before getting on the feluca i held court in the restaurant of the hotel we were in like that - rotating between 3 different power adapters, shuffling 3 camera chargers, 3 mp3 players, 2 phones and my Eee so that everything had enough juice to handle the next 2 nights away from power and flushing toilets. i just about got everything done, too - Mike's iPod didn't get a full charge and neither did my camera, but then neither ran out of charge before we could charge them again either so it all worked out.
it's all been a little insane on the blogging-front over the last 3 weeks. when Louise has been sleeping on the bus i've had my Eee out, bashing at the keys. any time that hasn't been spent sleeping, doing stuff, or on trips too short to make it worth booting up have been spent bashing keys or editing. here's a rough idea of what i do to get a post up online:
while i'm wandering around taking photos, seeing things or (if i'm not travelling) living the life, i'm drafting. witty or useful or insightful phrases or ideas that come to mind get filed away for later. sometimes i'll have entire paragraphs, or themes, or ways that i'm going to proceed with explaining something sitting in my head for weeks before i actually commit them to print. while on tour it's a lot easier - my framework is what i do with my day, and everything else flows or segues out from there. once the ideas are together i sit down to bash it out. almost every blog entry comes out fully-formed and ready to run with. no half-finished artifacts lying around on my Eee's hard drive, no fragments or drafts that need completing, no planning or writing-plans. i've always been like this. back in high school when they said you had to show yoour planning i'd fake it - write what i wanted in my essay and throw the "plan" together afterwards. that's just how i work: start with an idea and run with it until the spool runs out of string. the the only exception to this is when i'm writing something long and i get interrupted, which has happened a few times in the last couple of weeks, whereupon i have to pick up the flow again from where i left off which i always hate. each entry is the child of the mood i was in when i was writing, and that's going to be different 6 hours later. it's a pain in the fucking arse, which is why i wind up re-reading through what i've done already and often re-write the last paragraph so that the next flows the way i want it to. sometimes i go in with something resembling a plan or framework, sometimes i go open up my text editor with nothing more than a topic and my randon-simile-combinatron running in my headmeats.
music's important. i'm not sure if words can express just how important, but you could consider trying to drive a car without any bearings. i've tried, it doesn't work. crank the speakers, plug in earphones, doesn't matter, but give me noise. what it is doesn't seem to effect the flavour of the product, either. i've written angry while listening to Death Cab for Cutie, mellow and melancholy to In Flames and depressed to Blink-182. right now i've skipped through to Parkway Drive because after the last 3 weeks i desperately need metal. i've been listening to a LOT of Parkway Drive and Inhale Exhale of late, especially "Romance is Dead" and "I'll with no friends (and a grin on my face)".
when i'm sitting in the kitchen in Kennington with a reliable connection i'll usually write straight into the text entry field on the blogger site. out in the world i use a text editor and save it locally until i can get online. raw-text files from the last couple of months still litters the home folder on my Eee because i can't quite bring myself to delete them despite their having been uploaded weeks ago. once the file's saved it tends to sit for a while, hours or days, before i go through for an edit. read, correct, fix typos, add detail, rearrange sometimes. usually it's just a case of adding a few lines of information i missed out the first time around, embellishments or extra words to make the picture clear, sometimes a whole paragraph needs rewriting. these things you do for the sake of art...
whenever i have to work offline i'll note down the time and date i started so that i can fill in the timedate stamp when i finally get it up online. if i'm writing a retro i'll usually project the time i WOULD have been working if i hadn't been drunk, tired, distracted or generally not in the fucking mood to stare at a screen for hours on end. sometimes i try to string a sentence together and it just doesn't happen and if i try to force it all i get is drivel, a foul mood and a dead battery. i had that problem after getting back from Amsterdam - for a week and a half i couldn't write to save me and then spent the following 2 weeks catching up, retro's all the way.
once all that's done it's down to getting onto the net for 10 minutes, pasting all the appropriate words in the appropriate text fields, making sure it's tagged correctly (so you can click on the "UK" tag and only get my UK-related posts, for example) and hitting "Publish". sometimes i'll load up the page to see how it looks online, but since i don't use images or funky layout i don't usually bother. generally i'll spend an hour writing a thousand-word entry, do a quick read-through and post. i've improved my output in recent weeks and the other night in the hotel room in Cairo i was able to bash out 4700 words in around 3 hours, including a couple of breaks. i wound up adding a bit of content and splitting the entry into two for reasons of pace, so the editing-session took around 45 minutes. bearing in mind that i've posted near 24k words so far, you can guess how much time i've been spending in the cracks and quiet moments, on buses, trains, plains and boats. i'd have blogged in the fucking donkey if i'd had somewhere the rest the Eee - don't think i wasn't tempted, or that Louise didn't jokingly suggest it. 24k words and i'm nowhere near done.. i still have to worry about that fucking day in Alexandria, then try to capture the atmosphere of the last couple of days in Cairo... then somewhere in there i need to put together the exposition piece i've been planning since yesterday evening, but have no idea yet just how i'm going to make work.
sometimes when i sit here looking at my Eee i just can't bring myself even to start. sometimes i attack the keys with a focused fervour that would make an OCD-sufferer on cocaine blush. sometimes i sit down to say something i thought would be interesting, like... say... what i did in Alexandria, and wind up talking about something completely different. whatever it is i upload, i try to keep it fresh and interesting and people keep reading it so i guess i can't be doing too poorly. i often get perplexed when people i've only met recently tell me that they enjoy the blog, but i won't try to pretent it's not gratifying. meanwhile, i'm planning to continue with this until i get sick of the idea... or when people stop yelling when i don't post for a while. getting things out of my head and onto the screen tends to help reduce my desire to kill people, and the feeling of getting an entry that i've written, edited and feel good about posted is, while less than post-orgasmic, still a real buzz.
meanwhile, i need to eat more of the monster Toblerone i bought at Cairo International Airport (i was feeling shite and wanted chocolate. no preaching about my diabetes, i'm SO not in the fucking mood) and get Alexandria out of the way. i need something to get me in the mood...
No comments:
Post a Comment