Christopher Hamilton

It’s remarkable how quickly a week seems to pass when you don’t have to go to work. Last week, as I relaxed and unwound from the terrible month I had, and intended to get a great deal of writing done. Unfortunately, because I was so tired, I spent most of the week recovering, and it wasn’t until Friday that anything resembling coherent thought passed through my brain. Until that point I had been running on auto-pilot as the stress slowly drained from me. Of course in typical fashion, it was from that point in my break that I had made important plans that couldn’t be changed, including the highlight of the week where I went to the Hibs -vs- Celtic match with my Dad. We went to the game as an early 50th birthday present for him, and thankfully Hibs managed to somehow end the match with a win. It was a great day that I know he enjoyed.

In all honesty another week away from work would have been perfect. I ended the week feeling great, and wished that I had been able to take that feeling and achieve a few of the goals I’ve set for myself. That wasn’t an option open to me though, so I’ll just have to make do with what time I have at the moment. One plus point of this week, and I can’t really believe I’m about to say this, is that I have to go down to London for work. Normally I complain about going down, and never look forward to it. This time however, it becomes a buffer between my break and getting fully back into the recent high stress situation of my job. I do have to work when I’m down in London, but it’s not as demanding as it would be if I had to be in Edinburgh. Plus it gives me time on the train to write, and get a few things out of the way without any distractions.

Over the next few days there are a few ideas I want to get written down, with a possible short story, and a piece of travel writing that I want to polish. The aim is to get them both published in the coming months. If for any reason that doesn’t happen, I may post them up here on the site. Since my aim is to increase the writing on this site, there may be a few pieces like that showing up in the coming months. When and if they do show up, any and all feedback will be welcome.

There’s a few things I want to get done before I arrive in London, (Whenever that’s going to be. This already seems like a never ending train journey.), so I’m going to wrap this post up here. As an aside, it’s only 36 days until NaNoWriMo begins. I’m really looking forward to getting started with the story I intend on writing this year. If you haven’t given it a try in the past, it’s a lot of fun, and well worth the experience.

I just learned that one of my favourite authors has passed away. Robert Jordan, (real name James Oliver Rigney, Jr), died after a fight against the rare blood disorder amyloidosis, which was first diagnosed in December 2005, on Sunday afternoon aged 58.

Jordan on his own blog had written many posts that showed he was clearly determined to beat the disease, and remained positive until the end.

His Wheel of Time series was a great inspiration to many authors, readers, and aspiring authors alike, myself included.

He will be greatly missed

Today marks the first day of my week long holiday/vacation/whatever you want to call it. Essentially what it really means is that I don’t have to go into work, and I may have a chance to actually relax for the first time in months. I really wish I had the spare cash to actually get out of Edinburgh for a couple of days, but unfortunately that’s a luxury I’ll have to do without.

I do have a lot of plans for this week, but with the Rugby Word Cup currently on TV, some of those plans may have to be dealt with another time. One thing I had really intended on doing was to go out to various cafes and pubs to do some writing. That plan took a huge hit when the battery on my laptop decided that it no longer wanted to hold a charge for more than ten minutes. I’ve watched the battery health decrease dramatically each day since the start of the week, and it shows no indication of slowing down. Batteries from Apple are £100 and I don’t really know if I can realistically spend that kind of cash just now, not with a £500 dental bill hanging over my head. It’s going to have to wait until the end of October.

It means I’m tied into writing from home, or finding somewhere where I can use their power outlets. There aren’t many places that I’ll be able to do that, since it relies on sitting at specific tables that have power beside or under them. Not ideal. So if I do decide to get out of the house to write, it’s all going to have to be longhand in my trusty Moleskine.

This coming week also signals the real beginning of my journey into moving away from IT, and into a writing career. Since I made the decision that it’s what I really wanted to do I’ve had virtually no free time to really move forward. Work has been so busy, and as I was looking after the place on my own for the last month, I had no energy when I got home, and any creativity was crushed under the weight of stress and exhaustion.

I have a few projects I want to start, and I made an effort to note down as much as I could during the month long fog I found myself in. One of them is going to be my novel for NaNoWriMo, which is something I’m really looking forward to again. The other was going to be a short story, but just seems to want to be a screenplay. I’ve never actually written one of them before so it’s going to be fun trying that one out. There are others but they are scattered fragments at the moment, and I’m not sure whether they’ll develop into anything just yet. On top of all that, there is the fact that I’m going to need to discover just what it’s going to take to have a career in writing.

Tomorrow Anna and I are going to spend the day relaxing, and have lunch somewhere nice in Edinburgh. Then on Monday, the real work begins.

This morning Pauly released the latest edition of Truckin’, and as always it’s filled with excellent short stories from a great group of writers. If you like any of the stories you read, tell your friends, and pass on the link.

Enjoy.

1. Monk’s Siberian Dream by Paul McGuire

Brain dead. Deep into the sixth day of a foggy bender, I had forgotten the day of the week. Frisatursunday? I’d successfully lost time. The demoralizing result was that my conversational skills had dwindled down to a few muttering sentences… More

2. The Rubber-less Traveler by Brad “Otis” Willis

Breathless, confused, and sick to my stomach, I arrived at the British Airways gate and looked at the departure board. The flight was delayed for an hour. This is how I travel. I run to nowhere to fly to somewhere where I see little, do much, and find myself asking questions like, “Why do they sell condoms in airport bathrooms?” … More

3. It’s Not Like I’m Dishonest; Honest by May B. Yesno

I’m a private investigator. A damn good private investigator. I have a wife, a very expensive wife. She likes the good things in life. We’re matched. I like good things too… More

4. Coming Home by B Kemp

Some of my former friends think that she is using me for my money. It doesn’t seem right to them that a man my age would “throw it all away,” leaving my career for a life of unpredictability and adventure. My old friends are naturally suspicious of younger women wanting to spend their money, rightfully so I suppose… More

5. The Confetti of Life by Sean A. Donahue

I read the love letters that my grandfather sent to his wife. I could see the tears in my grandmother’s eyes as she read them, touched them for one last link to him. I shed many a tear today, ones that no one saw, because I left the room before they fell… More

This last week has been an extremely busy one. Not only was I fantastically busy at work, the social side of my life was given a much needed boost.

With the Edinburgh International Festival, opportunities to do something different were slowly dwindling. It was one of the reasons I went along with my girlfriend, her brother, and his girlfriend to catch a play in one of the smaller venues around Edinburgh. We had no real idea what the play was about, who any of the actors performing were, and we weren’t entirely sure where the venue was. We found the venue without too many problems, but even with the programme in hand, we still had no idea what to expect from the play. I would like to say it didn’t disappoint, but that would be a lie. It’s not that it was bad, it was just….meh. It’s not something I would go and see again, and those sentiments were echoed by the rest of the group. We met up with a few more friends later that evening and had much more enjoyable time.

The following day was the last day of the Edinburgh Book Festival, and my friend Rob and I had tickets to go and see the William Gibson reading. This did not disappoint. It was a fantastic look into the creation of the novel, and the way in which William Gibson now approaches his work. I learned a few valuable insights, and afterwards had my copy of Spook Country signed. He also signed my Moleskine with a good luck message when he found out my aspirations to write for a living. That was so cool.

From there the week moved on as is it’s want, and I found myself sitting in my friends house on Wednesday evening playing poker. When we play, it’s essentially a single table sit-and-go with an option to rebuy once. The last two games, the host has beaten my heads-up, and I was determined not to let it happen again. After building a big stack, I took a huge beating from another player, and ended up heads-up with the host again, this time with a huge chip disadvantage. Needless to say, he won again, and took great pleasure in telling everyone that he was now unbeaten in three tournaments in a row. I’m going to have to do something about that. A fourth in a row is not allowed.

We spent the evening drinking a lot and having fun, and I think I had about four large glasses of whisky for the road. It left me scrambling the following morning when I realised how late for work I actually was. The day was spent nursing the worst hangover I’ve had for some time, before heading off in the early afternoon to the work summer party.

It was a tremendously fun day, once I’d drank through the hangover, and before there was some major drama involving a couple of my friends. That happened quite late, and it was after the period that I was chugging red wine from the bottle. Classy aren’t I? In my defense, I wasn’t the only carrying on in such a manner, although I was definitely one of the forerunners into drunken stupidity. It was a long day of drinking all round, and people were getting very… hammered seems to sum it up nicely.

After having to get up after those shenanigans and go to work on the Friday, I made a point of having a quiet evening. I sat in my livingroom, and watched an obscene amount of Battlestar Galactica’s Second Season. I got so invested in watching it, the early night I had planned, never materialised. Instead I switched it off in the early hours of the morning and stumbled to bed exhausted.

Saturday was supposed to be a quiet day, with no drinking and doing nothing too strenuous. It began that way, and then I decided to have a beer while I watched the football with my friend Keith. One turned into four, and then we came back to my place, met my girlfriend and drank a lot of wine while we watched the Big Lebowksi. It was a fun night.

Sunday… I’m going on a bit here aren’t I?.. Anyway, Sunday I met my girlfriend and a group of her friends, as we all had tickets for Princes Street Gardens to watch the end of festival fireworks. It was the first time I’d ever been in the Gardens for them, and it was much more enjoyable hearing the orchestra playing as the fireworks went off. It was more of a spectacle as the choreography made much more sense. Last year they looked good, but it lost a lot of it’s impact. After the fireworks we all went to our local rock/metal bar for a few beers. There’s nothing quite like going from classical music performed by an orchestra to the dulcet tones of Lemmy. It was a great, but strange transition.

All of which brings us to today. Hello!

Nothing much happened, except work, where I managed to resolve something that’s been irritating me for months. I was a happy man between that fix, and the next phone call five minutes later. Now that I’ve written this entry, and cleared out most of the mental backlog I had been building, I’m off to stick a few things up on eBay. I have to say, I really am enjoying getting rid of so many things that have been lying around for so long.

One last thing. Just before I went to post this, an India Arie song came on from my iTunes playlist. Her voice is just amazing, it’s so mellow and it just relaxes me so quickly. It always takes me back to the year I spent in Australia when my friend Chrissy first played it for me. That was such a great time in my life. I think I’m going to have to plan a trip back out there at some point.