A year ago at Christmas I got a book, a collection of stories by Adrian Tomine called Sleepwalk which touched me deeply. I had come back from Prague, where I had spent Xmas with M’s family, and my notebook. I had been dog-sitting for hours every day as they went to visit M’s grandmother, who was seriously ill in hospital, and I filled page after page with scrawlings, sketchings and ideas.
It’s impossible to describe how overjoyed I was to be doing so. I planned out so much. There were stories. There were essays. There were reveries to be written up as some kind of Unforgiving Minutes. There were the plans for Master Kidderminster which have not remotely come to fruition (it is depressing in fact to be looking back at how little has changed in my life).
I was getting into graphic novels at the time, and I think I was thinking then of trying to incorporate artwork into my writing, or indeed to write for the comics market, providing plots for illustrators and graphic artists.
I don’t have time to write. It was a problem then and it is a problem now. It is obvious to me now that there simply is not enough room in my life for me to have a relationship and to work full time. I came back today, Friday 29th February, 2008, and sat down at the computer and for the first time in a long while, following a few days or even weeks of taking garlic as an anti-fungal, I have been able to sit down and write. It was such a relief. I then resented the presence of M. Looking back over at notes made at the time, I can see that this is a repeating pattern. I never have been ready for a full-time relationship and my intermittent guilty desire for reading Anthony Storr’s Solitude is evidence not of a dark demon inside of me which must be repressed, but that my character is formed in such a way.
I felt bad today at leaving M on her own so I could write, but I would have been forcing myself to go to her, and I have forced myself to do so too many times, against my nature. I must not force myself against my nature.
On coming back from holiday I settled down with the few days of holiday I had left and wrote a review of this collection of graphic stories. At least, I tried to. I got as far as I ever do:
sleepwalk-and-other-stories-by-adrian-tomine.doc
But looking now, this was not before I wrote a few ideas for one story I wanted to post on this site (which I had not yet sorted out) for others to post their artwork. The notes, as ever, were far more sketchy than the ideas themselves. They remain so, although, unlike many other lost ideas (for which I grieve constantly), I can remember a fair deal of the stories as they revealed themselves to me. Unfortunately, even to write notes for such ideas takes more time than I usually have. Even in Prague with so much time to myself to write, I could not keep track of the ideas in my head, and several days had to write off so much. If only every day could be like those! It’s what I lust for. One day I hope to post those notebooks, as idiotic as much of them are, and describe some of those lost ideas.
The story is simple, and I would like it to remain so, as my own stories most often do not when I sit down to laboriously write them.
It would be a dream for me for people to post artwork, to flesh out the story. Of course in my original dreamy idea, this website was to have so much content, reflecting some of the richness of my mind, and so people would have been only too willing to submit artwork knowing that even if I decided not to choose them to draw further, less throwaway ideas, they would get some publicity all the same. Of course, that is not the case, and the only person to have yet commented on one of my stories misunderstood what I wanted to say and took offence because I was incoherent, perhaps impenetrable. Still, if our reach does not exceed our grasp…
The story was followed at the end of the month by another, which I would also love to see various interpretations of.
who-cares-what-picture-you-see.doc
Again, I see a pattern here. I thought of this idea after a trip to the cinema I am sure I never wanted.
I have a lot to sort out in my life right now, but the ideas are coming to me no less than they ever did. For this site, for graphic novels, stories, for so much. And my diet and concentration have improved so much in such a short space of time over the last few weeks. Maybe something, soon, will stick.
February 29th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
It’s interesting for me to see here what I was thinking. Pictured in that first page (the 4th page of that Xmas ‘07 notebook) is my works masseuse/nutritionist. In the picture he is shown guilty by association, with the top brass in the world of the works’ philosophy, people who make their own clothing and believe in fairies but not evolution. It was partly for this reason that I didn’t see him. I was so concerned that Candidiasis, the disorder I have been recently treating myself for and feeling the benefits, was not scientific. His association with them only confirmed this for a while. It is interesting to see how often certain strands of my life cycle back after a year. That seems to have happened so many times, what with books I have taken out of the library to research rape and the law concerning rape for Family Fortunes taken out (and once again repeatedly renewed and neglected) taken out a year after the first time. Interesting, but painful.