Free The House of Writers by M.J. Nicholls

periphrasis,” she said. “You’re not the only one,” he said. “Perhaps in the future we might feel something tangible,” he said. “I hope,” she said.
    I returned to the Opaque movement several decades later, when there was a brief rekindling of interest in the national media, and I wrote a final novel that outsold all the others. I was known as the Godfather of the Opaquists, and lied about the movement’s formation—poaching explanations from several of the volumes of theory on the Opaquists I had read—and used the profits earned to correct my language blindness through laser surgery. The world of literary possibility open to me at last, I found myself unable to adapt to the pressures of having to place words in a logical order to make meaning. I had spent three decades of my life writing incoherently; changing this habit in my fifties seemed impossible. I took a post writing the information booklets for insurance companies. Further work writing restaurant menus, terms and conditions, and advertising slogans followed before I forged a path into the ordered sentence in the final stage of my career—the finest and most fertile stage.
    I entered The House as a hack thriller writer, taking to the form with delight. The ordered motion of the plots, sentences, and character motives was a liberation for me, and I became a prolific writer of the Charles Atmond series, moving the hero through nine books (and counting) of formulaic scrapes, revelling in the clichéd descriptions, the unoriginal themes and settings, the woodenness of the dialogue. This was perfect order for me: machine-made fiction safe in its well-trimmed orderliness. People complain that The House signals the death of literature and that workhouse-made fiction is somehow the finish of several millennia of artistic achievement dating back to Homer. I disagree. The House is a place for literature to achieve the perfection to which it has aspired at a consistent level. . . imagine a world free from imperfect novels, swimming in masterpieces being produced one after the other in an unstoppable flow. Sounds like paradise to this writer!

Cal’s Tour

Scottish Interest Books
    D ISPLACED from Second by a temporary ScotCall invasion (they occasionally blitz The House to commandeer offices), I meandered upstairs. Guarding the fire exit on the third floor is a naked man painted as a Pictish warrior. He holds firm a spear and shield, his arty pecs and muscles at full and impressive bulge, and stares into the middle distance like a beefeater with the capacity to disembowel. This is Pelf. A network of tattoos cover his body from dragon heads to sunflowers to lions with curly moustaches. His blue-hued penis is partially obscured by the lion’s beard but still draws the eye, being a penis. He said to me: “Manna hepkins?” Followed by: “Forneil yoman intrimp gulander? Gravure simpo larbis querval? Baaloom? Wanta mugghoom formpals? Pimpla numkaa ladoofalla? Sampo sampa? Sampo sampa simpkin appo? Gushval?” 1 These are authentic Pictish expressions he has memorised to welcome all contractors to the dept.
    As you enter the corridor, six fans mounted on the upper walls hit you with chilly winter winds. A watercolour rendering of an extremely steep Scottish incline (nowhere in particular—somewhere nonspecific and hilly in the Highlands) is on the left, and a mural of lines from Robert Burns and Ricky Wilson, the two most celebrated Scottish writers of the last five hundred years, on the right. Robert Burns is famous for his macabre poem “Tam O’Shanter” and his popular ballads and songs, and Ricky Wilson is the author of
Wee Billy Hummus Frae Largs,
a bestseller in 2013 that sold worldwide and helped usher in a Golden Age of Scottish fiction about superheroes from small towns who speak in dialect and settle down with sexy friends to work in chip shops. Sprinklers secreted in the carpets spray your feet as you “ascend” the hill towards the only room on