You Can’t Put A Price On Love

This was written for an exercise in Stephen King’s On Writing. This is not the sort of writing I usually do, and I think it shows, but nonetheless I had a lot of fun with this one.

22/10/2009

Day Off

An abandoned short story that I thought too dull to be worth persevering with.

22/10/2009

Untitled Novel – Chapter 1

This is another interesting idea that I would like to revisit, though perhaps in a different format. This was the sort of idea that required a) intensive planning and b) an engaging protagonist. Unfortunately, this has neither. It also has a fairly misguided subplot that apes the thriller/crime genre, which is perhaps outside of a few classic private eye books my least familiar area as a reader.

27/10/2009

Wendy & The Pessimist’s Club – Chapter 1 [Unfinished]

This was a project inspired by Wendy, a short prose sketch I wrote featuring a talking, top hat-wearing bear. It was planned as a kind of inversion of the archetypal children’s novel, though for some reason discontinued quite early on in its gestation. I still rather like the idea, and I do have plenty of notes on what was to happen throughout the rest of the piece, so I’m not ruling out returning to this piece in the future.

27/10/2009

Ham

A short story that I finished towards of the end of my first year at Durham University. The challenge was to write a story inspired by the word “ham”. I could do with rewriting this one of these days(!), though I still remain quite fond of it.

22/10/2009

Think Of Life

Presumably a misguided attempt to write a Joycean ’story of the moment’ (technical term, that), but I’m still fond of the idea.

22/10/2009

The Keen Observer – Chapter 2

One of my favourite chapters to come out of this project, and one that I like to think holds some interest as a standalone piece.

22/10/2009

The Keen Observer – Chapter 1

This was my first attempt at NaNoWriMo, and until this year the furthest I’d ever written for an individual project before giving up. A lot of this material is substandard (as could be expected from the ‘quantity over quality’ maxim under which it was written) but there are some chapters of this which I really love.

22/10/2009

Wendy

Another of my much-loved ‘prose sketches’, again touching upon a fear of growing up. This provided the initial inspiration for Wendy and the Pessimist’s Club.

22/10/2009

Mr. Bleaney

Originally a piece of A2 Coursework, this story is a “transformation” of the second poem from Larkin’s book The Whitsun Weddings. I still believe this is the strongest short story I’ve written.

22/10/2009