This is one of those times when you think – this is important I better write this down. The last time this happened I was in an Irish college away from home and learning to do a particularly complicated jig – and I thought this is totally unimportant but I better write something or the Christian Brother with the club will make good on his threat to beat some sense into me, though I still don’t see how that’s possible. I once went back to read through that diary and found that I had written Brother Murphy is a tosser four hundred different ways. A touch of the Shinings. It’s nice to realize how close to lunacy we all are all the time.
Like now, for instance. At the moment I am totally in the grip of some insane ego trip that convinced me it would be a good idea to write the sixth part of Hitchhiker’s Guide. More than a good idea – a brilliant idea – inevitable really – who else could possibly do it. Being a person who writes is a strange job – half the time we are so deep in solitary that we giggingly convince ourselves that our powers of perception and description are bordering on the godlike, which they obviously are not; exhibit A: gigglingly. And the rest of the time we berate ourselves for our sluggish stupidity and wonder why in the name of Jaysus would anyone ever want to read a single thing we tap on to a screen. Except gigglingly which has a curious charm.
When I got the H2G2 call I realized for a moment exactly how a cat feels when it finally succeeds in dipping its face into the elusive cream. A call such as this one rarely troubles the phone on this Irish writer’s desk. Or any writer’s desk. I feel like Gary Numan’s biggest fan who then grew up to marry Gary Numan, except for that allegory to really work, that girl would have to go on tour as Gary Numan and study for two years for her pilot’s licence. So I said yes. It was one of those yesses you say quickly because it is not you talking, it is that little impulsive little troublemaking demon that is leeched on to your good sense and made you buy the new iPhone when the old one was working perfectly well. In any case, I never believed that anything would come of this phone call. Douglas Adams’s widow, Jane, was never going to agree to a kid’s writer taking on the series.
But inexplicably she did and now I am. And where before it was all nostalgia and romance, now it’s time for bum on seat, put up or shut up, defy-the-critics-pull-the-two- headed-rabbit-out-of-the-helmet time and bash the words on to the screen. I had a few ideas which seemed all cool and wonderful when I told them to some drunk people in the pub, but in the cold light of actual publication they seem a bit feeble. For example, here’s one character name that did not make it past the first plan. I was on the beach with my two boys and the little one says to me with the frankness of youth, ‘Dad, I’ve got sandy goujons’ (goujons being the bourgeoise Colfer term for nuggets being the everyday term for town halls being the Dublin rhyming slang for you know very well). And I thought, Sandy Goujons, what a great name for a character. Probably a female, alien assistant district attorney. I could just picture her not too tall, only half a dozen limbs, but tenacious and spunky.
But I didn’t use Sandy, even though she still makes me laugh. That’s how dedicated I am to this book. Maybe that’s the wrong attitude?? Who can I be if not myself. I once told a man he wasn’t his brother and he looked at me and said of course I’m not my brother, and I’m pretty sure he projected the word dullard but sometimes I pick up stuff wrong so it could have been mallard. Which makes no sense, and he calls me a dullard?
My point is that there is no point pretending to be one’s brother, metaphorical or no, unless one’s brother dies suddenly and he doesn’t have a criminal record and it’s been so long since you were able to leave Brazil. Other than that better to stick to being the person that you know best, i.e. oneself, or the person you’ve been stalking.
So, to paraphrase Sammy Davis, Jr., I have no option but to be myself, so that’s what H2G2 is gonna get. A slap of the Colfer brush, a Celtic makeover, scatology and slyness. Something that won’t jar with the first five books but might not gel either.
How do I feel about all this? Scared beyond belief, but also I’ve got that tingle you get the first time you hear a special song. I’m going to boldly go and to hell with the begrudgers. Of course, I say that now when the begrudgers are far away and publication date is not for months. A little closer and a little louder and I might be more accommodating.
By the way, I don’t actually have a Colfer brush and I can’t promise that you won’t get Sandy Goujons. Maybe the world needs Sandy Goujons, just to teach it perspective.
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