Saturday 29 October 2011

The Novelist

A WILD WRITING EXERCISE APPEARED!
Okay, full disclaimer, this is not that good. But hey, verbose. And meaningful if you want it to have meaning.

The Novelist

It may come as a surprise to you that being a writer is not an especially appealing vocation. It is a life of churning out endless reams of paper with ink on them. It is a life of deadlines, of other people revising the words you strived to find, of an editor brutally dismembering your meticulously crafted sentences. Deadlines stifle creativity. If I may misquote Joyce, good writing is the right words in the right order. That is how I write. Writing is a craft. Writers are wordsmiths. Writers bend the written word to their will, they use prose to inform the masses, their publishers force them to write tripe for the mass market.
Writers are poor.
Some writers, if I am being honest, are immensely wealty, but they are rare and elusive. Very few writers are selected to chart, although, if I may be frank as well as honest, I would never have wanted to be one. It is a sad truth that the general public have very little taste in literature. Drivel like Meyer sells by the tonne, but Kafka, Sexton, even Wodehouse are ignored. 
Meyer is what I'm reading now. I'm making even less than I usually am, because the disenfranchised masses can see me scowl and scoff.
Nobody likes a surly homeless. 
I take what I can get. I'll take pennies, scraps of food, and paperbacks. Paperbacks are my priority, to be fair. Food can be stolen, pennies can be scrounged, but I never like to steal books. I wince at Meyer's description of the angsty, faux-Byronic would-be Adonis that she felt the need to commit to paper. A soft voice from above, and I look up from where I am sitting.
"Eclipse? Really? You're better than that." The voice is emanating from a young woman. The sun is shining behind her head, so I can't see her face, but she appears to be one of those... What do the youth say? Hipcats? No, that doesn't sound quite right. Hipster, that's it. She is a hipster. She's displaying all the symptoms I recognise. She has a flannel shirt, an overly large "beanie" hat, spectacles that may or may not have corrective lenses, and a tote bag she seems to have covered in ironic pins. It is into this bag that she reaches, and she removes a battered book. It's even got a hard backing, albeit a flimsy one. She hands it down to me, and as she stoops a little, the angle of the light changes, and I can see her face. I take the book thankfully, and I look at the title for a moment. It's a facsimile of an issue of The Strand. A fucking facsimilie of the issue with A Study In Scarlet. I look up, but she is gone. 
I open the book and begin to read.  
      


AN: Maybe more to come. Maybe.

Wednesday 12 October 2011

Free books plz.


http://bit.ly/qNJYCP

I want free books, okay.
...
DON'T JUDGE ME!


Yaddayaddablah, we love Derek, blah blah, BOOKS PLZ SIR!