10,000 words

10,000 words on my third novel, it's early days, but to me it's a significant milestone. The characters are becoming more familiar and the writing is flowing more easily. That's pretty much all I have to report on a dreary Sunday night!

Oh sweet vanity

I got my first poem published a few weeks ago, by a company named United Press. Of course I was elated, it was my first poem, my work had finally been noticed. I sent off another poem and a letter arrived saying they liked it but I didn't win the competition. It wasn't until my brother noted that the contents of the letter were word for word the same as the last. I had a niggling feeling about the whole company, using my google fu (my brother's term, not mine) and it turned out that United Press is pretty much a vanity publishing company, just no where near as obvious as the rest of them out there. I was fooled a first time, but now I wonder about letting them publish my poetry. It's a lesson well learnt early on, so there's no need to beat myself up over it. Still, I have a poem published, that counts for something....right?

Just hit a glitch, nothing major.

This is my problem, I sign up for something that sounds great (like voting, you don't read the fine print or think too hard about your decision) then realise down the line you haven't got the staying power. That can't be a good sign for a writer, now is it? I suppose with the NaWriPoMo that I can catch up with it, but I'm not in the spirit of the quest. I'll do a catch up over the next few weeks and stop making excuses. On the plus side I've had a small article published on a student website.

How to do it rite, and how to do it rong

Yes the misspelling in the title is intentional, I've not lost all sense (well I have, just not with my spelling. Yet.) I was chatting with a friend of a friend the other day about books, and they mentioned their mother in law had written a book. Given their faces were like they'd swallowed a bucketful of lemons juice and bleach, I admit I was curious. A nice surprise for me a couple days later is that I was handed the said book. It's a story about a young woman named Kate who's, let me guess, beautiful, rich, but has no personality of her own other than to fall in love with a Masai warrior. The idea of the story isn't so bad, but the amount of bad grammar (even I can do better than this!) is just appalling. Any editor or even proofreader worth their salt would not let this amount of bad grammar slip through the net. There's also the issue of nouns with stray capital letters like' Giraffe' and 'Leopard'. It's as the author is using the German rule that all nouns have capital letters. Last time I checked we were writing in English. It's clearly quaint how she's tried to use African words to make it more realistic, but when you include a dictionary reference for it, it does take away the tone of the book.


Unsurprisingly, it's been published by Authorhouse. Just a quick search shows up that it's not a trusty company to handle publishing your books. Clearly the author thought that her work would be in safe hands. It appears that Authorhouse haven't updated their spellcheck software.


I can't be too hard on the book, because after all, the author has gone out and published, and the story with some work and revision may have actually been a good story, but her hurry to publish it has created a half done job. Most publishers would say that to pay for your work to go into print is not good. But some people simply want to have their work printed and keep it between friends and family. There's nothing wrong with that. Just at least chek Ur spelling is rite b4 u publizh it.

Writings

It's currently thundering outside and pouring it down with rain. The first flash did scare me because I thought someone was taking a picture of me. It's gone strangely yellow outside as well, a curious sort of hue. Strange things you notice, like how the stone wall is dry in some places, so it must be well made. Probably not so dry now though, the rains just really stepped up. Even the streets look defensive, as if they're covering their faces from the worst of the cold rain. I love the sound of it the rain hitting the conservatory roof, makes you think of being inside a glass jar. Thunder going off felt like a landmine going off, and sounds like a large plane in the sky.

Anyway, that ramblings aside. My writing seems to be coming back slowly, which is good as I have a deadline at the end of this month. It's been a bit of a struggle to shake myself out of my laziness at the moment. Internet doesn't help and my lack of will. And Ben and Jerry's on half price offer. Doing the NaPoWriMo has been good for me, flexing the creative muscles has been good warm-ups for me. The novel I started recently is starting to come together more, I'm understanding my characters better and suffering less from White Page Syndrome. Word count is currently at 7974. Not bad, it's a decent start, the characters are introduced and the setting is taking shape. I'll hit a bump in the road soon, but that's the fun part in thinking a way around it. Many novelists will think I'm rather twee and sweet getting on with a third novel, but at 22, it's too bad to say I'm on my third.

Back in my third year of university I could bang out 1000 words a day easy, but I was younger with not as much responsibility as I have now. Work hard, play hard does not apply to me. I'm a sad case of a writer when I'd rather be knitting or watching TV and eating ice-cream. But then again I am human, we have our ups and downs. I guess this is what makes the difference over art and mass produced material, that there's a touch of human in us all. 

That last blast of thunder was, to use a word a friend loves, glorious. A good note to end this blog on. 

NaPoWriMo #5

Today's was to steal a line from another poem and make it mine. 

I have stolen away the dreams

that induced the great Kubla Khan,

In dreams I fall

down to a sunless sea. 

I hear the sirens of old,

singing the grace of their gods.
War! War! I hear the ringing

in my ears, the gasp for breath,

saltiness between my toes

and water down my throat. 

I build the dome in the air

with my waving arms, 

but poets and maids playing

in their sweet eastern symphony, 

do not hear me. The man

with bewitching eyes,

drunk on honey dew,

instead I have sunless water to drink.

NaPoWriMo #3 and #4

For day three, to write about a country walk, or something nice


The blossoms unfold
Until the spring rain draws them
away, indefinite.




For day four it was to write from the point of view of someone.


I spend my days weaving,
gathering together the tresses.
singing off the loneliness with no one
to share in the beauty of my tapestries.
Of course they are all one
colour, sublime golden hues.
But even gold is boring,
if all you do is weave your long hair,
make little silky corn dolls, that
fall apart in my dove white hands.


I sit and sing by my window,
a sweet little perch,
as I darn the holes in my clothes
with my golden haired sewing thread.
It is boring, weaving all day,
with no one to hear my singing voice.
But I weather it on,
weaving scenes of children and firesides,
of grubby hearths and empty bellies.
If Mother Gothel does not come tonight,
I set my deft fingers to weave a noose
and not a rope for her to climb.

NaPoWriMo #2

Today's prompt was to pick a colour and talk stuff related to it, I deviated, but I rather like the idea of watching the Northern Lights. 




The taste of the hoarfrost,

The aura borealis,

Woven in the sky by a spider god,

Tailing of long silk, stars,

Could we taste the night,

Would it be sweet sugar,

Wrapped over our imaginations,

Kindred to the northern hemisphere,

The dark sky, too twee to call it velvet,

Even if our skin touching

Feels the same.

The hotness of our mingled breath

Expounds the night air

But not eternally beneath us,

Even a thousand hearts, hands and feet

Will melt away the tundra,

Sweet ice blues, polar bears hunting

On glades of ice, fortresses trapping

Secrets, our unknown history

Written together. 

NaPoWriMo

I stumbled across a link to this http://www.napowrimo.net/ and thought what a great idea! I need a little boost for my poetry at the moment. I generally favour fiction, but I know with poetry it is a muscle you need to keep flexing or else you'll get sudden cramp and it feels sore for a while.


The prompt today was animals. I chose to write about a hare.


I looked at his sinews,
thick snaps and twacks of
ligature and bones grinding
to ecsape the gun dogs.
But there was no victory
for this hare,
he hangs solemn like
garlic hung in the rafters
but he does not deserve
a burial or rites.
I do not weep, I am
not a little girl. Grim, my brother and
I, we set to the task of carving
him up, starting at the neck,
shaving off his fluff of
sweet furs shedding like
dandelion down, but we make no wishes.
Grim, we could be
collecting tales of hares
bounding over fields,
but ours is destined for nothing more,
sustaining, thick globs
of his glorious blood,
my first rite and my brother's passed.

Life Writing: Onion Country

On a sunny morning, in rural Lincolnshire, a young woman wakes up to her day’s work. She is no ordinary young woman. She is the forefront of a revolution, but she does not know this yet. Her name is Victoria McDonagh. The backdrop to this revolution, the all-important catalyst is the pub her parents bought when she was twenty. Little would she ever realise what an impact this place would have in the course of history.

      Quietly she gets on with her day’s work, trying to set herself to writing something. But mostly she ends up texting her friends when she feels bored or uninspired. There are a few texts to the friends she’s left behind from University There is the occasional joke sent to her friend Toni Cox, lamenting her singleness.

     ‘We should just get married!’ is one text sent early in the year of 2012. The Facebook records show it has been a long time since her last relationship, two years perhaps. Her diary from university reveals scant facts about her dating life, but the joke clearly shows a point of frustration. But this is not uncommon in her generation, despite an ever expanding world of networking and tweeting, people are continually isolated even with vast amounts of useless technology.

      Her ambition to be a writer has not yet burnt out. There are still the odd status updates on Facebook saying how many characters are in her novel. She tries not to be too smug about her success in actually writing a first novel, even if it was rejected by nearly every publishing house and agent in her time. It is only marginally successful now because of her curious death.

     Victoria frequently laments her life as a barmaid and general dogsbody for the family business. Her parents were always self-employed, so taking over a rundown pub seemed a logical way forward. The actual paperwork agreeing the lease and general documents have been lost for a number of years, but many of the locals remember the family and Victoria;

    ‘She were a good looking lass, if I’d been forty year younger,’ one rather tall, but frail looking man comments. ‘His features have a strange rat like appearance to them’ and he’s ‘not all there with his cough drops,’ appear in a stray email Victoria sent to a friend describing some of the people who visited the pub.

   All of Victoria’s experience at the pub was not wasted. Her second novel, Onion Country was in its final drafts before the unfortunate accident that lead to her death. Onion Country was published by her family two years after her death, and donations went a charity for those who have been injured in incidents with pool balls and cues. It was difficult procuring any support from the locals to make any sort of donation, as Victoria once noted on a Facebook message that ‘the only way to get a tip from a local would be to prise it from their cold, dead fist, and even then it would be difficult.’ She presents them as curiously simple minded and rather backward, but this could simply have been because she had a degree. One resident was reported to say to her once. ‘Who needs a degree?  I went to university of life me.’ Victoria was rather happy when he was run over by a tractor.

     The Kindle had been a revolutionary reading device in the early years of the twenty first century, and as a keen reader Victoria invested in one. Her reading downloads show a variety of classics that she intended to read, but never got around to, as well as some other types of fiction. Sadly now the Kindle has gone out of use long since replaced ‘the Douse’ by Rainforest, the branch that took over Amazon in 2030.

   Victoria was keenly remembered at the pub for her unusual interest in handicrafts. A few locals remember her knitting behind the bar. She would often become a little too involved with her knitting and the residents developed a system of banging their glasses down heavily on the bar to get her attention, and would sometimes throw in an softly uttered swear word for variation.

   ‘Lol, I’m just getting high off the fumes coming off the munch bunch! Victoria sent this text to her brother one evening. It is difficult to pin point exactly who the ‘munch bunch’ were, but it appears to be a nickname for a group of people who made a habit of smoking cannabis. Such drugs are now long extinct, but in Victoria’s time the use was common. The laws at the time stipulate no smoking inside buildings, so actual fumes would not have been present. Victoria is possibly referring to a particular smell, the use of cannabis was said to have had a very strong, sweaty sort of aroma.

Victoria’s twin brother, Robert was two minutes younger than her, but that did not allow for any superiority on Victoria’s part. Records show that he was over 6ft and a rather solid mass. It is probably the reason why Victoria had few reported bully incidents during secondary school. Victoria closely describes one incident from her diary of a fight in which her brother took part.

      Some little shits had been giving Heather some grief, and she stupidly decided to try and have a go at them. They started chucking some stuff at her, so my brother went over to sort it out. His silent tall approach didn’t work, and on the grass he tried to trip one up. Rob couldn’t, so he just grabbed the little shit by the hands and just swung him around instead.

       Victoria’s diary kept during the years of her school life show she was secure in her ambition to be a writer, even adding a few poor poems into the pages, and oddly enough a few pictures of her cats with silly captions beneath them. The family have few surviving pictures. It is curious as many people in the early twenty first century were obsessed with displaying photographs in their homes. Some pictures have been salvaged from her Facebook account, and show an increase of pictures during her time at university.

      Her university life was fraught with the social problems that many poor students faced, especially arguments over food. One message from Facebook shows tension over Victoria using a cup full of hot chocolate without asking permission from her flatmate:

       Hi, u just can’t go around like taking stuff you didn’t ask for. PS it’s snowing outside!!!

Victoria being the wimp she was, gave a bland response about being sorry and replacing the amount taken. It is presumed they did not talk after the hot chocolate incident.

      Her diary during the second year of university shows she got little sleep in the first semester. The reason for lack of sleep was wayward housemate who in Victoria’s words ‘didn’t know the bloody difference between night and bloody day!’. There were reports of the housemate taking showers in the middle of the night and singing randomly. Presumably Victoria was still a wimp and was not able to confront the housemate about the problems, or the housemate simply didn’t listen. A record from the university shows that several complaints were put in, and Victoria recalls in her diary that when the house warden was called into have a talk with the accused housemate, Victoria gleefully eavesdropped on the whole conversation. She does admit it was childish, but felt rather good. Contemporary critics agree it was very childish.

       Some of her writings were thought lost until a discovery only a few years ago. A collection of notebooks were found in the attic space of a house she presumably lived in at one stage. Historians had hoped that the discovery would hold some great writings, but they were quickly disappointed to find that they were merely half finished stories and ideas written during her teens.

       It was during 2010 when plans were being made to start moving to the pub. Her parents wished to keep it quiet until plans were definite, but Victoria knew something was amiss as she mentions in email to a friend. ’Mum and dad must think I’m stupid. Don’t they think I won’t notice when they hole themselves up in their office for hours and don’t tell me why?’

      Such messages are hardly of someone who is supposedly revolutionary material, especially since she commanded little success and hardly managed to secure an audience for her writing. The most revolutionary thing she did was vote conservative in the 2010 elections. What is revolutionary about her is the lack of revolution. Her aims in writing were basic, until she moved to the pub. It was the environment of the pub that gave her such rich material that inspired her famous novel Onion Country. It was such a revolutionary hit, it sold millions of copies, but people still can’t really figure out what is so great about the novel. Probably because it’s a fad, just like Justin Beiber. 

No Love Lost

I do some work for an older chap who's trying to break into writing. We met at the pub a few months ago and got talking about our work. He suggested we form a partnership, and I agreed since it sounded like he had some connections in publishing I could use, and he said he's critique my work. Sounds good.

Only he didn't  want to work that way, and it quickly became apparent that I was being used for ego polishing purposes. I'm a young person, what do I have to know about writing, of course I've haven't lived for nearly long enough to  have anything good to say, let alone even be able to produce anything worth while. Needles to say our opinion about each other's writing is mutual and the only thing we have in common. 

It comes down to this, it's for the money. He pays me to type up some of his work and offer some criticism (but only what he wants to hear, but hey, I'm happy to say that for a bit of petrol money.) It's a good learning curve for when I get a job, the boss wants my opinion, but only the one he wants. I'm actually good at biting my tongue, I'm the perfect daughter to a father who likes only to hear his own voice. 

There are days I feel like hacking his website and putting up a link to something less than tasteful. I might only be a typing assistant, but my CV says I've been a mentor to a new poet for several months now. The job of a writer is to twist the truth and words, is it not?