Dark Sides

"The Lunatic Is On The Grass"

I'm on holiday and feeling sorry for myself. That's the long and the short of itI've been off for five days now, on a holiday that I've been looking forward to for a long time, because, you know, my last time off was the middle of February.

But this holiday was supposed to be about me and Debra. We were supposed to be off to Carlisle tonight for her friends wedding tomorrow and then we were supposed to be off to Yorkshire or the Lakes or somewhere on a camping trip next week.

So there I was, dumped and depressed as all hell, and I think fuck it, I'm not going to let it get me down. So I make some proactive choices. I rejoin Match, getting emailing to some people, and I think, ooh, I have two whole weeks off, if I make a concerted effort, I can get a lot of writing done. Inspired by a semi-drunken text that Blades sent me following Adrian Nightingale's stag do 9and there's a name I would love to steal) I come up with an idea. Basically, it's three friends who've known each other since school reuniting for a stag do. It allows me to play with my pet theme of the moment which is about realising you're not that young anymore, while one of the main characters (Adrian Monroe - I stole the Christian name at least) has inherited the storyline from Weeknights, which was far too tied up in what I felt for Debra the first time she broke up with me.

"Daisy Chains"

Funnily enough, when Blades and Gilli were up, he asked me, in front of Debra, how Weeknights was progressing. I was vaguely ashamed that I'd started writing a book that was, essentially, a true story (echoes of Sheryl Crow's 'The Book' from her self-titled second album) with someone who I was in love with (and who would, the following day, admit that she was falling for me in a big way, although we all know how that turned out).

"The Lunatic Is In The Hall"

Initially entitled 'The Stag', it has subsequently inherited the title 'The Violet Hours' which is a quote from TS Eliot's The Waste Land (but which is also, a quick Wikipedia search tells me, an album by an idie band called The Clientele, well, theirs is The Violet Hour - no plural - but the lyrics are vague enough so that they could be applied to me book too).

Except... I wrote a thousand words and a bit on Monday, a thousand and a bit on Tuesday. Then Wednesday and today, nothing. Maybe I'm just tired. Maybe I'm not really cut out for this whole writing life. I don't know.

"Everyday The Paperboy Brings More"

So, tomorrow I'm going on a date with someone I've met on Match. She seems nice, but I've already got the butterflies. We're going out for a few drinks. Nothing structured, which is terrifying. On the one hand I've got my first date with Debra which went better than I could have possibly hoped for, then on the other we have Angela, who never texted me back.

It's a surreal situation. You're going on a date with someone that you've never met before, but you've spoken by email (and we've exchanged a few texts as well) so there's a mutual interest there but you never know; you meet in real life (is there still a small corner of the world where netheads refer to it a rl?) and you might just not click. It can happen. So no pressure there then.

"I'll See You On The Dark Side Of The Moon"

So where does this all leave me? Sure, there's hope on the horizon, but if nothing else, these few days off have hammered home the point that my life isn't very interesting, even to me. Today I've sat and watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek, Sliders, Stargate, Fanily Guy apiece, thought about rearranging my books, faffed on the internet far too much, wrote a couple of blogs. Nothing much. And I'm upset with myself, because it was not supposed to be this way. I was supposed to do great things this holiday. I was supposed to get my life back on track.

We'll see how tomorrow goes. Peace out.