Sunday 22 March 2009

Revision and Lytham (and Doktor Hotfingers). Wednesday 18 March 2009.

Mother’s day poem from Ellie:

My mum is so great
I could eat her on a plate
Please don’t be late
Or I might be deflate
You make me laugh
when you’re in the bath
So glad you didn’t call me Kath
There are lots of things I could say…..
but we would be here all day.

Easy to see where my literary genes came to rest more or less unadulterated.

I'm brassed-off because my first drafts sound childish. My writer friend tells me that they wouldn’t sound any less juvenile if they’d been written by an older me; they sound like infantile shitty first drafts because that's just what they are. And the only way I’ll get them to sound any more mature is to redraft them twenty times, or more. I really think she was trying to cheer me up.


Motored to Lytham St Annes for Saturday afternoon Whelan's fish and chips . Lytham was the hanger-around-staring-at-stuff-person's dream. First there were clog-clad morris ladies.


Then there were exuberant hankie-waving, bumper-boot wearing morris men (that last was a heavily premodified noun phrase).












Then, outside Clifton Walk shopping tunnel, there was Doktor Hotfingers - tricked out in a red-spangled top hat and playing an electronic keyboard. I didn’t get a photograph of him because by the time I’d been into the watchstrap shop, bought and had fitted a new watchstrap, and come back out into the light, he’d packed-up and buggered-off; dammit.

I've faffed and fannied around with these pictures trying to get them in the right place and they just won't conform; they'll have to stay where they are.

1 comment:

Preston Writing Network said...

Aghh! I was trying to cheer you up!

Maybe not twenty times... just as long as it takes, that's all. :)

It wasn't me, but Ernest Hemmingway, I think - who said all first drafts are shit. I keep meaning to put that over my computer somewhere.