“…I had never kissed a boy before. His tongue felt slimy against mine, but tasted of mint. I was a little repulsed, a little excited. I thought about Elle…”
Contact
For any comments, questions or whatever, type the above address into your email client and send me a message. I especially want to hear from you if:
- You want to tell me how great I am. Or how much I suck.
- You have a suggestion for how H. Benjamin Petrie.com could be improved. I want to make the best site I possibly can, so tell me anything you would like to see on this site, or anything you would like changed, and I’ll look into how feasible it is. Be as vague or specific as you like, a surprising amount is possible now with online tutorials, plugins and scripts.
- You have any problems with pages loading in weird ways or missing elements. The site is mostly WordPress code, but I edited it a lot and though I’m quite certain the site works fine in Firefox, and pretty sure it’s good in Internet Explorer 8, I can’t say for certainty how it fares in any other browsers. I know that in older versions of Internet Explorer there are some oddities in the way text loads, and the central column of the blog is decidedly askew in Safari. Bringing my attention to any other such issues would be appreciated, and I will do my best to resolve them with all possible expediency.
- You want to publish my work and pay me lots of money.
- You want to publish my work for free. Depends where, but since a lot of my work is already available for free on this site, any further exposure can’t really hurt.
- You want to post my work on your site / blog. Ask me first, and make sure to credit me and link back to my site, and I’m pretty much fine with that.
- You want to post a work of fiction on H. Benjamin Petrie.com. I’ve had a couple of guest posters in the past, and I’m always willing to have more, whether it’s exclusive or a copy of something you’re already published on your own blog. No guarantees about posting anything you send, but I’ll consider almost any piece of original creative work, and, naturally, credit you with whatever name you supply and, if so desired, link to your blog or site.
“…between moving, drinking bodies, a face stood out. He didn’t realise he had been half-looking for her until he saw her. With eye-makeup and chic fancy-dress she looked beautiful. He knew she understood how he thought he wanted to need to suffer for his art…”
About the site
H Benjamin Petrie.com is the blog of H. Benjamin Petrie (see below) who, despite not yet earning a penny and having been published only once, in the student magazine of his Higher Education Institution, calls himself a writer. The justification for this description, he feels, is contained within this site, where he aims (and occasionally succeeds) to post at least one piece of original fiction each week.
With a loose focus on narratives, the rest of the blog comprises his opinions on films he has seen and books he has read, as well as thoughts on other topics, ranging from student cookery and videogames to insects and Modernist Literature.
“…she felt momentarily the hard dip where the bone joined the back of his ribcage as she pulled him towards her. Without giving him time to resist, if he even would have done, she kissed him aggressively, moving her hand up his neck, to the start of his short hair and the point where, beneath the skin and the tendons, the last vertebrae flowed into the base of his skull…”
About me
Born in Nottingham, England, I spent most of the first eighteen years of life in Nottingham and Derby, after which time I moved to Norwich to study Creative Writing. I started writing for pleasure when I was about fourteen, my interest in the hobby sparked by Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (the first story I ever wrote is on this site somewhere, but you’ll have to find it).
I write short stories primarily, their short length allowing me to complete them quickly and experiment with different ideas, structure and styles. Ultimately I would like to write novels, the first of which stands uncompleted as a sixty-thousand word first draft, with progress inhibited by the continuous distraction of unrelated ideas which simply must be spun into short stories.
Apart from whatever I happen to be reading at a given time, my strongest influences are from the Modernist writers such as James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and, more recently, Marcel Proust. While none of them are particularly widely read now, and often turn off those who would try by their long, meandering descriptions and frequent absence of tangible plot, something about their entire movement speaks to me. Consequently, I often write using stream-of-consciousness technique, or the similar free, indirect style, and focus intently, almost myopically, on only a couple of characters, usually a boy and a girl and how they relate to each other in the mundane settings of every day life.
Another influence for me, at the opposite end of the stylistic spectrum, is the minimalist writer Raymond Carver. While I’m ambivalent to his stories as a whole, there is often something very appealing about the way he can phrase interactions between people.
Portrait by Elizabeth Watts
At this point in my writing career, and that’s what I plan this to be, whether or not it makes me more than a pittance, I’m starting to form ideas about why I write about what I write about or, rather, what I want to achieve by writing again and again the interaction of a boy and a girl. I’m sure these ideas will change and evolve over time, but right now all my stories, as I scribbled in my notebook late one night, “seem to be about satisfaction through the unification of male and female, either physically, psychologically or ideologically, and the barriers to this unification, particularly the difficulties of forming meaningful and satisfying relationships and the insidious, pervasive effects of apathy and doubt.”
There was a psychologist, whose name may or may not have been Anderson, who claimed that humans, ideally, should seek psychological androgyny; to possess a balance between the best qualities of both the male and the female psyche. This will make us a balanced person, if not, necessarily a happy one. Similarly there’s the idea, which, since it’s late I’ll attribute to Freud, but, regardless, has been expanded upon by countless other psychologists, of wanting to return to the womb, to re-establish the oneness with another that was lost at the moment of birth. Since that is both impossible and disgusting, we therefore seek the next best thing, which is either to find that special someone with whom we feel a deep connection, to develop and mature as an individual into a more complete being, or to entrust ourselves to the gods of religion, although, as I’m an atheist (and not just because Philip Pullman inspired me to write), my stories focus on the first two.
Though hardly unique to my work, the idea of seeking oneness or completeness with another is prevalent, and often leads to disappointment, since, because human beings change with every moment that passes, with every outside influence and sensory stimulation, that goal is near-unattainable and so the characters of my stories, as I believe is the case with real humans, at least of the Western world, are forced to accept that there will always be a disparity between their reality and their ultimate dreams and either they must settle for the point between them at which they currently are, or refuse to accept that and forsake their current position for the chance of something better.
Of course that is only my own thoughts on my work and really does little to differentiate it from the rest of humanity’s creative output. What really matters is whether you enjoy my stories or not, and if you want to think about why you do or don’t enjoy them, or what they’re about beyond what they’re actually about, if anything, then so much the better for you,
Henry.
“…with a little half-nervous acknowledgement of what had passed between us in the grip of her fingers, and the quick smile of her red lipsticked-lips, our walk through the puddles and leaves of the undulating, rain-drenched tarmac resumed…”
