Unicorns Lullaby

Walking through the woods on a cool summers day

Taking in the scents and watching fairies at play

I wandered through the shade of the trees

Touching each blossom as I pass with ease

I walked through some bluebells in a clearing

When something of interest caught my hearing

I heard a sweet murmur of a lullaby song

When I had found the source it didn’t take long

There by a fallen tree was an elf, singing a song but not to himself

There was a beautiful beast laying right by his side

Of golden mane and white hair and hide

It was a unicorn with its horn like pearls

Lying beside the elf, its mane in curls

It drifted slowly and gently asleep

This image made my heart skip a beat

I can’t express this image to you

You have to see it yourself, you really do

But I will always remember that day so well

The image of a sleeping unicorn is a wonder to tell.

   

You are not going to blow my dreams away

I’m not going to be what you want me to be anymore

I never was that person

The person who’d never go out and was a bore

I am not going to live the life that you always wanted me to

Not anymore

I am going to be me and do whatever I want to do

I am going to have a full and happy life

A life and person of which you wouldn’t let me become or do

You are out of my life right now and that way you will stay

Because I don’t want you to come back and blow all my dreams away

Your fiery glove

As I build bridges of friendships and love, you come burning them down again with one fair swoop of your fiery glove.

I tried so hard to make family and friends, but you crashed down the walls and I couldn’t mend them.

You destroyed so much and I grew tired and ill, this is why you are not in my life still.

I need other people not just you.

You think I’m an introvert, you haven’t a clue.

You are the introvert, I socialise fine.

I don’t judge others, I am benign.

I tried so hard not to throw you away, because I am a people person, not like you in anyway.

However a time came when you drove me mad, I had to leave you and though it is sad, I am glad.

Because the poison you seep into my relationships are gone.

As you burned down my bridges I learned to swim across the pond.

Now I have not much family, but I am starting to gain friends and comradery.

It is wonderful, but you don’t see.

You only think that I have wounded thee.

Sunday word count 1

I will try to remember every Sunday to post up my weekly word count towards novels and short stories I am working on. 

This past week I have added words towards one short story and three novels. This is not including writing down ideas of new stories I have planned, nor is it including research notes, blog posts, poetry or anything else – just novels and short stories.  The word count is not spectacular, but I am working on improving it.

The grand total this week is….

5679 words

Disappointing huh? 

Well here comes the excuses; this is actually a slow week for me because I haven’t done much writing this week at all in comparison to my normal writing week.  Why?

My desktop computer monitor decided to die on me for two days.

I don’t cope well with the heat, prone to heat stroke and breathing problems.

My son is off from school for the next six weeks, so my writing count is usually cut by half on school holidays.

I have been reading and researching more.

I have been learning about make-up application and have been addicted to watching Nabela Noor and Jeffree Star on YouTube, I discovered them last week.  When I gave up being Goth around 15yrs ago I never really learned how to use make up and never wore make up since and I am getting to the point I need coverage, ha-ha.

So there are the excuses, I only watch an hour of YouTube a day this past week, so it’s not stealing that much from me in regards to writing time, considering I rarely watch TV, so TV is rarely a distraction for me – I tend to watch programs whilst writing, programs that doesn’t need me to look at the screen too much such as The Proms, radio channels, or the occasional glimpse at nature documentaries such as David Attenborough or the Spring Watch team.  I lose my hearing too much at random times, so I have learned not to make my life revolve (or is it evolve?) around TV, because I often have to use subtitles and get to hear virtually nothing a lot of the time anyway.  So I have learned to be a reader/writer/researcher, unless my eyes go on me, then I am going to be OK regarding entertainment.

It is because my hearing levels are so random from one day to the next, that I can no longer keep my secretarial and classroom assistant jobs that I used to have.  Hearing loss is a big bother because I can’t do much independently regarding going to a doctor and hearing them, I need someone with me who can interpret via lip syncing to tell me what the doctor has just said, it is even worse when dealing with things on a confidential front such as banking, particularly telephone banking when online banking goes wrong – you have no idea how many companies out there do not accept a speaker on a deaf persons behalf, I am only glad I am not a deaf mute, because then I would seriously have problems.  I often have to try and talk to someone I can’t hear on a phone, hoping my husband or someone else can interpret for me as long as I give them verbal permission over the phone, my goodness, I feel for the mutes.  Especially as three years ago I had a throat infection that lead into the ears that was so bad I had laryngitis for 4 months solid, so I have experienced temporary muteness and I did have a banking problem then, that I couldn’t solve until I could speak, 6 weeks to get a fraudulent act on my online payments sorted out, because I could not voice that I gave my husband permission to handle it over the phone for me!  For 6 weeks my account was blocked because I could not verify that I gave permission, I am only thankful that my account doesn’t pay any major bills.

Well anyway, going back onto my writing I could have written a lot more if it weren’t for the interruptions, I would say as much as 16k more words and I don’t expect my word count to be beyond 10k a week whilst the school holidays are here.  I do most of my writing in the living room on a desktop computer and my son rarely leaves the room and is often loudly shouting about his robots in the robot wars arena he has made on the carpet and his robot wars videos he watched on YouTube overtakes the music I put on to get me into the mood for writing fiction.  It is easier to write poetry and research and make research notes or further synopsis’s of new stories than it is to write towards novels or short stories for competitions during the day.  Most of my writing at the holidays happens between 11pm and 1am, but Henry is suffering from some emotional issues right now which mean that my days can be very challenging and tiring by the time night falls.

When the holidays are over I write sparsely throughout the day because of my ADD and therefore I can often get 3k words done on some days.  Well anyways, the future will show and tell if I can remember about Sundays.  You will see patterns of no writing at all some weeks, because I get health problems which mean I can’t even read a book at times, such as a chest infection with a running nose, where I am busy literally every single second trying to keep myself together and alive without choking.  Sad but true, I have an immunity issue that is much better since having a radical diet change but I still get long illnesses. 

Anyway, I will update my weekly word count towards short stories and novels every Sunday. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

Prompt result 2

GOBLINS – MOON – FOREST – UNICORN – SWORD

These prompted for me a prominent story idea of which I can’t share here but they also prompted some lesser ideas which I am more comfortable in sharing.

The idea I won’t share will be written after my four current projects which will probably be started around Halloween. Meanwhile I can just keep adding to the idea in snippets every time a new thing comes to mind and keep adding this to its own special folder until I am ready to work it like a jigsaw puzzle and make it into something akin to a largish novel.  There is quite a bit to the plot already but I need to flesh it out in my mind before I start writing it all down from beginning to end.

Here are the ideas I am willing to share which will probably not be worked on, unless of course I could eventually post them as stories here.  Which is something I didn’t think of until now; I could do them as flash fictions.

1. A goblin runs away from a lynch mob of humans as they believe he had something to do with the disappearance of a little girl in their village. He is so frightened that he runs away into a forest of which he is not familiar with as he is a mountain goblin, he finds a unicorn that befriends him and helps him find his way home again eventually.
2. In fairyland there is a unicorn moon festival approaching where the annual migration of stampeding unicorns is seen throughout the whole of fairyland and all the fair folk gather for the festivities, however, the goblins are determined to stop the migration of the unicorns because it disturbs them and they endeavour to wreck and ruin the entire event.

Do remember to join in with these prompts and either post them below or link them in the comments below to your own blog page.  Don’t be afraid to experiment with these ideas yourselves, this is my way of trying to help exercise peoples brains to become more creative and to help get them out of their supposed blockages by giving them the tools to learn how to get out of it and do something.

Have fun!

Midnight Madness – 7/19/2019

It is so true ❤

Putting My Feet in the Dirt

“You know what’s funny, mom?  We have freedom of speech, but we don’t have freedom of opinion.”

  ~Brianna Cook (Age 17)

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Photo Credit: Pixabay.com

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Prompt result 1

Today’s prompts were Mermaid – lightning – apple, blue and bird. 

For me the searches I had found prompted these following ideas.

1. An electric eel mermaid from the deepest depths of the ocean is trying to prove to the other mermaids who live up higher than she does that because she comes from the darkest depths that she is not evil and dark by nature. Unfortunately she loses her temper trying to make the others see a different side to her that she accidentally electrocutes a prominent figure in the other mermaids’ society and she swims away, higher and higher until she gets to the surface of the ocean, where she befriends a blue sea bird. 
2. A woman is trying to organise a mermaid theme birthday party for her daughter’s eighth birthday. Many trials and plenty of errors meant that it was a struggle for her to find mermaid theme food for her daughter, but she stumbles across a recipe for blue chocolate apples in edible glitter stuffed into an ice-cream cone and that saves the day! 
3. A bird has magical powers of throwing out lightning from his beak befriends a beached and sick mermaid and he brings her apples to eat from the island she is beached on.

Now all of them are very good ideas for stories, whether they are flash fictions, short stories or full novels who knows what will happen with those story-lines?  I am not claiming these story-lines, I am merely demonstrating how easy it is to play with ideas with a few keyword prompts and how you can train your brain to do this in everything you experience day to day.

Writers block and brain food

A debate today on twitter has been whether or not “Writers Block” exists or not?  My two cents on the matter is that writers block does not exist, I used to believe it did but then as I grew as a writer I learned that it was purely laziness on my part and the simple fact that I rarely thought outside of The Box.  I was also very nervous about how much of what I wanted to write has been done before and how little my stories represented “Original” ideas. 

The latter is laughable to me nowadays, because every idea in the present and the future has already been done somewhere, nothing is unique, but you need to understand that every human being is unique and therefore will have a unique take on a story already written.  For example, if a hundred writers had to write a story based on Alice in Wonderland every one of them would have a different stance to it.  Some would suggest that Alice was a drug addict hallucinating everything that had happened to her, another writer would believe that she had multiple personality disorder and that every other character who was not Alice was in fact her alter egos.  Another, would write the story as close to the original as possible, but even then there will be differences, some will make it dark humour, some will make it serious, some will throw in too much drama and one might make Alice a man from a rock band who got kidnapped and taken to an alien world and so on and so on. 

Now that has me thinking, wouldn’t that last idea be great?  Aliens kidnapping Alice Cooper, taking him to Wonderland another planet, but you see I can’t do that because of so many copyright laws, but it is a fun idea to play with in my mind or as a fan fic.

I can play with ideas like this all day long in any situation.  The problem for me is that I have too many ideas and I can struggle to decide which one to play with at the time.  I have got to the stage where I have selected five current novels I am working on and having to use random.org to help me choose which one to work on today?  I literally list and number my ideas like a maniac.  I even have a random scene list which is also numbered to help me fill in boring bits of my story or to prevent boring bits from occurring.  If I don’t know what I should do in the next scene, I use random.org and my lists to help me.  Each list is categorised.  It doesn’t sound very artistic, usually artists and writers are disorganised and free thinking, but I do organise my stuff like this a lot.  Granted I lose lists a lot, but I am getting better at keeping them in their place lately.

The idea of writers block is unfathomable to me in recent years.  I have learned if you constantly read and learn and if you make yourself look for art of what you are looking for, poetry etc, you will become inspired and if you do this daily as part of your routine, your mind will eventually throw things out at you.  Don’t ignore “brain farts” as I call them either – things such as…

I was reading a book about ancient Sumerian beliefs and I came across the title chapter called “The creation of man” I misread it as “The Cremation of man”.  This can spark interesting ideas if you don’t ignore it.

You’ve got to constantly stuff things into your brain daily, furiously, eventually your mind can switch into creator mode with little or no effort.  Try it.

Do this… 

Think of silver dragons and go to deviant art, flick through the pictures you first see in their search bar that says “Silver Dragons”, do this for 5 minutes, then go to pinterest and do that there again for around 5 minutes, just flick through pictures quickly, you don’t have to look at anything individually, just literally look them over, notice each different scene and do it at quick speed, you are not there for research, you are not there to steal, you are there to feed your mind and it is a hungry monster than doesn’t stop!  No idea is stupid, no idea is pathetic, if you get an idea whilst flowing like this, write it down because you’d be amazed how quickly these things pass through, it can be like being on a high speed train and you are trying to keep focused on a particular field you’ve just gone past!  Then search silver dragon poetry in google, or silver dragon songs, or silver dragon art in your search engines or snap chat or tumblr or anywhere that is likely to have a search option!

Do this with scenes or creatures or events you want to write about.  Writers block is just an excuse for lazy writers.  Don’t be a lazy writer.  If you don’t love playing with your mind and feeding it like this and you find writing hard work, then you can’t be a writer.  Because writers don’t work, they play and they do this every single day.  Some scenes are hard but the writing is never stressful or hard work because you love it and if you love something, it can’t ever be hard work!  Don’t keep chasing the money either by looking for things that are trending, because trends change exceedingly fast, as soon as you write about what is trending now you are already out of date by 30k words.  Play and write for you and read a lot of books; not just fiction books on the genres you like, read broadly, especially non-fiction because that can help you world build.

 

 

 

Learning to get around ADD?

I think I have to accept the fact that I have had attention deficit disorder most of my life, but was never diagnosed and still not diagnosed, this is the analysis that a couple of friends of mine have of me as I do seem to be disorganised and easily distracted – look there are butterflies outside my window right now hovering and ducking each other in and out of the lilacs! 

You see, that wasn’t a mock of people who are diagnosed, it is merely an example of exactly who I am and how I think.  Yes sure, I can sit down and write but I really struggle to stay here for more than 15 to 25 minutes at a time; I struggle to do anything longer than 30 minutes.  Watching TV is great if it is a varied show like Gardeners world or sketchy comedy (I think that’s what they are called, where they have mini 5 minute scenes?) I love movies, but I tend to need an intermission every 45 minutes for toilet breaks, getting a drink, or just generally not sitting there doing nothing and for me it doesn’t really matter how riveting the movie or anything else is, I just have this urge to move on for a few minutes and I will get back to that.

When I write I can write 750 words in 15 to 20 minutes, this is not revised and unplanned pantsing style work.  What irritates me is when I start to write a story then go into prose or poetry mode at the same time about the same thing, no I don’t want that to be my thing, but my brain starts to make songs and poetry of my stories a lot, this is usually a sign for me to stop – because I generally start ruining the story by letting it flow like that.  Though I suppose I should just edit those things out after I have done the book?  I don’t want all of my books to be musicals.

So I tend to write in 15 to 25 minute bursts, on days I try to write a set word goal, I need to break this down to 15 to 25 minutes an hour or every two hours until the word goal is completed.  For NaNoWriMo that goal is usually completed in about two hours but spread into three most days because of mental irritation.  This is not three hours of solid writing, please understand that.  I will start writing generally around 9am and by 9:25 I am going for a toilet or drink break and maybe checking social media or a game; then I am writing again around 10:15 till 10:35ish and getting a snack or thinking about checking on the wildlife in the garden.  Then around 11:30 I am writing again and at 11:55 I might start thinking ok, should this be it for the day?  It’s not that I don’t love writing it’s just I tend to overwork and I burn myself out and people usually have to remind me not to overwork!  Because you see there are certain types of animal in this world which have a feast or famine mentality and that is very much like me regarding my writing.

What you saw above was me struggling to write the same story without deviating throughout that whole day and throughout that whole month in NaNoWriMo, so basically it is a normal NaNoWriMo month for me.  A usual day to day writing habit is a little different in that every time I go back to writing it is poetry, writing down intense ideas because I don’t tend to like pantsing everything, then there are diary entries, blog entries which happen rarely to be honest, more ideas flow into my head and I would say around two thousand words a week are honestly going towards just one novel.  Well, I agree with my ADD friends, this can’t go on.  I have to accept the fact I am one of them and learn to cope with it and learn a way in tricking myself into doing more work without so many breaks!

How?

By accepting the fact that the reason why I have so many brainstorms for new ideas is because my brain is easily bored with old ideas, so I need to either learn to write short stories quickly or learn to write several novels at once.  You see, I used to do this before 2010, before writing became difficult – I used to write around seven books at once skipping merrily every half hour from one project to the next, but then I was advised by so many people not to do that as I will be killing my creativity and not putting enough love into just the one I should be working on.  Well, to be honest, I know now, the opposite is true, because since taking on those ideas for a decade now, I barely write and I barely enjoy writing as much as I used to.  In fact I remember last year telling Paul how I think my love for writing has died and that my new love for creating art is becoming more of a thing.  Well, I do with my art what I used to do with my writing; I have/had several art projects on the go at the same time, flitting from picture to picture as the whim took me.  But I realise now, I know me, the people who advised me not to write like that, didn’t know me that well and still don’t. 

So I have decided, as from today, I am going back to the old me.

This worries Paul slightly because I get tired when I try to write more than two thousand words a day lately and back in the old days of my writing I used to throw out double that and sometimes even the occasional 10k a day spout.  But I think I won’t wear myself out if I go back to my old style of writing, flitting from one idea to the other because I am not easily confused with my stories.  I know categorically my ghost story to my vampire story, my mermaid story to my pirate story, my other vampire story to my werewolf story and my deity story to my leprechaun story.  Yes I write many stories at once with the vampire theme, but I know my vampires so intimately I don’t confuse plots, it is difficult because they are so different, the characters are so different.  I know the difference, even if my friends and advisers think I am toying too much with my own mind, the thing is that it builds up slowly for me and so I get to know them intimately like real people or books that already exist if you understand me?

It is like knowing a Fred and an Alice in real life, I know that Fred won’t like Alice because he doesn’t like eco warrior vegans and Alice won’t like Fred because Alice hates people who hunt for sport and wafts bacon in front of her nose.  Fred might be a big business man living in a rural setting at the weekend and lives a party life as a bachelor, whilst Alice is constantly researching climate change and the latest protests, living in suburban Greater London and seeking new vegan recipe ideas; it is as simple as that for me.

Now this isn’t bad, I have written this in forty minutes without vacating the area, but now I really have to stop.  So bearing this in mind, starting my new/old way of writing again, I could be producing more stuff quickly again, which would be amazing!

No more forcing through the same novel day in and day out, I have to do what my brain needs me to do.

P.S throughout all of this writing today, I had also had two conversations with Paul and four conversations with my rabbit.

 

 

Just not today

Let the tears come

Let the suffering come

Separation is here

So shed those tears

Love is gone

May the night sometime become day

So maybe I can feel like I want to play

But not today, life has gone sour

Right now is not the right hour

I do want to play

But not today