Life & its many interruptions
(Disclaimer: I started to write this piece shortly before the Christmas break, when I was trying to crank out a good chunk of Blast, book two. Everything is now back to normal and I’m now doing my usual bit to wreck the environment.)
How is one supposed to write when life offers up so many interruptions? It's a question I ask myself constantly - as a distraction. Oh, I’m not talking about the regular interruptions like eating, cleaning or the mundane trudge of going to work. No, I’m talking about those little spanners life throws into the works, the banana skins of existence, those little moments when fate says ‘sod you; I’m in charge.’
The other day as I drove home from work, tired, bored and infinitesimally richer, I was happy in my heart, because I had five days off to look forward to. Five days available to me to sit in the middle of my imagination and write - Utter bliss. What’s more, I was going to write about sun-kissed beaches, rolling surf and far away lands; a tonic for the winter blues if ever there was one.
I should have known there and then, it wasn’t to be. The orange neon of an engine warning light came on and the car started to backfire. Suddenly my serene little world crumbled about me as I pulled my car on to the hard shoulder. I’ll spare you the complex series of events that followed, but in essence they went like this: I froze for two and a half hours on the side of the motorway. Two cars crashed in front of me because they were rubber-necking me. My breakdown service wouldn’t come out unless I downloaded an app on my phone; said app then drained my phone completely in fifteen minutes. I had to order a tow truck three times and finally was picked up by a raving lunatic who thought I was his hated managing director. You can’t make this stuff up!
Anyway, all rather distracting as you may assume. I spent the next day booking the car into a dealership only to be told it would take two weeks for a slot. I wouldn’t have minded so much but the car had only been in the shop three weeks before. So far, in the past two months, the car has eaten two turbos, a coil pack, a set of spark plugs, one catalytic converter, one wheel and a new water pump.
Now you might be asking what has this got to do with anything. Yes, it’s sad, you might say, that these breakdowns happened but what point are you driving at? (pun - get it?). Well, I wanted to point out it’s really, really, really difficult to be creative and funny while being held hostage by a certain well known car brand. That idyllic view of my coming weeks writing dissolved in to a series of petty shouting matches with faceless voices on the telephone over the following days. In my mind, I had a week’s worth of adventures all lined up in my brain. That seemed to evaporate the moment that little orange light sent me to the side of the road.
It shows, that even in writing, life can throw you a curve ball and that nothing is a certainty. Also, think on this. If my car hadn’t broken down then, and I had been able to write that week, how would it have changed what I would have written? Would book two be better or worse of it? We will never know.
Spooky!
(Second Disclaimer: There were actually a lot more influencing events that happened that week that resulted in a zero word count, but if I were to list them all in detail this would be a very, very long post indeed. Here are a few pointers though - phone battery, blocked plumbing, fencing knocked down, loss of filling and power outage - fun week!)