Some Day Days Read online

Launching a career as a writer of romances might seem a weird thing to do while reading physics and philosophy at Oxford.

  Hell, it is a weird thing to do anytime. No getting around it.

  In my defence, I must point out that I’ve been on the road most of this summer without my bike and living out of hotel rooms is pretty much of a drag. Writing down my memories seems much more, well, justifiable, than just daydreaming...

  I’d like to believe that there is more than boredom and daydreams motivating me to write and for my sake as well as yours, I think I’d best write the reasons out.

  The story of these stories begins with dyaries. As I mentioned in my first piece, I’ve been using dyaries to record my everyday life for several years now, off and on. Dyaries are often and not entirely unfairly, laughed at as devices geeks use to record every boring second of their boring lives. On the other hand, it’s often said that the best camera is the one you have with you, and it’s even better if you have it running when the unexpected happens, so I do see value in dyaries – even in the most boring of lives, like my pre-Beri life. And I can certainly testify that unexpected things happen. Funny thing is that when it happened to me, my dyary was sitting on my desk. They may be a niche device and a sometime fad which probably argues that they are not essential, but I do find uses for one. I also have found their flaws.

  One obvious flaw is that while they record the image and the sounds, they don’t record thoughts or emotions – something a written diary is quite capable of doing. I know of people who add a voice over narration to their dyary record, though usually to an edited version. Since this makes it more of a conventional diary with video, the shortened form makes it less of a true dyary, if one takes a dyary to be a recording of more or less everything in one’s day.

  What I’ve done since coming up to Oxford, to compensate for this lack of emotional backdrop, is to write a regular old-fashioned diary to supplement my dyary record. This made me more interested in words and writing, and writing creatively. This is the critical linkage, dyaries leading to a diary, leading to writing, and writing creatively.

  So far, so good. Nothing out of the ordinary. Half the people in the world want to write a novel, so I’m in fairly safe waters here. And like most of this half of the world, I dabbled in writing fiction, mostly science fiction, and mostly just the noses of stories, rarely getting the whole dog of the story down. Plots being one of my weaknesses...

  Enter Selina Beri. I need not go into what Selina Beri means to me, I’ve spent tens of thousands of words going into that already. But she brought with her a story. A story I could write. A story I wanted to set down, if only to live it again in my imagination.

  There are two main elements that make Selina’s entry into my life a story. The first is that her appearance in my life was something very much out of my ordinary. Let me put it this way – her appearance is like a series of mountain peaks arising out of an otherwise flat and featureless plain. It stands out. At present it's an isolated series, though I hope some day I'll see them as part of a range I’ve yet to glimpse. As mountain peaks, they can be described without dragging in a flat plain that surrounds them, which is to say, my everyday life. They have distinct shapes – beginnings and endings, which I've tried to craft into stories with the traditional beginning, middle and ending, though the larger story arc is unresolved.

  I should make this point – most everything I’ve written is not a verbatim transcription of dyary records. Mostly because they don’t exist for almost all of the incidents I write about. At least I have no such records. Moss no doubt has dyary records covering the parts of the time Selina and I were in Cambridge that he was present for, as his recording of Selina’s piano piece at the garden party suggests. I paid no attention to his glasses at the time. I’ve not talked to him about any other recordings he may or may not have. That they might exist and could be accessible has certain implications, of which I’ll touch on in a bit. The point I want to make is that these are stories. I’ve reconstructed the dialog from memory and the diary entries I made soon after the events, though actually, I’ve written these stories so soon after the events that they describe that they are essentially enhanced diary entries. The dialog, while not verbatim, is “true” in the sense that I include only what I can recall us saying, if not the exact words, close to them, and “fiction” in the sense that I did edit what was said somewhat in order to shape them into a story. The extent that life has been edited is the extend that these stories are fiction. So, looked at in one way, these pieces are fiction, since they are crafted, but I feel them to be real, my memories of events translated into words.

  What I have, or expect to have is not a novel, that I know. It is not fiction for one thing, but a description of a selected slice of my life set in words in a stylized shape. Since it is based on real life, it currently lacks an ending – so far. And without an ending, you can’t have a middle either... and without a middle and an ending, I don’t think you can have a novel, or even a story when you come right down to it. I’ve gone and taken liberties as well, tacking on various fragments and now, even this essay. I have adopted the term ‘pieces’ to include both the semi-independent short stories and the shorter, mostly plotless fragments to highlight the fact that I’m not trying to construct a novel in any traditional sense. While these smaller pieces could be viewed as ‘chapters’, I feel no compulsion to make them so. If they fit that way, fine, but if not, well fine too. I mean, how many ‘middle-words’ have you found in any other book? I’ll be ‘creative’, and follow no pre-set pattern – we’ll see what sort of pattern emerges from the life that inspires it.

  I guess I’m drifting off on a tangent. Let me try to wrap this up.

  In writing these pieces, I’m greatly distorting my life. This is obvious, but I guess I’ll state it anyway. I live mostly on that ‘featureless’ plain, which, of course, is not featureless, only very familiar. While I must admit spending a great deal of time thinking about Selina and, well, ‘us’, the truth is that if you add up the actual number of hours we’ve spent together, you will see that the number is sadly, quite modest, no need to start using days to measure our time together. However, the ‘atomic weight’ of those hours on an emotional level is quite large, heavier than whole days of pulling cable, installing sensors and jammers and programming desktop controls that fill my ordinary summer vacation days. (Being a security firm, we hardwire all our devices to try to insure that they cannot be breached, just so you know why I’m still laying cables...) anyway, the point is that between the few hours here and there that I’ve spent with Selina, I do live a quite ordinary life, both as a student, and as a tech guy in the summer. I really don’t want to write boring things... But I do feel an obligation to present a more honest view of my life, so I will try to place any future romantic episodes of my life, if any, within the context of my whole life as far as I am able. At the present time, the only way I see to do this is beginning to write creative pieces concerning my everyday life. Making them entertaining is going to be a mighty challenge.

  Chapter 06 – Piece Six – Mission to the Lamp Black Stars