…After having published more than one hundred and fifty stories on his finely wrought and yet incorporeal blog, after having negotiated precious terms of endearment with hundreds of reading and writing strangers and after having created a virtual, almost fleshly creature – more than a character but a creator of characters himself, the serious writer felt the need again to touch something real and be touched by it.

He grazed his chin with the index finger of his left hand while still hovering over the keyboard with all fingers of his right hand and retraced the small dimple that separated the point of his chin from his lower lip and which he had come to think of as one of the centres of his creative powers. Whenever he lost his confidence he put pressure on this spot. He slowly moved his attention away from his face to his pants and to the white napkin stowed in his back pocket for a single purpose: he took the paper towel out, felt its thickness with the same care which he had earlier given to his small facial dent, opened and put it on the table in front of him. He reached for his fountain pen, a burgundy Mont Blanc that had belonged to his mother, whose small fingers the pen had fitted perfectly, underlining her natural grace. The same instrument looked like a lost memory in his hands, which seemed knotty to him and too unwieldy for small tasks that required tact. When he put the pen on the tissue, a rill of ink trickled down the golden nib as if it had a mind of its own and created a minute black lake on the paper so that the serious writer felt forced to turn it over and start afresh. He quickly wrote the word ‘faith’ in capital letters before the ink could inadvertently blotch his canvas once again, sheathed his pen and let the fertile loneliness he knew so well take possession of him so that he could continue to write.

He was aware that none of his previous work meant anything anymore to him though it meant something to someone somewhere, which was a comfort anyways. In the nascent light of a new novel, which had begun to stir inside him like a newborn begotten in an act of poignant paternal love, all his old stories were just that: old stories. Joie de vivre was to be found in things undone, unwritten and unread.

The new novel might begin thus:

Once upon a time there was a cantankerous curmudgeon of a writer who lived his life by one rule only: to calmly move on to the next thing whenever it was time to do so. This man’s best friend was an ancient cetacean from a colony swimming off Capitola whose sorrow was that he loved movies more than anything. Fortunately, the writer had come up with a way for his friend the whale to indulge in its alien obsession with celluloid, which was not any stranger than the man’s preoccupation with mermaids and other magical sea folk.

See, everything flowed nicely: the serious writer could go on scrivening like that for a long time, turning trivial tattle into bewitching tassle and squeezing blood from the banal, like his character, who never died but jumped from story to story growing from a spring seed into a summer tree whose leaves gave shade to the uncanny and the unanswered, taking its water from the deepest depths of the telling well.

But to change water to wine, ‘nice’ wouldn’t do. It was cold comfort where a hot heart was required. To chafe his poetic protrusions, to make words like warm bread rather than to sneeze pleasantries onto the page, the serious writer culled inspiration from:

… his wife’s valiant calves, which held her head high and which helped to ground him when he watched her muscles work their magic on top of a pair of stilettos;

… the indistinguishable chatter from the sidewalk café opposite their apartment, where he imagined street musicians didn’t busk for fear they’d interrupt the permanent conversation which might eventually resolve some issues;

… the buzz of gnats at night before they bit, the feeling vulnerable under air attack, and the peculiar compromise negotiated between insect, skin and soul that echoed other equally ancient deals made with nature;

… all things and relationships that require a year and a day rather than a minute and a half to be understood, crafted, ingested, and committed to one’s flames.

“What’re you writing these days”, said his wife after they went to bed.

“I don’t know yet, my sweet, I’ve only just got the cauldron heated up”, said the serious writer and held out his arm so that she could cuddle up to him.

And then the curtain dropped. And it was good.

Standing in front of the ‘new movies’ shelf at the local vid store, the serious writer wondered if watching flicks like “Last Day In Hell”, “Vikings vs. Aliens III” or “The Grand Rapids Sawdust Massacre” would help him understand plot and become a better writer or if they might short-circuit his already overwrought mental machinery.

After some deliberation, he finally settled on an indie called, somewhat obscurely, “Julia, Julienne, Jules And Their Incredibly Indelible Love Affair Between The Sheets Of A Greek Tavern In My Neighbourhood”.

This movie also ran in the local cinema, whose Art Deco exterior was modeled after the first Nanking movie house.

The serious writer had worn a black patch on his left wonky eye for days and had lain in a dark room imprisoned with fierce imagination as his only companion.

He finally left the house to get some air. Out on the street, a break dancer was spinning round and round. His xanthous baseball cap lay on the sidewalk like a sacred Tibetan bronze bowl. A radio stood next to it blaring loud music and the words ‘PLEEZE DONADE’ were visible on the concrete.

The serious writer recognised the song as ‘Get Together’ and it improved his mood at once. He dropped a couple of coins in the hat and realised his eye felt allright all of a sudden. He took his patch off and felt the sunlight stream into his eye ball and traverse it, all the way to his mortal soul.

The serious writer has never measured the length of his penis. He didn’t see the need because he knew its size and form depended entirely on the woman. In mid-life, he had accepted the estimation of one’s genitals as a creative endeavour rather than a mathematical exercise.

“You’re huge”, A. said after she had unbuttoned him.

“Oh”, he said, uncharacteristically short in his reply but with a world of pleasant associations rushing to his head like a horde of wild buffalo to a water hole.

“But not too huge”, she added a little later once they’d found a mutually convenient position for their wordless play. The serious writer always remembered her as a devout, objective reader of his work.

“Don’t show it to me”, said B., the horticulturist, and reached across his chest uncomfortably to switch off the small bedside Tiffany lamp, “or I won’t be able to forget it.”

“Why should you want to forget it?”, asked the serious writer.

“Because I don’t want to compare it”, she said. He saw her point, though he always found it hard to orient himself in the dark. The serious writer imagined B. was thinking of a large, luscious, potentially dangerous jungle plant when touching his knob.

C., a fellow writer, looked at the serious writer’s penis for a long time before she carefully took it between index finger and thumb and shook it a little as if to see whether it would come to life.

“It seems a little small”, she said. The serious writer sighed, loudly, and said nothing.

“But I’m sure it’ll do”, she said. Among peers, C. was known for her delicacy, which permeated all her writing. Much later, the serious writer paid her back using these same words in a very long, altogether positive, critical review of her novel.

“Only strong personalities can endure such size, the weak ones are extinguished by it”, said D., a red head with an imposing chest, eyeing his cock. The serious writer, his past fogged by reckless existentialist thought, recognised the Nietzschean rudiment and smiled knowingly.

Good humour, the serious writer thought, is the strongest aphrodisiac.

published in Metazen – frank hinton in an interview on fictionaut blog.

The serious writer has a hamster. The hamster is dying. She drags her hindlegs and pees herself. The spirit of life is still strong in her: she climbs up the cage as she used to, then falls over to one side. Her left eye is half closed. She might have had a stroke. As he sees this, the serious writer’s heart breaks in small pieces suitable to feed the rodent, who will not eat or drink.

The serious writer has come to rely on his pet. He is reluctant to call her that, since she’s become a member of the family, albeit the least talkative one. He used to read his pieces to her. He enjoyed being with another creature purposelessly immersed in a mutual moment late at night.

Out of her one dark eye, the hamster considers the serious writer, who feels his humanity melt under her unlooking gaze. She feels little pain, only a deep tiredness as if she’d gone down one road too many. She delights in being able to move at all. She knows nothing of the embarrassment of her wobbly walk. The swaying of her little body seems odd but acceptable to her, as were the conditions of her incarceration, which she did not perceive as prison nor as a privilege. The large animals surrounding her, their stomping and shouting, reach her as if through a thick fog. She feels everything with the greatest alacrity now.

As she stiffens, as her small frame withers like a brush stroke splashed with water, the serious writer tears up and begins to sob angrily. He howls, his wail travels out on the street, rises above the roofs, and the soul of the tiny mammal rides to hamster heaven on a moonlight ray, carrying the sacrament of her short, nutty life to the starry skies.

Entry for a contest at Metazen – Image to Text Conversion Experiment. Picture by Metazen – an online metafiction journal edited by Frank Hinton.

The serious writer looks back on a long and distinguished career as an herbologist. Her favourite bush grows in Central Park and is called Noah’s Ark by the residents because of the myriad of animals that it shelters. The serious writer has given a name to every leaf and branch of the Ark, and when autumn comes, her heart slowly withers, pondering decay as the shrub sheds its summer splendour and returns to the raw.
(published in elimae)

The serious writer lifts his ideas like limp lychees from anywhere and anyone. Anything and anyone crossing his path becomes material. He turns silly stuff into junk and junk into art. The serious writer will defeat his demons and crush them under his ferocious foot purely by the power of observation.

In good company the serious writer uses the cognomen  Watson. In bad company, he’s known as Professor Moriarty, and in haughty company, he appears as the cool icon of logical deduction, Mr Sherlock Holmes.

The serious writer hardly writes. When he does write, he uses a glass quill and fifteen different kinds of ink. He creates without getting his hands dirty, a God in his own house.

At night, the serious writer eats steak and smokes bamboo stalks. He washes the day down with a glass of scotch. His bed is a wet concern at the bottom of an iron lake where he tells himself lies, ambivalence-stricken, looking for true feeling, alone now, a ferruginous plant, watered by the people in his life.

The serious writer is working on his first novel.

He moves his household to a deserted location called Loch Llamorgan. He buys a large shovel, which he covers with tattoos lifted from a book of Maori motives. He anticipates a journey of many moons. He drives to the local liquor store and purchases supplies. He devises a plan to shelter the house from all disturbing influences: it involves a system of trenches surrounding the house, an escape tunnel from the study, and CCTV surveillance around the perimeter. He begins to dig.

When the serious writer, weeks later, finally sits down to start writing, he is exhausted and has forgotten what he wanted to write about, or why. He dolefully looks at his tool with the strange patterns on them, and at his callused hands, and he cannot hear any voices.

He composes an e-mail for an anonymous publisher expressing his sorrow over pressing deadlines, the demands of work and family, and regrets the delay in providing a synopsis. After sending the message, he lays face down in one of the ditches criss-crossing the field in front of the house, and drinks in the scent of the soil, waiting for the book to write itself.

The serious writer makes money like other people fist fuck. He is a wild man, a beast, and a connoisseur, who spells French words forwards and backwards with ease. Most of all, he is serious.

The woman at the side of the serious writer is devoted to his cause, which he never clearly articulated to her. She is tall, but not too tall, a blonde who could, in the right light, be taken for a brunette. She has a black bushel of strong, willful pubic hair. When the serious writer needs serious stimulation, he grabs her patch down there and yanks it.

The serious writer knows about the fertile time shortly after waking up from a dream. His woman kicks him every half an hour to interrupt his REM cycle: he then gets up, creates, and goes back to sleep. Because of this arrangement, neither the serious writer nor the woman at the side of the serious writer can get enough rest.