Writing.

Creative writing, short stories, general musings.

  • The Poisoned Lake

    At the bottom of the deepest ocean, there is a lake. Where dense, ultra-salty seawater sinks to the ocean floor, it forms a toxic pool of unfathomable depth, deadly to all but the hardiest of undersea life. Somehow, strange muscles, hundreds of years old, thrive on the banks of this mysterious lake. But most sea creatures brave or desperate enough to cross it meet their end in its murky depths. Eels venturing from the safety of their caves to hunt on the lake tie themselves in knots as the deadly toxins claim them. Shimmering silver fish twist and turn gently on the current, their embalmed bodies doomed to float upon the surface, washing up on the banks of the lake and adorning its shores for years to come.

  • Deadlines

    Self-imposed deadlines can be useful, when the work is something you actually really want to do. Last month when I set myself the challenge of writing every day, having that daily deadline meant I prioritised the thing I wanted to do (writing) above almost everything else. This is especially useful for giving yourself licence to push the mundane but time-insensitive tasks (such as vacuuming the house) to the bottom of the to-do list, although, of course, those tasks all have to get done eventually. And setting writing as a high priority meant I was more likely to do it earlier, when my brain was at its freshest and the ideas could flow freely.

  • Reflections on a month of writing

    When light hits a surface and bounces back to our eyes, we see a reflection. Our face in the mirror is perhaps the most familiar one we see, but it is not our true self. It is a distorted image, flipped by the light. And so it is disarming when we see ourselves as others see us, through another’s webcam or video. Any reflection of ourselves should be honest, but it can only be as honest as our own perspective allows. Perhaps that is the perspective that really matters. Bats use echolocation to orient themselves in three-dimensional space, the reflections of sound waves helping them locate prey, find their way and circumnavigate obstacles. In a similar way, we can take the opportunity to reflect on our experiences, to consider not just what we’ve achieved but how we want to move forward.

  • Book review: Children of Memory, Adrian Tchaikovsky

    This is a book that would certainly fit into the category of “epic” sci-fi, spanning as it does vast intergalactic distances, countless millennia, and various intriguing alien races. But the story it tells is fundamentally human. The focus of the book revolves around the human colony on the far-off planet of Imir, as observed by a crew of highly intelligent aliens with far superior technology, and a young girl, Liff, on the planet itself. As the humans’ last-ditch hope after fleeing a dying earth, life on Imir is hard. We are treated to glimpses of the founding days of the colony and the tough decisions made by the founders.

  • Funfair

    When you’re ten, the funfair is a place of excitement and adventure. Of exhilarating, brightly-coloured rides with flashing lights, booming music, smoke machines. Of games of chance, with exciting prizes for the lucky few who can master them. Of ferris wheels and helter-skelters, taking you up high for a never-before-seen birds-eye view of an otherwise familiar place. Of the scary ghost train, where you enter if you dare. Of rainbow candyfloss, dodgems, bouncy castles and magical memories.

  • The Weeds

    Eleanor hacked at the brambles until her hands were blistered and sore. The midday sun beat down on her as she dug determinedly into the dry, stubborn soil, yanking up roots and tough, thorny stems. She’d been at it all morning. Sore and dripping with sweat, she stepped back to admire her handiwork. It was a start. A patch was starting to clear and she could see the brown, dusty soil underneath. A patch where she’d promised herself, a year ago, in the full flush of honeymoon, that she’d plant a vegetable garden.

  • Human

    The dawn of day
    The sparkling dew
    The rising sun
    The fresh
    The new
    The air
    The sea
    The breeze
    The heat
    The ground beneath your feet.

  • A thousand different journeys

    We must have walked this path a thousand times, my son and I. A thousand journeys, each one a little different as we’ve grown, changed and (mostly) become wiser. When my son was small he was also restless, with a ton of energy. Still is, in many ways. Always moving, never still. We’d wake up at dawn, sometimes before, and I’d be thinking of ways to keep him occupied so we didn’t both go stir crazy. So we’d walk along the path, in the direction of the park. Sometimes we didn’t make it that far. We’d be stopped by a bubbling stream, or a half-dead worm needing to be rescued, or a ripe blackberry bush, or just a patch of dirt that was inexplicably fascinating.

  • Sunny Bank Holiday

    The radio this morning announced that today has broken the record for the hottest day in May ever in the UK. Here in Wiltshire the temperature reached 32 degrees, more than many of us Brits can comfortably tolerate. Climate change concerns notwithstanding, we are lucky to have some sunny weather during the school half term and Bank Holiday weekend — though less so when it’s unpleasantly hot. And of course, climate change is a difficult thing to dismiss. The notion that while this might be the hottest May of my life so far, it might well be one of the coolest for the rest of my son’s life.

  • Beaches

    The sea is in my soul. Growing up in Cornwall, my vividest memories are of beaches. Jump in the car and a short drive along winding country roads would bring you to the nearest beach. Every family holiday involved camping in my dad’s 4-person mountaineering tent at Mother Ivey’s Bay, a mere hour’s drive from where we lived, sometimes for weeks at a time, every single day spent swimming, running and playing on the pristine beach. We’d wake up before 6am (with the arrival of the gulls) and walk down with our bodyboards, my dad, my sister and me, plunging straight into the cold, grey sea before anyone else was up. Spending that first golden hour, while the beach was deserted, letting the primal call of the sea deep into our bones before heading back to the tent for chocolate porridge (my dad’s speciality made from mixing hot chocolate powder and porridge oats) cooked on the little camping stove. At night we’d walk there again by moonlight, watching for bats and listening to the sound of the waves.

  • Beginning

    The first line is always the hardest. I sit in front of the blank page with its cursor blinking, aggressively or invitingly, wondering what I’ll write. I know that if I can first uncork the bottle, the rest will flow. It’s the decision paralysis that gets you. The temptation to turn back before you’ve even started. Sometimes you just have to begin, not knowing where it’s going. Forget about all the things you think you need before you can embark. You don’t really need any of them. Once you’re on the trail, the woods close in behind you and the only way is forward. A meandering path through the thoughts in your head, only forged by putting one foot in front of another, testing the ground underfoot, backtracking when it’s too thorny, too overgrown with weeds. Finding alternative routes, easier paths made by those who came this way before, but which combined with your own journey make something new. Streams to ford, distractions or unconventional paths to uncharted lands full of new wonders? An uphill climb until you finally break out above the tree line to survey the landscape below. How far you’ve come. Is it far enough, or do you forge ahead to higher peaks, where the path is more treacherous and greater dangers lie? Where the journey is more perilous but the rewards far greater?

  • Community

    One of the most significant things that inspired me as a web developer was the sense of community. Through conferences, meet-ups and just being online a lot, I found a tribe of like-minded people who were all similarly passionate about web standards and making fun, creative work. This community spurred me on to make better work, to think and discuss more, to write about what I learned and even to speak at conferences where, in turn, I made new real-life friends, grew my community even further and, hopefully, helped others too.

  • The swifts are back

    In the last few days, the swifts have returned. Surely the bellwether of summer, I hear their high-pitched trills and spot them soaring and swooping, twisting and turning joyfully as I settle down at my desk. Always moving, never resting. A life spent on the wing.

  • Untethered

    Elkin couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t been on the boat. He knew at one time or another he must have been somewhere. A long, seaweed-encrusted rope trailed from the bow of the small, weather-beaten wooden dingy. An umbilical cord. He supposed at some point it must have been tethered to something. Here he was nowhere, drifting freely on the wide open ocean, with no landmarks as far as the eye could see, the sun, moon and stars above the only markers of the passing of time and place. He had the vast open skies above him and the endless expanse of sea to call his own. But this little boat was all he knew as home.

  • Being a student again

    I’m currently studying part-time for an MSc in Computer Science. It’s an interesting experience being a student again. The course is entirely online, which has its advantages: I can fit it in relatively easily around work and anything else I want/need to do. But it’s a far cry from my arts degree 20 years ago, which was entirely studio based. I do miss the interaction with my peers, and I feel that shared experience can be a good motivator. The work is mostly interesting, but it could certainly be made more so by sharing thoughts and ideas with others.

  • Journeys

    Journeys are time to think. If not to relax, at least to collect your thoughts, to pause and to process. They are the spaces between places. It could be said that a good journey is a forgettable one. Uneventful, nothing out of the ordinary. The ones that went according to plan, where we arrived safely and punctually at our destination. These are the journeys we hope for. But the journeys we remember are the ones that defied expectations. The ones where we met someone new, or where we took an unplanned detour. The joyous ones spent travelling with friends or family, embarking on unexpected adventures, or the hellish ones where we’re stuck in traffic or delayed unavoidably by broken down trains. They are the journeys that leave their mark upon us. Travelling with another person is one way to really get to know them. A shared journey can cement a relationship, or expose its cracks.

  • Broligarchy

    The future is coming.
    The future is coming.
    The future is coming.
    So why aren’t you happy?

  • Operational Efficiency

    “At OpTeq, we don’t just help your business excel; we build the future, together.” The room broke out in applause as the presentation drew to a close and the well-groomed North American executive smiled brightly, her smooth, honeyed voice flowing like melted butter through the rapt audience. Frictionless.

  • Pools

    Inside everyone
    is a magical pool.
    I want to dive in
    and swim in them all.

  • Motherhood

    It’s hard to overstate the impact of motherhood. People can tell you of course, friends who have had children talk of sleepless nights and are unable to commit to plans for a while, making excuses and leaving early. But you can never really know until it happens to you. You can never really comprehend how your entire sense of self becomes refracted through the lens of someone else’s needs, how at times that shift is so great, so completely fracturing, so world-shattering that you feel yourself breaking apart entirely. I can only liken it to the feeling you get when as a child, having wandered too far, are hit with the terrifying realisation that you are lost, entirely unmoored. It was this realisation that hit me like a freight train in the dead of night, in a hospital bed after 60 hours without sleep, a heady mix of hormones and a cocktail of drugs still sloshing around my system following emergency surgery after my son’s birth. The feeling that I’d done something that could never be undone. That the person of three days ago was dead and gone, and my life would never, ever be the same again. And in the deepest, darkest recesses of my mind, that small voice: “What if I’ve made a terrible mistake?”

  • The Birds

    The birds flitter industriously, feeding and preening. The sun illuminates their gleaming feathers, a riot of red, blue, gold and green. Half-camouflaged by the long grass, the cat watches jealously, mesmerised. Without really knowing why, she craves their bright plumage, feels its pull. With her tunnel vision, her eyes are like saucers. She only has eyes for them. She has no thought beyond her desire for possession.

  • Leaving the imperfections in

    One thing I enjoy about this month-long writing challenge is that I can release myself from the pressure of delivering a perfect finished product. By setting myself a hard deadline of writing and publishing something every day, there can be no long refinement phase, no ruthless edit where I agonise over what makes the cut. I generally give pieces a quick pass over, changing the odd word here and there, fixing grammatical errors (there are probably still plenty I miss), but they are more or less published just as they are, in all their raw messiness. I’ve also set myself a rule that once a piece is published, I can’t go back and tinker with it, save to fix spelling mistakes and typos. It’s liberating to know that once a piece is out in the world, I can draw a line under it and move on. It can be frustrating too — sometimes I later think of ways to elaborate on what I’ve written, or things I could have said differently. But these are all lessons I can pour into the next day’s writing, a fresh blank page, another chance to express myself. I like to think that my writing will gradually improve over the course of the month as those lessons are absorbed and become part of me.

  • 10:57pm

    I don’t usually walk this way late at night. If I’m heading home late at all (a rarity when you have primary-school age children) it’s usually on my bike, whizzing down quiet roads bathed in the orange glow of street lamps, rarely taking the time to observe my surroundings closely. So walking home in the dark is something of a novelty. The night is cool and the sky is clear, a sprinkling of stars glimmering overhead like glitter strewn carelessly. There is a sharpness to the air. The waxing moon hangs low and heavy, not quite full. Venus and Jupiter shine bright, their trajectories familiar by now, like old friends.

  • The Watcher

    Spring.

    The sun’s delicate rays are beginning to warm the spot by the window. The spot where she likes to sit, a watchful sentinel on patrol. A plump pigeon struts, proudly, pompously on the tarmac. Doesn’t it know all this is hers? A soft breeze ruffles its feathers and her ears twitch at the rustling of the hawthorn and elder and dog rose, which are only just in leaf. A sudden high-pitched wail startles her and she turns instinctively towards the sound. A child with a grazed knee. A harried parent, torn between exasperation and sympathy. Sympathy wins this time, as she envelopes the child in a hug.

  • Perception of time

    Most of us experience the phenomenon of time seeming to speed up as we get older. When you’re young the days seem to stretch out forever. I can still recall endless summers spent exploring the fields and woodland out the back of our house growing up, or holidays at the beach, a constant source of excitement and adventure. These days, by comparison, it can feel like a year passes in the blink of an eye.

  • Making a mark

    Every mark you make is different from any that’s ever been made before.

  • A kind of journey

    Being on a train was something John Thurlow could get on board with, so to speak. As a native of Ontario, back home he didn’t catch the train much. In Canada, if you wanted to get the train somewhere, you usually had to drive a good few hundred miles to the nearest station, and even then you’d be lucky to find one that’d take you where you want to go. But here in the UK, pretty much everywhere had a railway station. Even some of the tiny little hamlets that had no business calling themselves a town. You could spend days hopping from one train to another, and that’s what John Thurlow did. He didn’t get why British people complained about it so much.

  • Sunrise over Sellafield

    Decaying, great, grey husks of concrete loom over faceless, corrugated metal boxes and prefabricated cabins, with smokeless chimneys towering over all. Imposing chainlink fences topped with razor wire separate the outside world from this metropolis, only accessible through fierce steel turnstiles and layers of security. It is truly the city that never sleeps: after all, the flow of nuclear waste never stops.

  • Labour of love

    One of my favourite parts of the creative process is the bit after the ideas have crystallised and you just have to knuckle down and do the work. I remembered this after seeing an artwork that involved lots and lots of straight lines drawn on a wall in interesting geometric patterns. Once the artist had come up with the idea and refined the design, well, someone had to get on with the business of making it a reality. Plenty of successful artists employ people to do this work for them, being far less interested in the execution than the idea itself. I used to help out with exhibition installs when I worked in a gallery years ago. One artwork involved bending hundreds of stainless steel nails in half with a pair of pliers, before they were hammered into a wall. Sitting for hours alongside other members of the team repetitively bending nails left my hands covered in blisters. But the feeling of being part of a piece of art as it came together was gratifying. Don’t get me wrong, spending day-in day-out doing this in a factory would be unbearable. It’s the end result that makes the labour satisfying.

  • I’ve never seen Star Wars

    Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, there was a planet called Ewokland, home to (you guessed it) the Ewoks. They were a fierce and proud people, but also incredibly cute. This cuteness caused many foes to underestimate them, and meet their gruesome fate in the tangled forests of Ewokland, where no one can hear you scream. But little did they know, on some other planet, a dastardly villain was hatching a plan to conquer Ewokland, ostensibly for its rich oil reserves, but mainly just for kicks. In fact, no one really know why he wanted to invade Ewokland, as the economics just didn’t make sense, not to mention it was just plain barbaric and violated interplanetary law. But everyone was scared of this bad dude, whose name was Darth Vader, because he was a bit unhinged and had his finger on the Death Star’s nuclear button. Also, he was somebody’s father or something, so it was quite important to appease him, although no one really knew why. Everyone kept saying to “take him seriously but not literally”, until he literally blew up a planet and they all belatedly realised he was quite serious indeed.

  • Art

    The other day I was invited by a friend to the opening evening of Spike Island Open Studios, an event where artists would literally open up their studios to show a curated selection of work, or sometimes their work-in-progress. It made me realise I hadn’t gone to a place with the specific goal of looking at art in years. It’s something I used to do a lot of, particularly during my university days and in the years after. I’d book trips to London to meet up with friends and see exhibitions, sometimes spending the whole day traipsing round various galleries, catching up over coffee in the cafes afterwards. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I stopped, but the end of a long relationship in my late 20s may have had something to do with it. I felt it wasn’t my world anymore.

  • These are my thoughts. Tell me yours

    I woke up early this morning, my head fizzing with ideas. This is not a day for writers’ block. It’s been some time since I published any writing, and longer still since I’ve felt excited about writing. But I’ve loved writing ever since I can remember. I used to love writing on my web development blog, but the tech world has become so tarnished for me that I can no longer muster up the energy to write about it.

  • Talking About Writing

    At a crowded art show, my friend and I found ourselves sitting at a table at the end of the evening talking about writing. Somehow, separately, we had both landed upon the resolution to explore our writing practice. Neither of us is what we think of as a “writer”. But what is a writer, except someone who writes? And whatever your reason for writing, if you write, aren’t you therefore a writer?