Tonight Deanna is taking me on my first ever proper night out. She has quite rightly decided that it’s time I lived a little, and so it was over a McDonald’s (other restaurants are available) on Thursday that our plan was hatched. At first, I felt a bit uneasy about it. There wasn’t anything wrong with the plan, it was just me. I was asking myself lots of questions – for example, would it be any good? Would it be a safe idea for me? Would I end up being all boring and spoiling the whole thing?

Let’s pause for a moment and focus on that word. “Boring”. It’s something that I’m constantly convinced applies to me. Deanna always does her best to reassure me that it isn’t true, but my belief cannot be shaken that easily, it seems. Without times like tonight I’ll be faced with the prospect of telling my grandkids (if I have any) that I spent most of my years as a young man staying in. I quite like doing that, but I also realise that everyone has to take the plunge at some stage – even though I’m feeling slightly apprehensive about what tonight could bring, I’ll just have to accept that any challenges are part and parcel of any able-bodied person’s life too. If everybody else has to deal with a crowded pub in order to have a good time, then it’s likely I will as well.

Having said all of that, though, I am also very excited. Deanna has very kindly agreed not to throw me in at the deep end, and therefore we’ve devised a simple route of four places in town. It’s manageable, but also one that should allow us to have a lot of fun. We get on well enough as it is, so I can’t imagine how we might be after a few hours! I’m glad I agreed to the whole thing (in precisely the time it takes to eat a McFlurry), and I’m feeling pretty confident that I won’t regret it either. Whatever happens, it’s a little landmark in my life, and perhaps above all a step towards de-boring me a little bit more. And helping me drink something other than beer!

Mason

I feel like anything we do on a leap year day is a time capsule, ready to be opened and reviewed in four years’ time. People mature in that length of time and their lives progress, and as I look forward now I feel quite excited by the prospect of 29 February 2020 potentially holding something completely unexpected. In 2016, however, things aren’t quite as mysterious and once again I’m finding myself spending the morning on my day off relaxing with a warming cup of tea. Regardless of how ill-advised lounging around again might be, though, I have had an idea (but I’m not sure if anybody’s beaten me to it).

Because I sometimes struggle to actually get around to committing to some things, or reaching goals as people try to with their New Year’s resolutions, why couldn’t there be an alternative option – a more manageable way of ticking off the accomplishments? To my knowledge, there is no such thing as a “leap year’s resolution”, and I think we’ve all been missing a trick there (unless, of course, I’m wrong and it does already exist). If we all utilised those, we’d still have an aim – to get whatever we want to done before the next 29 February – but we’d have a bit more time to actually be bothered about taking action. It’d essentially just be extra leeway, a shorter-term bucket list of sorts. For me personally, I think it could help me to grasp my life in chunks at a time, preventing me from having to organise all of my life ambitions in one go.

I should explain that when I first started this post earlier on, I ended up deleting all but the first paragraph to start again. Even now, part of me thinks that I’m talking total rubbish with this idea. If I am, it might just be that I wanted to say something lasting and meaningful to look back on in four years’ time, but even if that is the case, I could potentially find something to aim towards in the meantime, to make the best of the space. I can’t remember what I wrote at the start of the year regarding New Year’s resolutions, but maybe using the space between leap years would take some pressure off. Think about it – if you don’t fancy giving up chocolate this year, you could do it next year. Or the year after that. Or the year after that…

Mason

Last night, I went to bed far too late. When I have an upcoming day off it can be all too tempting to watch one more episode of Family Guy as the clock ticks towards midnight, and this is usually a decision I regret come the next morning. Foreseeing this, then, I hauled myself from the sofa to drag myself “up them wooden stairs”, as Mum would say. Everything was switched off as usual and the whole living room was plunged into darkness, at the mercy of the dead of night – and it was then that I saw it. Out of the corner of my eye, a red glow remained as everything else was silent. I was slightly amused, because every time you go into a dark room, or look out of a window at night, you always expect to be scared out of your wits by a ghoul or an axe murderer. Not so, because here I was being confronted by the light from the electronic tuner on Louis’ guitar!

I wasn’t scared at all, of course, more intrigued, because it was something small and insignificant, and yet I had noticed it almost as a massively odd phenomenon. It was just a light! That was all the proof I needed – nothing says “you need to get out more” like being surprised by something trivial like that. Earlier that day, I had been looking through some distance learning courses online, ones you can do part-time from home and juggle with work. The more I read about them, the more I began to entertain the possibility of taking one on at some stage. Upon leaving sixth form I’d said “never again” with regards to studying further, but as I scrolled down the pages of this particular website I couldn’t deny that I was seriously impressed by the sheer volume of subjects on offer. There were ones I’d taken at GCSE, such as History and Philosophy, that I’d slightly regretted not continuing with. That alone was enough to fill my head with questions about what could be – but then, when I actually clicked on said subjects, I found the list of subcategories to be genuinely staggering. And there were whole courses of knowledge for each! I did have niggling doubts about whether I’d be capable of success on any course, and maybe that’s what initially caused me to shut the laptop and put all thoughts aside.

However, I saw my reaction to that red light as daft enough to make me think about whether I should start networking a little more, or applying myself to something good. If I stimulated myself with a course, it might not be for a while yet, but there’s no question that my outlook on my own life could be markedly more positive – not to mention my employment prospects. Watch this space, perhaps?

Mason

The sentence that you are reading now has, by this time, been written and rewritten several times, in the hope that it grabs, entices and encourages you to read the rest of the post. In this respect, I’m experimenting – and “experiment” seems to have been something of a defining word for yesterday. In the afternoon, when I found myself agonising yet again over what to write on this blog, a friend came to my rescue with a suggestion that had never even remotely occurred to me before. In many ways I often have trouble venturing out of my comfort zone, and so the idea that they offered would require me to dip my toes into unfamiliar waters, so to speak. Nevertheless, I was definitely intrigued.

When we’d made our way through – and discarded – various potential blog post topics, there was a brief pause before my friend asked if I had considered doing an experiment. If you look at my last post, you’ll see that some experimental ideas I have aren’t always sensible enough to conduct with confidence, so instead of instantly proclaiming her suggestion to be brilliant I felt compelled to ask what she had in mind. “A social experiment”, she said – and almost immediately images of mad scientists bringing their evil zombie-like creations to life filled my mind. Part of me was already pretty unsure about it, but the other part thought that maybe she was onto something. She elaborated further, saying that maybe I could take someone who was an introvert and encourage or help them to become an extrovert. Whether you choose to take such a task on or not, it’s still a substantial one, and therefore one less likely to be doable for a mere blog-writing mortal such as myself. I think there’s still room for thought, though. Perhaps something else can replace my friend’s idea, because I can’t help but feel uncomfortable about the idea of trying to change someone.

In the corner of our living room, a guitar sits unloved and gathering dust. Louis had bought it not long before Christmas only to quickly decide he couldn’t persevere with it, and when he tried to sell it nobody seemed to be interested. He might have been a little taken aback by the fact that it wasn’t immediately snapped up, and so cast it aside to remain largely untouched – until last night, that is. Dad came in and, wondering why my average keyboard skills couldn’t extend to the guitar, placed the instrument on my knee. Of course, I only got about as far as Googling the order of the strings before putting it back into the corner again, and in any case I was never really that interested in being a guitarist. This morning I tried my luck again, but if I’m honest, I was most pleased about being able to hold it properly. I might not be destined for guitar greatness, but there’s nothing to stop me tinkering with it from time to time. That’s if I remember to get it tuned properly, obviously – which it wasn’t earlier on!

Mason

Several years ago, when I first decided that I wanted to write for a living, I set out enthusiastically devising some very far-fetched new ideas. At that time, my science-fiction obsession was blossoming, allowing my delusions of grandeur to flourish to such an extent that my central idea was one with 20 series’ worth of episode titles on a Word document. It’s possible that the file is still there somewhere on our PC, setting out the entire history of a TV show 12-year-old me was certain could run for decades. To start with, it simply told the story of a group of galactic explorers on your average starship. Of course, I didn’t have the benefits of a large professional production setup and budget, so I decided that – because I’d done some stop-motion animation in the ICT room at lunchtimes – it couldn’t be that hard to sculpt and film an entire galaxy with a few balls of plasticine. Everything else would be taken care of when I came to it. Sorted.

You can probably tell that there may have been more than a few flaws in this plan, the main ones being that I didn’t own a camera or have any outside help, and not a word of script had been written. In addition to this, I was having trouble making the idea itself different, having realised that the bare bones of it bore a striking resemblance to something less plasticine-y and far more famous called Star Trek. I therefore immediately tried to turn my mind to anything space-related that could possibly save the sinking ship. I thought of everything. Robotic zombies, a weird afterlife for those who got too close to the sun – and then I thought of black holes. Nothing can escape them, not even light, and when you are sucked in, that’s the end. You’re crushed, destroyed, and there’s nothing left. It was with that in mind that I thought a black hole could make a good antagonist for the ship and crew. They’d be sucked in and presumed lost forever, when in actual fact they were alive and well, and in contact with everything and everyone now forging a new path within a hidden pocket universe. As I write it now in retrospect, it doesn’t look all that bad, but I doubt it’ll be something I ever use. I remember that it was just causing me to hit brick wall after brick wall. I had this whole separate universe, but where were its limits? Who and what would be there? I tried thinking about it, but it wasn’t long before I realised I just did not have the answer, and when I think about it that might have been the first time I realised I shouldn’t force my writing.

For some unknown reason, I titled that ill-fated idea The Devil’s Inferno. That has since become a rather lengthy byword in my mind for all of the other bad ideas I’ve had. When it comes into my head, I know that I should drop what I’m working on, and if I’m itching to write something, I know that it is something I should aim to avoid for that reason. If I don’t follow this advice, I generally feel drained of all creative inspiration, almost like I’m sitting in a black hole.

Mason

The other day my friend David described this blog as “amusing, mixed with sad, mixed with intrigue.” I was thrilled by the fact that he’d enjoyed what he’d read, but also by his specific feedback, because it was succinct but telling at the same time. It proves that, in at least one post, I have successfully juggled three pretty big emotions that I wanted to include, but also that buzzwords – single prompts that I’m always hoping will launch something – do still work.

I remain a firm believer in clinging onto any kind of small idea. On this blog there’s plenty of material, and in its Trash folder there are currently 10 discarded posts. At the time I obviously thought each one of them to be inferior to any of those you’ve seen, but I still hope that one day I can look back at them and find something worth using or putting out there – regardless of how big or small they may be. Regretfully, however, nobody can do that when they are speaking, and over the past year and a half or so I have felt as though I struggle to focus when I do it. If there’s something that I want explained or information I need to obtain, I often find that my mind is a shambles. I can’t narrow the words down to the ones I want, the exact things I’m going to say. As a result, they come out in entirely the wrong way, usually as I trip over them – and occasionally not at all. I do realise that others deal with proper speech impediments, and to an extent that is far more severe, but nevertheless I do sometimes feel belittled when I splutter my words even after having considered them beforehand. I’ve noticed it becoming more frequent in recent months, and it can be both embarrassing and – at times – rather frustrating. It can be more difficult to believe in the confidence I know I could have most of the time when my speech doesn’t always let me prove it. In a way, it is rather inconvenient, especially as I may need to be able to apply for jobs without worrying about any judgements that might arise from it.

When I think about this, however, I realise that maybe I have been treating too much with a sense of desperation. I sometimes cram too many thoughts into my head, resulting in the verbal diarrhoea, but perhaps it would be key to be calm. I need buzzwords inside my head, just like the ones David used to describe this blog, and the more often I use them to get a clearer focus on things, the more composed my speech can be. When this happens, I will be at peace, and able to venture in a more relaxed manner into whatever comes my way. David’s words couldn’t have come at a better time.

Mason

Recently, Dad has been doing a spot of redecorating in my room in order to make it more suitable and trendy for a guy of my age. As I am 18, my family are naturally looking for new ways to help improve my independence, so that I’m able to live life just as my peers do. Mum believes I could do everything I want to do, but even she readily admits that it might take me “a bit longer to catch up”. This means we all have to be realistic when it comes to my objectives, and that we have to start largely within the house. Where the kitchen is concerned, for example, we’re planning to put a worktop in at a level that is convenient for me, and where I would eventually be able to prepare my own food. Nowadays I can make cups of tea with steady kettle handling, but in recent years I have been offered various gadgets intended to make different kitchen processes easier for disabled people. These have included cradles that make tipping the kettle safer and knives that’d be easier to grip if I was spreading Marmite on my toast. I refused everything I was offered. It may have been because I felt slightly patronised, but in any case I can now spread and pour without any kind of hassle. For now I’m happy with that, but before long I want to be cooking, starting with simple dishes and then working my way up. It’s an ambition that occupies one of the top spaces on my “independence list”, as it were. The other has so far proven itself to be much more problematic.

I’ve tried to start conversations on the subject of learning to drive with Mum on various occasions, but she is understandably very worried and is always quick to stay quiet when I bring it up. You really have to push for an answer. Factors such as the cost of taking lessons and maintaining a car are among her concerns, but at the forefront of her mind seems to be safety. No matter where I go or how much I exert myself in the process, I will always end up totally exhausted. Even sitting in a car during a relatively short journey is enough to render me a floppy and useless mess. Imagine such a person at the wheel of a solid block of metal on the road! When I think of it that way, I do realise that I didn’t quite consider all eventualities when I fantasised so readily about getting myself from A to B. In addition to this, there’s also the small matter of my reaction times, which are slightly delayed and therefore not entirely ideal if you’re about to have any kind of car accident. Whilst I know that there are many schemes, adaptations and precautions available to the disabled, each designed to make motoring more practical and affordable for them, it might be a few years before I hit the road solo. In the meantime, I’ll continue reading and researching the matter to take myself closer to it, all while still having two definite ambitions to aim for, the other being to cook.

That’s why I should try to be positive, regardless of how far away some things might seem for now. Those two things won’t leave my mind, central as they are to independence of most people, let alone myself. Aside from these, the rest of the list of blank and waiting to be filled, so I need to be optimistic in the future and give more thought to what might be achievable. If something looks impossible, it probably isn’t – it’s most likely just a little further away, as Mum pointed out. If there’s one downside to these claims, it might be that I’m not always that good at moving from the sofa to act on them. Perhaps I ought to work on that first!

Mason

In our free periods during sixth form, Will and I would often find ourselves scouring the aisles of Co-op (other supermarkets are available) for stress-relieving snacks that would give us both the best possible reason to procrastinate. It was never that hard to convince Will to down tools and put that work off for a little bit longer. The immortal question “Co-op?” would usually be rebuffed with the insistence that “I need to finish this essay, it’s due in an hour”, but in the end the temptation of a bag of Doritos or a bottle of Coke was always too much, and off we would go. The shop itself is relatively narrow for all customers, let alone those in wheelchairs, and from these experiences came the realisation that wherever I stop my chair, I will always be in someone’s way. It’s completely unintended, of course, but I often find that it’s the same everywhere I go. In middle school, I was sternly told that for health and safety reasons I could not drive at my top speed, but this was an instruction I disobeyed from the start. It therefore fell to a boy in my class to scream “MODE 5!” whenever I was spied at a forbidden speed, the highest being the fifth. I took great pleasure in going everywhere as fast as I could, but it’s memories like those that would cause me to believe the mass of metal underneath me could make me a nuisance.

I’ve glossed over this already, as it was one of things on my mind whilst I was buying stamps recently, but in Years 9, 10 and 11 it did have a big impact on my mindset at times. I remember my friend Emily, who was in my mentor group during those years, telling me that she used to notice how quiet I could be. She was definitely right – there were plenty of occasions where I felt like I dare not open my mouth, at least partly due to my physical presence. I always felt incredibly conspicuous. In classrooms I tried to park as tightly as possible so as to minimise the obstruction I would cause, and in the few PE lessons I did – which did little to get me exercise anyway – I’d be a little bit embarrassed by the rattling of my chair over the bumps in the playing field. During break and lunch, even though I had friends, I still felt the need to keep a low profile and this resulted in me often taking the same route through the quad over and over again to make it look as though I was doing something. Finally, at our Year 11 prom – which I had to be persuaded to go to in the first place – I crashed into a table in front of everyone whilst collecting the “Prom King” crown, cementing the idea that I really was a lumbering wally firmly in my mind. Don’t worry, though, because the rest of the night was great, and for various reasons I was able to come out of my shell in sixth form, which I had initially dreaded because of the shyness my situation had placed on me.

Among the few things I still feel reservations about is my writing, my creative ambitions. It can take me so long to finally set the ball rolling on an idea, and this can lead to frequent ribbing from my family, who always ask why they’ve never seen any of the writing I’ve done prior to starting this blog. I sometimes argue that it’s because I believe you absolutely cannot rush a piece of writing if you want it to be good. That’s why there can be a gap of several days between each post, but even when this is the case the need to write can be all-consuming. I always want to find the perfect thing to write, so that I can satisfy myself and get my fix, so to speak. Not long ago I was lying in bed, shrouded in total darkness, when I suddenly noticed the trickling of water into the gutter outside. As it was raining, this obviously wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but it swiftly set my brain racing, and I was therefore reassured that I wouldn’t be getting to sleep anytime soon. I simply had to write about it in some way, eerie as it was, but ultimately I didn’t. I was convinced, before a single word had had the chance to appear on screen, that it wouldn’t be adequate. It simply became one of many drafts that will never see the light of day. With that in mind, then, perhaps I could treat this blog like I do my keyboard playing. Whether it is published or not, I’ll keep sentences or titles, more of the ideas I like to hoard, in the hope of raising my self-confidence further and coming out of another shell.

Mason

I remember recently telling a friend of mine who had asked how my job searching was going that I’ll happily work my fingers to the bone if it means I never have to write another essay again. Every now and again I am prone to exaggeration, and making the odd mountain out of a molehill, but on that occasion every word was the truth. For myself, and many others, essays were an ever-present school struggle that ultimately helped to tarnish my positivity towards studying. Once you’d completed the draft, which was usually 2,000 words or more in length, seemingly endless revisions would lie ahead, and as I got further into sixth form these would usually involve scouring the web for incredibly tedious “critical material” in the desperate hope of fulfilling the marking criteria. I think I’ve made my disapproval clear enough already!

Indeed, life is that little bit more rosy now that the pressures associated with demands like those are no longer present. I’m very thankful for this and any apprehension that follows is microscopic compared to it. Therefore, my upcoming work experience placement at the local job centre – starting on Tuesday – is something I am looking to seize fully by the horns. The tasks waiting for me look to be perfectly suited to my skill set, heightening my optimism towards a challenge I know I can accept with confidence. That’s certainly an effect that writing essays never had on me. Everything about my position will be practical for me, from the desks I work at to the toilet I do my business in. Having been to the job centre yesterday in order to sort out all of the formalities, I now feel totally familiar to use the resources that are to hand in the best way possible during at least the next four weeks. Virtually nothing is daunting me about this – not even the return to an early start. Essays could be intimidating no matter when you started them!

With this mindset, I’m feeling very positive about life in general, and I at least partially have a distinct lack of essays to thank for that. I’ll go in to start on Tuesday with my head held high, being very grateful that I’ve finally found the work I’ve spent so long looking for since October – and in the very place that’s been helping me do that. What’s more remarkable is that the whole opportunity only came by chance. Had I left the job centre dejectedly after that Employment Event, at which I had not been able to make any other breakthrough, I might never have found myself at this point – one that will hopefully help me gain the experience that so many employers look for when recruiting. And there won’t be a single essay in sight…

Mason

Lost among the barren wasteland of the Internet is my first online project, which can be found at http://www.thejuniorscriptwriterscommunity.wikia.com. When it was founded on a spare summer’s afternoon in 2011, my slightly too optimistic 13 year-old self believed that it would immediately follow in the wake of the other communities I’d been inspired by and become a runaway success. Unfortunately, I obviously did not take into account the considerable development needed to make the website an appealing product for budding writers like myself, and therefore – as we approach the site’s fifth birthday – no more than four people, including myself, have ever contributed to it.

Nowadays, it’s like a ghost town – completely deserted. I went back to it the other day and realised just how big my delusions of grandeur had been. No more work has been done there, but my desire to create something that others can regularly enjoy alongside myself remains. It’s perhaps logical, therefore, to think about how I can expand this blog, in terms of what it has to offer and how it looks. Whenever it loads up, what do you see? Not just my writing, but also a substantial amount of blue, as things stand – and most people will agree that that won’t do me any favours where catching the eyes of the online public is concerned.

My main priority, of course, is the continued publication of decent content, be it text or anything else. With each new blog post, I’ve had to spend longer and longer on writing the material so that I can ensure it is as fresh as possible. This mindset even to the titles – the name of the aforementioned first website, as you can probably see, is far too long, so when it came to creating this blog I decided that they should be mostly concise. When this isn’t the case, however, they should aim to be sincere or – hopefully – amusing. Personally, I’d say they’ve only been longer when nothing else seemed to fit.

I’ve now come to another apparently natural progression for this blog. The appeal to others might increase if I invited other viewpoints, be they serious or surreal. So that’s just what I’ve done. In the near future, you can expect contributions from Will and Grace (not the sitcom characters). It’s just an experiment at this early stage, but I know that a careful and considered approach could gradually help me achieve the free-for-all community I’ve always wanted.

Mason