Ebb-Tide

Seeing the seagulls in the garden reminded me of a poem I wrote years ago, after a visit to New Brighton in Merseyside, where, amidst the crying wheeling gulls, an old man in a navy guernsey and jeans was standing on the shore, staring out to sea with his faded eyes like stone-washed denim. I wove in birth, decay, evolution, the impartial ebb and flow of every tide. It was only years later, on re-reading it, that I noticed every line rhymes, or half-rhymes, with another one somewhere in the poem. That was completely unintentional, and quite amazed me.

EBB-TIDE

What have you left to come come to, old man?
Have you felt the turn of the tide in your lungs
And the dawn's thin blood draining your day?

Old man, what have you left to come home?
There, you had the tide at the height of its leap
Tearing down the white sail of the moon
While here, the chimneypots keel over
In a wind raging with your salt weather
And a sky snowing with seagulls.

Wife by the hearth, would you wake from your sleep
For a captain with cap made of downy white feathers,
Bringing nothing but blessings you've never heard sung?
Would you rise from your fire to a violent noon,
Wild wind slapping the sails in the bay
And watch him sit up with his eyes full of pearls?

Yet both of you once had the sea for a lover,
With nothing left now but a thin line of foam
To mark where your intricate voyage began.

Snow!

The gulls were hungry this morning and came swooping down after the bread I'd put out for the garden birds. Their keening cries made me feel I was at the seaside.

Writing Styles 2

I was lying in bed last night (again - I think my brain only functions creatively when I'm warm, and bed is the only place where I am truly toasty in this freezing, draughty house; just glanced at the thermometer in room I'm typing this in and even with the heating on, it's barely 42 degrees F!), when I thought of an important category that I had forgotten. The cliche user.

I was at the library on Friday, pulled an interesting looking book off the shelf, opened it random and as soon as I spotted two words, I snapped it shut and put it back. They were 'flame-haired'. Seems like every tabloid describes someone or other as 'flame-haired', or even 'flame-haired temptress'. Huge, clanging cliche!

It's a lazy writer who bungs in the first thing that leaps to mind, which is usually a cliche. I have been guilty of it myself. It's far easier to do than to expend the mental effort to think up a more original way of saying something. Yet one has only to look out of the window, or even around the home, to spot other words that could be used to help describe red hair. Kitchen: cinnamon, terracotta, Le Creuset; geranium, fire extinguisher, apple. Yet, at the end of the day, nothing is wrong with saying 'red hair' and leaving it at that. It took me a long time to leave out the torrent of adjectives that sprang from my fingertips.

A major omission from yesterday's post was the good writing styles. The sentences that flow, the dialogue that isn't broken by colons and semicolons (nobody speaks in semicolons, do they?), the humour and wit, the bouncy, the young, the fresh, the confident, the elegant. There is just as much good writing about as there is bad, I'm happy to say, so, to those who tried to slot themselves into yesterday's categories, try the ones mentioned in this paragraph instead!

Writing Styles

I spent yesterday afternoon working on a book I am editing. It's wonderful. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. But no sooner had I gone to bed and my brain had gone into free-floating mode than wodges of prose from the past started swirling in.

I began work as fiction editor on IPC's Loving Magazine in 1984. By then, I had already had three romantic novels published and quite a few short stories, but I by no means regarded myself as an expert in writing and editing. Almost three decades on, though, I think I am allowed to call myself experienced in the field. I progressed to editor of that magazine whilst continuing to carve out my own career as a writer and when I was made redundant, I continued to write, and also joined up with a couple of agencies who critique and edit manuscripts for writers who are hoping to get published.

Millions of words have sped through my eyes and my brain. No wonder some of them have stuck in odd corners and continue to haunt me. I recall titles, phrases, images, characters - and, most of all, styles.

There was a man whose style was labelled 'chicken-pecking' by my chief fiction sub-editor. By this, she meant that each sentence ran for a few words, then was brought up short by a full stop. There was. No flow. It just happened. Like that.

Then there were the over-wordy, who never used one word when five would do, and who described their hero or heroine's every action in minute detail: She picked up the pink toothbrush, being careful not to touch the blue one next to it for fear her germ-obsessed sister might scream at her for polluting its bristles, rinsed it in cold water, squeezed out just a centimeter of paste - the striped one - and raised the brush to her mouth. She opened her lips... Well, you get the picture. The reader is desperate to find out if she will finally get together with the boy of her dreams at the school end of year party that evening, but there is so much boring detail to wade through first that, with a hiss of exasperation, Dear Reader gives up and flicks to the next story.

Another style I kept on encountering was the one in which the writer overused the gerund: Fishing in her bag, she found a tissue, applying it to her nose. Rushing, she caught the bus, blushing when realising she was guilty of leaving her pass at home. What these writers don't realise is that the gerund gives a passive feel to the prose. It holds up the flow. In a short story especially, it's best to use the active form of the verb.

Then we come to the famous Purple Prose. Yes, I am guilty of it myself, that overspilling of sentimental detail, the snapshot seen through rose-tinted specs, the affected hyperbole. Purple prose is over-the-top writing. It's complicating something simple. Instead of birds singing in the trees, a myriad of feathered souls are throwing their exotic notes of pure godlike ambrosia to we mere mortals down below.

There are those who score their prose with multiple dashes and those who pebbledash it with ellipses and colons. There are the 'can't spell, won't even bother to look it up' brigade - and those get sent back with a polite suggestion that they go on a writing course.

Then every so often, one comes across a gem like the one I am working on right now. It's not perfect. English is not the author's first language so some of her sentence constructions are back to front, and people look 'on' something - the ground, their shoes - rather than 'at' it. But the sheer lyrical song of the words, the glowing sensitivity of the characterisation, the spare, yet finely observed descriptive detail, is a joy to work with. In my 26 years of editing fiction, I have only found half a dozen manuscripts of this quality, and each time I've encountered one, I have yearned to reinvent myself as a literary agent so as to have the joy of discovering and acting as midwife to a world class author. This is what makes my job worthwhile.

If the current manuscript gets published, I shall tell you what it was. If it doesn't, then I shall truly despair of the publishing industry.

Injured!

I felt much better yesterday. My cold was definitely going. After my monthly visit to the chiropractor, I was feeling on top form and all set to buy a few more Christmas items and get some much-needed exercise following three days pent up indoors with my rotten cold.

But malign fate had something different in store for just as I was passing Maplins, my right foot landed on a wonky paving slab that was sloping hard to the right, and I turned my ankle so severely that my anklebone actually made contact with the ground. I managed to keep upright and hobble to WH Smith for some gift tags, but my ankle was so painful that I staggered to the bus stop and was fortunate enough to coincide with Mr G in his car at the bottom of the street.

Arnica and an elastic bandage are helping greatly but it will be a few days yet before my ankle will be fit enough for that exercise... and by then I'll have had my operation. What glorious timing! I think fate is fattening me up for Christmas.

Operation news

Had my pre-op tests yesterday. Felt like death with this awful cold and hacking cough, but dragged myself off to the hospital for a 10.30 am appointment. 'Get there 15 minutes early', the letter said. I arrived at 10.10 but wasn't called in till gone 11, so I was not amused.

I warned the nurse who was checking my blood pressure that I suffer from 'white coat syndrome' and the moment I see the machine, my blood pressure soars. Sure enough, it was a staggering 177 over 88! 'Hmm, that's a bit high,' said the nurse, 'I'll take it again in a few minutes'. She did, and it was down to 129 over 79, which was much better. Weird, isn't it? It's not as if I'm scared of having my blood pressure done. I suppose I'm anxious about being told it's too high and having to go on pills for the rest of my life.

They put me on a heart monitor, which was fine. Then they send me for a blood test. My heart sank. The only way of getting that done quickly is to arrive first thing in the morning when they open. By lunchtime, the waiting room is so full that there are no seats left. When I arrived, the illuminated sign was at No.10, having been round the clock several times that morning already, and the ticket I pulled from the machine was No. 43. So, after a quick chat with a nice lady who was No. 37, I beetled off to the hospital coffee shop and had a very nice coffee and a packet of organic, low-salt crisps and by the time I got back, they were calling for No. 32.

'Be gentle', I told the guy who was taking my blood. 'How much do you need?' 'Four tubes,' he said. I was reminded of the old Tony Hancock blood donor sketch. 'I'll have to look away,' I said, as I can't bear to see my red stuff squirting into the phials. My dad used to faint at the sight of his own blood. I remember my mum trying to take a splinter out of his finger once, and h went spark out on the floor! I'm not that bad; I'm fine so long as I don't have to watch. And the guy was gentle and I only have a tiny bruise and a red mark today.

Finally, I arrived back at the reception desk, where I was handed a letter and told that my operation was scheduled for next Wednesday. NEXT WEDNESDAY!!! OMG! Having had to wait 11 months for a hysterectomy despite having pre-cancerous cells in my cervix, I thought a minor thing like a pile operation would have a waiting list of about a year. Well, the old NHS has certainly speeded up since they whipped out my womb in 1998.

I'm on the afternoon list. I can have toast at 7.3o and can drink water or black tea or coffee till 10. Then nothing else, not even a sip. As somebody who swigs water constantly, this is going to be a real hardship as I don't have to be at the hospital till 12.30 and probably won't be 'done' till mid afternoon. Hope my cold has gone by then because the letter says if you have one, the op will be postponed. Fingers crossed... or should that be legs?

Ginger plant

My little ginger plant is sprouting quite wondrously. I took this pic this morning. The large sprout is over 3 ins and the shorter one measures an inch. Not sure if I should give it any plant food this time of year, though it is growing vigorously so perhaps it needs some. What do you think?



My orchid, which was given to me five years ago, is flowering for the fourth time. Again, November seems a very odd time to grow and flower. Just two flowers are out so far but once all the buds have opened, it's going to look spectacular. Both plants are on a South-east facing window ledge which is warmish in the daytime but very cold at night as there is no heating in the kitchen where they live. They don't appear to mind, though.