reality

Seeds of Inspiration

A friend on facebook asked me not long ago, “where do you get all your ideas from?”  A simple question indeed but one that is almost impossible to answer in a way people who aren’t ‘like me’ will understand.

By ‘like me’ I mean, well like me.  Let me try to explain.  I’m autistic, which means I don’t do the social thing at all well.  I don’t mix with folks effectively and I tend to quickly piss people off and if I do make a friend, I tend to lose it pretty quickly.  This means I’m alone for most of the time, both physically and inside my head.  You know when you have friends but they’re not actually ‘here’ at this moment but you know inside your head that they exist and they’re your friends?  You have an innate knowledge that you’re not emotionally alone don’t you?  Well I don’t have that.  I’m physically alone and alone inside my head too.  Now that’s freaking alone man..!

I also have major emotional baggage left over from an abusive childhood which means I have a trust issue.  Not something you want when you’re trying to make friends.  This also tends to add to my isolation.  I’m also physically unattractive so even if men did happen to overlook my other failings, the sight of me puts them off anway.  This also means I’m destined to remain just as alone as I am now.

All of this isolation takes its toll and not all of the effects are negative, for me as a writer anyhow.  I’ve developed an immense imagination.  Every moment I’m alone I’m living one of my internal fantasies.  People who see me may think I’m just shopping or taking out the trash but really I’m exploring the outer regions of some far flung planet, searching for the ancient truth stone that will save the people and show me my one true love who just happens to be mixed race, hugely muscular, clean shaven and hung like a horse.  I may appear to be driving to the store, or to my day job but really I’m on my way from my Los Angeles mansion to meet with my agent to discuss my latest appearance on the Ellen show and whether we could fit in a spot on Jimmy Kimmel the same day or whether we need to put that one back a week.  I may appear to be doing housework but really I’m searching the cargo bay of the intergalactic freight liner for clues as to the whereabouts of the hand written  notes that would prove that hugely muscular, mixed race, well hung hunk of a prisoner is completely innocent of those murders on Taxos 4.

You see what I’m driving at?  This is me every minute of every day and several hours into each night too as I toss and turn and struggle to switch it all off so I can sleep.  The moment I wake it all starts again.  This is the stuff that fills my mind 24/7 and all of the locations, the conversations and the people are as real to me as anyone I may physically meet.  Being completely alone both physically and emotionally too, allows me to indulge in this fantasy reality to a high degree and I’ve been doing it for so long that I doubt I could stop for long and I couldn’t imagine being able to survive without it.

It’s the easiest thing in the world for me to just write this stuff down.  I’m so tapped in to my creative flow that I can just sit down and switch it on and let the words come tumbling out.  I see it all happening as I write it.  I actually live it as I write it and I feel all of the emotions each time I re read it.  All I have to do is sit down, switch on and step out of the way.  My higher self does the rest, my creativity, my muse, call it what you want.  I always say that I don’t actually write my books; my characters write them and I just take dictation.

Last night I was bored so I sat down and opened a blank word document and then opened my mind.  An hour later I had a full plot synopsis for brand new epic space adventure novel.  No pain, no tears, no agonies of writers block (what the fuck is that anyway?) and no prob laymo.

So in answer to my friend who wanted to know where I get my ideas from.  The answer is, from me.

Brand new short story

Just letting you all know that I’ve added a brand new short story here for you all to enjoy.

It’s in the flash fiction tab in the menu above, or click here.

Hope you enjoy it.

A milestone I didn’t want to reach

Something just happened that I’ve been dreading for years.  I knew it had to happen but somehow you always think that a miracle will occur and it’ll pass you by.  I’ve reached a milestone.  A milestone that all of us reach at some point; some earlier than others.  I’ve been lucky to get to 50 before reaching it; I’ve known people who had to deal with it years earlier than me.  It’s a milestone that not only brings anguish but questions.  I now have an important decision to make and I haven’t a clue what to do.

I found my very first grey hairs today..!

So now I have to decide – to dye or not to dye, that is the question.

The problem with dyeing is that grey hair takes colour in a very different way than naturally coloured hair.  My mother once decided to try a coloured mousse that advertised itself as ‘semi permanent – washes out in 6 washes’ and she went bright orange; I’m talking day glow here.  It didn’t wash out in 6 washes either and she had to go around in a headscarf for months until it faded and grew out and I teased her mecilessly.  In order to dye grey hair well, you need a salon do and they’re expensive.  There’s the roots problem, which entails a continuous expense that I don’t know I can guarantee to afford.  There’s also the hassle of it all; worrying about the roots and looking like a skunk if you let them grow out too much.  At least if you’re all grey it looks better than looking like a skunk with grown out roots.

If I choose not to dye, then I have to get used to looking like an old woman in a world where being young and beautiful is everything.  My problem is I’m neither young nor beautiful.  I’m 50 and physically ugly and being grey as well is going to be too much to bear.

I simply don’t know what to do.  I hate getting old.  It wouldn’t be so bad if I was beautiful to begin with.  Ugh, I wish I was dead…!

After the hiatus, getting back into the groove

I haven’t been able to write for the past 3 weeks.  This wasn’t because of writers block.  It wasn’t because my imaginative flow decided to flow away.  It wasn’t even because my characters went on holiday without me.  The reason is Mother.  My mother visited me for 3 weeks and that means that all writing stops while she is ensconced within my living room.  Oh she likes books and is proud as punch that I’m writing them, it’s not that.  I read her the draft of my upcoming fourth novel, Changing Faces and she loved it.  I read her the 5 chapters of my fifth novel and she loved them too.  I even read her my two flash fiction stories and she positively gushed.

I just feel self conscious when she’s around and I don’t seem to be able to sink myself low enough into the creative flow when I know she’s lurking 5 feet away doing her cross stitch or soduko.  She also has the annoying habit of peering over my shoulder at the computer when she shuffles past on her way to the kitchen to make a cuppa.  That annoys me and makes me self conscious about what I’m writing and gives me a childish urge to wrap my arms around the pc monitor like a kid in school trying to stop the big ginger kid at the next desk from copying my answers on the math test.

I’m one of those writers who needs silence.  I can’t write to music.  I have tried but I find myself concentrating on the music instead of writing.  My mother is great and she would happily sit and do her cross stitch or puzzles for hours (she does anyway) while I write but she can’t stop nattering.  She can’t seem to go for more than a couple of minutes without making some sort of comment or conversation, about anything at all and the interruptions really take me off my stroke.  From the regular “oh there’s another emergency vehicle siren, you get a lot of them here don’t you?” to the occasional “must pop to the loo, my pills are working,” and everything conceivable in between.  Then there’s the coughing, sneezing and farting..!

No, I need silence to write.  I need to be able to focus my entire mind on maintaining that intuitive link with my characters so that I can hear their voices and take dictation from them accurately (yes that’s right, I don’t write my stories, I just take dictation from my characters.  I’m one of ‘those’ writers). Once I get going, hours can go by without me noticing and I ‘awake’ to find myself sitting in complete darkness at 2am, desperate for a pee and horrified that I have to be up at 6am to go to work.  I sometimes think that the ease with which I switch into my alternative fantasy-reality is what enables me to focus so entirely when I’m writing.  I don’t just invent the people, their lives and the situations, I actually know them and experience them with them.  It’s a total and real connection and if time and my bladder allowed, I’d write for days on end without stopping.

So now mother has gone home and I can get back to it.  Book 4 needs another proof read/edit and book 5 needs more chapters.  My characters have had a well deserved holiday; I just hope they’re back and ready to work..!

A Question of Beauty

Just what is physical beauty? Ask 100 people this question and you’ll get 100 different answers. They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this is one of the few oft quoted sayings that I truly believe to be true. Physical beauty follows trends in a similar way that clothing follows trends, although the physical beauty trends tend to last a lot longer than the clothing fashion trends do. In the past, to be thought of as beautiful, one had to be big. Thin women were thought of as symbolising an under nourished upbringing which meant they had no money. If you could afford to eat enough to be big, you were a good catch. In the same way at one time it was thought most unattractive to have a tanned complexion because it symbolised that you had probably spent a long time labouring in the fields, another sign of a lowly status in life. If you were pale, it showed you were rich enough not to have to toil out of doors. Many of the current trends are caused by celebrities and in our longing to be like them, we try to make our bodies look like theirs and so our opinions of what is beautiful, subtly change.
One of the current trends that has been slowly and quietly creeping its way into the top ten, is the issue of race. It is now accepted that it is most desirable to be, or appear to be, of mixed race. Mixed race people are thought of as the most beautiful and I have to admit that there is a sound physical reason for this. Every race has its own particular identity, things you can recognise as being of one race rather than another. They are generalisations of course but for instance the nose shape of the Jewish race, the eye shape of orientals and the nostrils of the black races. All of these and many others act as markers to tell us what race a person belongs to.

When two people from different races produce a child, that offspring will inherit traits from both partners and often the mixture results in a look that could never be achieved from either of the two parent races alone. This results in some stunningly beautiful people. Add to this is the current trend for a tanned complexion and you have the recipe for beauty and any combination of races will do the job, so long as one half is of black origins. Of course it’s not guaranteed to work, there is a famous actor of mixed race who has a twin that looks completely caucasian. I myself am technically mixed but I look completely caucasian. It’s just the luck of the draw.

In order to be accepted as even worthy of consideration, one has to be stick thin nowadays and the more bones poking out, the better. If you can play a tune on your ribcage, you’re streets ahead of anyone with a curvaceous body shape. This obsession with thinness has caused major problems for the younger generation of today, as we’re all well aware but even with this new awareness, we still don’t appear to be any nearer to changing this belief that thin is beautiful.

Height is one area of beauty that there doesn’t appear to be a definite majority viewpoint. Some men like petite women, some like statuesque ones. When asking women about height though, the vast majority of them will say their man should be taller than they are. I cannot imagine ever agreeing to go out with a man who is shorter than I am, it just wouldn’t happen no matter what the reward. I’ve never met a woman who has said that she’d be happy to date a man shorter than herself. I haven’t actually asked men, but I am confident enough to wager that most of them wouldn’t be too happy to date a woman who towers over them. It’s a question of male ego at the end of the day. A taller woman makes them feel less like the ‘king of the castle’.

There are some things that are so basic that they don’t need to be discussed at any length. Hygiene is one such area. No man or woman is attractive if they’re smelly or dirty. Without going into detail, I will just say that I did once know a woman who admitted that her husband found her most attractive if she didn’t wash too often! Some races have their own very unique traditions of beauty. Some pacific islanders cover their bodies in tattoos and scars and these are signs of status as well as beauty.

Of course 99% of all slaves to beauty are women and we put ourselves through all sorts of hell in the pursuit of acceptance and the affections of our chosen man. We spend our lives on permanent diets trying to achieve that stick thin quality that most men want these days. We survive on carrot sticks and cucumber slices in the hope that that hot guy in the office will ask us out on a date. When we find he’s already in a relationship with a woman who would make a bamboo cane look obese, we console ourselves with a family bag of Maltesers and a lardy cake. The next morning we feel guilty so out come the carrot sticks and cucumber slices again and the whole sorry cycle starts over. This weight/size issue is a strange one because I’ve met many men who have told me that they like curves on a woman and yet we all know it’s the bean sticks that men look at with approval. There are subtle racial differences to the weight/size preferences too. Many black and hispanic men like women with obvious hourglass figures – large breasts, tiny waists and round backsides. Just the sort of figure us caucasians find it hardest to achieve without surgery.

Women don’t seem to be as pernickety about weight/size as the men are. We women are happy to take a man with a bit of extra weight around the middle without it meaning we think any less of him. But then women are not as visually led as men are. A man sees you before he experiences you and his judgement of you will be formulated by what he’s seeing. A woman on the hand, experiences you without looking too closely first. Her judgement of you will be based on your character and behaviour first and looks second. If a man looks at you and likes what he sees, he will then decide whether to get to know you further or not. If he doesn’t like what he see’s then he will not bother to even ask himself whether he wants to get to know you better. That’s not a criticism, it’s just the way men are made.

Over the years I’ve done so much to try to make myself more acceptable physically. As with most women, I’ve dyed my hair, grown my hair, cut my hair, dieted, worn make up and clothing designed to accentuate my good points (whatever they are) and hide the bad (a bin bag would work here). Over the years my hair has been every colour, style and length imaginable and I’ve been fat and moderately slim and all places in between. All of the things that are wrong with me though, are those that cannot be changed. My racial look for instance. As I said before I’m technically mixed race but you’d never know by looking at me. I look caucasian and I’ve missed out on that lovely golden skinned, almond eyed look that would take me straight to the top of the looks chart. I don’t tan easily either and over the years I’ve spend many weeks in the agony of sunburn, only to suffer the itching of peeling skin for weeks afterwards and then find I’m just as white underneath it all as I was before.

Yes I can diet, and I am doing. I’ve lost a stone so far and very proud of my achievement. I still have 3 stone to go until I weigh what I regard as an ideal weight for my height. I’ve long since given up with my hair and now keep it in a short crop in it’s natural brunette. I’m not yet going grey but my hair is naturally very fine so all of the styles we women want, are out of my league. If I had money, and lots of it, I could achieve much more of the look I desire. I’m one of those women who is all for cosmetic surgery. But only if it’s done for yourself, rather than for someone else. I want to look a certain way because I want to look into the mirror and like what I see. I want to find myself attractive. If I won the lotto, I’d have loads of surgery.

I’m still hoping that one day fashion will dictate that the most beautiful women are pale, large around the middle, have over large round eyes and prominent chins and short fine hair. At the same time I still long to find my ideal man who is at least 5 feet 10, mixed race, very muscular and looks like he’s been carved out of a shithouse wall. The problem is of course that a man like that could have his pick of women and he wouldn’t look twice at me.

Oh well, guess I’d better get used to being an old maid.