Writing what you know

I don't know if this is true for everyone, but I find that it's more difficult to write about intense personal experiences than about fiction. It shouldn't be, logically. After all, the facts are all there to hand, right? You don't actually have to make anything up or, y'know, be creative. But when you're writing about something you've been in the thick of, something that has affected you deeply and permanently, it becomes harder to self-edit.

It suddenly becomes vital that you perfectly express every tiny nuance of what you felt, otherwise it doesn't seem true, or seems flat and emotionless and devoid of the intensity that so affected you in the first place. So many words, images and impressions come rushing to the fore that you struggle to bully them into some semblance of order and make them line up coherently on the page.

In case you're wondering what the hell I'm on about, I visited Libya in April of last year, during the thick of the fighting. After weeks of watching the slaughter of civilians on TV, the tipping point came when I learnt that we'd lost a family member during fighting in Brega. At that point I couldn't take it anymore, so I bought a backpack and sleeping bag from an army surplus shop, packed what gear I thought I'd need in the desert, and headed on the long road to Benghazi.

I really had absolutely no idea what I was doing or how much of a difference I could really make. I didn't know where I'd be sleeping or how long it would take to get there - I only knew I had to do something more than passively watch the horror play out on the news.

So I went.

The trip left me with some indelible images that I'm still struggling to come to terms with, and I think writing will help me through some of that, but it's difficult. Sometimes writing what you know really is tougher than writing what you don't...

100 words for a good cause

The unutterably lovely Caroline Smailes, author extraordinaire, has come up with a great idea to get people writing and supporting a worthy charity at the same time. Details are at Caroline's site here, but essentially it's a flash fiction competition in which the winners get published in an ebook and the money raised goes to support One in Four, a registered charity which provides support and resources to people who have experienced sexual abuse and sexual violence.


All stories should be no longer than 100 words and inspired by a song that's on YouTube, so here's my humble submission. Wish me luck!

She looked up at me as we lay in the field, the sun warm on my back and the sweet smell of dry grass enveloping us. She'd just said the magic word, her cheeks flushed and her eyes bright with the risk she'd taken.


"I love you."


I looked down at her, at the way she bit her bottom lip, at her hair strewn in a fan of silken ebony. I could practically hear her heart thudding in her chest. Did I love her back? I leant down and we melted into kiss that shook the world.


'Course I did.

Inspired by "Fields of Gold" by Sting

Next year will be different

Jesus, it's been so long since I posted anything here that nations have literally fallen and risen (huzzah for the Arab Spring!). In any case, my writerly muscles have atrophied and my vocabulary has withered, so it's high time I actually wrote something otherwise I face a bleak future of saying "um" alot and vegetating in front of the telly, watching reality TV while my IQ plummets to single digits.

Here's to a better new year and the dream of actually getting something finished and published. Even if it's flash fiction. Even if it's for a non-paying market. Even if it's for a dinky little webzine somewhere.

Cheers all, and have a Happy New Year.

Sleeping Children

He stepped into the childrens' room and watched as they lay sleeping, blankets twined around them, soft lips parted as they breathed gently and dreamed of school, toys, sunlight and laughter. He reached down and tousled their hair, careful not to wake them.

He watched them in reverent awe, gazing at the quiet perfection of them as their chests rose and fell. He bent to kiss them both on their smooth, unblemished cheeks, and he couldn't resist inhaling as he did so, snuffing up the warm, safe scent of them, the nearly indescribable smell of sleeping children that made him want to pick them up and hold them close. Instead, he gazed at them for a moment more, adjusted the blankets to make sure they were warm, then stepped carefully over the discarded toys and out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

The Prophet

Orphalese was once a wonderful city.  A beautiful place of simple white houses, of crickets singing on warm summer evenings and warmer hellos from neighbours who were genuinely happy to see you. It was small and unhurried. It ambled rather than bustled. It hummed softly and happily to itself rather than shouted. People had time for each other and were happy to let their children laugh and play in the streets, secure in the knowledge that there was no harm to fear.

But then one day the Prophet came.

He walked into Orphalese and smiled, his one good eye glinting merrily in the sunshine as he accepted the peoples' hospitality, their genuine offers of food, shelter and friendship. He smiled as he told them that with his other eye - the one that was as dead and grey as a shark's, he could see the future and foretell what awaited them all if they didn't change their ways.

He smiled as he sat in the warm sunshine of the courtyard with the smell of jasmine and the soft music of the fountain, and he told them that everything they thought they knew was wrong. He told them that their simple pleasures were sinful, that their happiness was an affront to God and that their freedom was an illusion. He smiled as he stood in the square, his arms outspread and told them that their trust in each other was misplaced, that their neighbours spoke ill of them behind their backs and that their children were in danger. He told them this because he loved them, he said, and did not wish them to come to harm.

At first the people dismissed him, shaking their heads and muttering as they walked away. But he had planted the seed of fear within them, and soon more and more people would stop to listen to what he had to say as he stood and smiled and nodded and expounded on the evil that lay hidden within each of them and within the hearts of their friends, lovers and children. Before long the people gathered in their multitudes to hear him speak, and looked askance at each other as they made their way home.

Soon Summer faded and the nights became colder. Where once the streets had been full of happy couples and families making their way home, they were now all but deserted as the people huddled in their homes. The doors that had once stood wide open to invite friends and neighbours inside were now all barred, and the laughter within had soured into dark mutterings and hissing arguments.

The Prophet stayed and spoke on, and by the end of Autumn the people of Orphalese had stopped greeting each other as they passed in the streets, and they squabbled and spat as they fought in the marketplace and accused each other of cheating, or miserliness, or lying or worse.

Until one day in the depths of Winter the wind bit and snapped along the empty streets, scrabbling at the locked doors of the houses and howling at the windows. The Prophet stood alone in the deserted square and looked about him with his good eye and his dead one, happily observing what Orphalese had become. And, satisfied that his work was done, he smiled and walked out of the city towards the next town.

Losing Stories

Once upon a time there was a man who used to write but didn't any longer. He hadn't written anything for a very long time. He used to think of wonderful stories peopled by brave and enduring characters, and thrilling adventures in far-off lands. Tales of magic, danger, and courage. Tales of clockwork superheros, oracular children with hanted eyes, gun-toting, trash-talking heroines and dinosaur-hunting cowboy space-ninjas.

 

But sadly, that was all in the past. It had been so long since he'd actually written anything that he'd forgotten how to do it. When he tried to use his imagination to dream up a story, his mind simply shuddered and ground to a halt like a piece of rusted machinery. Soon he began to forget words altogether, saying "nice" when he really mean "wondrous" or "bad" when he meant "hellish".  The sentences that fell from his lips became pitiful, shrivelled little gray things where once they had been intricate and beautiful curlicues of thought and expression intertwined.

 

Eventually he struggled to communicate at all and just said "um" or "er" a lot, then he resorted to pointing at things and grunting or simply shrugging his shoulders in dumb resignation.

 

Eventually the man sat in a chair, alone and mute. The words had left him, the beautiful thoughts and stories had left him, and all he could do was sit and stare as blankly as a dead fish, his mind a blank expanse of empty grey with no beginning and no end. His head filled with nothing but the soft hiss of white noise and the absence of stories.

 

Making It Better

The following is a recent attempt at flash fiction that I put together over various lunch breaks. Hope you enjoy it. :o)

Making It Better

Every day I help out at the shelter. If they knew who I was, they'd cast me out, beat me, tear me apart with their bare hands. Every day I leave the spot under the highway where I sleep and walk ten blocks through the shattered remnants of the city to the shelter. There I scrub floors and pans until my hands bleed, I cook and serve food until I'm barely able to stand and I help out in any way I can until the people running the place tell me to go home. They smile and nod at me whenever come in, but I don't meet their eyes. I keep my head down and throw myself into whatever menial, back-breaking task is set before me until it's time to go back under the highway and rest my head on a filthy blanket until morning.

Every day I walk through the jutting bones of the city - past blackened husks of buildings that look like God picked them up and smashed them down again. Every day I walk past the wreckage of a thousand lives, past people reduced to huddling in doorways against the cold and children scavenging for food like feral things. Every day I have to live with the knowledge that this is all my fault.

I did this.

I failed to keep my country safe from war. I failed to see past the smiles of those that wished us harm. And when I failed at the last hope of diplomacy and the bombs fell like black fists and shattered our nation, I failed to protect my people. So I fled into anonymity, fled into the same destitution that stalked the land like a vast, gaunt devil, feeding upon the people whose ruin I had brought about. And although I know redemption will forever be beyond my reach, every day I struggle to make things a bit better - one little piece at a time.

END

Seeing the Stories in People

I'm curious - how many of you deliberately observe people around you so that you can use them (or aspects of them) in your writing? Whenever you come across someone interesting on the train or in the queue at the store, do you surreptitiously pull out a notebook and start jotting down things about them, or do you file them away mentally for future reference?

I do this all the time. I have a little black notebook that I always have within arm's reach, and it's filled with scribbled scraps of dialogue, ideas for short stories, snippets of overheard conversation and lightning descriptions of quirky, interesting or downright odd people that I encounter on my daily commute.

Like the guy who sat in front of me on the train the other day who looked perfectly well-groomed and neatly turned out with a snappy suit and freshly scrubbed, pink face that was nearly hairless, but who nevertheless reeked so viciously that he singed my nostril hairs. It was an actively aggressive, sour stench - as if he'd bathed in every evil, nasty sin he'd ever committed and trailed them around with him like a cloying miasma of pain and guilt.

Or the sweet little old lady who sat across from me (again on the train), soaked and bedraggled from the rain. She stared hard at the sudoku puzzle in the newspaper on her lap, frowning at it, then she shakes her head almost imperceptibly and says "fuck" under her breath.

Or the red-headed guy with the vacant smile who works at my local grocery store and who must have been pushing carts around for at least the past fifteen years - I'm sure there's a story there.

My point is stories are all around us and that people - even ordinary-seeming people, are often deeper and more surprising than you'd believe. Be they villains, protagonists or extras, they can all have a part to play in your developing story.

Print versus Pen

I've always been as fascinated by the process of writing as I am by the end product. The "how", "when", "where" and "why" of it is as important and interesting to me as the "what". So recently I got to thinking about typing versus writing in longhand.

It's pretty much a given that if you're serious about getting your writing published (versus scribbling for your own pleasure), you'll need a digital version of your document saved somewhere so that you can make multiple copies, print them off, edit them painlessly and send them to agents and publishers. But there's something so very viscerally satisfying about a crisp, blank notebook and just the perfect pen.

The stationery nerd in me has amassed an embarrassing collection of blank and partly-used notebooks in all shapes and sizes, and my desk drawer is filled with enough pens to build a replica of the Eiffel Tower. From simple, spiral-bound jotters to elegant, leather-bound works of handcrafted biblio-loveliness, fountain pens to fibre-tips, and humble roller-balls - in their own way they're all inexpressibly and rather worryingly beautiful.

But writing longhand seems inefficient to me - it's harder to organise and edit my work, and I know that I'll inevitably have to transcribe everything into a digital document at some point anyway, so I'm just doubling the amount of work I need to do. And yet the thought of finally filling an entire notebook with page after painstakingly handwritten page of lovingly crafted story makes me smile in a way that a printed manuscript in 12-point Courier just can't.

I'm sure I can't be the only one.

Health, Family, Work, Writing - Choose Three

I've been wondering a lot recently about what it takes to be a writer, and more specifically about the challenges of making space for writing in your life. Finishing an entire novel means putting one word after another on the page, relentlessly and painstakingly, until you're done. That means setting aside a regular slot of time for writing, be it every day or every week, as long as it's regular and as long as you stick to it religiously.

It also means finding a space to write. I don't know about you, but I need privacy and quiet to get my head together before I can effectively put words on the page. Some people can happily tap away at their laptops in the living room, surrounded by the chaos and tumble of family life. Some can happily scribble away on a notebook on the train in to work, oblivious of the hacking coughs of the other commuters or the tinny scritching coming from the headphones of the badly-shaven salesman in the cheap suit that's sitting next to them.

I find that I can't even listen to music while I write as it puts me off, so my only realistic chance of getting a solid hour to myself is waking up an hour earlier before work. That means dragging my bleary carcass out of bed at 6am every day, sitting my arse down in front of the laptop and forcing my brain to form some coherent sentences, regardless of what time I actually fell asleep or how often the baby cried that night.

In addition to this, I'm also on a bit of a weight-loss crusade at the moment. I'm hell-bent on regaining the washboard abs of my distant youth, so I'm hitting the gym during my office lunch breaks, leaving no time for writing at work.

So to all you aspiring writers out there who actually bloody write instead of just talking about writing (or writing about writing, as I'm so ironically doing here) - my hat's off to you. If you can juggle that burning need to write with the more prosaic (but no less demanding) requirements of health, work and family, then you're already a world ahead of those who are still only dreaming. I wish you the very best of luck.

A few years ago, I was helping to run a writing competition that my employer was running in conjunction with a major publisher. The grand prize was a magazine feature and a guaranteed book deal, so it's no surprise that we were inundated with entries. The aspiring writers had to send in their complete novels and it was my job to help sort and organise the entries, so every once in a while I'd read a bit out of curiosity.

The majority of it was dross of course. As with all writing competitions, we had to wade through a lot of crap to find the good stuff, but I actually had a bit of fun while wading. I'd roll my eyes at clumsy sentences; I'd tut and sigh at poor grammar and terrible spelling. I'm ashamed to say that I even sniggered a bit.

"Look at this!" I'd say. "Does she really think she'll win with that shite?"

I was heartened by some of the utterly execrable writing before me. It was reassuring because I knew I could do better. But as I guffawed and chortled and sneered, it eventually dawned on me that each and every one of these entrants had achieved something that I hadn't:

They'd written a novel.

Each and every one of them had sweated and laboured - sometimes for years - to create something that they believed in, and had sent out to us with hope. As flawed as some of the stories were, they represented a dedication and self-discipline that was worthy of admiration in its own right. It was a humbling thought.

I still haven't completed an entire novel, but I've learned that anyone who has deserves a little respect.

The Envoy

The following is my submission for the Short Story Competition at A Steampunk Reverie. It's my first ever steampunk story, and it was certainly a challenge keeping it short enough, so I hope you all like it...

THE ENVOY 

The Envoy stood before the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister was afraid. Sweat prickled his brow and the chamber felt suffocatingly warm. The Envoy bowed stiffly in a series of small jerks, its glistening black carapace making the movement difficult.

He could smell it clearly despite the incense placed judiciously throughout the chamber - a sour metallic tang that hung high in the air like bad music. It straightened again, spreading two of its limbs wide and rearranging several of its facial orifices and mandibles in what the Prime Minister had been assured was the equivalent of a smile. Then the bristles around its upper set of eyes quivered, the spiricles along its sides gaped open and closed like a row of hungry mouths and its chest-plates thrummed as it began to speak.

"Has her Majesty come to a decision?"

The sound was a suprisingly rich baritone, with only a faint buzz. The Prime Minister's heart hammered in his chest. He was fairly sure the Envoy could hear it. Every natural instinct within him was howling at him to run and hide, to get away from the unspeakable thing that stood and glistened and drooled before him. But he was Prime Minister for good reason and he was a consummate diplomat above all else, so he swallowed the sour fear that flooded his mouth and forced his voice to remain level.

"She has."

"And her answer?"

"Her answer is yes."

The Envoy gave another careful bow.

"Then my Masters will be most pleased. Please extend my congratulations to her Majesty. She has made the right decision and Great Britain will soon be unmatched amongst the great powers of the world."

The Prime Minister shifted uncomfortably.

"And we have your utmost assurance that they will not be harmed?"

"Again, you have our word that none of them will receive anything but the very best treatment. No harm will come to them, physical or mental."

The Prime Minister stood then, his face ashen.

"Our thanks to you, then. May this be the beginning of a long and fruitful relationship."

"I have no doubt of it. But before I take my leave sir, I have brought this small token of our respect and appreciation for her Majesty. It is a mere trifle, really, but one that my Masters earnestly hope that she will enjoy." 

The Envoy turned towards the doors and gibbered and chittered something in its own language. The doors opened and another, near-identical creature entered carrying a small, highly polished wooden box which it handed to the Envoy before leaving. The Envoy turned to the Prime Minister and opened the box. 

Inside was a brass nightingale, lying still and silent. Its small black eyes were bright and glossy, its feathers perfectly arranged.

"It is merely a simulacrum" said the Envoy, "An artificial copy, but so close to the real thing as to be indistinguishable. Not only will it sing on command, but it will speak when her Majesty chooses to speak to it. We trust it will make a fine amusement as well as a most charming companion." 

The Prime Minister was acutely aware of how close the Envoy was standing and he realised that he'd been holding his breath. He forced himself to smile and accepted the box from the Envoy, but made absolutely damn sure not to touch him in the process. 

"Her Majesty will be delighted by your generous gift, I'm sure."

The Envoy looked at him with all of its eyes and gave its obscene parody of a smile again.

"It is the merest trifle, as I say, but also an indication of the scientific possibilities that will soon be yours, sir. And with that I must beg my leave - my Masters will be most eager to hear the wonderful news."

The Prime Minister had no doubt that they already knew, but he nodded again and wished the Envoy a safe journey. As soon as the heavy oak doors of the chamber had closed behind him, the Prime Minister collapsed back into his chair and covered his face with his hands. He shuddered and gasped for breath, but the air still seemed tainted. He didn't think he'd ever get the taste of it out of his mouth...

That night he lay in bed, listening to the dark. His wife moved softly beside him.

"You're still awake, aren't you?" she said.

"Yes."

"Shall I ring for some tea?"

"No."

"Some laudanum then?"

"No."

There was a pause then, the only sound the distant clopping of a hansom cab carrying someone safely home.  

"You did the right thing, you know."

"Did I?"

She rolled over to face him, her eyes wide and earnest, her skin smelling of warmth and lavender.

"You did the only thing you could do, Charles. You put put the good of the Empire first. No-one can ever say that you didn't."

"And what of the price, Mary? How can I sleep ever again knowing the price we've agreed to pay - the bargain we've made with those...things."

"They said they wouldn't hurt them."

"We only have their word for that though, don't we? What if their concept of harm isn't the same as ours? We don't even know what they want them for!"

Mary pursed her lips.

"In time," she said softly, "if people ever find out, they will understand. History will not judge you harshly Charles."

"The hell with history! What of Louisa? What of my own daughter? Will she judge me harshly? Will she ever be able to look at me again when she learns what I've done?"

"He's my flesh and blood too, Charles. Don't think I don't feel it just as sharply, but when all's done, it's only five of them. What are five children compared to the good of the entire Empire?"

He said nothing.

Eventually he put an arm around her and they held each other close in the dark. He turned to look out of the window at the stars above. There were more than he could ever remember seeing, and they shone so hard, so bright. Like a million knives poised above the world.

Endings and Beginnings

Endings seem to be the bane of my writing life.  I have no shortage of exciting ideas that get my mind fizzing and popping and eager to write, but as one of my friends pointed out, I need a big "So-What?" at the end.  It's the "so what?" part that I suck at, with stories often petering out and ending with a whimper rather than a bang.

So I have devised a cunning plan.  I shall think of my endings FIRST, and then work backwards to create a plausible series of events that lead up to the beginning!  Crafty, eh?  Hopefully this should leave me with tighter, more coherent tales that end satisfactorily, with the villains getting their comeuppance, the hero getting the girl, and the reader getting a proper sense of closure.

Gosh, but I'm frighteningly clever sometimes.  Why the hell didn't I think of this before?

Ummm....anyone want to start me off with a few good endings?

The Quiet Man

The following is a short work that I thought up whilst sipping coffee in a café the other day. It's really just a writing exercise, designed to evoke as much as possible with as few words as possible, and much of it through negatives. Do let me know what you think...


The Quiet Man

The man in the black coat sat in the coffee shop, sipping his tea and reading a newspaper. Every so often he flicked a glance out of the window to the bookshop across the street. Eventually a lady in a red coat left the bookshop, and the man stood, tucked his newspaper under his arm and left.

He followed the lady down the street, slowly closing the distance between them. When she turned into a quiet side street, the man in the black coat followed and walked briskly up behind her, then slid a thin knife into her back between the third and fourth vertebrae. The blade went in and out so quickly that there was no blood.

The lady gasped once and stumbled, but the man in the black coat caught her neatly under the arms and eased her down onto a nearby bench. As her eyes fluttered and closed, he placed the newspaper on her lap, turned, and walked back to the bookshop.

He spent a pleasant half-hour there, browsing the classics and fiction sections before choosing a novel by an author he hadn't read before. He paid for the book, making sure to smile at the bookseller as he did so, then caught the next bus home.

The house was still and dark as he entered and perfectly neat. Everything was meticulously dusted and carefully squared away as though placed with a ruler. There were no pictures on the walls. There were no messages on the answering machine. The only letters lying in the hall were bills.

He replaced the food in the cat's bowl and gave it fresh water, then he made a cup of tea and settled into his favourite armchair with the new book, reading until it became dark outside. At 9pm he picked up the telephone and dialled a number from memory. The answering machine on the other end beeped without preamble.

"It's done." he said, then hung up.

The cat slipped back into the house half an hour later. The man smiled and called to it, patting his lap in invitation. It ignored him, ate its food, drank its water and then left again. Half an hour after that, the man set aside the book and rose. He checked the answering machine again even though be had not heard the phone ring. There were still no messages.

He ate a grilled cheese sandwich for dinner, chewing slowly in the silence of the kitchen. Then he went upstairs and brushed his teeth. He did not look at the mirror. Then he changed into grey flannel pyjamas, switched off the light and got into bed. He did not sleep.

The 100 Word Challenge

Over at Velvetverbosity.com, the lovely Velvet runs "The 100 Word Challenge" - a weekly writing prompt exercise that's designed to keep those writing muscles in trim condition. Head on over there to see what I mean. This week the challenge was to write exactly 100 words (no more, no less) about "Thinking".  Here's my submission, and i should point out that this is entirely a work of fiction and i'm doing just fine, thankyouverymuch. :o)


Thinking


These days I try not to think too much. Thinking will only make matters worse. Ever since Rachel left with the kids, I've been stepping very carefully through what's left of my life, afraid of bumping into anything and shattering into a million jagged little pieces.

Routine helps - running on automatic as I wake up, make toast, drive to work, tap at spreadsheets, drive home, stare at the TV. I still smile at the right times, still laugh when people make jokes at the office, but I avoid thinking or remembering too much. Thinking will only lead to trouble.

Cold Station

The following is a very short piece that I wrote about four years ago now, and is a real-life account of something that happened to me on my way to work one cold Monday morning...




COLD STATION

I stepped off the train and merged with the crowd as they shuffled into another Monday morning. I adjusted the strap of my backpack and my thoughts were of breakfast, coffee, the day ahead. The crowd thickened as we approached the ticket barriers and people put on their commuting faces as they were forced to rub shoulders. A lady in a grey coat was pulling a small travel suitcase along and the man behind her tripped over it and fell crashing to the floor. I felt a small twinge of embarrassment for him but was already moving to one side so that I could step past.

After a couple of seconds I thought it a bit odd that the man still hadn't made any move to get up, he just lay there on the floor. As I got closer I saw he was laid flat out on his back, eyes closed, his face quickly turning from deep red to purple. My heart fell like a stone and my mouth suddenly became very dry. People were stepping around him and over him in their haste to get to work, switch on their computers and get on with their day. Some of them looked irritated at having to negotiate yet another minor obstruction, but I knew that something was very wrong. I knelt down beside him and placed a hand on his shoulder.

"Are you all right?" I said.

There was no response.

I shook him gently.

"Can you hear me? Do you know where you are?"

Still nothing.

This wasn't a clumsy commuter or an early drunk, this man was having a heart attack, right there on the cold stone floor of the ticket concourse of the train station.

A woman in a red coat kneeled down on the other side of him.

"Is he alright? she asked. "Does he need help?"

She was small, neat. Mid-forties with a short, dark bob and clothes that looked like she was heading into a meeting somewhere. I nodded quickly.

"Put your coat under his head" I said.

I looked down at his face. He had already turned from purple to blue and he still wasn't moving. He was big, with a substantial gut and a thick neck that bulged a little over his shirt collar. He had a thick mustache that was greying a little and I could see that he'd nicked himself shaving that morning. He looked like a smoker, like someone who'd enjoyed one too many pies in his lifetime.

"Don't worry, mate, you'll be all right" I said. "We'll get you an ambulance straight away."

I undid his tie, tugging it loose and undoing a couple of buttons on his shirt. The woman beside me handed me her coat, neatly folded. I tucked it under his head, and then I remembered that you were supposed to make sure that the airway was clear, so I tilted his head back and looked in his mouth to make sure his tongue wasn't blocking his throat. The man made an involuntary sort of grunt, as if air was escaping, and as I tilted his head back I saw one of his nostrils filling with blood. It quickly overflowed and trickled back along the bridge of his nose to puddle in the hollow of his eye-socket. I got some on my hands.

The woman made a noise somewhere between a gasp and an exclamation - a shocked little "Oh!" that made her sound like a little girl.

From the corner of my eye I saw that someone else had stopped to help, a man in his fifties with a dark jacket and white hair who crouched by the fallen man's feet. I told him to call an ambulance.

"Hang on in there, mate. We're here and you're going to be just fine. We've got help on the way, so you just concentrate on breathing for now, all right? Just try and take a deep breath."

But there was no breath, deep or otherwise. The man lay there, a helpless slab of meat as we strangers patted his cheek and tried to get a response out of him. The crowd flowed past, a dark river of people, a flurry of striding legs and twirling coats and faces, faces, faces going past. All of it was a blur. The man with the dark jacket was talking to the emergency services on his phone, rattling off details. The man on the floor hadn’t moved a muscle. He didn’t look as if he was aware of anything around him.

As soon as I knew that an ambulance was on its way, I got up and left.

I don’t know why I left, but I felt that there was nothing more I could do. I stood up and left the man lying on the floor with the woman and the man in the dark jacket still kneeling beside him. I walked to work with my shoulders hunched, feeling slightly numb and faint. When I got to work I went straight to the bathroom and washed the blood from my hands, scrubbing hard under the freezing water. I splashed some water on my face and took a couple of deep breaths.

Then I went into the staff-room, made myself a strong cup of tea and sat and thought about my father…

With a little help from my friends...

There.

Cast your eyes over to the right and you'll see some new links to some writing-related blogs that I think are well worth a gander. This list will of course grow as I make new online acquaintances and stumble across other brilliant blogs, so keep yer eyes peeled and check there often.

And so it begins...

I've had it on good authority that blogging about writing will actually help with the writing.

So here I am, and here this is - the first of (hopefully) many posts in a blog charting my journey from unknown wannabe to international bestselling literary titan. Ahem

I'm a thirty-something father of two with a great wife and a steady desk job in a nice, comfy office. But like you, I'm also an amateur writer (albeit a keen one), with a dream of getting paid to do what I love. Also like you, I've found that life gets in the way of a proper writing routine. Chores need choring, jobs need jobbing, kids need feeding, and eventually sleep must be slept. There just aren't enough hours in the day.

But still it's been impossible to give up. Sometimes the need to write, the physical need, takes over and I find myself scribbling away again, furiously jotting down my latest wonderful idea before I explode, or bashing away at the keyboard until something else more prosaic comes along that needs urgent attention, like nappy-changing time.

You know how it is. I know you know because you've done exactly the same thing yourself. We've all got half-finished stories or half-finished novels squirreled away in a whole bunch of battered notebooks or scattered across several thumb drives.  For my part, I've only ever finished two short stories to date, along with about 38,000 words of a novel that I'd outlined in perfect detail from beginning to end and fleshed out with character notes and exhaustive worldbuilding notes too. Then I tossed it because it all sounded like such a pile of steaming horse-apples. You've been there, I know.

Now I'm working on a new novel, and this time I'm determined to finish it.

James Patterson once said that writers should aim to complete just a single page a day, no matter what. "If you aren't writing at least that one page every day," he said, "your novel's never going to get done." So now I'm aiming for a modest five hundred words a day, with a grand total of 90,000 words. It won't be easy, I know, but then nothing really worthwhile in life ever is.

Anyway the journey starts here. Hope you'll stick with me and find out how it ends...

-Bibliovore-