Genesis – a small beginning.

No big bang, no serenade…just my first post…

My name is Kerry Muir and I’m a Hiberno-Antipodean writer with all the ideas in the world and no time to write them. Unlike other writers I have chosen not to name this blog after myself. Are blogs a marketing exercise? For some perhaps, but the greatest use of a blog that I can see is that it provides momentum.

A blog can be used to rant, vent, journal, joke and waffle but the end product of every post is that you have written something. I try and write every day usually contributing to some work in progress. What I havent had until now is a foil for all of that structure, research and considered characterisation which at times can feel like an out of body experience.

I think what excites me most is that I will literally write about anything. And this is the place to do it without feeling you are overstepping the mark or overplaying your interests and patterns. It simply doesnt matter how strongly you feel about something or how much you are lacking in a subjects knowledge, this is the place to write it. If someone else is listening or more accurately reading well that is an added bonus.

The best place for me to start is with the name “The Geneva Club” and the famous words of Mr Mein-Smith……”Not Plausible”.

In my sixth form year I approached my then English teacher, Mr Mein-Smith with a weakly written spy conspiracy of which the name escapes me. What doesn’t escape me is the first line of the piece:

“Neon Lightning, Diesel Thunder – The highway storm”

Now its fair to say that the line was probably better suited to poetry than the beginnings of a book and you would probably struggle to find more cheese on a pizza, but the short story as a whole did incite a response. Although not pleasing, in tiny neat red scrawl and probably an exclamation mark, were the words  “Not Plausible!”.

Whenever I have gone to write something since those words dance around my head like some irritating conscience willing me to keep one foot in the real world. At first I ignored those words with each piece more outlandish thanthe last until I arrived at ‘The Geneva Club‘. It was the very first idea I had for a novel. The premise was fun to think about. Geneva being a neutral city was the perfect place for a group of international notables to meet up and plot or just save the world. I started with a politician. Then a military man, a scientist, and a philanthropic Billionaire who funded all of their flights of fancy. But there was a problem from the outset. As I added these memebers and began to shape their individual stories the old ‘Not Plausible’ Kerry was returning. My scientist was doing all sorts of genetic research and even testing formula on himself, so as to keep it secret. Before you knew it my scientist had turned into a hideous beast but still with a human heart….of course.

I then realised I’d left all plausibility behind. I stopped planning ‘The Geneva Club’ and didnt think about it again for a decade.

Whats the moral of this bizarre tale? If someone had told me that a plane could be flown into the tallest building in New York and actually bring it crashing to the ground not once, but twice in the space of an hour or so, I would have said that it was not plausible. Yet now I have seen it with my own eyes. Only the extent of our imagination limits what is plausible and what is not.

Two of the most successful writers of all time have spent the last few years writing about wizards and vampires and although neither subject is plausible, it seems Mr Mein-Smiths ideas about what is eminently readable may not be in line with the rest of the populous. I challange any writers reading this to take both feet out of the real world. Go a little mad with your ideas and then perhaps reign them in later. You never know what you will come up with.

‘The Geneva Club’ is the title of one of my two as yet unpublished works of fiction and although I did away with the hairy man-beast with a human heart…….it’s still set in Geneva.