The Republic - a new translation

How then may we devise one of those needful falsehoods of which we lately spoke - just one royal lie which may deceive the rulers, if that be possible, and at any rate the rest of the city?

What sort of lie? he said.

Classical birdwatching

'Let us consider an albino crow. Is it not said, by the great poets, that such creatures have been seen? And there is, I believe, an old Phoenician tale regarding such an occurrence. But is a white crow not a crow nonetheless?'

'That it is, Socrates.'

'Then it is true that all crows must be white?'

'That must be correct.'

'Then what would you say is that black corvid, under the tree over there?'

Why Doesn't This Writer Have An Agent? #1b in a series...

I've had it in mind for a while to promote other writers' work wherever I can - there is nothing more depressing on a blog than pure self-promotion. Sebastian Aston, keeper of the wonderfully dry Notes From The Noon of Life blog, kindly gives me permission to show off his talents this week with an extract from his short and as yet unrepresented novel, And A Funny Feeling Of Being Lost - see what you think. I am very keen to hear from anyone else who would let me big up their work in a similar way. Providing it's, y'know, good...

People Are Our Greatest Asset

A company’s reception area is often the first point of contact for outsiders. It’s a window for them to the rest of the organisation and should reflect the company’s image. Our reception area is a cold mix of glass, metal and laminate, which gives it a very professional gloss. It’s much like our receptionist, Samantha, who is receptionist pretty, too heavy on the gloss, and almost certainly part laminate.

It’s gone nine as I rush in, glance her way and say, “Morning.”

She doesn’t respond as she is talking busily on the phone. I hear her say something about Madonna and hot pants. On days when she does acknowledge me, she usually curls her lip. This I put down to me not being senior enough, not looking like Brad Pitt enough, and not trying to chat her up enough. Or maybe it’s because she thinks that I stereotype people. Above her head, on the wall, in sleek inspiring graphics is written Vigora. The company used to be called Enterprise Technology Ltd. until last year when some American investors bought it with big plans to overhaul the whole organisation. They spent millions of dollars giving it a new name and logo and left everything else the same. In place of new strategy we got new mouse mats. The new branding is meant to indicate power and vitality. My suggestion -which nobody asked for- was WankAthlete. I even drew a logo.

The recently renovated office is open plan. It has been specifically designed to increase the interaction between teams. There are ergonomically shaped Formica desks scattered around forming little islands. It’s like a Formica Maldives located on the fifth floor of a dull office block in central London. The modular low-static carpet is granite grey, the fully relocatable partitioning walls are silver grey, and our high performance worktops are blue grey. Officially, there is no grey grey here. Unofficially, I would say there’s some plain grey in the kitchen but maybe I’m not picking out the hint of avocado.

As I make my way between the desks, I spot Steve, my boss, sitting in his office. It’s a large glass-walled room off to one side and is styled with executive beech furniture. His boss sits in an even larger office next door. His room is styled with executive walnut furniture. He also has his own printer, a gratuitous sofa and a picture of the Dordogne where he frequently mentions that he owns a property. I arrive at my island where David and Charlie are already sitting. Our Health & Safety certified workstations are separated from each other by low partitioning screens which we have attempted to personalise. David has put up a photo of the West Ham squad, and Charlie has some drawings by his little girl. They’re quite good, almost Impressionist, especially the one of him where he looks like a testicle watching a sunset. My screen is filled up with Dilbert cartoons.

“Morning,” I grunt, sitting down and logging on to my PC.

“Afternoon,” says David, looking at his watch.

“Evening,” says Charlie.

“Check your mails,” says David. “You won’t believe it, they want another spreadsheet filled in by end of day.” He has piercing blue eyes and, if I was a girl, I would probably fall for him like they all do. I would also soon be tossed casually aside, broken, like they all are.

“Another one?” I say. “What do they want this time?”

“An action plan for all your accounts,” says Charlie, who is only a couple of years older than David but, balding and with a beer pregnancy, the two years look like ten.

“But I don’t have an action plan,” I say, “because I spend all my time filling in action plans.”

“Maybe you can say that’s your action plan,” says David.

“That sounds like an inaction plan,” says Charlie.

“They’re going to ask for those later in the week,” I say.

Their smiles quickly disappear as they glance over my shoulder and start acting busy.

“Timon, can I have a word?” a voice says behind my back.

“Sure, Steve,” I say, getting up and following him to his office.

Steve sits at his executive beech desk as I close the door. “Please try and be on time, Timon,” he says. “We start punctually at nine here.”

I check my watch: it says twelve past. Then I pull out my .44 Magnum, point it at his chest and pull the trigger. He explodes backwards out of his chair, eyes struck wide in surprise. As he falls to the ground I pull the trigger again. The Magnum roars as another bullet slams into his body, the recoil shooting up my arm. Say hello to my leeettle friend! I pull out my 9mm Uzi with laser sighting and let rip with a few short bursts, the crack of the gunfire covering up my mad laughter.

“Yes, I’m sorry I’m late,” I say. “There was a problem on the tube.”

“Tell me, how did your presentation go yesterday?” Steve has a square face, a weak chin and is very ambitious. His main ambition is to be American and he dresses and acts as such. He slicks back his hair, wears tasselled loafers, and uses words like doable.

“I think it went well.”

He stares at me and raises his eyebrows.

I add, “I’d be surprised if they didn’t want to take it to the next step.”

“Good stuff,” he says. “So what’s the driver behind their need?”

“The driver? I couldn’t see his face, he was wearing a helmet.”

He stares at me and frowns.

I clear my throat and say, “Well, their immediate need is for better tracking of their customer requirements…”

“But is that a business issue or just a technological requirement?”

“No, it’s a business issue. Their current legacy system is very costly to maintain and isn’t capable of handling their growing volumes of business.”

“I see. So how did you pitch the benefits of our solution to them?”

“I told them we could consolidate and improve their whole process with an integrated solution which enhances and streamlines current processes, reduces their costs, and gives better customer tracking and service.” Expialidocious.

“Good stuff,” he says. “I just wanted to check on progress and make sure we can put this one to bed. We need this business, Timon. You need this business. You only have a few weeks left to make your target.”

“I’ll close it.”

“Be sure you do. New York is watching us very closely. Okay, thanks Timon,” says Steve, who’s from Wall Street in Croydon.

I walk out and close the door. Note to self: use a flamethrower next time, and remember to piss on the body. I go to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. It’s empty and I take a moment, take a deep breath. In and out. Then I punch my order into the machine and listen to it whir and click.

“No, he won’t get away with it, the little kid was there,” says David, as I arrive back at my desk.

“Yeah, but she’s blind, she doesn’t know what she heard,” says Charlie.

“You don’t think he’ll go after her?”

“I think he’ll try and blackmail her mother.”

They’re talking about the big news event of the day, front page of the papers, somebody killing somebody on some TV soap. It must have been a quiet night in the Middle East.

“What did Steve want?” asks Charlie.

“He told me he was beginning to self-loath for working here.”

“Really?” says David.

I sit down and check my emails.

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Insight, Conversation, Action, ?

In the beginning, I started out producing what I would have described as intensely psychological prose, creating entirely interior worlds, interior dilemmas, interior struggles... It seemed almost writerly. A chapter would involve one person, walking in a park, thinking. Or perhaps only sitting on a park bench. Perhaps this was because the thoughts came to me that way, and I didn't quite have the wit to dress it up more. This, I might call the Insight stage. Irony, hey.

I grew past it, in time. I started having two or even three people in a scene, even interacting sometimes. This, finally, was proper writing. They began to talk to each other, sometimes at length. They were (sort of) demonstrating things, through dialogue at least. No longer did the author clumsily illuminate via his eighteenth century narrator. Sometimes the characters even misunderstood each other, or talked across each other. Or were unreliable in their knowledge. I felt advanced.

But a different kind of pattern emerged. Each chapter, it was politely pointed out to me, is just people talking. Yet again. They were right, naturally. What was actually happening? I counted ten chapters in a single novel that each consisted in some part of two people talking at a checkout (mostly in coffee shops, but also, through a burst of wild imagination, in a supermarket).

Conversation isn't action, of course. Only action is action. Which is not to say a building blows up in every chapter, but at last I am deleting entire chapters that had seemed integral only months ago, and expressing a good thing once instead of a dozen times. It's the same thought that has football managers screaming at their daft winger to stop turning the defender and just bloody cross the ball.

I wonder what the next stage is?

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Not proud. Just saying...

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The writing season

The weather has changed. Being away, I didn't see it happen here, but I'd imagine it's much the same anywhere you go. I return from holiday to find a cooler, windier, wetter London. Trotting round my neighbourhood the colours have changed, and its not just that the housing estate has been repainted in battleship grey.

In the Eurostar magazine on the way home, an article heralded the change in seasons with the suggestion that autumn is the start of the cultural year en France, unlike ever-dynamic, always on London. I'm not so sure we're any different. The Wednesday writing group I go to has been low in numbers all summer, and suddenly in September the attendance has doubled. The deadlines of literary competitions seem to cluster around October and November; perhaps if you're interested in these things, now would be the time to prepare for them. The signs are everywhere.

I'm sure real writers don't ever slack in summer, even if real-world writers do. At least we're finally liberated of the fantasy that we might just spend the day lying in the park instead.

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What kind are you?

No update next week, as I'm on holiday. Guess you'll just have to get by with this in the meantime...

 

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Do I lose my single person discount on Council Tax if Paulo Coelho is living in my wardrobe?

I've always been able to console myself that despite lacking an agent or a (conventional) publisher I am still, at any rate, the most successful writer in my lone occupant household.

Sadly, even this turns out not to be true.

I got a letter last week addressed to "Paulo Coelho", who has given the Metropolitan Police my address in connection with an incident they would like to talk to him about. I'm not sure where in the flat he's been living but I guess it's a sign that I need to be a bit tidier around the place; clearly I'm providing too much habitat for writers. I cleaned out all the kitchen cupboards before the riots, but maybe he's been putting his head down in my wardrobe. Note to self: really must be more careful.

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Good books

The morning pages experiment continues. On the face of it, this has been spectacularly unsuccessful. Today's session was spent getting ready for Barry The Tiler coming round at five to eight. Does getting my kitchen done count as procrastination?

I had an insight. I was listening to someone the other day struggling to describe in straightforward terms what they liked to read, other than chick lit. It shouldn't be this complicated; we all know instinctively what this other genre is, even if we can't quite define it. It's the section in Waterstones or on Amazon we would all home in on, if it existed. Kind of speaks for itself, really:

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Morning pages

I had a routine of sorts. I called it the witching hour - that period of relative calm between about eleven in the evening and two in the morning when:

a) local people had stopped having daft accidents and requiring constant attention from paramedics from Europe's largest A&E department nearby,
b) the Napoleonic army of unfit, generally cow-like but nonetheless extremely noisy people popularly known as the Metropolitan police had finally gone to bed and were no longer using my street as their own personal Santa Pod, and
c) I used to have the stamina to still be awake to take advantage of the peace.

Magic happened in that witching hour, albeit not particularly publishable magic.

I must be getting older; for some reason I feel like more like sleeping when it gets late at night. So I am thinking of becoming an early morning person. If I can knuckle down to write before I go to work, I can be fresher and write before my mind has become distracted by all the nonsense of the average day. It's a good theory. So far it has worked only once in the two weeks since I decided to try it. Recent early mornings have been spent organising parking and, this last week, entertaining builders. Another morning's attempt failed on account of having already been woken four times at various small hours in the morning for call-outs. But what I did achieve in that much-abbreviated attempt at morning pages was the thought 'blog entry'. When life gives you lemons, hand them off to your readers  I mean, make lemonade.

The attempt continues.

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