Quicunque

Yay! I have achieved my goal of 5,000 words for the April Fool's challenge! *happy dance*

5,257 / 5,000 (105.1%)

No, I'm not going to get over-confident and complacent and up the ante again. I've done that already - I would have been chuffed enough with my originally planned 3k, so I'm well pleased.

What's next? *grin*

Today's post for one of my collaborative novels at PanE adds another 686 words to my total, and with the addition of a wee piece done as a prompt for In So Many Words it inches me a bit nearer my April Fool's goal:
I'm getting anxious about achieving those last 1073 words. It sounds very little, but with the series of Bank Holidays we have lined up for the next 10 days, the preternaturally sunny weather luring me outside and the fact both my partner and I are off work for the aforementioned 10 days and there will be activities planned, it means there are going to be many, many distractions away from the keyboard!

So, thanks to Ashtoreth's encouragement I embarked upon the April's Fool thing. Since I missed the first week of the month, I set myself a very modest target of 3000 words (not 2000 as in the counter below; the counter didn't offer 3000 as an option) and managed a 618-word post for one of my characters today which got me off to a respectable start towards that goal.

I want to try and write something every day. However small. Whether its a something self-contained or part of a work-in-progress. I just feel its important to get back into the habit of regular writing.

618 / 2,000 (30.9%)

This is my entry for the Yuletide Flash Fiction Challenge at PanErotica - "The challenge is to write a short story of no more than 600 words. The only other rule is your story must begin with the following first line: The lights appeared out of the darkness.

The lights appeared out of the darkness, a score of candles dancing in the unnerving stillness of the night, fixed to a small pine tree that had been set up on the parapet of the enemy trenches some seventy yards away. There was still some sporadic gunfire and the dull thud of shelling in the distance, but along this stretch the artillery had fallen silent on both sides of the line. Instead, the still night air carried voices across the span of barbed wire and mud: snatches of laughter and shouts, bursts of singing drifting across the stilled battlefield.

The stench of rotting and unwashed bodies, stagnant mud and cordite was little better above ground than in the trench, but he lifted his face to the night sky and breathed deeply anyway. After weeks of cloud and rain, it was a clear moonlit night. On the enemy side, he could see small groups of men emerging from the parapet, and behind him, his comrades were singing carols of their own.

The two sides met among the bodies of their fallen comrades in the open ground between the trench lines. They were cautious of the extraordinary and unexpected truce at first, but soon small souvenirs were being offered and accepted. Hands were shaken, buttons snipped from greatcoats and exchanged, tobacco swapped for chocolate.

“Ein Licht für Ihre Zigarette, Tommy?”

He glanced round to find an enemy officer, a lieutenant of some kind, grinning at him, holding up a brass lighter and miming lighting a smoke. He accepted with a nod and leaned over to let the tip of his woodbine touch the offered flame cupped in the officer’s hand. The brief flare of light illuminated the grime ingrained into the skin, the broken and bitten nails, and for a moment he felt a powerful sense of intimacy with this stranger.

“Thank you, danke,” he straightened up and exhaled a lungful of smoke, gazing at the face of his deadly enemy.

Not the sadistic and cold-blooded devil that propaganda would have him believe, but a man just like him, young with ancient eyes that had seen too many atrocities. It was hard to sustain hatred for a man who shared the same grim and brutal reality.

He offered a cigarette from his battered case, which was cheerfully accepted. Tomorrow they would go back to trying to kill each other, but tonight was a different country.

“Für Sie, behalten Sie es.” When he shook his head, not understanding, the officer reached out and took his hand, pressing the brass lighter into it. The metal was smooth and still warm from his enemy’s touch. Turning it over, he saw there was a name engraved into it but it was illegible in the dark.

In return he gave the cigarette case. It was heavily dented now and the silver tarnished, but the officer grinned and seemed pleased by the exchange. From the pocket of his greatcoat he produced a small flask of schnapps and they toasted each other in the temporary peace of no man’s land.

“Fröhliche Weihnachten, Tommy.”

“Merry Christmas, Jerry.”

This year I've decided to sign up for Reverb 10, which delivers daily creative prompts for the month starting 1st December. I'd heard several of my online circle refer to it as an interesting challenge and I do need something to slow the steady decline of my active brain cells. A month isn't too long a time to commit to a bit of daily activity, so I'm firm in intention and hopeful of keeping up.

Reverb 10 describes itself as "an annual event and online initiative to reflect on your year and manifest what’s next. The end of the year is an opportunity to reflect on what's happened, and to send out reverberations for the year ahead." You can read all about it and sign up on their website here.

So it's time again already for PanErotica's annual Hallowe'en Drabble Challenge. The theme this year is "Dead but Dreaming" which is a hell of a tough theme but I have only myself to blame because I set it. Yes, I am slightly crazy...

A little while ago I put my name down for Stephanie Thorton’s haiku contest, and then happily forgot all about it until some generous comments on an older blog entry alerted me to the fact that it's today and tomorrow allocated to post our haikus! Ooops. And why is it that when you set out to try and deliberately write something for a purpose, your mind turns into a lumpen mass of porridge? Or is that just me? Anywhoo... remembering Stephanie's premise was literature-related, and me being no real writer much less poet, I decided to take as my inspiration and theme a recent experience.

Last week I was moving some boxes of books around in the my attic in an attempt to make space for more. There are three generations of books mingled together up there: my father's, my grandfather's, and mine. Odd that it was always the men of my family that were the readers!

Inevitably, I found myself browsing through some of the books instead of just checking for mouse and damp damage. I rediscovered many old friends up there. Amongst them I found a small yellowing and dog-eared paperback copy of Mary Renault's Last of the Wine. Many of the pages were loose - I hadn't been its first owner (it's actually 6 years older than I am) and its binding had been poor even before I'd finished reading, re-reading and weeping on it. Considering how much that book had meant to me during my 16th year, it's hard to believe I left to moulder in the attic rather than being accorded its rightful place in the bookcase where my best-beloveds live. Cruel, cruel I am.

So, I flicked through it and revisited the self I had been when I'd loved this book almost to the point of its destruction. On page 197, in the last sentence of Chapter 19, the two heroes of the novel finally, and most discretely, consummate their love affair: "I am here." I found that page and the one facing it marked with the faint shadowy outline of several rose petals that had been pressed between them years ago and which now fluttered out like moths. The coarse paper had drained all their colour and left them brittle and transparent, but I knew they had been red, and heavily scented. I had been truly, madly, deeply in love with their giver - for all of one summer. Romantic, no? *grin* The stuff of haiku, maybe?

Clasped in the pages,
faded ghosts of lovers passed
with summer's ending.

This is my entry for this season's drabble challenge at Pan Erotica - 100 words on the theme of 'winter'. I based this on one of my collaborative fiction characters, a werewolf named Winter, whose story I wrote in 'Love Bites' in the Doors novel at PE a few years ago. It was nice to revisit him, albeit in a brief vignette.

Winter solstice; a far-off bell strikes the midnight hour.

Ash-grey and moon-silver, a wolf runs along the wood’s snow-shrouded edge. Pausing to snuff the familiar woodsmoke drifting across the frosted air from the tumbledown farm below, it raises its head to howl a night-song that pierces the glittering stillness like an arrow.

In the darkness of an upper window, a light flares up before banking to a steady glow. The wolf’s lover tends the beacon-torch that guides him home from his wilderness, until the night he too can shed his skin and dance with his mate in the moonlit snow.

(Disclaimer: I can't write poetry to save my life...) This sequence was originally posted on Twitter - random tweets from my daily observations.

i.
hidden in long grass
hollowed from roadside hedgerow
neighbour's cat sleeping

ii.
neighbour's cat today
has new nest in horse's field
sleeping in spilled hay

iii.
orange-eyed hunter
ginger cat in red-gold leaves
colours of autumn

Panerotica is holding a 100-word drabble contest for Hallowe'en, with the theme of Ghosts. This is the entry I've submitted for it.

It's written as an answer to a poem by Robert Browning, Porphyria’s Lover, which relates how a man strangles his lover with her own hair to preserve forever the single perfect moment in which she loves him. Because I’m some kind of weird masochist, I set myself the challenge of not only making Porphyria’s response 100 words, but also keeping to the same rhyme and meter (iambic tetrameter) Browning used. Please don't laugh too hard, hmmmm?


The rain is cold and hard tonight,
The chill wind tears the sky apart,
Steals away the warmth and light
With fingertips like deadly darts,
Shards of ice that pierce the heart

And I will come through wind and rain
To crouch as ever by your chair.
Are you so sure I felt no pain
When round my neck you twined my hair,
One perfect moment to ensnare?

Our love is pale and dead, but ever
Bound together by death’s knot
I will haunt your dreams forever,
Feed your madness till you rot.
May God forgive you, I will not.

I have a terrible time naming fantasy characters, generally. While I want the names to be non-conventional and even a little quirky I have a horror of overused monikers (Hawk, Raven), names that are glaringly inappropriate to the culture, and those stereotypical and unpronounceable fantasy names that look like a bunch of random syllables smushed together and riddled with gratuitous apostrophes to look suitably implausible. I mean, elven. I especially hate names where the author has forgotten that words need vowels as well as consonants to be pronounceable by the average human reader, and those that are just plain ugly and sound like klingon swear words - Klfffkpjt! Shogologol! Oh yes, fantasy name generators will have much to answer for on the Day of Judgement.

E R Eddison named his characters with sumptuous eclecticism. He didn't always get it right, especially in The Worm Ouroborous, where one struggles mightily to take seriously swashbuckling characters with eccentric names like Gaslark, Goldry Bluszco and Spitfire. But when he did get it right, the results could be very pleasing indeed - names still unusual enough that his reader understood this was no common world of everyday folk, but not so bizarre as to provoke irritation or mirth. Especially successful was his extensive usage of exquisite and unusual names of Greek, Italian and French origin in the Zimiamvian Trilogy, where they fit perfectly into that fantastical setting.

Most fantasy authors forget, or don't consider, that personal names used by a race or society need not all have the same origination. Certainly people of one race/country will likely have names that distinguish them as such. But the personal names used in England today derive from very many different ancient and modern languages, not a single source. Why should it be any different in other worlds that aren't a single racially, linguistically homogeneous culture? (and that's another issue! but for another post....)

I've taken a leaf from Eddison's book, and while many of the names I've chosen for my fantasy characters (or they chose for themselves!) might look invented, they are either 'real' or close variations of real personal or place names from around this world. So while Mihai is a Gypsy name, Jaion is derived from the Basque female name Jaione, Caelum Kahani has a Latin forename and a Hindi surname, and my hara Maavah, Laois and Chamonix are named after, respectively, an island in the Maldives, an Irish county and a French mountain range. There's usually no agenda in the provenance of the names - all were chosen simply because they were uncommon, I liked them and they seemed to 'fit' the character. Talk about globalisation...

A fiction genre is an artificial construct of conventions that affords us some idea of what to expect from a work, but can also prevent us from experiencing it as an individual experience rather than merely an example of a defined "type". It's both safety net and strait jacket.

Most popular fiction can be squeezed into a genre or mixture of genres, and while some authors readily market themselves as a horror writer, or a fantasy writer, many others resist being pigeonholing into just one genre. Margaret Atwood and J G Ballard denied they wrote science fiction, J K Rowling ingenuously claimed she didn't realise she was writing fantasy, and Stephen King has expressed disappointment at being seen purely as a horror writer. I think some authors are a little too quick to disassociate themselves from unfashionable genre labels, but I can understand why they might want to avoid typecasting.

I can see there is some definite value in genres. Mostly importantly maybe from the author's consideration is that genre fiction is easier to market because it can be aimed at a targeted audience. Genre readers head for genre sections of the library or bookshop. Publishers prefer works that have a ready-made niche. And yet the value of quantifiable creative criteria also comes with a definite downside.

An author defined strongly by genre is at the mercy of fad and fashion. As I write, YA horror fiction with sparkly vampires is all the rage. Next month, the trend may be (forgive the pun) dead. Being pigeonholed into a genre also means a restriction on creative range. Readers have specific expectations of genre authors and trust them to adher to an established formula. Many published writers say that if they become known for work in one genre it can be difficult to find a publisher for anything else without using resorting to a pseudonym.

As a non-published writer who will never be published, the very last thing I should be worrying about for myself is getting typecast in a genre! But I do write collaborative fiction in several online communities, and even at this very amateur level, I have never liked to be put into a box and neatly labelled.My reading tastes are eclectic and diverse, and when I write I am inspired by and incorporate many different influences. Creatively and socially, I don't want to feel myself pushed into a box, or stuck with an outmoded label long after I want to move on to something else. Why feel obliged to stay on one island when there is an entire archipelago to explore?

So when people ask what my favourite fiction genre is, or what genre would I place myself or wish to be placed into, I answer, none of them, and all of them. When I go into Waterstones I don't look at the horror section, or the crime section, because I don't read 'typical' horror or crime fiction, yet I have loved individual novels that I suppose would fall within those genres. When I was younger, our small local library didn't have genre fiction sections. It was all just "Fiction". Science fiction novels rubbed shoulders with Westerns, Tolkien sat near Tolstoy and I read widely, both popular and literary, unconstrained by classification labels. And that's how I like me and my amateur collaborative writing to be defined now. Not as action-adventure, or romance, or fantasy or science-fiction-with-a-twist-of-homoerotic-mystery. Just "fiction".

While waiting for my friend to come online and amuse me, I was idly reading through some of the collaborative science fictions novels I used to write in and it struck me how many of the characters were assassins or bounty hunters or both. Almost invariably female and kick-ass. Probably with big bazookas. They are beautiful, lethal, do mercenary work on the side, are 'not to be crossed' and 'not to be trusted'. The future is gonna be a very dangerous place to live in because if one of these sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) assassins don't get you, a sexy yet bad-ass (and almost invariably female) bounty hunter will.

And I am left scratching my head over these clichéd character types...

Every angle of the feisty (and almost invariably female) assassin/bounty hunter stock character has been pre-digested and overused so exhaustively that unless employed as a clever parody, I can only assume that it's a rather sad and dull lack of imagination that makes people keep on cloning carbon copies. And what's so appealing about mass-murders anyway? (in case anyone thinks I'm unfairly prejudiced against assassin characters, I use the same argument for vampire-fanciers *grin*).

Sure, unoriginal stereotypes can sometimes still be enjoyable. Sometimes a clichéd character type can suddenly come become more interesting if an unusual or unexpected angle can be found to them, although if the angle is too obviously contrived and/or whacky and it can just feel staged and unconvincing. Superficial, recognisable stereotype characters can also be useful (even essential, some would say) in a story to provide a familiar level of comfort and reference for the reader. But not as main characters, please! A lead character needs a certain amount of uniqueness and complexity to interest me, and I don't just mean she might do tricks with a shuriken that would make a crime-lord's eyes water.

Maybe the assassin stereotype is just a high-tech replacement for the Tart with a Heart of Gold? Whatever, my ennui with the cliché has reached the stage I automatically read no further if I find one in a story - and that applies to both amateur collaborative fiction and published fiction.

I was (un)fortunate enough to have had an English teacher who was positively anal about apostrophes, so I think I'm generally fairly good about using them correctly - except when I'm being lazy about reading something before I post it.

The one thing we were taught which differs from what I've read other people state is correct, is the use of apostrophes in the possessives of personal names that end in "s". We were taught that for biblical and classical names the final "s" should be omitted, but for all others it should stand. Hence, I was told, one should say Hercules' big head and Jesus' dog, but Charles's big head and Francis's dog (unless you're talking about St Francis maybe...??).

I've always tended to accept (if not always follow) this rule as it was drilled into me, but now I don't know if it's just a widely accepted quirk, one of those pedantic little quibbles that's become outdated, or simply a personal either/or decision!

A random flick through some mythology tomes on my bookshelf doesn't help as I've found examples both using and omitting the final "s", and my Word spell/grammar check cheerfully allows a word either with or without it too. This is probably a very trivial and nit-picky question but it's been bugging me since I thought about it!

- Originally posted at Panhistoria 08-20-04

This is a topic I've found relevant to myself while writing at Panhistoria and Panerotica with their predominantly American population - we Brits often seem to speak a different language. :)

Although British English and American English are technically the same language, there are substantial differences both in spoken and written forms. We're not talking just about spelling either - but also vocabulary, phraseology and grammar.

For example, the same sentence as rendered in correct American and then British English:

US: I don't have a car and I just burned my truck while I was visiting with a friend.
UK: I haven't got a car and I've just burnt my lorry while I was visiting a friend.

(Okay, it's a surreal scenario, but you get the idea...)

An American editor cannot accurately proofread a piece of writing that uses British English (and vice versa) unless they have a full and confident understanding of the differences. Reputable schools that teach English as a second language recognise the differences and usually specify if they teach American or British English. And of course, Canadian and Australian English are different again, and there are many more variations... :)

It's important to remember when reading with an eye to critique a piece of writing that what might seem weird or unacceptable phraseology to an American editor might be perfectly correct to a British one (and again, vice versa). In the example given above, each would have rejected the other's version, but both were correct. Neither version of English is 'better' than the other; the important thing here I think is consistency! Don't mix and match.

The links below are to some useful articles that summarise the main differences between American and British English and the pitfalls to watch out for.

• American and British English differences
• Differences Between American and British English

Originally posted at Panhistoria 08-10-04

Today when I went out for my walk, I took along a small notebook tucked snugly into my hip pocket. Ideas for my next collaborative fiction posts, snatches of conversation and description often come to me as I’m walking along with my brain disconnected, but by the time I get home I’ve forgotten them and they’re lost for good. So, I thought I could perch on a stile or fallen tree and scribble these flashes of brilliance down in the notebook as-and-when I think of them. Okay, so this idea is probably a no-brainer to any creative writing gurus who might happen to read this, but it was a giant mental leap for Jerry-kind.

Tomorrow, I will even remember to take a pen too….

Thinking about the notebook idea, it occurs to me to wonder if, after declaring for years that I am a humble roleplay writer, with neither talent or aspiration to be anything more literary, all these writing tips and advice I’m surrounded by in the communities I frequent might not be rubbing off on me – am I starting to take my writing seriously, egads?! No, no, I can quickly reassure myself on that account! Writing is, and always will be, nothing more a modest outlet of personal creativity for me. I admire those with ambitions, but I’ve long since learned that for me, the moment I undertake something too seriously it becomes a duty and not a pleasure.

I leave you with one of my favourite thought-provoking quotations from Jung: “But, if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself.”

Another piece of fiction from me. The beginning of a fantasy story that started out as the familiar old 'portal between the worlds' scenario but was beginning to incorporate all kinds of wierd, disparate elements just before it's host 'novel' at Panhistoria came to an end.

Yes, I suppose really one day I should post a sample of what I'm writing NOW rather than older, defunct stuff. But this is as much for me as it is for you (my hypothetical reader, maybe I have one!) and I am shamelessly prone to nostalgia. I can see the faults in these pieces now, and even ways to improve them (though I haven't), but that's half the point of this exercise for me.

So with no further woffle, here is Burn - a Fire Elemental, resident of Faerie, and reluctant guardian-to-be of that pesky portal.

The Earth Moved in Faerie

Something was terribly wrong. The Land knew it too, and moaned and trembled with its unease. The rumbling echoes of the groundquake and following rockfall faded back into silence, and after a brief pause during which everything seemed to hang in tense stillness, the birds began to sing again, though tentatively. The black horse, which had lifted its head from cropping the sparse grass to stare with anxiously pricked ears at the mountains facing them across the forested valley, gave a soft snort and stamped a hind-hoof, nosing at its master’s shoulder.

Burn absently murmured soothingly to it and patted its strong arching neck. “And what was that?” he mused. It was a rhetorical question – he knew what it was, just not what had caused it.

I don’t know but I don’t like it, said a small leathery voice from inside his jerkin. I think we should move on. Wherever we’re going.

“Hmm.” Burn looked across the valley at the hillsides beyond and frowned. There wasn’t much that could make a more-or-less immortal fire-elemental uneasy, but the series of unusual events he’d encountered over the past few days were getting close to it. Two days ago, he’d been drawn by the smell of fire and smoke to a meadow down in the valley below them, where he’d found nothing but ash blowing amongst the trees and long grass. The work of dragons, he’d assumed, scenting sulphur and brimstone on the hot breeze, but the mighty creatures generally kept to the mountain fastnesses and were rare visitors in the valley without good reason.

He thought he understood the reason for the dragons’ presence when he went a little further, and in a small clearing in the woods he found a rift in the fabric of the world, a rippling shimmer in the Spring sunlight that as he stepped closer revealed a view into another world beyond. The world of the humans, Burn had decided, creatures he generally had nothing to do with, not even those who had passed into Faery years before and stayed. He never went near their small, scattered settlements. He saw no point in it although he didn’t resent or regret their presence in the Land.

Small rips in the continuum were not uncommon and generally easily sealed, but Burn could see this one was something different. It had a force of its own that hissed in the wind and rippled in the aether, as if in defiance of any attempt to close it. Not that Burn did even think of trying to close it: he was Fire and this was not his responsibility. He had simply ridden away, assuming those who could, would deal with it.

But since then, he had begun to wonder. The next day he had found something wandering about in the valley that had no right to be there and had aimed a small metal weapon at him that spat fire. Burn had retaliated in kind and left the ash to mingle with that already lightly dusting the leaves of the trees. And then today—the Land itself had spoken and Burn realized that the rift he had ridden away from was of more ominous significance than he’d thought.

But still, he was a fire-elemental and such things as holding the boundaries between the Worlds were not his business. He gathered up his horse’s reins and swung into the saddle, careful not to squash the salamander that lay quietly beneath his jerkin. Normally Pyro would have been up riding on his shoulder and filling his ears with its chatter, but today the little creature was silent and hiding.

The big black horse moved sure-footedly on the rocky slope down to the valley floor, ears flicking back and forth as if it too had caught some of the salamander’s unease. As the ground levelled out and became more thickly wooded, Burn turned its head into the trees and crossed the valley floor at its narrowest point, fording the small stream that meandered along its length until again the land began to rise towards the foothills on the other side. What had made him decide to see for himself the aftermath of the Land’s protest he couldn’t say, and he never asked himself because he never questioned his own motives for anything.

Like many other creative fiction writers, I have a virtual cigar-box full of beginnings that have no endings. A good collaborative fiction writer tries on many different types of character and ventures into a variety of scenarios and histories during his journeys. Although my experiments have not always worked, I would like to think I have at least voyaged, and my virtual cigar-box contains a collection of old posts from my early days at Panhistoria when I was trying on various characters and novels as if they were hats.

Some of these posts are the only ones I wrote for that particular character. Sometimes I found the hat I tried on just didn't suit me, or it was too constrictive or cut from the wrong cloth. Several of the posts are for novels long since lost to posterity. None of these characters exist in my current fictional dabblings, although some of the names live on in different roles.

But I cling to these outdated and defunct introductions, not simply to revisit them and (hopefully!) consider how I might have improved since, but also because although they are no longer tied to their original novels/storylines, maybe they will one day fly again as something else altogether or provide inspiration for future stories.

This one is relatively 'recent' - from 2004. It was the beginning of a story in the pirate-themed collaborative fiction group at Panhistoria called Ile de Torture, and although neither the character nor the story came to anything, I was fond of him - Christophe Malheur, mixed-blood plantation foreman and local voodoo priest. Somedays, I feel he may still have a story to tell....

Answering Marie's summons

On this wildest of nights, the boy sent to fetch Christophe Malheur found him sitting on the storm-torn wooden verandah of his house with the wind whipping his long black hair about his face and lightening reflecting a yellowish hue in his ebony eyes. Thunder rolled back from the hulking black mass of Mont Pelée and lightening twisted in brilliant flashes through the torrential rain, but Christophe’s quiet observation of the storm’s wrath was more of appreciation than concern. They said he had been born at the height of just such a storm, his mother’s agonized cries muffled by the roll of Shango’s vengeful drums while the mambo-midwife called on the loas to give life and protection, and something of the storm had always remained in him.

He didn’t seen either surprised or much concerned to see the boy appearing on his doorstep in such weather, but simply got to his feet, took hold of the boy’s thin arm and hauled him inside the house out of the tearing wind and rain before remarking softly, “Not a good evening for a stroll, mon p’tit, so what’s wrong?”

“Madame Leveau sent me,” stammered the child, breathless with the force of the storm and the exertion of running. “They found a man washed up by the storm at Anse Ceron and took him to Colline Plaisante.” He danced from foot to foot nervously under the steady regard of Christophe’s ebony gaze, wide-eyed with awe of this man the gens de couleur called Nwa Kònèy, the black crow.

Most people on first meeting the facteur of Marie Leveau’s plantation tended to assume from his looks that Christophe Malheur was white—maybe even one of those pure-blood but dirt-poor haute Français one could find around the island. But he never troubled to conceal the quarter of his blood that was Dahomean or his servitude to the loas, and this had brought him a certain respect amongst the people of color, both slave and free, around Anse Ceron.

Christophe nodded his understand of the situation, calmly pushing long wind-tangled hair off his sharp-featured face. “I’ll go straight away. Has the doctor been sent for?” he asked the boy. “Good. Now you stay inside, mon p’tit, you may shelter here til the storm’s passed. But mind you don’t touch anything.”

“Non, m’sieur, I won’t!” The boy glanced nervously round the room, which was dimly lit by a single candelabra standing on what appeared to be a small shrine against the wall: Nwa Kònèy’s djab-spirit was said to be possessive and fierce if you were not safely protected with its garde.

“Mesi,” Christophe smiled at him and touched his head gently, then like a storm-crow was gone into the raging night.


If you wish to explore the stories told in Ile de Torture further, you can use the guest login option at Panhistoria to read there.

I have decided that one of the surest ways for me to hitting a writer's block is to be over-critical of what I'm doing. I've spent the last few weeks reading what a number of admirable writers have to say about writing, absorbing their tips and tricks, their good advice and even the conflicting advice. I've even re-posted some of the tips! (see previous entry...) But the net result for me personally has not been what I wanted or expected.

Remember that scene in A Knight's Tale where Count Adhemar (the effortlessly sexy Rufus Sewell) contemptuously dismisses our hero? "You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting."

That's how I feel *chuckles*. I've never been a confident writer as I fell into collaborative storyplay quite by accident, and I have never thought of myself as being anything more than an averagely entertaining two-bit hack. Although naturally, I like to try and do the best I can (I am a prideful two-bit hack!), I've never had pretensions to write for publication or anything high-falutin' like that. It's just something I do to entertain myself and my co-writers. But lest anyone think I am being overly or falsely modest here, I will add that I consider myself to be at least as 'good' a writer as many of my louder peers *grins*

Anyway, the Christmas holiday gave me an enforced break from my post-writing schedule, and as always when my routine is interrupted, it takes me a little while to get back into the flow again. But this time, I've felt strangely more reluctant than usual. And now I've finally managed to crack the posting drought, I think I've nailed why.

Somewhere, amongst all this good writing advice, I almost forgot that for all my admitted writing sins, I do still enjoy my modest forays into storytelling. I was starting to evaluate my simple little collaborative stories with a serious intensity that, for me, risked negating the fun I had in writing them. To put it baldly - I was starting to scare myself off. I was looking at my words on the screen and weighing them, measuring them, and finding them wanting.

Nope indeedy. My writing just doesn't withstand that level of critical scrutiny and come out of it undented *chuckles*

Well, I don't need to make myself feel inadequately gifted, or to market what I don't have! Most of what I write will never be read by anyone other than my writing partner because even in the Pans, I'm not a high profile roleplay writer in high profile novels. That's okay by me, and it even gives me a sense of relief and liberty to know there are only two people I truly need to improve my writing for and satisfy - myself and my writing partner.

So although I shall continue to read, and maybe even comment on, all the excellent creative writing tips and advice, I'm going to cheerfully chill out about it all and not worry about being serious or competitive, because that’s not why I personally do it. For me, the bit of writing I do will always remain a modest hobby. I want it to stay an enjoyable one, or it just wouldn’t be worth doing.