So The Story Begins....

After 20-odd years of procrastinating, laziness, writer's block and various other excuses, I have attempted to start writing some fiction.

Whether this will take the form of a short story or novel, I haven't decided yet.

It took me around five hours, on and off, to write around 500 words. Which, to someone who writes a 50-page report every week, and who used to fill a whole newspaper single-handedly in three days, seems terribly and painfully slow.

And now that the first 500 words has been committed to paper (or to .doc anyway), I'm pretty much convinced that most of it is utter shit.

I bet Enid Blyton never had it this hard.

Music, Sweet Music, I Wish I Could Caress

Well, hi peeps. I’m Erica, and I’ll just come right out and say it: I am a very, very, very bad guest poster, who has been absolutely yanking her hair out from their follicular roots, trying to figure out what to write while Mark is yukking it up with Mrs. Wife in Shanghai.

Anyhow, I was sitting here at my job thinking to myself, “I really gotta put a post up — but what??,” even though, to channel Langston Hughes, my own blog is beginning to “crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet,” but still…no excuses. I need to figure out what to write.

And then, it came to me.

Mark — who I was “introduced” to by Eric, and who is also a fellow newspaper peep (I work for a chain of local weeklies here in Brooklyn, USA) — has the unusual distinction of being only one of two or three other bloggers on my blogroll who are younger than me, and a fine blogger he is, and yet, we both count ourselves among the throngs of young music listeners around the world who deem The Fab Four a favorite music group.

I refer not, of course, to Pete, Roger, John and Keith, the respective members of The Who, my favorite group growing up, nor John and Michelle Phillips, Denny Doherty, and Cass Elliot of The Mamas and the Papas (I have it on good authority that John Phillips was a total dooshbag), but rather I speak of John, Paul, George and Ringo, The Beatles.

And so, sitting here on a rainy deadline day, banging out my myriad mess of photo captions and press announcements for our Southern Brooklyn papers, and trying to keep my sleepyhead from inadvertently slamming down onto the keyboard with a mighty thwack, I try to get through it all by listening to Pandora Radio, “an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service created by the Music Genome Project.”

The entry continues (this figures prominently in my tale): “Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on the individual song choices — approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.”

So say, even if I enter, as an example, “Franz Josef Haydn” into the search box, Pandora will probably play me some early Mozart symphony, and maybe even a little pre-Romantic Beethoven, which is musically somewhat reminiscent of Mozart.

But back to The Fab Four. After having gone on a somewhat lengthy hiatus from them, we’re talking years and years, suddenly I craved The Beatles, which I typed into the “create a new station” search box, and not only have I been able to satisfactorily scratch my niggling Beatles itch, with Pandora providing me with a plethora of awesome classic rock tunage, but I also got to hear lots of other “musically similar” songs, such as John Lennon’s “Jealous Guy,” Led Zeppelin’s “Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,” and a buncha stuff by The Hollies, a very cool band; this is one of my favorites from them, though the video is a mite creepy.

As I hinged nearer and nearer to a comatose state at work, barely able to focus, it occurred to me in a rather abrupt, yet lucid, moment, that of all the Beatles songs Pandora has gifted me with over the past few weeks, including “A Day In The Life,” “Golden Slumbers / Carry That Weight” (the first song[s] I ever got stoned to, back when that was a thing I used to do), and “Paperback Writer,” the one song I have not yet heard — the Holy Grail of Beatles love songs, the modest little ditty which somehow slipped through the cracks of being queued amongst the mélange of other classic rock tunes — was “In My Life.”

WTF? How can such a travesty even be?

I know what you’re thinking: “Geeeeeez, so what?? Get to the friggin’ point already!!” And I will, no need to be tetchy, but anyways, here’s the point to my loooong story, which I thought was really weird and kind of even a little magical: The minute I thought to myself, while listening to “Wild Horses” by The Stones, “Why don’t they ever play ‘In My Life?,’ right after “Wild Horses” ended, guess what song came on? I scheisse youse not.

And since I’m the only person who could A) hear my inner thoughts, and B) hear what’s playing on my headphones, although I am told by coworkers to turn the volume down every once in a while, especially when AC/DC (another of Mark’s faves) or Metallica comes on, I couldn’t exactly SHARE my special private moment with anybody else in the room, ya dig? I mean, yes…technically, I could have, but I could have just as easily made the whole thing up, even though, honest injun I didn’t, but also…would anyone really have cared?

Probably not.

Yannow what, though? I never met Mark, but I have met the aforelinkedto Eric, and they two are good buds (I’m sure the AC/DC video Eric posted, right after he came back from Scotland, had somewhat to do with his falling under Mark’s influence), and one thing us thirty-somethings have in common (wait, Mark…are you even 30 yet? Or did you just turn 29?) is that we take our music very seriously, and I just know Mark would have cared.

And that, children, is only part of why I am a loyal reader of Groanin’ Jock. The other reason being, I just fancy the way the guy looks in a kilt.

From The Dim and Distant Past

Today at work, the conversation turned to awkward interviewees that myself and other reporters had encountered in our professional careers.

Without a doubt, the most obnoxious person I ever interviewed was Bobby Williamson during his time as Hibs boss. He was a grumpy, ill-natured, torn-faced little neep of a man, and he deserved every single piece of abuse he received from the club's fans.

In stark contrast, his predecessor, Frank Sauzee, was one of the most charming, likeable people I've ever met.

Anyway, this conversation also saw me reminiscing about my days as a music journalist, and the great times I had interviewing bands including The Cooper Temple Clause, Terrorvision and South.

And this thought process reminded me that, for a short period after finishing university, I had my own ramshackle website devoted to reviewing music.

The idea was basically that I would be able to blag free CDs and gig tickets by agreeing to review them. And it worked pretty well.

I presumed that, after I lost interest in the site around five years ago, it would have been deleted.

But it hasn't. To this day, it's still sitting quietly on the dark fringes of the worldwide interweb, showcasing how pretentious I was at the point when I finished university.

And so, for your entertainment, here is a link to the site in all its non-showy glory.

What a shambles!

Blank

I am (allegedly) a professional writer.

I don't intend that to sound like some wanky self-aggrandising statement of my writing abilities - it's merely a statement that means I get paid to write stuff.

But being a professional writer means that I shouldn't now be sitting staring at a blank page (well, blank screen) pondering what nonsense to commit to the blogosphere.

That's not really the case though. Just because my employer is kind enough to fill my bank account at the end of each month for committing words to page, doesn't mean that I have any inspiration to write witty, intelligent and thoughtful discourse here on the worldwide interweb.

(I've never written anything witty, intelligent or thoughtful in 18 months of online gibberish to date, and I'm not about to start now.)

Basically, I get paid to translate the machinations of the oil industry into commercial gold, information that can help keep cars running and PlayStations in production around the world.

Inspiration isn't one of the job requirements. I never really have to start at the 'blank page' level.

But here - well I can write about anything I like or dislike. Nothing is taboo, no sacred cow is so sacred it can't be butchered.

And therein lies the problem - where do I start? How do I even begin to tackle the sheer volume of stuff happening in the world today, the weight of history behind it and the possibilities ahead of it?

Hmmm, maybe I can't - maybe I should stick to what I know best - weird folk from the internet:

Write Here, Write Now

As seen over at the Adelaide Green Porridge Cafe, some magnificent writing from high school students, the like of which I have never seen before:

1. Her face was a perfect oval, like a circle that had its two sides gently compressed by a ThighMaster.

2. His thoughts tumbled in his head, making and breaking alliances like underpants in a dryer without Cling Free.

3. He spoke with the wisdom that can only come from experience, like a guy who went blind because he looked at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it and now goes around the country speaking at high schools about the dangers of looking at a solar eclipse without one of those boxes with a pinhole in it.

4. She grew on him like she was a colony of E. Coli, and he was room-temperature Canadian beef.

5. She had a deep, throaty, genuine laugh, like that sound a dog makes just before it throws up.

6. Her vocabulary was as bad as, like, whatever.

7. He was as tall as a six-foot, three-inch tree.

8. The revelation that his marriage of 30 years had disintegrated because of his wife’s infidelity came as a rude shock, like a surcharge at a formerly surcharge-free ATM machine.

9. The little boat gently drifted across the pond exactly the way a bowling ball wouldn’t.

10. McBride fell 12 stories, hitting the pavement like a Hefty bag filled with vegetable soup.

11. From the attic came an unearthly howl. The whole scene had an eerie, surreal quality, like when you’re on vacation in another city and Jeopardy comes on at 7:00 p.m. instead of 7:30.

12. Her hair glistened in the rain like a nose hair after a sneeze.

13. The hailstones leaped from the pavement, just like maggots when you fry them in hot grease.

14. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

15. They lived in a typical suburban neighborhood with picket fences that resembled Nancy Kerrigan’s teeth.

16. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

17. He fell for her like his heart was a mob informant, and she was the East River.

18. Even in his last years, Granddad had a mind like a steel trap, only one that had been left out so long it had rusted shut.

19. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

20. The plan was simple, like my brother-in-law Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just might work.

21. The young fighter had a hungry look, the kind you get from not eating for a while.

22. He was as lame as a duck. Not the metaphorical lame duck, either, but a real duck that was actually lame, maybe from stepping on a land mine or something.

23. The ballerina rose gracefully en Pointe and extended one slender leg behind her, like a dog at a fire hydrant.

24. It was an American tradition, like fathers chasing kids around with power tools.

25. He was deeply in love. When she spoke, he thought he heard bells, as if she were a garbage truck backing up.