I’ve written a short post for the Sustainable Witney blog about switching to greener energy. Writing it took me about ten minutes; switching my household’s electricity and gas to Ecotricity took about five minutes.
… and the bitter taste of something… bitter-tasting…
Horses:
So, that scoundrel Tom.
Tsk.
Tom is nothing but a worry to his ‘dad’. He spends all day sleeping and eating and some of the time he’s more lovely than a lovely thing. But unfortunately, some of the time he’s less than lovely.
He’s not, to hastily clarify a point, nasty.
Oh no, I don’t believe for one instant that Tom has a nasty bone anywhere in his 17.1hh body – and that’s a big pile of finely-muscled body!
But he is… inconsistent.
And in a way, Tom’s inconsistency is his consistency.
On Sunday we competed at a British Eventing One Day Event in Berkshire.
The dressage test, unlike our dressage test the previous weekend, felt brilliant. Tom was alert, keen but listening. His attention was on me and him and not once did I feel his physical or mental gaze wander outside the dressage arena.
The judge’s sheet shows we were awarded lots of 6s, a large helping of 7s plus an 8 and a 9. These are good marks. Actually, given that Tom and I have been a working partnership for about eight months, these are very good marks.
During the working-in for the show-jumping Tom changed mental gear. He upped his speed, upped his game and upped the amount of riding I had to do. The working-in was, frankly, fast and furious.
But our actual show-jumping round was more controlled, better balanced and more finely-tuned than I could have hoped for. Yes, Tom had a pole down, but that was just carelessness on his part. And yes we had a run-out because I got the pace of approach and angle wrong in to one fence. But that was it. And at no time did anything feel ‘wrong’. Slightly too quick, yes, but not wrong. And Tom’s jumping speed can be reduced even further, without threatening his ability.
So far, so positive.
Unfortunately the cross-country was a disaster, I had to retire us at fence 3 for reasons of safety. And yes, I was bitterly, bitterly disappointed. It was a lovely cross-country course and, with the exception of fence 5 which was a nasty – and very technical – ‘corner’, every fence on the track was well within our capability; we would have flown round.
Grump.
So here’s the plan.
Throttle back on the competing for the next couple of months.
I’m going to use the time to continue the improving trend in our dressage and show-jumping and, hopefully, find a way to reduce Tom’s speed in the approach to our cross-country fences.
This, I am declaring, is Our Way Forward.
Illnesses:
Thanks for the concern. The 24-hour tummy bug lasted 12 hours. How’s that for a service improvement? But unfortunately my hand is still sore from car door closure incident.
Bikes:
I passed a ‘motorised bicycle’ today. No, really! It was a normal pushbike that had been fitted with an electric engine.
So I’m just wondering.
Would it have road tax and insurance? Or could it be ridden on the pavement/cycle-path?
Writing:
You know the sitcom? It’s nearly finished. I’m at the stage where the palms of my hands are itching and I want to get the thing in front of the TV companies.
Music:
I need to be doing the playlist for this weekend’s podcast! I can’t hang around here all evening nattering with you – gorgeous though you are!
The Internet is all about writing. Writing that inspires and excites, writing that informs and educates, writing in tags that make the web work, writing in 140 characters. Whatever you do in real life, it’s going to be represented on the web in writing. Yes, images and videos are important too, but they’re the cheese slice and gherkin on the Internet burger.
Today I woke up to find an email from Meaghan in my inbox. It wasn’t just to me – it was an update to all the supporters of Coming and Crying, one of the most amazing webby/creative projects around.
Meaghan works at Tumblr and I met her on the Man (hat on) tour, when I played the Tumblr office in New York. She and Melissa, both writers, have put together a book of short stories about sex. They have funded it through Kickstarter and have been documenting the whole process in blogs, on Twitter and in emails. They have had live events like the intimate readings and the latest listening session, where authors and supporters gathered to listen to studio recordings of the stories.
The update email is only for supporters (we paid for the inbox love ;), so I won’t reprint it all (there are plenty of public updates too), but here are a couple of excerpts to give you a taste:
I’m not gonna lie to you guys, because you are my safe space: writing a story that is in a BOOK with your name on it, while managing the production of a book, while working fulltime and trying to find a place to live is A RECIPE FOR CRYING TO YOUR MOTHER.
Having the book back meant one very specific, wonderful thing, and that is that while I was moving (I strongly advise anyone who is considering making a book and moving into an apartment at the same time to RECONSIDER), Melissa printed the whole thing out in a fancy Kinko’s way that costs more than an actual book. Which means that for the past 10 days or so I have been walking around town, hugging an actual physical object to my body, flipping through it, reading little pieces of it, and realizing just how goddamn good this thing we all decided to fucking go for really is.
When I first read about the C&C project on Meaghan’s blog, I signed up and handed over my money almost immediately. I hadn’t read the stories yet. Many of them hadn’t been written. They hadn’t started to make the actual book. They didn’t even know how. None of this mattered. I wanted it to succeed, and I wanted to be a part of it. And I wasn’t the only one. They raised about $5,000 in three days, completely smashing their Kickstarter target. The total donations are now $17,243.
The success of the venture rests on Meaghan’s writing. Coming and Crying is very cool, but the idea isn’t unique. There are loads of worthwhile and interesting art projects going on around the Internet, and Kickstarter is packed full of ideas. Meaghan’s Tumblr blog was popular way before she starting working for Tumblr (back when she was Jonathan Coulton’s Scarface) because it’s such a satisfying read. She comes across as honest, funny and likeable (which she is). When she writes an email to the mailing list of supporters they are inspired and excited.
We managed a tiny version of this with the Little Fish Paper Club last week. We made something personal and handmade and sent it out in handwritten envelopes to 100 people. It was beautifully designed by Bekim Mala and it arrived in the post like a present, but at its core was a piece of writing by Juju that was inspiring and exciting. When the Fishy Paper Squares arrived on Monday people were posting thank you messages and pictures on Facebook and Twitter, and thirty more people signed up for the next edition.
Juju’s story was based around the song Am I Crazy?, but that’s not what made it work. People want to connect with Juju. They can do it through the music, but on the web it’s through writing that the connections are really made. The constant conversations on Twitter and Facebook, the blog posts, the emails, the comments. It doesn’t always have to be about the music.
I unsubscribed from most band newsletters ages ago because they tend to be SERIOUSLY DULL. Now I mostly just get updates from the bands I play with. But I had a dig through the email archive for some examples of good and bad writing and came up with a few. I’ve vaguely anonymised the quotes. Let’s see if any of them are as inspiring as Meaghan’s C&C email:
Keen for something completely different?
XXX and I have collaborated on a new album, Odd Frost, downloadable at this link…
And if you’re around XXX on XXX, we’ll be launching at XXX with a performance bash. Please see the ‘Nightvisions’ section of the theatre’s newsletter below.
Thanks much for your time and consideration!
Hmm… How about this?:
Goodevening everyone, i do hope that this finds you all keeping warm and well.
I am very happy to say that we will be mastering our second album in the very near future after which we will reveal plans for its release…. exciting times indeed… and there is more good news as well in the form of a very talented keyboard player who will be joining us for our show this sunday evening. So do try and make it down to the XXX for the XXX. It promises to be great evening.
I don’t mean to be mean. I’m just as bad sometimes. But you get the idea, right? Not very inspiring.
If you’re a musician, you need to write for the Internet all the time. Not only blogs, Myspace updates and Facebook messages, but also meta information for MP3s, Bandcamp track descriptions, Twitter biographies, interviews and endless ‘about the band’ copy. So aspire to make it great. Not just interesting, but inspiring and exciting. Don’t make people sit through any more ‘Hi, it’s me. I played a gig. Buy my album.’ emails. Brighten up their day with some great writing. And it’s not compulsory, but ending a sentence in uppercase can often make it AWESOME. ;)
I bought The God Delusion in hardback when it was first released back in 2006 but I have to admit it has languished on my shelf for four years. I started to read it when I was studying psychology but in truth I had to put it back down after about fifty pages because I couldn’t devote the time necessary to reading it (there were huge psychology textbooks looking at me making me feel guilty whenever my nose wasn’t in one of them) and it just isn’t one of those books you can pick up and put down at irregular intervals. Since readjusting my priorities this year I have suddenly freed up a lot of time to start reading seriously again so it was only a matter of time before I picked it up. I was inspired to do so mainly because I have been thinking a lot about what my own atheism means to me and also because I had the chance to see Dawkins giving a talk at the Oxford Union recently. It was the second time I had heard him speak (the first was after dinner at formal hall in Exeter College many years ago) and he was as lucid and compelling as ever as he read from his latest tome, The Greatest Show on Earth.
I have to say I have been rather surprised at the very negative response to Sex and the City 2, negativity which seems to me to stem from an endemic chauvinism within the critical film press. I concur, the film is indeed flawed, but rather than making personal attacks about the female characters or the actresses playing them I thought the majority of the blame was with the ‘male’ writer and director Michael Patrick King. It is flawed due to its rather desperate search for a plot-line which we have not, as a long-standing audience, seen before over the course of the very successful television series (the plot starts with Carrie and Mr Big, sags in the middle as she gets a bit moon-faced over Aidan, before going back to Big, which is essentially the entire plot of the series only not as interesting second time round). Taking the girls out of New York City was also something of a mistake, but on a completely aesthetic level a rather loved all the plush interiors and fashion of Abu Dhabi (or rather Morroco, where it was filmed).
Many critics have bemoaned what they see as four women who are vacuous and completely detached from ‘normal life’ (I didn’t know films, which deal mostly in fantasy, had to subscribe to such a thing), but to me they are just four characters who have been allowed to get stale at the pen of their creator/director when in all honesty their lives had been neatly wrapped up in the first film (again much-maligned, but at least this movie had a genuine emotional thrust – the marriage of our favourite New York couple). But the accusation that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda have become four hysterical women with no professional or domestic concerns is absolute rubbish. The film centres on them taking a vacation from the pressures of their lives – and what’s so bad about that? At best the film is just two hours of amusing but at times rambling light entertainment which could have done with a little more ’sex’ and a little more ‘city’.
I’ve been a fan of the show really since the beginning. Although it pains me to say, I remember watching the very first series with my housemates during my first degree in English Lit ten years ago (is it really that long ago?) I’ve followed it faithfully throughout all six seasons and then two years ago I dipped into my wallet and bought the entire boxset (which comes in a rather amusing ’shoe box’ though cost the fraction of Manolo Blahniks) and it has been a wise investment with excellent returns (the episodes never grow old and there is nothing better, when ill and/or hungover, than a SATC marathon). For a long time I always strongly identified with Miranda – smart, funny, loud, wise cracking, successful, red headed – I often cited her as my favourite character and the one, on those useless internet quizzes (with my deliberately skewed answers) I always came out as.
I also appreciate how she is always her own person. She says exactly what she feels, she is honest and forthright in her relationships, she has her own fearless sense of style (all the more commendable when she gets its spectacularly wrong), she never attempts to define herself by others, and she always tries to be true to what it is she wants, even when that can cause pain to others and to herself. For me however, what I like most about Carrie is that she is a person in her mid-thirties who rents an apartment (only becoming a house owner once her hands are absolutely tied), hasn’t felt the need to commit to one person for fear of an imaginary clock ticking, who doesn’t want children, whose financial situation can often be precarious (she never saves), who likes to be glamorous and have fun, and does not subscribe to age-specific landmarks which many feel obliged to tick off as they go through their twenties/thirties.
How many times have you heard people describe her character as pathetic and self-centred? These people are usually married in their twenties, have joint saving accounts within months of meeting each other, managed to get on the property ladder early on despite the crippling financial burden (better to be on any rung of the ladder than off they say), have or are planning children, are in ‘traditional professions’, don’t ‘waste’ their time reading books or patronising the arts because that’s what people do at school and there are now kids to provide for, and who rarely (if ever) put themselves first. This is perhaps why I like Carrie Bradshaw the most, because as I have come to realise now I am in my thirties, there are certain pressures and expectations to achieve certain things which seem adult and grown up but which frankly I don’t care for. She is a pioneer for those who won’t settle for second best. Yes, she finally marries Big (in her forties), but it is on the understanding that very little will change between them – no kids, no end to her professional writing life, no end to the glamour and parties, and no sale on her old apartment.
I have to say I have been rather surprised at the very negative response to Sex and the City 2, negativity which seems to me to stem from an endemic chauvinism within the critical film press. I concur, the film is indeed flawed, but rather than making personal attacks about the female characters or the actresses playing them I thought the majority of the blame was with the ‘male’ writer and director Michael Patrick King. It is flawed due to its rather desperate search for a plot-line which we have not, as a long-standing audience, seen before over the course of the very successful television series (the plot starts with Carrie and Mr Big, sags in the middle as she gets a bit moon-faced over Aidan, before going back to Big, which is essentially the entire plot of the series only not as interesting second time round). Taking the girls out of New York City was also something of a mistake, but on a completely aesthetic level a rather loved all the plush interiors and fashion of Abu Dhabi (or rather Morroco, where it was filmed).
Many critics have bemoaned what they see as four women who are vacuous and completely detached from ‘normal life’ (I didn’t know films, which deal mostly in fantasy, had to subscribe to such a thing), but to me they are just four characters who have been allowed to get stale at the pen of their creator/director when in all honesty their lives had been neatly wrapped up in the first film (again much-maligned, but at least this movie had a genuine emotional thrust – the marriage of our favourite New York couple). But the accusation that Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda have become four hysterical women with no professional or domestic concerns is absolute rubbish. The film centres on them taking a vacation from the pressures of their lives – and what’s so bad about that? At best the film is just two hours of amusing but at times rambling light entertainment which could have done with a little more ’sex’ and a little more ‘city’.
I’ve been a fan of the show really since the beginning. Although it pains me to say, I remember watching the very first series with my housemates during my first degree in English Lit ten years ago (is it really that long ago?) I’ve followed it faithfully throughout all six seasons and then two years ago I dipped into my wallet and bought the entire boxset (which comes in a rather amusing ’shoe box’ though cost the fraction of Manolo Blahniks) and it has been a wise investment with excellent returns (the episodes never grow old and there is nothing better, when ill and/or hungover, than a SATC marathon). For a long time I always strongly identified with Miranda – smart, funny, loud, wise cracking, successful, red headed – I often cited her as my favourite character and the one, on those useless internet quizzes (with my deliberately skewed answers) I always came out as.
I also appreciate how she is always her own person. She says exactly what she feels, she is honest and forthright in her relationships, she has her own fearless sense of style (all the more commendable when she gets its spectacularly wrong), she never attempts to define herself by others, and she always tries to be true to what it is she wants, even when that can cause pain to others and to herself. For me however, what I like most about Carrie is that she is a person in her mid-thirties who rents an apartment (only becoming a house owner once her hands are absolutely tied), hasn’t felt the need to commit to one person for fear of an imaginary clock ticking, who doesn’t want children, whose financial situation can often be precarious (she never saves), who likes to be glamorous and have fun, and does not subscribe to age-specific landmarks which many feel obliged to tick off as they go through their twenties/thirties.
How many times have you heard people describe her character as pathetic and self-centred? These people are usually married in their twenties, have joint saving accounts within months of meeting each other, managed to get on the property ladder early on despite the crippling financial burden (better to be on any rung of the ladder than off they say), have or are planning children, are in ‘traditional professions’, don’t ‘waste’ their time reading books or patronising the arts because that’s what people do at school and there are now kids to provide for, and who rarely (if ever) put themselves first. This is perhaps why I like Carrie Bradshaw the most, because as I have come to realise now I am in my thirties, there are certain pressures and expectations to achieve certain things which seem adult and grown up but which frankly I don’t care for. She is a pioneer for those who won’t settle for second best. Yes, she finally marries Big (in her forties), but it is on the understanding that very little will change between them – no kids, no end to her professional writing life, no end to the glamour and parties, and no sale on her old apartment.
This crook of land shoulders me, a great protector
of hills plush with luminescent ferns, hardy shrubs,
and lined by ancient sheep paths. And beneath me
a lip of rock, prehistoric forms looking to a horizon.
The infinite sheet before me is glaucous and white,
ever-moving as lunar light, the oily spread of years
crashing against the coast, endless and unceasing.
It is a tide marking off a life, the din of time passing.
As I sit upon this wooden bench, salted and rotten,
overlooked by the stunted lighthouse at Bull Point,
I find all decision is buffeted, the sea a great anvil
hammering out a future not ready to be quenched.
It is an unsatisfactory mirror, its broken reflections
require every viewer to piece together their own
answers. Here is mine; hold the pen, write with it,
for yours must be the unhappy life of the intellect.
When there is no other employment then a life is
as restless as the sea, rocking between two shores,
and each word written is a wave striking another,
blue and fleeting, always erased by a tide incoming.
The domain for this website has recently changed from www.pviktor.com to www.pviktor.co.uk which means the RSS feed you subscribe to may no longer show updated posts in your designated reader. Please make sure you update your subscriptions with the new address. (Note: for those who may be slightly confused about this, I have always had both domains mapped to this site, but the .co.uk domain took precedence over the site’s post and page urls whereas the .com domain often only pointed to the home page, in which case you may not need to change the feed at all).
Admittedly things have gone a little quiet over the last few weeks so it is time for an update on what has been happening. I have been doing a lot of thinking about my life recently and asking many questions about my long term goals. Over the last eighteen months / two years I have devoted an extraordinary amount of time to this website, writing for it constantly and building and maintaining a readership with people who have enjoyed the content I have been posting. However, about a month ago I suddenly had one of those moments when I looked at my to-do list and saw how much time I was spending writing for this site and others, as well as maintaining a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, Digg, and Myspace. I had somehow inadvertently made a full time job of blogging, on top of working a normal nine to five job (albeit part-time), and the realisation brought things to a head for me. I love to write about books and pop culture, but I think I have been expending far too much effort writing blog posts and not devoting enough time doing what I really want to do – writing fiction. I also found I had little time to read and do other things I enjoy. It’s not great waking up on a Saturday morning and feeling obliged to write reviews and posts when you all you want to do is see friends, sit in the garden reading, or get on with that second novel you have been promising to start for the past three years.
As a result I am scaling back and making positive changes in my life. To start with I have deleted my Twitter account, Facebook profile and page, Myspace profile, Digg account and all other social media platforms. These have all served their purpose, namely to increase readership, but the fact is a readership has to be built on and maintained and this takes a huge amount of time and effort (which I don’t have). I didn’t make any kind of announcements about deleting these accounts as I didn’t want to be dramatic about it. I have met some great people and I will maintain those friendships independently. I have also simplified this website in the following ways; I have stripped the home page and made this site specifically about blog content (which is how it was in the old days), I have taken away all of the social media plugins (which began to slow the ‘page loading time’ down), and I have removed the www.pviktor.com domain name so the site now only operates under www.pviktor.co.uk (be sure to update your blog feeds as a result). Regular readers will also notice that blog posts have dramatically decreased to a few posts a week rather than every day. This will remain the case, and I shall be reviewing less music in the future too (who needs yet another blogger writing their opinions on the latest album?) From now on I will be writing mostly about books and posting my own poetry.
So what about the future? Well, I will continue to scale things back over the course of this year and ultimately when the current domain name expires at the end of December I will be shutting this site down for good. By that point I will have been blogging for six years and even though I have really enjoyed it and learned so much I think it is time to stop and breath and think about the next project. I don’t think it will mark the end of blogging for me but in the future it will be in a new guise and will be something completely different (I have some ideas already but they won’t see the light of day until earliest summer next year and even then only after I have had sufficient breathing space). I also want to start to write under my own name and while P.Viktor has served as a useful pseudonym it is time to kill him off. I need a completely new start and I also want to concentrate on writing a second novel and placing this with an agent and a good publisher. Self-publishing has been a great learning curve but I just don’t think it is an adequate alternative to traditional publishing at the moment (especially for writers yet to establish themselves). I am now in a place where my sole writing efforts are back on poetry and fiction writing which is what I want to do. Making these changes now is important – it is always good to mix things up, even though the terror of ending something you have put so much work into over so many years is horrible to deal with. It is time to re-establish my goals and start pursuing them again.
The smallest of pleasures can be found here,
within the high redbrick walls which square
a miniature kingdom, a secret garden hidden
within a tessellation of neighbouring gardens.
There is no quiet quite like it, suffuse as it is
with the twittering of unnamed English birds,
the droning of lawnmowers and light aircraft,
the staccato laughs of children playing war.
This peace is suburban, as the breeze brings
the odours of late spring flowers, tinged by
the compost’s sweetly rotten wafts festering
in the heat of the first hot days of summer.
I can smell the withering vegetable peelings,
the weeds and limp cuttings, the mouldering
cardboard, the eggs shells and used teabags.
It is the redolence of decay under all things.
Sitting on veneered furniture, the gravel lawn
neat and manicured, I read and bathe in a sun
unusually hot for this time of year. Nothing of
the outside world can impinge upon existence.
Before me the neighbour’s apple tree is twisted,
bent by the labours of its fruit, and the terraced
houses behind it are in rows as mirror images,
ad infinitum as they curve towards the horizon.
Our neighbours look down avariciously from
the second floor windows like Rapunzel gazing
at the witch’s grove. And I, the witch, shrivel in
their sight, pretend to ignore their prying eyes.
I have spent a lifetime in gardens such as these,
buffeted by the safety of this realm unpeopled,
shying from the bullying insistence of a world
whose abeyance is by a false, temporary guard.
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