I planned to, in this blog, paste a funny mock-biography about William the Spider, a cartoon I made once. The biog was written in the form of a Dickensian memoir, and the humour lay in applying hyperbole, fond recollection and an ambitious lifespan to a spider that was prone to being stepped on.
But to my horror I find that blogspot doesn't allow material to be pasted into the blog, everything has to be typed from scratch (and no way am I typing that out again). The motivation and necessity for this absurd form of techno-prejudice is beyond me, so instead I'll use this intended spider-time to reflect on a new sub-theme I'm going to be applying to my novel.
Just to let you catch up, I'm partway through writing a novel about my friend, Jet Tea, with particular focus on his tendency to fall in love with every girl he meets. Within the realms of the novel, the tendency is manifest as a curse imposed on him by a magician, but as a means to satirise that way of behaving in the real world. The male tendency to over-exaggerate feelings of interest toward the opposite sex into neo-Keatsian poetic agonising has not been sufficiently covered as of late. The overall tone of the novel is that Jet Tea is the modern-day imbodiment of an angst-ridden romantic poet from the Regency era, albeit one who finds himself isolated in an environment where this sort of behaviour has no place. Surrounding characters are largely matter of fact about their feelings; not unemotive but honest with themselves. Jet Tea's expressions of feeling are melodramatic and hyperbolic, laced with overstretched metaphors and similes to put how he feels into words. With nobody to sufficiently counter-remark him, Jet Tea's main goal becomes to leave (nicely aligning the fictional Jet Tea with the real one, who has moved to New Zealand and achieved almost immediately what he was striving to do since I've known him; find love. Congratulations Mr. Tea).
But on a walk to clear my head and get some fresh air yesterday, I found myself listening to The Magnetic Fields' 'You Must Be Out of Your Mind' on my iPod. The song, in particular its lyrics, for some reason left me with feelings of nostalgia and lament for bygone days. I say 'for some reason' because the song itself is about a falling out of some kind, but the lyric 'you think you can leave the past behind / you must be out of your mind' fits my scenario just as sufficiently. The early parts of the novel see a regular scenario in which the three best friends (Jet Tea, and fictional characters based partially on myself and Glen Strachan), living in close proximity to one another, regularly meet at the pub for a drink and a debate. This was something I, at least, now think we took for granted. Jet Tea is now on the other side of the planet, Glen is out in the countryside and I 'm unemployed skulking around a flat in North London. The likelihood of meeting up at the local nowadays is slim, and unlikely to ever happen casually ever again. Such meetings now will be reunion-based, with conversation probably of the reminiscent variety. Its a shame, but its life, and it isn't like we don't communicate any more, only last week Jet Tea phoned me up drunk to tell me he'd refused a lift home on the basis that he didn't like the designated driver's taste in music, and I've seen Glen regularly as well.
But that brought me to thinking I should layer the narrative with a second tone, one of the fear of change. I thought about having this emit from my character, but that would contradict the largely unpoetic world in which Jet Tea lives, so its going to be a second hardship Jet Tea has to contend with, probably ultimately accepting it and deciding that the only way to numb the sadness of the end of the status quo is to begin again in a completely alien environment. That's where New Zealand comes into play.
Forgive me if I've ruined the ending of the unwritten novel for you (if that's the case then thank you for even considering reading it), but this story isn't really about the plot, its about the characters. There are plenty of biopics and biographies where the reader knows full well how it will end. Hey, Titanic and the Star Wars prequels wouldn't have been so successful if the audiences had such a huge problem with knowing how things turn out. The bottom line is, The Life and Loves of Jet Tea (working title) may be a fictional story, but its eponymous hero is very much real, and in real life Jet Tea buggered off to New Zealand with no intention of returning, so that's where my Jet Tea will go, so that the two parallel timelines can converge and the Jet Tea of the future is both the Jet Tea of the past and the Jet Tea of fiction.
Oh, and if you want to see that spider cartoon, its here.
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