Bring me the head of minor character number two.

I have said before that what I am working on is definitely first draft because it is only by the end of the first draft that I will know how it ends and, therefore, only then will I know what the early chapters should be re-written to accommodate. A case in point: I created a character a couple of days ago who was originally conceived purely as minor character (number one) who is, or was, a plot device to introduce my journalist to another minor character (number two). Minor character number two's role in life is to deliver some exposition and then die a horrible and meaningless death, thereby setting in train the build up to crisis number one in the story.

However minor character number one has taken on something of a life of her own and I've just realised that I need a more complicated backstory for my journalist than originally planned. I think this is probably a good thing.

Green and Red

Two suggestions for stream of consciousness colour pieces were made a week or so ago and I have now written them. The rules of these exercises are simple - once you start writing keep going for fifteen  minutes without stopping to edit or revise. After fifteen minutes stop.

I write them longhand in a notebook with a fountain pen and then come back later and type them up. The pic. above/to the right is of the first exercise I tried, Blue, as it came out of my pen. Generally I make no change unless there is something so obvious (like a missing verb) that a tweak is necessary. Otherwise what is written here is exactly what comes out of my head.

Anyway, for what they are worth, and at the request of my small band of readers, here are the two exercises.

GREEN

Green, a colour associated with life, with eyes, with jealousy and envy, and by extension with witchcraft. Where to begin? Perhaps with the Irish Pink Floyd covers band whose "Shine on You Crazy Emerald" never caught on?

      Green: verdancy, spring and lushness. The turning of the year's cycle towards rebirth and new life. It is one of the pleasures of the year when I look out of my kitchen window and see green buds appear on my apple trees. This is partly because I know the blossom will soon exhibit itself and partly because of the pleasures of autumn that they presage. Cooking apples for pies and crumbles and the fabby eaters - Katy and Cox's Orange Red - which explode with flavour in September and October respectively.

     Of course green, too, is the moss which now dominates what was once a back lawn and is seemingly uncontrollable.

     I wonder why 'green eyes' have become associated with envy (as too 'green with envy'); if anything it should be reversed, green eyes having their own character quite distinct from the unpigmented blue or James Bond's cold grey. The association with witchcraft too: green eyes, red hair and a real or vestigial sixth finger being the reputed indicators. Except for the sixth finger this looks like fear of the Celtic to me. My memory stirs to tell me that one of Henry VIII's wives was reputedly so endowed - Anne Boleyn perhaps?

     Oddly, these characteristics were not so determinative as to stop puritans and others condemning so many women with other eye colours to a nasty end, celebrated now in some places by the treatment of their deaths as the basis for a tourist economy: Salem and Pendle I am looking at you.

     Which brings me to another green - sickness, real or metaphorical. This I can understand insofar as I once flew back from Shetland to Edinburgh in a small plane in a storm while in the grips of a relentless hangover. At least wo people afterwards commented that I looked a very odd shade of green for most of that flight, and I believe them unhesitatingly.

RED

Red: the colour of Mars, the warbringer. The colour of rubies and PJ Harvey's ruby red lips. Red, the colour of blood, of danger, of an instruction to stop. Red is the colour of one's hands when caught in the act, a usage which is, I think, of Saxon vintage.

     And yet also the colour of roses, carnations and poppies, freckles of beauty in fields of green and gold, even as they become metaphors for death and violence. The red poppies, row on row, in Flanders' fields.

     This makes red interesting as a bipolar symbol, a symbol of both beauty ('my love is like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June') and violence. This bipolarity has been expertly exploited in popular culture - nowhere more so than in vampire stories and legends. This has been so since the technicolour sanguinity of Ingrid Pitt in Hammer movies to the more baroque creations of Anne Rice and her Byronic undead protagonists - at least one of whom, per my previous exercise, had red hair, green eyes and an extra finger.

     Red hair - a sure sign of a fiery temper and a passionate nature, something my memories of adolescence tacitly, if anecdotally, confirms! Given the geographical/genetic propensity of the red-headed to be in predominantly 'celtic' areas, one wonders what lies behind the tales associated with the red-haired.

     And some of my favourite actresses are red-haired: Pat Tallman of Babylon 5, Karen Gillan of Dr. Who and, fieriest of the lot, Maureen O'Hara, magnificent with Victor McClaggan and John Wayne in 'The Quiet Man'. A corny old tale to be sure but a great one. Was Maureen worth the efforts of the fight scene that seemed to fill most of the second half of the film? You bet.

     Maureen O'Hara as the incarnation of Mars, bringer of war, but also of fiery passion and the impulse that drives us tpwards the Dionysian. The impulse which means it is often better to seek forgiveness than to seek permission. The impulse that says 'No regrets, Coyote'.

Spirit of Randomness

A slightly different exercise this time (I'll get back to colours shortly). I remember someone advising that each morning one should sit down and just right whatever comes into your mind for twenty minutes or so. The aim is to open up the head a little and let the thoughts flow. This is today's result, unedited for style, grammar or anything else.

I'm surprised I got as far as I did - I've been playing peek-a-boo with an incipient migraine for a few days and can still feel it lurking. I was so sure it wouldn't happen today that I jotted this down on scrap paper rather than in my usual notebook.

Anyway, random thoughts from a slightly unsettled mind.

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Random, randomness as both chaos and design. Just because you see a pattern doesn't mean that there is one, and just because you can't see it that doesn't mean that it iosn't there - think of all those IQ test questions that baffled you.
     What are the implications? Some are obvious, like seeing canals on Mars or conspiracy theories.
     How does this work out in fiction? Partly I think it is in crafting a story and letting the imagination of the reader free associate. Partly it could be seeding a story with false trails to disguise the absence of true trails or to make the true trail obscure. That takes skill and hence my quest to write a million words of bullshit before I produce anything worthwhile.
     I'm listening to Daevid Allen with the scents of old joss-sticks in the air. The cd is Sacred Geometries IV - patterns which may or may not have meaning. Well, clearly they do have meaning for many; does this make them 'real'? Or, maybe better, in what sense are they real? This brings a flashback of Bertrand Russell talking about whether and in what sense chairs are real. And it starts to raise the questions that arise from my naive attempts to consider Quantum descriptions of the natural world.
     The chair on which I sit is real, I might say, but those words in themselves are full of assumptions - about 'I', for example.
     Following this line of thought, I was going to say that the physical reality of my body is how my consciousness experiences it. On the other hand I believe that my consciousness is a function of my physical body; that without my body there is no 'I'. I don't think that these are irreconcilable, there is a glimmer of something in my mind but I need to articulate it. I'm not sure as I can in a stream of consciousness piece like this one. It doesn't afford the time to reflect and to see what those glimmerings can illuminate.
     I think it is something to do with habitual frames of reference perhaps. The sense of self and the sense of physicality are deeply intertwined. Just because I don't think that self can be separated from the physical does not mean that our way of understanding our physical nature is the only one possible. Just because we see a pattern does not mean it is there: just because it looks random does not mean that there is no underlying order. These are not formally paradoxical statements.
     I'm not sure where, if anywhere, this takes me, but then again there was never any guarantee it would take me anywhere. Although I do think it puts me into the penumbra of things which I have thought about, off and on, for as long as I can remember.

Yellow

 YELLOW

Is there a one eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu? I dare say there might be, somewhere. If there is, it seems like an eminently sensible place to be. People would no doubt look askance, or at least with surprise, if the was a one eyed yellow idol to the north of Finchley High Street.
     Maybe that could be the new standard of public opinion: the one eyed yellow idol on the top deck of the Clapham Omnibus. Unless it is the Daily Express or the Daily Mail, of course, they are more representative of the views of Mad Carew.
     I wonder if Mad Carew was yellow? Perhaps that would explain why he was mad, in either sense of the word. If I woke up to find myself yellow I would be pretty annoyed too, and it could, indeed, eventually give rise to a certain hysteria.
     Goodness knows why one might wake up yellow: jaundice, I suppose, or perhaps a sherbet fountain of sulphur erupting during the night. The latter would, of course, require me actually to have sherbet fountains of sulphur adjacent to my bed, which I don't. Hence, of course, the surprise.
     Of course it -the idol- might be yellow in the sense of being cowardly. The lion in the Wizard of Oz was cowardly but it was not yellow, more of a sofa-fabric brown. It was, however, on the yellow brick road which is enough of an association for me. Also, more than enough for the Daily Express and the Daily Mail - the yellow press, ironically enough.
     It does occur to me, as I write, that yellow is a strange word. Of course all words are strange if you repeat them aloud out of context. But why those two syllables: yell - ow? Until a moment ago it had never occurred to me to consider the etymology: it probably won't occur to me again! I'm frightened of what I might uncover if I research it - yellow, in fact.
     Perhaps that's why the one eyed yellow idol is up there to the north of Khatmandu: it got so deep into the etymology of its colouration that it had no recourse but to flee into the wilderness to contemplate its own bi-syllabic skin. Maybe it will one day go mad, like Carew, who may, or may not, be yellow.

Still Got the Blues

I downloaded a book by Sara Maitland (The Writer's Way) which I'm enjoying. It has a series of basic writing exercises in it and I had my first crack at one last night. The exercise is straightforward: pick a colour and write about it for fifteen minutes. Don't stop, don't revise, just write. Then repeat with a different colour.

So I got a fountain pen and paper and wrote, and was interested in what my subconscious came up with. I've typed it up below but have made one tiny edit - one of the sentences had no verb and needed one. Other than that, this is what tumbled out of my pen.

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BLUE

Blue is the colour of my true love's face in the morning as I rise. Is it blue with cold I wonder? Did she attempt to apply eye-shadow while asleep - somnabulent cosmeticism? Or perhaps it is blue because she has suffocated, whether from apnoea or perhaps a cat using her for a cushion while I slept on.
  Perhaps there was a blue moon overnight and the rays somehow gave rise to an immediate genetic mutation, rendering her forever azure, like the Mediterranean viewed from Sorrento or a Microsoft Cloud solution.
  Or perhaps I killed her in a blue funk, a fit of the blues, a melancholic state that drove me to take her life in an unthinking few moments of rage.
  Furious people usually 'see red' - perhaps I saw blue. I'm certainly seeing blue now.
  Blue, blue, blues; the Devil at the crossroads with a blue cat bone, with Robert Johnson, selling his soul for fame and an early death.
  Blues, a music of sorrow or ecstasy, rooted in the forced exodus of Africans to a new land; the property of Bible-reading Scots protestants.
  From the blue skies of Africa to the blue lagoons of the West Indies to the blue cotton overalls of the cotton picker. And, often, to the blue face of the dead slave; dead from overwork or starvation or disease or casual homicide.
  Or blue fruit, strange fruit, hanging from southern trees while blue-eyed belles stand in blue cotton summer dresses and blue ribbons in their blond, blond tresses. Blue moon of Kentucky, keep on shining. Shine down on the ants, scrabbling in your soils, making their love, making their music, making their graves in your disinterested light.
  And what of Josie and Billy-Bob on the bench seat of their dirty blue Packard, his hands a-roving in her disheveled blue underwear? Each desperate with desire for the other, each repressed by their shame, by their fear of pregnancy. Until in an exultant lapse of judgement they go for it hammer and tongs, lost in lust. But they sure had the blues nine months later, when their bouncing, blue-eyed baby boy was born, to be taken away by blue-habited nuns under the rich blue skies of summer.

Back to the fray?

So, I have been wholly distracted from writing fiction by writing stuff for business and various other diversions. I keep reading all sorts of advice about discipline and putting aside time to write but, however much I nod sagely, discipline comes there none.

However I have been keen to get back into the habit. I printed off all that I have written so far and read it through to get back into the rhythms of the narrative. I also had a pen to hand and revised the odd sentence or three. My verdict is that it is a bit dull but that I should press on and finish the first draft of the story before addressing other issues in a substantially revised second draft.

All being well the next chapter starts tonight.