Tim McGiven's Blog, page 61

Excerpt from a new book

Frank sat atop a rusted Massey Ferguson tractor. It chugged along in a parched field, towing a hay baler which spat out prickly cubes. The morning sun painted shadows on the Rangitoto ranges behind him. Down the race, towards the Waipa River, he spotted a dust cloud approaching. Frank took a deep drag from his cigarette, before taking the shuddering behemoth out of gear and dragging back the hand brake.

“Bugger,” he said, wiping the sweat from his eyes.

Stumping out his cigarette he dismounted and took a seat on a bale. His eyes were fixed on the approaching cloud, from which had materialized a convoy of four-by-fours.

“Bugger, bugger, bugger,” he mumbled.

Frank was a man accustomed to life’s little set-backs. Just one glance at his face and you could see the struggles etched across his leathery skin. His nose was crooked, never having been set correctly after a scuffle over a gun, his eyes owned wrinkles beyond his years, and the sinews on his arms were almost abstract art. He wore nothing but a pair of loose shorts, work-boots, and a singlet tied about his head to protect his bald patch from the sun. Frank never once contemplated running as the markings of the police cars grew more visible. He simply sat and waited, his eyes sweeping the Rangitotos, enjoying every valley and peak. He had roamed the ranges as a kid, building huts, tracking pigs, climbing trees- he shivered at the thought of the logging operations tearing scars across the ranges.

“The hell are you doing Frank?”

Frank was flanked by four-by-fours, police officers were stepping out and staring at their surroundings in stupefied awe.

“The hell Frank, what are you doing?”

Frank turned to the speaker, “How ya doing Dave?”

Dave was a thick-set officer with a wild beard. He looked at Frank in utter bewilderment and then said, “You know you’re gonna have to go back to jail now?”

Frank shrugged, “Ain’t got enough criminals to lock up so you gotta go after the farmers, aye Dave?”

Dave stepped back and gestured around him, “I’ve heard of the term pot farmer, Frank, but this is a bit extreme.”

As far as the eye could see, from the Waipa River to the base of the Rangitotos, hundreds of small bales dotted the pastures. Frank had been a busy man.

Dirty Blood Music Video

Wildfire (New Song)

Was going for an ambient feel for this track. It’s actually a remake of an old track which I thought didn’t deserve to be left unfinished.

The Tailor

If I could reanimate bodies

I would cross-stitch your skin

With my crooked life line (it is all I can spare)

I would bind your frayed edges with thread-bare excuses

Lay beside you

Mend the broken bones

Frantically patch the cracks

Of bodies once bound

By wire

Now perilous

Tearing at the seams

I would unravel

Peel back my skin

Shed the tattered remnants of a life governed by excuses and

Trivialities

By distance

Because you deserve more

Than me

Grandad

I’ve only ever seen one photo of you

You’re in a parched field

Willows in the background

So I assume you’re by a river

You’ve reigned in your trotter

Brown horse with blinders

Cart looks as if it’s made of driftwood

You’re grimacing because the sun is too bright

Flint faced

Like you disapprove of all the sepia

I can tell you have a temper

You were a bit of a bastard

But in a good way

 

From what little I gather of you:

You were a man on the rack

Trying to hold your family together

Trying not to get torn in two

You flew Lancasters over Crete and Sicily

And maybe Africa

You were an accountant

A dairy farmer

Who hated cows

You loved horses

The races

Family

 

 

Little Man

Click here to download the pdf version of the story

I happened upon this story while browsing my computer. I’d completely forgotten I’d written it. It’s a depressing little piece, full of nihilism and moral relativism. Which is odd. I wrote it while I was still at school, possibly in sixth form. I don’t remember being so depressing at that age. It seems out of character for my 16 year old self to write. I was a pretty cheerful teenager.

But I do remember that I went through a period of my life where everything I wrote was depressing. In the original draft of The Barrier the main character dies, just like in the original draft of The Grey Man he never escapes the rest home. To me, good writing was tragedy. But this only showed my lack of life experience. I had never encountered true tragedy in life, I was sheltered, I had it good. But when shit hit the fan, I changed and the way I wrote stories changed.

Stories laced with tragedy and neglecting hope became tasteless. I started to realize that they were unfinished. A story doesn’t need a happy ending but it needs hope. Real life people aren’t platonic nihilists who are content with a portrait painted entirely black. We want colour. To see the contours of the face. What’s the point in a tragic story with no resolution? We can just turn on the news for that. That’s reality. Thousand of lives are snuffed out in natural disasters with no visible cause and no hope. The beauty of writing is that it can approach tragedy in such a way that it infuses it with hope. Which in my opinion, is the best kind of writing.

Enough rambling. Thank you for reading.

Cheers

Tim

Paul Emsley, Michael Simpson, Oil on board, 2007

Now it’s clinging to his kidney

And your mind is a chemical fire

Action potentials thumping over synaptic clefts

Havoc is a hitchhiker

Flagging down endorphins, dopamines, epinephrines

 

Genetic betrayal

A miscalibration of mitosis

The ghost in the machine

Has caused a catastrophic system failure

 

You’re scared

 

So you try to believe

That fear is a formula

Letters and numbers

Just some monkey’s response to being hunted

 

You start to think

That questions of religion,

Like are you a believer or an athiest?

Depend on whether you blame God

Or nature

 

So wring your hands

Child

Till your knuckles are white

Grasp, unclasp, grasp

Do this all night

It will help

 

Feel your skin slither

The puritan thoughts of a kid

Now more glacial and more bitter

Than the rotten ice

Lining the freezer door of your fridge

 

You step back into an egocentric little bubble

Peering out at the disfigurement

Shit only happens to those around you

While you sit, oblivious

Wishing you didn’t have to wear glasses

And that more people would like your Facebook statuses

 

When he awakes

You’re still asleep

Trapped

In a coma of self-induced apathy

 

He can barely stand

But he pulls you to your feet

He can barely speak

But without him you’d still be on your knees

 

Dirty Blood

Dirty Blood is a party track and nothing like the acoustic stuff I usually do. That’s why I was contemplating starting a solo project called Villainy Kid and creating a lot more material like Dirty Blood. I find myself becoming more and more drawn to electronic music. Especially being a solo songwriter with no interest in performing my songs (writer first, musician second). The genre is just more free. You can just sit down and fiddle with some effects until you create something catchy. It is therapeutic and recluse. Just like writing prose. So have a listen and I think the SoundCloud link has a free download as well.

Enough rambling. Thank you for reading.

Cheers

Tim

I Do Not Understand Poetry

Get worked up, get angry

Spit the words

Hurricane force verbs

Verses of the worst

Night of your life

 

Show don’t tell

Throw your heart at the page

And trade in your secrets

For a festering bouquet of insecurities

 

Gullible, malleable, (I am)

Popping bubbles like a boss

I do not understand poetry

Give me another try

 

Drowning in a teacup?

That’s nothing

I can drown in words

Dragged under by allegory

Just vague enough to be artistic

One blink, now you missed it

 

Just let your mind wander

Step back from sanity, over the edge

It is fine, calm down, you will not see the earth rising

Though you might desire, perhaps even try to acquire, that gagged throat sensation of lightness (generally experienced by the flightless (though not necessarily by those who know just what flight is)), your last seconds will be violent, possibly because you’re a nihilist, much too realistic for dying and other trivial wastes of time

Pardon me

Sometimes I try so hard to create rhythm

That I forget to leave spaces to breathe in

 

Inhale

Exhale

Continue

 

Do you ever feel like you are just grasping in the dark?

Concocting phrases with whatever images are left in the pantry

Stir through some synonym till it tastes vaguely edible

Maybe even a pun

Then let it simmer

Balance every flavour just right and it might

Just might

 

Make you shiver

 

I think it is poetry

So long as you use the word ocean

Or cadence

Or lilting

Preferably all three

 

The lilting cadence of the ocean

Pretentiously simple

When I use it

Simply pretentious

When I read it

 

Don’t start me on structure

Order, sequence, diction, directives

I can assure you that my structural integrity

Is far more chaotic than the arrangement of my words could ever be

 

Sometimes I like to sit in contradictions

Squatting in a foxhole of paradox

Neither of us understand

But they are my words

Mine

They mean something to me

 

Whatever that might be

I wrote this poem for a creative writing exercise. The objective was to write an Ars Poetica style poem instructing people how to write poetry. However, I don’t believe anyone knows the formula of how to write poetry. Creativity cannot be defined.

Cheers for reading

Tim

P.s. The featured photo is of me at Great Barrier Island, the most beautiful place in the world.

Writing Sleepwalkers

To purchase a Kindle copy of Sleepwalkers or to read a free sample click here

I started writing Sleepwalkers when I was 17. I’d already attempted another book which withered and died due to an inexplicably complicated plot and a fourteenth century Spanish setting (I really want to finish it one day).

Sleepwalkers was my attempt at a different approach to the generic coming of age YA novel. I thought it would be easy. I am a young adult, so why shouldn’t I write young adult fiction? It took me two years to finish the book, distracted as I was by being a teenager and having a social life. In truth, it probably only took me a few months to finish the novel, it was all the fiddling and editing that made it take so long to complete.

Plot holes requiring dramatic rewrites, lack of characterization, clichés, more plot holes- I think every aspiring novelist can relate to this cycle. When you change one thing, the shock waves propagate throughout the entire novel. And though it could be frustrating at times, I loved writing Sleepwalkers. I still love reading it. Not just for the story but for the snapshot of my seventeen year-old self it hides between the lines. That is one of the reasons I love writing. Every piece of poetry or prose is a time-capsule. I find it fascinating to look back at the kid I was (I’m only 21 so I guess I could still be considered a kid) and see how much separates us.

I designed the cover myself (you can probably tell) and I never realized that silhouettes could be so difficult to draw. When you’re trying to incorporate dynamic light with blank flat objects the result can be incohesive. In the end I decided to add shading to bring a bit more depth to the image and personally I think it worked quite well for a D.I.Y. job.

All in all, writing Sleepwalkers was a journey I am glad to have accomplished. It has gotten me excited for my future works and has taught me many lessons about the epic task of completing a novel (even if it was only 50 000 words). My advice to any other aspiring authors is finish at least one book. I know it is so easy to have half a dozen pieces of work on the go which never get finished. Completing a sizable work is a confidence booster.

Enough rambling. Thank you for reading.

Cheers

Tim