Kieran.Stories

When I was sixteen, I wrote (I would have used the word curated) a film blog. I posted under a pseudonym. I was in peak trying to cultivate a sense of mystery mode.

One of the final posts was a countdown of my ten favourite films. I only remember numbers ten, five, and one:

• Eraserhead (David Lynch)
• The Lord of the Rings (Peter Jackson)
• The Innocents (Jack Clayton)

I wanted to rewatch The Innocents recently, but realised I had lost the DVD. (It’s quite expensive to buy on eBay for some reason, maybe because it’s OOP.) It was so important to me as a teenager, I wonder if it could only disappoint. It’s not you it’s me, and all that.

The aim of that 2013 blog was to impress. David Lynch featured heavily. No one understood Eraserhead like I understood Eraserhead, even though I’d never had a girlfriend, let alone looked after a worm-baby. I was envious of the character Henry Spencer, played by Jack Nance, because he looked so sharp (dressed like a Beatle), and had his own flat in a city which to my mind wasn’t that different to Manchester – where I wanted to live.

At the time of writing, my next birthday is about a month away. I will be twenty-eight. Like the friends in hit TV comedy Friends, I am very aware of edging closer to the big three-oh. When I was thirteen, I collected VHS tapes of Friends. During a family holiday to Wales, I found all of series five in a branch of Age UK. At the start of series five, Monica and Chandler are keeping their relationship secret from the rest of the friends. Series five of Friends was probably the first time I had seen simulated sex on TV, or the suggestion of simulated sex. The impact was profound, I suppose.

In this blog I’d like to write about books and films, but my main motivation is to share new short stories. I was lucky enough last year to have my story ‘A Brief History of Dogs in Barcelona’ published in the April/May print issue of The London Magazine. It is also available to read online. Literally Stories are publishing another story, ‘Orders of Magnitude’, online in a couple of weeks. Free Flash Fiction are publishing a very short (sub 500 word) story titled ‘Longford’ in June.

Anyway, thanks for reading, and I hope to see you soon for some book chat and some stories, too. Keep on trucking.