Please, Vladimir!

In case you were wondering – and I doubt if you were - I’ve fallen a little further behind with the challenge. I accept that this is not very encouraging news to report, but I have reasonable excuses, I assure you. However, my concern about my inadequacies in keeping up (and yours too, gentle reader), should mean nothing. For no, of more concern to all of us at this time should be the impending collapse of the world order. In short, it’s the end of the world.

Do you remember the optimism that we all felt when the Berlin Wall came down and when almost the whole of the Eastern Bloc in Europe emerged from behind its curtain, blinking into the sunshine, to join the rest of us as we skipped along in our happy democratic freedoms? How simple everything seemed then, and how refreshing. The Soviet Union was no more, and the Russians - who for years had been blamed for everything that went wrong in our lives, from the weather to the decline of the butterfly and even to the reducing size of Mars Bars - were now our new best friends. Hurrah! A new era of world peace had dawned.

Leningrad became romantic St Petersburg once more. Our old view of the USSR where there was never anything in the shops, where everyone wore drab grey clothes, where the only car you could drive was a Lada and where everyone was unhappy, was replaced by a glittering confetti of newly independent countries, including Russia. The Russian Federation, as it became, seemed to be restored to its former status as a vibrant and exotic land of delicious mystery; a land of golden domes, sleigh-rides on the ice, and fur hats. It was all rather jolly, wasn’t it?

Were we being deluded, naïve, or were we just being plain crazy? Boris Yeltsin - as the first President of this new, exciting and freshly free-market country - emerged as an avuncular, slightly bumbling, lovely old bear of a man. Someone from whom we had nothing to fear. But poor old Boris soon fell from grace and his attempts to pull Russia into the twentieth century soon got completely out of hand with widespread corruption, inflation and economic collapse. His popularity fell and although he struggled hard to hold things together, he finally left office with a public approval rating of only 2%.

Waiting in the wings, like the evil fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening party, was an up-and-coming young politician who, only a few months before, had been appointed almost from nowhere as Russia’s Prime Minister. Yes, dear reader, the man to succeed our bumbling bear as President of the Russian Federation was none other than the shirtless pin-up we all know as Vladimir Putin. That was December 31^st 1999 and almost fourteen years later, Mr Putin has never been far away from the seat of power. In a convenient job-swap with his Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, our dashing Vladimir managed to swerve around the Constitution which bars a president from holding a 3^rd consecutive term, only to swap back again in 2012. In the eyes of the world, however, it was always Putin who was pulling Medvedev’s strings throughout these apparent ‘wilderness years’ and we can be confident that his power and authority have never waned.

None of this would matter, of course, if the President had simply stuck to the new order, and hadn’t decided to revive some out-dated imperialist ambitions for his once happy land. The West, which considers itself to be the arbiters of democratic reasonableness of course, was keen to embrace Russia into the New Age of Freedom. We wanted the handsome and macho Mr Putin to come to our party – we like having new friends who will dance with us, drunk, into the oblivion of the night. But Vladimir had other ideas, and now seems hell-bent on reforming the old USSR in his own image. Crimea was just the start, and he only succeeded there by appealing to the jingoist emotions of its inhabitants, but he plans to spread his net wider and seemingly will not rest until he has restored the Empire to its former glory.

I despair. Like most of us, I had fondly imagined that war-mongering in Europe was a thing of the past. It seems that I was wrong. The current situation threatens to escalate into an outright conflict of ideologies, something that could soon become very dangerous for us all. Why, Mr Putin, could you not exercise some restraint and leave things well alone? Why risk more misery and bloodshed than we need? Isn’t there enough of that elsewhere in the world? Why not just come to our party instead? We could be friends. If you did that, we could all have a jolly good time and we could all happily dance together until dawn. Please come – and bring a bottle. Vodka, of course.

One Hundred 'K'

In June I signed up for a writing challenge known as ‘100k Words in 100 Days’. It began on 1st July and the challenge is (guess what?) to write 100,000 words in 100 days. Seems easy, on the face of it – just 1,000 words a day. What could be simpler?

The rules are few, and nobody doing the challenge even has to provide any evidence that they are actually writing, but there doesn’t seem much point in cheating or lying about it because, as the adage so often repeated to us in our school days says: “If you cheat, you’re only cheating yourself.” The main rule is that the words that count towards the total have to be new words, which I suppose is obvious. However, they can be anything one likes (within reason). Blogs count towards the total – so perhaps I should try to make this blog as long as possible (but I won’t, for fear of sending you to sleep, dear reader), as does fiction, poetry, non-fiction writing, articles and reports etc. Tweets and Facebook postings definitely do not count, nor do letters or emails.


I am working on a novel that I started ten years ago and then abandoned after about 18,000 words. I had enough of the novel at the time – and since – to use it for submissions to agents. There was certainly enough for the obligatory first three chapters and synopsis and as such, I sent it off to various parties, usually re-hashed and re-edited every time, depending on my mood. It was rejected every time, over and over again. A good friend of mine, and a successful novelist herself, suggested that I perhaps wasn’t fully ‘in love’ with the novel and that therefore it wasn’t a work that I cared enough about to finish. She suggested that I had lost interest in it and that it wasn’t really what I wanted to write and that I needed to find an alternative ‘voice’ with a totally different piece of work. She was probably correct, but because I needed to write something – anything – for this challenge, I decided to pick that novel up again. If nothing else, just the discipline of getting the words down is a great motivation and if the novel turns out to be no good (which might still be the case, I regret to say) then at least I’ll have been writing for one hundred days, which is something I haven’t done for years. And the surprise for me has been to discover that I do care for the novel after all. I am quite excited about the way it has developed - I have experienced that delicious moment that all writers encounter when we suddenly realise that our characters are writing their own story. I think this novel might work after all.

Sadly, I have already fallen behind on the target. Today is Day 50, so half way through, but by the end of today I expect my total to be only about 43,000. So I have some catching up to do. The shortfall arose when I went on holiday at the end of July. I foolishly thought that I’d carry on while I was away - after all, it seemed perfectly reasonable that I could bash out 1,000 per day whilst lounging on the beach. Not so. I hardly opened my laptop at all while I was away – the beach was too relaxing, the sightseeing too urgent, and the ‘fruits de mer’ too tempting. But hey, I can catch up can’t I? If I exceed the 1,000 word target by just 35% for the next twenty days, I will do it. Then it’s a simple coast for the remaining thirty days and hey presto, I will have done it.

Procrastination is the enemy! No distractions will be tolerated. Except that I’ve just realised that it’s absolutely imperative that I immediately need to make a sherry trifle. Oh, and doesn’t that meat in the fridge need a marinade? And that pile of ironing, doesn’t that require some attention? This feels a bit like Sisyphus's challenge. As soon as I start getting ahead, I fall behind again. Oh dear.

Starting over...

So why have I resumed my blogging after a silence of over three years? There are several reasons for this – quite complicated and fairly personal reasons, to be honest, but I can attempt an explanation. My life has become somewhat unfulfilling in recent times – oh, I know all about the fact that one shouldn’t complain about such matters, or think negative thoughts etc., but when examining the reasons for the unfulfillment, it is necessary to identify the causes first before one can do anything about them.

So, another round of self-improvement is called for. Identifying that life had become a tedious routine of cleaning, cooking, administrating, drinking and sex, I decided to set about the re-introduction of more creative and challenging activities into my days. This is about creating more meaning to the lfe that I lead.

Part of that is to start writing again. I am filled with regret about the opportunities I have passed up previously – for example, four years ago I had a brilliant idea for a play or film to coincide with the centenary of the Sarajevo event that sparked the First WorldWar, but did I do anything about it? Did I ‘eck-as-like, and so the project lay dustily in the bottom drawer until it was too late to do anything about it. I doubt if I will still be around to resurrect the project in time for the bi-centenary, so it’s an idea that will have to be relegated, like many others, to the bin. However, I am bursting with many more ideas and I still have two novels to finish, so it’s absolutely key that I get on with it and take a more disciplined approach to the writing habit.

As well as returning to my fiction, I have also started entering a few writing competitions. I probably won’t win any of them, but this is something which can give a sort of kick-start to the writing process – as they say, there’s nothing like a deadline…..

I’ve also signed up for the the ‘100k in 100 days’ challenge which starts today and runs for, well, 100 days. And the good news, gentle reader, is that the very words you are reading here count towards my 1,000 per day! As any writer will tell you, writing is about being consistent and about being persistent – it is a strange fact of life that nothing is achieved if nothing is done (who knew?) and that only by getting the words down can success come our way.

For now, I won’t bore you any further – this is all a bit of (perhaps unnecessary) explanation about why I have started blogging again. From now on the blogs will contain less information about why a blog appears, and more blog-type stuff that will hopefully entertain and inform. We’ll see.

Hasta la Vista

Another test – this time to see if I can use the methods I used before (which are vaguely returning to me). This time I am

inserting a picture into the text to test whether I can position the picture where I want to. There is no particular reason to have chosen this picture of yellow lilies, it’s just that it is available and is the right size. I do like lilies, however.

So, if this works too, I will be all set to go. There have been many changes since I last blogged, some good and some not so good. I can report to you, gentle reader, that the piano lessons didn’t progress very much further than they had when I posted my last blog in 2011. This too, will be rectified. As with everything, I have a need for re-birth.

Hasta la vista!

Good Grief - I'm Back!

So, after an hiatus of several years, I have decided to return to the world of blogging. I am doing this to try to kick-start (or restart) my creative motivation. As I can no longer remember how to post blogs, and in what format etc., I am using this effort to remind myself of the technicalities. So, without further ado I will post this and if it works, I will prepare something more informative and more creative for posting later.

Watch this space!