Vivat Libertas

Tinfoil is very important. I don't mean literal tinfoil - I'm just being silly. But tinfoil sounds like foil and I happen to think that foils are very important - not just for wrapping up sandwiches and making good cat toys, but also in the literary sense. That's all very well and good; foils are pretty important to literature. This is the point at which I make a bit of a jump and claim that foils are important to real life - in particular, that they are important to friendship. This is also the point at which this post turns into a sappy ode to my friends. I am blessed to have friends from all over life's weird ways. They're not exactly like me. I have friends my parents disapprove of. This is a good thing. The differences between me and my friends mean that we can bounce things off each other - ideas, perspectives, maths, soft toys, bouncy balls, buckets of ice cold water. We disagree. We argue. We get things wrong. But it is worth it to illuminate eac...

First off, I saw my friend and his sister today. I don't see them a lot and it was good to talk to them again - they're probably the people most on my level in my social circle. Anyway, we had a good time and during the course of the day my friend asked to look at some of my writing. He knows how I write loads and loads of stories but run out of steam once I reach the middle (sometimes I don't even get past the beginning...), and I showed him part of a story I'd written on one of his prompts. We both had a good laugh at its general crackiness (I may post it up here one day, but it was a story about a French intellectual being kidnapped by a chair from IKEA who wanted to search for his lost love...yeah, it was weird) and my overblown style of writing (I was trying to parody bad romance novels and failed hard). So, this friend suggests I combine three of my stories (beginning, middle and end) and I suggest that since there are three of us we could each take a part of th...