Hello world! (Again)
Monday 04 Aug 2008
This is my new site, welcome. I’ve chosen to start my writing afresh for a few reasons:
- I didn’t want to keep on paying $100+ per year for my old domain. Dreamhost were excellent, but I simply wasn’t using the storage or bandwidth for my meager blog.
- I got tired of the name of my old site: “SortingShapes” just wasn’t doing it for me anymore.
- I really don’t have time and sometimes (thanks to my ropey provider at home) not even the access to properly administer the blog site myself. The old website was running an out-of-date installation of WordPress, I never got round to writing my own web apps (which I naively thought I might like to try), barely customised anything and had a few junky subdomains that really needed archiving. The whole lot needed to be saved or dumped. I’ve chosen the latter.
So here is where I will start writing again. This blog is hosted and maintained by Automattic – the lovely people that let you simply get on with writing – and as before is run on WordPress. I plan to tweak the CSS a little, and drop in the occasional widget, but essentially I’m done with even pretending that I want to develop. I just want to write. In the coming days I will replicate the above work for my career-oriented blog www.jonathansedar.co.uk.
I have somehow barely documented the most interesting period of my life so far (moving to NYC!) – I expect mostly because I been living it, rather than writing it – but that’s no excuse. Must try harder.
From now my old site www.sortingshapes.com will no longer be updated at all and I will take it down in a few days.
“Don’t Look Back”
Saturday 12 Jan 2008
Sweat blurs his vision, canyoning into rusty eyes every time his breath grows unmanagably tight under his pounding chest and he simply has to stop, heaving, desperately grasping to remain upright.
They must be far behind, he must have five minutes.
It’s not enough and he knows it.
With each pause, each blessed influx of cold night air, his scent patch grows and hangs enticingly on the breeze. A waypoint, a giant fucking arrow pointing directly towards him.
What else can he do?
Stop?
Fight?
These things dont fight, they consume. They feed.
A rooftop clatters in the distance.
Run!
Notebooks and ink
Sunday 30 Dec 2007
I’ve been scribbling the past few days, getting out to a public place, people busying around, and simply sitting down with a pen and tiny notebook, jotting down very short stories and haiku.
I’m happy with the five published here so far and have some more in the wings which need polishing. The one hundred word drabble limit is an interesting target and constraint in quite a similar way to haiku. Word choice is paramount, purposely choosing the right concise sequence to translate an idea, set a scene – yet I’ve had fun playing with meter and word structure, especially on Vanishing Point.
Time now too for deciding the annual aural list of my year’s favourite music…
***
Oh, have a haiku:
“An Hour Beneath Curved British Sky”
Percussive plate crash.
Two hundred murmuring thoughts.
My pen, my book, me.
A hundred words
Monday 24 Dec 2007
I want to write something.
Haikus, rambling blog posts, shopping lists, god-forbidden documents for work – full of buzzword-bingo conquering re-rehashed cliches – are all missing something, or, in the case of the latter, have missed something, then added in some other stuff, then lost the point and generally sound much the same as any other marketing trash.
No, I want to write a short story. Something of merit. Not so easy; that GCSE English A grade may have validated my 10 finger, 10 toe count in certifying my lack of familial interbreeding, but did not endow me with the ability to string together a storyline.
To that end I may have found a solution: Drabble. A really short story crafted from precisely 100 words, no more, no less.
A drabble generator has already delivered my first pant-wetting of the day, thanks to it’s insertion of my flippant crap into Shakspeare’s sonnets – “But soft, what sneeze through yonder window explodes? It is the Weetabix, and Batfink is the sun!”.
Reading near-exclusively scifi and fantasy may be an encumbrance, but with only 100 words, those literary neurons should get a workout and still be home in time for tea.
Time to type…
