Writing.
Creative writing, short stories, general musings.
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Sparrow
It was as I was pulling into the driveway that I spotted it. I thought it was a mouse at first. A tiny creature frantically trying to insert its tiny body under the garage door, whether for shelter or escape I don’t know. I shut the car door and walked over slowly. The creature increased its frantic scrabbling then, realising it wasn’t going to get anywhere with the garage door, found a narrow strip of shelter under the garden gate. Not the best idea, considering the garden is the cat’s domain.
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Clear Night
I sit at the table in our small back garden, ice-cold drink in hand. The condensation on the glass is refreshing under my fingertips. A little light leaks from inside the house, not enough to read by, but I don’t want to anyway. Now is the time to collect my thoughts.
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Open Mic Night
My band played our first gig last night: an open mic night at Mr Wolf’s in Bristol. It was raw and chaotic, we couldn’t really hear each other all that well and we made a lot of mistakes. But I’m still feeling good about it.
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Playing Music Live
Tonight my band, Green Sirens, make our live debut at an open mic night in Bristol. It’s been 20 years since I’ve played music live. I feel like I usually feel just before I deliver a talk: nervous, excited, scared I’ll be facing an audience full of professionals who are there to find flaws in what I do. All the same irrational feelings, when really it’s a much bigger deal in your head than in real life, and no one cares that much. It’s only an open mic night, after all. I hope I can relax and enjoy it, as I usually do when we’re rehearsing and I’m pretty sure I used to do back in the old days with my high school band. But playing live as a 42-year-old feels like it comes with more baggage than in your teens. People expect you to be good, I guess. I must be a far better player than back then – I’ve spent years seriously knuckling down and practising like I never did when I was younger. My technique has definitely improved a lot. But I still never really feel I’m a good drummer, far less a great one. I play for fun, and because it feels good, just like when I write: it’s absorbing and consuming, and I feel a deeper connection to something bigger. That’s what I hope to get from playing live too — that and the rush of adrenalin you get after doing something that scares and thrills you. I hope it’s like I remember.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?