breathtest
06-02-2010, 04:35 PM
Well i was looking back at some of my old ones, and i came across the beginning of something that i think really has potential. I'd like to post a bit of it here to see what you think, so feedback is much much much appreciated.
In the dark bowels of the lonely house that belonged to the Lorances, Henry flicked some strands of hair off his face and resumed clacking at the typewriter. The sounds of the keys echoed lightly off the dusty walls, and their hypnotic effects were evident to Henry after only a couple of sentences.
A skinny beam of light from a naked bulb illuminated him and the table that the typewriter was sat on, perfectly centred in the middle of the room, facing the stairs. The bulb hung from the ceiling on a thin wire that looked like string. In three of the shadowy corners of the basement were boxes stacked up to about head height, the fourth corner was empty. The boxes, stacked the way they were, resembled filing cabinets at a quick glance. In a way, they were. They contained all of the manuscripts Henry had ever written, filed away in chronological order, earliest at the bottom, most recent at the top. Thousands of them, never published. Short stories, novellas, novels, even plays and some poetry for good measure. Sad pieces of paper left to ferment in the confines of a cardboard prison.
He wrote for leisure. He would call it a hobby, but it meant more to him than that. It was his passion. His obsession. The thing he thought about most. He woke up early each day to write for an hour or so, he would go to work, he would come home, and he would write some more.
Okay, his routine wasn’t quite as tight as that. In between doing these things, he would make time for his wife, Jenna, and for the meals she cooked and even for going out on weekends. But currently, he was averaging about fifteen thousand words a day, and that, by any standards, is a hell of a lot.
He refused vehemently to get published when anybody suggested it. He told them he had a job (he was an estate agent), earned plenty of money, and did not want to sell his art simply because he did not need to. To himself he would declare, in some medieval English accent, one cannot put a price upon ones art. The glory is in the making of art, and the rewards we reap from it are inward and eternal. He showed some of his work to his wife and any other friends and family who showed an interest, but he wrote simply for the pleasure of writing, for the catharsis and for the escapism.
The basement was always cold, and while Henry wrote, he could feel his fingers stiffening. There was a tiny little window at the top of the wall behind his desk (he never called it a desk, because it wasn’t. It was one of those wooden tables with metal legs that you had at school, and a crappy plastic chair with scratches in it that he had picked straight out of a skip one day when he was out walking. But for the purposes of the story, we shall call it a desk). Anyway, that window behind his desk looked out at floor height along a stretch of grass that ended in an area of woodland thick with trees. This window could not be closed, despite all of Henry’s attempts when he had first started coming down here, so it was constantly tilted open on its rusty metal runners and the cold leaked in. Or perhaps gushed in would be a more accurate term. It made only a small opening, but let in a hell of a lot of the cold.
And now Henry was quickly coming to the end of his endurance of the cold. His fingers ached every time they reached for another letter. It became slow work, and he felt like he could feel the blood freezing mid-flow in the veins of his hands.
He looked at his watch and realised he had been writing for almost three hours. He was working on a very long short story that he feared would soon become a novella if he didn’t watch his step, or maybe even a novel. But that was okay, because it was a good story that perhaps deserved more pages and more words than he had planned for it.
The typewriter was new. He preferred writing on typewriters to computers or laptops because when he was a young boy, computers were not around. It was a typewriter or a pencil back in those days and Henry liked to write fast, to get his ideas down as quick as he was able, and longhand didn’t particularly allow a person to do that. Using a typewriter now kept him in touch with the hay days, as he liked to call them. He had bought the typewriter at a car boot sale, of all places. It was hard to get your hands on one these days, but Henry found one and instantly bought it. It was in very good condition after all, had all the letters in the alphabet and everything. An Olivetti Lettera 22. His old typewriter had very quickly found its way into the bottom of an unused wardrobe upstairs where it probably wouldn’t be touched for years.
He decided to leave it for the night, the cold finally getting the best of him again. He left the current piece of paper in the machine, the black ink words only covering a quarter of the white emptiness, and he shuffled the small stack of papers next to it that contained the story he was working on so that they lay in a neat pile. Another stack of new, unused paper was on the left side of the table, ready to be fed into the word machine and vomited on with ink.
Before he left the basement altogether, he turned and surveyed his sanctuary. He was at the top of the rotting, creaking wooden stairs that he suspected would one day be unable to hold his weight. The bulb made a halo above his desk, Work station would be a better term than desk, Tom thought to himself, seriously surveying the rickety table with its spindly legs. It certainly does not deserve the accolade of ‘desk’. It is a pile of crap after all. I would never even dream of calling this pile of crap a desk. I will call it my work station, until I get a desk.
With a decisive nod that seemed to say ‘yes, after long deliberation, I have come to a decision, and I believe it to be indubitably the best one’, he exited his creative enclave to spend the evening with his wife. No matter how involved he became with his writing, he could always count on his beloved better half to pull him out and back into the real world. Evacuate the imaginary and populate the reality. Henry always repeated this line to himself when he surfaced from the basement; he felt it got him back into the swing of things.
First things first, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, wincing at the touch of the freezing cold aluminium against his hand.
He could hear the mumbling of the television in the lounge, and could see, in his mind, Jenna slouched on the sofa perhaps with a glass of wine, absently fiddling with the tassels that dangled off the cushions. He smiled to himself because he knew her, really knew her, and he loved everything she did. He held on to that picture, and when he walked into the room, the real picture was almost exactly the same as the one in his head.
She was slouched on the sofa with the television switched to the news. In her hand was a glass of red wine, less than half full, held steady on her lap. With her other hand, instead of fiddling with the cushion tassels, she was fiddling with her hair. The soft glow from the long-stemmed lamp in the corner added a relaxed feeling to the room.
Her jeans rode low on her hips, and the sleeveless top she was wearing, the kind with straps instead of sleeves, was riding high up her body, just below her breasts, so that her belly button was showing as well as the little tattoo of the dolphin jumping out of water beside it.
‘Hey, Hen, have you finished for the night?’ she said lovingly, with a warm smile that filled him.
‘Yep, I’m all yours,’ He sat beside her, gave her a kiss, and wrapped his arm around her. ‘The new typewriter is better than the old one. The keys are less stiff.’ There was a moment of silence between them. ‘And I’ve decided to call my desk a work station, because it is not a desk.’
‘That’s lame,’ she looked at him and smiled once again, and Henry just had to kiss her. She moaned a pleasantly surprised moan.
In the dark bowels of the lonely house that belonged to the Lorances, Henry flicked some strands of hair off his face and resumed clacking at the typewriter. The sounds of the keys echoed lightly off the dusty walls, and their hypnotic effects were evident to Henry after only a couple of sentences.
A skinny beam of light from a naked bulb illuminated him and the table that the typewriter was sat on, perfectly centred in the middle of the room, facing the stairs. The bulb hung from the ceiling on a thin wire that looked like string. In three of the shadowy corners of the basement were boxes stacked up to about head height, the fourth corner was empty. The boxes, stacked the way they were, resembled filing cabinets at a quick glance. In a way, they were. They contained all of the manuscripts Henry had ever written, filed away in chronological order, earliest at the bottom, most recent at the top. Thousands of them, never published. Short stories, novellas, novels, even plays and some poetry for good measure. Sad pieces of paper left to ferment in the confines of a cardboard prison.
He wrote for leisure. He would call it a hobby, but it meant more to him than that. It was his passion. His obsession. The thing he thought about most. He woke up early each day to write for an hour or so, he would go to work, he would come home, and he would write some more.
Okay, his routine wasn’t quite as tight as that. In between doing these things, he would make time for his wife, Jenna, and for the meals she cooked and even for going out on weekends. But currently, he was averaging about fifteen thousand words a day, and that, by any standards, is a hell of a lot.
He refused vehemently to get published when anybody suggested it. He told them he had a job (he was an estate agent), earned plenty of money, and did not want to sell his art simply because he did not need to. To himself he would declare, in some medieval English accent, one cannot put a price upon ones art. The glory is in the making of art, and the rewards we reap from it are inward and eternal. He showed some of his work to his wife and any other friends and family who showed an interest, but he wrote simply for the pleasure of writing, for the catharsis and for the escapism.
The basement was always cold, and while Henry wrote, he could feel his fingers stiffening. There was a tiny little window at the top of the wall behind his desk (he never called it a desk, because it wasn’t. It was one of those wooden tables with metal legs that you had at school, and a crappy plastic chair with scratches in it that he had picked straight out of a skip one day when he was out walking. But for the purposes of the story, we shall call it a desk). Anyway, that window behind his desk looked out at floor height along a stretch of grass that ended in an area of woodland thick with trees. This window could not be closed, despite all of Henry’s attempts when he had first started coming down here, so it was constantly tilted open on its rusty metal runners and the cold leaked in. Or perhaps gushed in would be a more accurate term. It made only a small opening, but let in a hell of a lot of the cold.
And now Henry was quickly coming to the end of his endurance of the cold. His fingers ached every time they reached for another letter. It became slow work, and he felt like he could feel the blood freezing mid-flow in the veins of his hands.
He looked at his watch and realised he had been writing for almost three hours. He was working on a very long short story that he feared would soon become a novella if he didn’t watch his step, or maybe even a novel. But that was okay, because it was a good story that perhaps deserved more pages and more words than he had planned for it.
The typewriter was new. He preferred writing on typewriters to computers or laptops because when he was a young boy, computers were not around. It was a typewriter or a pencil back in those days and Henry liked to write fast, to get his ideas down as quick as he was able, and longhand didn’t particularly allow a person to do that. Using a typewriter now kept him in touch with the hay days, as he liked to call them. He had bought the typewriter at a car boot sale, of all places. It was hard to get your hands on one these days, but Henry found one and instantly bought it. It was in very good condition after all, had all the letters in the alphabet and everything. An Olivetti Lettera 22. His old typewriter had very quickly found its way into the bottom of an unused wardrobe upstairs where it probably wouldn’t be touched for years.
He decided to leave it for the night, the cold finally getting the best of him again. He left the current piece of paper in the machine, the black ink words only covering a quarter of the white emptiness, and he shuffled the small stack of papers next to it that contained the story he was working on so that they lay in a neat pile. Another stack of new, unused paper was on the left side of the table, ready to be fed into the word machine and vomited on with ink.
Before he left the basement altogether, he turned and surveyed his sanctuary. He was at the top of the rotting, creaking wooden stairs that he suspected would one day be unable to hold his weight. The bulb made a halo above his desk, Work station would be a better term than desk, Tom thought to himself, seriously surveying the rickety table with its spindly legs. It certainly does not deserve the accolade of ‘desk’. It is a pile of crap after all. I would never even dream of calling this pile of crap a desk. I will call it my work station, until I get a desk.
With a decisive nod that seemed to say ‘yes, after long deliberation, I have come to a decision, and I believe it to be indubitably the best one’, he exited his creative enclave to spend the evening with his wife. No matter how involved he became with his writing, he could always count on his beloved better half to pull him out and back into the real world. Evacuate the imaginary and populate the reality. Henry always repeated this line to himself when he surfaced from the basement; he felt it got him back into the swing of things.
First things first, he grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, wincing at the touch of the freezing cold aluminium against his hand.
He could hear the mumbling of the television in the lounge, and could see, in his mind, Jenna slouched on the sofa perhaps with a glass of wine, absently fiddling with the tassels that dangled off the cushions. He smiled to himself because he knew her, really knew her, and he loved everything she did. He held on to that picture, and when he walked into the room, the real picture was almost exactly the same as the one in his head.
She was slouched on the sofa with the television switched to the news. In her hand was a glass of red wine, less than half full, held steady on her lap. With her other hand, instead of fiddling with the cushion tassels, she was fiddling with her hair. The soft glow from the long-stemmed lamp in the corner added a relaxed feeling to the room.
Her jeans rode low on her hips, and the sleeveless top she was wearing, the kind with straps instead of sleeves, was riding high up her body, just below her breasts, so that her belly button was showing as well as the little tattoo of the dolphin jumping out of water beside it.
‘Hey, Hen, have you finished for the night?’ she said lovingly, with a warm smile that filled him.
‘Yep, I’m all yours,’ He sat beside her, gave her a kiss, and wrapped his arm around her. ‘The new typewriter is better than the old one. The keys are less stiff.’ There was a moment of silence between them. ‘And I’ve decided to call my desk a work station, because it is not a desk.’
‘That’s lame,’ she looked at him and smiled once again, and Henry just had to kiss her. She moaned a pleasantly surprised moan.