T'ain't What You Do

I've written a short horror story from beginning to end. Always a miracle. I don't know how good it is. I suspect that the two protagonists are slightly colourless. And I know for a fact that the plot is virtually stolen from M.R. James's The Mezzotint. I just hope that the reader thinks I've made good use of my stolen goods. I've got the chore now of typing it up from my notebook. I don't know how many words it comes to- the Writing Magazine competition only allows you 1, 700 words. We'll see.
It's been a productive week all round. I finally got my Squidoo lens up and running ( http//www.squidoo.co.uk/raindrops-on-roses ). They wouldn't publish it first time around, and then I realized why: they thought that my introduction was too short. I thought that a couple of sentences would suffice, but it just sat there, stubbornly, with a red "work-in-progress" sign on it. Why didn't the cuddly cartoon monster tell me? So, cobbled being the word, I cobbled a few paragraphs together, but I still think that the opening sentences say it all.
And I started writing a comic strip serial. Not comic strip- picture strip. You're not allowed to call them comics now. They are graphic novels. A work colleague who is an artist in his spare time said that he was on the lookout for ideas for picture strip serials. Something about getting interested teenagers from the local comprehensive to draw the strip. I don't know. I've devised a sort of sitcom revolving around two teenagers. I don't know what the hell I'm doing, really. I had grand visions of it being the Only Fools And Horses of picture strips. I'm trying to inject some character into the story, a sense that these are real people from real life. But teenagers might want something about a superhero taking on the forces of darkness.
I don't know what the form is for picture strips. I missed the graphic novel revolution. Or, rather, the same stories featuring The Incredible Hulk, Spiderman, etc; which used to cost 30p a week are now packaged in books which cost £6.99, and are now revered as art. They haven't even got a page on the back which you can cut out a Hulk mask from. And children aren't allowed to borrow them from the public library because they're considered too violent. Since I used to read them at the age of 7, I wonder what they've done to me. My parents never objected to them because of the violence, only that they were silly (and God forbid that children should read anything silly). There again, my parents had strange ideas about watching violence. They wouldn't let me watch Doctor Who, but happily let me watch The Sweeney. I saw The Godfather when I was ten- I couldn't sleep the whole night in case, when I woke up, there was a horse's head in my bed.
You might wonder how I managed all this frenzied creativity and managed a job. To be honest, though, I went sick again on Wednesday. I'd either caught another bug or else my original bug came back with a vengeance, but three o'clock Wednesday morning I woke up shivering. My teeth were chattering. I thought we were in the middle of an earthquake until I realized that it was just me. Afterwards, I was as weak as a kitten. So I suspect that there will be frowns when I go back to work, and faint hints that I wanted to extend my Easter holiday, but it wasn't like that. I barely went out, I was dozing off all the time (although I managed to watch Star Wars all the way through this time).
I didn't really notice any extra industry. I seem to have done all the above without really noticing. If anything, I felt that I'd been lazy all this week. And possibly, if you began and finished a novel in the same time, you might feel the same. Before I went sick, I was fretting about writing a short story, two blogs, a comic strip, and I wasn't getting anything done. But as I've noticed before, as Julia Cameron makes clear in her invaluable Artist's Way, there's a large element of play about art. As the song goes:
You can try hard,
Don't mean a thing.
Take it easy
And then your jive will swing.
T'ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
T'ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it.
T'ain't what you do, it's the way that you do it,
And that's what gets results.

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