This is the tale of a very short story. We begin, as many stories do, with an introduction, which is not so much telling you the story, as telling you about the story. The particular story we are introducing right now was written by someone who had no experience of writing stories, but who nonethless had resolved to write one.
We join the narrative part way through, as is the modern habit. Our writer has just made a significant revision to the story, which had started out as little more than a one-line joke but is lacking an elusive something that would turn it into an actual bona-fide work of fiction.
*
The writer furrowed his brow and rubbed his forehead. The task of writing was definitely more than putting sentences together, this much was clear now. The concept was good, he was sure of it, but now everything depended on the execution. He reflected on how unappreciative he had been of the authors whose books he had read in his youth. Sure, the stories were great fun and the characters had come to life and left lasting impressions on him, and some of the concepts and questions put forward in these works had enriched his intellectual life, but somehow the actual authors had remained invisible to him. These great architects of human emotion who were able to gently manipulate the willing minds of their readers were now enjoying new levels of respect in the new writer’s mind. Those people hadn’t been writing about subjects that you can simply research in a library, they had been creating from nothing whole worlds and - which is harder - people. People with concerns, motivations, fears and talents that were at once plausible, and yet extraordinary, and seamlessly woven into the fabric of a greater tale. THAT was writing. THAT was what he was aiming for, months or years from now.
He felt like an office worker dressed in city clothes looking up into the foothills of the Himalayas: out of his element, inexperienced, unprepared, fearful.
Perhaps, he thought, perhaps I am putting myself under too much pressure. It’s not like I have to write a best-selling novel. This is not going to be submitted to any publisher. In fact I doubt if anybody will have the patience to read this right through. But there’s definitely something missing.
It’ll probably turn out to be something really obvious, he thought.
He ran through what he knew of writing, as if through a checklist. The sentences were clear, paragraphs well formed. It had a good concept. It had a believable character, in so far as any kind of characterisation was needed in such a short piece. The narrative seemed to hang together, and structurally, well, just like he was taught at school, it had a beginning, a middle
While I was deep in my filestore yesterday, something like D:\My Documents\incoming\old_big_disk\My Documents\archive\old_c\linux files\home\sweavo\windows_files\backup\website\current.old\public_html or something, I found my first ever blog entry. It was just a page of HTML because they hadn’t invented blogs yet.
It stated that I started my website in order to practise writing. To an extent it’s been very good for that, though blogging is a journey in itself as you discover that you don’t like people reading parts of something that you’ve voluntarily made public.
What I didn’t make explicit in that post, probably because I didn’t understand it at the time, is that there are two types of writing I want to do. The first is simply to make it easier for me to write technical words for humans, and that has been an unqualified success. The second is to get me writing fiction, and in this regard, it has been far too little.
Writing fiction is a LOT more work than writing fact, if the facts are already known. Facts have a pleasing tendency to hang together coherently without contradicting one another, so you straighten out your facts, spread ‘em out on the table, divide up the space into coherent chunks, and get writing. Fiction however seems to me to be about retro-fitting made-up facts to get the effect you want. Organising thoughts and writing them clearly is a vital part, but a very small part, of the process of writing fiction.
I’m thinking the ’short story a month’ idea of Mongers’ would be nice to do, but I don’t think I’ve even got the time/commitment/organisation/discipline to manage that with any level of complexity.
So be warned, there may be stories coming your way, and they WILL be rubbish.
I saw a great watch online today. I’ve hankered after a nice retro LED watch for a while but haven’t got around to choosing one. For a brief while I entertained the notion of a binary LED watch but most of them look really crap, as if us geeks don’t have any sense of style whatever.
Alright, calm down at the back.
Anyhow, I saw an ace watch today (though with a rather stupid name) that was binary, LED and stylish too. It was £100. That’s a lot of money, thinks I. So I shop around a bit on the web and find it cheaper only at one place, which is out of stock. Then I chicken out and don’t buy it.
I do that all the time. I can’t seem to spend money on things just cos they look good. It’s really annoying! It’s how I failed to buy an ace early Digby Page painting too, before he got really popular, which would have looked great on the wall of my new-house-to-be…
Edit -
this is the watch. And I have been reminded that i need a phone more than I need a watch… hmm, three months without broadband? Or two months with neither phone nor broadband…? Shame I’m not a smoker cos I could quit and save the money that way.
It’s time I confronted my clutter. It turns out chicks don’t dig clutter, not even the hot ones. But it took an “Oh. My. GOD!” from a usually quite reserved young lady to put things into perspective. So here are a few rationalisations of the situation.
1) You hold on to junk for emotional security, like a kid with its blankie.
This is true. When I try to imagine completely de-junking and living in a minimalist designer hutch, I am struck to the core with fear. Part of this I think comes from the way I left home. I think there’s a sense of “my home is where my junk is”. Since I still live in rented accommodation I lack the grounding that a place of my own may bring. Shame I couldn’t have used a hat instead of 7 old computers, a half-done robot project, a bunch of stuff for fixing cars that should live in a garage, assorted percussion items, every 13amp plug I’ve ever owned, etc. etc. etc.
2) It might come in useful one day.
This is a multi-faceted one: I often find a requirement for something in my junk heap, like a 4-way plug or an audio lead. But if the junk heap gets too out of hand (like recently) you lose that benefit because you can’t find the thing you want anyway. There’s a bizarre phenomenon where you can hold on to an item for years, then throw it away then two weeks later you have a purpose for it. That only serves to reinforce the ‘hold on to it!’ feeling.
3) It’s not eco-friendly to chuck stuff away.
This is the main reason for still having much of my computer junk. I find it really appalling the amount of hardware that is trashed in the name of the newer hardware being more eco-friendly. Intelligently applied, a lot of old hardware is good for genuinely useful business tasks, but will never be applied for such :-(
4) Junk is free
This is not true. If I divide my rent by the cubic volume of my house, and then multiply that by the volume of junk, I would find out the ongoing cost of owning that stuff. However, part of the reason for having space is for putting junk in, so unless you have a better use for the space its storage really is free.
Another resource that junk uses up is “mindshare” in the modern buzzwordological parlance. If you have to think about your junk, even so much as to step over it once in a while, then it’s costing you in terms of your focus. While there aren’t more important things to be thinking about, that’s also fine.
I have a golden rule, which is that the junk doesn’t encroach on the living room, bedroom, bathroom or kitchen. I broke that when I needed to jiggle stuff around in the junk room, and haven’t yet recovered. I’m at the stage where I can’t put things away because the place to put them in is full or inaccessible.
Looks like I need to focus!
Hmm, going to the Brit Salsa Fest with a group of 10 people who I’ve known for years. I feel like a fish out of water. I’m used to the juggling convention way of doing these things, it goes like this:
- work out where convention is
- a few days before ask who has a bit of spare floor
- pack change of kecks, toothbrush, and a big bag of toys
This time we have:
- a house to share between 10 of us
- carefully planned the number of cars and where we can park them when we arrive
- a communal shopping list and cooking rota
- a lodged concern about potential bathroom conflicts
- someone bringing a radio despite there being a telly and dvd in the house, and 16 hours of dancing available daily
- a nominated bringer of washing-up liquid and dishcloth
- an ongoing discussion about what types of bread will be present
I’m bamboozled! I hope nobody’s offended if I’m too busy dancing to partake in group activities!
I was pressed for time so I thought I’d walk to the garage rather than drive to Heslington village for my lunch. They do hot pies there so I picked the chicken and mushroom bake, got told it was really a steak bake, paid nearly a fiver for that and a carton of tropicana orange juice, and set off back to work, discovering it was a cheese-and-onion-style-product bake.
Having devoured that and found no nutritious value, I popped into B&Q for a panini to supplement it. They were down to two, a bacon and cheese one or a mozarella and tomato one. I went for the latter, and it wasn’t till I’d paid £5.50 for that and a slice of chocolate cake and set off in a hurry for the office that I discovered it had been microwaved rather than griddled like you’re supposed to with paninis. The result was lots of cheese and flour and a little vitamin C for about £10. Gah! Would have been better off dining in a proper restaurant!
Failed to:
- enjoy salsa on friday very much
- get extra (freecycled) washing machine out of boot of car and attempt to repair
- Make any kind of impression on all the clutter in my abode
- buy any groceries
- lose any weight
- go to a party thrown by some salsa people
- get to bed before 3am on sat night
But succeeded in:
- finishing Northern Lights and starting on The Subtle Knife
- rolling 3 old PCs into one, giving me my website, email server, and music all on one handy box and freeing up over a cubic metre of PCs for freecycling, taking to the computer recycling project, or trashing.
- sorting through some of said music deleting duplicates and downloaded rubbish
- delivering another gameplay mutator to the Unreal Tournament SAS Sniper Server
- having a really good advanced salsa class
- going to Sam’s birthday party and losing at poker for no money
- adding up some finances and finding I don’t need as large a mortgage after all
- resolving the right-of-way issues with the house
- eating lots of chocolate cake
Yum! This is for my own future reference, dead simple, tasty and probably de-toxifying too. Serves two as a snack or starter.
* An aubergine
* 2 cloves garlic
* 4 outer leaves iceberg lettuce or equivalent
* Cherry tomatoes
* Balsamic Vinegar
* Olive Oil (make it a tasty extra virgin one!)
* Ryvita
Slice Aubergine, peel and chop the garlic, heat a splash of the oil in frying pan and chuck in the garlic.
Stir it about a bit and lay slices of aubergine flat on the bottom of the pan. Put in few enough that they can all lie flat and you have room to turn them over. Drizzle on a little olive oil and watch the heat for fear of over-burning the garlic. Turn the slices once while cooking.
Meanwhile roughly shred the lettuce, halve the cherry toms and toss together with a sprinkling of balsamic vinegar. Lay out on plates and lay the hot Aubergine on top, pop a couple of ryvitas on the edge of the plate and eat when the aubergine is cool enough not to hurt :-)
The aubergine ideally is soggy and translucent with slightly crisped skin and blackened on the outside. I tried it with salt and black pepper too but peferred it plain with just the fresh garlic.
I hereby claim this tag from Sarah’s collection of spare ones :-)
Ground Rules: The first player of this “game� starts with the topic “5 weird habits of yours� and people who get tagged need to blog about their 5 quirky habits as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next 5 people to be tagged and list their names:
1) I lean forward in the driving seat when I drive.
2) I often feel my hands need a wash, then while doing so realise I need the loo so end up washing my hands twice.
3) When I set the car stereo volume I tendto factorize it in my head. This leads to a slight tendency to avoid setting it to prime numbers.
4) When I have to make an important decision, I weigh up all the pros and cons, decide one way, then panic and change my mind.
5) when I hear music I usually adjust what I’m doing so that I’m in time with it.
I’m not going to tag anybody because this tag will live on forever anyway without my support!
In the old days, if you had a mortgage that was fixed rate for 2 years, you’d fully expect to be tied in for 3 or 4 years so that the bank got to charge you a variable rate for a bit and recoup some of the money it threw away on you in the first two.
Nowadays the tie in is the same length of time as the fixed rate. So the interpretation is “you can have this cheap mortgage as long as you change it after 2 years”. Bizarre. It means the cost for comparison is rendered useless once again because you never for the rest of your days have to pay the underlying variable rate. Double Bizarre.