Wednesday, 29 October 2008

Obligatory Post About The Cold Weather

Oh my heavens! I am at this moment, sitting in my room with my electric fire on, wearing jeans, socks, one cardigan, one fleece and a scarf and I'm still cold. Its like the Day After Tomorrow.

Even worse, I'm awaiting the imminent cold/flu which must surely be on its way as almost everyone at work is coughing and blowing their noses all over the place. Great. I'm expecting to contract a hugely sore throat and runny nose ready for my hectic social weekend (cousins party on Friday and possibly staying at hers on Saturday night as well) and NaNoWriMo.

I'm going to spend Sunday afternoon typing 5010 words and popping Soothers lozinges and drinking Lemsip like a mad bastard, aren't I? Never mind. Some days you eat chicken, some days you bite a mouthful of feathers.

Monday, 27 October 2008

Uhh...

*slumps on bed*

It isn't fair that some days I feel really motivated and manage to write 6500 words and start thinking that I've written something that isn't absolute shite, and then other days I just can't do it. Yesterday I wrote this wonderful story based around the idea of someone creating a giant fish finger, while today I have no ideas, no motivation, to little people talking to me, and i think I must have done about 500 words.

It's probably because I'm all nervy about going back to work tomorrow. It almost isn't worth it having a day off because its so nerve wracking going back the next day. Ugh. And also there's the horror of having to get up at 7am and brave the arctic temperatures outside. When is it Christmas already? Mind you, from looking round the shops, you'd think it already was christmas. That's what bugs me about it - you get Christmas shoved down your throat for the two months preceding it, and then when it actually is christmas you are so sick of it you wish it would just leave you alone and go back home. The holiday is nice though.

On the other hand, at least I have a new CD player so I can listen to music without having to log on to my computer and boot up Windows Media Player.

I suppose I ought to have another stab at writing something. I've got til 11... perhaps I could watch a DVD while I'm writing (with me, that can help. I was watching the Mighty Boosh yesterday and the words were just flowing out of me) and I could have a lovely cup of tea.

Sunday, 26 October 2008

Stuff and updates (original post title I know...)

Well, I've got a new short piece (I've got lots actually, but a lot of them are crap). Here's the link: Marigold the mermaid

In other news, I'm finally starting to catch up with my pre-nano word count thingy. I managed to get myself 8500 words behind in the last week but I've written 4500 today so I'm not doing too badly now. There's at least two of them that will be good enough to send to magazines, and there may be a few others if I combine them or edit them or whatever.

Last week of hellish college this week. Hurrah! Last one for this term anyway. And then four weeks til the exam, which isn't so good as I won't have time to do any revising because obviously National Novel Writing Month is more important than revising...

I'm just hoping to get myself discaplined in the last week of my practise, becasue I don;t know what I'm going to write yet, and if my plot is rubbish I'll give up like i did last year. The first weekend is going to be a write off anyway because I'm going to my cousins for a party on the 31st and if I end up staying over on Saturday night as well, I'm screwed. Still, I can't do any worse than last year, can I?

Monday, 20 October 2008

Nano Practise and update

Well, I've got to catch up on 4910 words before I'm up to date. I think I'm doing quite well so far - I'm being so disaplined.

Anyway, so far today, I've done nothing with my day off, except caught up with some fanfiction on the LJ communities, danced around my room, said 'Woot woot!' at every oppourtunity for absolutely no reason and eaten a number of things. Oh, and the sky looks really grey and depressing.

So, a day fruitfully spent on the internet it is then.

So, here's the link to another Nano Practise piece. Some of these I'm seriously going to have to polish up and extend and send to magazines when I've made them nice and shiny and good. It's a homage to a NaNO phenomenon called 'The Travelling Shovel Of Death' It may return for another episode before November: The Shovel Of Death

Sunday, 19 October 2008

Diamond (Nano practise)

Another short peice of projectile vomiting. :)


DIAMOND

Toby Shipley let himself into the flat. It was the only way, now.

He called out to her anyway, as he made his way through the dark rooms, a fine layer of dust covering everything. He wondered if he should take the time to get out the polish and a cloth and clean the p[lace up a bit, especially the horrible grey film over the mirrors that made him look as though he was looking at himself through a veil, or that he was ghost.

He decided he didn't have the time, and Isabella wouldn't care. Not when she couldn't even blink.

He dusted everything he touched, however. He couldn't go about rubbing his fingers in the dust and then getting it all over his clothes. He dusted the kettle, the tap, washed down the kitchen tops with a bit of kitchen towel while he waited for the kettle to boil. He got out his mug, the one he chose on one of the first nights he came round to Issy's flat - the faded Thomas the Tank Engine one that had belonged to Isabella's son, Paul. Paul was in America now and didn't know anything of what was happening in his absence. Best not to, really, with his Canadian girlfriend and that baby on the way, and their dog, who was called Polly.

Toby drank the tea, sitting in one of Isabella's armchairs, dusty and uncared for, they had that nasty clammy feel when he ran a hand over the blue material, flipping through an old TV mag, reading three week old articles and reviews of programmes finished last week. He brought it with him last time he came to visit.

At last he went upstairs, after quietly washing his cup out and replacing it in the cupboard. "Is?" he called as he walked up the stairs, one hand on the dark wooden bannister, feet creaking on the aging steps. He knocked on her bedroom door as he entered her room, even though he knew she wouldn't be able to call out to him. Hell, she probably wouldn't be able to hear him come in.

"Hello, Isabella. How are you? Look, I brought you a new bangle." He took the silver trinket out of its red velvet box and slid it over her wrist. Cold to the touch and rigid. Transparent, but betraying the shapes of her fingernails, the veins running along the back of her hand. "Well, what do you think?" He looks up at her face to guage her reaction. Isabella is frozen in mid breath, her eyes wide, her expression vaguely surprised. He sometimes wonders if she knew what has happening to her at the last second. He has the impression that she is still alive in there, still thinking, but unseeing and unhearing, all her nerves petrified.

Toby brushes her away from around her face. Tiny crystaline shards, little diamond tubes, so thin they are soft to the touch, almost like real hair. "You're beautiful," he breathes.

How do you destroy a diamond?

Wednesday, 15 October 2008

Fall (NaNo practise)

I'm doing all right with this so far, you know. Of course, I'm likely to miss out on most of the first day as I'm going to a party on the 31st, but I intend to at least get my title and symbolic first paragraph written down.

So, yeah. Here's one of the my little practise pieces. Most of them are dreadful, so I'm not even going to bother, but this one is quite nice.


FALL

Take a deep breath. Look at what you are about to become. Fall in. Don't jump. Fall. See the colours swirling around the vision of your closed eyes. And you're scared, of course you're scared, but you allow yourself to fall. Every day.

Hope that one day if you put the wordage in, force yourself to exorcise your brain of all those facts and lives and sentences, maybe something good will come out of it, something good, once you have cleared away all the dead wood. All those words, your whole life reduced to lines on paper, surely something must be good.

And when you look back, read what has gone before, you don't understand a single word - pretty words, put together in a nice and musical way but you have no idea what you were trying to say, what story you were trying to tell. Whose story. It's seperate from you now, stillborn, meaningless. Cold and dead. A child you never heard cry. You can't even see your blood any more, the things you gave when you sat at your desk, your stained bedroom floor, your blood, your sweat, your pain.

And you start again. This time, you will find a story, you will make something that you can care about, and that, in turn, someone else will learn to care about, fall in love with. You play the music that makes you want to cry, the music so beautiful it makes your heart hurt. The music you know you would never make. You make yourself a pot of Rose Pouchong, bring the pot upstairs with you, bring biscuits, a plate of sandwiches, cold milk in a flask, supplies for your long journey, and you sit. On the bed with a typewriter cradled in your lap, leaned against the bed with a notepad propped against your knees, sitting at a desk, sitting on the desk. Every which way. Taken. Raped. That's what it feels like you look at it later, crying, sick, because you know it's no good, and you feel so wasted and used up and tired and broken and torn, three stitches in your brain from the forced entry.

So you spend the whole of the next day reading. It is your last day before you have to go back to work. You sit and read in a fit of rebellion, thinking you can stop time if you stay there long enough, read yourself into someone else's story so you don't have to make up your own poor imitation, because that's all you can do. More tea. You read until your head aches, another forced entry, from the happy, fulfilled, functional writers who sit at their tidy and clean wooden, big desks, cheap from second hand antique shops. They choose second hand so they can kid themselves that other great writers have sat there composing a masterpiece, instead of the table being used for supper for a family of five who have to sell the table when dad loses his job at the factory.

Those functional writers, the bastards who wake at five in the morning and do yoga before writing until eight, when they have to take the kids to school. Those bastards who have a nap in the afternoon and spend the rest of the evening writing, taking their time, loving their wives, drinking strong coffee. And so you throw the book across the room and go for a walk downstairs - you feel trapped, a rat in a cage watching the mice steal all the cheese - to lok out the window. It's so bright and sunny. You can't stand to look at it, so you go back upstairs, stare at your books, all those happy bastards telling you what to do, telling you to write for yourself until you get to the second draft, or to write the worst story ever. You tried that and it really was awful, you ripped it up after the first three sentences and hurled it across the room. There's no time, and you can't think of anything you'd rather do, so you go to sleep, you think about giving up. But there's something inside you, some little part of you like a line of steel, that won't ever break and won't let you stop. Ever.

And you don't want to stop, because of the feeling you get when you fall in and you feel that vortex of silver and gold and black and blue and red seep into your head and all you want is to fall in ever deeper and never return. But of course you have to, because everything ends and sooner or later you have to stop to count your words. But you can start again, you can always start over again, with something different.

Once you've had a taste of what it feels like, to have all those ideas rushing at the front of your head, waiting for their turn to fly to the tips of your fingers, you can't stop. You remember the times it was real, and you were there and living someone else's life, and coming out of it was like going up for air, and the air didn't ever taste quite right and all the colours were dull afterwards. Because that's how it feels to fall.

Sunday, 12 October 2008

Flowing out of me like vomit....

In the run up to National Novel Writing Month (see previous post) I have decided to try and write 1670 words a day as a sort of practise. 1670 about anything, as long as it isn't one of those 'about my day' things. So far it's going quite well -

Monday 6th October: 240 words
Tuesday 7th: 675 words
Wednesday 8th: 800 words (and this was with college so I didn't get home until half past eight!)
Thursday 9th: 0 words
Friday 10th: 0 words (oh, gimme a break!)
Saturday 11th: 860 words
Sunday 12th: 1960 words (so far, although I don't think I'm going to think anything else done tonight. I think I'm going to catch up with watching Merlin, get drunk and play around on the internet)

I think I might start from scratch actually. I've still got nearly 3 weeks left.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that I was thinking of posting my better practise pieces on this blog. Or maybe the worse, because one or two (out of the seven) of them are just about ok to send to a magazine. I thought I might make it a bit of a feature bewfore Nano starts. It might give me the motivation to post in this blog a bit more often.

So here's the first, raw and uncut (hey, you better get used to it. I intend to post my novel as I go along, if there is a novel):

LIGHTS

She wakes up screaming, only there is no sound. She can feel in her throat that she is shrieking as loud as she can, can feel her vocal chords straining, but she hears nothing but the harsh and frightened rasp of her breathing. It's hot. So hot. She rips the heavy quilt away from her, flings its dead weight across the room. She sits up in bed, cradling her knees, bathed in sweat, feeling sick, but at least she has stopped not-screaming.

It's so dark, she blinks a few times, feeling as though she has been blindfolded. Where is the streetlight outside her window, and the streak of light that should be falling across the middle of her bed? Oh, light, that's what she needs more than anything else in the world. Light. Beautiful, life giving light. Slides out of bed. Where is she? She blinks a few more times, but it's no use is it? Eyes useless. Eyes not working. Ok.

She pauses where she is for a minute and concentrates on where she is. Carpet - chilly, like opening the fridge door, skin clammy. Her neck aches. Ok. Everything is fine. She's alive, she isn't dreaming. She pinches har arm just to make sure. Good. She definately isn't dreaming.

Now then. She must find the light switch. She takes a deep breath and steps forward. "Oh..." her foot bumps something hard, must be her straighteners. She left them on the floor last night, didn't she? Good, only a couple more steps to the light switch. She reaches it with no other mishap, carefully avoiding the pile of coats and jackets on the floor, and the guitar. She knows her way around now, It's fine.

One hand touches the panel of the light switch, but she suddenly thinks perhaps she shouldn't turn the ligth on after all. Why ever not? Silly. The dream coming back to her in funny ways. There's nothing to be scared of. Absolutely nothing.

Shit. Nothing happens when she switches the light on. Must be the bulb. She flicks it back off and then on, just to make sure. Hmm. She isn't scared. Really. She steps out of her bedroom doorway and onto the landing, and feels for the hall light switch, listening to the hammering of her heart. On. Off. On. Off. It's not working either. Oh, dear.

She strolls back into her room - there are some matches on her bookshelf. She picks them up, listens to the rattle inside the cardboard box. But she pauses before lifting one out of the box and lighting. Somehow she knows it would not light if she tried. 'I think I'll put them back on the shelf. It can't be long before it gets light again. I'll sit here and wait.' So she does. She waits. And waits.


It's kind of based on a dream I had, where I was dead and haunting my own house, and I didn't know I was dead and kept trying to switch the light on and couldn't. Great fun.

Sunday, 5 October 2008

That time of year again

Well, I've done it. I've signed up for National Novel Writing Month 2008. I just hope it won't be such a total shambles as last year, where I managed to write about 3500 words and then just gave up because my heart wasn't in it. Bring it on, baby... I'm ready.