Aaron D. Key's Blog, page 3

My style – writing ambitions

I once said that I wanted to be the Jane Austen for gay love stories in the 21st Century. I was trying to explain my style of writing. I wanted the romance but happy to leave the sex to the imagination – after all there are many other writers covering that field perfectly adequately. I am old fashioned enough to believe that what happens in a person’s love life should stay with them and the other parties involved. It is no one else’s business. Politicians, homophobes please take note. Just as no-one should imagine their parents in the bedroom, we are all a little happier to stay in the dark.

That’s not to say there is not a place for this sort of literature. It is after all the verbal equivalent of porn, and this also has an important place in modern life when people need stimulation which can’t be administered first hand for many reasons.

So I think there is a place and, judging by the popularity, a need for graphic sex scenes but I do not want to fill that need. I am more interested in the process that makes two people find pleasure in each other’s company. Whether there is a need for non-graphic romance – well we shall see.

I’ve changed that ambition now anyway. I want to be the perfect combination of Jane Austen, Tolkein and, dare I say it, Terry Pratchett  – stacked full of gay characters. So I’m aiming high!! Jane Austen displays a perfect understanding of what makes a relationship tick. Tolkein shows us another world full of fascinating magic and adventure. And Terry Pratchett – I was surprised to find out recently that he was relatively unknown in the USA –  his books have great characters, stacked full of humour, wit and a myriad of problems to be solved by people trying to do their best. 

If I achieve my aim I will be very content.

Timon of London and Bath (Book 5)

I had a little break from typing (see previous blogs for full story) and read Book 5. Book 4 & 5 I printed out small and stuck them into little notebooks. It’s a fun way of imagining your books are published.

Book 5 (or shall I call it by its provisional title of Timon of London and Bath) was an interesting experiment for me. When I started writing it I never intended that it would become a book. I just wanted to know what would happen to the characters in Book 2 and Book 3 after those stories had ended.

So I started with a question and kept writing…and writing…and writing. I have never done this before – started from the beginning and carrying on to the end with no diversions, no time out, no idea where I was going.

When I re-read Timon, I couldn’t even remember how the ending had gone. Even I was surprised how it had ended up. I’m not sure it will stay like that after editing so I will share it now as it may never see the light of day again.

“He felt a tug on his hand, a slight prising of his fingers. Gerald smiled at him and held his hand. Timonthy felt uncomfortable. He had spent so much of his life trying to fit in, and now this simple action was like a shouted declaration. He could choose to wriggle out of it or to accept it. Old habits die hard, he was tempted but one look at Gerald’s understanding smile and he swiftly embraced him. With a slight flush on his face they separated and walked back along the road, hand in hand.”

I know the place that this happened. It will always be a special place for me. It might be sentimental but after all that had happened in the book it fits and I love a happy ending – because after all the ending is just a snapshot of time. The story never ends.

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.”

A Scare

I have been editing Herai for so long that the other day when I decided it was time to look at Book 2, I had a scare. It wasn’t on my laptop. My writing netbook had died in the last year. Neither was it sitting on any of the 3 memory sticks I could have sworn contained everything I had ever saved on a computer.

Even worse the paper copy I found seemed to be missing the beginning which was fundamental to half the plot and thus presumably the half of the plot it referred to. The spine was beginning to tingle.

A foot lower in the pile of paper and relief flooded back. All I need to do now is retype 300,000 words.that’s a good opportunity for a pruning.

Herai

I wanted to write a story where the main character could be seen as either male or female depending on the wishes or viewpoint of the reader. It seemed an interesting experiment to me to see the reactions of the readers. 

I’m not sure it worked as the first two people who read the book assumed without question, and didn’t notice the fact that I had been very careful not to use any pronoun which would give it away. Other readers haven’t so far given me much feedback.

My own views may have influenced them. I know that it is so hard not to subconsciously think of the character without attributing qualities which may be seen as defining their sex. In my defense, at various points in writing the story, my own view was turned on its head.

I would very much like to hear feedback.

The sea

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Some views of the sea.

A picture everyday since the 18th March 2016. See my twitter account. Use the hashtag.#aaronlooksatsea365

The Silver Chair

The silver chair has always been my favorite Narnian novel. I heard an audio version of it the other day.

For those of you who don’t know the story, prince Rillian has been captured by the evil witch who killed his mother.He is enchanted every day by the witch to make him biddable and to forget who he is. Every day he is chained to the silver chair and for an hour each day he remembers who he is. Two children and a marshwiggle (played memorably by Tom Baker BBC 1990) have to witness his hideous transformation from a polished urbane gentleman into the savage man who’s realized he has been captured and enchanted for years in an underworld of cold dark stone.

Only the mention of Aslan’s name clears up for the them which is the real man and which is the enchanted puppet. 

The prince is released, the silver chair is destroyed, the evil witch returns. She tries to convince them, with the help of a drugged smoke, that the sun does not exist; that the world above does not exist; that our world – their world – does not exist. That there is nothing other than the dark underworld around them.

The marshwiggle – a very pessimist at heart – rescues them all by stamping out the fire. And perceived reality shifts back again. They know the things they have seen are real.

Perception is a very tricky thing. When faced with two alternatives how do you decide which reality to believe?  Is it about reality or about hope? There is always the other reality lurking in my head – the one in which everything is hopeless and grey – and I keep it at bay with the mental equivalent of magic smoke.