Unfinished Novel #4: Buy Yourself an Ice Cream

This was written in the last half of 1994 on my Panasonic word processor, which was the last thing I used before I got my first Mac. I wrote all my undergraduate essays on it, and "Buy Yourself an Ice Cream" was the last thing I wrote before selling it. It saved everything on floppy disks, but I didn't make much of an effort to recover the text from these disks, so all the words are lost now.

I may still have a hard copy somewhere, but I doubt it.

The title comes from something you might do with spare change, with what's left over when you're done doing the main thing. But I appear to have forgotten what the hell I was thinking about when I came up with that title.

Much of BYAIC was cannibalised from earlier inspirations. For example, the "Tell me a movie," line appears more often here than it did in MK. Also the original Burt Lancaster movie of The Obald appears here.

The plot concerns a musician, part of a band, who is travelling down to do some recording in London with his band-mates, including his soon-to-be-ex-best-friend. I think it turns out he's in love with the best friend's girlfriend, and stuff goes on.

Someone who read it, who didn't know me, said that the narrator came across as a bit of a weasel, which is a shame, because I don't think I meant him to be. Obviously I meant him to be enormously sympathetic, in much the way I am myself, but weasel is what came across.

My favourite was the "Shit Stories" chapter, which you may remember me collecting from all and sundry. I remember one drunken night in the Old Angel in Nottingham hearing one after the other. There's a whole nother potential weblog in shit stories on their own.

Anyway, I'm almost certain it ended with the same scene as MK, though it would have been after a few more pages. I may even have stretched to 300 this time.