Life in progress

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House of dreams

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In my recurring dream there is a house. It can’t always be found. Sometimes it’s in the city, hidden like the one in Harry Potter, squeezed between two others, sometimes I can only find it from the back. Sometimes it’s a barn and sometimes it’s just a vacant old thing with beer bottles scattered everywhere. Sometimes it’s in the country, looking out over acres and acres of landscape through large picture windows on the upper floor. But always, it’s hard to find.

I’ve dreamed of it falling to ruin with years of neglect and transient beings and cats. I’ve dreamed of living in it and oh how grand it was, with huge sunlit rooms. Many times the rooms are hidden too. Or they will be one after another so that I have to go through one to get to the next. No privacy – never any privacy in this house. And it never quite belongs to me, but always I used to live there. And I want it back.

The house of my dreams is always sinister.

Last night I dreamed it burned. Not all the way to the ground, but there were holes in it and the damage to the upstairs was extensive. The people who owned it, with whom I was visiting, wanted to keep it but it was no longer safe. It made my throat hurt. It hurt my heart.

I want it back.


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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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Epilogue Rich Boy

Spotlights shine down like mother’s sun. Father’s love comes after in the form of drugs and liquor. Relive, rich man.

 

On stage, man raises his hand to the shrieking crowd, awed with humility at his fans’ adoration. Grasping the microphone, he thinks of father rolling in his grave.

He sips water from a bottle and shakes the rest over his head, a momentary reprieve from the lights’ insulating heat. Layers of clothing hide scars he openly speaks of yet never reveals. He laments mother’s death with his lyrics and thousands cry for his loss.

Father’s legacy follows him doggedly. Later, alone, man will consume that for which he distances himself from his own offspring. Let the child have his mother.

The boy within bows, singing of the love engraved in his heart.
To go to the beginning of this series click here

Disclaimer: This series is an unauthorized, semi-fictional story, based in part on the author’s imagination.


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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…

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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.