Read part (i)

She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.

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He felt it roll over him in a wave; the realisation that a story was coming. It was like standing on a beach, staring at a huge, overbearing tidal wave as it builds up higher and higher in slow motion, white horses straining against blue reigns at its crest. He had had dreams like that as a child. He had feared then that the wave would sweep everything away, or sweep him away, and drown him or leave him alone. Now he welcomed the wave, the metaphor, the coming story.

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I do apologise for the complete absence of any updates over the last two weeks. Unfortunately, while I’m still aspiring, I’m afraid I haven’t really been inspired of late. Additionally, I’ve been busy seeing people and sorting stuff out in order to move back to Norwich. Then there’s been the actual moving and settling in. Now that that’s over, and the search for a part-time job begins, I’m hoping to get The Aspiring Writer back on track. I’m not sure how, however. I feel that some of my entries have been a bit too stuffy, and dangerously close to pretentious. I really need to develop a more naturalistic style. So, hopefully, these changes should be coming in the next couple of weeks, otherwise I might have to accept that perhaps Livejournal was the best place for me to stay.

Henry.

Outside, the sun beats down, warming and illuminating everything. Probably. It might be raining now for all you know. If not, then children will be out in the streets by this time, cycling, or playing football, or walking, or even just sitting around, talking about nothing. Even if it is raining, they’ll be inside, together, talking and laughing and playing videogames and complaining they’re bored. Perhaps you miss those uncomplicated days, before you had your own computer and the internet. When you were still at school, and not university. Before you had all the time in the world to kill and everyone else had jobs. You open up the internet browser and click through the familiar pages. It’s the summer holiday.

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Okay, so it’s been two weeks since my site went up. During that time I’ve had 198 unique visitors, so I’m doing a little better than I expected, even if 173 of those were in the last two days – uncoincidentally the amount of time since the latest issue of the PlotDog Press carnival went up (never underestimate the power of the blog carnival). Hopefully some of these people will stick around for future updates to the site, because there should be plenty more coming. (more…)

American Beauty is, as you might expect from the title, a beautiful film, full of beautiful imagery, the most prominent of which is the image of a paper bag blowing around in the wind. That this should be the most memorable of the film’s images is unsurprising, as it was just such a discarded bag blowing around the plaza of the World Trade Center that was that inspired writer Alan Ball to create the script for the film. (more…)

Throughout life there are days that don’t really mean anything, interchangeable days where you change nothing, do nothing; days that don’t serve any real purpose beyond getting you to the next one and adding just that tiniest shred to your total experience. There are days too, even if you don’t realise it at the time, when a single action, a misplaced word, sends ripples out across your life, irreversibly altering your future. The fifth of June 2008 was one of these days. (more…)

I realise it’s been out for quite some time, but I feel the Animatrix is somewhat under-appreciated. Firstly, let me explain what it is. The Animatrix is a collection of nine short films (each around the ten minutes long) based in some way around the Matrix universe. All but two of them are by different directors, most of them established Japanese anime directors. It’s essentially the movie equivalent of a short story compendium.

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