Procrastinations End

Ewan Jacob Malcolm Povey

Chapter 1

Devon Joffe rose in the middle of the night to start a novel. After checking his Facebook he booted up the word processor. It was a non windows, non standard sort of word processor that had been giving him problems. Lost documents etc. He thought of Hemingway's admonition to write one true sentence. He wrote one that was true enough. As little in the way of meta fiction etc. as you can manage, he thought. Try for heavens sake to write as naturalisticaly as you can. The computer started to make an appalling noise, one which it made often. Then just as suddenly, it stopped. Making the noise that is. It continued functioning well enough. He thought about the noise that his tip tapping on the keyboard was making in the middle of the night. Would he wake his neighbour he wondered. He tweaked the title of his novel a little. 'Death to Prevarication!' it was now called. He resolved to just sit there and type till at least lunchtime. The clock on the screen read 4.03. AM that is. He was going to write a novel. May it be the worst novel ever was beside the point. Be there inaccuracies, follies, spelling mistakes, poor grammar. Be it boring, clichéd, too short. Bah, it would be no worse than his love life, and yet a love life he had, of sorts. That is what he was aiming for. A novel, of sorts. So was this going to be written in real time he wondered, is he going to set his watch for 90 pages and try to make it to the International Space Station before the debris hits again? He put on his shoes and stepped into the garden.

The security light came on as he had triggered the infra red beam. He wondered if he would see a fox, bold as brass, eating a bird, but nothing of the sort occurred. Is there going to be anything worth writing about? At that moment he had a heavy sensation in his brow, as its highness began to ponder this kind of Millennial aesthetic. We have an unprecedented access to the entire culture of human history along with the ability for billions of ordinary people to aspire to be writers, we have.... He stopped there... There was nothing else to say...