November update

The River Wensum, Norwich

 Well, I've slipped on my weekly writing of a poem, but I'm not going to beat myself up about it. I  began November with the intention of writing a daily flash using the prompts emailed to me, but that also fell by the wayside. I usually love these prompts, but it didn't do anything for me. I wrote one, and also one using my own prompt, but that's it.

However, this month I did meet up with my writing buddy who now lives in Norwich, and on a very wet morning we adjourned to Norwich Cathedral Cafe to write over pots of tea. It was like old times and we soon slipped back into the habit of free writing and laughing over the results. We had a ready-made prompt board in the cafe (see photo) which saved us searching for words. We had a wonderful time writing together, and had a chance to catch up with each other. We last met in August.

A ready made prompt board!

I have been thinking of putting together a short story collection. I have a few that look at the funny side of life, including dark humour. Some of my stories are longer than the normal short stories, so much harder to find homes for them, so with three or four of these interspersed with shorter or even flash would work. 

To add to the collection I wrote a new story last week. The first draft is done and I really had fun writing it. There's bit of me in there (not going to say which bits!), but then doesn't every writer add bits of them into their stories? This one has very funny moments in it, but also sad moments. The story has the working title of The Holiday and it is set in Eastbourne.

Looking at my list of books read this year, I am on my 75th! My bought book pile is quite small now, but I'm off to the library on Thursday. There are a few books on my Christmas List, one being Elly Griffiths Norfolk which has locations of scenes from her Ruth Galloway series, which I have read. If I only get one book this year it has to be this!

In other news, we got the Christmas Tree up yesterday because I couldn't wait any longer. I love Christmas and look forward to carols and mulled wine. I'm singing tomorrow night with a new choir that started in January this year. Syrinx will be singing in St John's Church, Hoxton, including This Woman's Work by Kate Bush and a Finnish Reindeer calling song! Not to be missed. Have a look at the website. There are a few videos available to view.

That's all for now folks.

Into the last week

Image by Thomas Picard from freeimages.com

I have only four flash stories left to write this month for FlashNano. The prompts have certainly been challening, though in the last few days I have set out to use them as ways in to particular genres, and I have managed a sci-fi and a couple of spooky stories. One of them I would like to share with you. This will be my last share of the month. The prompt for this was to write 10 things I am grateful for and then use one to write a story. One of the things I am grateful for is music. It has been important to me in life, and I cannot imagine life without it. Like books, music is an addiction and I am so grateful for being given a decent voice and the ability to harmonize to with anything once I learn the tune. So, music formed this story. Here is something a little ghostly. Enjoy.

The apartment below me

The music woke me on my second night in the flat. At first it drifted into my dream where I was rehearsing a part for the next concert, except I kept getting stuck on the same bit and everyone else in the orchestra was staring at me. Coming out of the dream, I realised the music was coming from one of the other apartments in the building.

My clock said 3am. I turned over, trying to ignore it. I recognised the piece as Weismann’s Variations for Oboe and Piano. I had played it many times. A short haunting piece that shows the oboe’s range as it soars and falls. In my dream, I had become stuck at one of the more discordant notes. Now as I lay there, the short piece was playing on loop almost teasing me. At some point, I drifted back into sleep.

My nights became a pattern of getting to sleep, the dream and being woken around 3am to the haunting sounds of oboe and piano drifting up from the apartment below. I had by then found the source of the music because one night I had got out of bed, wrapped a coat over my PJ’s and slipped on my converse shoes to go in search of the music. Creeping around the landings of the building at night was slightly creepy, though light sensors flicked into action as I entered the hallways. I listened at my neighbour’s door before going downstairs. There were three apartments here, and the sound was more obvious. I located the door where it seemed loudest and lifted the flap of the letterbox. Yes, it was definitely coming from Flat Two. Darkness. That’s all I could see when I looked through. I caught the whiff of polished wood, smoke and that strange unwashed smell you get sometimes in charity shops. I pulled back. Satisfied I’d found the right apartment, I retreated to my own.

The next day I bumped into Susan, who lived next door to me, and I asked her about the apartment downstairs.

‘It’s been empty for six months. The owner tried letting it, but people didn’t stay. So now it’s on the market.’

I had my key in my door before I asked, ‘Who lived there?’

Susan shrugged. ‘A bit before my time, but the guy in Flat One said it was a conductor, you know, of music. Died in a fire there, apparently.’

I told her about the music at night. ‘Don’t you hear it?’

‘No.’

‘Has anyone else complained about it?’

Susan shrugged. ‘Not that I’m aware of. The only oboe I hear is when you play.’

I blushed. ‘I hope I don’t disturb you.’

‘I like it. The guy who lived in your flat before you used to play rap music at all hours. Now, I did complain to him about that. Actually, he said a funny thing, come to think of it. He said he was drowning out the noises in his head. I took it that he was on something. Always a strange weedy smell around him, if you know what I mean.’

I tried a whiskey before I went to bed in the hope I could sleep through, but I woke at the same time every night to the same piece of music playing. This was getting ridiculous. I was becoming irritable through lack of sleep. At rehearsal the following week new pieces were introduced for a coming concert and on the programme was Weismann’s Variations for Oboe and Piano. Anthony, our conductor, chose me for the solo. My heart flipped. Normally, I would be in my element. A time to show off my dexterity, but this did not sit well with me. At the first rehearsal, all was going well until I reached that part when the oboe soars into the discordant notes and I lost it. I stuttered, apologised and went back a few bars, and played again. The same thing happened. I stood up and walked out into the corridor. Anthony came to find me.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry, I think you should ask one of the others to solo.’

‘Why? You’ve played this many times before.’

I shook my head. ‘I just can’t play this piece right now.’ And I walked away from him.

That night I dreamed the same dream, getting stuck at the same point. I woke in a sweat and the same piece drifted up from the apartment below. I’d had enough. I donned my coat and shoes and marched downstairs. I was angry and didn’t care if I woke anyone. The music was louder than usual and I banged on the door of Flat Two. When there was no answer, I pushed against it. The door swung open. The anger was replaced by fear, yet I walked into the dark flat. A light flickered from the main room and I followed it.

The old man turned around as I entered. Music filled the room. The air was bitter. I shivered. ‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. He lifted an oboe leaning against the side of the chair and held it out to me. ‘You just need a little practice.’

And even though I knew this wasn’t real and that he couldn’t be real, I took the oboe from him. The wood was cold in my hands. I watched the conductor light a cigarette and lean back, waiting for me to begin. A musty smell emanated from him like unwashed clothes, and then he dropped the cigarette, swore, and brushed it away. He looked at me. ‘Begin,’ he said.

As I put my lips to the mouthpiece, flames began to spark around him. He ignored them. My frozen fingers welcomed the heat of the flames and I began to play, faultlessly, and true.

 

Flash story (2)

(Photo by mark jones from FreeImages)

I promised you a new story every Friday throughout November while I take part in #FlashNano. The challenge is going well and I've managed to come up with something each day. I think the strangest prompt was to write a story with ten sentences and each sentence had ten words! Having being taught that writing needs a combination of short and long sentences, this proved a little tricky. I tackled it like a poem and gave each sentence a line of its own, and I also split it into stanzas of five lines each. So, it reads more like a poem. I've yet to put the piece together as a whole.

I thought I'd give you something a little lighter this time. The prompt was a story that takes place entirely on a commute to work. Enjoy, and please free to leave a comment.

Fixing the nightmare

He sits down with a grunt, his arse pushing against my side. The morning commute is bad enough without him taking a quarter of my seat. I turn to the window, watching houses fly by as the train hurtles towards the city. Gardens boast bare trees as the sun creeps sleepily over roof tops. I yawn. The big arsed man pulls out his newspaper, turning it to the puzzle page, hovering over the Sudoku puzzle. He puts the number 7 on the top row in the last grid to right. It isn’t right. It should be in the next row down, middle box. Keeping his thumb on the top of his ballpoint pen, he clicks it in and out at odds with the rhythm of the train. This grates against my OCD. He stops now, poised over another box before entering number 5. Well, at least that one is right. But he is going to come a cropper soon. A smile forms on my lips and I turn away to look at the luggage rack. No one ever uses them. People would rather pile their rucksacks and holdalls on the seats or block the aisles with them. I try to count how many women there are in the seats ahead of me, but that doesn’t work because I can only see the heads of some people.

A grunt from the man next to me draws my attention back to the puzzle. How is he doing? Oh, no, he’s got two 3’s in the middle grid. I open my mouth and promptly shut it again. This is his funeral. Doesn’t he know you should never write in pen? Makes a complete mess when you come to cross things out. And there he goes. He’s realised that 7 is in the wrong place, but he seems unsure where to put it. I think of telling him. Instead, I shift slightly. My shifting makes no difference as his flesh just fills in the space.

The train stops, and the already filling train pumps on more passengers. There is nowhere for them to go, so they hang on to anything there is to hold on to while listening to music on their mobiles or reading books. By the next station, they’ll have trouble even doing that. Scratching noises bring my eyes back to the Sudoku puzzle. Yes, he’s found the two 3’s in the same grid. I glance up at him. Bushy eyebrows move with the concentrated effort of this morning’s brain teaser. He is younger than I first thought, a bit of stubble (intentional?) and he is sweating in his puffer jacket. Someone should open a window. If I wasn’t pinned down, I’d do it myself, but if I move, his arse will take even more of my seat. I shouldn’t have chosen this airline seat. The forward and back type would have been better.

I turn to the window again and wish I’d remembered my book. I always take one with me, but in my rush this morning I had left it on the hall table. Very unlike me. As the train draws into Clapham Junction, the newspaper is lying on big arse man’s lap, the whole puzzle crossed through. I feel a tough of grief. Suddenly he leaps up, grabs the newspaper and pushes his way through the passengers like a bowling ball towards the doors. He is almost flattened as a crowd tries to enter before he has got off. People have no manners. Let the poor sod off, I think. He’s just been defeated by a Sudoku puzzle. Have a heart.

A lady sits down next to me. Her perfume makes me sneeze. She wears a camel wool coat and a neat black suit underneath. She fiddles with a large bag, eventually drawing out a newspaper with a half completed Sudoku puzzle. At least it’s in pencil. I lean slightly her way and she moves the paper as if she knows what I am doing. Even so, a glance tells me there’s a potential nightmare waiting in line three.

The train stalls outside Waterloo station while we wait for a platform to be freed up. The woman’s phone rings and she drops her newspaper as she answers it. I lean forward to retrieve it for her and eye up the combination of numbers in their boxes. She has tried to fix the nightmare only to cause another. I place the newspaper on her lap. She smiles distractedly at me while I itch to sort out her mess.

As we pull into Waterloo, bodies heave towards the doors. Bags are grabbed, laptops packed away. The lady next to me stands. She places the newspaper on her seat and edges out into the aisle. I grab the paper and stuff it into my bag. I can’t stand half completed puzzles. They are like lost children wearing someone else’s clothes. Don’t you worry, I tell the Sudoku, I can fix you.

 

Flash Nano 2021

 

Well, I've done various writing challenges in my time - NaNoWriMo twice, a year of writing a poem a day, stone poems and other mini challenges, but I have never tackled a flash challenge.

This one comes from Nancy Stohlman, a name that flashed (pun intended) up on Twitter this week. The challenge is to write a flash story (flash is up to 1000 words) a day throughout November. I love flash stories and I write anything from between 75 words to 1000 words usually, though somewhere around 500 words seems to be what I write most.

So, I have taken on this challenge. Every day I receive a prompt via email and I try to stick to those. Don't you just love prompts? I love visual and written ones to nudge me into writing something I would not otherwise have written. So the challenge is twofold - writing everyday and sticking to the prompts.

I get my prompts in the afternoon (the delay being that this is a US website), so I may be a day late writing my flash stories. No matter, it gives me something to look forward to.

I thought I'd share a flash story with you. Every Friday throughout the challenge I shall publish a draft flash story. This one just happens to be one I wrote this morning, so it is hot off the laptop and without any real editing. Comments welcome.

Pit

It was all knew, the sound of the hooter from the mine. It marked my days. It was the clock I lived by. My father worked the early shift, coming home as black as the coal he worked with. When I was a young child, I thought he was two men, the sooty faced one, clothes stinking of coal dust, and the fresh faced one with pink skin. Every time he bathed, he became born again, like those Baptists up on Slate Hill. Yet however much my mother cleaned and washed, coal dust seemed to settle everywhere, and especially on me.

I knew that when I left school, that’s where I would be going. There was no other work in our town. Unless you made it to the grammar school, the mine was where you went. But I had a fear of the dark and a fear of being underground. My father said, ‘You’ll get used to it, son.’ And as the day neared to my journey beneath the earth, the nightmares started. During those last days at school, my chest would tighten when I thought of what was to come. I went around town after school searching for any job I could do. Anything, but go underground. Yet, my fate was sealed the day I was conceived a boy.

I walked with heavy feet with my father that first morning. My heart thumped harder the nearer we got to the pit. There were some formalities to go through and my father answered all the questions because I couldn’t speak. My breathing became laboured and shallow. I heaved air into my lungs, but there wasn’t enough. We walked with the rest of the gang to the cage. The stench of coal crept inside of me. The cage rose from below. The door opened and the previous gang stepped out. Dirty faced and exhausted men came into the light.

‘Come on lad,’ my father said. But I couldn’t move. My father placed a hand on my shoulder. I couldn’t breathe. Taking gulps didn’t help. Tears coursed down my cheeks. I was going to die here before I even made it down. ‘Pull yourself together,’ my father shouted. I dropped my lunch box, pulled off the helmet that seemed to drum me into the earth, and ran. 

I ran and ran until I came to the hills, where I could breathe again. I stood looking down on the town of my birth. The soot covered houses, a town with no colour, a town where washing smelt of air and coal. Thoughts dug through the fug of my brain. I had shamed my father, my family. I was not the son to be proud of. So I kept walking. Out of the parish, out of the county until I came to a green land with trees and sweet air. I felt cleansed. My heart was heavy, but I knew I could never go back. I would take my chances elsewhere. I shivered as day edged into evening. Below me stood a farm, a collection of barns set around a cottage. Smoke curled out of the chimney. The irony of it made me smile, but I kept walking towards it.