My profile has been inactive for a while but when I came back on I could no longer post stories in the community. Is this because I have been so inactive and if so what can I do? I've tried email administrators that I was in contact with before but got no response. Thanks.
I got this today: Dear ******, Thank you for your e-mail and manuscript. If you'd like to e-mail me a brief bio on yourself as well (including your postal address and contact details in ******), we would be glad to consider your work further for possible representation. kind regards, ****** I'm trying not to get too excited but this is only the second time I've had a positive response to something I sent off.
I noticed recently with a certain amount of bitterness that a girl i went to school with has not only published several books but now is gathering quite a name for herself as a writer. This bitterness is pure jealousy you understand. I've no reason to sneer at the quality of her work, vile though it is, or resent the fact that she has never had a proper job (has spent the last ten years being supported at home while she is allowed to create). I can't help but be resentful and grumpy that she has managed to do something i haven't. I've never had the guts to try to get something published until a few months ago and while that was a wonderful feeling, I had no cash for my efforts and reality sank back in once the afterglow had dimmed: I still had a whole manuscript gathering dust that I am afraid to send off. Just as afraid of the success as I am of the failure. So the bitterness surges upwards when I see her, fat, sleek and smug sitting beside a pile of her own books while I tap away here and mumble how mine could be better. It's pathetic. Good luck to her and her horrible books and I should get the f*** up and stop whining. Write more, send off more, just DO more. Get the f****** thing out there. Thanks for listening. You probabaly think i'm a twat.
The paper today announced on the front page that people in Fukushima had their urine tested and it was found to be radioactive. The government moving with customary speed has neglected to inform or protect its people accordingly and now they suffer. It's like a bad science fiction movie, instinctively I get the image of florescent green fluid, like that out of reanimator, when instead I should be rigid with horror at what these poor people must be feeling right now. Imagine knowing that your urine, something that gathers inside you until your body is too full to keep it there is radioactive. The streetsare full of anti nuclear sentiments now while the government sweats and blames the usual culprit, the Prime Minister (the fifth in five years). Whenever there is a problem the PM is replaced and a new golden boy is in his chair before the evening news. The entire nation celebrates and settles into a mood of gentle optimism but within two mouths the wolves are back demanding this freeloading, incompetent buffoon is kicked out so a 'real man' can take his place. Rather than get the person on watch when a catastrophe happens to be responsible for mending the country, Japan is much happier to slap some one else in place to clean up the mess. You would hope that after four years someone would have noticed this is not effective policy!
After a kebab and a beer the other day my colleague started telling me an idea he'd had about a man with an animals head living in Tokyo and dealing with racism and police brutality. I loved the idea hurried home and wrote six pages of scene setting: The characters painful homesickness, his depression, and confusion in the Japanese society. However, once this was done I was rather stuck with where to take it from there. I named the animal after my colleague (he's not so impressed by that) and while I can envisage many situations, that he finds himself in I can't really come up with a whole plot. The obvious choice is Yakuza and intrigue with corrupt coppers but I've never been a competent crime writer and would like something a bit fresher. I don't really write action well in comic form either so perhaps its better to be like American Splendor and make the mundane interesting rather than aiming high drama. There's another kebab and beer to be had tonight, perhaps fresh inspiration will come.
In one week I started writing a Doctor Who and Sherlock holmes fan fiction. My wife was horrified by the prospect of me touching the great detective, something of a purist she reads fan fiction but only ones that treat the great man with the uttermost respect and keep him pretty much the same as he always was in Doyle's originals (I mentioned the Lovecraft crossover collection and she told me to go f*** myself). The idea of me getting my twisted mind into Holmes' London was not a prospect she looked forward to. However, I ignored her and will persevere. The trouble is I clearly lack Doyle's brilliance for twists. Not being a huge fan of deteciive fiction to begin with I'm not very good at instilling riddles to untangle, at least not by a detective. I must produce a better story before I can show it to the wife lest she go all 'potty mouth' on me again. I abandoned the Doctor Who pretty quickly. I still like the idea but the whole thing was pretty self indulgent. This is my first attempt at any fan fiction, so I hope I can do Sherlock justice. Are there any guide lines to follow or is it just keep the missus happy. Think I'll abide by that.
It's a still Sunday morning; cloudy but not cold. It's not to be a relaxing day off, there is work and shopping to be done, but thats ok, I'm feeling pretty good. On friday night several students of mine came up to me in the bar to thank me for helping me get the grades that allowed them to go and study abroad, and yesterday afternoon I saw my name in print for the first time. A small independant American publication published a short story I wrote nearly two years ago after a having a nightmare. It was quite a rush seeing my name in print, a little biography and someone had even done an illustration to go with the story. I was giggling like a school boy all day at the idea someone out there is reading my work. Maybe I'm still a long way from being a proper author, but I've taken my first step and it feels great.
In the current turmoil of long work hours and stressful studies, not to mention the on coming heat of the summer (it's the third day of June and already Tokyo is like an armpit) it's nice to have some place i can kick back and forget about everything else. That place for me is my local second hand bookshop. Every time I go in there is like a delightful treasure hunt searching for unknown gems that lurk in every cranny. Having spent nearly two years living in a town where the only books in English were John Grisham novels, Samurai philosophies, back copies of One Piece or biographies of Obam it is a wonderful breath of fresh air to be able to walk into Blue Parrot and browse to my hearts content. The month before last, the great quake caused the shop to close temporarily and I was in a panic about whether this meant that the lovely girl who works there on Fridays (the day of the quake) was hurt as the books pilled high all around toppled on top of her. Luckily she was fine, but the overburdened shelves weren't hence the closure. I love books I always have, the new, the old the dog eared, the pristine it matters not. I love them I want them and if I could survive purely on oxygen I would spend my last penny on them and form myself a castle made from piled paperbacks and a protective roof fashioned from Folio edition histories. Sitting naked and gleeful amdist the different tomes I would feel like I didn't need a thing. Friday is the best day of the week, not because its the weekend (I work saturdays) but that is the day I go to the Blue Parrot and find some new wonder to get me through the week. Today its Kafu Nagai's Geisha in Rivarly. I can't wait.
... as I was saying (pesky Japanese keyboard) I once saw my father in a version of The Browning Version and it always made an impression on me. The play is about a retiring school master who maybe denied his pension and is being psychologically tormented by his wife. It's good stuff and I think it'll fit in nicely. I intend to make full use of this little weird inspiration and see it leads to anything.
Every time I sit down to try and write something short and sweet it gets bigger. Just taking a moment to flesh out character can mean that, within moments, I have his or her entire life planned out and don't want to leave out a single incident. Before long, the short splendid idea I had suddenly becomes longer and rapidly spins out of control or worse I realise its full of unrelated filler. However, sometimes it has unforseen and beneficial developments. I have five main characters of my new project all with back story and circumstance who are all about to come together and emerge changed. For no reason that I can fathom, this morning, while riding the train I had an image of two of them attending a performance of The Browning Version. My first reaction was to dismiss this as ridiculous but them more I thought about it, it not only would fit but would be a nice scene to develop the two characters relationship. I once saw my father
Just curious but in your opinion what is the best opening to a novel or short story? I'm going to have to go with the late great Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: 'We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"' Unadulterated brilliance.
There isn`t much more annoying than having what you (at least) consider as a really good idea and intending to write it down someday and then finding that some one else has already had it. I had a friend in Nagoya who refused to read any Neil Gaiman as he kept pre-empting her ideas and being adored because of it. Now I have a new nemesis in the form of Mark Hodder who has taken an idea of mine (admitedly one that didn`t require too much of a stretch of the imgination) and turned it into something great. I will fume in my impotence, jealous of his success and keep my ideas to myself in future, boxing them into my inner psyche so no one my usurp me.
I was standing in the shower this morning singing to myself and suddenly came up with the idea of a story for a novel. It started with one word that I repeated over and over to myself as I washed my hair and cleaned my body. By the time I was washing between my toes the idea was 80% there. Haven't figured out the ending yet, but the begining is clear and I can see how events would follow from there. I've just written the first paragraph and already my spine is tingling. The novel is not about taking showers. Does anyone else come up with ideas in situations like this?
So unless you have been living in a cave on mars with your eyes shut and cotton wool in your ears you've probably heard that Osama Bin Laden is dead, at least according to the world media. He was shot two days ago and his body was buried at sea. Suposedly this was because no country wanted to claim his body, or that they didn't want any terrorists still out there to turn his grave into a shrine. Also Islamic custom demands that a corpse be buried 24 hours after its death. Desert culture, supposed to stop disease. Many scoff the ideal of the American military respecting Islamic customs but I think its as least as plausible as anything else. If he is dead then he may be food for the fish now, or he maybe forzen in a morgue drawer somewhere being kept as CIA trophy, his head to be stuffed and put upon Obama's wall. Perhaps he's not dead at all, just being kept alive while Joe Public is told he is no more. We may never know. No doubt conspiracy theorists are at this minute detailing stories about how he did indeed survive and is somewhere out there with Adolf Hitler, Elvis and Princess Diana, design fresh plots of world domination when their club of evil is compete. Meanwhile the rest of us get on with our lives. American's gather to cheer and celebrate while the rest of the world looks on in judgement and Facebook profiles are awash with the same Martin Luther King quote: 'I mourn the loss...and all that jazz'. No one had that quote up when Saddam Hussain was filmed being hanged, perhaps too many had forgotten about him. It's an odd sentiment, to celebrate about death. In any form it surprises me, after the tsunami in Japan I found a youtube video of a girl gloating that she'd prayed for the world to be made aware of God and then a level nine earthquake had devestated Japan. She started by talking about how merciful God was and ended with saying his wrath could do such terrible things. Of the 25,000 dead she made no mention. Sadly, though, the truth is that when the dust settles and when we cut down the twitching corpses from the gibbet, the world is still here and the surviors have to get on with everything. Stopping isn't an option. But should we celebrate that someone else hasn't survived, even if they've killed others? We're too used to seeing movie baddies get their comeuppance and can't realate what we see on the news to real people anymore. It too nearly 60 years before Hitler could be portrayed on screen as anything less than a monster, by next year we'll probably be seeing Osama at the pictures, Hollywood will make him a likeable monster: fataly flawed but fascinating. Then they'll bury him at sea.
I've just started reading Stripping in Time: The history of erotic dancing. Its really rather great and is inspiring me to write all kinds of things surrounding the people I've read about and the time when they were dancing. Some places still find it difficult to seperate myth and reality and thats something as a writing I like to explore. Whether the dancing girl is a goddess or priestess or just a naked woamn its equally evocative.