About

833 words

In September 2014 out of idle curiosity,  I typed this question into my google search engine: How many words is a first novel? It was a ridiculous question, but I was genuinely interested:  how big a project was, say, writing 300 pages of prose fiction? One of the most ‘liked’ answers responded that between 70,000-90,000 words was the average for a debut novel – a similar length to a PhD. I then brought out my calculator and divided 70,000 by 84 – the number of days that I am spending in Ghent. The magic number that flickered on the screen was 833. Eight-hundred-and-thirty-three words a day, I thought to myself. I can do that. I’m not promising a novel. This blog is primarily about my life in Ghent – well, my attempt to establish myself one here at least; it is a story about being a ‘stranger in a foreign land’; about the journey towards strength and self-realisation, and the triumph over loss. But it is also a blog about my creative journey, and therefore, also about the process of writing itself. So these are the two parallel worlds I want to share with you: of my material existence & the progress of my spirit; but then also of my ‘flights of fancy’, the hallucinations of mind which take the shape of writing, and which you will be able to read in due course.

The project (Ghent) My creative project is an extension of some of the work and thinking that has informed my website Essays in the Air. The aim is to create a portfolio or small book of short stories based on moments in the lives of some of my favourite artists. As this is in some ways an Art Historical project, it obviously has its roots in real events. Yet I will exercise my full imaginative and artistic license to elaborate from the facts as I wish. In fact, I do not think it is valuable or helpful to think of these accounts as bearing any resemblance to historical ‘reality’. They take cues, and draw inspiration and stimulus from the ‘real’:  from particular paintings or biographical details, but they are essentially fictional projects, practise runs, before I alight into the world of pure fiction.

The project (Iceland) As you can see from the blog roll I have decided to include a number of blog entries on 833wordsaday which discuss my travels in Iceland. Though as I was working intensively as a ‘work camp leader’ at this time and naturally had less time to write, I did complete one extensive piece of writing called “The Garden of Wonders” discussing Pirro Ligorio’s legacy to the world at The Gardens of Villa d’Este in Tivoli. From a more holistic point of view I thought that the bright action-packed world of Iceland offered a perhaps well-needed antidote to the stiller and more magical world of Ghent in winter time.