Paul Schiernecker

Author: Paul

  • Gummy mouth.

    Oh god. My head. I’m sat trying to get on the Glastonbury site to buy tickets. It’s just not working so I thought I would write. Woke up with Jocasta Devillenerve this morning, first time that has happened in six years.

    Yesterday I journeyed up to Norfolk to visit my friends Lucy and Mark who have just moved out of the big smoke. Their place is lovely. You know you’re doing something right when you have enough room for a music studio. We went to watch a band at a pub round the corner and I can’t remember a lot beyond that. Good times.

    I know I wasn’t the first to bed though which makes a change but I was the first one up and with nothing to do I cleaned and washed up the kitchen and then sat reading 1Q84 until everyone else decided to join me in the land of the living. There are a team of builders working on the house next door and I’m trying to put a thought together and it just isn’t happening.

  • The weekend starts here.

    Got to wake up with her which is obviously the best possible way to wake up. Now I’m just tucked up in her little flowery duvet while she cooks me breakfast. I can hear J-Dogg playing recorder through the wall and Stacey being so pleased we bought it for him.
    It is Saturday. The sky isn’t grey and today I’m off to Norfolk to catch up with some of my dearest friends.

    It’s been a while but they’re never out of my thoughts, a point captured by the fact that I am still writing about them in Where Did All The Money Go?
    I’m hoping everyone will be there and that it will be another classic night and that I don’t act too much as a camera and can be silly with them. What’s Kings Lyn like at this time of year? How many jumpers will I need?
    Must dash. I can smell eggy-wegs and great lomticks of bread.

  • Rejected into a corner.

    This week I’ve received back the last of the manuscripts I submitted to literary agents back in July/August(?)
    Just so you know, so there is no doubt in your mind, they were all a ‘thank you, sorry, no’ at the very most. The majority of them didn’t include the title of my work, some didn’t even bother to put my name on them, just photocopied another rejection letter, rammed it in my self addressed envelope and sent it back so I could beat it against the coffee table and complain about how I am a genius doomed to never be recognised in my own time.

    The fact is that I thought having my novel rejected would absolutely destroy me. I don’t handle criticism (or creative criticism as people will insist on calling it) well, to me it always seemed as though they were assaulting me and my brain and my efforts when in fact it’s just not to their liking. The Beatles were rejected by record companies, all of my favourite writers were rejected, so I just have to hold onto this one for a while and come at it from a different angle.

    The thing is I learnt a lot from writing Situation One, it’s taught me that when I put my mind to something I can do it, it’s taught me that a hundred thousand words isn’t as much as you think once you get into a flow, it taught me to read, appreciate and understand the work of other writers, to try and take from everyone whatever I can. It’s made me a lot more receptive to the world around me and the people around me so even if it was all just an incredible pipedream and that novel never gets beyond the select group of friends I have sent it round to, that is enough for me, because although I’ve been backed into a corner I will be coming out swinging with the next one.

  • Early to bed…

    …early to rise.
    Or so I was this morning. It turns out I do brilliant work at half five in the morning. I’ve split my short stories, created a table to show what stage each of them is at and redrafted and finalised the first one completely. I’m not entirely happy with it and its ready to go.

    The plan is to finish nine or ten other stories to join Night Of The Fridge Graveyard and then to self publish them, hopefully eventually having them up on Amazon. I’m really pleased with the progress I’ve made on them lately although I would like to be done before I start NaNoWriMo which I know is an incredible amount of pressure to put on myself but there is a plan for it all and realistically it would need to be finished by then for everything else to fall into place.
    No pressure. No trouble.

  • Let’s give this NaNoWriMo a go then.

    National Novel Writing Month.
    It’s coming for us and I am very much looking forward to it.
    First off it will give me a good chance to purge my current writing from my system. I’ve been writing about the same characters and setting for over a year now and I’m almost ready to put the lot to bed, just another fifteen thousand words (approx) to go. I’m hoping that will all be out of the way by November and then the fun can really start.

    I’ve setup my account with NaNoWriMo here, feel free to ‘buddy’ me. I’d like to have a wide selection of people through life, Tumblr, Twitter and my blog taking part and setting up a forum where we can all share our aches and pains. If you’re interested then now is the perfect time to start planning, you’ve got twenty-eight days of planning, plotting and character development to carry out before the meaty task of actually writing begins.

    This is my first year of attempting NaNoWriMo and I’m still juggling the logistics of writing two thousand words a day and holding down a full time job. I’m thinking about writing during my commute and evenings and weekends, and seeing how I’m going after a week.
    I’m also quite pleased with the story outline I’ve got, it’s an idea I’ve been kicking about since October last year when I was so wrapped up in Situation One that I couldn’t have contemplated pausing for something else, but as I said that’s aside now and I’m moving on. This November it’ll be a love story about chaos theory and terrorism, because I can never do anything straight down the line.

    Come join me though, it’ll be an adventure.

  • Everything changes but me.

    I’ve recently been arguing with a dear friend about my decision to promote the fact that I’ve been trying to minimise the outrageous amounts of pure trash I have accumulated. I’d like to make it clear to him (because I know he will read this) that it doesn’t change who I am, or any of the things we have done together, I’m still the same person, it’s just that I’m not quite as lost in the things I own. I haven’t got rid of anything important and I never would. It’s just all the surplus. You’d be amazed how much you can skim off the surface without really denting the amount of things on display still. If it wasn’t for the sacks and boxes still collected on my floor I wouldn’t know I had sorted anything out.

    That’s it basically. I haven’t changed at all. I’m still the same awkward nervous person you met four years ago in a lift, it’s just that I’m trying a lot harder to mediate myself, trying to find the way I work best, what makes me tick and that can only be done by trial and error. I’m not saying I’m going to become some fully realised being of light, just that I would like to free myself a little so I can create and work better. You can call that pretentious if you want, or say I’m like all the other cunts but I’m the only one of that ilk who is also your friend.

    X

  • Throwing it off like a Whitman.

    I just had to run for my train. When you get up at half five to purposely go running in the rain and dark it really jars to have to pick up the pace an hour later to catch your train to work. That being said it does make me feel like I’m in Darjeeling Limited so I can’t really complain.

    As I commented yesterday I’ve been getting rid of a lot of stuff over the weekend and this morning was my first real chance to revel in it. I didn’t have to rifle through thirty t-shirts to find one I could stand wearing, I didn’t have to throw everything from my desk to the floor just to find my house key and I feel like I’m walking taller. The last one is partly psychosomatic and partly because I finished the bumper hardback edition of 1Q84 part 1 & 2 and now have part three alone in paperback. When I am done with those they’ll be passed on for someone else to enjoy, that’s what I would hope happened to my novel. I like the idea of printing a hundred copies of it and just seeing how many people it can reach just from there, like a book tree. I’m getting distracted.

    So far I’m reaping the benefits but I can’t help looking at everything and wondering what it’s purpose is.

  • All this stuff.

    I wouldn’t class myself as being a materialistic person. I do like films, I do like music, I do like books, I do like gadgetry but I’m not one for designer clothes and fads and things of that ilk which is why the last twenty-four hours has been a real surprise to me.
    I decided to take the first step towards a minimalistic lifestyle, my reasons for this are as follows;
    – I feel cluttered and loaded constantly.
    – I needed to give myself more direction.
    – It would help me avoid working on my short stories for yet another day.
    So I read up on minimalism and the minimalistic lifestyle, and decided that I could only ever follow it to a point. They would put this down to my fear but I don’t think that is the case. I just wouldn’t be comfortable in a room that was just my desk and a laptop, I need a little something else.

    I started by writing out what I wanted, how I wanted to be and where my focus should be directed. I then started working through the piles of everything I have collected in the last quarter of a century. With two bags of clothes, two bags of rubbish, a box of books, a box of DVDs and CDs to send off and a big pile of documents for shredding you would think I were typing this post from a stark Kubrickian landscape but my room still looks exactly the same, I’ve barely skimmed the top layer of stuff but already I can see where I could develop from there.
    We all own a lot of things that serve no purpose whatsoever. That’s one of the few things that annoys me about Christmas, I enjoy giving people presents a lot more than I enjoy receiving them but I often wonder what becomes of the things I give to people, if they ever get any real use out of them or if it just becomes another thing to sit on their shelves or line their drawers. I’m going to try really hard this year to think about what happens beyond the time of giving, when the tinsel comes down and we are left with a stark January. I would like to hope that I can give people something that they will look after and cherish, rather than just assign a space and disregard for months at a time.

  • The 2nd Law – an album review.

    And so, like a battered spouse returning to a lover who hasn’t quite beaten enough sense into them this morning I streamed Muse’s 6th studio album, The 2nd Law. It wasn’t actually that bad to start out with, Supremacy is a good opening track, bearing in mind I was expecting the weeble and bob of dubstep to ring out before a guitar chord could be struck. It’s grandiose in a Bond opening track kind of way, and the riff is typically Muse in a good way, there’s a bit of Kashmir thrown in for good measure as well with the strings, I’ve got to confess that seeing how I set out to hate the album, and dismiss a band I have followed for over a decade it was starting to draw me in.

    After Supremacy comes Madness which doesn’t sound as out there and awful as an album track as it did when I first heard it on YouTube as a single track, it fits nicely, and while it’s not Uno or Muscle Museum or Bliss or Hypermusic or even Invincible, it’s not wholly dreadful despite the bass sounding like someone was messing about and forgot to return the settings back again before releasing it. It starts heading into this strange Queen vibe with the solo, and that’s not a wholly terrible thing either. If Muse want to continue down the stadium rock avenue then Queen are a good band to draw from. The closing vocal harmonies are also very Mercury. After that comes Panic Station which sounds like Queen being covered by Scissor Sisters, it’s not Muse but it’s not unlistenable either.

    From there it starts to completely lose me though. Survival still sounds like Muse were given twenty minutes to pull a song together about the Olympics, it doesn’t fit and it’s lyrically one of their worst. Then unfortunately we get to Follow Me which starts out meaning well but soon ‘drops’ into the kind of chorus that would make me head to the bar, it’s very of the moment and I don’t mean that in a good way, I mean it’s very lazy and derivative and just not the band that I thought they were. I completely understand that bands do need to develop, especially by the time they’re releasing a sixth album but this is not growth, it’s not even enjoyable.

    Just as we are getting somewhere again afterwards, and I’m slowly accepting the way the songs are going, the layers of vocal and the choppy U2-esque guitar we get to Unsustainable, which to me should be called Unforgivable. I am not a fan of dubstep but I don’t think what is displayed here is even good dubstep, it sounds like a fad track and I hope it’s something that Muse will later laugh off, like it’s their Frog Chorus, that’s how it feels. Even for them the news report intro is heavy-handed and obvious and then it just descends like a car losing control and plummeting off a cliff edge.

    I can’t say I hate it, but it’s got a lot of skipability as an album. I’ll buy it, because there are some genuine moments of brilliance on there, but I wonder what is to come. I worry that I’ve lost a band that I once truly loved, that they’re going for a wider audience and that isn’t necessarily a good thing.

  • Babel – an album review.

    Every person I’ve spoken to who has heard Babel seems to be very much in love with it. Every review of Babel I’ve read criticises Mumford & Sons for not breaking boundaries or pushing things forward. Quick question; why break boundaries when you can do so well on a second outing under the same heading? The truth is that the album is an absolute triumph and I’m glad that Marcus and co haven’t cut back on the wild banjo-plucking builds or the choruses that already sound like they’re echoing across festival sites and in amphitheatres. That’s what we want them for.

    The only correct notion I’ve read in a review is that the cover looks like an M&S advert but I was always taught not to judge a book by its cover, and extend this to albums and films. Gathered inside Babel are fifteen songs that instantly feel comforting, like the smell of a loved one’s jumper. From the opening and title track to Where Are You Now it brings everything we all love about Mumford & Sons to the table of homemade preserves and cave cheese.

    What I say is let the critics carry on, critics gonna critique and all that. They’d be complaining if Babel was a space jazz odyssey as well. Time will tell on this one but I think they’ve done well, and I look forward to the summer when we will all be dancing round our ciders to Whispers In The Dark and I Will Wait.

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