Back to the drawing board...

This is the first post in my second attempt to chronicle the development of my new collection of short stories, titled simply Fictions. This blog is intended to serve as part teaser, part sounding board, part wiki for the project. It's been five years since I've written anything substantial - at least in terms of putting it down on paper or the modern equivalent, an MS Word file - my attention having been diverted as it were to actually making money. What I've had to do is say fuck it, like I did eight years ago and the work is flowing...or not trickling rather. I have set a tentative deadline for this work to finish but my deadlines have always been more like dead grey areas so who knows.

My book is going to be prefaced with the following quote from Jorge Luis Borges' parable "The Yellow Rose"

“Marino saw the rose as Adam saw it in Paradise, and he thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it; and that the tall proud volumes casting a golden shadow in the corner were not — as his vanity had dreamed — a mirror of the world, but rather one more thing added to the world…”

This is not the only reference to Borges in my work - the title is a homage to Borges' Ficciones - but it is important in that it serves as an overarching guide to how far I let my ambition influence what I attempt to deal with in the stories; in addition to being a sort of apologia for what the reader should expect in reading the book. I conceive of Fictions as one more thing added to growing body of literature about Guyana specifically and the fate of the many who occupy the same geographical and socio-economic space which we occupy.