Round 49.

49

Isabelle works for a cosmetic company, but she wants to be a writer.

When she was nine years old she wrote a book about her sister and walked to the offices of a book publisher and gave it to them.

The editors politely thanked her and had a look at it.

They told her that it was a little short and a bit childish, but that she should keep at her writing.

She did.

Now she is forty.

She is writing a book about a mother who disappears and her daughter sets off to search for her.

Isabelle has a daughter, but she is separated from the father.

She has a lover, but she lives alone.

Tonight she has to go to a meeting that will finish about midnight and she will go home to an empty flat; she will be too tired to write.

Sometimes during the day she finishes her work before everyone else and would like to go home and write, but she feels under pressure to stay as long at her desk as the others who work less efficiently.

And when she does get home, and once she has cooked, she is too tired to write.

Bill doesn’t work for a cosmetic company but he is sitting across the table from Isabelle.

He too wants to be a writer.

He has started, but sometimes he stops.

He is waiting to start again.

He tells Isabelle about something that someone had said Stephen King had once said.

Stephen King wouldn’t write a sentence like that.

That’s not what Stephen King said, that’s what Bill thought after he had said it.

He told Isabelle that someone had told him that Stephen King had once said that if you sit down and write just 100 words a day then at the end of a year you would have written a book.

Bill was sitting down when he said this and he thought he should maybe listen to his own advice.

Then he remembered something that someone else had once told him that Oscar Wilde had said.

“I always pass on good advice, that’s the only thing to do with it.”

Bill wondered if that excused his procrastination.

Something else that someone once told him that Stephen King had said was that if you wanted to be a writer then you should read.

Bill likes reading.

He is reading a book about a policeman who is trying to solve a crime that might not be a crime.

Bill found the book in a box where people put books that they have finished and which they think other people might like to take or swap.

The box is attached to a wall in between the Estate Agent and the Antique shop.

It’s not really an antique shop, but it’s a shop that sells old things.

The owner of the shop takes the old things and turns them into new things. People who wouldn’t buy the old things come to the shop and buy the new thing.

It’s a clever business and the owner doesn’t want to be a writer, he is happy turning old oil-cans into table lamps.

Opposite the shop that sells old oil-can table-lamps is a small house with the number seven on the door.

Behind the door a man named Richard lives with his wife.

Her name is so complicated that no one they meet can remember it, but it begins with and A.

Richard and A are happy in the house and they consider the number 7 to be a lucky number, even though they only have two dogs.

A is a painter, her paintings are a little depressing and they always have a dog somewhere in them.

Richard is not sure if he wants to be a writer, but he could be.

He used to work in a bookshop far away across an ocean that separates his old life and his new.

It was a famous bookstore, almost mythical.

Jack Kerouac once visited it and Richard was polite and said hello.

Actually, that’s not true, I made that part up.

Jack Kerouac may well have visited but Richard would have been much too young to even have been there had it happened.

Writers do that; they make things up.

Sometimes the things they make up are true; sometimes they are not.

Writers can hide the made up truths among the made up lies.

I am trying to write.

Richard could be a writer but right now he is learning to make the best pizza anyone has ever made.

His wife is a painter.

She is a depressionist painter.

I just made that word up so I am happy; I am not depressed.

Bill is depressed because he hasn’t written anything all day.

Isabelle is depressed because her work stops her doing what she wants to do.

Isabelle works in a cosmetic company, but she wants to be a writer.

 (ALL ABOUT ROUNDS)

(note from the editor - i misplaced my camera, so i misplaced my photos of rounds, so this post was late and the one before had a temporary photo, which i quite like so it's still there, and now i've found my camera, so here we are again)