Unpublished material by Anthony Burgess

I am sometimes ridiculously late getting the news. As I was googling for something else (an essay of Anthony Burgess on short stories), I discovered this article on the Guardian, from May 2011. 20 unpublished stories, including some ghost stories. Now that is interesting. I never thought my favourite writer had much interest in this genre. And I love a good ghost story, so I really wonder about his take on it. I hope they get published. This and The Worm and the Ring, which got stupidly censored.

Writer's block?

I thought about putting some music, but I have done that very often these days and this is not a music blog, after all. And I did not want it to be an excuse to pass time when I am in the middle of a writer's block. It happens from time to time: when I was writing my thesis (solution: read a book, repeat if necessary), when I was that creative writing course ten years ago (already), and so on. That said, I usually had a deadline to overcome this (it is always the best repellent). That was the case when I was doing creative writing, and I ended up producing a pretty good short story, set in a fancy restaurant, which I blogged about before. I got to find it again, it is somewhere on a floppy disk and in writing. I got a high mark on it and used to come back to it from time to time. It wasn't easy to please academics, let alone impress them, but I managed to impress my professor, so I was really proud. I have to find it again, if only to remind me that even young and naïve, I had writing skills which I probably still have.

How did I get over writer's block then, apart from the fact that there was a deadline? I remember working on it until very late at night, even though there were classes tomorrow. I think part of the way I managed to go through it is that there was a story to be told. I had rewritten The Last Supper in a kitchen environment, with the head chef as a Christ-like figure and cocaine as the spiritual connection/ideal/thingie that was making him go on and ultimately suffer and die. My main character was a waiter who was an ambiguous Judas (as Judas should be). When I couldn't find the right words, I was just trying to get the story going, and then I could rewrite the boring passages and give the strenght they needed. Basically, I need to get some good stories to write here, and the rest will go from it.

Last Supper

We are watching Real Hell's Kitchen at the moment, a documentary about the stress that goes with the restaurant industry, sometimes leading to alcoholism, drug addiction, etc. I used to be a dishwasher in a fancy restaurant when I was a student, I remmeber how stressful it could be, especially since I was the lowest form of life in the kitchen (but the pressure on the others was tremendous too). It inspired me so much that I wrote a short story about it in a creative writing course during my undergraduate studies, rewriting the account of Last Supper through the lives of a kitchen staff, where the head chef/Christ was dying of a cocaine overdose. It was very appreciated. I might "publish" it here one day.