Through wars both old and new,
the men, and women too,
have each been told the heart must be forgot.
But now and ever more,
shall elicit that word ‘Cor’.
And guys and gals are all a handsome lot.
But for those who seek connections,
of a more enduring kind,
I have this quaint narration,
to ease both heart and mind.
Though there are mines exploding,
and masked men are approaching,
with their machine guns primed.
Whether veteran or green,
support or combat sheened,
your stars will soon align.
Whether in the cubicle or through a reticle,
you may see your chance.
So go out and pursue,
sweetness for them and you.
Go after that one romance.
Though there are bullets flying,
and enemies trying,
to send us all on high.
Though you may be contested,
sent up or berated,
or fail that first small try.
Do not let your failure
affect your behaviour,
or make you miss that chance.
Just go on, don’t you rest,
you’re the best of the best,
you can make that one romance.
Though you’re laid up in bed, sir,
due to having ate, sir,
the cantine’s Christmas cake.
Even if you’re there, sir,
you mustn’t yet give up, sir,
that is the big mistake.
So just write that letter,
you can’t forget, sir,
that they might be the one.
So be up and away.
This is no time to stay.
This is the time to say.
Say it in your own way.
Say it to that one romance.
Sunday, 28 June 2020
A silly song for all...
Picture of young man feeling extremely embarrassed, but wanting this song (?) out of his system.
Tuesday, 31 March 2020
Short Story - The Cleaner
Author's Note: This story was born long before the current COVID-19 crisis. It was created in a brainstorming session with my late father in mid-2018. However, given the current situation, it came to mind as something people might enjoy. To all those suffering, I give my sympathies and good wishes. Here is a little story to take the edge of the current situation.
This account is for the benefit of those who may read it after my upcoming and state-sanctioned death. I think they'll find it... Maybe not amusing. Shocking, perhaps?
"Come on!"
I let myself be led from the van without protest. I was in my scrubs and mask, and when the cleaning gear was forced into my newly-liberated hands, I looked for all the world like a zero-hour cleaner. The guard, gruff as always, shoved me through the door of the evacuated hotel.
"It's on the roof. Deal with it."
Not quite monosyllabic, but certainly curt. It was a long trek up the stairway, up to the roof where my task was waiting for me. The building had been evacuated about an hour before, shortly after a patrol drone had spotted the thing on the roof. After that, the drone had remained while people were rushed and given preventative treatment, assessing how long there was. Then I was called for. Or rather, I was picked out from a large selection of society's unwanted. Better than the needle, I suppose.
It took ten minutes to reach the roof, up the main stairway then via a service entrance onto the roof. It wasn't hard to find my assigned clean-up. There it was, sitting in a slightly curled-up position just hidden by the concrete balustrade. It had been human, and was still to a degree. But the string-like fungus has completely covered their form, and from the pores round the joints came the first edges of immature fruiting bodies bearing the germs of a billion billion spores.
Want to read the rest? Visit the original on my WordPress website.
This account is for the benefit of those who may read it after my upcoming and state-sanctioned death. I think they'll find it... Maybe not amusing. Shocking, perhaps?
"Come on!"
I let myself be led from the van without protest. I was in my scrubs and mask, and when the cleaning gear was forced into my newly-liberated hands, I looked for all the world like a zero-hour cleaner. The guard, gruff as always, shoved me through the door of the evacuated hotel.
"It's on the roof. Deal with it."
Not quite monosyllabic, but certainly curt. It was a long trek up the stairway, up to the roof where my task was waiting for me. The building had been evacuated about an hour before, shortly after a patrol drone had spotted the thing on the roof. After that, the drone had remained while people were rushed and given preventative treatment, assessing how long there was. Then I was called for. Or rather, I was picked out from a large selection of society's unwanted. Better than the needle, I suppose.
It took ten minutes to reach the roof, up the main stairway then via a service entrance onto the roof. It wasn't hard to find my assigned clean-up. There it was, sitting in a slightly curled-up position just hidden by the concrete balustrade. It had been human, and was still to a degree. But the string-like fungus has completely covered their form, and from the pores round the joints came the first edges of immature fruiting bodies bearing the germs of a billion billion spores.
Want to read the rest? Visit the original on my WordPress website.
Sunday, 15 December 2019
My issue writing in First-person
I've discovered something interesting and slightly disturbing about writing in first-person. I've got three novels on the go at the moment, two of which are first-person narratives. It came home to me the day before last like a thunderclap over my head.
When you're writing in third-person, your necessarily disconnected from everything you're doing. You have a distance, an omniscient presence that doesn't have to be so involved in things. You can be as coy or gleefully detailed about character fates as you please without much of a pang. True, you do get emotionally invested in them, but there's always that distance because you're speaking about them from an outside perspective. Almost as if you're a god.
But with first-person, there's an investment. You're necessarily looking at the world through one character's eyes. In the concept stages you may be drafting the story from an overhead view, but for other things you're confined to a single viewpoint. Whether it's a life-or-death struggle, a romantic or sexual encounter, or just describing the outside world, there is a connection. It's far deeper than anything else, because you have that need to think as they think.
At least I know it now. I can think through this. I can stop myself feeling too much of what the characters feel. And I should be able to finish these and write more in this style without too much bother.
When you're writing in third-person, your necessarily disconnected from everything you're doing. You have a distance, an omniscient presence that doesn't have to be so involved in things. You can be as coy or gleefully detailed about character fates as you please without much of a pang. True, you do get emotionally invested in them, but there's always that distance because you're speaking about them from an outside perspective. Almost as if you're a god.
But with first-person, there's an investment. You're necessarily looking at the world through one character's eyes. In the concept stages you may be drafting the story from an overhead view, but for other things you're confined to a single viewpoint. Whether it's a life-or-death struggle, a romantic or sexual encounter, or just describing the outside world, there is a connection. It's far deeper than anything else, because you have that need to think as they think.
At least I know it now. I can think through this. I can stop myself feeling too much of what the characters feel. And I should be able to finish these and write more in this style without too much bother.
Sunday, 22 September 2019
Update... I've Got a Publisher!
You'd never be able to compare the feeling I had two days ago when, on a last email check, I saw something drop into my inbox. Something I was sure would be a "we regret to tell you". Like I've had from agents since my first tentative submission attempts all the way back in 2011. But it wasn't.
It was a pitch I had no idea would work. I'd needed to withdraw and rewrite it once because my overexcited fingers had attached the wrong documents and made some rather glaring spelling and word mistakes. It was the first time I'd put together what was basically a pitch selling myself and the many different series and standalone titles I could offer them over so many years at such and such a pace...
That was just over a month ago. And when I saw that email and read it, I couldn't believe my eyes. I read it again. My desk faces the window, and since it was dark outside it acted as a mirror. I was gawking like an idiot. Then I leapt up from the chair and started dancing about the house like a sentient pogo stick, bouncing round and round in circles as if I were an overexcited child. I wanted to shout, to tell the world, to exalt my good fortune from the rooftops. But the most startling emotion I felt wasn't excitement. It was a pure, unfiltered happiness that I hadn't felt in years. The pressure, the anxiety I'd felt with each submission....gone. Thirteen years of effort finally paid off.
I don't want to mention too much at this point, because it's still very early in the process and I'm awaiting a contract. And there's still a long road ahead filled with difficulties and the grind of any fledgling author establishing a market presence. But it's a start, and with a publisher I could only have dreamt of.
I have a publisher. Now the real work begins.
It was a pitch I had no idea would work. I'd needed to withdraw and rewrite it once because my overexcited fingers had attached the wrong documents and made some rather glaring spelling and word mistakes. It was the first time I'd put together what was basically a pitch selling myself and the many different series and standalone titles I could offer them over so many years at such and such a pace...
That was just over a month ago. And when I saw that email and read it, I couldn't believe my eyes. I read it again. My desk faces the window, and since it was dark outside it acted as a mirror. I was gawking like an idiot. Then I leapt up from the chair and started dancing about the house like a sentient pogo stick, bouncing round and round in circles as if I were an overexcited child. I wanted to shout, to tell the world, to exalt my good fortune from the rooftops. But the most startling emotion I felt wasn't excitement. It was a pure, unfiltered happiness that I hadn't felt in years. The pressure, the anxiety I'd felt with each submission....gone. Thirteen years of effort finally paid off.
I don't want to mention too much at this point, because it's still very early in the process and I'm awaiting a contract. And there's still a long road ahead filled with difficulties and the grind of any fledgling author establishing a market presence. But it's a start, and with a publisher I could only have dreamt of.
I have a publisher. Now the real work begins.
Sunday, 25 August 2019
Losing Focus
Themes are incredible things in stories. They can help bind a story together. But have you ever found a theme overtaking your work? Yeah, me too.
My writing can sometimes be painfully slow and difficult to start. I can end up spending up to two weeks on one chapter for no good reason. Words normally flow from my fingers. But within the last week, something clicked. I went through all the reasons my writing productivity might be down. One was me being a little distractable due to current home conditions and upcoming events. Those issues are slowly finding solutions.
The other is that I was letting the grand theme dominate the story, at the expense of characters and narrative. In an earlier WordPress post, I outlined an Ancient Greece alternate story. That was being stopped dead because I was trying to kind some grand theme for the narrative. I know, it's terrible of me. I was also trying to open it in a style foreign to my sensibilities of character writing. On top of that, restarting a project from scratch can be a little demoralising for someone based on the amount of work put in. In my case, this was my third attempt.
Here's hoping my current works, including the above story, will push forward now I've remembered what pushed me to write ten months ago. Before my father died, and I had to reassess my world. It's a miracle I completed anything at all.
My writing can sometimes be painfully slow and difficult to start. I can end up spending up to two weeks on one chapter for no good reason. Words normally flow from my fingers. But within the last week, something clicked. I went through all the reasons my writing productivity might be down. One was me being a little distractable due to current home conditions and upcoming events. Those issues are slowly finding solutions.
The other is that I was letting the grand theme dominate the story, at the expense of characters and narrative. In an earlier WordPress post, I outlined an Ancient Greece alternate story. That was being stopped dead because I was trying to kind some grand theme for the narrative. I know, it's terrible of me. I was also trying to open it in a style foreign to my sensibilities of character writing. On top of that, restarting a project from scratch can be a little demoralising for someone based on the amount of work put in. In my case, this was my third attempt.
Here's hoping my current works, including the above story, will push forward now I've remembered what pushed me to write ten months ago. Before my father died, and I had to reassess my world. It's a miracle I completed anything at all.
Sunday, 4 August 2019
Not Inspiring
Hi, sorry for the two-week delay. I hope you enjoy another vaguely coherent but still slightly inflammatory blog post on the follies of fictionalising reality.
As an author, inspiration can come from a lot of places. But when it's a lack of inspiration, you have to wonder why. Why doesn't this particular thing cause me to make up three story scenarios on the spot?
While I have a great appreciation for the Harry Potter series and greatly enjoy it, I can't say it had much of an impact on my writing unlike the work of Stroud and Herbert. Don't get me wrong, they're great books, and some elements have provided inspiration in some things. But there's something about that series that i feel is inviolate. Perhaps it's because I'm still pushing with my craft, or perhaps it's that I haven't yet found any concept that I can sensibly take for that long without stretching it to breaking point. But when I look at a seven-book series that only in a few places looks as if it's begin stretched out, I can't help but feel humbled. Barring a few choices, it still boasts one of the most fully-realised central casts of any fantasy saga. Ever.
I shan't go here into my dislike of Avatar (I've done that before, and don't have much new to say on the subject), but it draws on a tradition that's best exemplified in many Western movies; the oppressed natives in rebellion. The theme of rebellion isn't new. Heck, it's as old as religion. But its use in stories is often one-note, taking in the glory and justification while barely looking at the consequences or aftermath. Also, there are too many real-life examples that don't end well. French Revolution? Yeah it deposed an inadequate ruler, but it led to one of the bloodiest purges in European history prior to WW2. Russian Revolution and Long Walk? While the basic ideology is sound, it caused great suffering to a lot of people and was eventually used by effective dictators to create some of the most unsettling governments in modern history outside the Near East and the Americas. Indian Uprisings? Yes they were forced into it, but their rebellion only made the government come down even harder and it only caused more harm in the long run... I could go on and on. Basically, rebellion isn't something I put in my stories unless there's an excellent way of admitting its complexities, even if it's based around fantasy.
A fascinating example for me is Dungeons & Dragons, that oh-so-famous role-playing franchise. I'd only ever heard of it through the movie, which I thought was an enjoyable romp but lacking in much rewatch value. Particularly as some of the best scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor. It's arguable that many people's perception of fantasy has been moulded by Dungeons & Dragons. But for me, it's never had a great pull. Once I skimmed below the surface, there's so much that I think "oh, they used that" or "oh, it's that again". Now, I'm not saying they're the only ones. No-one is these days. But they're so blatant about their aesthetics that the world starts to come across as derivative to the point of comedy. Doesn't help that a lot of its most memorable media reinforces from rather unhealthy gender stereotypes. This spills over into the media it's influenced, poisoning my later enjoyment when I see how much of Dungeons & Dragons was used, either consciously or just because it's become ingrained into pop culture. Now, if a piece of fiction had the characters being openly at odds with the "dungeon master", that would be something. Still, didn't know it drew so much from folklore.
There's a tone of other examples I could name, but this blog post would be way too long. Hope you enjoyed. Are there any series that didn't inspire you?
As an author, inspiration can come from a lot of places. But when it's a lack of inspiration, you have to wonder why. Why doesn't this particular thing cause me to make up three story scenarios on the spot?
While I have a great appreciation for the Harry Potter series and greatly enjoy it, I can't say it had much of an impact on my writing unlike the work of Stroud and Herbert. Don't get me wrong, they're great books, and some elements have provided inspiration in some things. But there's something about that series that i feel is inviolate. Perhaps it's because I'm still pushing with my craft, or perhaps it's that I haven't yet found any concept that I can sensibly take for that long without stretching it to breaking point. But when I look at a seven-book series that only in a few places looks as if it's begin stretched out, I can't help but feel humbled. Barring a few choices, it still boasts one of the most fully-realised central casts of any fantasy saga. Ever.
I shan't go here into my dislike of Avatar (I've done that before, and don't have much new to say on the subject), but it draws on a tradition that's best exemplified in many Western movies; the oppressed natives in rebellion. The theme of rebellion isn't new. Heck, it's as old as religion. But its use in stories is often one-note, taking in the glory and justification while barely looking at the consequences or aftermath. Also, there are too many real-life examples that don't end well. French Revolution? Yeah it deposed an inadequate ruler, but it led to one of the bloodiest purges in European history prior to WW2. Russian Revolution and Long Walk? While the basic ideology is sound, it caused great suffering to a lot of people and was eventually used by effective dictators to create some of the most unsettling governments in modern history outside the Near East and the Americas. Indian Uprisings? Yes they were forced into it, but their rebellion only made the government come down even harder and it only caused more harm in the long run... I could go on and on. Basically, rebellion isn't something I put in my stories unless there's an excellent way of admitting its complexities, even if it's based around fantasy.
A fascinating example for me is Dungeons & Dragons, that oh-so-famous role-playing franchise. I'd only ever heard of it through the movie, which I thought was an enjoyable romp but lacking in much rewatch value. Particularly as some of the best scenes were relegated to the cutting room floor. It's arguable that many people's perception of fantasy has been moulded by Dungeons & Dragons. But for me, it's never had a great pull. Once I skimmed below the surface, there's so much that I think "oh, they used that" or "oh, it's that again". Now, I'm not saying they're the only ones. No-one is these days. But they're so blatant about their aesthetics that the world starts to come across as derivative to the point of comedy. Doesn't help that a lot of its most memorable media reinforces from rather unhealthy gender stereotypes. This spills over into the media it's influenced, poisoning my later enjoyment when I see how much of Dungeons & Dragons was used, either consciously or just because it's become ingrained into pop culture. Now, if a piece of fiction had the characters being openly at odds with the "dungeon master", that would be something. Still, didn't know it drew so much from folklore.
There's a tone of other examples I could name, but this blog post would be way too long. Hope you enjoyed. Are there any series that didn't inspire you?
Sunday, 14 July 2019
Mystery of Mysteries
Mystery stories are a pain in the proverbial. I should know, I'm writing one.
I enjoy detective stories, with tastes ranging from Christie and Sayers to Dexter and (Caroline) Lawrence, but until recently I didn't feel I had the confidence to either plan it out or carry through on something that required so much careful preparation or forethought. But that November, I was struck by inspiration. I knew the mystery story I wanted to write, the detective I wanted to craft. When I decided to start writing that detective story. I wanted to create a fantasy-themed detective story. Non-human characters, a classic Christie-style premise with an unconventional resolution. But then my father died.
As you can imagine, I found myself lacking in any real wish to continue. At least my description of the corpse was real enough, but it was after that point that my writing just petered out. It took me a whole month to get back to my work, when I started writing a different Japan-themed story I've just finished within the last fortnight. And I found myself freshly confronted by the difficulties of the form.
Quite apart from the usual issues related to writing about death within a year of my own father dying (and me being the first to discover the body, on top of that), I realised I had to define a lot more than just the characters. I had to settle the layout of the location as it relates to incidental and plot-relevant details, the time frame for the incident, note details about the condition of the corpse and the mechanics of the murder method, be realistic about who my detective acts in the wake of the death.
It's all complicated by the fact that it's a story where there is no simple magic trick to show that there is only one way the crime was committed and only one person capable of it. It's very like real detection; a grind of interrogating witnesses, examining evidence over and over again, and struggling through to a solution that best fits the facts. Well, that's not such a huge problem. I don't like stories that do that. You'd think the culprit would be less silly about committing the crime if its circumstances pointed so clearly to them.
Well, here's hoping it works out. I'm still pushing to find agents and/or publishers to take my work. And my latest completed work will arrive on Amazon through my self-publishing channels. And I continue pushing forward while eyeing other things, and keeping my dream alive in the best way I can. Here's to hope.
I enjoy detective stories, with tastes ranging from Christie and Sayers to Dexter and (Caroline) Lawrence, but until recently I didn't feel I had the confidence to either plan it out or carry through on something that required so much careful preparation or forethought. But that November, I was struck by inspiration. I knew the mystery story I wanted to write, the detective I wanted to craft. When I decided to start writing that detective story. I wanted to create a fantasy-themed detective story. Non-human characters, a classic Christie-style premise with an unconventional resolution. But then my father died.
As you can imagine, I found myself lacking in any real wish to continue. At least my description of the corpse was real enough, but it was after that point that my writing just petered out. It took me a whole month to get back to my work, when I started writing a different Japan-themed story I've just finished within the last fortnight. And I found myself freshly confronted by the difficulties of the form.
Quite apart from the usual issues related to writing about death within a year of my own father dying (and me being the first to discover the body, on top of that), I realised I had to define a lot more than just the characters. I had to settle the layout of the location as it relates to incidental and plot-relevant details, the time frame for the incident, note details about the condition of the corpse and the mechanics of the murder method, be realistic about who my detective acts in the wake of the death.
It's all complicated by the fact that it's a story where there is no simple magic trick to show that there is only one way the crime was committed and only one person capable of it. It's very like real detection; a grind of interrogating witnesses, examining evidence over and over again, and struggling through to a solution that best fits the facts. Well, that's not such a huge problem. I don't like stories that do that. You'd think the culprit would be less silly about committing the crime if its circumstances pointed so clearly to them.
Well, here's hoping it works out. I'm still pushing to find agents and/or publishers to take my work. And my latest completed work will arrive on Amazon through my self-publishing channels. And I continue pushing forward while eyeing other things, and keeping my dream alive in the best way I can. Here's to hope.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)