On Writing

Just writing this to remember 2 short stories which were lost recently. Data loss is textbook and should be avoided, but there you go – it still goes on. I don't contribute to the blog often but these were intended for upload.

One was called ELESHA, completed, and the other was called FORGOT IT, LOST IT, DOESN’T WORK, almost completed. About 4/5 hours, maybe, between them, in 4 or five sessions.

ELESHA was about a girl who spotted a guy in the post office while cashing her giro. She decided to hit on him outside, after weighing up the ups and downs of spending all her money in one go on food and drink in order to get him back to her flat and into her bed. What the would-be reader wouldn’t have known until the end is that the guy was in fact her ex boyfriend.

FORGOT IT, LOST IT, DOESN’T WORK was about a numbnuts in work who was hopeless at his job, and these 3 phrases were the only thing he ever said, not as honest excuses, but as lame explanations. He drove long distance to collect something and drove all the way back without even realising that he hadn’t collected it. He also lashed perfectly working goods in to the trash. This sketch was told from the boss’s perspective, who was in a state of shock that someone could be so thick.

Both are gone forever. It was annoying at first, until weighed against the other heavyweight loss, suffered way back in my teens. That is the book DREAM KIDS, over 200 pages-plus handwritten, a whole and complete manuscript lost unto the sands of time. A WHOLE AND COMPLETE MANUSCRIPT, lost unto the sands of time. And with it, part of me; a boy who didn’t know what he knows now; a boy whose only vital stand with a paper and pen in the raging throes of a dislocated adolescence did not even have chance to be read, by himself.