroom. Silly, but true. After a short request, we’ve worked it so that one will be staying to add a little brightness to a bathroom that’s otherwise going to desperately need it. Getting to the end of this week will at least give me a little recovery time- and once the main clean is done, we should only need to do a small clean once the day of glorious escape arrives…
A side-effect of this is that I’ve ground to a halt on the novel- only temporarily, but it’s still an annoyance. I’m going to try and get little things done, but it’s going to be hard to completely focus and do some of the major structural stuff I need to do to get it right. Every single time I think I’ve got a handle on it, it just gets more complicated. Hey ho…
Watched the season 3 premiere of Battlestar Galactica last night- hugely impressive, brilliantly made stuff, but 90 minutes of brutality, tension, oppression and some serious political issues was possibly a bit much. It’s great, but it also made the Pegasus storyline from last season look like an Oscar Wilde comedy in comparison. There’s a lovely moment between two characters towards the end of the episode that does bring some much needed humour in, and I hope they’re not going to forget that- plus, next episode promises some big-scale action. Should be good…
I’m off to slump in a corner, and not think too much. More packing tomorrow…
I don’t need to be told that I don’t handle stress very well. The one thing that really drives me up the wall is uncertainty- a world where there are a thousand possibilities, and most of them very, very bad. Once I find out what the situation is, it’s almost always nowhere as horrible as I expected, and everything goes back to something resembling normal. Up until then, it’s like having an anvil of fear dangling from my neck, a knot of stress that simply doesn’t want to unclench, a feeling in my chest that, to be honest, can’t be terribly healthy. I did, at least, not let my stress tell me what to do this week. If I had, I’d have insisted to George that we wait and see, and maybe something’ll turn up- instead, I said yes, let’s do something active, and we’ve ended up somewhere interesting as a result.
Basically, we have a go-ahead to move forward with our plan for obtaining a replacement to move in and let us out of the rest of the contract. We move most of our stuff out within the next two weeks, and then live a somewhat spartan existence until we find someone who wants to move in. And then- bang- we’re gone. It may be that simple, it may be more complicated, but the important thing is- we’re doing it. We’re actually going to try. So, if you know of anyone who’s looking for a flat for six months- a Zone 3 two-level maisonette flat with a double bedroom, washing machine and a good-sized lounge that’s close to the tube and buses, for £800 per calendar month (the price is going up- a part of the deal we can’t avoid, and one that should have affected us, if the landlord hadn’t actually forgotten to raise the rent)- then let me know. And, if you know of any good ways of spreading the word, feel free to let me know. Word of mouth is a good thing.
Was going to write more, but my fingers are aching, so rest is in store. More details soon…
Saxon Bullock 