Today, I’m taking a hiatus from editing a tome yours truly drafted in 2010. Although, I’m finding the re-write fulfilling and cathartic, I’m resolved to at least one day a week pen an essay in my habitual blogging style.
With amendment required, the reworking of the decade old prose is a slow process; if proof needed thus far I’ve only succeeded in redrafting 20 out of the original 370 fictional pages written.
With this in mind, you dear reader may opine I need to ‘crack on’ with the job in hand. However, I love chronicling my usual daily narratives and at this juncture am loathed to abandon them completely; consequently using Saturday’s to journal whimsical observations whilst stepping back from the book for a day.
On waking this morning an epiphany of a title for today’s monologue of the oxymoron ‘Fiction – You Couldn’t Make It Up!’ tickled me…… Or that might have just been one of the feathers woven into the chicken fancy dress outfit I’d woken in!
Without wanting to sound too patronising, for the uninitiated ‘You couldn’t make it up’ an adage said in reference to something too astonishing to be believed; ‘it is so ridiculous, you couldn’t make it up’….. The fact that fiction’s definition is made up stuff took me on a short journey to Mirthland – A place where you’re greeted at the gate by TV presenters Ant & Dec and a strict dress code advocates the wearing of chicken fancy dress outfits.
I’m unsure if the timeline I’ve penned above actually makes the chicken fancy dress outfit quip work effectively. Hopefully, though, you’re a ‘friendly’ audience and will make allowances if that’s the case.
If the inclusion of my timeline laxness, borne from a desperate need to include the fictional chicken comment, leaves a bad taste you can console yourself that you didn’t pay for this nonsense!….. Oh, and there’s a packet of Trebor mints in the kitchen drawer next to the cooker hob.
Footnote – If you did pay for this in some regurgitated publication, released after I become a literary icon and am able to secure financial recompense for my art, I hope you didn’t overpay….. If you did, hopefully the book comes in useful as a table leg stabiliser when you’ve read it; or indeed if you lose interest after page 14.
I was in Whitby a couple of days ago; one of the few north Yorkshire coastal town which, in my opinion, hasn’t grown less appealing in old age. It’s iconic abbey featured in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, when the eponymous character leapt up Whitby’s 199 steps disguised as a huge black dog – Steps which can still be climbed to reach the abbey.
Stoker a ‘proper’ writer, one of many who throughout literary history unequivocally disprove my tongue in cheek oxymoron ‘Fiction – You Couldn’t Make It Up!’.
The Irish-born author’s imagination bearing a fertility usurping most of his contemporaries. Although, in my opinion Stoker (not to be mistaken for ex-Sunderland football manager Bob Stokoe) penned overly fictitious works.
I mean a vampire disguised as a black dog running up 199 steps to reach the dark, gothic Whitby Abbey…… With apologies to Stoker, however, imagining someone jogging up 199 steps to reach an abbey is just far too incredulous to begin to countenance as possible!
