Personal Treasure Chest

A visit from my Mum has brought with it a wonderful, nostalgia-filled manilla envelope.

As a kid I loved to write short stories and she loved to read them. What I didn't know, what I hadn't even contemplated in the three decades since I wrote them, is that she kept them all!

There are literally hundreds of the little buggers, ranging from about two to seven pages in length, all hand written in an ever-evolving script.

For my benefit more than anybody elses, I thought I'd read through them and post any that I think deserve the light of day.

I'm going to open with a little number that gives a ten years old's view of preconceptions. I've re-written it here in it's exact form - grammar and spelling mistakes included.

"It's All Over Now!"

The van hurtled down the old country road towards Devon. It was late, dark and getting cold.

"Slow down Pete, we don't want to have an accident." Said Jo.

"O.K. love" pete answered and he eased his foot off the accelerator. After a while they were back up to 50 miles / hour.

Suddenly Pete's headlights shone onto a deer. The deers eyes glowed back at him. Jo grabbed the steering wheel to avoid hitting the deer, the car careened off the road and hit astone wall. Jo hit her head on the dashboard.

Pete opened his eyes and shoock his head as if to regain sense. He looked at Jo, she was unconscious.

"I'll have to go for help."

Pete wrenched himself from the drivers seat and began to walk towards the nearest village.

Jo woke to see an empty seat beside her. She panicked and tried to get out of her seat but,

"Ow! Ooh!" She couldn't move.

She lay back in her seat. "I'llput the radio on," she said to herself and turned the key in the ignition. She tuned in to radio Devon. She listened to the local news which said there were crowds of skin heads going to Devon for a big concert.

Suddenly a car stopped beside the van. Jo looked in and saw it was full of skin heads. She quickly locked all the doors.

"Look lads, someone has left us a van." They all looked in.

"Blimey, there's some woman in it!"

They tried to force the door open.

"Need any help, lady?" one asked. "Cor, she's bleeding!"

"Go away, leave me alone!" she screamed hysterically.

"Come on, we only want to help you, we'll give you a lift to the 'ospital."

Jo began to scream as if her life was threatened. One of the boys got a stone and smashed the side window. As he did this a police car and ambulance with Pete in came around the corner. Hearing the screams they presumed the boys were attacking Jo. The boys were grabbed by the police.

"But I was only trying to help her!" said the boy who broke the window.

"A likely story! You skin heads are all the same" said an officer.

"I was going to open the door and try to get her to 'ospital" argued the boy again.

Pete sat with Jo and hugged her. "It's o.k. love. The Police have got those skin heads now."

Jo began to cry on Pete's shoulder.

"Don't worry love. It's all over now."

Monday Morning Miracle

Who says there are no more heroes?




I've got the day off, it's hotter than Satan's Y fronts and I'm taking the kids to Schlitterbahn for some water park fun.

See y'all tomorrow.

Write what you know

I find myself in the unusual position of having both the time and the inspiration to develop 'Mirror Man' by several chapters. It has been rare lately for these two cruial ingredients to coincide.

But coincide they have and yesterday I sat down at the computer with a coffee and a seed of an idea for a sub-plot and before I knew it, I had 2,000 words drafted and a cold cup of coffee.

The thing that got my juices flowing is that this sub plot has been derived directly from actual events in my own life, several years ago. Taking those events and molding them into a fictional scene has been both an easy and a very satisfying task. I had great fun recalling the little hideaway bar in Paris where the events took place and recreating it on paper, together with its occupants. I then found equal joy in putting my characters into that setting and employing bucket-loads of creative lisence in retelling a very personal story.

The old addage of 'write what you know' certainly rings true in terms of ease of creativity. It remains to be seen, of course, if writing what I know interests anybody but me! The test will be when I polish the chapter today and send it out for critiquing.

Monday Morning Miracle

It's particularly difficult to come up with something that made me smile on this dismal Monday morning, particularly considering Edwin Van Der Sar saved three fricken penalties on Sunday.



Three.



And Man Utd. start to reduce their win deficit against Chelsea. I hope this isn't an indicator of the season to come.



Anyway, despite all that i still located a nice little picture in my inbox that managed to curl my lips upward:







Another thing to make me smile this morning is the knowledge that I have Friday and next Monday off!

See y'all later!

Earworms Guest Editor

I'm knee-wobblingly honoured to be selected for a second time as guest editor over at Swiss Tony's place.

Go check out ST's blog and see what sad tunes fill my head this week here

Take your time and explore the whole site - it's well worth your time.

ST pointed out, rather tellingly, I feel, that my last stint as guest editor also included "John Wayne is Big Leggy". I'm beginning to worry now; It can't just be the Night Nurse!

Have a great weekend y'all

Vignettes

My first draft chapters usually run at about 1,800 - 2,000 words. Once I've completed the entire first draft I'll go back and edit, usually bringing them up to around 2,500 words with added detail and missed logic from the first draft.

This chapter length isn't something I deliberately set out to achieve, it's just a natural break point in my story telling methods. When I'm reading I tend to prefer shorter rather than longer chapters and so I think my writing naturally follows a similar path.

So last night I came upon a minor problem: while drafting a bar scene in which the protagonist and a some support characters do a bit of bonding and foreshadowing, I'd reached my natural cut-off point but still had a large chunk of work to do. Valentine, the hero of 'Mirror Man' is about to reminisce with a little vignette which is intended to both solidify his love for his lost Father and raise questions about his real age.

Now, if I was writing a screenplay this would be easy; we'd either fade to a black and white sequence or have a 'Scooby Doo' moment where the screen goes all wobbly. But, in a novel, I'm not sure if a separate chapter for the flashback scene would be too clumsy?

Without a separate chapter however, I'm going to have one chapter in the book that's almost twice as long as the others and I don't know if that's equally jarring for the reader?

I think I will initially separate the flashback into its own chapter and see how it flows when complete. Any ideas? Have you ever been disturbed by a chapter that significantly differed in length from the main body of the story? Let me know...

Write On!

I tried to go to work yesterday, I really did. I got up and excused the dizziness as a function of the hour - 5.00 a.m.

My coffee tasted like mud, but it had been in the pot overnight and who knows, perhaps longer. My wife doesn't always drink it, so it could have been older.

The good news was, I could eat my cereal without the accompanying sensation of swallowing shards of ground glass. So that was nice. The antibiotics seem to have done their job.

I drove to the office at a dawdle; that should have been another clue for me that my world wasn't quite right. When the roads are relatively empty, as they are at 5.30 in the morning, I tend to flick the 'sport' button and drive my car as it was built to be driven, using the gears to slow it down, rather than the brakes.

It was only after I'd reached the office, sat down with a fresh coffee that tasted as much like mud as the first, and switched on the computer, that I realized the hazy, dull sensation was not going away.

By 9.30 the normal thrum of the office fluorescent lights felt like a banshee's scream and my computer monitor was a 13 inch square cut directly from the sun; blinding and cooking me at the same time.

By 9.45 I was called all sorts of names, accused of being a direct descendant of the gits who spread the black death, told to go home and not return until I'd stopped melting.

I went back home to bed, feeling just a little bit sorry for myself.

So this morning finds me feeling mentally much better - my eyes can focus on the screen and my mind can almost form literate sentences. The problem is, I'm still hacking and coughing and generally expelling all kinds of unwanted germ-clouds. So I plan to stay put, at the desk in my writing room, finish a couple of rough draft chapters of 'Mirror Man' and write a few critiques on 'The Next Big writer'.

The only thing I still can't cope with is the banal rantings of the radio 'personalities' but don't know what CD to put on. Any ideas on a 'soundtrack for the slightly sick'?