Paul Schiernecker

Author: Paul

  • Hunger – a flash fiction piece.

    There was a moment of shock and burning as the shoddily constructed flap at the bottom of the door was pushed open and a tray of what could almost be described as food was shoved through it, slopping its grey contents over the lip of the plate and skid marking the floor as it came to rest by his head.

    The last meal pushed through the hatch had made him terribly sick and he feared this was some part of their plan, whoever they were, to weaken him and make him more susceptible to whatever. He checked the date on his digital watch and concluded it had been just 44 hours before that he had got out of his car to remove a piece of paper stuck to the back window when he had been attacked. He was sure by now there would be a missing persons report filed, but he couldn’t work out who loved him enough to do it.

  • Joy Formidable at The Lexington.

    It’s fair to say that prior to last night my interest in Welsh three piece Joy Formidable was a passing one. Despite my girlfriend’s desperate pleas that they are one of the best bands of the last decade. We got to see them at a 200 person venue in Angel/Islington last night and I couldn’t look away.

    It’s fair to say Kate (my girlfriend) has a super girl crush on Joy Formidable’s lead singer Ritzy and I can see why. She’s a diminutive thing, who on first sight could get lost behind a guitar but as I watched her I realised that she really knows how to play. I think that’s part of the appeal, when she’s onstage your eyes can’t avert, and she knows how to play up to it, especially when she can address individual catcalls between songs.

    Bassist Rhydian layers thick heavy riffs over anything going on, and the dynamic is very much a grunge thing of quiet verse/loud chorus used highly effectively with effects pedals and loops to create a sound much more dynamic and epic than usually possible of a three piece (other than Muse (early Muse anyway)). Their drummer Matt doesn’t get the chance to say a lot but who needs to when you can play like that. It was amazing.

    I have to say (and this is just my acoustic sensibilities of late) that my favourite track of the night was Wolf’s Law taken from their upcoming second album, it was just one of those rare moments at a gig where you forgot who you were. Buoy, Greatest Light and Everchanging Spectrum were also fantastic live.

  • Put a steak in me, I’m done.

    Last night I ate a really good steak. It was so good that twelve hours later on the train to work I’m still thinking about it, that’s the sign of a good steak.

    Kate and I stumbled across Hundred Crows Rising in Islington whilst trying to find somewhere to grab dinner before a show at the Lexington. It’s a great find. The place is almost laid out like a cantina with bare wooden floors and an open bar/kitchen area so I could smell my ribeye coming.

    It was also very reasonable, two big steak dinners and two drinks for just over forty quid in Central London is pretty unusual and I plan on heading back there again. The staff were friendly without it seeming put on and the food left me with cravings on my way into work. Good show.

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  • Well I did say…

    you’ve got to try.
    It feels like a different person has passed through this skin since then. I have some exciting revelations in the coming week but I can’t give anything away upfront, because you’ll call me a blog slut.
    Just trust me when I tell you that I’m getting excited, and that I hope everything comes to fruition because it will all be much better for my psychological welfare.

    In other news I’ve decided that I want to start writing longer blog posts, I’m impressed that I manage to find some time and some words every single day but that’s not enough of a challenge for me, so on top of that I also intend to start planning a number of longer blogs, maybe verging on the term essay or the word article, depends on the content I suppose.

    The good news is that I’m going out in big London tonight with my little Kate and we are going to see Joy Formidable. I realise that in going with Kate to see Joy Formidable I am basically consenting to the affair Kate conducts (pretty exclusively in her own head) with their frontwoman Ritsy but hey, she came to see The Amazing Spiderman with me, so all is fair in love and war.

  • My blood is too thick for this.

    I can’t think properly when it’s humid. I know Essex is hardly the dizzying heights of Marrakech or Salamanca. I’m using that as an excuse for not having done any writing over the weekend. That’s usually the best time to do it but I spent the time with friends and family which I think was far more beneficial.

    Spending time writing basically means writing a paragraph, googling myself and sitting on Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr and WordPress and telling myself how good I am. It’s not the most productive way of writing. I seem to have lost a bit of focus since I finished Situation One which is probably for the best considering my intensity with it at times. I do have other stuff to be getting on with, but it’s hard to balance with the feedback I’m getting on my first completed novel (or the implied feedback I’m getting). Never more, must keep reaching, must keep on, worse things happen at sea.

  • Lovely bit of Sunday.

    I’m enjoying a nice relaxing Sunday.
    I’ve literally done no work this weekend. I’m managing quite well.

    This afternoon we are having a BBQ at my house. I think it’s the first one we have had in two years. All of us will be in attendance. I’m tempted to make an episode of You & Me & Him & Dad about it. It’s hard work to get the four of us together but when we do you can guarantee something funny. Bless those boys.

  • Heat rises.

    I feel shit.
    I went out last night with my little buddies, and ended up sobbing in a bar in Shoreditch but that’s another story for another time.
    I woke up to find that I had post. Unfortunately ‘post’ doesn’t excite me in the way it did ten years ago, there was a time when I loved getting post, it was always something good. I believe Arcade Fire covered this feeling in their song We Used To Wait. Today my post was my Reading ticket for next Saturday and a message to say that I had to collect a parcel from the Post Office because the full postage costs of it hadn’t been met. I wondered what it could possibly be, and who would be so stingy as to not cover the cost of sending it.

    In a state that I would describe as less than rosy I managed to drag myself into the shower, get dressed and head out of the house. By the way it’s too hot out, don’t do anything today, just stay indoors, shut the curtains or something, it’s not a practical kind of heat. Anyway I got to the post office, handed over one pound eighty and then realised that the cheap bastard who didn’t cover the cost of sending that package was me. It was the self-addressed envelope I sent off to a literary agent two weeks ago.

    This hasn’t helped me feel any better. I’ve accepted that I’m probably going to be receiving rejection letters for the next couple of weeks as they slowly filter back through my front door, that’s not what bothers me, it’s the way I’ve built it up in my head. At the end of the day my novel is a piece of work that I gave up a lot for, not just time but everything else, I got completely lost in it, and it consumed me, to the point that when I finished it I didn’t really know what to do. I think I cried a bit. This post is full of tales of me crying. Anyway, that’s what bothers me, that I actually tried, for the first time in a long time I committed to something work-wise and it isn’t having the payoff I have built it up to have, but that’s my drama and in time I’ll deal with it.
    In a related note I would appreciate it if people stopped telling me about ways I could get it self published, I am well aware of these avenues, but I want to try and get it published via an agent and publisher if possible first, so while I appreciate any help or input anyone may have, just shhh.

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    Just smashing up the high street with my droogs.

  • Mancrush Friday – David Bowie.

    David Robert Jones. Such an ordinary name for a man who has smashed the holy fuck out of music in the last fifty years and obviously I don’t use those words lightly. David Bowie’s music is amongst the first I can vividly remember hearing (alongside Zeppelin, Thin Lizzy and The Sweet (thanks Dad)) so I’ve been a fan for at least twenty years. His way with words has inspired two generations of writers, bands and musicians and his style (adopted from the punk and glitter thing rising in New York) opened oppressed teens up to a world of shaved eyebrows and skyrocketing makeup. I’m honestly struggling to write this because there’s so much to say, and I’m trying to hold some of it back so I don’t just explode.

    The wonder of Bowie’s music is that you know every word but you rarely have any idea of what it could possibly mean. In the seventies this just added to his alien-like mystique, something that today wankers would call ‘clever marketing, the androgynous wanderer angle’. From my own understanding his style of writing was borrowed from the Beats and William Burroughs who popularised the ‘cut-up technique’ where you take a completed text, cut it into phrases or lines and then rearrange it in its entirety.
    That’s how you get lines like ‘tigers on Vaseline’ or ‘Time, flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor’.
    I’ve experimented with it myself and it’s an extremely difficult thing to pull off with any confidence.

    The treat of David Bowie isn’t just that he’s an excellent songwriter, musician and (seemingly) nice guy but it’s also down to his legacy. Bowie hasn’t performed publicly in two years, owing to a health scare, and the world is waiting for him. He isn’t a musician who will make a quick buck on a farewell tour, he believes in what he is doing and has commented that he doesn’t want to be performing Space Oddity forever. While everyone of the same era seems happy to croon up onstage a couple more times (and I don’t begrudge them that because I loved The Who at the closing ceremony and was genuinely surprised at their prowess and Daltrey’s voice) Bowie is resting up in Switzerland and promising us something called Object in December.

    Watching the recent BBC Bowie season I was amazed at his presence, to this day when Bowie appears there is a hushed revelry, he is honoured and long may it continue.

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  • Slide – a flash fiction piece.

    It didn’t matter how much water he splashed up into his face his mind was not going to shift and he knew that. He was stuck with this feeling and whether he called it euphoria or paranoia was entirely his own decision.

    He rested his head on the mirror above the sink, and to any arriving party it would have looked as though he were locked in a battle with himself, like a pair of emerging rams, fighting for dominance over land they had happily shared previously.

    He wiped at the raw hook of flesh he called a nose and tried to remember how things had got this bad, where the spiral began. It hurt to think back, and not because thinking was difficult in his condemned and high state but because the memory was one of death. He wiped his sweaty face on his sleeve and returned to his birthday party.

  • Howl post.

    I got home yesterday to find I had a letter waiting for me. A letter sealed in an envelope addressed to me, by myself. It’s the first in the latest crop of rejection letters. I sent out ten and one has come back so far and it hasn’t got to me as much as I thought it would. It pisses me off because I want someone to recognise what it is I’m writing about and the fact that it could probably do very well thank you very much but I just get the standard ‘good luck in the future’ letter. I understand that it is hard getting published, and I appreciate that not everyone will think it’s worthwhile but I do, and I’m looking for someone who does too. I appreciate every single person who has taken the time to read it and thank you all from the bottom of my heart for your patience and time but unfortunately this next bit is a struggle I have to take alone.

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