Not so pretty!

Visitors to my blog should know that I do not edit posts after they have been posted, though I may add a further comment to the post as a postscript either in italics and in brackets at the end of the post or as a comment on the post itself. I do this because I do not lie and do not wish people to think me manipulative of the facts in anything.

However, it may be noticed by visitors here that the blog has fewer pictures dotted through the posts. I have today gone through every blogpost and removed any picture which may have a copyright attached to it. This is because someone else on the blogosphere has just reported that they were asked to remove a copyrighted image they had downloaded from google and they were subsequently sued for a large sum of money for having used the image without permission.

Don't think google images are free... they clearly aren't. Get legal... even if it means your blog is not so pretty any more.

Besides, this is a writer's blog so it should be about the words and they should be good enough to stand on their own... so from now on that's what they will do.

NEWS - just in: I have won the Fylde Brighter Writers Circle Prize (and there's a trophy!!!); and I have placed second in Calderdale's annual short story competition. Nice news for August.

Sun is Shining

After the usual rush of writing in January, I sort of stalled. It’s not that I didn’t have stories to tell, it’s just that I wasn’t sure why they had to be told. They felt a little frothy and superfluous. I wanted to say something in a story and something that had to be heard. That’s what I thought. And so production has been slower than usual.

I have tinkered with things and produced lots of flash fiction that may grow into something. I am working on a novel as well, and have penned nearly 20,000 words of that, and I am pleased at how it is going, so it’s not as though I have been idle. But still there was a nagging voice in the back of my head, that maybe it was time for something serious. So, yesterday I laid down a draft of something, was not altogether happy with the ending and not sure that it quite had what I wanted to say. I slept on it and woke to a much more complete ending. It is done now, and it is the first story in a long while where I feel it should be read for what it has to say as well as for the story and the writing.

And then today the draft of a second story falls onto the page, and it has something good in it too. And in my in-box notification that I am placed third in a story competition and I know I am on a shortlist for something else…nine competition hits so far this year and it feels good again… and I have a story available as a download through Ether Books for just 59 pence…and the sun is shining outside my window and birds are singing.

I hope there is something good where you are... whoever you are.

The Birth of a Story

A short flash that is a gift to those who visit this blog.

KEIRA’S STORIES

She sits in a room that is not part of the house. It is a shed but she does not call it a shed. There’s carpet on the floor, a Persian rug in reds and russets and blues. And there’s a low bed in one corner and in another a desk where she works and flowers in a vase on that desk and everywhere pages and pages of stories she has written. Keira calls them her children, those stories, her only children.

They are sad stories, all of them, stories of women losing themselves, slowly disappearing, cell by cell; or one of a woman trying not to lose herself, collecting every spilled hair and rolling each wisp into an unbroken thread that she winds up as one might wind up a ball of grey twine.

Keira does not always know what she writes. ‘That’s not important,’ she says. ‘It’s a sort of letting go and I am not responsible for what they are in the end’. She says these things with a light laugh, as though she means what she says.

The stories don’t always make sense. She knows that and shrugs and says that’s all fine.

She begins with a word or a picture and then she lets go, lets the story unfold just as the girl in the fabric shop unfurled the cloth Keira used for the curtains hanging at the window in her shed. She remembers that cloth and the wonder of seeing the pattern repeated over a greater and greater piece, so much that it covers the bed, too. Her stories the same, unfolding and unfolding onto so many pages and the pattern repeated.

The word becomes a feeling, the word or the picture. That’s how she explains it, and it is the same feeling over and over, and Keira says it is like giving birth what she does and every thing she writes is pulled out of her, and the pain is unbearable, she says. So it feels like they might be her children, it does, and every story so precious in its own way. Only today she has lost one, the page carried out on the sole of a shoe or pulled away on a draft when the door was open, and Keira cries and pinches the skin on her arms and punches her thighs till they bruise.