Whatever Happened to The Beach Diaries?!

I kinda left it all hanging there, didn’t I? Everything was chugging along nicely towards the natural narrative conclusion, and then; radio silence. I didn’t get bored, or abandon the idea, like 99% of dusty, derelict blogs with a single post from 2003 entitled “Gonna start blogging more!”, rather, a series of other issues got in the way.

Partially, it was down to the sad truth behind that romantic idea of the penniless starving artist. That truth being, it’s really not romantic in the least. When things like food or heating become aspirational luxury items, a sudden event like the death of the ancient PC you use to edit and publish your work is a setback that’s not easily rectified. Then, within a day or two of finally getting re-computered, a storm brought down my phoneline, so I had no internet. Couple that with the constant, growling presence in the corner of — what do they call it? The Black Dog — before you know it, Halloween’s rearing down on us, and any Beach Diaries momentum is completely gone.

Summer’s long over now, and the clocks will be going back any weekend. So, while the final entries, and the conclusion to The Beach Diaries 2012, sit safely within tatty notebooks, posting up ‘real time’ anecdotes about what happened at the beach today from six weeks ago seems like an exercise in anachronism.

So here’s what’s going to happen —

I won’t be posting them. Not here. But… The Beach Diaries 2012 will be released pretty soon as a Kindle book, with the final entries (and a few thousand words of deleted scenes) included exactly where they should be. There’s no date on that yet, other than ‘sometime before Christmas’. I didn’t lose any material when the PC went down, but I’ve had to trade down Photoshop for Gimp, which is so user unfriendly, they might as well have hidden the controls inside a fucking wasps nest, and a real nob-ache when you’re doing your own covers.

Maybe some of you think this is a swizz, like getting to the last disc of a DVD boxset and finding a post-it note with a bum drawn on it, but let’s be honest, I did put up about 30,000 words of material throughout the summer that you didn’t pay a single penny for, so, you know, pipe down.

In general, I’m feeling pretty burnt out on prose. I went straight from Volume II to the novel I spent two years on (and continue to tediously send out to agents), to the Beach Diaries, with each project overlapping, and none becoming the kind of wild (or even meagre) success that encourage one to plough another exhausting round of write/edit/promote-something-new. At least for the foreseeable future, I need a break from straight prose. If the Beach Diaries does return next year, it’ll be in another medium.

So, that’s it. The Beach Diaries 2012 will be hitting Kindles (and Kindle apps) sometime soon, complete with those final chapters, and in the meantime, if you’d like to buy last year’s, or any of the other Kindle books I’ve got out there for virtually fuck-all, that’d aid some of the nonsense I’ve wittered on about here, as well as helping to fund 2013’s possible, hopeful new direction.

Advertisement

~ by Stuart on October 10, 2012.