My first of 100 days of writing

I decided this morning to undertake the #100DaysOfWriting challenge.  And here’s what I produced in my first self-enforced hour of producing:

Smeagol wore a brown trilby with a purple feather stuck in the band. He walked with a limp and carried a stick at all times. Still, he surprised me the day he took off his right boot and showed me he didn’t have a foot on the end of that leg.

He drank heavily, and often. It was rare to find him without a bottle of sherry, except for when he had one of vodka instead. He was paid a pension for his missing foot, as he lost it when he was in the army. His own fault really – he was walking where he wasn’t supposed to – but they said the landowner shouldn’t have set gin traps to catch foxes and dogs and unwary squaddies, so he got an honourable discharge and a pension for thew foot. “Honourable discharge!” he would cackle. “If they knew half of what I’d been up to, they’d have kept me in the glasshouse til the end of my stint then chucked me out without a penny!” He always cackled when he said this – and he never4 told anyone exactly what it wasd he had been up to, if asked he would say “That’s for me to know and you to never find out.”

His pension would have been enough to live in moderate comfort, if he had been the type to want comfort. But he preferred sleeping out – “skippering,” he called it – face up to the stars when the weather was fine, curled up wrapped in doss-bag and blankets if it was cold or wet. No house meant more booze, he reasoned. And he reasoned right – by the time I met him he was in his late forties, with a spectacular alcohol addiction and a stewed liver that regularly tried to kill him.

Not my best writing, but not too bad, I suppose.  When I sat down and opened the text editor, the blank screen nearly scared me off – I’ve been suffering major writer’s block for a long time, which was the reason I decided to do the challenge in the first place: force myself to write for an hour each day and hopefully that’ll help me pound this block to smithereens.  But I didn’t have a clue what to write.  So I googled for some writing exercises and found this:

Creating a character outline

If you want to create a character from scratch, you could start by –
a) using the Character Generator to create a character outline.
b) thinking of someone from your past who still sticks out in your mind. Write down what made the person interesting.
c) turning an inanimate object into a character. Look around your home for possibilities. I once wrote down what my neglected cooker was thinking.

I went for b), and wrote about a guy I knew some thirty years ago.  Most of it is fictitious.  But I did know a one-footed man named Smeagol.  Maybe you knew him too?  If so, let us know in the Comments.  It’d be great to meet someone else who knew the old rascal!

I’ll be back tomorrow for my second #100DaysOfWriting.

Happy New Year! (Yeah yeah I know it’s late…)

I haven’t posted anything for ages. Sorry, Faithful Reader. I haven’t done very much at all lately, my head hasn’t been in the right place. But don’t worry! I intend to do more stuff this year, especially photos (which are always popular for some reason) and fiction (not always so popular, but tsb: you will *learn* to love my writing).

But what I really want to give you is what *you* want. So use the Comments to tell me what you want and I’ll endeavour to deliver it. But don’t bother telling  me to fuck off: I may have been slow starting this year, but regulars should know by now, I always return! Especially now I have the WordPress app for my Android phone (which I’m using to post this)… No matter where I am, I can get to  you, moo-hoo ha-ha!

So, normal service will be resumed very soon. Be afraid… be *very* afraid!!!  😉

Oh, one other thing: You can now make a donation to the blog (beer vouchers, ho ho ho!) by clicking on the “Make A Donation” button below.  It will take you to a page where you can make donations, in increments of £2.  The page says you’re paying the money to something called “razorednight” – don’t worry, this isn’t some evil hacker syphoning off the money, razorednight is the name of the account I use for the purpose of donation collection.  So, if you want to make a donation, feel free.  It’ll help me continue with this blogging thing.  If you don’t want to donate, that’s cool too.  You selfish oaf!!!  😉

Merry Christmas, Santa!

-Hello Santa!

-Oh hello! What are you doing out of bed this late?

-We wanted to see you!

-Ssh! We don’t want to wake up your parents.

-Okay Santa.

-What did you say your name is?

-Tracy.

-I wasn’t asking you Tracy, I was talking to your bear!

-Hehe! His name is Polo and he is a polar bear! Do you know any polar bears at the North Pole?

-Of course I do! But Tracy, it’s very late. You and Polo should go back to bed.

-But why were you putting the presents in your sack Santa?

-I just realised, I brought the wrong ones. I have to take these back to the North Pole. I’ll be back with yours in a bit.

-But how will you do it before waking-up time? We looked at the globe at school and the North Pole is a long way away.

-I can bring presents to all the boys and girls in the whole world in just one night! So I don’t think I’ll have any trouble nipping back with yours. Now go back to bed!

-Okay Santa. Good night.

-Good night.

-Santa, where are you going?

-I said, I’m off to get your presents.

-But don’t you have to go up the chimney?

-No, Rudolf and the other reindeers are waiting at the end of the road. So I’ll walk.

-Oh okay. Good night Santa!

-Ssh! Good night. Merry Christmas!

-Merry Christmas Santa!

 

Growing Frogs

When I was a kid, me and my bro would go down to where the water from the nuclear power plant drained into the canal and collect buckets of frogspawn. We’d pour the gloop into an old fishtank at the bottom of the garden and watch as the little black dots grew tails and became tadpoles, swimming around in the goo. Next their legs would form, like miniature chicken drumsticks… then the double-elbowed arms with their seven-fingered hands, and the heads, the glowing eyes and the mouths with their serrated razor-sharp cutting-edges. Then finally their wings would inflate and the frogs would fly away to hunt for rats and kittens, before mating season came round and the frogspawn formed again.

Sometimes, when the tumours don’t hurt too much, I look back at my childhood fondly. It’s amazing how great things seem when you don’t know shit.

The day they took the homeless away.

The day they took the homeless away

It was a bright but cold April morning when they came to take the homeless away. The majority of the workers in the office-retail park didn’t even notice – at most it was a fleeting thought, Oh, those smelly beggars and winos weren’t hanging round any more, swilling cheap wine and bothering everyone for “the price of a cup of tea”. But Emily noticed. For a while now she had become aware of one girl, maybe pretty under the greasy mop of hair and tatty overcoat – Emily had realised that the girl was probably the same age her own child would have been, if Emily hadn’t had the undifferentiated cluster of cells chemically removed a decade and a half ago. That was when Emily had started to buy an extra cheese roll and polystyrene cup of tea from the snacks booth at the top of the stairs from the underground car park. The girl liked her tea white with two sugars – Emily wondered if that was how her never-quite-child would have taken her tea if she… hadn’t had the procedure.

So that was why Emily saw the girl and her friends being escorted down the car park stairs and into a large white minivan, unmarked but with blacked-out windows that suggested there was room for lots of passengers. Emily was usually quiet and unassuming, but the rapport she felt had grown between her and the girl drove her to walk over to the van and ask one of the black-uniformed security guards what was going on. Where were these people being taken to?

The guard looked surprised at the use of the word “people”, but recovered his professional demeanour quite quickly. There had been complaints, he explained, so these… people were going to be bussed somewhere more suitable.

When Emily asked where this more suitable location might be, the guard was visibly perplexed. But the professional, emotionless expression quickly reappeared. He didn’t know where they were going, he said, he wasn’t driving the van. His job was simply to make sure that all the… people got in. Then he looked down at the paperwork on his clipboard. The conversation was definitely over.

Before the girl got into the van, Emily passed her the drink and roll she had bought for her. The girl silently took the gift, but didn’t look up. As the girl disappeared into the blacked-out van, Emily had to take a deep breath to suppress a sudden feeling of nausea. Somehow, Emily knew she would never see the girl again.