A special blog is needed since for once I am
elsewhere than in Glasgow moping along at a snail’s pace on the
various writings I am pummelling onto the page with these fists of
fury. I am in Reit im Winkl with my co-editor at Verbivoracious
Press, editing the Gilbert Adair festschrift, weeding the shaggier
fronds of my story collection and working pell-mell on the more OCD
aspects of my novel-in-progress, being intermittently besieged by
flies, and rather crankily enduring the heat and absence of solitude.
Reit im Winkl is a small village on the Austrian border walled in by
modest forests and numerous ski lifts, popular among the
snow-inclined in winter, and that is all I have to say on the matter.
This being a writer’s blog about what the writer
(me) is writing—let me amuse you (me) with a précis in equal parts
boring and factual. The Gilbert Adair festschrift is a selection of
fiction and essays dedicated to the Scots-English-French novelist,
critic, translator, and film aficionado. One of the greatest
all-rounders of the last three decades, Adair died in 2011 without
having earned a place in the hearts and hearths of the masses and the
chattering classes, so this festschrift aims to correct that
error in an entertaining and informative manner. I have been obsessed
with writing about writers for as long as I have been a writer and
the latest strain of this obsession has fed into the novel, The
House of Writers, about which more info in the previous posts,
and the collection, The Writer’s Writer and Other Writers.
Keen-peepered readers will note the word ‘writer’ in both titles
hinting at this obsession.
This brings us to an impasse, since I neither like
talking about the banal details of what happens in my real life
(these details will be reworked and re-imagined in the fictions), nor
about travels and photos of nice scenes (the proliferation of images
on the net has rendered one’s presence at the nice view
unnecessary), nor about what I am working on in ponderous detail
(since the finished work is what matters and one’s thought
processes are not something that should be rendered on the page
unless one is constructing a neat parcel of bullshit about their
creative process). So, once again, futility has prevented this blog
update from igniting. I will disclose, however, that the novel is
progressing to a pleasing point, having escaped an earlier
abandonment and attempt to chisel the thing into an ill-fitting
novella. The story collection is nearing completion and only a
last-minute paranoia about repeated forms or half-baked prose will
prevent this thing from limping into the publish-me queue.
