Raining Fairy Lights

On being woken up by cows

2011-10-04T01:46:00.003+01:00

My first week at university has been rather interesting. I was worried before because when I came here on the open day, the part of the building I’m living in that we looked at had very tiny, dark bedrooms, and though I can deal with small, I really hate dark rooms. They’re suffocating. But it turns out, I actually have a really nice room that’s bigger than I thought, and has a wonderful view, which I have posted below. Yes, cows. There are cows outside my room, and actually, they’re everywhere. My university has a farm, I think. The fields all around campus are full of cows. They come right up to the fences around the campus. In spring, they are replaced by sheep.

The view from my bedroom window :)

My flatmates are great. I don’t know all of them very well (there are nine of us) but there are four I get on really well with, and for the first week they kind of watched out for me. I should mention the first night, when we all went out together to the Student Union bar, I got lost and went home by myself because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t go out every night after, but on the nights we did go out after that, they looked out for me which was nice as I’m really not the going-out type and noise and crowds scare me, especially both together. So that makes going clubbing an interesting experience.

Most of the people in my block, as well as the building, seem to be doing performing arts. I didn’t realise before how creative my university is before I came. My flatmates (it’s not really a felt, but it’s hard to explain otherwise) are all very flamboyant and interesting, and I’m glad of that. I do feel rather boring in comparison though. But it’s great and everyone’s friendly and, so far, I think I’m doing well at making friends and not being antisocial.

In my last post I said I didn’t want to leave home. I still don’t really, and I miss home a lot, especially my family and my best friend, but I’m so busy that I don’t get to think about it much, and that helps. My mum and aunt have called me several times since I got here and they told me that my grandma, who’s been in hospital since May, is coming home next week, which is great. And I think it will help everyone because my family need something good right now. I wish I was at home too, but I think that after a while I’ll really love it here, and it’ll feel more like home. I love the city and the uni, and the people are nice, but I do really miss home.

I haven’t written anything since I got here unfortunately, but I’m determined to get back into it. Been reading lots, though, which is something I haven’t had the chance to do for a long time. I mean like reading books that are my own choice, not for school like the last couple years. My new story’s still bubbling away and stewing nicely. :)

Next week I might post some prose here and start something about my holidays. We got an assignment today to write a page-long story inspired by one of the book titles on our reading list. I’m not good with limits, but I think it’s an interesting first assignment anyway.

So umm, yeah. My first week at university. I can’t really think what else to write.

Update on the Life of Me

2011-09-22T01:40:00.001+01:00

Ha. Blog got forgotten. Oopsie.

Anyway, this is only a small update. I’ve actually been back from my adventuring for over a month now, but life since then has been a rather hectic mix of packing for university, cataloguing books, trips to hospital, funerals, and a new story.

I’ll write a longer post on my holiday, including some pictures, once this week’s over and I’m settled at university, because I need to go through the journal I wrote while I was away (ha, and actually find it) and sort out something that won’t be a terrible day-to-day monologue of all the amazing stuffs I was determined to never forget. It was amazing. And I know I meant to blog while I was away/when I got back, but eh. Better late than never? And besides, I only know of three people who actually read this blog and you guys will forgive me.

Anyway, on Saturday I go to university. Yayyyyyy . . . kinda. Every time I start to feel excited, I become that six-year-old who didn’t want to go camping because mum wouldn’t be there to make me a hot chocolate (‘milkies’) before bed. It’s big and there’s still so much to do and I suck at making friends and my bike’s still broken and I’ve not found a church (not that I have a way of getting to one because of the bike) and I hate that almost all my books are going to be left at home in boxes. Right now, I feel I need to be at home. Not just because of being scared of leaving home, but because it's just a bad time to leave, I think. We need to be together, and I also don't want to be alone so far from home at the moment. It might not be the other side of the country or the world, but it's still far enough.

But anyway. I’m a wimp so this is probably all just stupid panicking and over-emotional-ness. It’s been a very bad week.

On a more happier front, it was my birthday a couple days ago. I got some cool orange headphones, a tin of rice pudding, £50 of book vouchers, a pretty notebook and a CD, and my aunt took me out for a pub meal. And my dad sent me a card, a facebook message, and an email, which is pleasantly surprising. :)

I also started a new story recently. In the first week I spent an hour brainstorming the spark of idea, and the rest writing, like non-stop. I reached the 12,000 word mark. That’s more than what I write during a NaNoWriMo week, so it kind of blew me away with excitement. I’ve never had an idea that got me writing so much and so fast. That was about three weeks ago, and since then I’ve slowed down a bit (verging on 20,000 now) to brainstorm more, so I don’t get stuck and burn out.

When I first started out, all I had was a scene and two characters. Now there’s a circus troupe, a brother, a pet elephant, a bratty fairy, and a host of magical items I’m having serious fun making up, as well as a half-worked plot that’s unravelling as I explore more characters. So all’s going well, and it feels amazing to be writing a children’s story again. I was afraid I couldn’t write them anymore after so many attempts at ‘grown-up’ stories that are still floating in the periphery of ‘to research/planandbrainstorm/actuallywrite’.

Poetry, as seems to always be the case whenever I get back into prose, has taken a liking to the cupboard of my mind to play shadow-butterflies on the door with a torch. It may be there a while if this story keeps going as well as it started, so this place (now I’ve remembered it) will probably be full of ramblings and holiday photos rather than the usual poetry-dumping.

Anyhoo, I’m done. Be back next week sometime to tell you about my first week in university and Berlin.

Gone Adventuring

2011-07-14T10:26:00.002+01:00

Today I will be going on holiday with my best friend. I have bought a cool new travel notebook just for this holiday, and in it I will be doing what the cool kids do and writing about everything I see and do and hear and eat and all that kind of fun stuff. Also drawing and maybe painting, though I have proper paper for that.

I intend to find internet access at various points and post edited versions (my notes won’t make much sense without de-nonsense editing) of my adventures in Berlin, Athens and Rhodes, here. I will be gone a month.

There will also probably be pictures of obscure or pretty things, me and my friend, my scribblings, and maybe some drawings, if my camera behaves itself. So really, this blog’s transforming into a travel-blog until mid august when I come back and once again saturate this place with poetry, probably inspired by my travels.

But anyway, this is short because I forgot to do it earlier and am due to leave the house for the airport in an hour. Devon is sunny and warm today, and hopefully it’ll be the same in Berlin.

Anyhoo, turrah for now! :)

After the Poems

2011-07-08T22:20:00.002+01:00

I have immersed myself in poetry for hours,
and now my head wanders like a traveller
with a broken compass, through loves
and lives and the things people collect
to make themselves happy.

Every word is a picture of someone –

the electricity between thoughts and colour

– and every ending is a breath of cloud

plucked from the place dreams sneak out from

like naughty children. They are loosely tied

together and rarely double-knotted.

I wonder what happens to them once

they are done and forgotten,

whether part of the magic is that mystery

of forgotten things and the words

we write with our fingertips in their dust.

We can touch someone else’s scribbles in a margin

but like a mirage, we waste the play

of imagining who they were by stepping so close

that we see the sand falling between the pages.

At school we analyse and deconstruct

these glimpses into the swirl of another’s iris,

forgetting they are more than captions

beneath photographs, clinging to context.

We pull them apart like the same old

Lego bricks, and restack them again and again

in different shapes. Sometimes we create

windows. Done, miss.

But after the poems I see an ocean tossing

up the colours of a hundred choirs,

the light of a mid-afternoon fracturing them

like stained glass projections throughout a room.

I’m dizzy. Read me again, they say,

and look through a different moment,

in a different time, and see the reflections

of a thousand voices and shadows in a rainfall

which once filled my poet’s mind.

More of a musing than a poem, but whatever. I've been reading lots, writing less, and have spoken to some inspiring people about poetry and all the strings people tie it with. Found a love of graffiti poetry - I love the idea of writing on walls.

Also, Tumblr is to blame for the neglect of this blog. :3

And hello to my Russian readers - you're now the greenest place on my readership map, congrats. :)

Expression?

2011-06-09T03:21:00.007+01:00

Today's been a rather dull day. It’s funny, I only noticed today that I’ve never actually posted anything personal, about me, on this blog, whatsoever. Sure, my drafts are full of musings I’ve begun about Life or Specific Crisis or the occasional Unfairness Rant, or just Rants in general. None have been posted longer than four minutes before I’ve deleted them, most never even got posted in the first place.

So here I am, with something personal, sort of. My mum said something today about expression. She wanted to know why I write poetry about things that don’t matter to me, or are about me. I told her that my poems are all, in a way about me. They come from my mind, so I guess they must be, anyway. She didn’t press for a further explanation, even though I don’t think she thought my reply actually answered her question, but it got me wondering about my expression of myself.

I personally, don’t think much of myself. The world is bigger than I am. Muchmuchmuch bigger and people who think the world is small always seem to end up bitter about their life, or disappointed that they didn’t live enough. Nobody can live in a space that’s too small or live enough in a space that’s too big. Look at the stars, look to the horizon – the edge of sight is flat, the curve of the earth so subtle in its extent that we cannot see we are on a sphere until we no longer stand with our feet on the ground – remember how small you are, explore the vapour you’re apart of before the wind blows, and be happy. It's as simple as that to me.

People, however, seem to think a lot of me, which I can never really get my head around. I find compliments hard to deal with. My friends say I’m smart. I’m not. I absorb things that interest me, bits of stories, ideas, quotes, poetry, history. But I struggle every day with lessons and understanding. Odd that I find I can understand people far better than I can understand what they say. I don’t like speaking out loud and I don’t like it when people think more of me than I am, it means I’ll always end up disappointing them.

Expression, though, is not something I’ve thought much about before. Art, in itself is expression. I paint, write, isn’t that expression? But if I’m expressing myself in these mediums, then what is it I am expressing about myself? My mum thinks it’s nothing. Just meaningless, hollow poems about things and stuff and nothing. Yet there must be something of me going into them -- I spend hours writing just one, and while I’m writing, I do find myself thinking about things that do matter to me. The people in my life, the past, my childhood, worries, regrets, the usual ‘stuff’ I suppose. How much does content reflect the writer, though? I’m pretty sure that Stephen King, though he writes about murder and horrific-nesses, isn’t actually a murderer. He’s probably a really nice guy. So what does his writing show about him?

I’m studying William Blake at college at the moment (I’ve had readings of his poems on a loop for the past four hours . . .) and Blake, is one of those people who always seemed to write about things that really mattered to him. If anyone’s read his work, a lot of it is about how children were treated in his time, the corruption in the church, poverty and other such issues that not many people in the upper classes at the time gave much thought for. His opinions on these issues are very strong and apparent in his work, which shows a lot about the kind of person he was and, supposedly, that he was a caring person who thought a lot about people below the poverty line.

One theme in my work a couple people have mentioned to me is fathers. Several people who’ve read my work have told me I must have a good relationship with my father because I write about good relationships with fathers or have some kind of nostalgia thing going on. The irony is, I haven’t seen my father for well over a year and I really don’t think much of him at all. Fathers aren’t important to me. So, how true is it that Blake really thought much of the issues he wrote about? Did he perhaps just think they were good subjects to write about in a similar way I think father-child relationships are? Or maybe it was a kind of absent thing? Or perhaps he really did just write about what meant a lot to him and this is a bad example. Who knows.

At this point I’m aware there has probably been some big Blake-inspiration research-y thing and comparing my vague inspirations to a famous poet's who was part of a movement, probably is a seriously bad idea . . . Also, I don't believe Blake’s writing came of absent ‘what shall I write today’ musings like most of my stuff does. So yeah, bad example.

Anyway, my point was simply that, how do we know what we read in poetry is actually important to the writer? How much of ‘you’ do you express in your work, and how?

In prose, I think it’s maybe easier to express yourself. What kind of person you are might depend on how well you treat your characters, the kind of relationships they have, how morals are presented, the way people communicate and how actions are used to illustrate stuff, what angles and biases you may purposefully or absently use to make something seem good/bad, etc, etc. But then again, these might also not be expressing ‘you’ (such as horror writers), especially as everything that is written – prose, poetry, whatever – can be interpreted differently by whoever is reading. So what do we express about ourselves when we write?

Ha, rambling is fun.

Ekphrasis

2011-05-24T21:09:00.006+01:00

Chaos-6 ~ by Narcisse-Shrapnel (Deviantart)

A child, with arms wide, paddles

in the slosh of a shallow brook after rain,

humming, humming,

and wondering

how far waves can roll upstream from the sea.

Everything is grey.

Her hat is too big – it covers her ears

and makes her tune hollow

and far away.

The forest doesn’t listen anymore.

When she was smaller, her father hung

yoghurt pots in the branches

to amplify her voice. On a shingle beach,

crashes of waves

e c h o a n d e c h o ,

trembling through plastic, roots and bone.

Now the trees close themselves

around her and shake their rusted leaves,

trying to shed

their ashes.

She carries a bucket of red paint;

one hand bleeds the bank-side bushes

with a sable-hair brush, like rapping

a stick along schoolyard railings.

Marching now, she imagines the city

with waters running through its streets

and the beaded amber streetlights paddling

in a shimmer

of sliding reflections.

Fallen from her pocket, dried apricot pieces

float by, half-coloured red

like flowers timid for summer.

In noisy places,

it is hard to remember a half-forgotten tune,

though it might murmur with the patter of rainfall

and whisper like a boat along threads.

She would paint fish and musical notes

on the skyscraper roofs

where the telephone wires knot like dead lighting,

if she could reach,

so that God might see

her talent and give her more colours

to paint all

that she

half-forgets

and all the rain washes

a w a y

on a greyer

yesterday.

Finding your Perfect Writing Forum

2011-05-17T13:55:00.006+01:00

Lists of ‘good’ writing forums on the internet always seem to have the big bustly websites listed first like a popularity contest. As the list goes down, the size of the forums listed usually gets smaller, most of the forum-world gems being lost, save to those expert Googlers or those who chance across the whispers floating around the interweb grapevines.

As an amateur writer myself, and a forum-er of four years, I've found smaller forums with closer critique values work much better for writers, especially ones just starting out or who are interested in actually getting better (believe it or not, there are a surprising amount of writers who don’t seem to want to get better at all). Absolute Write's 35,000 members may be seriously daunting to someone inexperienced with forum life, and unless you're already a freaking awesome writer and have a flashing sparkly avatar or something, you are not going to get noticed among the crowds.

If you’ve never been a member of a forum before, regardless of how long you’ve been writing, you may find it a rather different experience than you may have initially thought. Some forums can be nice happy places full of friendly people and others can be a cut-throat world of surviving out the older members. Some can be writerly havens and others can be abysmal lairs of ego-stroked pre-teens waiting for you to tell them their Twilight fanfic is fantastic literature . . . it happens. Telling the difference is easy, though, so no worries, but the main concern is what you want to get from a forum.

I joined my first forum when I was fifteen, knowing nothing about them, and I know that I certainly wouldn't be the writer I am today without that forum and the others I joined. I dread to think of where I'd be now if my first stop-off had been the Young Writers Society (YWS) which, unfortunately falls under the category of a far from constructive forum. So getting the right one for you, is crucial. If you're a young writer in your early teens, concerned with meeting writery friends, then YWS might work for you, but keep in mind the doors - if you want to be a writer you need to always be learning. There is no such things as the perfect writer and if you’re serious, you’re going to have to convince more than just your parents and friends you’re good.

If you're perhaps a bit older (should I say mature?) and more serious about being critiqued by people who seriously know what they're talking about (and not afraid of receiving constructive criticism) then Critique Circle are fabulous. However, I wouldn't recommend CC to a newbie writer - these guys mean serious business. You’ll need a backbone and decent amount of knowledge in the craft to return the favour to whomever critiques your work. Critiques for critiques, fair game, right? You don’t get something for nothing.

Also, as I’ve jumped in the deep-end with the ‘best’ sites (in my opinion) I’ve had the experience to nosey around, this one’s for poetry-peoples: Tin Roof Alley Poets, which, though has a few downfalls in some members being utterly awful human beings, is great for receiving genuine, honest and very detailed critiques (have a backbone, though or you’ll probably find your poetry crippled at the knees rather than manning up) and will certainly help you improve your work and educate you in poetry-ness.

Another thing I always find with lists of writing forums is that they never seem to include are forums for younger writers, which, as I’ve been a member of about twelve different forums, possibly even more, and witnessing the births and deaths of some, I think I can comment on a few.

Young Writers Online and Teenage Writers are both excellent forums (Dear any possible readers hailing from either forum: I LOVE YOU BOTH SO NO ARGUING *coughs*) for young people. Though very different from one another, in both atmosphere and community, they both offer a great community of mixed ability writers focused on helping others improve through critique. The latter also has camps where more experienced members teach others about the different crafts, and the former has many competitions and events throughout the year. There are no better forums for young writers (age 12-25) on the interwebs. Trust me, I’ve been on almost all of them. I should note that these two are *coughs* rivals, though that may be an understatement.

When it comes to forums, as I think I’ve said before, the best thing you can do it ask yourself what you want to gain from joining them. If it's just to make friends with like-wise minded people then smaller less critique and more discussion-focused sites will work better for you as you won't get lost in the struggle to be noticed, as in bigger forums. People on those forums are generally friendlier and for lack of a better word, spammy, so it’s usually very easy to fit in to these kinds of places.

Some examples:

Poet's Graves Workshop (all ages)
Legendfire (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Fictionpost (all ages)
Hortorian (mostly younger writers, but appears to welcome all(?))
Kids' Writing Club (young writers, only)

Also, if you’re already a member of a critique-heavy forum, sometimes it’s just nice to pop by places like these for a little breather. A slower pace, new faces to talk to, teach, and learn from. There are many kinds of writers and you should always be looking to learn from others. I personally, like a balance, but that might be just me. I’m a member of both critique-heavy forums and more lax ones, and I find that this works for me. The thing is to find out what works for you.

If what you want is to get better at writing, learn something and be critiqued, then you need to look carefully before joining a forum. Many forums may boast awesome critique prowess, but rarely do they deliver *sigh*. A swift glance through some of a site's fiction and poetry forums is usually enough to confirm whether or not they are worth your time. Questions to ask yourself: are the 'critiques' mostly/all one-line comments or a couple sentences, do they say anything constructive or just stuff like 'zomg I love your work, post more!', or even worse . . . do they tolerate chatspeak? If so, these are the places to avoid posting your work, for you will not improve, and the people there are probably not overly interested in improving or already think they’re the best thing since Marshamallow Fluff. So it will be a waste of time joining. Look for places that more often, or even always, give good, detailed and honest critiques. By ‘honest’ I also mean, harsh where necessary.

I have little experience with bigger adult forums such as Absolute Write, so I don't feel I can accurately describe their services. I know YWS is lost in its own size, which, though is nowhere near as big as AW, comes under the description of a site filled with prospect, but saturated with no learning, no effort, ego-stroked members, and generally awful critiques, meaning that their prospect is mostly sadly wasted (can you tell I'm biased? :3). I guessed this could be the case with super-sized forums such as AW, but after joining and having a poke around I found the critiques were mostly helpful, and most work did actually get looked at, though navigating that place was interesting. It wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I suppose it depends on who you are. Size shouldn't be a deciding vote one where you join though.

Look around before joining somewhere that will get you nowhere despite years of posting, unless you want to join a forum more for the friends and discussion than for betterment and helping others. On that note, I must say, most of the places I've linked will require you to do your fair share of work to receive critiques in return, even the less critique-focused places require you to comment on others work - but critiquing, especially detailed critiquing will help you grow as a writer, too, so that shouldn't be a problem, should it? :)

Anyhoo, this is getting rather long and rambly. Feel free to contribute your opinions or any info you have on sites mentioned, or any others.

Waking up in Venice

2011-05-08T01:52:00.000+01:00

Haven't posted in a while, gave up on Nano (usual excuses), here's a new poem I wrote at lunchtime on Thursday, when I should have been revising. Usual meh-ness.

We woke up in Venice, once.

Spent lanterns hung from threads in the doorways

like failed nightlights, doused by arteries

we traced on a map, noting where they split

from the body and became sewn in with the fabrics

against our skin. You always liked simple linen

because of the heat.

Straw hat and sunglasses, such the tourist.

Our breakfast in bed was disturbed

by an early-riser, singing from a boat below to the lady

in the room above us.

She closed her window,

and told us later she preferred the voiceless Einaudi,

direct to the soul, you know?

That morning, some of the neighbours hung

bunting between the houses, window-to-window

like little Chinese washing lines,

tying the fourth storeys.

I sent a postcard home (hello, Albion, miss me yet?)

and bought some olive bread

you said tasted like the smell of cut grass.

I remember the bar: a pokey little place

beside a bridge grown green in the centuries,

and like everything, barely floating.

Two glasses of flat wine each. Risotto, just because

it’s what’s done.

Outside the wind tore at the colours

flapping in their zig-zags and pulled them from the windows

so they streamed in ribbons down the streets.

Poetry for the rejected lover in his boat.

We fed the birds with baicoli crumbs,

watched the canals grow dark,

and counted the fireflies burning holes in Venice’s

new curtains. We fell asleep and woke up

in someplace old

where aeroplanes flew overhead,

and the jet streams faded

like the memory of dreaming.

4. Silverskin

2011-04-10T00:48:00.003+01:00

tiny white flowers grow in the gash

of a silver birch, tendons split between the reaching

of roots which traverse upwards over old scars,

towards a branch shadowed with grey

and flaking skin.

leaves fall from origami twists

into the lap of a prince who, as an old man,

sits beneath this tree to confess his years into the quiet

of summer: loves, lives, losses

and a lingering thought

that his name means nothing.

in mornings passed, the prince would climb trees

and wade through the froth of sky, searching

for a fortune stories told him he’d find in the heights

of life. he’s a man with eyes

as old as the tree he sits beneath,

only he doesn’t look,

he breathes.

but this tree misses youth, too, and if it had eyes

it would gaze at each new shoot – green as eve

– with wonder. silver skin peels like the scales of armour

or notes on battle for excited archaeologists.

but beneath it all are the wounds

of old men, old crowns, and old hearts,

and a thousand rings of silver dust.

3. Painted Caves

2011-04-05T21:36:00.002+01:00

There’s something about painting caves

people don’t seem to remember

nowadays. Secrets in the dark press history through stone,

absorbing moments, loves, cultures — feeding

them back to us with the seep of minerals

in a trickle of ancient water about our feet,

and back into a world that has moved on.

The red walls have a strange glow

when you think of the hands that crushed each berry,

moulded the paste, the paint, with fingers and bones,

and carved an image in the gloom.

Firelight, flickering.

A deer might fly inside a cave,

a hunter might throw his spear and watch it sail

for a millennia (or longer), a woman washes and cooks,

waiting for love, birds are grounded

like shadows tangled to their makers,

and even the sun can set in the north, frozen

there, as if to prove it can.

Rocks furred with moss clench at the tide

that tangles itself between the caverns

like drenches of dark hair. Fish and tiny things weave

and pass by the paintings, minds unbent

around their meanings as they’re warbled

with refraction. Slant

figures stoop

and become old,

mirrored alongside younger selves and more

honest smiles, like hoping too hard

dissolves simply being.

2. The Pineapple Trees

2011-04-04T23:08:00.003+01:00

In autumn, pineapples fall in the woods

with soft thuds where the dying leaves lay among the needles,

dressed in red and gold to hide their bare bones.

I used to run home at dusk with one in each hand,

grasping at crocodile leaves that had shrunk and changed

by the time I held them before my mother.

My sister is taller than me and sometimes she picks them

too early, and their petal lips flake and fall away;

we take down the summer bunting and spit bitter flesh

(wooden instead of yellow) into the grass, a quarter

-ring is hidden inside for a shortened season.

She’d try to explain how pinecones are different

by putting their corpses near the fire, so they’d open up

and allow their souls to fill with the rain

that patters down our chimney.

Pineapples don’t grow on trees, she told me.

In the October quiet, the leaves fall slower,

revealing their transparency as they melt

into each other: blood and tanned skin,

hanging (barely) in the treetops, a memory of songs

blistering on the threshing floors.

I sit beneath a wintering tree and watch the pineapples

falldecayanddisappear, nature recycling in a second.

My summer dress is stained and sticky with juice

and an empty shell rests in my lap.
Could be a skull or a mask,

in time. Through the branches I see scales falling

in place of leaves, like fruit dragons

shedding their skins.

NaPoWriMo (the proper one this time) and Glass Alchemy

2011-04-01T21:12:00.008+01:00

Sooooo, my pre-NaPo failed, as you'll notice if you look back through my posts. I think I got seven out of twenty-eight or something embarrassingly awful like that . . . but this is a new month, a new start, and I'm hoping to achieve more this time round that in February.

My first NaPo was last year, when I was rather bullied into it by a newbie who'd joined about a month earlier and poetry-ised the whole site. I hadn't really done much poetry beforehand, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to have a go anyway. We shared a thread on one of the writing sites I'm on, and his awesomness made me strive to work harder so I didn't look so . . . rubbishy. :3 But I finished with thirty poems, and that made me happy. :)

This year, I also intend to finish. *crosses fingers*

Also, I'm hoping to post up a couple of reviews (for a TV series and a film) in the next few weeks, too, which is something new. They're probably going to be more discussions though, but heh, technicalities blow.

Anyway, without further ado, my first poem of April:

Glass Alchemy

When I was small and believed in magic,

my father showed me how to make little glass coins

from the white beaches collected in my wellies.

In the mornings, I watched him gather light bulbs

of glowing honey onto a dipper, and shape them

into harvest moons, small as my raincoat buttons.

On the walls he kept a hundred jam jars,

each half-filled with coloured powders, while rings

of wire about their necks fused them to the wallpaper

and stone, like captured palms, ever-holding on.

When he added the colours, they moved

in tiny eddies, like spices trapped inside a marble,

squashed flat. My task was to stamp them

and give them all names and faces.

My mother’s name was Laurel;

I do not remember her face.

In the evenings we’d search for seashells,

insert a coloured coin, and write our names

on their lips, might they sing her voice back to us,

instead of crushing waves.

Our footprints once waded out to sea, searching,

but now I’m older, wiser, no longer believe in whispers,

so I tip the glass coins back into the waves,

returning them to sand and old magics.

I sell back my father’s secret:

that beautiful things smash like bones,

and elixirs make the past grow older,

always unchanged.

Welcome to my new pad!

2011-03-20T20:03:00.003Z

Well, this is rather deceiving, isn't it? I look like I've been here for aaaages with all these months of posts, and yet, this is my first proper post on Blogger and this nice new shiny blog. Still working on the look of it, but fontssss, yes I do, I do love fonts. See how easy this is to read? *grins happily*

Anyway, the conversion to Blogger wasn't made lightly. I didn't know you could convert and was initially intending on just leaving Wordpress and starting over, but that prospect was rather scary given my track record of not finishing things, and this blog being something I'd actually kept going with (shock&horror). So I made another blog here, set it up and then closed it so nobody but me can see it because I discovered I could convert everything over, and all would be good in my blogging world. The other blog will be used for something else when I can think of something.

So, looking forward to new things and fonts and experimenting with themes (so if the background keeps changing, don't worry about it, I'm just rather indecisive) and saturating this place with more yukky poetry. I apologise in advance. Oh, also a writing update on novels/novella coming soon. Figured I should actually write something about writing for once.

Also, previous posts may be a bit odd in formatting, or alignment issues or in posts with pictures, have some bits of script randomly. This is just from the conversion and at some point I'll go back through my old posts and try and fix some of the problems. Mostly they're quite small, and the poetry posts all seem fine from when I checked through everything, so yeah, I'll get to the others in due time. :)

Tootles for now~
Lykaios

Hide

2011-03-16T20:16:00.000Z

Where sand dunes beneath the sea
move like duvet folds, slowly and creasing
as age does over faces,
little fishes slide through the silence
of sheets and blow bubbles through fibres.
Or perhaps they hear in colour
and match the shades of milky oceans
to their own dances, practised at night
while Iapetus closes his doors and wraps
a yellow sheet about himself.

Some sailors think porpoises speak
in tongues. Prophets for the pools, they pay
my toll fee in pearls and tell me I am
drowning.
Loose skin peels back like lace.
Do you see my bones yet?
I could lie here and sleep through
fairytales until you do.

Last chance to breathe the corals,
to study the sand for lost war helmets
and old tridents made of shells.
They shatter when you touch them;
bare skin’s an acid.
If fish could paint,
drowned cliffs would tell of gods
and clowns, and how the blue above shakes
leaves through open windows. Evergreen
in the real world, they’ll say,
everblue if you keep breathing.

#7) Untitled III

2011-02-28T22:52:00.000Z

Sometimes I stand on a haystack and imagine
the prickles are coals on a dark jungle floor,
and I’m walking barefoot, testing my skin.
They say that the mind controls the body,
and that an absent mind is more than a dream
with fairies, but a cave where water drips
in the air; every sense feels far away
until one lands on you, cold, like a fever.
I think the sheep watch me and wonder
what it’s like to be higher than the fence.
I would tell them I don’t feel the hay anymore
and that the wind gives me pins-and-needles
in my hands when night rises and I still
haven’t caught a cloud. The jungles grow
around me and they become blank eyes
staring from the undergrowth. I meet
them all and stare back until they turn away,
the coals flickering in the grass, growing cold.

(One day left, only . . . twenty-two poems to go . . . :S )

More old toys and much more nostalgia

2011-02-24T19:18:00.000Z

So my mum and I decided our loft was a disgusting pigsty and needed to be sorted out, and seeing as none of us have felt like doing much outside the house this week, we decided we’d have a crack at it and waste some time. Needless to say, we got rather dirty.

Our loft is rather . . . ancient in decoration, in the sense that the cobwebs are probably as old as the house, the spiders on their 561st generation or something, there are chinks of daylight coming from above . . . which is worrying . . . and the once-upon-a-time insulation has been turned fairytale-style into dust, though hopefully not by some wizard or ghoul-thing, hiding in the dark. O.o

Huzzah, but out expedition into the depths of the loft-space held surprises as well as cobwebs and othersuch . . . lovelies. So I’m doing another Old Toys and Nostalgia post, just because.

We found my old Lucy Locket Dream Cottage, which I swear we sold at a bootsale years and years ago (I always thought dolls were kind of freaky), but wallah, there it was was, boxed and everything.

Next was some more of my old Teeny Weeny Families collection. The Brown’s Mini Market was bought a lot more recently than the others, at a stage where I wasn’t really into playing with plastic playsets and was into the whole tomboy-moodiness and treehouse-building thing, so it never really got played with, sadly. It is one of my favourites though – got to love tiny fridges. xD

I also found some of my mini storybook Teeny Weenies which made me very happy as I thought I’d lost them years back. They are each only 6cm tall, so you can do the maths for the size of the lollypops . . . xD I used to love playing with these – the dad from the toy shop and the mum from the flower shop always had a thing for each other, I thought, and he’d by flowers from her shop and then give them to her (he wasn’t good at surprises), and then they’d go to the restaurant in the Grand Hotel set together while their kids played with the mouse twins.

I also had another two sets – a duplicate of the flower shop where it was a father and son, instead (bought from a bootsale) and they had little pitchforks and yellow flowers instead of red ones.

Also, there was an ice cream parlour which I never really liked because the ice creams were blue and blue ice cream just didn’t make sense. The little kid in that one was cute though and was friends with the little rabbit in the sweet shop. xD

There was also Waddle’s Boutique, which is a rather poor state as it was in a rotting box beneath one of the worrying chinks of daylight that really shouldn’t be there. The stickers are peeling on the inside and it’s very dirty. For some reason the bits for it have been living safely in the Grand Hotel from my last toys&nostalgia post, so as least they’re not wrecked. The little bobbin from the top is also with them. I didn’t find my teapot, though, which was my ultimate favourite, even before the Grand Hotel, and was my first Teeny Weeny set. I also have the bits for that one in the Grand Hotel though, so I guess it must still be somewhere in the loft. *sadface* EBAY will save me! :D

These next ones were *technically* my brother’s toys, as if I remember correctly, they were a fifth birthday present. However, he never liked them because he said they were too much like Polly Pocket and they were a girl’s toy. I my terrible sixes and sevens, my tomboy-ness was getting the better of me, so I decided I liked them and they were not a girl’s toy, so that was okay.

They are pretty cool sets though – the blue ones has this whole ‘rocks on the railway line’ thing which I always thought was cooler to play it out that the rocks actually fell on Thomas instead of in front of him so the little orange digger could quickly get them out of the way, so Thomas died a lot and the little orange digger lost his job. The other one wasn’t so cool, though it had the helicopter (I forget his name) which would usually crash or end up rescuing Pollies from the WRATH OF JAMES.

The next one isn’t technically a toy, but it’s something I absolutely loved, and I can probably relate it in some way or another to my love of stories and books and writing, later on in my life. If anyone remembers Tot’s TV, these tapes were a kind of magazine-collecting thing that was made to boost ratings before the show was sadly culled. :’( I have no idea what happened to the magazines – they basically just had the story from that week’s tape in them with illustrations. These magazines and tapes were how I taught myself to read before I went to pre-school at about two and a half years old. Writing didn’t catch up until I was about seven or eight though.

Anyway, I used to listen to these tapes all the time with this toy tape player (which is in the shed at the bottom of the garden) that was multicoloured and had a little yellow microphone and everything. I have all the tapes but two, but I do remember one got brutally butchered by my dad’s old tape-player and the other might possibly still be in my tape player in the shed at the bottom of the garden.

This next one is possibly older than me as it belonged to my late stepdad when he was younger. It was one of the first game consoles or something, I’m not really sure – but it still works and it has the most addictively awesome theme tune ever. Last I knew it had 100-200 games on it, we never really found out how many exactly, or what they all were, though I’m guessing Google would find out all this in an instant nowadays *sigh*. Space invaders, pac-man, frog-crossing, Othello and this awesome tank-tunnel game were my favourites, though. :)

When I was a kid I used to ADORE Disney, like most kids do. Lady and the Tramp was one of my all-time favourites along with Winnie the Pooh, and every time my mum or my uncle Tony went up to Norfolk or came to visit from Norfolk, they’d bring me and my brother back a stuffed Disney toy. We had the whole collection of Winnie the Pooh ones, and I swear I never got rid of mine, so I have no idea where the others went. *sadface*

On the expedition to the loft, I found Lady and Eeyore. I remember Tigger being my favourite, though, so I was very sad not to find him.

When I was about five or six, we went to visit one of my mum’s friends and their kids who lived in Bodmin, near the prison. I was absolutely terrified of Bodmin at the time, having been told in advance by my wonderfully lovely peers at school about the murders lurking in the moorlands the bodies under the grass and even more murders and evil men (Rasputin was mentioned by name) locked up in the prison. So Tigger came with me for moral support.

My mum’s friend had two sons, one a bit older than me and the other about three or four, so roughly the same age as my brother. The older boy was nasty. I didn’t like him as all. But when he saw my Tigger he decided he wanted him, and that I had no choice in the matter. All day we shot daggers at each other behind our mum’s backs. In the end, I lost the battle and my poor Tigger ended up having his tail ripped off.

Lady also has a story, as she’s technically Lady the Second, but it’s not as entertaing as Tigger’s story, and this is getting rather long . . .

*
Almost last up is yet more of my Polly Pockets, which are all complete with the original bits (I was a weirdly careful child about keeping things together) and . . . aren’t all that interesting, so I won’t say much about them. The Polly Pocket animals are seriously freaky, though, don’t you think? Like fluffy lumps . . .

And some Disney ones (Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Lion King) which have a few missing bits as I let some kids play with them as school once. *sadface*

Also, I found some of my Micromachines this time. :) I used to have a lot more, but I don't know where they drove off to. Some of them are newer than others – the green/yellow Chevy, the pink Cadillac and the orange Vee-dub are recent Ebay purchases. :3

Anyway, this is really long, so I’ll save my old Harry Potter stuffs for their own post sometime, oh and I’ll do a Pokemon post, at some point, too, but because my brother has most of our old Pokemon stuff, I need to bribe him to let me borrow them. >.>

#6) Shoelace

2011-02-18T00:29:00.000Z

One dancing shoe hangs
from the washing line by a pink ribbon
lace, and sways to the blown
-away music or sometimes, the quiet
humming of bees when they come close.
The garden is overgrown
and pegs divide the line
like paled toy birds, fasting
for a daybreak that keeps coming,
but never remains.

This house is old.
The garden became separate long ago
and the faces that sometimes glance
from the windows, are shadows,
or video-tape rewinds, dusted with age
and tracking lines.
Rewind again—
see how that shoe swings
and hangs lower when it rains.

The sound distorts
and you know your voice has changed.
Yet there is something nostalgic
or lonely about it now—
the voices of ghosts laugh
as you press play.

Dew glistens on the pink satin,
moulding.

Returning home you find fences folded
into each other, broken for easy passage.
The grass grows through the wire
squares, hiding it like a trap,
but that shoe still hangs there, tied
to the line like a margin for the constellations.
Cassiopeia watches the pirouette
of one tiny shoe
as the grass sways, gone to seed
in a garden of sentiment.

The house is empty now.
One little pink shoe twists in the wind
on its ribbon safety rope,
and then unwinds,
drooping.

#5) Invisibility

2011-02-14T00:58:00.000Z

Sometimes I feel like a ghost
when I wander around my house.
I think the walls are too thin
and the eyes that stare from photographs,
too false,
like the days we lived then
were fairytales etched on a shoreline,
then folded away into the sand
where only the clouds that blur
with the horizon’s millimetre of clarity
can get a close enough look
to see the fractures,
to see the age on the Tru-prints.

Rings on the coffee-table,
game-shows on telly, buzzing through the ceiling,
plates stacked in the sink, and the constant
banging
of the front door
remind me that people still live
here. Sometimes
I make some noise
when nobody’s home.
I sing out-loud, out-of-tune,
and I am louder than I remember.

I’m a ghost in my house,
seeing the misconnections where loops
carried through a chapter,
skipping lines.
I sometimes watch the rain,
and sometimes I repeat days, over and over
and over
again.

On a Tuesday I change the photographs
to dustier versions of memories
and allow the sunlight to bleach the colours,
so that like me,
we all become ghosts,
background noise that nobody hears.

/yukIsuck

What happens when I'm out of muse . . .

2011-02-12T22:07:00.000Z

So my pre-NaPo is going rather badly. I have excuses, but I won't bore you with them. I currently have a total of five poems out of the twelve I'm supposed to have . . . w00t!

However . . . Number Four needs some explaining, I think, lest you (all five of you) shoot me for my disgusting abuse of the English language.

Recently I've rediscovered children's verse. So, stupidly thinking they were easy to do and that all I'd need is a rhyming dictionary (which I totally blame for my rhyming-fail), I set about writing my own. It was fun until the end of the first stanza.

The idea of bears in cupboards is from a novella I'm working on alongside my novel, about a little boy called Alfred and his rather imaginative outlook on the world. It's a scene I've been thinking of for a long time, but actually got around to writing on Monday night/Tuesday lunchtime.

I'm happy with the prose, but as I was out of other ideas, I recycled the idea, added some fairies and ice-cream, and came out with this heap-of-junk poem. *sigh*

Anyway, I apologise in advance for the awful rhyming and all-round yukkiness:

#4) The Bears in the Cupboards

When I was a child, the carpet was an ocean,
deeper than the sky flipped up-side-down,
there were grizzly bears in all of the cupboards,
watching me with eyes in their hundreds,
and all the fairies who lived in the garden
would sing in the rain, and call me to their fairy-ring.

But I stood in the window, safe behind the glass,
drawing myself as I breathed close, a misted mask.
And I told them all about the great grizzly bears
who hid behind the books and dust and other such things
my father used to hide away with his old inks.
They told me, “Child, see the pouring rain
and tell me what bears love again?”

But I thought and thought, and I couldn’t think,
so I ate my tea,
counted my A-B-Cs,
said thank-you to mummy,
and then played soldiers in the nursery.

Then just before morning, while the birds still slept
and the milkman only halfway up the street,
it came to me – the solution – and up I leapt!
It’s deadly top- secret, you see,
that bears go mad for ice-cream!
Love it, they do – gobsmackingly adore it!

So with Jennie’s ice-cream, around the house I dashed,
the big ones and the small ones, each loping and lumbering
— they swum the oceans and shook out the loose threads,
then ran out into the garden and through all the flower beds,
all after me and the vanilla ice-cream.

“Come quickly!” called the fairies, glinting in the trees
as I dropped the pot of Jennie’s ice-cream in the fairies’ bright ring.
One-by-one the bears, they came, and snuffled and squeezed,
just to get a tiny lick of that delicious ice-cream.

Then the fairies worked their magic in twos and threes,
filling the air with frost and brown autumn leaves.
The bears growled and roared — a great sound it was!
then disappeared in a flurry of smoke and sparkling dust!
So now you know, when you spy those bears, hiding away
in the backs of cupboards, wardrobes or stairs, you’ll trust
that with a little ice-cream, and a fairy ring –
that beating bears is simply child’s play.

#3) Fabian Kiss

2011-02-05T01:16:00.000Z

His handprint across your face
blushed red, as the sunset lay murdered
on the horizon, its blood burning in a fireplace
laid by Orion in the skies. I often wondered
what made me think of pears and French grapes,
and why I didn’t choose Cristal over that rosé
wine, dusted with gold filigree shapes:
love-hearts that came free with your bouquet.
But on your breath they were ictarine sparks
pleating the savannah’s heat before my eyes,
as we leant in close like young monarchs
tired of unwoven sighs and bad wordplay.

Do you remember we watched hot air
balloons pedalling the sky over a watercolour savannah?
Caught in orbit, they seemed to remain there,
like fathers of the absent rain, watching our samba.
And later, when we said goodbye on the veranda,
you pretended our kiss was a childish dare
and walked away, avoiding the fanfare.

/ attempt at rhyming >.<

#2) Imbolc

2011-02-03T00:57:00.000Z

Winter ends quietly.
Reflections of fairy lights gleam
on the frosted buds, the icicles beading towards
earth,
and I fish in the glass,
watching it ripple
into the edges of the sky you can only see
in dark windows.
I ask my reflection for a name
and it repeats my words without voice
like the frost froze familiarity
or perhaps
I was always an outsider
and the heavens always knew me.
I tell Cailleach it’s okay
to cry for the darkness,
and that though the drips echo in the forests,
nobody hears them.
I wait for Midas
to touch the boughs around me,
and for ghosts to craft ferns on windows,
and then I’ll hold my hands out
to catch the first snow.

#1) Little Neon Angel

2011-02-01T23:48:00.000Z

Mist drenches the rooftops, painting a city
backdrop in smears of purple watercolour,
and it hangs the streets with air-force saris
too long to be part of the night. Sequins
twinkle like rain-blurred traffic lights
caught on the underbellies of swelling clouds;
they wait for release, for God’s thumb
to squeeze them out like wasted dishcloths,
and beneath it all, silence
waits in the alleys,
avoiding echoes.

She sees the city as more than harsh angles,
ups and downs, and windows, finger-marked to blindness,
(these nails are shaper than twenty-twenty)
and reflecting back eyes and stars. She sees
the drips sliding down the curbs and wonders
about gravity
and how the beaded rain magnifies
the city lights.

A ring of orange flickers
to the edges of a puddle, and she breaks the rim,
taking the cracked halo up in one hand.

In a backstreet bedsit a mother waits
for her angel to come home
from the neon darkness,
and a siren pricks the walls in red, bleeding
in parallel lines through the blinds.

Somewhere on the inter-city highway, her chalk lines fade
and turn into blurs of people and places –
the ones she was always too young to see
– and she tries to peel away the answers
from the histories the ground buries like bones
(but dust floats, too) as the sun rises,
allowing the city to find its colours again
while a mother’s hands fold a sequined scarf.

/wordvomityukkiness

Enter February

2011-01-31T19:35:00.000Z

So, one day left of January. Or . . . less than a day, I should say.

Normally this would mean little to me, but because I'm crazy and seem to be asking for some kind of early life-crisis or mental breakdown, I've chosen to do NaPoWriMo (the poetry version of NaNoWriMo, where you have to write a poem every day for a month instead of the usual 50,000 words of prose in a month), while I have coursework deadlines up the ying-yang, a family member in hospital on the other side of the country, and various other time-consuming chaoticnesses going off like fireworks all around me . . .

This won't be an official NaPo thing, though -- it's more of a pact between a friend (whose blog is: HERE ) and I, as we both feel we've kind of run out of steam with poetry and need something to help us get back into it. Devasaurus would also like to win the Foyle Young Poets Award this year which would be epic, as we were both commended last year, and for her to win this year would be awesome, especially considering the amount of work she's going to. And I'm very happy to be like motivational support for her, or whatever the term is *readies poking stick*. Normally it's held in April (we'll probably be doing one then as well, but were eager beavers, and this is a slightly shorter month than normal, so . . . we'll call it like a practice round, in preparation for April. And as a warning: they'll all be various shades of awful, unedited drivel.

I'm looking forward to it, I must say. I think some of my more imaginative poetry came out of last years' (April) NaPo and the weeks afterwards. It was the first NaPo I'd ever done, as before that point I hadn't really been into poetry and only dabbled when the feeling struck and I didn't feel like writing something long. It started off a kind of poetry-revival on a forum where Devasaurus and I are both members and got lots of people who hadn't tried poetry before, really into it, so it'd be awesome for something like that to happen again. It'd also be good bonus to get out our lovely threadbox filled with some fresh work and revival-ness. I'm not expecting any good work to come out of it as I suck, but I do think I'll enjoy it nonetheless.

Eh, this post is rubbish, so I'm going to wind it up quickly. I ramble too much and yikes . . . run-on sentences and comma splices galore! Someone save me! D:

Anyhoo, as I've noticed the stupid 'page' thingies on here only allow you one 'post' in them and don't like update or show notifications like regular with posts, I'm going to add a thing on the end of a regular post every time I update in Snippets or Artynesses, because I'd rather have art and longer prose separate from the bloggy bit so I can easily find and edit/delete them if needs be. Currently there are two updates under Artynesses, jus' so you know. :3

So yeah, over and out!

Lego, Old Toys, and Serious Nostalgia

2011-01-22T23:25:00.000Z

Today (actually, the day before yesterday now), I spent two hours moving Happyland figures over my desk and building Lego walls around them for my stop-motion thingummywhatsit that's going to be in the music video I'm making for my Media Studies coursework. It was more fun than I thought it would be as my teacher and some people who’d done it before said it was a chore. So I surprised myself at how my inner child found moving yukky chemical-smelling plastic toys half a centimetre after every picture, very thrilling indeed.

See this grin??

Those are the colours of happiness, nostalgia, and that freaky smell of new plastic.

Nobody would lend me any Lego though, and weirdly, my family never actually ever had any 'proper' lego, just the huge Duplo stuff. So I had to buy some proper Lego of my own (who knew it was so expensive?) and make up a story about my actually-existing-but-not-yet-anywhere-near-four-year-old-brother's fourth birthday coming up next month for the nice checkout guy who commented on my age and my obvious wide-eyed childish excitement (I'm guessing I was smiling too much?) at finding myself in a toyshop . . .

Anyway, yes. Lego is awesome, and I'm totally going to build houses and ducks and have mummy invasions (two mummies holding scorpions are the only people I have) to relieve college/life stress.

[caption id="attachment_153" align="aligncenter" width="535" caption=""My Scorpion will kill you even though you're already dead! Muahahahaha!!""][/caption]

*smiles happily*

Anyway, the awesome thing is, I actually have lots to talk about for once! Rediscovering Lego has made me remember all my favourite old toys from when I was a kid. I still have a few, and some I think must be in the loft somewhere, but I'm very saddened now that I sold so many. Ebay's helping me find old favourites I've lost though. My bank account doesn't like toys, though, the boring old fart.

So this is going to be my List of Most Awesome Toys from my Childhood.

First up is my Polly Pockets:

I got the wedding set (big purple heart) for my fourth birthday, I remember opening it and everything. It's always been one of my favourite toys, and though I don't have as many of the pieces as I used to (I was always really careful about bits, but we moved house a lot), it still looks new and plays the sounds and everything. xD The other one was one my dad bought for me when I was about eleven from a toy fair – I was a bit too old to play with it, so it’s in much better condition and the bits aren’t so . . . obviously nineties, if you know what I mean.

Second is the Teeny Weenie Families Grand Hotel:

Apparently this series of toys are quite rare now, and I'm gutted to say I used to have many more. There was a teapot cafe (I still have the characters and some of bits for it though, so it might be in the loft), a sewing machine tailors shop, a little tiny flower shop, and all sorts. They were like Polly Pockets but so much more awesome and cuter. The furniture and accessories, though . . . geez, some of them were so tiny it's hard to believe they could be made by machines and that the dreaded HealthAndSafetyDemons actually allowed them to be made for four year olds. Anyway, it's an adorable set, and I hope my (future, maybe) daughter might like them as much as I did. I’m currently stalking eBay for the other sets. :3

Third is the Pound Puppy Diner:

I had a huge Pound Puppy addiction when I was a kid. I can still hear the TV adverts in my head, word for word. I pined for the Pound Puppy Play Van for a long, long time, and was absolutely thrilled when I got it for Christmas when I was five/six. If I still had the Play Van, it would have the No.1 spot, purely because it's so awesome. It had a little Pound car and everything. However, I sold it to one of my brother’s friend’s little sister, who I reallyreallyreally hope looked after it.

The only Pound Puppy toy I still have is a miniature diner set (no original bits, though). The bits in the picture come from a later version of the Pound Puppies toys, when the dogs and cats stopped being steamrolled flat and gained normal animal shapes. The reason I kept these ones was because they were my favourites and it was these guys that I wrote my first 'proper' story about, when I was six. I don't have the story anymore, sadly, but can still remember it well as it was a game I used to play over and over again. I can still remember all the characters' names: (in order, left to right) Charlie, Maddy, Gregory, Bright-Eyes, Angel and Shiloh. (I was apparently much better at thinking of names when I was younger, too . . .)

Also, the last one, because I can’t find all of my Micro-Machines, here’s a picture of my awesomely pretty marbles. Don’t they just make you feel like a seven year old again?

. . . if you’re thinking, ‘No, they make me think you’re a seriously weird eighteen-year-old,’ then you need to go spend some time with your inner child . . . now.

Anyhoo. So yeah, if anyone ever reads this, and actually cares about my rants or whatever, then I’d really love it if you commented and told me what your favourite childhood toys were. Nostalgia is good to share, don’t you think?

Dragonflies

2011-01-19T01:43:00.000Z

She made paper birds on the porch
and once she’d given them eyes to see,
she shut them away in soap boxes
and stacked them beneath the steps
like old toys growing dusty in the attic.

Sometimes she’d use tissue instead,
and sometimes those birds tore their wings
and managed to fly up and away, taken
by wind and clouds with no love for paper,
or they’d catch the horizon and swoop.

On sunny days, the sand would shine
and she’d make parchment horses
to gallop the distance home again, scattering
paper crumbs between the seashells
and breaking their legs in the fall.

Sandals left out in the rain fall apart
as those birds watch the dune grasses grow
longer through their breathing holes.
They witness the dragonflies dying
when it rains, sinking with origami flowers.

It’s the paper-cut that makes her stop
– the slice of blood that makes her consider
Science at work – and wonder if she is God
to the boxed birds, and to the dragonflies
she burns, wing-tips first.

Rose Heads

2011-01-16T02:30:00.000Z

Bring me the rose heads
from last summer and let me feel the fibres
of their decay beneath my fingers;
brown confetti floats down and sits
on the surface of a puddle.

My thumb presses a thorn, skeleton
to skeleton, and here’s to flat champagne
and the petals you picked and scattered
like ashes in the flowerbeds — you still think
they follow the sun?

I liked the red roses best; an old cliché.
They grow like nettles between rocks, now,
and their heads float, decapitated as buds,
face-down

in the pond.
Where I left you
wanting an answer I couldn’t find
when it mattered, there grows
a daisy, breaking all the rules,
and I think I’ll let it grow.

/awfulpieceofdrivelyesIknow

The Red Bicycle

2011-01-09T03:11:00.000Z

When I was six, I unwrapped a bicycle
as red as the goo in a Jammy Dodger.
My feet were unwilling to pedal, still connected
to the ground like webs between windows
in the wet. The day was grey,
and the world still
small. You never taught me about gravity;
that going down
-hill always means lonely circles.

The treads lost their definitions at the weekends
and the bare screws pock-marked rust
between the years. Spiders wrote of
old words and choruses in their webs,
wise words I couldn’t read.

Later you saw me racing like a child
twice my age, fearless and perhaps a little
fictional? Sometimes when the clouds rained
reality in grey, you told me about the Amazons
and their feather-tail boats.

The bicycle, growing smaller, kept collecting
spiders between its webbed spokes,
spinning through years faster than a storm
through Neverland. You’d forget
my ABCs, paint the letters back into your greyscale,
and like bad songs on the radio,
blame it all on how ignorance breeds
among the young and stupid.

Your face fell into photographs
and late birthday cards,
rather than days with capital letters.

I remember a tower made of satellite dishes,
watching with a swollen smile amid blink
-ing lights, red and green, through the car windows,
and I remember you said you’d race me
one day in the past, long before
I knew how big the skies could be,
and when it rained and rained and rained.

(Revised: 25/01/11)

Cast List - Sins of Jade House

2010-12-29T16:59:00.000Z

I haven’t written a blog post in almost a month . . . O.o
I can give excuses: coursework, homework, life, Christmas, but heh, they’re just words and don’t really mean much from the other side of my screen, so I’ll just write something and make the snow look useful or something.
I was reading through a friend's blog (all my friends seem to have blogs, it’s cool) and saw she’d done a cast list for her characters, and thought that it was such an awesome idea, that I thought I’d steal it and do one of my own. (Sorry!)
I thought about this for a very long time, because I have lots of stories and lots of ideas of who would play my characters if they were a film or something. But my newest story is hardest, because the characters are all new, except for my main character, Will, and I have had less time to think about it all. So three hours of Googling later, here I am:
William Chance
Will is my main character and was hardest to cast because I’ve never seen anyone that looks completely how I imagine him, and the ‘completeness’ is important because he’s my main character. BUT I found some pictures that work with my imagination and fit him, though the actors themselves may not suit him or look like him in other pictures/films, etc . . . *sigh*
Ryan Gosling . . . yeah, he looks kind of like (younger) Will in this picture, but not in others, except he’s not got coppery-brown hair, but ehhhhh, I’m a perfectionist. There’s also Paul Bettany, who normally doesn’t look like Will at all, but does in this picture, so I’m going with that.
I do have some drawings I’ve done of (older) Will, but I’m too much of a wimp to post them, and I have issues with all of them.
Issues already, how fun. Moving on . . .

Roderick Chance
Will’s brother (younger) isn’t as hard – Andrew Buchan, for sure. He’s got the nice-guy look but can play someone a bit more complicated and mixed up, as well as do the whole banter/argument shebang. Needs to be red-haired though.
Older Roderick is harder, because I figure he’d have a kind of weathered/serious look to him that Buchan doesn’t – my possible idea was Damien Lewis as he’s got all that, plus the gingerness. xD

Isabella Chance
Not an actress, but some picture I found from a bridal magazine. However, this is exactly how I imagine (younger) Isabella to look like. She is beautiful and her hair is amazing, and she’s got the whole sensitive-with-hidden-spirit kind of look, which is great, if that even makes any sense.

Annalie

She’s the hardest, because I still haven’t found someone who looks like her, how I imagine her. However, I saw the BBC’s new Nativity adaption before Christmas, and Tatiana Maslany grew on me, mainly because of her hair. Her voice is all wrong though and Annalie is taller and has a thinner face, but I’ll compromise.

Lady Francesca

After seeing Romola Garai in Emma, it’s without a doubt that I think she’d be awesome playing Lady Francesca. She looks like a lady, can act and speak like one, and carry great emotion. Can just imagine her throwing a riding hat at Will and telling him he’s a pig-headed clown.

Uncle Anton
I spent absolutely forever trying to find a match for Anton, who is currently my favourite character, and thus, has to be perfectly cast. I scoured IMDB for all the cast lists of films where I could remember there being an old man or something in them, and eventually, found Jim Broadbent from the Chronicles of Narnia, Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, (though finding out his name was difficult) and he is PE RFECT. :)

Just look at the expression and the hair and the costume and the glasses! Geeese, I should just steal Digory Kirke, add some madness, alcohol, bad eyesight and hearing, and have done with it.

Lord Chance, Will’s Father (doesn’t have a fixed name yet)

He absolutely has to be Michael Caine, because he’s awesome and hardcore and everything. Seen Harry Brown? Yup, terrifying, right? Michael Caine is one of Britain’s very best actors (in my opinion) and could play Will’s father easily. He’s got the voice, the seriousness, the fierceness, the look, the everything.

Michael Garrett

Annalie’s husband, and my main bad guy for part one, Garrett has to be played by Richard Armitage. He’s one of my all-time favourite actors and can do both the merciless terrifying-ness at the same time as deep sensitivity, and certainly makes an awesome complex character with little to lose, or maybe I just love Spooks wayyyyy too much. xD

Anyway, he’s perfect, without a doubt.

Tomas
Tomas is a minor character, so I wasn’t originally going to put him on here, but I have two actors for him. The first is Matthew McFayden as the younger Tomas and Martin Freeman for the older Tomas. Both of them look, I think, surprisingly similar . . . kind of anyway, and Martin Freeman’s voice is just how I imagine Tomas’, but a bit more whiney. xD

The next few are mainly from the second/original story which I haven’t written yet except for a couple really bad and very different drafts two years ago, but I am in the process of planning so it makes sense with the first. The first is:
Adam Chance
Will’s son would definitely be played by Barney Clark if he was still as young as he was in Oliver Twist, but *sigh* this is all make-believe so a little time travel won’t harm me. He’s cute and looks perfect, has the right voice and is the right age (or was), and I can’t imagine Adam any other way. :)

Derek Garrett

Hugh Dancy is almost perfect for Derek, though I think that maybe he looks a little too old. I’ve never seen him in anything so I can’t really comment on acting skills or comparisons to character or anything, but he looks how I imagine Derek, so all’s good. :)

Jesse

Jesse is Adam’s accidental gypsy friend, and was very hard to cast as I have a very good picture of what he looks like in my head, and I couldn’t find anyone who really looks like him. He’s supposed to be a bit older than Adam, maybe twelve or thirteen, and more mischievous-looking than quiet. William Miller was the closest I could find, but heh, not really happy.

Hettie Cairns

This is one of those pictures that doesn’t look how the person normally looks in other stuff. But ah well. Amber Heard, as she is here, works for Hettie, but I guess that’s another spell of time travel owed here. xD She and Hugh Dancy would be a cute couple, though.

And, I know it’s not a character, but it’s one of the most important paces in my novel, so I feel I should include it. This is how I imagine Jade House, just with a much larger garden, near a cliff and behind a coastal road:

Woot, all done! Now I really must do less procrastinating and actually do some work . . . *sigh*

Purpleness!!

2010-11-29T22:52:00.000Z

The penultimate day of NaNoWriMo dawns bright and early with my alarm clock bleeping its head off at 6am. My arm promptly keeps on snoozing it until I become aware it is semi-daylight and I've missed my bus to college by fifteen minutes. Oops. On the other side, I feel rubbish and have been ill all weekend, and I only have one lesson, so I make a quick guiltless phone call to my college attendance monitor and then promptly go back to bed. Having not slept much that night, I sleep right through until 2pm-ish and feel extremely lazy and unproductive.

Knowing I have a media essay to write today, too, I get started on Nano. Sadly, there is nobody around to war with me; my regional chatroom has three people in it, none of whom say anything in the fifteen minutes I wait for some kind of answer to my feeble 'hi'. Facebook also proves rubbish in provinding me with a warring partner, so I decide to go it alone. Jamming headphones into my ears I squeak up the volume of James Blunt and The Script's new albums (my novel's writing mix) and attack my novel's key scene (the midway point!!).

In this scene, my MC, Will, finishes his fight with his brother by finding his 'true love's grave in the field where they are fighting, and in a mad panic, time-travels back to her time. The following involves a near suicide, lots of running, snow in July, two revelations, a enormous paradox and a whiskey in a tavern (not in that order). I must say, it was all terrifically fun to write and now, I leave Will at 50k, lying in his sister's bed (nothing vulgar) with more bruises than bones, his brother actually being nice to him for once while he's interrogated by his irate sister for time travelling after he faked destroying the watch that allows him to do so.

Geeee, I want to keep writing now . . .

However, back on track. Finishing a day early has been wonderful, especially considering the amount of stress this has all been this year. My coursework is in serious neglect . . . O.o I highly recommend the experience to anyone who struggles with first drafts (you write a hell of a lot of rubbish, but hey, it's out there and written) and longs to write that novel. The breaking down of your inner editor is hard, but satisfying.

I have 50k with which to find the first half of my story in (oh believe me, editing will be brutal this December: most of it shall not live to see draft 2) and I hope to continue to the end through December and January. This story, I hope, will be much easier to write and redraft than my other NaNo Novel, Hamartia . . . which, despite being my baby, is an utter pain to edit and plan. >.>

As a last note, though, congrats to all those Nano winners out there, great dedication, and best of luck to those who have yet to go green/purple, I'll be rooting for you tomorrow! However, as I write this, I am actually meant to be word warring with a friend who, by the end of this war, will also be a purpleite . . . time to get typing. Toodles, people! (or just Kanen xD)

"You cannot map a desert, for it is breathing."

2010-11-16T21:41:00.000Z

A travelling man with straw hair gave me a map
of the desert and later turned out to be a hallucination.
the map contained my feet, bare and blistered,
as spots in sector A7, though I felt a rock nearby
would do better in blue than dried-out green.

I ask the map for names, though it cannot trace her
contours or find the water she cups in both hands,
and it tells me she is a desert with the syllables
of her name spoken with every step gravity rejects.

Sometimes the night tells me I’m going west
and other times it tells me the horizon awoke
in the east or south-by-north, lost in its own compass
because they forgot to turn the highway lights on.

In the daytime, the sky moulds to her curves, shaping
a horizon from twisted rhymes and broken poetry.
Planes (like pilgrims) find their wings clipped,
feathers dropped into watercolour tattoos
for artistic licensing, and nothing more.

Somewhere in the weedy fictions that populate
my mind, I see her lying belly-up, breathing
like the sun will melt her skin and make her as sand,
the sort that sweeps between the sable doily skies
and hugs a new landscape, turning it yellow.

I could tell you the nursery rhyme I first heard
from her lips; of a travelling man who never knew
her name, burning in the sand and passing on
a map that rewrites itself too slow and leads
me around in circles until flames follow my feet.

Weekly to-the-death Duels

2010-11-11T20:29:00.000Z

My novel started with one, and I figure, it will end with one if I get to the ending. I'm currently just past the 23k mark, which is like wow because I've never been more than 1.5k ahead on Nano in previous years (and only or like two days before I got lazy), so now I'm waiting for my coursework to be set and my nice cushy buffer to disintegrate under the pressure. :S

But progress s going well. My MC, Will descovered time-travel a couple nights ago, has followed himself to the duel that started the story, thinking he's either completely wasted or been cursed by witchcraft, and is now sat in a London pub having a pint with a conspiracy theorist in 2006. His sister will kick his arse tomorrow, though, when she finds out he's still travelling, tut-tut. Getting excited though, lots of fun and explosions and stuff, not to mention a romance (O.o) to write.

. . . 50,000 words is seriously too short for a novel. I think I either pad too much or my characters like long-winded-ness.

So this is my day 10 update, I'll keep it short and sweet because I still haven't written anything today.

NaNoWriMo Kickoff Rant!

2010-11-01T00:24:00.000Z

Woot, so yeah, I know this blog was intended for poetry and musings and stuff, but novelling is my better area, I feel. I've been debating what to do this year for weeks; the previous two years I've done Nano, I've worked on the same story, and now that story is at a point where it need's a serious going over rather than a slap-dash speed-writeup, it's off the cards for this year. I've also been working on a short story, but I intend that one only to be about 20/25k long, which still leaves me half a Nano. So I decided to throw in an old children's story to rewrite.

However, I have this character called Will, who I use in this wonderfully awesome idea called a Character Chatroom on the site www.teenagewriters.com and he's from a story I started in 2008 but never really did much with as I had too many different ideas for it and I wasn't able to research it properly. Buuuuut, I've been getting to know him through these chatrooms and now he's been coming up with his own background and character and all sorts (including a four-day argument with his brother in my head >.>) so, I thought, with some help, I could write his story instead of the children's rewrite . . . However, my novel of the last two years has also been getting back in my head and the characters begging me to write . . .

[Fully aware I sound insane right now]

So figuring this out's been hard, but I'm stuck on the short and Will's story now (though Will's story seems to have turned into a prequel to the actual story I vaguely started two years ago) and my other novel's being forced to shut up and sulk.

Ahem, soooooooooooooooo. Rant over, I'm so glad nobody reads this blog. :)

Roofless

2010-10-22T00:27:00.000+01:00

Sun between the banister,
morning through the ivy,
this house with its open worlds
closes nothing to searching ghosts
or their reflections in the windows.
Her feet count the steps to a bedroom
strung with bursts of net curtain hanging
like blanched vines. They draw
in the night through their fleshless leaves.

Outside, a neighbour watches,
busy watering his dead fuchsias.

Her hands leave meanders in the dust,
and capture a butterfly in a teacup,
halfway between a streetlight heaven
and the desires she pinned on the sky,
where she’d always figured heaven flitted
away from the rain.

Snapshots don’t make memories
when the mottled hues of music and voice
are lost with the dust between linoleum
fractures (arteries take blood to the heart)
like paint sucked into the earth.

He allows the dusty wings to rub off colour
on his wilting progeny. They are choking
on the early frost, and euthanasia sits in a flowerpot
in the shed, mixed with dust and cobwebs.

For a moment the house remembers
the feeling of rain running over its tiles,
like streams of ghostly tongues racing
in cycles back to the sky,

and she feels it too, like a choir
singing in rewind, blowing blue-grey
into dawn’s clutch of swooning mist,
while a pair of wings seep the last of their colour
into the puddles pooling on the carpets.

(Revised: 25/01/2011)

Heh...

2010-10-20T00:01:00.000+01:00

Balloons tangle in the sky; they're red
and green, like the halves and wholes
of a voice singing to me while I’m sleeping,
with the blush of headlights combing
my duvet. Someone drew strange faces
over the curves and shadows, and I
can’t make out if they’re smiling or staring,
singing in red murmurs, or watching the olive
trees sway outside my window.

Postcard

2010-10-08T23:32:00.000+01:00

Good morning, I hope
you are well, and the toast isn’t burnt;
I’m spattered with Mediterranean salt,
just like you promised – easing ink
through the Adriatic and its penny
promises, shining like eyes
on the seabed.

I’m crossing waves
with these over-the-counter postcards,
on my way back to you, while Venetian cream
threads a loose skin over my coffee.
If you were here, you’d ask me to remember
drawing faces on maps of the world

as the rain poured lingos through our smiles,
threading tie-dyed kite tails amid the contours
around your lips and eyes (hanging on tight),
and I’d tell you maps don’t have sunsets.
In these hot midnights alone, I gaze

over roof-top gardens gone to seed,
with Indian dyes and watercolour reflections
clutching the canals below like embroidery grass,
I spend listening to the lions who guard
each tributary with fevered eyes

that teach a lullaby on the art of living
well into the swill of colours as words
in song, printing them in stone and lining
new words on my lips: caelum, non
animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt.*

My hair is the horizon now,
and it’s pulling at the sellotaped corners
of the universe, undoing your careful origami,
and laying it out on the sky where my words
trace their way back home, on a jet plane
resisting the air.

*"Caelum, non animum, mutant, qui trans mare currunt." (Those who run off across the sea change their climate but not their mind.) – Horace, Espistles

Nautical Optimism

2010-09-25T22:37:00.000+01:00

barely awake it seems
the sun forgot to bring coffee
or a fogless breath
to her window –
but that blue’s a fine glow,
she thinks – is it dawn
or the tread of a storm
colouring over the divide
of sea and sky?

she waits and sighs and asks
of the beasts she colours
in daylight and picks apart
when the ease of splitting weaves
where oceans cohere and forbid
an easy return,

if prayers count when thrown
to fishes, day after day.

The Old House

2010-09-21T00:44:00.000+01:00

I know I was meant to do one a day . . . but yeah, I failed at that. Done . . . three. So I'll edit up the other and post is in the next couple days. This one's more of a musing than anything else, and is going straight on my 'to edit' pile. :/

The Old House

The wallpaper peels itself back,
stringing decade-old glue
like party streamers, made grey
by the rain, over the carpets
we scuffed black and blue,
and then ‘till the colour wore away
and our names were revealed,
etched into the bottom stair.

This house pretends
that ghosts play in the eaves,
weaving banners between the beams:
the children who lived here smile
and draw crayon wishes on the ceilings,
the walls, and unravel their way
to an attic where laughter
filters through the dust
like sulphurous whispers.

Unsolved

2010-09-07T23:43:00.000+01:00

[Beware: word-vomity awfulness drizzled with a dash of eww. Trying to get back into this, 29 more poems to do in the next three weeks, hopefully it'll help - wish me luck.]

Wonderland was the name you scribed
on the patio doors, though stiffened
by fortnights of rain, and swollen at the hinges.
You’d gaze at the flat areas in the grass
until the curves of your mind spilled
like laughter down the hundred worn hooves
of a carousel as it spins, entombed in its own
symmetry, waiting for it to spring up
between the daisies fainting against the glass
when night rises, unsmiling.

You remember my name
sometimes, and call it out loud,
as though to the cat who’s pawprints
still ghost the concrete steps, looking
for the dried-out milk I used to leave out,
while every night in this garden,
more moons look away in the sky.

Your fingers reach out to stroke my face
but pull away when splinters separate
your memories of what you always believed
happened here. The garden listens, but only speaks
when nobody is there to hear its murmurs.
The pink champagne we spilled between the blades
dried like blood in the moonlight: black.

And I thought I saw a star cry my name, before
the constellations became your witnesses.

[Sept 3rd]

Helloooooo

2010-09-03T23:54:00.000+01:00

This is my shiny new blog as the other one never seemed to get used and I thought a change might help that, though so far it hasn't. Hopefully, thanks to a September Napo, this will be for poetry, but let's see.

Also, other poetry people - if you're using wordpress and the automatic space between line breaks annoys you (I hate it because it messes up stanzas) then [shift]+[enter] creates normal linebreaks without the space between the lines. :)

Just
like
this
:)