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A little upkeep is needed here, with a few announcements.
- First there are some wonderful upcoming features coming up including a review of Diane Ackerman‘s eloquent One Hundred Names For Love (May 14th) and a delightful guest piece in Your Inspirations by Barbara Chepaitis (May21th)
- I’m in the process of merging both this blog and Many Worlds, but the process is becoming far more emotionally stacked than I would like it to be. Please stop in occasionally for updates.
For the moment, please allow me to share a piece with you I’d written for the StoryDam Writing Challenge prompt this week
Spring time is about new beginnings and with new beginnings you have choices. We often are so excited to see the first days of spring turning into warmer days of outdoor fun, new projects, gardening, home improvement, new outlooks and decisions that have to be made if you want to start something new. Is there a doorway you always wanted to go through but allowed something to hold you back? What great adventure might have been waiting on the other side of that opening?
Dam Burst Prompt:
Write fiction or non-fiction, tell us what lies on the other side of the door. Will you take door number two or door number one? What magical wonders are just waiting for you to step through?
Despite writing this piece on the 30th of April, I’ve been unable to do anything with it until today…. It’s fairly raw. Still I hope you enjoy it. Sometimes life simply “is”.
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Two doors… Where do they lead? Choices, choices…
A watchman stands at the door to the left. With promises of the stable life, the known life, everyone else seems eager to enter that door. Get your papers in order. The watchman–or watchwoman, depending on how you get here–deals with this every day. Just pass the information over and let him do his job.
He, or she will compare your papers to a checklist they keep. (Be careful–these guards all seem to have slightly different checklists!) It doesn’t matter what the little variation might be…. Child out of wedlock, too many job changes, a tattoo in a noticeable location… There are countless numbers of little things the guards check for.
After perhaps five strikes you have your papers handed back to you, and guard turns you from the line. There a few ways to get through the door even so. Perhaps you have a bonus supply of money or good looks or chutzpah… even talent can be used as currency to bribe the guard. If you have a surplus in some area, you still might get through. You can be one of the ones who has it all.
If you are smart, you may go over your papers on you own . Once you are in line, you’ve made you choice and unless the guard urges you out of line, you have to go through that door. You really have to mess up once you are on the other side to get sent back out to try again.
At least that’s what every one around you in line says, whispering in low, horrified voices, the sheer weight of ostracism held in each letter, each atom the air that is exhaled from their lips. They look askance at the ones that stand in line at the other door… Its blackened, muddied, peeling surface, dented and warped just enough that occasionally a whiff of “something” that doesn’t set well on your stomach escapes it. They have made it quite clear that you don’t want to enter that door.
That’s where those people go. You don’t want to be one of those people, do you? (They motion to their guard and say with pride “Why do you think we have to guard our door? Everyone wants to come in here. We have to be selective, you know.”)
And it does look so much nicer. There are flowers growing on a arbor over it. There is a light. Everything about their door is bright, clean. You once were near enough to catch the whiff of fresh clipped lawns and gentle perfumes as someone was let in.
But as you stand in the crowd, knowing that you should decide, already starting to step forward toward the door with the guard, you see someone push the other door open. This person hadn’t even considered the flowered, guarded door. He stepped out of the crowd boldly, he even seemed to smile when he got to the door and found it was stuck closed from having been warped so much. He pushed against it with all his weight, making his body into a battering ram in his determination to get through that door. And behind him, you could hear others calling to him saying “No! Please don’t do this!”
Suddenly, the door opens for him, just as the guarded door is opening for someone else, and you see inside for just the briefest moment. You see the guarded door and the rows of neat little boxes, of neat, carefully manicured grasses and faces, the sameness of it all.
Your eyes take it in in a second before you look back to the unguarded dooor as it creaks closed against the boy who has ducked into its depths. You see a multitude of colors and glaring brightness amidst devastating darkness, You hear music. You smell flowers and refuse and you hear laughter and tears.
You know that it’s all the same then. And why should you ask someone else yo judge you fit to simply “live”
We know the end result of both doors. The long term end that is. The doors all end in death. We cannot avoid it. Even if we were to try standing still and never move, we have chosen our exit from the world. And what a sad, desperate exit that is too. So what exit do we chose to use?
PHOTO CREDITS:
- Watchman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
- Ipsden: inside the church porch Entering the 1761088 and closing the outer door behind you, it soon becomes clear that the porch does not have much in the way of illumination. Not having looked beforehand, I had to reopen the outer door so as to find the handle of the inner door. Here, we look back at the closed outer door, facing south on a bright sunny day as sunlight seeps in through gaps in the woodwork and under the door. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
- Roses along a trellis, Interbay P-Patch (community garden), Interbay neighborhood, Seattle, Washington. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The Storyteller in Uncertainty
Inspired or nudged or something by both Shan Jeniah and Shah, I’m adding my two cents into Shah’s Storyteller Challenge due today. Or maybe it was the cool picture–See?
Does she manage to soar?
As She Said
The wings felt heavy, unnatural. It should have been a clue, but the desire to escape the confines of her day-to-day life seemed so strong, so powerful, Naria accepted them. How could she not, she thought? How could anyone refuse the chance to soar free, above the clouds, to live, even for a moment like the birds…
The djinni had warned that few could wear the wings and make themselves a part of the living bird spirit that existed within them. Death came to those the bird spirit refused.
But what of those it accepted, Naria had asked, several times, demanding the djinni answer her, even to the loss of her last favored wish. She had to know. Could she become as the birds in the sky? Would she stay human, bird, both?
The answer had been unsatisfying to say the least. How could a djinni not know such things? He had sworn even to the oath of his royal family in the Planes of Ether that there had been those the bird spirit in the wings had accepted. Death had not taken all those he had been sent to gift. And yet, he could only answer her with “They became what they were already.”
A truly unsatisfying answer
Still, even if it were a moment of escape, a moment to try on the life that she would never experience again, to see the world in a new light than than of her husband’s kingdom, her oversight of the servants, the petty squabbles of her fostering ladies… If she could have but a moment to be more than she was, she would not refuse to take it.
“I won’t fall,” she told herself as she crept to the top of the highest tower of the castle. She paused at the window ledge, weary from hauling the large wrapped bundle up the stairs, held as carefully away from her body as she could in the tightness of the stone stairways. It had suddenly seemed vital to protect the delicate barbs of the fathers from harm. Every quill must remain solid and firm.
She knew this, and as soon as she’d entered the tiny chamber, she had gently laid out the plumage, inspecting it carefully, soothing it, feeling it, cool yet warm and alive under her fingers. And, though the djinni had told her otherwise, saying she should spread the wings out inside out and lay upon them till they became with her flesh,, Naria erected them, tenting them over her body as she crouched, bare to any eyes that might see. The wings felt heavy and unnatural, pressing her body into the stiff straw pad of the bed.
And now, they felt even heavier, drawing back her shoulders as she tried to stand straight and proud the way she’d always been taught. Chest in, she heard her nurse scold, though the woman had been dead many years now. Do not show a man more than he need see to know you are virtuous, her tutors had lectured. But try as habit forced her to do, she could not, her back wearied from her journey up the several flights of stairs already, and Naria felt herself drawn forward, chest pressed to the world defiantly.
Forward, unsteady, weary, wobbly, from where she stood, looking down over her husband’s lands. “I will not fall,” she told herself once more, even as she felt herself totter. A moment’s panic gripped her, but she vowed it yet again.
“I will NOT fall.”
And she did not try to hold on. She faced what was to come, whatever her choice would bring. She could not fall, she realized, because she had already escaped. She was already free. She had already done as she’d wished.
Naria did not fall.
There was a second prompt to write about; a timed prompt for 3mins. It could be in any genre, any form, just three minutes…
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Treacle:
TIMED WORD ASSOCIATION:Treacle, Bloated, Yesterday.
Sweet the pudding words you told me, treacle to my ears and heart
Yesterday your mind was showing, you spoke some thing,
Pop art, urban deco, bloated with your self-importance, thinking foolish
hardly worth my time and thought
Yesterday, your words were treacle,they tasted sweet, they warmed my soul
Today your words smell of noxious vapors, putrid bloated in my bowl
I don’t want to touch them, don’t want to taste, don’t to smell.
I can’t even wash them
We’re back on schedule here at the Garden of Delights, and that means Your Inspirations. Today I have the honor of welcoming a wonderful writer (and an incredibly helpful and outgoing person), Martine Svanevik, the self-named nascent novelist. When you have a chance, please step over to her blog and read her most recent piece on Stories That Stick or any of a number of others
Writing in Public
There are two types of writers: reclusive and social. The reclusive writers hide away in corners, go on solitary retreats and lock themselves away so they can write. The social writers join groups and collectives, and like to go to parks or cafes to get their writing done.
Often, non-social writers and readers have the preconception that social writers are hipsters or posers or both. That their Macbook airs are open on blank pages because they have nothing of depth to offer, that they sit at cafes to be seen, while real writers hide away, shaping their words in private. But really, it’s all about the kind of environment you draw inspiration from.
The cafe writer enjoys the buzz of human interaction, she thrives on catching snippets of other people’s conversations, she needs a space where the tap-tap-tapping of fingers on keyboards won’t thunder through an empty room.
She knows that her words are written so they can be shared, and that it’s only in the reading of them that they serve a purpose, so she writes them in public. Or maybe she feels like the only place she can truly be in her own space, is in a crowd. That her muse hides in that special silence you get when you’re surrounded by noise and movement. Sure the laptop sets her apart, but it doesn’t define her.
Now, I’m not saying there’s a right way to write, or that everyone would gain a circumstance bonus from sitting in a noisy crowd. I am in awe of writers who are so comfortable in their own head that they can spend most of their time alone in there. What I am saying is that the search for inspiration might take us weird places, but as long as we’re willing to chase our muse, who cares where she leads us? I’m sure it’s going to be somewhere good.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to steal a snippet of conversation from the girls next to me, and then figure out the definition of a “Toronto bro.”
Martine, lovely both inside and out
About Martine Helene Svanevik
Martine Helene Svanevik is a fiction writer from Montreal. She spends her days editing text for computer games, her evenings powerlifting and crossfitting, and her nights writing twisted stories set in a darker world than our own.
She blogs about writing and training over on nascentnovelist.wordpress.com and can often be found wasting time on twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/martinemonster).
