By Macon Holt.
Walter looked up from his keyboard with extraordinary frustration. He looked incredulously at the 
document open in front of him. 70,000 words and he had not noticed. He had given the twenty-something protagonist of his newest work of contemporary prose his own name. This of course he had noticed immediately; in fact looking back it had been intentional. “Let the mainstream press pour over this, to try and find the truth of my salad days and let the intellectuals hunt in the gray space between fiction and the world outside”, he had thought. Walter hated the word “fact”, even in his private thoughts, in his work it was a word often used ad-nauseum by antagonists and the absurdly caricatured victims of his memory turned text. A scholarly collection was soon to be released entitled Walter D—— and Facts: Politics, Prose and Truth Content. Walter had been sent copy and replied with his blessings though the volume remained wrapped in publishing house cellophane. This name sharing was not a problem after all, authors using their own names for characters in their work is a well established trope of literary fiction. Indeed in this case Walter had even included the first letter of his last name, though replaced it with and elongated hyphen to add distance and ambiguity. Continue reading
“I’m so sorry Edwin couldn’t be here today Charles. It’s just this city y’know, if it’s not one thing it’s
We were stranded in Brindisi for a short time before the next boat out and it was raining. It hadn’t rained at all in two weeks and now that we were out of viable options, it rained. It was the one night on this whole trip – even our whole lives maybe – that we would have to sleep outside on the street. We decided to kill some time in a bar, nursing a beer each, making it last longer than usual so that we could stay inside where it was dry. We knew from the vaguely understandable newspaper weather reports that the rain was supposed to finish in the middle of the night and it wasn’t too heavy so we finished our drinks before the bar got too busy and went outside. We sat on a circular stone bench in the street, amidst cheering Italian drinkers who were presumably celebrating the arrival of the weekend. The Italians stood in the entrances to the busy bars, just about outside, smoking and laughing their rich laughs. The bench was a smooth expensive stone and had an enormous tree in the centre which sheltered us from the majority of the downpour. We’d left our waterproof clothes in France a fortnight before as the heat and sunshine had been ubiquitous on the continent for some time – it meant that all we had was shorts and linen shirts, sandals and sun-cream. Peter would meet us in Athens with our pay from the writing we had done together a month before, back home in London, and what we’d been writing for him since getting out here. We had only to see out one night in Brindisi before boarding the ferry across to Patras; sixteen hours on the boat and we’d be on Greek soil where the rest of the job could be done. 
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