Well this shit is real!! Book 2 claws its way from the gutter.

In my last blog I spoke very casually about having lost a 330,000 word novel. I had a paper copy. Slightly inconveniently it was printed out on 8 pages to an A4 page to save paper and ink. Now I am typing it up I realise it is my eyesight that needs saving. I was hoping in my flippant blog that rummaging would produce the missing memory stick. It hasn’t. I realize that another 3 books have also gone missing – apart from their paper form. I may be making a trip to some IT specialists to see what can be rescued from the dead carcase of my netbook (assuming I haven’t chucked it yet. Actually think I might have done. This day gets better and better.)

In the interest of making sure that some record remains of my writing I am going to blog the beginning of Book 2. Until you all get bored of it. I’m not sure anyone’s ever read my blog but I’m hoping it will remain in digital form at least until civilization collapses (even though this may be sooner than we all thought last year.) Bear with the unedited state, you my imagined readers, and hopefully be intrigued.

“My name is, well my name is irrelevant. I felt that I should introduce myself as I might do if I had met you, the reader, in person but I know really that I am not important and I only relate a few small facts about myself to explain where this story I am about to tell you comes from. I am a gardener by trade. I have spent 45 years, this being my age, being haunted by dreams and images of different places and people. Some people think I am stupid, I see it in their eyes, but I do not feel stupid. I am a slow thinker but a deep thinker and my mind is often not where it should be, in the present, in its place with my body and my surroundings.

The wonderings of my mind give me pleasure and make the slings and arrows of fortune no more than bee stings to be brushed aside. At least I try and think so.

On the whole I have led a happy life. I enjoy my job although I often wish that I was in the garden of my dreams instead of the real gardens I work in to pay my way. I was lucky when younger to have met someone who loved me in spite of my many faults and we had many happy years together until their recent and premature death, another sling shot which ached more than most.

So now I work slower than I used to and my mind is patching together all the bits of the story that run in my head like a continuous strip of writing along the bottom of the news on television. The way the story is written here it looks as though my life has been nothing but one continual denial of reality in the passage of an alternative life but this story came to me in tiny pieces. Some from when I was an unhappy child, some in my adult years and more frequently and more clearly now in my lonely and desolate state. Each time I remembered a section I wrote it on a piece of paper and for years I had a box full of scraps of paper taken from wherever I was when the memory came: some on napkins, or diaries, or beer-mats or notebooks. Only recently I decided to shake myself out of the lethargy I had fallen into and tentatively entered the digital age with the acquisition of a laptop in which all the fragments could be stored and rearranged and played with until this almost comprehensible narrative has emerged.”

By Aaron D.Key

Fantasy Author