Aborted attempts, skeletons, and failures...

The stories appearing on I Know You're From Circumstances usually begin as a single idea, a sentence, or an observation. The final stories are usually built up around these central ideas or sentences. Colonial Culture and Cambridge developed from a discussion with a friend about Robert Hughes and how pretentious he is, Nothing matters in our private universe was the spawn of a badly mistimed comment at a dinner party, and A bear by any other name was originally an extension of the question "what would happen if someone corrected everything they saw misprinted with a texta?". It's kind of hard to see that last one in the finished story. The character evolved into a wanker in joggers and jeans, roughly based on my girlfriend's father (in appearance only. He is not a wanker, and even if he was I'd be too scared to say anything, lest he develop a property on me or my loved ones. The dude develops property).

"So what?" I hear you, the gentle yet powerful reader, asking. "Is this the blog equivalent of a DVD's extra features section, because I never watch them because they're usually rubbish and self congratulatory."

No, it isn't. What I was trying to get to before you, the impatient yet understanding reader, interrupted me, is the frustration this method can cause. Too often an interesting sentence or idea pops up that cannot be developed into a story. Considering it has been three weeks since the last Circumstances post, I decided it was time to stop forcing them into being stories and just write them down (including the original idea for A bear by any other name). Extra points for anyone who can email me a story using any of these ideas.

1- The army of skeletons that had spent the course of the evening massing behind the closet door took Uncle Arthur's comment as their cue to burst out into the living room and form a faceless, unholy, but unmistakably jovial conga line.

2- Robert was not a Conservative, he was barely even a lower-case conservative. If anything he tended towards muddle-headed liberalism. His primary concern was being lower-case right (ie, correct). He had no particularly strong political views, aside from a nagging suspicion that immigrants were okay as long as they wanted to work. However, when one's favourite pastime is correcting spelling and factual errors on posters around university campuses, one will inevitably come into conflict with members of the Liberal Left and beyond. Robert was in the middle of crossing out misplaced apostrophes on a "Principle's of non-violent resistance" forum poster erected by The Socialist Alliance when he was placed in a headlock by a long-haired youth in a Che Guevara t-shirt and Thai fisherman's pants, front pockets bulging with juggling balls, coloured ribbon, and a bottle of "Firebreather's Delight" ingestible butane. As the two wrestled for posession of Robert's texta, the youth's woven hemp satchel spilled open, scattering a dog-eared copy of Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx across the concrete footpath, coming to rest next to an ancient copy of Harpo Marx's Barefoot Circus Tricks and Juggling.

3- It wasn't that Justine thought Max was lying, she just knew Max's stories represented the truth in the same way hardcore pornography represented lovemaking. It was easy to believe Max provided you were 14 and weren't there when it happened.

So there are three things that were going to be stories but weren't. I couldn't think what Uncle Arthur had said in number one, the ill-kempt youth in number two just became a vehicle for stereotype exposition, and three just had no obvious way of making it into anything, and I hate having to try too hard at anything. This post is proof of that.