There is a Salmon-
pink cloud in the sky tonight,
gently dissolving.
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Lost Voices
Lost Voices is a show I was in in 2016, I also did some work on the script. The show is about the children who did during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. I’m very proud to have been a part of this production. If memory serves we did only three performance at the Ballyfermot Civic and Community Centre. As well as members of the local community theatre, we also brought in local schools. I played three parts, one on film and two on stage. That’s me at the beginning announcing that the republic has been declared.
Me & the Movies
Trying to think of who I could send this to in the hope of getting reviews, because despite getting four stars on Barnes & Nobel and Goodreads, under a different title, I still have no reviews on Amazon, which means, of course that sales are extremely slow.
Last night I realised it is most likely to appeal to fans of Tarantino. Like his early work, at least how it appears to me, I’m of the opinion that character is plot, perhaps because I trained as an actor. You put a character in an environment and if that character is true they can only behave in certain ways. This is true whether they’re heroes or villains. And of course heroes can be villainous, villains can be heroic, everyone has private motivations that we might never suspect, and almost no one is exactly who they appear to be.
I might be mistaken when I say this would appeal to Tarantino fans. I’m not a big fan of his work, I still think Reservoir Dogs is his best movie.
Pulp Fiction is funnier but I must have missed half that movie the first time I saw it because I was laughing and looking forward to seeing it again.
Jackie Brown is a much more mature movie (say that really fast!) but I feel it’s let down by him trying to be clever.
I haven’t seen either of the Kill Bill movies and both Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained bored me, so I haven’t bothered with him since.
I’m still acting and with the movie business being what it is I might be shooting my career in the head writing all of the above, but that’s ok; I’m a stage actor! That shouldn’t be taken as snobbery, by the way, movie acting is much more difficult.
Story
The joy and frustration of writing! I started a short story to put out some new material while I work on the next novel. But it turned into a long and now I’m tempted to make it even longer. It’s the story of how I wrote my first play: Trial of the Living Dead. I hope to have it finished this week, but deadlines and me are on very bad terms.
Some Kind of Bohemia
I’ve put this sampler together while I work on the new one. As I don’t write by the yard I have no idea when it will be ready. That’s the trouble and the joy of not knowing where a story is taking you until you get there.
I called this Some Kind of Bohemia because I like the sound of it. It contains samples from Drinking in the Park, The Company of Thieves, and Online Cupid, as well as links to the freebies, Teach Yourself to Live and Examine Your Zip.
Please feel free to share this with whomever you choose.
The photograph was taken by Jelena Demchenkova and is used with permission. You can find more of her work here.
Some day I might even write a real book with this title, but for now here is Some Kind of Bohemia.
Cover Uncovered
This is the cover I’ve designed for the paperback edition of my novel The Company of Thieves, just in case anyone is looking at it and wondering ‘What in the name of God is the name of yer’man’s booek?’
I know all the book blogs say to hire someone, but mine is a no budget operation.
The painting is one I made years ago and the icon is based on something I whittled in the late 90’s. I did put it on a t-shirt over at Zazzle, but as I’ve dropped my mark-up to 10%, and as that won’t go into effect for another week or so, it feels like a cheat to post it here.
Anyway, there are a few more things to do before releasing this book into the wild. Maybe the paperback will do better than the ebook and I’ll be able to buy an apartment.
Ps. Oh my Me! I’ve just been tagging this post and I realized this story is also a family saga. Maybe I should have put that in the search terms on Amazon.
Writing School
Coming home on the bus yesterday a poem filled my mind. That might be a dramatic way of putting it, but still…
The poem is called Hollowman and I wrote it in 1992. I was twenty-two and my writing was full of teenaged angst. In my teens I wrote about sex I wasn’t having and politics I didn’t understand. I started writing poetry when I was twenty-one and holding myself to a higher standard I thought if I used straightforward language it couldn’t be any good. I was part of a writers group, as a rule, when I read my work, the response was silence or a considered nodding of the head. The only, let’s call it verbal feedback, came when I joined a new group; I read out a new poem, a piece I was really proud of, and someone said, ‘That’s shit.’
A few years later living in London, I was going through all my poems, I had a couple of hundred, and decided it was time to find a publisher. I didn’t submit to magazines, I suppose I thought they would never accept my work. Instead I compiled 40 poems into a book which I called Buddy, Can You Spare Me and sent it off to Henry Rollins. I never heard anything back and a few months later I left London.
As I write I remembered before London, I submitted a manuscript to Gallery Books because they were the best poetry publisher in Ireland. I knew so little at the time that I had double spaced everything!
Hollowman
Screaming dream machines
Collide in ecstacy,
Dreams are there to dream
Dreams are there to realise.
The dance of the Hollowman
With a beauty trip
And an empty can.
In the sudden silent stillness
We see and feel the shake,
This attracts us
And repel us
And propels us
Into motion.
The Hollowman can dance
And his lips can move,
But his hands are empty.
——
My writing has changed now, and maybe within the next year I’ll have enough poems to start submitting to magazines.
As I said before, I can’t help thinking that if I ever become a famous writer the book will turn up and be widely overpraised or over criticised, depending on the critic.
Meanwhile, here’s the freebie, what I now think of as my student work.
