This Blog’s Slow Decline

I can feel the rot setting in. What this blog needs is focus. New management. Some strategic thematic wank. When QoD launched in 2009 I wanted to combine detailed discussion on writing technique with amusing digressions and the occasional slice of fiction experiment. Now what do we have? Scraps! Book roundups. Does anyone need to know what I think of the five million books I read? Nay! Surreal fictions farted out the brain. Where’s the discipline? The effort? Oh, sir! This will not do, not at all.

So what we’re going to do is regulate the posts. There comes a point when the spontaneous word-slinging must stop and a new form of logic, order and coherence must dawn. I know this is hard for you to take on board. I know in our youth we climbed vast peaks together, vast peaks of strange words and ideas, entering lands of partial amusement and interest. But those days are gone. We burned brightly, we loved nightly. Now we’re shrivelled old-age husks, taking vittles through a straw, wondering whether we knew each other in a past life.

I exaggerate. The proceedings won’t vary too much. On Monday I’ll write a personal post about a particularity of the M.J. Nicholls experience. On Wednesday, a blog themed around writing in whatever tenuous way. Fridays will concern an arbitrary topic I will attempt to write about, chosen by Lizzie Sage in the Newscopter, or Bill in the sewercraft.

Quiddity will rise again!

What Makes a Good Writing Blog?

Blogging is tough. You sit there drinking your fifth gallon of strawberry Nesquik (or boozy liquid if you're pretending to be a grown-up) trying to commit words to posterity. You want to write something informative to show the world how immensely together you are as a writer. But you are writing into the void, writing for one or two people, so you must assume a future audience, a chance Googler who wants to know the one or two facts you can assert confidently. There are no perfect templates for the writers’ blog. All approaches are limned with flaws, such as using the word ‘limned,’ and the artless brain-splatter you write is to be applauded and cheered. Here’s why:

Blog Type #1: Informative & Wise

We hate these blogs because the people writing them come from business backgrounds and network their books into print with their luscious eyes and BBC tongues. They have their feet too firmly on terra firma and can’t possibly be decent writers. They don’t tip the keyboard upside down and eat the crumbs. They don’t yell at strangers for hours on end until they finally write the last 350 words of their stupid book proposal. They know what they are doing and they can help us become better writers, so we hate them.

BT #2: Read My Words Please

Contrary to the popular belief that writers are a friendly, encouraging community, writers are vicious rivals who will stop at nothing to get their story in Issue 5 of the Monkeypaste Annual. When a friend gets a book published they don’t respond to your emails as quickly, they start to sound more blasé to downplay their success (‘got this book deal thingie’), they start to offer patronising advice, they gradually acquire more powerful friends and leave you drowning a pool of your own urine. Their cute and funny blog is now updated semi-regularly with news about their awesome book Something To Do With the Occult and the subsequent tours and money and lovely love. You will never be friends with them again until your book Something To Do With the Occult But Done Differently gets into print, then you will become their Bestest Mate again.

BT #3: Hilarious Crazy Wackiness

Writers in the bizarro genre tend to be the sort of people who have to make the funniest remark, who demonstrate no warmth or care for other people’s comments, the sort who nod and wait for the moment they can make that semi-amusing observation that will make them the Wittiest Person in the World, Ever. So these blogs go to town on the exclamation marks and the insufferable goofiness and don’t really make it clear the author is a writer. They could be any number of loudmouth scene-stealers in a pub corner boring the assembled. As a consequence, these blogs are an exercise in vanity. (This blog has similar tendencies, but I am a love-starved child of the streets, so forgive me).

BT # 4: Apologetic

Maybe the person is attempting to become a writer but they’re finding it hard because they’ve just moved into a new house and they aren’t really sure what they’re doing I mean they like books and things, but they aren’t really sure, they might do something else, but in the meantime, here is four pages of their new novel.

So, there is no answer, except all writing blogs should be chaotic and reflect the splatter of the writer’s brain! Viva anarchy!

Checking In

No ideas for blogs or impulse to write strange things for personal amusement. No need for this post.

Don’t need to read this post. Don’t need to search words for deeper meanings or hidden subtexts. Don’t need to focus eyes on words and process each letter to form coherent message.

No need for panic. First rule of life among tetrapods is to remain calm and drink water. No need to embrace in an ever-loving hug until drought begins. No need for sadness.

New stories. First one is misanthropic moan about futility of existence. (Not a new theme). Second is an old one about why I don’t own a TV. Third is about moving to Russia and not meeting peasants.

No need to argue. The healing ointments will arrive soon.

Five Paragraphs

Paragraph About MA:

This term abounds in bumper crops of work. I’m hoping to go insane in March and convalesce in October, after graduation. I stopped being so obsessive about grade-hunting last term (because I bombed the assignments), so won’t be so sad to get my low pees this time. I’ll still put in the effort, but this course is about learning how to do things well. Things I have no aptitude for well. This includes making errors and weeping. Fact.

Paragraph About LEVY:

Sometimes you read books that set aspirant benchmarks. One such book is the incredible Billy and Girl by Deborah Levy. The novel hits the highs I aspire to hit one day, building a strange and humorous world around damaged and original characters. It staggered and floored me. And for British people it is easily accessible at the Devil’s Bookshop.

Paragraph About BLOGGING:

I hate one-sided bloggers who post and then refuse to interact with other bloggers. When people sneer at bloggers I kick them in the face and steal their Ribena. I like to visit and comment on other blogs but I am stuck on a 2004 computer that runs slower than a sleeping Linford Christie. So I do generally read the blogs on my blog roll most weeks, and if there’s no comments, bask in the knowledge I am reading and learning and loving.

Paragraph About STUPIDITY:

I forgot to renew my student card at the start of term. I must be going mad since I swear I read an email about this. There are times when I envy the stupid. I’m hardly an intellectual colossus, but I do know words like colossus, so I’m hardly mixing with the mongs. Having said that, I only befriend idiots. I find I can pour my ideologies into their minds and get them to lift things for me. Failing that, they make neat coffee tables.

Paragraph About PARAGRAPHS:

I grew up respecting the well-placed paragraph break. In Infinite Jest, there are about five paragraph breaks in 1000 pages. There is a term for this sort of torture: paragrapixis. (Try pronouncing that). Foster Wallace was a paragrapixist and Joyce was so scared of spaces he developed agoraphobia by proxy. Paragraph breaks are beautiful things. In terms of pacing and rhythm and structure and style. The whole caboodle. It’s no longer chic to bind words together like twine and print them in 10pt font. Give us room to breathe and laugh and love. That’s all we ask.

Studementia!

A few days ago, I met a plump woman on a traffic island in Marchmont. She told me about her two prize roosters, Elkie & Bournville. The former is due to perform in the Marchmont Poultry Slam this Friday, and the latter is more of a layabout, “like you students” she said.

Well. I took umbrage at this remark. Why do ‘grown-ups’ like portraying students as bone idle layabouts, too stoned on Rizzlas and pizza-bongs to so much as cough out a salutary hairball? And even worse, why do students indulge in this cliché, albeit with irony, but taking a genuine pride in thinking themselves immobile losers dripping with detached hipness?

This is an OUTRAGE! There are worse things to get riled up about, of course – the endless shirking of humanitarian laws by unscrupulous cunts hungry to taste western privilege; our slow descent into penury and suicide under the LibCon dictatorship; how our culture of conspicuous consumption has produced a generation of vacuous movie-quoting voids too obsessed with THINGS to form deep and meaningful spiritual unions with their fellow human beings.

However. I only have limited space on this blog. I’ll get to those later.

When I was first a student, I was profoundly miserable. Being the sort of sensitive emo type to find the deep sadness in the wilting of a petunia, the lost expression on an old man’s face, and so on, I took things very seriously indeed. Turning eighteen is NO LAUGHING MATTER. It is an exhausting transition period, when we shift from our cosseted naïve fantasia into the real world, with its snaking awfulness, its petulant horrors.

On top of this emotional whirligig, we are expected to be interested in our degrees. There isn’t TIME to be a lazy buffoon. If we sleep in to ten o’clock, it is because we are preparing ourselves to go OUT THERE, in that horrible shit-pit of a world, and do things with a modicum of success. The mistake here is confusing laziness with deep philosophical trauma. I explained this in great detail to the plump woman on the traffic island.

She apologised. She also added this illuminating point – perhaps workers are the true sloth of society. Perhaps those scowling philistines so quick to denigrate students are those sick with Sartrean nausea, their beings clenched with indecision and self-loathing. These people have grown embittered in their existential limbo – caught in the middle place between their obligation as British drones and people with hearts, passions, loves, hopes and dreams. You people are SICK with misery, and I PITY you.

At the moment, I am kept stable in my Napier MA, writing through the casual hellish nightmares that arise from being alive, and occasionally smiling at anyone who dares to send beams of light my way.

Be brave out there, and I will too.

P.S. I have totally pimped this mo'fo blog. If it ain't coup de la to your eyes, lemme know.

Hello, Beautiful

Blog neglect is a shame. The nature of blogging demands a casual relationship with one's readers, and because these readers don't exist, this means the relationship taking place is between oneself in the present and oneself in the past.

So to break it down, blogging is like having a relationship with a slightly younger version of yourself. You are the same person, only the person speaking to you is the person who wrote your last post a week, a month, or a year ago. What is that person saying?

Blimey, it's lonely here.

In the event that a later incarnation of myself is reading this – M.J. in June 2019, after my fifth child and first alcohol addiction, or M.J. in March 2076, when the Bumblebee Lizards have colonised Scotland – I would like to impart one piece of advice:

Don't waste time reading old blog posts.

Too late? Well, you might want to read 100% Godfrey instead, my new flash at the radically purple blog Clockwise Cat. Or perhaps a longer piece is what thine eyes require? In which case, read my splatterporn debut Inky Beast in the new issue of Deadman's Tome.

Thank you to the editors in question for the exposure, but mostly, thank you to me. Without me, none of this would be possible, so thank me very much. I hope me will come back soon!