Alasdair Watson

Via Script Sales I see that there’s a remake of the 1950 film Last Holiday in the works. That’s fine. It’s this bit of information that’s fucking with my head right now: ” Queen Latifah set to play the role originated by Alec Guinness.”

I’m off to see Flogging Molly tonight. To amuse myself at work, I’ve been reading around my subject a bit – interviews with Dave King (their lead singer), works by Irish poets, interviews with Shane MacGowan, critiques of Joyce, that sort of thing.

This may seem like a bit much, just to go and see a celtic-punk act for a few hours on a Friday night, but y’know, it’s a subject that fascinates me – the cultural hertiage of Ireland. One of the support acts last time I saw FM have a T-shirt that reads “It’s a second-generation Irish indentity crisis thing – you wouldn’t understand”, and as much as I shy away from identifying myself as Irish these days, there’s a part of that in me.

Watered-down mutant of a Belfast accent notwithstanding, I’m a London boy. I don’t even qualify as “London Irish” – I was raised in a nice middle class suburb in South London, and went to school with South London kids. I’m more familiar with Belfast than the Kilburn High Road. At school, yeah, I identified myself as Irish, as much because everyone else did (even if they knew I was born and raised in the same area as them), and it was easier to go with the flow. It took me until my early twenties to get past that.

But still – if I say I’m going home for Christmas, I mean back to Northern Ireland. I’m keenly aware that as much as I’ve inherited my father’s temperment, I’ve inherited my mother’s background. And for all the rest of my family isn’t terribly ‘Oirish’ (because, y’know, they actually live there), there’s a cultural heritage there, a mindset and a way of thinking that fascinates me, and that shows through in the literature and music, and the circumstances surrounding it.

Irish comedian Ardal O’Hanlon has a joke in one of his stand up routines: “The pubs in Dublin are full of writers and poets – in most other countries, they’re called drunks”, but in point of fact, most of the people whose writing about Ireland interests me are the ones who’ve left it, as much for the commonality one finds in them as for the writing itself – they retain their love/hate relationship with the place, and nowhere else quite matches up, but they can’t write about the place while they’re actually there.

Ireland (and I’m generalising, based on my experience of the North – I can’t imagine the South is much different, based on the writings and commentary I’ve enountered) is often a parochial place. If you don’t fit in, you’re going to have a hard time, and the only place in the world that matters in the nearby area, which is partly, I think why so many of them had to leave. Even if they themselves weren’t given a bad time, it’s not a place that supports reaching out of oneself, one’s immediate environment – which is surely the point of any writing – to communicate with a wider world – very well.

To return to Flogging Molly – there’s a transmuative quality in King’s song writing, perhaps the very essence of the Irish custom of the wake, something that turns sadness and mourning into a party. It’s there in Shane MacGowan’s work, too levied with MacGowan’s darker edge, or even in the works of James Mangan, Ireland’s answer to Poe, and it’s tempting to draw a connection between this tradtion in Irish culture, and the need for Irish expatriates to go at length about Ireland – at attempt to get past their own sadness at having left the place (because for all they’ve left, you can bet there’s a small, parochial part of them, wishing they were back there) by making the distance into a virtue, using it to write about the place with a greater clarity.

Well, that’s more then enough nonsense for now. As you were.

This cannot be allowed to continue. And before anyone starts feeling terribly smug that they’re British, and thus the government isn’t guilty of attrocities like that, I advise them to read this, too.

Hugely busy weekend coming up. Out Friday night, out all day Saturday, write 15 or so pages of script on Sunday to catch up on missed Friday and Saturday, which should take me comfortable past one third done nicely ahead of schedule.

As always happens during periods where I have a lot of work going on, I find myself spontaneously generating ideas at a rate of knots so I’m amusing myself a bit at work by kicking around a pulp romp with zombie dinosaurs and fucking big snakes and Aztec gods, and wondering if I haven’t finally found a setting for a character I’ve been tinkering with for years called John Dials. The whole thing would play like Indiana Jones, if Indy made time for tea and scones every afternoon, and followed the cricket. And as I think about it more, I finally might be able to use the title BIG DEAD BONES…

Also toying with the idea of condensing some of the first ten pages of Stormbreak down to two – it’ll remove a small element of show and replace it with tell, but it might also excise a fairly weak sub-plot, and the replaced items won’t hurt too much, I think. Either way, it’ll wait to December…

Well, I’m fifteen pages into Stormbreak, it’s going almost exactly to plan, and I’m taking a bit of a break. In celebration of the fact that my current rate of work, I’ll be be finished with a few days to spare, I have opened the Bushmills 12.

You have to understand – this is my favourite whiskey. It has the smoothness of the Bushmills 16, but balances the vanilla and citrus notes that mark Bushmills out a bit better than the 16, which sometimes looses them in it’s sweeter, port-influenced flavour. But with that, the 12 also has the sherry warmth and spice in the aftertaste that you find in one of my other favourites, the Glenfiddich 15.

For the last year and more, I have had an unopened bottle of the stuff. I have not opened it because whiskey doesn’t keep as well, once it’s been opened – it starts to oxidize a bit, and you loose some of the subtler notes. Not a problem for cheap, everyday stuff, but the really good stuff should be drunk in a few months.

And the reason I am more careful with my supplies of the 12 year old is that you can only buy it from the distillery shop. But I bought another bottle last time I was there, so that’s OK.

Like I said: Y’gotta treat yourself.

I’m insane. I have to be. It’s the only possible reason I could decide to do 26 Things while also doing NaNoWriMo, in a month where I have two weekends completely spoken for already.

Actually, I’m not. No, honestly. I just know how I work best at this time of year. My creative muscles wake up in the Autumn, after hibernating all summer, and they’re itching to be used properly. So I give them room to stretch.

So. Yeah. 26 Things. The gallery is here.

Halloween. I like Halloween, strange melange of religions that it is. It’s celtic, it’s voodoo, it’s christian, it’s a bit of everything. It’s a celebration of that little shiver of superstition that makes life much more interesting. I like it’s history (forexample, trick or treating’s origins in the medieval practice of going ‘Souling’ for ‘soul cakes’ given in exchange for prayers for the dead can be a marvellously macabre notion if you roll it around you head a bit) and I like it’s present, although I’m disappointed to discover that the horror stories of razorblades in apples and poisoned sweeties are just that – stories. Next year, I’ll have to lay in the ground glass and the strychnine.

Mostly, though I just like the ghoulies and the ghosties and the long-legged beasties. I like the idea of people hurring home after dark, afraid of the things like bump and slither in the shadows behind them. Because in this day and age, where everyone’s a pagan, or a thelemite, or knows some kind of ‘magician’, I like the idea that we should be frightened of these things, that they do have teeth, and that we should treat them with a bit of respect…

Andrew’s food quiz

I’m a bit lacking in ideas about what to do for this last piece of NaNoWriMo warm up. I’ve written a bit about Emma and Tim, and if I write about the opposition at this point I’ll spoil some of the surprises in the thing, ditto writing about their friends, and besides, it’s only Emma that has any, so I’m not entirely sure what to do. I did toy with the idea of putting the original first draft opening up here, but that’s not actually me writing anything, or warming up in any way. And besides, I just looked at it again, and it’s toss.

I can’t even share the idea I had on the bus this morning for a sequel to STORMBREAK called HARD RAIN that’s even more berserk and explody than the second half of this one, because the sequel has it’s genesis toward the latter half of the story.

But on the other hand, I can cheat a bit. Here, then, with the names removed, is a rough possible opening sequence to HARD RAIN. It probably won’t get used – my first ideas for opening sequences almost never do, because I tend to start writing them before I’ve got the thing fully plotted, but still…

MAN AT CONSOLE: HE’S INCOMING.

GENERAL: IS EVERYTHING READY?

ASSISTANT: YESSIR.

GENERAL: GOOD. REMEMBER, BOYS, NOTHING TO MAKE THE LITTLE BRITISH COCKSUCKER SUSPICIOUS. EVERYTHING NICE AND FRIENDLY.

MAN AT CONSOLE: SIR? I’VE GOT ANOTHER INCOMING. ON AN INTERCEPT COURSE.

GENERAL: WHAT-

The room shakes. Plaster dust falls. Console boy falls out of his seat.

GENERAL: THE FUCK WAS THAT?

MAN AT CONSOLE (pulling himself back to chair): IT’S IMPOSSIBLE, SIR. THERE’S *TWO* OF THEM.

The room shakes again. This time, a huge crack opens in the ceiling and down one of the walls. The lights flicker crazily. Sparks fly from some of the equipment.

MAN AT CONSOLE: THEY’RE FIGHTING. AT LEAST, I THINK THEY ARE.

GENERAL: SEND A LOG OF EVERYTHING YOU HAVE ON THEM TO WASHINGTON, THEN SOUND THE EVAC.

I’M GOING TO WATCH.

More NaNoWriMo warm up