OK,
I think I may need to set a record straight here. I can't
be bothered trawling through the higher-volume groups
I posted to on this subject earlier but I consider that it
is possibly better posted here as there may be some
constructive comments that others starting off on the
path toward networking and collaborative writing may
find useful for when things don't quite go as planned.
Simon approached me whilst I was working behind a
bar in late 1993 possibly very early 1994.
At the time I had abandoned all hope of making it as
a young writer in the popular sector. And, in so many
ways, I am happier working with the factual. I had not
long finished a fixed contract with an R&D outift as a
junior technical author and the *****sment of writers
such as Hemingway and Greene that I had Received
rated their backgrounds in journalism as a defining
influence in the economy of their styles.
OK, knocking out a few do***ents for an ISO Quality
System is not journalism and is performed under very
different constraints.
However, I figured similar bookings would follow in time
and by such a point as I had settled into a career I'd've
developed a better understanding of human nature that
would enable me to write the kinds of tight, plausible,
fiction and tense, provocative poetry that precede an
eventual broadsheet obituary, which naturally would be
consistent with the kind of corpus that only decades
of consistent acclaimed output can justify.
Ha. Ha.
Anyway, I may have got things wrong when I recounted
this event before--I was still failing to get back going from
what's probably best described as nervous exhaustion
and was struggling with various linguistic factors. Oh, my
copyediting skills were fine; it was my conversational and,
to an extent, general writing skills which were awry.
I had also for the first time had to consider the possibility
I may lie somewhere on the Autistic-Aspergic spectrum,
having only realised it was kind of spectral from first-person
accounts by "High Functioning Auts".
I don't have their detachment. Life has always had some
characteristics of being adrift in a sea of other people's
feelings--from well before I ever took acid or aught.
Basically I'm not convinced either way.
However, as may run contrary to what I've said elsewhere,
Simon did approach me in a sympathetic spirit, having
heard that various other parties were ripping the **** out
of me and being, in his own estimation, well on the way
to being a successful writer.
He did bring samples, I seem to recall but I wasn't interested
and he didn't leave me any to ponder.
Anyway, he decided pretty much there and then that actually
I deserved it all and now he'd met me he could see why it
was people were ripping the **** out of me and announced
that he was going to do just as they were.
It's whether or not he originally approached me in a spirit
of sympathy that I'm unclear on. Perhaps he might like
to clarify?
It's entirely possible that all I'm doing here is misremembering
what happened in a light which is favourable to me.
Personally I don't care too much.
I know what I've been doing with music recently.
One outfit I was rehearsing with? I chucked some ideas
about one night and they made me stop because it was,
in their words, "like suddenly being in the middle of an
entirely different song altogether".
I suggested they concentrated on keeping on playing
regardless and gave themselves a chance to get used to
it, on the basis that a) playing regardless is a necessary
motor discipline for any real-time performance and b) in
practice there is only so much morphing that can be
done from any given reference point and I should've
dropped back into the song proper within a few bars
anyway.
They suggested I **** off and play like that elsewhere.
It was beautiful rather than abstract. I gather people agreed
it wasn't that it was ****, musically, it was just that it was
unsettling from a perspective of the perceptual mechanisms
involved in playing exactly the same as they had been only
moments before yet the entire sound was different.
The nearest analogy I can think of is if one considers a
song to be a month. It's like opening your curtains one
morning and instead of sandstone glacier valleys dotted
with weavers' cottages, you're looking over upstate New
York; then you close the curtains, rub your eyes, open
them again, and it's back to normal.
I'd forgotten about it until I got myself another mixer recently
and needed to put it to the test. I'm still having to keep on
playing it to reassure myself that, despite being off-the-cuff,
it really is quite as brilliant as it is in places.
It's a grey matter thing, and it puts my mind at rest over
any creativity I may show linguistically. I had to develop
an appreciation of signal mixing in the first place in order
to mimic it in real time. I just hadn't been expecting to
reproduce quite so faithfully some of the genius of the
late Thelonius Monk.
Particularly not as I was playing a guitar.
I doubt people will believe that it's not dubbed. But it's not.
Anyway, whilst I can't claim to be impervious to mockery,
it kind of recedes in comparison.
You stick with your computer games matey, and I'll play
with parameters that haven't been designed and coded and
play-tested and refined and re-coded, and marketed and
reviewed and rated as actually in terms of playability you
do feel like a pioneer...
....I used to love computer games and no doubt will become
obsessive once more with them when I have kids.
But for the moment I don't need to have any synthetic sense
of achievement designed into an off-the-shelf product in order
to face another day.
So, constructive feedback time for people looking to network,
Simon had done the work of learning to write. This much I do
believe. And it didn't take him too long to become a success;
it was only 6 or 7 years or so before 'Spaced' was a runaway
hit.
However, at that point in time, I gather, quite a lot of people'd
been fed rather more bull**** about me than truth. And the
effect on me socially was quite profound. Maybe I am on the
autistic spectrum; the people with whom I can stand and chew
the fat for hours on end seem few and far between sometimes
and I prefer the quiet focus of a pool or snooker table.
Certainly at this point in time I was quite routine-driven. I'm
less so now, much less so. I also have read both rather more
widely and significantly more deeply.
I wouldn't've have been up to it then, I wasn't interested as I
saw it as a distraction, and it really was totally unexpected.
He seemed surprised, if I recall, that I was totally unaware
that anybody was taking the rise out of me at all. Well, I was.
But I keep looking back and looking at everything from UK
employment law to the ethics of self-defence systems and
thinking: 3 chances is considered reasonable. He made one
approach.
I'm not looking to jump on the bandwagon. I'm merely saying
that so far as I remember it he initially approached me with
it in mind to help me fight my own corner then, having met
me, kind of took the attitude of "if you don't want to join me
then beat off" and I remember him as a precious little twat
for it.
I'm sure, Simon, that you'll've found what everybody else has
found: that actually what you ended up writing wasn't what
you would have ended up with if I'd been on board and, at
the end of the day, what you ended up writing is indeed what
people actually like.
If I'm wrong on anything here then please do set the record
straight.
As far as samples of your work go, I don't why you were so
uptight about them. There's no way I would've ripped you off;
it's just not in my character.
So yeah, I saw you the other night, appreciating the music,
remembering what I've pieced together, like how some creep
broke a needle in my arm trying to shoot me up with **** I
didn't want in my system then went arguing the toss about
how it wasn't ****, it was actually really ****ing good.
I gather Mr Julian would've agreed with him if he remembers
that year's May Ball booking.
As far as I'm concerned "****" is stuff I don't want in my
system and regardless how I may or may not have rationalised
my attitudes to a bit of this or that on occasion, I still consider
it was ****.
And to say these people were supposed to be so darned
intelligent, he was talking in terms of the needle and didn't
seem to have ever had a big enough profit margin to buy, say,
a Dremel multi, which, in all fairness, would've reconditioned
his precious ****ing needle to a usable state in seconds.
The long and short of it is that you approached me in a kind
spirit in the first instance but I can't help considering it was
probably rather contrived for the purposes of making me
feel good about myself ultimately.
And, quite frankly, I don't need you to ****ing do that for me.
Not then. Not now. Not ever.
I'll take you at face value on it though, until I have reason not
to. And, yeah, thanks, it was a nice, if misinformed, thought.
I'm pleased you've "made it". I suggest you actually wouldn't
have if I'd been on board.
So the upshot for anyone in a position of following up information
on strangers with a view to proposing collaborative projects is
that my advice is this:
If, at first, you don't succeed then try, and try again. But don't
bother any more after that.
Even computer games used to give you 3 goes as standard.
And they've featured so prominently in your work.
G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
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