I ate last night the first of my cheap meals, Penne pasta with Sainsbury’s Basics Pasta Sauce. I added mushrooms and cheese for a little more flavour and protein. Unfortunately the attempt proved futile: that was possibly the worst meal I have had in my life. Worse than flavourlessly bland, it had a lingering cloying flavour that only faintly evoked either tomato or basil, the two primary ingredients of many such sauces. I began to wonder if the sauce had ever seen a tomato, much less been graced with the inclusion of one.

(more…)

Yesterday, Sunday, instilled with a sense of boyish novelty and studentish irony, I set out with my housemate Luke McNeil to Sainsbury’s, single ten-pound-note folded expectantly in my wallet. Owing to a lack of organisation, we arrived at the shop twenty-five minutes before closing-time and were obliged to rush our shopping more than I would have liked, denying me the opportunity to stand and pedantically weigh up the benefits of each product over another.

Still, I loaded up my basket with white-and-orange labels, finding particular amusement in the 7 pence jar of ‘curry sauce’ and the 45 pence tin of baked beans and ‘sausages’. Meanwhile, Luke filled his basket with items from the Taste the Difference Range, abstaining from any packaging that sported less than ten adjectives below its name, as if as a counterpoint to my thrifty food procuration.

(more…)

I worked out other day that after I’ve paid my rent for the next two months, with the money I have left over from my student loan and if I don’t get a job, withdraw from my savings, scrounge money from my parents or come by funds some other way, I would have about £10 per week to live on.

I’m sure I’ll be fine for money, if it gets dire I can always go back home for a few weeks and eat all the food there until September and the next installment of my student loan (which, thinking about it, I should probably sort out), and I’m still optimistic of getting a job, ideally making money blogging but otherwise in a shop somewhere.

(more…)

Keen-eyed visitors may have noticed a few minor changes to the site in the last couple of days, the most prominent of which is the new ‘share’ button accompanying every post, this in addition to the ‘stumble’ button I already had and the ‘delicious’ button I added at the same time. This, I am hoping, will drive some more traffic to my site.

My other additions to the site include a flavicon, which is the little logo you should now be able to see next to the URL at the top of the screen, or in the title bar of the tab this site’s open in, if you’re using tabbed browsing, and a simple line break to separate posts in place of the rather obtrusive borders I had before. Also, I re-enabled comments on all posts, so you should all feel free to tell me what you think about anything.

(more…)

Just a quick post:

I went to a writing careers fair at the University of East Anglia today. Besides reaffirming my ambition to study on the MA course in Creative Writing there (the places for which are very competitive) it was interesting.

One of the most interesting parts of it was that I met Stephen Foster, a published author. While I can’t say that I’ve come across his work, being, as I am, stuck in a bubble of mostly pre-War literature, talking to him was a positive experience, particularly because he had studied on the course that became the course I’m on now, and he had the same tutors as me, and it was on that course, in his final year, that his final submission was marked by someone who worked at Faber, resulting in him being offered a publishing deal straight off the course. Which is encouraging. He also went on the MA Creative Writing at UEA, since he had already applied for it when Faber picked up his work, and said he would highly recommend it. Since then he’s written I think four or five books, all of which were well reviewed, though not all of which sold particularly well, until the fourth one which was more of a bestseller-type book.

(more…)

Okay. Firstly, something I’ve wanted to do for a while is post other people’s work on my site alongside my own, for the sake of variety and extra traffic. The first of these I’m going to put up after this post.

So this that I’m going to post by another writer is from a girl I added on Myspace, Molly, who writes some pretty superlative poetry. At least, I think so. It might just be the use of words like ‘skitter’ and ‘colloquial’, and some interesting images, but I think the voice is quite unlike a lot of poems that I’ve read. Anyway, I like them.

Next, at some point in the next few months I want to make this site ‘better’. Not sure exactly how it will improve much, but I want to vary the content some more, and write some more personal pieces, like I did at the start, so it’s more like a blog, than just a collection of short stories one after the other.

(more…)

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.

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…)

Lately I’ve been turning cold towards Japanese ‘stuff’. I’m not sure whether it’s because it’s suddenly becoming more popular and mainstream, or whether I’m just growing tired of it, but it’s just not as cool as it once was.

Take animé for example. I used to love animé: It was the first section I went to in DVD shops, I bought all the Studio Ghibli films, and I watched countless series and movies. But now I just don’t get so excited by all the visual bombast, by all the surreality or the squiggly little symbols. There’s a lot of cliché in anime films, perhaps no more than in any genre, say film noire, or romance, but the weird-for-weird’s sake, or the cool-for-cool’s sake of anime isn’t doing it for me any more. (more…)

My father keeps praying mantises, four of them. I’m not sure why; they’re hardly the most affectionate of creatures, but at least they’re pretty cool as a sort of curiosity pet. Since he’s in Scotland this week, yanking innocent fish out of their murky-cold homes, I’m charged with looking after the little creatures. (more…)