The Lair of the Emerald Serpent

This time last year I was well and truly riding the Green Wave. It was as if someone had tipped a whole vial of Felix Felicitas potion into my pot of Polonium Tea.

This time it is very very different. Chalk and cheese.

Things had been fine for the start of the month. Nothing like a grand project to make life interesting and to impose a bit of discipline and purpose.

I knew from past experience that I do Nanowrimo differently from most people. From the very first time and ever since then.

Most people who sign up for the crazy caper of writing a 50,000 first draft of a novel in a mere 30 days during November are all guns ho and full of grand plans at the starting stalls.

At the stroke of midnight, they are off and racing. Full of the enthusiasm of a grand brand new venture. But then the initial excitement wears off and they are faced with the less glamorous drudgery of plodding on and clocking up 1,666 words every day in order to stay on track.
It is the second week when they start falling by the wayside. And that is precisely when this serpent gets the wind in her scales.

The first time back in 2009 when I signed up on the spur of the moment thanks to the evil influence of Catness and ever since then.
The first time I made a point of joining at the last minute because I am by nature someone who insists not just on Plan B. I am not happy unless I can go all the way to Plan Z. So by signing up at the last minute it would be my one and only chance to wing it because of course I would revert to the usual mode for the next one especially with a whole year’s notice.

It was such a struggle to get through the first week since I had of course gone totally out of my comfort zone with no prep at all. Nothing but a pack of Dark Grimoire tarot cards as inspiration.

I kept wondering what masochistic madness made me sign up for such craziness but the inner serpent insisted - have all the pity parties you like but get those 1,666 words on the score board first.
It was like squeezing blood out of a stone, nails scratching on a blackboard. But then on the fifth day the muse turned up.
Nanowrimo went from wading in treacle to a frenzied attempt for the forked tongue to type fast enough to keep up with the tsunami of words in the serpent skull.

For some inexplicable reason it has been like that every single year since. It is almost like the muses and monsters want to know that I am serious before they deem me worthy of their visits.

( Notes from Nanoland )

I was supposed to post this on the evening of Monday 15th November. The half way point of Nanowrimo. But at this stage, I guess that’s not going to happen.

The official word count at the half way mark is of course 25,000. I am at 28,888 so just over 2 days ahead of schedule and I intend to keep it that way.
Unlike the last 5 years where I had a serious case of Writer’s Block and was completely incapable of telling a proper story, this time it is more like a case of the Writer’s Runs where I simply cannot keep up with all the ideas begging to be set down upon the page.

At this stage I have a prompt list of some 15 ideas and have managed to cover only 3 of them.
Once again I am not writing a proper Nanowrimo novel with protagonist, antagonist and assorted side kicks. It is more like morning pages on steroids but that’s just fine by me because I have learned that sometimes the actual story is not the one you make up but the one that is happening in your own life.


( Notes from the Green Zone )

It's that time of year again. Nanowrimo is just around the corner. After 3 years of brain dead word count quota filling with bugger all story to show for it, this time I have decided that I really do need to make an effort to get back to proper novel squiggling

About two months ago I managed to get my paws on Charles Duhigg's book "The Power of Habit" and I am slowly making my way through it. In combination with the evil "Hell Week" it has made one thing very clear. There is a lot to be said for doing stuff on autopilot. Using one's brains to make plans when they are still fresh and unfogged by the slings and arrows of daily dramas so that there is no need to make decisions when will power and the brain batteries are running on empty
The writer of Hell Week said that the reason soldiers can get so much stuff done is that someone else has already done the thinking and all they have to do is follow orders and just keep on marching.
Unlike Catness who gave me this inspiring book, I never actually did the 7 day program. The book arrived in my life right in the middle of some serious Dursleyish dramas and through no fault of its own has been tainted by them but one central message still remains which is reinforced by the book about habits. Clever use of thinking time can drastically increase the effectiveness of doing time. Because decision fatigue is much more draining than physical fatigue.

For almost 3 years I had set up a house work schedule with certain jobs assigned to certain days and was pleased to discover that it did not take too long for it to become almost automatic so much so that it required more energy NOT to do the job of the day and something else instead. Tasks that has initially taken almost an hour soon shrank to less than half that time leaving more space for squiggling and slinking on Twitter

But then Petunia got sick and I got totally out of the usual routine. It is now only some 3 years later that I finally feel I can get back on the broomstick of usual routine. Even just a token gesture is sufficient to start anchoring old housework habits again.

Last month I dusted off the old housework schedule and also decided to make a habit of writing 333 words per day. Not 333 good words. It could be any old waffle (and usually is) just so long as there are 333 or more of them. Sometimes I would do double that or more and I missed only 2 days in the whole month so I was happy with that new habit. Now for October I have decided to double it to 666 with the intention of using at least half of them for plotting and planning for November


And this time there will be no gaps in the 31 day streak.

It has been a long time between hisses but it looks like this serpent has finally found her way back on to the broomstick again but this time with a bright shiny new Dursley repelling anti bludger charm

Been waiting 14 years for lightening to strike twice and it appears increasingly likely that this is exactly what has happened

With the help of assorted rituals including copious sniffing of Angel's Trumpet flowers, a Dead Can Dance soundtrack and hours devoted to squiggling in the Pensieve under the pretext of November novel writing, magic is finally happening.
The usual strange serpent pattern applied this time. Unlike most folks who are firing on all cylinders for the first week but then falter and splutter and lose steam during the dreaded second week before finally crashing into the wall in the third and never quite recovering, for me it has always been slow going during the first week. Simply meeting the daily quota is an uphill struggle but then in the second week the rockets start firing and magic happens. It takes that long for the muses to realize that this serpent is dead serious and only then do they finally join the party

Which is just as well because this would have been a particularly sticky wicked week without such serpentine intervention

What was supposed to have been a 50,000 word novel about a worker stuck in a dead end goblin job daydreaming of escaping the rat race and owning her own private detective agency turned into a giant Moaning Pages on steroids. To be quite crude about it, a sort of colonic irrigation for the soul. Getting all the toxic waste from the serpent skull on to the page has proven valuable in joining the dots and devising an effective Defence Against the Dursleys

Daisy Dursley has been doing this too and we have been both comparing notes. Her secret weapon is riding her broomstick and mine is writing words, lots of words. Then there is also planting weeds

Wicked wonderful weeds that grow and provide a heaven for feathered friends and other creeping crawling creatures. Green and growing things. For where there is life, joy and hope, vile Vernon Dursley dares not linger.

Green lightses are the best Dursley repellent ever.

It’s Divali today. But I am way too drained to do any party sorts of things.
There are just too many Dursleyish dramas. Every time I manage to get back on my broomstick and flying again, the vile Vernon Dursley hurls a dozen bludgers at me and then I go crashing to the ground all fallen to pieces. And then he sends in his army of Dementors to finish me off. But not totally. That would be way too much like mercy.

Oh No. He would prefer to keep me as his personal Prometheus. Of course he does not even know any of those stories of ancient Greek Gods and mortals but that does not matter. He has the soul and the mind of a predator. No higher brain and all gut instinct. (Uncannily like a certain real estate developer on steroids who has delusions of being a president. Pity there are so many brown nosed sycophants fuelling this illusion. I had a snarky twitter blitz with one of them this evening. )

It is more fun to watch and wait as I slowly crawl into a corner to put myself back together again.
After curling into a ball and having a grand pity party it eventually gets rather tedious and a bit boring. Before long the broomstick is calling. The temptation becomes irresistible and then he strikes again.

He has even totally derailed the grandest of Nanowrimo plans. What began as a story about a tax clerk looking for a big break to set up her own private detective agency has slowly turned into a sordid tale of a Prodigal Father who rejects his own grown up children in favour of a gold digging hippy only to end up broke, alone and friendless and left begging at the door of his disinherited offspring.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!

Here in Oz, the only news is the results of the so called Same Sex Marriage Survey - a non-binding postal survey that cost a mere $122 million to conduct.
While 62% in favour is not quite Brexit, it is still not the sort of respectable 90% landslide worthy of Putin or Mugabe.

Especially amusing is that the whole thing was a sneaky tricksy scheme designed by conservative politicians to kick the SSM can down the road and hopefully avoid dealing with it forever. Well that blew up in their faces big league. And now they can’t turn around and vote against it because they will be gored to death by unicorns or sparkled by fairies if they even dream of it. But that won’t stop the Mad Monk and his twisted minions like Kevin Andrews from trying

While the rest of the country are still celebrating at the biggest party so far this century, Izzie has other plotting and scheming to do.

So it is the half way mark in Nanoland. Happy to report that the serpent is now just short of 32,000 words so well on target for reaching the magical 50,000 on time and even for the personal goal of 60,000 by the stroke of midnight on Thursday 30th November.

But not all of those words are proper story words. Found out from trial and error that when the muses are not lurking, the best way to invoke them is to simply write dribble about pretty much anything. Mind dumps along the lines of the so called Morning Pages are pretty effective. Usually after 10 to 15 minutes of that, the inner serpent realises that the Izzie means business and is then less hesitant about delivering the real goods

But still it has taken nearly two weeks before an actual story line finally took shape.
It was the good old Bohemian Gothic deck that came to the rescue. A certain evil scheming Red cardinal turned up who bears an uncanny resemblance to one Vladimir Putin even if the former is rather more modestly dressed.




That combined with a prompt from the very sick and twisted Michael Arntzen in his Inspiration Guide - Instigations concerning a serial killer who removes the tongues from his victims
Having followed the Snoops and Spooks on Twitter for the last year or so, it has not escaped this serpent’s attention that an unusual number of people who oppose one V V Putin seem to meet untimely ends in very peculiar and unnatural ways.

Strange suicides and accidents near windows. Even apparently innocent heart attacks.
All with possible sinister explanations. Still waiting for the poisoned umbrellas and hot pots of polonium tea to make appearances

I had always assumed that Alex Litvinenko was nuked for being a sneaking ratty double agent. Those folks are universally despised once they have outlived their usefulness to both parties. But the stuff coming out of the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers and especially the recent murder of a journalist in Malta implies that Litvinenko’s real crime was knowing too much about His Master’s Vices and even worse - threatening to tell.

Same with the famous Sergei Magnitsky who has turned out to be far more dangerous and disruptive in death than he ever was while alive. He was put on trial for fraud after he died. I don’t know if they dragged his corpse onto the stand or left his spot empty. I remember thinking at the time that Zombie Courts make the concept of kangaroo courts look totally tame
Of course I did not know then that his crime had been to uncover the grafting and shafting of the real mobsters.
Bill Browder then got Hillary Clinton on his case and that's when it got really personal for Putin

If you were to put all this crazy stuff into a story, folks would tell you to get real. No one would ever believe that BS. But we are now living in a reality TV show world and nothing can be too crazy or unlikely to be true. So why not have fun with it all?

So if the Devil and his Minions are hell bent on creating the conditions for the New World Order, then of course it would make sense to silence the pesky tin foil hat folks and nosy conspiracy theorists who threaten to spill the beans.



The other thing that I have noticed. Aside from Tarot cards being an especially useful device for getting into the Zone, the other almost guaranteed way to know that I have arrived is the appearances of quotes and stories from the Bible.
Some one out there has been asked to turn stones into bread (or rather the modern equivalent of turning words into $$$$) and has been offered all sorts of unearthly powers and privileges as far as the eye can see as well as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice.
All he had to do is sign the dotted line…..

Then there’s still the saga of the Golden Calfefe and the Tower of Babble.
But back in the real world, it looks more like The Writing on the Wall

Was supposed to have posted this serpent snippet ages ago but sort of got distracted by Nanowrimo and an assortments of tweets from #Trumplethinskin

One of the more useful and unusual books about writing that I have recently encountered is Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande

If you can get past the antiquated and annoying ‘he man’ language, it is actually full of useful ideas and information.
It is very different than most other books on this subject in that it does not deal at all with plots, three act structures, character arcs, dialogue and all the usual things one would expect to be covered in a book about writing. It is more concerned with the mindset that is required to write, how to develop it and the delicate juggling act required to balance the conflicting aspects of the mind.

It would be more accurately described as a book less about writing and more about Summoning the Muse.

The 3 most important ideas in this book I found are

1 Sneak past the snarky carping inner editor


By writing first thing in the morning after waking up - before turning on the radio, talking to anyone (or especially these days - checking the smart phone) it is possible to bypass the pesky inner editor and let the subconscious run riot on the page. It is also a good idea not to reread these pages lest you unleash the inner editor or give up in despair at the awfulness of your rambling purple prose.

2 Tame the Beast

The subconscious is a creative creature but childish and wilful and prone to fits of procrastination. It has to be tamed and disciplined if it is to serve you well.
She recommends this be done by writing first thing in the morning to develop the habit and then later to choose a time to write and to keep to it. No negotiations and no excuses. At the appointed hour you turn up at your desk and write. It is best to pick different times on different days to train your subconscious to be able to produce the words on demand.
If you stick to this schedule the subconscious will soon learn that its temper tantrums and trickery are of no avail and will then conform to your will.

3 Feed Your Head

The creative self needs lots of new experiences to keep it inspired and amused. Go to museums and art galleries. Be a tourist in your own town. Or else be condemned to constantly replaying significant emotional episodes from childhood when everything was truly new and magical and almost every day an adventure.

If this advice sounds suspiciously similar to that offered in Julia Cameron’s “The Way of the Artist” that is because it is. Only some 50 years older.

Habits begin as cobwebs and end as cables.




On Wednesday evening I finally passed the finish line in Nanoland. For the first time I actually kept to the daily target that I had set myself of not just 1,666 words which is necessary to cross the finish line on the last day but the rather higher 2,222 words per day. This serpent is a sucker for pretty numbers.

I've aimed quite often for the safety net of an average of 2,000 per day but never seemed able to keep it up for much longer than a couple of weeks.
This time was different due to one simple new trick.

( The Early Bird catches the worm )




The video sums it up so perfectly. Establishing productive habits really is like having an army of zombie minions at your disposal.

We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training." –
Archilochos

Nathan Lozeron has loads of other videos devoted to productivity porn and it's all the real thing. No click bait junk to be found. Well not yet.

It’s just past the half way mark over in Nanoland.

I’ve got myself a cosy cushion of words and presently almost aimlessly meandering down the mountain to the finish line which is almost within reach.

It has been a very strange month so far. Never have I gotten to the starting blocks with so little in the way of inspiration. Like The Beast 66 himself, this serpent's planning and preparation for this year's event was non- existent - even less than for the very first year I joined when I signed up a couple of days before the start of November.

At first I figured that I could always resurrect and expand on a super heroes project done earlier this year as part of an online course

So that was the fallback position in the event that nothing more interesting turned up in the meantime.

But it was listening to a correspondent’s report from the election in the USA and the first of the three very nasty debates that the little green light went on in this serpent’s skull.

( Agent Orange )

Today it was time to indulge in some serious nostalgia. Not just a visit to my favourite lunatic asylum but also a sneak peek at the work in progress that is Sculptures by the Sea which officially opens this Friday.

Then there was also the matter of decadent indulgence. Back in December 2014, New Edition book shop was filled with an assortment of gorgeous tomes all out in time for the Christmas craziness.

Including this one




The walls are adorned with promotional pictures from China Mieville’s “Kraken” which must be a good 5 years old by now but is the perfect theme for a book store located in the university quarter of Fremantle and less than 5 minutes walk to the Indian Ocean.
It was while flicking through this book that I had the idea - “What if New Edition were really a recruitment centre for an ancient Kraken cult?” and figured this would be fun idea for a possible plot for next November. And never mind just the book store - the whole town could be in on the scheme. The following 12 months provided an abundance of circumstantial evidence in the form of street art and assorted graffiti.

Of course the inner serpent would have none of this nonsense. There is only one true faith and that is the Church of Serpentology and NO you do not need this infernal tome or any other for research purposes. Not just because you already have several paperbacks with most of the stories and they are all online these days anyway. But this book is a ridiculous $49.99, it weighs a ton, is suitable only for a rather large coffee table and anyway you could probably get it online for half the price. But most importantly of all - you do not NEED it and you cannot justify wasting precious pennies on such decadence when the book shop is filled with endless rows of interesting and useful books.

So reason and logic prevailed. That was until the evening of a big Nanowrimo write in. There was a table full of books and mysterious envelopes as prizes. I picked the one from New Edition. It was worth 30 silver sickles with a use by date of NEVER unlike most vouchers which are valid for between 6 and 12 months.
Now this was the perfect excuse for some decadent indulgence. The summer solstice seemed the most auspicious time to snaffle the Squid. Problem was that it was not there. After all, the book was published in November 2014 and was not going to be hanging around taking up precious space on the shelves waiting for Izzie to win the lottery. There were also many other gorgeous books on the shelves worthy of serpent attention including the Thing Explainer (complicated stuff in simple words)

No harm in asking. They said they would have it back in stock in mid January and today was the first day since then that I have darkened the doors of the store. Once again I could not find it in the Sci fi and Cult fiction section so asked at the counter and one of the book sellers came back with the big black tentacled tome within the minute. It turns out that it was in the classics section along with the complete works of Edgar Allan Poe, the Annotated Alice, Annotated Brothers Grimm and an assortment of other enormous, gorgeous and very expensive books.

So I handed over the gift voucher and 20 silver sickles and took possession of the Tentacled Tome. From there I made my way to the new arts centre (and old lunatic asylum) and sat in the gorgeous courtyard browsing through the pages and all the pretty pictures until it was closing time. Then I was off to catch the bus to see the sculptures by the sea.
So inspired by the monstrous abominations on the pages, an assortment of strange sculptures on the sea shore shining and glowing in the spooky light of the setting sun, it was a gorgeous way to end the day.


Back in the real world there are soul sucking vampires, weasels, werewolves, zombie prime ministers and other evil monsters lurking and snivelling and indulging in their usual arse covering, back stabbing, cost cutting goblin ways but the dreadful recent resurrections of Tony Abbott and John Howard, the triumphs of Trump and the simpering sniveling litany of excuses spouted by Goblin George Pell are best left for another day.

They are where the true incarnations of horror and cosmic monstrosity can be found.