Hermes, the Forgotten Blog Master

Basic things seem unbelievable when I transpose them into prose. How can I possibly be believed when life is so absurd?

All I want to do is recount my life. This is impossible. Even if nothing worthwhile has happened it still seems strange and unusual. I defy you to write about your day without seeming like some white lie is forming the basis of your humour. If you do manage to write about your day and find it mundane and humourless (and so proving me wrong) then you have failed to live a day worth taking note of.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I create a situation knowing my actions can lead to absurdity. I don’t know anymore. I remember hearing a stand-up comedian trying to explain with all seriousness this bizarre thing that had happened to him and he said, “I used to allow things like this to happen, maybe I encouraged it. I knew, no matter how weird things got, after the danger had passed I would have a good story to tell. And if it went bad I could trust on my wit to get me out of it. And if not my wit I could say, ‘Hey, I’m a writer, this will all end up in a book someday. Don’t kill me.’” Or something like that. That’s my version of what I heard anyway. Maybe I made the whole thing up. I think I did. It still holds true.

Weirdness happens naturally. It is up to the writer to capture it for prosperity. Life is weird. Get used to it. Embrace it. Chase it through the normality and wrestle it to the ground. You will learn so much more through your mad moments than you will through your sane ones. Sane ones pass by like a series of red crosses on a fridge calendar.

It is not routine that we really crave. It is the broken routine that excites us. It is the moments when you look back at that calendar and see that a red cross is missing. What happened to that day? You weren’t there to cross it out that’s for sure.

If you’ve managed to get this far through this post then good for you. I’ve had a lot to drink and it is entirely possible that the above will turn out to be a gibberish series of incoherencies. If that is the case I will write another blog post tomorrow explaining how late it was and that it’s a miracle the laptop survived the night. Violence follows inane drunkenality. (Take note! Drunkenality is a new word, write it down and inform the authorities).

Tomorrow I will have had some sleep and some coffee. I will be in control of my intelligence. I will no-doubt mistrust my drunken instincts to write such rambling nonsense. Or maybe truth lies somewhere in the whisky sodden words of the writer trapped in his natural habitat.

See him. The writer. There he is. In his cage. He is drunk. He has a cigarette hanging from his mouth. There is no plot in his mind. There is no character waiting to be created. There is only the page and his incessant nonsense.

Goodnight. Farewell. It is up to Hermes, the Greek god of wit, literature, and poetry, to determine if these words are worthy of an inconsequential blog post.

The Book Trailer

Book trailers. I hear that’s the new thing. “Make a book trailer,” they say, “People will watch it and then you’ll be famous. Everyone will buy your book because they saw a video of it. It’s all about getting the word out.”

There used to be a time when all a writer had to be able to do is write. That was it. Nothing more was really expected of them. Now your abilities at marketing and promotion outweigh the necessity to write a good book. You must be a writer, an advertiser, a director, and a blog forum socialite. You must be shallow. I’m not very good at self-promotion. I made an advert though. You can watch it in a sec, it’s just below these words. Before you do though, let me apologise for the lack of effort I put in to making the advert. You see, my daughter was making a video for her YouTube channel and when she was done she left the camera out. So I thought, hey, I know, I’ll make a trailer! So I pressed record, sat down, and went for it. There was no real thought or idea behind what I was going to do. But now it is done. Tripping the Night Fantastic has its very own commercial. Yay.

Applied Daydreaming. The Madness of the Wordsmith.

There is a problem. Daydreaming has become a habit. It has overtaken all things. It has got to the point where these mad divergences into the imagination have spilled out of the fingers and become real. All reality is at risk. Nonsense has overridden sanity. Imaginary friends have been re-labelled as characters. The lunacy has become accepted by the ones we expect to be most rational; the literary folk.

Farewell normality. Welcome to the world of the author.

Every tendon from my shoulder to my finger tips are crying out to turn this into fiction. I want to write about the beginning of all this writing, “You there. At the back. Stop daydreaming!” said the retarded fucking teacher.

And so it would continue. But I must resist. We all know how that goes. The supressed creative mistook for an idiot. Whose fault is it that something the teacher said sent your mind into a spiral of questions and possibilities? And why is that such a bad thing? Daydreaming is less often born from boredom, and more from inspiration.

Writing is a cherished folly. Writing is applied daydreaming. That is all. For now. Soon I will come back to this blog and write something worthwhile. The beast must be fed.

I don’t know why I put a picture of a shoe at the beginning of this.

Mellifluous Ramblings

The problem with reading dictionaries is that you find yourself writing words into your prose that you are certain you would not understand yourself if you came across it in someone else’s book.

But that’s how vocabulary grows so you should never shy away from it. The context should carry the word anyway. And if you read in the way I do, and come across a word you don’t know, google is at your fingertips with all the meanings and definitions for all the words and things in every language in all the world. Smart phones are magic impossible devices sent to us by aliens.

(I just want to say quickly that I am aware that using the words “but” and “and” at the beginning of a sentence is technically wrong. It is a matter of grammar that I dispute. If it is used widely in common speech it is acceptable in prose. I might expand in this point at a later date).

Anyway, I was talking about words you wouldn’t normally use. I wrote the following sentence –

She made a wonderful mellifluous sound.

In the interest of context, the girl mentioned in the above sentence was enjoying the intimate company of the protagonist (Ghastly isn’t it? Sex has no place in comedy, the scene will probably be deleted). Mellifluous is a word no one knows naturally. In fact it’s a word I didn’t know I knew until I wrote it and had to look it up to see what it meant and if it fit the sentence, which by chance it did. Osmosis in action. Mellifluous. I’m not going to tell you what it means (you may already know). If you don’t, think about what you think it means and then google it.

On this occasion I actually decided not to use the endlessly helpful Google (or the brilliant and underrated Wikipedia) and instead I took the opportunity to flop open my massive and beguiling Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. It has all of the words in it. Look at it. It’s enormous –

You see, it’s big isn’t it. Let’s open it at random and see what new word we discover.

Cock-horse. Well, there we are. Who was expecting that? Definition –

(In the dictionary the definition is long and exhaustive so I’ll break it down) A Cock-horse is when a child rides an adults knee. Like a game. Pretending she’s riding a horse.

The massive dictionary makes for a nice light bedtime read for the kids too –

I mean, who has ever used the word mellifluous before? I know I haven’t. Well, I have now, 4 times. But you know what I mean. I don’t think I’ll be using cock-horse any time soon.

I seem to recall having some kind of point when I started this post. Until I got distracted by the dictionary. I might start doing a word of the month (or whenever I come across an interesting one). Here’s a good word – Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia. It’s the name given to the fear of long words. There’s a psychologist somewhere with a sense of humour. Some people add an extra “p” in the “…quippedalio…” bit. But that’s just silly.

Do feel free to share any interesting words in the comments.

If you liked this post you might also like this one – https://andychapwriter.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/paradise-lost-hobby-gained/