It won’t be a long one this week. It can’t be. It’s been a long week. It’s been a tough week. Last Saturday, after spending a thoroughly brilliant day at a wedding, Sam and I got back to our hotel and logged online to find out one of our closest friends had died.
Read MoreI don’t know about you, but I think there are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to music. Never mind which genre you chose to set up your base camp. Never mind what you’re currently listening to or what you truly detest. The way I see it, you either grew up listening to the same music as your parents or you immediately turned your nose up at it. In some cases, you might keep the same taste as your parents. In other cases, you might rebel against it as soon as your friends snigger at the music they find lying around in your bedroom.
Read MoreI only book a stay at The Overlook Hotel occasionally. Every visit always leaves me with a different souvenir. I go in with pieces of the mystery set firmly in my head, ready to help me decrypt what I’m seeing. The native American mythology. The reference to The Donner Party. The many, many other theories the truly mind-bending documentary Room 237 has implanted into my thinking. Regardless of those intentions, by the time I get to the end I’m always too unnerved to think past the overwhelming sense of escape.
Read MoreHi, everyone. As you know, here at The Blank Page, we like to try and keep our offerings to a fairly high standard. Sadly, Chris had a bit of a bad day yesterday. So we thought it was time to look out into the multiverse again and see if we couldn’t find another Christopher Long who would talk to us. We’ve managed to get hold of Christopher from Universe 846 A U D Gamma. He was happy to answer a few questions for your entertainment today.
Read MoreI’ve never been a career chaser. I’ve worked in post rooms, telesales, technical departments, shops and kitchens, but none of those jobs have ever been about earning a pension. Nope, I’ve always been there to pay some bills and make my bank account look a little healthier. The carrot the world tied to the end of the stick it chose for me was never a gold watch. Which is why, every so often, I find myself in a room full of people having a meeting where the best I can hope to do is look interested. During those meetings, I always catch myself looking around the rest of my fellow captives, trying to spot anyone else doing the same as me. Sadly, it seems we’re a dying breed.
Read MoreHey, Internet, it’s good to be back amongst you. After a couple of chaotic weeks and some incredibly painful days without any sort of signal that belongs in the 21st century, The Blank Page is up and running again. I’d call it 2.0, but let’s not fool ourselves. We’re in for more of the same here. The overly long posts and occasional reveries that don’t quite add up to a bigger pay cheque. Still, that’s hardly the attitude to start on. The Longs have moved finally moved house. Let’s begin there.
Read MoreThe house move that's been consuming our live since we started looking at locations back in March has finally locked into place. Over the space of a rapid Tuesday afternoon we went from feeling like we were never going to actually move to finding out it was happening in a week’s time. It was pretty dizzying. A happy flavour of panic.
Read MoreAnother plateau. Sorry, folks. I normally like to come here with something planned, but I got distracted by my new short story this morning. I sat down with a plan of changes I wanted to make to the current draft and totally forgot about I had this blog to tackle first. True, it’s a rod I made for my own back, but I’m no quitter. I can figure this out. I just probably shouldn’t be doing that in front of you. You’re going to need to bear with me. This week has pretty much reduced to me to doing all my thinking out loud.
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