An Update

So I'm dealing with some pretty serious writer’s block at the moment. I've written a couple of stories which I'm happy with but I don’t really feel that they are right for this blog, and I'm actually thinking about possibly submitting them to a competition which means not publishing them on here. Apart from that I'm short on inspiration on the story front. I've though about making some politics posts but they are either a bit derivative or just make me depressed. So what’s the post below? It’s about struggling with inspiration which is a bit self-absorbed and wanky I admit but it’s all I've got and hopefully it’s kind of interesting.

Inspiration

I have the scene in my head, it is night, it is a forest, two people meet and fight then reconcile. I have the scene but I can’t find any way to explain or convey it. I search the vault of my memory, to find an image. To find the words. Perhaps the twisted abandoned buildings I once found in a dark pine forest, with lilies growing up through the cracks. Perhaps the memory of the night sky above the cold dark desert, that perfect sea of light stretching out to infinity above me. An argument with a lover. Anything. Something. The events, the words, which are entirely unique to me.

My memory finds me in a Marks & Spencer’s. The Marks and Spencer’s in Swansea and I am a young boy holding my mother’s hand. I watch the people sink below me as I ride the escalator from the ground floor up to the first floor; from food to childs and womenswear, and it is if I am there. The dirt between the grooves in the escalators steps, the pale green pattern on the beige walls, the little red lights next to the doors of the elevator. I try to look at the people but they are faded ghosts, just vague human shapes below me in the corners of my vision.

Why am I here? All of these thoughts that are in my head, all of the images and dreams and memories of my mind and it picks Marks and Spencers. It picks grey overcast Swansea, its shops barely lit up by the strange and ethereal fluorescent lights.

I try to shift somewhere else, anywhere else and I am the same young boy on the same day in the café of a boots drinking a carton of ribena and eating an iced bun. My mother talks to a friend she has met whilst buying toothpaste and soap, I can’t make out their words, just the mumbling of misheard memory. All the places I could be and the only place my mind will let me be is in the body of a small boy sat in a sea of linoleum, licking icing sugar from the corner of his mouth.