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Number 3/Third

A long entry, set as I remember it in the usual mangled town (as an aside, Jovum is its name it has been decided, I saw it on a sign. It also turns out to be an obvious misspelling of something else) my brain settles in to...and also the paper place. This features an old friend, whom I no longer speak to for simple reasons; he is a cock. I also thought I remembered this as two separate events but apparently not. The specifics of the cut out town reminds me of Salvador Plascencia's People of Paper, so I elected not to use it in any of The Last Night Tree. As way of an update on 'that', it currently stands at 26000 words, and the initial sections set in Jovum and the United Kingdom, of which all are introductions and plot setting, are just about complete. Characters are in place and characterised. A synopsis of the book will come in a few weeks.

This entry was written at 3.46 am


'Wandering around a bizarre cut out town. Some features are familiar to me. Matthew Hyde is about. We are in a Spanish lesson. A badly disguised celebrity sets a test to which I fail. I say I have never learnt Spanish. The class is aghast. I point out that I have no need to be in school as I already have postgrad qualifications, and that I wouldn't listen to the teacher any way as he is a Z list celeb. Looking at my neighbour's answers to the test, I see that they are gobbledegook. Outside in the cardboard town; it changes from a sleepy windswept street to the inside of a darkened school and back again in the blink of an eye. It is Siesta time in the cardboard town. I take Matt Hyde on a tour, as I seem to know the place. At first it is York. We go past the chocolate shop on The Shambles, but then the town becomes an odd metamorphosis of several places; we are on a road like the end of Ashcroft at the mini roundabout, looking down over the old town of Edinburgh but also Oxford, and the seaside. For the rest of the experience, I refer to the place as 'Oxford'. Down by the quayside, I explain about Oxford's prison (which is on the harbour for an unexplained reason). Hyde seems interested. We are allowed to see the inmates exercising, and I touch a mattress in one of the cells to find it is paper thin. Also, the cellmates appear to sleep on the slats of ladders.'

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