Tag Archives: life

a day in the life, ePublishing, Random Thoughts, Rants, Writing

Site redesigned, ebooks online…time to get back to writing!

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I find myself checking my download count for the three poetry books I have published so far, like an expectant gardener watching his crops turn from seedlings into blossoming fruit.

It is difficult not to feel a shade excited by a ‘good’ day of downloads.  The danger is, of course, that I’ll be down in the dumps after no or low downloads.

More interesting, to me at least, is the fact that I need the feedback of people choosing to download my books to feel better about my writing…or do I?

Truth be told, I have probably spent more time mucking about with my blog (thank you Adam for making it look so good…on Monday this week – I’ve probably already wrecked it by putting up ‘halfway’ decent graphics – sorry man!), checking my download count on Smashwords and generally not doing what I should be – which is rewriting my Killer Application book.

It is way too easy to get distracted.  The procrastinator kicks in and tells me all is well – I still have six months to get it into second draft shape.  Yet that is a goal I set so as not to put too much pressure on myself, an arbitrary goal to say the least.  Yet it is counting down towards me and I have lost a bit of traction on the rewriting.  Not a bad thing – distance may give me a better perspective, yet I feel it is not the right time for perspective.  The danger, of course, is slowing down too much…or is it?

I wonder if all artists, writers, creators feel this way.  Maybe this is a common theme – to keep the pace up while not burning all of the energy at once.  It is a hard balance to strike – between sleep and writing.  Seeing as this is only my ‘hobby’ (until I publish Killer App and start to actually ‘sell’ books instead of give them away), I guess I have to take the balanced view.

Oh to be able to spend all of my time writing – what joy, what excitement, what unbelievable bliss!  I envy you, full-time writers, I really do.  I am sure there are issues with it, but as Terry Pratchett once said, “Writing is the most fun anyone can have by themselves.”  It is true.  Nothing I have ever done on my own aside from writing has given me so much joy and satisfaction.

No, this does not count ‘raising children’.  That is not done on your own, even as a single parent like me.  That is done with the child or children – they are as much a part of the ‘raising’ as we parents are.  In fact, I’m pretty sure my daughter raised me as much as I her. 🙂  Thanks Sky!

Anyway, I’ve decided to go away and stop mucking about with my blog, and the store I tried to create, and the ebooks I keep playing around with (oooh oooh ooh, I’ll just waste another three hours placing the new logo my mate Adam created for me for Darker Zeus on my ebooks…and create a new anthology of free stories…NO!  Get back to work!).

Sometimes we have to be the disciplinarian.  I think parenting others (children, people you know, your own parents) is easier than parenting ourselves.

Do they teach classes in ‘parenting yourself’?

Til next time, adios and good luck in all your endeavours!

Em (mE)

Random Thoughts

Two rules to…erm rule them all?

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I think we only really need two commandments:

“Help as many people as much of the time as possible.”

and

“Hurt as few people as little of the time as possible.”

As far as I can tell pretty much everything we ever have to decide fits into these two rules.

The fact is that we cannot go through life without hurting other people. Even something as simple as getting a job or a place in a good school means that someone else did not get it. Any competition will have winners and losers. If we won, someone else lost. Fundamentally that means we are directly accountable for any upset that loss causes them. Therefore it is impossible to go through life without negatively affecting anyone.

Yet we can control how many people we actively hurt and how much we hurt them, by managing our behaviour and being aware of how our actions and behaviour affect other people. (And yes, this is even more difficult in a different culture, such as an American living in England. I’ve been here most of my life – 23 years to be precise – and yet I still run into idiosyncrasies that remind me how different the two cultures are, some of which still have the ability to sting…more on that later!)

This is a constant learning curve but that’s what keeps life interesting! 😉

Til next time, this is Em signing off,

mE

Poems, Random Thoughts

broken humachine

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The sad lost rundown engine
Turns, spinning us off into
An infinity of unknown confusion,
Our forlorn loneliness, just another
Tear, drop in the ocean, heart-string
Plucked, resonating the sound of our loss, deep
Down in the gut of our source, where
We all came from, first pushed, then pulled,
Grabbed, hung upside down for a moment,
That first screaming searing burning blindness,
The first coughing clutch of outside poison air,
The first disappointment, the first
In a line of continuing disappointments,
Our own failings and fate’s cruel tricks
Of giving us precisely what we ask for,
If only we remember those requests made, long
Before we had a clue what the outcome of our
Wishes could ever be, this we take
All in our stride, breath deep the air of
Regret, wonder where the time went
And pray that we don’t end up embittered
Like all the grumpy negative kind, so happy
To be miserable, reminded every day
By their own shit-tinted glasses
How nasty the world is, while
The rest of us carry on, making
The most out of what we have,
Breathlessy running from one extreme
To another, learning forever that karmafatelucksodslaw wins, every
Time picking ourselves up, dusting ourselves,
Off, heading out into the world
Bright eyed and bushy-tailed,
As if the next time the bruises will have healed first, instead of
Compounding rotten emotional fracture with fresh psychological bruising,
Able to get up and carry on, yet kicking ourselves
For being so foolish to think the next time
Will be any different, as if we have forgotten
That first screaming burning blinding breath
Of noise polluted air, poisoned by the very liquid life
That we grasp gasping to the very end,
None of us more terrified then I of dying
Reaching vainly for that last breath, sucking
Ineffectually at dying lungs, weak
From the effects of living, breathing
That polluted air –
When a moment strikes, a man on the train
The melodrama stops, inner voice momentarily stunned into silence,
Like breath held in aweshockwonder at dawn breaking silent
Over a desert mountaintop, this man, at first
Glance, nothing more than a ‘trainspotter’, someone
Lost between this time and tomorrow, mind’s
Eye fogged up with imagesemotions living memories
Taking up all of his mental and emotional
Space, clouding his eyes to what is,
Breath held as we watch him
Sift through a plastic bag of
Old letters, bills, paperwork,
Moving files from place to place, as if
It mattered where each sheet was, forgetting even
As he moves them, one envelope at a time
Why he bothers, perhaps peaking sanity
Up through the depths of fogged consciousness,
Eyes meeting other commuters, seeing enough
To survive, judging benign from dangerous,
Only survival level awareness left, this man
Who once clearly had a ‘life’, just as
You and I, now sits befuddled on a train,
Confused even by his own busy hands sifting
Through his own well-fingered materials,
How many times has he picked up this same envelope,
Looked at it bewildered, perhaps unsure of why he holds it still,
All of the previous memories of holding
This same letter perhaps giving him some anchor
In reality, a touchstone for the remainder
Of his sanity, as we know it, but
Still we stand, holding our breath, watching
The lost movements of a ‘broken’ humachine, lost
But still all there, as much us as we are him, and
We are reminded of the cruelist of life’s mean japes, that
Even the most astute, sharp, aware, in
Control amongst us can slip and fall, for
Something as simple as a misfired neuron, missed timing,
Misconnection primed, made and with repetitious visits,
Ironed into place, the frailty of the human mind,
Human kind only holding onto this ‘reality’ by a gossamer thread,
Waking up one bright loud screaming gasping nightday, working
Endlessly to reach ulterior goals, outside of
Who we are, forever reaching and striving
For the ever disappearing horizon, only
To end up dead, as we all will
Eventually. Until we see him,
Sitting on the train, alive and hearty,
Yet ‘not all there’, out of touch, and
We freeze, remembering how life can be the
Most fickle of bed partners, first searing pain,
Fear, screaming blindness,
Then life’s ups and downs, bumps
And grinds, all in hopes of something better,
Whether in this life, or the next depending on
Prevailing religious views, only to be
Stopped dead, as it were, in our tracks
By a single man, lost as a young child left
All alone by mistake,
Separated from parents
By cruel twist of fate, corner turned
Too fast, another wipeout in life’s 24 hour
Race, reminding us there is more
To life than striving, we live,
We die, we lose, and
We get lost,
This is our life.
This is our premise,
Life’s bitter sweet decline
It all ends in the same terminal
Way, why not enjoy what
We have, before it
Has all gone.

Poems, Random Thoughts

By the River

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Sit and watch the swans dance
Sublime across liquid time,
Ripples sparkle with dying light,
Edge the night’s winning battle with day,
Waning as it does towards the end
All the while wondering at time lost,
Another echo in the well of lives remembered,
When eyes still burned with amazing grace
As each new dawns golden light broke
Once upon a time, not forgotten but tasted
Instead on tip of soul’s forked tongue,
Not lies at least, embellishments of memory’s fickle grasp
Love’s ghosts, favoured tastes of childhood’s own
Rose-tinted glasses, a hug, a smile, a coy glance
Forever lost in the quickly darkening water,
To surface again only in the glint of time’s remembered waltz,
The dying day’s final kiss bleeding light breaking sharp
Against the deep dark, swans sublime swimming
Cross micro waves of timeless wonder,
When will we next meet again, my heart
Is here when I next visit Kingston-
Upon-Thames.

Short Stories

May and Harold

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.ned vision brings you May and Harold, the portrait
.ned vision brings you May and Harold, the portrait

Great guffaws of choking laughter ripped through Harold’s throat, in dark contrast to the torrent of tears pouring down his cheeks, salty liquid slipping down his throat as he opened his mouth and tipped his head back to spout deep gut laughter, only to choke on his own tears and double up with a coughing fit, finally folding up on the floor as the hiccups, coughs, laughter, and tears overwhelmed his massive body and forced him to collapse in a seething heap on the cold stone.

“What is it Harold?” May was used to this sort of outburst, having been best friends with Harold since they were mites under their mothers’ shared watch, “what’s so funny?”

Harold found himself sitting up slowly, raising a hand to his cheek to calm the hiccups, holding his breath to keep the laughter down, and squinting his eyes to see through the tears. His eyes were burning, and so was his throat, ripped apart as it was from the joint abrasiveness of the tears and coughing fit.

“You have to see it for yourself. It’s just too much!” May’s outstretched hand recoiled nervously, but not quickly enough to stop Harold from grabbing her wrist tightly in his massive calloused paw, and pulling her down to her knees to stare straight into his eyes.

She found herself lost again, falling forward in perpetual spin until his eyes were the world. She landed on soft ground, thankful that he had remembered to put gravity on this time. She did not mind sharing his visions, but she did not enjoy the floating feeling that usually accompanied them, as it made her quite ill for sometime after.

“Watch,” his voice came from all around her, inside her own head, even. She shook her skull, knowing that she was not really shaking anything but her imagination of her own head, but it felt real. The voice still resonated from inside her mind nonetheless. “Watch the two birds fighting.”

Suddenly the dark around her lit up, and she was the size of an ant, floating somewhere above the ground, in line with the tops of the tall grass blades. Two massive redbreasts were hopping at each other from the corners of her vision, and she cried out as their massive beaks clashed only inches from her chest. “Get me out of here, you idiot!”

She nearly threw up as the entire picture moved around her, shifting her a few feet back from the arguing birds. May could feel he was sorry, without his apology, could feel the shift in the air, the taste of sweet honeysuckle in her mouth, the sensation of a caress across her forehead and back through her hair. The hackles that had been raised only a moment earlier dropped against her neck, and her whole body relaxed once more.

“Watch now.” The birds were fighting each other for ownership of a worm, a sad, defenceless worm that was getting battered and bruised, torn up as they grabbed an edge, lost it, and hopped back and forth to grab another piece of meat, pulling until the other bird lost its beak-full, and the hopping dance began again.

Even this close, the birds looked ridiculous, hopping at each other with such determination, reminding May of a bank manager chasing an errant customer down the street, or a teacher with a frustratingly intelligent child trying desperately to win their classmates back from the brink of anarchy. She even allowed herself to smile, but she did not see the reason for such gaiety in Harold.

“They’re hopping mad,” he said, chuckling so loudly in her head she automatically covered her ears to stop the sound, realised the futility of it, stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly instead.

Suddenly she was let go, and fell backwards on her haunches as Harold let go of her hand. She had been thrown out of his world so quickly that she had not had a chance to readjust, and the illness that usually overtook her when in a moving vehicle made her vomit on the spot.

“Look what you made me do!” May glared at Harold and pointed angrily at the vomit sprayed on her trousers. She was furious, and he knew it, but he was already off giggling again. “Stop it! I’m serious, dammit!”

His face, closely controlled, became unglued, and he started to giggle, first behind closed lips, then through clenched teeth, then a snort, more snorts, and finally complete hysteria. She felt her chest clench in annoyance, until she heard him mumbling something to himself as he rolled clutching his belly and giggling.

“I’m serious, dammit!” His voice was almost a perfect copy of hers, but when he said it, it sounded petulant and childish. She smiled after the third or fourth utterance of that phrase, just as he managed to regain his composure, roll to his side, and look her in the eyes. They stayed like that for a few moments, staring at each other, serious and controlled, when she felt a snort in her own throat. What was this? Dammit! She started giggling, and he started giggling.

They were rolling around on the grass giggling at each other, some serious part of her mind wondering when he would ever grow up, when she would ever grow up, when he would come to terms with the fact that he was completely insane, that she was too, and that no matter how gifted he was, neither of them was going to be set free from these blue institutional walls.