AUTHOR'S CORNER;

THE TRUE REALITY OF IT...

WARNING; THIS BLOG MAY BE SLIGHTLY DARK, QUITE DEEP AND AT BEST DEPRESSING.

I started off my birthday with a sudden and rude realisation of my own mortality.  It's personal, I can't really say, except that someone very close to me, someone whom I thought would always be there, always see me through life, always hold my hand and be my rock, has fallen very ill.  I am a writer and I can only write about things that touch me, and this my dear readers has hit the core of my very being.  You see that someone was the person who has always been there, the person who has always comforted me, held my hand, taught me how to ride my first bike and saw me through happy times and sad times.  This person was the guy who held me tight, wrapped up inside his 1970's fur coat as he sat me through my first Frankenstein movie at the tender age of six.  He was the guy who threw snowballs at me, chased me round the park, let me ride behind him on his moterbike and taught me how to fight like a boy! The person I loved, who loved me back, the person whose love was so strong that it was always easy to sometimes hate and know that he would never, ever hate you back!  My dad.

It is never easy seeing the rock in your life crumble, never easy to understand how someone so tall, so strong and so wise can be reduced down to a hospital bed and helpless expression on his face, tearful eyes and there is nothing you can do about it.  

It is life; I know it is inevitable for parents to get old, ill and perish, it's just we never really think they will!  They have always been there, strong, decisive and caring and it is difficult to imagine them any other way.  

But as I held his frail hand and looked into his eyes, I realised that life is but a short fuse that passes us by with no second chances; once the fuse blows, it blows!  I realised that time wasted is time never regained and there is never any going back.  The person I took for granted, loved for granted, is in trouble and all the times I promised to phone, visit, take him out, are no longer available within my grasp. The moments we spend being too busy, are the only moments we ever have, the rest... the rest never comes, because in reality there is always a tomorrow that will never come!

Guilty?  Yes, I am.  Sad, very.  Because I thought I had all the time in the world; that is what I was promised when I was born, or at least that's what it seemed like.  He is stable, but has a long road to recovery.  Suddenly that soap on t.v. isn't so important, the fact that it's cold outside or I have to write my next novel, all seem futile and stupid excuses made in a moment of selfishness.  

For each heartbeat, each beep from the monitor represents a memory, a moment spent in my childhood; the six foot Christmas tree, the broken bike he found and we fixed up together, the shopping trips down the market and the roller blading in Hyde Park!  Each beep from that monitor is a phone call missed. a promise broken, a "I'll come round soon" excuse I made, thinking that I had forever!  

It is a sad fact that each middle aged adult learns the hard way, parents will never ever be there forever...it could take only a breeze, a sullen southern wind, or a blink of an eye for the hands of fate to reach out and grab them away!  I pray he gets better, so that I could actually see through all those broken promises I once made!

AUTHOR'S CORNER;

HOW DO I LOVE THEE?

Guessing that tomorrow is Valentine's Day, and that one ought to pick up on one's pace and pluck up one's courage and engage in a let's say - more romantic setting, frankly fills my heart with dread!

You see, as a writer I am very adapt in the language of love, I can set the scene for a delightful rendezvous that could put Romeo to shame!  I can conjure up all sorts of saucy romantic scenarios that could make a stripper blush!  Yes I have that power....on paper!

But I am only a writer; which means I am shy, awkward, quirky and rather insular in my ways.  My fiction is great; I can do anything in fiction, unfortunately though - not in real life! There is a reason that I write, and it's not just because I am absurdly talented, (though I am a little talented) but it's because in being fragile and self conscious by nature, shy and retreating in the real world, writing has heightened and developed to an acute skill; rather like a blind person having a strong sense of smell.  I hide behind my fiction because it enables me to say and do the things I would otherwise find horribly embarrassing.  But needs must and I have a husband and it is Valentine's Day and he needs pampering!

The problem is, I am not very good at expressing myself in the real world; not when it comes to chat up lines!  I tend to get tongue-tied.

And though I would attempt to practice in the privacy of my own study, and try to come up with witty lines, outside the word processor, my lines sound quite corny!

It is a sad truth, that in the past my chat up techniques are, shall we say... a little cheesy at best!

Often, my past attempts at chatting up my poor husband have tended to sound like a bad script from a corny eighties movie!  It's a wonder he actually married me!

But tomorrow is the day of love, and love must be practised on such a day; otherwise, all the card companies will go out of business!  And although I know and he knows that I am as good at this romance stuff as a wet dishcloth, I felt that I must give it my best shot and attempt to bring about that magical feeling of love in the air. So I started as I meant to go on; I cooked breakfast today as a pre-warmer to the big day!  That did not go as well as I had expected; breakfast was burned whilst I was attempting to apply my lipstick on and the fire alarm sounded like a crazed mother in-law throughout the house. This only served to agitate poor hubby, as he had an early meeting to get to!

I tried to rectify the mistake by putting on a romantic CD and hoped that he would hear it as he marched out of the door, late for his meeting and smelling like burned toast!  I smiled sweetly at him as he declined to kiss me goodbye and pretended that the music was random and not deliberate.

optimism still gripping my fragile soul, I phoned him up an hour later and accidentally interrupted his very important meeting; it didn't go down too well when he discovered that I was only phoning to say hi!

Determined not to be defeated I turned up at his work to see if we could go to dinner, that went down like a lorry load of bricks; he was in another meeting!

A half hearted attempt accompanied by one of my classic corny chat up lines on his return home was met with a long stare on his part and a grunt in my direction!

That's when I snapped and my two sides split apart; the writer broke away from the shying nerd and my vocabulary made a full recovery!

And it wasn't pretty! There was no romance, there was no love, there was a lot of spoken word!!! In fact I might have composed the best rap song in the history of time!!  He stared at me blankly and quietly asked what I was on about.  

 

I yelled and shouted and stamped my feet!  I cried and screamed and threw a tantrum!  I listed all my failed, ignored attempts at romance! And he said, 'I don't understand?'

I stopped in my tracks, thought back to the events of the day; in my corny, shy, introverted way, I had assumed he would read my mind and follow the script.  Not his fault, entirely mine!  For as a writer, I have to learn that the theme playing out in my mind is exactly that; in my mind!  I am fiction and fiction has no place in the real world.  I was trying to be fictional, elaborate, great, fantastic, like a character in a novel.  So I took a deep breath and an idea popped in my mind.

So I took a deep breath, stopped thinking corny thoughts, forgot about the fiction and the storyline and simply said 'I love you!'  His anger melted away as his expression softened.  'Oh Sam,' he said, 'I love you too!'

The moral of the story, as writers we don't need the great storyline, we don't need the grand gestures, we don't need the magical setting.  As writers, sometimes all we have to do for the people we love, is simply be ourselves!  Because after all, books are made out of paper and words, love is made out of pure emotions!

Happy Valentine's Day!

AUTHOR'S CORNER;

SECRET OBSESSION

I have been often asked by friends and family, am I writing about things I myself have been through?  The answer I unreservedly give is no, of course I am not writing about myself! But if truth be told, this in itself is a half truth.  You see, the half truth of it is, unlike my novels, I have not done outrageous things such as kill somebody or scheme a tragedy or held someone up to ransom!  The half truth of it is, I have not cheated, nor did I lie to get someone into trouble nor have I ever been in trouble.  That's the half truth, the fictional part of my writing.   The half lie?  the half lie I tell is when I unreservedly give people the impression that all I write about is detached from anything that I am!

Let me explain; in my first Novel, for example The Misfortunes of Ellie May, where my main character is a young girl from a troubled family who finds herself trapped in a pimp gang and has to find a way of freeing herself, so she plots and schemes and lures members of the gang in with her beauty and charm, and turns them against each other, thus, mistrust seeps in as some believe that they are in love with her and fight for her amongst each other.  Where those who stood in her way were destroyed and met a fatal end.  

Of course, I have never been in a pimp gang, I have not plotted and schemed and lured pimps into my sordid web of lust and debauchery.  But amidst this cleverly written piece of fiction, there is a fair bit of me and, let's say, drawing on personal experience.  'The gang' was finding myself in a world of strangers, 'the plotting' was the inner struggle of survival, and the 'violence and pain' was my inner flitting self destroying thoughts, that passes through the mind in crisis! All combined, sieved and churned into a fictional plot.  

My second novel, The Devil's Truth, where Satan himself plays upon the lives of innocent, yet suggestive people, where there is emptiness in lives and a lusting for something more. Where the beaches of Marbella create an alluring setting for sin to take place.  Was I lured in?  Was I influenced by Satan himself....would I write about it if I was?  No!  But once again, emotions that characters felt were drawn upon from personal, deep seated, mind numbing trials.  'the Spanish seductress' secret desire, 'the poor fat woman who wanted to be loved' invisible moments.  I can go on, but you get the picture?  Have I been to Marbella and felt the Spanish sand beneath my feet? Yes.  Which character am I?  None of them and all of them!  

 As Virginia Woolf once said, every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written in his work! Which to me means, not just their experience, but their way of thinking!  In my first novel, my temptress prostitute was not a bad person, because if truth be told, I don't believe in an all bad person, just bad circumstances and bad actions!  Though status quo would not permit me to say so in real life!

Even those of us who write science fiction, or vampire novels or comedy or whatever!  We all have our secret opinions, experiences, beliefs firmly woven into the fabric of our work! That's what compels us to write and what allows us to be good writers; because you can only truly write well about what you believe in!  That is part of the reason we become so nervous when giving a public reading.... because unbeknown to the eager public, we are being asked to share a part of our inner deepest self!