Lit crit of the week, #3

"I didn't fall asleep - I just started to think about death."

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Biogging

I return to a theme I recall pushing about a year ago - sometimes there's more to storytelling than mere story. I'm beginning to think a narrow purist obsession with the perfect re-re-revised manuscript might just be letting me down.
It kinda helps if the storyteller is coming from somewhere. If I remember rightly, the word hinterland popped up in a new context one day in the 1980s when some politician or other (probably conservative?) bemoaned an absence of it, to describe the gap in life experience and personality of one of his colleagues. It has got me thinking - what, for writing purposes, might be my hinterland? I do not have an exciting job, or a colourful lineage, or even a delightfully eccentric obsession (that I'm aware of, at any rate). After much musing, the best I've come up with yet is this:

The Myth of The Basement Office

Ten Openings That Never Went Anywhere - #4

They stared at the screen together.

Across a vast, snow-covered square so large that the ends were lost in the sky, innumerable ranks of grey-green figures stood in tight rows, from the cameraman seemingly all the way to the blanket white clouds. In the distance, along one side of the square, a square black limousine struggled like a beetle, almost broken by the weight of the enormous portrait of the Dear Leader it sustained. It was only the sheer scale of the scene that revealed any sign of humanity. Rows of mourners that in any smaller number would have appeared drilled with laser-like precision revealed the subtlest kinks in the foreshortened middle distance. Perspective could be harsh.