Life in progress

Category Archives: Writing


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The more

Contentment. Who has it? Put your hand up if you have everything you want. A new computer? A better place to live, of your own perhaps? A new car? Perhaps a mate? Even more followers on WordPress? Or for someone to acknowledge your brilliant work? Yes, most of us are guilty of wishing for more of that.

With the internet came this wonderful tool for being recognized. Faster, further the more people the better.  And more and more. As a society we’ve become greedier than ever before. Recognition has become the new consumer’s must-have. People are coming out of the woodwork to publish their photography and their art, their stories, and regardless of how good or how bad it is, it’s being consumed by those who want reciprocation.

Will it ever end? Will we drive ourselves into the grave staying up til all hours, sitting on our asses pounding out our work while the blood clots in our veins, eating too much or too little until one day someone finds us with a smoking keyboard… ‘But he did some great work!’ they’ll say. They may appreciate us when we’re dead. Only we died in discontentment, wanting more.

More fiction

 

 

 


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Private Thoughts, Private World – Part 4 – Characters

In recent weeks of perusing different WordPress sites, I have come across on a few occasions writers talking about character development and how they will sometimes watch people and make up stories for them. I do this often. I get endless enjoyment from watching people’s mannerisms and body language as they relate to others.

I remember one instance when a friend and I were sitting on a park bench at a local public rose garden. We had been resting in quiet companionship for some time, enjoying being outdoors near dusk listening to the birds sing and watching people stroll through the park. There was one family I vividly recall – at least I assumed they were a family – a mother, a father and a son who pulled up in a car across the street. They got out and entered the park gates. The boy, around eleven years old, ran ahead seeming happy to be there. The mother followed, her nose in the air enjoying the fresh fragrance of the roses in full bloom and the father lagged behind. Observing them, I leaned toward my friend and commented that the man didn’t look like he wanted to be there. Even though none of them spoke there was just something in the man’s gait, in the way he looked straight ahead and in the way he held his arms at his sides even though the pockets of his shorts gaped as if they were the natural resting place for his hands. As I watched him some more I leaned again to my friend and said, ‘I bet he’d rather be at home watching the baseball game on TV.’

I thought, what a character this man could make! Even if I were to tell his story from that moment on I could imagine that perhaps he was angry because he had a bet on the game and wanted to see his team win. Or that he loved watching baseball because it was the last thing he ever did with his own father before he died. Or that his own father would be disappointed in him, as he usually was as he grew up, because his father said he was a momma’s boy – just the same as his own son was growing up to be, having fun in a rose garden of all places! The boy should be watching the game with his dad, not asking to be driven all the way across town to look at roses with his mother!

If I were to make a character of this man whose world and thoughts I had surmised, I might not use any of these stories of his past in my tale. But knowing his past, and having a past already fitted to the reason for his present mannerisms I would know how he would react in any given situation. This, I find, is what gives a character dimension beyond the singular.

This recollection of mine has left me again to wonder just how private our thoughts and our world are. Yes, I might be (read: probably am) wrong in my imaginings of this man. But then again, in a perfect if sad conclusion to this episode, as my friend and I were walking home from the park, a car passed us with the very same family in it. The man was screaming at the top of his lungs at his family.

True story.

For Part 4 of Private Thoughts, Private World I decided to go off on a bit of a tangent due to a comment over in Ionia Martin’s blog a couple of days ago. The above is what I came up with.


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New Blog

In the interest of keeping my blog organized I finally went ahead and created a new one just for my fiction. I’ve been hungering to write more but I didn’t want this place to get cluttered.

I’m still organizing things, but I’m up and running at my new location: Get on my plate! Or I’ll eat you right now . Please come and check it out! There’s not much there at the moment except one post and my ‘about’, but I hope to get writing soon. 🙂

I will keep this blog for daily observations, parenting stuff and my life in progress.

Cheers all, and thanks for visiting!


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Private Thoughts, Private World – Part 3

How much is too much?

It has occurred to me, partially due to a comment on Private Thoughts, Private World – Part 2 that perhaps there is such a thing as too much. While we attempt to convey our thoughts and our world to our readers, we, at the same time, need to keep at least a modicum of our ideas private, or do we? How much of ourselves do we wish to divulge? It’s fun every once in a while to have someone we are close to point at us and say, ‘HA! I knew you were going to say that!’. But if that were to happen more than occasionally it would get tired after a while. Particularly if strangers began to do it to us.

In our time of having the freedom to receive instantaneous feedback on the internet we are given equally the opportunity to hand ourselves over to whomever wishes to place us under their microscope. And as we all know, not everyone will treat us with the delicacy we deserve as humans. I have to wonder if the modern masters of fiction thought of this when they began. They are so good at their craft that they allow us to see into their souls, but at what cost?

tied hands


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Haiku

Japanese doll

Gossamer Dream

Placed in morning light
Draped in gossamer wishes
I kneel to your pyre


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Private Thoughts, Private World – Part 2

Incomplete Thoughts

Is there such a thing as a complete thought? When, as writers, do we know our meaning has been entirely understood by our reader?  Is it possible to have entire understanding between two people? After all, there are only so many human experiences, just as there are a limited number of stories, written over and over again from different perspectives. But still, I think not.

It occurred to me that writing a thought is like taking a step. No matter how many times you think you’ve taken your last step, come to the end of your journey, there will always be another step to take until you die. Then all there is left is for someone else to attempt to interpret your life, your steps, your thoughts.

JnT2


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A Letter to my Main Character

Dear Stephen,

You were a magician before I ever met you. Nevertheless, I handed you your tricks; your wand, your cards and your bunnies to be pulled from hats.  It was serendipity that you met the love of your life. I didn’t expect you to show up any more than she did. But oh, how I discovered you. We discovered you.

I’ve seen you through many troubles, frights and flights, I watched you dance and fall in love, I saw your joy and your pain. You surprised me and you caused me grief. Most of all I saw you grow as a man. You blossomed before my very fingertips.

Now you have outgrown me. You’re ready to move on. Though perhaps we’ll meet again in another tale, I have to let you go. I am happy to say it was a natural break. You have a life to live that doesn’t need me to tell it.

For now.

Giving away your smile
Your precious crooked grin
Fills me with pride and sorrow
In almost equal measures

Selfish is the heart who won’t let go
Allowing your wings to spread
You don’t need me
Though I created you from scratch

Grown and changed
You look upon me now with love
For what I have given
You have given me much more in return

Sakurai as Stephen Dagmar


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Private Thoughts, Private World

DSC00010

Do you see the head of the dragon?

We all have our little private world, filled with thoughts that are seemingly impossible to express in words. Try as we might as writers to embellish, whether by attaching to them a likeness of something totally foreign to the initial thought or by attempting to capture something that is close… neither quite click perfectly in place.

Many times we find ourselves giving up, moving on to something else that seems closer to the human condition, as though no one else has ever felt exactly what we are feeling. And yet we have to wonder, maybe others were as unable to put across that particular idea as we were.

It’s those breakthroughs that keep us going though, isn’t it? When the sun shines on our idea – when we are actually able to put into text what we were feeling, and then our private thoughts, our private world becomes stuff of the outside world, no longer within us.

Free.


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My Poetic Paper Route

It’s cold and damp outside. The snow is melting in all the wrong places turning the earth that was churned up beside the sidewalks by the sidewalk plows into mud. Said mud is running in dirty puddles down every conceivably available square inch of concrete, and where the sun doesn’t touch the mud is an icy sheet. Every day before noon I walk these muddy sidewalks delivering the local newspaper. I don’t do it for the money, I do it for the exercise – at least that’s what I keep telling myself. Most of the time I think I just do it because I’m masochistic, especially on days like today.

However, as I was trudging up the hill on my street today, an inch deep in dark black mud, I realised I am living my dream. I write in the hopes of one day distributing my words to hundreds of thousands of people. What am I doing now? Admittedly, I only deliver 16 daily papers (and 124 flyers on Thursdays).

One day, when I’m a bestselling author perhaps I’ll be able to look back to my life now and say, ‘There I was, doing what I’ve always wanted to do. I spread the written word’.

Poetic, isn’t it?


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Scintillating Dialogue – writing assignment

“So,” Alice asked, looking down at her shoe as she prodded it into the sun-warmed sand, “what do you do for a living?” She kept her hands in her back pockets, knowing that if she took them out she would want to touch him. Anywhere.

Daniel lowered his sunglasses and gazed at her over the top with deep blue eyes. “I build houses. How about you?” he asked. “No wait.” As his eyebrows went up so did his finger, the bicep of the same arm bulging in response to the movement. “You must be… a model,” Daniel smiled.

“Funny you should say that,” Alice blushed, swiveling her shoulders. “I thought I saw you in a firefighter’s calender the other day. But no, I’m just a lowly shop girl.”

“In that case lowly shop girl, let me carry you over my shoulder to the bar for a drink.” He flashed a dazzling grin and her hands came out of her pockets as he bent down to take her in a fireman’s carry.

“Hold on there, Tarzan,” she laughed. “What do you say we walk to the bar?”

“Only if you’ll at least take my arm.”

His gaze pierced her like a bullet, traveling from her eyes straight down to her lower belly. She swallowed and opened her mouth to consent but realizing nothing would come out, made do with a nod.