E.C. Jarvis's Blog

Small dip, big toe

I’m dipping my toe into the writing pool.

Just a little.

This post is nothing more than a small step for a small writer on the celestial bridge between brain and page that us author-ly types attempt to traverse on occasion. It’s a rickety bridge I’ll say that much for it. Some seem to scoot across it with reckless abandon. Others tip toe, avoiding every crack or ridge. I came to a large hole in the bridge some time ago and have been sat looking forlornly across at the other side wondering “why me” in a pitiful tone, or occasionally searching for materials which might help me fix the gap. Maybe this is one of those times. A blog post counts as writing after all, so let’s say that I have laid a plank down and moved an inch today, and for today that is enough. In truth it may as well have been a plank stretching a million miles across for how hard it has been to get back on the writing wagon.

I have both loved and hated my small measure of success as a writer. I achieved more than I ever dared possible, but found myself open to such hateful judgement. That’s what happens when you show a piece of yourself to the human race at large, some love you, some hate you, I knew this, but I wasn’t really prepared for the level of vitriol that some of the “haters” seem to enjoy spewing from their keyboards. I had also presumed myself to have a far thicker skin than the one I actually wear. My real skin is paper-thin and my ego hates to admit it. But rather than fight against my nature, I have to try and work around it. Fear is a funny thing, being both fundamentally useful and at inconvenient times completely obstructive. Who has stopped me from writing? Only one person on the whole planet.

I have decided to stop focusing on the end. It is too far away, too abstract, and altogether too much work to conceive of at once. I can’t think about having written an entire book (even though I already have 6 of the things to my name). Today I CAN think about writing one blog post. And maybe even a few lines of a book.

I can.

I will.

It’s almost complete already. I’d go so far as to say perhaps two planks have been laid down… but I won’t step on the second yet. I don’t trust it. Or perhaps I don’t trust myself. Either way, I am a small writer, and a small toe dip is enough for today.

And this is it. Such as it is.

Sleep

I haven’t blogged for so long. In truth, I’ve barely written a thing in months. There are many reasons for this, but the main one I wish to share with you. This is a long story about my relationship with sleep. You may tire of it before you get to the end, and I won’t be offended if that is the case. I am writing this as much by way of catharsis as anything. If you do stick it out to the end, feel free to share with me your thoughts and perhaps your own experiences with sleep.

We all have our afflictions, some more than others, some bearable, some unbearable. It’s part of human nature to suffer with aches and pains and parts of our body that don’t work, or break. My greatest afflictions usually err on the mental side of health issues. Mostly these days I’m healthy, apart from one main issue. Chronic insomnia.

For as long as I’ve been alive, I have loved to sleep. Where some people can get by on six hours a night, I prefer to get nine or more whenever I can. Even in my misspent youth, when friends would relish in the newfound ability at the age of eighteen, to stay out in a club until the wee hours, I would go along with them, but by midnight I’d be sat in a dark corner yawning, waiting for the time to tick away until I could go home, and sleep.

I always thought I was an easy sleeper, and to some extent that was true, once out, I’d be out cold for the duration, very little would wake me. But the ritual of sleep was specific. Some people can lay their head anywhere and go off without a problem. For me, I went from a childish need for the soft glow of a nightlight all night long to a specific desire for absolute darkness, one night in my teens, and the ritual has grown ever more specific since. Pitch black is a must – I have black-out blinds at the windows to cope with the summer months. In addition to darkness, I need silence. The slightest sound – a dog barking – a car racing up the road outside – someone shouting in their garden, causes undue stress. It’s as if, once disturbed, I have to reset the entire process of attempted sleep, each time, after each sound. The loudest sounds of all were non-existent. The voices in my head, replaying events of the day, events of the past, conversations with people that had happened, that I planned to happen the following day, or that were utterly imaginary. I obsessively played them out, over and over until, eventually my exhausted mind would find quiet and let go.

Imagine then, what having a child did to this delicate ritual. I’ve gotta tell you folks, it fucked me up no end. Add to that an unhealthy dose of post-natal depression, plus PTSD from the near-death experience of childbirth, I can safely say that the first twelve months of motherhood was a mess. It took all of two weeks before I sat in the doctors office, sobbing, shaking, breaking down into shards of a human, leaving pieces of my mind on his grey carpeted floor that I was sure I wouldn’t be able to pick up again before I left. I hadn’t slept for more than two hours a night for all of those two weeks. Luckily, I had broken down in front of the very best products of any medical training and experience that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting. I wish I could remember his name so I can sing his praises. He told me simply, to stop breastfeeding at once, to take anti-depressants, and to take sleeping pills.

Zopiclone was perhaps the only thing that stopped me tumbling over the edge of insanity. A heavy sedative that took all of my specific sleep ritual needs and threw them out the window. Take one pill, twenty minutes before bed. Lay down. Sleep. I took one a night for twelve months. Then I tried to stop taking it… what I didn’t know was that I was completely dependent on the drug. I tried lowering the dose, taking one every other night, all sorts of tricks to wean off the stuff. None of it worked. The only way I got off it was cold turkey. It took around three weeks of utterly broken sleep (most nights where I didn’t sleep at all) before I could get back towards some sort of sleep routine.

The World Health Organization assessment of Zopiclone states that since the beginning of its therapeutic use, zopiclone has been found to cause rebound insomnia and anxiety. I can attest to that statement. Coming off the anti-depressants was just as hard, and against all advice on the matter, was only achieved, again, cold-turkey – I DO NOT recommend this approach, I very nearly killed myself as a result of the quick withdrawal of such a strong drug. I am alive only by the skin of my teeth on that point. My reasons for doing so are varied but not pertinent to this post.

My daughter is now almost seven years old. I have spent seven years with chronic insomnia. A lack of sleep affects you in so many ways. Go without good sleep for long enough and you’ll find every part of you suffering. Your head throbs and pulsates. Parts of your body weaken at odd times, you could be walking along then find your knee gives out and you stumble. You forget things easily. I struggle sometimes, even now, with the names of people I’ve known for years, people I work with every day, I look at their face and have no idea of their name. You can have open-eyed micro-sleeps – very dangerous for driving. The list goes on and on.

A few months ago, I’d had enough. It’d gotten to the point where I was having maybe three hours sleep a night. Anxiety was at a peak and so I went back to the doctor. A different doctor this time, since we moved house, but still a good result, I was prescribed with Amitriptyline. A low dose anti-depressant, it’s an older style drug in that it makes you drowsy (most of the modern anti-depressants try to out-engineer this “side effect”) but since drowsiness is the goal, it was worth a try. I was also told it has low-dependency – a definite bonus since the awful experience I had with Zopiclone. It worked. It still takes me a good hour, from the moment I lay in bed to the point where slumber catches up to me, but it does the trick. My mind quietens quicker.

I still struggle badly with sleep issues. I’ve accepted the insomnia as part of me now, I couldn’t cut it off any more than I could cut off my own head. I can manage it with help, and that’s perhaps the best I can ask for.

The worst side effect though? My writing. I’ve found different anti-psychotic medications have differing effects on my ability to write, some enhance it, some quash it entirely. Where I spent a good number of years on a handful of drugs, I wrote prolifically, and though Amitriptyline allows me to sleep, it suppresses my ability to write.

I hope it won’t always be the case. I’d like to find a balance. But working full-time and raising an energetic daughter, and caring for my wonderful husband (who was diagnosed with cancer last year)… requires me to be a functioning human being, and that means I need to sleep.

And so to you dear reader, if you’re still there, tell me of your own relationship with sleep. Are you an easy sleeper, or a fellow insomniac?

I Hate It

It’s been a long while since I waxed lyrical on my own website. I feel like a neglectful parent, leaving my spawn to fester in the abyss while I drink wine and pretend life doesn’t suck. Thankfully it’s just a website and not an actual child otherwise it would have been taken into care and I’d be in jail by now.

Anyhoo, there is a reason I’ve been neglectful. A similar thing has happened to my writing. I guess I’ve hit that dreaded period of “writers block”

*spits onto laptop*… eew

I’ve had it before, and as almost any writer will know it SUCKS. But for some reason this time has been worse. It’s not really that I can’t write, I can write I have just developed an unhealthy attitude towards my own work. I hate it.

I can blame any number of things, perhaps I’m burnt out from writing and publishing 6 novels and 4 short stories in an 18 month period. I guess that was a bit much. I was working for a long time on a reserve tank of “fuck you” juice. I work well when given an unhealthy dose of ‘bloody-minded reason to do something’ just to spite someone. God I sound like a hateful person, but there it is.

Perhaps it was the shock of putting the work out in the world and then having actual real people purchase, read, and offer their opinions on it. At last glance all six books are still holding out at the 4.5 star mark on amazon, which is pretty good going considering the quantity of ratings that have racked up. I should be pleased, but as an eternal pessimist I still habitually pour all my focus into those minority low ratings, the ones we authors aren’t allowed to mention or complain about for fear of appearing ungrateful… *grits teeth and refuses to comment further on that touchy issue*

It was almost inevitable that at some point it was all going to go horribly wrong. So here we are. I can’t write because I hate my work. It’s not that I don’t think it’s good, I mean, within the realms of my limited literary skill set, it’s good, but I hate it.

I have three books on the go at the moment. I hate them all.

I get this gut-wrenching feeling when I open a document. As if I’m opening the door to a relative I don’t like, there’s nothing wrong with the relative, I just have an irrational temperament towards them.

I can write, and I do on a regular (although reduced to my standard) basis, but only after I force myself over that initial hateful hurdle of frustration and anger. I’m looking forward to the day when I can genuinely fall back in love with the process of writing. At the very least, I am hopeful that those days will return. I long for the 10k days, the chapter complete days, the OMG my character did that? days, the tears when someone dies days. I want it all back. I miss it. I miss it enough to push through these hateful times in the hope that those days are nearby. Maybe I’ll turn a page and find them again. All things are temporary, and such vicious hate can only be sustained for so long.

Has anyone else out there experienced this? What have you done to overcome it? I’d love to hear from you, and as always, write on

It's not all writing and snark... Sometimes it's deeper... with writing

Soliloquy on Clinical Despondency

The Bi-polar Swing

 

There is no reason

It can’t be fixed with conversation

It can’t be described with words

It is simply a disconnect

You are there, and I am here, and people are around and I just.don’t.care

I function

Daily

Weekly

Tasks are fine. I can DO

I just can’t FEEL.

Don’t ask me to try

There is no happy, or sad, or elated, or grumpy, or jovial, or laughter, or calm, or flirty

Those functions are out of order

Maintenance required

Please standby.

 

There is no cause

No singular event that will make you say “aha! That’s why. Now I understand.”

For it is C-lin-i-cal

You will not understand

Unless you have been here yourself

Then perhaps you might

Or if you’ve witnessed a loved one, falling down a well

You reached out to catch them, but they slipped through your fingers

Perhaps they didn’t even try to be caught

It must be hard for you - the witness of the fall

I am sorry it is hard

I am sorry.

 

There is only one way out

I can see it over there, the path to "normality"

Waiting

I’m not ready

Not yet. My feet won’t even move

Perhaps I won’t make it alone this time

This may require,

Pills

Small things. Prescription only

One a day

Simulated convention in round white blocks

Taste like shit if they linger on your tongue

They don’t fix

They just mask,

The worst bits

And suppress certain brain functions

Wait it out or lose a limb?

Quite the choice.

 

I wish I could hide it

So you don’t have to see

So no-one can see

It’s like standing naked in a crowd,

And everyone is wondering what the fuck is wrong with you?

And I shrug

Knowing I should care,

but I don’t

I can’t

Out of service, remember?

 

So here I stand

Nude

And there you are, wondering

Why?

And offering me a raincoat

I appreciate the offer

But it won’t help

Besides, it doesn’t fit

 

I may wake up tomorrow

“normal”

“fixed”

And everyone can breathe a sigh of relief

Or not

I wish I could tell you when

Or how

This will end

But I cannot

Because

There is no reason

It's Clinical.

To Count Or Not To Count

Word counts are both a bane and a boon for a writer. People living under a rock for the last sixteen days may not have a clue about Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month). Simply put, it is an exercise undertaken by a collection of people who consider themselves to be writers to pen a fifty thousand word novel in a month or less. I am not currently participating in this interesting practise.  I have tried a few times over the years and “won” once or twice. If I’m honest though, the fifty thousand word splurges (or thereabouts) that have come out of my attempts at Nano, have been generally unworthy of ever showing to the humanoid world and not worth putting the effort into fixing up. One thing that I did take from this exercise is the practise and discipline of tracking word counts.

Some people refuse to count the words they write, opting to just wing-it instead. I am not one of these people. Working in accountancy, I have an odd affinity for numbers. I like certain number patterns, or any number containing a 2 (which is my favourite number incidentally… yes, it’s perfectly normal for someone to have a ‘favourite’ number – don’t judge). I don’t much care for the number 7, although I can’t fathom why. What I can tell you is that I obsess over word count. I have a spreadsheet that tracks progress of each book (as I usually work on several at the same time), over an annual period. So far this year I have written 225,741 words. Bearing in mind that these are tracked words for my bigger novels and exclude things like blog posts, shorter stories and anything that I’m not planning on either submitting to publishers or releasing into the stratosphere of self-publishing, the actual number of keyed utterances is probably far larger (possibly double).

What is the point of this weird obsession I hear you ask?

It’s all about progress. I’m an antsy and anxious person. I need to know that I’m achieving something, otherwise I’ll sit around worrying about how little I’ve achieved. If I can look at a document and quantify exactly how much (or on occasion – how little) I’ve achieved, then I can use the satisfaction of a growing word count to bolster my determination, or contrariwise, use the dissatisfaction of a waning growth rate to kick myself in the backside – proverbially of course. I’m not a contortionist.

I can’t fully explain or articulate the joy of seeing the word count at the bottom of my document hit 1,000. It’s a very satisfying milestone. I actually race towards the number 2,222, which gives me an unseemly and possibly inappropriate endorphin boost. Other numbers give short little bursts of happiness as I see them float across my screen. 5,000 – 10,000 – 22,222. I’ll never forget the first time I managed 10,000 words in one day, I was buzzing on a high for a long while afterward. I could probably go back to my old spreadsheet and tell you the precise date on which that occurred, but I know not many people besides myself would be genuinely interested in such minutia, so I’ll rein it in a little.

The point is, that for me, I cannot function anywhere near as well without a detailed tracking of just how many words I can manage to write on a daily basis. I therefore feel deeply connected to any of my fellow writer friends who insist upon sharing their word count updates with the world. I know it must be tiresome to anyone who doesn’t write, or who doesn’t track their word counts, so I can only apologise if you’re rolling your eyes as you read this. But to the rest of you who find themselves consumed with numbers almost as much as the words themselves, I say BRAVO! Count every one of those suckers you manage to squeeze out of your mind and shout it out loud when you hit an awesome number in your total count and feel free to let me know if you're a fellow obsessive counter. There’s no shame in that.

 

Write on

Lemons

Sometimes life gives you lemons. I hear you’re supposed to make lemonade when this happens. The trouble is, life doesn’t give you the sugar and equipment to accommodate the making of lemonade. It just lumps a pile of mouldy, manky looking lemons in your lap and says “here you go you bastard.”

Life keeps throwing lemons at me lately. I wonder if the universe mistakenly has it on record that I can juggle, and is expecting me to put on some kind of farcical show of juggling fifty lemons whilst riding a unicycle through a pit of dragon fire. If only I could. Even then, I’m not sure if I could manage to make lemonade at the end of it.

What does this have to do with writing? Writing to an author is like brown sugar to junkie.  When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. When I’m not talking out loud, I’m listening to the voices in my head (I’m not crazy I swear…). These things don’t go away when the world sticks a big fat lemon in your life and expects you to put everything to one side to deal with it. In fact, it only makes the desire to write even stronger. It’s escapism. It’s fantasy. It’s a safe place. It’s a judgement-free zone. I can build and destroy a universe in one page and no-one gets hurt. I can fix things in my imagination that I can’t fix in real life. It’s addictive. It’s as simple or as complex as I want it to be. It’s cathartic.

But above all, I can control it.

When the world around me is turning to shit, I can open a document, write my heart out and disappear from that fucking great big lemon that won’t go away. It might only be for a minute, or if I’m lucky a couple of hours, but that’s better than nothing. Some people watch TV. Some people watch sports. Some people socialise (crazy people). Writers write. When I’m away in my own little world nothing can hurt me unless that’s part of the plot, and even then it’s only on my terms.

In times of crisis we gravitate toward comfort and safety. Right now, I’m not writing anything for the purposes of publication. I’ve pushed aside the projects and pleaded where I can for extensions to writing deadlines. Right now, I’m writing for pure personal edification and gratification. I’m writing because that’s all I know. I’m writing because if I don’t write I’ll have to deal with the un-lemonadeable lemon - to focus on what can’t be fixed or cured by me sitting around worrying about it.

Maybe when these lemons stop piling up I’ll get back to the serious stuff, but right now the less pressure the better.

 

Write on.

Stuck?

Got to a part in your book where you don’t know what happens next?

Know what happens next but don’t know how to write it?

Know how to write what happens but your characters won’t talk to you to back up your scene with dialogue?

Brain melting out your earholes?

Pulling hair off your head?

“Writers Block”?

 

If you think you’ve tried every trick in the book to get over it, I’m telling you now there is one method you haven’t tried that will work 99% of the time. It’s really bloody easy too. I almost don’t want to tell you because it feels like my own little secret. Like my own red button for launching nukes which I sit stroking whilst laughing manically at the fact that nobody knows how much power I have. What? It’s a perfectly normal analogy…

Moving along.

Wanna know what to do if you get stuck with your story?

Stop.

Put it to one side.

Go and read.

I don’t care what you read so long as it’s something you love. A book that draws you in. A book you don’t want to put down. If you can’t find a new book that makes you feel that way then go back to an old one that you’ve read before and start over. Forget about your manuscript.

Neglect your characters. Ignore your world and go visit someplace else instead.

Now here’s the tricky part.

When you get sucked into a book, when you’re at that point where you just have to read another page…

Stop.

Put the book down.

Go and write.

 

Now I’m not saying it will lead you to finish the rest of your story in one sitting. But I promise that this is more likely than any other method to help you get out of the slump. You may only write 100 words, but that’s 100 more than you had before isn’t it?

Sometimes we get lost within our creations, and our imagination gets overwhelmed with the scale of the task. We all need to escape from time to time, so give it a try.

Write on.

 

 

E.C. Jarvis is a British author working mainly in speculative and fantasy fiction genres. 

Since 2015, she has independently published six books spanning two different genres and series. The Machine, The Pirate, The War, and The Destiny in The Blood and Destiny series - a steampunk adventure. Desire and Duty, and Lust and Lies in The Consort's Chronicles series - an erotic fantasy.

If you like action packed, fast-paced page turners, then try one of her books. There's never a dull moment in those pages.

She was born in Surrey, England in 1982. She now resides in Hampshire, England with her daughter and husband.

https://www.amazon.com/E.C.-Jarvis/e/B0154YOIGI

https://www.facebook.com/E.C.JarvisAuthor

https://twitter.com/EC_Jarvis

 

Fantasy Con

Hi, I’m E.C. Jarvis, author of…………………..and I’m your host for this stop in the Hunt.

 

If you would like to find out more about the Hunt, please click here - http://vfcscavengerhunt.weebly.com/

Somewhere on this page is a hidden number. Collect all the numbers from all the authors’ posts, and then add them up. Once you’ve added all the numbers, and if I am your last author, please head to the official website and click on the ENTER HERE page to find the entry form. Only entries will the correct number will qualify to win.

 

The author I’m pleased to be hosting for Virtual FantasyCon’s Blog Hop Hunt today is author, Lesley Donaldson .

Bio

Lesley writes books and saves lives. A vampiric unicorn that farts rainbows inhabits her soul. Between twelve hour emergency nursing shifts and twenty four hour parenting shifts, she redefined herself as an author and published’ Growing A Rainbow: The Premature Journey of a Two Pound Hero in two thousand and fourteen, supporting the Canadian Premature Babies Foundation. Not satisfied with being a ‘one-off’, Lesley debuted, the following year, her first fiction - The Queen’s Viper. In this dark fantasy, the villainous anti-hero Viper battles humans, immortals, and an elusive inner darkness in a captivating story that spans both Elizabethan and modern timelines. The Queen’s Viper is a semi-finalist in the two thousand and sixteen Kindle Book Awards, and the book received multiple five star reviews.

 

This ‘born again’ writer holds degrees in Human Biology and Nursing Science from the University of Toronto. She proudly parents a child with enhanced needs, and is an often, companionable wife. She loves traveling with her family and is a bobby medievalist. She also co-authored, From Blog-to-Book (with Doris Chung), published by Publisher-PS, described as a ‘must-have’ book from Dan Morris of Blogging Connected Prime.

 

In two thousand and fifteen, Lesley was a panelist at Ad Astra, Toronto’s premier fan convention for Sci-Fi and Fantasy Literature. You can find her on panels at CanConSF in this September, as well as in the online conference Virtual FantasyCon in October. She has also been an Hour of Power speaker at Blissdom Canada in two thousand and fourteen, a contributor to Preemie Babies, one hundred and one, Urban Mommy online magazine, and other online blogs. She blogs about prematurity and special needs parenting on http://realwomendrivestick.com/ and about her author’s journey on http://writerlesleydonaldson.com/

 

 

Camberwell, Present

Camberwell, London.

June third, two thousand and twelve: dawn.

The unforeseen sinkhole gave birth to four hundred years of hatred. London exchanged its concrete crust for an ancient soul, the prisoner trapped within the oblivion. The hole started as an innocuous golf ball sized pit. A hotel employee in kitchen whites smeared with grease tossed his cigarette butt towards it without notice. Within minutes of his departure, the indentation expanded into a bottomless crater the width of a man’s arm span.

Chunks of asphalt tumbled into the void as bony hands clambered to the surface. Stale earth choked the immortal’s first breath of freedom. Her hacking cough transformed into a bitter cackle. She shielded squinting eyes from the morning sunlight, weak behind heavy clouds, then gasped. Her skin, once captivating with its luminescent hues of purple, bleached to bone-white.

When she adjusted to the light, her new environment replaced the harsh memory of the faces she last saw before powerful magic incarcerated her. The cream-coloured building in front of her, with its rows of windows, wasn’t the same wooden Banqueting Hall of her entrapment. She scanned beyond the small lot and its strange metallic carriages to the houses bound together in rows.

Her instincts told her that this was Camberwell, where her journey to betrayal had started.

Her heart told her how to seek revenge.

The immortal stumbled upon her first step in this unfamiliar world. Her tattered Elizabethan clothes fell away in ragged strips. Sunlight cleaved deep valleys in her emaciated body. Behind her, a solid bottom appeared in the hole, as if protecting itself from her return to its depths.

Her supernatural senses rushed the future that had been denied her into her head. She dropped to her knees, stunned by the barrage of modern sounds: cars on the main road, thick electrical cables humming overhead, the roar of a giant bird with fixed wings in the sky. She didn’t know how long it took her to adapt to the din. One sound in particular caught her attention. At a third floor window, a boy of about seven years of age pressed his hands on the glass. His shallow breaths hammered against her ears.

“Mummy,” the boy didn’t turn away from the immortal as he spoke, “there’s a white lady in the parking lot.” Although the glass muffled what he said, the immortal understood him. She created a psychic connection to the openness of his youthful mind. Through his memory, the immortal perceived Mum sitting on a bed, and Dad in a small room behind a door. Mum stabbed a slender black box at something the boy’s mind called the TV.

“This is London,” his mother said. “It’s full of 71 white people. Come away.”

The fog of the boy’s breathing obscured his view of the immortal. He adjusted his head and squinted through the clearing made by his nose. The immortal wasn’t yet capable of making herself invisible. Through him, she saw herself glaring with hateful, black eyes.

“Uh-uh.” He shook his head, studying her harder. “She doesn’t have a car and there’s something wrong with her eyes.”

He looked at Mum for an answer, but she didn’t reply. Mum found the station that she wanted and settled on the foot of the bed. Flags of white, blue and red decorated her outfit. The immortal recognized the crosses symbolic of St. George and St. Andrew, the patron saints of England and Scotland, combined into one flag the boy knew as the Union Jack.

The boy wiped the window clean with his sleeve for a better view of the immortal. Seeing both his vision and hers in her mind demanded all of her concentration. Long wisps of fragile, grey hair clung to her skull. Unsure of herself, the immortal froze.

“She doesn’t have any clothes.”

“Not now, Willie.” Mum focused on the news announcer detailing the manufacture of the queen’s Jubilee barge. The report cut to a live shot of the royal boat moored on River Thames under less than enthusiastic skies.

“Oh, honey,” said Mum, tilting her head towards the bathroom door as she spoke to Dad, “come see the boat. It’s so beautiful!”

“Of course it’s beautiful,” he replied in a gruff voice, “it’s the ruddy queen’s. D’you expect her to be floating in a dinghy manning her own pole?”

“Hurry up, would you?” Mum tapped her red shoe on the stained carpet. The words Keep Calm and Carry On glittered across the toes. “I want to get a good spot. I wish you’d let us come yesterday. There’s been people camped out since before midnight.” Thousands of people would ignore the bleak day and line the river’s banks for a glimpse of Queen Elizabeth II on her Diamond anniversary during her Jubilee Flotilla.

“The sun’s just up. We’ll have plenty of time to catch the train. The whole city hasn’t jumped into the river. Let a man curl one off in peace.”

The boy faced into the room, oblivious to his parents’ discord and to the presence of the immortal in his mind. “Mum, you should see what she’s doing.”

His mother’s chest heaved with exasperation. “Is she breaking into a car?”

“No.”

“Is she pointing a gun at you?”

“No.”

“Then I don’t care. We’re here to participate in a monumental day for England, not spy on visually impaired people who live near a hotel.”

Her disregard interrupted his fixation on the too-tall, scary-looking woman in the parking lot. The boy turned from the window and said, “But Mum-”

“No ‘buts.’ Come away right now or I’ll ground you for the rest of the weekend.”

“Oh, man!” He pumped his arms in frustration. Mum had already returned to the pageant coverage. When the boy risked one last peek at the parking lot, he was nose to nose with the face of death.

Death was hollow-cheeked and hungry. Malachite green swirls permeated the blackness of her eyes. The immortal clung to the building on the other side of the glass. Stucco crumbled beneath her elongated nails. The boy yelped and backed away, falling over a hastily unpacked suitcase. His chaotic, fear-filled thoughts broke the immortal’s link to him. She no longer cared.

“William Harry Kingsley, really!” his mother scolded over her shoulder. “Stop fooling around!”

“But Mum, she’s there! There, at the window,” he said, pointing, “and she’s naked, and she has black and green eyes, and she’s not really a lady, and I think she’s very, very bad.”

Mum slapped her hand on the bed. “We’re on the third floor. There couldn’t possibly be a woman with a black eye outside the window!” A large flag slipped from her lap when she rose and stomped towards him.

“Not a black eye, Mum. Two eyes. Black and green. She didn’t even have any white part.” The boy stayed on the floor, knees tight to his chest, eyes wide. He averted the nightmare at the window.

The immortal burst into the room at his mother. Shards of glass slashed at their bodies. The boy dashed to the bathroom. He pounded on the door for his father. The immortal paid no heed to the boy and began feeding from his mother.

Desperation made the immortal devour Mum’s life-magic with such speed that, for a moment, it blinded her. When her vision cleared, Dad had emerged, struggling with his trousers. The immortal summoned enough strength to charge into him. He bashed his head into the wall mirror as she bowled him over. The boy ran into the hall, shrieking for help.

When the immortal knelt over the father’s semi-conscious torso, she saw two words on the TV screen in the fragmented mirror.

Queen Elizabeth.

Multiple black and white images of Queen Elizabeth II in her Coronation robes loomed over the immortal. Stunned, the immortal stared at the screen. How was it possible that the queen she had left behind bore offspring, offspring so long-lived? The immortal felt like she had been slapped across the face.

Her vengeance found its target.

She heard the stirring of groggy, bewildered people in the hallway. In moments, their curiosity would bring them into the boy’s room and she would be discovered. The immortal escaped through the window and up the exterior of the building to the safety of the roof.

She noticed seven vertical, red beacons reaching high into the sky. Not seen by humans, they marked the prison in the River Thames created for the hateful creature who had captured her.

The immortal wrung her bony hands together with eager anticipation. “You named me Viper,” she said to a long-dead Queen Elizabeth, “so shall the descendants of your loins know my venom.” If Viper’s immortal enemy had been captured at those red beacons, then Viper could kill her and bring an end to the Tudor bloodline on the same day. “Dual success. A fortuitous start to my new life.”

The immortal traversed the rooftops, eastwards to the Thames and central London, the Union Flag of Britain wrapped around her rejuvenating body

 

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Imperfect

I am not perfect. No-one is. You aren’t either. It shouldn’t come as a shock, therefore, when we put our creative endeavors out into the world and ask the population to give feedback on it, and some of it ain’t so rosy. “You didn’t do X,” or “Why did you do Y?” or even “It’s utterly shit, don’t make people waste their time looking at it.”

Feedback, reviews, critique, writers love and loathe it. I need it. I crave it. I hate it. Gimme gimme gimme reviews but oh god I can’t stand to read them… it’s like some form of self-torture. Are we writers masochists?  It certainly seems that way sometimes.

I joined a local writing group recently. I told them about my books. These are a group of people, the majority of whom haven’t managed to complete an entire novel yet, let alone publish it. I’m somewhat of an anomaly to them. On my second visit to the group, one of the lovely ladies told me she had purchased my book and was reading it, and wondered if I would mind if she recommended it to her reading group. I nearly threw up in her lap, so visceral was my reaction to hearing that suggestion. Yes, oh my good yes, people reading my book? People wanting to talk to me about my book? Awesome… but, shit, they probably won’t like it. Statistically at least one or two of them will probably hate it. Even if they do like it, there will be bits of it they don’t like.

Cue “Why did you do X,Y,Z?” type sentences. Or “I thought Character A would have reacted differently in Chapter 19.” Or “What happened to Character B midway through the book was abhorrent and you are a bad person for even thinking it.”

I’m surprised I didn’t just throw up in her lap to be honest. That chain of thoughts went through my head in about a millisecond and my actual reaction was to just smile and mutter a lot of incoherent “um” and “uhh” type sounds. How eloquent.

I have to remind myself frequently that I am not perfect. My books are not perfect. As it is, another online reading group is currently reading The Machine, 60 or so perfect strangers looking, reading, JUDGING my words, my work. I started reading the book myself having not looked at it for at least six months and I cringe at the first few chapters. They are not well written. The writing improves markedly about a third of the way in, but I accept that some people might not make it to that point. What should I do? Pull the book for a rewrite? Do you think other far more famous and successful authors would do that? Would Stephen King consider rewriting Carrie all these years after? We change so much, so quickly as authors, as artists, as we grow and work. The improvement in my ability is evident within the chapters of my debut novel, never mind the others that have come afterwards. Is it fair to judge my ability as a writer now on something I wrote two years ago when I was far less experienced?

I don’t know. I’m still not perfect. I’m better than I was, but not as good as I will be. I think that’s why it’s so hard to take the negative feedback. The nit-picking comments. The snide remarks. “I’ve improved!” is a pretty poor response. I can’t really expect people to take that into account when reading the book I wrote two years ago.

But what I would ask people to remember is that I’m human. I wrote a book. It’s not perfect. It was never meant to be perfect. The only intent behind the endeavor was to write something that would be enjoyable to read. You can pick it apart, pull it to pieces and put it back together again as much as you want, but all I really want to know is “did you enjoy it?”

If the answer is no, then never mind. Thanks for taking the time to read it anyways. You can’t please them all.

If the answer is yes, then that’s good enough for me.

The critique I will take. I will listen and consider. I may absorb some of it into my future literary endeavors. Then again I might not. After all, nobody is perfect. Not even you.

Why I hate first person

I’ve made no secret of it. I hate first person stories. It might seem harsh, but I’m serious. I have a visceral reaction when I discover that a novel is written in first person. Something happens to me, akin to a heart attack, or that moment when you realise you’re about to puke up and there is nothing you can do to stop it. It is a very rare thing for me to read past the first page of a first person story, or the first sentence. In some cases I won’t make it past the first word.

I’m not saying that first person stories are wrong, or bad, just that I personally (generally) do not like them.

You may think it odd, therefore, that I am currently writing a story in first person.

That’s because it is odd.

I have had to take a step back to analyse why I hate first person narratives, and why I can manage to write in first person without spewing all over the floor every time I put a sentence down (writing is hard enough as it is without having to go through that sort of nonsense). Do I think my writing is better than anyone else’s? Not particularly, arrogance is not the issue here. There is a reason though and I believe I have finally figured it out.

It is very easy to write badly when writing in first person narrative. There is a lot of debate going on lately regarding show vs tell writing, and whilst I could argue that some “tell” writing is acceptable within a story, I feel compelled to put a limit upon its usage. Let’s say somewhere between 1-7% of a story should be written in a tell style. There are always moments where a short, simple “tell” sentence is better placed than a slightly longer “show” version, for dramatic effect, or for simplicity. You might feel that percentage should be higher, but I would argue this is down to preference, and in any case, the higher you go with a percentage of “tell” writing, the worse a story will be.

What does this have to do with my aversion to first person? Everything.

When writing first person it is inevitable that an author will fall into the tell style. And you know what? It’s dull. God is it mind-numbingly, ass-fartingly, brain-meltingly dull to read.

I woke up.

I started my car.

I felt hungry.

 

I DON’T CARE. If a story begins with the word “I”, then I will not read it. The exception to this rule is if you can follow the “I” with something, unique, amazing, and interesting.

I am an eight legged bear from the planet Zongrikon with a pet dwibble named Stanley and I am currently attempting to blow up the planet Earth.

Alright, I’m in. I’m hooked. Give me more. Don’t tell me “I woke up”. Every human being who has ever lived as at some point woken up. Big woop. If you are going to open with a tell sentence then it had better be a fucking amazing tell moment or I won’t bother reading the next sentence.

You might think I’m harsh, but you know what? I work two jobs, and I have a family. My reading time is limited to a half-hour slot before bedtime when I’m able to harness enough brain power to still concentrate, or the half-hour bit during my daughters swimming lesson on a Saturday where I can look away and concentrate on something else, safe in the knowledge that she won’t drown. I don’t have the time or patience to read dull shit from a writer who can’t be bothered to give me interesting stuff from page one, sentence one.

Stories are all about the author’s voice, and it is tough to be unique in the literary world. It’s even tougher to pull it off in first person. But it’s not impossible provided you put a little more thought into the work.

I have this reaction every time I write an “I” sentence in my book. It makes me wanna hurl, which is probably a good thing, because it’s forcing me to do better. If only more authors suffered from this odd affliction, there would be a lot more well-written first person stories in the world.

In any case, if you like to write first person, then go ahead. I won’t stop you. As a new member of the First Person Perspective Club, I shouldn’t be so judgemental I suppose.

But if you’re going to write, at least have the decency to write to the best of your ability and try not to litter your manuscript with throw away “I” sentences.

 

 

 

p.s. I realise the irony in the fact that this blog post is in first person, so no need to point it out… however, that’s kinda the point of blogs, so … yeah.