Sometimes a story just clicks with you because it’s the right story at the right time, because it somehow reflects the things you’re going through in your own life. That’s the power of stories, of narratives, when they transcend entertainments and distractions and become an affecting mirror of your own experiences.

For me, The Rainbow is the right story right now. It’s beautiful and it’s honest, with less of the literary self-awareness of other novels of the time I like, such as those of Joyce or Woolf. Admittedly, I’m only about two-thirds of the way through, but unless it has a really bad final third, it’s shaping up to be one of my favourite books in a long while. Which surprises me, actually, because I didn’t previously rate D. H. Lawrence that highly, even if he is probably the most famous writer to have come from my home city.

I read Lady Chatterly’s Lover a few years ago, and I admired him for the frankness with which he described physical love-making (you’ll probably notice his influence in some of my more explicit work), but I found his writing style to often be quite blunt, almost crude, a little thrown-together. He has a tendency to repeat himself quite a lot as well, like he might use a word or a phrase and then you’ll see that word or phrase again half a page later, as if he can’t quite let go of it and wants to make sure you’ve noticed how good it is. He does that in The Rainbow too, sometimes to greater effect, sometimes to lesser.

He was a talented writer though, not as ambitious as my other early twentieth-century literary heroes perhaps, but talented nonetheless. The Rainbow, I feel, has both the broad strokes and the subtlety of a Turner painting, and when he starts describing the weather, and the way the characters experience it, like the sky pregnant with rain about to break as Tom Brangwen goes to visit Lydia Lensky to ask her to marry him, it is of a Turner painting that I am given a distinct impression.

I think, however, that if I had read it at another time, while I was at university perhaps, I would not have been so captivated by it. I would probably have read the first hundred-and-fifty or so pages, and then become bored with its apparent repetition as it moves down the successive generations of the Brangwen family and how each falls in love and marries. But I can appreciate it more now, now that, for the first time, I am living with my girlfriend, and living through the new and unfamiliar joys and challenges that brings, because, while in some ways The Rainbow is a love story, it is much more than that.

It’s not just a fall-in-love-and-live-happily-ever-after story, it’s about the way love grows up and brings a new awareness of oneself, how it makes your blood run hotter and brings you to a new life, how you relate to another person and how you mature with them as you live together and begin to know one another. It’s about how love and your regard for another person can be constantly shifting and altering, moving through subtle shades, and sometimes contradictory. Lawrence’s character, at least when they are young, are not living a static, easy life of marital bliss, they are constantly trying to understand each other, to re-evaluate themselves, struggling with their passions and their angers and their desires.

The effect of the characters’ experiences is all the greater because the reader watches the characters grown and mature, Tom from a young country farmer to an old land owner in the first generation, and Anna from a little girl to a mother of five in the second generation. I liked the way Tom was shaken by his first drunken sexual experience with a Nottingham prostitute, and the way it sobered and matured him, made him wiser and less happy-go-lucky, so that he was nervous and awkward when he first encountered the young widow Lydia Lensky. I liked the way, when they were first married, he would run away to the pub because he was almost frightened of how he could not understand his wife and her past life in Poland, though he loved her and they made love, and then how they gradually come to understand one another and their connection becomes deep and unbreakable.

I liked too how, when Will and Anna are first married and moved in together, though they passionately love each other, they also hurt each other without meaning to. How she would become so absorbed in sewing or some other work that she would forget to make the dinner for when Will returned, and then he would become angry, and then she would become angry and want to hurt him, and they would argue and then they would come together and be passionate again. I’m putting it bluntly, but Mr. Lawrence does it much more subtly. It seems honest and realistic the way he captures the shifting moods within a relationship, the way two people have to adjust to each other and can affect each other.

I actually found it disappointing, almost upsetting, to read when Will tried to cheat on Anna with a girl he sat next to at the theatre, because I empathised with the characters and wanted them to succeed. What actually happens though is that the girl rejects his advances and Will goes home to Anna and she asks him about where he’s been and he says he went to the theatre on his own and met nobody, and she can tell that he is keeping something from her, but then she decides that she doesn’t care, and when he realises that she is indifferent, it reignites his passion for her, and their marriage becomes stronger and more secure after that, even though it had started to sour.

And the book is not just about the love between men and women, but also parental love. It’s touching the way the love grows between Tom Brangwen and his wife’s daughter, the young Anna. At first Anna rejects him because he is not her real father, but he is patient with her, and they grow to love each other, and Tom almost takes solace in his love for Anna when he feels unable to connect with his wife. Then, much later on, Anna and Tom have a disagreement, and Anna accuses him of not being her real father, but immediately regrets it because she loves him and because it makes her feel less secure in the world and it feels like she has broken something between them.

The Rainbow is a love story then, but it’s about the changing shades of love as one grows older, as a person moves from a child, to a lover, to a parent. It’s about the people relate to the people around them, and how this can be both difficult and life-affirming. The thing is, all lovers argue sometimes, and all lovers, in their everyday lives, sometimes hurt or frustrate each other, people are as inconstant as the weather, sometimes we can happy or sad or lonely or irritable, sometimes several of these at once, and that can make living with someone you love difficult. But you stay together, and grow together.

I’m not complaining, and I’m not trying to make The Rainbow sound in anyway negative, because it’s a very positive novel, at least so far. Obviously, I’ll have to wait to see how it ends before I can say what my ultimate lasting impression of it will be. I’m very happy living with my girlfriend, of course, but it’s a new experience, a different way of living to when you’re living with friends or your family. Sometimes you can argue without really knowing why, or one of you could be sad for some reason completely unrelated to the other person, and that can directly affect the other person. You can both have your doubts and hopes and fears and joys, and they all get mixed in together. I don’t think this is abnormal nor necessarily bad, it’s just part of being in a relationship and living together, but The Rainbow acknowledges this in ways I haven’t really seen before, perhaps, to an extent, in To the Lighthouse and Ulysses and In Search of Lost Time, but not in a way that speaks to me like this work by a writer from my home city. Right story, right time.

I just want to share these videos with anyone who hasn’t seen them because I think they are some of the absolute best on YouTube. They really speak for themselves so just watch them, and I’ll put a few comments below. Credit to Reid Gower, who created them:

I think these videos are beautifully put together, and I often watch them in the mornings, before I go to work. I find them both inspiring and humbling. Certain phrases from Carl Sagan’s narration often stay with me all today, phrases like: “It will not be we who reach Alpha Centurai, and the other nearby stars, but a species very much like us, with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses … for all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness,” and “we long to be here for a purpose even though, despite much self-deception, none is evident, the significance of our lives, and our fragile planet, is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning.”

Sagan had the ability to step back and view human existence from a distance, to take it all in without bias or preconception. I do not think this is uncommon among scientists, particularly astronomers, but what set Sagan apart was the poetry with which he could express what he saw. His timing and intonation are perfect. He was one of those people who serve as the human face of science, the link between the arcane discoveries of men in white coats and the general public, the artists, the dreamers, the people in the street.

That’s an important role for someone to fill. After all, it is easy for many people to mistrust scientists and scientific theory, simply because they don’t understand it, especially when it doesn’t fit in with your every day experience. We still have people like Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough, along with many others, to fill this role, but none have had quite the same power of expression as Carl Sagan, nor his passionate optimism. Richard Dawkins, while brilliant and intelligent, can often be quite acerbic, while David Attenborough, well, he’s close to Sagan in his almost child-like wonder and passion for all things living, but is no poet, is just a presenter, one of the most distinguished and respected presenters of zoological programming, of course, but just a presenter.

I’m not saying that everything Carl Sagan was unequivocally amazing, from reviews I’ve read, some of his books are a bit hit and miss, and I’ve seen a couple of episodes of Cosmos which were fairly boring, compared to the brilliant peaks that show occasionally reached, which I couldn’t say, for example, of The Ascent of Man, which is consistently boring. What the above videos capture, however, is Sagan at his absolute best. The length and selection of the quotations is spot on, and the images match them perfectly; I love the synchronisation in the first one of “we who cannot put our own planetary home in order” with the image of the oil-covered bird and the riot footage. I think everyone should watch these videos, I think they should be required viewing for the human race, because these words are the words that should make a person realise that the universe does not revolve around our own young species, but that we, as a whole, can do great things. These videos should inspire people to begin work, in their own small way, on those “new wonders, undreamt of in our time, [which] will … have been wrought in another generation, and another.”

(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.

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.

In honour of the long-awaited release of the third instalment in what is commonly known as ‘gaming’s greatest crossover’, Marvel vs. Capcom 3, I’d like to talk about one crossover that I would love to see, but almost certainly will never happen: Doctor Who and Batman.

Now, have you ever considered the similarities between these two characters? Here’s a list:

• Both are heroes, obviously, but both are the same type of lonely hero. Only child Bruce Wayne lost his parents in a robbery gone wrong, the Doctor lost his entire race in the Time War.

• Both refuse to use guns, or to kill people, regardless of the cost. There are a couple of exceptions to this, with Batman wielding a gun in Year Two, and the Doctor has tried to wipe out the Daleks several times, but generally they both stick to this strict moral code. They’re certainly not any-means-necessary anti-heroes like Rorshach from Watchmen, for example. Instead both Batman and the Doctor really on their wits to rather than brute force to save the most possible lives, even if that means granting the villain a minor victory elsewhere. 

• Sidekicks. Batman has Robin, the Doctor has his companions.

• Detectives. They’re both essentially detectives, identifying what’s wrong with a situation and trying to rectify it and restore justice.

• Secret identities. Batman is really billionaire playboy Bruce Wayne. The Doctor is, well, he is ‘the Doctor’, but he has a secret name known only to a very few characters, and he has a mysterious past; he was once both a father and a grandfather.

• Time travel. This is a minor point, but there has been a precedent set for Batman travelling through time in one of the most recent story arcs, and obviously the Doctor does nothing but travel through time.

• Both are highly intelligent.

• They’ve also both appeared in the same sort of media over their many decades of existence: comics, television series, movies and videogames.

So, having established that they are similar sort of characters, they could slip quite easily into similar sorts of stories, in the way that, say, Batman could never fit into an X-Files episode. But what would really be interesting would be how each would face the other’s enemies.

How would Batman outwit the Daleks? The Doctor always keeps them distracted with words and bluffs, and in the later episodes, holds them at bay mainly by reputation of his Dalek-beating alone. Batman’s more a silent man of action than a man of words though. Would he stalk them from the shadows, waiting for his moment to pounce even as they slaughter innocent victims? Would he blind their eye-stalk with a batarang, or try something more ingenious?

And how would the Doctor square off against the Joker, a man who fears nothing and cannot be reasoned with? Would he be goaded into violence against a villain who understands nothing else? Or would he set up an elaborate joke of his own? Would the Doctor pity the Joker, like he did the Master, and try to save him, or would he decide the Joker was beyond redemption?

It’s a shame there’s no history of Doctor Who crossovers, really. I mean in a way it’s good they’ve kept the brand pure, so to speak, but I don’t think a couple of one-off novelty editions really hurt a brand’s identity, and there’s certainly a rich history of Batman crossovers, even encompassing a fight with the Predator race from… Predator. What do you think? Is this something you’d like to see, or is there not that much overlap between fans of Doctor Who and fans of Batman?

*Disclaimer – please note that it is not my intention to cause offence in this post; this is merely a discussion of words which people find offensive. If you were offended by the first word of the title, I wouldn’t recommend reading any further.

The radio was playing in the car the other day, and Kanye West’s All of the Lights came on. It’s so rare that I listen to the radio as opposed to my own music that I was mildly surprised that one of the songs I’d been listening to frequently since getting the album a couple of weeks ago suddenly had a few words missing, most prominently the word nigger.

Nigger’s a strange word, because it’s not really a swear word, it’s not like you’d hit your thumb with a hammer and shout “argh, niggers!”, but it’s likely to cause as much, if not more, offence than, say, cunt. So why is that? Well, it’s a derogatory racially-specific term. I think that second part is the most important aspect of it; dickhead is derogatory, but not racially-specific, and would be considered much less offensive.

Presumably then, it’s the combination of being derogatory and being racially-specific. After all, there’s plenty of racially-specific words which aren’t derogatory: ‘occidental,’ ‘Aryan’, ‘kiwi’, ‘Asian’. Okay, I suppose these are more or less geographical, but the ideas of race and culture are inextricably linked with geography.

So, assuming that the racial-specificity of word is not in itself a bad thing, but rather acts as a modifier depending on what other labels can be applied to the word, is the word ‘nigger’ still derogatory, and therefore offensive?

Historically, of course it is. The connotations of the word run deep and remain as an ancestral relic from a time the people of the western world would like to, but never should, forget. But the connotations of words change over time. Does anyone use the word ‘gay’ to exclusively mean ‘happy’ or ‘cheerful’ any more? So is the derogatory connotation of ‘nigger’ still the prevailing sentiment?

In Hip-Hop culture, a powerful, primarily African-American cultural force, probably more so in the US than here, the word ‘nigger’ is used without care or restraint, admittedly still referring almost exclusively to a black person, but almost never in a negative manner. My interpretation of it in Hip-Hop, and African-American culture in general, is that the word is almost a synonym for something like ‘brother’; a mark of solidarity.

One thing that does occur to me is that the adoption of the word nigger by the very people it referred to, could in fact be ironic. A kind of verbal rebellion against the subjugation to which black people were subjected by the white men who called them ‘niggers’. But used ironically or not, it could still retain the ideas of brotherhood and solidarity.

Take for example the line I heard censored on Radio One the other day, from All of the Lights: “Something wrong, I hold my head, M J gone, that nigger dead.” Whatever the deal with Michael Jackson was, he started out as an ordinary black kid, had some cosmetic surgery, and ended up looking pretty Caucasian. Maybe he had some skin problem, maybe he was a bit unstable, maybe he wanted to look more ‘white’. That’s not important. My point is that by calling him a nigger, Kanye West is reasserting Michael Jackson as a member of the African-American community as a mark of respect and a lamentation over his death. In that context, is the word ‘nigger’ offensive?

Of course, context is everything. If there’s a guy in a white hood stood by a burning crucifix saying ‘nigger’, you can be pretty sure its neither a mark of solidarity or respect. If that guy starts talking on Radio One on a Sunday afternoon, I’d expect them to censor everything he says and replace it with several minutes of complete radio silence or, even better, some Miles Davis. Okay, that’s not entirely serious, I don’t really believe in censorship, as we’ll come to in a minute, but I do believe that saying anything discriminatory or with an agenda of discrimination against a group pretty much immediately invalidates your argument.

So I’ve given two examples where the word ‘nigger’ has such disparate meanings as to be almost two different words. But those are two extreme examples of a word being used within particularly groups. A word doesn’t change its connotations by being used by small groups of people, it changes by entering the mainstream world of every day language. But can that every happen for a word as charged as nigger?

One thing to bear in mind is that words do not inherently have meanings, and therefore are not inherently offensive or anything else. Words are just a series of vocalised sounds that can be represented as symbols and to which meanings are attached. If you say ‘cunt’ to a three-year-old, they’re not going to be neither offended or phased. They would treat it with the same unbiased curiosity as any other word. And if everyone said ‘cunt’ on a day-to-day basis, not in a derogatory manner, but in the same way that you might say the word ‘balloon’ for example, it would cease to offend anyone. Words are not inherently offensive.

What can be offensive is the meaning behind them. Now I’m going to take a guess here, because I can’t back this up, but I would say that the majority of people in Britain today, maybe not the vast majority, but, I would hope, a growing majority, are not racist. I’m sure everyone colours the world based on their own beliefs, and racist people probably believe the majority of people think like them too. There’s no use pretending racism doesn’t still exist, but I believe, on balance, Britain to be a fairly tolerant country.

So if the average British person head or used the word nigger, there would be no racist sentiment behind it, and it would be at worst neutral and, perhaps, mingled with a sort of inherited shame, because, yes, it is an uncomfortable word to use.

Now what’s the one weapon a racist has? I mean, sometimes, sure, they have sticks and petrol bombs, but generally the only weapon a racist has is language, which, in the long run, is much more powerful than anything physical, because words, for all their ‘vocalised sounds’ are, essentially ideas. There are no ideas without words to express them, no thought without language.

If the ‘brother/solidarity’ meaning of ‘nigger’ starts becoming predominant, if we overcome our initial discomfort at using the word, it ceases to be any more offensive than ‘Asian’ or ‘occidental’. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but if it did, you deprive racists of that word. Sure they could come up with new offensive words to express their views, but fear of a word only increases its power. That power can be diluted to nothingness just by using the word.

So, should Radio One have censored the word nigger? I don’t know to be honest. I don’t believe in censorship, but I do believe in restriction. I believe people should be allowed to make Saw and the Human Centipede and gay groupsex porn, but I do I think children and teenagers should be able to watch them? No. And I do I want to watch or discuss or even think about any of those things? No.

It’s up to the BBC whether they want to censor certain words or not. Actually, it’s probably up to Ofcom. There obviously is a need to avoid certain words on the radio and television, at least before the watershed, because certain words shouldn’t be glamorised to children to the detriment of other, more intelligent words that would help them articulate themselves better.

I’m definitely conflicted on the issue though. It was recently announced that an edition of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to be released with the word ‘nigger’ removed. I’ve never read the book, but as far as I’m aware, the word is not used as a derogatory term but rather as part of the everyday lexicon for the time and place where the book is set. Whether for good or bad I believe that both words and work of literature are important relics of the time when they were created and should not be tampered with just to become more ‘palatable’ to modern tastes. Adapted into new works based on the original, maybe, but not edited.

The counter-argument for this is that because of that one little n-word, the book is banned in American schools. Remove that word and, hey presto, American schoolchildren are suddenly given access to the work of one of the important writers of the twentieth century. That’s good, definitely. But what if they did that to To Kill a Mockingbird? “Don’t say black person, Scout, it’s common. Say ‘Negro’.” I was taught that book for GCSE English, and I still hold it as one of the finest books ever written. But what poignancy and impact it would lose if you started censoring it. “Why I saw that yonder gentleman of colour ruttin’ on my Mayella!”

Then again, Enid Blyton’s Noddy books were edited for racist content when the evil gollywogs were photoshopped out and two politically neutral goblins were photoshopped in. Now again I’ll admit ignorance and say I’ve never read a Noddy book, and I certainly can’t speak for Enid Blyton’s intentions, but I’ve heard she was not a very nice or sociable person and that she didn’t particularly like children, despite writing for and about them all day, but, it’s my understanding that the gollywogs were the villains of the stories, so I would suggest there might be some conviction beyond sheer chance that all the other toys got on together nicely, but the black toys were evil, motivating that decision. So yeah, fair enough, if kids like what are otherwise considered to be ‘delightful’ books, then quietly remove the blatantly racist content and let them go nuts.

So those are some of my thoughts on the word ‘nigger’ and offensive words and censorship in general. One final thing I want to mention is that one of my absolute pet peeves that really annoys me in is when people swear but censor themselves, like f*%&er or sh@t or really stupid stuff like b*gger. Either have the balls to swear properly or find a different word that more accurately reflects your sentiment. If you don’t want to swear, fine, but don’t make a half-hearted, limp-wristed gesture at swearing. And don’t be afraid of it. They’re just words, and words are just tools, and all tools have their job and their purpose.

Until next time I update, remember, all of you who read my site, you’re all my niggers, feel free to send me love, hate and opinions in the comments below.

I can’t remember where I first heard about it, but somewhere I read that Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves was one of the main inspirations for the MarbleHornets YouTube videos, which has become one of my absolute favourite horror narratives. You may remember me writing about them a while ago, and if you haven’t been keeping tabs on them, they’re back for a ‘second season’ after several months’ hiatus, as creepy and enigmatic as ever.

Anyway, being a fan of terrifying myself with videos of the Slender Man, or ‘The Operator’ as he is known in MarbleHornets, I cajoled my mother into buying me Danielewski’s cult novel for Christmas. After reading the first few pages I remember thinking something along the lines of “this might be one of the most important novels since Ulysses”, which put me in mind of a quote from the experimental novelist Bryan Stanley Johnson where he asked “Why do so many novelists still write as though the revolution that was Ulysses had never happened?” True House of Leaves is very much more towards the post-modern than the modern, but it has very strong elements of modernism in the Joycean stream-of-consciousness side-notes of its main protagonist, and in its relentless T. S. Eliot-style theft of famous literary and mythological phrases.

In the post-modern fashion however, its central concept is as difficult to grasp as anything Italo Calvino of John Fowles ever wrote, approaching more the complexity of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (which I have not yet attempted to read, I must add), but I shall try to sum it up for you: A young Los Angeles tattoo-apprentice named Johnny Truant finds a series of notes in the apartment of an old recently-deceased blind man named Zampano. These notes were dictated by Zampano and amount to a critical work on the subject of a supposedly-famous documentary film that does not exist. To suggest that the film does in fact exist, the notes extensively reference other critical essays, many of which are also fictitious.

To draw a parallel, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman has sometimes been referred to as a ‘braided narrative’ due to the contextualising footnotes it contains, which support and enhance the content of the main story. This ‘braided narrative’ could be said to have two threads; the thread of the main story and the thread of the footnotes. House of Leaves shows a comparable, but more complicated, braided narrative in that there’s a constant interplay between the thread of the story of the fictitious film, the thread of narrative within the critical essays about the film, the fictitious titles referenced in the footnotes which, though non-existent, suggest ideas that support the critical arguments, the thread of Johnny Truant’s comments, and the final thread of the appendices, which contain such items as around 50 pages of letters sent between the young Johnny Truant and his institutionalised mother. If you want to get into proper post-modern terminology about it, you could say that House of Leaves is a novel that plays with a multitude of ontological layers, constantly shifting and undermining them to create feelings of uncertainty and paranoia in the reader which mirror the unpredictable and incomprehensible movements of the titular house.

That’s a point; I still haven’t really said what the novel, or rather the ‘film’ at its centre, is about. Well, the ‘film’ that Zampano’s notes discuss is called The Navidson Record which is a film made by a supposedly famous photographer about his family’s move to a house in the country. Despite being a documentary film, the notes reference the fact that a lot of people have called into question its authenticity, due to the events that occur within it. Nevertheless, it starts out ordinarily enough, with the family adjusting to their new life, but then the house starts to change: first, after they’ve been away for a few days, they return to find a cupboard on their landing which had not been there before and is not on any of the original blueprints. Next, the wife, Karen, is putting up some shelves in an alcove. In the film there is a moment when she puts books on these shelves and then they fall over like dominoes, but fall against the wall, and so remain on the shelf. When, by chance, the books are knocked over again a little while later, they fall off the shelf because the shelf is no longer flush with the wall. The most dramatic of the house’s changes, at least up to the point I’ve reached in the story, is that a doorway appears in the living room that, due to being in an outside wall, should lead straight into the garden, but instead leads into an ever-expanding unlit space, superficially resembling a house, but without any windows or furniture or fixtures or a very, very long list of very, very specific items that is detailed in one of the footnotes.

So that’s what the film is about, but of course the film is only the creation of Zampano. The thing is, Zampano died alone in ‘mysterious circumstances’, the implication being that his death was somehow linked to these notes. And then Johnny, reading the notes, starts getting really paranoid and lots of strange things start happening to him, which sounds pretty trite, but it’s handled with a reasonable degree of subtlety, and the structure of the book makes for an unusual way of building tension, going into long theoretical discourses about, for example, the scientific explanations and mythological representations behind the ideas of echoes, before suddenly revealing a moment in the film where one of the children’s voices can be heard to echo, despite there being no room in the house large enough to cause the phenomenon, except of course the impossible hallway through the living room. The book also does some clever things with layout so that the form mirrors the content, like for example in a chapter about labyrinths printing footnotes in weird places on the page, and having footnotes link to other footnotes, which then refer back to earlier or later footnotes and sometimes just go round in circles.

It’s clever in a way that is not entirely original, but is certainly under-used when most writers do still write as if the revolutions of modernism and post-modernism hadn’t ever occurred. Certainly I’m enjoying it and am eager to return to it each night, except for one criticism I have with the book: too much sex.

I don’t find Johnny Truant a particularly relatable or likeable  character, and he lacks the depth the rest of the novel delivers, but he’s passable. What is beginning to annoy me about him is that almost all of his longer notes turn into long, graphic descriptions of all the sex he has and, so far, I don’t think he’s described a single female character he hasn’t then had sex with, regardless of the context of their original meeting. Now, people have expressed to me a lot of shock at the amount of sex in my book (still on sale at Lulu.com, by the way), which I didn’t think was that gratuitous or even that shocking, eighty years after Ulysses and forty years after The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but House of Leaves is something else. Every single woman!

There’s a very fine line between art and pornography; D. H. Lawrence had to go to court over which side of the line Lady Chatterley’s Lover occupied, but the key factor with Lawrence’s novel was that the sex scenes were thematically necessary in establishing the development of the attitudes of the character’s and, in particular, Lady Chatterley’s sexual liberation. My work is more about sex and sexual tension than actually containing all that many full-on sex scenes, but where it does contain graphic scenes I hope they are always thematically justified, as necessary to the story as any other aspect. In House of Leaves however, unless Danielewski ties it all together at the end, the sex scenes read like superfluous erotic fiction, serving no purpose other than titillation. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with erotic fiction, if that’s your thing, but it detracts from the overall quality of the work here and, rather than, as it was possibly intended, holding the interest of otherwise bored male readers, distracts from what is otherwise a distinct and enthralling novel.

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.

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.

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’ve been going over some of my old stories recently, and I’ve just been looking at one which I posted two versions of a while ago, alternately called ‘A Ghost Story‘ and ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue‘. Generally, I’m not in the habit of creating two different finished versions of a story and I only did so for this story at the recommendation of my tutor.

Both versions follow exactly the same plotline: a slightly naive fourteen-year-old boy, Ben, invites his friend to spend a night with him in a haunted house and Ben’s friend invites some other people. Ben is obsessed with ghosts and with seeing a ghost and photographing it. The other kids don’t care about ghosts, but just want to have a party in this abandoned house. Tensions rise between Ben and the rest of a group because he’s something of an outsider. Two of the group, Gavin and Michelle, go off together and have sex in an adjacent room. Naive, over-imaginative Ben mistakes the sounds of their sex for the moaning and bumping of a ghost, and so convinces himself that he has had a paranormal encounter.

The difference between the two versions is that one is written as if it had been written by fourteen-year-old Ben and the other is written as if it was written by an older Ben looking back on the experience. Purely looking at the writing style, the second, alternate version, is clearly superior; the sentences are more considered, the vocabulary is more expansive, and the imagery is evocative. This version, we’ll call it Version 2 to save confusion, was written more in my ‘natural’ writing voice; it was written in the style of someone who is, say, studying a BA in Creative Writing.

I had taken my tutor’s advice on board and written a ‘better’ version of the story, and it went on to achieve either a first, or a high 2:1. So I should have been happy with the story, only, I wasn’t, because, although the writing was better, it left a huge flaw in the story that I was never able to fully address with the more accomplished writing style: the crux of the story is the misinterpretation by naive, innocent Ben of the sounds of sex as the rattlings and moanings of a disembodied spirit, and of the regretful, tired face of Michelle the next morning as the traumatised and haggard visage of someone who had come face-to-face with said spirit; a mistake that fourteen-year-old boy who was a bit obsessed with ghosts and who hadn’t matured quite as fast as everyone else, might make. But not the sort of mistake an older person, looking back on and writing about the experience would make. So Ben, as the narrator, ultimately lacks credibility in Version 2.

Now what was my tutor’s criticism of Version 1, the version written as if by fourteen-year-old Ben? Ironically, it was the very effect I had sought to achieve: the story read as if it had been written by a fourteen-year-old, ie. badly. It’s a valid criticism: from a technical standpoint Version 1 is badly written: the pacing is off, there is a lack of detail, and the information the narrator gives us is often superfluous or contradictory. The only part of the story that could be argued to be well-written is the dialogue, as the narrator is only recording rather than describing this, but since dialogue counts for probably less than 20% of this story’s word-count, that would hardly recommend it, as a ‘badly-written’ story, to a high grade. One might even accuse me, at age nineteen, on a writing course, of being lazy when I say “oh, it’s badly written because I meant it to be.”

Laziness was not, however, my motivating factor when I wrote Version 1. On the contrary, I did quite a bit of research in order to develop the voice of my narrator, looking at the style of the Goosebumps books I used to read when I was young and which I assumed Ben would look to for stylistic inspiration; looking at the sort of writing I did when I was fourteen and fifteen, how I used to phrase things; and looking too at Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time a superficially amateur book written by a fictional autistic narrator. So what was my motivation for writing a ‘bad’, amateurish story?

Authenticity. I wanted the story to read authentically as if a fourteen-year-old boy had really written it, and the reason for this was that I wanted to prevent a skewed and biased viewpoint for the reader to question. I never spell out that Ben actually heard Gavin and Michelle having sex rather than a ghost because Ben doesn’t realise it and I want the reader to go “hang on, is this a fairly bland, clichéd ghost story, as the name implies, or is it actually that what the narrator is telling me is wrong and there’s something more?” It’s not an original idea; I basically lifted it from Mark Haddon, and I’m he was hardly the first author to present the reader with pieces of a puzzle from a limited narrator that the reader can then place together to complete the story, but it was my intention, and I think it’s why I still prefer the ‘inferior’ Version 1.

That brings me to a dilemma the contrast between these two versions has caused me to consider, though not for the first time: Which is more important, authenticity or readability? I suspect the answer is different for different works and for different people depending on the goals they want to achieve and the stories they want to create/read. But must the two necessarily be in opposition, are they mutually exclusive? These questions deserve more space and time than I can give them here today, but just from a cursory consideration, I seem to think they are opposed, and therefore that one or the other must be chosen and one or the other might be more important. Because if I write from the viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old amateur writer, not in a To Kill a Mockingbird retrospective way, but in a The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time immediate way, I must sacrifice readability for authenticity. For if I write well, in an easy-to-read way, then the authenticity of the fourteen-year-old’s writer’s voice is lost.

Generally, I think I’m more attracted to authenticity than to readability. Let’s take as an example (anyone who’s read my posts before can guess what’s coming next) James Joyce. I believe that the four episode of Ulysses, ‘Calypso’, which is the internal monologue of Leopold Bloom as he makes breakfast and gets ready for the day, is possibly the most accurate representation of representations of the conscious human mind in all of literature. It’s not very readable. It feels ‘authentic’ but you wouldn’t sit down and read it to your kids as a bed-time story. I think Virginia Woolf bridges the gap between authenticity and readability in some passages from To the Lighthouse well, but then she uses third-person free indirect style in that novel, which is different to the character’s themselves writing their stories. In The Waves she has the same ‘problem’ as Joyce; she goes for the more authentic stream-of-consciousness voice, so that book is harder to read as well.

Vladimir Nabokov, I’m told, does voices well, particularly in, I believe, Pale Fire, but I’ve not read that. That novel features the voices of a poet and a critic though, so they’re already writers. What I’m really talking about, before I start going too far into literary esoterica, is the difficulty of writing well in the voice of someone who is writing their own story, but is not a writer. Perhaps I’m a little hung up on ‘authenticity’ , on ‘reality’. I did my entire third-year dissertation on which group of writers ‘most realistically represented reality through fiction’ . I’m much more attracted to ‘realistic’ over ‘exciting’ characters who live excitingly readable lives; I’d much rather read about Leopold Bloom, Mrs. Ramsay and Marcel than… blast, what’s popular with normal people these days? Edward Cullen and Harry Potter and James Bond. No, they’re not great examples, but you get the idea.

And this is why, in stories such as ‘The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue’ I prefer the badly written ‘authentic’ version over the more well-written ‘readable’ version, and why in certain other stories, such as ‘My Ideal Saturday‘ and another one I wrote recently, I was conscious not to ‘over-write’ them, to leave them slightly rough, with a few awkward sentences, a few under-precise descriptions. Well, I like awkward sentences anyway, sometimes they’re more interesting than regular ones.

One final point on ‘authenticity’ over ‘readability’: the other problem a writer faces by writing badly, is that if the reader doesn’t get that this bad writing is a literary conceit, or they start to notice, say, spelling or typographical mistakes, there’s a danger they would think that writer was a bad writer, and not want to read any more of their work. Satisfied as I am of them, I wouldn’t like someone to read either The Ghost of Sycamore Avenue or My Ideal Saturday in isolation from my other stories. My Ideal Saturday particularly I feel has been a misunderstood story, and if it is read purely on a superficial level is very bland. I think it only works in the context of my other work, because, I assure you, it’s not really about a boy and a girl who live together in perfect bliss going out and having a nice day.

Okay, that is all on this subject, for now. And now that I have access to the internet again, I might even treat you all to some further updates in the near future.