BLACK HOLE.

Events intrude. Life. You may be forced to write nothing for a week as you deal with hospitals, maintenance issues, or weird technical stuff that slows your world to the consistency of something that has fossils in it.

   Sound familiar? Go back one blog post. I crawled from a digital BLACK HOLE to write this entry. Not so long ago, I was handed a free computer. It wasn’t a great computer, but it was better than the one I had. Oh, and it was free.

   My office arrangements changed. I’d run two computers now. A whole computer as a back-up for the other. If one engine sputtered, I’d still have the reserve to keep me in the air. Cables and components were moved around. Chairs. Books. Notepaper. All the big things swirled with the little things.

   And, when the dust settled, I was more or less happy. The year 2012 drew to a close. There was no Maya Apocalypse to trouble me. Unbeknownst to me, a microscopic Maya shaman was chanting and dancing atop a peculiar pyramid inside my old computer.

   The great change, dawn of a new era, had come.

   I worked late into the night struggling to copy my archive. For some reason, this straightforward process was anything but. The forces of evil themselves were in deep array, preparing to march against my glorious cause of saving data.

   With back-ups done, I was closing in on the end-of-year sale. There was a temporary archive of the last few months. Now I wanted a full back-up of the latest changes. Putting another year to bed in the vaults.

   Good job I did all that the night before. Next morning, zap. Nothing. The machine wouldn’t start. I ran through the emergency checklist. Was this the result of a loose cable after migrating from office to library? Check the connections.

   Connections seem fine.

   In that case, are you missing something obvious? Perhaps you only think you flipped that switch over at the wall. Highly unlikely. See to socket.

   Socket and switch seem fine.

   The TV is on, so there’s no need to fall back to the electric light to check on failure of mains power.

   Power seems fine.

   Switch everything off and get into the workings of the computer. Check internal connections. You know by this time that you don’t want to. And that you have to.

   Internal connections seem fine.

   After each test, the button is pressed. No go.

   Bonus test. Unhook the umbilical. Atomic batteries to power. Turbines to speed. Disconnect the machine and cast your computer into space. Connect the new computer to the set-up and see what happens.

   New computer works just fine.

   Damn. It’s the old computer’s innards. Something went. You’ll likely never know what. Engage Plan B. That’s Brain Transplant. Shift the old hard drive over to the new machine. Some fiddly work is called for here…

   It’s all a bit too dense and technical for you. I say that as it’s all a bit too dense and technical for me. Things were unplugged. I invoked Cosmic Law. When removing something and placing it out of the way, that item automatically gets in the way of the next thing you move around.

   Repeat as required.

   I experimented with the computer brains. The new machine’s brain was set in charge of the old archive. That worked. For complicated reasons of the plot, I switched the old brain around so that it invaded the new computer and seized power.

   That worked too.

   A crisis was averted.

   Deep in the computing jungle, a digital shaman planned an evisceration. Days passed. I was staring at the near-empty shell of the old computer. There lay an item of equipment. It may have been faulty. Let us suppose it was.

   Something in the old machine had failed. I’m inclined to call this item the KIDNEY. An evil organ. I stared at the kidney. That kidney could have a new home in the working computer. Hey, I’d performed a brain transplant. I could handle a lowly kidney, right?

   My authorial sensibility tells me the audience can see where this story is headed. Into a BLACK HOLE. I moved the old DVD player over to the new computer. Now my machine would have two brains and two kidneys.

   Atop a pyramid hidden in the depths of the DVD jungle, the tiny Maya shaman raised his sacrificial blade and brought an end to civilisation.

   Bastard.

   With everything plugged in, I was raring to go. Nothing happened. As an author, I am prepared to construct a tale from this series of events. A bad thing stopped my computer from working. No big deal. The computer’s mind survived the infection. Nothing nasty passed across the blood-brain barrier.

   I then moved the faulty item of equipment over to the new body and the same shit happened again. BUT I couldn’t say that for certain. Many factors were at play. Anything could have gone wrong. I called in an expert.

   He’d given me the free computer, and remembered exactly how it was wired up to start with. In the process of investigating the problem, we blew a fuse. Something nasty had shorted in there, and the fuse took a bullet for the team.

   A fuse.

   Straight from the lone wall socket to the computer. No go. I had to visit my reserve stash of fuses – which hadn’t even been removed from the packet. That’s because, these days, no one blows a fuse. I can’t remember the last time I had to change one.

   The expert, parachuted in to help save the day, couldn’t remember ever blowing a fuse while running a computer. Ow. The Maya shaman must have been up all night sharpening that sacrificial knife. We concluded that something electrical went for the first computer’s guts.

   And with the transplanted brain working just fine, the culprit – lone suspect – looked like the KIDNEY. Though I stress other items could easily have been at fault. In electrical terms, I’m sure it’s obvious. But I’m going with storytelling terms.

   An evil kidney transplant of a digital Maya pyramid, complete with micro-sized sacrificial shaman, was responsible. I’m going with that.

   There was redundant computing equipment sloshing around, so my expert handed me a laptop to save me from a digital BLACK HOLE. I was in the BLACK HOLE for a while, and caught up on some reading. Aside from that, I wrote a story outline by hand.

   To minimise the risk of a third rat leaving a sunken ship, I reorganised many things. A fuse had blown. Perhaps cabling was damaged. I checked a lot of stuff. Then, in a mad experiment, I cloned the laptop’s screen to my TV via a safe cable.

   My reconstituted office flew along on one engine, again. I’d emerged from the darkness. Yes, my publishing plans were put back. And some plans changed. But I could type in a file once more. This almost affected blogging.

   My store of automated blogs wound down. The blog monster drained its egg-sac and threatened to vanish with little trace. I’d have fixed a temporary sign to the door, letting a few readers know that technical difficulties were to blame.

   Non-technical difficulties are harder to apportion.

   My plans must resume. But what are those plans? I didn’t see far beyond four collected editions of blog posts, truth be told. Allowing for eighteen blog posts in my INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED WORKS, that’s 90 blog entries plus the odd emergency blast of the horn.

   With assorted stops and starts to my plans, I’ve still managed to blog weekly. Publication dates for collected editions weren’t fixed in stone. They were fluid. And I’m glad of that. So now, after falling into a BLACK HOLE, I’m sitting here asking myself what happens next…

   Enough blog material gathers for collection in March. That would be the third volume. A fourth carries me through to Kacey Vanderkarr’s publishing launch in the summer of 2013 – which will be plugged here on this blog in some or other fashion.

   Not for the first time, I contemplate halting the blog. Perhaps temporarily, come summer’s end. By then I’ll have a surer picture of what’s coming out next, and where my fiction heads after all that. There’s a writerly duty to warn my 0.75 readers that the blog might wind down for a break.

   Or, who knows. I may keep writing blogs ahead of the game, and automating these reports from a fugitive.

   Today’s lesson, for writers? If you can’t type into a machine, use a pen and a piece of paper. Use a physical paper dictionary to check troublesome words while away from troublesome machines. Always have a back-up. And a back-up for that. If all else fails, be prepared to reconstruct from memory.

   And I thought I had troubles with the computer desk. It, at least, is still functioning more or less as intended. I’d say at the 98% level. Good enough for government work. The chair’s just fine, and that’s the main thing.

NEXT BLOG: KACEY VANDERKARR.

WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

Am I a millionaire? Yes.

   No, I’m not rich. Spammers – stop salivating. Sell your Rolex watches elsewhere. In one form or another, I’ve generated a million words during my first year as a self-publisher. I didn’t set out with that objective in mind.

   As I neared the first year, I noticed the word-count. Stories I’d dusted down and reformatted. Blog posts, gathered with a view to publication. New tales I concocted. Old tales I recycled. Leaving aside the repetition that arises from listing the same ALSO AVAILABLE sections at the end of my works, I was a millionaire.

   How would I have fared, writing from scratch? Neon Gods Brought Down by Swords runs to 195,000 words including notes. That’s three long weeks of writing, right there.

   I wrestled with formatting that story and I managed to throw something together inside two months. A story that was already written. My first attempt at formatting was a cautious affair. Had I written 50,000 a week instead of formatting, I’d have knocked out an epic of 450,000 words.

   That Odyssey may not have made much sense. Writing isn’t editing. After Neon Gods was published, I turned to the creation of INCOMPLETE UNCOLLECTED SHORT WORKS. The editing and formatting process was now on a six-week clock.

   I handled the deal inside the time-limit, adding new fiction to old tales. That book runs to 116,000 words. If I’d written 50,000 a week over the revised editing and formatting period, I’d have come up with an epic of 300,000 words instead. After the second book was out, I turned to LYGHTNYNG STRYKES.

   This book runs to 295,000 words. So if I’d elected to write something new instead of editing and formatting an old novel, I’d have been in the same area for once – given the writing of 50,000 words each and every week.

   It isn’t always possible to write 50,000 words in a week. With Hallowe’en 2012 looming, I wanted to put out a 30,000-word story called WITCHES. I wrote that story in three days. It runs to 35,000 words. The rest of the week was given over to editing and formatting.

   What could I write in a year? Let’s say a five-day writing week generates 10,000 a day. I try to write seven days a week. This isn’t always possible. Sunday is usually the day of rest. Output is often down. Monday is a day of reading. If I could read a book a week, I’d feel good.

   However, sometimes you have to throw the stack of books aside and write a bloody chapter on the Monday. Or read publishing articles on a Monday. A long time ago, traditionally, Wednesday night was a design night. Now and again, I hark back to that era. Mostly, design happens as and when. I am no longer ritualistically tied to that specific time. (The radio show ended.)

   If you are knocking out 50,000 a week, then your writing year is half-over by the time you’ve hit a million words. Is that how things went for me? After twelve weeks, I’d produced those three products and I had 600,000 words out there – equivalent to being banged out at 50,000 per week. And now, the important bit.

   Coincidence.

   Mm, this is all crap. Don’t pay attention to a single figure. The amount you write in a day is irrelevant. Written is not edited. Edited is not published. Published is not indicative of sales. Sales may not relate to quality. Oh, I’ll return to quality.

   I’d love to knock out 50,000 a week every week, but there are other considerations. A 10,000-word day can seem short. Or very long. A 15,000-word day IS long – even though days like that are days on which the story flows like molten fucking lava. Hot. Fast. Spewing ash. Roaring along faster than a man can run.

   My word-count drops to nothing on heavy editing days. And on reading days. Also, sometimes, on design days – if I go mental on design. I can’t put a value on what’s written in a day. Next day I might cast a glance over a piece of writing and curse at the typos I glossed over as I rattled away on a creative streak.

   National Novel Writing Month occurs in November. I’d only heard of it in 2011. November was a busy month that year. I didn’t take part in the challenge to write 50,000 words. My task was to finish editing and formatting my novel for sale in December.

   For 2012, I decided to support people who were participating. I’d shadow the whole thing, and post a daily word-count on Twitter until I hit the 50,000 level. After eight days, I was done. That included a knee-folding day on which I wrote 17,500 words.

   Take plenty of rest-breaks. I did. The story flowed like molten lava. Destroying everything in its path. Including the continuity of the story. I switched to writing an unconnected scene knowing it would be placed later in the story once I turned to editing. There was no pause, bar the double-tap of the ENTER key. I simply made space and got the hell on with it.

   Eight days. I didn’t manage 10,000 a day every day. Life stepped in. Sunday was the day of rest. Could I write 10,000 words a day for a whole year? Yes, if I cut and pasted FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY FLY into files and then fucked off to do something else.

   No. I’d have to devote time to reading books. And to editing. To formatting. Design. Hell, I’d occasionally have to eat meals and fall in and out of hot soapy water. Go for a wander. See the sights. Take time off. (A writer is always on the job. I took two stints off in 2012, and got stories out of both breaks.)

   It doesn’t matter how much you write. Some days, 5,000 seems low. A slow day. And on other days, that 5,000 comes across as a job well-done. My limit of 20,000, that I hit once, was ridiculous. I had to spend the next day editing. So the fantastic 20,000 in one day became 20,000 the next. No advance.

   As though I’d written 10,000 one day and 10,000 the next. This is an important point. The 20,000 on day one wasn’t as good as the same 20,000 sitting there on day two. By day two, it wasn’t the same 20,000. It was edited.

   No, it doesn’t matter what you write that day. My word-count may increase by nothing or even drop a few words after editing. Events intrude. Life. You may be forced to write nothing for a week as you deal with hospitals, maintenance issues, or weird technical stuff that slows your world to the consistency of something that has fossils in it.

   Don’t get hung up on word-count. One smooth word trumps a thousand rough ones. There are other aspects of the business to deal with. Reading is so important that I should have spent this entire blog post typing READ READ READ READ.

   I may actually do that in a blog post. It would be quick to write. Ah. But how long would I spend editing?

   Let me turn to the issue of quality. Quality is unimportant. That’s right. Say it again. Quality. What is it good for? Absolutely nothin’. Basic quality is vital. Your story is about something. Oh, you may feel inventive and write a story that appears to be about nothing. That’s your affair.

   Develop a minimum standard, and write beyond that. Beyond that, opinion takes over. So don’t concern yourself with the quality of writing. Whether you write in television or not, ask yourself what you would do if you wrote in television.

   I’ll delve into the second person.

   You are a writer for an American TV show – the series runs episodes in the twenty-odd range. Scripts must be churned out through half the year. On a weekly basis. A few weeks after your script goes in, someone is building a set in which to film your wonderful piece of writing.

   Quality?

   Doesn’t matter. You have seven days to turn in a script, or you won’t eat food. If you are the sort of writer who sits there aching over the construction of a perfect sentence, I imagine a voice just popped into your head.

   Well I wouldn’t eat that week, ha ha.

   Laughing? The joke’s on you. If I had a week in which to write a story by contract, that story would be written. Tom Berenger is scowling over you in the jungle. TAKE THE PAIN! You should write as though you have a weekly deadline, even though your deadline may be further off. Stop worrying about quality. About perfection.

   A perfect one-sentence TV script makes for a short show.

   What am I getting at? You wrote 10,000 words that day. Irrelevant. The piece may not be up to scratch. You wrote one sentence that day – and it shone through the storm, healing the sick as it passed by. Irrelevant.

   Somewhere in there, is your own balance. You write stuff. It looks okay. You’ll tidy it later. After many days of this, you have a story in front of you. This is a story you decide to put in front of others. Job done. Thus endeth the lesson.

NEXT BLOG: BLACK HOLE.

JAZZ WITH MARJORIE ELIOT.

Take the ‘A’ Train to Sugar Hill.

   Looking for something away from the standard New York tourist trail, I happened on an entry for Marjorie Eliot’s jazz concerts. The first time I saw Marjorie was in a movie starring Al Pacino as a cop named Frank Serpico. Marjorie portrayed the victim of violent crime in one of the world’s most brutal cities…

   New York: in the 1970s, as much known for being the Bad Apple as for the jazz-man’s appellation Big Apple. These days, New York is still a dangerous place – for different reasons. Witness the flooding as a storm comes calling at high tide. Waves wave the subway goodbye.

   The next time I saw Marjorie Eliot, she was opening her apartment door to me in Edgecombe Avenue. Jazz splashed into the hallway, as though some elixir of life escaped its confines – spreading vitality to the wider world note by note.

   If you think you’ve discovered jazz by listening to any of the ordinary popular mass-market releases of the past fifteen years…then that’s your thought and good for you. Dig deep. Find Fats Waller tinkling those ivories. Discover Lady Day doing incredible things to incredible songs.

   There are no mistakes in jazz. In jazz, there is simply…improvisation. Jazz has many homes. Sometimes it seems as though jazz has no home at all. It throws a hat on a peg and calls a hallway home, for the time being.

   This is the story of my visit to one of the many homes of jazz. A big green apple painted in skyscraper tones – New York, New York. Though it’s not just the dizzying skyscraper heights that seem made for jazz.

   You can also feel that decadent vibe underground. The subway is packed with people, and scattered with musicians who will veer in and out of jazz as the mood takes them. It is illegal to beg on the subway.

   If, however, you happen to sing as you stroll down a railway carriage…

   And you happen to be holding an empty cup in your hand…

   Who are you to complain if people decide to throw money into that cup?

   No matter how refined jazz becomes, there’s always going to be that hint of decadence about the music. By decadence, I mean fun. What you mean by fun is your own business.

   Mr Einstein’s equation E = mc² can also be written mc² = E. Taking a leaf out of that book, it’s possible to say, no matter how decadent jazz becomes, there’s always going to be a hint of refinement about the music.

   Whisper this, folks. Jazz isn’t exactly the new kid on the musical block. There was a time when jazz was wholly reviled and simultaneously praised as a rebellious lowdown dirty young item. That era is not the period through which we’ve lived. I’m wary of nostalgia for a time that never was.

   Why jazz? They keep telling us jazz is dead. And we let them tell that lie so we have more jazz to ourselves. When writing fiction, you shouldn’t listen too closely to the music in the background. If you do, you won’t be writing fiction – you’ll be listening to music. Let the background sound slide around.

   Jazz knows how to slide.

   I listen to instrumental jazz in the background. Or movie scores. Sometimes I combine the effects and listen to a jazzy movie score. If I want to stop writing and listen to vocal jazz, I will. Anyway, when writing fiction don’t get too caught up in the music.

   Plenty of people will tell you they hate jazz, though they’ll not realise they’ve enjoyed it in movies down the years. Jazz doesn’t have to try too hard. It isn’t there pretending to be cool or affecting a pose. Oh, people attempted to force that foolishness into every aspect of culture – even jazz. Charlatans are soon unmasked.

   My trip to Marjorie’s home began with a transatlantic telephone call. I decided to invest in the expense. There’s a miserly Scottish theme to this tale that I must return to. For once in my life, I was delighted to be put on hold while the answering service kicked in.

   Music played while I waited. This was clearly a jazz recording made by the musicians who regularly attended Marjorie’s apartment concerts. Once in a lifetime, I enjoyed the music playing while I was on hold. I left a message saying I’d try to drop by and catch a Sunday concert.

   And so…

   There I was in New York on a Sunday afternoon, heading for Harlem. I was low on time, having swept in from Coney Island. I’ll do my bit for tourism and say I really liked the aquarium down there.

   How to get to Harlem from midtown? Take the ‘A’ Train to Sugar Hill. That blue ACE line beckons. My best bet is actually the C train. There are no C trains to the stop I’m after. Instructions posted to subway pillars warn that C trains are temporarily out of commission. Either take the A train or hop on the red 123 line and pull the ripcord as you near journey’s end.

   I turn to look for the A train’s location. An Asian man is one step ahead of me. He spends time rattling the metal gate clamped across the route to the A train. I hop one step ahead of him by marching to the surface and heading for the red line and a rendezvous with the red uptown train.

   That was my original plan. Penn Station was closest, and I considered the red uptown train. But I was looking to do a tourist thing. Taking the A train. A blue train. To Sugar Hill. The frantic trip through Penn Station to reach a red line uptown train didn’t quite turn me into a native New Yorker.

   But I could see why so many people bustled.

   Take the ‘A’ Train is almost an Ellington composition. There was an Ellingtonian hand to the music – and that hand belonged to the Duke’s son, Mercer. Billy Strayhorn threw the piece into the round filing-cabinet. Mercer’s hand reached in and saved the composition from obscurity. The Duke adopted Strayhorn’s number as the band’s anthem.

   There’ll be no A train for me today as I head for Sugar Hill. I am, of course, wrong.

   Harlem. The Jazz Age. Prohibition. Harlem Renaissance. Langston Hughes. The Cotton Club. Duke Ellington. By the time I pass through the turnstile and head for Harlem, I’ve already been through the place and enjoyed raucous jazz at a reconstituted Cotton Club.

   So I’m returning to Harlem. And I’ll bump into someone I met there. Small world.

   Keeping an eye on the stations. I cross 110^th, thinking of movies from 1970-land. The Seven-Ups, Across 110^th Street, The French Connection, and, naturally, Serpico. I’d read the book by Peter Maas. Frank Serpico’s dissection of cop-speak had me in stitches.

   I was no longer travelling through the New York of the Jazz Age, or the violent New York of so many cop movies. The producer of Serpico, Martin Bregman, had trouble getting the film into production after a glut of violent cop movies in the early 1970s.

   New York had a violent reputation and dined out on it for decades after the crime statistics started to fall. Blinking on emerging from the subterranean journey, I walk through a lovely sunny afternoon. The only crime was that the afternoon wouldn’t last.

   By this time I’m up in the 150s. Most of my tourist maps don’t climb that high, which is a crying shame. There is much to see downtown, but there’s much to see all over New York, and by that I refuse to restrict my definition to the isle of Manhattan.

   You might be forgiven for thinking that the area’s favourite son is Duke Ellington. Passing the Duke Ellington School, I walk through a very Spanish Harlem in which most of the inhabitants indulge in a love of what I can only describe as street chess.

   No, they don’t race along the canyons passing pawns to each other. That image was prompted by my walk to Washington Square, when I shadowed a game of American Basket Football.

   The school may be named for the Duke, but Tito Puente is the local hero in this street going by what’s playing on the air. I’m now late for the start of the concert. Let’s say I’m stylishly late.

   I’ve reconnoitred the landscape in my mind. Leave the train. Head north. Turn east. Catch sight of the Morris-Jumel Mansion. Turn right and I’m on Edgecombe Avenue at a building Duke Ellington might have called a Harlem Airshaft. The building is no mere airshaft. Paul Robeson once called it home.

   Triple Nickel. So called for the 555 address. An inhabitant strolls out into the glorious daylight. I ask if Marjorie Eliot is still running concerts.

   “I believe so.”

   Armed with that information, knowing she hadn’t missed a Sunday concert, I advance on Marjorie’s abode. I am buzzed in to reach apartment 3F. This makes me nervous. I have no desire to upset the music by throwing in a note of discord.

   There are no mistakes in jazz. In jazz, there is simply…improvisation. My improvised trip across the city carries me to this point. I expect the musicians will work around my unexpected note. Marjorie opens the door. There’s a cliché here that happens to be true…

   You just follow the sound of the concert to find the right door.

   She welcomes me and throws a jazz tune at me by uttering the words Special Dispensation. At least, those words sound like a jazz tune. Composers had a lot of fun with wordplay. I think of Minor Yours by Art Pepper or Jumpin’ off a Clef by Al Haig.

   Music soars. I warm to Marjorie for her use of the phrase in our brief conversation. She says more than I do. We cause minimal fuss to the guests. It’s standing-room only for me. Not everyone can stay for the second set, so Marjorie assures me I will be seated eventually.

   Sunday. I’m late to the party, and pass well below the salt. But I don’t mind. I’m practically in the kitchen. The view is unimportant. I’m there to listen. Dozens of people are crammed in. Mentally, I see an empty space gradually fill as folding chairs stretch their legs. There’s much preparation in making wonderful music happen. Many rituals are involved.

   I hear the bass-man doing his thing. He’s giving Jimmy Garrison a run for his money.

   Straight down the apartment’s right side is the hall. More chairs are camped there. I spy Marjorie’s friends and all the regular visitors. You couldn’t be happier to see a more mixed bunch of enthusiasts. I come under the heading of irregular visitor.

   There’s a familiar face in the crowd.

   Out of sadness, music. Marjorie started the concerts to fill the despair of a Sunday on which her son died. During a break in the concert, I’ll spot a dedication carved to a second son. There isn’t a sad atmosphere, though. The jazz is terrific.

   Marjorie has a sense of pride in the arrangement of a structured jazz concert. Even the buzzer, admitting another latecomer, chimes with what’s going on. The music flows. It is divided into two vast sets of an hour each. Vast, though over too quickly.

   The afternoon daylight mellows and the blue fairy lights come on. There’s a break, and some leave-taking. Everyone is offered one of those Granola-type health bars and a cold fruit drink. I pocket the bar for later and consume that fruit drink.

   There’s a chance to take a few photos of the piano and the bass. I sit, framing the shot through an arch. And I do something I’ve done several times before. Not paid attention.

   I commit to the centre of the image and snap away. The light is fading. Only much later, do I realise that a woman leaned against the arch and canted her head in a pose for my photograph. If I’d looked left or right, I’d have taken that in.

   It’s absurd that I didn’t see this. She’s RIGHT THERE in the picture.

   We kick off with the second set, and I sense something about Marjorie’s pride in a structured jazz concert. The music lives. I suspect, strongly, that we’ll be given a performance of the Rodgers-Hart number, My Funny Valentine.

   There’s no mention of this, except through the vibe in the air. Light fades as flowers do. Early evening. Marjorie takes a turn at the piano. There’s the illusion of singing. She plays without opening her mouth. I think of Chet Baker and Julie London. (Both are represented on the soundtrack to yet another 1970s cop movie, Sharky’s Machine. Burt Reynolds didn’t film in New York, though.)

   Jazz invites darkness, though the fading light is a welcome thing. The humanity of the artistry fills the space. For a few minutes, it’s all about Marjorie working her way through pain in a beautiful rendition of a classic. I’m happy to put her arrangement up there with some very big jazz names.

   To finish the show, the musicians gather and belt out…

   Of course. I do take that A train in the end. Musically, at least. Mercer Ellington’s hand reaches into the basket and saves a tune played in Marjorie Eliot’s packed parlour. That’s almost the final note. I meet a familiar face.

   She’s my tour-guide from earlier in the week. We went around in her company and stopped off at the Cotton Club. She’d never been to Marjorie’s before. Sunday wasn’t even her day off – she’d handled a gospel tour that morning. I suspected she’d return to Marjorie’s – a business card was handed over. My writer’s mind says a friendship was formed.

   Marjorie came by. She thanked me for being so patient without a chair and, by extension, without a view. I declared that even from around the corner, I could tell that she had a great bass-man who really enjoyed what he was doing.

   The great bass-man instantly loomed over me to thank me profusely for that. It was time to take my leave, so I returned to Marjorie for that long-shot. There’s a miserly Scottish theme to this tale that I must return to.

   I took a chance on the concert being there. This was my last night in New York. In Scotland, I’d stuffed an envelope with dollars for the concert. What if the concert doesn’t go ahead? Spend the money on food during your last day in New York. You’ll still have to eat before you fly home.

   In the Jazz Age, inhabitants of Harlem Airshafts would throw rent parties. I wasn’t in the Jazz Age, and the Triple Nickel isn’t exactly an airshaft. No – Marjorie’s concert wasn’t a house-rent party. I am Scottish, and miserly, and never put money in an envelope for her. If you hear a vicious rumour of that stripe, ignore it.

   I handed her the money in the envelope and she, not expecting that, thanked me. The cash went some way to defraying the cost of feeding the musicians, I’m sure. With that, I was out the door. At home, I’d stare at a Chet Baker album. Minor Yours. Jumpin’ off a Clef. No. My Funny Valentine is on the other disc. I went through the photographs and discovered that a woman had improvised a pose…

NEXT BLOG: WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

OBITUARY: MISSY BIOZARRE.

“George Gershwin died on July 11, 1937, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.” (John O’Hara.)

You mustn’t believe what you’ve read about Missy Biozarre’s death at the hands of genetically-engineered zombies. That report in the New York Times was faked. The dead-giveaway was the news that her shorn dreadlocks were found deep in the Biozarre Lair.

   Stuff and nonsense. The year 2012 will go down in history as the year of the Maya non-apocalypse. And the year in which Missy chased a word-count goal. Falling short of that word-count, she declared her dreadlocks would simply be shorn. The Penance of the Follicle.

   So pay no attention to that bedomed personage behind the curtain in the Biozarre Lair. She’s no Forensic Scientist. The circumstances of Missy Biozarre’s death are far more mundane. She died in a Zombie Apocalypse? Ha. She wishes your belief to flourish.

   I have the obituary here.

*

The sudden semi-expected death of Missy Danger Biozarre at the tender age of 21 has robbed American letters and the world stage in one fell swoop. La Biozarre was found crushed beneath the manuscript of a gargantuan Young Adult novel she’d secretly been working on. Associates knew only that she was really stoked, had gone all covert-ops, and was looking forward to mashin’ me up some spiddies.

   Born off-world in an orbital weapons platform/budget-price genetic lab, Missy was sold to Thomas and Martha Wayne of Goth…wrong file. She was looked after by her sick Aunt May and Uncle Ben…wrong file. Made a ward of court in the care of Alfred J. Pennyworth, butler. No. Raised by wolves and forced to murder her twin sister in the insane pursuit of power over newly-established Rome…

   Details are hazy. La Biozarre leaves behind a Morbidly Obese Twitter following, and her much-abused pet spider Humphrey. In attendance at the empty open casket ceremony, Missy’s writing buddy Kacey Vanderkarr wept buckets, waited tables, coached teams, and wondered – just exactly what are the 39 steps?

   Who was Missy Biozarre? Astronaut. Time traveller. Gibson Girl. Debutante. Crime Scene Instigator. One of Edward Gorey’s favourite models, she’s credited with inventing the striped-stocking look Gorey adored. La Biozarre vanquished Picasso in a canoe duel, dined with Sidney Bechet in Paris, and taught Cary Grant how to tango upstairs in the aisle of a London double-decker bus.

   Hitchcock considered her for the lead role in North by Northwest, but hired her ex-tango partner instead. She can be seen, briefly, in The President’s Analyst, Save the Tiger, and the lost silent movie, Quarz. (Of which, only her first-reel appearance remains. The cinematic gnomes of Transit Film GmbH went to some length to show that the uncredited camera operator was Karl Freund.)

   Of her time travel, she was coy. She spoke little of her movie appearances, noting famously that most could never be shown – as history would be rewritten. Her favourite role was in a short movie filmed during the destruction of Pompeii in AD 79. (She’s shown larking around at the temple of Apollo, mock-bitching about the outdated Sony Walkman on her hip. Missy warps out just as Vesuvius kicks off in the background.)

   Her criminal record was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. Missy spent sporadic years as Eastwick or Jane Doe, peppering the mid-1900s with appearances under those guises. I first met Missy on Moreau’s island, and had iced lemon tea with La Biozarre and a nervous lady who introduced herself as E. Borden. Cutlery was notable by its absence.

   When next we met, in London, we spent the summer of 1889 tracking the Whitechapel Murderer. Our paths rarely crossed, so thin were we spread across the rambunctious East End. We communicated by semaphore-wielding street-urchins or, when available, sea-urchins.

   Rumours that Missy Biozarre was Kacey Vanderkarr’s part-clockwork father are simply no more than that. It is true that the liquid tones of hyperfast California-speak ran through Missy’s voicebox. She attributed the sound to noises absorbed from a mechanically-recovered Boy Band, raised in pitch to female level.

   Those who met her were surprised to discover that she was six feet tall. Overly-engineered boots were to blame. Missy deflected the conspiratorial truth – short people secretly rule the world – by pretending to be taller. In private, she acknowledged that she was shorter than she was unwise.

   Her legacy? Missy inspired rage in vegetables, rust in iron, and poetry in snow. She walked between the raindrops only to slush through mud with a mischievous look to the eyes in the back of her head. The notion that she is sadly missed will, itself, be sadly missed – for that notion was kidnapped by her minions and held to ransom for the ransom note.

   She no longer works for the CIA, which the CIA is forced to deny at non-periodic intervals. One of several authors known to hire actors as impersonators, it is not clear just exactly who died in her place.

   In attendance at Missy’s funeral, Kacey Vanderkarr was impersonated by Missy Biozarre – saving the real Kacey Vanderkarr impersonator a journey. The real Kacey Vanderkarr was left feeling miffed at that, as she’d turned up to impersonate me.

   “Ah spent a’ week rehearsin’ yon Scoattish accent an’ ev’ry’hin’, but.”

   A veil was drawn over this scene, as a pipe-bearing scaffold was moved in to provide fake rain.

*

What to say of the death of Missy Biozarre? Those of us who talked her down off the literary ledge the first time pretty much knew there’d be a second time. And she’d jump while we were on a break. Missy’s writing persona wasn’t sitting well with the fiction she wanted to write, or her wider aims in writing. My response, the first time she reached for the self-destruct?

WTF! Am I seriously going to have to dress up as the anti- Peter Cushing, vampire-hunter in reverse, standing ready to pull the stake back out of La Biozarre’s smouldering corpse? That’s forcing me to look out a whole load of capes, waders, Gladstone bags, and other arcane accoutrements. Stay off that ledge. Publish as Biozarre. Bleed words.

   My advice to writers is so boring it is worth repeating the mundane truth of the writerly life. Keep writing. Never give up. That’s it. There’s no secret to writing. You have to keep at it. There are elaborations on the basic advice.

   If you genuinely feel uncomfortable with a writing persona, find another way that works for you and your writing. The opinions of others will never trump your gut-instinct. Go with that. Feel good about writing, and you won’t go wrong.

   Change what you are doing if it is unwholesome. Find another way. And this is what Missy Biozarre did. She was a writer who popped up in 2012 to thank me for helping her author friend Kacey. I gave Missy no great advice and she swore at me. She decided to pack it all in and start again with a new identity. Kacey and I had words, and Missy held back.

Without your blog, your internet presence fades and you become yourself. Missy Biozarre reaches her write-by-date, and goes the way of all replicants. While the human version slips out of that crumbling shell and has a different life to lead. As another writer, with a new blog.

   My crystal ball was supposedly looking a few years ahead, not months. I saw that Missy was a temporary commodity. A few months roll by, and Missy Biozarre reaches her write-by-date. What’s the purpose of this blog entry?

   Advice to other writers, of course. If you have concerns about your fiction, and feel the need to write as someone else – for whatever reason – then that is up to you. Experiment on a blog before publishing a book. Missy had a go, and, over the course of an apocalyptic 2012, she advanced so far as a writer that she outpaced her online persona.

   Writing is about change. No time to stand still. Keep moving. Type away. Get on with it. If you have to leave items of equipment behind in the rush, ask yourself if you’ll stop to go back for bits and pieces. And if you decide no, then you likely didn’t need that stuff anyway.

   New writers are often bewildered by the amount of learning involved. That’s true of old writers, too, so don’t worry overmuch about how much there is to learn. Or how to learn it. You are on your own, flying in loose formation with the rest of us.

   I’d said to Missy…

In letting Biozarre die you deprive Kacey of a book dedication, and force a tired Caledonian writer to spend days toiling at the coal-face of obituaryism. That is not a prospect any scribbler with a weak constitution wishes to face.

   As I enter my declining years, with the cold winds of winter circling my leaky castle and night falling hard on the icy cobbles (that was all fiction), I sense I could take a measly crumb of comfort from knowing that the younger generation didn’t piss writing up the wall.

   The first time she threatened to retire the replicant Missy, I made it plain that I’d be forced to write an obituary. For my blog. Which brings us to this blog. Missy found her writing identity less and less in keeping with her ever-evolving style.

   There’s no right way, and no wrong way. Pick yourself up every time you fall, or lean on colleagues for a moment until you are steady. But never give up writing. Missy Biozarre pulled a new mask down over her head. She’s still out there, in the radioactive wastelands, typing like mad and, to quote Kacey Vanderkarr, stomping the same furious path. That only leaves the end to this blog post. The one I never wanted to write – but I prepared for the moment, just in case.

   Missy Biozarre died today, but I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.

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