(Things are starting to happen in my life, and I’m going to be starting a new HBenjaminPetrie blog soon to tell you all about them and offer practical advice based on my own experiences of trying new things. I just haven’t set it up yet. So in the mean-time, so I’m not posting a whole bunch of stuff to it at once, I’m going to be putting a few posts on this blog. Stick around and let me know what you think)

I don’t have a particularly difficult job, but it is very draining, sitting in an office for eight hours a day, five days a week, dealing with computer systems that don’t really work. I haven’t written a word of prose fiction since I started this job in October and, despite all the other great things about my life, I haven’t been very happy about that fact.

Sure I could force myself to write, maybe get up earlier or go to bed later, or give up something else, but as it has been, by the time I’ve gotten home from work, showered, made and eaten dinner, all I want, or have the energy to do, is play a video-game or spend some time with my girlfriend. Same with weekends, my two free days a week. I might get some blogging done, but the rest of the time I’m either spending time with my girlfriend or consuming entertainment.

It’s not all bad of course, I have fun, I do enjoyable things, but I just don’t get any writing done, and that feels like a betrayal of who I am, after I’ve studied to become a writer for three years, and practised for much longer, to sit in a dead-end office job and not do any writing.

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I got my first order of finished books yesterday. Fifteen shiny new copies ready to be palmed off on friends, family and casual acquaintances. The work I put into this book seems like a distant memory now, even though it was only a few weeks ago, but I want to share with you some of the cover designs I came up with before settling on the final one. Here are some of the best:

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Possibly you’ll have checked it out by now already, but I just started a new blog, or rather sub-blog, about videogames and I’m going to talk about it now.

The Blog

As you may have guessed, I like writing, literature and stories, which is why I blog about them. I also really like videogames, and particularly videogame stories, so I want to blog about them too. The only thing is, I don’t think there’s a lot of overlap between the two interests for a lot of people. If you drew a Venn diagram of people who like literature and people who videogames, it would look something like this:

I figured the people who came to HBenjaminPetrie.com to read about the books I’ve read and read my stories, aren’t going to be interested in reading about videogames. And the people who are interested in videogames, aren’t going to come to my site about fiction for the occasional post about what I’m playing. It’s a shame there’s not more overlap because I think a lot more people would enjoy videogames, proper ones I mean, not Wii shovelware, if only the barriers to entry weren’t so much higher than, say, a DVD player, but oh well.

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A day late, here are my two moderately exciting new announcements: my first book, a compilation of short stories, including two brand new ones, is now available for purchase from lulu.com, and I’ve started a new blog, or rather, sub-blog, about videogames. I’ll talk about the book now and the blog in my next post:

The Book

First, the book. I just got my first copy of this from lulu.com a couple of days ago, and it’s looking pretty good. I mean, and perhaps I’m a little biased here, I think it looks really professional, like a proper book. And I’m pleased about that because it’s self-published and I did all the formatting and cover design and photography myself.

So what can I say about it? Well, firstly, you can buy it here:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13003519

But I’m not expecting you’ll want to go and do that right away, if at all, I mean I know how difficult it can be to spend your hard-earned money on a particular item, especially a self-published one, when there’s so many other things to buy in the world, and so many other books to read. To try and ease that decision, I’ve made the book as cheap as I possibly can, while still making a little bit of money for myself from it, not a lot, but a little.

What it says to me if you do decide to buy my book, whether in print or digital form, is that you care about my writing, you care enough to put a few pounds down on it and spend some time reading it. And that’s what I care about. I’m not trying to get rich from this, I just want to be read. Because, after all, what’s a writer without readers? And if I sell as many as twenty copies, I’ll be happy, because at least that’s twenty people who care about my writing.

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Morning, it’s far too early to do much else and I’m waiting for a Dreamcast game to burn so I can see if my new DC will play burned discs. It’s taking ages though, so here I am updating my blog. Today’s beginning was rather too abrupt for me. I had a dream this morning that I was at work (which I was last night) but it was slightly different. And we were trying to close up the shop but people kept coming in because we hadn’t had chance to lock the door or something, then we finally got everyone out and I left. It was light outside, even though I’m sure it was night, and the roads were quiet. I decided to try cycling a different way home, so I set off up the road rather than down it. I went up this road that I thought would lead to my house, but it was a dead end, I think it just led to some locked-up garages, so I turned around and tried the next turn-off. This was like a lumber-yard, and another dead end, but further away. What was strange about this place was that it had flickering flourescent lights on metal posts, about head-height. As I passed them on my bike I noticed that in my hands, resting on the handlebars, I was holding several sheets of paper with dark grey squares on them. Every time the lights flickered, it lit up the squares somehow and they were printouts of CCTV footage from the shop, just of me and the guy I worked with standing around.

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Every now and then I get an impulse to create something or do something new with computers/technology/the internet, usually in the summer when I don’t have any uni work to keep me occupied. I always think this creative urge could be put towards writing, but it always seems to manifest itself as a desire to learn how to write computer code. I always think it would be really cool if I could write games or applications or other things, but I have no idea where to start, or what I definitely want to do, so  I usually spend a couple of days reading about programming languages then give up, since I don’t have the resources or inclination to follow through.

My general philosophy is that life’s too short to learn how to program, because even learning how to do fairly simple things with code takes ages. Two summers ago I did start this site though, and during short bursts over the next several months I taught myself enough HTML and CSS to make it look and work like it does now. I doubt you have any idea how long it took me to work out how to do a front page that displayed the latest post and a random post in a nice rounded border, but was separate to a page containing my last ten blog posts. It took a long time. Sure, I probably could have done it much more quickly with Dreamweaver or some equivalent, but I did it the old-fashioned step-by-step way so I could learn how it worked. I still know next-to-nothing about web-programming though.

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Perhaps you’ve forgotten about this blog, it seems I have. Two whole months without a post! It makes me wonder what I’ve been doing, since it certainly feels like I’ve not done any work in months and months. Well, I must have done some: I’ve got my dissertation finished, or very, very nearly finished. I’m not really all that happy with it. It will get a first, I’m quite confident of that, but it won’t be the best among the thirteen or so people who are doing 50% dissertations. It might even be, ugh!, average. Maybe it’s not so bad, I’m just bored of it now. I wanted it to be amazing, but maybe I was too ambitious or, rather, too broad with my scope. It feels somehow awkward.

I’ve had a general lack of enthusiasm this year, which is a shame, since it’s my final year. The writing I’ve done just hasn’t been up there with my writing from last year. But I think I’ve just been bored. I haven’t really been inspired by anything in ages, haven’t felt a spark of electricity, like when I first read Ulysses, or even Remembrance of Things Past or, years before that, the opening page of Mrs. Dalloway. I have read some good books though, and I’ve had some good fictive experiences lately, especially with some really good games. Games like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Far Cry 2. Both of these create feelings in me that just can’t be achieved through books or films. Maybe I’ll write about why they’re amazing sometime.

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I’m not sure if this is the same for all writers, but I have to really feel what I write. I suppose it probably is the same for all the best writing, otherwise fiction is just churned out soullessly. That’s kind of how I felt reading Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s well-written, no doubt, but I didn’t really get any feeling from it, like he didn’t feel anything when he wrote it. If I don’t feel anything when I write, my writing becomes lifeless, and lately I haven’t been feeling anything.

You might recall the work I posted recently, An Unfamiliar Girl (extract from my current work). That seems to have halted production at around the twelve-thousand-word mark, and I still feel I’ve barely begun it. I’m quite sure there’s enough material in it for a novel, but it’s just writing the novel that’s the tricky part. And this one seems to have become tricky because it is based so much on feelings, rather than plot.

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I have been terrible at updating this site, and in being creatively generally, not only since the start of this year, this new decade, but a little while before. I’m not sure I believe in writer’s block exactly, it sounds like an excuse, but I’ve certainly had a dearth of creative output. Well, I’ve been writing my dissertation, but that’s only been here and there. No, I just haven’t been inspired for a while, and I’ve been busy, well, busyish. What have I been doing? I’m currently addicted to two games for a start: Forza Motorsport 3 and Dragon Age: Origins. The first is, as the name implies, a car game. I’m not even that into cars, a few months ago I couldn’t tell an R8 from a Veyron, a Dino from a Testarossa, but somehow I’ve been addicting to driving around in virtual sports cars, and it’s time-consuming. The second of those games is an epic fantasy game of the really geeky sort, with elves and dwarves and mages and such. I wouldn’t say I’m a fan of that sort of thing, though I like the Lord of the Rings movies, but it’s such a well-made game that can’t help but love it. Girlfriends take up time too, but I can hardly complain about that.

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I really like Christmas, or Annual Family Gift Day as I atheistically and frequently refer to it. A lot of people don’t, my mother included, which always surprises me, but I really do. This year I think I’ve spent already more than I have ever before, and I’ve still got a few people to buy for. It gives me a vague pain, being someone who’s usually so careful (stingy) with money, but then it makes me feel good. I’m almost certain everyone will really like their gifts, and I can justify the expense to myself not only with that, but that I might get a taste of such and such, or ‘try out’ this game to make sure it’s good enough, or watch this film with the giftee etc. I’m looking forward to wrapping them too. I bought some ribbon today, so they’re all going to look good.

But yes, I am being uncharacteristically frivolous for this one time of year: I spent £60 today alone, without really meaning too. That was more selfish though: I’ve essentially bought two of my presents, both because they were on special offer, and so cheaper than my parents would have found them for (both videogames too of course). Now I find out that this one game I asked for, and bought today after failing to contact my father because the deal was amazing and ended today, has already been purchased for me. Usually my father doesn’t get around to Christmas shopping until at least the 15th, sometimes the 20th or later. Who’d have thought he’d get his act together this year? Still, I’m sure it can be easily sorted. What I’m more worried about is lugging all these gifts home, since I’ve elected to go on a train rather than get picked up a day later.

Aside from being uncharacteristically frivolous, I’ve also been uncharacteristically happy of late. (more…)