The Barn - a writing challenge

November crows in the line of trees behind, nests overcrowded by the loss of one felled prematurely, crashing, crushing through the roof, rendering it beyond repair.    Monochrome, except black with red not white ... the red near brown the colour of dried ... no do not go there.   One end still standing, corner struts supporting despite the sagging centre where the shelter is no more, reduced to emptiness, no longer able to provide its once-essential role.  
Corrugated ridged and dotted tracer lines of blacker circled holes where nails had once held things together, now shown to have begun the breakdown, caused the sapping of inherent strength, allowed the red-edged crumbling to begin.   Aching jagged gaping where violent rust has torn away what once was bright and new, unmarked, was whole and made to last far longer than just nineteen years and twenty-seven days.
Thirty-seven weeks before those nineteen years and twenty-seven days a sweeter-smelling place  - new hay and striped inside with dust mote beams, shadow-interrupted by the nesting swallows, darker corners sought and found and stifled laughter, the future mirage-bright.


[This is my response to a challenge by Bill Latham and Six Sentences and is an exercise from The Art of Fiction by John Gardner, page 37. The challenge is: "Describe a barn as seen by a man whose son has just been killed in a war. Do not mention the son, or war, or death. Do not mention the man who does the seeing." And, as always, only six sentence entries, please. The winner will receive the admiration of starving artists everywhere.]

Over and out - [Book Blurb Friday #47]

Morgan York, after fifteen years as a private investigator in the city of Bath had promised to retire at the end of the year.

It was a promise he had every intention of keeping until, on the 21st of December, he was visited by Annis James, a twenty-two-year-old PhD student.   Annis told him she was the latest in a long line of students whose research was being appropriated by head of department Professor Rabelais.   Inadvisedly challenging him at a department dinner, she had been overhead by the Dean and, infuriated, Rabelais  vowed to not only ruin her reputation but also threatened her life.  

Twelve years ago Rabelais had seduced and then abandoned Morgan York’s daughter.   York had long wanted to discredit him and was not going to turn the opportunity down now, regardless of the fact that Rabelais had, just the night before, phoned to reiterate his original death threat.

Week #47’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge and Sioux Roslwski’s  photograph. Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”  http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

Solstice sacrifice [Book blurb #46]

Two days into what turned out to be the Madigan family’s final family holiday sixteen-year-old Rose is told by a malicious shop-keeper that the daughter of the family who rented their holiday cottage a year ago disappeared under mysterious circumstances.  

Against a background of shortly-to-be-divorced parents and soon-to-leave-home brothers, the weather too bad for climbing, Rose takes refuge in investigation and uncovers not only the possibility of sacrifice by a local, deeply secretive pseudo-religious cult centred on the nearby Neolithic stone circle, but a playboy yachtsman whose appetite for illicit drugs and nubile crew members has already brought him to the attention of HM Customs and Excise.

And when Magnus, son of the owner of the local pub, who has been helping her, tries to call a halt, Rose becomes even more determined to solve the mystery, refusing to believe that she might become a victim herself.

Week #46’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge and Joseph Claro’s innocent photograph. Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”  http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html

NaNoWriMo2011 - five weeks on

A friend, questioning my reasons for absence from Six Sentences ("I am impressed that you are still novelling") surprised me because it really is NOT possible to write a novel in a month, and I knew that 'Not wanted on Voyage' would take much longer than that to properly complete.

For three of those five weeks (two were taken up, most enjoyably, with friends and family) I've been editing what was already written and trying to fill in the scamped bits which were necessary to reach 'The End' by November 30th.   Harder than writing from scratch in many ways, and the more it grows the harder it gets and the more apparent the holes in it.  

With a cast of around thirty-five, a whole shoal of red herrings and three, four, five attempted murders, it's more like plate-juggling.   It took two days to write a half-hour episode of confrontation simply because I couldn't keep in my head how many policemen there were supposed to be in the room, and had to keep practising on myself to understand how to describe how someone could be held tight, walked backwards, with a knife held to their throat ...

   And the word total has grown only 10K from the 78K I ended on, but there is still more to write as well as more to prune.   Not that I'm not enjoying it, just it's mind-consuming, and likely to be so for a few months yet.

Number puzzle

Northings and eastings.   That was what they looked like.  

Dad had told him about those last summer, on holiday in Suffolk, when they were looking at one of those pink Ordnance Survey maps, number 156 for Saxmundham.  

That summer they’d spent a lot of time doing a sort of I-spy with the symbols in the key – ticking off the different sort of woods, coniferous and mixed, the bridges and embankments along railways, quarries and pylons, and all the stuff on the little picture with all the water features.   Dad had made time to find as many as possible.   Mum had kept asking about the churches – why did they not have those any more, they used to have steeples, and towers and things she said.

But this board couldn’t be a grid reference, the numbers were useless without a two-letter grid square reference.   Looked more like telephone numbers or something.   Pretty badly written though,   pretty inconvenient too, just painted, and with a bit of a scraggy brush, onto a piece of old ply.   Couldn’t sensibly go carrying a piece of ply around, not when it was ten times the size of a mobile.   And why the stripes?   They had to’ve been painted in first.

Dad would have been able to tell him, he was sure.   Mum wouldn’t know, and wouldn’t care, would ask why he was wasting his time asking questions without answers.  If he knew the answer he wouldn't ask the question would he? She was doing that all the time now Dad had gone.   And Scotland was too far to see Dad every week like he’d promised. He’d also promised Disneyland if he wanted next holiday, but really he just wanted to go back to Saxmundham.   Back to last year. 

[This was inspired by this week's Thinking Ten ' Canvas prompt]

Persuading Alicia [Book Blurb Friday #45]

Tobias, prematurely inheriting the title of Duke of Tettleburgh and thereby becoming responsible for maintaining the livelihood of sixty full-time estate staff, urgently needed a wife.  
Discussing the problem with Clumberpatch, his estate manager, a plan was hatched and rules drawn up for a  Winter Selection Ball to which a dozen well-bred girls from the best families would be invited and at which they would undergo a series of tests and competitions to identify the most suitable.
Unbeknown to Tobias, however, was the fact that Clumberpatch had a daughter who was both pretty and practical and who would make a most admirable wife.   Mr and Mrs Clumberpatch laid plans to ensure that Alicia attended and that she would either beat every other candidate on merit or they would fail miserably by some trickery or other.
But they forgot to ask Alicia what she wanted.

Week #45’s response to Lisa Ricard Claro’s Book Blurb Friday challenge and Tammy Goodsell’s  beautiful photograph. Each week Lisa posts a photograph which represents a book cover.   Participants are challenged to “Write a book jacket blurb (150 words or less) so enticing that potential readers would feel compelled to buy the book”  http://www.writinginthebuff.net/p/book-blurb-friday.html