So, inspired in no small way by Double Word Score’s unemployment bucket list, what are my plans?

1. Get a job

There is a small part of me that would love to indulge myself and wallow in the unemployed life, to wander around the flat in my dressing gown and get reacquainted with daytime TV. However, I know that the Not-Working Guilt will pretty soon set in. Plus, wandering around in my dressing gown will not pay the bills, unless there is a niche subscription website for that stuff.

So, what sort of job? As it stands, I’m going to look into two options. First – The Perfect Job, where I use all my skills in a fun, creative environment and get paid handsomely for my time. Second (and far, far more likely) – The Lesser Paying But Non-Stressful Job – If I can’t get the right job, then I’d rather take a pay cut and do something that will cover the bills, but not take over my life. Who needs a disposable income anyway?

2. Be a househusband

Well, sort of. I’ll try my best. Another means of fighting the Not-Working Guilt will be to be useful around the house. I am no Domestic God, but I’m sure I can do some washing, cleaning and cooking. I don’t want to become one of those horrible guys who lives off his partner without lifting a finger himself. Also, I think I’ll look good in a pinny.

3. Read books

Without any sort of disposable income I’m going to have to make my own entertainment. I have a huge pile of unread books. Rather than just visiting bookshops and adding to that pile, I shall try to work through them. I will label this ‘self-improvement’. The knowledge gained will yield results in pub quizzes, should I have enough money for a pint to nurse through proceedings.

4. Watch baseball

In a rare case of perfect timing, the baseball season will be starting around the time I may (or may not, depending on future developments) be starting my Imposed Vacation. Those heady early days of the season will be a tonic, and will help my fantasy baseball efforts no end.

5. Write a book

The aforementioned Great Office Novel may get written. Or perhaps something less obvious and clichéd. Either way, my efforts will probably never see the light of day, but will hopefully keep me entertained. I may even attempt my own personal NaNoWriMo, just without all those social elements. And not in November, obviously.

So, what else can I get up to, if the working world decides that I’m just not welcome anymore?

Image from the Nationaal Archief via Flickr

And while I didn’t write for long, maybe an hour or so, it was an incredibly productive session. Somehow, I managed to get over 1,000 words of a story down. I have no idea if it was any good – I was afraid to read it back right away, to jinx it or shatter whatever confidence I gained from actually writing something. I thought it best to leave it a week, and then return to the story with fresh eyes. But, 1,000 words! Never mind the quality, feel the width!

I think what helped, is that as much as I don’t really set aside any time to write, I do think about potential story ideas a lot. This might be when I idle away a lunchtime, or when I pop to the shops, or when I am travelling somewhere. I might just spend five minutes mulling a story or a character over on each occasion, but it all adds up.

So, when I did actually sit down to write, I had access to a lot of material in my head. It was then a case of getting it all down in a vaguely coherent way.

This may not be the most efficient way to work, but until I engineer the time, it seems like as good a way as any. Anyway, I’m sure the lack of time is an excuse. I can think I’m giving my thoughts time and space to breathe and grow, but perhaps I should just be getting on with it, anytime, anywhere. Those stories are no good to anybody stuck in my head.

Image by Brandon Christopher Warren via Flickr

So, do you write fiction? And do you fancy joining us?

If so, please leave a comment below, and I’ll add you to the first email, which I plan to send out later this week.

These probably go without saying, but I think it wise to start this enterprise according to the following principles:

1. Each member contributes both their own fiction and feedback on others’ work.

2. No sharing of other people’s work outside the email group.

3. This isn’t a big, heavy deal for anyone.

4. Be nice.

Anyway, it could be a fun activity, or failing that, an opportunity to laugh at my attempts at short story writing. I hope some of you join up.

Image from the Nationaal Archief via Flickr

But now, we have the glorious internet! We don’t have to worry about writing half a million words of genius, or finding an agent, or a publisher. We can just scribble a few words down and BLAM! We foist it upon an unsuspecting public!

But, then again, dare we do that?

I’ve been working on some short stories lately (hence the title above), but have absolutely no idea if they are any good or not. Clearly, this ol’ internet is a great medium for sharing writing and getting feedback. But that is kind of scary, isn’t it?

What if the stories are downright awful, and are greeted with disdain, or even worse, silence?

Or what if they are in fact works of God-like genius, and putting them in the public domain will reduce my chances of getting a great big multi-million pound advance?

Don’t worry, I’m well aware that the former is more likely than the latter.

And if I do go ahead and put up some stories online, should they go up unadorned, or should I try to present them in an interesting manner? Why not make the most of the medium?

The best example of this I’ve come across is Jennifer Egan’s blog, which I found via the New York Times’ profile. She not only publishes the start of the story, but gives it a context – where it was written, the inspiration behind it, the music that soundtracked it. I think it is a brilliant idea and a wonderful site. It certainly points towards one future for fiction, and fiction writers.

So, do you publish stories online? Or do you write fiction, but opt to keep it out of the public domain, or at least off the internet? What have been your experiences as a fiction writer engaging with the internet? And finally (if you’re not sick of all these questions already), have you seen fiction presented in an interesting way on the internet?

Cheers! Now, I’m off to fantasise about my perfect writer’s desk…

Image by Sacha Bertrand via Flickr

“I’m a writer.”

This is not going to end well. If they genuinely are, we are consumed by a combination of admiration and envy. If it turns out they write blurbs for catalogues or other such hackery, then we are beyond annoyed.

After all, we write. We write regularly, on all manner of subjects. And we care about what we write.

But does that make us writers?As a kid I loved putting together my own comics, magazines and newspapers. I loved writing them. But I loved the production of them just as much. It was a wonderful sensation to have a real, actual artefact in my hands, which I had created. Obviously, being a kid, the production values were not high. We’re talking about a few pages stapled together. As I got a little older, it may have been typed, with some Letraset thrown in for headlines. But I loved the whole process.

As an adult, I’ve fallen for blogging. I enjoy writing, but I enjoy it far more for it being presented on a professional-looking website. It is an integral part of a tangible product, as opposed to being hidden away in a notebook. It is my grown-up stapled comic book, or badly typed magazine.

And people actually read it! Not many, I grant you. But those who do, and who comment, appear to be lovely, interesting and interested people. And people who write too. Really well. This is the audience I never had as a kid.

But does that make me a writer?

Or should I get caught up in believing that to be a writer, you should actually be published, or at least paid to write? I’ve written stuff as part of my job, but it was hardly my heartfelt life’s work. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a writer, as such, professionally.

But is a regular(ish) blog evidence enough to be a writer? It feels a little pretentious to view it that way, doesn’t it? There are great blogs and great bloggers out there. But there are also some truly awful, lazy ones. And my suspicion is that blogging is just too easy for bloggers to be considered ‘writers’ also. How long does it take to set a blog up – five minutes?

Reading The Guardian’s rules for writers it seems that proper, successful, real writers consider hard work, persistence and talent to be key tenets of writing. I’m not convinced I fulfil any of those.

Hard work. I’ll often just throw something up on here. I’m sure this blog is littered with typos and errors. My arguments are not always coherently thought-through and presented (this very post is a shining example). I hardly research. I barely edit. I spend far too much time coveting stationery, or fantasising about my perfect writing desk. I read more than most, but I still fall into the trap of reading rubbish. I’ll just as soon pick up one of London’s many, terrible, free magazines as a great novel.

Persistence. My updates are sporadic at best. I have a plum gig writing a column for BaseballGB, with a hugely supportive webmaster, yet often, shamefully, I let it slip. Here, on my own blog, I veer from one subject to the next, with little thought for my poor readers. I rarely see through any grand plans. I have ideas buzzing around my head for stories, yet I never get anywhere with them.

Talent. I’ve written some good stuff. I’ve written some dross. Beyond that, we’ll leave this one, as I think we’ve had enough self-pitying for one day.

So, I wouldn’t label myself a writer just yet. I doubt I would even label myself a blogger. I write, I blog, but that is as far as it goes right now, until I truly throw myself into either. If I truly throw myself into either. Maybe I’ll just be happy with a shiny product. A blog, that I created.

Of course, I could quit getting hung up on semantics, and just get on with it.

But if I am a writer, I think I am because I have an audience. A small, perfectly formed audience. Thank you for reading.

Image via Flickr by Miss Pupik

So, to bring you up to speed on my Hemingway adventure, on the advice of this parish’s Steven Harris, I picked up the complete short stories late last year in one of those beautiful Everyman hardback volumes, using my Borders vouchers just before the place went belly-up. Then, for Christmas, as part of an array of writing-inspired gifts, my wonderful Significant Other gave me Ernest Hemingway on writing, a brilliant little book compiling many of Hemingway’s thoughts on writing and the life of the writer. So…I’ve been keeping up.

Last week I popped into one of those strange discount bookshops, that sometimes have some incredible bargains and other times have nothing but hopeless junk. This time, I got lucky. I picked up the slim The Old Man and the Sea, the story that won Hemingway a Nobel Prize for Literature.

My verdict? Well, I loved it. It is one of those stories that will stay with me a long time, hopefully forever.

And I used the word ‘story’ rather than ’book’ quite deliberately.

Here we have a real tale, a fable even. Here we have an old man, a young boy, a fish and little else. Everything is honed down and necessary, like a good story should be. In its 100 or so pages there is no room for flowery prose, or padding. And while it is set in contemporary times, the 1950s, it feels like the kind of story passed from generation to generation, as old as the act of fishing itself.

The one concession to the modern-day is baseball. Oh yes, there’s another reason why I loved reading this, apart from Hemingway’s prose and its brevity (I do love a good short book to rip through). The Old Man’s mind often wanders to baseball, and in particular the great Joe DiMaggio, wondering how the Yankees’ great centre fielder would deal with the Old Man’s situation, being the son of a fisherman himself.

So, concise, timeless and it namechecks baseball. It’s as if this was written for me. Don’t you just love getting that feeling from a book?

I haven’t read a whole lot around the book yet, but it is clear that this is a book that divides opinion. There seems to have been a fair bit of criticism in terms of its symbolism, and if it veers too far from the writer’s famed realism.

I’ll just let the man himself reply:

“No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. … I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things”.

This is, of course, forgetting that you can get all this, and more, from good fiction. I can find out just as much, and be just as moved, as I would be by a true-life story.

This was certainly the case with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. After reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, which features Fitzgerald around the time The Great Gatsby was written, the novel itself seemed a sensible next stop. Here I could perhaps flesh out that 1920s world, and see if Hemingway was right about this being Fitzgerald’s best work.

It did also help that the book is my Significant Other’s favourite. She has pretty good taste (well, she lives with me, right? OK, apart from living with me, she has good taste) and I doubted she’s recommend a book I wouldn’t go for.

You’ll be pleased to hear, dear reader, I wasn’t disappointed.

Here is a wonderful snapshot of 1920s decadence. Here was that sense of freedom and abandon after the First World War. Here was the truly modern(ist?) world, with its pleasures and its pitfalls. The book chronicles the recklessness of the age, which would eventually lead to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression (although obviously Fitzgerald was not to know of this when he was writing the book). People wallow in excess, on money that appears from nowhere, with no foundation, a modern Gomorrah, heading for disaster. Sounds familiar, eh?

Money is no object, and with Gatsby, he appears to have magicked it from thin air. The allusion is that he has gained his fortune by nefarious means (perhaps he is a con artist, perhaps a bootlegger, perhaps a fixer of the World Series). But the great and good are more than happy to accept his charming self, and more importantly are happy to see his money spent on their own enjoyment, at his countless parties. No questions asked.

I found Gatsby such a fascinating character as he does not seem of this (that?) world. He is a mirage. He seems to have appeared from nowhere, and can disappear just as quickly.

In the early passages of the book, Gatsby is but a mythical presence. The narrator, Nick Carraway, hears of him but does not meet him, despite living next-door. When he first catches sight of him, he vanishes. When they first meet face-to-face, Nick does not immediately realise who he is talking to.

Here is a character who is dropped into the ‘normal’ world and seems to unsettle everything. Yet, by the end, on the surface, normality has returned, or at least the unrest has been suppressed. This lends Gatsby an almost ghostly,dream-like air. For the main characters, to the outside world at least, it is as if nothing has ever happened. The status quo is restored.

He is soon forgotten by high society. They move on. Those who he genuinely touched will at least pretend to forget him, or wish that they could. Only Nick remains to mark and remember Gatsby. And so, Gatsby starts and ends a myth. He lives only in Nick’s words and memory.

Was Gatsby an illusion? Just as all that surrounded him was, and as the riches of that time were? It seems that way.

Hmm. So, on with the post. And I really don’t understand why I’m rambling and procrastinating as my problem is…I just don’t have enough time to write and to blog. Don’t worry readers, this isn’t some bizarre farewell, or unnecessary moan (hopefully not, anyway, but it is Monday…) but I thought it was something worth addressing, as I’m sure it is something that affects many of us from time to time.

In that ideal world we all dream of, I’d have hours to while away, honing sentences, crafting punctuation and creating works of literary art. I love the Oscar Wilde quote, “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.” Oh, to have the luxury of that time!

It’s not that I lack ideas, either (‘then why the tired post about lacking time to blog?’ I hear you cry!). I know I’m really lucky in that sense, in that I’ve yet to suffer from any sort of real writer’s block. In the shower, on my commute, at my desk at work, here, there and everywhere, more often than not I’m mulling over ideas for blog posts, or stories or other things I might write. But where to find the time to actually research and then write the bloomin’ things?

Work is a necessary evil. Home life is lovely, really lovely, but awfully busy. Do I lack the discipline and organisation to find the time to write? Or should I scale back outside commitments? Then again, if you should ‘write what you know’, then you should probably get your share of living in, right?

And when I do cram in some writing time, do I give it enough attention? Blogging makes it easy, nay irresistible, to just throw something together and throw it out there. I might snatch a few minutes at the start or end of the working day, or during my lunch hour, or when I get a sit-down of an evening. But do I really give my best? Is there enough quality control? (‘No!’ cries the last exasperated reader left). If I had more time, would I have cut down on the questions in this post?

What do you reckon? How do you find the time to write?

Photo from Nick Webb via Flickr.

I thought I ought to acknowledge this, particularly as, for the first time, stationery got a few mentions on the blog, in my post on writing.

First, there was the Wall Street Journal article, How to Write a Great Novel. Reading through it, it was clear that stationery is pretty central for many writers. It’s not just about scribbling on any old sheet of paper – each writer has their own needs and wants, when it comes to what to actually write on, and write with.

Orhan Pamuk writes in graph-paper notebooks. Hilary Mantel always carries a notebook. Kazuo Ishiguro collects notes in a binder. Michael Ondaatje has a thing for notebooks from Muji. Dan Chaon writes on colour-coded note cards.

Margaret Atwood is perhaps less fussy, scribbling away on napkins, restaurant menus, in the margins of newspapers. (Interlude: Working that way reminds me of an interview with Elvis Costello I read. He said that despite buying many notebooks with the intention of using them for lyric writing, they would often be left unused, as he would end up scrawling his ideas on whatever pieces of paper came to hand. He clearly can be in my Stationery Fan Club, as his intentions are good, but it is interesting that he and Atwood are not tied to a particular method for physically writing their work.)

I was then delighted to see that the world of WordPress has a few stationery fans too. Frances Bean commented, “There was nothing like a fresh compilation notebook and the possibility it holds.” There is definitely something special about that new notebook, ready to be filled. Sometimes it almost seems a shame to write in a good notebook. Almost.

So why do I love stationery? From a very, very young age I enjoyed having paper and pencils. Apparently, before I could write, I would scribble on page upon page, convinced I had written a story, and would then ‘read’ it back to my parents. When I was a little older I’d spend hours writing in A4 pads. Sometimes I’d write stories, sometimes I’d make up football scores, sometimes I’d make up entire discographies of imaginary bands. Paper and pencil was a means of channelling my imagination. I was as happy with a new exercise book as I would be with a bag of sweets.

As an adult I’ve continued to enjoy using stationery, especially notebooks. I’m a real sucker for Moleskine notebooks and have completely fallen for their marketing and stories of famous writers and artists using them in the past. I find them wonderfully tactile, sturdy and just right for carrying wherever I go. They are a bit of luxury, but hardly an extravagant one.

I can also be quite fussy with pens, although so far I’ve shamefully stuck to the disposable type. One day I’ll find the right ‘proper’ pen. One day.

My Significant Other shares this love, luckily for me. We’ll happily mooch around the huge Staples superstore near where we live, or smaller shops we find, like the pen shop we came across whilst holidaying in Eastbourne. As silly as it sounds, enjoying stationery has been a lovely, fun thing for us to share.

I suppose when it comes to me actually writing, with this blog or whatever else, I’m far more likely to use my laptop than pen and paper. But my notebooks are still really important to me. I enjoy having something to hand to jot an idea in, or write a list, or to simply play around with an idea. And there is something more satisfying for me to use a notebook for this, rather than a laptop, or smart phone (not that I have one), when I’m out and about. I look forward to, many years from now, looking through those notebooks and reading those snatches of my thoughts, those snapshots of a past me.

So, do you covet particular items of stationery? If you use pen and paper, are you fussy about the pen and paper you use? Does it depend on what you’re writing? Or where? Or do you think this is all stuff and nonsense?

Photo from mrbill via Flickr