Keyword Analysis - a found poem

It's over a year since I stopped posting at my old blog, The Quest for a Million Words, but according to StatCounter it's still getting a lot of hits through search engine results. Interestingly over fifty percent of the traffic (an average of 500 page loads a month) comes from people curious about the weight of a certain stoner space rock front man...

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Keyword Analysis
a found poem

dave wyndorf fat
dave wyndorf weight
dave fat wyndorf
dave wyndorf got fat
is dave wyndorf still fat
star wars monster
fat Dave Wyndorf
wyndorf fat
the Wizard is just a man pulling knobs and twirling cranks behind a curtain
dave wyndorf
first struggling of anal quest
dave wyndorf is fat
a kink in the armour
words of rejection
david wyndorf fat
words linked with rejection
the wonders of new zealand travel
expanding sidebar
I got a million dollar bill and they can't change it
"not for general consumption"
italy "driving tour"
has dave wyndorf lost weight?
dave wyndorf love monster blogspot
why dave wyndorf fat
The American Dream - then and now
dave wyndorf lose weight
Baby Götterdämmerung meaning
hardboiled baroque
short story with word like snack step pond luck and sick
dave wyndorf photos
"shoes drying"
shetland pony
wyndorf weight loss

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Random Roundup (including A Man Melting's first three months)

I got a package from Random House today summarising all the promo stuff for A Man Melting in the three months since its release.

There was only one review that I hadn't seen previously, if 'review' is the right word. It was in the Oamaru Mail on 15 September and was a whopping 80 words...

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It seems I'm getting a lot of hits from people Googling when the BNZ Literary Award (the old Katherine Mansfield Short Story comp) is going to be, uh, awarded. And until now I've left these hopeful Googlers empty-handed.

For once, however, I'm actually in the know (sort of) and can be of assistance. The awards night is 3 November in Wellington --  so less than three weeks away.  Ooh, excitement.

Don't start thinking that I know something more / am verging on an embargo break. I get an invite every year by virtue of my win in the Novice Category in '07. At least this year when Dame Fiona Kidman looks at my name badge and asks me why I'm there I can say something other than, 'I'm the guy who had to send his mum to give his speech a couple of years ago.'

(Although I'm secretly hoping there'll be some form of humiliation that I can turn into a column.)

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You didn't think I'd leave you hanging on the Oamaru review, did you?

"Craig Cliff is a modern young author who writes with flair on a variety of topics.
This collection of short stories shows his versatility in subject matter and style.
His stories are bizarre, whimsical, humorous and serious.
The reader is sure to be entertained with some amazing situation outcomes.
Cliff’s talents are well demonstrated in this anthology. The title invites the reader to open the book to discover what it means. A young writer with a future in short stories."
-- Anne McPhail, Oamaru Mail

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An interesting, if slightly impractical, proposal for a Kiwi author co-op online book store (a snappier name would be the first agenda item) over at Public Address has prompted debate, as you'd expect. There's even the obligatory flame war (though still waiting for Godwin's Law to be borne out) and an argument whether using your real name online is really "a cloak of anonymity".

You stay classy internets.

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Random House's list of reviews didn't include this one from the Otago Daily Times which was published over the weekend. Plus there's gonna be one in the next issue of Landfall.

Random were cheeky enough, however, to include a clipping of my first column from the Dominion Post. True, the my publishers did line up the interview I had with a Dom Post which planted the seed that I might be someone to call on one day when in need of fortnightly light-hearted reflections...  But I definitely had free reign on what that first column would be about. That it mentioned my short story collection is more a sign of my own shamelessness than any coup on the part of my publishers (who I love, honest).

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iTunes shuffle seems to be lovin' the long Neil Young songs this week. 'Like a Hurricane', 'Cortez The Killer', 'Cowgirl in the Sand'... Not a complaint, just an observation.

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While we're talking about short story competitions, you can read snippets of the top ten stories in this year's Sunday Star Times short story competition here and cast your vote for the People's Choice. Haven't read any of them myself as yet; looking forward to playing pick that author. [Update: the author's are actually disclosed, all female if you think that's noteworthy.]

Also, the RSNZ Manhire Science Writing Prize has its short-list online for both fiction and non-fiction. There are some knowns (Alice Miller in both categories, David Hill, Cliff Fell, Ingrid Horrocks, Serie Barford) and some unknowns (to me at least).

Best of luck to all.

(I didn't enter either of these contest this year and am enjoying being pleased for other people without that  bummed aftertaste. Um, surely I could have phrased that better. Meh.)

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Excerpt from A Man Melting Marketing Strategy:

POS [point of sale]     Dazzling Debut shelftaker

If only I'd known this handy term that rolls off the tongue like, well, stewed tongue I wouldn't have wasted all that time explaining my cover to people as having 'kinda shiny lettering and a picture of a fat guy in a paddling pool'.

It sure has been a lesson-filled three (and a half) months.

S(h)ame again? Working through an author's ouvre

Aiding and Abetting by Muriel Spark is the worst novel I have ever finished. Thin, slap-dash, meandering... Its only redeeming feature is its brevity (if it were any longer I would not have retrieved it that time I threw it across the room).

I know that a useful discussion of this book and its failings should include a plot summary, but I just can’t bring myself to do it, so here’s a link to the Complete Review’s review (which gives the plot and isn’t negative, though you have to scroll down past a number of negative excerpts from other reviews to get there).


The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is one of my favourite books, but I have also read and not-really-liked The Comforters, The Public Image and The Driver’s Seat. Which leaves me with a conundrum. Do I continue to pick up a Spark novel every year in the hope of getting another Brodie (I could, perhaps, be more scientific about which books of Spark’s I choose) , or do I just move on?

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The audiobook I finished about the same time as Aiding and Abetting was similar in that it was by an author I’d read before and hoped this new (to me) book would delight me as previous works had. The author was E.M. Forster and the book/audiobook was A Room With A View. I’ve read Howard’s End, A Passage to India, and Maurice (Forster’s posthumously published novel) and hold the first two in great esteem.

A Room With A View (1908) is very, very similar to these other books in terms of mechanics. Conservative, static, uncreative types (symbolised as rooms in ARWaV) versus more liberal, dynamic types (symbolised by views/the out-of-doors). Howard’s End (1910) is the book ARWaV resembles most closely, though the later book is a step up the evolutionary ladder.

In A Room With A View, Lucy Honeychurch is lured out of her conservative background and tittering girlhood by the lower class Emersons: the Communist, atheist father and the earthy, quiet, impulsive son, George. Most of Forster’s moralising comes from the mouth of one or other of the Emersons, though they spend most of the novel out of shot.


Howard’s End, however, splits the Emersons in two, with the outré politics and moralising taken up by the Schlegels, and the earthy, lower class role played by Leonard Bast. The endings of the two books are intimately linked to this division. Lucy and George Emerson end up happily ever after (until the Appendix, “A Room Without A View” Forster penned in 1958), whereas Bast’s quest to climb socially leads to his death. It needn’t be the case that a more negative ending automatically trumps a positive one, but in the case of these two books the more successful ending is a sign that the opposing forces in the novel were positioned to deliver maximum conflict.

With this said, I still enjoyed A Room With A View very much. It was a pleasure to enter Forster’s world again and relax into his prose. This is the reason I return to authors whose books I have enjoyed (despite some, like Maurice, leaving me cold).

To summarise my view as a reader: Dear Author, please give me something similar to the book of yours I liked the most, but not exactly the same, okay? If I want something completely different, I’ll read something by someone else.

As a writer —one who, if my short story collection is anything to go by, likes to jump around — I wish it wasn’t like this. Unlike a reader, if I feel like writing something completely different I don’t have the luxury of turning to someone else. It’s just me. So I jump around.
Those of you here from the beginning, you’re in for a bumpy ride.

Novel B Playlist #2

Subtitle: Songs that have struck a chord while working on Novel B this past fortnight...
Explanatory note: Links are to youtube.

Playlist #2

Hope in the air - Laura Marling
Afterglow (of your love) - The Small Faces
Bittersweet me - REM
What do I get? - The Buzzcocks
The snow leopard - Shearwater
Handshake drugs - Wilco
Anyone's ghost - The National
In hiding - Pearl Jam
Basta de llamarme asi - Los Fabulosos Cadillacs
No. 13 baby - Pixies
Surf's Up (demo) - Brian Wilson (I could write 16,000 words about how this demo is not only better than any 'finished' version but probably the fourth best track ever... but I won't)
Days/This Time Tomorrow - Mumford & Sons with Ray Davies (below)

Worksheet #40, including September Reading in Review

I rode the Sistine Chapel bus again on Wednesday morning. Talk about diminishing marginal returns.

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September Reading #3

I went to the library hoping to get Ian Wedde's Good Business, but there was no copy available. I settled for a copy of Wedde's Commonplace Odes (poetry, NZ), which was okay but wasn't really what I was after. Maybe in October...

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I sat on my first two interview panels this past week. I'm looking forward to applying the lessons learned next time I'm the intervewee (like talking about lessons you've learnt and how you've applied them -- interviewers lap that up).


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September Reading #4

All The Poems by Muriel Spark. I'm a bit fan of Spark's fiction, so thought I'd check out her life's poetic output. Again, okay, but nothing to make my tongue tingle with excitement. I think I'll read another of her novels soon though.



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The deadline for submissions to Turbine is 22 October. I've had a range of things in Turbine over the years (novel extract, short story, poem, reading journal extract), but the well looks dry at the moment. If I find a spare three hours (ha!) I'll write a list-poem called: '10 places I could be when the big one hits'.


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September Reading #5

Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. I rather liked this book. At times I felt pulled in two directions: was this a PG Wodehouse 'romatic romp with manners' or was this the sort of serious E.M. Forster 'tea-table tet-a-tet' novel? In the end I'd say this is comic writing (example of a phrase) first, campus satire with a deep moral core second and there's nothing wrong with that.



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Three columns in (2 published, one more submitted and will appear Saturday 9 Oct) and I'm starting to get my head around the form. The challenge at the moment is dealing with the two week lead time between submission and publication, which nixes writing about anything 'in the news' which will be overdone by the media in two week's time (e.g. Chch earthquake) or something like seeing the first pohutokawa blossoms (unless I write about last year's and time it before this year's arrive…)

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My idling bus this morning sounded like the start of 'Pinball Wizard' by The Who. I wish I was better at putting sounds into type. The best I can do is: Brrrrrrrr-ditta-ditta, brrrrrrrr-ditta-ditta.

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September Reading #1 and #2

Haven't you been paying attend? I've already mentioned The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris and Legend of a Suicide by David Vann. One will be in my 'Top ten books I read in 2010', one will not.

Novel B Playlist #1

Twelve songs that have rung my bell while working on my novel this last fortnight. This may become a regular feature. We'll see.  Links are to YouTube unless otherwise stated...

1. 'Running out of angels' - Elvis Costello (not on YouTube, general info here)
2. 'I couldn't say it to your face' - Arthur Russell
3. 'Ahead by a century' - The Tragically Hip
4. 'Strangers' - The Kinks
5. 'Winter song' - Screaming Trees
6. 'Rene' - The Small Faces
7. 'For you' - Bruce Springsteen
8. 'Weighty ghost' - Wintersleep
9. 'Fashion show' - Eels
10. 'Taster' - Grandaddy
11. 'Sleeping sickness' - City and Colour
12. 'Studebaker' - Warren Zevon (Jordon Zevon's cover here)

Forecast: grey with occasional cloud-bursts

Back in February I wrote about those cloud-bursting moments writers have every so often that show you the way forward and give you an energy boost to push on with a story or novel. At the time I’d had a small revelation in relation to the novel I'm working on (a.k.a. Novel B).

Well, it was a long time between drinks, but I had my next cloud-burst today. That's seven months between revelations for those of you playing along at home, which partially explains my snail's progress on Novel B.

Status report, Dr Spock

I'm still mired in Chapter Three. I've had problems with how to make the transition from the first two chapters which take the narrator down to the bottom of the well (so to speak; this isn't another Wind-up Bird), to the more positive, more active section that follows. I did my best Sisyphus impression, pushing and pushing the narrative up hill each evening, only for it to roll back down overnight so that I felt as if I was always sitting down to write with my toes crushed.

But like I said, the clouds cleared momentarily today and I will take this chance to examine once more this cerebro-meteorological phenomenon.

Conditions for a Cloud-burst

You need three things for a cloud-bursting moment.

One: A problem.

Two: A build up.

Three: An idea.

In practice, you identify the build up first. You have to be writing (or at least sitting down with the intention to write but giving up soon after because it's all too hard) for the build up to occur. You then have to spend several days mooching around feeling lost and frustrated and blaming things like your day job and your new keyboard for your inability to finish the chapter. (If I could figure out how to skip this mooching period it would make several people's lives easier, but alas.)

You can then either:

A) identify the problem and the idea follows instantaneously and voila, the clouds have split.

Or

B) on occasion, you'll have an idea and then find out that in order for it to work, you'll have to change something, and in figuring out the changes you realise what the problem was that was causing the build up in the first place.

A Worked Example

You're writing a story about a boy who wants to go sky diving. In your current draft he dreams and dreams of sky diving, then one day wins a free sky dive. Ugh. You know there's something wrong. Think. Think.

Aha! You realise the problem is that the boy gets what he wants with too little effort. People don't believe life works this way. This means readers may view your story as unrealistic, which is another way of saying they see can see the writer at work in the story. So you have the idea that the boy pesters people who can help him achieve his aim of sky diving. His parents, his grandparents, a family friend who works at the airport… Not only does this make the boy getting to sky dive more realist (he's earnt it, at least in story-logic terms), but it makes him an active participant in the narrative rather than a passive one.
This is scenario A above.

Under scenario B it would be more like this: You think, 'What if the person who offers the boy the chance to sky dive knew the boy somehow?' Then, 'What if, the father past away or was in a wheelchair or something, so the man felt sorry for the boy.' So you begin to formulate a reason, or a set of reasons, why the boy gets his wish, based on this first idea. In playing around with things in your head, you can tell straight away this makes the story more compelling, and realise that the problem that had plagued your story was that the boy got what he wanted too easily.

You'll notice that both solutions started with the same problem, but in option A, the boy earns his reward through action, and in option B he earns his reward through suffering.

More action. More suffering. These are two pretty standard ways of fixing stories.

You'll also notice that neither of these solutions sew up the end of the story. In fact, for me, the heart of this story (which I just made up on the fly here) is the experience the boy has when he actually goes sky diving. That would be the idea that makes you think: I want to write this story. The image of the boy falling through the sky (either loving it or hating it, you decide) would always be in your mind as you sat down to work on the story. But you hit the road block while trying to write yourself to this point. Cue mooching. Cue cloud burst. Cue finish the story, submit it to a literary magazine your read, respect and subscribe to. Cue literary success.

One final point for those of you wondering how you could get stuck with such a silly conceit as the boy winning a sky dive in some competition in the first place. It is often the case that you’re in such a hurry to get to the heart of the story – the boy falling through the air – that you take an expedient route to get there. Prizes are won. Offers are made out of the blue. Dei ex machina swoop in from the wings.

The more I write, the more I find the expedient route is the surest path to a rooted story.




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Bonus FAQ

Why do you call it a cloud-burst? It sounds like a rain event. Surely you see blue skies and sunshine when you have your revelation?

Sometimes. Other times it feels like a bucket of ice cold water has been tipped over you. Other times you feel as if you’ve been caught in a sudden, unpredicted storm – that moment just after the two minute downpour stops is as magical as any sudden burst of sun. And you can’t forget the feeling that comes right after the eureka moment when you realise the foolish assumptions you’ve been labouring under. It feels very much like being caught in a downpour without a coat.

When is your ‘sky diving boy’ story coming out?

I told you, I just came up with the idea on the spot to help illustrate my point. I wouldn’t be surprised it someone has already written it. It seems like a good idea. Very traditional structure. If I were to write it (I’ve said these words before) I’d be mindful of making it too perfect.

This was all very interesting, but shouldn’t you be capitalising on the boost of energy that came with your latest cloud-burst and actually work on your novel?

Uh, true. Excuse me for a moment...

Struggling writer blues, or Worksheet #39

I’m back from Christchurch. I’d post my photos of the carnage but you’ve already seen the buildings online, in print or on tele.

Seriously, I was surprised how few and far between the total write-offs were. Far less than the coverage might lead a North Islander to believe.

There’s a reason Simon Dallow was standing in front of the same demolition site each night.

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I’m not loving my new keyboard.

It has little plastic nodules on the F and J keys, presumably to help me orientate my fingers without having to look down. But I can touch type just fine without these nodules. And what’s wrong with a wee peek every now and then?

But now the tip of my left index finger is especially sore (no surprise that I hit the F key more than the J).
It seems nine months of guitar lessons fifteen years ago weren’t enough to harden up my fingers.
If I’m not careful I might develop an averse to F words...

Time to use the only tool I have sharpened in the intervening years to fashion a solution.

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My first column appeared in the Your Weekend magazine in Saturday’s Dominion Post.

It was difficult to find a copy in Chch on Saturday for all the stacks of special Earthquake editions of the weekend The Press (to go with the collector’s edition on Mon, Tues, Weds, Thurs and Fri, not to mention the $5 charity issue of the Star).

But I got one in the end.

And joy of joys when I turned to the back page (the section titled, ahem, “Craig Cliff”) the photo they choose is not half bad. Phew.

They did change “Ministry of Education” to “Education Ministry” in my first sentence, which annoys me immensely for some reason. Probably the fact it’s called the Ministry of Education. No one says Education Ministry. It sounds like some high and mighty evangelical church.

At least I’m paid by the column and not by the word, otherwise I’d me doubly miffed by the missing “of”.

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Plan A: swap F and J keys with those on my brother’s computer.

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Most of the liquefaction in Chch has been cleaned up, the serious urban road disturbances paved over, and the teetering chimneys gently dismantled. The structural damage to houses and the lasting psychological effects are much harder to discern from the roadside.

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I finished David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide today. Twas fantastic. Hard to classify, but its essentially three short stories, followed by a novella in two parts, and two more short stories to close out the book. Wasn’t so taken with the final two stories, but was gripped by the rest.

Similarities to my short story, ‘Copies’. Not just the stories, but the relationship between author, autobiography and fiction.

Vann’s back in NZ later in the year to teach a short fiction course at the IIML. Would be great if our paths crossed and we got to have a chat...

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Plan B: melt the nodules.

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One more piece of miffage regarding my first column. The by-line, which I didn’t write:

“By day he’s a civil servant, by night a struggling author. Craig Cliff introduces the two sides of his double life”
Struggling author? I prefer the term ‘talented new author’ (TVNZ.co.nz) or ‘aspiring young New Zealand writer’ (Nelson Mail). Heck, even Owen Marshall’s somewhat confusing ‘absurdly youthful’.

It’s true, I may have a ways to go before I dine with the Prime Minister, but I thought I was doing okay to this point.

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“Memories are infinitely richer than their origins.”
-David Vann

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I only felt three aftershocks in my first 18 hours in Chch, and nothing in the next 48.

Despite this, I had Carole King’s ‘I feel the earth move’ stuck in my head for six hours. AC/DC’s ‘You shook me all night long’ for two hours, and Elvis’s ‘All Shook Up’ for about 20 minutes.

#inappropriate earworms.

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Plan C: Admit defeat and buy a new keyboard.