Category Archives: Just James

Anything I feel like putting online that may or may not relate to anything.

By the way…your laptop is your wife

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Photo by Angela Roma at Pexels.

In Saturday’s Guardian Review they published the ten rules of writing of which my favourite came courtesy of Phillip Pullman: ‘My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work’. As is often the case with good advice, I’ve decided to completely ignore it and compile my own list.

1. Read your work out in public. You’ll develop a new found appreciation of tone, rhythm and punctuation. See the reaction of the audience as a kind of verbal editing. When they don’t laugh at your funny character, it’s because he isn’t funny.
2. Join a writing group and open the windows when you leave the flat. It will smell lovely and fresh when you come home and your girlfriend might finally agree to come over.

3. By the way…your laptop is your wife. That cute one that comes over when the flat smells nice is just your bit on the side. Treat her as such. Your loyalty is with your wife and a wife is for life.

4. Walk to work. This way you don’t have to waste valuable writing time joining a gym. There is no greater betrayal of the imagination, than joining a gym. Before you know it you’ll be slipping into your imagination and going over the various scenarios of your book.

5. Take a pencil and paper with you as you’ll be stopping every ten seconds to scribble these ideas down. It’s probably a good idea to invest in a pencil sharpener, finances permitting.

6. Buy a memory stick and type up everything you’ve just written when you get to work because you’ll lose the scraps of paper.

7. Get a job where you can write in peace and preferably one without too much responsibility. I strongly recommend the public sector. The perfect job is one in which you are able to do eight hours work in three, thus enabling you to write for the other five. This is the closest you’ll ever get to being a regularly paid writer. Feels great, doesn’t it.

8. Ensure you have a boss who doesn’t mind you being late. (see point 5)

9. Write a blog. It’s like having a regular mental workout and a good way to track the development of your thoughts. I don’t have a camera and so the blog is the closest thing I have to a photographic album. It’s also a great place to outlet those thoughts you know you’ll never have time to turn into stories but will eat away at you regardless. Like the one about ‘the strange man who used to crouch down every ten seconds by the side of the road to scribble something down. Nobody knew what he was writing or why he did it but…’

10. Don’t write a list of top ten writing tips when you haven’t had your novel published yet. It’s arrogant, delusional and distracts you from what matters. As does reading funny quotes by Philip Pullman on a Saturday afternoon

This was originally published as a guest blog for the Literature Network

Behind on the schoolwork

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Photo by Pixabay at Pexels. 

My son is sixteen years old and consequently, no longer wants to hang around with me. I’ve tried posturing like his friends and leaning up against lampposts in a provocative fashion, but he’s having none of it. Same for the footy or cinema, he’d prefer to go with his mates – can you believe the audacity of the little squirt, exerting his independence and personality instead of relying upon me as his fount of knowledge. I’m gonna have to get a pet dog, the ego can’t take it.

The most difficult aspect of watching your child become a young adult is that you don’t have a clue what makes them tick anymore. All knowledge is hidden away in an undecipherable text code, pseudonym myspace accounts, the music on the iPod I can’t even operate or the grunt of ‘nothing’ or ‘ok’ to every single question asked. All in all I no longer know who he is or what makes him tick. But then the best thing in the world happened. He got really behind on some school work.

I’m not going to vent my anger at the incompetence of a school that lets a child get one year behind on assignments and fails to mention it because without their incompetence and his deviancy, I’d not have had an insight into his personality and thoughts. Instead I begrudgingly turned our house into a homework prison, whereby he had to sit down all evening and write up the assignments he’d missed. Rather worryingly they were all English essays, suggesting, perhaps, that the walls of our home stacked ceiling high with books has had an adverse effect…(Next child will be forced to read the Daily Mail every day and fed Ikea hotdogs for dinner. He’ll be a fucking genius.)

He had two assignments: One about An Inspector Calls and socialism, the other from the perspective of the young Spartan boy in the initiation ceremony of 300. (And let’s not even delve into why he is writing about the scene of a film for English Lit…) After much moaning and groaning he finally got into a good routine and a month or so later completed the work. To support him, I agreed to type up his smudged notes and email them to his teacher. He smiled, we became best mates again. But what I thought was going to be an arduous task brought me more pleasure than a game of arrows on a Friday. Reading through his work enabled me to step inside his mind and see the world through his eyes. His choice of metaphor, his expressions, his opinions and general structure of argument gave me a brief insight into who he was, something I’ve not experienced for a while.

I’ve just emailed the work off and after pressing send I felt that gut-wrenching sadness I felt when he recently went to see a James Bond movie with his mate and broke our ritual (we’ve always watched them together since he was six years old). It’s hard watching your child transform into a young independent adult and gently letting go. Thank goodness then for words and sentences, for these peculiar chains of logic that allow a father once more to be. Of course if he gets behind on his homework again I’ll be smacking his arse and locking him up in the shed for a year. But for now I’m really grateful for the simple things in life, like awful schools.