Jack Stone's Scribbles

  We must protect the poets. We must save the artists and the writers and the buskers. Our streets and our cities bustle and pumps. Bodies drag frowns and swift moving legs through corridors of concrete. Quick they move. Fast/ Go-go-go/ No stop. No time to admire the view.   Music smooths the edges and softens the blows and gentles the cracking of the capitalist whip. Like a finger in the sands of my mind, a simple thought is written. A wonderful soul-changing idea. A fragile story. A delicate flutter in the heart. A floating petle hints at something joyous. The breeze of distraction wipes out its form. Like workman’s boots over pearl white pebbles of a gently combed zen garden. – SNAP OUT OF IT. BACK TO WORK! And it’s gone. The budding poet’s flame is extinguished. 

Life is full of small disasters. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the guilt and embarrassment of your office party behaviour; the things you said, memories of your loud voice, flirting with someone you should not be flirting with, being on drugs in front of your boss, inappropriate dark jokes, controversial opinions, secrets, confessing your childhood traumas to people who don't want to hear it, letting your defences slip so your mental illness ends up on display, mad stupid dancing, crying, falling over. After all the carnage, you might find yourself, as I often do, huddled in the foetus position in turmoil over the memories that clank around your brain like a washing machine full of bricks. But there is still one little emotional safety boat. – Laugh. Laugh at the absurdity of your life. It’s all meaningless. There is no real purpose to it yet you’re lucky to have it. Even in the bleakest of moments, you might as well make light of it. Enjoy what you can of it. You could be ...

 I saw franc moody in the Applo, Hammersmith. His biggest hit was Dopmaine. It felt so profound as we were all there getting flooded by the stuff the lyrics were about. It was our fuel. It felt like this is what life was all about. And then after, normal life, and I was stratching for that amount of dopamine again. It made me think... What is missing. There is always something missing!! I used to think I was a slave to the system. I thought I was a slave to consumerism. I thought I was a slave to money. A slave to the workplace, bills, to landlords, to the economic machine. Then I realised I was actually a slave to vices, to beer, drugs, music, women, porn, looking at women, desiring women, needing women. Even poetry and art and film and music, I've felt a slave to them all. But now I realise I am just slave to dopamine. Even if I transcend the dopamine, it still drives me. Even if I shed all sense of being and all notions of what I am and who people are and what the world is, t...

I wrote a poem and below is an explanation of its meaning. It is my first draft and may evolve in time.  It was half inspired by a girl I fancy while in a state of a dissonant self awareness of the psychological hard truth of it not being real and being real at the same time.  This is only a daft. (As everything is.) But please enjoy: Those things you almost promised with your eyes, but not quite. Left me on my own to die in my heart. I should know it's a waste to dream of me in a world where there's you. Even in a world where dreams come true. What I carry is heavy. Love is want. Greed is wrong. Lust is true. We love ourselves. It's a lie to say I love you. You love me means you love you. And I love you does too. What we mean is love me please. Loving you is loving me. What we see in someone else's eyes is a reflection of ourselves So look at me and see your perfect self.  We could be beautiful. Explanation: The psychologist, Jacque Lacan, said th...

Neil De Grasse Tyson once said. "If your personal beliefs deny what's objectively true about the the world, then they're more accurately called personal delusions." I believe this to be true. But I also believe it to be inescapable. N o one operates outside of some sort of delusion. We are all victims of the narratives we find ourselves in; religious, political, cultural, familial, and even ones we create just for ourselves. How can any of us really know what is "true" or how things work. Some people can only find meaning in their life by making something up, with an opinion that "I am special" or "The world is like this.. and so my duty is to do this.." And it comes with a story that justifies it. And all stories are written with an element of fantasy. Every historical account has had embellishments of some sort, some exaggeration at the least. The Romans were notorious for adding some magical thing; "Poseidon rose from the s...

Based on advice to which I opposed with plenty of passive aggression, I did a "save the cat" introduction. It might need some professional editing to really shine, but I can see benefit now. Chapter 0 – Spirits of nature. Two two-pound coins in my hand, like treasure, with their gold rims and shiny silver cores. The most satisfying of all the coins, I thought, with their heavy weight, large and flat, like the gold coins of the pirate age. They felt lucky somehow. I rubbed the coins together as I walked up Penglais hill through a light sprinkle of rain. My breath ran out quickly. It always made me feel out of shape, that hill. Four pounds. Enough for a hot pasty, and a coffee. Maybe two coffees. That's how much my budget allowed after blowing my student loan on all those pints in the Angel; four pounds a day. That's plenty, I thought. A bit of food and good coffee is all a man needs. About a third way up the hill, a man sat on some steps with a guitar...

 This is the Email they sent me after my submission. (Part of me feels like they are just trying to flog their magazine, but that's a whole different think to think about atm)   Hi Jack,   Thank you for submitting your words to us. They made for an enjoyable read with much promise.   We especially enjoyed the musicality, which gave us a strong taste for what the novel could grow into. This was original in how it was deployed by sprinkling it through the prose in a causal way. The prologue and first chapter felt a little rushed and the prologue may be better suited as a flashback with more detail. Enjoy those moments – really soak them up and watch the pace to get readers as lost in nature as the character. What this would also benefit from is an element of Save the Cat – give this a google if it’s unfamiliar to you. Essentially, readers need something about the character to empathise with as early as possible. This at present reads a little flat. W...