An exercise

Sometimes my life seems to take a sudden, sharp turn left. My conscious mind, knowing it should be following a sensible, forward path, tries hard to overcome it, but the demon inside my skull has other plans. The world takes on odd colours; lights are brighter; and objects develop hardened edges. Suddenly I am scared. Everything is too close: traffic, walls, people. And I need to push them away.

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69 words
I used to take part in regular writing challenges, but somehow I have diverted from them. I must try harder to keep my creative juices flowing.  This is just as the words came out of my head. I might edit later.

The Alien

No-one seems to know how long the foul thing took to establish a hold on me. They tell me it had been there, growing steadily, for a long time before making its presence clear to me. Within a comfortable fold in my innards it latched on to my flesh, taking advantage of my bodily functions and feeding off my waste. Foul thing. They come in all sizes, I'm told, but this one attained a prodigious level before I knew. But how I knew! At the end of a long day I felt particularly tired, and weak, and nauseous, but when I rose in the night to throw up I suddenly felt the griping, stabbing pains in my side. Over and over again the waves of agony sliced through me. In hospital they photographed my insides, to reveal the ugly, misshapen entity lodged just below my ribs. Immediate thoughts of gory movies sprang to mind, but I have been assured there is no risk of sudden exit through my chest. We have formed a bond, and I must learn to live with my lodger. I am in no immediate danger, as long as I follow the rules. I must feed my alien correctly or face its wrath. It hates saturated fats, and sugar, and anything at all that tastes good, but if I eat them the pains return. Otherwise I rarely notice these days that I share my body cavity with an alien. Rarely.

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Because I need to get back into the writing habit.

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It's just a gallstone. Don't worry!

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Thursday extracts: today's Thinking Ten contribution

When the alarm went off this morning I really didn't want to leave my bed. I knew it would backfire, but I craved just another ten minutes in the warm, soft, duvet coccoon. Well of course I dozed off again and had to rush my normal routine. Made sure of the essentials: not quite a shit, shave and shower; more teeth, tablets and toast. And then out of the house. There was no time to sort out my day over a leisurely coffee like I usually do. I catapulted from the front door, still buttoning my jacket, because it was so bitingly cold outside. Forgotten scarf. And where were my gloves? Underdone bread gripped between my incisors after being ripped from the toaster before it was truly browned. No time to wait for it to pop. Looking back I suppose I could have saved a few minutes by skipping breakfast, but I really couldn't afford to be hungry today because of the presentation. I'm unlikely to make an impression if my belly's rumbling. Of course I'm even less likely to make one when I try to give the speech without notes. Papers I took home last night to rehearse, and left beside the coffee pot to remind me to bring them back today.

Don't give up your day job

A computer expert in Florida has designed a program that is capable of writing stories. But don't panic, all your scribes out there: it doesn't write very good ones.

The software, called Xapagy, has been loaded with a lot of existing tales, translated into a language it can understand, then asked to create new writing of its own.  At first it was given a section of a known tale, such as Red Riding Hood, then asked to predict what came next.

Anyone who was taught English by a creative teacher in the 60s will be familiar with that technique. Xapagy looks for familiar connections within the given script, and uses them to create the next stage of the narrative. Here's an example of its work:

"My, what a big mouth you have Grandma," says Little Red Riding Hood, with just a hint of suspicion. The wolf sneezes. "Bless you," says the little girl.

The idea of the program is to improve the design of future robots; to make artifical intelligence more human and therefore more user-friendly. Experts predict that eventually it will be able to make up its own stories, once it has a large enough store of existing ones.

Xapagy's tale is told in the December 8 edition of New Scientist. I had to check that it wasn't from April.
The programmer's name? Lotzi Bölöni.

Inspiration, Thinking Ten, and generally getting my act together

I have been remiss. I admit it. I have been doing absolutely no writing for weeks/months/ages. Then I heard that Thinking Ten had been missing for a while but was back. I had been missing for longer.  In penance I visited and played the prompt (yesterday's prompt I admit - but I did it anyway!)   Herewith:

Ingrid

It wasn’t like it was the best room in the place, and by god the place had some very nice rooms, but it was comfortable and well supplied. And once Ingrid had a pass key it was easy enough to come and go as she pleased. Nobody took much notice of her and her kind. They were supposed to act in a way that wouldn’t disturb the other residents. That was the point.


She liked to think she paid her way. She knew what had to be done and was happy enough to do it, even the dirty bits, in exchange for her little piece of freedom. So she would never have to go back to the awful man who took her money and made promises he didn’t keep. Oh he’d brought her to England alright, at least, most of the residents spoke English, so she assumed that was where she was, but there was no mention when she bought her passage that she would have to pay more on arrival, and if she couldn’t pay (Of course she couldn’t pay. It had taken every coin she had to buy the ticket!) she would be made to provide in other ways. With men. Dirty, smelly men with hard fists and limp dicks.

Luck followed her the night she got away, when she hid by latching onto a group of rag-tag folk by a dimly lit back door of a huge building. She was hustled inside and given a pink-checked uniform to wear and sent off with another woman who showed her how to clean and tidy the hotel rooms and make beds with fresh new sheets when guests left. That night she learned where all the stores were kept and she realised that behind the shelves was space: enough for a bed, made of abandoned cushions and covered in last year’s style of sheets.

Six months had passed, as far as she could tell. She worked every night and early morning but never asked for pay. She lived on leftovers, and people’s waste, and was richer than at any other time in her life.

Going to the beach

Everyone knows what you do at the beach: it’s all to do with sandcastles and paddling and eating ice cream. Well it is if you go there on holiday. But if you live at the seaside it’s different. For one thing you don’t want to share it with hordes of other people who come to stay and spoil the view and get in your way and don’t understand what it’s really all for.  People who sit in the sunshine with knotted hankies on their heads and expose their pasty, factory skin until they turn pink as peppermint rock, then slouch painfully back to their B&Bs with sand in their shoes and soggy knees where they didn’t turn up their trousers quite far enough before they waded in. They always look dejected as they return to their evening-meal-included and no-children-in-the-bar. Not like us.

We avoid the beach in summer. We wait patiently from Easter to October for them to leave, and then we have our fun. They never walk alone along the sand, leaning into a biting northerly wind, wrapped in woolly hat and scarf but smiling as the ocean air fills their lungs to bursting with life-boosting ozone.  They never see waves crash against the concrete defences and rise high over the railings before landing smack back down on the walkway. They never laugh and run, backwards, away from the torrent, to escape with just a smattering of spray across their faces, licking their salty lips, before turning, content, towards a harbourside café where they buy Bovril or hot chocolate and wrap their hands around the mug for warmth,  matching the glow of delight already rising from inside.

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I'm a bit busy at the moment and I'm not sure if I'll have internet access so I'm posting some things in advance. This was written a few weeks ago for Thinking Ten.

Weather

“There’s no such thing as bad weather. Only the wrong kind of clothing.”

We all turned to look at Nigel as he spoke the words, various expressions of disbelief on our faces.

“What a supremely stupid comment, you stupid fart,” came the reply, “Who the hell told you that bit of crap?” The speaker was Alan, by far the sportiest of the gang and probably the most put out by our current state. He could hardly sit still for a couple of minutes, let alone the fifteen we had been trapped inside the hut by the torrential downpour outside.

He shook his head again to try to rid himself of the rivulets running from his thick, curly hair and down his face, but he only succeeded in splattering everyone around him. A chorus of disapproving hails rose up in reaction and he got up and tried to walk off his excess energy. It didn’t work though, because he could only make three strides before he had to turn around and come back to where we were sitting, hunched up near the front and eyeing the waterfall that was cascading off the roof.

“My Dad says that the right sort of clothing can overcome even the worst weather.”

“My Dad.” Heavy with sarcasm. “My Dad! If your dad’s so bloody clever how come you’re just as drenched as the rest of us then?” That was Simmo. Nigel was the last of our lot to have a dad still living at home, and Simmo resented him a bit for it. Simmo’s dad quit home and moved in with the local pub landlady a year ago after the old bloke died of alcohol poisoning. Simmo’s mum reckoned his dad was going the same way and good luck to him. I think her bitterness just rubbed off on him.

Before the argument had chance to take off, Baz stuck his nose in. Literally. He’d taken his glasses off for about the ninth time and he was polishing them on his t-shirt. He’s close to blind without them and the combination of rain outside and us indoors was making the shed kind of steamy so Baz’s specs kept misting over. He leaned forward so he was only a couple of inches from the others, just so he could see them, and said: “Must be good to have a choice of what to wear.” He was somewhere in the middle of eight brothers so he was always lumbered with stuff that didn’t fit the older ones any longer.

That made us all stop for a while and think, or at least shut up, and all you could hear was a roary sort of noise and the splashing just outside the door. We sat like that for ages, just staring at the rain and listening to that engine sound. Looked like it was going to be a long summer.

On-the-job training

Over at The Year of Writing Dangerously Michael G-G asked the question: "How have YOU learned to write?"

My answer was:
I'm a trained journalist and did a year's specialist college course before a three-year apprenticeship serving under some tough sub-editors who drilled style, accuracy and speed into their charges. 
It was only after completing a gruelling four-exams-in-a-day test that I was allowed to call myself a writer.
Since then I have worked to hone my skills (for 35 years!) both by writing and reading (not to mention listening to theatre productions, radio drama, lectures, etc.)
I write because I cannot imagine doing anything else. I earn my living that way (now as a communications officer) and when I get home I hit the keyboard as a creative writer.
I honestly think I'd die if I wasn't able to.

Die? Seriously? Well it wasn't until I wrote those words that I realised quite how important my writing is to me. It is all I have ever done and really all I ever want to do. I know that I get very depressed when I don't write regularly and that I probably would lose the will to live if I was ever told that I couldn't.

I've been getting despondent lately about my work because I entered a couple of contests and came nowhere. The winning entries were awful. Maybe the tales were good in themselves, but the writing was sloppy, the spelling was awful, the tense kept changing, there was very little technical ability in evidence.  It was a bit like giving first prize in a baking contest to the best looking cake, even though it was burned under the icing and tasted of gravy.

But do you know something?  It DOESN'T MATTER!  Because I know I'm better than that, and if the judges didn't value skill I don't really care what they thought of my work. Why would I bother what someone with such low standards thinks? It wouldn't mean much, even if they loved what I do.

So there it is. I shall go on writing and self-publishing and being read by just a few of my friends and that's OK because, I WRITE because I CAN write.
I don't need to be the next Ian Rankin or Terry Pratchett.
I just need to keep writing.


Michael's post was fascinating, by the way -  about a writing contest for military personnel. Make sure you go over there and read it.

Packing

My intention is always to pack light when I go travelling, but somehow I end up with loads of clothes and bits and bobs that I throw in 'just in case'. Literally just in case, because that's where they spend the entire holiday; never touched, never used, never even seen. In spite of that, I never learn. I find myself standing on stations and in airports, weighed down with all my clutter, surrounded by bags and holdalls and rucksacks and wondering just how I'm going to fit in everything I'm prepared for. Reading, photography, painting, hill walking, bird watching, shopping, fine dining, (we never do), and that's even before I start to cater for every potential kind of weather.

Five pairs of trousers is way too much for a week, particularly when I shall find myself slumming round in the same, comfortable pair of jeans for four out of the seven days. Take lots of t-shirts to ring the changes, that's the secret. But then there's the shoes.

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We're off on holiday in a few weeks and I've been wondering what to take with me. I started writing a list. It made me realise just how much STUFF I pack that I don't need, so now I shall start crossing things off it.