Purpleness!!

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."

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

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!

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

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...

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

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

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

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.