Tell Me the Story

Regardless on which side of belief a person stands, there is no denying the impact one man's life has had on our world.

Throughout centuries, people have misused His name as a blessing on their endeavors, though He was not a part of them; abused His name as a curse word; mocked His name as that of a madman, a figment of imagination, or a grand liar; dismissed His name as having no place among those of rational men; strove to anhilate His name, persecuting or killing those who put their faith in Him; and yet His name remains. It is a rock against which storms rage but cannot overcome.

The name of the LORD is a strong tower; the righteous run to it and are safe. (Proverbs 18:10, NIV)

In honor of Easter, an old hymn that tells His story while inviting the hearer / reader to tell it, too -- fitting for a writer's page:

Tell me the story of Jesus,
Write on my heart every word;
Tell me the story most precious,
Sweetest that ever was heard.
Tell how the angels in chorus,
Sang as they welcomed His birth,
“Glory to God in the highest!
Peace and good tidings to earth.”

Refrain:
Tell me the story of Jesus,
Write on my heart every word;
Tell me the story most precious,
Sweetest that ever was heard.

Fasting alone in the desert,
Tell of the days that are past,
How for our sins He was tempted,
Yet was triumphant at last.
Tell of the years of His labor,
Tell of the sorrow He bore;
He was despised and afflicted,
Homeless, rejected and poor.

Tell of the cross where they nailed Him,
Writhing in anguish and pain;
Tell of the grave where they laid Him,
Tell how He liveth again.
Love in that story so tender,
Clearer than ever I see;
Stay, let me weep while you whisper,
“Love paid the ransom for me.”

- Frances J. Crosby, 1880

I Ain't Keats

This being National Poetry Month, I'm revisiting my scant folio of poems. Fiction might be "plant your butt in the chair, and get it done" kind of writing, but poetry has to strike me before I write it. (Except when I was a kid, and it was a school assignment. Oh, the agony.)

Here are a couple of angst-y pieces, inspired by two different people, years apart, and both poems have won awards. (I can't recall the years or the contests. I did pocket the money, though!) Call the first poem an act of tough love, and the second a manifesto.

Weedkiller

She is a choking vine,
twining my limbs,
wrapping my throat,
squeezing my strength
as if I am the soil that succors her roots.

I was, at first,
a sympathetic, willing trellis,
thinking my role temporary,
like a stake to guide a sapling,
but she will not let go.

Sun and shade equally strike,
yet she claims the lesser share,
complaining her weakness, her lack,
her compromise—
shadowing me as she seeks more light.

I am dying,
throttled by her need.
Freeing my hand, I tear at her tendrils;
broken stems bleed on my skin.
Remnants of her cling to my clothes.

She cries her shock and anger,
pleas the length of friendship,
but I reck not her arguments,
turn from her tilting form,
and say, “Stand.”

-------------------------------

The Flood

You left
a high-water mark
on the walls of my heart--
a crusted undulating line
that marks the end
of the rising filthy tide
of pollution I once called
love.

Puddles
of receding emotion
lap against my reality boots
and cover the toes,
but I feel nothing,
wading through the muck and
debris like Peter walked on
water:

If I
look down, I might sink
into that miserable morass
of self-pity and doubt,
mourning the lost years
and cursing you for taking them,
for making the dreams
die.

Buckets
of memory bleach
saturate the walls and wash away
disease, letting the clean things shine through,
leaving behind the bones of a house
in which laughter will ring
again.

poems c. Keanan Brand

Mad Streak

Ever get on one of those mad writing streaks, where sleep and time and food don't really matter? Those are the best.

I've been on a few where I forget such elixirs of life as fresh coffee and Southern sweet tea exist, but those are the real benders, when it's all I can do to take dictation from the ideas flooding my mind.

The current craziness is a calmer kind, when the story is a puzzle, and though I know what the final picture must be, I spend hours examining the pieces, turning them, shuffling them, fitting them together.

After work Tuesday night, and after a few trivial chores and a call from a friend, I started on the writing. Lots of tea, lots of coffee, and many deleted words later, I realized the sky was looking light.

Even when the digital clock beside the bed ticked over to 6:00 a.m., I still wasn't asleep, but the ideas that came then were for a different story than the one I'd been working on. Great ideas, too.

Figure I'll ride this streak till it dies. It always does, but it's awesome while it lasts.

Reaching for the Light

Check this out!

Read more about this awesome nebula and a pulsar here.

Meantime, here's a quote from the article:

The red light (is) actually a neighboring gas cloud, RCW 89, energized into glowing by the fingers of the PSR B1509-58 nebula, astronomers believe.

The scene, which spans 150 light-years, is about 17,000 light years away, so what we see now is how it actually looked 17,000 years ago, and that light is just arriving here.

image courtesy of NASA

Mis-Laid Plans

I had big plans for this weekend: write, mow, read.

What actually happened: slept on the couch, watched TV in between naps, took medication.

Oh, yeah. I did write a little -- a long journal entry, and portions of scenes for Thieves Honor, Episode 8 ("Endgame"), which will hopefully end the small story arc of "The Game", and be a little longer than previous episodes.

And the only reading I did was of the Biblical variety, on Sunday morning, in lieu of church.

It's now officially Monday morning, I've just taken another dose of medication, and I'm wishing work wasn't on the schedule in a few hours.

I've become a huge fan of fancast.com, with its vast selection of free TV shows. I set the computer on a couch-side table, navigated over to fancast.com, and episodically watched shows. (Yes, episodically. In between long "station breaks" when I slept.)

I own a few TV shows on DVD, and frequently rent them, too, in order to study the story arcs and the episode structures. Several years ago, at a writing conference, someone suggested watching soap operas for certain story elements, but that ain't my thing; other television shows work just fine, and I like 'em, so I actually pay attention. They're like homework, only cooler.

Being such a rookie to writing serial fiction, I feel like I have to re-learn how to write with every episode: If this were television, which scene would open the show? How long should a dialogue scene extend before the viewer (ahem, reader) gets bored? Action scenes can get boring, too, so how long should this or that one be, and what do I show? How much explanation is necessary in order to keep the audience informed, and how much should I let them infer from actions and dialogue?

See. It's an ongoing education.

Well, this post has rambled on, and I'm feeling a little loopy. Must be the medication. Yeah. Let's blame it on that.

Friday!

This being Friday at the end of a busy week, and with no work-related items on the weekend schedule, I am looking forward to a couple of days of solitude and writing.

And mowing the yard, but not with as much enthusiasm as I anticipate the writing and the quiet.

In the span of a couple days, my inbox filled up with slush for Fear and Trembling, now that the online horror magazine is open again for submissions. However, being behind on my own material, I probably won't wade through the slush till next week. Don't be discouraged, however, if you have scary short stories or poems you'd like us to consider; they will be read.

I took a little break in brainstorming the other night, and scanned a few unfinished stories. One, temporarily titled "Eban's Crossing", is a bit of fantasy I need to finish for my oldest niece. Another, also with a temporary title--"Costano"--is the beginning of a novel that intrigues me, because it's an alternate, fantasy version of Rome during the Renaissance/Baroque era, the main characters are artists and architects and accused heretics, and, though I know the ending, I don't know what's going to happen between the opening chapters and the final scene. Then there's The Anachronist, the space station murder mystery that stumps me, not because of the murder, but because I'm still learning about the structure of the legal system in the futuristic world in which the story occurs.

This weekend, however, will be devoted to furthering Episode 8 of Thieves' Honor, and perhaps working on Dragon's Bane, which is shaping up far differently than I first envisioned. But that's the fun of writing: envisioning a new world, then being transported into it, where anything can happen.

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Hey, there are still only two chapters to the "group novel" project in the F&T forums (John Kuhn wrote the first, I wrote the second). Click here to read the existing chapters, and maybe add your own. Let's see where the story leads!

Also, if you'd like to volunteer for Fear and Trembling, editor Scott Sandridge has put out a call for five more slush readers and two assistant editors (one for columns, one for poems).

Love My Mac

I'm bringing more work home again.

My work PC, a hand-me-down from a former director, has been serviced and refitted and serviced again, but it still can't handle the desktop publishing tasks I need it to perform. However, my cool Mac at home is more than capable of doing the job, and I wish the Club's budget allowed me to purchase one of these awesome machines for the office. Maybe then, instead of contending with a slow and cantankerous computer that keeps shutting down or losing page formats or contents, I could actually be getting work done. What a concept.

In order to buy the Mac, I went into debt, not my favorite modus operandi, and took almost two years to pay for it. I'd rather do that, though, than spend half the money for a computer I didn't want and couldn't use.

When I bought my first Mac several years ago, it was a floor model on clearance, on the verge of obsolete. I just wanted a workhorse, though, and the price was right, so I picked up the elephantine blue critter (didn't even get a box for it) and carried out of the store. I still have that machine, and my niece gets a lot of use out of when my brother's family visits; one of the best deals I ever made.

Never thought I'd do much creating direct to a document until I bought the current Mac -- I still prefer pen and paper, then transcription via keyboard -- but this one is so easy to move around, despite being a desktop computer, that I haul it to different parts of the house so I can work standing up or sitting down (mostly standing up).

So, tonight, instead of writing science fiction, I'll be standing in front of the computer propped on the bookshelf, and working on a book highlighting the Club kids who placed or received honorable mention in the recent photography contest. Betcha the Mac, in a matter of hours, will chew through pages that would take me several days to compose on the PC.