My silent child
our precious baby,
Close to my heart
I’ll keep you with me.
An important job
God has for you,
There is love to give,
and work to do.
He needs an angel
strong but small,
To shine light on many
and give love to all.
Before you go
I give you this,
half my heart
and one last kiss.
We’ll miss you dearly
that we know,
But by God you were chosen,
So to heaven, you must go.
— My Silent Child, Kelly Lancor
Why? *
Because I was driving to my tennis match after work last week, when the sublime intro for Black Cat – my favourite JJ song – came on the radio, just as I was approaching a junction. I knew I was supposed to go straight ahead, but – because the volume was pinned to the max, and I was playing a rather awesome air guitar while I crawled through the rush-hour traffic – I took a left instead… which is the way I go at least once a day for work.
I was on auto-pilot, but left wasn’t going to get me there.
No problem, I thought. There will be a turn off soon, and I will just take that instead. So I went back to singing: all those lonely nights, I spend alone; never round to love me, you’re always gone, but when the song had finished, four-minutes-and-forty-seven seconds later, I was still driving at something approaching eighty miles an hour, along the same road, furiously looking for my exit.
I eventually took a random exit just to get me off the road I knew to be wrong, and fumbled my way back to where I was meant to be twenty minutes ago. This was followed by a terrifying journey along what must be one of the narrowest and most convoluted roads in the British Isles, to get to the tennis courts…
…where we scraped a draw.
So, Janet: if you’re reading this, just round it up to £2 and we’ll call it even. Thanks.
* calculations available upon request.
I recently received a rejection for my short piece Cleavage & Cleavers. Not a problem – I have already moved on to the next one – but the editor had this to say in her response, which I thought was worth sharing:
While it was well written, we’re not interested in stories that take noir to a new definition of dark.
I just finished writing a 6,500 word horror story called The Quick Brown Fox, which means that in the last six months I have completed three pieces that have been ‘on my books’ for many years. All three have turned out pretty well, but it does make me wonder why I have gone back to these old ideas all of a sudden… and is it just my imagination, or are they coming together better than the finished products of my more recent ideas?
I think a lot of the ideas I had when I was younger were very ambitious (too ambitious for the kid who was dreaming them up) so many of them were left unwritten or partially scribbled down to be tackled at an undisclosed date further down the line. Now that I have a clearer understanding of what I am capable of producing – and more importantly, what I’m not – my ideas these days are more… appropriate. Does that mean I have lost my imagination as the years have progressed? I don’t think so. Sure, I have pulled in the edges a little, but I still have the ability to come up with something a little left field when I need to.
Don’t get me wrong: not every idea I had back then was worth saving. Far from it. There are more than a few duds in amongst them that even the greatest literary mind couldn’t rescue, but another difference is that now I can (usually) tell which ones they are, throw them in the bin, and move on.
I still have a lot of (good) ideas from years ago that I want to get around to completing before I shuffle off this mortal coil, but hopefully I can balance that with some of the more recent imaginative acquisitions I have had as well.
So my birthday came and went yesterday without much fuss or fanfare. I should say, I’m not one of those people who cares too much about parties and/or functions, but even some of the usual suspects were missing from the line-up of text and email reminders that I am yet another year older. I am sure removing myself from Facebook last year didn’t help, as I know that jogs a lot of people’s memories…
But I suppose I have to presume that’s just what happens when you turn thirty-seven, because the alternative – that most people don’t really care about me all that much – isn’t something I want to spend too long thinking about.
Maybe people only really make a big deal when the year ends with a ‘0’, which is fair enough, but you know, sometimes other years are important too. Sometimes hitting thirty-seven – when you had it in your head, for a number of reasons, that you maybe weren’t going to get there – is worth celebrating as well.
…I’m just saying.
— is losing weight, at an alarming rate.
— my horror novella Replay is now available on Amazon.
This last week or so I’ve felt like I’m in an unscripted episode of House.
Yesterday – after having spent most of the weekend trying to recover from the way I felt last week – I was on the bus, going to work. As the journey went on I felt progressively more nauseous, to the point where I absolutely knew I was not going to make it without being sick. But then I was blindsided – quite literally – and I lost my sight. Quickly and without warning: I couldn’t see anything. I fumbled my way off the bus at the next stop, and gradually my vision returned.
Of course, I called in sick and went home.
My next call should probably be to Princeton–Plainsboro.
At the height of my fever yesterday, I finished my first full length sci-fi story, called Wyrmhole, which I thought was quite impressive given that I could barely remember my own name for most of the day.
And in the cold light of the following afternoon, it feels like death has smeared itself all over me, and isn’t going away anytime soon.
Enjoy your dinner folks!
To coincide with the release this week of my horror novella Replay, fellow Australian author and sometime artist, Greg Chapman (who Dark Prints published last year via their novella series) shouted a few questions to me from the other side of the pond.
Hopefully, when he reads the story, he won’t want to pull the interview down!
You can pick up Greg’s effort, Vaudeville, for the special April-only price of 99 Australian cents.
-- Purveyor of Imagination -- 