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.

The thing is, I, like all people in developed nations, need money to live, to pay for food and bills etc. Unlike many people my age, I’m in a very fortunate position in that I live in a nice house for very low rent and have a fairly low cost of living, despite my gaming obsession. I’ve perhaps become a little more frivolous in buying premium foods at the supermarket since my job started, but generally I don’t need much money to be happy, at least right now. In fact, I have more than enough money to be happy for right now. And yet, in my work life, and my writing life, I am not happy right now.

There’s two questions I feel are worth asking right now, and maybe you, reader, should ask them of yourself:

1.Am I happy?
2.What is my happiness worth to me?

Being comfortable is not the same is being happy. It’s very easy to get comfortable in a job, to adjust to it, to become a part of it. There’s people my age doing the same job as me, who’ve been doing it for longer than me, and there’s people I work with doing the same job as me, pulling in maybe slightly more money (I’m hired through a recruitment agency, while they’re permanent members of staff), who have been doing this job for a long, long time.

I don’t mean to suggest that there’s anything wrong with that, or that I think anything less of those people. They’re nice people. But have you ever imagined yourself doing the same job, week in, week out until you retire or die, and never shooting for promotion or taking any risks? What did you dream about doing when you were at school or university and dreaming was free, before the mortgage / rent bills came along? If you’re not doing that now, what’s really stopped you?

Like I say, it’s very easy to get comfortable in a job. You start out, you get to know how the place works, you get to know the people around you, you come in each day, five days a week, and that’s how it is. It’s a routine now. You know there’s other jobs out there, but this is your job, this is what you do. It’s comfortable like a bath that’s very slowly cooled to blood temperature. You feel like you’re not good enough for those jobs, otherwise you wouldn’t be doing this one, and you’ve forgotten what it was like to take a risk, to go for something you wanted rather than something familiar. And the longer you stay somewhere, the harder it is to get out.

What do I know about all this though, right? I’m just a kid. Yeah, I don’t have much experience of this, but I feel this job taking a hold after only a few months, and I see the people around me. You choose between a safe-bet low- to medium-earning job or a few big risks, and it’s a lot easier to take big risks when you’re young, so that’s what I intend to do, it’s what I’ve been intending to do ever since New Year’s Eve, but now that my twenty-second birthday has just passed more than ever.

What’s brought about this change? What’s stirred up this fire in me? A few things really. Here’s the main ones, in chronological order: watching the Apprentice towards the end of last year, seeing people my age and slightly over starting their own businesses from nothing, with no formal business education, sometimes even with very little school education; reading a book my uncle gave me for Christmas called “How to Drive a Tank and Other Everyday Tips for the Modern Gentleman”, a book in which the author, Frank Coles, does a whole range of exciting things, and then tells you how you could do or learn to do them, and where to go next if you want to; reading a book recommended by the previous book, “The 4-Hour Work Week” by Timothy Ferriss, something I very recommend you read as soon as possible (he makes some bold claims, some parts of his advice is more useful than others, but, more than anything, that book will inspire you to go out and do something to improve your life); realising that you don’t have to be a genius to start a business and that people less intelligent and less resourceful than me have done it before and become millionaires; and throughout this all, knowing that I have parents and a girlfriend who believe in me, and that I believe in myself.

So what am I saying? Well, it was my birthday last Friday, and it’s my girlfriend’s birthday today, so I took a few days off work to make this a five-day weekend. All that previous stuff has been going on in my head for weeks, but over these last few days, it’s all beginning to crystallise in my mind, it’s like I’ve reconnected with myself. I haven’t done any fiction writing over this time, but I’ve decided how I’m going to find time to do it: I’m going to quit my job.

Right at the start of the year I set myself a deadline to have a plan to do something better with my life than sit in an office by March, and to be ready to quit my job by April. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I between us had an idea for a business we could start, an evolution of something we’ve been looking into for a while, and today I had another idea for an income source. Watch this space.

It’s easy for me because, like I say, I’m young, I don’t have dependants and I don’t have a high cost of living. I’m not saying you should quit your job, because maybe you even like your job, or maybe it pays well enough to compensate for sucking your soul and your life away. What I am suggesting is firstly, order ‘The 4-Hour Work Week’, you might not agree with everything in it, but it will get you thinking. Secondly, maybe even more importantly, take a couple of days off work without a plan. Just be. And think about what you used to want and what you really want and how, if you want it so much, you could get it, what you’d be willing to give up or change.

I’ve had some of my best ideas over these last couple of non-work days, and I’ve felt more creative and more motivated than I have in months. I can barely wait to make that one last point-of-no-return decision and quit my easy, convenient, low-paid, too-many-hours job and pour my energies into new ventures.

One more tip: post-it notes. They stick to your walls (mostly) without leaving any marks. Find a clear wall, preferably near your desk. Write a few quotes that motivate you on one or two of them to get you started. I’ve chosen as one of mine a line from a T. S. Eliot poem “Time for you and time for me / And time yet for a hundred decisions / And for a hundred visions and revisions / Before the taking of a toast and tea” as a paradoxical reminder that there’s both plenty of time in which to achieve things, and that time should not be wasted and allowed to slip away. Then write a goal for yourself on a post-it and, if you want to, include why you want to achieve that below it. Then what you do, is go horizontally for further goals, and vertically for how you’re going about achieving them, or just further notes on them. So for example you could have “Goal 1: start a business selling custom socks” and then below that a note saying “look into material wholesalers and sock manufacturing”. I haven’t had chance to test the system much, but so far it’s been a great visual aid at a) tracking my progress on my goals and b) reminding me constantly what I want to achieve so that, rather than sitting at my computer on facebook because I’m bored, I can look at what I actually want to do and what the next step is in doing it.

Try it and let me know how you get on.

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:

As you will very soon notice, most of the images I used as covers are of the same place at different times of different days. The view in these images is actually the view from my bedroom window, which I originally used as a test image to try out different text layouts. I had no intention of using something so immediate as my final cover, but after this first one I decided the view across the rooftops gave a fairly unique image.

This is the only image I considered using for a cover that was not taken from my bedroom window. I think the clouds are very striking in it, but it feels a little unbalanced with the great mass of silhouetted trees at the bottom.

For a long while I consider using this quite blurry night-time photo because what I really wanted was an image that was something other than a completely flat, uniform sheet of colour, but was not so visually arresting that it overshadowed the text. As I said before, I based my cover design largely on the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Finnegans Wake:

The cover image on this is very much in the background, almost to the point of inconsequentiality, and it’s the text that boldly stands out. I wanted the text of my title to be what drew the viewer’s eye, not how clever or unusual the image is. I suppose I also, although I hadn’t considered it until now, took some inspiration from A Softer World, as those comics use photos that are often blurred or cropped almost to the point of abstraction.

This image would have been the back cover if I’d used the previous image as the front cover. I’m not sure it would have particularly complemented the front cover though, since it’s a lot clearer and brighter. The problem was, I didn’t take enough photos, or I took as many as I thought I’d need to get a good image, but wouldn’t work on them until the next day, and then the lighting conditions of the earlier photos would be gone, meaning I couldn’t produce any more. To an extent I had the problem with the final cover, although that eventually worked in its favour, but we’ll come to that in a minute.

This image is quite similar to the image I ended up using, and was taken on the same day, but with the window open rather than through the window. The text is too much trying to mimic the Finnegans Wake cover though, rather than being its own thing, and the image is too plain at the top while having too much going on at that bottom.

This is my least favourite of the covers. It’s a complete tonal departure from the other covers and from the tone of the book, it’s also the most clichéd and has that TV aerial jutting out right across it. If my photo-editing skills were better, I could probably have gotten rid of it, but even so it’s not a particularly expressive image.

(Click this image to see it full-size)

(Click this image to see it full-size)

If you click the above two images, you’ll see they’re pretty large, 1,728 by 2,304 pixels to be exact, which is about the size Lulu.com recommends for A5 book covers to give them appropriate resolution. The problem you may spot is that I didn’t want to use this entire image, since it has the window frame and too much roof in it, meaning some serious cropping was in order, resulting in a smaller picture with fewer pixels. I think my front cover ended up being about half the size Lulu.com recommended, meaning I had to upscale to about a factor of two. That’s not so bad, with a decent image manipulator, barely noticeable to anyone other than a professional.

The image I wanted for the back cover however was an area of the photograph much, much smaller than the front cover. See if you can spot it on the first large image. This I was a bit more concerned about, because I had to roughly quadruple the size of the cropped image to make it big enough for Lulu to accept, causing a significant loss in fidelity. I was worried the image might turn out horrible when I got the proof copy. Fortunately though it turned out quite well, in fact, I like it more this way. I like the way the trees in the background are really shadowy and the colour’s sort of patchy because of the upscaling. It reminds me of when you scan old physical photographs onto a computer, and because scanners work at such high resolution, they come up massive and slightly blurred. So yes, although I haven’t got the highest fidelity images for my book which, let’s face it, wasn’t going to happen anyway with a Fujifilm Finepix (which, btw, is a lovely little camera with a big screen and small form factor), the images I did end up with not only encapsulate the feeling I was aiming for with my book, but also give me a warm nostalgic feeling.

Let me know what you think of my cover designs in the comments below and, if you’re so inclined, go and buy my book from Lulu.com:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/as-you-and-i-stand-motionless-here-the-world-becomes-very-far-away/13387176

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.

What I’ve done then is taken all the videogame-related posts from the HBenjaminPetrie blog and transferred them over to the new one, Once Upon a Polygon. I’ve also started to add some new content, which I feel goes into greater depth than the earlier posts because I’m writing exclusively for a gaming audience, rather than a general audience. At some point I’m going to continue the Videogame Diaries series too, because I really enjoyed writing those.

What else can I say about this new blog? Well, I’ve learned a lot about designing a website from HBenjaminPetrie.com, but haven’t really had the impetus to change it much since I created it’s current layout. Starting a new blog has given me the space to tinker around and experiment without jeopardising the site I already have. Right now I think Once Upon a Polygon looks much more attractive, if only because I worked out how to a gradated page background. I’m particularly proud of the menu buttons as well. They took some time and a rather nifty bit of CSS code I found somewhere, but they look really good. My inspiration for those by the way was a combination of the original Resident Evil interface and the menus from Final Fantasy VII. The text on them is all deliberately blocky to evoke the pixellated text of the 16/32-bit era.

Some thought went into the title too, so I hope you like it by the way. Originally I thought about calling it ‘The Literary Polygon’ but decided that was stupid, not least because it wasn’t at all literary. For ages I was trying to come up with a snappy title that evoked the idea of both videogames and stories. ‘Once Upon a Pixel’ was the first variation I came up with, but that suggests retro games, so I exchanged pixel for polygon, polygons being the basic building block of any three-dimensionally rendered object. Of course, making a sort of wire-frame pseudo-3D header is a beyond my artistic abilities, so I settled for boldly pixellated characters there.

The background, as you may have noticed, uses objects from the original Super Mario Bros. Usually for page assets, like backgrounds and buttons and stuff, I like to use my own designs, but for this blog I knew I wanted to use something from Mario. Why? Because Super Mario Bros. tells possibly the simplest narrative you can tell in a videogame: the princess has been kidnapped, you must rescue her. It’s also possibly the most iconic games of all time, rivalled only by Pong, Pac-Man and Space Invaders, none of which have as clearly defined narratives.

In order to represent this idea of the Mario narrative, I experimented with first putting entire levels of the game into the background, and then splicing together different aspects from the key levels between the first and last one. You can see the results of my splicing below, a sort of tour of Super Mario Bros. in one screen.

(Click on the image to View at Full Size)

The idea was to show the whole narrative in one go and also, if you look at the ends of the image, they link into one another in a kind of Finnegans Wake way, suggesting the narrative repeats over and over again. Unfortunately, the image is so large at full size that it doesn’t display fully on a monitor, let alone repeating, so I went for a more simple cloud and item box motif, which doesn’t quite conjure up the same sense of narrative scale, but at least is a lot cleaner.

There’s not much else to say about the blog that you can’t work out for yourself. If you’re interest, the two primary influences on my writing style for it are the columns by Randy Smith, Clint Hocking, N’Gai Croal etc. in Edge magazine, and the rather excellent Chris’ Survival Horror Quest.

So if you have a passion for videogames, or even are just a little curious, go check out Once Upon a Polygon, and if not, just stick around here for some more updates.

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.

But, of course, how can you care about this book if you don’t know what it is? So I’ll tell you. It’s a collection of twenty-three short stories, some longer, some shorter. Specifically, they’re the twenty-three best short stories I’ve ever written. Now, many of them are already available on this site for free, and they’re going to stay here, for free, because I want to be read more than I want to make money. However, many of the stories have been tweaked for this compilation in a kind of ‘director’s cut’ way, and two of the stories are brand new and exclusive to this collection.

Of these two, one is over forty pages long, an epic nestled among the more bite-sized narratives, and I’m particularly proud of it as one of my absolute best short stories. It’s called Emerald and I’d say it’s one of the primary selling-points of this compilation. But it’s not the only one.

The other reason I feel you might buy this book is because it’s nice to own a physical copy of something. It’s all well and good reading off a screen, but I find when I’m reading on the internet, I can’t concentrate on more than a couple of thousand words at a time, there’s just too many distractions going on when you can have multiple tabs open, and it’s just not comfortable for your eyes. And reading fiction for me is sitting in a sunny garden, or by a window, or, most often, lying in bed when everything else is quiet, not hunched over a computer desk, or squinting at a laptop screen. That’s why I hope you might consider buying my book; as a new way to enjoy my fiction.

So what are you buying when you go to Lulu and place your order? Well, if you look at the cover, you’ll see it’s called ‘As You and I Stand Motionless Here, the World Becomes Very Far Away’, a long title I know, but I did deliberate on it for a long time. If you’ve been following my stories for a while you’ll kind of already know what it’s about, but I’ll try to explain it concisely for the uninitiated.

Most of my stories, and particularly the ones in this collection, centre around a couple of people coming together, either by chance or by intention. That’s the ‘you and I’ bit. When these people come together, there’s often very little exterior action, they think and they talk, but often little happens to or because of them, except the occasional, brief physical connection, a kiss perhaps, or their hands brushing together. That’s the ‘stand motionless’ bit.

The idea of ‘the world becom[ing] very far away’ is a theme that recurs often in my work, and I’ve referred to it on this blog before as ‘distancing’. It’s almost an overarching theme of all my work in fact, that people in my fiction are often isolated, or feel as if they are, and they find it difficult to make meaningful connections with other people, but, occasionally, their shared experience of isolation can bring them together. So, while they are together, it is the world that becomes far away, inconsequential even, because they have found this brief connection to someone else.

You see, I’ve thought about this. And I wanted a long title because a) it makes it stand out from the crowd, b) some of the best titles are long and exact rather than short and snappy, and c) maybe I’m a little bit pretentious. With reference to b), on a little side note, some of the titles I was thinking of, that I drew inspiration from were stuff like, “if on a winter’s night a traveller”, “if nobody speaks of remarkable things”, “in search of lost time”, and of course, the shadow that persists over any creator of a short story compilation, “will you please be quiet, please?”

I spent a while creating the cover too, and you’ll see some of my earlier concepts for the cover in a future post, but ultimately I wanted an image that would match the somewhat subdued nature and ambiguity of my writing, and something that would not overshadow my title, which, being as long as it is, would take up most of the space anyway. One of my absolute favourite covers of all time is the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Finnegans Wake, and the cloudy scene on this inspired the rainy scene on my cover. But again, I’ll talk about that in a future post.

All that remains for me to say is that I hope you’ll consider purchasing my first publication and if you do, will enjoy the fact that you will then be in possession of a complete and considered work of fiction that was worth the asking price over a loose array of digital stories. The link again:

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

And look out for my next post in which I’ll be discussing the other thing I’ve been working on, my new blog about narratives in videogames.

I cycled further back towards the road, and then the lights kept flickering and the images kept changing, and then they were like CCTV footage of me on my bike in the lumber-yard, as if the camera was in front of me. I could see myself and then I saw a shape a short distance behind me which I thought was a deer or a stag. I saw it getting closer with each flicker, and saw it was a stag, then I saw a doe and her foal cross in front of the stag, but the stag was still getting closer. I don’t think I realised at first what the images were showing, then I realised it was me and the stag was behind me, so I turned round and then it started charging me. I was still on my bike, so I couldn’t move easily, but the stag missed and went past me, then it turned and got ready to charge again. And I was proper panicking because I could see the road, but the stag was blocking my way. Then I woke up, and the sun was bright through my blind and my window was open, then I heard a cat make a strange yowling noise like they sometimes do around here, because there’s loads of cats, always walking around and making noise. The noise scared me though because I’d just woken from the dream.

The worst part though, as soon as I’d woken up I started thinking about various things, then the thought suddenly struck me that I hadn’t locked up the shop when I left last night. Usually the guy I work with locks up, but he wasn’t in last night, so I was working with someone from the co-op next door (my shop’s owned by the co-op but it’s an off-license), and I had to set the alarm and lock the door. I’ve done it before, but not often. Lying in bed at ten past six this morning though, I genuinely couldn’t remember if I’d locked it or not, and then I was thinking how, if I hadn’t and the shop got burgled it’d be entirely my fault, and even if it didn’t, I’d still be in trouble when someone came to open it up this morning. Even though I was like 90% sure I had locked it, I wasn’t absolutely certain, and I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep until I was. So I got up, got dressed, and cycled down there, got there, pushed the door, and it was fine. I’d locked it.

Once I got back in, there was no question of going back to sleep, so now I’ve been up for three hours and I’m bored. I started looking for DC games to burn, and I’m not sure if the one I’m doing now is still burning or if it’s just stopped and is pretending it’s going fine. Guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer, or try a new one. I might blog about my DC soon too, but not now. For now I’ll leave you with the above little tale. Hopefully I shan’t be too tired at work tonight, since I’ll be there until eleven, functioning on four hours sleep…

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.

Another time I became sort of obsessed with programming was when a game called Kodu was released on Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Community Games channel. It had next to no publicity, and I doubt it received the audience it deserved, but that ‘game’ is amazing. It isn’t so much a game as a serious of assets for making games, kind of like a budget Little Big Planet, but, while it doesn’t have as much charm as LBP, I think Kodu is more powerful. It would take a while for me to explain what it is, so here’s the Wikipedia entry. Rest assured it’s amazing for someone who wants to mess around with immediately accessible games design. I once played it for nearly 18 hours across two days. It only costs about £3.50 too.

For the last few days I’ve been reading a special edition of Retro Gamer magazine that looks at all the major videogame machines between 1977 and 1999. I think that is what’s brought on this fresh bought of desire to learn how to program. I downloaded a BBC Micro emulator earlier. There’s something satisfying about typing in simple commands and watching the screen fill with a blocky red triangle. I doubt there’s a lot of point becoming an expert in using the Micro at this point in time. I was thinking earlier how, if I’d be born in the late seventies, I’d have gotten into programming computers and/or games because it was so much simpler then. I could have learned BASIC easily if I wasn’t distracted by modern videogames and the internet all day. Then I could be making bestselling games today, though I’d be older. Now programming has moved on so much, and so much more complicated. It’s like history; the more time goes by, the more there is to learn. I suppose at least I’m spared the torture of growing up in the eighties, ‘cos the nineties was much cooler.

Anyway, I went to the library earlier and borrowed a book on web programming with HTML, XHTML and CSS. I already know a tiny bit about two of those, so it seems like as good a place as any to begin, if I actually do bother to learn some form of programming. I’ll probably get bored and go play Mass Effect 2 though. Or I found out there’s a new version of the OS I’m currently running (Mint Linux), and, even though my current system is working fine, I’ll probably upgrade anyway, just because I like to mess around with these things occassionally, despite the hassle of reconfiguring all my settings. If I do learn HTML etc. though, at least it might make this site a bit better. And that concludes what is possibly the most boring post I’ve put up here.

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.

I hope this is a phase. I want to create, I want to be original, but… I don’t know. There’s people who are more creative and more original than me. And there’s people who can stick to one idea. I know my blog would be infinitely improved if it was more focused, if it just dealt with a single, slightly quirky idea. Even if it was just my stories, but I like to jump around and do different things. (And actually, I think I used to have more readers when I just wrote long rambling posts like this one on my Myspace, than when I started planning content and putting it under my own domain).

I’m still not enthused about the piece I was complaining about being stuck on before. I can’t relate to or care about the characters very much any more, and I still haven’t decided on a style for it. I’m wondering if maybe I should just rework it completely, exclusively for submission, or even spend my last month before deadline writing up something new, not that I know what.

Anyway, this post isn’t really going anyway, I have nothing really to say except further complaining about my increativity. I was really just letting anyone who cares know that I’m still alive, and hopefully I’ll get out of this creative stupor soon, and start posting frequently again probably after my deadlines.

Henry.

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.

I shall elaborate: I wrote a short novel before (still in it’s first draft, still, one day, to be put up on this site) and the way I did that was by making myself write two pages a day, six out of seven days, until the first draft was finished. This is one way to get writing done and becomes easier with practice but, particularly with early attempts, the writing can seem forced, and consequently, there’s a lot in the ‘novel’ I’m not very happy with. I’ll go back to it sometime, but in the meantime I’ve been working on this other piece, extracts from which I plan to submit for my course, though I’m still waiting for feedback on my first submission.

The problem I think I’m having now is firstly that I don’t want to force myself to write it, I want to feel it and then write what I feel. Therefore, rather than set myself a daily quota to meet, or a total word-count to aim for, as I did with my previous piece, which I set, rather modestly, at fifty-thousand words, I have been writing when I felt like it, with the idea that it will be finished when it’s finished whether it takes fifteen-thousand words or a hundred-and-fifty-thousand.

But why is feeling it so necessary, so much more necessary than with my previous work? Well that ties up with the second problem I think I’m having: this work is pretty ambitious, I’m tempted to go as far as ‘experimental’, but that would be only in terms of my own work, and not within the western literary canon. As one might expect, it’s a very modernist-influenced work, even somewhat impressionistic (the above picture, by Leonid Afremov, I’m quite sure, is a type of impressionism, and has been something of an influence among other things). It has been particularly influenced by Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, which is a dangerously great work to emulate.

Proust has a distinct writing style, centred around extremely long, digressive sentences. His syntax is what I wanted to emulate, but in doing that, it is easy to appropriate the kind of late-nineteenth / early twentieth-century phrases he uses, which then makes the work something of a pastiche. This became such a problem in early passages that I had to stop reading Proust altogether. Now I feel rather stylistically lost: I’m not sure how to write the work, except that it’s a kind of stream-of-consciousness. I think this is my biggest problem at the moment, along with the perennial problem of the amateur novelist: maintaining a consistent style across the whole work.

Another problem I’m having, which is related to style, is discourse, the layout of the piece, how it is introduced, how the narrator moves between events. As I said before, it is impressionistic: it aims to give impressions rather than definitive explanations. I suppose I should say here, as I have not yet done, what the piece is about.

Its working title is Lila, Remi and, as the name suggested, it is about two girls, specifically two girls with whom the narrator has a relationship. It’s not a love-story, or a romance novel, but rather a story about relationships, as my works tend to be. There is never any question of “will they / won’t they” get together, because this is made explicit from early on, and there is no happily-ever-after because the story deals with the relationships in their entirety, from the first moment the narrator meets each of them until after he breaks up with them. From a suspense point-of-view you might suggest I’ve already shot myself in the foot by revealing the entire story from the word go, but the piece is about how and why things happen, not what happens. But yes, that sort of story is more uncommon and more difficult to write, which is what I meant by both experimental and ambitious.

This relates back to an idea of mine that I like stories that are not spoiled by knowing the ending, of which Ulysses is my favourite example. Now, if you know the ending of most thrillers, or, in fact, most genre fiction, the story is ruined, there is no point in reading it, because you know what’s coming. If you know that Ulysses ends with a reconciliation between husband and wife, mutual forgiveness and acceptance, the story is not ruined. If you know every detail of Leopold Bloom’s journey over the day described in Ulysses, the story is not ruined, rather, I believe, enjoyment of the novel is increased, it makes more sense and can be more easily appreciated. For me, Ulysses is like a jigsaw puzzle. There are a lot of ideas and events in it which do not make sense on first reading and only in the context of later ideas and events. In a way the entire book makes very little sense until the last page is finished, and then it is as if all the pieces of the puzzle come together at once to form an intricate tapestry.

I am not aiming for exactly this, but perhaps something along those lines. My story is not told chronologically, but rather, like Remembrance of Things Past, in the order that the narrator remembers things and how they link together. This poses the problem of how to put all the events together so that a coherent narrative is produced, and I’m still working on that, but, for example, though this is subject to change, currently, there is a part where the narrator first finds out Lila’s name. He recalls that the name made him think of lilacs, which then leads to a digression about how he once decided, after they were going out, to buy her some lilacs, or rather, some other flowers, because he could not find lilacs anywhere, and how she was overly-happy to receive them. In the story this is a sudden narrative jump from the first time he meets her to a time when he has already been going out with her for several weeks. The plot then moves back again, but has created an impression of the semi-random leaps human consciousness makes.

Again, this is why it is so important that I feel this story in order to write it. I have to get the relationships straight in my head so that, as I write, I can freely jump between different times in them to give an impression of what it was like living them. In a way, I have to imagine as if I had had these relationships, as if I had known these girls.

In order to ease this process, and somewhat in homage to Remembrance of Things Past, I have made the story semi-autobiographical. In many ways, the nameless narrator is me, or a version of me with a few exaggerations and tweaks. It’s as if I’m writing an alternate universe account of my meeting these two fictional girls and going out with them. Perhaps this could be interpreted as some Freudian wish-fulfilment, perhaps it is only a logical path to writing this sort of novel. All characters come from the author’s psyche however, and so are always, in greater or lesser parts, a rendering of the author or aspects of the author. It has been said to me before that the male characters in my stories are always essentially me, but I felt this was only half the truth; the female characters are just as much myself as well. There’s a further discussion of the importance of androgyny in my work in my About section, but the female characters generally just express different aspects of my personality to the male ones, as much as being composites of people I know.

My third and final problem at the moment, if it can be called that, in terms of this story, is that I seem to be in a pretty good relationship right now. At the least it seems hypocritical to write about how depressing and bad relationships are, or can be, when I’m enjoying one so much. And at the most, it’s possible my overall view of them is even changing. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still pretty pessimistic and fatalistic about these things, but right now I remain content, and my work is built on discontent.

Of course, this might not be the problem at all. I don’t seem to have had much time or inclination to write fiction lately, and so I could just be going through a non-writing spell (I refuse to use the term ‘writer’s block’ because it’s dicky and self-important, which I most certainly am not), but I can’t help returning to the idea that happiness is antithetical to my writing. We shall see.

I don’t think I’ve read or watched anything of great inspiration lately either, not something that’s made me want to go off and write or even write about it. The last really great movie I watched was Let the Right One In, which I highly recommend, but otherwise I seem to have just been watching b-movies and comedies and such, oh, and I watched Forbidden Planet finally, but I was tired and half-asleep by its end, and somehow it wasn’t quite all I’d hoped for: I rather prefer the implausability and exaggeration of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Invaders from Mars.

As for reading, I just a few minutes ago finished Truman Capote’s The Grass Harp. It’s a very short novella, and it has the typical Capote flair in the writing, but there’s something about his writing style that’s kind of boring. It’s hard to explain, but stuff that is consistently good can be boring, and with Capote there’s none of the wordplay or sudden flights of fancy in Joyce or Woolf. It’s like with those latter writers they really feel what they’re writing, but Capote seems more like he just developed this rather masterful manner of expression and from that base is able to just churn out stories. The plot also seemed a little ridiculous, with a sixty year-old woman running away from her sister’s house to stay in a tree-house for several days with her sixteen-year-old nephew, from whose viewpoint the story is told. The characters seem a little too colourful to be plausible, only a little, mind, but it was a little too much for me. Capote, I’m also going to point out, was good friends with Harper Lee, and there was speculation for many years that he actually wrote, or largely wrote, To Kill a Mockingbird and put it out under her name. To Kill a Mockingbird I think is quite different from what Capote work I’ve read, and far superior, so I don’t see how people could have believed that.

The other book I finished recently was Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, one of the classics of Russian literature. I’ve never read a Russian novel before, and the only Realist novel I’ve read was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which did not compel me to read to its conclusion. I was rather disappointed with Crime and Punishment also. For a start, there was a lot of authorial intrusion, which irks me, though I doubt the average reader is even aware of the term. It basically means the author interjects opinions into the text, even though the author is this ethereal voice that exists beyond the text, on a different ontological plain if you want to get poncy about it. Modernist literature doesn’t do that, primarily because the Modernist movement was a reaction against the Realist fiction of the previous century. (This is what my dissertation is about, so I’ve been learning more about this lately). So authorial intrusion, I find, kind of takes one out of the story, because it’s like the director of a film jumping in with comment suddenly out of nowhere. The characters also seemed to lack psychological depth, or at least the psychological depth I like in Modernism. It’s debatable whether that’s true or not, but it would be accurate to say that in Realist fiction characters are defined through action and in Modernist fiction characters are defined through thought. I prefer the latter. So, yes, I saw the book through to the end, and I did feel a certain amount of intrigue waiting for the next twist of the plot, but every twist never quite satisfied me, and even I felt the title seemed unjustified: there was neither that much crime, nor that much punishment.

I’m starting a new Virginia Woolf book tonight though, so that might at least make me happier, though it will be Night and Day, her second novel, so not quite as ‘modernist’ as her later novels. Anyway, since there’s been so few updates recently, and really,  I have nothing new to show, I thought I’d drag out something old, from the archives you might say. So, in a minute, I shall paste in some poetry I wrote when I was a teenager, and a young one at that. Bad poetry, of course, the sort one does write as a teenager. I’d like to think I got marginally better over the years, but poetry has never been my forte. And, if you’d like, you can use the following three examples as instructional aids in how not to write a poem. Really, if you ever write anything resembling this, I recommend not showing it to anyone with any semblance of earnestness, only perhaps as a novelty five or more years afterwards.

No more than human

No need to speak,

there’s an eternity of words,

and sensations,

in every touch,

and with every touch,

millions of sensory neurones tingle,

as the heart flutters.

Slowly, nervously,

(anticipation makes the blood flow faster)

the covering is pulled away,

and, like candy,

no matter how beautiful the wrapping,

the inside is always sweeter,

expected and proven.

Every curve flaunts its perfection

in the soft ambience of the clouded sunlight,

the eyes know it,

the fingers know it,

the tongue knows it,

no more than human,

no less than love.

Love has no glory

Once upon a time,

Distance was our only division,

But love could not prevail,

You made too deep an incision

We had something once,

That distance could not take,

My dreams are still of you,

But the truth hurts when I awake

You took it away,

With his love that you returned,

Now we can’t go back,

Our crossed bridges we have burned

I hold on still,

To that distant memory,

It was only ever a dream really,

Love has no glory

Ropes and strings

Time like a spool

A reel ahead

A straight path laid out in

Red string

Two hearts tied together with

The strongest rope

Unbreakable

The strings just strengthened

The bond

Until

They got so tangled

There were too many of them

We lost sight of the rope

We weren’t sure whether it was still there

Any more

Or whether it was just the tangled

Spaghetti strings

Tying us together

Strangling us

Now came the scissors

The blood

The hurt

Cutting everything

Down to that central rope

It was still there

As strong as

ever

And if, for some reason, you liked reading these, perhaps in the way that I enjoy watching really shoddy, low-budget horror films, there’s plenty more where it came from. Just let me know in the comments and I’ll be sure to post up some more. I might even dig out a few old teenage stories about vampires and angels and such for your delection.

P.S. My girlfriend illustrated Glitter and you can see the pictures over at Victoria Stitch.

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. I’m worried it might have a negative impact on my writing, because I haven’t done any for about two weeks. The reason for this happiness? I, who write so pessimistically about relationships, have somehow stumbled into one quite unexpectedly and pleasantly. Really, I don’t feel things could be better at the moment, though I’m sure it won’t take me long to find something to be depressed about. Hopefully anyway, or my writing career might be over. Is it ironic that loneliness makes me feel contented, and happiness makes me suspicious? Probably not, it’s just strange.

I suppose that’s not the only reason for my lack of new material though: I was ill for a few days and had to pretty much stay in bed for three days, and only managed a walk to the shops for some much needed food on the fourth. All I could do was lie there playing videogames and watching internet tv. It was terrible. But on the first day I was well, my girlfriend came over and we made a gingerbread house, in honour of Annual Family Gift Day and because we like making gingerbread together. Actually, I make gingerbread with a lot of people. I’m a gingerbread whore.

It’s not the best gingerbread house I’ve ever seen, but it turned out better than I excpected it would when we first tried to stick the walls together, and I don’t think it’s bad for a first attempt. It tasted pretty good too. Obviously that’s my girlfriend on the left in the second and third pictures, looking better than me and my unstyled hair (hmm, I hope she doesn’t mind me putting pictures of her on the ‘net…). You can read her blog here, or at least look at the pretty pictures.

One last thing before I round off this post: for a while it was my goal to get this site in the top one million on the Alexa Ranking, because it hovered around 1,000,500 for ages. Recently, it not only past that arbritrary goal, but got in the top 900,000, and is currently fluctuating around that number. So thank you to everyone who reads my site, I hope you stick with it through these occasional droughts and like it enough to show other people. I’ve pretty much finished at uni for the year now, and my girlfriend will be going home for Christmas, so I should have some time and some loneliness to spur on some writing I can put up here.