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Wow, two updates in one day! My hypergraphia must be getting worse.
Many people are surprised to learn that I’m both Irish and a writer, yet I don’t drink anything harder than cranberry and pomegranate juice. This is genuinely unusual, given that most of Ireland’s writers are slightly deranged, overly-patriotic windbags who have their heads so far up their own asses that they’ve developed a method of inebriating themselves that involves pouring whiskey and guiness straight into their colons. Or at least, the ones they make us study in school are.
However, it is true (according to popular opinion) that a writer without an addiction is like a church without believers, which is to say greatly improved entirely pointless. I could raise my mistique by writing letters backwards or with the words looping around the page in weird spiral patterns like the tracks of a demented snail, but that’s hard work and, let’s face it, WordPress’s formatting tools aren’t quite that robust. Instead I’ve been cultivating coffee as my chemical crutch of choice, and was recently forced to leave my cave to restock. It was while I was trying to avoid frostbite from the fierce Irish Summer breeze that I was struck by an epiphany that hit like a jackhammer to the limbic system. I’ve been having great fun defecating all over other people’s work, but why not present some of my own to the baying public?
I mulled this idea over for a while and then tossed it out like the results of an unwanted pregnancy, afraid that exposing my writing to the world in its infancy might shatter my already glass-like ego. Instead I’m going to talk a little about my experience with writing a book and the many lessons I learn along the way. If at any point I start to take myself seriously, you have permission to nuke my house into oblivion George Bush style.
So, on to the book, then. I won’t say much about it now except that I’m currently at 23,664 words and am racing towards the halfway point faster than a horse on steroids. It’s set in modern day Ireland and England and has some ‘gothic undertones’. (They’re hidden beneath a ‘postmodern overcoat’).* I won’t go too much into the plot right now except to say that it’s a bit ironic, given how much I like to bash Stephanie Meyer. For future reference, accusations of plagiarism should be forwarded to a crater on Mars.
on May 23, 2008 on 1:13 am
I look forward to reading about your experiences with writing a book. I lack the focus or the passion to do anything of the sort. Dabbling is what I do best but mostly for my own amusement.
The tantilising bits and pieces you’ve posted about this mysterious story you’re working on sounds intriguing.