This blog is by way of tribute to the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 250 years ago today.
I originally intended to upload a chapter a month of a novel about the young Mozart's little-known trip to America, and his adventures in the tiny Coloradoan town of Scopas, a story that begins with a murder and ends with an opera. That proved a foolish endeavour -- there was too little time to revise the existing chapters, let alone compose the later ones, and soon other fictions began crowing into the back of the cupboard of raggedy seersucker suits.
I began writing this more than twenty years ago when I was a postgrad living in a shared and somewhat hallucinatory household in East Oxford. I got a couple of chapters in before the next supply of narcotic substances arrived and I embarked instead on a picaresque tale of a trip on or to the Isle of Skye. I picked the story up a few years later and tidied things up, gave it a bit more of a plot, and then... I lost it big time.
To be more exact, I lost all the disks it and most of the writing I was doing at the time appeared on, somewhere in all the boxes and boxes of papers that started following me from residency to residency and house to house like a pack of rather placid huskies. When we moved to the Old High Light in North Shields, we basically set aside a room for boxes, piled them up, and that was that. Mozart slumbered on for a few more years in the husky fur.
Then the lighthouse got damp, seriously floor-timber rottingly damp (well, it is nearly three hundred years old), and by the time we got back in I seemed to have acquired some more boxes of papers. The result was my study got piled up with these ancient-looking cardboard containers and, one day, looking for CDs, I happened across a heap of old 4.5 inch floppy disks.
My PC at home no longer had a slot for these, but luckily my work PC was a little more elderly, and so I had a look. Hey prestissimo: Mozart, plus all the other novels I got half-way through and gave up on. I didn't know whether to go Erk! or Eureka! (A more common problem than people think.)
As I'm now a horribly busy middle-aged oaf, instead of a terminally lazy mid-twenties oaf, I have a fairly busy work and publishing schedule which doesn't leave time for polishing up of novelistic fragments. On top of which I doubt the publishing world is screaming out for a short silly novel mashing together classical music and classic westerns. But there may well be a few benighted souls out there in Blogaria who could be interested.
Who Killed Old Man Pattinson? And why was he hiding on a houseboat in a cave? And will Mozart solve the murder even though that would make him the world's first child detective?
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