Cementum

So, they did it, they finally confirmed that Operation Concrete has won arts council funding and now I'm taking possibly the biggest leap in my life. Approximately £5,000 to explore emotions, creativity, and a collaboration between the written word, art and music, put on an exhibition and release a series of products.

I plan on telling everyone everything that I’ve done so far and what I’m doing as I go along to ensure that people can benefit from how I did it and how eventually, if all goes to plan, independently released and published my first novel. Then there’s the other side as well, about how, fingers crossed, I manage to create a little bit of buzz about it online, enough to introduce a few people to the novel, CD and art book that are going to be release. This will be in the form of a video blog over at the project’s site, www.operationconcrete.com, which, I have been putting off for a terribly long time because I’m not particularly fond of filming myself. My voice is weirdly out of sync with my mouth a lot of the time, not sure how to solve this, but we’ll see how it all goes.

Now, where am I? Well, all the big things are falling into place, there’re lots of correspondence and lots of confirming things. But I plan on doing a series of posts that will help people, who, like me, had no idea how to win arts council funding, how to bring together artists, musicians and organise exhibitions and all that other jazz.

I’m currently making heavy revisions to the novel, turning it from an introspective head fuck of internal monologues and quarrels about everything from fate to love, into something people actually want to read. Not to say that it was totally unreadable to start, only that I was the novel that I wanted to write, and not necessarily the novel that people would want to buy.

I’ve come to realise there’s actually quite a difference, so I expect that I’ll tackle that subject on here, and keep the blog on theme, about creativity.

I’ve also undertaken another large idea, I’ll post about that when everything comes together, and is 100% done, rather than just in a selection of moleskin pages in note from.

Suffice to say however, everything is going to get more difficult and more fun from this point in. Sleep is for sleepy people and the hard I work the luckier I get. The future is going to bear some interesting travels; I’ll enjoy sharing the ride with anyone who cares to listen.