Saturday Brings You… Shakespeare Graffiti

Yep, you heard right. I was recently wandering around a section of my home town where graffiti artists are allowed to go ape-shit with their spray cans and stumbled across this beauty:

Now I am seriously considering inventing a time machine just so I can go back and show Shakey an Instagram pic of this art (though I’m sure between a girl arriving in Elizabethan England with a smart-phone that can take pictures, and graffiti of himself, old Will will be more freaked out by moi). Not that there aren’t a dozen other things I could be doing with a time machine, of course. And amazingly, this isn’t the only bit of Shakey graffiti out there. Oh no:

Actually, I’m bored, so I thought I might list all the things one could do with a time machine:

1. Stop John Lennon getting assassinated.

2. Discover what the crack was with the JFK assassination so History programmes don’t try and fill us with crap about Oswald being part of a mafia hit to intimidate JFK’s little bro.

3. Ditto Tutankhamen.

4. Bring a copy of Harry Potter with me so I can copy it all up and become an instantaneous multi-millionaire.

5. Pull faces at Hitler while his back was turned. And maybe shave off his mustache while he was sleeping for good measure.

6. (Temporarily) be on board the Titanic before it sank so I could grab the nearest guy, go to the front of the boat, put out my arms and scream: “I’M ON TOP OF THE WORLD!”

7. Pretend to be a God

8. Tell everyone not to vote for George Bush

9. Ditto the UK with the Lib Dems and Nick Clegg. There’s no better liar than a politician. And I have to pay for everyone being suckers with higher uni fees.

10. Prevent Justin Beiber’s mother from ever meeting his father, so he wouldn’t exist. Except maybe this would be counter-productive. Maybe instead of Beiber we would have some other horrific ‘musician’ who was worse…

11. Get a piggy-back off a dinosaur.

*No, I do not know why I decided to call the dinosaur Dennis.

Oh well. Do let me know if you find anymore Shakespeare graffiti out there. Or invent a time machine!

Adventures in Writing: The Block

This is what happens when you start to write:

At first, you’re incredibly enthusiastic. Your muse is flowing. You have ideas! Brilliant, absolutely, utterly unique ideas. You’re going to be the next J.K Rowling… no dammit, you’re going to be bigger that SHAKESPEARE!

All of this is very commendable. But foolish is the writer who thinks they can get away from the dreaded Block. Not the Writer’s Block, which comes when you’ve gotten stuck with an idea. No, something worse… The Enthusiasm Block. This horrificBlock will eventually loom over you and laugh.

You may think you can avoid the wall. You’re so enthusiastic and so consumed by your writing, after all, that you’ve pulled a few all-nighters. You can’t sleep from need of writing. Therefore, the Block has been completely avoided, right?

Wrong.

I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. It may take some time. It might take days, or weeks, or even a month…

But the Block will get you in the end.

So what’s the solution, I hear you asking? (Actually, I don’t, because this is a computer and if I could hear you talking that would be weird.) Nothing. That’s right: nothing, nothing more than what you’re already doing. You’ll get bored. The writing will become a challenge. Finally though, if you push to write a little every day, you’ll get over it. You’ll look one day and be amazed to see page after page of Word document writing (or paper, if you’re old-school like me) the Block will be scaled and beaten. And you’ll feel like you’ve just climbed Everest.

But I will warn you, there’s a sacrifice involved. In the end, you’ll look a little like this: