Incandescence

This is the first of the pieces that I have written on my commute to and from work - I have started giving myself a word / idea in the morning, and try to get anything in 10 minutes. If the idea seems to be going somewhere, then I carry on the story in the evening (and to the next day if necessary), if not, then I give myself a new word in the evening. What I'm putting here is still pretty raw, not polished.

Freewheeling, the bird soars through the sky. The sunlight flashes off of brightly coloured plumage; irridescent blue, pink and green. A trickle of bird song flows down to the observers, fluttering through the air. There is no chirrup or tweet from this bird; the song rises and falls in cadences to delight the ear.

It is a spectacular sight, only ever seen once every few years when the bird looks for a mate, and she is crouching under a bush at the edge of a clearing. She is small, dull, with brown and green feathers. She has no song, no bright colours, and is therefore of no interest to the observers, who have patiently researched and waited to find this particular clearing, in the middle of nowhere, at this time.

They knew they had to work quickly. Once the pheonix mates, the male bursts into flames, providing the heat for the incubation of the next generation. The ultimate sacrifice for the continuation of the species. It is also an extreme self defence mechanism. Should the bird be attacked, it releases a combination of hormones and digestive acids which spontaneously combust. If it is killed, it takes about five minutes for the bird to be completely aflame, meaning that any predator will also burn.

The observers watch the mating dance intently, focusing their instruments, making sure that they do nothing to alarm the bird. When the positioning is exactly right, they shoot.

The falling comet of colour, now stained a dull red, falls near their feet, and they work quickly before the chemical reaction is complete. Each whole phoenix feather is worth nearly $100.

Where has the year gone?

Once more, nearly three weeks since I last posted, and the usual excuses apply (though I think they are very poor ones when I consider the blogs that I read, usually medical people who work silly shifts, study, and still seem to manage to post every couple of days... But then, they have more interesting lives than I do, as well!)

I'm hoping that my posts will pick up after the beginning of May - the Fforde Ffiesta will be over, and I will have some spare time again. Will try not to spend all my time playing Scrabble on Facebook and actually post properly...

We might be on the move again - the shower and bath are both on the blink, and the landlady didn't pay the electrician's bill from the last time it broke (October -> February - 4 months without a shower...), so I am not hopeful that she will pay out for it to be fixed again. We have the same electrician coming in this week (I've promised to pay up front and claim back from the landlady by deducting from the ), but if it can't be fixed straight away, we are just going to hand in our notice...

On a more positive note, I'm going in for a Tae Kwon Do competition in the middle of May - getting to test my sparring skills properly against someone. I'm not expecting to get very far, but I'm really looking forward to it!

I'm also hoping that I'll be able to get more creative writing in after the beginning of May - I'm trying to write every day on the train to and from work, and I've got a couple of pieces that I'm willing to show to the world :-)

Back again...

Well, I'm back now - three weeks 'off air', and I've been amazed at how many people have looked at my blog even when I've not been writing (between 30 and 40 a week...)! Big hello to everyone :-)

NaNoWriMo didn't go terribly well - with only 10 days to go, I've not yet hit 2,000 words... A bit of a failure all round, really! But, the story, even though not really on it's way, does still have wings (I think), and I'm hoping will get a bit further. It's turned into another teen-sci-fi story though - I seem to be incapable of writing anything that isn't teen...

However, the reasons for failure have been many:
We've suddenly had every single council in the country (or so it feels) go out to tender, needing the documentation to be back before Christmas - most of them before this coming Monday... So the stress levels are running very high, and the overtime has been piling up.
In September, I started a college course (Introductory Certificate in Supervisory Management), which got off to a dodgy start ("We will be covering the same topics as in the full certificate, but instead of doing it in 35 weeks, we will do it in 10. By the way, I've only ever taught the 35 week course..."), got worse, ("Because no-one understood the basic stuff I went through in 3 hours last week, I'll spend 1 1/2 hours going through it again this week, and only do the first page of this week's topic."), hit a major low point ("Your course tutor has gone off sick permanently."), and then picked up again with a nice new tutor ("You will get an extension on your assignment (which would have been due in next week), but I want to go through the first half with you individually *now*"). Which meant that I've had to spend the last couple of weeks writing up the first half of my assignment!
Also - we still don't have a car (until tomorrow - huzzah!), which has meant that I've lost half an hour every evening (small excuse) because I've had to walk home, rather than have John come and pick me up.

But yay - as mentioned above, we are picking up our replacement for the Punto tomorrow. It's an L Reg Toyota Carina - not the swishest car on the market, but certainly a good buy, according to Yahoo. It has been very well loved, and the current owner is going to give us the contact details of the garage owner who has been looking after it for many years (not sure if since new, but definitely since it has been in this chap's family). After a month without wheels, I've not got used to not having a car - I'm sure that this says a lot about us and our modern lifestyle. Whilst everybody we know has been amazing in giving us lifts, often coming miles out of their way (big thanks to Sarah here) to make sure that we don't miss out, and my day-to-day life hasn't been disrupted *too* badly (I walk/train to work and back - John normally picking me up from the station in the evening), the inability to jump into the car to go somewhere, even just round the corner (10 minutes drive, 30-40 minutes walk) to Sainsbury's to go shopping has been frustrating. I will be glad to be in a car again, even if the thought of getting behind the wheel of a strange car is scaring me whitless! (I wasn't too bad when using the company pool car to go home for my mother's birthday weekend, but I had driven it before, and a Ford Focus isn't hugely different from the Punto)

The other thing that I need to catch up on before I sign off for the evening (it's getting late, and I've got a long day tomorrow!) is cinema reviews. We've been to a lot of films recently, and I've not talked about any of them - slap my wrists!

Daywatch
The sequel to NightWatch, this is an adaption of a series of Russian novels. Confusingly, although the film title sequence follows the titles of the novels, DayWatch is really an amalgamation of the second and third thirds of the NightWatch novel. We saw it in Russian with subtitles, and the subs themselves were as much a work of art as the rest of the film (one particular one that sticks with me is where one character yells "Bitch" at another, whilst throwing a lump of bloody meat at her. The meat hits the tiled wall, and the blood, running down the wall, forms the "Bitch" subtitles.) The story itself is very confusing, even for me, and I had read the book recently! There are a lot of interweaving threads, a lot of characters who aren't properly introduced, and who look similar to each other (we had met some of them in the first film, but that was shown a while ago...), and the ending is just HUH? But all of that pales into insignificance when you see the beauty of the film. Whilst Moscow probably isn't the most gorgeous of cities to have as a backdrop, every scene felt like it was crafted with care. My overall impression of the film, even over a month after watching it is still "Wow!" I'm going to be putting the DVD on my wishlist :-)

Stardust
This is an adaption of Neil Gaiman's graphic novel - and, though it has been a long while (must be three or four years at least) since I read the novel, I felt that it was pretty much faithful to the story. I really enjoyed it - a pop-corn type of film without any really hard thinking needed. It had a star studded cast; Peter O'Toole making a few minute cameo, and Ian McKellan doing a front and end narration! Michelle Pfeiffer played an incredibly convincing witch, Robert De Nero, a fantastically camp pirate, and a slew of British comedians also had roles (David Walliams, Mark Williams (only he could play a goat dressed up as a man...) and even David Brent (though he, as ever, only played David Brent...)). The film hardly had any CGI, which made a nice change, the scenery used was beautiful, and there were some lovely one-liners in it, and one great sword fighting sequence. Definitely worth a look - whilst you might not come away feeling changed or have any philosophical awakenings, you'll have had a great time!

Black Sheep
This was my horror film for the next five years... I don't do gore. I don't do spatter, and I definitely don't do horror. I therefore went to see this New Zealand independant film with a mild feeling of dread and the knowledge that I was going to be hiding behind my fingers for a lot of the time. But, hey, how could I turn down a film about zombie sheep? And when this was the trailer we saw, it had to be worth a look! I was prepared that all of the best bits would have been in the trailer, as is so often the case, but I was so pleasantly suprised! It was a very funny, but definitely *very* gory film. I *did* spent a lot of time hiding behind my fingers (often at points where, I was told, there were cutaways at the final moment), but I spent even more time laughing. Very silly, sick in places, not one for young children, but a brilliant film - I hope that this team do more!

And finally...

Beowulf
This is the much advertised retelling of the Old English tale - man meets beast, man kills beast, beast's mother gets a little upset and comes to complain... I'm not going to give away too much, as this one is still in the cinemas, and I don't want to add any spoilers (particularly where the story has been changed from the original). The technique of the film is interesting - the actors were filmed, and then animated, so the entirety of the film is CGI. Unfortunately, they seem to have been hanging a lot on this technique to sell the film (much is being made of it being seen in 3D, which we weren't able to do), and the technology isn't *quite* there to pull it off (apart from the final action sequence, in which almost all sins are forgiven!) The script was ok (not fantastic, given that Neil Gaiman was writing it), the acting was good (Antony Hopkins played a great King), and there were some lovely bits (the fact that Grendel speaks in Old English - it takes a while to tune the ear to it, and I know that they would have picked the words close enough to English to be understood, but it was still a beautiful touch). However, there just seemed to be something intangible missing. Something that could have turned this from a mediocre film into a brilliant one. I do think that I'll go and revisit the book, though...

And, now that I've written almost as much as I have for the whole of my NaNoWriMo story, I am going to sign off... Hopefully, it won't be another three weeks before I write again!

The people in my head

Inspired partly by Jekyll and partly by my own insanity...

There are too many people in my head for one brain to cope with. They bicker and argue worse than siblings on a wet day. And I never know who is going to look out of my eyes when the alarm clock goes off in the morning.
They split themselves into two groups, and but struggle between themselves for control.

The happy group...
There is the sensible, "Mumsy" one. She is the one that makes the lists and does the housework, and the one who tuts at the dirty carpet whenever any of the others ignores the mess.
There is the childish one. She's the one who makes me want to make an objection in weddings, to tell people what I really think of them. She's also the one who enjoys eating jelly snake sweets, who thinks that thunderstorms and downpours are great fun, and giggles at cartoons.
There is the one that is me at my most balanced. The one who makes the rational decisions, but who can also let of steam and have some fun.

The sad group...
There is the argumentative one. She is the most approachable of the sad group, but is also the one that, when not in contol, questions everything. She's the one who answers back and snaps.
There is the melancholy one. She's the one who takes the colour out of the days, who will take everything the wrong way. She spends all her time trying to stop the child from giggling.
Then there is the violent one. She doesn't come to the surface much, but usually follows on the heels of the argumentative one. She's the one who will hit the walls or hold the hot pan for too long. I'm scared of her.

They are all me, but they are all different.

Random Musings

Inspired by travelling down the motorway and the Dr Who programme guides I've been reading...

Time is a one way process. In the same way that we travel down a motorway, we live life in one direction. The speed of the journey depends on the driver - some people enjoy the speed and thrills of living life at 100mph, but they will reach their journey's end faster as well. Others are juggernauts, bulling their way through, intimidating the slower drivers who don't want to conform to the speed that the lorry is going. Slow drivers might seem to potter, but they get there in the end.
But what if, as on a motorway, we could see people coming the other way? Those who have already lived through what we are about to encounter? People who, unknowing of what they are doing, could give us a clue as to what lies ahead. We would have to be skilled at reading the signs - the lit headlamps and slowing windscreen wipers showing the storms ahead. Occasionally, one or two would be aware of us, and try to alert us, flashing their headlights to warn of the police speed checks.
And, once we became aware of the opposite flow, could we find a way to join them? To find the junctions and roundabouts to travel in the opposite direction? To rewind time and our journey to the beginning.

Fenrir Sleeps

Fenrir sleeps. The wolf has been bound by the gods and chained by men, to wait for Ragnarok.
Fenrir dreams. He dreams of freedom and destruction. He dreams of revenge against those who have imprisoned him.
Fenrir sleeps fitfully. He twitches under his chains of tar and padlocks of concrete. The world trembles with the power of the wolf waiting beneath the surface.
Fernrir sleeps and waits for the end of the world.

First post

First post in a blog – I have finally succumbed to internet pressure and signed up…

The aim of this blog is not only a diary of my thoughts and ramblings, but also to try to get me writing again. I am finding that pressures on my time at home (and also, the lure of the Sims…) is stopping me from getting my arse in gear and writing. The idea is that in getting me to write something on a regular basis will start off a habit that will lead to me dusting off the novels that have been waiting to be finished for years…

The blog name comes from a quote:

“To withdraw myself from myself has ever been my sole, my entire, my sincere motive in scribbling at all.”

Lord Byron