quote:Originally posted by Fionnula the Cooler: Hey Tom Boy. I've read some of your fiction on TMO before and enjoyed it - your descriptions often have loads of evocative details that are satisfying to read and you seem to have an impressive instinctive storytelling way with words. I tried to finish reading your above post but I have to admit - its length got the better of my attention span. To be honest, I'd make more of an effort with it if you made the effort of editing/polishing it up a little. It reads rather like you posted it as soon as you wrote the last word, without reading it through first for typos, dodgy syntax, fluctuating tenses, etc. Unless ... they're ... done on purpose. Maybe it's an avant-garde work of literary genius and I am an idiot.
much appreciation for the comments With reference to tenses and shit I havent really written anything to be viewed by others since secondary school and I got a D in english. Just writing cos I have the time and the idea, really I'd like to make a film out of it I have had various ideas for how to run it but none that really feel like they work. I tried to go through it to sort some of it out, but as you say likewise for me, my attention span keeps getting the better of me, I will have it a proper go soon but I find that when I do try to fix its numerous problems I come up with more ideas which give me more shit to sort out, basically a revised version is soon to be on the way.
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Apparently my fiction writing teacher has a little boy who is ginger. Apparently This means I should be "less down on the gingers." So I can't have a character who is sad and ginger. Fag.
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Well you think she might have mentioned that then, rather than her son. Unless of course her son and gingers are generally lazy stereotypes, in which case I feel sorry for you all.
quote:Originally posted by Tom Boy: thought no-one was paying any attention sorry dude
I'm glad you put that back, Tom Boy - I read it just now and it transported me from the bland surroundings of my desk for a whole quarter hour. As per my first impression, the writing's a bit rough and ready but you describe a very recognisable kind of urban squalor: thrown into contrast by the pastoral, even festive, names of the charmless streets. I'm not sure whether it's by accident or design but the hypervivid, noticing-everyting style evokes the mentality of the whacked-out addict very well - the violent zoom into pin-sharp detail, the cataloguing of every corner turned and road walked down.
As Fionnula said (and you acknowledge) just working through it with a spellcheck will help quite a bit, but I actually found the manic, jumbled style actually added to the depiction of crack-consciousness rather than detracting from it. If you do get round to substantially rewriting it, I'd love to see the result.
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FUCKING eehee! The sort of noises that might escape a room where an unfortunate Tourette’s sufferer was losing the battle of, “no” to Michael Jackson. I made these noises in triumph. Years spent prostrate with a laptop talking to other prostates (quite literally, at one point), had finally paid off. Through a combination of message boards and messengers, I had somehow hooked up with Jack, a staff writer at The Face. He had offered me a place to stay and three works work experience. Three weeks! I would write articles and finally show everyone my art. It would spread through London like HIV in Africa. “Have you seen Laddle’s work?” “That guy is the AIDS!” I am Laddle, at least my screen name is and as far as I’m concerned my screen name is the far superior part of my personality. What would this acquaintance get in return? I don’t know. Probably bum sex. A kind of prostitution then, except both parties are attractive and willing. Reciprocal prostitution. Though I’d sleep with him even if he weren’t to be my landlord and employer. The bright lights of London, the tube! The thousands of people and potential partners! Don’t worry mum, my gay disease won’t be infecting your house anymore. You’re safe. You can have friends round again, they won’t turn gay now. You can spick and span out the homosexual atoms, Fabreeze through the furniture so I’ve left no trace. No longer will you have to hear the muffled shuffling of queer dreams, a hard dick and a shaking fist. I will write you though, dear mum. Letters of semen scrawled on the back of obscene photos just to let you know I care and that you’ve produced a miracle.
The train darts out of the station like an erect penis from loose boxers. I look back, green fields and neds with too much plastic bling. Finally I am going to be in a place of culture. People who have gone further afield than Miss Selfridge for their clothes. People who don’t know what gender means anymore. Orwell said, “Londoners are primarily useless.” I want to be the most useless, irresponsible person in the world. Passing through Newcastle. Derby. I fall asleep. London, lights, tramps, action! I hadn’t bargained on their being quite so many homeless, the great dark swashes. In Italian, the, “s” before the word usually makes it mean the opposite. Why Italian? It’s my culture mark. Look, I know another language. Be impressed. How can you fail not to be?! I read some poems once too. Black rags, spots and sores like the plague. Accents thick with tax dodging, drug dealing youth that they had all been forced to spend. I’m too excited to be dogged down by the terrible stories of lives that I’ve never met though, and not a single one of these people is as important as whether or not my collar is still in the right position. It isn’t. A quick flick will put that right. My collar, not the homeless.
Jack had said, “Come out of Oxford Circus, turn right and then left when you see Portland St. I’m above the pub.” He didn’t tell me that Oxford Circus has around 13 exits, some of them apparently running off into parallel universes. And the homeless never stop coming. A bundle of rags and a brown face hidden somewhere in there. Refugee from Rwanda? Can’t afford your baby? My collar still isn’t right. I get a little bit quicker and the day starts to get a little bit darker. Faces get like Myspace.com pictures. Each one with a little less exposure than necessary to hide the spots and arcs of not pretty enough bones. Everyone looks a little better with a little less sun. Faint thuds of pub rock filter out into the street. Quite how some people managed to end up with a taste in music that was about as good as holocaust, I do not know. I like Electroclash, it was last season but I intent to report on its tail end for The Face. We (the hip media elite) appear to have been swamped recently by borings wearing jeans. I find Jack. He looks a bit more normal than his black and white filtered photos had led me to believe. It’s hard to look arty when you’re standing on the door step. Still, he seems to be his Messenger profiles six foot and his stubbled head is perfectly boyish. Plus he has me at an advantage, I can’t let him think I’d sneer at him for even one second. I am gay boy in the headlights. “Laddle you’re soaked , get in lad.”
“Jesus. This place is pretty cool”
“Ye. It’s nice enough. D’ya want a beer or tea or coffee? How long were you on the train?”
“About eight hours”
“You must be shagged. Which is a shame, ‘cus tonight we’re going to go out and get wrecked”
Which we do.
I’m glutted on MDMA and I’ve got the fuck you look or that rather I would like to. Quite the sex as I walk and pout. Jack dances, face contorted with pleasure, as his hip swings a little to the left and then a little to the right. All one hundred and forty of the beats per minute and the syllables spoken around I take into account, each and every piece seeming to fit. Jack starts to move from the dance floor, so I follow, because talking would be good about now.
“Oh man, Jack, I’m fucked”
Some where in the back of my mind, I can hear a little man screaming, “cliché!” But now it’s about the feeling, and Jack looks ever so pretty with his stubble poking through the tiny gaps between the stitched threads of my tee, his hand on my thigh and his pupils dilated so much that it looks like he’s about to fall out of them.
“Good, in that case, you won’t mind giving me a quick kiss”
So we kiss and it’s tra la la and very nice. We have a cop and feel and his package isn’t prominent but then neither is it hidden and I guess on E for it to be there at all is something. We grope our way through the night. Grinding our teeth and asses and cocks in time to the thumps. Then there’s a little catch in my stomach, but I can’t figure out where it is. It passes and the euphoria passes back through me as the lights come on and the final track plays. The bouncers come to usher out, the come down catch, spreading as the “have you got any more pills mate” echoes around the fallen Eden of the now what we all realize filthy club. If I did have pills, I wouldn’t be giving them to you, junky. Jack says that we’re going to an after party in Brixton. I say “yes Jack ok whatever” because the come down catch is turning into a vacuous hole and I don’t really care where we’re going. Where have his bright edges gone? We get a car to some place and then we sit down in some place and smoke draw with people we don’t know. No ones comfortable. Just no one’s uncomfortable.
“Yeah, Gillian was on form tonight, init?”
“Yeah, I loved that one at the end, the rise or something”
“No mate that was second to last”
“No mate I’m sure it was last”
“Oh..whatever….banging.”
“Yeah”
I can’t take these abortions of conversations, void and blank as the loss of serotonin to my system has left me I refuse to sink to this level of lame. I’m embarrassed for Jack as he takes part, seemingly happy with these empty monosyllable, all-we-can-manage discussions.
First day of work. Come down not pretty. My artistic aspirations start to look silly after the thirteenth errand I run for the office. I don’t see Jack all day and instead I’m being told what to do by James. He’s saying my new romantic subtle gothic is passé. He’s saying that just because you can see my penis through my trousers doesn’t make me daring. He says it makes me look like a prick and asks me if I, “haven’t heard of Camel toe?” “Well of course I have,” say I. He snorts. The not so subtle come on of standing in front of James with an erection was obviously failing. I sit down and chew a pen lid instead. I still have faith in the glossy print to turn over into that pretty world of chic, copies recycled before the sun has a chance to dye their brilliance away.
The second week of work and so far I have spread my art (my art, what am I even talking about? My paid-for words that about thirty thousand people will probably skip over once.) Last night someone tried to mug me. I ran off screaming like a girl. Today I find out everyone in the office has been talking about me behind my back. I am bored of being a runner. I am bored of writing nasty DOT / SLASH hype merchant trash for other idiots like myself. The Face, as opposed to being a safe haven for creative types, is actually a mess of scheming gays. I shred documents. I run to the deli. This time, the tramp gets money put towards his fix. I sit typing out a review of yet another club night I was too high to remember. I stand up and go the window. Other runners enter and exit the deli shop, some clearly from the en-e-my, the ***** in jeans. I see the tramp, begging again. Everybody ignores him.
“Why are you staring out of the window, squire? Who do you think you are? Some kind of Neo-Wordsworthian? Now get back to your desk and write something interesting about the night we paid you to go out on. I said interesting too, Laddle. Not a piece about the unethical treatment of coke growers in Mexico.”
Tickety tap tap tap. A computer whirrs. The air has a sticky staleness to it. Although I haven’t visited every office in the country, I should imagine they’re all the same. Fans moving dust through the room, steaming cups of coffee staining carpets, the smell never quite going. Tickety tap tap tap. A computer whirrs. Radio 1 drivels on in the background. Jay K and Joel clearly never got past hospital radio, and neither did their audience. The mechanical spazzes doing this and doing that at the behest of someone else. At night it is a thudding electronica and mixes of the most obscure records to have ever wasted the worlds oil. Jack keeps me going on a diet of drugs and alcohol. Last night I ended up leaving a club early. I couldn’t handle another night of drug induced teeth clench jaw rot. I’d took a bit of speed though and was still a little too up to come down fully, so I turned on the radio. Westwood. –EXPLOSION- His catch phrase sound effect is like being punched in the face with the worst of pop culture. The settee still smelt of old sweat and come, the weeks of allowing Jack to rut away at me leaving only this noticeable effect. Fags and empty bottles discarded on a wonky coffee table. Well I thought, “isn’t this just fucking marvellous.”
Sorry for length. I used to have it finishing on a tramp coming into the office, defecating everywhere then throwing himself out of the window, but it got to slap stick. suggestions for the end welcome!
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End it thus. Boy flounces out of office. Steals bicycle. Bicycles to the beach. Sits on rocks. Watches waves wheeling up the sand / foam fountaining up his ankles / night tiding in with the sea / gulls dunking down and up the sky as though on strings / occasional fleets of smaller birds descending on the waves and scudding feet through the spray. Strains for epiphany. Fails. Pulls Madame Bovary / Mrs Dalloway / Hedda Gabler from shoulderbag. Reads by starlight. Contemplates seabed. Contemplates seabed. Contemplates seabed. Remembers The Hours. Remembers Ben's post. Feels foolish. Flushes. Makes fuck-this face. Drops book in sea. Goes home.
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It's true! I'm about to read Warner's The Man Who Walks and on first flick-thru it promises to pre-empt every 'quirky Highlands odyssey' idea I've ever had, not only for fictionwriting but for lifestyle. Wretched man.
May I just add: Isn't it satisfying, fellow Johnfans, that John has once and for all proved to the forum his literacy?
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When you and John take e together, do you ever do a little snog? It doesn't matter who you snog when you're on e, you know. It's just like sucking your thumb or twirling your hair: sensual, but not sexual. So do you?
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jhojn, at first I thought you were a bit too full-on for me and part of me was just thinking, "Just back off a minute," but as the weeks went on and you came out of yourself more I started to think you might be someone I could really imagine myself with - maybe even getting to know in the real world.
But something about how you did the last task really set the alarm bells ringing. On the one hand, the focus on cocks and asses could be just like a gay man would do - but it was equally similar to what a straight man would imagine a gay man would do - but then, wouldn't it just be like a gay to second-guess how I might imagine a straight man would do the task: with, you know, throbbing cocks and things.
So anyway - though I thought I could trust you I'm now starting to think that you might not have been totally telling the truth all along...
quote:Originally posted by London: When you and John take e together, do you ever do a little snog? It doesn't matter who you snog when you're on e, you know. It's just like sucking your thumb or twirling your hair: sensual, but not sexual. So do you?
If Mcandrew liked me enough to come anywhere near me we might have.
quote:Originally posted by London: When you and John take e together, do you ever do a little snog? It doesn't matter who you snog when you're on e, you know. It's just like sucking your thumb or twirling your hair: sensual, but not sexual.
That's like what John says, London. 'It doesn’t count with the lights off.' I just do an inside-smile and nod. I once spilled a wrap of speed all over your settee. Did you notice? John was beside me all of a sudden, brushing it onto the floor. It didn't escape my notice that he took the opportunity to brush fingertips against my thighs and – 'look, you twat, you've spilt it everywhere' – between my legs. We didn't kiss then. Months later, though, in his room, he was teaching me how to 'do a pill'. He said because it was my first time I didn't want to do a whole one. He said we'd share one, half each, split it between us. I said yes that was best and held out my palm but he ignored it and put my half on his tongue. I knew what was coming. I've seen this sort of come-and-get-it behaviour so many times in my life. I am an expert. Gamepads on laps. Hands brushing in soapy carwash buckets. Crotches of tracksuit bottoms pressed – 'oops! aye, bet you liked it though, poof' – in the face. He said with his eyes, Come and kiss your half off my tongue, Fionnula, dare you ;(. I shuffled up. I leaned in. I tilted my head. He fled.
I have never kissed JohnJ. I think he wants to. He just won't let us.
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I think we're really lucky to have FtC and jhonj posting on TMO. When you see news stories about 'young folk', like ben posted this a.m., it's reassuring to read their posts and see that they're creative and imaginative and intrepid and daft and not fretting over their 10 straight 'A's in Theology so they can get a nice safe job with a bank or sorting out their fucking pensions.
quote:Originally posted by ben: I actually found the manic, jumbled style actually added to the depiction of crack-consciousness rather than detracting from it. If you do get round to substantially rewriting it, I'd love to see the result.
Sorry its taken me ages to get back to you on this, just wanted to say thanks for the feedback, as soon as I get round the net nazis at work I will be free to concentrate on doing a proper edit, thanks again dude. I felt quite brave putting this up for the forum to pick holes in but appreciate the constructiveness of the critisism Just to point out the spell check situation, we dont actually have word on the PC's at work so have been using notepad to write with, no spell check, Grr.
Can you imagine such a cruel game To be played by parents on their new babe? To bestow on her this particular name And forever to lie in the bed that they made. How could it be That one so young Could have received A lazy tongue? On the fateful school photograph day The photographer drifted from his script The usual word was not in play His request for her name was poison dipped.
Our lisping heroine was dutifully captured Tongue protruding, classmates in raptures.
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This will be really dull to many people, but it is the last semi-creative thing I wrote.
xoxoxoxox
For millions of fans, there is no time before Star Wars; the saga has been around for as long as they can remember. For my generation, born in 1970, distinguishing before and after can be difficult. Seeing Episode IV: A New Hope – as it was later subtitled – at age seven was a photon torpedo to the psyche, but it didn’t wipe out all the myths, memories and folklore that had gone before, replacing them with a brand new fantasy. It shattered them, but instantly joined them together in new ways; it reanimated them, mixed them, montaged them and brought them to life more vividly than ever before. George Lucas may never have been a great director, but he was a genius at bricolage: building his story like a cut-and-paste scrapbook, combining the best bits from religion, fable and cinema into a new order. If nothing else, Star Wars was a masterclass in postmodern pastiche.
Of course, that isn’t what Star Wars meant to me in 1977. For most of that year, Star Wars was nothing but a background buzz, something other people were raving about. My parents, having seen the film on its release, had convinced themselves it might be too grown-up, too scary, too boring for me and my younger brother; so I played the old games that year. I played Robin Hood, making longbows from branches, and the Lone Ranger, armed with cap guns. I read Ladybird picture books and Marvel superhero comics, watched the Saturday morning pictures and the black and white telly. I’d been to the cinema to see 2001, which genuinely was too grown-up, scary and boring to engage me fully. I’d been to America, where I was entranced by the bicentennial histories of the Minutemen, and sided with the rebels against the British Empire. My world was a small corner of South East London, where the parks and back gardens were recovering from the drought of 76 and the pavements were strung with Union Flags for the Queen’s Jubilee.
So when Star Wars finally hit me – though it was like falling in love and taking drugs on the same night; though it dominated my imagination for the next six years and shaped me more subtly for the next twenty-seven – it wasn’t so much that it cleared the decks for something brand new. The real trick with Star Wars wasn’t that it was new; it was that it immediately seemed old, familiar, as if it had been waiting for us to discover it. Lucas had constructed a used universe where the clothes were dusty and the spaceships scuffed, where the Tatooine townships looked like they’d been standing for decades and the costumes and hairstyles – the Corellian “bloodstripe” decorating Han’s trousers, Leia’s Alderaanian ceremonial buns – carried their own history. This was a world we’d stumbled into; a big world, where every minor character in the background had a name and a backstory. The teaser trailers from 1977 picked up on this depth and plausibility, asking the viewer to imagine “what if” this was really going on, right now? Star Wars, a saga “a billion years in the making”, was pitched to audiences as though it came in a time-capsule from a distant civilisation, a Voyager message from the stars like Leia’s distress call. A New Hope captivated because it convinced.
Everything was vaguely familiar, but everything was slightly different. The Minutemen were there, in the rag-tag recruits assembling to battle a colonial Empire; so were Robin Hood and his cocky guerrilla war against the powerful establishment. Han Solo was a gun-slinging composite of Jesse James and, in his name at least, the Lone Ranger; the dogfights between X-Wings and TIE fighters were 2001’s elegant space ballet, set on fast-forward into choppy, thrilling space opera. Even Luke’s petulant kicking against the rules of his dry life on the desert planet Tatooine, and the crowds lining up for the fanfare finale where the heroes get their medals, resonated with my own seven year-old experience of a neighbourhood scorched by drought, then forced into Jubilee jollity.
But Star Wars was a richer package than that. It didn’t just rework the characters and stories a seven year-old already knew and loved; it reworked the characters and stories the thirty-two year old George Lucas knew and loved. Star Wars was a supercompressed compilation of great moments from cinema’s first seventy-five years; that intoxicating rush of the first viewing was also a teaser trailer for a host of other movies, a rapid-fire education in film history. From the scrolling titles onward, Star Wars paid tribute to cliff-hanger Saturday morning science fiction like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon. The derring-do and swashbuckling swordfights were part Errol Flynn, part Samurai; Robin Hood meets Kurosawa. C-3PO was built around The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man, melded with the robot Maria from Metropolis; the victory parade saluted Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The dogfights were World War Two in outer space, Dam Busters style; the gunfights were straight out of classic Westerns. Whole scenes on Luke’s home planet are a tribute to John Ford; when I first watched The Searchers, with Wayne discovering the family ranch burned by Comanches, it took me a while to realize why it seemed so powerfully familiar, and to trace it back to the almost identical shots of Luke finding his aunt and uncle’s corpses outside their smoldering homestead.
Star Wars was a mash-up, a best-of Hollywood genre moments mixed with surprising images from other national cinemas – German Expressionism, fascist propaganda, Japanese epic, even French New Wave. As a film student, Lucas had tended towards art cinema, making esoteric shorts called 1:42:08 and 6/18/67. His major project at the University of Southern California was THX1138: 4EB, which drew inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 Parisian science fiction film, Alphaville. The “electronic labyrinth” of THX1138, and through it Alphaville’s sterile futuristic corridors, became the Death Star interiors, with their Nazi-uniformed officers and white-armoured Stormtroopers marching down a maze of near-identical passages past torture chambers and prison cells.
Already a potent mix of ingredients to give kids as a down-in-one slammer: but there are still deeper levels to Star Wars, echoes few seven year-olds would have recognized but that may well have grabbed them subconsciously, pulling them in without telling them why. Star Wars is, explicitly and deliberately, built on traditional myths and fables: Lancelot and the Grail quest, Siegfried reforging his father’s sword, Odysseus’s perilous journey to Ithaca, Jason seeking the Fleece, Theseus in the labyrinth. The spiritual underpinning of the Force can be mapped onto Jungian archetypes, Zen Buddhism, pagan Shamanism and Christianity. Vladimir Propp’s 1928 study of the repeated structure in one hundred Russian folktales finds the same motifs recurring: the hero receives the call to adventure, leaves home, passes a threshold, gains a magic item, meets a helper, defeats his archenemy. Star Wars ticks all the boxes. It made the new look familiar, and it made the old, the ancient, the deep-seated myths seem fresh and gripping. No wonder it captured so many and held them so hard.
I began the research for my book on Star Wars fandom by placing a notice on TheForce.net website, asking people to mail me with an account of what the saga meant to them. The first reply came within a minute; when I finished reading that message, I found three more waiting for me. With my email account expanding and the pages multiplying, I had to take the notice down after two hours and keep only the first one hundred replies. The testimonies were more passionate and dramatic than anything I’d expected. Star Wars had dominated my creative life until Return of the Jedi, shaping my felt-pen drawings, my exercise-book short stories, my mini-action figure panoramas and role-playing dress-up games. Even in the mid-80s, when I was at secondary school and Star Wars, with its muppets and cuddly bears, was something you didn’t like to mention while the boys were talking about X-rated pirate videos, I kept the faith at home, commandeering my action figures into stop-motion super-8 films. Star Wars was the most important single story of my childhood and teenage years, and I still loved it enough in my early 30s to write a book about it.
But I was never like my correspondents Colin, who wrote a one-line email “Star Wars is my life,” or Robert, who happily confessed “I spent $1500 to see Episode I three days early, and it was the most beautiful experience of my life…I know the perfect love that is Star Wars.” I wasn’t like Scott, who boasted that he’d “completely memorized every line, every sound and every movement in each film”, or Dev, who told me “Star Wars is always in my mind. Without it I would probably be lost.” My route into film studies and then cultural studies may have been partly inspired by Star Wars, but other fans had used George Lucas as their career counselor, even their spiritual guide. Rudy had joined the Indiana police force because of his obsession with Boba Fett, coupled with the state’s prohibition on bounty hunters – cop was the next best thing – and decorated his squad car with Fett’s insignia for perps to admire on the way to the station. Phillip, a New York psychologist, was typical of many respondents in his incorporation of the Jedi code into a personal moral framework, almost a substitute religion. “Sure, we may not be able to lift droids, rocks or X-Wings, but we could use the Force in other ways such as helping, loving, caring and supporting, and be our own personal Jedi.”
For others, from vulnerable or unhappy backgrounds, Star Wars was their support and solace. Kevin, who never knew his father, identified strongly with the orphaned Luke Skywalker. He turned his back on Star Wars as a teenager, but later kicked drugs by replacing that addiction with a determination to collect the toys of his childhood. Barbara grew up with an abusive stepfather, and told me “Star Wars was my distraction, my escape, my dreams.” To all these fans, Lucas’ creation was clearly far more than just three films. The characters were role models, friends or mentors, and the story was familiar as their own memories; a powerful myth, even a quasi-religious parable.
In this context, it doesn’t seem so surprising that the release of the prequel trilogy, starting with The Phantom Menace in 1999, sparked such intense, heartfelt debate. By re-opening the franchise and expanding the mythos, George Lucas was changing the nature and definition of Star Wars – which for sixteen years had been a safely closed circuit of three films – and to many, he was diluting or corrupting it. By 2000, Star Wars wasn’t just the tight cycle we remembered from growing up, with Luke becoming a man, Vader becoming more human and Han learning to care for someone other than a Wookiee. It was also Jar Jar Binks clowning with a cod-Caribbean accent, a little kid whooping as he won a space battle single-handedly, and stiff, cold acting from most of the adult, non-CGI performers. It was cinema as a computer game; it was toilet jokes mixed uneasily with trade disputes. Some fans loyally defended the new film, trusting in Lucas’ vision, but others felt they now had more of a grasp on the saga’s tone and essence than the man who originally created it. Debates between “bashers” and “gushers” raged across internet forums, and fan creativity flourished as amateur film-makers and authors produced their own variations on The Phantom Menace or predictions for the next episode.
Attack of the Clones was the decider. It resolved the basher-gusher wars – most fans greeted it with relief, glad of anything that improved on The Phantom Menace – but some diehards who disliked it now opted out altogether, deciding that for them, Star Wars ended in 1983. For those who remain, Revenge of the Sith is Lucas’ final chance to redeem himself and give the saga the completion it deserves. Star Wars matters to millions of people – it matters a lot. To the fans still hanging onto the myth they loved as kids, Episode III is the new hope, and the last hope.
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Hey, some of you guys might be interested in this competition and new publishing company.
quote: old traditions, newly established.
ENDpapers is a new general UK publishing house, the first to establish in York this century, and among the first outside of London. Although new, ENDpapers wishes to follow an old publishing tradition by emulating those of the turn of the last century. Publishers were often themselves writers and artists, and were committed to quality and to just rewards for all. Our approach is one of partnership between art and industry, between conscience and commerce.
Our annual ‘ENDpapers Literary Prize for Short Stories' continues in 2005 with the TALES series.
In association with BORDERS, we are publishing FIVE NEW ANTHOLOGIES of SHORT STORIES from work set in five areas; LONDON, BRISTOL, TYNESIDE, CHESHIRE and GLASGOW. We are expecting as diverse and exciting a range of tales from these cities as we received for YORK TALES.
See our EVENTS section for individual BORDERS launch dates across the country!
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
It reads rather like you posted it as soon as you wrote the last word, without reading it through first for typos, dodgy syntax, fluctuating tenses, etc. Unless ... they're ... done on purpose. Maybe it's an avant-garde work of literary genius and I am an idiot. ![[Frown]](frown.gif)
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