Eat, Drink and Be (Very) Merry

I've been to quite a few employees' Christmas meals while working for quite a few different companies in the last thirty years. We've eaten in corporate boardrooms, football grounds, posh hotels, small family restaurants and quiet, specially reserved upstairs rooms in pubs. The quality of food has varied wildly from almost gourmet quality to stuff I’d be ashamed to have cooked myself.

And, sorry to say, I've seen food fights in just about all of them. I've never personally been involved, you understand. It's only through other people that I know that an empty party popper filled with black pepper and plugged with a cold sprout makes an excellent and rather explosive missile. Allegedly.

All of the places that I worked had one thing in common. Whether they were small, family run businesses or multi-national corporate behemoths every one of them had put a little - and in some cases a heck of a lot of - cash behind the bar, paying for the employees' drinks for their Christmas celebration. The money always ran out far too early but that didn't stop us from making the most of it. Without exception every single work's do that I've ever been on has descended into drunken carnage. Every last one. It was seen as a kind of stress relief for the under-pressure workers at the bottom of the corporate food chain, as was the occasional sight of newly-connected couples sloping away from proceedings when they thought that nobody was looking. Naturally they were never as invisible as their beer-fuddled brains thought, much to everyone else's delight the next day at work.

Now I'm not condoning these events of alcoholic hedonism, I'm just stating the honest facts. That's what has happened at the office parties I've attended. They've not always been fun but they've always been memorable and since becoming self-employed I have missed the camaraderie that these kind of events reinforced among the workforce. Being a sole trader I don't have that day to day banter at the drinks machine, that social intercourse that cements workplace relationships. What I do have is lunch with my Beloved every day which is infinitely better, but it would still be nice to have a work's Christmas do.

So this week I arranged one. Not that I officially employ anyone these days, I don't think that my writing income will ever stretch to that, but I do pay people for work occasionally. Mostly the aforementioned Beloved, my primary proof-reader and muse, but occasionally others get reimbursed for their reading and suggestions. I made a few phone calls and one afternoon this week a few of us gathered at a local Toby Carvery. Hey, if I'm paying then I get to pick what and where, and I've never been one for fancy food. Make it simple and plentiful and I'm happy. Suffice to say that it was and I was. The people with me were happy too. We had old fashioned roast dinner, a couple of beers, a lot of fun chat and (best of all in my book) there were no silly party hats.

And there was no food fight and the only people who went home together at the end of it were me and my Beloved.

Result.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Sanity Clause

I'd like to point something out, something that all shops and media seem to have forgotten. It's a simple message, just six words, but I feel it's important to get it off my chest.

There's still a month to go.

We still have a week of November left. It's nowhere near Christmas yet so why are they already trying to whip us into a festive frenzy? The run-up to the big event seems to start earlier each year, destroying the magic of Christmas. Whatever your religious views, is there really any fun to be had in starting shopping for the festive celebrations while the deciduous trees are still green?

Carry on like this and by the third week of December I'll have exploded in a starburst of tinsel and cranberries. It's too early. It's too early. I keep telling myself that but it's no good. I have a stupid amount of writing to fit in between now and Christmas so the earlier I can get my shopping done the better. Christmas shopping in huge crowds drives me crazy.

I think that somewhere, probably in the depths of one of the Catholic Church's secret vaults known only to the Pope and Dan Brown, there's a special annotated version of the Bible. It has an extra line with an extra promise from God detailing how he would, at an unnamed date in some far flung future, repay his followers for creating the shopping frenzy of Christmas. It will contain just one extra line, reading as follows:

"And lo, on the several billionth day, God created Amazon."

I, for one, am very thankful.

Today is known as Black Friday in America, the day when many people turn their thoughts from the Thanksgiving holiday towards preparing for Christmas. This time of year, when December is itching to be uncovered on my calendar and we've already seen the first snow of the season, seems a much more civilised time to start, not the end of October (which is when I first heard "I Believe in Father Christmas" playing in a shop). It's Cyber Monday in a couple of days too, the day when more money gets spent on online shopping than any other, apparently.

Much as face-to-face interactions are sometimes nice, if you want to avoid the crowds the it's much better to stop at home and settle down with a coffee and a well-prepared list in front of your screen and keyboard. I spent an afternoon like that this week, in blissful isolation, clicking away and handing my Visa details over to the Russian Roulette of the virtual bankers. Within a few hours pretty much all my Christmas presents were ordered. If the Royal Mail can manage not to go on strike for just a few weeks then maybe my family will get their presents on time.

But some things you can't really buy online. Some things have to be seen or felt to know that they'll be the right gift for the right person. And that they'll fit. With that in mind I decided to take my annual 'do everything in a morning' shopping trip to my local massive mall this week. It's a huge indoor shopping centre, one of the biggest in Europe. It's fine when it's relatively empty but the busier it gets the less I enjoy it. Guess how full it's starting to get already? So I employed my standard Christmas shopping strategy - get in, get done, get out before most people have even got out of bed. It worked a treat and I got everything that I needed but it was still far too busy for my liking. Last Tuesday morning was as heaving as a normal Saturday afternoon. 

And I heard Greg Lake telling me how he'd woke with a yawn at the first light of dawn far more times than was enjoyable.

So I've done three separate sets of Christmas shopping this week. The hellish one at the large shopping centre, the pleasant afternoon spent at home in front of my laptop, and yesterday a wonderful trip to a Christmas fair and market in the grounds of my (relatively) local stately home, Chatsworth House. For those of you who don't know it, think of it as being halfway between Downton Abbey and Buckingham Palace, both in size and in poshness. It was decked with classy trimmings and there was no piped music, just a hurdy gurdy and a brass band. The smells of cooked pig and roasted chestnuts filled the air as did the mist of my breath in the cold, damp atmosphere of a beautifully clear end of Autumn day.

I bought no presents whatsoever, just wandered around a load of food and craft stalls. The only things I bought were some cheese and a jar of jam. My wallet stayed relatively full but my stomach became even fuller as I sampled as many edible wares as I could. Bliss.

Now that's the way to kick off my Christmas preparations.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Counting Down

When I was little one of the first mental challenges my parents set me was learning how to count. I'm guessing that your early education was similar. "One, two, three, four, come on baby…" Eventually I got to be so proficient at it that I didn't even need to take my shoes and socks off.

These days I'm a master at this counting lark and can easily get to a hundred, five hundred, a thousand. It gets pretty boring after a while but I can count almost as well as that guy off Sesame Street now. In fact I wish I could write as well as I count. Words flow from me when the ideas are there and my fingers are pretty adept at typing, but I still don't do it as quickly as I'd like. I used to say that my target was to write a minimum of a thousand words per day. A thousand words, that's approximately a page of a glossy magazine or maybe four pages of a paperback novel. For someone who's trying to make their living from writing though a thousand words per day isn't quite enough. I need to be able to double, triple that amount or more.

You may have heard of something called NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. Hundreds of thousands of would-be novelists around the world (so maybe it should be InterNoWriMo?) try to write the first draft of their novel, end to end, through the thirty days of November. That's just a first draft, nothing polished, nothing that I'd want anyone else to read. For many, that will be enough. Others won't make it that far. But some of us will use it as a springboard to give us the impetus to start and even finish our novels. However many drafts it takes to complete after November, it's NaNoWriMo that starts it off. I did it last year and the result was my novel, 'The Happiest Workplace on Earth.'  This year I'm using it to kick-start that book's sequel.

As part of the project you're encouraged to hit a daily wordcount. They suggest 1,667 to give a total of a 50,000 word first draft. I'm there or thereabouts at the moment. But I can't get my head past that 1,667 being a very arbitrary figure. And why is the first draft 50,000? Why not 60,000 which would be 2,000 words per day? That's much closer to a 'proper' book length.

Or how about writing for a given length of time rather than measuring the output? After all those 1,667 words could just be 167 repetitions of 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'. Nobody says it has to make sense. And it's not something that I'm beholden to. Life, taxes, doing my accounts and watching Pointless all take precedence over work. I mean I try to get the words done but sometimes something important steals my hours. That's fine, it will always happen, but the problem comes when the time thief is something that's not really that important, like Candy Crush Saga. That's when working somewhere with no internet connection (like my local coffee shop) can come in so very handy.

Right, I'd better crack on. Time or words, however you measure my output, it's not as much as it could be today. And anyhow, I've just got to take a few minutes out to try and complete level 103…

© Shaun Finnie 2013

What Would Arthur Brown Say?

Dark nights, baked potatoes, visible breath, checking for hedgehogs, unrecognised pagan references, flash and thunder fire, woollen mittens and staying up way past bedtime, extremes of heat and cold.

For many of us in Britain the fifth of November is the only night of the year that we venture outside as a family after dark. It's the only time that we gather with family and friends and eat in the cold and dark, wrapped up against the weather. We're no longer a nation that spends much time outside but for this single evening we put that to one side and celebrate in the way that our grandfathers and their grandfathers would recognise.

But why? Are we really still jubilant about the foiling of a plot to bring down the parliament four hundred years ago? Or is it really just an excuse for revelry, for coming together, for showing the cold and the dark that we humans won't be cast down by such natural unpleasantries, that we now have control over illumination and temperature, that we are now the masters (and potential demolishers) of the environment in which we live?

How many people who oohed and aahed at the flames and the rockets on the fifth of November  know that the original celebrations had strong anti-catholic overtones and the first effigies to be placed atop the burning bonfire were more likely to be of the Pope than of the would-be assassin Guy Fawkes? And how many of us had a small family bonfire in the back garden, complete with our own fireworks display, as was common when I was a boy, forty years ago?

The celebration of Bonfire night seems to be in decline or at the least it seems to be merging with an increased celebration of Halloween (something that went pretty much unnoticed half a century ago) here in England. But don't go thinking that Halloween is an American tradition that we've imported to Britain. No, it was a British celebration that went over to America with the pilgrims. We here let it lapse while the colonial cousins continued it.

The moral is, don't believe everything that you've been taught to be true, especially if you read it on the internet. Remember, once upon a time everyone 'knew' that the earth was flat. Question everything, constantly.

* Bonus points to anyone who can tell us exactly what Arthur Brown would say.

© Shaun Finnie 2013

Silence is Golden

I've been talking to several other writers about music recently. Specifically, what type of music, if any, do they listen to while writing.

Me, I love to listen to music. It's one of the great joys of my life. Just about any music will do from Mozart to Motörhead, Frank Sinatra to the Frank Chickens (look them up if you need to), I've never understood genres; it's all music. And most of it is interesting.

And therein lies the problem. Not only do I love music but I adore words, the combination of words, the subtle interplay of them that, when mixed by a good wordsmith, makes the whole immensely greater than the sum of its parts. And I can't hear a song without listening to the words being sung and the poetry that binds them together as lyrics. And if I'm listening to lyrics, to other people's words, then I can't really concentrate on placing my own specially chosen combination of words on paper or screen.

Some writers choose to play different styles music to put them in the mood for writing different kinds of scenes. Hard rock for an action sequence or a light piano piece for a gentle love scene. Whatever does it for them, I guess. For me, I'm OK as long as it's an instrumental tune with no discernible lyrics. Or if I'm struggling with something, if I'm stuck with how to express the emotion in a piece I'm writing or how to get my characters out of (or into) a particularly thorny plot hole then I'll turn the speakers off and work in absolute silence. That is, if you discount the dog down the street that barks incessantly morning until bedtime.

So, fellow witers, what's the soundtrack to your working day?

Maybe it's Elvis Costello's "Every Day I Write the Book"?
Or "It's Only Words" by the Bee Gees"?
Or, if you're recording the audio book of "The Hobbit", maybe you listen to OMD's "Tolkien Loud and Clear"?

Sorry.

© Shaun Finnie 2013