“If you like her, you make allowances: you let stuff slide that you probably shouldn’t. But if you love her, trust me brother, she could stab you repeatedly in the chest, and you won’t feel a damn thing.”
Over the last few weeks I have written a couple of… well, I guess you would call them love stories, of sorts. It’s not a genre I dabble in very often, and to be honest, even these ones are not strictly speaking, romance. When I start writing, the boy never gets the girl, it seems.
The first one is called Stale Bread & the Stable Boy, and is a redraft of a 1000 word tale I wrote seven years ago. It’s a love story with a bit of a dark sting, and is now twice as long as it was then. It’s quite clever and detailed for the length ,and tells the tale from the perspective of both the man and the woman… And trust me, the title makes a lot more sense once you read the story.
And I just finished (today) a first draft of quite a personal tale called, The Love That Trips You. It’s what I would term a broken love story, with a kind of Tales of the Unexpected feel to it. It’s 1600 words, and reminds me a lot of another short story I wrote a few years ago – Between Hanson & Hendrix – as it has a very similar kind of speculative dance between the two characters. Ultimately, it’s a sad story of love found and love lost… with maybe some hope at the other end. Who knows? I guess, Blake – the protagonist in my tale – will just have to wait and see.
I guess maybe we both will.
Now, I have written hundreds of stories over the years and maybe a few dozen poems, but I have only written two songs. The first was when I was nineteen and was called I Don’t Want to Know Tomorrow. It was about as sickly sweet as mid-tempo love songs can get, and maybe it’s for the best that I have lost most of it. I even had a melody for it, but I promise, I won’t sing it for you…
The second one I wrote this week. It’s a blues song called She Done Left Me. I had one of the lines floating around my head for ages, and a few days ago I decided to build the rest of the song around it. Now, I’m no Robert Johnson or BB King, but I think it works in the traditional, familiar style. It’s no Grammy winner, let’s be clear, but it would make a reasonable album track with the right guitar riff and a vocal that sounds like it’s been around the block a time or two.
Anyway, in a moment of madness (and because the internet allows you to do such things) I sent it off to a music publisher. Haha. Funny, right?
Well,
I have spent £100 on nine writing competitions over the last few days, just for a change from the regular submission process. The results won’t be out for a few months for most of them, but I always find it best to consider that as lost money, and anything I may get back is a bonus.
Do I expect a profit? Well, even one placing in any of those competitions would go some way towards it, but historically I have not done particularly well in this area – runner-up in a comedy contest for £30, and third in a flash contest for £100, being the only two placings I have had. Both of those were last year. I never really put much emphasis on competitions until a couple of years ago, and by then I had submitted through the regular channels hundreds of times. I find that contest writing is almost a different skill; in some ways more precise, more pure, and in other ways more reliant on luck and a little inside knowledge.
So, fingers crossed I know the right people.
This week I finished the first draft of The Stork, a 2000 word children’s comedy, about two young boys discussing where they think babies come from. It made a welcome change from all the dark and depressing stuff I have written lately – not a death in sight – and gave me a few laughs along the way. It’s always nice to switch between genres like that; it keeps the creative juices fresh.
…so, back to the darker stuff.
This week I finished writing a 2400 word short story called The Other Me. It’s a dark first-person tale with a sharp, sarcastic narrator. I think it is pretty good, but it’s also the last piece about depression and/or suicide I want to write for a long time. I spent a lot of 2011 down that particular hole.
Shockingly, it is the longest new story I have completed since December 2010, but also one of the most personal, which made it particularly difficult to finish. I think there was a part of me that didn’t want to call time on it.
It reminds me of the anecdote Stephen King likes to tell about Pet Sematary – how he found that novel so upsettling to write that he threw the manuscript in a drawer, where he thought it may stay forever. I’m not sure how much of that is true – I guess only he knows that for sure – but I understand his point. Some things you just write for yourself. Perhaps – like King – I just need a little distance from the words, and then I will be ready to send it off.
So… time to write some comedy.
-- Purveyor of Imagination -- 