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

The Book

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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There’s some things you own that you’re particularly proud of, objects that give pleasure just from being in your possession. Usually these objects are uncommon, collectors’ items, or they hold sentimental significance, or they just say something about you. I’m considering doing a series of posts on some of my favourite possessions, but I will start with a fairly recent acquisition of mine: Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson’s A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake.

This book is uncommon on account of the obscurity of its subject matter; it’s a synopsis and critical discussion of James Joyce’s final and most difficult work, Finnegans Wake. Outside of literary circles I doubt it was ever widely read and the book’s been out of print for years. My copy is from 1947, making it only slightly younger than the oldest book I own, a 1944 copy of Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat.

I like this book on two levels: Firstly, it has a very pure bookish sort of quality. The cover is blue, the pages are slightly yellowed, though still in good condition. If it ever had a dust-jacket, that’s been long-lost somewhere down the years, leaving only its plain blue hard-cover. The front and back offer no clues to the book’s identity, the title being printed on the spine only, and there in gold lettering only distinguishable from the sun-bleached fabric by its metallic sheen. It has a charming anonymity.

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Willowy, slight as one of the twigs bristling at the end of her nostalgically-fashioned broom, camouflaged against the day, she stood, sweeping. In her ears, as if straight into her conciousness, music played through tiny white earphones. Her hips swayed with the rhythm of music and sweeping, her eyes down-turned towards the sodden leaves that plastered the concrete. A black plastic sack rustled next to her, its crumpled surface rippling in the November breeze. It was a warm day, the first after two of wind and rain.

She did not see how it happened, heard only, above the sound of her earphones, the cry of surprise, the sharp scrape of metal on concrete: the sound of a bicycle losing its traction on the decaying leaves and throwing its rider to the floor. She looked up, pulled out her earphones, saw a student lying in the road, curled into the foetal position. She gasped, dropped her broom, ran towards him. There was no one else around. Already the student was picking himself up, assessing the damage. He wore an open chequered shirt over his t-shirt, the sleeve of which had been ripped by the fall.

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She had a commitment to magic, Tim thought, as he watched Gemma brush her hair; a commitment to glitter and sparkle, to pretty clothes, and looking pretty, and to the manufacture of pretty pictures. In his own way, he too was committed to fantasy and fabrication. They had little else in common, but that suited them. “We’re not going to be boyfriend and girlfriend, you know,” she had said several weeks before. “I know,” he replied. “I haven’t got time for a boyfriend; it just complicates things.” Instead they had sex, animal and meaningless, regularly, at weekends usually.

It was Saturday morning. Her hair had recently been the colour of candy floss, and before that, shocking pink, but had since faded to the bleached milky hue of evening clouds. Several strands of it clung to the brush. She turned.

“Are you still here?”

It was a joke.

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We wake up next to each other, sprawled out and overlapping like we’re each in bed alone, warm but not too hot. I roll over and your hand’s on my back. It’s eleven already. We kiss and I get up to fix you breakfast: Choco-Shreddies swimming in milk. I bring the bowls up, and cups of tea, on the tray with the oil-painted fruit on it. Your hair’s tousled and you get some chocolate on the corner of your mouth. I wipe it away with my thumb. We stream some cartoons on my PC, like we used to watch when we were kids, our knees bent up together like mountains under the duvet. Then we get dressed. You straighten your hair like you like it, even though I prefer your bed-hair. While you’re doing that I take the tray back down and go clean my teeth. When I come back I smooth out the duvet and we’re ready to leave.

I lock the door behind us, noticing as I hold back the handle so it shuts properly, that cracks of naked wood are beginning to show through the faded blue paint. I think maybe I’ll paint it tomorrow. We start walking towards town. The sky’s overcast and the air’s cold. You’re wrapped up in the red-brown scarf and hat and gloves I bought you last Christmas, and your black coat, but you still walk close by me for warmth, and squeeze my arm when a sharp breeze cuts across us and makes the leaves pitter-patter along the pavement.

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Ah, I thought I was going to keep my promise and post this yesterday, but it’s just gone past midnight.

I don’t feel that’s entirely my fault: I was called into work unexpectedly and have only just, fighting through post-work, food and shower drowsiness found the time to make the final edits of this story, which I fear might not actually stand up to any hyperbolic statements I may or may not have made about it (I’m really too tired to remember what I said about it, if anything). Regardless, it is a good story, possibly a great one, and I think there’s a fair bit going on in it, which I hope will come across in subsequent re-readings of the story, if not the first time through.

So, yes, I am proud to have this as my one hundredth post, and I hope you all enjoy it,

Henry.

The New House

“Hey,” said Kate, “hey, stranger.”

She grabbed Jay’s arm, brought him to a stop in the cloying heat of an August Saturday as he picked his way through the crowd. People continued to push past, making little, if any, concession.

“Hey,” he said, looking at her, surprised.

“You nearly walked right past me,” she said.

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A cartoon flashed across the screen; all bright colours and high-pitched childish voices from tinny speakers. In the corner of the screen an immobile, ghostly presence; the famous round face and over-sized ears, behind which danced Mickey, Donald, Goofy and the rest, acting out an approximation of a Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mickey was Lysander. Goofy was Puck. It’s easier that way; saves the writers from coming up with original plot lines. Not that Rachael knew that. Perhaps she might have guessed this episode was based on another story from the mock-Elizabethan costumes, but it would be another four years or so until she learned who Shakespeare was. From downstairs came her mother’s voice, shouting over the raucous cartoon voices, over a baby’s wail, over the shouts of boys playing football outside and the middle-distance hum of traffic.

“Rachael.”

“What?” She uncrossed her legs, hopped off the pink My Little Pony sheets of her bed and went over to the door frame where she hung off the door, letting it swing with her body-weight and felt the smooth white paint under her fingers. “What?” she repeated.

“Come downstairs,” her mother said. Rachael sighed, flicked her head back towards the TV. The adverts were on now anyway: blonde girls dancing with glittering plastic hoops in the sunshine, spiky-haired boys in sunglasses chewing gum, blowing bubbles. Rachael slumped downstairs, letting her bare feet fall heavily on each step, while, in the cramped kitchen her mother tried to comfort Michael, Rachael’s baby brother, and unpacked shopping from white and green Asda bags. Entering the kitchen Rachael began to root into one of the bags, searching for sweets and chocolate, making the thin plastic crinkle as her slender hands moved over a packet of mince, a bag of carrots, some folded up magazines.

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I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.

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(This one’s kind of like Jigsaw Puzzle.)

Collective Student First-Year Dream

I’m terrified.
“You’ll make lots of friends.”
The words sounded hollow. What if school had been a fluke, all my friends until now exceptional people, not like the rest of the world? The words came true though: I made lots of friends.

We watched a film together, she and our friend, huddled on floor cushions, the screen illuminating our faces, a spring breeze through the open window. Our friend fell asleep, and it was like we were alone, alone and complicit when he gurgled in his sleep and we looked at each other. I thought then of putting my arm around her, but I didn’t. Had we been properly alone, then I would.

How many nights had I sat with him in his darkened room watching him play videogames, sharing his pain in each failure, his joy in each success, thinking ‘is this what a relationship is’? I suppose that never crossed his mind: he only had eyes for her.

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