I started yesterday to write a short story. I listed it as a kind of finger exercise. I am experimenting with writing first drafts directly into my blog to try and shame me into finishing them (if I don’t it’s no humiliation, I suppose, given the subject of the blog). The story was a transposition of my struggles with M at the moment, intended as the transcript of a conversation, not disimilar to a collection of Ivan Klima’s which centred around lovers conversations.M has found this bog. (No, I have never told her about it but tangentially, guardedly, same as with everyone else I have told, maybe three people.) She knew about it. She has come in sometimes when I’m writing and From clicking off a site too quickly or not wanting to be seen to click from a site too quickly, she has figured something was going on, and even read M, M, M, this initial she hates now to see or think about since she thinks I must be writing nasty things about her. I tell her I’m writing about my own mindstate, and putting my thoughts and ideas into context, but of course, that doesn’t wash.

I came back yesterday to a screen on this, what I consider to be my personal computer, showing a Polish text message screen for free text messages on, I think, T-Mobile. To know that somebody had been here with all this detritus on my desk was like having been robbed. This is my study. My room, which I lock every day, and I don’t like anybody coming in here, let alone M’s friends. She had been staying at her Polish friend’s, a girl who has broken up with her boyfriend some weeks ago and is having a hard time, having moved to a dump of a place which got robbed just after she moved in. Worse than this intrusion, though, as the fact that all the tabs I had left open on Firefox on my sleeping Mac had been closed for this site (I always hate it when M closes my tabs, something she has always done quite often). I tried to cast my mind back on what had been open, basically a lot of autism forums and e-mail and stuff. I can’t remember if I thought of my blogs, both of which were open and logged on. I did think of the Word document I had open in which I was describing some reveries about my students’ beautiful nurse. This was neglectful, I suppose, but then perhaps I had seen it as a root into conversation, should she come by them, since I had intended to explain a little more my exact relationship with women, in my fantasy life especially.

I have been thinking more about this recently. Interpreting my reveries rather than just letting them go by me all the while. What are all these reveries about Corinne, our works chef? About other women? Going back all the way to old Caz Stanley! A biker chick (and her occasional twin?!) I used to meet up with when I was a Ducati-obsessed 17 year old.

The story was going well. I was thinking maybe it was planning that got me bogged down all the time. I need to think of a story and write it as a matter of priority there and then before it dies. If I cannot do that it inevitably does die, because it expands and gets too involved, too intricate, too schematic, too known. It no longer interests me.

(It was maybe this line of thinking, running continuously in the back of my head, that got me thinking today of how I should write reviews of those books I never managed to write, bringing them alive a little, condensing them, serving the function of the revision guide pastiches I was planning to write and send off to publishers one time, trying to ape too certain reviewer’s prejudices, and writing many and varied reviews, giving different takes on things and even reviewing those different versions of the same book that are always competing in my mind. I even thought about how readers on reading these reviews would reconstruct the book for themselves and imagine the positions of the characters and their interactions. Though I of course despise these books about how to bluff your way through books you haven’t read, I do nonetheless harbour some defensive vestiges of an idea I held on to to console myself back in the days of Kidderminster College, One I remember dwelling on about the novel, Hard Times, that gives this blog its name, that thinking about a book of which you know a little makes you take a stance from first principles, makes you think, and can even edify to a degree in much the same way as in reading the book itself

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