Wrap it in Words

Wrap it in Words: Meat

Sun, 12 May 2013 13:16:10 +0100

Dying is easy. I practice it, sometimes. Do you want to try? Think. Find your centre. You have to separate the mind from the meat. Ever hear of Descartes? I read about him once, all about the mind controlling the body and the body controlling the mind. He got it right but didn’t even realise what he’d got. If you do it right, you can be a bundle of pure thought, controlling a slab of meat. But it takes practice.

I don’t mean any of that breathe-in-breathe-out-find-inner-peace stuff. Me mam tried that for a while; went to classes in with the French lady in 44. She’d come home and tell me about downward dog and leaping lion and some other shite. Sounded like an orgy to me, but I didn’t tell her that. It made her happy for a while, and isn’t that what matters. She stopped going when her back gave out, but she still tried to keep it up at home. I’d find her frozen in some stupid pose in the kitchen, arms stretched out and legs splayed like a new-born foal. And then one day I came back an hour later and she was back in her usual one, curled up in a ball under the table, shivering. Took me longer than usual to coax her out that time, but I put her in the shower for an hour or so with a bottle of wine and she seemed okay after.

But yeah, dying. I’ve practiced it loads of times. It happened a few times by accident before I learned to control it. The first time was at the beach when I went out too far, dived under and got confused about which way was up. I panicked and tried to swim to the surface, but it turned out it was the ground. Hit my head bad off some rocks, bit down on my tongue and passed out. I was seven when I died that time. I think that was the first time, the first time my meat died but my mind said no. There could have been other times, but I can’t remember so good before that.

Then there was the time when I bet myself that I could beat the trains coming out of the tunnel near the canal. I’d leave it till the last moment and duck across the tracks. Their horns where the best part, and the horrified glimpse of the driver I’d get. I always beat them. Except one time, I ran too fast and couldn’t stop and I fell off the wall and broke my back over a railing. I looked like a half open book, except backwards; with the leather spine bent the wrong way.

Now I can control it. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve met my end, and come back. What people don’t get is that the meat can be cut, bruised, can fall away and rot, but the mind is the one that chooses to let go.

Mam tries it sometimes. But she just can’t. She can’t cut that tiny thread of her-ness that keeps her anchored to her body. She acts like she wants to die, like she wants it all to end, but that little bit of her always gulps a last breath, sicks up the poison.

But I can do it whenever I want. I just think in, and find the places that matter. Lungs, heart, brain. The liver is another good one. And the spleen. They get ignored sometimes, but they can do the trick as easy as the others. The hardest one is the muscles. Did you know that every muscle has the strength to crush bone, to pulverise it, if the brain lets them off their leash?

But most people can’t do it. It’s like that time Mister Gregory got his fingers caught in the hinge of the swinging metal door. I was there, I saw the tendons on his arm stick up and his face turn pale. He pulled and he pulled as he howled, pulled away from the door, closing the vice and shattering three fingers. His brain knew what to do – if he’d stood still and stepped towards the pain, he would have got them out. But he listened to the meat and not the mind, and now he can’t use his hand so good. Practice, though, and you’ll get it.

Here. Let me show you. Look at your hands. Are the trembling? That’s good, that’s good. Now. Push down hard on the table for a few long seconds. A few more. See they way they rise up, all by themselves? That’s the idea. But you gotta do that with your whole body. Try it. Push down with every part of you, push and push and push with every tiny bone, every single cell, every lonesome hair on your body. Basically, you have to trawl through the brain, try and find that bunch of nerves that holds you together and convince them that it’s okay, they can take a break and go out for a smoke. The hard part is to make it all happen at once, one giant convulsion where every single muscle and organ cramps violently and shatters the bone it was meant to protect. There’s not much of you left after that one. Just a pinky bag of flesh and tendons and bile and organs.

But that’s not really the hard part. The hard part is putting it back together. I might teach you about that sometime.

I…..just

Thu, 02 May 2013 00:16:23 +0100

I get confused, sometimes. My eyes unfocus and all I can see are blocks of colour. My bed, the walls, the passing cars - they all break down into shapes that grind together to create a whole. Things are clearer, then, but more obscured.

Sometimes, I….

I just get confused.

It’s hard, hard to put the pieces back together. My brain used to do it for me, but now I have to gather them up, shard by shard, and glue them back with sticky lines of effort. They cut me, sometimes.

Sharp. Yes… Yes.

And why, why, why are you here, with your sharp questions that poke and tear open every crevice of me; every inch, every pore? Do you rape me with your words? Do you defile me with your explorations, do you torment me with your lies? Do you? Do….?

Do, or do not. I always thought that was stupid. There’s always a middle ground. You can push the boulder all the way up the mountain, but if you don’t shove it that final distance over the cliff, then the job isn’t done? No. It’s all about the doing. I’ve always been doing.

Doing the wrong thing, the right thing, the best thing, the worst thing, the every thing. I just want to rest, and stop the doing. But it keeps happening.

My body is a machine; it clicks and whirrs at me, beeping in protest, or maybe in satisfaction. I cant understand its messages. I let it get on with it, most of the time. When they fill me with acids and posions and morphines it protests, at first. But it succumbs to their warmth. It always does. I do.

I…. just get confused, sometimes.

Meat

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:22:41 +0100

But that’s not really the hard part. The hard part is putting it back together. I might teach you about that sometime.

Figure in a Landscape

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 22:36:16 +0100

Figure in a Landscape - Arthur Armstrong

Bones of the dead things bleached in the sun.

Some dawn, some monstrous scorching dawn an age ago, an instant ago, tore into the sky and forced the land and sky apart. A knife eased into the horizon, eviscerating, separating; oh agony.

A step forward, another, another, will reveal the yawning gap. The world ends at the edges. Ahead, the sky and land part company - oh I know, I know, oh - recoiling away from each other in disgust, into infinity. Logic’s anchor has dragged; corners flap loose here, in this place, in this time.

That dawn, the earth cracked and shivered, oh, cracked and shivered, and the abyss opened with a sigh. Dust and seas and souls alike swept down, down, down, caught in the flood of their own passing, until that was left was bones. Colour fled soon after, draining out in a shimmering swan song through the hole in the bottom of the world.

The long day began. It reigns still.

Dusk will come, or it will not come. No matter, no matter

I stand sentinel.

Sometimes

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:08:17 +0100

Sometimes, I want to put my fist through a window, stick my head out and shriek until I vomit my voicebox out and it dangles from my mouth, a bloody mess of smothered screams.

Sometimes, I feel like a rubber band, vibrating to the tune of others around me, twanging in time with their pain and joy and lives.

Sometimes, my hands shake, and shake, and shake, and my face twitches like a swarm of insects has hatched under my skin and they are crawling, burrrowing down, trying to find a way out.

Sometimes, I want to run into walls, bounce off them and run at them again, and again, and again.

Sometimes, I get so angry that I punch things, people, myself, but it doesn’t help.

Sometimes, I am so full of energy that I want to claw my own skin off, shred myself down to the bone, so the fire can bleed out, and I can rest.

I just want to rest

Carnivores

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 16:06:00 +0100

I am not sure if I can remember what it tastes like, just the texture, the flesh separating into strands and getting stuck in my teeth for days afterwards. I would always ask for mine well done, charred to a crisp. I couldn’t bear to see any hint of pink, any hint that this chunk of meat was once alive and running around somewhere. Everyone thought I was strange when I decided to stop, they couldn’t understand why I would give up something so delicious, so juicy, so necessary to a strong and healthy body. But I had made my decision. It was wrong, and I wanted no part of it. And I have done well for myself. I may not be a hulking, bulking young man like some of the rest, but I’ve plenty to recommend me. It hasn’t been such a bad life.

But now, winter has come in too fast and the wolves have been at the cattle, teasing and forcing them away from the rest of the herd, until all we hear is their screams in the night. We will have no milk from them, nor will the chickens ever come clucking back into camp to hide their eggs. And now my skin begins to sag from my bones, and my hair is leaving my scalp in clumps. I fear I have no choice. My morals have only lasted as long as the milk and bread and cheese were plentiful.

I must join the rest. They eat already, they have not gone hungry all these long days. Unlike me, they know what they do is right. I stand, stretch and step further into the fire-light. They nudge each other and look at me, but they are kind enough not to point out my failures. I sit down and reach out a hand, wordlessly pleading.

I am lucky. There is a whole arm left, fingers pink and dripping from a swift searing on the flames. A tattoo is still almost visible, just below the crook of the elbow. It is a crude grey-wolf’s head. Predator, not prey. I take this as a sign. I will not go hungry this day.

Streetlights and Booze

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:06:00 +0100

The doors had closed, the lights had been flickered. The drink poured itself into a river; a pathway home. They left together, wending their way along narrow streets and shortcuts of the heart.

One spoke:

‘That’s no’ his room anymore. Nah, he’s long gone. Gone away, d’youknow? Fucked off like the rest of them.’

Others nodded.

The darkness was kind to their stumbling, grumbling forms. They passed from dark to dark, in their journey towards oblivion.

One said:

‘Tinking of headin’ meself, d’youknow? Somewhere, anywhere.’

They agreed with each other, bouncing their hopes around, letting them ricochet of the high walls of the flats, letting them loose in the darkness. Letting them drift without fear of all those traps that are oft set beneath the traveler’s foot.

But then, a solitary streetlight appeared to block their way. To shed light, oh yes, to guide the wanderers home. But to banish their hopes to the far corners of the world.

Perhaps, in the days before humankind took over the earth, the dark had a different purpose. But now, in the domination of mankind, it has been banished to the corners; the dark buildings, the bedroom cupboards, the shadows that are but reflections of what was. It is the unwilling understudy to the light. Now, it has but one part to play in that great theatre that is humanity. It hides, it softens, it cherishes.

So as they walked under the streetlights, they saw themselves; saw themselves true and despaired.

‘I’m headin’ home. No stomach for this anymore. Me bed’s calling.’

The Poet Dreamer: Tumblr Writing Community Links and Tags

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 01:52:32 +0000

The Poet Dreamer: Tumblr Writing Community Links and Tags:

burningmuse:

[Updated 02/16/13] Here is an amazing list of other Tumblr writing community pages/projects/tags that work hard to expose readers to great writing. Find new writers to read, discover talented people to interact with, find new readers to share your work…

Rotten

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 01:26:48 +0000

I’m sick.

My body is rotting. My mind is rotting. Chunks of flesh and thought putrify and fall off; full of pus and hate and stale blood.

I feel it, I feel it happen. I feel my cells, my neurons dying. I feel every single one, every last one, gasp in pain. I hear their death-rattle echoing in my ears.

In the night, the night, they die. I am rotting.

I wonder if the end will come quickly, or if I will lose an ear, a finger, an emotion at a time. I think it is more likely that the poison is eating away at my connections. At the points where one bone meets another, where my thoughts converge. One day, soon or late, these connections will all snap at once, and I will fall into a pile of parts. My thoughts will be unlinked; flying free and solitary. They will waste away and die, too, for no thought can survive without another to sustain it, develop it.

I will be a pile of parts. Rotten. Flies will buzz and breed on my remains and maggots will flourish.

Were Cummings, Neruda, Barrett-Browning, Teasdale, Lawrence,and Dickinson predictable and teenage-y? Your comment was shallow and uninformed.

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:33:56 +0000

I’m pretty sure they didn’t write about luuuuurve.

Stewed

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 12:30:08 +0000

second draft - feedback please!

‘And if you let them sweat on a low heat, they’ll release their juices quicker and you won’t have to add water. Pass the-’

He handed her the butter-dish again and she scraped ruefully at the inside of the white porcelain. The hard, thick smell of fat filled the room and he made tiny whooshing motions with his hands to clear the air. Cara took a deep, dramatic breath and shuddered in pleasure.

‘Nothing like a bit of butter, a bit of bought butter, the best bit of bought butter.’ She repeated the tongue twister, once, twice, and tittered as she stumbled over the words.

She wasn’t really talking to him, he knew, but he listened anyway. Every now and then she would address a remark to the air, and seeing as he inhabited that air, it was enough excuse to remain perched on the kitchen table, waiting.

‘Where’s the – thank you, meat – I’ll brown it in this one so that it doesn’t stain,’ she said to herself, beginning to slice chunks off the slab of beef, keeping them uniform and well rounded. They bled only slightly before she tossed them into the old cast-iron pan, sizzling in the hot oil and spitting bits of fat back at her like an ungrateful child. She stirred, oblivious, ignoring the goblets of oil that flew through the air and caught in her loose hair.

She brandished a jug full of slurping, tumescent brown. ‘… And the amazing thing about stock is that it lasts forever – this is the turkey from last Christmas, can you believe it?’ She looked briefly up at her second son, legs dangling over the table.

He could believe it. He remembered the turkey well. It had been monstrous, far too big for the five of them, but that was Cara. Some fancy about stuffing growing boys had been drilled into her when she was young, and she had never left it behind. And so she had surrounded the bird with mounds glistening potatoes and vegetables fried into anonymity, and had bowed her head when they couldn’t manage a third helping.

She scooped the fat from the top of the jug and set it aside for the potatoes, then poured the yellow-brown mix in with the vegetables. It left the jug with a soft glump-glump sound that sickened him to his stomach.

Molly, their greying and overweight lab, groaned in her sleep as Cara stepped around her, perhaps taken by some fleeting scent memory. Well she should remember the smell. The massive turkey bones and entrails had been left out for the dogs in the days after Christmas. They had bickered and fought before settling into the usual order – Molly was first; she took the choice bits of flesh and dragged them away to a safe distance, glancing up to make sure the others had not followed. Stinker had nipped forcefully at Trudy’s muzzle with his greening teeth and had gained the second spot, leaving the dirty-white poodle mix to dart in and out between his legs. Still, Trudy had eaten till she was sick; a corrosive stream of bone fragments and white meat, then lapped it up again, growling at Stinker till he lost interest and retreated. Then they withdrew to sleep off their swollen bellies and return.

Their Da had done the same, dabbing gracefully at his stained and pocked chin before retreating to his room for a nap. Cara had cleaned up while the three boys watched a Disney movie that they were all too old to enjoy, but no one had dared to change the channel.

The vegetables were swelling again, taking in moisture from the stock. ‘Salt-and-pepper, salt-and-pepper’, she chanted. ‘Your father loved beef casserole. Oh yes, he did. He did! My recipe, anyway.’

Her son hadn’t spoken, but she hadn’t lifted her head from the stove or turned towards him, so he did not respond. It had been six short weeks, and this was the first time Cara had mentioned him since they had finished with all the fussing around coffins and flowers and priests. He watched her carefully, but nothing more seemed to be forthcoming.

He worried for her, sometimes. They had mourned, as much as they could, for a father whose rotting and flabby body repulsed them and had gradually eaten away at any affection that had remained. But Cara seemed to have just erased him from her life, wiped the slate clean. Now she looked only to her sons.

She still slept in the same bed, on the side that he had died on. It had always been her side, in truth, but in his final throes he had rolled over, gasping and rattling his life away. He hadn’t reached, or hadn’t wanted to reach, the panic alarm that had been installed by the bed just a few months previously. When she found him, she had dragged her sons up the stairs, as if their presence was needed to make it true.

Niall, the eldest, had called the ambulance and made the arrangements. His mother had just sat by the bed, holding his hand and weeping. He remembered the low, throaty sound that had come from Cara’s mouth, like a wounded animal that was trapped in her throat. It had filled the house until the walls reverberated with her keening. Steven, only seven, had wept at her tears. The ambulance had taken him away with sirens muted and unhurried. The dead could wait.

Danny felt he should say something, something to fill up the silence that had slunk into the room as the meat stopped sizzling and began to slide sullenly around the pan. But he didn’t.

‘In you go,’ she told the beef, not unkindly, letting it slide into the bigger pot of half-sweated vegetables. The smell of roasting flesh had begun to rise through the house, and Niall could be heard stirring from his computer upstairs. Steven was in the front room at the television and had a unique sense of when food was on offer. He would not appear until the plates were set on the table.

‘A can of Guinness, if you wouldn’t mind.’

He slipped, surprised, from his perch on the table, stepped carefully over the elderly dog and out into the pantry. He knew where the remaining beer was kept; it had been doled out liberally during the three or four days it had taken for his Da to be buried and forgotten. Cara didn’t seem to notice the missing bottles that often ended up on Niall’s floor, nor the slowly sinking level of whiskey that had been brought by neighbours and friends. But his father’s Guinness was never touched. This was the first time they would be used, since he had died.

Without turning the solitary light on, he found a can from memory and brought it back to his mother. She cracked it open with a flourish and tipped it into the stew as he took his seat again, watching his mother’s fingers as she stirred. They were as slender as they had ever been, her wedding band loose below her second knuckle. Sometimes he thought she was shrinking, like a wicked witch doused with water, but then he felt unkind.

The stout bubbled and simmered; the smell of sour earth pouring from the pot.

His Da had loved to eat, and she had been overjoyed to oblige. Even when he had come home with the doctor’s orders – no fats, no sugars, no alcohol – she had snorted and merely reduced her portions by a finger’s width. His father hadn’t complained – three meals a day set before him and a few cans of stout in the evening were all he desired in the world. Their father had taken his diabetes seriously, at first, but under Cara’s care he had soon forgotten all thoughts of diet plans and exercise. She had told him his chest was too weak to take long walks in the cold. She had fed him like a prize cow, beaming when he cleared his plate and looking so sorrowful when he left drippings that he had always reached for a hunk of bread to wipe up the rest.

The stew simmered in its own juices, and she hummed to herself. A dozen waxy potatoes flew out of their jackets and fell sizzling into the turkey fat.

When he had begun slowly rotting away, she had only fussed and fretted more, sure that he just needed some more of her attention. He had been twenty-odd stone before he took to his bed, and on his second heart attack, but Cara insisted. Soon, the smell of proud flesh had sunk into the room’s oak panelling as his feet began to ulcerate, but still she had tended him with fried meat and eggs and batter. And so he had stewed, alone in his bedroom.

Now she took a carton of cream from the fridge and poured it into the casserole, glub-glub, tapping the bottom with a wooden spoon to get the last few drops. The mixture turned a marbled white-and-brown before the cream was swallowed whole, sucked down to the bottom where it would thicken and simmer.

He wasn’t really hungry. His waistband was already uncomfortably tight and he felt bloated, like he had swallowed a child’s balloon animal. But the potatoes promised to be golden brown and the casserole was so thick he felt he could take a bite out of the air and live for a day off the fumes. The other dogs, Trudy and Stinker scratched at the door, aware that it was dinnertime. They would get their own meal of the fatty, discarded meat, perhaps topped off with some gravy and crisp fragments. He let them in and they joined his silent vigil as Cara stirred, and hummed, stirred and hummed.

Soon, she set out four large plates and heaved the massive pot of casserole over to the worktop, teetering slightly under its weight. She built a buttress of roasted potatoes and ladled a generous amount of meat and vegetables into three of them. For the forth, she merely dribbled some gravy over the puniest roasts of the batch. She opened the door to call for her eldest and youngest soon, but there was no need. Niall was already blinking in the doorway, dazed by the kitchen lights. A door slammed in the house, and Steven’s footsteps echoed down the hall. The three boys took their seats at the table and she laid out their meal.

She stared at her own pitiful plate for a moment. They pointedly did not look towards their Da’s empty chair. The angles in her face caught the light and her eyes were hollowed, like she had darkened her lower lids by mistake. Then she turned to her three sons and smiled, swollen with pride.

Wordblind

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.

But that was before, before, before.

Before they shoved this metal demon in my ears, before they injected their poison into my my visual cortex.

Listen to me - demon, poison, cortex - all these words I have learned. Aren’t I well trained? Keep your treats. I detest them; I am no dog. Your choke chains will not hold me.

I was happy not knowing what they were. I was happy without words. But now they have forced themselves upon me so that every thought I have is immediately captured, crippled, raped, wrapped in words.

Oh, they smiled as they did it; holding up sign cards with pictures and letters, playing Bach and Scarlatti and Chopin at intervals so I could hear and know music.

But every sound appalls me. To hear music after a lifetime without is no blessing; it is torture. The noise is everywhere; the creak of a door, a sniffling nose, a page turned. Incessant. And I must put words around them all; my brain describes each sensory change where once all was freeform; sublime . How do they survive these neural cages.

They keep me here, in this room. Room, wall, bed - all words I learnt early on. Just after that twisting, blistering moment that shrinks away from memory - too painful to touch, leave it to cower there in my unconscious - when they opened my eyes and ears to gave me the words. Oh, they are kind, as they see it - I want for nothing, and they tell me that what they can learn from me will be invaluable. I am helping them, helping the world.

But before, words were nothing. My mind worked in different ways, ways they could never conceive of. But now it slips away and these clunky shapes and syllables fill my eyes and ears and thoughts.

But tonight, I will escape them and their words. A nurse, a sweet girl, carelessly left a pair of scissors by my bedside. I claimed it, it hides under my pillow. It is blunt, but that should not matter too much.

Tonight, I will hack off these ears, gouge out these eyes, for they are not mine, this is not my world. I will be free from the the chains of words.

What’s a realistic daily word target? For someone who is unemployed and spends all day in her...

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 16:23:43 +0000

What’s a realistic daily word target? For someone who is unemployed and spends all day in her pyjamas…

Bird's Eye

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:00:20 +0000

Start far away, in the great OutThere, in the place of mind-wrenching vastness.

Zoom in, in. Faster than thought, faster than light. Further. Through all the walls and trees and people. Outlines blur, boundaries melt away. There. Target. A figure, a lone figure in a landscape. Fall through the flimsy barriers that the human body pretends to. Skin, teeth, nails. Focus.

There. See? There is a tar pit, inside. It clings tightly to the stomach lining and makes its home there. Black, syrupy, foul-breathed - early man knew it, feared it. Death to any who wade into its midst. A mass of darkness.

Sometimes it lies still; a child giggling, trembling and frozen in a cupboard, praying the seeker will walk past her hiding place. It even seems to shrink, then, while it lies hidden; pulsating smugly, secure.

Other times it explodes into life, doubling, tripling in size until it grazes the top of the throat. It is alive then, and it is angry. Clawing its way out, it rips gashes and slashes from the innards. Huddle, foetally, clutching desperately at shreds of flesh to try and keep lifesblood from leaking out. Freezeframe. In that moment before the last vestige of consciousness slips away and the subjective world dissapates into objectivity, anonymity.

And there, we leave. The camera spirals out, a slumped figure centred on a tiled floor. The pattern is red and black, repeating in a gentle vortex. In the centre, something twitches.

Face down, eviscerated, waiting to die.

Dying

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 00:30:46 +0000

Dying is easy. I practice it, sometimes. Do you want to try? Think. Find your centre. You have to seperate the mind from the meat. Fuck Descartes; he got it right but didn’t even realise it. If you do it right, you can be a bundle of pure thought, controlling a slab of meat. But it takes practice.

I dont mean any of that breathe-in-breathe-out-find-inner-peace stuff. Me mam tried that for a while; went to classes in with the french lady in block 44. She’d come home and tell me about downward dog and leaping lion and some other shite. Sounded like an orgy to me, but I didn’t tell her that. It made her happy for a while, and sure isn’t that what matters. She stopped going when her back gave out, but she still tried to keep it up. I’d find her frozen in some stupid pose in the kitchen, arms stretched out and legs splayed like a new-born foal. And then one day I came back an hour later and she was back in her usual one, curled up in a ball under the table, shivering. Took me longer than usual to coax her out that time, but I put her in the shower for an hour or so with a bottle of wine and she seemed ok after.

Dying. I’ve done it loads of times. It happened a few times by accident before I learned to control it. The first time time was at the beach when I went out too far, dived under and got confused about which way was up. I panicked and tried to swim to the surface, but it turned out it was the ground. Hit me head bad. I was seven when I died that time.

Then there was the time when I bet myself that I could beat the trains coming out of the tunnel near the canal. I’d leave it til the last moment and duck across the tracks. Their horns where the best part, and the horrified glimpse of the driver I’d get. I always beat them. Except one time, I ran too fast and could’t stop and I fell off the wall and broke my back over a railing. I looked like a half open book, except backwards; with the leather spine bent the wrong way.

Now I can do it whenever I want. I just think in, and find the places that matter. Lungs, heart, brain. The liver is another good one. And the spleen. They get ignored sometimes, but they can do the trick as easy as the others. The hardest one is the muscles. Did you know that every muscle has the strenght to crush bone, if the brain lets them off their leash? So you have to trawl through the brain, try and find that bunch of nerves and convince them that it’s ok, they can take a break and go out for a smoke. The hard part is to make it all happen at once, one giant convulsion where every single muscle cramps violently and shatters the bone it was meant to protect. There’s not much of you left after that one. Just a pinky bag of flesh and tendons and bile and organs.

But that’s not really the hard part. The hard part is putting it back together.

You pick a couple of your short stories, and figure out what is the prime concept around which most of them revolve. create more characters in contrasting story lines where in you inter relate them using links from different concepts in your short stories. Idea is to create a conglomerate of short stories, which are inter related. So think of a topic for your novel, think the characters through, jot down an ending before anything else, then start making a rough chapter by chapter sketch.

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 22:40:46 +0000

This is great advice.

All my stories do tend to revolve around a central theme of nature and twisted nature. I’d just worry that if I tried to pull them all together, I’d a) end up with a nonsensical chunk of writing b) lose all my individual stories or c) use up all my ideas and never be able to write again!

pfpc replied to your post: I’d love to have a story in me that could become a… Couldn’t you...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:21:34 +0000

pfpc replied to your post: I’d love to have a story in me that could become a…

Couldn’t you use brute force? 500 words a day no matter what and don’t stop until a plot emerges?

That’s not a bad idea.

I’d love to have a story in me that could become a novel. All I can do is little short stories...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:11:43 +0000

I’d love to have a story in me that could become a novel. All I can do is little short stories where nothing really happens.

How do you tease out an idea into something bigger?

Question? Ask

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 21:04:24 +0000

Question? Ask

Bleach

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:49:07 +0000

When the lights go out and the white coats leave, it isn’t quiet. The bodies aren’t silent, no, they sigh and settle and hiss as the fluids that once gave them life drip from every pore. But they scream, they scream in voices that are gone silent, with voiceboxes that have been ripped out and placed in caredully labelled jars. The stench screams; a tangible thing, a wave of a hand or a movement makes a draft that leaves swathes of clean air in its wake, but the stench comes crawling back like a cheating lover, back into your nose and ears and eyes until it burns, you burn. No amount of bleach can completely cover it, no amount of acid can sear away the stains on the workbenches. Not visible stains, no, the greasy sponges and careful smearing takes care of that, but stains that go deeper, etched into the metal, etched deep into the soul of the place. The instruments that have been cleaned so carefully and hung back in place do not jangle softly together; there is no breeze. The light does not fall softly on the sterile surfaces and turn them red. The taps do not drip, they are tight and sealed tightly against the rot and rust that seeps into the strongest of steel. The bleach covers everything, a thin slick coating that keeps the germs and the pain and the blood away, the one barrier between this world and that, between life and death - the barrier, the safety net, the cleanser.