TMA 02 is looming.  I have an extension until 11 January due to reasons of moving house and going on holiday but I’ve only just now picked up the BRB for the first time in about two weeks.  I’ve caught up insofar as I’ve done all the reading.  I haven’t done any of the activities though but I thought reading up on the coursework might motivate me to start on my TMA2 as the damn thing obviously won’t write itself (it won’t, will it?)

I had an inkling of an idea a few weeks ago but decided to trash that idea as I didn’t think it would fit into a short story as it was too convoluted.  I kept scribbling down a few ideas about a character I had.  I think I mentioned here that I wanted a character with a pink Vespa.  Now, today I’ve sat down and gone through my notebook and headed up some pages at the back of it with headings such as CHARACTER, SETTING, POSSIBLE INCLUSIONS, CONFLICTS/OBSTACLES, FLASHBACKS, etc. and under these headings I’ve started jotting down notes and ideas.  I’ve also got a heading called METHODS (for commentary).  I’ve started thinking about POV, the amount of time elapsed, to who the story is being told, where does it start and I’ve reminded myself to use all the senses.

So, a good start don’t you think?  I think it’s a good start, albeit one that should have been started about a month ago.  And then what do I do after making my late good start?  I sit down and write my flipping blog instead of making a start on the TMA.

Can someone tell me to just sit down and write the god damn bloody thing please? 

p.s.  Is god damn one word or two?

I read James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces quite a few years ago, long before The Smoking Gun outed him for having fibbed about it being a memoir, but this didn’t bother me (not nearly as much as finding out large chunks of Roots were nicked from The African by Harold Courlander anyway) and so I picked up Bright Shiny Morning in WH Smith one day and promptly forgot about it.  While waiting for some books I ordered from the library, I thought I’d give it a go although the reviews on amazon are less than glowing (think unlit candles that have been trodden into the ground then smeared around a bit).

Firstly, syntax and punctuation pedants steer clear.  Steer very clear.  If I wrote like this for an OU assignment, I’d get a big fat fail (although we’re not exactly encouraged to be adventurous with our writing; maybe someone ought to point out to them the word ‘creative’ in the course title).  Frey’s writing in this is less like stream of consciousness and more like he’s forgotten any of the rules of writing, i.e. sometimes a comma comes in handy.  Even I know that, although some of you may disagree if you’ve ever read any posts on my other blog.

E.g. Dylan comes home after a long day two bags one was a doctor who blamed Dylan for most of his bad shots and only tipped him ten bucks the other a pen salesman who got drunk and yelled.  Maddie has dinner on the table chicken parmigiana and pasta Dylan can smell a pie maybe cherry.

This doesn’t bother me too much and I find I can actually read it but some of the time I had to go back and re-read it for it to make sense.  He also hasn’t read the OU guidelines about how to set out dialogue but as Frey isn’t doing an OU course, I don’t suppose this bothers him too much.

Is there a story?  Oh yes, the story.  There’s four stories, all set in LA, each with characters who never meet:

Esperanza, a poor cleaner with unfeasibly large thighs who falls for her employer’s son, Doug.

Amberton, a mega-rich, mega-successful actor.  The lamest character in the book.  I couldn’t give a shit about him.

Dylan and Maddie.  Ran away from their abusive parents to start a new life in LA.

Old Man Joe.  Thirty-eight years old but looks in his seventies, due to life on the street.

In between their stories are fillers, showing us other characters and facts you never knew you wanted to know about LA (how many of these are fictional and how many are real I neither no nor care).  Personally I could have done without these fillers.  At over five hundred pages, the book’s long enough to have these chopped out and still have a long enough read.

So, now that I’ve just spent over four hundred words slagging it off, it’d be reasonable for you to assume that I didn’t like it.  But I did.  I felt for all the characters, bar Amberton.  The syntax didn’t annoy me and it worked with the flow of the book, I just could have done without the fillers.

I am stuck for inspiration for my TMA2.  I have a couple of story ideas but I don’t think they’ll fit in a short story.  I have a character though.  She’s called Emily and she rides a pink Vespa.  That’s as far as I’ve got.  I thought a freewrite might help.  It didn’t.  But at least I wrote ‘something’.  Here it is.

So, there’s this girl with a pink  Vespa and she has a matching helmet but what does she do?  Does she trawl the internet dating sites looking for men to write about on her blog?  Can that be a short story?  I don’t think so.  My chewing gum story won’t work either.  I need something to write about for TMA2 which is going to creep up on me really really soon and there’s moving house and going away for my birthday beforehand too and I don’t think I’ll be doing much writing on my birthday in Naples.  Ok, then, I won’t be doing any writing on my birthday in Naples.  Just drinking.  And eating pizza.  I’ll probably see lots of Vespas in Italy too.  When I was in Bologna there were LOADS of scooter drivers or are they riders?  Anyway, there were loads of them and they all drove like complete wankers.  I’m lucky to be alive I think.  They don’t seem to have a highway code.  Just drive and ride all over the place.  Street lights?  What are they?  Traffic lights, I mean.  They don’t care about them.  I paused typing but this write or die thing didn’t do anything.  Shouldn’t it have shouted at me or something?  I need some inspiration.  Not easy after drinking too much wine last night.  Sunday drinking must stop.

This month’s book was Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller which we all enjoyed.  I liked it so much, I borrowed the DVD of the film from the library and not just because the book had only taken a few days to read and I therefore needed a recap as I couldn’t remember what happened. 

The book is narrated by Barbara: a lonely old spinster with an obsessive streak.  Her latest obsession is Sheba, the school’s new art teacher who starts an affair with a 15 year old boy.  Sheba confesses the affair to Barbara and Barbara has the perfect opportunity to manipulate Sheba until jealousy takes over and Barbara betrays Sheba.

The book is more about friendship and betrayal, rather than the affair.  None of us had any sympathy for Sheba as there was nothing wrong with her marriage and we decided she was just a naive, self-absorbed crap teacher.

One of our group is a teacher and since reading the book, had spent his time in the staff room looking at his colleagues, wondering who would be most likely to have an affair with a pupil and he decided that yes, it would probably be an art teacher.

Next month we’re reading (or trying to) The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie.  I’ve never read any of his books, so I’m not sure why I’m not keen to read it but I’ll give it a go in a case of “don’t knock what you haven’t tried”.  And as the next meeting will be the last before Christmas, it’s going to double up as our Christmas party in Pizza Express.

If you’d like to join the Maidstone Book Club, contact me.

I’m a bit behind in the course.  I should be starting Chapter 7 (point of view: trying on voices) today, but I only finished Chapter 5 (character creation) yesterday and started on Chapter 6 (setting) yesterday evening.  Oops.

As part of character creation week, we were supposed to develop the history and background of two or three characters that we might like to develop further.  Someone commented on the forum that he kept devising characters he didn’t want to develop and that’s exactly the same as I felt yesterday.  I’d been inventing characters for a specific exercise, but not actually anyone I want to write about for anything else. 

I’m finding inventing characters a long process but a fun one.  I spent a few minutes on the internet looking at photos of men (damn, the things this course makes me do, shocking) and found an oil-painting self-portrait of a man with bags of character in his face.  Unfortunately for the poor bloke, I turned him into a divorced alcoholic when in real life he’s probably a very happily married tee-totaller.  Then I decided I wanted to write about a modern woman in her 20s or 30s.  I didn’t want to type “pictures of women” into Google (although Shaun’s brother helpfully suggested I do it, but on Shaun’s pc) so a friend sent me a photo of a modern looking girl who I’ve turned into a Sex and the City watching, wine drinking kind of girl.  Someone like me then.  How boring.  Although this lucky girl gets to live in Islington and ride a pink Vespa.  Hmm, maybe I can have some fun with her after all.

No, it’s not the sound of me busily typing away.  It’s the sound of my fingers drumming on my desk, while I wait (im)patiently for the return of my TMA.  I know it’s not even been a week since I sent it off, but others have had theirs returned and every time I log into the OU, I get this:

Bah.

Our tutor has been busy though.  She’s added a new icon in our tutor group forum.  It’s a picture of a cow.  Louisa Lemon said maybe we’ll be getting free milk?

Eek, I’ve just sent my TMA.  I worked quite hard on it.  Well, a lot harder than I did for my TMAs for A174 (Start Writing Fiction), so I’m hoping this will be reflected in the marks.  The freewrite can’t be wrong (if I understand properly what a freewrite is, although some people seem to be worried they’re not doing it right).  The main part I’ve tweaked and edited and rewritten and moved paragraphs and I don’t think I can do any more to it and I did the commentary this morning and although I’m not entirely happy with it I think I’ve got all the relevant points covered.

I think the worst bit was having to do it in Times New Roman and a ragged right margin.   Bah.

Just need to nervously wait for two weeks now and hope our tutor gives more detailed feedback than she did for the online tutorial (as you would expect some detailed feedback for £600, wouldn’t you?).

Wish me luck!

The first TMA is due on Friday and for the first part, we had to write a 200-300 word freewrite.  I’ve done that, and now I need to do the second part:  Write a 750 story or autobiography based on the freewrite.  My freewrite ended up mentioning a friend’s wedding on Hallowe’en and so I thought “aha, a ghost story then” and as I live near-ish Pluckley – the most haunted village in Britain – I thought I’d nip up there and get some inspiration.

So I’m happily sitting in the graveyard doing writerly things and I’m busy scribbling down descriptions of bright red trees against bright blue skies and doggy choirs going on somewhere in the distance when two ramblers I’d passed in the street enter the graveyard.  Just as I’m wondering if they’d noticed my pink bicycle when I went past and remember me, they come over and interrupt my scribbling and the woman says “sorry to disturb you” and so instead of saying “piss off and stop disturbing me then”, I remember I’m British and say “that’s ok, no problem” and the woman asks to sit down.  The bench is very small and there’s not enough room for two people who aren’t related to sit on it at the same time and so I stand up and let her sit down and she says something like “oh, have I stolen your seat?” and I think YES YOU HAVE, YOU EVIL OLD WOMAN and I say “no, I was going anyway” which I wasn’t as I wanted to sit on the bench doing writerly things and then she starts asking me questions like do I live round here and do I know where the pub is and she says she’s out on a three mile walk and I think “I don’t fucking care, you’ve ruined my day you old bag” and I put my notebook and pen away and I think if I had one of these,

then not only could I carry it around with me and do writerly things on it like, um, write, but I could bash evil old women ramblers who steal my chair around the head with it.

I’m not entirely sure what morning pages are.  Are they just whatever comes to mind when you first wake up?  I’ve been writing down my dreams, but I decided to write down what I saw out of the window  this morning, which turned into a freewrite.  I like freewrites.

Mist, can’t see in the distance.  On a landscape, desolate.  Morrisey’s bicycle.  Cars with their headlights on.  One cottage stands out above all the others.  Two windows.  A green hedge.  A gold car.  Cars going slowly.  Brake lights on.  Yellow chimney pots.  An empty bus.  Golden headlights.  Beams.  Rays.  Sunlight.  Blue sky.  Just getting light.  No streetlights.  Cat hungry.

Now, had that not been a freewrite, I could have utlised my new Dictionary of Colour and looked up something more descriptive than “green”.

How about:

mushy-pea green
sludge green
spinach green
swamp green
ocean green
olive
rifle green
porret (a yellowish green – a porret being a baby leek)
smaragdine (emerald green)
mythogreen (a brilliant yellowish-green)

I could go on, there’s loads of ways to describe green (and every other colour of the spectrum, it’d be a bit of a crap book if it only contained words relating to to the colour green).

It’s a great book.  With 520 pages in four parts, it covers:

1. A listing of colour phrases (e.g. blue funk)
2. The colours (over 1100) arranged in alphabetical order
3. The colours arranged according to colour groupings
4. Adjectives of colour (over 800)

I will never describe something as plain as green again.

Right, I’m off to buy a pair of smaragdine shoes.

I was at the train station 15 minutes early, so like a good A215-er, I got out my trusty notebook and pen and did a freewrite.

Sitting on a bench at the station platform.  The wind’s blowing my hair, it tickles my face.  My pink bicycle is propped up on the wall where the back door of the cab office is.  I’m not blocking it as the sign says to use the front door.  I can hear men in the cab office.  Chirpy cockney cabbies or whatever the Kent equivalent is.  People are crossing the footbridge to get the train going towards London.  I’m on the Ashford bound one, off to a job interview for a job I don’t want.  The thought of sitting in an office all day again depresses the life out of me.  The woman on the tannoy is announcing the train on the other side.  The 14:40 to Charing Cross.  It’s only 14:05 so she’s a bit early.

My train is going to be a minute late.  It’s warm today, the sun is heating my face and I’m glad I didn’t wear my heavy jacket as well as my suit jacket.  I have to leave the jacket unbuttoned as I’ve put on weight since the last time I wore it and I’m bursting out and it looks crap.

I stand up to look at the screen.  It now says it’s going to be 3 minutes late.  Fuck.  I’m cutting it fine as it is, as I’m cycling from the other side.

They’re calling my train now but it’s not here.  If I don’t get lost on the way I should be ok for time.  There’s a train on the other side.  She must have said 14:14 not 14:40.  At least she’s clearer than the London ones.  Someone else is crossing the footbridge but she’s not hurrying, even though the train is there.  They must take it easier round here.

There’s people coming down the footbridge from

Train here.

I’m on the train with my bike, I hope it doesn’t fall over.