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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Horizon recently did an episode on Growing Old, different theories on why it happens, how it might be slowed or prevented. It wasn’t the most interesting Horizon episode I’ve seen, apart from suggesting that studies had proved, or strongly suggested, that antioxidants have little benefit to slowing the aging process, as many products and adverts proclaim. It inspired a few thoughts within me though, like how I want to have a white beard when I’m old. I’ll probably wear tweed too, so I look like some old professor, and maybe I’ll even be one.

When you’re young, you feel your youth will last forever, you can’t ever imagine being old and achey and not able to do things. When you’re young, summer holidays last forever, at the start at least, six weeks is forever. Often, I feel, people, unless it’s just me, can’t imagine feeling any different to how they feel at a certain time. If you’re in the depths of a dark depression, you can’t imagine ever feeling happy again. When you feel happy, you wonder whatever you were so down about. For a few days before Christmas I was ill, some sort of flu or a strong cold or something. It was only three, maybe four, days, but when I was lying in bed all congested and nauseous, I couldn’t remember what it felt like to not feel like that. Now I’m in my final year of university, Childhood’s End, and yet the days and weeks and months, what’s left of them, stretch out before me and I can’t imagine them ever ending, that there will ever be anything other than the house I live in now, and the people I live with now, and the course I’m on now.

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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…)

Recently, since reading Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway, I’ve come to a new appreciation of the short story. I’ve always written short stories, but I’ve always wanted to be a novelist, to tell long, grand tales over hundreds of pages. Consequently, I’ve always read novels rather than short stories. And novels are worthwhile, fulfilling experiences. But they take a long time, and it just hit me that maybe, and I think this is true of myself, though I can’t speak for anyone else, I generally don’t enjoy novels while I’m reading them, only afterwards, when I look back on them. (more…)