writing

November Challenge

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I am doing NanoWrimo – but the blogging version, again. NanoPoblano – right? I didn’t sign up properly this year. But this has been the hardest year in my life so far. I have moved across the globe – which is stressful in itself, trying to settle in a new country. And now my mother is going through something so shocking, terrifying and confusing for us all. It’s taking a toll on us mentally, mainly because we just don’t understand it and don’t know what to do. Normal illnesses are understandable because at least the patient is coherent, and not saying awful things or wailing or in a pit of despair. Mental illnesses are ugly, and it’s so difficult to watch your mother become alien.

I would usually call my mother up and ask her what to do in this situation, but I can’t do that, because she IS the situation!

And so in order to achieve something, and to distract myself, because Lord knows I need the distraction right now, I am going to write a post every single day in November.

Let’s go.

I don’t have time.

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I always say I DON’T HAVE TIME.

Hurry UP, we’re late.

What are we late for, though? We are homeschoolers. We’re certainly not late for school because we get up when we want to and school ourselves when we want to. For a swimming lesson, yes sometimes. For the bus? Or is this just echoes of my entire life for thirteen years. WAKE UP YOU’RE LATE FOR THE SCHOOL BUS, YOU’RE LATE FOR SCHOOL, WE WILL BE STUCK IN TRAFFIC IF YOU DO NOT GET READY NOW.

Mad, rushed, tired, reluctant scramble to get dressed and leave. Toast eaten while racing down the stairs to the apartment carpark. My dad’s coffee in a mug spilling all over the arm rest as he manoeuvres the great giant beast of a Chevrolet with one hand, holding his ceramic Ikea mug in the other. Swerving and slicing our way through the jam-packed wide roads of that hot Middle-Eastern country.

But why now, as an adult, do I still say this? Why am I always rushed and anxious? I don’t have a full-time job I need to get to (yet) and my kids don’t go to school (also yet).

My daughter says ‘Mama we are disGUSTINGLY late, aren’t we?’

And I stop in my harried tracks. She is only 4, why is she concerned about being revoltingly late?

Yes, but why?

Why can’t I slow down when I don’t live the ‘rushed’ lifestyle?

Why can’t I relax and bake bread and wake them up slowly and slowly make our way to our appointments that never start at 7am?

WHY don’t I have time to do the things I love, and barely have time to do the things I need to do?

SO – with that in mind, I have decided to embark on the journey that is the SHORT STORY. I bet you didn’t see that coming.

I challenge myself to write a short story every day. It isn’t hard. I am currently reading a compilation of The Great American Short Story and it is a fantastic book filled with the great voices of Alcott, Chopin, Hemingway, Twain and Melville.

I don’t like ‘Americans’ as a rule, I think I have been ‘decolonised’ – I think the empire of America and Israel and the Greater West was built on hypocrisy and on the backs of my ancestors (Moroccan, African, Indian, Egyptian – to name a few, I am a very mixed bag). I think the fact that ‘America’ right now is fighting immigration the way it is, is hypocritical and offensive, given the fact that ‘America’ is a land of immigrants. None of the Americans right now doing these raids are genetically tied to the land. But that’s complex isn’t it. American governments are not its people. American policies are not its people – for the most part. So American authors are not to blame.

SO I won’t idolise anybody anymore, I will observe their work, appreciate it, and also look at the works of other ‘greats’ who were not white, who wrote beautifully (in the past, and in the present), from other lands – and I will use all the works to inspire me to write one short story a day.

Grease this machine.

Use my writing brain again.

Get moving.

get clicking.

Let’s go.

Poetry

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You can write beautiful poetry if you open your window out to a view of a craggy set of grassy cliffs, foamy sea crashing against hard black rock, and the ocean spreading out before you.

Your garden is sprawled along a hilltop, and hills rise and fall all around your humble abode, with its whitewashed walls and thatched roof.

You could sit on your doorstep everyday, watching the view, not a single human sound to clang in your ears for hours on end.

Your mind could wander to far off places, and the scene would change hourly, as the clouds and sunlight chase each other over the plains and lend jewels and paintbrush strokes to the sea.

You could write beautiful poetry if you opened your front door to a busy highway, which is never the same from minute to minute, let alone hour to hour.

Bright in the day, backdrop of engines and shoes pattering on pavements, clamour of conversations, snippets of lives, all trundling down the highway as though on a conveyor belt. Shops brimming with people and then empty, the hum and bang of various playlists drifting out into the street and intertwining with a variety of smells. Earthy tobacco, warm and sweet cinnamon, sharp pungent car exhaust, a woman’s expensive perfume, the stink of a turd, fried fish roaming its way down the road. Then at night the beat increases in pace. Vibrant lights and dancing shadows, glamour replacing busy bustle, and the subtle undertone of danger, menacing and yet ever so slightly exciting.

Your poetry would be full, bursting, fleeting, less contemplative, less slow, a stark contrast to the gentle nostalgia of a mountain and sea that have remained through time immemorial.

View of the Calf of Man, a small isle just off the Isle of Man, from the cottage of Edward Faragher, a renowned poet and Manx culture preserver on the Isle of Man. He was known as Ned Beg Hom Ruy (Little Ned with the red beard), and this was the cottage he grew up in. He had a deep love for the Isle of Man and this was reflected in a lot of his work. My visit here today inspired this post. Photo by Peter Killey at Manx Scenes website. You can read some of his works here: Ned Beg’s Poetry.

Romance

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Folks I ought to be at the gym right now, it’s the only window of time I have while the kids are just about waking up from their night’s sleep and my husband isn’t rushing off to work. But here I sit sipping coffee and watching birds on a bird-feeder outside my window and wondering why life ought always to be such a rush and where is the romance in life anymore?

Plenty of romance still, I suppose.

Romance in the back of my garden. The neighbour behind is elderly and poorly and had been transferred into a care home two years ago, but his house remains empty. I don’t think he has a wife anymore, but thirty odd years ago they planted two evergreens and a hazelnut tree at the bottom of their garden, which borders the bottom of ours. And when we first moved in said trees were the height of our house, and blocked the May sunset. Today they stand taller than all the houses. Ivy has taken over and carpeted the floor at the back of their garden, and made its sure and confident way up the thickening trunks, snaking here, snaking there, but let me tell you it makes for a luscious summer of various shades of glorious green. The hazelnut tree darkens from an already dark green into almost burgundy towards the end of the summer, and the abundance of foliage is so soothing to the eyes.

And in the winter there is romance too, for the evergreens are ever green… and the ivy does not shed her leaves as most other climbing plants do, and we have replaced the back panels of the fence that separates our gardens with trellises, so that we can better control the ivy, and on the trellises I have allowed my own climbing plants to grow.

I have a ginger syllabub, folks, that takes over and spreads her thorny stalks as far as she can reach, releasing buds which bloom into fistfuls of peachy rose petals, sending out the most delicious lemony-sweet scent, and providing nature’s perfect paintbrush pinkish-yellow tints to the kaleidoscope of greens at the bottom of my garden.

Now how’s that for romance.

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In Which We Prompt

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In an effort to get myself back into writing, and to oil my writing gears, I will be attempting the Author’s Publish Magazine’s 2018 book of writing prompts.

Every day I will attempt one of the prompts and publish it as a blogpost for accountability.

Here is prompt 1: Three Minute Warm Up (daily writing exercise). Write a title, set a timer for three minutes, and write! Write anything, doesn’t have to match up to the title. It’s a good warm up exercise!

Title: Summer Afternoons

There could be a great many things you can do with a stack of beads. You could polish them expertly using your hands or a machine. They have machines for those now, and you would have a brightly coloured pile of beads to use. Thread them together to make a pretty necklace or take them to the beach and sprinkle them among the stones and shells for curious little hands to pick up and curious little minds to wonder over.

Exuberance.

I wonder where there ever could be something wonderful to play with, at the beach or at home. I watch the sun setting over the ocean nearly everyday, when the clouds don’t join me to mar the experience. I marvel at the colours and the way the sky is different from one day to the next. Sunsets are like fingerprints. Never the same. Always telling a different story. Sometimes I am there with my loved ones and sometimes alone, nothing but a cup of coffee to keep me company. Sitting on a hidden bench watching the swimmers who brave the winter seas and then have the freedom …

That, folks, is as far as I got.

My writing gears really do need oiling. Lol!

City

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The cold is vengeful. It’s bitter. It carries a mace, and its teeth are long and sharp and pointy. Its breath is a painful gale, the winds of which find their way up sleeves, through cuffs, goosebumps all along arms and legs. They make necks shiver. Hair stand on end, eyes water, noses drip… fingers turn to steel.

There is blossom on trees but frost pushes its way out of the earth in place of pale seedlings. Daffodils nodding in the sun but every breath you exhale is a puff of frothing cloud.

When she finally saw him walking along the road, striding confidently through the crowd, she noticed the smile on his face. Satisfied, self assured, sun in his eyes, walking on a cloud.

She drew back immediately.

She didn’t know what she was expecting. A sombre face? In one of the biggest cities on earth? Sunshine, after months of grey – was she expecting to see him depressed?

My spirits are low, Laura. He had written. Low, down to the ground. The men tread on them with their freshly shined boots, the women trip over them in their finery, the children yank at them, but they do not rise.

And she was here, his saviour, she had thought, but no. He was jauntily walking through this town. His town. What could she possibly bring from the muddy, countryside that could outshine the triumph of this place?

She slid backwards, further into the shadows, while he walked through the sunshine. The cold brick wall behind her seemed to seep into her coat, her back prickled and an icy pain took hold of her.

I have had a blow, Laura. I often stop myself from reaching out to you when I feel this way. To hear your words of wisdom – always wisdom, solace, calmness, joy, even. Joyful naivety, I call it. But one needs that in a pressing world where one’s thoughts threaten to drown a fellow.

So she came. She packed her carpetbag, she caught the train, in her drab red coat and her best hat – which, here, among the fine women of the big city, looked akin to something the dog had been chewing on.

She is nothing special. Nothing real. Nothing.

She turned, and fled.

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Writing Purples

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I am supposed to be writing for myself this month but there are six days (about) left and I only have ten thousand words of the fifty thousand minimum limit. I shall give up without much of a fuss this month And hope for the best in the next month I set aside for some writing.

With cheer I say, I do believe I have once again stumbled upon the Writing Blues! Everything seems to come to a juddering halt before the brick wall of discouragement. None of my characters will adhere to my commands. They have wilful souls of their own, and oddly, all seem to be biased towards the defiant, sullen demeanor. This will not do at all, because they can’t all monopolise the brooding inclination. They can’t all have the same damn personality!

These aren’t blues, though, so much as purples. This is not the muffled thump of me falling into a pit of writing misery. This is the tremulous hanging in the airless space between inspiration and avolition. Between red and blue. In purple.

Sandstorm

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It was the darkest, coldest night of the year, she felt, as she stole her way out of the side door and into the blackness outside six months ago. The world was alive, still. Cars and lights and surges of people milling around malls and shopping centres like the sun was not going to rise in 3 hours.

It was the meanest, cruellest thing, she said as she ate two scoops of chocolate ice cream.

It was the harshest storm, she whispered, as she put the coats away in the cupboard.

The floors were polished to a shine. Gleaming in the dark. When the sun rose she could see her reflection in them. Her face distorted, blurry, somebody else.

The windows were dusty, so she got her cloth and slapped at them until the sand fell in little heaps on the windowsill. Then she dampened her cloth and smeared the windows so they became muddy. She could no longer peer out of them at the sand storm outside.

‘Perhaps it is for the better, perhaps seeing the storm is worse.’

There was food they had left on the table. Bits of rice by empty plates. Clumped with leftover sauce, some yogurt smeared on the side of the plate. Glasses covered in greasy fingerprints. The dim light that fills the room after a day of torrid heat, after the sun is covered by sand dunes, yellow world, dust up nostrils, clogging all the openings into the house. And when you step outside you have to cover your face. Wrap a scarf around your head, over your nose, only your eyes visible. Like a face veil.

And silence.

I don’t think you realise this, but sandstorms are silent.

After the initial gust of wind and wailing currents, there is only silence.

And a fog of dust.

Don’t stay out too long, you shall wheeze.

It was the coldest, harshest winter.

But the summers are long and arduous. And mountains of dust engulf the city every other week.

Phone Call

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“You have to dial 9 before you call an external number,’ he said to her when she picked up the receiver. She looked right at him, piercing black glare right into his hazel ones. He did not blink, glared right back at her. She knitted her brows, he looked at the receiver then at her again as an alarming beeping sound began to play through the earpeice – loud yet distant.

She slammed it down so it clattered, not quite slotting into its correct position, and flounced away.

‘Fine,’ he called after her, ‘Fine. I will do it myself, as I always do.’

He pressed the correct sequence of buttons, held the receiver to his ear and waited. She waited outside the door, which was slightly ajar.

‘Yes, hello.’ he said firmly, ‘It’s me.’

A pause.

‘Yes, she was.’

Another pause.

‘Do you really expect me to believe it works like that? I have been up from dawn doing these things.’

Long pause.

‘The papers will not write themselves, is all I will say. She has been dreaming of this day for three years. She maintains it was three hundred but she was always marvellous with hyperbole.’

He shifted impatiently from foot to foot.

‘Now listen here, Francine. Listen to me…’

He gasped.

‘You will not!!’

He jumped.

‘I forbid it!’

He put his hand to his forehead, and began to pace, picking the phone up and taking it with him. He stopped short when the wire became taut, and turned back on himself, staring at the ceiling and rolling his eyes.

‘Listen to me Francine. This has gone on for far too long. You will remove yourself immediately from that seat so that my wife may sit. And I WILL complete the papers and send them off. If you do not, oh, trust me, lady there will be hell to pay. We do not bake apple pies for nothing. Now I am going to put this phone down and I expect my request to be handled appropriately.’

He stood still, cocking his head to the side.

‘Alright. Good.’

A small smile graced his sour face.

‘Goodbye, Francine.’

Then he turned to the door while putting the phone down and tidying up the wire which had tangled with the receiver’s wire.

‘She said yes.’ he called.

She breathed a sigh of relief, patted her hair, and walked primly away down the hallway, her heels clacking loudly.

He nodded to himself lips pursed. Then allow a smile of relief to take over his face.

‘As I always do,’ he muttered, putting a cigarette between his teeth and lighting it.

Roots [29]

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I don’t think you understand how this works.

How does it work?

Well, when the Beast’s wind blows, it says things to me.

Both of you? At the same time?

Well, if we are in the same place, yes. But otherwise no. It tells Tom different things.

So it speaks differently to you than it does Tom?

Yes! Yes, Mary, exactly.

And do you know why it only speaks to you two?

It doesn’t only speak to us. It spoke to you once, remember? It speaks to Aunt Martha.

Yes, but only that once.

Maybe, my dearest, sweetest girl, maybe some people are more in need of it than others.

Why does Tom need it?

I don’t know, darling. If I knew, I would.. well.

You still wouldn’t say yes to the poor fellow, would you.

Stop it, Mary. Don’t talk to me of such things.

Well. I think you’re stubborn and silly. And I think you have trained your ears to only listen to the silly things that old Beast tells you. Who knows how old those words are, and from which ancient tree they came. Who knows how long they have lived in these lands, and what hold they have on them. And you let them into your mind, and you let them make decisions for you. I think it’s all silly. I think you’re growing older, Laura, and you are putting roots where there is no soil.

Don’t you tell me where I ought to put my roots, Mary.

Well, I shall. I shall tell you. I think you’re wasting your time.

I am not!

You don’t laugh anymore.

I can’t.

The Beast has taken your joy away!

That’s absurd. If that was the case, my joy would have vanished ten years ago.

Something is not right, Laura.

I tell you, you don’t understand how this works!! Now stop it. Let us walk the rest of the way home in silence. The moon is large tonight. I want to feast my eyes on the world bathing in its silver light.

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