As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. Today is the turn of the terrific Chris Callaghan, a writer who conjures warmth, wit and a wonderful sense of fun from a disastrous situation in his comedy The Great Chocoplot. You can check out his website here. Chris Callaghan: Hello Darkness One cool thing I’m looking forward to this autumn is the dark. Not the German sci-fi time-twisting Netflix mindbender, but the actual absence of light. The onset of shorter days and longer nights as winter arrives. It does mean getting up in the morning will be even harder and picking up dog poo on evening walks on overgrown fields becomes more of a challenge, but there is an undeniable coolness to the dark too.
The dark sometimes needs that little glint of light to show itself off. Whether it’s a uniform stream of streetlights punctuating the gloom, a full moon straining behind a cloud or the single beam of a torch snapping around a cellar searching for ‘something’. It’s in the dark where our imaginations run riot. The scariest things are not what we can see, but what we can’t – hidden in the murk, but still touching distance away. But we fight the darkness. As the nights get longer, we defiantly fight harder. We illuminate everywhere we can. As Christmas approaches, that fight becomes more sparkly and kitsch, but the scale is nothing less than impressive – and I love that! So, hello darkness, my old friend – I’ve come to do battle with you once again… As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. Today is the turn of a terrific poet - Dom Conlon, writer of This Rock, That Rock and Leap Hare, Leap! - making an autumnal observation with which I very much concur! You can check out his website here. Dom Conlon: Dark Nights I try to not look ahead too often. Being less focussed on plans and more excited by the tiny life events happening around me helps me deal with an increasing number of projects without pushing them all to one side until they become a burden.
But one thing I am looking forward to in the coming months is the tightening fist of darkness around my waking day. Lovely as the summer has been in its own weird way, nothing beats autumn and winter for having the darkest of skies in my part of the world. And where there are dark skies there are stars. When I talk to children about astronomy, the subject which often underpins my poetry and my stories, I am asked whether looking up makes me feel small. It doesn't. Looking down at my phone makes me feel small. The rage of social media is a crowded elevator descending into hell. But looking at the vastness of space, contemplating points of light it would take generations to reach, this centres me. It makes me feel THE centre, in fact. The centre of the universe where I am surrounded by such undemanding wonder that all I have to do is observe in order to be a part of it. So yes, I am looking forward to the darkness and the thoughts which shine in it. Thirty years ago, in 1988, Morrissey recorded a devastating, tender and tragic account of moving house.
It was called Late Night, Maudlin Street and it was eight minutes long, a wandering dream-state narrative of childhood. "I was born here," he sings, "I was raised here, and I took some stick here." Amongst the drifting jigsaw pieces recollected are a hopeless love affair and betrayed trust, a head injury and a late-night lift home in a van... a 1972 powercut prompting a secret walk with the subject of his unrequited love ("No, I cannot steal a pair of jeans off a clothesline for you!")... vivid pen-portraits of a working class urban upbringing in which three generations of the same family inhabit the same houses. "Your gran died and your mother died on Maudlin Street..." he observes, before tragically adding, "...in pain and ashamed." And towards the end he draws to a close, ("I am moving house. A half-life disappears today") before shifting his perspective, returning to the present and singing to his lost love - or perhaps previous self - "Wherever you are, I hope you're singing now." It's a tremendous song, all echo and chime, ghostly piano and long bass-drops drawing heavily from Jaco Pastorious's work on Joni Mitchell's Don Juan's Reckless Daughter. Terrific. But Morrissey has changed, as we all know. This year's album contains another song about houses. Except Morrissey's not in them as a child anymore, he's outside them as an adult; rich, successful and proudly iconoclastic, so this time rather than tender insight we just get cheery spite: "What kind of people live in these houses?" he asks, part disgusted, part incredulous, before observing: "They vote the way they vote - they don't know how to change because their parents did the same." It seems his jokes are at the expense of the trapped these days. "They look at television, thinking its their window to the world!" he chortles, before dismissing his subject matter entirely in his closing line: "Who cares what people live in these houses?" A silly swipe at conformity, musically unimaginative, it's a mid-tempo strum-a-long wazzed over by paper-thin pedal steel. Thirty years is a long time, it seems. I was chatting with my daughter one Saturday morning last Autumn and she said the above. Immediately struck by her insight and sweet, naive optimism, I tweeted it.
By Monday morning I had 10,000 likes and over a thousand retweets - the kind of lucky break that'd have the guys and gals in marketing flossing their way to the canteen and high-fiving each other over their soya flat whites. I have to say, I had an entertaining weekend watching the numbers grow and reading the responses as they came in. But what have I actually learnt from the experience? Umm well four things, really: 1. Not surprisingly, nothing changes. Life goes on. A little like having a book published, once the brief and usually restrained furore is done, normality returns. I got retweeted by Neil Gaiman once - same thing. Brief firework display of interaction followed by long dark fortnight of the soul. 2. People don't like your tweet then decide to check out your work. Most on social try a follow-up that goes, "Whoa, well that blew up, check out my online store here..." but they're wasting their time. Folk hit 'like' on your tweet because - ahem - they like your tweet. 3. I got about thirty new followers. They stayed for roughly two more tweets to see if I was a whimsy-machine with its dials set firmly to 'good vibes'. When they realised I was in fact a fiction-fanboy set to 'ooh look a new podcast about movies', they left again. 4. People are generally nice. Of the 214 replies, 213 were lovely. The other used the vomit emoji pretty liberally. So there you go, folks. Social's nothing but a mirage. We may as well just do the work. Sit down every day, try and write something really difficult, come back the next day, do it again. That's the stuff that matters. Now, if I could just get my kid to say something along those lines, I could tweet it... As part of this year's September Shorts I've asked writer friends to contribute posts inspired by the title One Cool Thing. They'll be telling you about one cool thing they're looking forward to as Autumn approaches. It might be a book or movie, a tabletop or computer game, an event or visit to a special place, a chance to achieve something... or perhaps even an exciting new project. Today is the turn of Ruth Estevez, writer of Jiddy Vardy and the forthcoming Erosion. You can check out her website here. Ruth Estevez: Ghost Stories The cool thing I’m looking forward to in autumn is exploring ghost stories, haunted places, ruined buildings – anything that’s going to set my imagination on overdrive!
It’s a season of mists according to John Keats, mornings and evenings tinged with a whisper of winter. The smell of apples and bonfires. Footprints sunken in the grass, cobwebs sparkling with dew in the mornings and copper moons. I’m desperate to write a ghost story and this is the time of preparation, a gathering in, like the harvest and I’m itching to wander amongst ruins, castles and Yorkshire abbeys from Whitby to Fountains. Get me on the Haworth moors or in the ruins of Wycoller Hall and I’ll be scribbling down ideas! In the next month or so, I’ll be glimpsing shadows in the woods and be generally spooked! It’s the time to celebrate the dead, and I want to write a story that does this but also one that sends chills down the spine. What better time of year to prepare for those winter chills and thrilling shivers? I can already hear the rustle of leaves… or is it the long skirts of a ghostly bridal dress? What can you hear? |
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