Alasdair Watson

Summer’s hit Battersea Park. I’m beside the boating lake, drinking massively overpriced Red Bull, and contemplating a vareity of solutions to my current writers block.

Option 1: Drown myself. It’d be easy, and convenient, and with any luck it’d leave a few of these bastard children that are all over the damn damn park with something collosally traumatic to remember.

But on the downside, I’d be dead. And I don’t really want to be, so I think I can rule that one out.

Option 2) Just keep hammering my head off a wall. Well, I’m getting kind of tired of that, to be honest. I’m sick of dealing in substandard fragments of thought, and half-formed ideas. I need somethingto give soon, and let me actually write, rather than makes notes.

Option 3) Medication. Devolve back into my bad habits, and abuse my body with whiskey and coffee. This is my favourite option – I know that belting my brain sideways with those two will nearly always shake something loose. I’m not the only person I know that works like this, and I’m certainly willing to give it another go at this point.

The problem with this is manifold, though. Top of the list: it’s bad for me. My diet is still residing in the “fucked, but improving slowly” zone that it slipped to late last year, but my other habits are actually quite reasonable – my caffiene intake is minimal, these days, and I don’t drink more than a few measures in an average week. This is not the sort of level I can use to punch myself in the frontal lobes with – I need half a pot of coffee and a good double in me to get started, and I need to hold that level of wired over time. Additionally, coffee makes me want to smoke, and I’ve been having a hard enough time staying away from the fags for a while now.

Also: I’m not much fun to be around when I’ve medicined myself. I shut myself in my room, and fight with language, emerging only to refresh my drinks. This is not the sort of behaviour one can indulge in when one has a girlfriend one would like to keep seeing. It’s profoundly anti-social.

Still, I think it’s my best bet. And y’know, Fin gave me an espresso machine last night, which is practically an inivitation to anti-social behaviour.

So it’s out to buy a burr grinder with me tomorrow, and fresh coffee beans on Sunday.

In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the last of this Red Bull, and put some more notes together, in the summertime.

Sucked. Got up at my usual time, to find that one of my flatmates was running late, and was in the shower. So I wound up running late – not “late for work” late, just “later than I like my routine” late. My meeting this afternoon has been cancelled, too.

So, at lunch, I went to the gym. It was dry when I walked out the office door, but tipped it down within minutes, only to dry up as I got to the gym. It remained dry all through my workout, and right up to about thirty seconds after I left the gym. It’s dry again, now that I’m back in the office. And my workout was deeply unrewarding. I underperformed on just about every machine, and I don’t know why. So I’m feeling deeply disassified with myself. I don’t feel like I’ve had proprer exercise, and I’m damp.

This afternoon had better be better.

Pan fried zebra in red wine jus. Reminded me curiously of duck. Highly recommended, though.

Of course there are. I direct your attention to this (Nicked off Rachel, ta.

Checking in on Done Deal, I see that Paul Dini’s Jingle Belle has been optioned. Excellent news. Hope it actually gets made…

Like, tonight. And, y’know, drop me back again, too? I’d like to go see Flogging Molly again (saw ’em last night, they were fantastic), and they’re playing in Oxford tonight, it turns out (on Cowley Road, wherever that is), but I need to get back here tonight, in order to, y’know, work tomorrow.

I’ll happily pay petrol, and a for a ticket to the gig for anyone that gives me a lift. :)

No, didn’t think so. Anyone fancy getting the train with me, then?

Everyone’s doing it

Well, on your friends page, that is. Add to your friends page to get the new syndicated feed I just created for it.

Ninth Art has a new suit. It is sharp, and well tailored. Go look.

It’s a rotten, menacing sky outside my window right now. Suits me. I’ve been feeling drawn out and tired for the last couple of months. Disconnected. Last night was prime example: saw X2 at the cinema. Everyone else came out going “Wow! Cool!” I left going “Yeah, OK, that was fun. Can I get on with something exciting now?” I’m going to go and see it again at some point, in the hope it’ll grab me better.

Except that I don’t seem to know what exciting is, lately. My enthusiasm is shot. I can’t muster up any fire, any passion. This, I’m sure, is the root of the problems I’ve been having with writing – there’s nothing in my gut that’s pushing it forward. This was brought home to me last night, reading Warren Ellis’ Orbiter on the tube home – this is a book he obviously gave a fuck about, writing it. There’s passion in it. It’s the best thing I’ve read from him since early Transmet. (I’m glad of this, because it’s a hardcover and cost me the best part of 20 quid, but it’s fucking lovely throughout.)

My own work’s been lacking in it for months. I stalled out last year, and by the time I was writing again, the fire just wasn’t there. This time last year I was sorting out the last bits of SIx Strings, a coming about wanting to achieve – about drive and ambition, and the things we throw away for it. I wrote Six Strings with a bellyful of coffee and a headful of booze, and I think it shows. It creaks in places, but there’s a drive in it that I like. Passion. A year later, nothing. A struggle to find the spine of a short story, and the scratchiest of notes toward something new that’s still not even got a shape.

Eh. I’ll get through it, but for the moment, it’s really, really frustrating.