There's this thing that happens when I'm reading and I turn the page to see that the chapter ends on the following page.

I'm seized by the most uncontrollable urge to flick forward to the last sentence of the chapter, out of sheer, bloodyminded impatience. If the book's not very good, it'll be ok; I'll manage to get through to the end without glancing forward. If the book's good though, I'll have to cover the final few sentences with my hand so that my eyes won't mischievously take a peek. I'll find it hard to concentrate on the bits leading up to the end of the chapter, so sometimes I combat this by putting the book down for a bit, gathering myself together, making a cup of tea to help taper the excitement and impatience somewhat, and try again. Usually that works.

Sometimes, though, I don't cover it in time and I accidentally on purpose read the final sentence. It often doesn't make any sense - obviously, considering I have skipped there from a page before. Then I feel really guilty about spoiling those last couple of pages on myself.

If I ever write a book, I'll make sure all the chapter ends come at the very bottom of the right-hand page, so that you won't know that the chapter has ended until you turn the page and see the beginning of the next chapter.

However, I expect I might be quite alone in this incontrollable impatience, so the only person that will benefit from my thoughtfulness will be me. And, considering I'll have written the book, I will HATE the book. With all the power of hate that I can muster.

Like a recent feature I wrote: a 5,323-word behemoth that makes my skin crawl to read now. Some other people have read it and said it's good, so I take their word for it. I'll never read it ever again. I invested so much time, effort, thought, sanity, and cups of tea into the thing that I felt betrayed when, on writing the final full-stop, the world did not pause, a beam of pure, blinding light did not come from the heavens, a multitude of singing, dancing angels did not descend from above to provide me with the most mind-bending of sexual and culinary delights. In fact, all that happened was that I coughed slightly, and went to the toilet. It was sickeningly underwhelming.

I wrote it because I, along with three other wonderfully talented people, am founding a magazine. It's about football in Berlin. If you're on that other social networking site, you've probably seen it around. It's called No Dice and we're hoping to get our first print edition out by the end of October, which is where the hateful behemoth feature will appear. In the meantime, there are reports and pretty pictures on our website, which you can find here.

I hadn't actually planned on talking about the magazine in this post, so I can't really find a way to tie it back into what I started rambling about at the start of this post. I kinda just wanted to write a post without mentioning my knee.

Oh. Shit.