Marcus paused in the courtyard to listen. The sounds from within had changed. The small hairs on his body stood up… his entire body alert to the waves of energy building and crashing through the wall. A powerful, guttural roar tore into the silent night and he felt the hunger rise and possess him in an unprecedented fashion, even though he had feed before he had left to hunt down Sylvie.
The danger was all around and he thought he’d prepared himself… but he realised now, nothing on earth could have readied him for this.
Marcus held tight to Sylvie’s suitcase in one hand and the decapitated head inthe other, desperate to stay in the present. He felt the earth shift, then the images came.
…screams amid flourishes of bright tie-dye material. A flash of facial piercing and tattoos. Groups sitting calmly, like monks in Vietnam, in submission rather than protest. No cameras to record bloodied mouths and frenzied looks as man, woman and child devourd each other. A seething maelstrom of rage and cannibalism. A split second choice to be bitten and the earth shifted – the course of what this history should have become, altered forever.
…a filthy room. Holes in the wall. A naked light bulb. Beautiful bare legs beneath cut offs. Her face growing out of the shadows. A realisation he could not abstain. He could not give her what she deserved, regardless of what she argued. She had a life. He merely existed. He was not the man for her. He was no man. The flash of his scars in the broken mirror. The clatter of her diamond belly ring falling to the floor. A single tear.
… Sylvie’s flesh on his. The earth shift again. The spark of feeling. Of recognition. The name on her driver’s license. A wound reopened. Memories resurfacing…
“What are you doing here?”
He gasped in the cold air as though he had been dead and a stab of adrenalin in the heart had brought him back. The world spun for a moment, a tornado of memories stilling and setting his feet back in the present.
You’re not in Kansas now Dorothy.
The crone stepped out of the shadows.
How long had she been there? What had she seen? Heard?
“It is not time.” She turned her back on him. “You will be called when it is.”
He took a few steps closer to the Birth House, his anger at the Crone protecting him temporarily from the temptation within and he threw the head at her, hitting her squarely between the shoulder blades.
“Responsible owners keep their pets on a leash.”
She snarled as she turned, picking up the inert head, the pupil-less eyes reflecting the glow of the full moon before it was once again covered by heavy clouds.
“They could have killed Sylvie.”
“The world is in flux boy, and I have no intention of letting just anyone walk in here tonight.” She held the head up. “Did you think you could scare me?”
Marcus took two crunching steps closer, his words white in the freezing air.
“I have something for Sylvie.”
“You’re on a first name basis with the midwife.” She threw the head out into the snow. “How sweet. But given our arrangement – completely inappropriate I would have thought. I’ll take the case.”
She moved out of the shelter of the crude eaves and into the snow to take the suitcase from him.
“Uh-ah… patience, old woman.” He put up one condescending pointer finger just to piss her off. “Things just got a whole lot more complicated.”
“We had a deal.”
“Deals off.”
“The deal is not negotiable.”
“You lied to me.”
“I did nothing of the sort.”
“You did not tell me who the midwife was.”
“She is nothing important in the bigger scheme of things. A baby will be born, a midwife was needed.”
“There you go again, old woman, telling lies.” Marcus put the suitcase down behind him and planted his feet at hip width, crossing his arms across his muscular chest. “Omission of the truth is the same as lying.”
“So… she’s the daughter of Dr. Johaanson.”
“The sins of the father do not need to be visited upon the daughter. Don’t you think she’s suffered enough?”
“Suffered enough…” The words flew out through the gap in her teeth with a hiss and her withered featured contorted into a look of sheer hatred. “You either take her and feed from her when all of this is over or I throw her to, as you have called them, my pets. Either way she will not be leaving here. His flesh and blood will pay for what he did here.”
“She wasn’t even born when this started. She’s been punished for his other sins. His whole family has.”
“What do I care about what Johaanson got up to after he tried to kill us all here? What do I care for his family.” The crone moved in on him, shuffling through the snow in a stop motion version of a circle. “Why do you care so much for her? What would one like you want with Sylvie?”
Marcus squared his shoulders.
I wont let her get to me.
“You are nothing more than beast. Nothing more than the first plague. Like him.” She pointed to the head lying with one cheek to the snow. “Living in the shadows on the perimeter of society. You can’t be normal, any more than they can.”
“You are wrong!” He spun around and grasped the suitcase, pulling it away from her outstretched hand. ‘Take me to see Sylvie.”
“You think that girl is going to redeem you?” She laughed, a sound like a flock of annoyed crows alighting from power lines. “Oh, Marcus. How does one so evil, still find shreds of innocence and naivety.”
She shuffled away from him, back under the cover of the eaves, muttering and shaking her head. Brushing the snow from the thick shawl around her shoulders she regarded him, one hand bloodied and the other holding onto the suitcase as though it were a life raft.
Another roar exploded into the night… shifting the lines between them, as the it went deeper. Raw. The primordial sound of the ecstacy and pain of life. The crone noticed how Marcus’s skin flushed and despite the sub zero temperatures, a thin layer of sweat broke across his brow.
She smiled, then sucked in her bottom lip for a moment as she thought, her cheeks sinking even further into her skull, letting the birthing sounds hang between them a little longer.
“You want to broker a new deal. By the grace of the Goddess we’ll broker another deal.”
The blood raced through Marcus’s body, the snow melting in a halo around him. The labouring woman’s roars and pants thundered in his ears, as his defences dissolved like the snow, the sounds pounding in time with his heart beat.
“You give me the suitcase and I’ll give you the other baby. And I give you my word that nothing befalls the midwife.”
He could feel the heat in the room, the smell of garlic, the lines of power that Sylvie had stepped out to protect the space. Ineffectual against him, since she had touched him earlier. The touch of Sylvie’s hand on the woman’s searing skin.
“I want both of them,” he gasped. “The midwife and the baby.”
He squeezed his eyes shut and focused for a minute on the smell of the snow and the rancid, polluted blood of the plague still thick on his hands, pulling himself out of the birthing room. He shook his head as though to free the connection with simple kinesthetics.
Focus.
“Shake on it?” He extended his hand and he saw The Crone falter and hesitate. “If the deal you make is true then you have nothing to fear in shaking my hand.”
She closed her eyes and took a minute to think on it.
Just say yes you old bitch. Do it. I can’t hold on much longer…
Marcus tried to keep his focus on her, but the strong, steady heart beats of the twins, about to break free from the womb called to him drew him in. One promised to him.
How long could I live with the life energy of a new born babe? One of them was meant to die anyway… it was the prophecy? But Sylvie…
…I don’t care what she thinks… the chance…
“Indeed Marcus, we have a deal.” He fought to stay present – to be patient. The hunger was clawing him, like a rabid beast fighting its way out of his flesh. A frantic dance to the dual rhythm of the heart beats.
The crone is going to seal the deal.
She’d shake his hand and they’d all have insurance against any deceit.
“I have nothing to fear in shaking your hand.”
“Ok, old woman,” the words barely came out of his mouth. The trembling had begun, the primal parts of him swamping the civilised parts. He took an unsteady step towards her, the suitcase heavy in his hand, the other outstretched to grasp hers.
The crone nodded her head, urging him towards her as a woman jumped from the wall behind Marcus, landing lightly with a crowbar across her thighs. With a single swing Marcus lay face down in the snow, the suitcase wedge underneath his prone body.
This installment incorporates Mum and Robbi’s challenge (a lie) and Anna Barros and Em’s (walking the boundaries, garlic)
I became the Monday columnist at Write Anything on February 9th last year. To celebrate one year of writing weekly about writing, here is the first article I posted. From henceforth I will be posting my old articles here every Monday.
Ideas for writing come from all sorts of places.
I have to admit, personally, coming up with ideas for what to write is something I have always struggled with. Good, original, sustainable ideas that capture and hold the reader seem even rarer in my world. That’s why when I returned to the page in October 2007 and was directed here to Fiction Friday by my wonderful friend Danae, I thought all my Christmases had come at once. I didn’t have to think up the idea – just had to gestate and put down the story.
Left to my own devices – I would probably write very little. I would always be searching for the ‘perfect idea’ and let’s be honest – there is no perfect idea. Prompts bypass the need for perfectionism and allow writers, like me, to do what they’re best at – write!
It’s not always easy though. Using a prompt as the impetus for a piece of work can challenge you – especially if there is no light bulb moment to assist you in those first few minutes after reading the prompt. It can almost be more frustrating than having no idea at all.
Sometimes you’re lucky, other times you’re not. There are weeks when I stare at the Fiction Friday prompt and feel like an unlucky fisherman, continually casting and dragging in nothing but a slightly nibbled piece of bait. In these moments I begin the freak out and lose faith in my abilities as a story teller.
Who cares – it’s just Fiction Friday – the world won’t stop rotating on its axis if I don’t post (even if I have committed to writing one a week). But if I give up because a prompt is too hard, the idea wont come, the story isn’t clear, the characters are ambiguous or I don’t like them, it sets up a negative avoidance pattern for when things get tough. And I don’t need for my journey. After all it’s rarely smooth sailing all the way.
It’s good to have a back up plan for these times, rather than rely on luck, serendipity or begging or the return of your creative inspiration to get you through.
Jennie Cromie in her New Year’s post No-Fail Freelance Resolutions: How to succeed in 2009 talks about planning for low motivation days. She writes:
“There will be days when you wake up all motivated and ready to tackle your daily goals, and then several hours later—for some inexplicable reason—you’ll feel like throwing your hands up in the air and chucking the goal, the novel, the article, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish. I call these the “F*&k-Its.” You have to decide how you’re going to handle these moments ahead of time. Because no matter how much you think you want to achieve that dream of yours right now, I guarantee that there will come a time when that shiny new goal of yours becomes a pain in the you-know-what .. The key is to maintain the forward motion toward your goal, no matter how imperfect that forward motion is.”
So what about a Plan B?
In moments of extreme creative drought I’ve turned to my writing oracle. Women Who Run With Wolves is a feminist psychoanalytic exploration of fairy stories – mainly very old ones to do with women’s rites of passages. When I first got it (a wonderful $10 buy at bookstore that helps to support a women’s shelter in my home town of Cairns) and began reading, a friend told me that it could be used for bibliomancy. That is, you can hold a problem in your head, open to a page and find some wisdom to mull over. More recently my soul sister told me that she’d it in the same way as a writing oracle.
Since learning of this useful trick I’ve turned to it twice. The most successful was the creation of Demon Lover (inspired via a dream from a paragraph in the story The Red Shoes) – a short story that I actually sold last year! It’s a good fall back, when the flow of ideas dam or dry up.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way suggests that if you’re stuck or blocked to mend a piece of clothing or to bake something – the physical process of fixing and mixing works at a creative/unconscious level. A friend of mine swears by this, as she does about knitting to keep the creative flow moving. Sewing, cooking and knitting are not everyone’s cup of tea though.
Mundane, everyday, repetitive tasks have the ability to still the mind. Many artists and writers say their best ideas/plot revelations/characters developments happen in the shower, while hanging clothes on the line, driving the car or walking.
Other useful ways to generate forward motion with an idea (or in the idea-less vacuum):
- Just write – it doesn’t matter if it is bad or indifferent. The simple act of writing generates momentum. Writing badly is painful – but it’s not nearly as awful as not writing at all.
- Create a scrapbook that you keep handy, where you can write down things or glue images that you like: words, sentences, ideas, plot, characters, colours, poetry, images etc. They don’t have to have any real shape or purpose – just things that strike you as being interesting.
- Make friends with your bad/imperfect ideas. Like new friends – give them a chance and they may just surprise you.
- Put your music on random and take the first line of the first ten songs and try to create something from that. Or listen to your favourite album, or something from a friend or partners collection that you have never listened to and do the same. Or just let the music wash over and through you.
- Keep a record of your dreams. Some of the best stories have deep roots in the dream sphere. Even if they are just snippets or glimpses rather than a whole story downloaded to you while you sleep.
- Have a word bucket – as described by Andrea.
- Go for a walk – take your muse out for some fresh air and a new perspective.
- Indulge in your favourite mundane task – wash the dishes, fold the washing, take a shower, hide away in the toilet. You know what works best for you.
- Do something else that is creative – play a musical instrument, doodle, paint, dance, sculpt, take some photos. Change your clothes, re-do your hair, wear a silly hat (this was the favourite source of stress relief for one of the girls my partner used to work with!)
- And remember that writing is meant to be enjoyable.
Having a list handy of the things that help to stir your creativity is a useful tool – a Plan B, for the moments when writers block hits or the ideas just refuse to come. Type it up, write it out, make it pretty, make it practical – but stick it up somewhere you can see it. If it’s filed away in the bottom of your desk draw it’s not going to be any use … you’ll forget it’s there in your frustration.
Sometimes writers need safety nets. We may as well weave ones with plenty of spring to propel us upwards and onwards.
What tricks do you use to feret out ideas for writing? How do you keep the creative juices flowing, and your ideas alive and brilliant?
Thanks to Eamon and Tricksie Pixie who shared their creative prompts with me last year.
Image: Where Ideas Come from by Natalie Dee
At the end of a day, and a restless ‘going to sleep effort’… this is the sweet sight.
The oil is a hangover from NaNo and sits on my altar on my desk. It is made up of peppermint, rosemary,basil, black pepper and lemon (and is actually far nicer to smell than it sounds)
The quill and ink well in the foreground is a Swarovski minature given to me by my friend Jo, back in 1995 when we were working for Captain Cook Cruises. It has spent its entire life in the box, until a few weeks ago I finally found where it had been stored and bought it out for my writing altar.
All prepared to go live on American radio with Cyrus Webb on his program Conversations LIVE! – my pink bubbles (in my fav glass tumbler), head set, telephone (just in case) and my hand written notes.
On the heel’s of Wednesday’s acceptance letter came the second, this time from Jon Strother informing me my story ‘Taping Lydia’ has been selected to be published in the Best of Friday Flash (BOFF) 2009. What a week!
