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Addict
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Aylesbury, UK
Posts: 150
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Novel beginning
I've decided to try an write a longer, if not full-length piece instead of short stories for a change. This is the beginning of it... enjoy!
‘He turned the volume up on his stereo, letting the soothing sounds of various metal bands drown him in their songs of hatred and greed. He couldn’t remember why he felt bad or why his stomach was churning over, but he knew there was a reason. Why couldn’t he just sit up and stop paying attention to all the crap around him. Why couldn’t he just stand up and shout till his throat hurt like he wanted to, or walk over to him and punch him square in the face until his nose broke. These were the things he wanted, the things he longed to do but alas instead he just sat there, up to his knees in self pity looking out the window at the world that could have been…’
I sighed under my breath. It was another one of the stories I’d been sent by a self pro-claimed ‘aspiring writer’ wanting to use me as his test subject. I just laughed to myself and threw it into the rubbish bin next to me. The last thing anyone wanted to read was another piece of angst from a bored middle class teenager. So where does this leave me? I’m sat in a coffee-house sipping my massimo mocha latte… whatever it’s called and reading through the rest of the hopefuls. The world was passing by the windows as I looked out, whiling away the hours. A mother with her two children, pushing the buggy with the younger, more docile child held within. All the while making sure the other child did not accidentally smother it with his jumper that he’d got tired of holding. It was a scene any family man saw, the bickering between mother and son, the love of the mother shining throughout, not always visible but undeniably there.
On the other corner there was the other side of life; a young girl of about 10 years disguising herself as 16 or older. This was the saddening thing about what was happening today, people growing up too fast – childhood not existing anymore. I smirked to myself, It’d always amused me how up until the age of about 25 you strive to make yourself look older, to try and be accepted by the people you saw in magazines and on TV. Then suddenly, you became almost neurotic in thinking you looked too old, you suddenly wanted to capture the youth and childhood you had thrown away so easily in early life. I’d never really grown up, or so I was always being told. Parents, friends, teachers and later professors and bosses always asking, ‘When are you going to grow up?” To these people I always gave the same reply; “Never, I hope.”
I pushed my musings to one side as I saw the family walk past the café and continue down the street towards the subway. The bag next to me however hadn’t moved, and was full with more short stories and reviews from the fan base, all asking for critique and ‘insight into the mind of a writer’. It was this very thing in itself that annoyed me, the way that I was supposed to be deified for using my imagination. Everyone is capable of writing, all it takes is time and a good imagination. Hell, I was far from well trained in the matter – I’d been studying chemistry at Birmingham Uni. for Christ sake! I sighed to myself and picked up the next folder, before re-ordering my fourth coffee of the day.
‘Dear Mr. Stevens.’… I had made several books by now, some of which this person has read other wise my opinion would be nothing. Surely he must realise it’s spelt ‘Stephens’? The mind boggles, it really does. I carried on reading regardless. ‘… I ask for your advice on a piece I have written. It is a short I wrote during a troublesome time and this was my way of dealing with it.
- Mark Hallcourt, aged 15’
‘I was cold. So very cold. The warmth of the world had been sucked away from me, the emotion-vampire draining me of my spirit. I sat on my bed curled in a ball, lying there confused I wondered about what was happening in the world outside me. Friends that were passing me by, I hated myself, I hated my parents, hated everyone in fact. I wish the pain would just go away…’
“Oh bollocks to this!” I shouted, disturbing some of the other drinkers and making one old man nearly spill his cocoa. “Trouble in paradise ay John?” A smirk blazoned across my face. The same old cliché’s everyday, yet somehow with him they never became tiresome. “Still repeating what you say are we Tommy?” I swivelled around in my chair, it was one of those steel one’s with wooden latticework, very artistic but made your back hurt something chronic. He was dressed just as he always was; the familiar baggy, dark blue jeans, ragged grey T-shirt and battered brown duffel coat. It was his uniform of a type, you never saw him without it. It was what people like him were destined to always wear. “How goes the house hunt Tommy?” The smirk was still in place, the joke we always shared when I saw him.
“How goes the diet?” he retorted, his own face now smiling along with me.
“Ah touché,” I replied, looking down to see that he was right, I could stand to lose a bit of weight. Just being a writer wasn’t a particularly physical job, at least it wasn’t for me anyway.
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"Take a look at your life and no wonder you're so sad. Y'all put up with more sh*t than a colostomy bag"
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