All I want for Christmas...

... is a green witch! Dontcha just love the Orange phone network advert? The wicked witch made The Wizard Of Oz so much more interesting. And she's come back. I just love witches - the star of Into The Woods is the witch, and the title of this blog is her song, which I had to play again.
I hope there are more adverts with this green witch. She's a star!

What the Dickens!

Ha! Something straight out of Dickens has entered my story. It kept flashing at me every now and then, and although I wasn't ignoring it, I kept putting it to one side to think about later.
Actually, it isn't from Dickens - that is, he didn't make it up, just it is an association with his memory, his work.
It's taking me such a long time to move on into the rest of this story, especially this Chapter 2, and I've been getting worried about the future: where would it lead, end, take me. Now I understand that my hesitation is probably founded in this new addition. It's also part of the middle section, the river. Hey! It's a result!
And probably means I'm still in the planning stage.
Perhaps.
Oh, what do I know...

Ghosts

Whilst finalising my thoughts about Chapter 2 (revised), I began to look through all of my notes. Checking things over in case there was something I had missed, I told myself, preparing for the movement into the tale itself. In actuality, I was re-familiarizing myself with the story and its inhabitants. Almost shaking hands with ghosts.
I surprised myself by what I had recorded in these notes with regard to the beginning and the end. I also surprised myself by what I hadn't written with regard to the middle.
I understand now that I have no middle, mainly the movement from the beginning into the tale itself, and then the ending (a possible choice of endings which I have yet to totally set out). I love what I have done so far, but I get a feeling that I may be hampering myself by not properly exploring the main event. Guess I've been too busy thinking about the beginning to have had many thoughts about the hero's journey after that. Then again, the beginning is vitally important, so I shouldn't be too rough on myself for that.
Perhaps, when Ch 2 is done, my mind will free up and I'll be able to explore what really should happen next. The flashbacks are great, for one thing, and hold up very well after looking at them with a fresh pair of eyes. Fitting them in should be fun, and I have to remember that I wrote them, so I shouldn't be worried I won't be able to write what is going to happen around them.
You gotta have faith, boy!
Cracking up? Probably...

You and I are yesterday's answers
The earth of the past come to flesh
Eroded by Time's rivers
To the shapes we now possess

The Sage, Emerson Lake and Palmer

Just musing while watching Alien Resurrection...
Were the stars put there so that we can admire them, or were we put there to admire the stars?
Either answer implies a consciousness behind the reason. That is, someone (?) must be behind it all.
The one constant I can find in anything - in the absence of the proof of life beyond our current knowledge - is 'light'. Light travels from one star to...... where, exactly? Where does it go after most of it passes by us? Does it stay together, or expand into next-to-nothingness, or is eroded by planetary forces as it brushes past, or all of these?
And what is the purpose of light? Is there an intended purpose? Just why is light?
I know we can say why to anything, making the question an almost redundant nonsense behind which particular smokescreen all answers to existence may hide. But light intrigues me more than anything - apart from emotions, because without them no reason of any kind could exist. Well, you wouldn't ask any question and care about the answer if emotions did not exist, would you?
So I wonder: does light have another purpose to those scientists know of? And could it be alive, organic? If it is not alive initially, does it become so while travelling through Dark Matter?
Are we actually part of light's own self? Is it possible that if we find the true reason for light's existence, we may find the answer to our own existence?
The words of Ed Wood JR spring to mind in one of his masterful (!) films. He hinted at the existence of the Solar Unite. A force that linked all planets across the universe. Silly, I know, to listen to the ramblings of..... But I guess he had a point. Is light some kind of solar unite?

The above was created without the use of alcohol or other substances of any kind. I promise!

Technology - Huh!

Can't seem to get Blogger and Youtube to agree to show the video I want. Oh well, maybe another day...

Happy New Year!!!!!!

Happy New Year everyone.
Would you believe it, I just opened a fortune cookie from a Chinese meal. It said: You have a potential urge and the drive for accomplishment.
Glad I don't write that way, but the sentiment's good enough for me lol

When friends are gone...

Today, in 2006, my greatest friend was killed in an air crash at sea. Life does go on, but it kills you a little as it does it, leaving you trying to catch hold of some kind of meaning of life as it disappears over a far, non-existent horizon. I just needed to hear something from the past, something reassuring - though quite what, I couldn't tell you. I wished Les' wife Julie a Merry Christmas on Christmas Day, a sentiment I meant, but couldn't be sure had any meaning to her. They had two sons together, Lewis and Joel. Perhaps these two young fellas made it mean more to Jules than could really be expected at this time. I hope so.
Wandering through youtube in search of some kind of meaning (what a place to look for that!), I came across We Got The Funk. Wow! That was in the heart of our old nightclubbing days. It actually sounds like a Chic tune, so I haven't posted it up here with a Sister Sledge song already up, but please go to youtube and listen to it, by Positive Force. Of course, after listening to it, you'll probably do what I do and enter the labyrinth of songs posted up all over the place, stumbling across all kinds of stuff you had forgotten about. Have fun! Nothing lasts forever - a positive statement only if you believe that 'nothing' exists. 'Time waits for no man' is probably a better saying - a positive urging, if you like, to do something with your life.
Guess I'm only just holding on to this blog - the effort of writing my latest work, my own personal dreamworld, seems to be leaving little room for a blog in my life. I am beginning to wonder if blogs have the meaning they originally held. Are they no longer an end, but now have become a means to help further another, perhaps more important, end. And if they don't have that more important 'end', then it maybe has no useful purpose. Not sure.
Thoughts of a night...

What if...

Maria's wrestling with the 'what if' question has rung a few bells. I'm at that point right now, sorting out my second chapter whilst simultaneously exploring some different endings to the story itself. Sounds like a recipe for disaster, as I'm looking at both ends of the book at the same time. I can't help it - it just seems to be happening and I can't control it. Maybe there's something in the back of my mind that's telling me the one affects the other. I've got a great ending, but a slightly different one has entered my head. 'What if' a third one wanders along to threaten my sanity even further? I dunno. I'll suss it out soon, I guess. Maybe I don't need to and it's just a diversion, a distraction. I could, of course, be secretly wishing it was all done. Yep, I know the strain. Been through it all before and the brick wall I hit then could be right there at the end of this particular road, too. Always crashing in the same car, sung Bowie, and I'm trying my best not to. Ha! The fear factor... Maybe I could turn it into some kind of X-Factor and have you vote my next move!!!! All five of you lol
The replacing of the song-quote at the beginning has changed the central focus a touch. I'm happy with that, and maybe it's the domino effect, a bit of background re-programming, I'm experiencing. That was a good 'what if' that worked wonderfully, I gotta say! Solvey hasn't read that part yet, and neither has Noel the Ultimate Proofreader, so their reactions aren't known. They will be, though!
Presha...

King Street in South Shields this very night. It looks a lot more magical in real life than these mobile phone pics can portray, but I thought I'd post them anyway. When I saw this display, I immediately thought of someone from my new story who would have loved to have been with me, staring up at the lights. My problem, if I can call it that, is conveying scenes such as these, and also conveying properly the wonder felt by someone at the very moment she beholds them. Not during, not after, but at the very moment she would first see these lights. This is where my fantasy training would come in: I know I would have to believe it first before I could describe it. I would have to see it for myself. Then I must become the person I am portraying. The reader has to believe, too, that he/she is there, looking up at the lights. Wonder must be universal, it must be contagious, passing from the writer's vision, through the eyes of the person in the story and into the mind's eye of the reader.

Difficult.

But you have to believe you can do it. More than that: you have to know you can do it. This doesn't mean that you will never do it if you do not know if you can. It simply means that you must learn how to do it.

Practice and study.

Practice doesn't always make perfect. Nobody ever achieves perfection - not even me, your resident raving loony perfectionist! But practice helps you achieve a state of mind that allows you to write in a more lucid, more eloquent, way.

Studying your favourite writers always helps. Ask yourself how they would have done it. If they have done something similar, ask yourself how you yourself would have done it instead - what would you have done differently.

Then try it. And keep trying it until you believe you have done it the best way you can. Your only worry after that will be that it is good enough to get you published. Lol! That's worry enough! But at least you will have given yourself a better chance.

Postscript to 'Cold, is Wisdom'

I've mentioned writer forums a few times as I've gone along, and I did so again in a recent post. Seriously, these days an unpublished writer must expose their work to opinion, and writer forums are the best medium for doing this. It's pretty hair-raising having a bunch of guys you hardly know kicking seven bells out of your masterpiece, I can tell you. But you must do it, and you must give your opinion on the work of others. It helps enormously, and you won't regret it, I promise you.
In time, though, the novelty and hard work wears off and it wears you down. And no matter how good a writer you become, and no matter how good you are at critiquing the work of others, there is a limit. A shelf life applies - and it applies to everyone. You have to watch for this, be aware of this. Never let it go on too long. Your own writing must never suffer, which it will if you stay a part of forums for too long. All forums must recycle their writers and critiquers. If they don't, something is going wrong.
My time in forums was largely productive and happy, and I did get some lovely emails from people who believed they got published after taking on my advice. This was for short story work at Critters, as Critters is/was primarily a short story forum. I don't get emails any more from Bedtime-Story; it's a dead site, and I can't change my email address on the reader contact option. Jeez, I had some marvellous feedback over time, and one Italian guy thought my Christmas story was the 'bees kneeze' as he put it when his grandson had just been born and he was going to save it for when he was old enough to understand it - it still makes me smile to think of it. But it was all practice, and that is what you have to remember: it is all practice, real practice. At some point, you have to stop. I will never exchange my experiences for anything, and I've had some really rocky moments for sure. Forums will never hold the same attraction as they used to, but I'd advise any unpublished writer to find one and put themselves out. There are two such forums on my 'links' list - Critters and Litopia. Join them both. You won't regret it.

Great expectations (revisited...)

Hmmm. Every now and then I find myself reading Great Expectations. Dickens' greatest work, in my opinion. The amount of observation and human interaction within the tale is huge. Colossal. I do wonder if this is my prop for my latest work. It must be - I can't think of any reason for doing it.
Of course, I can't write in the same way - I'd be laughed at, for sure, as the moderness I'm trying to create would jar with the ancient-speak of Dickens' time. Funny, but I rarely think of Sword, now, where the ancient-speak, the cod-mediaeval language, was so apparent. I had thought of myself as the new Tolkien, but was writing a mixture of Peter Pan and King Arthur - a heady mix that, perhaps, was always destined for failure! The sense of failure was acute, so maybe it's no wonder I rarely think of it - it hurts too much to keep dipping into it.
Now, writing about Newcastle and some of the happenings I've discovered/created, I've become quite divorced from writing anything other than my version of a modern English tale. Not even Dickens can get me to write in ancient-speak. Except, of course, where it is called for as part of the story's own ancient history. Failure, which is so easily attainable in the publishing world for an unpublished writer, will cut me hard. As tough as I am on myself, I'm pretty soft when it comes to the failure of rejection. I really don't want to place hurdles in front of myself, when I don't need to.
No, I'm actually looking at Dickens as part of my human interaction education. Newcastle, after all, does feel like a Dickens setting. But it's not just Dickens, though - Banks and Koontz have their own charming wizardry when it comes to conversation and perceptive observation. I know what I like, and these three authors are/were at the top of the tree. Great teachers all.
Hopefully, I've been paying attention...

Cold, is wisdom...

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' said Keats, and the truest words I have ever heard or read in my so-far unsuccessful writing life.
Thinking about things as I do, always searching for the exact thought, the exact mood and word to illustrate my thoughts, I do sometimes wonder whether I'm doing things right, or whether I'm just doing things my way, which may cause me to do things wrong. I mean, can you stop yourself from doing the wrong thing when everything you do, become or create, is so subjective? In other words, how do you know that you know the truth about yourself, about what you do?
Of course, if you want to be original, or believe in your originality, then perhaps you can be afraid to take advice, or if not afraid then wary. In seeking advice, you may instead become someone else, or a projection of someone else. Like the plague, this must be avoided.
I do believe I'm more wary than afraid - I did wander through writer forums for a while and sought advice, knowledge, that was different from what I knew myself. Quite often, I would challenge what others said or did, in the search for knowledge. Looking back, I guess I didn't actually take much advice, filtering out stuff I disagreed with, or stuff that I just couldn't verify in my head.
Reading as many classics as I did (accidentally, as I didn't know what I was reading at the time and usually went from how they felt, as opposed to their standing in the literary world), I wonder if I only ever read what I wanted to read and was somehow forming an instinct of my own, and not an instinct influenced by other tastes.
For example, as a child, I was given 'Kidnapped' as a Christmas present. I could never get past the first chapter. I would rather have read Peter Pan over and over again, than go through a work like 'Kidnapped', which I must confess remains unread by me to this day.
Instinct.
That word again.
The biggest word in any writer's dictionary. The truest word. If you don't have it, you will write nothing. At least, you will write nothing of note.
Perhaps I will never write anything of note. Because I may not have the right instinct. But I do have one, I can see that. It has caused me to choose what I'm writing now. And to choose carefully who I will allow to review it.
If I'm right about what I'm writing, then I'm more than likely right about who will critique my work. If I am right about who will critique my work, then I'm more than likely right about my writing.
Instinct.
I hope I have it. I hope I have it right.