61? cough cough and many other ramblings

 Tempus Fugit, Time Flies, was the motto of my Primary School back in the 1960s. Indeed the time has flown. It was my birthday on Thursday, and this year I was 61. How did that happen?

I was thinking about what to write this week and got to thinking about these balloons floating around North America and Canada. Really what we should all be thinking about is the terrible situation Turkey and Syria found themselves in after the two massive earthquakes last week. Nearly 200 hours after the events, they are still managing to pull people alive out of flattened apartment buildings. 

Thankfully, the balloon story is all bluff and bluster; however, the earthquake area problems will continue for much longer.

I shouldn't look at news sites as it makes me anxious about world affairs. For instance, February 24th will mark the anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The Ukrainians have fought with fierce dignity in defence of their country. Ukraine expects that the Russians will launch a spring offensive to save face.

After all that, sadly, I had to miss this month's Ottery Writers meeting as I was working, but there are to be many exciting things happening at our meeting over the next few months. I'm sure I have bored you with this news before, but I am excited about might 'Novel in a Year' workshops starting next month. I've tasked myself with some work on the premise of my book and some on the characters. Even though I have written nearly 20,000 words so far, it is about now that I should be looking at the premise, plot and characterisations. It is about finding the time and a quiet place to work, but that is probably prevarication.

As you know, I have a MacBook M1 Air, which I use to write. The great thing about MacBooks is the number of useful apps for writers. I have several in everyday use. Scrivener is a writing app for all writing styles, from Novels to Screenplays. It can do it all. I find it to be much more versatile than Microsoft Office, i.e. Word, and it is also a fraction of the price. It is excellent for organising your novel and keeping all your research and characterisations in one place.

The other app that I have recently started to use is Day One. Day one is a journalling app. I immensely enjoy writing a journal. Indeed, during the pandemic, I wrote four or five notebooks of daily ramblings over a year or so. Day One has made it easy to write a daily journal, even though I have only been using it for a short while. As always with journalling, it is writing for yourself and will only become available to read once I'm a famous writer and have been dead for several years. With these journals, reflecting on what you have written is excellent—exciting reading and a mine of ideas for stories and articles.

Drafts is another app that I use. I have it on my MacBook and iPhone. It syncs between the two. It is like a notebook, and I often make notes for stories and articles there. You can also save links to sites of interest.

I have a few planning apps I have skirted using and should use a lot more. I will use them more during the 'Novel in a Year' workshops. The app that I currently use is MindNode. You can create a mind map and task list, which has helped me when writing short stories and for several chapters of my novel.

The most important app I use, apart from the app that I am using to write this piece, Pages, is Grammarly. This app, embedded in my browser's bar, will check my writing for grammar, punctuation, spelling and syntax. I will be putting this piece through it once I've finished.

A Novel Idea for Spooks and a new Ghostbusters?

Next month I will embark on a series of workshops entitled 'Novel in a Year'. I feel chuffed to have gained a place in this workshop, as numbers are limited to just five people. There will be workshops over twelve months, and we will be able to have up to 20,000 words of our work critiqued during that time.

I currently have about 20,000 words in my novel already, but there are several things that I can learn about that will change and improve my work. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into the novel and the workshops.

Another area of writing that I would also like to study is screenwriting. I have previously reported that I am reading a lot of scripts to learn how to write screen/radio plays. I may be on my own in learning this, but I know who to get hold of for any advice I need.

For scriptwriting, I'm currently reading through the scripts for the BBC series, Spooks. I have already picked up a few terms, and I'm getting used to how the writing scripts appear on the page. Interestingly, in the first episode of Spooks, the script describes the characters that we will come to know over the episodes. One of the main characters portrayed in writing differs from how the character is depicted on the screen. I thought this was strange, only to be told that in the pilot episode of the American series Fame, there is a character that is a central part of the story, only for that part to be written out of the remaining episodes and subsequent success of the show. It must be brutal in the world of screenwriting! 

After watching a Channel Four program interview on Sunday morning with a writer/screenwriter, I sat down to catch a couple of episodes of Lockwood & Co. The Netflix series has a bit of Ghost Busters about it. The exciting thing was that whilst I was watching it, I thought about how the scene would appear in the script. I was almost writing a script in my head. I am starting to pick something up from the screenwriting books and blogs I'm reading.

Those two projects will require a bit of writing over the next year. I intend to keep writing for this blog and migrate it to another platform. The migration may have started by the time this piece is published.

I will be continuing with my short stories. I'm on the lookout for more competitions to enter. The results of the last one that I entered should be out in the next couple of weeks. There are £49,949 writing prizes in this month's Writing Magazine for starters.

My letter to the Rugby Paper was not used in the following week's paper, and neither were any others, as they didn't publish a letters page that week. I expect they were overwhelmed with reader's letters that week and after the RFU's latest missive. I will check if it gets used in the coming weeks.

Just a thought; is there going to be anytime for work?

Purifying, weight loss, dentists and the blindingly obvious from our Prime Minister. It's been a week!

 As many of my friends and colleagues are aware, about 12 years ago, I lost a large amount of body weight. It was eight stone or 50.8 kgs. To say that was life-changing would be an understatement. I started work as a Slimming World Consultant, met Kathy, moved to Stoke Fleming with Kathy and, two years later, we were married.

Over the intervening years, my weight has been a yoyo. At the moment, I'm heavier than I would wish to be at my age, especially as I'm coming up to my yearly MOT with my GP.  

Having been a Slimming World Consultant for a couple of years, I know it is one of the best ways to lose weight successfully. Slimming World, however, taught me to have an open mind, and with this open mind, on Monday, I started something very different for the next three weeks. On Monday, I started a 21-day Purify Programme.

The first morning started well. I would typically load coffee beans into my grinder and heat the water in my swan-naked kettle to just the right temperature. Instead, the big kettle was out on, and in my mug was a peppermint and liquorice tea bag. I'm usually good at having breakfast each morning, and this morning, although different, I started with dairy-free coconut yoghurt with frozen fruits and added chia and sesame seeds. Surprisingly, that was very tasty and filling, and along with the tea, it was a satisfying start to the day.

Lunch is always a challenge where I work within the NHS. Almost every day, we end up having our lunches at our desks. That is not ideal and happens as there are no welfare facilities where we can be away from our desks for breaks. We bring it up regularly at meetings and with our Unions.

Ok, what did I have for lunch? A mix of fresh veggies, bean sprouts, and hummus provided a filling lunch. Snacks throughout the day were fruit and a mixture of pumpkin and sunflower seeds toasted with Tamari sauce.

Dinner was a lovely and hearty Mushroom soup made by my beautiful wife with some Buckwheat bread, a collaboration between us. The bread is a bit of an acquired taste, but with a lick of a plant-based spread on it, it was passible. The rest of the evening, I snacked on fruit until nine o'clock, which is chocolate time in this household. Murphy dog knows what time it is, and he's ready for his Scooby Doo Chocolate. For the humans, it was a square of 80% chocolate.

Tuesday morning…disaster. 

 Sadly, my wife had a horrendous toothache. A trip to the Dentist confirmed that root canal work was urgently needed. She had to wait until Thursday before the Dentist could complete the required work. Although not pain-free, Kathy is at least in a lot less pain than she was. As she is now on antibiotics and the purpose of the purifying programme is to put new probiotics into our diets, we decided that it was best to pause for a week or two. We kept to our planned diary and gluten-free diet, and we have both lost a substantial amount of weight, which is a very positive end to the week.

I started this piece earlier in the week and hoped it would be a chronicle of the week of changing my eating habits. I achieved that in a small way. I do not intend to blog about any weight loss over the coming weeks, but I will come back to write about the purifying programme in a couple of weeks.

After a busy week at work, in which we had the Prime Minister urging us to provide the services that we have been doing for many years, It has been nice to sit quietly and complete another week's piece for the blog.

An Early Start, Productivity, and a Lesson to be Learnt

 An early start to this week's blog, Monday. Unfortunately, last week's idea for a pitch is a non-starter. I have found a book recently written about the subject and advertised on Facebook. I wouldn't want to steal the authors' thunder and hard work. I could write the same story from a different angle, but I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that in a local publication.

It doesn't matter. I've still got plenty of research I can use for something similar.

To maintain my writing productivity today, I have written a letter to The Rugby Paper. I've been a devil's advocate about the furore about lowering the tackle height for grassroots rugby.

I have some time this week, so I will take my notebook with me, as I always do, and see if I can come up with an idea for a short story. I sat in a Costa on Saturday and jotted down a few notes, which may be working their way into a story. However, I must be careful this week as I have a hospital appointment and can't write too many notes while in the waiting room.

In the notebook already, I have an outline story about someone getting on the wrong ship after a run ashore the night before. I wonder if a story about a Matelot and two Leander class Frigates tied up alongside each other will be a thriller. I have an idea to transform it into another location and an entirely different type of ship. It doesn't need to be a ship, either! 

In exciting news, I have been accepted onto a Novel in a Year series of workshops starting in March. The aim is also to have at least 20k words of your novel critiqued. The objective for me, at this time, would be to complete my thriller novel and have it ready for either editing or being sent off to an editor for consideration. I have been aware of the workshops since early December last year and decided to park working on the novel for a couple of months. Then last night and this morning, I had a salutary lesson to learn.

I write mainly on Pages and Scrivener. Scrivener is an app where you can write your novel, do research, create your character and have different versions available if you wish to go back to them. It is also great for compiling the completed work in many other formats.

Scrivener backs up its file, and mine have been backing up to Microsoft OneDrive. As you might be aware, Microsoft 365 services had a problem with an update they uploaded on Tuesday. We have a problem at work early on Wednesday as the NHS mail runs their online service. I have a OneDrive app on my phone that opened ok, but when I got home and wanted to access my novel, I found that I now had a BIG problem. Scrivener couldn't find my book!

In the middle of the panic to reconnect to OneDrive, macOS Ventura wanted to start an update. I went to sleep with an updated MacBook but still no OneDrive.

This morning, Thursday, I updated the OneDrive app, and yippee, the novel is back. Phew. I have now backed it up to somewhere else and emailed it to myself. I shall also search out a
hard drive I have somewhere and put that to use.

That's a lesson learned, then. One, I know many writers have learned over the years. It's certainly one that I won't forget.

(C) All photographs copyright of the original owners.

Don't Always Assume What You Are Told !

As usual, I was racking my little brain about what to write for the blog this week, and I’m always amazed when the subject springs to mind in equal measure. Naturally, I should be thinking about topics all the time. I suppose that I do, especially in the middle of the night. 

Among many writing challenges this year, I have challenged myself to pitch to an Editor at least once monthly. I want to up that amount much more during the year. There are a lot of short story competitions to enter as well.

I have identified a publication and the subject I want to research and write about this month. It is a subject that I thought I knew well, and I was ready to write my pitch. That was until I started my research.

Some of my former Royal Marines Band Service colleagues might be interested in this piece as the subject I envisioned for this pitch is Woodbury Common in Wartime.

Some of you may recognise this place.

During our Military Training weeks at the Commando Training Centre during the 1980s, we used Woodbury Common for navigation and patrolling serials. If we had upset the DS (Directing Staff), there were always section attacks and contact drills amongst gorse bushes to keep us Bandies amused.

The assumption, and hence the story, was that US troops used the common in the lead-up to D-Day. This story was my initial thought for the article pitch. There was likewise a tale about a ‘Woodbury rash’, a condition well known to the recruits at the ‘Health Farm’, the Commando Training Centre. The rash was caused by the toilet facilities not being what we would expect today—crawling through the gorse bushes contributing to the problem. 

I have found that the story and assumption are far from reality.

The camp constructed on Woodbury Common was called Dalditch Camp and used by the Royal Marines. There is a history of its use between 1941 and 1947.

During my early research forays, I found a website with a lot of information about the history of the common. I shall work to verify the information and have a deeper dive into any further information that I can find.

It has made me giggle that I and quite a few others have believed a story entirely plainly wrong for many years. We didn’t have the internet in those days!

Now to write a solid pitch that any editor cannot turn down.

I Do Love An Apple

 To be a writer, you only need a pencil and paper. There are certainly writers out there still using them.

I have a few notebooks and journals that I carry around with me, and I have a lovely roller pen, which my beautiful wife bought for my birthday a couple of years ago.

As we are all aware, technology has advanced dramatically. I am writing this on a computer. You will also be reading this on one.

Let's face it, pencils and paper still cost under £5, even in this current financial crisis. The MacBook Air I'm using is…well, let's say it costs a bit more than £5.

I resisted moving away from Microsoft for many years, but with some inheritance and an NHS discount, I bit the bullet and purchased this MacBook Air with the superb M1 chipset. It certainly opened up a whole new world of technology. It has enabled me to reach out to fellow writers that use Macs, iPads and iPhones and to benefit from the knowledge and expertise of others. 

I'm a regular consumer of a YouTube channel, 58keys, which regularly drops on a Wednesday and then on a Friday, I earnestly wait for the latest post on his Self Distract Blog.

59keys is 'for writers like you and me, who use and of course write on Macs, on iPads and iPhones'. That is the tagline of the creator and presenter of 58keys, William Gallagher. I had an exciting and productive month on one of William's Zoom workshops, and I am often in contact with him. He's my writing guru.

I now have a few apps that William has reviewed on his channel and that he uses. They are all based on increased productive writing. Unfortunately, one of the most useful that I would use to write this blog doesn't link to my platform. I have already set myself the task of migrating my blog over to another site by April, which will make writing these posts simpler and quicker. 

The app that I use the most is Scrivener. It is a word processor for writers. It is very clever in organising novel files, enabling the writer to quickly move blocks of writing around. Your first chapter can become your fourth if needed! Scrivener also has a template for several forms of writing, including scripts. It is much more advanced than a rival product on another operating system, although if you need to, you can compile it in that format. 

Another of this year's aims for me is to have a go at screenwriting. It is something that I have yet to try, and it looks complicated. William gave me a nugget of information about screenwriting when I wrote to him about any courses that might be available. His suggestion was to just read a load of scripts. I had never thought of doing that, and having found a site for TV scripts, I set about reading some of them. They are excellent relaxing reads that take little time. I started with one of my favourite BBC series from a few years ago, Spooks. I can visualise the characters I saw on the TV and compare how they are in the script and how they appear on the screen. There is a difference.

I will be, of course, pitching to magazines and will be using another app, Readly, to research potential markets. The short story market is still out there, and I will gather experience by entering short story and flash fiction competitions regularly.

Can you tell me that I love my MacBook? I used to look askance at any suggestion of buying an AppleMac in the past. This was mainly from my experiences with the very early ones in the 1980s. The promotion of IBM, its clones, and the DOS system bought about that well know the operating system and its many iterations that still dominate the market today.

That's it for this week's post. I hope you have ended it in one piece and that I haven't bored you to sleep. I shall be perusing my notebook for something different to write about next. 

Welcome to 2023 and some Flash Fiction News

 Most probably due to the Royal Mail Postal Strikes, my monthly writing magazines arrived on the same day. I was eager to see the results of the Flash Fiction short story competition in the Writers Forum I entered last month. I wasn't expecting to see that I had won as they would have been in touch beforehand.

Sadly, I wasn't placed or highly commended this time, not to worry. However, it was interesting to read the editor's comment. It was a 500-word story with a twist ending. The editor wrote on the results page,

'I was surprised to receive so many entries where the main character turns out to be an animal or dead. Such old chestnuts will always struggle to turn a judge's head. A few entries did manage to bring new life to the 'dead ending, but they didn't make it past the shortlist.'

I didn't realise that this is how the judges were thinking about these subjects. I want to feel that my story brought life to the 'dead ending'. It was one that I had used for the Ottery Literary Festival, where it was awarded highly commended. After further editing and a few changes, I entered it for this competition. I received favourable results when I took it to work for a couple of colleagues to read through, and it got the reactions I wanted when they got to the end and the 'twist'.

I will not be using it again for competition other than to submit it for the Ottery Writers anthology or save it for an anthology of my own. I'm now getting a collection of these short stories.

I have another flash fiction short story, this time only 300 words, ready for the Bath Flash Fiction Award to be submitted any day now.

Anyway, for your enjoyment, I will now post the story here. As a note, the details at the end are not accurate. They are close to being correct but far enough away so as not to be recognisable to anyone.

THE Sun shone brightly on Lion-sur-Mer. The late spring sunshine on the Normandy coast starkly contrasted with the dark and dank weather 78 years ago, on the morning of 6th June 1944. Today, on the beach once code-named Sword, a crowd gathered for a service to honour those who had bravely stormed ashore on that momentous morning. Several re-enactment volunteers joined returning heroes and their families. Dressed in the uniforms of the times, they conveyed the scenes and feelings of the battles past.

There is a brilliant blue sky, and it's already a hot day. Thankfully the service didn't last too long in deference to the ageing heroes and the heat. 

The assembled crowd enjoyed a cooling, refreshing drink before boarding an air-conditioned coach for the journey to the cemetery at Ranville. I decided to yomp towards Ranville just as the allied troops had in 1944.

The coach passed me. The boys didn't have the luxury of transport on that fateful day. The purring engine of the passing coach differed vastly from the loud explosions, gunshots and the rattle of tanks rumbling along this road 75 years ago.

In 1944 Brigadier Lord Lovat marched his 1st Special Service Brigade down this road with his Bag Piper to the fore. The bagpipes caused much mirth amongst the passing tankers who waved their support to the lines of troops marching, whose task it was to relieve the paratroopers dropped overnight at Pegasus Bridge.

I was close to the bridge, yomping ahead in the day's rising heat. There I could mingle with the re-enactment volunteers to pay my respects. After a break, I picked up my kit and continued towards the cemetery at Ranville.

 A loud bang had me diving into the roadside ditch to take cover, but I quickly realised it was the jeep belonging to the re-enactors backfiring. The roar of engine noise as a couple of Douglas DC3 Dakotas flew overhead, dropping their parachute passengers off over Pegasus Bridge. Although today was a hot sunlit day, you could almost smell the fear and death that permeated the area on 6th June 1944.

I neared Ranville; the coaches were offloading the families. I was puffing a bit when I finally arrived at the cemetery.

I went straight to the row where the lads we had lost that day laid to rest. A family joined me alongside the resting place of my colleagues.

"Here's Grandpa's grave. Hasn't it gone cold suddenly?" one of the women remarked.

I turned and tried to answer but knew I couldn't. I looked down at the headstone as the woman placed a small wreath.

I realised it was my headstone; it was me who they were remembering. They are my family.

Ford, Frederick Henry

PLY/X204848

No. 48 Commando

Royal Marines

Died Tuesday, 6th June 1944.

I'm in limbo; I've been here every year since 6th June 1944. I'm not at rest. I'm trapped.