Yeah, OK, when I came away I had visions of tossing off 40,000 words and having half a book by the time I came home. I don't know how I can even begin to think that way. I have been here enough times. It never works like that. Sometimes you can do the last 40,000 words in a week - but only because you absolutely have to and are working at it 20 hours a day and have already worked out what you want to say.
But writing a book is very hard and even on a day like today, when I was pretty much on it and busy all the time, I have actually added next to nothing. I've worked and reworked the introduction and got to the last half page and been thinking about how I make the transition to chapter one proper. But I haven't finished it. I thought I might complete draft one of the introduction on Sunday night, but here I am on Wednesday and it's still not done.
Some people like to just write and write and then come back later and do a second run through it. But I don't work that way. Not with books, not with sit-coms and not even with my live shows. I work and work on the first bit and rarely progress at all until that is 95% ready. I don't plan too far ahead - though I might have an idea for something that will come later - and I like to surprise myself with twists and turns that suggest themselves organically, rather than manufacturing a story or a through-line. I might be stupid to do this. Maybe I should have just been writing and writing and clearly I can do that - that is what I am doing now writing this nonsense (and plenty of the stuff I have written here will prove useful when I get further into the book - I have already reworked several stories from here for the intro.
I have a slight fear that the intro I have done will prove to be superfluous. Maybe when I've got a bit further I will want to get straight on with the stuff that is central to the book's theme (it's about my immaturity and the emotional car crash of having to deal with turning 40), rather than what I have done (documenting the five fights I had had in my life before the one I had in
Liverpool). My editor might not like what I've done. That's the risk.
But these 5000 words, whether they end up in the book or not, are getting better and better each day and funnier as well and I am hoping it's a cracking start. It would be great to move on to the next bit, but it won't be a disaster if it's all I have done out here in my retreat.
It doesn't make it any easier that I am mainly writing about myself. In some ways it makes it more difficult. I think it's going to be a bit of a warts and all look at my 41st year and it's difficult to know how much to reveal. And when events are so fresh and still ongoing it's harder to have perspective and distance from them and before I know what the outcome will be. It was easier writing the stuff for the Headmaster's Son because it all happened a long time ago.
And it's interesting to me that with the perspective of time what seems like quite a dull life while you're living it accrues interest. As a youngster I constantly heard that you should write what you know and mine your own life for stories and I despaired because I didn't think there was anything exceptional about my existence whatsoever.
As an older man I realise that to some extent that is true, but the lack of being exceptional is not necessarily a bad thing. Plus with the benefit of hindsight and accrued life experience, it is easier to spot the stupid and ridiculous things you were thinking and doing. Or even the interesting things that as a young person you were too blase to notice.
Someone from the HQ of Camp America contacted me because I mentioned them a couple of days ago asking me if I had had a good time at the camp. I really hadn't at the time, but thinking about it now it was so packed with incident that it would make an almost unbelievable story. Not only did I make out on some matresses in the woods (which would be good enough on its own), but amongst many other things I nearly got sent home for slapping a kid (there were some extenuating circumstances and I didn't do it very hard and most pertinently the little fucker deserved it, but that's still not much of an excuse), I was put in charge of an overnight camping trip (and I was only 18 or 19 at this time) and when we got to base I said the kids could go and play in the woods nearby as long as they stayed close and within about three minutes about eight of them had falled down what I'd like to call a cliff, but which was in fact a perilously steep incline, one of them breaking his fingers (I think), on the last day of camp, thankfully when all the kids had left, there was a massive fire, in the middle of the redwood forest, over a hundred miles from the nearest fire station and we had to work together to control the blaze that was shooting hundreds of feet into the air. Which is a pretty good end to any story.
Except that my attempts to get back across America from California to New York were also pretty funny - particularly when down to my last 100 dollars, I had to pretend to be called Sally so that I could use someone else's Greyhound bus voucher. Luckily the man at the desk although through seeing through my ruse, realised I was in desperate straits and gave me a ticket that would get me from Florida to New York for just ten dollars. God bless him. I still had to survive a week in New York with ninety dollars though, which wasn't easy even in 1986.
My whole year off (gap year for any of you youngsters) was packed with incident and excitement. My two archaeological digs where I had to cope with being away from home, falling in love with someone who wasn't my girlfriend (then falling back in love with my girlfriend the minute I went home) and also in my second dig with the sudden and pointless death of one of my fellow workers. It's all pretty much covered in
Excavating Rita, though that turns two digs into one and no one had sex with a skellington as far as I am aware.
I also interrailed round Europe with Geoff Quigley and worked in Cheddar Caves, which also had their share of surprises. But the overarching memory is of how green I was, how boring and well-behaved. Shocked by and scared of drugs and sex and pretty much all the things that an 18 year old should be interested in. But then slightly loveable for that fact. I was just this gigantic idiot, stumbling around the world, putting myself in tremendous danger, making awful mistakes and completely failing to lose my virginity - which is surely the point of a year off, for anyone who wasn't cool and normal enough to have lost it while they were still at school.
So I spent most of the evening thinking about this, rather than the book about the idiotic things I did when I was 40 (where if anything I had the opposite problem - I think I have lived my life back to front) and wondering if there is a book or a show in it all. I am sure there is. I even came up with a title "1985 - my year off", which even though it's slightly inaccurate as my year off was 1985-6, I still like because it implies some kind of sequel to George Orwell's classic, but is just about a stupid, swotty virgin blundering through mini-adventures. I know Anthony Burgess has already written a book called
1985, not that I've read it, but I am sure that mine would be better.
Anyway, should probably concentrate on the job in hand for the moment, hey? Not that I ever will do that. The thing is that I love having the ideas for things, but I can't really be arsed with the hard work bit. Even when it's autobiography and I've already done all the real work myself.
But I do like the idea of living off the teenage me for a couple of years and of making a living from the diaries that I conveniently kept at the time. It's like plagarising myself. And funnily enough I know that the teenage me would be furious about what I am doing to him, even though I am him. He wasn't documenting his life just to have it mocked by an old man.
Cheg on, young Richard Herring, you am a twart.
And thank the Lord for that.
Your twartedness might just be my pension.
Or maybe my current twartedness will be what sees me through my twilight years. Hey 80 year old Richard Herring - don't you dare use this blog to make me look stupid. It's mine not yours. I am going to draw up a legal contract to prevent you having access to what is mine. So cheg on to both the old and young me. I win.
Do you think being out in the countryside is driving me a bit bonkers? I quite like it. You know flirting around with insanity. It's my job essentially. But my worry is that one day I will actually genuinely have crossed the line. But I don't think it's a day where I am threatening legal action against the 80 year old me.
Oh no.
