Curious lost lines

Brain hurricane season is still present; I have had more ideas in the past few days than I knew what to do with.

This appears to be a long one and I blame it all down to the “Bluewater technique” I spoke about in a previous post.

I really did try to force myself to write something every day whether it’s going to be published or not, whether it’s more than a sentence or not and I got thinking about some very wacky things!

You’ll see them as posts such as “If I were a fairy” or “life of a mermaid” though the latter is due in the first week of June, so you won’t see that just yet.

Somethings I consider unpublishable or are unfinished poems or plays.

I don’t like to leave poems unfinished but it is a habit I am trying to get out of because a book I’ve been reading called “How to grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy says, it is easy to lose a good line, never delete the line when you don’t know where its taking you, store them in a folder called “lost lines” and come back to them later, a poem doesn’t need to be rushed.

So I’ve done that and have accumulated approximately twenty unfinished and would be deleted poems in just a week!

They don’t even have to be poems actually; they could be good prose lines for a short story or a novel.

Who knows where those lost lines will lead us?

There is a whole paragraph which seems exciting, but I don’t know why yet.  But it’s very intriguing and it’s called “The Masters of Dream”.

I haven’t been able to add more to it yet, because in all honesty I was busy with other things today and working on those things with a raging head and ear ache.

But I could not ignore that paragraph, which started like that.

I hope I have time tomorrow to think about it and see what this is!

Thanks for reading!

Types of stories I have finished or are working on

Types of work that I am currently doing;

I have mentioned in several posts that there are certain themes I am writing in my novels and there has been a question of just how many novels are you working on at the moment?  Personally, I don’t know!  I know that sounds really funny to some, but I have been writing loads of stories almost my whole life and I have never really sat back and wondered how many I am working on, because I just write what I feel like at the time.  Yes, there are many novels which are 100% finished now, but to me they could still be in redrafting stages and many have been redrafted umpteempth times since two years ago.  I only started redrafting my 30yrs of work two years ago, simply because I never thought it would be necessary and also because I was never sure if I could cope with writing as a career.

I think I am ready to say, I am now ready for this career, hence why a lot of my writing habits have changed recently.

I am totally self-taught, I have no formal education and I was home educated by a dyslexic parent throughout most of my childhood and pretty much neglected by social services to get on with it without too much interference.  As an adult I have been kept too busy to take up education, but even now, I am trying to teach myself.  I can’t afford even the cheapest monthly fee on skillshare yet, but I am hoping by the end of the year that I can do some of their courses to learn how to punctuate properly and use grammar and anything else I need to improve my writing for both my blog and my novels, before finally approaching that agent I want to.  I have found an agent I like, but whether or not they will like me this time next year is another matter!

This post is going to tell you the types of novels I am working on or that have been finished, without revealing too much of the plot; but the list is not conclusive, these are just stories I am willing to throw out into the world in the next couple of years, with any luck!

1.  You all know how much I love my vampires; so it shouldn’t be a shock to tell you that I have twenty seven different stories already completed in both my mind and on paper, along with full encyclopaedias and fictional historical booklets based on that world.  I have been working on this massive project since I was ten years old, yes ten years old!  That’s a whopping twenty eight years!  However, there is a list of seventy eight other stories I haven’t even finished yet, not even once that has been on the go for years, some are new. 
2. Recently you have learned my second favourite creature to write about are dragons and there are approximately five books I have been writing, three of which are near completion with hopefully their final drafts. 
3. Pirates are another fantasy thing I like to write about regularly and there are three separate pirate books to date.  One of which is near its final draft and another is an off-shoot book to one of the dragon novels. 
4. Gargoyles also have their own books with this author, I have six novels with those and in two of them they are the main characters.
5. I have written two novels with phoenixes as the main theme too.
6. I have a whole series based on a character that lives in a hot air balloon, this is currently five books long, but there are more being planned.
7. There are seven books based on robots. Half of which are fantasy more than sci-fi.
8. There is a big series about giants, that is almost ten books strong and again, they are off-shoots of a dragon novel I have.
9. There are loads of mermaid novels I have and various other new sea creatures, I haven’t actually counted those, but I do know that there are at least six finished.  These are standalone novels, not a series.
10. I have four separate series of werewolves, one of which I am very passionate about and spend a lot of time on.
11. There is a demon erotica series I have been working on for the past eight years; the series is actually nearly complete now.
12. There are three zombie books that are both standalone novels, too, two of which are more fantasy than horror and very comedic.
13. There are five separate afterlife series I am working on, some are fantasy, some are horror and some are dystopian.
14. There are fourteen dystopian series I am working on too, two of which are based on religious ideologies.
15. There is a series of fairy stories for children too, which is approximately seven books and I regard as novellas.
16. There are four Christmas themed books I have written too.
17. There are four comics too, or, I think one of them is actually graphic novel rather than comic – this is dystopian and steam punk in style.
18. I also have two ghost stories.
19. I have a selection of horror too, which could be considered a series, but they are all standalones really.
20. I know I have 777 poems on this blog, but there are at least 5000 off the blog that have never been published online anywhere.
21. I have nine musical compositions as well, that has never been published anywhere.
22. I have six operas written too as well as musicals for theatre, but I am so not confident about those right now.
23. I have a series about little people that were inspired by Land of the giants and the borrowers. 

There are probably more I haven’t mentioned yet, but these are the only things that come to mind right now for me.  I do have a lot of work here, but I just haven’t had the confidence about really throwing myself out there.  I am terrified of the consequences.  I don’t want fame, I want my work to be enjoyed and I really want to see them as movies, but I don’t want to have a famous face.  But I am getting used to the idea that maybe I will have no choice someday?  I can’t keep my work hidden forever, I didn’t write it for it to be hidden and forgotten – those novels are like little people to me, they are like creatures that need to be nurtured and their only food is recognition.  Their only source of nourishment is to be enjoyed and read, it keeps them alive!  I believe in BIG MAGIC, I believe ideas are alive!

Mermaids murder murmur

They told me to drown my sorrows

So I drowned you

I held your head under water

Until your life was through

I supped and dined on your heart

Killing you was a fine art

I am part fish and human too

I took immense joy ending you

You was my bane

You was my terror

Bothering me was your error

I pulled you into deep dark waters

I won’t be a pet for your daughters

A mermaid lives her life free in the sea

Your biggest mistake

Was hunting me

Sunday Word Count 2

Sunday word count time!  Drum roll please…

14987

This is what I have accomplished since last Sunday, getting better, much better.

Here is how it has been broken down, day by day, with excuses in tow, even though there are no excuses really for bad days!

28^th July – 2437 – good

29^th July – 1456 – better than bad

30^th July – 3039 – writing like my old self again

31^st July – 3100 – Oh yes, I am back in the flow, just like my old self again for sure

1^st August – 160 – what the blazes happened here?  4 hours sleep and a migraine, darlings.

2^nd August – 4329 – Making up for lost time huh?  No, just an excellent day!

3^rd August – 466 – what happened here?  Tired and was distracted by library books!

Notes for the week –

I am writing towards three novels at once because I get twitchy if I am forced to work on the same thing over and over, variety is the spice of life right?  I am going to name them for you as subject and number with main characters name because I don’t really know what the titles should be and I tend to write about the same subject a lot.  So my current projects are…

Vampire story 1 – Rhea

Fantasy adventure 1 – Maud

Horror 1 – Johnny

But in February I had a dream and you know what they say about authors who dream their story plots don’t you?  Well neither do I actually, but the ones who had written stories based on a dream tend to become classics – I doubt mine will, but I was surprised when the dream came to me.  The dream left me until Thursday night, when it came back with more details and then again last night, it doesn’t want to leave me alone, so I have been trying to fight the urge to add a fourth book to the list of working projects, but I am fighting a losing battle, I am going to have to include a fourth book in the works.

This book will be known as werewolf story 1.

I have put a mermaid story on the back bench as I have to fall in love with it again.

I am trying so hard to stick with three ideas, but if you want me to be completely honest with you, it is so hard, because I have too many ideas and sticking to just three is literally torture, so I do sometimes sneak in titbits of other stories.

Maud and Rhea are very nearly finished actually, so around Christmas they shouldn’t be a problem anymore, well Maud should be done in the least.  

Once a first draft is written I do what Stephen King suggests in his book “On Writing”, I put the story away for about three months and then come back to it with fresh eyes, it works wonders because you tend to forget what you’ve done – seriously, you do!  You get to read it as a reader, not the creator and you see more mistakes and weaknesses in your story if you do this.

Maud though is not a first draft, the draft I am working on is the fourth attempt and there will be probably be a fifth as I had noticed quite recently two characters which are following the main character around are adding literally nothing to the plot, so I have to write in more interesting stuff for them or just wipe them out from existence; which would be a shame because I really want those characters to work.

I must admit, all blog posts, poetry included are first drafts, I don’t bother polishing my work here, it is not that I don’t care about my blog, it is that I care more about my novels and stuff I want to send to publishers more.  If I became persnickety about my blog, the other stuff would never be done.

Further word count scores will be posted up every Sunday, I noticed it does motivate me to write as I don’t want to go the wall of shame like I should have last week – I will actually start doing that I think, if I write less than 10,000 words in a week, I will wall of shame myself. 

Could I bare the humiliation of another last week?

Good luck with your own writing!  But more importantly, make sure it is fun, if it is not fun for you it won’t be fun for your readers.

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.

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.

 

 

Inktober 2018 – Day 5 – The Mermaid

Mermaid

 

Yes today is the 5th day of Inktober and as you can see I have chosen a mermaid for my theme of the day!

Everybody knows what a mermaid is, but do you know what they are really like?

They aren’t what you see in Disney movies according certain world folklore and that’s for sure!  They don’t go around singing at mortals and wishing they were humans and fall in love you know, well actually they do sing at mortals and when they do it’s a sign you really should block your ears and get out of that ocean and according to some legends, they do sometimes fall in love with mortals too, but it’s not all pearls and coral – oh no!

Mermaids from Ireland were called Merrows and they were supposed to be ugly creatures, with green hair, scales, and claws and were evil critters by all accounts.  They had a penchant for falling in love with beautiful human men and would often kidnap them to take them into the sea to drown them so their spirit could live with them in the other realm or they would take on the appearance of a beautiful human woman and breed with him on land and disappear with or without her offspring and the groom.

In Russia they have the Rusalka which can be either benevolent or evil depending upon the individual, you could never tell what a Rusalka would be like if you saw one, so it was best to keep away from them.  It is thought they were the spirits of young girls who were horrendously killed or had violent accidents, if their death was caused by a rape and a murder it was said that those would be evil spirits to men, as any man who goes near her in her transformed self would be garrotted to death by her long hair!  Sometimes women who are in danger would become protected by the Rusalka from any man nearby who is about to harm her!

The Fin Folk of Norway and the Orkney Islands were often considered using humans as slaves and they only way to escape them were to throw coins of silver into the sea to distract them as they loved silver a lot!

So, the next time you think that mermaids are sweet endearing ladies of the sea, with shrill beautiful voices and you fancy taking your chances to get romantically involved with one – think again! 

 

 

 

Myths of the tailless four arm mers

Every mermaid is expected to drown in her own tears

For the dreams she’s had for years, of walking on hot sands like a lady for a man

A thousand myths and legends tear at the mermaid’s heart

Myths of the tailless four arm mers

She has seen them in her people’s art

How she wished to be an explorer of their sands

Witnessing the dry green scape and touch them with her hands

How she wished she knew, what it meant to be dry

Dry from all her tears

 

The foregoing poem was written rather quickly and the quality has surprised me, usually I think everything I do is useless, but I like this piece.  In fact I like it so much, I feel a story coming on, whether it will be short enough for me to want to post that eventually on this blog, I don’t know, but it is inspiring me to do more and there are other poems creeping into my head of a similar theme too!

Cold Sands (introduction)

Windy, grey and cold was the weather that day, the cold wet sand beneath Rebecca’s bare feet felt oddly comforting to her. Trying to warm herself in vain with folded arms rubbing her shoulders, standing in nothing but a renaissance style under-dress, she watched the horizon intently as though focusing on something approaching, but there was nothing and nor was she really expecting there to be.
She could hear them coming behind her – her family and her maidservant, calling out to her to get inside and put some clothes on, as she might catch her death of cold; but she looked on and the nearer they got, the further towards the sea she walked as though hypnotized by some demonic siren.
Intrigued to find out what happens next? Like this post and if I get 10 likes by the 20th November I will make a story for you.
Thank you, enjoy!

Watercolor mermaid 1st attempt

1st attempt at watercolor mermaid scene

 

For the last 6 months I have attempted to teach myself art, sketching and painting particularly with watercolors.
The image that you see is my first ever attempt at creating a watercolor mermaid under the sea scene and my first ever attempt at under-painting a picture.
This image is unfinished and I am afraid to say it will stay that way because I mixed the shades of colors that are used on the paper and my fiance Paul knocked over the palette when getting it for me and it was all lost and I am very reluctant to attempt to try making more of the same shades of color as I don’t want to completely ruin this picture.
There are some blemishes to the image, for example the mark of yellow on her left inside elbow amongst other things, but I cannot repair these without severely impacting on the color scheme, as I cannot guarantee I can mix the same shades again.
I am a self-taught artist that have only really been practicing twice a month any kind of art-work for about a year now, as I mentioned before my attempt at watercolors started about six months ago.
In my personal opinion, starting to teach yourself artwork, particularly sketching/drawing shouldn’t really start at how-to-draw books, because that never worked for me, instead, trusting my own eye works better and reading books based on painting; that is of course if you eventually want to move onto painting your images.
I have been getting a lot of comments from my immediate family and friends that they believe I have a natural talent for art considering that I spend less than five hours a month practicing; personally I don’t see it, I see too many imperfections in my work and I cheat. For example, I have hidden one of the mermaid’s hands in this picture because I couldn’t make it look as good as her right hand and the paper was thinning with all the erasing I had to do.
I have a gallery at deviantart.com if you wish to see more pictures that I’ve done as well as my budding artist four year old son, Henry, some of his best work are up there, which reminds me that I must add his version of a toucan up later on.
http://ffgallery.deviantart.com/