Those Immortal Words - The End!

It's got to be, for me, one of the strangest feelings I've ever felt. To actually write those immortal words down on a page and lift your fingers from the keys, knowing that you belong to the club of countless others who have done the same thing through the ages.

It's something I have felt many times now, but it never seems to dwaine. To write 'The End'

To see a story that popped into my head a couple of years ago, has festered and brewed in there for so long, has finally taken shape and moved from the neural patterns of the mind, and into the physical world is something quite overwhelming.

This evening, I came home from work with the last bit of the puzzle in my mind, and before even kicking off my shoes I was tapping away. An hour later and not only the last bit of the puzzle, but the last moment in the story was complete. Realising that I didn't even have any food in the house to, if not celebrate with, stave off the hunger pangs, I went out to Sainburys. Walking around other shoppers, I tried to find something to pop into my microwave, I really didn't know whether I wanted to jump in the air for joy or stand in the middle of the place and cry: luckily I didn't do either!

Every day, there must be creative people all over the World who have finished a project that's been ongoing for months or even years. I know writers who take part in NanoWriMo who have finished their books and have had days like this - today though, is my day! The silly thing is, it's not actually finished, now comes the hard part of editing, re-editing, re-writing, editing again and again until I'm totally sick of the story - but for now I'll enjoy the moment. I haven't got anyone here to celebrate with, so instead I'll eat my dinner, press the print button and have a well earned early night!

Aylesbury and Salisbury Services

A busy few days for me last week. Monday I travelled up to Aylesbury Traincare Depot to do a service on one of our oil/water separators, it was sooooo hot and definitely the worst timing to do such a job.

I drove up in the van, which in itself was more like an oven than a mode of transport; however, my mistake was to stop at Taunton services for a breather, and a cold drink. Costa up there does some amazing coolers for when the heat is getting to me, but the queue was so long that it was apparent that I would lose half an hour plus just waiting, so decided to skip the drink. When I got back into the van, the sun had been hitting it so much that the seats burned and the steering wheel was almost too hot to touch, resulting in me putting on some riggers gloves to drive away until it had cooled down somewhat.

I don't remember ever going to Aylesbury before, but it was quite a nice place and the Premier Inn I stayed at was well above average. Martin join the party late that night after going to Wyfla Power Station before meeting me near where the service was to take place.

Trying to work on the Tuesday, even with the lightest of overalls and Personal Protective Equipment on was a nightmare, and I'm sure I was close to the record for most sweatiest workman ever! I did get laughed at when I emptied out the media baskets that were completely caked in oil, and I ended up with instead of white and orange (hi-vis), a more black, slimey and oil covered getup - all up my arms, face, head... everywhere!

Anyways, we had booked for the job to take two days but somehow managed to do it in one day, even after feeling as though I was going to pass out from the heat a couple of times while down in the oil sump sorting out their suction pipes.

Wednesday was used in the hotel just getting over heatstroke before I made my way down to Salisbury to spend the rest of the day in the new room with two fans on full while I laid on the bed recovering.

By the time we got to Salisbury Train Care Depot at 9am on Thursday, the people there had already taken the lids off the separator and sucked out most of the oil layer from the top of it, so the job for us was a lot easier and quicker than we expected. In fact by midday we had finished the cleanup and were refilling the separator with clean water from a fire hydrant. Martin and I went into town, which is quite a quant place, to get a drink and by the time we came back an hour later the separator was ready for testing. Just a couple of hours later and I was back on my way home.

Friday was spent cleaning up, go knows how much oil from the two depots we managed to bring back with us, and cleaning my new work boots involved being on my hands and knees while scrubbing them in a bucket... so much for their blue and grey colour, they will always be a permanent oily/black from now on. Hey-ho!

Well now back I won't be complaining about the weather any more... it's glorious! We have put off a couple of other services though because it's really far too hot to try and do them in this weather.

My cousin Emma... Long time, no see

Well I've just had a couple of wonderful hours catching up with my cousin Emma. She has come down to St Agnes with her husband Malcolm (sorry for not recognising you straight away) for her son Joshua's rugby tour. Emma looked fabulous and hasn't changed a dot since I last saw her getting close to eight years ago, Malcolm was on top form and Joshua has grown right up.

It's sad to think that I spent so much time with my cousins Sally, Emma and Mary when we were kids, and now we let many years pass us by before seeing each other now that we're adults... a cycle I would love to change from now on. I have been invited up to theirs for dinner next time I'm passing by Putney, and will definitely take them up on their offer.

We chatted about my Nana (where we all stayed for sleepovers god knows how many times), people that we've never spoken about before on my family tree, and how the world has rotated in different ways through different lives... I really could have carried on chatting for hours!

It was lovely seeing you again Emma, I had a lovely evening, lots of laughs. Have a great day tomorrow and let's catch up some more soon x

How do I come up with new stories?

I am often asked how I come up with new stories and how I think of the ideas that I do; I would guess all writer’s are asked the same questions many times. In fact I have myself wondered how certain authors have come up with ideas that I would never have considered. On the other end of the scale, there are stories like William P. Kennedy’s Toy Soldiers, a story that I could kick myself for not coming up with myself, even though I hadn’t started writing when he jotted that one down! As with all budding writer’s, there will be people around that will always come up with a great idea before yours has sprung into your brain, or worse that you find after you’ve written something, that it’s similar to.

It is even true that my first novel ‘Something Brand New’ bares a resemblance to the first J K Rowlings Harry Potter novel. When I wrote it I had not even heard of Harry Potter, let alone read it. Don’t get me wrong there are no wizards, no flying games or castles in my manuscript, but there is a young ten year old soul looking for his future parents in a world only a breath away from our own. Combined with that is a style, not too dissimilar from the one she uses, I will confess. Actually when rewriting the novel some ten years later, there was one paragraph that sounded so similar to her words I decided to completely rewrite it.

I have also found this Christmas just gone that there is a story about Santa crashing his sleigh. For those of my readers who have seen the film ‘The Santa Incident’, in my opinion a rather poor effort in comparison to some great festive movies, there could be an idea that one of us writers had got the idea from the other. Now I am unpublished and only came up with my first idea for ‘The Late Christmas’ in 2006 so the writer of that couldn’t have got his idea from me, and yet the film I watched a couple of months ago couldn’t be more different, and yet somehow similar.

Luckily, my baby, who is right now being rewritten for the umpteenth time ‘Mother Nature’, doesn’t as yet have anything that I can compare it to. I think the day that I find something similar will be a sad one for me.

Anyways, what was I saying? Oh yes, as some of you know I am a fan of some of Stephen King’s work, most notably The Stand. Mr. King has said in public that it take two totally separate ideas brought together to make a good story. It sounds a strange thing to say, but the more I thought about it, the more that he makes quite a bit of sense. Lets take the above story Toy Soldiers as an example. Basically the story revolves around an all boys school for troubled teenagers – there’s a story right there that many of us could write, but then the author added a completely unrelated story into the mix. While we learnt the characters and the rules of how the school was run, another story about a terrorist group who are trying to force the release of the founder-member, who is incarcerated. The terrorists make their way to the school and take the pupils hostage as a lever to getting their member freed. This is a classic example of how two separate ideas can indeed be bonded together to make one quite enjoyable read.

When Stephen King was asked how he writes a book, he came back with ‘One word at a time.’ This of course is exactly how you actually write a book, but certainly this was not what the person asking the query was meaning. In literal terms, an author will start with a blank sheet of paper, or a blank document on a computer, and start typing. However, it is entirely formulary, with the author working from models or ideas in his mind, the idea of writing one word at a time before coming up with the next word is ludicrous. Moreover, when I go over what I have written on a first draft, I will often find that I have missed out words, phrases or sometimes even half a sentence because I am desperate to get the words down in the way I have them in my mind as quickly as possible, before the synaptic patterns change or completely degrade.

However, let’s go back to Stephen’s ‘One word at a time’ because there is some truth in that, although not for a first, second or even third draft of a manuscript, but for the editing. When editing a piece of work, every word in their singularity as well as within the context of the sentence is looked at very carefully. One slight change of a word can completely change the meaning of the sentence, and placing that same word in a different place within the sentence can not only do the same, but can enhance even the shortest of notations.

In the past couple of weeks I have come up with two fairly good ideas, which if I had more time I would like to pursue. Both these ideas came to me during that half awake, half asleep state before dozing off for the night, and both times I woke up and started writing my ideas down – which tends to mess up my sleep patterns quite well. As it happens, for both of these possible stories, I have a completely different idea that I’ve already started to merge into the first ideas, one at the very end of a story, the other as a parallel plot.

Now don’t ask me how I came up with these ideas because I really couldn’t tell you, they just popped up in my head. Also, when thinking about them I suddenly popped up and thought of a completely different story that could be squished into them… maybe it’s just an active imagination, that’s all I can put it down to. Now there are times that other things around me have influenced my train of thought about stories. For instance, I had on the back-burner a few years ago the idea of Santa crashing his Sleigh, as I’ve already said, but it was only when I was listening to a track from Moby did it come alive.

It was the day I was moving into the Farm down on the Lizard. I had asked for a few people to help with the move, and sprucing up the place so that it was liveable. We were all in different rooms painting everything that didn’t move, and many of us that were moving, if truth be told! In the background I had my jukebox on random and ‘Everlovin’ by Moby came on. I was happily painting away and in my mind I imagined large American eighteen wheeled trucks in a convoy, rolling across the American desert… listen to it and I bet you’ll know why I had that image. Well then I added to the images in my mind, the trucks filled to the brim of Christmas presents, then a large teddy bear symbol on the front of each truck, then helicopters with the same symbol on them flying above the trucks with large sacks dangling from them. Lastly, I had crowds of people cheering as each of the thousand trucks passed them because their presents were being distributed to all the homes… all within one sitting of the Moby track. The Late Christmas, the story I had on the backburner for three years previous to that day had taken a completely different route all within about a foot square of paint… It was within the month that I started to write the full manuscript, and if I don’t say so myself, it turned out cherry :)

So lets recap on my ideas and how I get them down. Often I will come up with an idea and that idea will sit on the backburner for a while; maybe get written down as notes or on a corkboard. When another idea comes up that can be linked into it, I will add it to the first. Only then will it start to show it’s colours and whether there is something to continue with. At that point I will often write a chapter or two, quickly and in draft to see whether I can put down on paper in a way that resembles what I have in my mind; not one word at a time but in a flurry of finger presses on the keyboard, or scribblings on paper that are hardly legible. If I find there is something meaty in the idea then I consider writing a full manuscript… and that is about it.

I have often been told that I’m eccentric and that my mind works in mysterious ways, but I can’t help that. I’m sure if you ask other writers how they come up with their ideas, they will give you a different story, but that’s what makes us all unique. Happy writing all of you.

Better late than never!

My apologies to everybody who has been waiting patiently for me to write my post, but it has been a very hectic couple of months... I can hardly believe that it's the end of February already! Basically, work has taken over recently, so much so that I've even found that a lot of my weekends are now getting clogged up with it. However I see that while I've been gone the world has still moved on around me. Today was the last day of the Pope's duties before another one is elected, we've had the horse-meat scandal, snow and of course close encounters with asteroids (or if in Russia, even closer!) We've had the passing of Mr. Good Life himself, the Oscars and even more austerity... some things change, some never do.

It hasn't been all bad though, I did take a trip up to Scotland to see one of our customers. I drove up to Manchester in the van, and then Martin and I carried on the journey in his hire car. We drove through the snow, which was coming down quite heavily at the time, but I was more concerned with how pretty everything looked than concerned we might get snowed in - we didn't!

On the journey in the van I dictated a chapter of one of my books, just to see if I could act out the scenes while driving, rather than listening to the radio, which is usually my only company. It was a fifteen hour journey in the van, and I dictated over 8,000 words - I'll have to try that during NanoWriMo! Talking of writing, I did go to the Creative Writing Group again at Waterstones. It was held on Valentines evening, so you can imagine what we all had to write about!

I have started to write a few things for this blog, which I haven't finished yet, so there really is more to come soon... I think on one of them I get on my soapbox a bit, but then if these posts were boring then you wouldn't be reading them :)

Well, I am working for some of this weekend and I've got a get-together with a load of other nerds (sorry, writers) on Saturday, but will make a concerted effort to add to this - I just wanted to say that I haven't forgotten you lot.

Oh yes, just before I go... As with many of you, I have felt over the past few weeks that I would freeze in this cold weather; however, I have just heard that Sir Ranulph Fiennes (one of my heroes) has just been evacuated from his latest expedition because of frostbite... Apparently, he just removed one of his gloves to adjust a strap on his ski binding, and ended up with four poorly fingers! And we complain about the cold? I think I'm going to have to harden up.

Can I just say in here that I wish him and his fingers well, and a damn good try Ranulph - Get well soon.

Okay that's it for now, speak to you soon.

Waterstones Creative Writing Group

I went to a new creative writing group that was held in Truro's Waterstones store last night.

I didn't know what to expect, although I was sure there would be a few people that were part of the NanoWriMo competition there, and I was right. It was great to see some of the old faces again, and even better to see that they were a lot more relaxed than during the relentless task of writing 50,000 words each!

The last time I went to a writing group, it was one held in Helston Library a few years ago. It was at the time when I had first come up with the idea of my Mother Nature story. I wanted my new story to have a Hollywood kind of feel to it, but as my luck would have it, I was set upon by an old Pagan who wanted to try and change my mind in the way I was going to write it - needless to say she didn't have any influence and I only went to that group a couple of times.

Sarah, the ML for the NanoWriMo and one other ran the group last night. It was good fun, they gave us silly tasks, like we've got ten minutes to write something about 'Inspiration' and then read it out to the rest of the class. There was a good sixteen people there and a couple I'm looking forward to chatting to if I go again.

I'm not totally sure if it's my cup of tea. I spend hours thinking of what I am going to write and when it gets put down, it'll get edited, rewritten, edited again, re-read and spell checked, then given to someone else to read, re-edit depending on what they say, then think damn-it I'm bored with this story and file it.

To think up something in a couple of seconds and then write something that's good enough to read out aloud is a different matter. I held my own, and even got a few giggles from the things I wrote, but all the time I was thinking that I'm wasting valuable writing time at home - you can tell I live in the middle of no-where and don't socialise much :)

To top it off they gave me homework! I've never been one for doing homework, my teachers at school never got any out of me when they told me I had to do it.

Sarah cleverly said that no-one was forcing me to do homework and I didn't have to do it if I didn't want to... bugger, now I have to do it. Actually, I stayed up last night after getting home and did it then!

I think it's quite nice to see faces, and great for people who are either unsure about their writing or need that push to actually put that book on to paper that they've always wanted to write - but I'm not really in either of those groups any more... we'll see in a month when the next one is planned, I'll keep you posted.

Fish!

Well, my fish tank has had it's weekly clean and I've decided to add a couple of additions to it - so now you'll see theres some more Zebra Danios and Tetras. I'm pleased as punch and have already wasted an hour this morning watching them all swimming about :)