Tuesday, June 25, 2013
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The
sorcery of scribbling
In a blog, many moons ago, I wrote about
the creation of The Azimuth Trilogy. I was fascinated by the act of writing
myself into knowledge. Since I had placed the novel in ancient times and wasn’t
a historian, everything in the books came from my imagination. When I had
finished the thousand or so pages I became suddenly concerned that the work
would be embarrassing. What if I got my facts wrong so badly that I would be a
laughing stock? So I checked. It was amazing that my sure-footed imagination
had dredged from somewhere a whole world that had truly existed. In incredible
detail. You can search through the early blogs on writing to flesh it out but
the basic tenet is that writers can be conduits to the shared experience of
homo sapiens. Mystics call it channeling but the term may a bit too mystical
for me.
Then, only two or three blogs ago, I wrote
about the mysterious experience of finding myself in Ghana and how some
imperative had drawn me there, despite myself. It consisted of a series of
synchronous events, spread over time, strange in themselves; portents, if you
will.
I am experiencing much the same again. I
discovered the delights of the OCR recently. This is computer software that
recognizes scans of printed pages and turns them into editable word files. Now,
in my writer’s war chest, I have a number of novels. I always wrote even when
leading a reasonably fulfilling academic career as a research professor. It was a necessary
complement to the less glamorous life I was leading.
When I finished my novel earlier this year
about a super-heroine in a dystopian future Britain, A Woman Who Kills, I turfed out one of these novels. It was typed
and legible enough for the OCR. Three days later I had transcribed it into a word
file. It is called Middle Ages and
deals with the vicissitudes of a group of overweight women and their husbands
in Norwich, England. Middle class angst. A dark comedy of manners. Coming
eventually to a kindle near you. Or a shop. What is completely engrossing is
that I hardly remember writing it, have no idea of the plot and find it a real revelation
of life and mores in the early 1980s. It stands up as a sociological exposé of
those Thatcherian days. But (segwaying back to the beginning of this blog) what
is truly occult is that the names of the characters, chosen at random when I
was writing, have all become key names among my friendships and associations,
developed in the years long after the book was finished. Not only that but all
the issues about being overweight for a woman are headlines in the media.
And, of course, those who are following
these blogs would know that I married someone four years ago, Helen Teague, who
designs clothes for large women and is in partnership with Dawn French the
comedienne and writer. Imagine me, therefore, editing this novel, written by a
former self some thirty years ago and finding in its pages, all sorts of
foretellings of what has since come to pass. Creepy or what?
More of my writing at www.chronometerpublications.me
The Azimuth Trilogy at: www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Helen’s and Dawn’s clothing website is: www.sixteen47.com
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