Wooden Spoon

This blog post very nearly didn't happen. It was originally going to be about the banality and innocence of children or something but I got bored after a paragraph in which I made words about paying bills and stuff. Had I continued with it, there may have even been a segment somewhat akin to "don't kids just say the darndest things?", featuring fractured utterances from my three-year-old nephew and that one time I was spending chill-time with friends and a someone's friend of a parent's friend's child or something showed up and started pondering the mechanism of a toilet in pure unbridled fascination.

A lot of my time lately, however, has been devoted to thinking about story ideas as I approach the final year of creative degree study. Because of this, drifting through the motions has become the order of the week, which proves extremely detrimental to this thing when I have nothing to babble on about at length. I could, of course, makes notes about the stories I've been concocting in my brainspace as of late, but doing that here and now would mean I'm even less likely to make any financial gain from it in the future. Chances are I'll never earn from such writings anyway but a boy can dream.

A story that I have written as part of assessed work in the last year or so has made it into a published booklet-type-thing to be launched approximately one month from now at a literature festival, so yay! Having said that, this university-led venture featuring works from all manner of students probably won't make any money. If it does, chances are that it'll go straight back into university funding and I'll still carry on drinking away what's left of a weekly wage, which - if I'm lucky - might amount to a shot of flavoured water.

Correspondence with the event has been somewhat miniscule with regards to attendance figures. Whether enough space has been assigned to authors, creators, speakers and contributors at the event remains to be seen, so without purchasing a ticket or anything - assuming tickets are to be purchased for such an event (which, let's face it, in this world, they will be) - I could potentially be absent when launching a published piece. I don't even have Skype or anything that I could join them live via satellite link, or send a pre-recorded Oscar-style acceptance speech. I suppose if it came to it, I could always send along a wooden spoon with a smiley face on it in my place. However, lacking an address for the event, the spoon will have to just stay here, on the desk, smiling up at me with those unblinking eyes and that unwavering smile that seems to say 'you're not doing anything with your life other than sitting here at a computer and pretending you're a famous writer', at which point I'll scream back at it, chastising the inanimate object for being made of a dead tree and whose sole purpose in existence is to stir pasta.

I have no idea how I got here but I think I'll leave now. A felt-tip faced wooden stick has suddenly appeared out of nowhere and I fear about what it may do to me. Next week's edition in this series of boring updates of life will come from my proper computer in my proper house at university once more. That is if I can be bothered unpacking properly.

(Actually, I've just realised it won't because the aforementioned house is not currently connected to the virtual realms of the planet yet because the provider cut us off. Like I said, the original version of this post was going to be about paying bills and other grown-up stuff.)