Closing Time!

00:09 a.m.
                Just finished listening to Leonard Cohen on BBC Four, on the digital thingy.
                There were some things I could do when I was a writer and some things I couldn't. Here are maybe some of the things I could do.
1) When I wrote radio plays, I could write up to the minute. So you're doing a drama and it's supposed to last and hour and a half like the ones on Monday Night Theatre on Radio 4, two of which I wrote. Anyway, you have to write an hour and a half. Not an hour and thirty one minutes. Not more than an hour and a half and not less. I learned to do this. This meant that the producer didn't make any decisions on the script. It fitted. Nobody has to do this in the theatre. Theatre is sloppy by comparison.
2) I could write dialogue that made folk laugh. I don't know why this was. It didn't make me laugh. Sometimes when I watched folk watching Busted, which was the be all and end all in some ways, they were falling off their seats laughing.. Bizarre to see this.
3) Before there was word processing, I wrote City Whitelight. This book has, if I remember right, about thirteen really good paragraphs in it. I think I counted them once. It might have been seven. If I had been able to write the book in longhand seventeen times, there would have been more paragraphs which were good, but thirteen paragraphs in a book which were good is quite a lot. You get whole books with no good paragraphs at all.
4) Rhythm. It don't mean a thing if it aint got that swing. Even after there was word processing, I tried to make the writing hypnotic. Like, you start reading and you want to keep reading. I don't think I ever did this all that well in the third person, but in the first person I could maybe do it a bit though the first person is easy, and is not art. It's like pick your personality and then flow ...

             Anyway, that's all I can say about the good bits I think I could do. Whether or not they were any good doesn't really matter. They got me through this existence. Before I had to leave Bellshill at the New Year due to having to witness the appalling excesses of alcohol abuse, I used to stand outside the auld maw's and at the front gate listen for the bells. And I'd think what might happen to me in the next year, or not happen. I always knew when the draft of whatever was going to end because I could tell how long it took to write a page. So, I'll be finished this by February and this might happen or not.
               In comparison, I hardly write anything these days. I don't care. I have reached the end of times. Trying hard to write was the surfboard that took me across the ocean of horrors  and kept me apart from it.
               The auld maw rattled off a list of factories that used to be in Bellshill today, and a list of pits. And she named all the women who moved into the then new houses in Orbiston Drive. And they're dead now, Jack! Telling folk about dharma is the best thing. Thank god for the spam robots!!