2286: Disappointment

This post is a response to WordPress’ “Daily Post” writing prompt for today.

My immediate reaction to the word “disappointment” when seeing today’s writing prompt was… well, disappointment in The Daily Post’s prompts of late.

Longtime readers may recall my occasional use of The Daily Post’s writing prompts and the fact that they led to some interesting explorations of topics I might not normally explore on this blog. My default go-to topics for writing about are video games, games journalism and mental health issues, but the prompts from The Daily Post gave me a nudge to consider other topics now and again, whether they be nostalgic, hypothetical or just plain weird.

Lately, though, the prompts on the site have just been single words, and these don’t inspire me nearly as much as the questions or phrases that used to make up The Daily Post’s bank of writing prompts. I’m trying to pin down exactly why the change to this style of prompt fills me with such disappointment, and I think it’s because it provides the opportunity for too broad a range of things to write about; single-word prompts are too flexible.

Let me explain what I mean. When I decide to make use of a writing prompt for a day’s post, I like it being in the form of a question or an exam-style “Phrase. Discuss.” prompt because it provides some sort of direction to the writing. Creativity is, to me, at its most interesting when you work within some sort of constraint, because you then have to not only use your creativity to produce the work itself, but you also have to use your creativity to perhaps bend the rules of the constraint in question, too. A single word doesn’t constrain me at all; I can still pretty much write about anything tangentially related to, say, “disappointment”, and I’ve technically fulfilled the brief. That, to me, isn’t a helpful writing prompt. That, to me, makes me feel like I should have just started writing any old thing off the top of my head rather than looking for a prompt.

I’m aware that my experiences and feelings about this aren’t going to be the same as everyone else’s, and that there are doubtless plenty of bloggers out there who relish the chance to tackle the challenge of a single-word prompt and make it interesting. But for me, I always found The Daily Post much more enjoyable when it provided much clearer briefs and prompts on what to write about — and much more interesting to see how other people interpreted these briefs, too.

Hopefully we’ll see a return to form for The Daily Post at some point in the near future. If not, well, I may have to contemplate setting up something of my own. I can’t be the only one feeling disappointment in this way!

2273: One an Hour

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(11:23) Today I am going to write one sentence each hour.

(12:35) It’s going well so far; I’ve remembered to follow up the first sentence with this one.

(13:26) Could do with a poo; not currently in an ideal situation to do so.

(14:22) Still need a poo, but I will survive, dammit; I will survive!

(15:07) Semicolons sure are useful for exercises like this; they effectively allow me to cheat the system and write more than one sentence at once.

(16:15). Lacerated my thumb on a security box; now both of my thumbs have been mangled by retail work.

(17:31) I’m having a poo; at last, sweet relief, and after this I’m going to go and play some old Atari games before dinner thanks to the excellent compilation Atari Vault.

(18:58) Ooh, nearly forgot to write something this hour; got in there with two minutes to spare.

(19:53) Gave the Prison Break heist in Grand Theft Auto Online another go; we still can’t nail that last part, though this time our failure was more due to the game glitching than actual incompetence for once.

(23:05) GOD FUCKING DAMMIT.

See, I could have been dishonest there and just made up sentences for the hours I forgot about, but my integrity means too much to pull the wool over your eyes in such a manner, dear reader.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted; certainly made working on a Sunday a smidgen more palatable. I have tomorrow off, which is nice; I do like a nice midweek day off, although I only have one before it’s back to work for three days. I shouldn’t complain, I guess; it’s money, and the place where I work so far appears to be inoffensive enough for the time being.

Tomorrow will be spent sleeping, completing some freelance work assignments and playing lots of video games, in that order. The remainder of this evening will be spent playing video games, too.

2227: Filling the Days

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Anyone who has been out of work will know how frustrating it is to be in that “waiting” period while you have some applications out and no idea whether or not you’re going to hear back from any of them. It seems that most companies these days use the catch-all get-out clause of there being a “very high volume of applications”, thus absolving themselves of any responsibility for actually delivering an answer to unsuccessful applicants — or even acknowledging them at all, in some cases. (I know that rationally speaking there probably is a very high volume of applications and it would be very difficult to respond to all of them, but it’s still fucking rude.)

As I noted a while ago, I’ve been trying my best to fill my days while this waiting is going on. I’ve been looking for jobs in various fields — preferably those I can perform a bit more flexibly and/or from home — and applying to a few as well as continuing with the trickle of regular-ish freelance work I’ve been undertaking, but doing that all day every day is a sure-fire recipe for wanting to fall asleep and not wake up again.

So there have been a number of ways I’ve been keeping occupied. There’s video games, of course, but those aren’t especially “productive”, though they do provide useful fodder for writing about various topics, which is handy, as well as something I can talk about with people. That’s something that’s actually quite important, particularly when you’re stuck at home: it’s a tremendously awkward position to find yourself in when you’re at a social occasion and you realise you have literally nothing of note to contribute to any conversation. (As a socially anxious person, I feel like this most of the time, so it’s best not to give myself any actual ammunition to back this up.)

I’ve been continuing to work on my book. I figured out that my writing software Scrivener has a “target” option with exciting progress bars that fill up for both your complete project and your session target, so you can have that RPG-like experience of filling bars and feeling all happy and satisfied when they’re full. I’m not yet sure what a reasonable target for each session is — I can knock out 1,500 words in one sitting without too much difficulty, but that doesn’t feel like very much and I kind of want to try and keep my momentum going without burning myself out. I’m sure I’ll pin down a suitable target; perhaps I’ll increase it little by little from 1,500 with each session and see what feels comfortable. As for the book itself, recommendations online seem to suggest a length of 80-100k words is a suitable length, so I’m aiming at the lower end of that spectrum as a minimum target; since I’m a verbose sort of chap, that leaves me some leeway to go over, whereas if I aimed specifically for 100k as a minimum, I’d have to excise big chunks to get the word count down, which is something I don’t like doing; every word is sacred, or something.

Currently, the project is at 21,000 words or so, which is quite good going — or about a quarter of the way through, if you want to look at it another way. I’m enjoying getting back into the swing of things; while I write on this blog every day and have even indulged in some creative writing on here on several occasions, simply sitting down and writing a story for the sake of writing a story rather than “because oh shit I need a blog post for today” is an enjoyable experience that stimulates my already rather overactive imagination; I’ll probably write more about how I feel while I’m writing on another occasion, as I think it’s an interesting discussion.

Aside from this, I have some other things to be getting on with, too: there’s a second edition of the Digitally Downloaded magazine in the works, and I have Japanese studies to be getting on with. Or indeed restarting to refresh my memory, since it’s been a little while since I last engaged with them. I am pleasantly surprised how much hiragana have stayed with me since my last dedicated effort to learn, though; my next hurdle — and the one that tends to stall me each time — is katakana, but I’m sure with a bit of effort I’ll be able to conquer it. Then I can get depressed at knowing I’ll never, ever know all the kanji.

Anyway. That’s how I’m filling my days at the moment. While none of this is making me any money, sadly, a few of these things do at least have the potential to lead somewhere in the future. Perhaps my book will sell. Perhaps I’ll learn enough Japanese to be able to do something with it. Perhaps the magazine will take off and we’ll be able to start charging for it. Who knows? While I have this time, it’s worth exploring these things rather than getting depressed about the fact that jobs in the traditional sense seem to be extremely, frustratingly, infuriatingly difficult to come by these days, particularly when you yourself aren’t really sure what you’re qualified and/or skilled enough to do…

2219: Picking at the Scab of Creativity

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That’s a horrible metaphor, I know, but the more I think about it, the more that it seems to make a certain amount of sense.

I’ve been picking at said scab for the last few days, as I said I was going to. I haven’t been spending all day on it or anything, but an hour here and an hour there has meant that a story I’ve been wanting to finish since my teenage years is finally making some progress further beyond the point where it typically stalls any time I attempt to form it into some sort of… well, format.

I’m taking a different approach to what I usually do, and it feels like it’s working. Those who have read my various month-long sort of NaNoWriMo projects and other creative pieces will know that I have something of a tendency to write in a fairly spontaneous manner — in other words, I don’t really plan anything out in advance, and this usually serves me well but occasionally sees me writing myself into a bit of a dead end I’m not sure how to escape from. In contrast, then, said scab-picking has involved not just continuing on with what I’ve already written — which is a substantial number of words that I’m actually quite pleased with so far — but instead planning out a synopsis, chapter by chapter, of what’s coming next.

Doing this has helped me get over the biggest creative block I’ve had with this work — a creative block that has lasted a good 15 years or so at last count. The trouble with this story is that I know how it begins and I know roughly how it ends, but I’ve never quite figured out what happens in the middle of it or the specifics of the ending. Now I’m planning each chapter out in general terms rather than trying to write meaningful scenes as I get to them, I feel like I’m developing a much stronger sense of the work’s complete structure, and those middle bits are starting to fall into place naturally. It’s that old thing where a huge job looks daunting if you look at the whole thing, but if you take it a single task at a time it suddenly seems a lot more manageable.

So picking a scab then — why? Well, because I’ve been picking at it for the last few days, and each time I do so, I feel my creativity loosen up a bit. It’s surely — hopefully — only a matter of time before that scab comes off completely and creativity comes gushing forth from a newly reopened wound, splattering the walls and desk with… you know what? Maybe I didn’t think this metaphor through as much as I thought I had.

Anyway. Disgusting mental imagery aside, I’m pleased with my progress, even though it’s relatively minor in the grand scheme of what I need to do to finish the damn thing. It is progress, though, and while I’m still not feeling great about bumming around at home all day rather than having a proper job, it is at least helping me to feel like I’m achieving something, however miniscule that something might be. And that’s pretty important.

Let’s hope I can keep that motivation going, a bit at a time.

2217: When You Have No Occupation, You Should Stay Occupied

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One of the things that is most difficult about being out of work is keeping yourself occupied without falling into unproductive routines. It would be extremely easy to not bother doing anything useful at all each and every day, treating the time “off” as a kind of holiday, watching television, playing games, listening to the radio or falling into a deep, existential depression while staring at the ceiling of one’s bedroom. I say it is extremely easy to do these things because I have done all these things while out of work at various points. Sometimes you need that time to yourself, but unfortunately, said time to yourself doesn’t pay the bills.

Doing nothing but hunting for jobs isn’t necessarily the most productive course of action either, though. Job-hunting is an enormously demoralising experience, since by its very definition you’re going to be faced with more inexplicable rejection than acceptance in most cases. At other times, you’ll find yourself faced with an opportunity that just doesn’t seem quite right, but which you feel guilty turning down because you need work. (I say this having turned down two opportunities recently that didn’t feel right at all. Like, a big ol’ “bad feeling in the guy” not right at all.) That can be exhausting, and the toll it takes on your mental faculties can have an adverse effect on your subsequent attempts to find work as you lose patience with it and get tempted to apply to any old thing on the off-chance someone will find you in any way employable.

Therefore, it’s important to find other ways to occupy yourself, and to divide your days up into various things that, if they’re not necessarily directly productive, they at least provide you with the opportunity to feel like you’ve accomplished something. Indulging in a creative project, learning something new, practising your skills in something — all of these things are good ways to spend your time and if you’re out of work, it’s an ideal opportunity to spend some of those empty hours doing them.

You’ll notice that I’m writing this and using the word “you” a lot, as if I’m giving advice to someone else. Really, I’m giving advice to myself, to be perfectly honest, since as previously noted, I find it much too easy to sink into depression and just want to comfort myself with things that don’t require too much in the way of effort. But that way leads further into bad situations, so from tomorrow, I’m going to make a particular effort to spend a bit of time each day doing something that makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something. I don’t think I’m going to go so far as to schedule what I should do when — not for the moment, anyway, though that has worked for me in the past — but I am going to ensure that I do at least one thing every day for a minimum of an hour that leaves me feeling satisfied that I’m not completely wasting my time.

Activities that spring immediately to mind to accomplish this include music practice, music composition, creative writing (both fiction and non-fiction — I have a number of ideas for both), Japanese language studies, developing my computer skills (particularly with regard to things like programming and/or web design), working on the next edition of the magazine I shared with you a while back and making more gaming videos. That should keep me busy on a fairly regular basis; some of those things may even lead to further actual paying opportunities of various descriptions in the future, if not immediately.

Mostly they’re attempts to keep myself occupied and feeling positive. I feel I’m at a particularly low ebb right now, if that wasn’t already abundantly clear from my recent entries, and I want to feel like I’m making the best of a bad situation rather than wallowing in sadness. It won’t be easy, but I feel it’s probably the best way to approach what I’m dealing with at the moment.

Wish me luck.

2089: Connect the Dots

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “Connect the Dots.”

“Scour the news for an entirely uninteresting story. Consider how it connects to your life. Write about that.”

When looking for “entirely uninteresting stories”, your first port of call should almost certainly be your local newspaper. Sure enough, the Daily Echo didn’t disappoint with this marvel:

BREAKING: City bridge closed due to ‘police incident’

A SOUTHAMPTON bridge was closed this evening due to a ‘police incident’.

The Itchen Bridge was shut at around 6.30pm but the exact nature of the incident is unknown.

And the bridge was quickly reopened at 6.40pm.

This is currently the top story on the Daily Echo website, which probably gives you an idea of the sorts of things that get posted on there. But let’s ponder the actual question from the daily post: how this connects to my life in some way.

Well, okay. This is actually quite an easy one in many ways. The most obvious connection, of course, is that I live in Southampton, and consequently I know where the Itchen Bridge is. But the connection actually runs a little deeper than that: about five or six years ago, I used to live very near the Itchen Bridge in the town centre. The bridge itself was within walking distance, only about five minutes or so away. This didn’t really have much of an impact on my life for the most part, as I tended to find other ways to cross the river owing to the toll gates at the other side of the Itchen Bridge. But during my oft-mentioned “difficult period” in my life — the time my first wife left and my life pretty much fell apart — the bridge became somewhere that I liked to occasionally head towards in order to just stand and reflect.

I don’t think I ever seriously considered jumping off the bridge, though with my mental state at the time I won’t lie to you: I certainly thought about it more than once or twice. Ultimately I knew that I’d never actually have the courage to do it, though, for all manner of reasons: firstly, part of me, despite being deeper in a pit of misery than I’d ever been in my whole life, I didn’t really want to die; secondly, even contemplating that sort of thing made me feel guilty about the people I’d leave behind; thirdly, the idea of jumping off a bridge into horrible dirty water sounded both terrifying and unpleasant. And, I mean, I know killing yourself (or the contemplation thereof) isn’t particularly pleasant anyway, but I kind of figured there were easier, less painful ways to do it.

That didn’t stop me regularly going out to that bridge, though, noticing the Samaritans stickers on the railings every time I walked up to its highest point to look out over the water. I never called them — as I say, I knew that I didn’t really want to jump — but they always gave me pause when I saw them. Perhaps they did help, in their own way.

Eventually I settled for getting these musings out of my system with a piece of creative writing. In the short first-person narrative — which was left a little open-ended in case I wanted to expand it into a full-on story at some point — the protagonist, who was very obviously me, walked out to a bridge that was very obviously the Itchen Bridge, tormented by his own despair, and jumped. At the last moment, he was saved from his seemingly inevitable demise by a character I’d created and had my own story in mind for; this particular little narrative was set after that other story, even though, to date, I still haven’t written all of it. In other words, the character who saved me was the character as she was at what I had planned to be the conclusion of her original tale; as it happened, she fit nicely into this little fantasy scenario, though.

But I digress. How does this news story connect to my life? Well, my first thought upon reading the headline of the story on the Daily Echo website was “someone’s probably jumped”. Given that the bridge was re-opened after just ten minutes, though, I wonder whether that was really the case or not; at the moment, it looks pretty much like a non-story, despite its prominent billing on the Daily Echo website. I guess my thought process ran something along the lines of “I wonder if there would have been a story like that on the Daily Echo website if I’d actually given in to my despair and jumped back in those dark days?”

Bleak? Oh, absolutely and definitely. But, well, there you go. That’s me.

1386: Untitled November Creative Writing, Part 4

Sian was bored.

It was Sunday, the most boring day of the week, and she was stuck in the house with nothing to do. Her parents were both “busy,” they said, which meant they couldn’t take any time to give her a lift anywhere interesting, and none of her friends were free either.

She’d spent the morning reading her book, an uninteresting “supernatural romance” novel that all her classmates had been raving about recently, but which she was finding deathly dull. She had a mental block that prevented her from leaving a book unfinished once she’d begun, however, so she figured that a boring Sunday was as good a time as any to get some of it out of the way.

She had tired of the book, though; she frequently found her mind wandering as she read and had eventually given up. She tried listening to some music, but she couldn’t sit still. She tried playing some games on her phone, but suffered the same problem; nothing was engaging her brain and keeping her occupied.

Sighing to herself, she opened the door to her room and decided to try fluttering her eyelashes at her parents one last time. Surely they couldn’t expect her to stay cooped up here all day while they did… whatever it was they were doing sitting at their desks at opposite ends of the house. She wasn’t worried about them; they always did this, and they’d been married for a long time now, so it obviously worked for them. It frustrated her, though.

Her father was predictably dismissive of her attempts to convince him. He had a whole stack of email to get through, he said, and it needed to be done right now. He did, to his credit, apologise, but Sian didn’t feel particularly appeased by his half-hearted “sorry, Sian.”

Her mother, however, surprised her.

“Why don’t you just take the bus into town?” she said. Sian was taken aback for a moment; normally her parents weren’t at all keen on her going out by herself, so this was an unexpected development — so much so that she had to check what she had just heard.

“Are you sure?” said Sian. “I mean…”

“It’s fine, dear,” she said. “Your Dad and I were talking earlier, and we figure it’s time we let you be a bit more independent. You’re sixteen, after all, and you can probably handle going to town by yourself.”

At last, Sian thought, but didn’t say it out loud. Her friends had been “independent”, as her mother put it, for many years now, but she had always felt like a shut-in. She had fought with her parents on numerous occasions about it, but had never been able to prevail; what had changed?

It didn’t really matter to her; she was finally getting to go out without a chaperone, and the reasons were unimportant.

“Here,” her mother said, handing her a five-pound note. “Get yourself a treat while you’re in town.”

“I have money, Mum,” said Sian, but graciously accepted the note regardless. Her mother chuckled.

“Go and have fun, Sian,” she said. “Don’t be back too late. Send me a message or give me a call when you’re on the way back.”

“All right,” Sian replied. “I’ll see you later.”

She wandered out into the hall, threw her coat around herself and fumbled in her pockets to make sure she had everything. Keys, purse, phone — yes, that was everything.

“See ya,” she called from the front door.

“Bye,” said her mother. She heard the sound of her father getting out of his chair and coming down the stairs, but decided to leave before he came down.

The door slammed behind her, and she was free.

* * * *

Town was surprisingly busy, despite the fact that there was a chill in the air. Sian zipped her coat up to her chin and hid the bottom half of her face inside the collar. Now she was here, she wasn’t sure what to do.

Coffee, she thought to herself, glancing a nearby café. That ought to warm me up.

She strode purposefully over to the cafe and entered. The air inside was warm, and the smell of freshly-ground coffee beans was invigorating. She ordered herself a latte and a cake to treat herself, and paid with the five-pound note her mother had gave her, plus an extra pound from her pocket since it wasn’t quite enough. She knew it was extravagant, but she didn’t care right now; it was just nice to be out and about.

As the barista passed her her latte, she glanced around the café in search of a place to sit, and was surprised to see Miss Charles sitting by herself in a window seat. She didn’t seem to have noticed Sian; in fact, she didn’t seem to have noticed anything at all, since she just appeared to be staring out of the window into the middle distance.

There was a table not far from Miss Charles’ table, so Sian decided to sit there and observe what her teacher was up to.

Not much, as it happened; her initial assessment was correct, as Miss Charles did indeed appear to be doing little more than staring out of the window, occasionally turning to her table to sip her large, black coffee. She still hadn’t noticed Sian.

I wonder if I should go and talk to her, Sian pondered to herself. No, she probably wouldn’t want that… but she does look sort of lonely. Maybe I…

Her phone chimed loudly and interrupted her thoughts. It was a chat message from Jasmine.

ey babes what u up to? x it read.

Not much, Sian tapped out in response. Just in town for a bit. She chose not to mention that she was staring at her music teacher and was contemplating going to sit with her.

She sipped her coffee and returned to gazing at Miss Charles.

She doesn’t look at all happy, thought Sian. I really think I should…

Her phone chimed again.

“Oh, for fuck’s…” she muttered, this time flicking the switch onto silent. She always felt embarrassed when her phone went off in public, even though she knew her ringtone was far less obnoxious than some of the ones she’d heard.

im free now, came the reply from Jasmin. wana meet up for a coffee or sumat? x

Sian was about to tap out a response in the affirmative, but paused for a moment, frowning to herself.

Sorry, she eventually replied. I have a few things to do, then I have to be back soon. Another time. My folks finally seem to be cool with letting me out of the house by myself, she added.

k x came the reply after a moment. Sian always felt a little bad when she received a blunt response like that from Jasmine, even though she knew that it was just the way she was. She hoped that Jasmine wouldn’t mind being turned down, but she had something on her mind right now, and wanted to see if she could resolve it.

She picked up her latte, leaving the crumb-covered cake plate on her previous table. Then, feeling a little nervous, she pulled up the chair opposite Miss Charles and sat down.

“Oh!” said Miss Charles, suddenly snapping free from her reverie. “Um. You’re… Oh, Sian? Are you all right?” Sian could tell that she was switching into “teacher mode,” obviously trying to sit up straight and look a lot more prim and proper than she was a moment ago.

“It’s okay, Miss,” said Sian quietly. “We’re not at school now. I just… I just wanted to come over and see if you were all right.”

“Yes, I’m all right,” said Miss Charles. “I’m just having some quiet time.”

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Sian with a gentle smile. She swallowed, then took a swig of her latte before she continued. “I, err, was a little worried about you.”

Miss Charles’ eyes widened a little, and she stared directly at Sian.

“You… were worried about me?”

“Yes,” said Sian. “Friday was… not very nice for anyone, was it?”

“No,” said Miss Charles with a slight sigh. “No, it wasn’t. I’m really sorry about that. It put a real downer on things, didn’t it?”

“It couldn’t be helped,” said Sian. “You hadn’t… dealt with Edward before, but we all know what he’s like. Seriously, it’s not you, it’s totally him.”

Miss Charles gave a weak chuckle. “Yes, well, it doesn’t—” She trailed off. “Anyway, I hope it didn’t upset you too much.”

“Not at all,” said Sian with a smile. “I’ve seen people handle Edward much worse than that, believe me. A lot of people really can’t keep cool when he’s being a di— when he’s being like that. Sorry.”

Miss Charles chuckled again. She seemed to be loosening up a bit.

“Thank you for coming to talk to me, Sian,” she said. “I appreciate it.” She hesitated for a moment, apparently unsure of whether she should say any more. “It’s… difficult,” she added after a moment.

“I bet,” said Sian. “I don’t envy you at all. Sometimes I just want to give those kids a good slap.”

“Yes, well, we’re not allowed to do that, unfortunately,” said Miss Charles. “N-not that I want to.”

Sian laughed. “Well, we’re not really allowed to, either,” she said. “I sometimes think it would do some of them good, though.”

Miss Charles smiled slightly uncomfortably, apparently thinking the same thing but being unwilling to actually say it out loud.

“Look,” said Sian. “I’m sorry for interrupting your Sunday like this, but, well, you looked kind of sad, and I just wanted to see if I could help.”

Miss Charles took a sip of her coffee, then closed her eyes and sighed deeply.

“I don’t know if you can help, Sian,” she said. “I’m not sure if anyone can. But… well, I appreciate that someone like you is trying.”

“We’re not all bad,” said Sian. “Some of us are even human beings, believe it or not.”

“So are we,” said Miss Charles. “Teachers, I mean.”

“I know,” said Sian, laughing.

Miss Charles set down her coffee cup and sat forward, suddenly looking a lot more youthful.

“You know,” she said. “I always hated that big divide between teachers and students, even back when I was at school.”

“Yeah,” said Sian. “I do too. Some of the kids in my class seem to feel obliged to just… I don’t know, fight against the teachers or something. You’d swear school was some great oppressive regime or something. It’s just… weird.”

Miss Charles chuckled. “Yeah, I get that feeling,” she said. “I haven’t been in the job for very long, I know, but I think it’s always been that way.”

“Okay,” said Sian. She swallowed, unsure of whether or not she should say the next part, but pressed on regardless. “How about… how about we be friends, then?”

That wide-eyed look again. Sian immediately regretted saying what she’d said.

“I’m sorry, Miss,” she stammered. “I didn’t mean… I’m sorry, I…”

“N-no, Sian,” Miss Charles replied. “It’s fine, I just… that’s a really nice thing to say.”

“Oh,” said Sian. “Whew. I thought I’d crossed a line.”

“You probably have,” replied her teacher, laughing. “We probably both have. But you know what? Right now I just don’t feel like it matters. All right, Sian, let’s be friends.”

“Okay, Miss,” said Sian.

Miss Charles raised an eyebrow.

“If we’re going to be friends,” she said with a slight smile, “I’m going to have to insist you call me Kristina, or Kris.”

1382: Foreword

It’s November tomorrow, and that means NaNoWriMo. Or, if you’re me, and you like to be awkward, it means monopolising your daily blog with creative writing rather than inane blog posts about nothing in particular and/or video games.

Yes! I’m going to do it again. Much like previous years, I’m going to write… something every day for the next month. Exactly what that’s going to be I haven’t quite decided yet — and if previous years are anything to go by I will probably “improvise” it and make it up as I go along, with variable results — but I do have a few themes, plots and characters in mind already; it’s just a case of actually fleshing them out into something over the course of a month.

Normally I try and post a minimum of 500 words per day for my generic posts and often exceed that; in November, because I’m writing something a bit more long-form, I typically set myself a minimum of 1,800 words instead. I’m going to stick to that because it’s worked pretty well for me in past years, and I’ve usually been able to churn out 2,000 words or more each day, resulting in a total of 60,000+ words by the end of the month, which is sort of novel length-ish.

As for what I’m going to write about? Well, you’re going to have to wait and see, aren’t you? Largely because I haven’t decided which of the ideas I have I’m going to run with as yet. Those who have read my previous work know that I have various stylistic elements that I’m rather fond of using — and have been since creative writing classes at school and university, as it happens — so I’m pondering whether or not to experiment a bit with other perspectives or tenses. Again, we’ll see, and I’ll make a decision tomorrow when I actually start writing. Once I start writing, I will stick with whatever I go with until the bitter end, and see what happens. Sounds like fun, non? Of course it does.

I’m half-tempted to work on a story I’ve been working on off and on since school, but I kind of feel doing that would be “cheating” somewhat. While I’m very fond of said story and the characters involved, I do kind of want to do it justice whenever I get around to actually finishing it, whatever medium I end up completing it in. (There’s a distinct possibility it will become a game rather than a book, for example.) Not that spending a solid month of churning out 2,000-ish words a day isn’t “doing it justice,” but I sort of feel like I want to do that without the added time pressure — not to mention the fact that there’s already 17,000 words of it that I’m rather pleased with on my Google Drive that I don’t really want to abandon and start again.

Anyway. I’m rambling in an attempt to fill space and do something prior to dinner being ready. Hopefully dinner will be ready soon so I can spare you further inane ramblings, and you can enjoy (or be subjected to, depending on your outlook) the fruits of my creative labours over the course of the next month. Either way, thanks for reading.

Oyasumi nasai!

1160: Spoilers Ahead

After writing yesterday’s post and doing a little more work on it today, I’ve decided that I would actually quite like to talk about my RPG Maker project a little more rather than being unnecessarily vague and obtuse about it. Those of you reading who like the concept might be able to give me some motivation to continue with it in the long-term, then, which is probably going to be a valuable thing if (when, more likely) this initial burst of enthusiasm runs out.

However, I am also conscious that discussing some things about this project may constitute spoilers of various descriptions, so I am going to add a “read more” tag to this post so those who would like the finished product to remain a complete surprise can avoid it if they desire.

So, without further ado, click the link to continue reading if you want to… otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow!

Continue reading “1160: Spoilers Ahead” →

1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

“It has been a long day,” he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn’t supposed to “publicise” it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got “proper Internet” back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn’t the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A “high-tech hobo,” he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie’s mother’s house.

“Wait a minute,” he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. “Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?”

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

“I really, really need some sleep,” he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel’s painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.