It's starting to snow...

I look up from the book of writing, to see light specks starting to fall. So I dash up the wooden stairs to the living room to wake up Maca, the ancient guardian of this home. I bring her down to the basement and pull on my furry black 'Airwalk' boots and my knee-length coat from Leeds and open the door to the crisp 3pm cold.

Eyes on boots, down the well-trodden path to the barn and the curious earth shapes where cars once sat. Crunch crunch crunch. Kiss of cold on one ear. Ice tire tracks form a circle. Maca runs ahead and sniffs the white ground. I get to the barn and hear in the distance a male voice at least thirty feet down behind the perfectly arranged garden where the dog-trainer and her husband live. Two cars in the drive, they're home and also out in the snow. Sounds are magnified. An alien landscape where white takes the place of dark colors and everything glows in a luminous way. Silent, crunchy.

I clap my hands and pat my thighs, motioning to the elderly dog before she hears wind of company and dashes down to find a new friend. The black animal, with her gray face in its curious mix of Boxer and Labrador, lifts her head finally and gazes at me, then comes leaping my way, paws disappearing five inches deep in powdery icing sugar.

We turn together and I follow the second path that leads up the hill. Maca makes her way into virgin territory, an expanse of perfect white that stretches some fifty feet before it is broken up by wild shrubbery. She crouches with shaky back legs and lays a perfect brown dollop on the pristine white, like a Zen joke.

I continue to the house, to a little grassy knoll at the bottom of the porch steps. And the scene reminds me of those photos from up in the mountains when the mist rolls in and submerges a valley. This time it's the snow that has made the ground vanish. A strange sense of vertigo. The Earth's known browns and greens have been replaced with this otherworldly and entirely mystical pure white. A new world for eyes, ears and mind.

Finishing Line Bliss

Nitin Sawhney was playing on the sound system. Tablas, flutes, an emcee rapping. The driving rhythm of Indian hip hop perfectly matching my flying fingers: I was at speed, rounding the corner from the dark dread of the 48,577th word - where the story felt like a great abyss of death - to suddenly feel the pace picking up.

The colours of 24 days of weaving, suddenly shifting into focus and becoming a picture. Of life. Of love. Of ambition and that ultimate destination: happiness. The sun moved in the sky of mind and words began to flow like rain, until the music and the thoughts were one. Somehow that miracle of the writer's mind that inexplicably comes into being like a spell - a rainbow - formed the final scene.

It was as dramatic and magnificent as I hoped it would be. I came flying at that 50,000th word and hurtled straight past it on pure momentum to 50,017. The endorphine rush of the marathon runner crashing through the finishing line. The end came to me and the story found it's rest and now all that's left is to print and pour over it, and hopefully shape this creation into a novel.

Any writers out there who are reading this humble blog, take note. It's worth the pain. It feels so bloody good to get to the end!

29,553

Greetings from an antique Indian desk. With curtains drawn to 5.10pm black night and air that's fast falling below zero. Inside this warm, writer's hibernation zone, Jeff Buckley is singing on the local radio station. There is a pile of notebooks to my right. There is an open green leather notebook to my left. There is an empty tea pot next to a clock and a little handwritten sign that optimistically says: "OK creative force: you take care of the quality, I'll take care of the quantity."

Welcome to Day 13 in the National Novel Writing Month. I have hit 29,553 words! And bizarrely, I am not yet frothing at the mouth. I am not going insane. I am finding it suprisingly easy to write 3,000 words a day. Just sit down, let it fall out on fingers tapping keys, then walk away from the desk feeling like nothing has actually happened.

Of course, this could mean that when December dawns I will read over these thousands of thousands of words and be stupified at my horrendous creation. Or I could be pleasantly surprised. Who the hell knows? What I do know is that I will have 50,000 words that contain one or two nice scenes, some cool lines and the odd moment when words and images work together to recreate life.

And amusingly, despite being 29,553 words into it, I still don't know what this story is about. But that is absolutely fine. As writer Lynda Barry recently wrote in a Pep Talk that was emailed into my inbox: "You can't know what a book is about until the very end. This is true of a book we're reading or writing."

So here's to writing into the unknown.

The 30 Day Novel

I am on Day Two of an intriguing writing exercise.

The idea was brought to me three weeks ago by a monk with a vast mind. He knew that I wanted to write a book, and in our Skype chat he asked me if I knew of the existence of the National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org). This mad organisation has been inspiring budding novelists for over a decade. Every November they gather 150,000 or more writers around the globe, and tell them to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

The concept is thus: we all want to write a novel, but the only way to actually do it is to sit down and bash it out. No planning or outlining or day dreaming is going to get us there. When we do make it to the desk, we are crippled by our inner critics and censors. A few paragraphs into a piece, and we become besieged by doubts - so don't write again for a while. No novel will be born from this quick sand of sinking ideas!!

On the contrary - to sit down for 30 days and write anything, simply for the sake of reaching the 50,000 word mark by 11.59pm on November 30th, 2009 - means that we are churning out words. And through this churning, this stream of consciousness purging, all the themes and stories that have been circulating in our deep down mind for the past decade or so, come trickling out. They take a form on the page, sometimes surprising to the point that it makes you want to cry. Sometimes painfully badly written. But right now: Just write - don't edit, don't change anything, don't delete. Just write rubbish and nonsense and out of that raw matter, diamonds will start sparkling and leading you forward.

I'm on Day Two, 4,002 words into the journey, and so far I'm loving it.

Peace, Man

So the morning opened with a dazzling ray of sun. Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize. Close to tears over tea. That man still gets me. Having studied the insanity of slavery in my Literature degree at Leeds, the oppression and pain of the African-American existence; I saw his election victory as an explosion of hope. He continues to inspire me.

By mid-morning the talk-shows and blogs and opinion pages were roaring across the country. The international community had made its point - but internally, the land of the free was a mass of opposing voices. "Yeah. but he's done nothing" being the resounding Conservative line.

All this focus on action. As my Buddhist teacher Gen Kelsang Tonglam constantly reminds me: mind creates everything. It's our intentions that shape our future. If we come from a good intention, of kindness and compassion: our actions will carry that purity forward. If we come from anger or delusions, then we're creating a load of bad karma for ourselves and others in the future.

Fear. I think that's what it boils down to. We are scared to believe these days. We have become so critical, that even when we see a brilliant being in our midst, all we see are our own projected fears playing out. Well, I think that the Nobel Committee made a profound point today. They reminded us all that it's not only about what we do: it's what we're thinking that makes the difference.

The Town That Won

I recently walked into Freeport, to investigate this town that I now call home. It was one of those trips where you are very amused, where you point, giggle and go "ahhhh" many times. Freeport is a magical little town.

The first thing we noticed on hitting Main Street, was how the corporations have for once in their lives, LOST. Take a look at the above pictorial evidence of Freeport's McDonald's. Note the architecture, and the fact that it is not only a historic listed building, but it is also haunted. It is without doubt, the best McDonald's in the entire world.

It seems that when the powers of Maccy D wanted to sweep into town, the people of Freeport simply would not allow them to build their normal red and yellow Lego structure. McDs argued, they threw various tantrums and attempted to shove their dirty cash into the faces of the people of Freeport. But as the name of the town suggests, these Americans were free. They said no.

McDonald's eventually gave up and moved into this haunted home. We popped in for a burger (purely for research reasons) and noted the presence of ghosts when Tim mysteriously spilled copious amounts of coke from the drink vending machine. And the waiter looked a tad pale.

But ah, how wonderful: people power in action! Unlike 98% of the rest of American towns, where the corporate powers have changed the landscape with their horrible box malls, fast food restaurants, Dairy Queens, and Walmarts - Freeport has said no. 'Piss off,' they yelled (or perhaps concurred, this is after all a posh neck of the woods). 'We don't want your generic faces to ruin this quaint little spot!' And that's all it took.

To The Fair!

We drove North for the 2009 Common Ground Country Fair. We parked on fields and walked through the autumn drizzle to the "Rose Gate" and entered 11th century medieval England. At least, that's how it felt to me.

This was America's most hotly anticipated, 100% organic farming event. A three-day festival of all things natural, hand-made, lovingly grown and sold without guilt. Upon entering the hippy domain there was immediately an audible - and delightful - absence of noise. There was simply the sound of feet stepping through mud, shoppers talking at stalls selling soap, shit and socks and the slicing sound of the occasional windmill. 25,000 liberals in a field: This was BIG and remarkably well-behaved.

We immediately began to eat. I had an expensive yet undeniably delectable vegetable stew. Tim chewed on a happy cow burger. We ate under a marquee and listened to a young lady do a sound check with her Ovation guitar and angelic vocal chords.

Then we wandered. And wandered some more. We saw a remarkably large male turkey with all his plumage. We stood in a field and watched sheep dogs round up sheep and geese, and a group of donkeys pull an old dude in a sled. I spotted Worzel Gummidge in the distance making some kind of steel sculpture, and laughed out loud. Then we ate some pie cones - filled with Indian Pudding (a miraculous substance of spices and pumpkin) and blueberries mixed with maple syrup.

The central part of the fair (that covered acres and acres and acres) featured a large sitting out area and a stage where speakers and farmers spoke wisdom, and planting methods. There was the odd shriek of activism, but mostly a sense of peace radiated. This was America at its most innovative and forward-thinking, yet also at its oldest. The pagans of England (and the hippies of Lamma Island) would applaud.