If we acknowledge our Muse, we draw on her boundless energy, our creativity is enhanced, we avoid stories, editors and publishers that we previously thought were right for us – or she helps us put up with them if she deems it necessary – and we have a far, far clearer sense of where we are going creatively and why.
Morning Andrew. Your experience echoes my own. Hold onto those PI memories - they're gold. Kevin O'Neill and I had a similar experience with Read em and weep which was briefly okayed by a producer, but then it turned out it had to be greenlit by his boss who said no. So I novelised it as you probably know. That's one way forward but it has its own challenges. But Print on Demand does set you free from the chicanery of publishers.
Great to hear from you, Andrew. With your background as a private eye, amongst other things, there's got to be a novel in you somewhere! Yes, the name Simon Frith does ring a bell. So glad 2000AD gave you a sense of direction. My background is not that different - a shit and abusive school with pretensions of grandeur that convinces old boys to this day that it was a good school. It wasn't. Then dead-end jobs before getting a job as a trainee magazine journalist at D.C. Thomson. i'm sure it was all meant to be, with my Muse wanting that result - e.g. to write for popular culture. Maybe the same for you. Good luck and Happy Birthday!
Thanks, Pat. My birthday weekend has been fabulous.
I promise you, I'm not trying to pitch you anything but, a few years ago, I actually wrote the first two episodes (and a series outline) for a funny/dramatic TV show based on my P.I. life. I'd worked as a runner in TV and film productions during my university years, so I knew the guy to send it to; I was better connected than most novice writers.
The show transposed my own experience of being *completely* out of my depth (never having been a cop - as all P.I. my colleagues had been - or even so much as a member of the boy scouts, come to that; I'm a liberal softie) onto that of a newly-hired young woman P.I. who had to navigate some of the stuff I did. The commissioning editor (whom I'd known for years) took me out for lunch with another producer and a professional writer. I thought I'd hit the big time.
What the lunch transpired to be was that the professional writer just wanted my anecdotes for free, for a BBC show he had been hired to do. The commissioning editor later explained the hard facts of British TV production to me: there is no mechanism in UK broadcasting for new writers to get work who haven't worked, at least initially, in soap operas. I don't watch soap operas. My interests are pretty limited, but what I love I really love and that’s not it. The Pavlov's dog model of soap operas, where the baddies are so clearly signposted as to be virtually-pantomime is, I suspect, to give an endorphin-rush to the viewers who can congratulate themselves on working out future plot events in advance. Once I heard that piece of (valid) advice regarding TV work, my ambitions on that front more or less ended.
I’m not complaining at all, though. I have a superb life (and wife!), and wouldn’t change a thing. Maybe one day I’ll go back to the show, though, for my own amusement. I’ve been assured that it was pretty funny.
Apologies for the long-winded posting. I don’t do social media and there’s no one I know who I can discuss this kind of thing with, so you’re it, I’m afraid.
Hi Pat (and Lisa). Apologies in advance for the long post. I'm Scottish, drunk and it's my birthday, so I'll indulge myself.
I find your musing on The Muse to be extremely valuable and inspiring. Whenever I post here, I always rhapsodise about 2000ad (ad nauseum), but it really was that important to my life: when I was a kid, I didn't have pop music or sports; I had that comic, and that was enough. I left school (in central Scotland) in the mid-1980s with virtually no qualifications. No one at the school gave a shit about the kids in those days, and I ended up in a series of soul-shrinking jobs until, in the early 1990s, I pulled myself up (with the aid of grant-assisted education) to eventually get a decent degree in English from a decent university.
I've never been academic so, when it came time to do my dissertation, I had no idea what to do for it. Literally nothing on the 4 years'-worth of the curriculum had inspired me. In one of those truly serendipitous occurrences, my supervisor was a professor called Simon Frith (he's quite well-known, you might be aware of him), who allowed me to work on the idea for a humorous film script I’d had in my head for a while as my dissertation, instead of more traditional fare. Simon told me that most supervisors didn’t allow creative dissertations because most academics didn’t know how to mark them. It worked out pretty well. The Muse was there when I needed it.
I went on to fulfil an ambition by working at the BBC for a few years, pissed off to Montreal for a glorious year, then (coming back at the age of 34 to no job, no house, no girlfriend) became a bona-fide private investigator for more years (and weight-gain) than I care to remember. I’m now (in 12 minutes) gonna turn 54 years old. I still have pretensions to write – I’ve done a few things, but I suspect I’m more of a poseur than a writer – but I honestly don’t think I’d have had the same life without the Muse you created in 1977. The Muse, I would contend, extends far beyond the printed page.
Apologies for the long post – as I say, it’s my 54th birthday (now three minutes ago) and I’ve been a-drinkin’ since 3pm, as is traditional round these parts.
Morning Andrew. Your experience echoes my own. Hold onto those PI memories - they're gold. Kevin O'Neill and I had a similar experience with Read em and weep which was briefly okayed by a producer, but then it turned out it had to be greenlit by his boss who said no. So I novelised it as you probably know. That's one way forward but it has its own challenges. But Print on Demand does set you free from the chicanery of publishers.
Yeah I have (actual paper!) copies of both the Read 'Em novels. They're superb. Laugh out loud on every page good.
Great to hear from you, Andrew. With your background as a private eye, amongst other things, there's got to be a novel in you somewhere! Yes, the name Simon Frith does ring a bell. So glad 2000AD gave you a sense of direction. My background is not that different - a shit and abusive school with pretensions of grandeur that convinces old boys to this day that it was a good school. It wasn't. Then dead-end jobs before getting a job as a trainee magazine journalist at D.C. Thomson. i'm sure it was all meant to be, with my Muse wanting that result - e.g. to write for popular culture. Maybe the same for you. Good luck and Happy Birthday!
Thanks, Pat. My birthday weekend has been fabulous.
I promise you, I'm not trying to pitch you anything but, a few years ago, I actually wrote the first two episodes (and a series outline) for a funny/dramatic TV show based on my P.I. life. I'd worked as a runner in TV and film productions during my university years, so I knew the guy to send it to; I was better connected than most novice writers.
The show transposed my own experience of being *completely* out of my depth (never having been a cop - as all P.I. my colleagues had been - or even so much as a member of the boy scouts, come to that; I'm a liberal softie) onto that of a newly-hired young woman P.I. who had to navigate some of the stuff I did. The commissioning editor (whom I'd known for years) took me out for lunch with another producer and a professional writer. I thought I'd hit the big time.
What the lunch transpired to be was that the professional writer just wanted my anecdotes for free, for a BBC show he had been hired to do. The commissioning editor later explained the hard facts of British TV production to me: there is no mechanism in UK broadcasting for new writers to get work who haven't worked, at least initially, in soap operas. I don't watch soap operas. My interests are pretty limited, but what I love I really love and that’s not it. The Pavlov's dog model of soap operas, where the baddies are so clearly signposted as to be virtually-pantomime is, I suspect, to give an endorphin-rush to the viewers who can congratulate themselves on working out future plot events in advance. Once I heard that piece of (valid) advice regarding TV work, my ambitions on that front more or less ended.
I’m not complaining at all, though. I have a superb life (and wife!), and wouldn’t change a thing. Maybe one day I’ll go back to the show, though, for my own amusement. I’ve been assured that it was pretty funny.
Apologies for the long-winded posting. I don’t do social media and there’s no one I know who I can discuss this kind of thing with, so you’re it, I’m afraid.
Hi Pat (and Lisa). Apologies in advance for the long post. I'm Scottish, drunk and it's my birthday, so I'll indulge myself.
I find your musing on The Muse to be extremely valuable and inspiring. Whenever I post here, I always rhapsodise about 2000ad (ad nauseum), but it really was that important to my life: when I was a kid, I didn't have pop music or sports; I had that comic, and that was enough. I left school (in central Scotland) in the mid-1980s with virtually no qualifications. No one at the school gave a shit about the kids in those days, and I ended up in a series of soul-shrinking jobs until, in the early 1990s, I pulled myself up (with the aid of grant-assisted education) to eventually get a decent degree in English from a decent university.
I've never been academic so, when it came time to do my dissertation, I had no idea what to do for it. Literally nothing on the 4 years'-worth of the curriculum had inspired me. In one of those truly serendipitous occurrences, my supervisor was a professor called Simon Frith (he's quite well-known, you might be aware of him), who allowed me to work on the idea for a humorous film script I’d had in my head for a while as my dissertation, instead of more traditional fare. Simon told me that most supervisors didn’t allow creative dissertations because most academics didn’t know how to mark them. It worked out pretty well. The Muse was there when I needed it.
I went on to fulfil an ambition by working at the BBC for a few years, pissed off to Montreal for a glorious year, then (coming back at the age of 34 to no job, no house, no girlfriend) became a bona-fide private investigator for more years (and weight-gain) than I care to remember. I’m now (in 12 minutes) gonna turn 54 years old. I still have pretensions to write – I’ve done a few things, but I suspect I’m more of a poseur than a writer – but I honestly don’t think I’d have had the same life without the Muse you created in 1977. The Muse, I would contend, extends far beyond the printed page.
Apologies for the long post – as I say, it’s my 54th birthday (now three minutes ago) and I’ve been a-drinkin’ since 3pm, as is traditional round these parts.