On the Four Corners

“Take me with you,” she said. A world of possibilities were ensnared within that simple demand. She was pretty, too. Better looking than than I had any right to expect of a random woman who’d taken one look at me walking past and decided I was worth talking to. Suddenly I wished I was going somewhere a bit more exciting than Wendy’s.

And really, it’s not like I was ever heading anywhere more exciting than a fast food burger joint. I’m not sure that I led the sort of life her demand implied she was after. After the infinite promise contained within the first few seconds of our life together the rest of it would certainly be an anti-climax. Every second after the first one would be a little less satisfactory than the one before until they summed up to months and years of disappointment.

But perhaps this was a chance for change? A moment where I could pick my life up and point it in a whole different direction. Start being the sort of person who was going to places where beautiful women would want to accompany me. There’d surely be no shortage of those sort of places even this late on a Saturday night – this is Las Vegas after all.

That sounds like a lot of work, though.

Anyway, she’s probably a hooker.

And what I really want, right now, is a Wendy’s.

So I smiled, regretfully, and carried on walking.

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Anathema Rhodes: Dreams by Iimani David

This book chronicles a three day battle between the forces of “The Source” – the true deity of the universe – and the “god of man,” the focus of mankind’s “religion, idolatry, and … blind worship of false gods.” From these few, short quotes you can probably already guess at the general world view underlying […]

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Extraordinary Engines – Edited by Nick Gevers

I received Extraordinary Engines through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme. I’ve been a fan of the Steampunk genre since I read The Difference Engine many years ago. The first story is Steampunch by James Lovegrove, the story of the rise and fall of a steam powered boxer related by a veteran denizen of the Martian […]

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Vilnius Poker – Ričardas Gavelis

I received Vilnius Poker through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme. It’s published by Open Letter Books, who publish only books in translation – “contemporary literary fiction from around the world that is unique, distinctive, and that will have a significant impact on world literary conversation.” The package included a catalogue and, while I don’t expect […]

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Satisfaction

Outliers, Malcom Gladwell, p149: Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. This content is published under the Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Too late

All names have been changed, Claire Kilroy, p44: I would describe my state at that moment as borderline murderous. I had left it too late, you see; I saw. The years spent cherishing the aspiration to be a writer had wrapped it up and sealed it off, rendering it as discrete and inaccessible to the […]

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