‘The thing is,’ says Oscar, draining his coffee, ‘is that the British one pound coin is very thick, and around the edge it has something written in Latin.’
‘Right,’ I say.
‘Or Welsh.’ He orders another latte. ‘One of those two. Which is the one with lots of ‘w’s?’
“Well, the more coffee I drink the more impulsive I become and the more coffee I order,” explained Oscar, “so by late morning I tend to feel connected to the here and now, the ghost of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a quasar at the edge of the known universe I’ve decided to call Ian.”
“I’ll get the bill,” I said.
People are asking me questions.
“Yes,” they say, “it’s all very well, all this business with burgling and urine portage and the lesser-known works of Danny DeVito, but didn’t you used to be an unrequited novelist?”
“Well – ” I say, but they interrupt me.
When a continent is millimetring its way gradually across the face of the earth, occasionally subducting or letting out an embarrassing little slip-strike, there’s a lot of time for it to reflect, ponder and submit silly stories to its blog.
After a few hundred millions of years of this, however, the continent looks up lazily from a half-finished story about pigeons, of which it very much likes the look, to find India carving mountains out of its southern flanks.
There’s a kind of archaeology in the editing process. Having finished a rough first draft of The Last Monk about three weeks ago, I’ve spent much of the intervening time reading and re-reading the entire manuscript, picking out everything from typos and bad grammar, through inelegant sentence structure to the high-end narrative and character lines which should drive the book.
Due to recent advances, I can now reveal the first and last line of The Last Monk. It begins with ‘The house is suddenly filled with music’, and ends with the words ‘small, green plastic frogs’.
It’s a philosophical piece, obviously.
Milestones are a strange business. I’ve never had a problem with motivation writing this novel, except when driven to soulless despair by some of the insaner moments of a listless career in university administration, yet I do tend to go a bit wild when my word-odometer passes a number with four zeroes in it.
As promised, here is the second part of the Fitzgerald House extract. It’s shorter than the first and takes up the story from Mr. Peabody’s angle. Kate has fled, so there is no one to say whether what is about to happen is real or entirely the product of Peabody’s fractured mind.
I’ve posted the first installment of a new, two-part extract from The Last Monk, which introduces the hottest young tea-cosy in modern Australian literature. As always, feel free to hand it around, comment on it or print it for use as the raw materials of a complex origami moose.
I’ve reached an interesting point at the end of my first week of full-time writing. I’ve written much more than I thought, so much in fact that I’ve written myself out into unknown territory.
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