Alasdair Watson

It’s been a good weekend – mostly, I’ve done nothing (we saw Phone Booth – popcorn films do not count as Doing Anything), with friends. This is pretty much my definition of a good weekend. To fully meet the definition, it requires drinking and clubbing and cultural events and doing no work at all (or, alternatively, it means no human contact and working all weekend, depending on my mood). In the absence of that, I’ll settle for doing only three or four hours work in four days, and otherwise just relaxing. Currently drinking a rather nice Fruit Drink – fresh orange juice, blended with strawberries and raspberries. Well, mostly fruit. There may have been some tequilla involved.

Aside from some time off sick, though, I haven’t had a break since January, because of the usual “no holiday in your trial period” clause in my contract, so I was very much in need of that. But the trial period is up, and I’ve a week (sort of) off at the end of May, and a couple of bank holidays, so that’s not too bad. Now, though, I think I’ll stick a DVD on, and call the weekend done.

Our, in this case, being mine. I mean, like the man said, “It couldn’t have gone far, right?” I’m not used to having to force it, but I’m sitting here, trying to write a twelve page story, and nothing, but nothing is coming together. The best I’ve got are a couple of dodgy outlines that don’t satisfy me – there’s a flaw in each of them, chiefly that there’s no emotional heart to them – they’re just some events that happen to some characters, rather than being about anything. Even if I leave aside the “scary trees” concept that Fin and I agreed, I can’t make anything come together. Oh, and I’ve got five different start points for things without outlines – just half formed ideas that I can make coalesce. I need to find something that I want to think about, resonate off. A feeling I want to catch, or a theme to explore.

Eh. Time for bed. I’ll fight with it again tomorrow.

It’s the bog end of the week, and I’ve got very little to do. Waiting for clients to get back to me on two different projects, and the prospect of a new project to start next week with, but nothing to do right now. So I’m sitting in my chair and watching the minutes tick by, and feeling small pains crackle up and down my back, shoulders and upper arms after the gym today. I’m slowly getting back to where I was, although my progress was has been somewhat slowed by the cold I had the other week. I never ceases to amaze me how short a break from the gym one can take, and still feel progress slipping away.

In other news: Not a whole lot going on. Work on the new look for 9A proceeds. CSS continues to frustrate and delight me in equal measure. Have randomly decided that I need to look into badgers. Specifically, their mythic attributes, because just gazing into a badger would be weird. Very little reason for this, other than that they’re mentioned in China Mieville’s “Perdido Street Station” and I remember how much I used to like them as a kid. Hell, how can you not like something that’s also be known as an “Earth Bear”?

How d’you change the wording for comment tags? (So that instead of being called comments, they’re called blamanges, or something more sensible). I know it’s something in the styles section, but I’m fucked if I can make it work. Can anyone with munged comment names mail me (or leave a comment with) the code they use, so’s I can adapt it for my own nefarious purposes. Ta.

Here’s an interesting article about the challenges of translating comics, especially funny ones into other lanagues, written by the woman that translates the Asterix books. I love Asterix as a kid, so this was really interesting reading for me. Thanks to Anna for the link.

I’ve solved the problem I was having at work (with help from dulux) and have now finished (barring handover to clients) all the work I have for the next week and a half. So I thought I’d do a survey, mostly because I almost never do, and I’m bored.
Yeah, I’m even going to hide it. See how nice I am?

Well, not quite static – A Silver Mt Zion Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band on the headphones, and a lunch spent sitting in the sun by the lake in Battersea Park, reading Drummond and Manning’s classic (Bad Wisdom, obv.). It’s a beautiful thing, watching their prose stylings mesh and syncopate. With any luck, there will be new West Wing DVDs waiting for me when I get home tonight, and pleasant and relaxing time will be had by all.

I’m watching BBC2’s “The Big Read”. Two foul travesties have occured. Firstly, Jilly Cooper won the “Author’s Weakest Link”. That was bad enough. But she won about seven and a half thousand pounds for charity. And what’s she doing with it? She’s donating it to a society that wants to put up a statue in London, as a memoiral to all the animals that have been killed in wars. That’s just fucking sickening.
Point 1: I’m a damn sight more concerned about all the fucking people that have died in wars than their bastard cats.
Point 2: It’s not fucking helping anyone. Charityable donations should be making life better for people with a pulse. If you can’t manage the people part then fuck, I’ll settle anything with a pulse. A statue to dead things, and worse, dead fucking pets is not a charitable act, it’s a memorial. Gah!

And the second travesty? It turns out that I have to dump Fin, because Martine McCutcheon’s favourite book is Perfume by Patrick Suskind, and there’s no way I can date someone who shares their favourite book with Tiffany out of Eastenders. Sorry.

Idea shamelessly thieved from Marysia, I present the meaning of my name:

Alasdair: Scottish form of Alexander, meaning “defender of men”.
Nicholas: From the Greek “Nikolaos”, meaning “victory of the people”.
Watson: Son of Wat. Wat is a medieval contraction of Walter, meaning “ruler of the army”, so “Son of the ruler of the Army”.

So, broadly, my name means that we’d all be better off if the rest of you just did what I said.

So, I’m feeling like shit, my brain’s a weird syncopation around the real world, and I spent half my day drifiting in and out of a strange psycho-political landscape, fever dreaming in time to the third season of The West Wing. I’m trying to put together questions for an interview with Grant Morrison about the relationship between comics and magic, and actually, all I seem to do is jot down my notes, theories and ideas about the link between us an our fictions. I’m re-reading a piece I wrote a couple of years back for a fringe-culture magazine that I don’t think ever saw the light of day, and allowing for the fact that the pop culture references date it slightly (less that I’d thought they would – the Beckhams are a little less current now, but that’s it) it’s still passable. There are a few nice phrases in there, but it’s knocking on 2000 words, so there ought to be a few occaisions where I hit my stride.

The piece was an attempt to understand magic as a tool for identity manipulation. What Robert Anton Wilson calls “meta-programming”. Last year, for Ninth Art’s 24 hour comic event, I wrote a story that was a tool to teach me more about the Kabbalisitic Tree Of Life, but I think in the end, it had more to tell me about fiction and reality than about the Kabbalah. I think perhaps that’s what I need to do here. A twenty minute speech on fiction as magic. See what I come out of it with, and then see if that’s a start point for an interview.

It’s that, or I get stinking drunk, and write down whatever old shite comes into my head. That’s worked OK in the past.