Two years ago I had a Science Fiction Short Story, Baby Babble, published in a SF and Fantasy anthology called Fusion by a shiny new independent publisher called Fantastic Books Publishing.Since then Fantastic Books (FBP) have gone from strength to strength, culminating in them fully embracing the computer game franchise Elite: Dangerous and sweeping up five of the authors who had funded their writing pack license costs through Kickstarter campaigns of their own (including my friend Drew Wagar and BBC Click presenter Kate Russell). FBP then ran their own Kickstarter campaign to produce some amazing physical books to support the imminent release of the actual game...Anyway, now that they've produced the Elite: Dangerous books they've returned to producing their next (pure) SF anthology and... <drum roll> Two, yup, count 'em, two of my short stories made the Short-list...Dreading the edits, but I always do...Here's the news direct from the site - SF Anthology short-list. Until next time.
Writing in a group; the benefits of a procrastination
At the start of the year the Word Watchers crew embarked upon a retreat to the somewhat fabulously eclectic Symondsbury Manor.
Whilst there we concluded that a gathering of writers could only be termed ‘a procrastination’ of writers. Maybe this was our attempt at convincing ourselves the fun we were having was more purposeful than playing table tennis and drinking champagne to celebrate Abbie’s recent success might have felt.
As the newest member of Word Watchers I wanted to give a newbies’ insight into the benefits of writing in ‘a procrastination’.
Before joining Word Watchers I spent long and lonely days writing the first draft of my novel ‘Crossed Lines’. In many ways this was how I fell in love (again) with the beauty of writing; the simplicity and sense of completeness you can feel with just yourself and your words for company; the ability to listen to the voices of your characters, to develop them and to create a tangible work.
Once you have that first draft though it can be a long and difficult slog to make something commercial from it. Adulterating it so that it complies with the ‘unwritten rules of publication’ such as genre guidelines and sentence structure can become a chore.
This is where a procrastination of writers comes into its own. Yes, sure we procrastinated a little…there was the odd walk, a trip to the beach, and we explored the spectacular country house steeped in history, but most of all there was writing.
For four days the manor house became a haven of creative productivity. A creative atmosphere fostered by the house’s dynamic interior design as described by Word Watcher John Hoggard in his blog ‘A procrastination of writers’.
Writing collaboratively is something that many writers find benefits in. This is why writing groups exist. But sitting in a room with 5, 6, 7, or more other authors, each lost in their own world of creativity, is priceless.
The subconscious pressure that comes from knowing that everyone else is writing, teamed with the fact that usual daily distractions such as the housework or phone calls are not haunting you, means that writing collaboratively can be extremely productive.
Taking a tea break isn’t just an opportunity to refresh your mind (and your eyes for those of us who write direct to a screen), but also to discuss plot ideas and character development thoughts. Concerns or problematic plot issues can be resolved quicker when you have someone with similar interests to share them with. Then, when you finish your break and take your seat it’s so much easier to dive straight in and face any elements of writing that you may have been putting off.
So, having returned from the creative haven that we found over the winter has the procrastination resolved my procrastination? Possibly not. ‘Crossed Lines’ is still a work in waiting but it now has a clearer direction. It’s just currently sitting in the pit-lane awaiting a tyre change whilst faster, more fuel-efficient cars sail by on the road that is life.
By Danielle Auld
Going through a phase
As the title suggests I'm going through a phase. This, it would seem, would be my Neil Gaiman phase. That's what happens when every time you get in your car Neil reads a short story to you... what happens is that loads of little vignettes and flash fiction and short stories that have been gathering dust for sometime in the back of your mind find an escape route. They disguise themselves as stories that I think Neil might have written (if the idea had been his and not mine) and when I'm trying to think of something else to write, they pounce at the lull and write themselves.So, I wrote a 75-worder (different from the 75-worder that prompted me to write the last blog, but pretty much in keeping with the style) and the story was just too big. I mean it went into 75-words, but only in the same way that a family of four might try and pack a week's worth of holiday clothes into a bag meant for carry on luggage. It's in, but you're fairly certain that the slightest nudge and it'll explode filling the cabin with your smalls and odd socks.This 75-worder did pretty much the same thing. While trying to make it fit better into the Paragraph Planet format, the zipper of my metaphorical hand luggage came undone and the story made a break for it. I tried to convince myself that I could hold it in a drabble of 100 words instead, but the story was having none of it and pretty soon I was picking phrases out of the hair of the woman four rows down and unravelling descriptions from the overhead TVs.So I gave up, I wrote it as a proper story since it clearly wasn't going to let me write anything else until I did.I wasn't sure what to do with it once I'd written it, I mean it was done, it was out of my system, but in one last gasp of defiance it demanded an audience. So I posted it on my deviantArt page, it sat there for a few hours and I noticed a that it had been read a few times and it had got a couple of nice comments and well, given how little traffic I get on my page that wasn't too shabby. So, I've tweaked it a little and I've decided to post it here too - this is under the vague assumption that it might be seen by more people here...So, without further ado, may I present Green Eyes:
Green Eyes
The increasingly heated discussion with my wife is interrupted by a crash from upstairs. I stomp up the staircase so that my daughter knows of my displeasure in advance. I find her huddled in the corner of her bed, shaking. I ignore her distracting pretence at fear and I demand to know what she has done. At first she says and does nothing and I feel my anger rise at her defiance. Then slowly she points across the room into a darkness that should not be there and at a pair of luminous green eyes deep within.The eyes do not flicker with fire, they do not blink, they are not windows into hell, they simply are.My daughter final speaks. “He is the Tear Monster," she tells me in faltering tones. "He comes when I have been crying. He waits until I am not quite asleep, when I cannot move and he comes to my side and licks my face and takes away the tears. He likes the taste of my sad tears most he says. He likes it when you and mummy fight. I cry a lot when you and mummy fight.”I am stung by her words, delivered with such honesty.I ask her if she would like to sleep in our bed tonight, something I had told her she was too old to do last year. She does not reply with words but holds out her arms and I scoop her up and hold her close as I carry her to my bedroom and lay her gently on my bed, although she is understandably reluctant to let go.I am whispering her a story filled with princesses and unicorns as she finally, but fitfully, drifts off to sleep and my wife enters quietly, curious, it would seem, to know where I have gone.When my daughter, our daughter, is definitely asleep I rise carefully from the bed, turn and wrap my arms around my wife and hold her close. She is stiff with the anger of the argument, but I persevere and eventually I feel the tension dissipate and she reciprocates my embrace.When we finally, mutually, break apart, I look at her and whisper, “No more fighting.”Her expression tells me she does not believe me, but she nods and we undress quietly and climb carefully into bed, our daughter a snuggly, wriggly wedge between us.I dream of green eyes glowing in the dark, but they are not so intense and indeed, as I watch, they flicker and go out, leaving a purple after image in my mind's eye.In the morning, I rise with the first buzz of the alarm. My girls stir but do not immediately open their eyes. Later, I bring a coffee for my wife and a glass of warm milk for our daughter. I can see that our daughter is watching, studying us carefully as she sips on her drink. I do not carry on where I left off the night before. If my wife is surprised, she does not say so. Perhaps she is just grateful for the respite.Later still, after my wife has left to take our daughter to school and before I genuinely begin work on my book, the rapidly approaching deadline, source of the current discord, I visit my daughter’s bedroom. I stand in front of where I thought the eyes had been the night before and I whisper into the silence, “There will be no more tears for you.”
*
Until next time...
Dream logic
I have been listening to Neil Gaiman reading the unabridged audio edition of Fragile Things. It is as glorious as you can imagine. He is the best of company on my journey to and from work and I am happy to let him do all the talking.In the Introduction he says dream logic is not story logic, easily and comfortably putting into words something I am acutely aware of but have often tried to prove to be untrue (tried and failed of course).However, as many of you may know, I have found I can sneak up on these dreams, ensnare them, at least for a moment, in the form of a 75-worder. For a 75-worder in itself, does not necessarily have to follow story logic given the scarcity of content and the need for the utmost clarity.So, this morning, having woke from the limited sleep I got, filled to brimming with the most wondrously complex tale, I realised immediately that it would be lost to me in minutes, so I captured the essence of it in a 75-worder. It is, unusually, already pushing against this constraint and I have most a drabble written based on this seed. I am hoping that this, with some careful nurturing, will grow into an entry for the Fantastic Books Publishing comp that WW member Pam has already entered (and I was included in the 2012 edition, when FBP published, Fusion).After I had written it, another 75-worder piled in behind it, capturing how the previous process actually felt like (although, for purely dramatic effect, I effectively lie in the final sentence...). I will share that second 75-worder with you now:On waking my mind is filled with the most glorious of tales. I quickly throw open my laptop. The moment the screen brightens I begin to type. However, illuminated thus, the tale dashes this way and that, like a cockroach scurrying into the shadows, trying not to be seen. Eventually it hides beneath the bookcase in my mind, the one filled with other tales still to be told and I know already it’s lost forever.Thank-you for your time and if I finish the expanded story of my dream I shall let you know.
Banishing the tumbleweed
It's been a crazy couple of months for WordWatchers as a whole. Julian has been frantic to finish his Work-in-Progress Sundial ready for the group to critique it in our May meeting. Sundial arrived in our inboxes a few days ago, not quite finished, Julian is hoping to get the last few paragraphs written as we read the main story...
He described it as that wonderful scene from Wallace and Gromit's The Wrong Trousers where Gromit is desperately laying track ahead of the speeding train on which he's riding....
Charlotte has been desperately trying (and succeeding) in meeting her Publisher's deadline for her fourth novel. I take my hat off to Charlotte, I really don't know how she does it, she's a superstar of perseverance.
Abbie, having secured her publishing deal back in January has been working her way through her edits with her publisher with little time for anything else.
Debbie continues to seek out every possible opportunity to further the brand of Alonzo the Chicken, while simultaneously finishing book 3 and dabbling in a rhyming book for younger children.
John Potter (along with Julian) has started a new job, bringing his writing bromance with Julian to an end and also, inevitably reducing the amount of time available for writing...And so on and so forth, and this, I guess, is why there's been tumble weed blowing across the WordWatchers blogging area for the last two months.So this is a mini-blog, until normal service can be resumed and hopefully the rest of my fellow WordWatchers pitch in with a blog of their own.Since my last blog my adventures in 75-word flash fiction has continued and I had my 21st story published on the Paragraph Planet site on April 11th. Helen Withington, my illustrator for our WIP 75 Squared, continues to produce wonderful work for the book. We've been spurred on by the opportunity to present the finished work at the Yeovil Literary Festival in November (organised by fellow 75-worder James Brinsford). There's a chance that some of my 75-worders will appear on bus stops around the city, the idea of which, just makes me smile every time I think about it.I also entered a short story into the Bath Short Story Award (BSSA), I finished and tweaked one of my old WIPs and was very glad to have something to draw upon because I didn't start working on it until a few hours before the midnight deadline. Why did I leave it so late? Well, I wasn't planning on entering, but during the day BSSA tweeted that they were short of Science Fiction stories and I can't resist a challenge to write something in my preferred genre.Finally, today, I entered five stories into Mashable's "Tweet a complete short story in 140 characters" (details here: http://mashable.com/2014/04/15/twitter-fiction-contest-bj-novak/) I suspect they won't win any prizes, but to come up with five different ideas in 20 minutes and squeeze them into less than 130 characters (you had to include the #MashReads tag thus removing 10 characters from your 140 character tweet/story) really does make you think about not just every word, but every character (at one point, in one story, I changed a past tense story to the present tense to save three precious characters).Of course, all of this is tied up with the fact that my wife, Vee, continues to not be very well, so I find it easy to distract myself from the editing of my novel Endless Possibilities which is what I'm actually supposed to be doing...Of course, I've managed to distract myself still further by writing a long overdue blog.Until next time.
John
Before the Monsoons come
Way back in 2007, WordWatchers held one of its twice-a-year short story competitions. The theme was to write about a story set in Newbury. Although I was new to the group I was pretty confident about my abilities and wrote my story and submitted it to the rest of the group......I came precisely... nowhere...The competition was won, quite rightly, by a beautiful story written by Charlotte Betts. It was, a distinctly Newbury story and yet with its Science-Fiction and Dystopian overtones it was such a different story for Charlotte's normal style that everybody thought the story had been written by me... I wish... I wasn't that good, then or indeed now.It would seem that the recent flooding across the country (of course) but specifically in Newbury had several members of the group instantly thinking about the imagery that Charlotte's futuristic tale created.Although the story was going to feature in our 2nd Anthology (our first, Out of Time, is available here), we decided to share it with you here, instead.(The photographs are by my friend Lindsay Ferris and copyright remains with her, used with kind permission).
BEFORE THE MONSOONS COME
Early morning mist drifted over the paddy fields of Marsh Benham as the Angelika slid through the canal at water buffalo pace. Pirate stood on the prow, his black muzzle twitching as he tasted the air, deliciously scented with the aroma of frying bacon. The other bargees were up early, too, in an attempt to beat the heat. I waved to Old Ibrahim as he lifted a lazy hand at me from his bedroll on the deck of the Star of Arabia as we chugged past.
I’ve always liked coming to Newbury. As far as I can call any town home, having spent my entire life on a barge, this is it. Great-grandfather Marek came over in the First Polish Wave in 2007 and was one of the workers who laid the Market Place cobbles. He saw the Profligates waste their children’s resources by overheating their shops and homes and poison the air with emissions from their cars. He endured as global warming took hold, even before the Chinese Influx or the Middle East Stranglehold, which meant an end to oil. Marek’s son, Jozef, who lived at West Fields until flooding destroyed the houses, was around to see the African Influx as refugees fled from the inferno that had been their country and then my father saw them find employment digging the new canal network.
By 8am the mercury had already hit 42°C when the Angelika nudged her way through the basin to the quayside. The Wharf was bustling. Porters shouted warnings as they hurried by with loaded handcarts. Bicycles zipped in and out of the milling crowd. Sweating, swearing stevedores offloaded the barges, heaving crates and sacks of rice to the ground. Carts rattled over the cobbles towards Market Place.
Pirate jumped onto the quay and provoked an argy-bargy with a couple of mangy town dogs and I had to drag him away and thrust him back onto the Angelika, teeth still bared and hackles raised, but nothing could spoil my happy mood. I was full of the joys of spring not only because it was a beautiful May morning but because I hoped that the day would bring me my heart’s desire. My old Polish grandmother would have muttered something about ‘the calm before the storm’ but, hey, she wasn’t around to spread gloom.
Faisal was waiting for me. Unsmiling, he watched me hook up the first of ten barrels of salted Cornish sardines and swing them over the side to thump down dangerously close to his feet. Several chests of first quality white tea from the Scottish Highland plantations followed, along with a couple of crates of dried chillies and fresh ginger root. He prized open one of the barrels of fish and sniffed suspiciously at the contents.
I smiled encouragingly.
He signed the paperwork and his driver started to load the goods onto a cart.
I waited.
Eventually, Faisal plunged his hand under his robes and extracted a roll of bank notes. “Seven million, five thousand Riyals, I believe?”
“Seven million, five thousand, two hundred and three Riyals, to be exact.”
“Ah, yes. So it was.”
Reluctantly, he counted the money into my outstretched palm and I watched him walk away, his djellaba flowing around his ankles. He’s okay really, a little buttoned-up perhaps but Faisal’s Fine Food Emporium is an important client, nonetheless.
The skipper of the Scheherazade bought me a mint tea and by the time we’d caught up on the gossip, the morning had slipped away. Time to go. I cast off and headed towards my usual mooring on the Kennet in the wetlands beyond Ham Bridge.
The midday call to prayer was echoing from the minaret of the Hambridge mosque by the time I’d tied up. Hurrying, I freed Beatrice from her yoke and staked her out in the marsh to forage with the other buffaloes before I washed and changed. Pirate pushed his nose at my hand and I filled his bowl with leftover rice.
“Okay, Pirate; you’re in charge while I’m out.”
He flopped down with a sigh in the shade of the canopy, watching me with reproachful eyes as I set off along the towpath towards the town.
The Thursday market was underway when I arrived at Market Place. A glance at the clock tower told me I was a few minutes early so I paused to buy a bag of cherries for Mei-Ling. Mei-Ling! My pulse quickened in anticipation of seeing her sweet face again after six weeks away. Weaving my way through the crowd, I saw her slender figure waiting in the shade of the Rice Exchange. Eyes demurely downcast, her shiny black hair hung in a thick plait to her waist. I crept up behind her and put my hands over her eyes. She spun round and I caught her in my arms.
“Jed!” “Did you miss me?”
“Not remotely,” she said, looking at me sideways out of her almond shaped eyes.
“In that case you won’t want me to take you to the fair this afternoon.”
“The fair! Oh Jed, you can’t know how I long for some fun!”
“Is your grandfather playing up again?”
She bit her lip, loyalty warring with truth. “He is old and deserves respect.”
I shared the shade of Mei-Ling’s parasol as we strolled along the road towards the park, eating our cherries as we went. Bicycles and rickshaws sped past us, bells constantly ringing in a discordant symphony. I found myself singing that old folk tune, Nine Million Bicycles and made Mei-Ling laugh.
An excitedly chattering crowd was teeming across the bridge to Victoria Park, drawn by the sound of hurdy-gurdy music. Years ago, the park had been raised using the spoil from the new canals and now it was a moated island. The fair was a splendid sight. Steam puffed out of traction engines and the air was rich with the hot scent of oil and candyfloss. Little children laughed as they whipped around on the teacup roundabout and young men showed off to their girls at the shooting range.
“Look at the carousel!” said Mei-Ling.
I lifted her up onto one of the gaudily painted wooden horses and she squealed as I jumped up behind her. The roundabout began to move up and down, faster and faster. I rested my chin on her shoulder and when she turned her cheek for me to kiss I thought I was in Paradise.
The afternoon passed in a flash and we left the park when the mournful sound of the muezzin calling the faithful rose above the fairground music.
“I must go home,” said Mei-Ling. “Grandfather will be waiting.”“I’ll walk with you.”
Hand in hand, we walked back along the towpath until we came to the Angelika. Pirate’s tail thrashed with joy when he saw us coming.
“Come aboard for a moment,” I said.“I mustn’t be late.”
“Just for a moment? There’s something I want to ask you.” My heart began to thud.
I made us mint tea and she sat in my favourite old armchair in the shade of the canvas canopy, stroking Pirate’s ears while she listened to me. I talked about my travelling life, working my way from one end of the country to the other and all the places in between. I told her how I liked to lie on deck at night looking up at the stars and how I revelled in the freedom to make my life be whatever I wanted it to be.
Her eyes shone. “It all sounds so perfect.”
“It is. Except for one thing.”“What is that?”
“You. I’d like to have you by my side to be my travelling companion, to share my life and be my love. Could you do that?”
Her joyous smile was all the answer I needed. I took her face between my hands as carefully as if she was a piece of precious porcelain and kissed her rosebud mouth. But when I opened my eyes again there was a tear sliding down her cheek.
“What is it?”“Grandfather… He won’t want to let me go.”
“You’re a grown woman now!”
“He has cared for me ever since I was a little girl. He took me in after my parents died …”
I stroked her cheek with my finger. “He can’t keep you for ever. I’ll speak to him tonight, man to man. Come, we’ll go now before he begins to worry about you.”
We took the footbridge over the wetlands towards where the Old Racecourse used to be. Now, as far as the eye could see, we were surrounded by the paddy fields owned by Mei-Ling’s grandfather. The fields were flooded in readiness for the June planting and the early evening sun touched the water with gold.
Mei-Ling’s family home was very fine. Built on sturdy piers to escape the floods, its roof had so many solar panels that I could only imagine the luxury inside. I doubted I could give Mei-Ling all the comforts she was used to. She had told me that she helped her grandfather but now I realised she could never have been a regular labourer in the paddy fields.
We walked up the house steps and as we reached the veranda the screen door creaked open and Mr Lee appeared. A drift of cool air followed him. Air conditioning. Here was a rich man, indeed!
“Grandfather, I have brought a friend to meet you.”
He stood looking at us for a long moment, his narrow eyes inscrutable in his wizened yellow face. “Go inside, Mei-Ling. It is time to light the lamps.”
“But I …”
“I said, go inside!”
Mei-Ling sent me a pleading glance, her eyes full of tears. Then she slipped through the doorway and was gone.
“Mr Lee, I have come to ask you …”
“I know why you have come.” His voice was quiet but there was authority in it. “I make it my business to know what is happening in my beloved granddaughter’s life. And now you will go, before I ask my men to throw you back in the canal.”
“Mr Lee, I love Mei-Ling and I want to look after her!”
“Look after her? What can you offer her?”
“Love. Freedom. And I have savings …”
“Ha!” He smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile. “You are nothing, a newcomer!”
Comparatively speaking, of course, he was right. The Lee family had come from Hong Kong as far back as the 1970’s, long before Newbury became the rice bowl of southern England, before the Chinese Influx and years before great grandfather Marek arrived. I’d done well for myself and I enjoyed my travelling life but I could understand why he didn’t approve of me.
“Mei-Ling wants to come with me.”
“I need her here. When I decide the time is right I will find a suitable man for her. A man who will not take her away.”
“But …”
“Go!” The old man turned his back on me and went inside.
I stood there for a moment, at a loss. Then I slunk away, full of anger at him for not giving me a chance and at myself for not standing up to him. I walked for hours, eventually finding myself sitting in the dark among the ruins of Donnington Castle, listening to the swish, swish of the wind turbines all around me. The wind had changed and was coming from the west, lifting the tails of my bandana and flicking them fretfully against my cheek. Soon, it began to rain, great, heavy drops pelting my skin until it stung.
It rained all the next day and the day after that too. Summer rains are dangerous; the sun-baked ground is too hard to soak up the water. The Kennet burst its banks and the wetlands flooded. I had to take Beatrice to high ground and secure the barge with extra ropes, anxious that the fast running river would sweep us downstream. Thunder cracked all around and Pirate hid himself under the table while the rain hammered down on Angelika’s roof.
At the end of the night Pirate began to bark. I sat up in bed and peered out of the window into the grey dawn. Still raining. On deck, I scanned the rising waters all around. A movement caught my eye. A man was standing on the towpath, up to his thighs in water, cutting my mooring ropes.
“Hey!” I jumped onto the flooded ground with a monumental splash. The man looked up and I recognised Mr Lee’s yellow face. “Stop that!”
He started, lost his footing and slipped below the surface of the river. Then his head bobbed up and the floodwaters snatched him away.
Boiling with antagonism, I waded along the treacherous bank until I saw him in the middle of the river, entangled in the overhanging branch of a willow tree. I scrambled up the trunk and out along the branch. The Kennet raced past a few centimetres below me. I stretched out my hand but I couldn’t reach him. Inching forward, my weight dipped the branch under the swirling water, along with Mr Lee’s head. I couldn’t get him! Picturing Mei-Ling’s grief if he drowned, I lunged forward and grabbed him by the scruff of the neck.
The branch collapsed with a loud crack and we were swept away. Hurtling along in mid-stream, I clung to the branch with one hand and Mr Lee with the other. Suddenly the branch snagged against an underwater obstruction and spun sideways towards the bank where it lodged in a split tree trunk. Coughing up water, I dragged us along the branch until my feet found the bank. Still hanging onto Mr Lee’s collar I scrambled up and then, slowly, painfully, started to haul him out. Exhausted, I paused to catch my breath, thinking how easy it would be to let him go, leaving Mei-Ling free to come away with me. Mr Lee’s eyes locked with mine and I knew he knew what I was thinking.
An hour later we sat wrapped in towels silently drinking tea in the Angelika.
At last he spoke. “So, I suppose now you think I owe you?”
I blew on my tea. “I’ll be on my way as soon as the flood goes down. There’s business to be done, profitable business. Mr Lee, I love my travelling life. But I love Mei-Ling more. Maybe it’s time for me to settle down, make fewer trips away. I’ll never give up my boat but I’d make sure we were always in Newbury for the rice harvest, before the monsoons come.”
Outside the rain eased. Mr Lee remained silent.
“Perhaps you might like to come on a fishing trip on the Angelika with me? The pike are plentiful and very good baked in herbs.”
Mr Lee looked out of the window at the flooded land. He worked his mouth for a moment, chewing his words as if they tasted of something he couldn’t quite identify.
After a long time, he turned to look at me with a glimmer of a smile in his wizened old face. “When I was a boy,’ he said, ‘I used to like fishing.”
***
May you all be safe and dry.
A Procrastination of Writers
Apparently the collective names of things is made up, there is no official rhyme or reason to it, no rules and therefore, "We", i.e. WordWatchers, while on our writer's retreat decided that the most appropriate, informative and accurate collective name for a group of writers should be: A Procrastination.This particular procrastination consisted of the current core ten members of WordWatchers plus our most successful alumni Katherine Webb and it collected together at Symondsbury Manor. We met on the evening of Friday, 17th January and, if we're honest, ran around this magnificent manor house like naughty school children for the first hour. It had so many nooks and crannies to explore. Several of us looked for entrances to Narnia.The house's interior is simply wonderful. Absolutely nothing matches or is coordinated in any way. The furniture is at odds with the light fittings, which wrestle for attention with wall paper and ceiling decor...
My own room for example contained an enormous (and extremely comfortable) four poster bed...
...and on closer inspection...
...a lamp constructed entirely from cable ties...I think that sums up the feel of the house rather well - gloriously quirky and great fun.I got a good feeling from the house and its grounds and while I never found such a gate, my first piece of inspiration was turned into a 75-worder within an hour of arrival:
It really did feel like we had crossed a threshold entering that house, a magical place where writing would somehow, just happen, I had no doubts about it at all.So, when I nearly knocked myself out an hour later by failing to duck sufficiently to get into the larder which had a very low doorway (and I hadn't even had a drink at that point!), then I immediately (well, after an ice pack was applied to the Tom & Jerry like lump on the top of my head) wrote another 75-worder:
Yet again, he had failed to duck sufficiently. People rushing forward, hands to mouths. He was sitting on the floor, looking up, waiting for his brain to stop slopping around inside his skull. Waiting for the momentary double-vision to pass. Waiting for the shock to wear off and the pain to rush in. They handed him a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a towel to press to another soon-to-be scar upon his bald head. All in all I wrote sixteen 75-word stories over the weekend, in fact I wrote fourteen of them just on the Saturday. At one point I was turning them out at three every hour. That's in no way meant to come across as showing off, but for those wonderful hours on Saturday I really was 'in the zone'. The house and the inspirational company of my fellow WordWatchers just made it feel very easy.It wasn't all writing, there was huge amounts of food, cooked beautifully by Charlotte, who would often dash away from her novel to briefly do battle with the house's old AGA, and then return to her work, a glorious waft of whatever delight would be served later, following her up the stairs.There was wine, lots of wine in fact and quite a lot of fizz too, except I can't tell you why there was fizz, not yet...And of course, being WordWatchers, there was cake, lots and lots of cake...
During Saturday, in that incredibly creative run I reached my 300th Paragraph, this was the number I had set myself to reach over the weekend. It is the number I have decided to stop at. It is the number I think I need to have enough material to carry out my plan to release three books full of 75-word stories over the course of 2014.I have been submitting one 75-word story to Paragraph Planet every day since July 4th 2013. The sixteen I wrote over the weekend will take me, unplanned but serendipitously to February 4th 2014. Seven months to the day and, I feel, a fitting end to this facet of my writing journey.On the Sunday of the writing weekend I fired my novel back up, much neglected, much in need of a good edit - the very reason in fact I started writing those 75-word stories, to improve my editorial skills, to overcome my urge to overwrite (little did I know they'd be so addictive!).Endless Possibilities is in need of even more TLC than I recall. All those 75-worders have certainly removed much of the tint of my rose-tinted spectacles of my own writing and it is clear from the opening chapters that I was enjoying the writing more than I was enjoying telling the story. It's going to be a battle, this edit, a bloody battle and many, many words will fall over the coming months.I think however, this time, I am ready for the onslaught.Finally, I'd like to end with my favourite picture of the weekend. It is of Julian, deep in thought as the new novel swirls around his mind's eye, but not necessarily making it to the end of his fingertips. The cup of steaming coffee and ping-pong ball are there accidentally, but are rather symbolic of the entire weekend.
One thing I think is certain, WordWatchers and Symondsbury Manor will become intertwined again. There is talk of doing this every year and I'm definitely up for that.Until next time. John
The Fight Before Christmas - A Book For Our Time
Chris McCormack's latest children's book, The Fight Before Christmas, is very much a book for our times. Firstly, at the time of writing this blog, that time is obviously Christmas; with just a few days to go before the big yuletide ho ho, and as a delightful take on Clement C. Moore's classic tale, the book ticks that box beautifully.But there's more to it than that.Embracing all that the digital world has to offer, Chris has constructed a book that reflects the potential that digital books have to be so much more than just an electronic version of their printed sibling and offer some interesting ideas for authors looking to bring new ideas to their work.While still delivering everything we'd want from a children's story - great characters, an engaging plot, and a timeless message that appeals to young and old - the iBook version utilises the digital medium to engage the reader in other ways too. Chris presents the reader with opportunities to click on the screen and learn more about the traditions of Christmas and also try to find hidden messages from the characters. And at the back of the book there's an interactive quiz to test how much you've been paying attention.And, of course, there's the audio version, where you can opt to have the story read to you (by me!). At one point, there's even a song (for which I engage the services of my daughter). And this is another interesting angle the book brings for cross-over, adding layers within a single medium and really showing what authors can do to bring their readers more completely into their world.To promote the book, Chris has been combining old school press with online marketing. A couple of weeks ago, the book was featured in our local newspaper, but online Chris has also pulled together a great promotional video, once again showing how authors can use readily-available tools to add a little cinema-glitz to their awareness campaigns. Take a look. And, if you're a writer considering how to bring your next work to the world, there are definitely a few ideas here worth considering.Merry Christmas from WordWatchers!
Making Time To Write
Charlotte Betts blogs about making time to write (no matter what).Because one of Charlotte's tips is learning to delegate, this link is brought to you by WordWatchers member, JohnH...To read the blog in full, click here: Writer's Tips 1: Making Time.
Dead Ends and Secret Doorways
It's been a tough few weeks for my novel and me. We hit a bit of a rough patch, as we ground our way through a mid-point crisis. It's not been helped by some back story elements that needed adding, causing me to go routing through existing (and no doubt perfectly balanced and happy in their own skin) chapters. And as exciting as they might be (and I actually think they are - which helps) it's not made for good momentum.
So, I've been languishing around the 50,000 word mark and losing faith.
Last night, though, I felt we'd turned a corner. I was feeling better about the whole thing. The back story pieces were in and making friends with the rest of the gang. It felt like we were getting along again.
And then it went and did this.
I say 'it', because it certainly wasn't me. I admit, I was there, I might even have been holding the smoking gun… but I would never have written...
'To Billy, should he outlive me, I leave my <insert something interesting here – collection of books or magazines maybe?>. He’ll understand why.’
Clearly, it's someone, my main character, reading a will. And clearly he's just read that one of the other characters has been left something of significance - something personal from their mutual past that will not be immediately obvious to the protagonist, the reader… or, indeed, the writer.I sat there looking at it, wondering what on earth this was telling me. And then I sent an email out to the group, explaining enough of the context and asking for suggestions (silly or sane) as to what this item might be. And they were great. I got suggestions that immediately helped me understand what the novel had meant by it, what the item might actually be, and where it fitted into the various plot threads.
So, it seems we're still okay, the novel and me, and I wasn't being shown down some dark, dead-end alleyway to be bumped off so it could run off to the city to be a high concept thriller beneath someone else's pen, but instead was showing me a secluded doorway to a private garden I'd not seen before.
The moral of the tale - trust in your instincts, and trust in the group, no matter how much you feel the answer can only come from you. A little sharing goes a long, long way.
The Writing Elite
This weekend I was in Manchester. To be precise, I was in a Premier Inn, just the other side of the Airport Perimeter Fence. Why was I there? Well, to meet up with a bunch of people I had mostly never met before...
That might sound a bit odd, but we were united by a single cause - the computer game Elite. Yes, a computer game released in the 1980s brought a bunch of guys (mainly) in their 40s (mainly) from all over the country to a very wet and windy Manchester.
Most of our stories were the same, that we had, by whatever means, discovered an amazing computer game called Elite. We had read the novella, The Dark Wheel, written by the late, great Robert Holdstock, we read the Flight Manual, also, in part, written by Robert Holdstock... and, as we flew around this 3D procedurally generated universe, trading and fighting, we took what Robert had written and filled in the gaps that those early 8-bit computers just couldn't supply visually.Me and my friends, who also had the game, started to swap stories, of great battles against impossible odds, or lucky trades that netted a large profit, of harrowing escapes from Witchspace and fruitless searches for the legendary (and it turns out mythical) Generation Ships. In a time before the Internet these stories were swapped in the playground, either as complex narratives using our hands to describe how we outmanoeuvred the police vipers, or as pencilled notes with key details about which planets to fly from and to and what to trade.The only diary I have ever kept was my Elite Pilot Diary. Here, in a modified exercise book, I kept notes of my trades and my battles. Later, for my own amusement, but occasionally to share with my friends, I wrote them up as stories. Eventually, this storytelling grew to monstrous proportions and, for a GCSE English Assignment, I handed in 39 sides of narrow feint A4, hand-written story. Indeed, nothing less than a sequel to The Dark Wheel.
Due to an annoying quirk of the exam system, no copy could be made and I never saw that assignment, and therefore story, ever again. Twenty-six years later that still pisses me off.After Elite came Frontier and more powerful computers to run on it and as much as I tried, I didn't like Frontier, it was more Simulation than game and considerably less fun and I stopped writing about the Elite Universe for a long time.
Then, back in 2006 I discovered Oolite and, as I have said elsewhere, I got my writing mojo back and found a game that captured the magic of the original game (but with amazing new graphics) and my desire to write about it came back. I wrote two novellas set in the Oolite universe which eventually ended up in the Anthology Alien Items, edit by my friend and fellow writer/contributor Drew Wagar. Of course has gone on to great things and is currently writing Elite: Reclamation, an official novel for the forthcoming Elite: Dangerous computer game... (which will be published, along with three other books, by Fantastic Books Publishing) Elite: Dangerous was the reason we were in Manchester, Elite: Dangerous, the Kickstarter campaign kicked off a year ago this week, Elite: Dangerous the common hope, dream and aspirations of a group of 40-somethings. That's what got us into a conference room in a hotel in Manchester.At the meeting, a regular event known as the Lave Radio Conclave took place. I took part in that event. During the hour long discussion I could hear how passionate I was about writing, about how much I loved writing about Elite (and basically for myself) and how much I still do. It was a good feeling.I've written a few Elite themed drabbles and submitted them into the weekly drabble competition on the Elite Frontier Forums. I've got an idea for another short story set in the Elite Universe and I feel the need to start writing in-game content again. This time however, I'm trying to do this while also finishing my other projects. This is not, this time, a distraction technique, or the next new shiny thing. It's a desire to do more. I like having that feeling again!For those in the know... "Write on Commander!"
WordWatchers at Reading Writers
WordWatchers (at least a subset - Julian, Abbie and me) had a wonderful evening with Reading Writers (@ReadingWriters) last night.We (as a group), had been invited, to judge and critique their most recent competition. We were honoured and readily agreed. It was only on the way to Reading that the trio had what could be best described as an "Oh..." moment.This is moment was because in WordWatchers critiques have been described as "being mauled by velvet claws" and we weren't sure how our 'style' of critiquing would go down.It was very interesting for us to see how another group works, especially given how much larger Reading Writers as a group is compared to WordWatchers (our continued meeting in our own sitting rooms, is both our strength, but from a size, point-of-view, our Achilles Heel).The evening, however, seemed to go brilliantly (it certainly did for us) and we're very grateful to have been included.Highlights included Miranda who had to hand her story over to Eileen to read because she was reduced to tears by her own prose (as she read it so well with such comic timing that it was a delight to listen to, despite her protests to the contrary), and also, Josh, whose story had him adlibbing the odd swear-word as he squirmed beneath the gaze of the 20 people in the room as he read out his tale of an excitable mouse going on holiday - complete with actions. It was hilarious, despite (or because of?) Josh's obvious discomfort.We certainly hope to work more closely with Reading Writers and we hope our critiquing has not scared them off - we do it because we want everybody who has a dream to write - to get better. We genuinely loved being part of the process and it was a wonderful opportunity to see so many different styles of writing and we really did get a lot out of it.We had a lovely time in the pub afterwards with Julian and Josh (Reading Writers 'voice' on Twitter) talking about children's stories and Abbie and Julie Cohen talking about... well, I would blush if I told you...Finally, congrats to the winners, but thank you to all the participants for allowing us to be part of your competition. John
What are you reading?
Character driven story
AllYouNeedIsKillCover-thumb-300xauto-34952
The likely improbable
Destiny and time
Very often in social chit-chat with other writerly types the question comes around to books. When we’ve exhausted conversation on our own masterpieces I’ll usually ask what book the other writer is currently reading. To which the surprising and frequent answer is that they rarely read books while working on a project. Often these projects have lasted years.
‘Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life.’
Stephen King, On Writing, 2000
Oddly the substance of the above quote is routinely refuted. I never debate, we are after all masters of our own destiny. This writer, the John Potter writer, seldom has less than three books on the go. Here is the most recent example of why.
Back in 2009 I had an idea for a book about a man whose wife was murdered and his unsuccessful attempts to track down her murderer. I wrote half of it between other projects through 2012.
Smart but different
The original title was The Man Who Would Right a Wrong (TMWWRAW) and focused around a simple man called Marcus. He was not stupid but a man who struggles with the world and people. When he can’t find his wife’s murderer he begins dreaming of her, and in the dreams she leads him towards her killer. I struggled to get a grip on his internal thoughts and voice though. What was his mindset? His kind of simple would be a long way from Forrest Gump but somewhere on the same dial. Rain Man was also another character I looked at. I couldn’t get traction.
By the middle of 2012 the story was out of control and had grown way beyond anything I actually wanted to write. It had become closer to an international and political thriller mess I couldn’t dig myself out of. The story came to a dead stop. TMWWRAW went on the back burner.
Chasing Innocence was published 2012 and I wrote a novella called Mahrie, published April 2013. June 2013 I properly started the sequel to Chasing Innocence and on we went. Always finding time around writing to read books and watch movies.
Truman
In July 2013 I watched Capote and was bewitched by Philip Seymour Hoffman’s incredibly nuanced performance. I was also very intrigued by Truman Capote as a character himself. As a consequence I read Capote’s highly acclaimed In Cold Blood, a non-fiction account of four brutal murders, which starts with a beautiful and visual description of a mid-Kansas rural landscape, the farms and the communities grown around them. The book traces the impact of the murders on the local and very close community, who all suspect each other of the murders. It also creates a detailed insight into the minds and lives of the men who actually committed the crimes, who were far from local. I have never read anything like it. Not one breath of sensationalism and you would have to go a long way to find that kind of honest insight into the mind and background of a psychotic murderer.
Feel good
In August I read 600 Hours of Edward, a captivating first person account of an Asperger’s sufferer attempting to deal with family, neighbours, life and the colours of his garage door.
Idly browsing my Kindle after finishing Edward I found and read Christopher Hitchens’ essay on George Orwell: Why Orwell Matters. A key theme was Orwell’s belief many of those in western politics who retained power after WWII had been busily working through the war to ensure they retained power in the event of a Fascist victory: Just who are the good guys?
All of which was feeding into my writing of the sequel to Chasing Innocence, called Hunting Demons, the lead male character of which is very much influenced by characters played by Mel Gibson, notably Gibson’s ‘Porter’ in Payback. Listening to the Payback audio commentary by Brian Helgeland, led me to Point Blank written by Richard Stark, the book Payback was based on. Richard Stark was the pen name of Donald Westlake, a very successful American literary author. Several of Westlake’s novels have been made into movies. Most famously Point Blank but also most recently an adaption headlined by Jason Statham. At the front of Westlake’s novels you will often find an endorsement by Elmore Leonard.
Character driven story
The writing of my sequel continued at pace during August while reading some of Elmore Leonard’s books, which I’d never done before. I read The Hunted, Raylan and 310 to Yuma, many other Elmore Leonard books await on my Kindle. His books consist of focused narratives built around a single story with few tangles. They are almost entirely driven by character and a simple premise. No wonder so many have been turned into movies when the structure and beats of his books resemble those of a movie.
The link between books written by Leonard and Westlake, so often turned into moving picture, led me to start breaking films made from books down into fifteen distinct beats found in both book and film.
Time and Destiny
Which led me via a random sequence of events, to deconstruct the beats from Tom Cruise’s recent Oblivion and to listen to the informative audio commentary by Cruise. A quick check on IMDB and I discovered he was currently working on a movie called, The Edge of Tomorrow, which I learned was based on a book titled, All You Need is Kill, by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. I read the book – a sublime Groundhog Day, see also Source Code, narrative charting a single day in the life of a rookie soldier, a day in which he dies in combat and is destined to relive over and over until he can acquire skills enough to survive the day. This was such a different, well structured story, full of real character and invention, I added the audio book to my Audible library and have so far listened to it about five times during various car journeys or zipping about with headphones while hoovering.
The likely improbable
In September a friend recommended I watch Stardust which I found to be a good concept ruined by filmmaking. The original book was written by Neil Gaiman and I doubted the disjointed story of the film came from his writing. On a flight to Cyprus in September, I read Stardust and realised the movie’s flaw was in trying to re-work Gaiman’s adult fairytale for a young audience. I was struck by how Gaiman’s writing made a world of implausibilities seem totally natural. In Cyprus I spent the week reading in the sun or in the shade beside the pool. Towards the end of the week I was escaping the wonderfully relentless heat, sat beneath an open veranda beside the children’s pool and the all inclusive bar. I think there might have been a cold Keo in a frosted glass on my table.
Amid all the splashing children and attentive mothers in the pool, was a man with his young blond haired boy. The man had a very happily wide grin on his face. It never left his face. He looked almost insanely happy as he weaved the boy backwards and forwards through the water. In complete contrast to the other bare limbed children his blond boy was clothed in a child’s version of a wetsuit, socks, armbands and legionnaires hat, complete with neck flap. He looked well protected and idolised. The mother was sat just off to the side, reading an iPad. She was attractive, a few levels more than the almost stupidly grinning man.
It occurred to me the man and his wife seemed familiar and then I realised – they were how I’d always imagined Marcus and his wife in TMWWRAW. Immediately after, out of nowhere, the random musings of my unconscious (non-conscious for the psychology buffs) came together and there it was – a solution to my dead in the water TMWWRAW problem a year after it was mothballed. I now knew the story needed to be focused around a simple, meaningless murder of the wife. A small story, nothing big and grand. The power would come from the characterisation and the loss and the need for closure. It would be a whydunit and the conclusion, as clear as anything in my head, would echo Orwell’s observations relayed by Hitchens – a theme of who are the good guys? I also had Marcus’s perspective nailed right there – a combination of my perceptions of this madly grinning and happy dad in the pool and what I’d learned reading about a man with Aspergers in 600 Hours of Edward. Pulling off the fact the murdered wife leads Marcus to her killers through dreams would be tough, I’d just have to study how Gaiman pulled off the improbable in Stardust, just as I would study Aspergers and read more Orwell.
Destiny and time
I also realised the TMWWRAW title needed to go and swapped it for The Handyman and in contrast to the whiz bang opening of TMWWRAW, this revised opening would have a clear and simple narrative and echo Capote’s open landscape of In Cold Blood, swapped for the rolling skyline of Devon in the summer, the narrative retaining some element of the journalistic in witness statements to build a sense of Marcus’s abilities. The opening would feature an outwardly innocent man (Marcus) and child playing with a kite. A family gunned down, Marcus desperately trying to save them. And we think we know why his family are dead, because of his past, immediately correlated from the deep recesses of my recollection to Andy Mcnab’s Last night Another Soldier…, which I’d read and reviewed three years before. The concept for duplicating Gaiman’s ability to make the improbable sound probable, went a little bit out of control as I daydreamed by the pool. The intriguing construct of All You Need Is Kill re-wired itself with a distant memory of a movie I’d watched at the cinema twenty three years before: Jacob’s Ladder – could this be a story with a twist on time and destiny at the end? Even the structure for a 55k word novella was in place, having spent so much time reading the books of Westlake and Leonard and breaking them down into the core beats of story. This would not be a novel with a wide and messy scope. It would be a novella, echoing those core story beats I had been studying. It was all there. In my mind’s eye Marcus was Tom Cruise, diminutive, silent and intense. Fast and deadly but mentally unable to resolve by himself who murdered his wife.
This all came together in about 90 seconds as I sat beside the pool in Cyprus, watching the happily grinning dad and his wet suited little boy. I might have welled up with the excitement of it all.
I quickly had two very different endings in mind, a crowd pleasing, no dry eye in the house version and a harder to pull off thought provoking ending that floated at the very border of my imagination and defied all attempts to reel it in.
Back home I was faced with a need to keep working on Hunting Demons and finish a 2nd edition edit of Chasing Innocence. I needed to park The Handyman for later and then I had a brainwave. I’d write it in November, NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. I’d do some planning in October in downtime, then put everything else on hold for November with the goal of writing and finishing The Handyman in one go. But how would I plan for such a condensed writing experience?
Early October I broke First Blood the movie down into the key story beats, which you can read here. Writing the trivia section of the post I got to wondering what the original book’s author was up to these days. Quite a lot it turns out. David Morrell is a very interesting and very accessible author who has written at length about the processes involved in writing First Blood and the subsequent movie adaptations of Rambo II and Rambo III. He has also written a book based on his writing career and methods that offers insight on a par with Stephen King’s ‘On Writing’. Right in the middle of David Morrell’s book, amongst all the interesting detail, was one of the greatest pieces of writing advice I ever heard. I immediately put it into practise and started to plan for my NaNoWriMo.
I’ll be updating my progress through NaNoWriMo and when the dust has settled afterwards, I’ll let you know whether that planning advice by David Morrell was successful.
If you’re interested:
I just finished Fahrenheit 451 and the excellent companion study guide by Bradbury’s. I am listening again to David Morrell’s The Successful Novelist on Audible, conversationally and captivatingly read by Patrick Lawlor. I have also been listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s intriguing David and Goliath, also narrated by Gladwell. Next up on Audible is David Morrell’s Creepers.
On my kindle I’m currently reading Ashes to Dust by Yrsa Sigurdardottir, and Rambo and Me, The Story behind the Story by David Morrell. Next up is Land of Midnight Days, YA fiction by Katrina Jack and Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday.
Really, Really Short Stories - An update
When I discovered the Flash Lit Fiction Hashtag #FLF13 on Twitter, it was the 14th of September and I knew I would only have eleven days to throw in a few Tweets into the mix.Well, in the end, I managed, in between, writing lectures and general family stuff, to write sixteen of these little 140 character stories. I didn't plan on writing so many, but there were so many other inspirational tweeted stories that I just kept writing them.
To my surprise, on the night of the 26th, one of my Tweeted stories was short-listed and in a short two-hour window of frenetic voting, I managed to rally enough support to garner 25% of the votes and finished 2nd. So thank-you to everybody who rallied to my cause and thank-you to everybody who said so many nice things about my Tweeted stories in the run up to the short-listing and after the results were announced.Special mention to Tom Briars who actually won the competition with a fantastic entry, which can be found here (along with the other short-listed Tweets/stories).[Ignore the fact that the Poll might say I've won, it was still taking votes after the competition actually closed.]**I would also like to add that the feedback to my most recent appearance on Paragraph Planet has provoked the most positive response I've ever had. It's an interesting little story, not just in content, but in its history. It started life, about twenty years ago, as a short story that got a bit out of hand. Over the years as I revisited it, it grew in size and complexity until I realised I'd painted myself into a corner with the plot (the danger of rewriting over a long time, even for a short-story/novella) and I didn't have the skill, imagination or will to fix it. So, like many of my projects in my 20s it got quietly pushed into the electronic graveyard of the archive on my hard drive.
The 75-worder that appeared on Paragraph Planet is therefore the blurb on the back of a book which doesn't actually exist. Yet. And I say yet because I think, when I've cleared the decks of my other projects, I may take the essence of this story and start it again. I think I'm a skilled enough writer now to keep the plot tight and in check, it may not even reach novella size, but I would like to see what I can turn it into now, after it and I have matured over the last 15 years or so since I pretended I'd never started it...
Really, really short fiction
Anybody who has read even one of my blogs, read my Tweetfeed or is familiar with WordWatchers output on Facebook (where I am responsible for most of our output) will be aware of my love of short fiction, specifically, the golden nuggets found on Paragraph Planet.Well, I promised myself I would submit one story to Paragraph Planet everyday and, apart from a few days when I was completely out of Internet connectivity when on holiday, I have managed this feat, each day, as promised, since July 4th. However, it's been a tough month, four very gruelling weeks of teaching at work (Cranfield University) and there has been ill health in the family too. So, I haven't actually managed to write a 75-word everyday for about two weeks (most days, but not every day). Fortunately, I have a buffer, a surplus of stories (now somewhat reduced), that I have managed to draw upon, to keep up my output to Paragraph Planet up.To that end, it's been a while since I had a story up on the site, but I've got another, going up on Wednesday 25th, so I'm just about managing one a month. Each notification is still immensely pleasing to receive. (it's also one of my favourite 75-worders, it's based on a short story that I never finished, so it's nice to extract something from a stalled piece of work, that would otherwise never see the light of day)Although I've not managed to write even 75-words every day, I have managed to contribute to Flash Lit Fiction '13, part of the annual Brighton Digital Festival, via Twitter. It's been great fun. By the time you have put #FLF13 in the Tweet, you're left with a measly 133 characters to create a story with the theme of "Soul". If I thought editing a 75-word story was hard work, editing a story in a Tweet can leave you gnashing your teeth over a comma you really think should be there.I've written horrible stories, humorous tales, melancholy anecdotes and (hopefully) thought-provoking twisters. There's only a few days left (Midnight of the 25th), but I recommend you give it a go.Catch up soon.