Apologies for the lack of posts recently. I am frantically trying to complete my Masters dissertation. Only eleven days to go and then I’ll be well and truly back to the creative writing because, quite frankly, if I have to write many more academic footnotes I may well go insane.

Another year had wandered passed
With lead toed boots, muddied all
The life I live. Squandered fast
With nought to show but this scrawl.

And there I stood, smiles beneath
The streamers on the chandelier.
My multi-coloured mourning wreath
Heralds the death of another year.

The table gleams, treasures atop,
Musing on the memories gone.
Innocence wilts in a teardrop
A child from a time, once upon.

A small, green steed and a knight
In jeans flew with me into the sun
Enchanted rode we through fading light
The night sang lullabies of fun re-begun.

Sweet melodies of blissful sleep
Linger as the dawn glows red
We lovers arise, and up we leap
Into Hope’s rosy joy, we fled.

Up blue hills and passed a stream,
Through the cool-veiled waterfall
We looped a knot around a dream
And listened for the fairies’ call.

And here we are, back again.
Gone the whispering bluebells.
Wishes swirl through life and rain,
Love and pain, kissed by fairy spells.

            She had grown up in a house filled with books. The walls of almost every room were decorated with a hodgepodge of shelves, grinning with rows of multi-coloured teeth, some lying on their sides, being read from sometime long ago. In the living room and the study, there was a shelf, with a single line of books, encircling the top of the room, just below the ceiling; crowning these rooms with the laurel of literature or perhaps, that of the eccentric collector. But from every shelf the world shone, illumining the beholder, encompassing them with a light denied to so many and sought by too few. Drawing in the open mind, with the enigmas of their pages, hoping to open this mind some more. She would stand bathing in the cool glow of enlightenment, loving the way the book shelves looked, this myriad gleaming cracked spines and beautiful leather and gold bindings and yet she would turn and walk away. To her own bedroom, with its own shelf of books, most of them pristine, still yearning for that first caress, the first bent page or crack in the spine. She would fling herself into the dusty pink bean bag in the corner of the rotting bay window, near to the radiator; she liked the choking heat from the central heating and the creeping draft from the rattling window. This was her favourite place. In the other corner of the bay window, there was a pile of books, perhaps two feet high. These were the books for which she shunned all others; reading and re-reading and then reading some more. These were the books she loved. These were the books she would live. There she sat, hour after hour, winding her way through the labyrinthine quests of the stories. Sometimes she was locked in a castle, ravished by the wicked son of a good king, sometimes, she was won in tourney. Other days she would be of great help to the Knights of the Round Table and on many days, she would fall in love with a single glance. And as she read of these fantastical worlds of days bygone, days long gone, she grew into the fairest maiden anybody had ever had the glorious good fortune to lay their eyes upon. A river of blonde, gushed down her back and past her waist, shimmering opalescent in the sunlight that snuck through the old window panes. Her complexion was of lily white, with rose bud lips and gentle blushes of pink across her exquisite cheeks. She was beautiful and she was eighteen and soon she would embark on an adventure of her own, away from the questing knights and malicious ogres of the kingdoms of somewhere else. Lunette was to go to university.

  (more…)

I’d like to thank Alaric for his hard work producing the magazine and suggest that anybody interested take a look at it… and not just because I’m in it - it’s an impressive showcase of fiction writers.

* To download the PDF, click my link, scroll down the page and click the button marked "free". On the next page, scroll down and enter the "captcha" code and click the button marked "download… " It’s a little complicated but worthwhile!

 
I cower in the dark,
And now that Hope is gone
Life sears bright and stark
With smiles plastered on.

 
Through this mask of joy
Eternal wishes fly
For Hope’s return, coy
I pray it’s not goodbye.

 
Content soon, I hear
"Anon, I come" Hope sings
Quelling creeping fear
Wrapped softly in Hope’s wings.

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, in a distant land, not so far from here there lived a girl. A girl who was not a princess but who never gave up hope that one day she may be. It was not the riches, the dubious celebrity, the contempt of Mrs. Jones, Mr. Smith, their kids, step kids, pet hamsters that she desired. It was not even the inevitably insipid looking Prince Charming that drove this dream. The thing she most wanted was to be like the beautiful, happy princesses from the animated films that had punctuated her childhood with their spinning dresses and sweeping hair and sweet songs and happily ever afters. Dancing in a field, friend of the birds, (strangely coloured, fat and charismatic birds, sometimes even clothed), singing like a nightingale (not clothed and possessing the normal levels of charisma for a bird) and utterly enchanting to look at, even though the happily ever after dress and hair hadn’t happened yet. (more…)

“Ignoramuses!” she exclaimed. And then added, “Or should that be ‘ignoramii’? She lay down the pen she had been using to mark the essays with. Green, never red. Red looked too threatening. Too much like school. She couldn’t help thinking that judging by the standard of the work she had just been subjected to, the red pen probably wasn’t employed enough at the schools of some of these fools. Spare the red pen, deal with the consequences. Maybe what they needed was a good dose of the red to show them the error of their ways. Or was it perhaps the errors of their beings. She preferred the latter. Sighing, she swivelled around in her scratchy, black office chair to face her computer desk. She noticed she had an email, an internal, urgent, marked red. There it was again. Why was it acceptable for someone to use red on her? She opened the email and read: (more…)

Smoothing willing eyes with her benign 

Temptation. Submit, she bids. Abide, she wishes

Repose in Lethe, shroud of forgetful divine.

Hand in gentle hand, she winds her labyrinth

Around the cruel enigmas of your soul.

The spectral cocoon of this drowsy nymph

Brushing invisible rainbow, paints you whole.

But you lie heedless of her gossamer call

A wonderer, wandering darkly through

A fractured conscious, obscure mirrored hall;

Mysterious, worldless, slumberless you.

Clawing at the bleeding dark, wall of words at your head

Velvet tears, light crawls in, illumines numb and weary dread.

I suppose I should explain my aim. I write stories and poetry and I have been convinced that it is time to get some of my work "out there". So here they are, (or at least will be). I hope to have something new here every week, life permitting. I can’t help feeling that doing this is me gradually releasing tiny bits of my soul into cyber-space, or whatever we’re calling it now. Because the things I write are, essentially, me. I think that’s the only way writing can be successful. I hesitate to say my work is "successful writing" but I believe I’m on the right path. So; read, love, loathe.