The Woodstock of the Mind

This week, I have plans to go to the 14-acre Puzzlewood in the Forest of Dean. Described as a “maze of pathways winding through the gulleys of mossy rocks, twisted roots and bridges,” Puzzlewood has been the inspiration for Tolkien and Rowling alike (also, a filming location in both Merlin and Doctor Who). Naturally, I aspire to follow in the footsteps of these great literary giants, so Heathens has its own ‘enchanted forest’ — one full of ruin-stones, jackalopes, skeleton trees with fungus-acne and boys who are far too much trouble. Puzzlewood is thus the perfect spot for research, inspiration and spiritual contemplation. I’m going to take my camera and my Moleskine notebook ( ) and get beautifully, terrifically lost in this ancient woodland.

Next week, not to be out-done, I also intend to attend the Hay Festival, the so-called ‘Woodstock of the Mind’. Hay-on-Wye is a magical book town near the Welsh border, in the Black Mountains of the Brecon Beacons National Park. I’ve wanted to go since, like, forever. Finally, I will be browsing streets full of bookshops in the quaintest heart of Olde England. There is a bookshop called Murder and Mayhem, stocking crime and horror; there is a bookshop dedicated solely to poetry; there are antiquarian bookshops specialising in rare and out-of-print works…

This might be dangerous, in fact. I might never return.

I mean, LOOK! Just look at the booky wondrousness!

Don’t you want to live there?

(On a related note, how amazing would it be to do a world tour of book towns? Anyone up for that? I should have the money for it in about five thousand years.)

According to their website, the Hay Festival:

“gathers people together to think about the world as it is and to imagine how it might be. We share stories and ideas with great international writers and thinkers, film-makers, historians and novelists, philosophers, environmentalists, poets and scientists. And at night we like to party with the greatest comedians and musicians. It’s a bunch of mates hanging out in a field with time to think, finding the inspiration to re-imagine the world.”

I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do than that. Just that.

*   *   *

Evidently, I have ousted the daylight writer’s block that plagued me in my last post and am back to my usual business of ignoring the world. Huzzah! On the downside, I skipped Praise Sunday yet again yesterday (risking some serious smiting). The bad blogger returns. To be fair, I was working all weekend, and today I actually went SHOPPING for a change… Real world. Bright lights. Shiny people. But alas and alack (and pleasedonthateme), I’m going to have to impose a blogging blackout for the next two weeks so I can finish this Heathens draft and meet my deadline.

I know, I know, right? It’s going to be difficult, if not entirely impossible… Might have to define the terms a bit. By ‘blackout’ I don’t mean I’ll be completely incommunicado. I will post about Puzzlewood and Hay Festival and anything else of great importance that might occur, but in terms of my daily participation in WordPressery I’m slightly AWOL. I won’t be writing any of my 1,000 word epics. I won’t be keeping up with my WP reading. And I feel bad about that. I really do.

But I need to focus. The end is so close in sight. The five-year dream is finally being realised…

Or something.

With this in mind — and I know this sounds a bit wanky but I really do love reading you all — if there is anything in particular you’d really like me to consider for my Epic Sunday Praise catch-up post scheduled for 2nd June, which will contain practically a month’s worth of best bloggery, please comment on this post and I promise to check out your recommendations.

Alternatively, if you just miss me a bit, I will still be replying to emails (heathenwriter @ gmail . com) and tweets. Please feel free to send me randomly brilliant brain-farts to remind me that I still exist.

In the meantime, here is a picture of my new bovver boots. Fancy, eh? I promise a picture of me wearing these awesome boots in awesome Puzzlewood forest and awesome Hay-on-Wye very soon.

Big Love, like Fleetwood Mac,

Morgan x

Big black bovver boots

P.S. — Sorry if this post makes me sound like a shithead.

Night Writer

Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to be writing Heathens but I find the daytime so uninspiring. I’m a classic night owl; I do my best work in the darkest depths of the witching hours. I love being awake when the rest of the world is asleep, my fingers on fire as I listen to the sound of foxes playing on the heath, awaiting the well-synchronised reassurance of the 2am milk-van, rolling ‘cigarette’ after ‘cigarette’ as slumbering nothingness swallows the world whole.

Alas, I’m working at the doomed antiquarian bookshop this weekend and have to rise from my chambers at 7am tomorrow — that wicked and alien hour whose grotesque face I avoid at all costs.

I dread the morning. I hate the day. When it’s nighttime and I’m writing, I want the darkness to last forever.

This excerpt from Heathens just about covers it:

I stood at the window praying the sun would not rise. I knew it to be impossible but I hoped for a miracle.

Not of God, but of nature.

I would’ve given my soul not to see the burning brim of that great fire peeping over the horizon. Yet the stars soon gave way to daylight, as they had been doing ever since the first dawn, and with a sinking heart I saw the sun’s head crowning. I watched as its light grew, bleeding warmth over the slopes of the land, illuminating the patchwork hills and the stony mountains beyond, the tangled forever woods and silver, snaking rivers.

With every encroaching inch of daylight my heart became heavier, until it was an enormous stone in my chest, making it hard to breathe. I slumped down on my bed, defeated, and stared at the dresser opposite, facing my unchangeable, immovable fate.

The night is one’s friend, a comforting cloak of ethereal dust and twinkle that allows the author (moi!) to be drawn into the unwritten shadows of imagination. In the daytime I can hear people doing peopley things outside, driving cars, walking dogs, talking of the weather… and it anchors me too well in the here and now.

For any writer, the here and now is the enemy. The distractions of reality are both one’s inspiration and a great and terrible hindrance. I am one of those lucky sods who has nothing much to do in life but write, yet even so, the bright allure of the day is still a fly in my ink. I loathe all of that healthy, happy normality, gawping at me freakishly. Urgh

That’s why night is best. No one interrupts me. There is nothing on television. Even the internet is exhausted. There is absolutely nothing to do but write. I can forget myself entirely, then. I can forget that I exist. Only at 3am, when I feel like I’m the only living person on earth, can I truly be free… by being someone else.

Perhaps it’s a self-serving concept I invented to justify my chronic dysfunction and laziness, or perhaps it’s the result of a string of slightly traumatic experiences, but I simply wasn’t cut-out for the real world. I am way too abnormal. One day I will be forced to join it properly and then I am sure I will embrace it under duress, but for today, for tonight, I am the insubstantial phantom of a real person, a holographic emanation of my Self, nothing but the atoms of words.

My ideal existence isn’t necessarily a ‘normal’ one. In my mind, my future-self is floating across oceans, drinking wine while doodling dioramas, having lots of impressive emotions. Even-more-ideally I’d be accompanied by some debauched Gothic god of a man, or some succulent bohemian honey of a woman (probably not both; great idea in theory, terrible in practice), but if I can’t have that then fuck it, I’ll do it alone.

I live to write, live for the void of night, and that is terribly, beautifully sad.

The Virtues of Trash Television

My new piece is up on Huffington Post today, if you’re interested. Click here to read my sociological musings on the inherent value of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and other televisual garbage. A choice quote:

Although I have no personal interest in slathering myself in fake tan, I enjoy observing those who do. Like David Attenborough in Sugar Hut or Sigmund Freud at a hoedown, these clown-faced starlets are the equivalent of naked-breasted warrior women with clay plates in their lips. I might watch Made in Chelsea to observe, in their natural habitat, creatures so wildly exotic and unencumbered by mortal plight that looking good in fur is their greatest challenge. They are the natives, with their strange rituals and foreign tongue, and I am the anthropologist, trying to understand, looking for commonalities.

The First 520 Words of Heathens

To make up for being a bad blogger lately, I am proud to share with you fine, fine people the first 500 (and 20) words of my debut novel Heathens, part of a trilogy to be published sometime this century

I hope you like them. The words, I mean. You might have read them before but if not, enjoy. I’d be extremely interested to hear your thoughts. Would you be compelled to keep reading? Feedback welcome.

—

Place me like a seal over your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
It burns like blazing fire,
like a mighty flame.

The Song of Songs
8:6-7

—

My name, Hosanna, means ‘please save me God’ in the long forgotten language of our ancestors. In church, we sang Hosanna in joyful voices full of worship, our faces split wide with smiles as we praised the skies. My name is written in the Holy Book. But I also heard Hosanna prayed in pain and in fear. I heard my name whispered as the last words of the dying and the damned. Hosanna is both a cry of exultation and a prayer for salvation, a prophecy of both darkness and light.

I was birthed on the day of Sabbath, when everyone else was at church. It was left to the servants to deliver me. Luckily the dark-skinned one named Temperance had five children back in her far-distant homeland. She bought me safely into the world, bloody, blue and screaming.

As my mother cradled me newly-born, the chapel choir began singing Hosanna. The sound of their hymn floated down the hill and in through the open window. So the Lord-God named me and decreed my fate, so He decided who I would be.

I did not choose my name but it came to define me. Hosanna I was christened and so Hosanna I became. Had I been called Ruth or Catherine or Marybeth I might have lived a nice, ordinary life. But such was God’s will, as interpreted by man: I was destined to sing His praises or beg for His forgiveness, or both.

I have been baptised three times. The first was in the parish of Calvary in Mercia, seven days after my birthing. In Angles, babies are Blessed with great haste else the Devil get to them when their heads are still soft as uncooked bread.

I was feverish and fitting, both signs of the Dark Man’s touch. At the physician’s insistence I was rushed to the chapel as soon as my mother could walk.

Apparently I was very unhappy that day. I cried myself purple when Father Job thrice dipped me naked into the font. I wailed and flailed my tiny fists and as my mother tried to quieten me I knocked over one of the three Trinity candles, representing the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The congregation watched in horror as the Father-candle toppled towards the actual Father, setting alight his robes.

I can’t remember it, of course, but according to my brother David there was an Almighty panic as the burning Priest plunged headfirst into the font. Hollering madly, he sloshed Holy water over himself in an attempt to douse the flames, accidentally swiping my face with fire as my mother pulled me away, shrieking.

I was marked with a scarlet burn across my left eye, normally unseen but for when I’m angry or upset, when it throbs hot and red — a reminder of the fiery chaos in which I was forged.

Even though I was just a baby, people whispered that I was cursed, branded by the Dark Man. The Devil had made me his.

Fortunately, my father was the Minister of Mercia, a man of the law and the cloth.

—

(Word count does not include quote. I cheated.)

(Copyright me, me, me.)

7 Facts, 15 Bloggers

Having been awarded the Versatile Blogger Award by Turmeric and Twine, it is now my duty to pass the baton. Obviously I’m totes grateful for the acclaim, honoured, bashful, etc. Thank you once more, lovely Habiba.

There’s something important I’m supposed to do first, though, but I can’t remember what it is. Ask you some questions? Do an Irish jig? Draw a map of my clitoris?

Oh yes, that’s it. 7 more random facts. Crikey. Aren’t you bored yet?

Photoshopped selfie

1. I actually own a Harry Potter costume.
2. I once interviewed Johnny Depp’s girlfriend Amber Heard.
3. My favourite video game is Day of the Tentacle.
4. I tried veal once. It was tasty.
5. I frequently get ID’ed buying cigarettes, even though I’m almost 30.
6. My karaoke songs are “Bitch” – Meredith Brooks, “One of Us” – Joan Osborne, and “I Would Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That)” — Meatloaf.
7. My go-to happy place is The Princess Bride.

Now on to business.

I think these folks are ‘versatile’, if not all-round fudding fabulous, thus I am awarding them all the Versatile Blogger Award, regardless of whether they are ‘new’ to blogging or not. We’re all new here! Possibly I’m pissing all over the traditions of the Versatile Blogger Award but that’s just the way I am. A heathen in every sense.

If you don’t get a mention it’s probably because I pimped you last Praise Sunday and I don’t want to be accused of nepotism, because you already have the Versatile Blogger Award (or else so many awards that I got confused and thought you did), because you don’t accept awards, or because after looking through all these blogs I realised I’d spent four hours of potential-novel-writing time on this perfunctory list and began to panic about all the things I’m supposed to be doing right now.

C’est la vie.

Here’s some love. You’re all awesomely versatile with cowbells.

1. Susan B. Raven
2. Andra Watkins
3. Letters To Dionysus
4. Dating Dramas of a Thirty Something
5. Speaker7
6. Lynette d’Arty-Cross
7. List of X
8. Jennie Saia
9. Sonora Vaughn
10. Sian Mann
11. The Misfortune of Knowing
12. A Small Press Life
13. sparklebumpsthebookwhore
14. The Spinky Kitten
15. S. W. May

A Postcard From My Ex-Wife

“We’re such heathens, darling.”

^ A charming postcard from my dreadlocked American ex-wife Ethel (though technically she’s still my Actual wife — we’re planning a fabulous divorce party in NYC soon) and my Polish muse Jinx, who was visiting the Big Apple.

They know me so well.

Here they are, look!

Ethel and Jinx

They both read my blog so say hiii, everyone Hopefully they’re not pissed that I put their picture up.

Here are 5 handy facts about my marriage to Ethel:

1. It lasted from Jan 2007 until Sept 2008.
2. It happened in a registry office in Barnet, London. There was a picture of the Queen on the wall. My parents were there.
3. Our rings were borrowed. I wore a black Topshop dress held together with a safety pin.
4. Our wedding reception consisted of a few awkward beers at All Bar One on a depressing rainy weeknight in Soho.
5. She did later buy me a proper nice Russian wedding ring. I wore it again recently to discourage rampant male attention when I went on holiday to Morocco with my best friend, who…

Yeah, that’s a whole other post

Or possibly not.

This postcard is my new favourite thing. Not only does it sum me up exceptionally well, it also reminds me of Hosanna and Wilder, my two beloved main characters in Heathens. Hopefully a bit of news on that soon — some rumblings in the works… I’m currently working to a two-week deadline for completion of the full first rewritten draft.

I really have to write something magnificent for The Huffington Post this week, too. I have a good idea, but it might get me in trouble and result in more “depressing person” comments. I don’t want to do a Jenny Schecter and end up dead in a pool, murdered by one of my friends.

What to do? Where’s that barrel of wine?

Interesting and Versatile

This week I have won two (yep, count ‘em, TWO) awards from fellow bloggers. The first is the Interesting Blog Award, which I was most kindly granted by Michaela Ragan at Old Picture Project. Thanks so much, dear!

The rules of the award are:

1. Thank the person who nominated you
2.  List 5 random facts about yourself
3. Nominate a minimum of 5 blogs for the award
4. Reply to 5 questions you are asked. Ask the nominees 5 new questions of your choice
5. Notify all nominees on their blog

So let us begin.

Five random facts about me:
1. I watch horror movies with the intention of scaring the shit out of myself but more often I merely larf, because I’m ‘ardcore. I welcome the opportunity to watch something truly sickening and disturbing that will scar me for life, if you have any recommendations?
2. I can’t dress for warm weather. All of my clothes are black.
3. My belief system can be best expressed with the following: “I believe in something, I just don’t know what it is.”
4. I’m not much of a cook, but I make a smashing risotto.
5. Here are some random things I like: Japan, old cemeteries, snowglobes, roller coasters, eerie forests, abandoned buildings, motels, roadtrips, mixtapes that tell stories, wine and cheese and bread.

Questions from Michaela:
1. What is your favorite time period?
The 1890s.
2. What is your hobby?
Writing, reading, smoking, thinking, daydreaming. That’s about it, to be honest. I’m not especially proactive. I used to make jewellery. I’m not bad at drawing. I take photographs. I eat. I learn things. The usual, you know.
3. What is your favorite photo that you own (old or new)?

New Year’s Eve 2010-11

4. What do you like to write about?
The true meaning of spirituality. War. Human nature. Love.
5. What is your favorite book? Favorite movie?
The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Network (1976). These answers would probably be different tomorrow.

My nominees for Interesting Blog Award are (in no particular order):

• Samantha Bush – http://happyappalachy.com (Happy Appalachy)
• Erica King – http://akingswanderlust.wordpress.com/ (A King’s Wanderlust)
• Anastazja Oppenheim - http://coverrated.com/ (Coverrated)
• John Zande – http://thesuperstitiousnakedape.wordpress.com/ (The Superstitious Naked Ape)
• Sheepman - http://lettersfromthetubes.wordpress.com/ (Letters From the Tubes)
• Six String Samurai – http://abriefhistoryoftimetravel.wordpress.com/about/ (A Brief History of Time Travel)

Congrats, lovelies, though of course you’re not obliged to accept. You might be much more humble than me.

Samantha, Erica, Ana, John, Sheepman and Six String – here are your questions:

1. What is your ‘spirit animal’?
2. What is your ‘theme tune’? (If you don’t have one, make it up.)
3. If you were being executed, what would your last meal be?
4. Say there’s an afterlife and you get to choose what it’s like. Tell me about it.
5. Do you believe in UFOs?

Commenters, please feel free to answer these questions also.

The second award is The Versatile Blogger Award, thanks to the very-lovely Habiba Smallen at Tumeric and Twine. But since that involves posting 7 more facts and nominating 15 more bloggers, I think I’ll have to return to it with a ‘Part Two’ this afternoon.

In the meantime, check it out! Ooh, ahh, etc.

The Model Community

Reblogged from Tip of My Tongue:

• 

No, "the model community" isn't some twisted Ayn Rand world view. It's much more fun than that! It's a community effort to visualize what it would look like if the fashion industry represented a true variety of body types and looks.

I won't go into the entire lead-up to this project right now. You can read about my realization of just how limited fashion's standard of beauty has become…

Read more… 803 more words

This is something you beauties might want to get involved with, too -- a 'real world modelling' project representing all ages, origins, body shapes and styles. Having spent my life gazing longingly at pictures of legs that are longer than my entire body, I'd like to see more tiny girls on the catwalk. Small is beautiful, or so they say.