The Diary

I have never kept a diary. So please forgive me if what I imagine are the reasons for maintaining one is incomplete.

• A diary as a way of preserving memories of events and feelings
• A diary as a log of one's personal development

• A diary as a way of conducting a conversation with yourself to play out problematic scenarios or figure out your feelings about an event or incident
• A diary as a way of blowing of steam, as catharsis

• A diary is where you can share your vulnerabilities and anxieties without fear of disclosure or judgement

although Kurt Cobain would seem to disagree on this last point.

I’ve always rather regarded writing fiction as fulfilling many of the functions of a diary. As did Picasso apparently (though painting rather than writing in his case)

It certainly let’s me blow off steam, while the emotional journey undertaken through the pages of a book often provides catharsis. The process of writing frequently involves thinking through scenarios and challenges, how the character would think and feel.

Are those characters inevitably you, are those situations ones drawn from your own life? I honestly believe that all writing is autobiographical, including fiction, for the simple reason that no writer can write something that is completely outside of them. Even if you write something based on something you read in a newspaper, or an anecdote someone told you, the fact it resonated enough with you to remember it and later to work it into your writing, means that it has become part of your own experience, even one imported second hand. However, what a writer has to do is work their autobiographical material to make it more universal, so that it has the possibility to engage its readers, rather than remain so personal to the writer that it can't communicate itself.

Where writing fiction does diverge from writing a journal, is that the writer is exposing their vulnerabilities and anxieties by making their book public, unlike the secrets that stay cached in a diary (unless someone else steals in to read your private journal, or like Cobain youm invite others in to unravel him because he couldn't do it for himself).

Time is a key element of a diary. If you make entries every day, then the time is largely structured already for you. If you catch up to events more sporadically, then time is not so determinate of your entries. As a child I did possess a previous year's diary which I used as a notebook rather than a diary. If I had made any entries surrounding events of that day, they would have been already fictionalised since the page they appeared on, had a day and date that only matched up in the past, not in the present. 

When you have children, everything in your life can revolve around them. Manage to escape for an evening for a meal out with your partner, the chances are the conversation will be dominated by the child at home. When our twins were born, someone presented us with two Baby Books to maintain a record of their developmental stages such as first solids, teeth and words. In a way these books are diaries, marking the early years on entry into the world. (There's a question as to whether the parents should retain the Baby Books for their own memories, or present them to the children themselves once they have grown up, after all they contain clippings of their hair and nails and a baby tooth or two (reappropriated from the Tooth Fairy).

In my new novel "Three Dreams In The Key Of G", a diary plays a central role in the narrative. The mother of two young daughters keeps a journal, so that when her second daughter arrives, she has a supposedly ready record from her first born to refer to. However, all the pages and therefore the chronology of events appear to be out of order. Why ever could that be?


“Loneliness is the diary keeper’s lover. It is not narcissism that takes them to their desk every day. And who “keeps” whom, after all? The diary is demanding; it imposes its routine; it must be chored the way one must milk a cow; and it alters your attitude toward life, which is lived, finally, only in order that it may makes it way to the private page.

William Gass - "Temples Of Texts"

                                           

 A date for your diary 26/07/2018

Published by Dead Ink Books 

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

Dear Teen Me

Writing Letters To Dead Authors

6 imaginary letters composed to 6 significant authors to me. A meditation on art and death.

The Future History Of Demythology - Flash Fiction

Avant-garde is time bound. Hidebound. In our age of rapid technological change and shrinking attention spans, the avant-garde are the nostalgics. The left-behind, derrière-garde guardians of the remembered past, (forlornly) demanding concentration and application..

Body Politic was a metaphor that came into use through a fifteenth century understanding of medical anatomy. With the human genome and the structure and function of DNA becoming known, new metaphors present themselves which we currently remain insensible to.

Consciousness will not reveal itself from human genomics (see B). For how can we objectively observe fully in the round something in which we already stand within? Anticipating our consciousness to demurely deconstruct itself for us, as us. Consciousness forever as the dark side of the moon.

Decidedly deciduous deicide, yet dread of death and the dangled deal with a desperately conjectural afterlife, denotes the divine obtains still.

Ethics derived etymologically from a group or cultural disposition or mien and then back engineered to apply as obligations for each individual member of that group or culture. Only in this atomised age, singular group cultural identities evanesce. All morals and moral behaviour are relative. Ethics have become superannuated, duty obsolete and there is nothing binding us together, be it natural or moral law. 

Freedom: if you are reading this of your own free will, then you have a reasonable degree of freedom. If you disagree with even a single proposition here, then you are enslaved by your programming. If you agree with every single tenet here, then you are enslaved until you break free of what they counter. What lies on the other side once you have burst through? Who can say as it is unexplored terrain. Probably a whole new set of super-subtile myths to enslave you afresh. 

Game Theory is applied to many aspects of life, positing that when humans calculate that cooperating with one another, it best redounds to their mutual interest. The deterrent argument follows this flawed logic, since as David Hume explained through his white swans, a single appearance of a black swan on the pond erases the proof of your senses for the entirety preceding that occasion; that is, the nuclear deterrent argument only has to be disproved from holding once and we are all finished for eternity anyway.

History is the Butterfly Theory in effect. Yes it constantly repeats itself (since its actors are all humans given to repetitive behaviours), but the starting conditions are different each time so that the outcome will not be the same as previously. Once upon a time and only once indeed…

I is not in the word ‘team’ (more’s the pity) but it is in ‘time’, which is ironic seeing as after a brief span, the I drops out permanently. I is not only in the word ‘identity’ but actually leads it; but what is the point of spending as lifetime establishing an identity, only to have mortality erase it permanently? I also leads the word ‘intimacy’, yet this proves nothing. 

Je t’aime… Je m’aime (consider that phonetically) more like it. For we are but a clump of sensory information receptors, who have hit upon the evolutionary decision (randomly of course) that they are best served by aggregating and maintaining a unified outlook of the whole. But they are still in control of this consciousness rather than the other way around (see C).

K, Josef was guilty and he knew it, Kafka knew it, Max Brod knew it and now you dear reader know it. 

Language is not fit for purpose. Conceals as much as it communicates. Slippage and seepage. Ellipsis and elision.   

Myth is pernicious since it dresses up ignorance (of cause and effect in the natural world) in supernatural pretence in order to justify the exigencies of the local institutional and power relations among humans. Though science has provided better approximations of cause and effect to strip away the supernatural and replace it with ‘reason’, science itself is a myth-based body of knowledge (see S).  Myth, like ethics (see E), is man-made and therefore self-imposed and should only be demanding of voluntary adherence.

Nouns are Plato’s Ideal Forms in linguistic form. That is, they don’t actually exist either. Objects classified as one noun or other are approximations and simulacra. “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” et al.

Once upon a time (see H).

Pangram of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” only holds for the temporary duration of the ban on fox hunting perhaps, when the fox knows it has legal protections from the dog. An example of the viral algorithm infecting language,with periodicy, permutation and prosaicness.

Quantum Mechanics are scientists hedging their bets. Mathematically proven probability. Probably.  

Reality is a construction of the human mind. The notion of an objective reality is merely a human consensus. The templates of what we take for reality are imprinted in our brains and our senses only scan for deviations referenced against the template in order to prompt our responsive action. Our reality templates are premised on our three-dimensional perceptions, yet scientists posit 11 or 12 dimensions of existence (see S).

Science bears more of an elegant, logically consistent canon than religious beliefs, but it is no less a credo. Whatever the equations prove, our limited perceptional apparatus means we can only conceive in three dimensions, four at a stretch, yet current theories are up at around 11 or 12 dimensions of existence (see R). 

Tripartite human brain, reptilian, mammalian and human, does not represent unalloyed progress and upgrade. Greater processing power yes, but we have barely progressed from reptilian filial infanticide, to mammalian killing of a rival’s offspring, to human kind’s targeting of any and every one of its own species (see G).

Uroborus is perhaps of all mythic symbols the one that resonates most. However, take your pick of the myriad of symbolic representations it proffers: Circle of Life; creative renewal; duality, synthesis and integration; immortality; eternal immutability; perfection; kundalini energy; hermetically closed systems; feedback loops; the philosopher’s stone; the singularity from which all existence stems. Go pick the bones out of that little lot. 

Vicious circle applies to not only language (words defined in terms of other words), but to this very exercise itself, (many of these definitions refer the reader on to other definitions listed here). There is no inertial frame for logic, nor language (see C,L). 

W; literally double ‘u’, itself already the elongated sound of twin oo’s. Tautologically redundant as an outcome of an alphabet whose characters and their sound bear no relationship to the meaning of the words they delineate (See L). 

Literary Lacrosse Stick - Literary Quiz answers

I set a 25 question literary quiz here


Here are the answers

The Story Of Story - Flash Fiction

With the summer round of book fairs and literary festivals just around the corner, authors rolled up to the storehouse of stories. They checked in their plots that would keep them fermenting throughout the winter cold, executing them beside a roaring fire. In return they took possession of anecdotes and terminological exactitude, blew the dust off them and dialled their agents to inquire of the travel arrangements, itineraries and Green Room riders.

When their literary rambles and belletristic excursiveness were over for the season, they all assembled at the fabled construction and pushed on through the silo doors only to discover every last one of their story stock had disappeared. They were aghast, with their instinctive reactions of placing their professional pen-holding, or keyboard-palpating hands over either eyes, mouth or ears resulting in a series of tableaus vivant of the Three Wise Monkeys. “What, ain’t you lot ever heard of backing up your work then?” chimed in the warehouse’s custodian, who wrote the odd bit of cyberpunk in his spare time but never showed it to anybody.

“This is an utterable, bloody disaster!” expostulated a writer of the old school.  

“Swearing is a sign of a poor vocabulary, or didn’t your mother teach you that bouncing you up and down on her knee?” snarked a writer of erotica. 

“I feel… bereft” sobbed a writer of romances.

“Of course you do dear” smirked the erotician.

“Just because you have no need of a plot in your- I can barely bring myself to call them - stories”.

“Ladies, ladies, come now- who’s that sniggering? I hardly think this is a situation that invites levity. We have all just lost the entire wellspring of stories-“

“All seven of them-”

“- That affects us all”.

“- Not me squire, I write anti-novels”.

“What are you doing here then?”

“My Steampunk writer pal is giving me a lift home from ‘Wilderness’ festival, but he had to stop here to load up his saddlebags”.

“They can’t just have vanished”.

“Recycling’s Tuesdays, so can’t have been carted off in a commercial waste lorry”.

“Not funny”.

“Call this dialogue? It’s bloody rubbish”

“Yes, well we’re rather lacking for stories to hang realistic characterisation on at the moment, aren’t we?”

“Magical Realism bloke, can’t you conjure up something for us here?”

“I got nothing”.

“Christian Fiction guy?”

“I do redemption endings not deus ex machina ones”.

“Pretty simple really. Someone’s nicked them. Half-inched the schemata, hitched up our storylines and had our narratives away on their toes”.

“What on earth are you talking about you ridiculous little woman?”

“Clues me dear. It’s what I deal in. Detective fiction at your service”.

“Well your books can’t be much cop. Our plots haven’t been stolen so much as devoured and consumed. We writers of Police procedurals do things properly. By the book. Anyone here pen forensic science protags?”

“Yeah I do and I see what you mean. There’s insect husks scattered all around here”.

“What are they, boll weevils?”

“I dunno mate. I’m not an entomologist, I’m a writer. I’m the geezer who emails the entomologists when I need some facts”.

“Well here’s a fact for you, boll weevils feed on cotton, not stories. Not paper. Something you’d know if you read my saga on slavery and the Deep South”.

“Oh, I remember that book. When the critic pointed out the infestation that destroyed the crop only happened long after abolition and the Civil War”. 

“Yes, well poetic licence and all that”.

“Historical Fiction, or as we call it, Anachronic-ism”

 “I think you’re all missing the point here. The custodians have a duty of care to our germs of ideas. So we should demand redress. Write a wrong, compensation for lost earnings”.

“Germs of ideas? That’s more Billy Burroughs’ territory. Words as virus”.

“Billy Burroughs? Close personal friend were you?”

“Wasn’t everybody?”

“Plot hole my fictive friend, Burroughs has been dead nigh on two decades. Can’t have been responsible for this”.

“Copycat? Plagiarist?”

“Is no one listening to me?”

“Probably not. Cos no one’s read you I know that much”.

“We should sue the Depository.

“I think you mean sue the Repository?”

“No, I mean Depository”.

“You don’t know what you mean. You don’t know what you’re talking about”.

“You’re splitting hairs”.

“No I’m being pedantic. If they meant exactly the same thing, we wouldn’t need two different words would we?”

“Oh go shove it up your sphincter”.

“He’ll require a suppository then”.

“Fellow writers and Creative Writing Fellows, we can still solve the riddle here. The husks are shed larval skins. Therefore there should be adult insects round here somewhere. We should be able to tell what they are then and what they’ve done with our stories”.

“This might be a clue! This big lump of earth in the corner here!”

“A termite mound! Yes, I’m pretty sure termites eat wood pulp, so paper would fit their diet”.

“Well where the hell does that get us?”

“Into the mound! Our words would be excreted by the insects, so if we can collect them all up, maybe we could reconstruct the plot lines”.

“What are we looking for exactly? What does termite pooh look like?”

“Termite ‘pooh’? What are you, a children’s author?”

“You don’t need to go scrabbling about on the floor. That mound is part earth, part termite faecal matter”.

“I’m an artiste darling, I’m not plunging my hand into a mound of insectile cloaca for literature or anybody”. 

“That’s not true of your last book”.

“That’s not just a mound… that is the literary Omphalos. The font of all story”.

“Who let the prose poet in here?”

“The literary Omphalos, here in Hay-On-Wye, are you sure?”

“Insects, this is all a bit Kafkaesque don’t you think?”

“Kafka’s insects were more metaphorical than literal I would have said”.

“What, insects devouring our words then shitting them back out as pellets and making a tower of them isn’t a metaphor you mean?”

Review - "The Desire Machine" by Arbonauts

Decades ago I went to a lot of dance and physical theatre in London. I tried writing in the hope of working with some of its practitioners. I even attended conferences about the relationship of both to conventional theatre. As my own artistic interests changed I drifted away from stage performances and stopped going to such events. Arbonauts' new show was a welcome re-immersion in that world and brought back much of the awe and pleasure I used to derive from such spectacle.

First the space, a shaft servicing Brunel's tunnel under the Thames at Rotherhithe. Entrance through a low door, admitting one audience member at a time. Inside the venue, a music soundscape designed very precisely to meet and fill the angles and recesses of the brickwork. It might have been interesting to move around the space and experience how the sound worked differently within the various pockets, but the 'auditorium' was too crowded to have the chance to do this. Centre of the space was an erected carousel with round disc floor and cables to form part fairground ride, part birdcage.

The performance started with some aerial work amidst the cables, the lighting working well to blur the outlines of the performer, their sinew blurring with the cable so one becomes indistinguishable from the other. I was very much put in mind of Steven Berkoff's company's extraordinary performance of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" and that insect's aerial movements.

And later when the lights are more powerful and you chance to look up at the brickwork to see the giant projected stages from the stage, you're put in mind of the filmic "Nosferatu".

But for me the real tours de force came from the dance and movement of the performers on the ground. The first deeply involving tableau was when a bridal gowned Rachel Alexander stood stock still in the centre of the rotating stage, just her arms stretching out as part inviting embrace, part clock hands. two other performers moved subtly shaped by her orbit, with exquisite precision when in close proximity of the bride, manipulating the space between these two bodies between intimacy and disinterested proximity. I have always preferred angularity in dance to smooth, sweeping curves and I delighted in the spectrum of flections of both performers and the space between them.

But the highlight of the whole show was the performance by Dominique Vannod, angularity supreme across her body as she moved on all fours trying to conquer the restraint of the turning disc. The sharpness of her bones (shoulder blades, wrists etc) jutting through the skin in seemingly impossible ways was breathtaking. It conjured both insect and some larger beast, suggestive of being multi-limbed and not just restricted to the normal two/four of the human. Simply spellbinding.

 Dominique Vannod

image courtesy of Ludovic des Cognets 2013 (from different Arbonauts show)

If I had a quibble, it was with the snatched phrases of dialogue which i just felt couldn't bear the weight and intensity of what was taking place on stage. Even though these were taken directly from the source book, Angela's Carter's "The Infernal Desire Machines Of Doctor Hoffman", phrases like "I am my own self-antithesis" just seemed trite to my ear. But then maybe that's just the ghost of the old writer for physical theatre rising in me again.

Staring At The Sun - Friday Flash

He pinched the bridge of his nose. When he removed his fingers, it seemed as though a flyaway strand of hair had been caught up in his pincer and now dangled irritatingly over his eye. He must have failed to dislodge the follicle, for it still caused his vision to writhe and squirm. He sent his fingers on a sortie, careful to draw his nails in like a cat with its claws when preening itself. And still the prickling sensation continued, as his brain fired barrage after barrage in protest at this trespass on its visual cortex.

It didn't feel like  piece of grit, since there was none of the usual burning sensation that usually accompanied such a thing. He bathed the eye in water and though that appeared to have shifted the interloper, soon enough back came the impression as he was drying his face with a towel. He pressed his face right up close into his mirror and lifted his reptilian lid to scour for the troublesome detached cilium. The problem was his hair was turning grey, so it was harder to isolate in contrast to his skin tone.

Still there was nothing there. He didn't like to do this much, since he didn't like to admit he was growing older, but he even put on his spectacles to try and bear down on the invisible interloper. It only made things worse, like a magnifying glass, though he still couldn't find anything trespassing across the focal plane of his lens.

He removed his specs and scanned them for fluff, dust or hair of their own. He wiped them clean on his shirt, maybe it was the little stains in the glass itself. But no amount of polishing yielded him any better vision. He inspected the goggles and was appalled at just how much gunk and grime was wedged beneath the nose pads. He cleaned it out with a pin and noted its flocculent texture. It was disgusting, especially when he considered that he donned his glasses so rarely and yet here was such an accumulation of his shed skin, pressed and layered beneath the pads' plastic.

But no amount of scouring ameliorated the hairline crack laying across his sight. If anything it had got worse, now taking on the appearance of some of the strands of a spider's web. He even convinced himself he could see part of the bloated body of the spider. Clearly his mind was running away with itself and playing tricks on him. He was so damn tired and that couldn't have been helping his overwrought brain.

As he turned his head in despair, his glass lenses seemed to catch the bathroom light in them right at the side of his vision. That was all he needed to compound his current inconvenience. He switched the light out and two tiny electrical flashes seemed to fizz across the periphery of his perception. Or just below where the glass lenses ended. This was getting ridiculous. Now his addled brain must have been overcompensating, or going into hyper-drive perhaps, as he failed to clear this agitation from its sensory apparatus. He could take a hint, he needed to go to bed and wake up fresh, when hopefully his brain would have settled and the hair itself might have been shaken free.

The next morning he awoke and while not quite a Gregor Samsa moment of imagining himself turned into a cockroach, it did appear as though an insect might have inhabited him and was busy crawling across his retina. He shook his head, partly to clear his watery vision, but also in terror. He slowly unsheathed the eyelid, but still some mote was fluttering and wafting there. It was like viewing bacteria under a microscope. That his eye had become a petri dish prison and insects were slithering over his eyeball. He felt turned utterly inside out. Tears on the inside of his peepers.

He sat up in bed and rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand. Again two shooting lightning bolts seared past him. He saw them and yet knew that they weren't there, so that it was his brain which had extrapolated or maybe constructed them. So much for his rested and clear grey cells. Perhaps such corsucations were an after-image of the brain's flare of distress. Perhaps he was being afforded an insight into the brain's electrical transmissions themselves?

He got out of bed. Standing on the floor, his eyes were filled with laboriously moving flecks, like the motion of a lava lamp. They formed shadows on his vision and this freaked him out as he wondered if he was losing his vision entirely? Was there a micro-organism living inside his eyes, scuttling over his irises so that they amplified their own size like when a bug crawls over a movie projector? Either it was on the move the whole time, or there were many of them. A veritable army of invaders parasiting his brain perhaps?

Though such notions made him feel queasy, he managed to stumble over to his computer. Squinting through his compromised eye, he managed to discover that he was probably experiencing floaters. Just like the degrading ozone layer that protects the earth from the sun's rays, the protective gelatinous barrier of his own eyes was deteriorating. Thus light was being refracted in strange, debilitating ways his brain was struggling to process. Or else it was projecting shadows where none had previously existed. He flopped back against his chair with relief, that at least he wasn't playing host to some alien invasion. He knew floaters were not themselves threatening blindness or any more serious impairment.

But then he was struck with a wave of despondency. It still represented a decaying, a degeneration of his physical being. Another marker on the migration towards death. And everyday now, he would have reminders of putrefaction's flies hovering right in front of him where they could not be denied. The veil of permanent darkness was drawing in over him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly this story was prompted by me waking up a couple of weeks ago and having these strange sensations appearing in my vision in my right eye. it took me a couple of days to figure out what they were and then I had to go get checked out that there was no retinal damage causing them, which it turned out there wasn't. This was merely a feature of aging and I haven't even reched 50 yet! 

Taken from my 4th published collection of flash fiction

Available from Amazon

Kafka's Wound

"Kafka's Wound" is a multi-media collaboration on a new Arts Council funded digital site called The Space, hosted by the London Review of Books and partnering with Brunel University.

At its heart is a literary essay on Kafka by Will Self, but there are lots of links embedded behind icons that take you to the work of other artistic practitioners, in the form of photographs, music, animations, art works and videos all commissioned for this piece. It's very exciting, a magical mystery tour and well worth a look. And deeply flawed of course...

Self's essay is quite brilliant. A confessed non-academic literary critic, it's more of his personal relationship to the writing of Kafka, clearly a seminal influence for him. As Kafka is for me. And like me, Self eschews trying to analyse Kafka's work, as sublime and uncanny and beyond any forensic authorial dissection. In my case, Kafka is perhaps the sole writer I have never read with an analytical eye. For where his voice is otherworldly, mine is lumpenly rooted in the material world around me; where his words are lean and taught, mine look to bludgeon each other into insensibility.

Self points out that "Kafkaesque" is THE adjective that prevailed into our modern idiom from literary modernism, more than "Proustian" or "Joycean". And Self also lambasts lazy thinkers who all too easily resort to the adjective for anything intricately labyrinthine. He suggests that Kafka's representation of the individual overwhelmed and disoriented by faceless bureaucracies and unseen legalistic powers, was perhaps only supplanted by George Orwell's depiction of Totalitarian states putting the jackboot and the granite face on to these restrictive, oppressive forces.

         

But I feel Kafka's vision is back in place of primacy as Orwell's dread regimes crumble away and the technology of the internet atomises us all amid a welter of discombobulating data and information. With the Totalitarian regime, everything was prescribed, limits were in place, the eyes of the State assumed to be everywhere; the reason I struggled with "1984" was that the power of the State was so all-encompassing, I never believed Winston Smith had a chance of getting away with his transgressions. Hence the book had no tension for me. But with Kafka's "The Trial" and "The Castle", the forces of oppression are like ectoplasm. They are powerfully indistinct, chokingly nebulous, so the individual never knows at any moment exactly where they stand and that is far more punishing to the mind.  I feel we are back at that point now, not at the hand of any government nor overtly oppressive agency. Merely the power of the free market.

There are no limits to production and consumption of virtual goods. But with that bombardment of data and information online and in digital form, how do we know we are getting the bits we want or need? We may be missing something in the deluging torrents that pass us so quickly. Even if we have the 'right' text at our fingertips, we may be so desperate to look out for the next piece in the jigsaw, we only read it cursorily, missing things buried inside.

And this is what I feel with this whole project of "Kafka's Wound". The essay at its heart is as I said, brilliant. Initially every time I clicked on an asterisk, it brought me an instant pop-up footnote or explanation which was convenient. But soon it brought up a video, an animation or a photo. As was designed for the whole project, to function like a treasure hunt of association. Yet in doing so, each time I was taken out of Self's essay. There was simply no way of being able to read and digest it as a whole. I was, at my own clicking fingers, bombarded with tangential connections and associative flavours. Narrative was utterly fractured. Now this might work well with a fiction piece, giving it further layer upon layer of meaning. But for an essay, a tightly structured throughline of logic and argument, even one as non-linear as by Will Self, such diversions become digressions and detours which shatter any coherency for the reader. Argument and logic proceed by linear steps. The multi-media egg hunt is anything but linear.

I would welcome such a multi-media, non-linear approach to a work of fiction

30 Day Book Challenge

I'd like to credit Becky (@stupidgirl45 on Twitter) for this idea which I have nicked and adapted for my own. You can read her original here

Day 1: Favourite Book: "Hard Boiled Wonderland And The End Of the World" by Murakami. An extraordinary book unlike no other I've read, in that it has two entirely different narrative worlds winding down to meet one another. One is a fairly straight forward Japanese noir thriller, the other a semi-mystical dystopia. Mind-expanding

Day 2: Least favourite book: Oh man too many to mention. But probably "Demo" by Alison Miller which is seemingly about political protest to the Iraq War, but actually is about a couple of Trustafarians slumming it for a bit

Day 3: Book that makes me laugh out loud: quite a competitive little category this one, but the late Steve Tesich's "Karoo" narrowly edges out Steve Toltz's "A Fraction Of The Whole". Both have a laugh on almost every page, but Saul Karoo is a more satisfying character to guide us through the laughs

Day 4: Book that makes you cry: I'm a geezer so I don't cry period. Can honestly say I don't think I've cried at a book, though I've moistened at the odd film or so. My father however claims that as a young child I laughed at the death of Bambi's mother. I have no way of verifying this

Day 5: Book you wish you could live in: "Sum - 40 Tales of the Afterlife" a wonderful small book positing 40 imaginative scenarios for life and post-life. Not only does it give the brain endless food for thought, but I'm rather taken with its notion that there is life after death, so yes please I'd like to reside there...

Day 6: Favourite young adult book: I'm sure they weren't called YA books when I was a lad. I didn't read books as a boy anyway except Asterix and Tintin. I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'd recommend "Watchman" though it's not really about YA themes

Day 7: Book that you can quote/recite: Even though I have a good memory that got me through my exams by memorising stuff by rote, I would actually have to apply myself to learn quotes which I don't tend to do with my reading for pleasure. I never remember jokes either. But I did use to religiously (sic) read Camus "The Outsider" once a year for about ten years, so after repeated readings I managed to commit the first line to memory "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday I can't be sure"

Day 8: Book that scares you: What in a treehouse of terror sort of way, or the horror of knowing that it ever got published? Let's go with the former shall we? I don't scare that easily just through the power of art - I rarely surrender my disbelief, but the Jo Nesbo crime thriller "The Snowman" which I'm reading now is pretty neat on that front. For non-fiction, FBI Profiler Robert Ressler's "Whoever Fights Monsters" is pretty chilling in parts

Day 9: Book that makes me sick: Again, an extreme reaction I'm not really given to. I can tell you a film that I've tried to watch on several occasions and never made it past the first third and that's Polanski's "Repulsion". I think if I picked up any reality TV star's autobiography, penned at the tender age of 20 for the Tv tie in, that would make me upchuck. But this is supposition. Same thing Kenneth Branagh's autobiography (age 24), but I never read that either

Day 10: Book that changed your life: Okay, I don't do self-help right! But returning to Camus' "The Outsider", it was the first proper book that I read of my own volition and set me on my devouring course of literature. I'd been tipped off to it by a cooler older cousin who said check out the song "Killing An Arab" by the Cure and then read the Camus book, both of which I dutifully did and have never looked back

Day 11: Book from your favourite author: Kafka's "The Castle" sadly incomplete as Kafka ordered all his work to be destroyed on his death, but a tantalising piece of writing all the same. The author's control of both the fates of his characters and the journey undertaken by the reader are so deft and light. Mesmerising

Day 12: Book that is most like your life: Dostoevsky's "Notes from the Underground". I'm saying no more...

Day 13: Book who's main character is like you: I know how Meursault feels in "The Outsider" but I'd stop short of killing someone, plus I stay out of the sun... Probably one of Michel Houllebeq's misanthropes. #lowselfesteem

Day 14: Book whose main characters you want to marry: Actually I'd have to say my own character Karen Dash from "A,B&E". She is the strongest woman I know and she would keelhaul me every single day of our married life and I would be eternally grateful to her for doing so

Fairy Tale

I have contributed a story to Eight Cuts Gallery latest curation

The story is called The Eighteenth Brumaire Of Peter Sclemihl and is a dialectical materialist deconstruction of the fairy tale. Hopefully its funny, challenging and excoriating.

The Eight Cuts Gallery concept is a fascinating one, offering a new way to showcase fiction online, in that like an art gallery you can wander through in many different paths, not having to plod in linear fashion. There are also visual art and music tie ins with the literature.

Some of my favourite writers are part of the same exhibition, so check out

alison wells

penny goring

cody james

and to discover some writers new to me.

Go pay a visit and let me know what you think.