Notes from an Anglo-American Man

… how much I missed building things until today.
I was helping my landlord move some furniture around the apartment (is it really an apartment when it has 2 floors?) and i noticed that the RTA bed was quite loose. So i dashed up stairs to my room and grabbed my ever trusty screwdriver collection (used so far on computers and 1 bed now ) and tightened the whole things down, and boy did it need it.

But doing that brought an old feeling back, I’d not realised that I missed doing that kind of work until I was doing it again and it was like, oh, something is missing in my life .

I knew i missed building bikes, (you can;t build thousands of them and not enjoy it a little bit) but never other things.

So I’m going to build something. I don’t know what, but I need to I may work on another design for a table that can be put together without any tools.

But I also realised that although it was such a short time I enjoyed doing blacksmithing and I began to wonder what my life would have been like if I’d carried on as an apprentice. But it’s all academic really. I chose moving back to the UK over it so I guess I’ll never know, but it can be interesting to think about it and wonder

Ok so i’m over 20,000 words into the Black Tower, and I’m already begining to realise that as soon as I finish it I’m going to have to go back and rewrite the stuff i wrote for the first 10k of it to make it the same level of quality as the latests stuff, I really don’t know where it came from but I happen to think that the last 4 chapters that I’ve written is the finest stuff I’ve ever written, and if the book continues on in that quality then it will be a very good book indeed .

I’ve been working on how to explain the book and I’ve come up with a couple of pitches, the basic one.

It’s about a school that teaches people the art of spying and assassination. - that’s the one I give if I don’t care if the person buys the book because they will never read it

and the more detailed one.

It’s about the dichotic nature of life, the connection between things that seem opposed. Right and wrong, good and evil, love and hate, friend and enemy. It’s about choices, the choices that this group of friends have to make.

There is an almost Machiavellian  ideology in it as some people think that they can do what they want as long as the end jusitifes the mean, but some of them fail to realise that power is not an end that justifies.

that’s the one I give if I want to impress them, I usually give it to pretty women

Peace and love

Ben

So went to london, got to spend a whole 2 hours there, they went by so fast, wish i could say the same about the train journey. upside, i wrote almost 5k of the Black Tower and am totally in love with it again. plus i hammered out a bunch of the plot lines so everything is cool.

so I’m traveling 13 hours round trip to spend 2 1/2 hours in London. It’s totally worth it though, going and seeing friends is always worth the long hours.

Sadly it’s not the longest trip i’ve ever made, I still have nightmares about my 36 hours traveling from the US to Carlisle… FUN! anyway will post details sunday/monday