Life in progress


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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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… One Man

Stale air fills sunlit kitchen of childhood’s end. Choking on father’s love fills the coming void. Look back, poor boy. Closed eyes reveal crystalline crimson sparks, drowning in tears of years gone by. Look forward, young man.

Man sits across from father at the kitchen table. Turning and turning a crystal tumbler tinted with two fingers of scotch in a puddle of its own condensation he listens to father’s wheezing breath.

“Give me some,” demands father.

Man regards father. It is the first time man has been alone with him indeed since he was a young child. Man recalls that setting with its backdrop of violence and self-consciously man touches his chest.

“Give me some,” father repeats. He stretches across the table for the bottle but man moves it out of reach. Father begins to cough with exertion.

In the refracted sunlight from the crystal glass man envisions his future, reflected in father’s dull eyes.

Man swallows the remainder of the scotch in his tumbler and stands.

“Give me some,” father chokes.

“Fuck you,” man answers.

Man carries the bottle to the sink. He considers emptying it but instead places it on top of the high cupboard, inches from the ceiling. For the last time man studies father’s dying face.

“I love you father,” man says.


To go to the beginning of this series click here

Final installment click here

Disclaimer: This story (and series) is semi-fictional, and is in no way connected to persons alive nor dead. Apart from certain facts, it is a product of the author’s imagination.


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At last!

Sixteen and a half long months since the day I began, I finished writing the first draft of my novel this evening.

I’m celebrating by going to bed.


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Advice from Kristen Lamb

Excellent advice about your antagonist!

Author Kristen Lamb's avatarKristen Lamb's Blog

One of the biggest mistakes most new writers make is they don’t understand the antagonist and how antagonists are used to drive plot momentum and ratchet up the stakes. Without true antagonists, there is no way to generate dramatic tension. One of the “outs” many writers try to use is “Well, my protagonist is his own worst enemy.”

Yeah, um no. That’s therapy, not fiction.

All stories need two types of antagonists:

The Big Boss Troublemaker

Since the term “antagonist” confuses a lot of new writers, I came up with the term, BBT. If the BBT is something existential (like alcoholism) then it needs to be represented by someone corporeal. In WWII, the Allies weren’t fighting fascism, they fought HITLER. Concepts need a FACE.

Scene Antagonists

Often allies and love interests will provide the scene conflict. Protagonist wants A, but then Ally wants B.

Today, we’ll use a “My protagonist…

View original post 1,267 more words


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Milestones

Life’s milestones come in so many shapes and sizes. While many are like gigantic boulders others can seem like pebbles at first. But even a pebble can create a ripple.

Today my firstborn, my baby, who has somehow so quickly reached a height of almost six feet and eighteen years of age, moved out. A huge milestone for him and what I thought would be a smaller one for me.

But now I find myself thinking about how empty my house feels, even though my other two children are asleep in their beds. There’s no one to call down the laundry chute to say good-night to before I go to bed. I’ll turn off all the lights without worrying if he’ll trip over anything should he get up in the dark. The ripples have spread, just as my son has spread his wings and proverbially flown the coop. Just like that.


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Private Thoughts, Private World

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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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…One Mother

Odd shapes shine on linoleum, on table. Wind outside splays triangles of leaves displaced on again, off again, the clouds whisk like milk boiling on the stove. Struggle, dear mother. Coffee dreams drown bourbon breath bathing father’s last wish. Struggle no more, precious mother.

Mother retrieves a crystal cut tumbler from the kitchen cupboard at father’s behest. Into it she pours the golden liquid until it brims.

Mother and father are alone, as they usually are since the children moved on, brother with his family, boy… mother thinks of boy’s wanderings as something that will certainly bore him eventually.

“Where’s my drink?” father demands.

“I’m coming!” mother cries with cheer.

(to be continued)


To go to the beginning of this series click here

Next installment click here

Disclaimer: This story (and series) is semi-fictional, and is in no way connected to persons alive nor dead. Apart from certain facts, it is a product of the author’s imagination.


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March Break Blues

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It’s snowing. And I’m thinking to myself, why the hell is it snowing when it’s almost the middle of March? And then I remember, oh yeah, I live in Canada.

I’m also right smack dab in the middle of March break. Kids are home and the youngest one is looking for something to do, as usual. I know what I want to do, but sitting around while I write, for some reason doesn’t seem all that fun to him. He wants my attention. Constantly. OR he wants my laptop, which is not very conducive to getting any writing done either.

So I pawned him off.

No, I didn’t sell him, though sometimes I’d like to. I gave him to a friend. Somehow I think he may be returned however.


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March 11

Japan - Kyoto park2When I visited Japan in 2005 I was struck by the beauty of the land with its mountains and valleys, towns nestled in between as though they had grown up from the ground and the way the Japanese make their culture known, from the most magnificent temples to the tiniest of window boxes.

But what most deeply affected me was the people themselves. Their capacity to give of themselves to a complete stranger without asking anything in return was astounding. I found that all I had to do was stop on a sidewalk and look at a map and someone would invariably come up to me and ask me if I needed help to find where I was going. I had people walk far out of their way to escort me to places I wanted to go. In fact, in Kyoto I did my best to get lost, just in order to have a reason to talk to people. But it wasn’t just the fact that they were helpful, it was the eagerness and the grace with which they offered.

I promised myself when I got on the plane to come back to Canada that if ever I had the opportunity to help a Japanese person I would go as far out of my way as so many of them did for me. Unfortunately that opportunity came in the form of disaster. Two years ago today I grieved when I learned so many of these wonderful, generous people were lost, and all I could do at the time was send money. I hope that I will be able to go back, next time to help with the restoration of a beautiful land laid to waste.

It’s odd, I suppose, that a born and bred Canadian should think of a country almost half way around the world as home. But that, I do. I love Japan and its people.

Itsuka Nihon ni kaerimasu.


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… One Brother

White quiet halls, scuffs covering walls, nurses pad by in soft shoes. Whisper, obedient brother. Crumpled sheets on vacated gurney, heart leaps then falls as toilet flushes. Bow down, father’s son.

Brother, standing in the doorway of father’s hospital room, steps aside when an orderly arrives pushing a wheelchair.

“You takin’ him home?” the orderly asks.

“That’s what I’m here for,” brother answers.

The orderly leaves without comment. Father exits the washroom and torments brother with yellow eyes.

“Are you ready to leave father?” brother squirms, offering the chair.

Father turns, sits and waits for brother to gather his belongings. Brother wheels him to the car.

The two drive through rapidly emptying streets into the setting sun. Brother squints and glances at father’s hands in his lap. Old and sallow, liver failure tinctures his skin.

“Stop at the liquor store,” father commands, his first utterance of the journey.

“Yes, sir,” brother concedes, relieved to turn away from the blazing, bloody beam of the sunset.

(to be continued)


To go to the beginning of this series click here

Next installment click here

Disclaimer: This story (and series) is semi-fictional, and is in no way connected to persons alive nor dead. Apart from certain facts, it is a product of the author’s imagination.