Catmachine

As the light threatens to start fading on the final day of a year, it's time to look back, take stock and then decide to do everything differently, starting tomorrow. Well, these reviews of the year make for cheap entertaining TV, hopefully they can serve the same purpose for one whose primary medium is blog. As far as this blog and its associated writing is concerned, I didn't do too badly in 2010. In January I was still writing every other day, a remnant of the daily writing with which I'd started back in August 2009. The whole idea was to clear the creative tubes to allow me to complete my novel. Instead, the blog entries seemed to take on a life of their own.  Curiously enough they were at their most popular when I started writing series of memoirs, staring with my Dimensionally Transcendental Confession and then moving on to I Was A Teenage Toyah Fan , the latter of which proved so popular that I am now planning to rewrite it more fully in the early months of 2011...

For the past 15 days I've been writing approximately 1,000 words of my novel a day. I was getting tired of it being half-finished and wished I could just splurge out the basic content, taking the time afterwards to finely tune it. Thanks to a tweet from one of my erstwhile colleagues from the two-year creative writing course I took part in from 2007 until 2009, I was introduced to a website called 750words.com which has enabled me to activate a particularly useful form of addiction. Daily writing. It's not intended for the production of novels; the mission statement on the site claims that it's a more up-to-date version of " morning pages " from The Artists Way . I did give them a try but could never quite get to grips with the mechanism although ironically I started this blog as an attempt to unplug my creative juices in a similar way. The main problem I had with The Artists Way was the author's insistence on the morning pages being handwritten. 750...

As I've discussed before, there's a very good reason we don't remember our dreams for long. Feedback. Howlaround. To reiterate; there are two kinds of memory, long and short term. The long term is our hard disk, the storage of time past, whereas the short term is our working memory space, the RAM in which our consciousness occurs and in which reality seems to take place.  Sometimes a backfiring brain will temporarily mistake the latter for the former and misidentify what's happening right now as a memory of the past, hence deja vu .  Sometimes this feels more like the memory of a dream, a clue to its origins. We sleep to allow the short term memories of the day to be processed and filed in long-term storage; dreams are a side effect of this process.  If we remembered them as well they'd have to be processed and filed along with the rest of the day's memories producing their own side-effect dreams which in turn would have to be processed and so on ad infin...

The strongest drive is neither love nor hate nor indeed the urge to change another's copy. The greatest desire appears to be to experience moments of moral superiority over others, however minor or petty these moments may be. It's true, think about it. Maybe you're not like that, but they certainly are. See? This trait is most obvious when you unintentionally make a faux pas, especially one involving death.  You might comment on how so-and-so has seemed a bit grumpy lately. If you're quick you can see the first moments of internal drama playing themselves out on the face of the person who knows something you don't and is therefore about to put you down, score a point and feel good about themselves at your expense for a couple of seconds. The first micro-expression to cross their visage is one of astonishment. They can't believe their luck. They've been handed this one on a fucking plate . Astonishment is swiftly followed by delight. I'm goin...