Almost At The Finishing Line...

Almost Ready with Hanging Around, just a few kinks with the ending to iron out then it will be up over at fifty-two-stories-lite.

As a trite maxim "Write What You Know" has stood me in good stead with this story, although like all old wives tales it has only limited usefulness. After all the majority of people capable of thinking outside the terms of their own existence don't want to read what they know. If this weren't the case, there wouldn't be any room for Robert E. Howard, J.G. Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman or any of the countless other writers from the pulp-ish to the Pulitzer winners the bad to the Booker nominated (although those two aren't mutually exclusive!).

I know that my tastes as a reader tend towards the fantastic, be it the epic vistas of Middle Earth or the hyperactive lunacy of Carl Hiassen's Florida, the dreamlike orient of Journey To The West or the nightmare future of Orwell's 1984. If every writer only wrote what they know, the literary world would be a much drier and less exciting place. All that being said, it has been a pleasure to write from experience, rather than madly trying to get inside the heads of people so far removed from my own emotional make up. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere, but I need another couple of cups of tea before I can figure out what it is.