A soap impression

I stayed up late last night to listen to Virgin Radio playing the "new Beatles album" Love, in full. Now, as I've mentioned here before, I'm a very big fan of the Beatles, and listening to them for an hour and a half last night was a wonderful experience, but I don't honestly think I'm going to buy this album. I have trouble seeing what the point of it is, other than making another pile of money for everyone involved (does Paul McCartney hate it so much when his bank balance drops below a billion pounds?)

If you're not up to date with what the middle-aged kids are listening to these days, "Love" is basically George Martin and his son rummaging through all the old Beatles master tapes and putting them together in new and exciting ways. It's a strange selection - some songs sound identical to the originals, some are enhanced by funny noises in the background. Most have intros composed of patched-together snippets of intros from four or five other Beatles songs. The highlight is George Harrison's unspeakably beautiful acoustic demo version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", but there are other little-known bits and pieces in the mix too. But really, who is this aimed at? Ardent fans like me who've got the albums and Anthologies already? There's a bit of fun to be had in spotting which tracks each little bit of sound or music comes from, but personally I prefer to listen to them as they were originally created. Yet the whole project is too fanboyish to be of much interest to non-fans. And I honestly don't think the new mixes have any objective artistic merit.

Which segues nicely into another topic - I'm really stalled on this "novel" of mine. I just find it very, very difficult to write something over a long period of time. I have the attention span of a hyperactive butterfly when it comes to writing - if I can churn something out over one writing session, two at most, I'm fine with it, but having to work on something piece by piece, a thousand words or so at a time, really snags my creative impulses somehow. After the initial burst of creativity, what I'm writing gets ever more dull and uninspired. Even when I know what's meant to happen in the bit I'm writing about (I do have the whole structure of the book at least vaguely sketched out in my head), it's hard to put it down on paper without it seeming forced and flat.

This is, of course, exactly the kind of problem this whole exercise was designed to force me to get my head round, so I'm certainly not giving up on it. And I still think I can manage 50,000 words by the end of the month - it's just going to be hard, and it's most definitely not going to be pretty. That said, I've been lazy today and done nothing at all, unless you count going out to the corner shop for some sweets. It counts as a legitimate writer's expense, because I thought a sugar rush might stimulate me a bit. Either that or it was a medical necessity on account of the diabetes.