Last week I posted one of my entries for the Dazed & Confused lyric based short story competition. If you missed that bit of fried gold click here. Here is my second entry based on a Bowie lyric.

It was the third weekend of the month which meant we were all skint and smoking roll ups outside the Legion Social Club, hidden at the top of the high street round the back of the church. The reason we were there was two-fold. At least one of us was banned from each of the pubs along the high street and the Legion served up a pint for cheaper than anywhere else, it cost me more money to open the fridge door. The Legion was a lot more reserved than most of the watering holes available elsewhere and our presence had earned us a nickname – The Young Dudes.

I walked in first, chucking my dog end down and catching it under my brogue as I stepped up to the door, behind me in formation were Freddy, Rex and Lucy, who were possibly my only friends in the world. I didn’t stop moving until I got to the bar and greeted the barmaid with the same greeting I gave her every time I led the way.
‘Alright Wendy, how’s things?’
I don’t really want to go into how I became a member of the Legion and yet managed to escape fighting in the war, you can just draw your own conclusion and judge me for it, most people do.
‘Yeah, can’t complain Billy boy, got some M&S men’s shirts doing the rounds if you’re interested, back of a lorry, you know the drill’.
‘Nah, sorry Wendy, got no money and no need, I spend the working week in overalls, thanks though’.
Wendy got our drinks. We always ordered the same and it was always the four of us, that was just how it was. I handed the exact change over to Wendy, we took our respective pint glasses and headed for the table in the corner that was always available to us when we arrived, as though they were expecting it.
‘What are we doing for your birthday then Billy?’
‘Nothing’ I said, ‘I don’t want anymore birthdays, this will probably be my last one’.
‘Don’t start with all that bollocks again, there’s nothing wrong with having no direction at 25’
‘Yes there is Rex, it’s pathetic, when my old man was twenty five he had two kids, a mortgage and was second in command at the factory, what have I got?’
‘We are a different generation, what happened with that job on the paper?’
‘They want someone with smarts, like a degree and all that shit’
‘University of life mate’ said Freddy, raising his glass to me. I lifted my pint to drink but couldn’t help staring straight down it like the barrel of a gun, and then beyond it at his funky little boat race, which glistened from his burrows of acne, it made me a bit sick.

Suddenly the television blurted to life, it wasn’t something I had ever noticed before, and it cut the usual hum of old voices like scissors to puppet strings. It meant something big was happening. I was reminded of school, and how a big old set would be wheeled in on an aluminium frame to show us a documentary on osmosis, to keep us dumb and spellbound for a little while longer, to stop us progressing. The television man was illuminated by fires, there were shadows and people running back and forth behind him carrying blunt objects, smashing up pig cars, it was all a bit Lord of the Flies. There were mentions of a protest descending into riots, but it wasn’t reasoned and casual, they were blaming the youth, saying we were juvenile delinquent wrecks.
The rest of the Legion sat low in their chairs with goggle eyes and dropped jaws, they couldn’t believe the disrespect of it all, and for some reason they thought that we were involved.
‘You’re lucky I’m not thirty years younger’ one of them shouted, ‘I’d punch your lights out’.
They didn’t mean any harm, we were all they knew of youth, we carried the news, it was sad in a way. We were drawn to be with them, to sit in there, and it wasn’t all down to the cheap beer, there was an essential Britishness, which you just don’t get anywhere else, it’s reasoned and it’s wisdom and we knew it.

I finished my pint and ordered Lucy up to the bar, I refused to be left dry. Lucy was more one of the boys than any of us, she could kick like a mule and drink like a fish, and often combined the two as a night wound down. It was beneficial, it showed that I didn’t have no hope with birds, because I had a mate who was one.

We kept drinking until the concrete walls started to fold in on me, and I got freaked out. It often seemed to be that way, I’d drink to a point that a lot of the mindless chatter in my head would stop and then I could get to the crux of the problem with my life, I hated it and I wanted out.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to University, well at all times I wish I could go back to my University experience because it was brilliant (a statement backed up by my obsession with it in my writing). What I mean is that I still want to learn. There are some people you meet who come from a completely different range, and have a completely different set of skills, different knowledge and I would love to take the time to learn it all.

I think as a rule people get stuck in what they know, mostly through circumstance but occasionally through laziness and these are the people who need to think. I encounter so many people who laugh at their own ignorance on a diverse number of subjects and I wonder how that feels. If I don’t understand something then I am desperate to learn it.

That’s why I’m so proud of my friend Jade who sent me a message last night to say that if things don’t go her way in the next year she is going to go back to university to study Museum Studies. What an incredible back-up to have, I’m really pleased that she could be picking up the education relay again.

I was talking to my learned and (at least) bi lingual friend yesterday about the access to learning available to us now and he turned me on to a couple of resources. You would probably do best to check his blog here. In it he talks about the power of Collaborative Online Learning and it is an avenue I will definitely consider once everything else settles down.

What I’m trying to say is that there is nothing wrong with being hungry for knowledge, and I hope it continues inside us all so our brains don’t turn to slop.

I’m well on the way to having my first album together. This is quite an exciting prospect for me. If anyone has any tips on how and where to get it heard my ears are wide open, the plan is to put it up on Bandcamp as a download and let you all have your wicked way with it.

In my head it will be half acoustic and half electric with a clear split down the middle but that has changed about fifty times since I started work on it. All I know is that I appreciate everyone who has taken the time to listen to the tracks I’ve put up on Soundcloud and Tumblr and you’ll be the first to know when it’s done.

I still live at home. You might think that’s bongus at twenty-five but I have a number of very good reasons. Unfortunately I also have a number of gripes about being the mother of my household, being the only one to take action about anything ever and just being mugged over in general. Case in point: I got home on Friday (with my beautiful girlfriend) and was ready to make us a delicious meal before cracking on with my letters to agents. As I made my way into the kitchen I noticed that the doorway was covered in ants, they were everywhere, crawling across the tiles of the kitchen, up the walls, it was fucking disgusting.
‘Dad’ I called out, ‘we’ve got ants’.
‘Oh yeah, I know, just hoover them up’. I then noticed our vacuum cleaner sat in the hall ready for the next invasion.
‘Dad, that’s not the answer’ I said.
‘Well what do you expect me to do about it’.
That’s the point when my head literally exploded and I’ve thought about it a lot. I expect him to take some responsibility, it’s a constant clash between us, I love my old man more than anything but I wish he had a little more drive and initiative sometimes. It’s bad enough that neither of my brothers have a lot of savvy (or can’t be bothered) but I expected a bit more from my dad.

This is where I realise that I’m moaning on like an old wife, but that’s what it feels like, and that’s what I’ve become. Somebody had to step up and unfortunately I was preconditioned for the role. Since I was very little I’ve been the sensible one, the tidy one, the reliable one, and it has split in two directions. It has developed a kind of OCD personality where I can’t stand mess being left, and it also means that when I let go I really let go. It doesn’t happen very often because my conscious self is also wary about making a mess of myself but when it does it manages it on a big scale. The first incident that comes to mind was a leaving party in Southend where I walked through an automatic door, fell down some stairs, went missing for about twenty minutes and then fell backwards off a wall. I’m a catastrophe. My point is if you get pushed far enough one way you end up swinging with more force back the other.

I’ve just sent ten copies of my novel out to literary agents. I’m really pleased with myself for getting it done and I’m not completely destroyed by the idea that I could get ten rejection letters, the important thing is that it is out there now.

I believe in the story and think that at some point and in some form it will be published, I just need to hold out. My next task is to complete the set of short stories I’ve started and stopped a couple of times in recent months. The plan for those is to launch them as a free download through eBooks or Kindle, just to get something out there and to have people reading my work. The short stories collection is currently called Where Did All The Money Go?, I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned it to you before but it’s a number of adventures, anecdotes and incidents which I couldn’t squeeze into the novel itself, it will include some of the same characters and explore those mentioned in the novel. I’m quite excited about doing it because I feel a lot more comfortable with short stories than I do with a novel, it’s a lot less pressure to string the story out, you can get straight to the nuts and bolts of it.
In the meantime if anyone wants to read my novel Situation One then please let me know.

Tom Hardy is the kind of mental older brother you always wanted at school, the kind who would kick the shit out of anyone that gave you a hard time for wearing a Nirvana hoodie. He’s equal parts animal and machine and I bet he’d give an amazing cuddle.

The winning thing about Hardy is that he is quite forthright about his misspent youth. He will happily open up about his joyriding, subsequent arrest, drug problems, rehabilitation and eventual sobriety. He’s not another cookie-cut leading man, he’s a bit different and comes across as being on the edge constantly. His portrayal of characters like Bronson and Bane reveal a man who is completely comfortable with appearing right on the brink of crazy, a mass of muscle but with brains to see him through.

I think the appealing thing about Hardy is that he gets completely sucked into what he is doing, you’ll see him interviewed one week and he’ll be twitchy and closed and the next he can be open and hilarious. There’s an obvious talent to it and it could be described as ‘method’ which in recent years has just been used to describe Christian Bale’s ability to gain and lose weight for a role, or to shout at people he wants off the set.

Hardy gets so encapsulated that it comes across, at no point during Dark Knight Rises did I think I was watching a man, it was a comic book creation and I hope he has many more, and many different roles to come.

Yesterday I received my first ever piece of fanmail as a writer, that’s what I’m considering it to be anyway. Somebody I do not know personally took the time to say how much they had enjoyed my writing and it was very sweet of her and it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Trying to find a literary agent or publisher is a gruelling task, there’s very little sense of achievement and it takes far too long to do, I like to get things done but for some reason compiling manuscripts, finding an agency, finding the correct person within that agency, writing a cover letter, trying to work out what should be in a synopsis, whether it’s worth paying a reading fee…. it’s all just thankless.

I appreciate it whenever anyone shows any interest in my writing, I really do, and friends and family and particularly my girlfriend give me a lot of support but I feel, and this is one of my many faults, that I don’t deserve that support or congratulations or whatever else, or that they are obliged to provide that support through their proximity to me and my life. It makes it hard to accept good feedback and creative criticism knocks more than it should but that’s my own thing and I’m dealing with it.

I think what I’m trying to say is that it’s a very lonely existence being ‘creative’ so anyone that reaches in is very much appreciated in turn. One of my friends recently told me that if she enjoys a book she will write to the author and tell them so. It’s something I had never considered (possibly because I read Salinger, Orwell, Hemingway, Kerouac) but I think it’s an amazing idea.
What I propose is that if you enjoy someone’s output whether that be a story, a poem, a song, photography, painting, an essay, whatever, please let them know, we all crave recognition.