A Perfect World

Full disclosure: This blog post is an unplanned, badly structured ramble. Make of it what you will.

In my short twenty-one years of life, I’ve experienced nothing so astonishing, terrifying and frustrating as the machinations of the human brain. Depending on who you ask, the brain is either a bundle of nerves and synapses that muddle together to make a being, a house of memories and emotions too complex for science to grasp, or the ship within which the soul resides. Or all three. Or something else. It may be the most abstract and fascinating physical object within our reach. Everyone has one, and we hardly give it thought. Well, without further ado, here is my brain, examining others.

Looking at the world from a different perspective, we might be a conglomerate of brains piloting sacks of meat that have managed to communicate with each other, and form the illusion of a society. Not only have we ascended from our ancestral tribal qualities (allegedly), we’ve also convinced ourselves that we’ve evolved past the fall of civilisations and live by a strict moral code. Most of us know rights from wrongs, days from nights, self defense from murder. In fact, we’re brought up under the hypothetical wings of our parents who teach us that the world as they see it is the way the world is, full stop, and it’s not for a decade or two that we might begin to question this notion. And we begin to ask ourselves the difference between right and wrong, capitalism and communism, justified war and uneasy peace. The lines become blurred. We begin listening to other sources and slowly, we begin to shape our own opinions on the state of the world and people’s places inside of it.

Now here’s the problem. Somewhere along the way, whilst we were evolving into this society into which we’re born like it’s normality, people’s codes of morals began to divert, or had begun diverted, and led to a string of complicated different spheres of opinion. People on Side A believe that people on Side B are wrong and maybe evil for their opinions, whereas people on Side B think the same of those on Side A. Perhaps they’re both good people. But with each passing generation, the children that are born into the normality of either side’s opinion being true fact believes perhaps more strongly that the opposing side is inherently ill-willed. Those who want immigrants to seek safe haven in this country are clearly fools who have no concept of the wider implications. Those who bar immigrants from entering the country are ruthless human beings with no regard for human life. And so they cook up plots against each other, telling themselves that the means justify the ends because they are right. Those opposing them don’t see that right now, but they are right.

Nobody will ever see the whole picture for what it is. I pride myself on objective thinking where possible, but I often fall to bias and limited perspective, as much as anyone else. People far more learned and intelligent than I may try to think objectively, and fail all the same. Because we weren’t born into neutrality. We were born into a pre-existing world of opinion and lies, and hatred and the greater good, and it’s gotten to the point where this tangled web we weave no longer has a beginning, a starting point to return to and figure the whole thing out, and we’re trapped in it. You can’t please everyone, there’s no such thing as perfection and in a perfect world, there’d be no conflict. But I suppose that’s the price of individuality.

This greatest of moral problems, I think, can be best personified in the World War 2 example. Hitler’s rise to power was catastrophic for millions of lives, and no child even 70 years later grows up without hearing of his malice. And yet he was human, and without his despicable conquest we wouldn’t have many of the advances in technology and medicine that we now do; we wouldn’t have swayed to the philosophy that those alien to our nationality are good, and that the Aryan race is a hideous concept. So having seen the (admittedly, currently clouded) promising future that was left after the downfall of the Nazis, would you go back in time to kill Hitler? It’s the same sort of problem with individuality. With differing opinions and philosophies comes hatred, pain, war, death, but if we were all one, and if we all agreed on every outcome, we’d surely lose our identities, our hopes and dreams, our loves, our souls.

So I ask you: Is a suffering world the only one in which love and laughter can exist?

Game of Thrones Season 6 Review / Reaction

To read this post, click here, for the post is lengthy and full of spoilers.

This does not count as today’s weekly blog post, which is still scheduled to go live five hours from now.

This is the solution I’ve come up with for being able to post a spoiler heavy review on something on my blog without passerby scrollers getting spoiled. It might not be a regular thing! I considered writing it in a shareable Google Doc and sharing the link, but this way it’s all still hosted on this blog, and relies on no external aid. Enjoy!

Brexit

(This is not a tantrum post. Little bit ranty though.)

So this morning I woke up and the country had imploded, because just over half of the country voted – for whatever reason – to leave the European Union. I’m not going to let my anger win out over my logic and call half of the country a bunch of backwards racists, because I’m sure many good people were enticed by the notion of £350 million a week going back into the NHS. (More on that later.) It is, however, hard to deny that much of the Brexit vote was made out of fearmongering, xenophobia, a rose-tinted view on the past and outright lies fabricated in order to steer the public in the disastrous direction of somebody’s idea of the greater good. When will humans get it into their heads that the greater good is a goddamn subjective thing and that thinking you’re right does not make you right?

Well, anyway. I promised myself I wouldn’t be angry if Brexit won through fair democracy… and I guess fearmongering and lies is what counts for fair democracy nowadays. But what does anger me is that when the country inevitably continues to struggle outside of the EU, many of those who voted Leave are likely going to let pride win them over, refuse to admit they were wrong and allow those with positions of authority or journalism to convince them that no, they’re not wrong, it’s still the immigrants’ fault. And they’ll believe it. Because they have to tell themselves that they did the right thing.

Remaining in Europe wasn’t going to solve our problems. But we had the opportunity to change things from the inside. Leaving Europe has just created a whole bunch more problems.

Now to the part that really does outrage me. One of the main counterarguments to remaining in the EU which I thought was worth pondering was the idea of keeping £350m a week, and putting that money back into the NHS. It was promised that this money would be going into the NHS. But lo and behold, the moment that the votes were in and counted, our good friend Nigel Farage takes to the stage and says that it was a “mistake” to promise £350m a week for the NHS and that it would likely not be going back into the NHS. This was the basis on which many people voted Leave, which has now been hastily withdrawn with an “oops lol soz”.

This deserves a protest.

Not just because Brexit won. But because many voters with intentionally misled into voting for something which would never happen. That’s not democracy, that’s manipulation, and considering how close the vote was, I’d call it grounds for a re-vote.

So, David Cameron just stepped down as Prime Minister. And for all the years that I’ve wanted that man out of his position, I’ve surprised myself by being upset about the matter. Not because I like his warped idea of leadership, but because his empty seat only leaves the way open for even worse right-wing leaders to take his place. If I honestly thought that another party had a chance at winning whatever election comes next, I’d be ecstatic, but if this referendum has proven anything it’s that prejudiced hearts prevail.

The Short Story and Me

After happily giving feedback to a good friend’s piece of writing, I felt inspired to finally pick up the digital pen and get to writing fiction again. I needed some time to recover after university picked me up like some sort of creative lemon and squeezed me dry, but as creative lemons are wont to do, I soon ditched this nonsensical metaphor and got down to writing a good old fashioned short story.

When I first started writing, as a child, I didn’t really consider the idea of short stories at all. I’m not sure I knew they existed. I was, after all, a child, and thought that three or four pages in my literacy book might have amounted to much more in the format of a paperback. But the reality is, I started out with short stories, as I’m sure many people do. Our Year 2 literacy teacher asked us to write a story of whatever length, about whatever we could think up, and all I can really remember was that it had something to do with a magical flying island and a woman who’d found it by diving into a well. My teacher thought it was excellent, and showed other teachers, got me to record an audio reading of it, the whole shebang, and to this day I believe that this is what really kickstarted my ambition to become a writer, which is somewhat amusing considering the likely less than publishable nature of my childhood magnum opus. In fact, it was simultaneously as damaging as it was uplifting, for it planted a seed of arrogance that survived until university put me straight. But hey, each to their own hubris.

Well anyway, I did some writing on and off, but it wasn’t until I was around eleven or so that I really began to write more. At the age of twelve I started writing New Recruit (or: The Life and Times of Reluctant Teenage Vampire Jack Chimcholi) as we saw in last week’s blog post. This was, of course, more of an attempt at a novel, being split into chapters and updated over the course of about a year. And, as mentioned in last week’s blog post, I thought that it was quite the successful story at the time. But even then, I was aware of the lack of plot and structure from not thinking ahead, and would therefore resort back to the short story as a mode for storytelling, more from laziness than from anything else. One short story I remember writing was about a man who was chased down by an evil, self-driving bus in the dead of night… and now that I come to think of it, my Year 2 story probably made a lot more sense than whatever that was. Regardless, I brought it into school, and my tutor told me it was brilliant, further solidifying my sense that I was something special, maybe even a prodigy when it came to writing.

As I grew over the next few years, my writing turned to poetry, the like which many developing writers probably have somewhere hidden under their floorboards, if they haven’t burned it already. Much of this poetry will never see the light of day, and the light of day will thank me for it. (Picture an insecure 15 year old with a dark past who was convinced he was stuck in the ‘friendzone’, and you can cringe even without the source material.) Despite the mounting horror I feel whenever I turn my mind towards these works, they were still integral to my development as a writer, and even helped shape the way I would approach short stories when I later returned to them.

I chose English Literature as an A-Level because, hey, study what you know, right? And eventually our teacher (let’s call him Mr. Howard) asked us to write a short story about a subject of our choice, so long as it adhered to the genre of Gothic that we’d been studying. Much like that fabled Year 2 task a decade earlier, but uh, more Gothic, obviously. By this point, however, I’d grown an appreciation of the darker side of storytelling, and proceeded to write a short story which is possibly the first one I’m not ashamed to discuss in this blog post, though it does still show a hint of the immature, overactive, nonsensical teenage mind that brought us Jack Chimcholi. This short story, scrawled quickly in the space of an hour, was named Human Harvest, and followed the flight of our stereotypical Gothic damsel in distress and she attempted to flee from the hands of her lifelong tormenter, the owner of this stereotypical Gothic castle who forced her to eat human flesh for her meals. I won’t reveal the entire narrative, but there was a nice grisly twist at the end and it almost even made sense. To my great relief, Mr. Howard was impressed with it, though he argued against the name, which wasn’t originally Human Harvest but instead something else that I don’t quite remember. (Also, I just looked up the title Human Harvest, and it’s a movie that was released in 2014. I wrote my story in 2012. I was the original, damn you!) And the reason I mention all of this was because it was the next great step as a writer, coercing me to return to the short story as my preferred choice of narrative.

I wrote many short stories thereafter, publishing many of them on my personal Facebook page for want of a better place. Many more of them stayed on my PC, and have since been lost to time, for I was a non-Dropbox using fool. There was some good stuff in there, though. Well, maybe not good, bur some salvageable concepts at the very least. These short stories, typically first drafts that would be abandoned to the mercy of my terrible attention span, acted most simply and most effectively as experience. There’s a theory that it takes 1,000 hours to perfect your craft, and that if you want to get good at something, you’ve got to spend hundreds of hours being awful at it first. Whilst there’s no perfecting writing, I’m very glad that I spent much of my time creating these works, even if they are lost to time or are otherwise rubbish.

And then I started my BA in Creative Writing, and finally began to realise that I wasn’t the only person in the world to write half-decent stories. Good job, Kristian.

I learned some of my most valuable lessons about short stories in my first semester. Mainly that they were not, as I had previously considered, simply short novels that could be used as a platform to practice writing. In fact, all that short stories really have in common with novels is that they’re both pieces of prose. Some people believe that short stories are closer to poetry that they are novels, and I’m inclined to agree. The more I look back on my time as an emo teenage poet (oh god), the more I’ve come to realise that I never put my fictional narrative development on hold during those years; I merely explored it from another perspective. I came to understand that short stories have to be short stories for a reason, and that many of my previous (and future) faults were (and would be) writing a short story that would prefer to be a novel. I mean, sure, people can still enjoy a short story about a man who has an imaginary friend that follows him everywhere he goes, ruining his relationship with his parents and girlfriend and driving him to the point of insanity, but when you try to squish that into anything less than 4,000 words it begins to feel very crammed. And that example was from a piece of coursework that I handed in last year, because simply knowing how to write a short story isn’t good enough. You have to stop your imagination getting away from you.

So I’m going to continue writing short stories. I’m going to write them until I have tons of the things, and publish them into some sort of collection that you can do a nifty little read of on Amazon and hopefully enjoy. That’s the plan for the next few years. But I also need to practice my novel writing separately, and that’s something that I have precious little experience in. So I’m gonna go suck at it by myself for a little bit. Maybe turn 4,000 words into 40,000, more, who knows. And if my short story collection or this fabled novel ever sees the light of day, I’ll be sure to let you know right here.

Memory Lane

I was going to blog about guns, and how they’re bad and how the recent events in Orlando were a tragedy, but I think we’ve already heard all of that before. I extend my deepest sympathies to anyone affected and truly do think it was a terrible thing, but my condolences aren’t going to help or add anything to this discussion. My monetary donation isn’t going to bring those people back to life, or stop killers thinking the way they think, and if I lived in the area then my blood wouldn’t be needed either due to the immense generosity of the human race having already met that quota. So that’s why I’m blogging about something completely different today. I just felt that I should acknowledge that.

***

I’m not sure what prompted me to do it. I was talking to a friend about a particularly awful old story I wrote on a website called Quizilla back in the day, and pure curiosity compelled me to try and dig it out of the Wayback Machine‘s archives. I didn’t hold much promise that my work would have been archived, and most of it wasn’t. But I found two things: 13 year old Kristian’s Quizilla profile, and Chapter 22 of New Recruit, my teenage vampire story.

That’s right. I wrote a teenage vampire story. And I’ll never live it down.

Rather than immortalise this monstrosity on the blog where I’m supposed to show off my writing talent, I will instead post two extracts here and point and laugh at them. The first will be a segment of my profile description, and the second will be a small extract from chapter 22 of the epic teenage masterpiece itself. But I’m not quite self-loathing enough to post the entire thing right here. So without further ado, here is a glimpse into the mind of a creatively rabid teenager from 2008:

I’m becoming a bit more popularz so it’s time to update my description. Yeah, I’m a guy. Plain and Simple. Believe it or Beat it. Age? 13. And I’m not a stalker or anything. Description: Ohh, I dunno. My profile pic is what I want to look like, I’m close to it. Green eyes, short brown hair. Nothing much else to know. Oh! I’m a MIDGET people! Webcam Show Schedule: HEY! Wrong guy, wrong website. OKAY?! Confession: I don’t update my journal much. I have a blog though: [REDACTED]. What else ya wanna know?

So at this point you may be wondering why I’m posting this here, and if I get a kick out of ridiculing myself. The truth is that I find this type of thing fascinating. It’s like that moment when you see a photo of yourself maybe four or five years ago, and realise that actually, yes, you do look like you’ve aged into the adult that society is convinced you’re supposed to be. Now, I always knew that I was a little… overzealous as a young teenager. But I don’t remember being this… sassy. Maybe this is only interesting to me – I hope not – but the passage of time and growth of the human mind has always been a keen point of fascination for me.

I’m not stalling, I promise.

Okay, maybe I’m stalling just a little.

Without further ado, I present to you an extract from chapter 22 of New Recruit. Jack Chimcholi (our sensibly named teenage vampire protagonist) is currently being introduced to the secret underground vampire city that lies below the town he lives in. His friend, Felix, is showing him to one of his favourite shops.

Felix then leads us to a shop which sells all sorts of anomolies which the human world couldn’t dream of. Sweets that make you tell the truth, Y-ray goggles that let you see all the things inside a body, V-goggles which shows you who’s a vampire.

“Woah. This shop have a name?” I ask Felix. I want to come back here later.

“Umm, ya stupid. Its called Berties Bizzare.”

“Berties Bizzare what?”

“Just Berties Bizzare. You don’t get it do you?”

“Whuh?”

“Bertie is an awful bizzare name for a vampire.”

“Oh. What the hell? Flying potion for 100 gold? That CAN’T be real!”

“Oh it is. It just has some nasty after-effects. Only for suicidals really. Here.” He says, taking a packet of the shelf and scanning it on a nearby computer. It comes up on hte screen, and he clicks an option saying “Show Dangerous After-Effects”. A video comes up.

It shows someone drinking the potion and smiling. He then flies up for 10 seconds and goes back down to the ground, holding the product and winking. He then blows up.

Felix tuts. “Death in 2 seconds.”

We walk on.

So it’s clear that I had a pretty nonsensical, overactive imagination. And let me assure you that whatever doubts I have about my writing, I can objectively say that I have come a long ways from writing this kind of trash. But the crazy part – and the reason I’m sharing this today – is that when I wrote this, I was fairly confident that I was ready to write a novel. In my mind, I knew that this wasn’t the best writing in the world and that a real novel would require more focus and attention to detail, but I was pretty sure that I was just about there. And to look back on this now, after 8 years more writing and having finished a Creative Writing degree, I can safely say that no, I was not ready to write a novel. I’m not even sure if I am now. The writing of a novel requires continued creativity, originality, editing, rewriting and an objective evaluation of one’s own work, along with much, much more. And when I do write a book, you can be sure that Jack Chimcholi, Reluctant Teenage Vampire will not be making an appearance.

Kristian’s Brain (Or: How My Low Self-Esteem Got Me A 2:1)

Having low self-esteem is one of the defining qualities of being a Kristian Richmond. Whether it’s poking my chubby tub, frowning at myself in the mirror or driving myself into a state over other people’s opinions, I’m always finding ways to make myself feel down about something. And I’m far from the only person in the world – in even a 2 mile radius – to be so crushingly hard on myself. But instead of this being a blog post where I analyse my reasons for having low self-esteem, and bore you all to tears whilst doing so, I’m actually here to discuss a rather amusing prospect.

It may have just saved my degree.

In the first semester of the year I had two modules to complete instead of the typical three, as the third was essentially my dissertation which carried over into the next semester. So, these two semester A modules – Advanced Prose Fiction and Poetry Writing – they didn’t go quite as planned. I’ll be honest, I thought I crushed Poetry Writing. The creative assessment (which is what yours truly chose) consisted of writing 6 poems and then writing about them, and all through the semester I received rather positive feedback on all of them! I even wrote a poem from the perspective of Henry VIII (I was watching The Tudors at the time), utilizing Martianism to explore how he’d feel about modern-day England. But both that module and Advanced Prose Fiction came back as a 56, or a 2:2 (or a C). Far from the worst mark in the world, but I vaguely remember just scraping a 2:1 on average for the previous year, and needing this year to count. This, coupled with crippling demotivation and disinterest towards my dissertation, led me to ending semester A feeling very insecure about my future grades.

As of last week I’ve gotten all of my grades back for semester B. They were all 2:1s. Healthy 2:1s at that. Almost firsts! And that really surprised me, given that earlier in the semester I’d put up a totally-non-public-meltdown status telling people not to be surprised if I got a 2:2 and that it wasn’t for lack of trying, that they’d all overestimated me, yadda yadda. (I got a whole bunch of support <3).When I handed my coursework in I was absolutely sure that it was 2:2 material, and spent the next week or so in a bit of a sulk.

(Alright, quick pause. I want to clarify that a 2:2 is absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. Nor is a third. These are still difficult qualifications that you have achieved from a uni course. My panic about getting a 2:2 was mostly due to some perceived expectations and personal fears of underachievement. And if you didn’t get a grade, if you dropped out or didn’t get into uni at all? There are still a bunch of other things you can do better than someone with a specific degree. The academic system does not define your worth as a human being, so don’t let it put you down.)

Here’s what happened. Due to my lack of self-belief and low self-esteem, I eyed my work with more scrutiny than I otherwise would have. In my mind, it wasn’t even to do with putting more effort in, but rather, a last ditch attempt to throw together more academic sources than I otherwise would in order to almost trick my way into a higher grade. That’s right, even when I forced myself to write at a slightly higher level, I put myself down for it. But hey, it worked. I’ve got a 2:1 on average for this year, and if I recall my previous results correctly, this should all add up to a 2:1 in my BA Creative Writing degree (I hope). Hurrah!

This isn’t just some kind of warped brag, though. What I’m getting at here is that the self-abusing human mind is not to be trusted. Time and time again I am reminded of the frightening power of perspective, and its ability to warp reality. It can turn innocent glances into rude stares, harmless humour into snide remarks, honest work into half-baked attempts at looking busy, and friendships into superficial relationships. Every day we have to fight to maintain our rationalism and to keep the world as objectively true as we can, and it’s one of the driving forces behind my constant pursual for a state of objectivity.

(Final side-note: I haven’t really looked in to that much about objectivity or objectivism, so I have no idea if it keeps in line with my way of looking at the world the entire time or descends into some sort of utilitarian Nazi party. If the latter, let it be known – I do not attend these parties!)