Fiction

Pass the Parcel

One excitable afternoon at University, when I was hanging around the library not doing any kind of work and in fact wasting time reading webcomics and hitting refresh on Livejournal about a thousand times every five minutes, I had a minor brainwave: since my fiction tends to stall if I try to write anything longer than a thousand words, why shouldn't I create something novel-length made up of interlinking short stories held together by the passage of a solid artifact, with stories arching away from the point of contact with this item?

It didn't turn out very well, and as usual I got bored long before it was finished, but here is the beginnings of what might have been a revolutionarily dreadful novel had I any kind of stamina.

Flyering Files

These began as fictionalised, exaggerated accounts of just how fecking weird promoting nightclubs can get, based on the experiences of myself and my flatmate in our second year at university. Then it branched out a little and gained a backing cast, and stopped being about flyering so much. There's not much in the way of plot and people take a lot of drugs and abuse each other thoroughly, and thus I expect it to be an instant hit. Obviously.

Hamiltwins

By far and away the most successful thing I have ever written, and the most fun. These stories are vignettes from the lives of two rich, obnoxious, ridiculously beautiful identical twins, but it really isn't as bad as it sounds. Or so the regular readers tell me. It has spawned artwork and very silly conversations and been inherently what I always wanted writing to be: fun. The stories do tend to be quite sexually explicit, and the main theme of them is consensual incest, so if you're not wholly comfortable you may want to skip it.

Miscellaneous: University

As my degree was in the (typically lazy) subject of Creative Writing (though the actual degree title was a BA in the nebulous category of "Writing and Media"), I spent about three years writing appallingly bad fiction and equally pointless essays explaining in no coherent detail quite why my writing was in fact so terrible. The best of them, for a given value of "best" are displayed here, although as some of them were created as installation projects they lose something when brought to a website. It is up to you to decide whether they were ever much good in the first place.

Miscellaneous: Prompted

Livejournal is possibly my favourite website ever: it has more writing communities than I could ever hope to list, and many of them centre around the marvellous idea that providing a single-word or phrase prompt and setting a time or word limit is a good way to stimulate the well-documented "panic" centres of the reluctant writer's brain, an exercise which was used to variable effect during my degree also. The results of this are available here.

© Derek Des Anges (unless stated otherwise)