WHOOP-WHOOP-WHOOPEE!!

I am sitting alone just now, at my computer. The cat is alseep and the back door is open to let in the sun and the warmth of the day, and this is everything I wanted today for I have been at work on the completion of a project and I needed the peace and quiet of being alone to do it. Last night I wrote one chapter and today I have written the final three and so it is complete... another novel, and yesterday, just by chance, an email from an agent wanting already to see the new work. That feels good.

I have still to work on a novella I wrote last year and it needs some spit and polish, and its bootstaps pulled up, and its tie straightened. That is my next job, and the same agent wants to see that, too!

Anyway, I have come here just to yell and to say whoopee and to let the world know it is done... the work I have been penning for this past month (in between walking from one side of Scotland to the other and being back at work and getting the classes ready for their big exams)... yes, so it is done... the first draft at least... and now you know and it's not just me that knows.

As promised...

FINDING SHACKLETON IN A BOOK

He didn’t talk much. Not really. Not about things that mattered. Never said anything about who he was or what he wanted to be. He talked so little that even his son sometimes felt as though he sat with a stranger. Now the father is gone and the son wants to know him better and so he clutches at the shadow-scraps of memory.

A book there was, that his father owned. Not the dictionary, but another book, and it must have meant something for it stayed with them when so much else didn’t, was there on a high shelf in each new place they travelled to. It was a prize that the father had won at school; that’s what the son thinks, tries to remember a copperplate certificate that was pasted into the front cover saying as much. Now the son wishes that he’d given that detail more attention, that he’d read the words over and over until he had them to heart; but a careful search of what his memory holds does not offer more than a vague picture of what it was, and sometimes he can even doubt that it ever existed.

The book was real enough. A light-blue hardback cover, like a piece of a cold sky, and the title in silver letters. Silver like needles of frost or ice, which seems appropriate, for the book was about the life of Shackleton and that was all there was running down the spine, his name. Ship’s Boy to snow-blind wanderer, everything that earnest man was had been set down in print, and the man raised to something like hero though he achieved less than many and many of those have been forgotten.

And it must have meant something, that book, though the father never spoke of it or of Shackleton. The book is lost now and the father lost, too, and the son does not know when that happened. He searches old bookshops just in case, years of looking, and never finding the book that exists now only in his head. He has another Life of Shackleton, an old library book that smells of dust and the pages are yellow, and he pours over that book, at night, just before dreaming. And he reads that Shackleton gave up his only biscuit to Frank Wild and afterwards Wild’s diary records that ‘all the money that was ever minted would not have bought that biscuit and the remembrance of that sacrifice will never leave me’. And the son knows his father liked biscuits, with his tea, and he knows his father would have gone without if ever the son had needed for anything.

So he reads on, sifting through every detail, like there might be small gold to be found in the silt of those words. He is carried on the shoulder of Shackleton, almost to the south pole, across glaciers and adrift on floes of ice, and sled dogs dieing, and the Endurance lost to the cold sharp sea, and Shackleton gave up his mittens for someone called Hurley and suffered frost bite for his charity. And the son sees a hero rise up from the pages of the book, walks towards him in his dreams, not bearded or snow-burnt, but something like his own father, upright and loved by the men under him, and loved by the son, too, though that was never said till it was too late. And the father never wore gloves against the cold, the son remembers that, even when he wakes he does. And the book must have meant something then, to the man, and now it means something to the son, even though it is not really same book.

NEWS TO DATE

Seems like a while since I posted anything here, so I thought I'd better bring things up to date.

Have been busy in lots of ways just recently and there is a new energy in my writing after a slow time... I say slow time, but I did lay down the first draft of two novels last year and won a couple of comps and got some nice other prizes... but it felt like it was hard work between those novels. Now it feels like fun again.

I think part of that might be to do with a change in my life. My wife has got me walking... miles and miles of walking... and it's been good for my physical health and for my state of mind, too. It seems to have given me a new energy and a new ambition and a new view of things.

This Easter my wife and I walked from the west coast of Scotland to the east. We did the canal walk, following thr Forth and Clyde canal from Bowling to Falkirk, and then hopping onto the Union canal at Falkirk and walking all the way into Edinburgh... then we tagged a little extra onto the walk by taking our sore feet down to where the water of Leith folds into the Forth... and there I dropped a stone I'd carried all the way from Bowling. It's only about 70 miles in total and we did it over 6 days, but it was our first long distance walk and, aside from the cushioned plasters, it felt like an achievement for us both.

And with the rest of the holiday, I laid down 50,000 words to the 12,000 I already had on a new novel project that feels fun and exciting and even relevent. We'll see what comes of that in due course. And I am writing every day, a small flash of some description, and that's a challenge I have set myself, and that is turning up some good pieces... might display them some day.

And there was some instability at work... all of us in our department having to apply for our own jobs and one of us unlucky enough to not get a job... but I am safe and so we move on... a change to what the job involves, but there's good and bad with that.

So, that's where I am at. I will give more news as and when it happens... and maybe I should post something creative up here soon as that has been absent a while, too... ok, as I write this, a target: to pen an extra flash and get it up here before the end of the week... just because I know there are a few of you reading this blog and I have three followers now... why not comment?

Best to you all.