Humorous Quest

His armour rattled and clanked as his horse made a slow progress through the pass. Sir Oswald knew that he should have used the tallow to grease the hinges and joins but he had forgotten to rifle through his page's belongings after the ambush. Geoffrey had been an honourable, if somewhat simple, man but he has known his job inside out and his duty, by God. Oswald would never forget the loyalty of such a faithful servant who had laid down his life for his master. It was only right, of course, that he should do so but such actions must be sung to the rest of the ignoble rabble back at camp to remind of them of the loyalty expected of them.

He had been travelling now for days, alone, expecting another attack. The bandits must have sent out a search party for their dead comrades but, as yet, Oswald had travelled without further molestation. A blessing for which he would give dutiful thanks at the chapel of Mont Clair when he made it back to the camp, even thought the priest was a French dog.

The mission may have had it's ups and downs but it had been ultimately successful. The Earl of Dismoore would be impressed enough to grant him lands, riches, even the hand of his beautiful daughter, Aethelfled. It filled him with joy and anticipation to be bringing home such a holy relic. He grabbed the handle of the leather bag in which the saintly artefact was securely wrapped. It felt strangely soft but Geoffrey must have wrapped it well, and Oswald had made such a risk grasping it from wreckage of their cart before more vandals came from the hills that he felt a glow of pride at his valour. He would enjoy unwrapping it slowly from the bag and telling the tale of his fingers grasping the holy handle from amongst their baggage strewn across the road as the assassins swung at him with their swords.

A midst the awed silence of the clustered knights back at camp he carefully opened the bag, basking in the expected glory that was to be his, until the flap flew back to expose Geoffrey's spotty pyjamas and teddy that he always kept in his overnight bag.


Time well up.

Damn you website which generates ideas for writers! Make it easier next time, you bastards.

Put on the light.

She looked up the stairs from below. The light receding into gloom. It was always another world, upstairs, at night. She dreaded it like any child dreads something: Not from the moment her eyes opened or throughout her day looking at colours that surrounded her, smelling crayons, chewing the wood on her pencil and tasting its bitterness and sweetness, not at home with the excitement of a story on the screen, not at dinner with the noise and doughy smells and laughter but when the windows showed a somber look and the bath water was being run and the nightclothes laid out on the bed.
The flannelette made her pause and then she remembered her fear. Placing moist feet into slippers she let her damp hair fall against her neck, trying to be small and inconspicuous, maybe they wouldn't notice her and she wouldn't have to ascend then, maybe later when a larger hand would take hers and she would not be alone when she went into that all-enveloping gloom.

Time's up.

Finding inspiration is hard and I want to try different was to inspire myself but finding a title was making me prevaricate tonight so I just looked at the dark lamp and switched it on and then I had my title.

And I think to myself...

a great deal. Perhaps too much, quite often. I remember saying to my mum once, "I wish I was like Paul because he's so thick and he just goes through life reacting to stuff rather than worrying about things that might happen, like I do." I'm totally aware of how arrogant that sounds but I am arrogant sometimes (for no real reason-I'm not that bright.) And my mum replied that I was wrong. He would worry about things too but he just responded to his worries more practically than I did. It was a lesson to me to try to see things from different perspectives. I wouldn't say it made me less arrogant sadly but it did make me aware of my arrogance and then at least to try to be less so. I'm still trying.

Humility is something I wish I had but I think humility only comes with total self-confidence.


Time up.
The inspiration today was from the first phrase in the first tweet I looked at when I turned my phone on just now. BBC Naturewatch.

Ten minutes a day challenge

365 projects are all over the wonderful world wide web but do you know what? So what. I want to do one of my own, so I'm going to.

I intend to write a short story or at least something structured and preferably lucid in ten minutes every day. This is in the hope that my writing improves. Or, failing that, at least I will have stopped prevaricating about writing and actually be writing.

I have thought about inspiration for the stories and ideally I would like people who read this blog to suggest things and then critique my writing but, as I don't like to self-promote, there is
no one to do that at the moment: I like to think of it as if my voice was echoing across a vast and empty but highly picturesque chasm. In the meantime i'm just going to take inspiration from wherever i find it - i'll let you know where.

However, if anyone DOES stop by this blog please leave a comment with a character, thought, word or scenario that you think might challenge and inspire me. It would be to be lovely to thing there was someone at the other end of the chasm.

That's my first ten minutes up, so here goes...

Tinkety tonk

Dostoyevski: cockroach?

I turned off my lights for Earth Hour this evening and my faithful friend and I held a tet a tet quiz.  OOO and I lost.  God, I hate losing.  I nearly turned the lights back on in my rage, until I realised it wasn't the Earth's fault that I didn't know the title of Katie Price's biography.  Is this what constitutes general knowledge these days? I ask you!

Anyway, back to the next suggestion from F.W.W. I've decided to stay with the robbing from books idea.  When it claimed that Dostoyevski said, "Only if I could become an insect!"  I found myself wishing he had, and then been stepped on or roasted by a child with a magnifying glass before he'd had a chance to write any of his wordy tomes to save me the guilt of never making it past any of his first pages. So, I'm rejecting this idea as I neither fancy (metaphysically) becoming an insect or, indeed, Dostoyevski (never trust a man with a beard).

N.B. I submitted an entry into the Bristol Prize competition today.  I felt proud of myself that I had, firstly,completed a story and secondly actually sent it off.  It is very gentle and parochial and far from deep but I enjoyed the process.  So, that's good isn't it!

All righty, then. What's next?

Ooo, 'Rob fromBooks'?  Plagiarism, eh?  Crickey, a bit of sticky wicket there.

Ah, no. My mistake.  Not plagiarism, merely that I should attempt to write variations on themes.  H'm, very Elgar -ish.

Do I like Elgar?  Do you know, I don't think I do.  Bland and slow.  I hate to be thought a philastine, but there you are; one must be honest. 

Sorry, back to task.
Borrowing from other people's originality certainly appeals to me and my distressing genetic condition: laziness. (Distressing to other people, that is.)  The work book suggests borrowing from The Odyssey or The Inferno. What!  I know Dante wrote the latter but that's as much as I know.  I made a vague assumption some time ago that it might be slightly whingy and, like most assumptions, I didn't care enough to find out the truth.  The Odyssey - Virgil or Homer?  I certainly haven't got the inclination to try to appear well educated enough to know who is whom.  Was one Greek, one Roman?  Was one a nom de plume of the other?  Who cares?
......you, possibly.

Rob from the cradle.

That's the first suggestion of the writing work book I'm trying to use to make me into: An Writer......dun, dun, duuunnn. 

But what if you can't remember your cradle?  

Make it up, you say.  That is what writers are supposed to do, you say. But then, if I did that, it wouldn't really be my cradle would it, and it's not robbing either.

Washout.

The next task encourages me to: 'Rob the grave.  Look into the lives of your ancestors and tell their story.'  Yes, this is more like it... I can imagine a tonne of Irish peasants grubbing around in the leavings of their 'betters' or hoards of hairy Scots ranging the highlands waiting to cut Redcoats' throats - REMEMBER CULLODEN!  Hmn, but I live on the South Coast and have the same accent as most upper working /lower middle class English people of my era, yes that one, the one you couldn't place if you tried.  I've never been to Ireland and have scant knowledge of my Irish ancestry.  If only it were that straighforward anyway - I'm such an anglo/celtic blancmange that any story pertaining to be from my Irish or Scottish heritage wouldn't ring true and would, at worst, sound desperate, as if I'm not happy with my mongrel gene pool and want to cling on to a heritage, any heritage, that might give me a single identity.  

I'm not interested in being anything other than I am: a bit hither and yon.

Well, that's a non starter too, then. Let's see what the next task is tomorrow, eh?