Justin's throwing a feast?

The HOOK, LINE and SINKER BLOGFEST is a feast of worlds and characters built with words and ideas. Pop over and see how deeply you get towed in.

The tests your story and character must past in the first 1,000 words or less.

• Who is the character I am relating to?
• Does he/she have a personality that I crave to read?
• Is the world around them set up to compliment the character as they are introduced?
• Are there secondary characters to assist the hook along, with conflict or pace?
• Lastly: do I love the character? Do I want to read more about him/her?

USURY: DOUBLE DESIRED

CHAPTER 1

KINGDOM OF THE STRANGE

Only the grind of bone-on-bone grated through the cavern, until a thump disturbed the stillness. The intermittent double beat played out an uneven rhythm. Pain made Will strain against the laws that governed nature. Cold granite ripped the skin from his heels. His legs rigid, arms locked, as he convulsed. His jaw jarred open, oxygen flooded his lungs. Heat lashed through him. Every cell in his body screamed. He clawed upwards, curved his fingers around the upper edge of the stone sarcophagus. When he was sure there was no movement but his own, Will gripped the stone wall and pulled. Scrambled. He grazed his shin against the side of the chiselled coffin in his haste. Crashing to the floor, the cinder-sharp surface bit.

He ached. Heavy and awkward, swamped in sensations, Will gasped for breath. He opened fists to fingers, traced tips over tight skin, angular cheek bones and the hollows of his cheeks, short silky hairs over boned chest, thin legs, and long feet. He catalogued what he knew, gained a sense of self. In the cacophony of knowledge that didn't belong to him, Will clung to the practical and the physical: he was cold, naked and male. New to life. 
Into his panic and self reflection, the stone box billowed a frigid air so dense it was visible in the blackness. It swirled over his skin, as it rose. An unnatural cold? Darker knowledge oiled through Will's understanding, dead sleep was cast in chill waves. Terror became the impetus to move. When his legs could not bear his weight, Will crawled. The crumbling door held by bronze-work bands gave, when he beat at the copper latch. 
The dewy ground beyond ignited a terrible thirst, Will lowered his head to long blades of grass, and licked. But surging power drew moist, warm heat from the ground into the sky. Will staggered to his feet too. He squinted into the violet-blue sky, shrouded in grey clouds that billowed, tumbled over, and into, themselves. Undirected fury, the silver-lined clouds were lit by shards of brilliance edged with gilt. Will recognised ancient anger. He felt it, when the slivers of ice sliced through the air, heavy and hard. He cried out, arching his back. 
The crypt offered the closest shelter from the storm, but Will staggered towards the crumbling, grey stone tower revealed in each flash. Before it, dim in the shadows, grew a split stemmed tree, low and wide. He stumbled. Stopped.  In the silence that preceded the whip and lash of lightning, Will’s hair began to rise. Power licked it higher. Moonlight broke through smothering cloud, illuminating the small, white flowers and the delicate leaves. Dark then pale, the leaves writhed in the gusting breeze.

What shelter could there be under a tree?

Lightning struck close by him, singeing the fungus there. The acrid, charcoal stench clogged his throat. The brilliance blinded him. Water streamed down his cheeks, as he stumbled not towards the stone walls but to shelter of the tree. As the air heated before the next flash, Will crashed to his knees and crawled under low branches. Gasping for air, he grazed his face against the knotty bark. He waited. Beneath the candle-shaped canopy of leaves, the shredding power of the wind, heavy with debris, the potent mix of menace and power, could not reach him. 
With fierce thunderclaps, the lightning struck the taller trees nearby, in turn.

Dawn broke as a golden rim of light and rays: the clouds dissipated; the wind faded to a thin whistle through the trees. Will rested his head in the dust and the crisp fragments of leaves. 

Then the whispering began.

He flung himself from the edge of sleep, back against the tree. Using physical and deeper senses, Will amplified the sounds around him: the scrabbling of insects' tiny feet from the bark, the crash of stealthy footfalls in the woods beyond the boundary walls and the rush of wind through the leaves of trees. Awake he could not hear the voice. 
Will fought the need to sleep, until he was too tired to care enough about the consequences.

Now I'm off to read everyone else's hooks and see where I get reeled in ;)

A MOMENTARY IMPULSE

The Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital is in Stanmore, near Edgware. This is not a hospital I ever want to visit: it houses the London Spinal Cord Injury Centre.

Last night, my Minnow went out with a group of friends – emphasis being on the word group. 

Dressed up in school uniforms they would have been sent home for wearing, she went out to a student union disco. An hour later, I got a call. 

I’ve fallen and hurt my back; don’t worry I’m coming home in a taxi. 

I got to worry for about twelve hours.

It was a short cut, would have saved them at least five minutes. Everyone else climbed down the wall, Minnow jumped. Six or seven foot. Why? Good question. Maybe she was a cat, in a previous existence. 

It seemed like a good idea.

She survived the taxi ride home, lay on the floor, couldn't work out how to get to the toilet without increasing the pain. (Hysteria is one reaction to pain, Min.)

We chatted to tetchy doctors on the phone, paramedics in the house, consulted at length about the degree of pain medication that might be necessary. Sat and watched her sleep.

She did the damage when she landed on her feet. She would have done more damage if she had landed on her back.

So here's to near misses. This miss means she still has to worry about co-ordinating shoes rather than whether her wheelchair clashes with her latest look.

To the work of all the staff at the RNOH and in particular to the SCIC, bless them all, I’m glad we didn’t get to know them. 

NATIONAL POETRY DAY - A butchered WOLFWATCHING by Ted Hughes

Ted Hughes poem Wolf Watching is much longer than this. 

I used these stanzas, pinned on my noticeboard, to inspire me when I wrote NEAR EDGWARE. 

Mac, the pack Alpha, has been raising the next generation. He hopes they'll make a difference. But to be Were, and city living? Enmity woven into the fabric of society? Is London really home? Mac would never let the pack know, but often he despairs. 

Wolfwatching - butchered

Woolly-bear white, the old wolf
Is listening to London. His eyes, withered in
Under the white wool, black peepers,
While he makes nudging, sniffing offers
At the horizon of noise, the blue-cold April
Invitation of airs. 

                        ***

All his power is a tangle of old ends,
A jumble of leftover scraps and bits of energy
And bitten-off impulses and dismantled intuitions.
He can't settle. He's ruffling
And re-organizing his position all day 

                        ***

The fairy tales
Grow stale all around him...
His eyes
Keep telling him all this is real
And that he's a wolf--of all things
To be in the middle of London, of all
Futile, hopeless things. 


DO YOU HAVE A POEM, OR A POET, WHO INSPIRES YOU?

THE LIGHTHOUSE LITERARY COMPETITION and the story I'll never write

This month I have collected ideas, and stage one planning, for about six books -- MG and YA, usually.

However, the odd literary novel arrived. I remember thinking: what would I write for The Lightship Literary International Competition : if I was going to write literary, what would I write.

This took half an hour, at about two in the morning. 

When I read it back it didn't even sound like me.When I opened the document, I wondered if it was something I had read somewhere, and collected to consider in depth. 

Then I read it. 

Then I remembered. 

Gotta say I know the subject material: it's the book I'll never write

“We'll go tomorrow. If you are up early enough. On the train at ten o’clock.”

The boy who lay on the polished boards, moved the dinosaurs one at a time, from a circle into a straight line. This was not a quick task. He ran his finger from the claw, across the breast, up the neck. At the mouth he deviated from the line he marked, he raised his finger and placed it back on the plastic toy above the nose, then he continued. The trail was finished only when his hand ran down the empty floor board. Then he picked up the next model in his collection and moved it into its place in the line. The sensation pleased him, right and true. Unique, each time his finger skimmed the surface of the toys. Rough, worn smooth in places. Each stroke amazed, amused him. The unexpected. The shapes: smooth, rough, gnarled: the light and shade loomed large. His head, in line with the top edge of each dinosaur maximised the difference between the here and not; the shape's form in relief, the discordant jumble beyond. The here and the jagged-edged toys filled his being. They provided warmth and companionship; enabled him to maintain his stability: his place in the space that was not self. He: chest to hard board; stomach to chill-breeze blown line; knee to knot and digging nail: he was MARTIN. Mar and tin and floor. 




The subject material demands the perfect voice; the punctuation creates the vehicle for the story: the thought processes reflecting the lifelong loop.


WHAT STORY ARE YOU NEVER GOING TO WRITE?

THE FOUNDATION OF WRITING - PART 1: The Wiggles, Head Shoulder Knees and toes

So you want to write a novel? Think back to your earliest days: during the development of your literary skills, the mantra of the writer was spelled out loud and clear:

HEADS

Not for no reason is this first.

Slicking somewhere in the chemical soup of everything you have ever seen, done, read or heard about is the germ of an idea. Until it explodes like a geyser of inspiration: speculate, percolate and mediate!

SHOULDERS

When you are weighted down with familial, fraternal and financial burdens add the fanatical need to write. Time management, like the wooden yoke, comes in all shapes and sizes.

KNEES

Not to agents or publishers, that is a marriage of equals – it is true that while gratitude may send you to your knees, that is a passing phase, the one before the phenomena of non-mechanical, human flight  – it is periodically necessary, to use your knees to crawl to your partner, friends or family. When begging for support, forgiveness or five minutes more than your allocation on the computer, the knees are an important writerly tool.

TOES

An essential part of the writer’s arsenal, they are often overlooked – or invisible, after too many hours spent writing at the expense of gym time – they tap with urgency, when the manuscript is going well; curl with excitement, when the inbox reveals the name of agent you have queried; suffer the pain of fitting into those gotta-make-a-good-impression shoes

PART 2 – Eyes, Ears, Mouth and Nose to follow ;)

Scenes Defined: Dwight V. Swain LET ME DEFINE THE SCENE...

Crediting Dwight V. Swain  - book available somewhere up the Amazon- The How To Write Shop posted about scene control.

It made me smile: I control scenes, ten a minute, every Monday...

Monday.

It is the best of days, it is the worst of days ... it is menu and shopping day. The fridge and freezer have a hollow ring, when the door slams shut.

Today the fridge offered two parsnips and two eggs, while the larder rattled with two potatoes and an onion. Not the greatest fan of parsnip soup with a boiled egg chaser, I dug under the frost at the back of the freezer's bottom (drawer) and added frozen okra to my harvest of bounty. Not even Jamie Oliver could gourmet that lot into a feast for all the family.

The rush and thunk of baskets and drawers alerted Sunshine, long before I went looking for paper and a pen, a shield and helmet (this part gets dangerous.) Autism affects empathy, understanding and the appreciation of which food groups combine into a healthy balanced diet. A discussion of suitable menus: three meals a day for seven days starts a bit like this:

“So, dinner on Monday... what would you like?”

“Pizza.”

“OK, we can put pizza on the list ... as long as it is thin crust, and not pepperoni. Plain cheese and tomato or would you like –“

“Pizza with sausage rolls and a chicken kiev?”

And so we start, one meal at a time.

I try to do breakfast, lunch and dinner separately so he can develop an appreciation of these meals as being different. He likes nothing to appear twice on the whole plan. (No, we can’t recycle the plan from one week to the next because weeks, per se, are an artificial convention and not one he subscribes to.)

I refuse to add ASDA’s  Chicken Carbonara to the list. He is devastated. I’m cruel and heartless, apparently. (I can’t bring myself to buy it so he can strain off the sauce and bin the chicken.) Time is less elastic than patience.

We finish the menus, and then write the shopping list while we check what we actually need to buy.

In the supermarket, I stick to that list like an iron rod to an electromagnet — with rigidity the boy would be proud of – because if I waver my control tears like wrapping paper on a Christmas parcel. If he spots a narrowing of the eye or the merest hint of lip twist he becomes the dreaded tall-toddler-in-tantrum mode, and the trolley goes from empty to full faster than Nathan Bransford’s inbox.

We survived, there is food in the cupboard,  and it better stay there so I don’t have to go through this again... until next week.

THE FORCE OF BOOKS: 10 things boys want to read about

By the time they got to me, their reading habits were carved in marble, more difficult to remove than limescale on the wrong side of the u-bend.

With a broad-spectrum array of fiction (published anywhere between 1719 and the present day) my formidable arsenal was complete: fantasy, adventure, historical, science-fiction - I had the lot and I knew how to use it.

Like a gunslinger -- light from the rising sun, behind me, fingers flexing, ready to sling texts in their direction – I could inspire-the-reluctance out of the boys who fidgeted in their seats, and turned pages during reading time.

But, when most crumbled before the might of books targeted at their interests, every year there was the hard core: the (usually) three, unreachable boys. 

“Ha! Do your worst, for I will do mine!” they said... although that might have been the Count of Monte Cristo.

If the enemy will not crumble under the rub of endless works of fiction, in every genre, what can you do? You discuss what is missing.

Minus the dancing, which I will include somewhere else: STAYING LOST has it, the ‘what-other-things’ they want to see in books :

1 sports

2 motorbikes

3 shoot outs   'like my game - yeah, sick!'

4 fit women

5 friends  ‘but not too many ‘cos you know where that goes’

8 Maps and places that aren’t here – ‘Not here like in school, ‘cos everyone has to go there -- but like HERE, can’t books go some where different: cities and s**t?’

9 Not funny   ‘That stuff is for when you’re young. More real action than that.’

10 Music, dancing and phones – ‘all the same: what you do when you're out!’

Anthony Horowitz was the closest I could get.

“Shorter, already. I’m not spending my life in that book.”

Have fun. It’s what I did when I was writing STAYING LOST with the boys who will not read. Now, if we can just junk the three kinds of video games they all have at home, we could get all boys to read more.