After a week away in rainy Derby I return with something that is a must for anyone who aspires to be a writer, and of interest to anyone who enjoys a good story:

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

This is a monthly podcast presented by the New Yorker’s fiction editor where, every week, a writer is invited to read and discuss a short story which they admire. So not only is it a free short audio book, but it’s a light critical analysis of the story. The value of this for any writer of fiction speaks for itself, since the constant advice to budding writers, after ‘write as much as you can’ is ‘read as much as you can’. And outside of quality anthologies, which are relatively scarce, it can be hard to find really good professional short stories, on the web or anywhere else, so it’s great that there’s a place where they can not only be picked out for you, but read to you.

Since the benefits of a free audio story and discussion are so immediately obvious, there’s really nothing more I can say about it, except go there now and download some. Hopefully by the time you get back, I’ll have some new original content on here. (Also, I’m not done updating the aesthetics of the site, I’ve just been busy and it takes time).

I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.

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(This one’s kind of like Jigsaw Puzzle.)

Collective Student First-Year Dream

I’m terrified.
“You’ll make lots of friends.”
The words sounded hollow. What if school had been a fluke, all my friends until now exceptional people, not like the rest of the world? The words came true though: I made lots of friends.

We watched a film together, she and our friend, huddled on floor cushions, the screen illuminating our faces, a spring breeze through the open window. Our friend fell asleep, and it was like we were alone, alone and complicit when he gurgled in his sleep and we looked at each other. I thought then of putting my arm around her, but I didn’t. Had we been properly alone, then I would.

How many nights had I sat with him in his darkened room watching him play videogames, sharing his pain in each failure, his joy in each success, thinking ‘is this what a relationship is’? I suppose that never crossed his mind: he only had eyes for her.

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Not quite Hemingway, but still, a story in six words:

A beautiful girl walks into traffic.

It occurs to me that I’ve almost completely neglected to blog about videogames during the eleven months I’ve been writing this site, yet, aside from writing, they are one of my greatest interests. This was in fact a conscious decision from the start, since I wanted this site to be about writing and literature, but now I’m feeling the need to branch out more for the sake of greater variety, and the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is as good a game to start with as any, since I just finished it for the second time last night and enjoyed it more than the first time I played it six years ago.

The Wind Waker is the tenth game in the Legend of Zelda series, a twenty-three-year-old series of games which can be played in any order since each is largely self-contained. As with the Mario series of games, there are three recurring characters in almost every game: a boy named Link who is the hero, a princess named Zelda who generally becomes kidnapped or imprisoned at some point in the game, and a villain who is some sort of evil sorcerer determined on taking over and/or destroying the world, usually called Ganondorf, but occasionally another evil person. While this initially invites comparisons with Lord of the Rings-style high fantasy, the Zelda games have very much their own style and mythology that blends inspirations from both Eastern and Western legends.

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The man had wondered before how old he would be when he felt old. He was not old now, but he felt it as he pushed the door. It was unlocked, like all the doors, of which he might have chosen any, except that this one, belonging to a secluded house atop a rural hill, had held a certain appeal for him. Perhaps it was that even from a distance the house looked as if it had once been lived in. He stepped into the cool embrace of the damp air that lingered about the hallway. The light in here was dim, the few beams of sunlight that penetrated the dirty window above the door and squeezed their way between the man and the door-frame being absorbed by the musty carpet. This house had definitely been lived in, loved even, but now it was what might once have been called a ‘fixer-upper’.

The man walked through to the first room on the left, which had once been the living room. As he entered he saw a spider dash across the floral white settee that looked as if it had been worn-out for a long time. It must have been comfortable though, must have been sat in hundreds of times as the family gathered around the TV that now sat impotently against the wall to the side of the fireplace. The man put down his backpack on the sofa as he went to inspect the TV, his body distorted along with the room as he moved closer to the reflection on the lifeless grey glass of the screen. For a second he fancied he could see reflected behind him the family who had lived here, sat together on the settee and its two satellite floral armchairs, but he knew no one was there, so he did not turn round. Instead, he continued staring into the dull grey screen.

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