Here's that Diary Update, Amigos.


Tuesday: uploaded Baby Bonus 1 from bar in town. Had a couple of drinks, came home, Lost, bed.

Wednesday: Woke to serious building destruction / construction, clouds of dust everywhere. Hammers, cement mixers, etc. These things finding their way into the story. Wrote 2000 words, went out to internet cafe to mail P and check mail etc. Came home. Wrote more. Had break, wrote more. All in all, a 4000 word day. Delighted with self. Weather getting hotter, sweat pours as one sits in sun. Tried to irradiate self – instead got covered in sweat and came inside.
Waited for guy to come and place electric meter outside, decided to keep busy. Washed filthy wall I recently scraped lose paint from. Made matters worse, more paint coming off, wall no cleaner. Hernia pain as the lad popped out for a look around. Pushed him back in. Carried on washing wall. Hernia popped out again, definitely trying to tell me something. Chatted with neighbours about walls and hernias. Watched DVDs, drank vino, went to bed, had amusing idea for Bonus track, wrote it down, went to bed again.

Thursday; one week to go. Woke up, wrote massive treatise on The One for possible future podcast. However, doubt I ever will because I feel it’s for people to interpret for themselves rather than be told. Kind of spoils it. Especially look forward to one day getting thoughtful letters from people who have ideas to see if they concur with my own ideas. Had a few already: one guy was expecting extraterrestrials. Didn’t anticipate that interpretation, but interesting nevertheless.
Got up and went out to fill all the cracks in the wall, sun was soon upon me and the sweat was spurting out of me. Put on Panama hat, feeling vaguely ridiculous, Noel Coward’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen in my head. Hernia popped out; stopped work and came in for lunch. Spoke to Spanish friend, student of mine. She’s broken her toe. Still, she’s coming to classes tonight.
Had lunch, sat down to write first quota of the day. Difficult to settle into routine as always something that needs doing. Guy coming tomorrow to move leccy meter outside at 8.30. Lot of bother no doubt, but necessary. Sitting here, sweating as I write. Will get fan later, but for now, just sweat and write: somehow more appropriate.

Friday: woke early, man coming to put leccy meter outside. Used low sun advantage to paint external wall. Sweat like a racehorse. Man came, made hole in wall, put in plastic box, had to go. Said he’d be back on Monday when it had dried and stuff. Carried on painting till all paint gone. Came in, had lunch. Wrote – rubbish. Had nap, woke up, wrote again. Much better, wrote for hours until started making mistakes (about 2000 words). Went to internet bar to upload stuff, collect mail, check stats. Baby Bonus done great numbers. Happy. Came home, ate. Then, drinking wine, eating big oily tasting crisps and watching pirate copy of Fantastic Four 2 (which I quite enjoyed) became plagued with doubts over Extrañeros. Wonder if I should even continue, or maybe continue but release under pseudonym. Wonder if best to just keep going; finish the first draught and re-write it and re-write it until I do like it. Seems like the best plan. C called. Spoke about stuff. Went to bed, tipsy.

Saturday: woke up late, day already too hot to do much. Sat down and worked on The Grave for the next Bonus Track. Kind of story that makes me smile; black humour, uncomfortable, compelling. I enjoyed it and look forward to reading it on BT3. Expect complaints though (as always) (and as always, doubt if any will come).
Try to sit in sun – too hot.

Then went on to write 2000 words on Extrañeros. Good stuff, different from OAtS and my short stories, but still, good. I enjoyed writing it. I have to accept that some people won’t like it, some people may be offended. But then I always think this. People generally aren’t, and even if they are, isn’t that sort of what books are supposed to do anyway? Stir things up, make people look at things in different ways? I have to go on. It’s like, not an option. This story demands to be told, the characters demand it.

Sunday: woke early and read on the terrace. Morning is the best time of day; sunny and yet shade is available. Nice temperature. Came in, did more work on The Grave. Still finding ticks and bugs, not cases of wrong words or grammar so much as just ‘could be better’. There’s also the page formatting problems in updating documents from that old Samsung notebook thing I used to own or earlier versions of Word. Bugs galore.
Time now 11.am and sitting here I can really feel the heat. My blood pressure is starting to rise; I can feel it in my extremities, like I’m cooking in a microwave. I must get some aspirin to thin my blood or whatever.
Happy as I am here, in some ways I’m ready to go home. I now like the idea of cold. The idea of a grey day, the hint of a chill in the air, appeals after two weeks of ever-rising heat. Also, I guess, because home is where P is, and so this just isn’t home without her.

Later I worked on poems like Bunty and Once a Flock, bringing them to podcastable standard (finishing them, basically).
K came around for a chat and a tour of my podcast world and we discussed my travel arrangements for Thursday. Seems I need to contact L pronto about doing an airport drop as he’s a busy bee. I called in at K and A’s too to see if K fancied doing it, but he was kind of ‘hmmm’, so I had a tour of their place (from which I was able to see plastic bottle on our roof, as thrown by local kids – which explains odd bits and pieces I see on K and E’s roof too). They’ve done a lot of work over there with plasterboard walls – making rooms were there was only one previously, and lots of electrical upgrading. Apparently the previous occupants tried to take out everything – including the kitchen sink when they left and the woman who lived there, even though she wanted to leave, got a bit hysterical when it came to actually going.
Anyway, I came back and made a lentil curry
Watched a bootleg copy of ‘Grindhouse’; too long, exhausting even.
And as you can see: no work Extrañeros today, this is because I spent much of Sunday doubting it: doubting it as a novel, as a podcast, Just doubting it.

Monday: woke up and came up with thread idea for Sleepless 2. Very strong idea: definite sequel material. Kind of six years later stuff (which it would be).
Went to shops, bought more paint and a vegetable peeler, plus a bunch of shopping at Mercadona. Temperatures are just silly at the moment. Yesterday it was 100 degrees F in the shade (another reason why writing comes reluctantly). Came back, wrote this.

Just wrote today’s first instalment, 1, 800 words, which officially almost makes up for yesterday’s poor output. The text was great, I liked it a lot. It’s obviously rough, just vomited from my head onto the page with as much order and organisation as that delightful substance, however, I can do all the organising and improvements later. Right now, get it out, that’s the main task.
I was shocked to learn that I’ve produced just over 20,000 words. That means I’m 30,000 short of the word-count designation of a novel. I’m delighted. I feel like I’ve actually achieved something here. A novella is 15 – 30,000 words, so I can safely say I’ve entered into that territory, and story wise, I am realistically, only still in the first act of a three-act drama. It would be nice to wrap the novel at 90,000 words or under, if only for podcasting’s sake: I don’t want to go over twenty episodes on this one, simply because over the twenty episode mark I start to get tired.

The big problem now is the heat. I’m sweltering here, I’m sweating as I write; my blood pressure is up - my feet and hands feel like they’re being inflated with poison gas. I want to get into a cold bath, and I would, if that guy wasn’t coming at some stage (whenever between now and midnight) to finish the leccy box out front.

OK. Lunchtime
Man hasn’t come. This whole mañana thing is a pain in the arse, ‘sometime whenever’ would be a better phrase. Anyway, wrote another 1, 700 words. It’s 8.30 and I’m sitting here sweating, taking aspirin to try and keep my blood thin. I tried to run a cold foot bath but got tired of waiting for the cold tap to stop running hot and start running cold. Seriously, this is insane: books warp in the heat – I’ve seen them warp with cold and damp, but not from the heat. You leave a book for an hour in direct sun and come back an hour later - it looks like you’ve been carrying it in the back pocket of your jeans for six months.
I tried to sunbathe again, but the sweat was dripping off my like I had a tap on my head and I’d forgotten to shut it off properly, drip, drip, drip. I came inside and went downstairs for some Rainbow Six and my head was throbbing like a cartoon. It didn’t hurt; it was just throbbing, pulsating. I was only in the sun for about six minutes. Upstairs a few moments ago – I keep trying to have normal holiday moments – and it’s like sitting in an oven. The tiles are too hot to walk on, the arms of the chair are hot enough to take skin off and the sun itself (at 8.30 pm) still has the power to burn. I had to come in again.
I’m going to open a bottle and watch Lost and some dumb movies. I fancy They Live tonight. Oh, and yes, I know that wine mightn’t be so great for my blood pressure, but fuck it. I feel like Alec Guinness going into the hot box in Bridge Over the River Kwai. But with wine and nibbles – and a fan.

Tuesday:
Up at seven, another night roasting under the fan, which pushes the hot air around the room. Late night last night: forced by noisy pack kids to watch all of ‘In the Mouth of Madness’. I hate that film, I’ve watched it about 3 times now, and I always end up thinking, ‘well that was pants.’ Then a year later, I can’t remember what it is I didn’t like about it. Let me now state what it is, so as to remind myself next year... It’s stupid, the plot – which thinks it’s clever – is just dumb. By the half way mark I’ve lost interest (as I always do) and I’m watching it and thinking of things like Extrañeros or painting my wall.
Quick note on noisy pack kids for possible inclusion in book: probably because the daytime is so damn hot and the kids have to stay cooped all day long, then the dictates of the Spanish dining timetable means dinner at about 10 pm, which then means that all that trapped energy in the local kids gets released onto the streets at 11p.m. So from 11 pm to about 1 am, it’s time for about 15 kids to charge around, screaming at the top of their lungs and getting all worn out and ready for bed. Obviously the local Spanish folk don’t even notice this, but some of the local English have mentioned it with exasperation: get kept up till 1am by kids, get woken at 7am by builders smashing houses to bits. What do you do? Well, when in Rome... You take a siesta like everyone else does, that’s how they live here, and if you want to get enough sleep, that’s what you have to do too. Either that or be sure and drink enough vino the night before to keep you sedated through the construction work of the morning.
Anyway, today: got up early to take advantage of the baker’s van leaving the parking space in front of the only bit of wall yet to painted outside. Of course, some bastard had already gone and snagged the spec. However, he’d left about a foot between his car and the wall though, and so, knowing that tomorrow I may not be so lucky, I got my tin of paint and went out to squash myself into the gap and do the job. For some reason his car was attracting wasps, so at least I had company while I was working.
Then (praise be) the man came to do the leccy. He brought with him a seemingly mute kid that stood around being bored and hammering nails into random surfaces, like the pavement, while his boss did the work.
I had hoped that once that work was done I’d be free to leave the house and do other stuff, but no; seemingly (and it’s always ‘seemingly’ with my comprehension of what’s being said to me) the electric company are going to come and do something in order to finish the job. Until then I’m fucked.
When will this be?
Shrug of shoulders.
Today?
Maybe.
Great. The only time of day you can be sure they won’t come is siesta, the long midday when no-one does anything. This is when I can safely leave the house and... achieve nothing whatsoever, because everything is shut.

Just done my first writing of the day and book now stands at approx 23,000 words.

Book Going Well; Not Going Mad

Quick note from Internet Cafe in Spain. Book going well; characters coming to life and doing their own thing. On chapter four, though it's a mess and will need a lot of work when I get home.
Weather getting hotter. Done some decorating to house exterior, have to do it when sun is low in the morning.
Just got groceries in for weekend as I know that shops closed from tomorrow afternoon till Monday and I don't want to get up early tomorrow.
Message ends. Hasta luego, amigos
M

The Baby Bonus - Live(ish) from Spain.

Just a quick one. The Baby Bonus Track, a diary from Spain on the writing of novel #2 is now live at Podshow (and only at Podshow).

Here's a link: The Baby Bonus Track

The show also features music from Fruitcake Superbeing and Blahfishend.

Today (the day of the writing, not the posting) is the 22nd of July.

Hello there
This is my first blog entry from Spain and the writing of my second novel, provisionally titled, ‘Extraneros’ which in Spanish means ‘Foreigners / Strangers’. It’s the double significance that makes it the right title for this book, though for reasons that you’ll just have to wait to learn more of.
The process so far has gone pretty well. My wife and I came out here last week to a house in a white village in Andalucia. I wanted to be

a) In Spain
b) Hot
c) Isolated - with absolutely nothing else to do but write.

For the first week, my wife and I had a nice relaxing time, doing nothing much other than chilling out and trying to tan our deathly white skins to healthier, pinker hues.
The first thing I learned when I arrived was that I had neglected to pack my notes on the plot of the novel. So I had to re-write them all out from memory. This wasn’t altogether a bad thing as it meant I had to thoroughly re-examine the story and the people in it.
Then, on Saturday, my wife went back to Dublin, leaving me here on my own. In theory, this was my great idea. That theory being I’d write and therefore I’d wind up with a novel at the end of it all. However, I have to admit, I’m finding it a bit difficult. Not the writing, that’s coming along well enough. I finished my first draught of Chapters One and two today. It’s rough – and it needs a lot of refinement, but it’s out of my head and onto the page (ten pages of Windows A4 to be precise). So, that’s great.
The first part of writing a story, for me at least, is the hardest. Setting up the world and populating it with people. People who are, at the beginning, as strange to me as they are to readers when they begin the book: I know who the characters are and what they’re doing, but that’s all. But then, by Chapter 3, the characters begin to come to life, creating their own dialogue, doing the things they want to do and eschewing the things they don’t - whether or not I want them done or not.
This happened this evening, as I was closing Chapter 2 and starting Chapter 3, I suddenly fell through the screen and into the world of the story. The characters were doing and saying their own things. The people I had envisaged started to become the people they are and I simply found myself tagging along, writing down the things they say and do and hoping they don’t see me and get all self-conscious and start doing what they think I want them to again. It’s weird, fun and sort of exciting – especially since I’ve got two weeks of undisturbed solitude to work in. But that’s also the problem.
The difficult bit is the being alone. Solitude, isolation: think about that for a moment. When was the last time you were really, completely, alone? No spouse, no kids, no mates, no work colleagues: just you, alone. Weird isn’t it? I haven’t gone mad yet, but it does feel mighty strange.
I’ll leave you today with that thought. I’m alone in a foreign country, and I’m feeling mighty strange. A book is coming out of me, and although I’ve got a plot to work to, I get the feeling that over the course of the next few weeks, ‘plot’ is something I’ll probably be losing – and maybe in more ways than one.

Bonus #2 - Update
OK, due to problems people have had subscribing to Podshow, I've decided to drop the Bonus Track 2 into the Libsyn feed after all.
I can't say for sure if this will always be the case; I do want to keep the Bonus Track separate, but too many people got shut out in the early days of the Bonus Track's being on Podshow before I had the iTunes link on there. I thought the Podshow navigation was going to be fairly well-known to most podcast listeners (this being the age of Sigler, Dawn and Drew, Keith and The Girl etc), however, it wasn't - which means it isn't just me that finds the podshow set-up akin to Chinese alegebra.

So this Bonus Track at least will be in the Libsyn feed, if only for a limited period, until I can get the podshow site established.
So if you are subscribed to Podshow and you've already got it and you see your Sleepless feed whirring away - cancel it: coz it's The Bonus Track coming at ya (again).

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"
US poet (1819 - 1892)

Mike Bennett's Bonus Track #2
Hello Listeners
Just a quick note to say that Mike Bennett's Bonus Track #2 is now available from podshow.com / OneAmongTheSleepless.com/bonustrack / podcast alley and directly from here.

It features music, poems and the second part of the interview with Seth Harwood (better quality sound this time). I also spill a few beans on the location of my second novel, which I'm due to start writing... Well, just download the podcast and find out.

I'm going on my holidays (sort of - listen to the show) tomorrow and I'll be fairly offline for three weeks, so if you contact me and I'm slow to respond, that's why. Be patient, I will get back to you.

Cheers
Mike

Download "Bloodhounds On My Trail" (mp3)
from "Passover"
by The Black Angels
Light In The Attic

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More On This Album



Oh yes, and I messed up when I said that Death Cab for Cutie, 'Title and Registration' is on Ioda Promonet (I downloaded it ages ago and forgot where I got it from - Doh!) Anyway, DCfC can be found on the Podshow Podsafe Music Network. Sorry for any confusion.

Also on Podshow: Played All the Wrong Games and 'The Chocolate Box'.

Compare and Contrast... Sex, Death and Noisy ?

Hello Mateys,
I'm just taking a break from the re-writing of my 2001 short story, 'The Grave', which I'll be podcasting as part of The Bonus Track #2, to drop a brain teaser into the blog.

A listener in Australia (who I shan't name in case she'd prefer me not to) has come to me with a puzzler, I quote:

"I have to compare a book (which will obviously be One Among The Sleepless ...with either another book, or a movie, for English (class). It's just a simple essay, nothing too serious. I get to form the question the essay revolves around, and would like do make it something to do with the variety of characters - there's the psychotic one, the jock and his cronies, the sex symbol, the two nice ones who get together in the end, etc - or the way their lives all intertwine. I've done a lot of research, and haven't been able to come up with another book or movie with a similar 'character structure' - if you will - to that of your book. I was wondering if maybe you had any ideas?"

And the truth is, listeners, I don't have any idea. Call me Mr Not-Widely-Read or Mr Not-Movie-Hip, but I just can't. And I don't want my chum down in Aus to be put off doing some class-A work on my novel just because I'm too much of a cultural dunce to help. So I though I'd ask you lot. Does anyone have any ideas that might be of use? You can send them to me via email, or just slap them in the comments on this blog entry.

Many thanks.

Oh, and that Bonus Track shouldn't be too long now. Though saying that, I'm going away for the weekend and I'm working overtime and (fill in your additional excuse here ______________ ).

And another thing, looks like that spell out in Spain may well be on again for the writing of novel #2. Hot dog, it's all go!