Writing

  1. Something to say?

    Must a writer always have some underlying message in their fictional works? Or can they exist as mere entertainment and information? I don't know. Personally, I write to entertain and bring people to another reality, another universe. But even if I don't consciously implement messages, they are still there. In the shadows of my words. There is a suicide in one of my works and it seems portrayed like a pointless death. So, is that my eternal message about suicides? Not at all. I hold no...
  2. The Death of My Father

    My father killed himself when I was around ten years old. I can not remember the date nor even how old I actually was. Family members are the ones who need to remind me of the date and my age when I ask about his death. It struck me hard, I was nearly apathetic and very silent for many months afterwards, much contrary to my usual personality. When he died, it was like an awakening to a harsh truth. That everyone you will ever meet and love, can and will eventually perish. This set me back...
  3. Last Day

    Today is my last day in Greece. It's a painful sentence for me to write (or think about). Every summer, it's the same story. Get excited about going home to Greece for the summer, and get literal nightmares as the days grow nearer and nearer to the time where I am to go back to the UK to continue my studies. I've heard of people who get 'work dreams' where they find themselves in an unpleasant situation at an old or current job. There are also school dreams where you have a nightmare over...
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  4. Old, Brown, Run-down Home

    Back in 2007 when me and my siblings were still children, my parents built a beautiful home for all of us to move into and live in. The home had several small balconies (as many rural homes in Greece do) and one very large one. The large balcony faced a field. And in the middle of that field, surrounded by overgrown trees, was a colourless home. It had the ash-like colour wood takes when you leave it outside in the rain for enough years. Nobody lived in it. It was just an old, brown,...
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  5. Perfect Bananas

    Perfect Bananas Can you imagine them? Without blemish or bruise or speckle, a uniform yellow colour, maybe a hint of green at the corners and stems. Perfect bananas are rare. Not surprising, considering the long journey they make from where they grew to where they will meet their fate. But I can really appreciate a perfect banana. It’s a thing of surreal beauty. Look at it, resplendent in its excellence. Slightly curved, like a knowing grin. Really something to look at. Kinda showing off....
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  6. Figuring Out My Relationship with God

    Figuring Out My Relationship with God Don’t know what’s got into me but I want to go back to church. I used to go to mass every Sunday with my mother and it felt like going home sitting beside her in the pew in the same church in which I was baptized, confirmed and got married. But then Covid hit and we stopped going. And then we entered the worst part of my husband’s battle with MS which ended with his death in September of 2021, and my faith was shook up bad. There was no God in what...
  7. Missing the Cat

    So the Mrs. is out visiting family this weekend and I'm at home, free to run wild. Took a bunch of naps this afternoon. Almost went to Kyoto but didn't have the energy. And it's after midnight and I've got a tumbler of brandy, watching something or other on cable and missing the cat. Back 25 or more years ago I was living with my dad, working the midnight shift so I found myself awake in the middle of the night with a glass of something sitting in front of the cable in the basement and...
  8. Piscis Fugit

    Maybe 10 years ago my daughter won a goldfish in some sort of raffle or such. Cost her one quarter. 25 cents. She named the fish "Adele" and we put her into a small fishbowl. She outlived my admittedly pessimistic expectations, and soon outgrew the bowl. We got her a bigger one. Ultimately, we bought a nice 20-gallon tank, with filter and a gravel bottom. Which is where she's been for the past several years, in a corner of the "family room," where we enter and leave from the garage,...
  9. Draft One Completed

    I have now written to completion draft one of my first ever book. At sixty four thousand words (around 106 A4 pages) it sits ready for extensive edits, which is the next part of the process. It has taken me more than ten years to refine the world and around three years of writing the current draft. Though the end result lacks my contentment, I am confident that I will improve the work to the best of my ability. The story is about a grey skinned human who grows up in the slums of a city...
  10. What's Anime to me anyway?

    I've always loved animation. I don't know why, but I favoured it over live-action based movies since basically forever. My earliest memory of it is in the very early 2000s, when my Dad had a TV box that included a channel named "Jetix", which broadcasted animated shows. I don't know much about the logistics, but it is an American channel, and it did exist in Greece where I grew up. In fact, many of the shows were officially translated to Greek. Not sure what's going on there but I'm glad...
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  11. Character, Plot, & Theme

    Recently in a thread on this forum, a member put forward two potential “driving forces” of a story (plot & character) to suggest where the greatest share of a writer’s focus should be. I then chimed in to say that I subscribe to a theory of three potential driving forces, those being: character, plot, and theme. And in this post I’ll go into more detail about those three, as well as what I view as their hybrids. (1) Plot-driven: I opted to start with plot because I suspect it’s the most...
  12. The Things we Keep

    My neighbor directly across the street died a few weeks back, at the age of 92. His wife died about five years earlier. They lived in the same house for about 50 years,and raised five kids in it. He died at home, the fact that he was able to stay out of nursing home was due to the willingness of his sons to come and stay with him until the very end (his one daughter did too, as she could, but she lives in California). Anyway, once he died and things settled down, the kids decided to sell...
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  13. Man is like the grass that flourishes and is gone.

    I'm not much of a Biblical person, not because of animosity toward the Bible or the faith, but because of unfamiliarity. As a kid I only rarely attended Sunday school, and when I did I invariably got lost in any reference to a particular book of the Bible. Later I learned to understand and appreciate Christianity, but never really the Bible per se, especially the Old Testament. Anyway, the above words popped into my mind the other day, as I was rooting through long-sealed cardboard boxes...
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