A dark cabaret play

Insomnia is something I’ve lived with for a long time; I have always been a night owl.

But recently my brain had decided the best hours to concentrate on anything is between 3am and 6am every morning, which to say the least is unsociable and inconvenient – had I lived in Alaska and working on the British time zone, it would be more bearable but I don’t.

My brain seems to think it lives somewhere in the West of Canada or America for some reason and has since I was a teenager!

I’ve never been there, so I don’t know why it’s clocked for it.

Anyway, last night was the worst because my brain kept me up until 8:45am – why?  Because around 6am it decided now is the perfect time to a turn a poem I’ve been working on into a play and I wrote nearly six hundred words to it before I decided I was starting to hallucinate!

So, yet again, my brain has decided only to have let me sleep for ten hours in the past two days all told, five hours is all I am getting lately in a night on average.

I think I am surviving because as I daydream I zone out and sort of go into a meditative state of stasis throughout the day, if it hadn’t of been for that habit I think I would have cracked by now!

The play is a dark cabaret, mild horror in my opinion, poetic and I am not going to share the plot here – but there are only five characters in the whole thing.  I know the beginning, middle and end and there are songs in my head I will eventually write for it and being as I know nothing about choreography I may have to collaborate with someone for that if anyone is interested in helping it go to stage someday?

It needs to be written first though.

But yes, this is not my first foray into writing a play, I’ve done it a lot in the past but most plays ended up being destroyed as I lost confidence with it.  Though some others did survive but goodness knows where they are now, finding anything in this house is like a quest for The Holy Grail!

I didn’t plan for this to happen, my brain just did it.

I could have done without the extra work, but there you go.

I am going to write it as it calls me, like I do all my things and I am living in the hope that it will be complete within the month, but like always, I won’t hold my breath!

I wasn’t even supposed to be writing anything other than poetry for the blog this morning, so it was a total surprise for me.

Funny old brain of mine!

Thanks for reading!

Silver demon

It’s dark out there

In the night

The moon is the only light

Blinded by the dense black

I look through the window but I look back

I see only myself reflected there

Trying to see out, but there’s a glare

I dim the light to see more

And what I saw shook me to the core

For under the oak I saw a tail

It slithered and made a silver trail

It raised its head at looked at me

Two silver eyes as cold as cold can be

It went to the cabbages and began to munch

On the green leaves his midnight lunch

The demonic snail, the king of them all

Eating my cabbages with fervour and gall!

I’d chase him off but he was bigger than me

Ate the whole row of ten!

Bet you don’t believe me!

But he will be back next month for more

Until then I’ll lock my door

For it’s an unnatural thing that snail

This is why the house is for sale!

Moledro what’s that?

Moledro

“n. a feeling of resonant connection with an author or artist you’ll never meet, who may have lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away but can still get inside your head and leave behind morsels of their experience, like the little piles of stones left by hikers that mark a hidden path through unfamiliar territory.”

A beautiful notion I’m sure, it is a new word I learned through an acquaintance on Twitter the day before I left the site for good. 

It’s interesting and inspiring to think that some artists and authors have the skill to be read and noted centuries down the line like this, but it seems only a small margin get the opportunity to have that effect on the world and we will never know if we will be one of those people, for life is cruel and short like that.

Some people are very fortunate in that they could predict they’d be like that someday, because they have been made a big thing of before they die – but most teeter on usually without the vain slither of hope that it will ever be them.

Some, who experience this kind of fame during life, often remain in denial of their talent and so they don’t get to enjoy it whilst they can.

I have experienced moledro with a couple of authors who aren’t widely known or popular – I found their books through Goodreads giveaways before they closed them off to the UK and I found them on kindle really cheap – attempts at vanity publishing, I presumed because they gave up trying traditional publishers after many years of failure.

Here’s one that I can remember Alex Weinle, his book The Decapaphiliac: or love in the time of cappuccinos, it is an anthology of fantasy stories and in my opinion he is very similar to Neil Gaiman, though more macabre.

There are many others that have never been traditionally published where their stories have gripped my imagination so much so, that I still cannot believe why they are not huge household names by now?

An amazing short story I read in a magazine once by an author I can’t remember the name of – where an angel was attacked by a demon on Earth and she had her wings ripped off her and she was found by a mortal man who took her in and had a relationship with her – suffering from depression as she pretends to be a troubled mortal.  Eventually her stepdaughter found her wings in the closet and the story had ended and I thirsted for more.  Why was it so short, why wasn’t this writer known?

Moledro, do you have an infatuation with an author?  Are they still alive?  Are they traditionally published yet?  Let me know in the comments below about any gems you have found and let’s help these people build their confidence as a writer and get them to try again shall we?

Thanks for reading!

Rigid mind

Rigid, those are my thoughts tonight; Rigid and taut through depression and desperation

No matter how hard I try to sit myself down tonight and ignore what’s going on in my heart and mind on a base emotional level, I still can’t help but be dragged down by a numbed mind.

I have written four poems tonight, all destined for the deletion pile, though I am trying to be more merciful with my craft and lock them away in a file on my laptop called “wasted”, as it was wasted time.

Wasted one, wasted two, wasted three, and wasted four, until I felt that tonight I am not in my poetic mojo at all and gave up.

I am certainly in a creative mind-set, but not really focused for Project AD, that’s a children’s comedy horror and I feel more like writing something along the lines of Mr Ted or The Gargoyles Heart.

Oftentimes when I have days or nights like these, I tend not to write anything, not even towards my blog – but I have decided to change.

I have decided to share these times with you all, because these are the times when I can get really down to the heart of the matter – become creative, it’s a strange place to be.

Depressed and apathetic in everything but the written word, depending however what that written word is going to be at the time and whether or not it matches what’s going on inside of you.

A few years ago I used to write snippets, where they were more or less like practise pieces and I would just write the first thing that came into my mind and I would post it.  I got out of the habit of that and it really should be revived again.

This is the start of that.

Thanks for reading…

TV and simple life’s pleasures

From the other day I forgot to mention another fandom I am hugely into; Dr Who.  The thing is, since living with Paul I am behind on all the series of Dr Who because it is a fight for me to watch anything in this house without being disturbed.

So I am several years out of sync with the TV and movie trends.

It’s annoying, because before I moved in with Paul I watched TV about 2 hours a day, usually movies or sci-fi, fantasy series and along with this I used to also buy specific magazines in the genre I am interested in – such as Rock music magazine and Sci-Fi Now.

For the six months living with Paul we didn’t own a TV, he didn’t want one and it was a battle to convince him to get one – he didn’t, my mum gave me one of her old ones instead and then he had to go and get a TV license, he resented her for this.

It’s one of the small things I was actually grateful of my mother doing!

These days I kind of keep up to date with things by watching movie and TV news on YouTube, so I am not totally in the dark about what’s going on – but I sit and watch in envy because I know most of the things I see up there are out of my budget and reach and I will only ever see things if it turns up on Freeview at a convenient time where the household isn’t going to disturb me!

Convenient times are hard to come by – generally I am left alone between 8:30 and 10pm most evenings, but Sunday is the best time for me if I want to watch something.  7pm to 10pm, this is why I was able to watch Lucifer until the seventh episode – I didn’t get to see anymore because Henry was sick and I missed a week and if I miss a week I know I can’t get it back so I gave it up.  It’s a shame because I got to like that series a lot!

We have watched “Zomboat” and “What we do in the shadows”, Paul and I because it was on around 10 or 11pm at night and its horror comedy, which Paul is OK with.

I have never gone to the cinema as an adult either; the last time I saw anything on cinema was when I was 12yrs old and that was Jurassic Park!

Simple life’s pleasures like watching TV seems a feat in this house, it’s so bloody weird how everything seems unobtainable whilst I live here – it’s like the house has cursed me!

I’m pretty sure my lung problem is to do with the damp, Paul denies it! 

Thanks for reading! 

Fandoms? More like Fangdoms!

Here is the subject of fandoms.

I have been asked in social media a few times over the past few weeks about why (other than horror and vampires) my fandoms are not more widely shared and why I haven’t narrowed them down to specifics?

I haven’t the clue to be honest.

But it’s an interesting thing to think about sharing. 

I think I have made it clear in some of them, but there are a few which I think would even surprise some of my most dedicated followers here.

I think almost everybody knows by now that I have a huge passion for Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the looking glass books and anything pertaining to it, their adaptions and generally collecting stuff that has the characters on them?

This is because I have a huge passion for nonsense, nonsense rhymes, absurdism and surrealism and therefore this also means that I like those kinds of art, I also like abstract art and impressionism.

Another widely known fandom I love is The Wizard of OZ and the whole series of fourteen books and the adaptions of those too. 

I like Peter Pan and all their adaptions too.

But I like other things too, not just fandoms pertaining to classical literature, because I am also a fan of Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and The Bronte sisters and their adaptions.

Everybody knows I have a passion for vampires, I love the vampire diaries but I am also mad keen on Vampire the Masquerade since a friend introduced me to them fifteen years ago because they felt I was copying them – which I couldn’t have been because I knew nothing about them before they told me!

Actually there was a lot of similarities that I had to rehash a huge amount of work for, because I too, was afraid of the coincidences.  This had meant that literally after I learned about Vampire the masquerade I had to totally re-edit about thirty whole books I had finished and stashed, waiting for the time I found my courage to send them off.  Luckily I didn’t, is all I can say!

Since finding them on YouTube two years back, I have been trying to watch Vampire the Masquerade L.A by Night and its so much fun! 

I’d totally love to be on that show!

I have only got through season 1 episode 10 so far, that’s an epilogue, so I have to finish the epilogues before I move onto season 2; I’ll get there eventually!

I also love Anne Rice, naturally.

Another fandom I like has been The Sandman Comics from Neil Gaiman.

I also like mafia movies and series such as The Sopranos.

I am a huge fan of Stephen King and have been since I was a kid; I started horror young, thanks to my grandma!

I also love anything to do with the Froud family, their puppets, their artworks I absolutely adore their works!

I love the muppets too and sesame street! I love puppets, but I am scared of certain types like the traditional ventriloquist wooden dummies and Pinocchio, Pinocchio freaks me out!

I’m huge keen on Queen, the rock band I got into them with another one of my big fandoms “The Highlander” movies, TV series and books!

I am also a huge fan of Batman, have been since I was 5yrs old and all their villains.

I like the original Star Trek too – one of my exes is such a big trekkie he is actually a famous lifestyle Klingon these days – seriously, he speaks fluent Klingon and works day in and day out purely entertaining his hobby with other fans, it’s his day job!  I am not such a huge fan to do that myself – but hey Star Trek is pretty cool!  I never missed an episode growing up!

I also love anything to do with the Lord of the Rings.

Both Henry and I are huge Lady Gaga fans as well or little monsters!

I personally love Monty Python and Mr Bean too.

I will never grow up either, so I love Trolls and Winnie the Pooh and I still collect things to do with them!

I also love musical theatre and operas as well, so I have quite a few passions for some of those – such as Phantom of the Opera, Cats, Witches of Eastwick, Carmina Burana, various Shakespeare plays too.

I am mad keen on anything to do with circuses, fairs and carnivals and I have a huge passion for masquerades!  With this being said, I love Pierrot, jesters, harlequins and these days clowns too – I used to be terrified of clowns and now I love them – go figure!   

I love anything pertaining to the occult as well, I do a lot of research in that and love learning new things about superstitions and other stuff – usually because I write horror and love horror.

I am also involved with several horror fandoms, mostly pertaining to Stephen King but I do like other stuff too, things from Susan Hill, Edgar Allen Poe and Max Brooks.

I like anything to do with fairyland and gnomes and things like that as well.

So I would say my fandoms are broad, I do spread myself thinly – but I am mostly just horror, vampires, batman, absurdism and that sort of thing.

I would also include dogs but do they count?  I think they do!  Also goats and guinea pigs, but hey there you go!  People don’t acknowledge those as fandoms!  LOL

I love Rome Total War and Warhammer games too, but I am too poor to enjoy them when they are new out and that sucks!

I like war games and anything to do with strategy – I also love learning about ancient warfare.

I also love Victorian or regency dramas.

I really love Discworld too!  Terry Pratchett is amazing!

I liked, but didn’t want the whole thing – Once Upon A Time a TV series, that was cool too – just didn’t have the time to see all of it and then the DVD player broke down halfway through the box-set in fact right at the part they first met Captain Hook!

So sucky – I loved it and I want to know what happens – but NO SPOILERS PLEASE!

So, yes that’s me in fandoms… I wouldn’t say I am hard-core in much except vampires and Alice in Wonderland though.

Thanks for reading! 

A silly dream

One thing I didn’t realise or remember about having an Alexa Echo Dot thingy, is that I can get to hear my kindle books on it, spoken aloud by Alexa herself!  I am excited about that because my Kindle stopped working around two years ago I had loads of books on it, downloaded a load of free classic literature.

Today I sat through and heard the first three chapters of The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole, for the first time – it’s quite a good read actually.  I have wanted to read that story for years!

I can totally understand why so many classic horror novelists have owed their inspiration to it!

Because of the book and because of the music, I have found myself daydreaming about my vampires again – yes I know there are no vampires in the story, but still, the thought is there.

The music I have been listening today have been my vampire playlist, but I have started to create a new vampire playlist now, one that concentrates mostly on classical music because of the time period I am thinking about.

My music tastes are more than just a little bit eclectic; I do in fact listen to classical music about half the time actually and my paternal family has always been into classical music and that side of the family has always been musical and involved with entertainment in some manner of speaking.

I for example, was classically trained in opera as a young child, until my mum got fed up forking out the money for something she didn’t find productive, my dad and his family were very distressed at her stopping this.

I love a lot of different types of musical interests, Jazz, soul, rock and alternative with classical or classical fusion and world music.  I have never been to a music concert before, unless you include local classical orchestra that is and nobody really wants to hear that I have gone to those, because they expect you to say some cooler like a rock band or something.

But I have always been a huge fan of Vivaldi, George Gershwin, Beethoven, Vaughn Williams and Tchaikovsky to name but a few.  I even like modern classical from John Williams, Alan Silvestre and Brad Fiedel which are movie composers.

I am one of these strange people that when she watches a movie, she lets the whole thing consume her – the visuals, the acting, the audio – background music, it is all taken in by me.  I am not happy to just watch a movie and enjoy it; I like to know where that music came from in scene whatever and well that’s just me, I am a geek, what can I say?

Since I was very small I had loads of dreams about being some kind of composer myself, lyricist, but also a director or something along those lines.  But the thing is I could never narrow down what I wanted to focus on, because I like the whole caboodle. 

I want to be an artist, I want to do the music, I want to design the costumes, I want to help the props, I want to write songs, I want to write the stories and for a good few years as a child I used to roleplay being a radio DJ too!

But because I can’t focus which one, I never threw myself into it, because I would literally run around trying to do the whole thing!

I have so many interests and I let a project consume me, I remember when I was in college I was part of an amateur dramatics group and I couldn’t choose my focus and my friends loved me, but found my lack of focus on one or two aspects very frustrating and distracting!

They loved my dedication but would often cry into their hands about “Tina, please just focus”!

Most of them pushed me into the acting, writing or prop making as they felt those things were my best strengths.  But I wasn’t keen on the acting, though they kept trying to steer me into it as they believed I was amazing.  But I didn’t want that, I knew that, I knew that I didn’t want that part of it, but I wanted everything else, lol.

In the last few weeks of being in that group, I was primarily writer and they enjoyed it – but then they started to try and shift my genre focus.   “You do better horror and psychological thrillers than anything else” they said.

By that time I knew my time was up, because my mum didn’t like me doing this in my spare time after college, she wanted me home in the evenings and didn’t like how many friends I was making and didn’t like me leaving the college to go into London with my friends to do things like street miming.

I love mime artists.

Recently I have new desires and I am not taking myself seriously over it, because I am starting way too late.

This new desire is one of the reasons why I am losing weight and trying to get good fitness levels back.  I want to join an adult beginner’s gymnastics class, as silly as that sounds.

Because my whole life I have wanted to do something and I had never confessed it to anyone because of how stupid it is!

I am one of these people who want to run away with the circus, kind of – but not quite!

Since I was a child I would often find myself listening to classical music and imagining myself as a circus acrobat, primarily trapeze, trampolines or tight rope walking.  I often saw myself in the circus glamour and doing my stuff – but more recently, as silly as it sounds, I have thought of myself doing this in a comedy sketch form.  A clown in fact, but I am not interested in any circus.  I am inspired by the Cirque Du Soleil.

I know it will take me around fifteen years to get to the standard they would hire, so this is why I am not taking myself seriously.

It’s just a stupid big dream of mine.

I have even thought about the clown design I would have for myself.

I don’t want it as a long term career, I just want to do my show on tour for a year and then give up, because it is something I would have worked hard to do and ticked off my bucket list – one of the BIG dream tick offs!

But as I said, I don’t think it will ever happen and it is just a silly dream after all, I can barely walk two miles without coming to my knees right now – still recovering from eight years of bedbound sickness, this is why I am not taking it seriously.

But I am totally in love with The Cirque Du Soleil.

I sent an email to a local disabled adult beginners gymnastics tutor today, she said twenty hours a week for ten to fifteen years and I could do my dream and no, forty years old is not too old to be accomplished in that!

There are many silly dreams I don’t share.

Thanks for reading!

Horror discrimination

One thing I have found very true about being a blogging author is that there is a lot of discrimination about horror writers.

You write poetry, fantasy and other things, even lifestyle things and your blog has a healthy flow of new followers daily and you grow and grow and no sooner had you mentioned just the once about going back into horror, you lose twenty to fifty overnight and you are left stumped as to why?  Until you realise what you have done.

This has happened to me the other day.

I am not complaining because I have made it abundantly clear in several of my previous posts that I was first and foremost a horror author who lost her mojo and was always endeavouring to rediscover it.

You wouldn’t have me as an author if it wasn’t for horror, that’s how I started out.  Ten years old writing the goriest stories I could muster to the extent a proud English teacher at school wrote to my parents about my amazing writing talent and how gory it is for a child and whether or not they knew I wrote such ghastly things?

They said that they did and they were thoroughly open about me watching horror movies since I was five years old!

I stand by what I’ve said – horror is still in me and although currently I have more fantasy projects than horror ones, you must expect horror to pop out now and again because it’s a large part of who I am.  In social media I have joined several online fan clubs specifically in the horror genre, it’s me – sorry!

I have even made a couple of celebrity friends who are pretty big in the horror industry and no, I won’t drop their names!  I don’t do things like that! 

But they are very supportive of my work and one of them likes to cajole me every few weeks and remind me not to forget my original genre and that I scare them to death at times!

From March my finances will stabilise hugely, especially when I can get my online business starting off.  This means I can do a lifelong dream of going to Horror Con, Comic con and Fantasy con events some day!  Wonderful, it’s very exciting I could practically live at those places from what I have seen of them!

But to stop reading my blog because I mention horror on a one off is a bit drastic in my opinion.

But never mind.

Thanks for reading! 

A little disappointed

There is nothing sadder than realising you’ve worked hard on a project for nearly two years only to find it so similar to a recent movie or a book that has only just been released and you realise that if you were to continue your project, you could be blamed for being a rip off of that successful project of another person!

This has happened for me this week, I recently learned that there is a new horror coming out and it looked brilliant but then I realised there was a lot of things in that movie which seems almost identical to my project called Horror 17 – yes I have in excess of seventeen horror projects on the go!

It’s a little sad but it is OK, I am not giving up the project, I am still going to write it, but I will be cautious about giving it to anyone to publish.  It may end up being published on my blog, then trolls can tell me how much of a rip off it is – when in actuality it is just a coincidence!

For your information I have over seventy projects on the go but I try to primarily work on just three at a time.

I have a long list of things I am currently doing and I put their genre next to the title of the stories I am doing along with the pseudonyms I use on my blog for that project. 

My main genre is fantasy of its various descriptions including dark fantasy it would seem, horror being a close second (specifically vampire horror) and dystopian the third.

It helps me keep track of what I am as an author primarily.

Thanks for reading! 

Inspiration in the air

Any progress towards any project is good progress in my opinion, even if that progress is only around one paragraph a piece – this is how I am doing things these days!

Today for example, I struggled to get into a creative mind-set, I told you earlier what I did and the results of that – well that wasn’t the full story as after I posted that post other things occurred.

I did a little bit more towards one of my previous projects, the Steampunk 1 project to be precise.  This hadn’t been worked on since Easter 2022 and after I posted my previous post I started to draw up a map of a new area within the story.

I had also had a brainstorm of what happens in the mid-section of the novel, an area I was struggling with for months.

After I did this I had yet another entirely new idea for yet another story and once again it is another horror idea although I would say this is more of a psychological horror than a dark fantasy and no sign of any animal distress in this tale at all, thankfully!

This story will be known as The Hermit Horror story and you’ve guessed it, there is a hermit in the story.

I wrote the synopsis to that already and I know the beginning, middle and end which is unusual for me as it usually takes me months or even years to see all the three sections pieced together appropriately; which got me starting the project immediately and I am halfway through the first chapter already – again, highly unusual for me!

What is concerning is this story reflects quite a lot of my personal life as the main character had a life of isolation and has a similar health problem to me and well… let’s just say I can really identify with her!

So by “How to write” books this book is destined to be a bestseller then?  With any luck, though I am not holding out!

I have also added paragraphs towards the Anthropomorphic Dystopian project too today and I have to say this has meant that today has been my most productive day since September – which is something I didn’t think I would do this morning because of how difficult it was to get into the creative mind-set initially!

I don’t think I have finished yet, yes I am having a break – but technically not because I am still writing… well this post for you right now – so that’s not a true break is it?  But to my brain if feels like one!

I feel poems coming on, so I am going to wrap this post up now and I am pretty sure later on tonight I will do more Project AD snippets as well as Steampunk 1 and even more towards the Hermit Horror… I can feel inspiration in the air!

Thanks for reading!