I'm blogging after a relatively sleepless few days of writing, working not only on my follow-up to Laikonik Express and a short story work-in-progress (see my works-in-progress tab on the main site) called The Fortune Teller's Factotum, but also some of my freelance editing. Do I get them all mixed up from time-to-time? Not really. It'd be difficult to look at any of the factual, prosaic things I work on to make a living and mistake them for anything creative - the creativity with them is in making them readable, which is not a snarky comment: they're not setting out to be Dostoevski or anything. The two pieces of my own are easily separable too, though maybe there are things I'm not aware of that make me impose the style of one onto the other. I wonder if mega-successful writers, Booker Prize winners and all, ever work on more than one major thing at a time - I imagine they do.
I spent much of yesterday doing a Wikipedia entry for the band I play with, the Trans-Siberian March Band. There are dire warnings all over the 'create a new page' bit of Wiki, things like "Don't do a wiki on the band you play in; if you're notable enough, somebody will do one eventually; very few bands are worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia..." etc etc, and fair enough. I'd had the wiki entry written for about 6 months, but was always put off doing it whenever I read these words. What made me go ahead and do it yesterday? It was finding a wiki entry for a band we are friendly with, and have seen on the London scene, though we've never shared a bill with them. They're in a similar situation to us, but, arguably, have done a lot less. So I went ahead and did it anyway. I had to put on my dispassionate editing hat and savage the rather flowery text I'd written, reduce all our beautiful endeavours, the exciting places we've been to on tour, exotic venues, surreally brain-addled promoters, all to a few matter-of-fact lines. I'm still waiting to see if Wikipedia's watchdogs will get rid of it citing contravention of their 'notability' clause, but will be on the point of arguing that my friend's band's entry shouldn't be there either - which seems a bit mean... I hope it won't come to that.
Tomorrow I may just junk writing and do something else. It's not like I'm sick of it, or anything, but I don't do it so well when I'm overloaded. On the other hand it's not going to do itself...
I spent much of yesterday doing a Wikipedia entry for the band I play with, the Trans-Siberian March Band. There are dire warnings all over the 'create a new page' bit of Wiki, things like "Don't do a wiki on the band you play in; if you're notable enough, somebody will do one eventually; very few bands are worthy of inclusion in Wikipedia..." etc etc, and fair enough. I'd had the wiki entry written for about 6 months, but was always put off doing it whenever I read these words. What made me go ahead and do it yesterday? It was finding a wiki entry for a band we are friendly with, and have seen on the London scene, though we've never shared a bill with them. They're in a similar situation to us, but, arguably, have done a lot less. So I went ahead and did it anyway. I had to put on my dispassionate editing hat and savage the rather flowery text I'd written, reduce all our beautiful endeavours, the exciting places we've been to on tour, exotic venues, surreally brain-addled promoters, all to a few matter-of-fact lines. I'm still waiting to see if Wikipedia's watchdogs will get rid of it citing contravention of their 'notability' clause, but will be on the point of arguing that my friend's band's entry shouldn't be there either - which seems a bit mean... I hope it won't come to that.
Tomorrow I may just junk writing and do something else. It's not like I'm sick of it, or anything, but I don't do it so well when I'm overloaded. On the other hand it's not going to do itself...
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