Robert C. Day's Blog, page 14
March 10, 2017
To Pee or Not to Pee
This is a test to see how many words I can write without having to break off and go for a pee.
I don’t have anything burning that I want to say but I do have a burning desire to do something else instead.
Did you know (you don’t – how could you?) that I’ve never ever peed in a bottle in my life. Ever. And I don’t intend to start now.
Actually, as I get flowing (ooo – bad choice of words) into this exercise (of my pee-holding-back muscles) I realise that when I distract myself by writing somet...
March 9, 2017
My Writing Retreat
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Some of you may be aware that I went on a Writing Retreat in Wales this week and a subset of those (hi, Dee) asked me to write about it, and so this is me doing that.
On Saturday I boarded a train bound for new horizons, with joy in my heart and writerly optimism bubbling out of my every pore. I was going on my first ever Writing Retreat and it was to last five days and nights in (mostly rainy) Wales.
On Monday I boarded another train bound for home with a flea in my ear and a lot to think a...
March 8, 2017
More Breaking News
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(Also kinda connected to Breathe)
Sheena was just shallow enough to love listening to BBC Radio One and just complex enough to wonder whether the songs were not a little trite. She was half enjoying the pre-orgasmic sounds of Selena Gomez claiming that she could not keep her hands to herself when someone knocked on the door.
Damn – not another bloody salesman with a sense of humour. Fixing ‘Door to Door Sales – Please Don’t Ring’ seemed only to goad them to use their knuckles instead – presu...
March 7, 2017
Breaking News
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(Kinda connected to Breathe)
Sheena was just shallow enough to love listening to BBC Radio One and just complex enough to wonder whether the songs were not a little trite. She was half enjoying the pre-orgasmic sounds of Selena Gomez claiming that she could not keep her hands to herself when the phone rang.
Odd that someone should be calling her in the day. She almost never got calls then. Even the salespeople and survey-mongers and scammers seemed to have got to message that she was not int...
March 5, 2017
A Feeling
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A shiver
A shrinking
A taking within
A crack of gone light
A withdrawal of my sight
A sleeping of sound underground
A retreat into darkness
A suffering of silence
A down and never
A turning off
A murmur
A gone.
Psychic Distance
Three examples of closing in on the character’s inner voice:
On 13 November 2015, a woman boarded a plane. She was looking forward to her holiday in Spain. In fact, she was deeply in love with Manuel. His hands on her body – she blushed to remember. Movement – slippery slick, gasping. And the heat … oh God, the heat! First thing in the morning, on his way to work, a man walked under a ladder. When he reached the house he was going to paint he was glad to put it down. He’d carried that lad...Making It About Memory
I must go to the supermarket. I must stride the aisles in hunter mode. Olympian grace.
Shoulder the bag of rice. Hook the nine-pack of loo-roll over the trolley, under the handle. It knocks against my knees. No mind.
Prey do not scatter as the squeaky wheel betrays me again and again. They are insensate of me. Corn without ears. Spuds without eyes. Legs of lamb that will never again frolic in the fields. Cattle tamed of every low.
Yet I strut my way on towards the checkout. I make ready the p...
March 3, 2017
Not Telling
“Yeah, no – I can’t tell you, Larry – it’d hurt too much, wun’t it!”
Gappy’s catarrh edged voice cut through the tannoy like a gutting blade as they hurried from a night sky filled with more air than water, and down the ramp into Edinburgh Waverley. They made an odd pair – Larry’s bulk seeming to eclipse the barely wrapped bones of Gappy’s hunched figure slinking along beside him.
“Was that our train?”
“Dunno, Larry, I was talking weren’t I!” He glanced in the larger man’s direction, grimaci...
The Child in Time – riffing
I guess this is what fan-fiction is like.
(continues from McEwan, I. (1990 [1987]) The Child in Time, London, Rosenfeld, J.E, pp. 15–19 in which three year old Kate has just gone missing from the supermarket where she and her dad were shopping)
They followed him into a low, cramped room in which two aisles stretched away into semi-darkness. Tins and boxes were piled untidily into racks along the sides, and down the centre, suspended from meat-hooks, were giant carcasses. The group divided int...
March 2, 2017
Breathe – scene by scene
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I wrote a story that I’m now calling Breathe. It’s serialised over these five parts:
Exciting New Story (p1)
Exciting New Story (p2)
Exciting New Story (p3)
Exciting New Story (p4)
Exciting New Story (p5)
I’m going to rewrite this to take out the spoilers at the beginning and tell the story from Sheena’s point of view, but before I do that, I’m going to break the story down scene-by-scene to see how it flows:
Scene One
The partially omniscient (only has access to Sheena’s thoughts) narrator...
