Another Damned Thing

3
September
2010

My First SEO Campaign | Targeting Salesforce CRM Integration Business For Nexus451

With business the way it is – busy, but not growing as much as it had been in previous years – my co-directors at Nexus451 persuaded me to stop fucking about writing a damned novel in my spare time and look at marketing the company. Naturally I was chuffed with the idea; apart from the fact I’m a sociable misanthrope and can’t stand people (in general), have an even lower regard for the majority of marketing people and think most SEO companies couldn’t find their own arses with a map, what’s not to like?

So, that little chat between the three of us went well.

For them.

I lost.

I reluctantly kicked things off in June, and determined to be allowed play with pixels for a while to keep myself sane I decided – as a Creative Director is wont to do – that a complete rebrand of Nexus451 was necessary. Well, that idea might just have been brought about by Jason – who invested in the company and joined us as a co-director (the fool) and COO. Having come from Palm, he bigged himself up for hours on end about his role there (yaaaaaaaaawn), we eventually, tiredly, please-shut-him-the-fuck-upedly, agreed with him that the company lacked focus in how we presented our capabilities to potential clients. He was right, of course, because we never really paid any attention to that. All our work over the years had come purely from client referrals, and while we had a website we never really paid it any attention. We were always so busy doing client projects we left ourselves out of the loop, which explains why you couldn’t find us in Google under any search criteria other than by typing in ‘nexus451′. Doh!

First impression of the task ahead: how the hell do you go about building an online brand?

I had no idea.

A lot of our clients are a good size, they have established brands and their own marketing people, a PR company on tap, and one or two have SEO companies doing work for them. Now, we tried the PR company route a few years ago and I was hugely unimpressed with the ROI. No way I was going down that route again, not yet anyway. SEO companies, naaaah, I’m not buying into paying a few grand for some poxy report some spotty fifteen year old has run off from some freebie online service and dressed up with a few bits of clip art. Which left me as our marketing department. Cock, as James May would say.

First thing we did was to put ourselves under the microscope, analyse everything we had done for clients over the years and make a list of categories that work fell into. Then we analysed those categories in terms of profitability, the resources they required, the length of the projects involved, and anything else we could think of – in short, we did a business intelligence survey on ourselves. We then did further research on what direction we thought the market could go, and put down our own thoughts on the kinds of projects we’d like to work on. Over the course of a few weeks we pushed all that through a blender and came out with enough information to define ourselves, which became my brief – most of which is what makes up the site structure at the moment.

Obviously, if we were going to change the structure and content of the site it’d be a shame not to throw a few licks of paint at it too. Well, that and the fact I get easily bored. Hence the new logo and overall look and feel, which i still like – for now, but that could all change in a month or two.

Look and feel aside there was content to be filled in. And we all know how easy it is to get content out of clients – it’s a damned sight harder to get it from yourself. This is where my SEOing began, if I was going to do this I was going to make fucking sure it was done well. I gave myself 3 months to get to the top of Google for key phrases, beginning from July 1. We’ll get to the results of it all later.

SEO Step 1 was to analyse keywords that suited the categories we wanted to be found under – those categories pretty much make up out site navigation. I was sure other stuff would come up that we’d want to be found under as the campaign progressed, so we’d need a blog to assist things along. We went with Wordpress, because it’s lovely and even a simpleton like me can use it. The site’s fairly minimal, 10 pages including the blog, so getting the right keywords into the mix was the challenge. I started by analysing our competitors sites, as you should do, seeing where they were coming in the search engines and reading as much of their site content as I could bear. I didn’t keep notes – I rarely do – because I prefer to digest everything and let it simmer in my head for a few days. I did lots of searching using different search criteria to see who came where and for what. I used various free online tools, all legit and above board, that gave me some indication of the direction I needed to go in. And I did a shitload of reading about SEO and online marketing – to the point where it was hard to find anything new or insightful. Honestly, it didn’t take long, a couple of weeks browsing blogs and wikis on and off and I figured was good to go.

SEO Step 2. What about social media? Well, I hate Facebook with a passion so that was out – yeah, yeah, I know, everyone says you have to have a Facebook page, but honestly, life’s too fucking short to be dealing with ugly every day. I went for Twitter instead – I treat it as a cut down RSS aggregator, which makes it bearable. I keep all my personal tweets on my personal damned Twitter account, and anything related to work/design/web on the Nexus451 Twitter account – I detest the business twitter accounts that have a high noise to signal ratio; like I care about where the fuck somebody I’ve never met goes for a pint of an evening or what their pet threw up. I tend to use Hootsuite for posting to Twitter, it lets me view and post to either account, or both, and gives me a view of my LinkedIn account too and an inbuilt URL shortner. LinkedIn is useful, it’s business focussed with none of the Facebook bullshit – like suing small companies for using ‘book’ in their URL … gimme a fucking break. Of course, Facebook might be important if that’s where your customers hang out, but Nexus451 is B2B and not B2C … thank God.

SEO Step 3. Well, the one good thing about having a web development company is having good guys on board who know their stuff. A chunky part of SEO is how the site is constructed from bits of CSS, HTML and javascript. So that bit took care of itself. Don’t scrimp on having your site coded properly, preferably by people who know what the hell they’re doing, because search engines will find you out and slap you with a sock full of stink. What was interesting was seeing that one of our competitors had flawed source code, something the search engines would fall over and bang their heads on repeatedly. That made me smile – something basic that’d take 5 minutes to fix was holding them back. Result!

SEO Step 4. Well, this one is the hard part. Really hard. So hard it requires actual effort. What’s needed is content. Fresh content. Keyword rich fresh content. Keyword rich fresh content that’s relevant and makes sense. Keyword rich fresh content that’s relevant and makes sense, not just to humans but to search engines too. Most every day for the last two months I’ve been pumping out tweets like a crack rabbit whore, feeding the juicy relevant ones through to LinkedIn, and stuffing my noggin reading whatever I post about. I usually do the Twitter thing for an hour in the morning, half an hour around lunchtime, and perhaps an hour or so in the evening. Posting takes a few seconds, but finding interesting relevant shit to post about – that engages my brain anyway – is the time consuming bit. It’s a head-wrecker because you have to crawl through an awful lot of crap, but I think I’m getting better at spotting the trash and spammers. The other time consuming bit is writing your own articles. Again, they have to be keyword rich fresh content that’s relevant and makes sense, not just to humans but to search engines too. Though, if I’m going to be truthful, I really only care about the search engines and getting to a good position. That’s the key, writing Nexus451 articles for human consumption isn’t that relevant for me – getting stuff out there in front of as many people as possible is the first priority. I don’t particularly give a damn about other people’s opinions on what I should write, I care what Google’s algorithms think about what I do write. I’m writing purely for search engine consumption for two reasons – to get better positioning than my competitors (for obvious reasons), and so that I don’t have to pay for a google AdWord campaign. I see Google as a pure advertising platform, the purest, but tarted up in the pretty search engine sequins and mascara which lure people in. The vast majority of Google’s income comes from Ad revenue, and I don’t like spending money if I can find a legit way to get similar results for free. If I can get to page one, or near the top of page one, I’ve saved the company money and maybe helped make some. And that should be anyone’s SEO goal.

So, how did it all turn out?

I’ll post the results next week.

Sorry, it was half past my bedtime hours ago and I’m just too knackered to write more tonight.

Bummer.

Tags: CRM, Integration, Marketing, nexus451, Salesforce, SEO
Posted in The Office / Nexus451 | No Comments »

25
August
2010

Images of Meath & Wicklow

Tags: photography meath wicklow
Posted in Images & Photos | No Comments »

24
August
2010

New Damned Portfolio Gallery | Dubland

Been going through all the snaps I’ve taken with the trusty 5D since 2007 and trying to put some manners on them. Sorting through everything, categorising images, and backing things up. I’ll post some larger ones in various portfolio galleries as I go, and thumbnails in here. Hopefully I’ll get some time to start photographing again soon, but this will do for the time being. Anyways, these belong to a new portfolio gallery – Dubland – which will be where I put stuff shot in County Dublin…other than the Coastland shots, obviously.

Tags: photography dublin
Posted in Images & Photos | No Comments »

20
August
2010

Chapter Two

Obviously, you should start at the beginning - Chapter 1

———————————————————————–

4am.
Can’t sleep.
Obviously.
Sit up and turn on the night-light and try to read.
Herself was in earlier.
This afternoon.
Told her not to bring Jake, our kid.
Didn’t want him to see me fucked up like this.
She brought me some books and fussed over me.
I hate being fussed over.
She gets it right, as usual; just enough to care, not enough to smother.
Makes me laugh.
Something Jake said.
Something one of our cats did.
Doesn’t matter, she got my mind out of this place for a while.
She leaves me with James Lee Burke’s ‘Neon Rain’. Very 80s feel to it. Some of the descriptions remind me of Miami Vice. In a good shiny retro-techno way. Before Colin fucking Farrell and Michael Mann cocked up my nostalgia. Those two need to get their arses in gear, do something decent before they end up being wistful for the potential they once had. When you lose faith in actor’s and directors it’s very hard to win back.
Trying to get a picture in my head of who would play Burke’s Dave Robicheaux character. All the crime shows are so dreary and ‘real’ these days, trying to be The Wire or The Sopranos. Trying to be smart, gritty and deal with grown up issues. Usually ending up badly acted or just dull and dumber than a box of rocks. What happened to the fun ones you could watch and not really give a shit about, like Magnum, Moonlighting, Remmington Steele, and even Simon & fucking Simon for Christ’s sakes. Everything’s doom and gloom. Like the Ledger’s panto psycho Joker says: why so serioussss?
I’ll tell you why: these days any poor twunt with a camera’s considered a fucking terrorist, or a paedophile…or both. Paedophile terrorists are everywhere. Everything changed after 9/11. You know, just about the time the politicians were telling us that the terrorists would never defeat us, they’d never make us give up our way of life, that they were jealous.
Bollox.
Everything changed.
We lost.
We just haven’t seen it yet.
That’s not strictly true though.
Losing usually means putting some effort into winning.
The general populace doesn’t want to win, it wants to be left the fuck alone. After a week of clinging desperately to it’s soon to be outsourced job it just can’t be arsed to kick up a fuss over the insidious erosion of individuality that 9/11 kicked off. Governments and their bastard corporate fuck-buddies know more about us now than they ever did. Privacy has been fucked out the window and the fear of being part of a failed state has been instilled into everyone, so we go along with whatever we’re told simply because we’re afraid of this or that or the other because, well, we’re too busy tweeting and sharing and liking to stop and think. Because we’re chasing our tails paying over the odds on mortgages, negative equity, and trying to stay afloat that we don’t have time to deal with reality and can only catch it in soundbites. Hell, we even share willingly those things we would have once held private because we can’t be arsed to send an email here and there in private; far easier to take the shotgun approach and post shit for everyone to see, regardless of whether they’re interested or not. Give everything we are to faceless youths working for dollar-whore multinationals, their shiny happy campus fortresses fashionably secure behind manicured lawns, cutsey logos and Orwellian mottos. The Corporate Youth Squads believing in the unquestionable value of constructing a vortex of databases around the floating thought turds of human existence, sucking them into their vast secret bunkered underground shitters, breeding genetically modified algorithms to feed off the endlessly typed diarrhea of everyday mundanity, sifting and sorting this from that and the other so that they can achieve their ultimate aim for global domination: to target a geo-location based ad for laxatives at you while you vomit in the back of a taxi.
Timothy Oliphant.
Yeah.
I knew the name would come to me eventually.
The guy from Deadwood.
The Sheriff.
He’d make a good Dave Robicheaux.
Part cheesy Magnum you can’t take seriously, part fucker you don’t mess with.
Perfect.
Well, it would be if I could concentrate on reading.
I can’t.
Timmy the Arse is farting up a storm. Lloyd the Loon is sleep-muttering his inanities towards a God who isn’t listening – fingers in His ears wishing everyone would fuck off and deal with their own shit for five lousy minutes. Deaf Geoff is snoring peacefully unaware of anything and everything, including himself probably. And I’m hitting the happy button just for laughs.
Haven’t felt any pain in a while now, just curious to see what happens if this thing keeps jolting my system with its glistening drips. Surely I should be knocked into some sort of laid back tranquility and not give a shit.
That’d be nice.
But no, that’s not what’s happening.
Just seem more awake than ever.
More aware of little things.
Noises.
Colours.
Thoughts.
My own, not others.
That could be an interesting side effect.
Then again, no.
Probably not.
Be a fucking nightmare.
Especially if you coldn’t control it, focus it, and all you got was a wall of seething noise babbling on about shopping lists and bowel movements and petty hates and counting calories and prejudices and teletubbie nonsense and hormonal urges and little white lies and dark hypocrisies and cheap fantasies and everyday stresses and all the regrets and swindles and half baked plans and fully baked psychosis and neurosis and navel gazing meanderings and all the regimented chaos of theories and probabilities and second guessing and speculating and number crunching ifs and buts and whens and hows and whys and why doesn’t everybody just shut the fuck up for five minutes and let me get some damned shut eye.
Christ, I could murder a burger.
Food, any food.
Been two days since I’ve eaten anything.
I’m not hungry.
Just want the feel and smell and texture of food back in my face.
I can almost taste what I want, but it’s just a memory flitting across my tongue.
And a beer.
God, what i wouldn’t give for a really cold drink.
I close my eyes for a moment and remember a hot summer day sitting out front of the house as the sun was going down and Jake playing football on the lawn with his cousin while I sip from a cold can and watch them run and scream and laugh in the fading warm shimmer of day’s end light.
Man, the colours are so vivid.
Unreal.
And everything so sharp.
Pin sharp.
And slowed down, which is odd and fun and disconcerting.
I can see every single detail, every blade of grass, every leaf in the trees, every hair on their heads. Can take it all in so fast it feels like my eyes and brain are connected to all the moments at once and sucking it all in and the world can hardly keep up with the speed of thought. It’s running out of data for me to compute.
Madness.
I blink and hit the happy button again.
Try to figure out if the morphine is slowing things down or speeding me up. Put my head down for a minute to concentrate but i can’t and everything just skids about and spins off on tangents and nothing makes sense and everything seems possible and it’s all a matter of lining up the tasks and getting through the abcs to get to the 123s so the xyz is the outcome and it’s so obvious even a child could understand and I must write it down because it’s important; but it’s so important I’m not able to think about anything else, not even about where my pen is except for the split of time that I remember it’s under my pillow and that’s just enough to distract me. Shit. It’s gone. Fuck. I had it. I fucking had the answer to everything and it wasn’t 42 and I know I can get it back if i just try to remember everything that lead up to the answer, work my way back to work my way forward and get ahead of where i am, was, want to be.
Shit.
This is worse than Lost.
Running rings around myself.
Displacing my self within my self.
Better get inside my head and sort my shit out.
In a minute.
Just need to shut my eyes and block out the farts and mumblings and snorings.
It’s important.
It’s all important.
It’s all connected.
Just needs to be unravelled.
Tidied up and explained.
Find the logic and it’ll all make sense.
Footsteps coming.
I’ll ask Vinshy.
She’ll know.
She wanders in to the room to see if we’re all still breathing.
She sees me sitting up and asks if I’m okay.
Smiling.
Perfect white teeth.
I tell her I feel lost.
Tired.
That I can’t sleep.
Too many things knocking about in my head looking for an answer I thought I had, that i need to have because it’s important.
She asks me why it’s important.
I tell her it’s because without it I won’t know the right question.
She looks at me funny.
I tell her there’s more questions than answers out there and without the answer I won’t know what question it belongs to.
She tells me I’ve a strange way of looking at things, most people decide on the questions they want to ask before looking for an answer.
I tell her some people are happiest when they find an answer to a question they didn’t know they had. That’s the real breakthrough right there, the realisation you’ve stumbled across something so new no one had ever thought to ask the right question. She asked me had I ever done that, found the answer to a question that didn’t exist. And I knew that I had, almost had, was on the verge of knowing something impossible like that when I got distracted and I tried to tell her but it came out a jumbled mess of ums and ahs and didn’t make as much sense as I thought it did inside my head and I stopped talking and just looked at her.
She looked a bit worried.
Told me to follow my conscience.
Smiled.
And left.
Weird woman.
Follow my conscience?
That’s a proper non-sequitur right there, so it is.
What has my conscience got to do with it.
Was it some sort of obscure hint, a random clue I shouldn’t ignore because it just didn’t belong with anything before or after it – or was it just a lack of communication and I’m making more of it that I should. Now I was worried that I’d lost more than I’d lost before Vischy came along. Things were getting worse. If I wasn’t careful everything would become questionable. I’d lose the run of myself. Look at everything as if everything was a clue to an answer I didn’t have a question for.
That’d be bad.
Probably.
Not good anyway.
Definitely needed to get some sleep.
And maybe hit the happy button a little less.
Or more.
Just once more.
For now.

Tags: novel first draft
Posted in A Novel In Progress | No Comments »

25
July
2010

Toy Story 3 : No Favourite Bits

Took Jack to see Toy Story 3 yesterday, and it was hugely disappointing. Aside from the opening 10 minutes, with all their fun and invention, the rest of the film is a turgid bore with hardly a single spark of joy that made the two previous films a delight. Jack’s 5, and a half, but the film doesn’t seem to be aimed at that market. It’s full of nostalgic navel-gazing angst, dwelling on how kids grow up and leave toys behind; and if they get donated they’ll get fucked over by toddlers who have no relationship with them, or by other toys who’ve bullied their way to the top. Of course, it all turns out okay with a nice pat ending, but it’s too little too late and it doesn’t make up for the shit everyone had to endure.

The other thing that really gets to me is this ongoing love affair with 3D. It’s not fucking 3D, it’s 2.5D at best, and I’m sick to the back teeth with this latest greatest gimmick. What it is, is distracting and really fucking annoying. It keeps reminding me I have to look at something rather than just sticking with the story and being engaged with the characters. It’s like someone continually tapping you on the shoulder while you’re reading a book and telling you which bit should stand out, I’d hit the twunt if they did that. Best of luck to any TV manufacturer hoping to improve sales by creating a new market with 2.5D TV, because it sucks.

And while I’m at it, what the hell were the Wall•E lighting & textures department doing anywhere near a Toy Story film, those shiny blurry glows and the too real feel belong in another world – although that world at least had some charm and wit. The ‘big’ scene with the furnace just looked like it was used to show off that Pixar can animate billions of polygons, but had none of the wow and unexpected wonder of Monsters Inc’s door distribution centre, or the baggage handling area from TS2. I’m not sure whether Jack noticed those things, but I do know that when I asked him what his favourite bits were – as I do after every film we go to – for the first time he didn’t have one, he was just glad it was over so we could go to the book shop.

Posted in My Damned Things | Comments Off

30
April
2010

Chapter One

Hospital.
Interior.
Late evening.
Standard issue 4 bed semi-private room.
Which isn’t really private at all.
Even in a semi-skimmed way.
But it sounds a lot more fucking enticing and a lot less fucking inoffensive in brochures than saying ‘no poor cunts allowed in here, boss’. No witless druggy slap-head skangers they mean. Certainly not from the cheap and nasty uncultured end of the recreational drug market.
We can’t be dealing with that shit, us middle classers.
Not when my own pupils are sharply etched bottomless pinhole lenses, sparkling with shards of a precise gastric pain teetering on the verge of exploding. My jaundice coloured freckled skinned arm sucking in happy happy juice from a merry morphine machine drip by drip by drippity drip. My brain trying to pretend to be back home safe and sound with my wife and son and just about half a smile away from getting there for the first time in 72 hours when Timmy The Arsehole in the bed next to me turns on his poxy TV.
Twunt.
It’s nearly 10pm and some of us are trying to catch some Zs.
Some fucking manners would be nice.
You know, a smidgen of consideration for your fellow sufferers who might not be interested in watching whatever you want to watch as loud as you want to watch as late as you want.
Self centred twat.
Fuck’s sake.
That’s annoying.
No, that’s not quite true.
It’s typical.
Of people.
Which is worse.
Because it’s disappointing.
Disappointing more than annoying then.
Aye.
Fuck it.
So, who else is here aside from the unctuous arsehole next to me?
Deaf Jeff, not his real name, duh, lies in the bed diagonally across the room from me.
To the right.
By the window.
His hair’s white, spikey, a bit like Spenser Tracey; the older version.
His foot’s bad day black, but doesn’t look too rotten – just bloody and sore.
His hearing aid packed in today, so he’s a bit shouty.
Obviously.
But he keeps to himself in his quiet loud way.
Must be in or around his 70s, just like the other two.
Next to him, facing me, is the new body.
His hair’s white too, Christopher Lloyd ‘Back Io The Future’ stylee.
He’s got those big baggy bulging staring eyes perched on a skinny long sack of pointy angled bones that look as though they’ve never really felt completely at ease with each other; his pyjamas flutter about him as he walks, like ripped sails carrying a ghost ship of skin and bones. He sounds like an actor of consequence when he speaks. A resonant voice full of rich tones and subtle inflections which should convey the deep raw range of of edgy emotions any self respecting nutter needs to be able to tap into. Whatever’s wrong with him he just looks like your everday Mad Scientist, somehow familiar and oddly safe in his quirks and twitches and spasms and tics.
He can’t settle.
The TV going on seems to have pushed a big red sparky button in his head.
He’s muttering.
Uhoh.
Religious mutterings.
That’s never good now is it.
Not in movies anyways.
Or books.
Or on buses late at night when there’s no one driving and you can’t remem…
“Oh sweet Jesus. Fucking Christ. Protect us. Make it stop”
Shit.
Crazy Llyod’s gone off on one.
I err on the side of caution.
I hit the morphine button.
Start counting down the five minutes till I can push it again.
This could be a long night.
Sounds like some Pride & Prejudice muck on the 15 inch CRT TV that hangs from the ceiling at the foot of Timmy The Arse’s bed. I can’t see the screen because his bed is the only one with it’s high curtain drawn about his semi-private bed space, shutting out the riff raff and protecting his petty privileges.
I think about switching my phone onto recorder and sliding it across the floor to underneath the Crazy Lloyd’s bed to record a few hours of tortured profanities.
No idea why I’m thinking that.
The man’s got a terrific voice though, all wretched tormented angst wrapped up in a culchie accent.
Timmy The Arse sniggers childishly in the bed next to me. Must be all those posh accents, bad teeth and dialogue dripping with humourless sincerity giving him the horn. Classless derivitive music for the hard of understanding tries to pump up the the emotional cues, but it’s all a bit flaccid and tiresome.
Timmy sighs appreciatively.
Loudly.
Smugly.
Christ, I really cannot stand the man.
Deaf Jeff catches my eye.
Raises his own to heaven.
That makes me smile.
I press the happy button again.
Timmy the Arse is the kind of person who won’t look you in the eye when he talks coz he’s too busy looking for a way to cover his arse. I doubt he’s ever done an original thing in his life. Or a selfless thing. Or even tried to. Why would he?
When he says ‘hello’ to anyone new he says it like it’s a series of questions.
- Are you safe?
- Will you hurt me?
- I’m important, you know, and you must surely be able to tell from the way I dress and carry myself that I know important professional people of a certain standing, whom you have probably never even heard of, and am capable of paying for their services. You’re smart enough to realise that, aren’t you?
The only way to respond is with a civil ‘hello’ back, one that takes the time and effort to answer all the questions his ‘hello?’ raises by saying, succinctly
- Fuck off, Timmy, you’re a proper twunt.
Drip, drip, drippity drip.
Oh shit.
Crazy Llyod’s out of his bed so fast it’s like his cock’s caught fire.
“Will you please turn that abomination down? Please.”
His raised voice rolling across the room faster than his feet can carry him on his ram raid collision course with Timmy.
There’s a shuffling sound behind Timmy’s curtain.
Can’t see.
Sounds like he’s pulling his bedclothes up around his scrawny neck.
Llyod yanks back Timmy’s curtain.
His voice drops a couple of hundred octaves into rasping villiany territory.
“Please.”
Timmy quivers.
“You’ve no right to demand anything, this is a private room and I’m allowed to listen to what I want.”
“You utter scumbag. I haven’t slept in days and you and your selfish ways…I’m in pain…can’t you see that…can’t you just turn that horrible thing off.”
“Get away from me. I’ll call the nurse. I’m perfectly entitled. I’m a man not to be bullied or intimidated.”
“Cunt. Fucking cunt. You’re all the same. Cunts. Dear Holy Jesus. You have no right to make me suffer. You are a horrible horrible fucking little man. Turn it off now. I demand it you do so.”
“No.”
“I haven’t slept in days. Why don’t you care? Scumbag. I’ve asked you nicely. For the last time please turn that fucking shit off so I can get some sleep. You cunt.”
“You’re a pathetic excuse for a man. I have the right to watch what I want when I want. I’ve paid for the privilege.”
“Scumbag cunt. You and your kind ruined this country. Blah blah blah.”
Etc.
Etc.
Etc.
It’s fun listening to a couple of old farts go at each other.
But it’s all getting a tiny bit too fucking loud.
And the morphine’s not working any more.
I sit up.
Deaf Jeff is already sitting up.
Must be loud if he can hear it.
I decide to throw my tuppence worth in.
“For fuck’s sake will you two cocks shut the hell up.”
Lloyd stops ranting and looks at me.
Timmy snigger snorts.
I can’t see him.
“He started it.”
“Go back to bed Lloyd. Relax.”
“You’re taking his side. That scumbag. You’re standing up for him.”
“No. I’m not. You’re making more of a racket that his poxy TV.”
“You don’t understand. I’m in pain.”
“Lloyd, I’m the only one in here hooked up to a morphine drip. Exactly how much fucking pain do you think you’re in, man?”
“I haven’t slept in days. I’m in such terrible pain. It’s a contsant agony to me.”
“That’s not pain. That’s torment. Now fuck off back to bed so the rest of us can sleep.”
Lloyd begins to shuffle back to his bed, muttering about torment.
Deaf Jeff pipes in.
“He’s right, you’re creating a bigger disturbance now.”
Too loud, Jeff.
“I am not the disturbance. I am a sick man. I want my privacy. That’s all I want. And that scumbag cunt is smirking and doesn’t give a shit about his country.”
What the fuck!?!
Llyod’s eyes are popping.
The fucker’s losing it.
“It’s not a private room, Lloyd. Believe me, I wish to fuck it was.”
“It’s not right that scumbag gets to dictate to us. We have to have some dignity and respect for each other or we’re all lost. We’re doomed.”
Doomed!?!
Fuck me, it’s just a telly that’s a bit loud like.
He’s getting up again.
Looking like he’s going to go at Timmy in a flurry of shuffling outrage.
I press the nurse call button at the side of my bed.
“It’s scumbag fuckers like him who make life a misery. His type don’t care. They never care. Not about anything but themselves.”
He’s gesticulating wildly now, arms raised to heaven doing that pointy sermonizing hellfire and brimstone thing.
Drip drip drippity drip.
Pit pat pitter patter.
The soft shoe shuffle of the seventh cavalry arriving.
“Lloyd, what are you doing out of bed?”
Lloyd’s eyes bulge.
Eyebrows recoil to the top of his head.
He stops mid stride.
Snared like a rabbit midway between the beds, frozen in a scumbag rant.
Nurse Vinshy.
A small Indian woman in a perfect white uniform.
Perfect white teeth with an easy smile.
Isn’t smiling now.
Lloyd scuttles his sack of bones body back to bed muttering under his breath.
“What’s going on here, Lloyd?”
“I can’t sleep, nurse. Him. Him over there. He has his television on too loud and he won’t turn it down.”
Sounds like a little boy.
Fragile.
Nurse Vinchy looks weary.
Goes over to Timmy behind his curtain.
“Timmy, would you mind turning your television off for tonight?”
“I’d like to finish watching my football match first, Nurse.”
What!
You lying toad.
“Is it that important, Timmy?”
“It’s a final, Nurse. Europe.”
You cock.
It’s 10pm on a thursday night.
In April.
There’s no fucking finals till May.
Women!
“What time is it over?”
“Twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. It’s important.”
Honestly.
I can’t be arsed.
Too tired.
Drip drip drippity drip.
She concedes.
Walks over to Lloyd.
“It’ll be over soon and then the televsion will be switched off.”
“Okay, nurse. Thank you, nurse.”
Lloyd.
Deflated.
“Who pressed the call button?”
Bugger.
“That’d be me.”
“What can I do for you?”
“A glass of water please.”
She smiles.
She knows.
Shakes her head and leaves us to it.
Timmy sniggers.
I wish he’d stop doing that.
The smug wee shit.
Lots of ooohing and ahhhing and sobbing coming from the TV.
John Terry’s been tackled and crying again no doubt.
Can’t stand that man.
Sounds of horses hooves galloping.
Must’ve sent the stretcher on by the sounds of it.
More sobbing.
Must be bad.
Good.
That’ll help United if the twunt has broken a toe.
Gunshots.
Even better.
Put the miserable whiney fuck out of his misery I say.
Drip drip drippity drip.
Just need to sleep.
“Oh Lord Jesus protect us.”
No chance of that then.

————————————————————

Now you can go to Chapter 2

Tags: first draft, novel
Posted in A Novel In Progress | 2 Comments »

17
March
2010

The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold

The dog barked ardently.
Nope.

Ardently the dog barked.
Pfffff.

The dog ardently barked.
Meh.

It’s a fucking stupid sentence.
No matter which way it’s written.

That’s the problem with this book: it feels like it was put together with the aid of a thesaurus, while the dictionary was out on loan.

It’s full of these little floating turd-like annoyances, much like The Time Traveler’s Wife, that won’t disappear entirely until you flush them away with a well-written, properly plotted book that contains fully-realized, believable characters. Just like Niffenegger’s book this was a half-decent idea let down by just about everything else.

The plot, such as there is one, revolves around a family of dullards living in a town of less interesting dolts. One of the dullards, a daughter, it doesn’t matter which one, is lured away and viciously murdered by a stereotype. The by-the-numbers-pedophile has managed to dig out and construct an underground room, of a decent enough size, in a field next to where the dullards live. No one noticed him doing this even though it sounds like he’s built something you’d need a fair bit of time to put in place, especially in the middle of winter when the ground’s rock hard; it wouldn’t be quiet work either.

Young Ms Dullard, on her way home from school, agrees to visit this underground lair in the company of the local quietly-weird-middle-aged-loner-guy-who-rarely-leaves-home. There’s absolutely no surprise when she is subsequently molested and cut up into wee bits. It’s clear from the start, and the blurb, what’s been planned to happen: that the murder is completely irrelevant, it’s just a gratuitous bloody device to get the character to heaven so the real novelty can begin. Don’t worry though, this horrible and sickening crime is carried out in a way that lacks any tension, feeling or offensiveness; he’s a pedophile with a PG cert, so nothing too scary or gruesome for the kids.

The one-dimensional-serial-killing-kiddy-fiddler then collapses the underground room without anyone noticing, or leaving any traces. You would think collapsing a space of that size would leave a big old depression of sorts in the earth, but apparently not. Certainly not as far as the cops or anyone else wandering around soon after could see. Nor later when they find blood – does blood seep upwards?

Maybe he had a couple of ton of topsoil in his pockets.
Maybe he used a shovel with a silencer.
Whatever.

Still, no time to hang about. Body bits must be hefted across the open field, back to the garage so he can leave the necessary bloody stain on a floor. Then all the bits go into a safe. A very heavy safe. Yet, this is a safe that no one will be suspicious of seeing dumped so soon after the murder. Especially not by the man who was paid for the use of the sinkhole where the safe is disposed of. A man who chatted to the killer about the safe, about how big and heavy it was. The very same man who’s related to the boy who ends up going out with the victim’s sister. A man who spends significant time with the victim’s family. Who knows the victim’s father is suspicious of the man who owned the safe that was big enough to hold a body. Surely…

But no.

So, anyways, Little Ms Dullard gets safely dumped, then exits stage left and reappears in Heaven. No, wait – ‘a’ heaven. Singular. Specific. There’s lots of them apparently. Each one unique to the person inhabiting it. Ms Dullard’s heaven consists of a gazebo (!) and fuck all else. I’m not surprised she gets so few visitors there: a few stray dogs, some old bint and that’s about it. From there she watches over her family. The end.

Except.
Not quite.
There’s more.
An awful lot more.

Mr Dullard has a brain-fart: that the creepy-loner-guy down the road must be the murderer. So he tells the police. The police investigate, find nothing. He continues to hound them for information and they eventually get so fed up with him that they tell him he’s going to be played by Mark Wahlberg in the film version. Mr Dullard wilts and becomes a flimsy shadow of the one dimensional character he was: “Mark Wahlberg! Fuck it, I give up”.

Mrs Dullard has a flash-forward, an out-of-novel-into-movie experience in which her husband is played by Mark Wahlberg. She’s suitably traumatised. She has an affair with Tony Soprano’s dead ex-Capo instead. It’s a savagely insipid affair. Probably because they spend 1,327 pages (maybe slightly less) walking along some shopping centre corridors (or some equally seductive freudian location) to get to a room (womb?) full of pipes (steamy or not) so they can knock themselves out over two sentences (short, with little punctuation) of wtf!-was-that-it? sex.

Mrs Dullard packs her bags and goes off to find herself.

Years later she comes back.
Her son pouts.
The end.

Fuck.
There’s more still.
It involves teen angst.
And a storm.
And a house in the woods.
And a girl who sees dead people.
But no vampires.

Honestly.

Posted in The Bookshelf | Comments Off

7
March
2010

The Road | Cormac McCarthy

The Road is one of those books that drags you kicking and screaming from the first page to the last with a desperate rush of fear and hope. Set in a post-apocalyptic world where the only fresh meat is human, and there’s not many of them around, a father and son travel the road of a devastated, frozen and unforgiving landscape in search of something better – or, at least, less dangerous.

This world is all the son knows because he was born soon after whatever happened that brought about the destruction of civilisation. He’s never seen a blue sky, a rainbow, or any of the simple everyday joys that we take for granted. He’s half-starved and mostly scared, but he’s also filled with an innate goodness that his father clings to. The father is educated, resourceful, dependable and barely holding it together. Shattered by loss he keeps on going because he’s needed, willing do almost anything to protect his son and see him safe. He teaches his son what he can about surviving, about what means to be one of the good guys. Their mutual dependency, the father’s hopes and the son’s fears, is what defines their characters and drives the story.

The initial confrontation with strangers is riveting and sets the background tone for every chance meeting after; some choices become limited, choices that should never have to be made. The landscape they must survive in plays a huge part, the relentless grey gloom shrouding everything with an air of hopelessness. That moments of kindness and good fortune can still be found here make it seem more bearable, just as those moments of horror which occur are filled with utter despair. The tale of how the father and son struggle to survive in this world is gripping from beginning to end.

We tell our kids it’s a big bad world out there and we try to prepare them for it.
McCathey’s world of The Road is bleaker, its choices far starker.

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28
February
2010

Silk | Alessandro Baricco

Silk is a sweet wee fable that can be read in an evening. It concerns itself with Hervé Joncour, a successful 19th century French silk merchant who is happily married to a wife he adores: Hélène. When disease ravages his usual African supply of silkworms he is persuaded by Baldabiou, a wealthy financier, to travel to Japan for silkworms; their businesses and the well being of his village depends solely on the silk industry. Hervé undertakes the months long arduous trek across Europe and Russia, to avoid China, and then he is smuggled into Japan which is a closed country. Once there he begins his business relationship with the fearsome Hara Kei, and also becomes captivated by his concubine – though they never speak or touch.

It’s wonderfully written, but perhaps a bit too sketchy; we never get to know any individual in depth but, then again, maybe we don’t need to. The author has presented us with the faintest outline of five lives and some bare bones facts, but the most important aspects of the relationships between the characters are left to the reader’s imagination. You’ll wonder about the possibilities once you’ve finished, the ones missed and the ones that may have been grasped.

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27
February
2010

Coastland Project | The Blurb Book | Rural Dublin

Finally finished processing all the Coastland images. Now I’m working on formatting them to be published on Blurb.com, putting them all into book format and I’ll make my final selection of what stays and what goes over the next day or two before sending it all off to be printed. Feels good to be at this stage at last, hopefully it’ll feel even better when i have something tangible in my hands.

Posted in Images & Photos | Comments Off

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