Out of the Debauched Sloth

Chaz Brenchley's Fortnightly Newsletter

“People everywhere confuse what they read in newspapers with news.” - A J Liebling

...whereas we lovelies know the truth, that you should only believe what you read in newsletters, right...?

Not that I have much to tell you this fortnight, except a silly thing. Long and long ago, maybe two decades since, I was on a bus going between Newcastle and London (up to Town, I think, but I can’t really be sure at this distance; I might have been going home). I was sitting there innocently gazing out of the window—and, surprise! I conceived a notion for a book, a novel. By the time I debouched from the vehicle (I am not now nor ever shall be accepting of “debussed”), most of the whole thing was right there in my head: title, premise, setting, characters, the whole kit and caboodle. Ready to go.

And there in my head it stayed, for lo, these many a moon. Thing was, it wasn’t a genre novel. Not crime, not fantasy, not horror, not SF. Not YA, although the main character’s sixteen. It’s just ... a novel. Contemporary, set in Newcastle, set in a particular Georgian square in Newcastle (you won’t have realised this if you’ve never been there, but much of Newcastle is beautiful), which used to harbour a number of my closest friends. Two households’-worth came to our wedding, five thousand miles away: that kind of close. I spent a lot of time on that square. (It helped that it was halfway up the hill, on my walk home from town; I used to wander in randomly, in the tolerable surety of finding someone to hang with. Also our pub was at the foot of the hill, and the Lit & Phil was not much further, so yeah: that street—it follows the line of Hadrian’s Wall, two-thousand-and-some years later—saw a lot of my foot-traffic, one way and another.)

Anyway: my career at the time really had no space for an uncategorisable novel, a simple work of unlabelled fiction, so I tucked it at the back of the queue and got on with the tasks then in hand. And there at the back it stayed, occasionally raising a tentative hand to remind me that it was there, but never with any real hope of its being drawn out into the light.

Until this weekend just gone, when—for no observable reason, with no particular trigger recorded—I just started writing it.

My brain is kinda like cold storage for ideas, I find. They tend to keep fresh in there, however long I leave them unattended. I mean, it’s shifted a little—the backstory is now darker than it was, and there will be a gay romance so sweet the very section in which it commences shall be called “Meet Cute”—but almost all that shift has happened in the last few days, since I began actively working on it. It is my process, as opaque to me as to others; it is why I can tutor, one on one, but I can’t teach. I cannot conceive of working with outlines and spreadsheets and all the other tools of the kids today; a story is a living, growing thing in my head, and all I can do is type it as it grows.

So anyway, yeah. I do indeed already have far too many unfinished projects on hand, and I really thought I’d have been finishing one of those this weekend gone. People, I was mistaken. Got one more now. (It’s called CLEANER, since you ask, as it always has been.) *shrugs* I might never finish it, but at the moment I may be a little bit in love. Teen boy in trouble, people help. It’s really very low-stakes (except for that back-story, which—yeah, no idea where that came from, except I guess it was implicit all the time because when I needed it, there it just was), just a kid coming to a sense of self and starting to pattern a future. I’d call it a Bildungsroman, so I would, except that it’s really all about that very particular Georgian square, so it’s totally a buildingsroman instead, oh yes it is.

Links of the Fortnight:

Mrs Bailey’s latest recipe!

Writers Drinking Coffee: their latest podcast!

My latest books, presented for your delectation and delight!