And so to book four. I feel I have hit what Maya Angelou, Dee Light and/or Jamiroquai would refer to as a “groove.” I think the comedy thriller is where I shall be laying my homburg from now on. The next one I have planned is a mixture of twisty heisty confidency tricky thrills with a bit of a sideswipe at the therapy industry (inspired in no small amount by the works of Jeffery Masson) and self-help, with 20mgs of bi-polar confessional dissolved in to keep things peaks-n-troughs-y.

For those bored enough to want to follow such things, I’ll be putting my notes, drafts and progress up on the site for you to peer at, sniff at, “hmmmn” at and then generally disregard in your race for new and exciting entertainment.

So feel free to drop back from time to time and see how the whole thing is getting on.
I’m hoping for a draft to be done by December and publication summer 2010.

We’ll see how we get on.

A few words on...
Psyche.
The collected
ill-informed drivel
of
Richard Asplin
A few words on the subject
A few words on the subject
PSYCHE
Notes from an extract of some notes - 15/12/2009

Chapter 2

Good with words. It’s neither a blessing nor a curse, as it’s not the middle fucking ages and we as a species are merely a fragile, yet determinedly resilient virus on the planet and there are no blessings or curses. There’s just the life we have made for ourselves. Good with words is good with words and I’m not much in the mood to say more than that about it really. Other boys at school had their skills. Daniel Jones with his “good at drawing” – called up to the frontline for school Christmas cards and family birthdays cards and portraits of pets and watercolour holiday cottages. Pimped out by first his parents, then his art teacher. Nikolas Phiniefs, the musical one. Shined and polished and preened and stood infront of prospective pupils, parents and governors for recitals, his piano-black brillantined parting shining, as Moonlight Sonata and something else echoed the school hall.
Oh, and you got that, diary, did you? Brillantined piano-black parting. Good wasn’t it. Well done Jack. VG. Gold star, two red ticks in the margin. Very descriptive. It just came to me. Brillantiend rather than gelled. More old fashioned, helps create the required fusty, dusty anachronistic tone. Piano-black I liked too. Shiny and polished. Not so as to be reflective, but glossy and uniform. Plus the whole thing illiterates. Brillantined-black.  Piano-parting. Those pleasant plosives on the lips. Admit it. It’d take you an afternoon’s pacing, pen-chewing and perspiration to come up with something like that, right? Whoever you are, reading this? My mum, my shrink, my parole officer, my eulogist. Me? I can’t help it. Look, I’ll do it again:  Giles Ingrey – the rugby boy. Granted a huge floppy public school fringe to peer sensitively from behind on many a strapping school magazine photograph, absurd oak shoulders in his dad’s Thomas Pink shirts. You can picture him, can’t you. It was the way I described his fringe as being granted and huge. Echoes of Hugh Grant. You probably didn’t spot it. But it cemented the idea, didn’t it. A trick that’s all. And one I can do with my pen tied behind my back. That’s my thing. Better than music or sport or art. Not so easy to give to others. More difficult to borrow for self-aggrandisement, which is what any encouragement of talent is. They’re my words. And I’ll keep them. Plus you can hide behind not being in the mood for a poem or a reading or a speech or an article or whatever else they want from me. Not in the mood. Like the ability is so fragile, a balloon pop or a car backfiring might shatter it. Utter shit. I can turn it on whenever I like. If I seem grumpy or uncooperative it’s boredom or irritation. Truth is, diary, I can’t turn it off. It’s with me always. My turn of phrase. It gives me no rest, no peace, no silence. There it is, quipping and punning and flowering away. I wish it would shut up sometimes. Really I do. Just shut shut shut shut up.