Page 113 - Student: dazed And Confused

good gift on your planet? You mental woman ! " And I know there's a row coming -
another one for me to lose - but the door slams open before she can start anythin'.

Writer's notes

I had the bloke-lit genre more chosen for me than decided upon myself. I just turned out to
have made a pretty good first attempt at it, but up until that point, I was adamant I was
going to do childrens writing. I had the story and characters ready to be written.

I read a book once called Goodnight Steve McQueen, and I decided I was going to use that
as my main point of call when writing. It was quite easy for me to write as a man at times
because I'm more blokified (can that word go in the dictionary?) and I have a lot of male
friends. So it was quite easy to slip into my masculine side for a while.

After reading around it a little, I've noticed the big thing is these new-age, metrosexual
blokes having minor crises, or blokes going on some big emotional journey to become better
me. As far as I'm concerned, that's chick-lit with a man's name. Myself, i think it's high time
we had a return to men as Neanderthals and doing anything for a quiet life. Not to portray

the average man as pond life but to get back to some good, old honesty in writing.

That's the biggest 'rule' I wanted to bend backwards. I like challenging everything but
writing bloke-lit, there really aren't that many rules. If you do it really well... sod the rules
'cos anything goes.

The story is basically about a young guy who's being pressured into relationship counselling
by the girlfriend he never really wanted. He's torn between wanting to keep her happy and
not destroying his CD collection, his best friend who thinks a few pints and footie on Sky is
the universal solution and himself.

I wanted to get a picture of how blokes felt about counselling if their relationship went bad
so i asked a few people. The consensus was they'd do it if it kept her happy. I think I'm also
going to have to find out what goes on in couple therapy !

About halfway through the story comes a crisis point and something terrible has to happen
to one of the characters. I want to challenge the issue of disability really badly and ponder
the lack of decent cripple porn on the net. I guess that's one avenue I could explore.

In fact, i made one of them disabled from the start but I quickly realised it was a huge
mistake to drop a bomb like that so early so I had to rewrite nearly two pages. It's
important that these problems are identified fast.