Hour 1

I'll tell you what I am. Fucking talentless. Sit here in the dark working on ruins, feeling them sweat like old buildings. Nothing ever happens in the dark. Sure, when you turn on the light, something's changed. You're not like the man of old. You sit there and don't speak until someone approaches you. I used to fucking respect you. Now I wait for the days when you'll need me to piss.

I can't write because I took the edge of my mind off with drugs. I could have been pure, but now look at me. Or I could have been alive, but that's a joke now. It doesn't do you good to think like this. You want something to spin, but it doesn't. What was that lift you felt in the old days, when a story was like an old interesting smell you were trying to remember? It formed in your mind before you put it down, not after.

You're so lazy you should have been a poet. This prose stuff isn't for you, you know. Oh, she was the darling of the ball, her ankles, those ankles. I find it all trivial, all of it, kaput. Everything has been said, so post modernism is merely trying to say it backwards. I used to have plans, back when it was fashionable. I used to have dreams, before they became cliche. Now I just sit in a room and check my facebook (not writing as myself, I never use facebook).

I count three of you. Children and OAPs, for free. That devil on your back, he'll cost extra. Come on, Sammy, you know you love me really. No I don't, you're fucking rubbish. I'm always there for you. Yeah, like an ulcer. I think we have to straighten a few things out. You're completely alone, except for all the things you've nicked. Yes, I believe you'd be some sort of original, if it weren't for that.

Are there writers who spend their whole lives writing drivel just to make themselves do something? If I was getting paid for this it wouldn't be half as painful. Meagre lines, bone-dry of meaning - and you think that the bone is the meaning, but it isn't, it's just the skin. He used to be a paragraph, in his salad days. Now he's shrunk to an axiom. His epitaph is eagerly awaited, however. Oh, fuck, it's so dry in here, in this place, with these words.

Latin is a dead language, they say. But all language is dead. Writers are just grave-diggers, and librarians morticians. Even this sentence, if I were to brandish it in front of my face, does it not look a little like the hand of Eliot? Christ, you'd expect me to have more interesting thoughts than this over the course of an hour. Oh wait, you're talentless, remember. I'd love to be a nice, normal person - in fact I'd give up my stinking soul for it, and that's the issue, really.

So imagine 10,000 hours more of this, then. Are you having fun already? Don't tease me, I have dying ambitions of a faintly romantic persuasion. What are we going to do when the biscuits dry? That's what I want to know about global warming - not when the seas will overcome the land, but I want to know the moment when you look at a tea cup and realise things will never be the same agin. It's those moments on which history is built.

If I keep this up I'll turn into a pen. My fingernails will sharpen like quills, and when I kiss my lover I'll leave ink in her mouth. Oh, you're enjoying yourself really. If you got yourself a laptop you could go into the park with a picnic and do this. Just stay the fuck away from coffee houses. Made yourself a little bottle of cordial, down here in the dark, typing away for precisely no reason.

Does this count as practice? Surely as much as those meaningless scales on a musical instrument. And every thought is new, not some old thought you try to squash in with your strange mistrust of your present state of mind ('no, the past self was better ...'). The only difference between you and all the past selves is that they outnumber you. I could write the most beautiful sentence of my life right now, and in fact am slightly better equipped for it, but simply unlikely due to the sheer amount of hours I've spent writing versus this one.

He walked across the room like all that you've ever loved. The thought of his breath makes you conscious of his mortality, and you comfort yourself that his breath is clearer than the air around, and his silence is like thunder beneath clouds - how then could such a person ever die? You realise your own absurdity, standing there and watching him with your useless stitching and a passion that will never break your smile, but still: he walked across the room like all that you've ever loved.

When the count thought of his wife, he thought of lemons. Their brightness, and the images of the sun that collected around them. How they could sit on the shelf of a grocery and still bring a bit of the continent with them. Just like lemons, his wife went with a cocktail perfectly. Her dresses lit up parties, and her sharpness suited conversation well - in small amounts, of course. Her body had the small hardness of a lemon: but most of all what reminded him was how they tasted when sugared, and when bitter.

'Are we alone?'

'Yes.'

'You're sure?'

'He's gone, Clarence.'

'I'm sorry, Joe, but I just can't stand him.'

'I know. It's not your fault.'

'Yes, it is my fault - I mean, he's done nothing to make me feel this way.'

'Apart from -'

'Yes, apart from that. But it's not like he could choose -'

'Well, any more than I could.'

'Yes, but I know you ...'

'What you mean is that you knew me before you knew what I did.'

Word count: 1035