Small-Scale Practice

One of my aims for next year is to post something online regularly. I don't just mean a tweet or a Facebook status. I mean a video, or a poem (or a piece of poem), a short story, a blog post, an article, an interview - something that adds some sort of value. If I could, I'd do it every day. And so, that's what I'm trying to do from this week on.

Monday saw the first part of a poem go online. Entitled The Winter Folk, it's my run up to Christmas poem. You can read the first part here: http://paragraverse.wordpress.com/2013/12/02/the-winter-folk-part-1/

Tuesday featured a video, uploaded to my YouTube channel. I'm normally adverse to posting my videos on my Facebook page, so if you're reading this you're seeing something I wouldn't have otherwise shared with you.

Wednesday saw part two of The Winter Folk go online, and automatically so. I made the decision from day one that I wouldn't have to worry about when I posted the poem. ParagraVerse would sort it all out for me. I just needed to share the link later in the day. Thankfully, the site has a few subscribers already, so they'll receive it without my having to do anything.

And today, I have a blog post. Friday will see part three of The Winter Folk. Saturday, who knows. It depends on how my time gets divided between now and then. The important thing is, I'm keeping up with my schedule of posting online.

Obviously, it won't be this easy when I'm doing it all the time. I won't always have a twelve-mini-part poem to post online, because it won't always be the run up to Christmas. I can, however, begin sticking to a posting schedule that isn't too difficult to main, by writing regularly. If I wanted to, I could make a proper schedule for when things roll out properly. I already know that I'd like articles up on Saturdays, poems on Tuesdays, and short stories on Fridays. But that doesn't say much about the rest of the week.

Essentially, though, keeping up posting online is relatively easy when you take a page out of Alex Day's book: create a lot of content in one day, and schedule it for release over a number of days and weeks without your having to be there. That's the kind of intention I have, simply because I find that the reason I don't do something is because I couldn't get to my laptop to type it up.

However, I can share from my tablet or my phone. I don't need to worry about typing something like a blog post or an article on them when they're already written and just going live at a particular time. I can still be there to respond to people's comments, or tweet about something else entirely, without having to concern myself with the practicalities of how and when I'll be able to write something on a given day. When I have Drama or work, that challenge becomes ever more difficult to address, and the end result is that I avoid posting anything online at all.

So, I'm starting small. I have The Winter Folk on schedule to publish, and this very blog post will be set up to post, even though I'll probably be at my laptop when it goes live anyway. Why? Because it means I don't have to stop doing what I was doing to write (or even just publish) a blog post that I could have easily written before and just didn't because it wasn't the right day. I plan on writing for an hour or so every day, no matter what, but I already know when that'll become impractical. On days like that, at least I won't have to concern myself with whether or not I'm producing enough regularly. Scheduling might be the key to keeping up regular posting. We'll see how it works out this month - my busiest in the bookshop - before rolling it out officially in January.

Day 21: A Poem for the Day

Today's a day for family. As a result, I won't be around much to write or to tweet or to freak out in celebration of the announcement of Avengers 2: Age of Ultron. Instead, I'm leaving you with a poem for the day.

These Are Days

These are days we'll remember,

From January to December,

Days spent with family,

Celebrating merrily.

These are days to sing about,

While pouring drink out

From fancy bottles of wine,

Sitting down together to dine,

And raise a toast to the day

And the people who chose to stay.

These are days to commemorate,

Marked on a calender to mind the date;

These are days for spirits to fly,

Days to share between you and I.

How Did FUFDay Go?

On the second time around, Face Up to Fear Day was less successful. However, that said, I forced myself to do a couple of things.

The big one was to record a poem for my YouTube channel that'll serve as an introduction to who I am. I figure that was something I should probably do, even if it meant having to put my face out there again, and try to figure out what to say. Since I plan on putting up a fair bit of poetry on the channel, I figured it was a good idea for a video. You can watch it below.

I still cringe at how up close it is, and how poor the quality of the camera is. One day, I'll be able to replace my set up.

Incidentally, the other bit of work I did today was to write the copy for a couple of gigs for Fiverr (which has just updated its model, so not everything is $5.) I'll be launching both gigs (as they were called the last time I checked) tomorrow, and I'll probably have to create a web-page to support them both on my website, as a way of driving traffic to them in some way.

I've avoided doing it in the past, for all the usual reasons, but I think I'm finally ready to do it. Plus, with my current working situation, I have plenty of time to address this sort of stuff.

While I didn't get to do everything on my list (again), I think the last-minute work I did tonight (after a less-than-exciting day) has paid off towards something. In the spirit of the day, I'll keep on working tomorrow. That's the point, after all. I'm supposed to be doing these things all the time, and for whatever reason, I haven't been able to of late.

Tomorrow's another chance to get things right. I wonder how many super exciting things I can get done in the space of a few hours.

More FUF?

My Face Up to Fear Day (i.e. FUFDay) has the potential be a weekly affair. But the real question is, will it?

Last week, I had seven ideas for things I could do. I ended up doing two of them, and one other item that wasn't on the list. This week, I have the potential to do up to eight different things. Eight. That's one more!

This includes, of course, a repetition of a YouTube overload. However, I don't plan on doing that five-videos -in-a-day sort of thing again any time soon. Too much work, too little else done. Plus, I don't think my eyes enjoyed it every much. I do, however, have a number of other related videos that could over time, become a new playlist of poetry on my channel. And that's always fun, right?

There still remains, on the list, a few items I haven't even once addressed. One of these is simply to write a short story, to submit to a competition. The real "facing up to fear" aspect of it is the submission of the story. I've been avoiding competitions for a long time, partly for fear of rejection, partly because of the entrance fee. (I canny help being without money a lot of the time...and then I buy comic books.) However, I'm really going to give it a shot, and hope that I can produce something that's up to the standard's expected. Fingers crossed, right?

There are other things I can do more set-up for, as well, though they're more boring now than they have the potential to be, based on their success, and as with a couple of the challenges faced last week, they'll remain unspoken of until such time that they actually result in something happening. Or something. (I've got three this week that are like that, so, you know, don't expect to hear much about those for a while.)

Even now, I can see the potential for the continuance of FUFDay. It can get a great many things done.

However, it can also reduce me to only doing important things on a weekly basis, and that's not ideal. I think, maybe, once I get into the habit of doing two or three things per week that scare the content out of me, I'll double the FUFDay antics. Then double it again. And they I'll have a four-day working week set up for myself in which I make sure I'm always producing and publishing something, and hoping people find some value in that.

And hey, I think I can be okay with working for four days of the week on things I love doing and that I'm just too damned scared in a weird sort of way to not do anything about. FUF fo' life?

Smile

Some days it's just easier

To smile and say goodbye,

To the memories and fantasies

And ideas of you and I,

Without asking too many questions

Of the how and why.

Three Weeks

Three weeks ago, I met up with some friends in Dublin city centre, and we wrote poetry. I went on a mad one, writing what I saw and attempting to do one thing: write a lot of poetry, and look later to see if any of it is any good.

From that day, until today, I've been using the same notebook. It's one of four, and it's officially been filled.

Three weeks' work has gone into the first notebook. This has seen 60 pages filled with 36 poems of varying quality and length. Some I wrote because I needed to write a poem that day (remember, I'm writing at least one poem every day this month!), others I wrote because the idea was in my head.

There are poems about relationships, poems about things that have been bothering me, poems about spelling, poems about Dublin and poems about YouTubers. The latter category will be on display, all things going according to plan, from tomorrow onwards, in a short series of videos, as I discussed in my previous post.

That's all part of Face Up To Fear Day, or FUFDay as my friend Ian has put it. (You know Ian...I've mentioned Ian a lot.) Anyway, it's part of my attempt to get some poetry out into the world, which has been an important thing for me. However, recent activities, from over the past few months, have made it so I don't just want to post the words online. I want to perform the poems, to read them so that they have more substance, and I want it to be supported only by my voice. Not some gimmick with a word cloud, not with a song playing in the background. Just me.

I typed up a lot of the poems I've written recently, today. It took a while, especially considering the fact that one poem is almost 120 lines long. I was proud of that one.

My aim, over the next few days and weeks, is to type and print every one of my poems to have an accessible collection for my poetry folder. As you can tell from the photo above, it's extremely professional. It'll have a lot of work in it, though, when I've caught up with the poems that haven't yet been typed. There are still a lot of them from before I opened the first notebook, and that's where the backlog will come from.

Thankfully, the longest poems have been typed up already, for the most part. One of them was short-listed in the Heart-in-Mouth competition this year, another ended up on my college's website as a goodbye to the other final year students. Thus far, those are my poetic achievements. I'm hoping to add to that list eventually.

Anyway, that's it from me for tonight. Tomorrow, I'll be posting an awful lot online. It's going to be a busy inaugural FUFDay.

Poetic Focus

Progress on The Hounds of Hell was practically non-existent today. I'm still hoping to have the energy to write at least the rest of the chapter I was working on once I finish up here.

My principal problem was that I couldn't sleep last night. This put me in a position of having a headache for most of the day that makes looking at a screen a challenge and a half. I've been avoiding writing this blog post all day for that very reason, instead focusing on part of what kept me awake so late in the first instance: poetry.

Last night, upon realising that it was Bed Time and I hadn't written a poem in the whole day, I started writing one. Forty minutes later, I put down my pen and did a line count: 120 lines. Rhyming. It took quite a lot out of me, and not just because it's an mini-epic of life and death.

Having written it, though, I couldn't sleep. When I then woke up, I wasn't sure if I could leave it there as the last poem I'd written. So, I wrote a happier poem, one about The World of Orange. That was followed by poems about exams and spelling and grammar, because there was something there that I could see, something I could take advantage of that was fun and simple and less miserable than last night's poem.

It didn't make me feel horrible to have written it, mind you, but it was a bit dark in places and I didn't want to just leave it there. I've been writing poems in the same notebook for the past couple of weeks, now, and I don't want there to be a wholly negative chunk of it as some form of conclusion. (Not that it's actually a sequence.)

This has, of course, all been part of my hopes to write more poetry, because I didn't feel like I'd written enough, or was writing enough. Now, I'm facing something of an opposite problem: I'm taking a huge focus on poetry, and not enough on fiction.

That is something I want to change, without sacrificing one for the other.

If I can manage it, I'd like to up the ante a bit. From tomorrow onwards, every day shall see me:

1. Publishing a blog post here.
2. Writing a poem.
3. Writing fiction.

Not necessarily in that order, of course, since the five poems I've written today were all completed before this post had even been conceived. (I'd planned on writing about "strong female characters", but my brain is too melted for that. Soon. Soon.) Tomorrow, I'll write a chunk of fiction - definitely enough to finish the chapter if I don't manage that tonight - as well as writing at least one poem and writing a blog post.

So yes, that'll be busy.

But it's a necessary busy-ness. I can't afford to not write fiction every day. It has to happen. I won't actually write enough if I don't write fiction every day. I'll probably have to take on Camp NaNoWriMo next month, too, to ensure I'm writing a ridiculous amount of fiction every day in an effort to destroy the deadline-target.

I've definitely got my work cut out for me, but this is the life I want to live. I just need to figure out the sleep thing, first. If I keep losing sleep (for some reason... I wish I knew) then I'm going to keep struggling with the writing. Fingers crossed, tonight I'll sleep, and my new daily writing plans can get under way.

Deep and Meaningful

Is it just me, or is it a mistake to try and sound deep and meaningful in writing? Maybe it's just that I don't really feel about myself that way. I'm not talking about writing have multiple layers, mind you; I mean trying to enforce a philosophy in a book or a poem, trying to get an idea out there that only ever makes sense in the context of the writing.

Considering the poetry I've written this year, I've tended to go the opposite route, writing about personal experiences and thoughts in my head, and aiming to write about that very limited - but not necessarily shallow or meaningless - moment or relationship. (I've written a heck of a lot of poetry this year, rather than fiction, so there'll be something of a focus on the poetry in this post, I'm afraid.)

I've been writing a lot about friendships, more specifically the ones that didn't work out (more commonly than those that are ongoing and wonderful.) Sometimes, there have been explicit references to events in my life, other times it's been a more general "me and you" poem that, rather than dealing with the specific reasons that relationship imploded upon itself, I've tried dealing with the idea that a relationship, more generally speaking, has ceased.

This leads naturally on to wondering what it is about me that caused any of these friendships to fail. I try not to dwell on that - I know it's not healthy - but it does come up. I speak about myself in metaphors when it comes to that, but again: it's not an attempt to be deep and meaningful. I'm not trying to say something about life. I'm not trying to explain why X happens to everyone. It's a personal exploration of my flaws and faults, but in the context of everything else, what it was about the other person that might have made these particular aspects of my personality so...negative? Unbearable?

It gets to be a bit too much, but you know what? It's just me.

Maybe, you might argue, it is meaningful. And sure, I'll bite. There is - there has to be - some meaning to the poems. But it comes from me, and it's only as deep as anonymity and the vague essentials can reach. That, dear reader, is a shallow pool indeed, in a majority of poems.

What certainly needs clarifying is that I don't set out to write a poem to say something to the world. Often, for me, the poems just "happen". Yes, I do have to think about the words to use, but the essence of the poem is there already, and that's what makes me write it. There's something within me that needs saying, and the words slot into place more easily, even when I sit down and attempt to force something onto paper.

I've tried the grandiose statements about life and death before. Tried it, and failed it, because it doesn't come naturally when my experiences are what they are: mine. Attempting to speak about generally about something so universal as life and death, or the lackthereof of either, is to generalise about the billions of individuals, the uniquely constructed bodies, souls, minds and personalities of our species. There is nothing "general" about us but our anatomy and our surveys.

I'm not saying we shouldn't attempt to talk about life or death. I'm not saying we can't talk about our species. I'm not saying that, as writers, we can't be "deep" or "meaningful" with our work. What I am saying is that we shouldn't set out to do that, especially not if we haven't first lived a deep and meaningful life. While it's not always true that we should write what we know - because (a) that could be boring and (b) it's not necessarily going to be the best story/poem/article we could ever write, especially not if we've lived a sheltered life - but in thise case, maybe that's a good idea.

The Month That's In It

This month is an important one for me. It's not that there are any big anniversaries or grand occasions worth celebrating, either. This month is the first month entirely free from having college work to do. And so, I'm taking advantage of it by defining my own life and how I spend it.

Since blogging so regularly in April proved beneficial for both my blog stats and my general ability to write on demand, I'm doing it again this month: every day, one post on this blog. I don't have a list of back-up ideas to work with. I don't have much to go on except for what I do each day. But I do have that: I have the days and what I do.

With that in mind, I can tell you two things that have also begun today: an attempt to write poetry every day for a month, and a new website.

The poetry is fairly simple, actually. I have a tendency to write poetry when I haven't written something on a particular day, so writing a poem every day isn't much different to how things turned out on repeated occasions over the past five months. This is also coming off the back of a poetry writing day(on Thursday) with some friends, for which writing poetry on demand was a necessary requirement to actually doing what I'd wanted to do.

I've already written today's poem, and though I plan to "perform" some of these poems on YouTube throughout the month, for now I'm keeping it quiet. I went for something more personal than I let myself write on Thursday, and I'm still unsure as to how exactly to share it with the world. It's now among over thirty poems I need to type up, too, so it could be a while before it sees the light of day.

The website that launched today is a fairly important one for me: ModernIrishMyth.com. I've pulled my flash fiction across to that site, and set it up so that over the next month or so I can add in some Behind the Scenes posts about the different myths and monsters in the stories. It's the home for the books that are due to pick up rather quickly. Balor Reborn has been out for some time, but between college, my research paper, The Jerry Davidson Show, teaching placement and exams, I haven't actually had a chance to go near The Hounds of Hell, beyond planning it.

That's all changing, and the new website is the start of it. My rather ambitious plan is to release a new book in the Modern Irish Myth series every month until they've all been published, bringing us as far as April 2014.   By May 2014, there will also be four collected editions of the series (books 1-3, 4-6, etc) in print edition, pending finances. It's going to be big, it's going to be exciting, and it's going to be a lot of work. But then, I'm not really doing much else with my time aside from writing like a mad man.

This month will also see the rise of another site, mid-way through, so keep an eye out for that. I'm effectively setting myself up make a full-time job out of this (though how much I earn depends entirely on how many books I sell!). I need to fill up my time with writing, or I'll really be feeling it in September when I don't start lectures again. Some people travel, some work full-time in the same job they've been working for three or four years, and while I'm still in the bookshop, weekends just don't cut it when you have five other days of the week to fill up.

This is the month that gets the ball rolling on a lot of different projects. I hope to see you around when these changes start happening.

The Answer is...

In accordance with my New Year's Resolution to write every day in 2013, I've found myself writing even when I didn't really want to. If I've been at my laptop, it's easier to force myself to do some work (except for  tonight, for some reason, when work just seems disgusting, so I'm writing this instead...) However, it's happening more and more often that I don't even switch my laptop on, sometimes for three or four days in a row.

The biggest problem with that is that I do most of my writing on my laptop. While I can use my tablet and keyboard anywhere, and have written blog posts in bed using them, I find it much more annoying than if I'm sitting at my laptop. I also can't write flash fiction while using my tablet, because I can't accurately judge how many words the story has. I don't like writing fragments of pieces on my tablet, so I can't write a novel/novella, and I can't concentrate when I'm in bed on writing an article or a chapter of a non-fiction book.

So what do I write?

My Twitter followers and my Writers' Soc friends might already know that the answer is...poetry. Which really surprised me.

I have never really considered myself much of a natural poet. I once tried writing a poem every day, and the end results were too awful to share with the outside world. However, more recently I've found that I can more easily express myself in poetry, and I tend to enjoy it more than I used to. I've written, if I counted correctly, 21 poems this year.

Okay, it doesn't seem like a lot when you add it all up, but considering the fact that's probably more than I wrote all of last year I'm pretty proud of myself. It's become a more comfortable experience, even though I'm usually lying uncomfortably in bed while I write in an A4 pad. I've written poetry about friendship and alcohol and relationships and Dublin. I've explored the weirder side of my mind, the feelings I've been hiding from myself, and the notion of death as someone I might have known from school passed away.

Overall, it's been a weird but fulfilling experience, and it has led me to the conclusion that anyone can make an attempt at writing poetry, and if they're honest with themselves they might actually produce something worth reading or listening to. The feedback I've received on some of my poems has been positive (I can't say anything about the poems people haven't heard or read or given feedback on, so... yeah...), and I didn't really consider myself much of a poet to begin with. Occasional poetry was the most I ever had to my name.

Now I'm a bed-time poet. If I haven't written anything on a given day, I pick up the notepad and pen and just start writing, not trying to come up with something clever half the time, just letting the words come out as naturally as possible.

If you're in a situation like I am, where you want to write as much as possible but find yourself without the time to write anything, there's an answer available to you. The answer is poetry.

New Year's Resolutions for 2013

A few days ago, I found myself thinking about New Year's Resolutions. More specifically, I didn't know what to do for mine. I make one every year, usually failing early on in the year, but never really know what to do. It's a force of habit making one, with the special psychological effect of it seeming significant, even when it's not.

So, I Googled it.

As it turns out, there are common New Year's Resolutions - lose weight, give up smoking, travel, etc. - and the one big thing that lets people down? Specificity. I wrote about this on Tumblr, but the gist of it is this: if we're not specific about our Resolutions (instead of lose weight, lose a pound a week, for example) then we're much more likely to fail.

With that in mind, I thought about last year's New Year's Resolution, for 2012. I wanted to write every day. In fairness, this went quite well for some time, until I became too damn exhausted to think about what to write, and I gave up on journalling my days. That's two things I could have done but didn't, and as a result: failure.

That doesn't mean my Resolution was too ambitious. Far from it. I just didn't have my head wrapped around it properly. So for 2013, I plan on writing every single day, without fail, but with some specific help. I have a list on my wall on a sheet of yellow paper, right in my line of vision at all times, of seven things I can write, if I can't think of anything. That's seven categories, mind you, not seven items. In order, they are:

1. A blog post,
2. A poem,
3. A flash story,
4. 500 words of a novella,
5. 500 words of an article,
6. A video script, and
7. 500 words of a non-fiction book.

Going by my schedule, the first three are to be posted every week - on Monday, Wednesday and Friday respectively - and everything else is an added bonus. I have more detail per point on the poster, but the main thing is that there are options available to me.

Click the appropriate link:

In the US or Ireland?: 

In the UK? 

To make the articles easier to write, I haven't left myself without some help. In a green envelope on my desk, right underneath the poster, there are assignment cards (on coloured paper, don't you know). Each assignment is a word or phrase, with space to plan (roughly) around that word. When the article(s) per assignment are written, the assignment then goes into the red envelope on my desk. Why? Think of it like traffic lights: green to go, red to stop.

So far, I have 40 cards in the envelope, but I have a whole list of topics I still have to put onto card to add in. What this boils down to is more than one assignment per week, if I so chose to write articles all the time, by the time I actually put everything onto cards. All of these assignments, however, are based on one thing: writing. I have ideas for other areas of interest that aren't in the envelope, because I want to be able to write them without chance being involved.

Yes, chance. I won't know until I take out an assignment what it will be. I have five different colours of paper in the envelope, so currently eight assignments per colour. That's already more than enough for me to forget what's written on what colour paper. I can't choose at all. I did that so I wouldn't get caught up thinking I have to write an article about something, even if I didn't especially want to.

Not all of these articles will make it online, of course. Being split as they are into subjects, I could easily choose to make the topics parts of a book. This enables me to keep focused, and should encourage me to keep writing from the green envelope every day I find myself stuck for something to write about.

Writer's Block, you can consider yourself vanquished.

So, there it is, my New Year's Resolution, and how I plan to kick it's ass. 2013 is going to be a busy year, that's for sure, but I think my Resolution is definitely manageable.

What about you? What are you doing for New Year's?

Without Time

I had great intentions to set myself up with a running schedule. I mentioned that, last time, I would like to post a Friday Flash story, and a poem on Wednesdays, and a blog on Mondays. While I did manage to get the poem posted onto YouTube - which was a new and fun experience for me - I didn't get to write the flash story.

This was, by and large, because I didn't actually have the time when everything else was taken into consideration. I imagination I'll have a similiar problem again this Friday, though I don't have an entire Comedy Journal to do for college. I just find that when I don't have the idea already in my head, coming up with the whole flash story on the day is a bit...tiring. Attempting to write the whole story from scratch within an hour, then, is nearly impossible. I had started writing one, and one I would have enjoyed if I had gotten it down in my head properly, but I started off wrong and it only got worse.

Maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get to write a story this week. That would be nice, if it can be done. We'll see, sure.

In the meantime, I can at least do the work I need to that would keep everything else in check. By that, I mean get another poem up on YouTube. I might write a new one, just for that, or work from a backlist of poems I have that I'm happy with. I'll have to see how much time I actually have to do that.

As it is, I had wanted to do a video for Project For Awesome (P4A) this year, but didn't get a chance. With the  full time hours I currently have in work and all the business of Christmas to deal with, getting to do much else is difficult (especially when I'm also doing the last bit of college work that needs doing before Christmas!).

I'm hoping this isn't the way things will always be. Actually, I know it's not. When I'm only doing the one thing - working or college - I can manage fine. Right now, I'm attempting the full time hours and the college work that needs to be done. So, I'm without the extra time I need to do everything else I want to do, and still talk to my family.

Anyway, this has just been my long winded explanation as to why (a) I didn't have a flash story up on Friday and (b) why I didn't get to make a P4A video. With a couple of days off ahead of me, maybe I'll get to sort out a few of the things that have been on my mind lately. I'll be a busy boy, that's for sure!

In Reality - A Poem

He wondered in through the foggy falling mist
Wearing a silly grin and an attitude that couldn't be matched,
Taking control of the situation and the lives of those he touched,
Carefully becoming a part of their whole.
That isn't to say he was the same for everyone.
He has two faces I've grown familiar with:
The cheery, smiling person who everyone loves,
Always there, always helpful, full of chatter;
And the angry, violent deviant,
A haunting figure with an evil stare.
One is to be missed,
And fear comes from losing him;
The other is to be dreaded,
And there's only fear surrounding him.
They look the same,
And I swear in reality they are the same person.
But truly
How do we tell who he really is?

Is he the mask of sorrow or the one of joy?
In reality, I don't know.

What Do You Do?

What do you do when all those around you aren't aware of who you really are?
What do you do when the person who said you should talk, isn't there to listen?
What do you do when the world closes in around you?
What do you do when you feel like you're losing your mind?
All these and more, I ask myself.
Through these and more, I suffer.
In silence, in pain, I ask myself,
What did I do to deserve all this?

Was it because I didn't conform,
Or maybe because I simply couldn't?
Was it because I was too different?
Was it completely out of my control?
Was I always meant to lose my mind?
Was I always meant to die inside?

Into the Night - a poem

Compulsion
Obsession
And freedom –
Entrapped in myself
And lost in others –
Forever away from the world –
Forever locked in the dark ––
Take me away into the night
And forget the world behind us –
For I am not the one you know
Nor the one I remember –
The one who couldn’t keep control
Or stay calm through it all –
Pain
Panic
Torture ––
I am not the same
And never will be –
Not now that you have come –
Not now that I am free ––

A shallow grave awaits us at the end of our journey –
We had a good run – while it lasted

When Twitter Was Down

Silly little poem. Enjoy!

When Twitter Was Down

Millions stranded,
Left behind,
Alone in the dark,
When Twitter died,
Searching for wisdom,
Courage and friends,
During those hours,
When Twitter was dead.
Searching the Net,
Wearing a frown,
Passing the time,
When Twitter was down,
Anything but life,
The thing we connect,
Everything to share,
With the Internet.
Silence fell on Twitterville,
No more chirps and Tweets,
The World Wide Web was bitter,
But life became more sweet.
No more death for Twitter,
As the weapon has been shown,
It shall be defended
(Our cybernetic home)
From virtual villains
And their techno-bots,
And everything else
That takes a shot,
So no one will cry,
Or moan or frown,
So that never again
Will Twitter go down.

No One

Poor ill-fated blog. I'm sorry!

*ahem* I apologise for that. I had to comfort my blog after my absense.

A lot has happened these past few days that I haven't had the good grace to write about. There has been good things, and bad things. Since I hate ending on a bad note (happened before at mass "singing" and I came off the alter laughing and red-faced), I'll start with the bad point. My head is melted. Not literally of course, but my writing brain is dead for the time being.

To compensate (people like compensating) I've begun a YouTube vlogging session! That's the first of the good news-y bits! I get to chat a lot about nothing in particular... yet. People say vloggers are vain and that they just want to record themselves so they can watch/listen. I think that's a bit... stupid? I'm certainly not doing it for that reason. I hate how I sound and I don't like the camera pointing at me. I do, however, enjoy talking. Communicating, rather. It's easier to do on YouTube because no one will interrupt. Plus, I like seeing the viewing numbers go up.

And that, oddly enough, brings me onto more good news. I have a new TV show to watch! It's the forecasted topic of my next video - Doctor Who!! I have to blame Charlie McDonnell for that. See, at the Den we blame people for good things. It's Claire's fault, for example, that we released an anthology last year. And when I blame people like that, I'm really thanking them and giving them credit. So yes, I love Doctor Who. Just wait 'till you see what I can pronounce! (I can't spell it though...)

Now, to celebrate my return to my blog, I'm leaving you with a poem. It's called No One, hence the title of the blog. It's not much of a poem, but I liked the idea a bit. Here we go then..!

No One

No one heard me scream.
No one came to help.
No one watched me die.
No one was a witness.
No one came forward.
No one...

Rubbish, innit?

Anyway... le link for the channel if you want to watch my videos! http://www.youtube.com/user/writeranonymous

You can subscribe if you want, but it's not mandatory. feedback, however, would be nice.

Well, until next time - Cheerio!