Concisination

I could spend precious verbiage telling you what I've been doing of late, of the wrangling, the mental gymnastics, the creative push-and-shove, the battles to the death.

Instead, let me admit that "concisination" is not a word. "Concision," however, is. When I told a new team member at a client site that I was in the business of "concisinating" the other day, he said, "She's our copywriter and she's making up words! What have we done?!"

That was before I spelled "neck" with a k. At the start. (It came right after "knuckles" so I couldn't help myself.)

Fortunately the designer likes to write "words" by putting down the first couple of letters, but then trailing off the rest in a vague, you-know-what-I-mean-ish squiggle. I think I'm in good company here.

[a foreign place]

[There's something about meeting a hare
on a cool morning,
or in the dim twilight.
That black eye glows,
and you are caught:

time
stands
still.

That's how you know you've seen one
—how you know it's not a rabbit:

for a single, perfect moment
you fell into that timeless eye
(the slender ears
narrow face
ticked fur
as intangible
as to have been imagined).

In a heartbeat, it's over.

The cool morning continues
or the twilight fails further
—ordinary,
as if the world
is as it always has been
and not now a foreign place
you must fight to make your own again.]

[infinitesimal]

[to see what growing up in such unpredictable circumstances does to you," she says. "Surrounded by physical peril. Death is everywhere." 

She shakes her head again, like she's trying to clear her thoughts. 

"This is hard to understand," she tells me, looking at me directly. "It's hard to say. You're always waiting for the death blow, you know? And that can come at any time, no matter how rosy things seem."

I stifle a frown. She goes on.

"There are times when I sense trouble, and that's when I see the peril clearly: death on the road, on a flight of steps, by plain and simple accident, or maybe ... I don't know. Some violence inflicted by a stranger...

"Other times, it's not so obvious, but it's always there—in the surprise you feel at good luck, at tenderness, at the kindness of a stranger ... good fortune at not hitting black ice on the drive home."

She pauses. Outside a car sighs past on the road. A blackbird calls in the late afternoon.

"Life is a numbers game, mostly," she says after a long while. "Odds. Chance. But there are times," she adds

—and here her eyes stare into the space between herself and me with clarity, as if she's actually looking at something real and specific and concrete in that void—

"when the chances of surviving seem infinitesimal. When it all seems]

What the fuck I'm doing now I'm done

Last time, I left you on a cliffhanger.

In case you've forgotten, I was waxing lyrical about a book and wondering with what I'd fill the empty void left by its imminent completion.

The answer is: this. I'm reading a wildly compelling, equally soul- and synapse-nourishing number about the evolution of language.

No shit, kids: the evolution of language.

I'm barely a few chapters in, but already I hold lofty hopes for the realities from which this book will pull multiple masks. Heavens to Betsy, but it is good.

Note to self: find more Derek.

Pertinent questions on evolution ... and, er, other stuff

Events like this put me off Richard Dawkins because, to put it bluntly, he can be so fucking condescending. Being an arsehole is a surefire way to discourage people from, well, liking you (let alone coming around to your way of thinking), and Dawkins's relentless, supercilious intellectual aggression makes me want to set his hair on fire.

However, for, oh, months now, I've been reading The Greatest Show on Earth, and slowly, slowly over the course of the book I've come to love Dawky's writing, and perhaps his brain, if not the man himself.

What on Earth is happening to me?

Really, I pretty much loathe him in person. But The Greatest Show is a joy to read. A joy. Whatever my personal objections to the man's MO, his writing is easy, charming, human, amusing and clear. It gives the impression that Dick Dawkins (as I like to think of him) would be a great person to sit down and have a chat to, even though when I see him in action I want to throw the viewing device of the moment through the nearest window.

How is this possible? How can someone's natural writing style be so different from their actual persona?

For the better part of this year I've used The Greatest Show to entertain myself on planes, stave off torrid wee-hour emotional debacles, and indulge my still sleep-addled brain on many a weekend morning. No matter how crap you're feeling—how sad, how sleepy, how distracted, how disgruntled—DD somehow manages to whisk you away to a beautiful, intriguing, and captivating world of beautiful, intriguing and captivating sense. And it is our world, our sense. And he tells it so well.

I'm up to the last chapter. Which raises a new question:

What the fuck will I do when I'm done?

[never with]

[every single day. He was never without them, yet never with them. They were always there, the three of them, those three lost loves.

To think of any one of them would make him smile—the fun they'd had, the shared moments of bliss, of fear, of boredom—but now they were lost, and there was always that sadness. He missed each one terribly, even now, and he didn't know why that was. He couldn't understand. All the same, it was there, every day, the deep pain of each loss.

They said that in life there would be pain as well as happiness. But now the thought of adding a new person to the list was torture, a terrible]

Make good; be happy

Originally I titled this post "do good, be happy", but the point here is not just doing, but making. Creating something that you, personally, believe is good makes you happy.

This is not opinion; this is a fact.

In recent weeks I've been writing a large body of work with no style guide and little tonal direction. I wrote outlines that said I'd edit existing content, but then when I came to do that, I found that that content said nothing, so more often than not, I deleted it.

So I've been doing a lot of making—so far, around 9000 words in draft, plus whatever I used in the outlines for the drafts.

And right now, I'm not sure if it's what the client wants, because I've had very little stakeholder feedback indeed. My project sponsor's back from break on Monday, and will, I'm sure, give me sound direction then. But will it be "scrap this and bring back our lovely, fluffy corporate motherhood statements"? I sincerely, sincerely hope not.

Not just because I like my writing to actually say something, but because I'm happy with what I've made here. There is something immensely, deeply satisfying about communicating through something you've made, and I think what I'm making here is good.

Will the client be satisfied? I don't know. Am I? Hell yes. If I could write more about their business—write more that makes their superficially boring, dry story arresting and compelling (or at least, in the especially dull parts, readable), I would. Gladly. This is satisfying work.

If I had children, this is what I'd tell them: make good, be happy.