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

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Stories aren’t emotions, aren’t ideas, aren’t people and places: stories are just a series of words on a page, placed in a certain order, separated by various grammatical signposts we call punctuation. Less than that, they are a jumble of twenty-six different abstract shapes we call letters, jammed together into discrete bundles. It’s amazing therefore how certain words in a particular order can elicit a strong emotional respons, how a good story becomes so much more than the sum of its parts. Tom’s Midnight Garden is a good story. I supposed it must have been since I remembered significant portions of it from a single reading in my childhood, but these were only fragmentary and vague, and it was not until I finished it for the second time last night, maybe a decade after my first reading, that I realised how good it is, how nearly perfect even, it is.

Superficially, Tom’s Midnight Garden is a story about a boy, Tom, who is forced by his brother’s outbreak of measles at the start of the summer holiday, to stay with his aunt and uncle in their small city flat. Philippa Pearce wrote the book in 1958, and it is set around about then though, like all the best books, it is timeless. The only reason a reader would know the book was set in the late fifties / early sixties rather than at any other time, if they did not know when it was written, is from certain events near its end, and from Tom in the second line on the first page being said to have “looked his good-bye at the garden, and raged that he had to leave it.” Obviously this is a time when children were more inclined to play outside, to ‘make their own fun’; a time before videogames, or even widespread television, when being shut up inside a small flat for hours on end was torture rather than a preference.

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I’ve had this theory for a while about why we would choose to read a particular work of fiction. I was discussing it last night with someone I work with, and he seemed to not disagree, so I shall expand on that theory here: I believe that there’s two reasons we read what we read: either it’s i) a well-written work or ii) it has an interesting story. Obviously these aren’t mutually exclusive criteria and a work can be both or neither, but I think that, to an extent, one can compensate for the other, although there’s a minimum level of each anyone would be willing to accept.

Here’s a bar chart I made illustrating the point, although the y-scale is comprised of competely meaningless arbitrary numbers:

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It occurs to me that I’ve almost completely neglected to blog about videogames during the eleven months I’ve been writing this site, yet, aside from writing, they are one of my greatest interests. This was in fact a conscious decision from the start, since I wanted this site to be about writing and literature, but now I’m feeling the need to branch out more for the sake of greater variety, and the Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker is as good a game to start with as any, since I just finished it for the second time last night and enjoyed it more than the first time I played it six years ago.

The Wind Waker is the tenth game in the Legend of Zelda series, a twenty-three-year-old series of games which can be played in any order since each is largely self-contained. As with the Mario series of games, there are three recurring characters in almost every game: a boy named Link who is the hero, a princess named Zelda who generally becomes kidnapped or imprisoned at some point in the game, and a villain who is some sort of evil sorcerer determined on taking over and/or destroying the world, usually called Ganondorf, but occasionally another evil person. While this initially invites comparisons with Lord of the Rings-style high fantasy, the Zelda games have very much their own style and mythology that blends inspirations from both Eastern and Western legends.

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I can barely believe it’s nearly three already. Still, I suppose I got up late. I read the second half of a short story by Angus Wilson earlier, which I was supposed to read and analyse by tomorrow. Well, I intended to get onto analysing it, but then I read another Raymond Carver story. It was one of his better ones, in my opinion, since some speak to me less than others. It was about a man who felt his life was falling about going to abandon his children’s dog because he hated it. Having read that, still procrastinating, I decided to reread William Faulkner’s short story Tomorrow. (more…)