New angle of dangle

My angle of dangle has changed significantly. The novelistic carrot is now in front of the noses of 37 different literary agents - well, at least it will be once Postworker Androgeny get its shit together.

You see, I read this article online written by a guy at Bloomsbury - he nearly has his non-fiction piece publsihed and if he can get that turgid overpaid crud in front of publishers then HALF LIVED is gonna fly like a hyperactive migratory goose. Anyhoo...he could not be arsed with the whole Chinese water torture approach to getting an agent, sending oput reams of paper, waiting 8 weeks, getting rejected by someone's assistant, and on, and on, and on. He took the blanket approach, contacting at once everyone he thought might be interested in representing him. That's what I have done.

It is only a matter of time now.

So I toddled off to the postbox - 200 metres each way, max. Off I went on an azure late spring morn, past the unemployably fat, the stupidly tracksuited. There was I, spanish sunglasses, gravy-stained Texas tee, stylish jogging pants and a classy pair of Gola. my hair slick with two days of natural oils, side-parted and unkempt: a few whispers, imagined and real were heard, perhaps only by me. I even crossed the busy road before the pedestrian crossing and only did one four-count.

Relative liberty.

A new angle.

No fire in the hole

I flushed out the fox in hole - or rather they fessed under little or no examination. All rather disappointing really; a definite whimper-not-bang situation. Who it is and why they did it is not relevant - though it still slightly bemuses me, both in motive and the poorness of execution. It is enough to know that they will not be back.

I should have been cracking on with flogging the novel but that has had to hit the backburner...in fact I think I might have turned of the gas. It is there, sitting, ever evident, but i have been frying the cashfish, flogging my creative wares on the freelance circuit and making pretty good too. So after next week, when I have nother cashfish deadline, I will be back on the hawking trail...not stalking a spaz genius with a robot voice. I will be doing the agent thing.

Which reminds me to remind you that I have had jack shit for an age in respect of HALF LIVED on this blog from agents, publishers, groupies or wannabies.

Get your fucking shit together; get mesquite; get charcoal briquettes; get propane; get what-the-fuck-ever is your combustible of choice and let's get some fire in this hole.

You know you want to.

Shopfitters of the world, unite and take over

Things at once not big, not clever, not funny - nor challenging, as a result of the previous.

So much so that you hope you misheard, or in this case misread. So it is with the lackwitted attempt at sarcasm from dickwad who left the comment on the previous post pretending to be lit-twat Euan T.

Do me a brotherfucking favour; use a name, any name but preferably a good one. Show some imagination, anyone's imagination, but preferably a good one if not your own. Have a fuckin' go rather than piss about with half-arsed attempts at sarcasm, admittedly the highest form of wit but quarter-witted when at the disposal of this feckless impotante.

The arse crease, the butt crack, the bottom line is I will not take it personally, I fuckin' love it. The whole point of the Blame Game Name Shame is to rile people. What really offends me, what I may take personally if it continues, is the insipid nature of the bollock-drained comment left by that yellowest of recreants, that most jelly of fishes, the lowest milquetoast. That is, the habitually vapid, the daily jejune, the oftenmost anemic.

Did I hear you right?

Fantastic.

Let's have it!

Blame Game Name Shame on!!

Blame Game Name Shame

Well toute le monde I am back, from a two week Texas roadtrip with my old Oxford mate, Table Legs, followed by a one week work stint over there. Respectively I took in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Denton, Fort Worth and Arlington (henceforth know as Armpit Town, as it is truly the sweaty underarm of the west), and wrote a beauty of an article on the theme of escape and notions of a 'new past' in the works of Chinua Achebe

...I know, you wish to fuck that you were me. Well hold the back and front pages simultaneously, to say nothing of the centre-spread...

I am done with Texas, my semi-residence there is over, no more Pond-hopping for Truman. My 18 month flirtation with transatlanticism is no more. This was my last trip. Rose is returning come the summer. Together for good and all. Sure I will be back in a different capacity, to TX, as a visitor, but it is Hasta to my big-hat wearing, y'all-have-a-nice-day calling, you're-in-Texas-now chanting, ubercilious friends. I am away to get myself a writing career. Next time I hit US shores I intend it to be on a natioinwide book tour.

On which note I got my first agent rejection today. Some quarter-wit claiming that I must not have got his email of April 23. Well, not unless I have a fucking time machine. The dozy, coked-up lit-twat.

For the record his name is Euan (pronounced You-an, as in You an' who's army is gonna stop me now?) , he works at A.M. Impo-tant, London.

First victim of the Blame Game Name Shame. As Stephen Colbert would say, You're on notice!

Hey, so this Blame Game Name Shame is not going to win me any friends in the lit world. Who gives a fuck? I don't have any friends there now so I have jack shit to lose. Plus it will make it all the more satisfying when the book gets published and is shit-hot, as will be its progenies. Plus there is the film rights deal to consider.

I GUARANTEE this will happen.

So get in on it at the first floor - premier etage, baby. Write to your MP, Member of Congress, friend, or even friends, your local Fat Twat, publishers, agents - go on, I'll cut you a deal...1%

You think?!!

btw - I landed myself a gig writing for this tre-fooking-mendous mag, it is an online thing called The Standard. I'll be providing a weekly rant for them from Issue One, which is due for launch in May 2006. You should contribute too, if you have an ounce of conscience and a tonne of talent. www.standardraisers.com

Do it!

Go on, do it!!

No Welsh, No Cocker-knees

So I did the whole five-day wonder thing, the trip to TX.

No, I did not get the chance to do the TSA wind up. More to the point i did not need to. There was this geezer, you know the type all Larnn-din swagger and a gold toof, two places in front of me at immigration mouthing off in his stentorian, nicotine-barbed grate about farkin' lazy this and farkin' ages that - makes me proud to British, the dopey twat - and I wouldn't mind if we were in DFW cuz he'd have wound up with a five-fingered butt plug up his ring faster than he could have shouted Dee Arse-nul, but[t] cuz we were in O'Hare the TSA Oirish guy and two Puerto Rican girls just laughed at the dickwad with well-placed and perfectly measured disdain.

I got back Tuesday morning and the jetlag is just wearing off and my quads and hamstrings are just returning to the flexible side of pityfully taught; twenty-five hours on aeroplanes in less than five days. No es bueno.

Apologies for the lay off; I am just getting settled back in. I'll be back in my invective-feulled stride before you can say Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (my nan taught me how to pronounce this when I was kid. If you are wondering about this and the connection with my invective-feulled stride then just trust me that you do not want to get me started on the Welsh).

Hwly ti plentyn gordderch (as the average friendly Welsh salutation goes).

Tendon is the night

So I have wound up in a wrist brace

...forget the cracks about 'wank strain' and similar hilarities I have heard them all in the past 24 hours...

and it is a proper fucking pain. So I have decided to write this blog as it comes - no spell check, no editing at all; all those accidental Caps Locks (which prick put that button next the letter 'a'?), no retracingg to erase typos, just none of that shit at all. Typing is difficult enough with this spazzy thing on - it is one of those beige efforts with the four wrist straps and the single thumb strap, with a stretch abndage beneath and around, if that makes sense. Essentially what I am saying is that the bandage is under and over the spaz support. Claro? Bueno!

I feel like a fucking footballer running out with calipers on; like a racehorse in a friggin' wheelchair. A writer with a fucked up forearm. Apparently it all stems from my shoulder. Oh, point of refertemce, it is my right hand. I am left-handed. No wank strain, unless I have been doing a serious amount of pretending it is someone else or the old double-handed shandy. Whether or not I can or need to do that is none of yours. I have nothing to prove so make up your own mind. If you haven't got one as k someone else to make up theirs and get them to tell you what to think. Don't be ashamed there is a lot of it about.

Enough of this bollocks. The Ibuprofen are not kicking in and I'm getting the pins and needles from elbow to finfertips and the feeling that Butterball is standing on my right forearm trying to prevent me from typing.

Tendonitis - you've gotta love it.

Maybe more tomorrow. I've decided to go Stateside Wedensday not Friday nextr week so I'll be in transit then - FYI.

a BIENTOT X.

Wind up Banged up?

So I am making a quick trip across the Atlantic a week Friday for a long weekend. It is a surprise visit to see Rose; a birthday treat. I am bouncing through Chicago O'Hare and I have eighty-five minutes from touchdown to take off, needing to clear immigration and customs, then hop from Terminal 5 to Terminal 1, check in for the flight to DFW, then board.

So you might imagine that the last thing on my mind would be to wind up a TSA employee. You'd be wrong for two reasons. Last time I went through Chicago, around May '05 I think, there was this TSA guy who was a real hoot, having the craic with everyone in line. That leads me to believe the TSA have a sense of humour, deep deep deep undercover. Secondly I want to get back at those mothertruckers for last time (see the '...Rubber Gloves' blog posting)

Here's the deal; I will be carrying hand luggage only, due to the short turnaround at Chicago and the fact that I will only be staying in TX three nights - even I can travel light for a three night trip, notwithstanding my toiletries and CDs. But I will be bringing back some bits and bobs for Rose, clothes mainly, ahead of her permanent UK return in the summer. So I will be packing this kit bag which, when unfolded, looks like a sleeper carriage for a female gymnast. This thing is fookin' huge as bags go.

So I want to tell the TSA guy (or girl) that the folded up kitbag is to;

facilitate the safe carriage of an emmigrant midget family that has been hiding out in the TX hill country, near the town of Shitkickerville

or to

allow me to transport my celebrity midget from TX to Manchester, UK, for the 14th Annual Pro Celebrity Midget Throwing World Cup, for which I am the defending champion (I am a big, strong guy so this is feasible).

Let me know what you think. Which is your preferred option? Do you have any better (and by that I mean funnier) options? How do you rate my chances of making that connection at O'Hare? How do you shoot a friend accidentally with bird shot? Did Cheney think the poor old bastard was a Dove? Answers to all, some, none, or more of these questions ASAP to the comments page.

As Ben Stiller says in Starsky and Hutch ,

(bad Noo Joyzee Mobster accent).
Do it!
...Do it!