13.07.2025: After receiving casual enquiries about the writing schedule, I had, some months ago, foolishly made a declaration of a deadline. While working towards that deadline—then leaving it in the rear view like a Lamborghini passing litter on a Lucca laneway—it came to mind as being strikingly similar to the least enjoyed activity of my primary school years… the cross-country. On slightly downhill sections, enabled with on-board momentum and facing a cool breeze, it is bliss. But then comes uneven ground and other bits that might as well be bouldering with sweaty palms.
Deadline-lite was cut loose.
Though deciphering notes and running down research continue as the hard graft they may sometimes be, surprising new recall that stems from the resumed relaxed approach is happily added to the mix, which also, occasionally, opens up further recollections. In as much as this post is meant to be an update of the FtB project, it’s probably not a bad idea to offer the reader a taste without contextualisation. One advantage to this is that it leaves me to go back and keep writing, or not. What’s more, it’s been suggested a tang of mystery is a good thing. So herewith, in draft, an extract from somewhere within the first half of FtB.
—|—
She spoke as if touching lightly on a lament. ‘Sometimes I wish to go and pick out another one.’
I had been headed for the door that led to the front yard when my mother had spoken those words. They seemed to immediately begin repeating inside my near eight-year old mind: ‘Sometimes I wish to go and pick out another one.’ That’s what she said.
What did she mean by that? ‘… another one… ‘, ‘an-oth-er’…
The screen door clattered shut behind as I stepped into the sun-filled yard. The inexplicable sudden trigger that had me pause in such a way was a new experience. Its vividness at the time, and its persistence as a memory ever since, are stark. How and why the determiner another broke into the moment I’ve not been able to answer, but through the years it has somehow remained a key to a propensity for close observation.
Outside I had confusedly looked down at the ground and around about as if an answer might spring up like a seedling. But at the time nothing presented itself to solve the head-turning oddity of hearing that word. As it would be, the answer, or rather the necessary subject that was missing in my incomplete comprehension of my mother’s statement, would not be known to me for another seven years.
Another: definition 1 - used to refer to an additional person or thing of the same type as one already mentioned or known about.
Subject: definition 1 - a person or thing that is being discussed, described, or dealt with.
Trying to decipher the former definition without the latter would have required a question by me of my mother at that time. It would become evident that she’d have deftly obfuscated, as all parents do.
The word had come at the end of a casual chat between my mother and our very recent unexpected visitors, Veronica, and her daughter, Mandy. My mother had been standing in the kitchen, tongs, or perhaps a spatula in hand—her Sunbeam electric pan sizzling nearby—when she matter-of-factly uttered that word. Though possibly still a teenager, Veronica was having an adult conversation with my mother, and it was babies they were talking about. Year-old Mandy played on the carpet by her mother’s feet. Chubby-cheeked, plastic pants over her nappy, the toddler brought herself up to stand unsteadily at the edge of our scratchy folding settee, verbalising the beginnings of her own speech. Of course, whatever it was she was trying to say, nobody could know what that was, either. It was about at that moment I heard the word as I departed the room.
My mother’s tendency to be unselfconsciously forthright with strangers might have been for no other reason but to practice her English. Witnessing her boldness of confidence in this way led me to extremes of awkwardness as a kid, a state many of us have experienced, as well as witnessing it in other children: youthful cheeks hot with the rouge of embarrassment, imploring eyes to a parent to quit talking to strangers, the youngster ready to explode in mortification. My mother’s strong-willed personality and precise German-accented diction put its manacles on her English. Bear in mind this was little more than twenty years after WWII. Sometimes it seemed to stun strangers to awe. And, as it was in my case, all this encouraged the honing of my radar on the words people used, and the way their gestures accompanied.
A stranger and her child had come into our house because my mother exercised empathy, and then, in a relaxed moment, spoke openly, not realising that she had just, to a degree, let a mystery cat out of the bag. She had unwittingly lit in me a fuse of curiosity about a secret she would keep for the rest of her life…
—|—
Though not exactly a cliff-hanger, the above (partial) extract from FtB exhibits more along the lines of a load of dried laundry, for it's best that wrinkled shirts be put on a coat-hanger, in order to make the ironing out more pleasing.
This scene commences elsewhere, and may conclude with answers to a question I’ve had for fifty-eight years. It will depend on whether information about our short-stay visitors can be unearthed.
TA
31.12.2024: Oiling the gears of productivity is what ought to be going on. Instead, there’s been the oiling of the woodwork of a recently built deck. First, the timber must be ‘watered’. The tree from which the deck timber was sourced is presently pining for the fjords, its metabolic processes having ceased to be... So why is there an obligation to water it? you might ask. It seems it needs a cleansing to remove the tannins, which emerge as a red substance, thick, heavy, at first, then slowly diluting. These tannins must be flushed out, in order oil can go in, therefore, ironically, bestowing more longevity into the ‘life’ of the wood. If words aren’t flowing, then oil, or something, most certainly must…and so the brush has been in hand whenever the weather has permitted over the last few weeks because wood watering and oiling is dependent on dry skies and the job of wood oiling must be brought to an end—even though there was never a decreed deadline for oiled wood!
To be direct…what is really the dearly-departed in all this is a deadline—mine own, for the second book FtB. That is why I’m re-casting the deadline I decreed about a year, or so ago, and due at end ’24, to what is now called Deadline LITE. Deadline LITE is as flimsy as those mini packing pillows, inflated with a whole little lot of nothing, inside a little hole of nothing that one can pick up and toss ahead of oneself—out just far enough to ease the micro-burden of a flimsy deadline. With a breathy tail-wind it’ll be possible to land that little bit of embarrassment cushioning near the end of March, or on the doorstep of early April.
In a manner of speaking, there’s been a training regime throughout the year, the kind to pump out a good ’n’ steady workflow. But there’s not been a personal trainer who bounds from their Korean compact in Under Armour and Asics ready to painfully stretch the writer’s brain equivalent of the hip flexor. Maybe it’s the heat, or the humidity, or the number of rings in the old tree, but it is dawning: who would set a writing deadline for the end of the year, anyway.
26.08.2024: A phrase about impermanence had barely come past a friend’s lips, when to my mind’s eye came George Harrison sitting in his garden amidst gnomes for the cover of his album All Things Must Pass. We had been discussing recent events and tending to the difficulties and rawness of sudden change and, somewhat unwillingly, coming to the moment when one must say: well, that’s done. While such a resolution is not in itself a tonic, the stoic in me hopes there is yet something of deeper value to be found, beyond the freshness of having a weight off the shoulders.
Looking into the past has its pleasant paths—and its pitfalls. At the granular level, though, it can make the project of spending time to recall what has gone before, personally, seem as if one is suiting up for a run into a compromised core, to shakily reach for the geiger counter and then, on feeling a rise in heat, to lunge for the backspace key.
The work over recent months on the next book, FtB, has been a building up of raw materials that come out of the past, along with a process of filtering what of that material is in, and what is not. In a strangely counter-intuitive way, it can turn out to be that omission may lead to a leavening effect on the eventual story, a telling that will come from a distilling into what truly matters.
I saw again recently, in a film, the well-used trope of a person skipping a stone on a lake. Many of those who come to the water’s edge to play out this depiction seem never to have done the stone skip before, and so are unconvincing in their attempt. This is no criticism of the actor doing their job because in the majority of cases the scene exists to specifically portray the subject’s struggles in life. With that metaphor, they project themselves—with something of their essence—and frequently send their stone out with the result that they achieve no more than a very few skips, sometimes even not a one. Mere mortals after all. Sometimes they repeat the action, in a kind of learning, or to press their determination, which will either improve their prospects, or not. This scene, at what is usually a picturesque locale, is a writer’s means of furthering a character’s challenges, while revealing their necessarily troubled journey. None has the balletic capacity for the elegant ballon, the required weightless suspension that will allow a transcendence to some sweet utopian landfall. But a test of one’s character, there will come. There, then, also come the limits. Of course, the ultimate metaphor is we must all, in the end, sink in order to make the journey to that fabled other shore—or not. One may also find the equivalent scene played out with the hapless subject surrounded by taunting onlookers, at a bowling alley. The gutter-ball rattles down the gutter, while the pins stand imperiously erect, serving to hone one’s further intent because, ultimately, the pins are there to fall.
It’s a primarily personal story I’m working on so it can be a tricky business. There’s the sensing of themes, running a rule over the reliability of recall, leaping the crevasses of embarrassment, and being true to the elevation of those dear, and now only near in memory.
TA
07.03.2024: The prep work for FtB is moving along. That's author speak for I'd better get up and do some work.
Going through the material, I read again an email I received from the PI. He was very complimentary. I put that down to PI speak for Keep the customer satisfied, but I did take on his praise: "Your dossier's impressive. If you ever need another job to fall back on, you could try investigations". Which is humorous because I remember speaking with a volunteer in a suburban parish office and trying to extract some basic information thinking this is the thing - this is what investigators do all day! But then you look at the dossier, growing in thickness, and it's not about the ordinariness of individual details, but the build up of the big picture. The empty puzzle with pieces plopping into place...
15.07.2023: FtB is a volume that has waited patiently in the wings since 2019.
An unexpected event occurred in that year, an event which, as I reflect on it seems to loom more and more into what could be described as a shocking event, released me to think about how I might write the story I had never before seriously considered writing. The decision was made and I began making notes and perusing the relevant evidence to assemble the material needed to write said book. Amidst these notes is a dossier, gathered detective-like at an originating stage of the story. A document that contained all the hope I had laid down: single A4 pages holding one, or perhaps two facts, confirmed in triangulated searches. Even this document had been set away at a time when a way forward seemed to have run out of steam.
As thoughts of this project come through—often daily—so too, do images of relics in memory, or in boxes, or on shelves where they dwell until the time they will each speak and reveal their small but important part. Thoughts also go to the serendipity of things, how the hoarder’s irresitble impulse can provide the key that permits entry into an old hope, once thought impossible. In the case of the story in development, it was a yellowing object hidden for decades and then seemingly, deliberately placed atop empty used envelopes and ancient receipts in a black plastic garbage bag locked inside a storage box, waiting to be found.
Sometimes truth is indeed stranger than fiction and one will, on occasion—should the timing have a say in it—turn a corner and run into a person, or persons, in the most unexpected of places.
FtB is due for release around the end of 2024.