SNERP

CANDERFAST

TO BE CLEAR

WAITING TILL WORDS

SORRY SUN

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

“You may call it ‘brown’ but I call it Burnt Umber.”

The things we come out with when we’re kids! Cute stuff. Cringeworthy stuff. Stuff we can’t remember saying, except from tales told about us by grown-ups years later.

I produced the piece of pedantry quoted above when I was about six. Our neighbour, a man in his forties, fresh home from his shift on the railway, had casually remarked,

“That’s a nice brown you’ve got there!”

when he saw me enthusiastically using my new watercolour paints to depict the bark of a tree. I loved daubing. I adored words even more, even then. Loved the shape and texture of the sounds. Loved the feel of saying stretchy vowels and delicious diphthongs that made special patterns and flavours in my imagination.

I was such a polite kid, too. I wouldn’t generally say ‘boo’ to the proverbial goose. But I knew when there was a fantastic magical proper name for something, especially when it rolled mysteriously off the tongue like this “Burnt Umber” then I sure as heck was going to say it.  And encourage others, including adults, to join in. Enter our neighbour.

I look back in horror to think how priggish and precocious I must have sounded. My mum assures me the neighbour laughed like a drain and wasn’t at all offended. He knew I wasn’t a cheeky kid as a rule. It was just that, being me, I’d learned by heart all the special exotic-sounding names on the labels in my new paintbox. Raw Sienna. Ultramarine. Cobalt Blue. Yellow Ochre. Vermilion. Burnt Umber.

If something didn’t already have a marvellous moniker, I wasn’t averse to making one up for it, either. I would go on errands to the local Post Office to purchase a “Post Lauder” as it was in my head when I asked for it at the counter, or “Postal Order” as the rest of the unenlightened populace called it. “Terrid” was my infant mangling of “terrible” and “horrid.” My cousin assures me that when I was little, I used to insist the small rectangular block of wood at either end of our piano keyboard was, and I quote, the “tisstop”. Don’t even ask. 

Somewhere not very deep below my placid exterior, even now, the voice of that pintsized pedagogue and would-be word-wrangler is still biting its tongue. Most of the time. Nearly sixty years later, the memory of the “Burnt Umber” controversy incident still has me blushing brighter than a brushful of Cadmium Red!

SINGING ONLY STILLNESS

She stands as the crack of light
Between darkness and day
Not editing herself
Letting fears sob and unknot inside her opening heart
Letting her silent survival outpace the tread of doubt

Till suddenly there is peace
Where it has waited, always, quivering,
Muffling the gibber of plans and resolutions
Crowing crowds under the gasp of fireworks
Heckling bells, the shuffling off of yester

Rooted in this rainbow now,
Meets herself face to faceless,
Where the robin's ribbons
Of shocking silver song
Echo eternity
Singing only stillness

ENLIGHT

THE CAMERA NEVER LIES. HASHTAGS, RATHER MORE OFTEN!

I take lots of photos these days with my faithful ultrazoom bridge camera.

Even on days when I'm too ill to venture far, there's always something swanking into shot, flaunting its best profile, posing for its spotlight moment, framed by my lens.

Birds. Such remarkable characters, always up to some busy business!

The Moon. I try to capture her in all her moody magnificence.

Clouds. A member of the Cloud Appreciation Society and a BBC Weatherwatcher, I aim to keep one eye on the sky.

Trees. Flowers. Fungi. Every one inspirational and unique.

Planes. Pipers with their sleek lines and their ankle socks aka in less anthropomorphic style, their wheel fairings or spats. Cessnas with those jaunty struts bracing up their wings. Taildraggers. Show-offs phuttering over my rooftop.

Anything that makes my imagination do a creative somersault.

I upload my snapshots to Flickr (other photo clouds are available!)
Flickr has its own puzzling range of bewildering tags. Even when you've tagged your own images with the appropriate search terms. Sometimes I find my crescent moon's been labelled "FULL MOON" or even worse "PIZZA" or just "FOOD".

Flickr once labelled my image of a Pheasant as "DOG" and a Wood Pigeon recently metamorphosed via Flickr tag into an "EAGLE". Though I never was quite sure what kind of crossbreeding they imagined was going on, or what they'd been drinking!

Then there are clouds that Flickr insists are "MOUNTAINS" "SEA" or "SNOW". Local upland fields here in northern England it calls "PLAINS" as if they've been transplanted into the New World. Often the Flickr bots throw up their hands and attach perplexing tags like "ABSTRACT" "MINIMALIST" and (even when it isn't) "MONOCHROME".

I often marvel at how Flickr manages to transform birdwatchers like me into unwitting soft porn peddlers! No sooner have I tagged a Great Tit, Blue Tit, Coal Tit or Long-tailed Tit than my view count soars up into the hundreds overnight! Last week when I tagged the catkins of Salix caprea, Goat or Pussy Willow, my view count skyrocketed and kept on climbing off the scale.

Just imagine the droves of disappointed users clicking and salivating in anticipation of extracurricular thrills, only to be frustrated by my innocent picture of a tree in springtime!

If you've ever had hilariously inappropriate tags added to your photos, please share your laughs by leaving a comment below.

If you fancy exploring my Flickr, ditch your dirty raincoat, grab a cuppa and join me over at:
Joyce's Flickr

APRIL DAWN

Feathersmiths swim through friable cloud

Dunk wings as wafers at lips of the wood

Caw still hangs in the dazzling air

Through her fan of rays Sun

 Sifts gold and blood

No-one has spoken though thousands sing

Earth submerged in her tidal Spring

ATTIC

When I was little, I dreamed of writing in a magical attic.

I dreamed of just having an attic!

Back then, in Railway Cottages, painted Railway Green with Railway-regulation paint, we didn't have one. No attic to go writing and dreaming in. Only a dusty cockloft where my dad would store those once-a-year, just-in-case household items, reachable only by adults, only by ladder. Only an outside loo and a coal-shed of similar compact dimensions in our little yard, where the zinc bath hung from the brickwork, the bath we filled with kettle-and-panfuls of boiling water the night before school.

But I wrote all the time. On the dining table. On the three-legged tipsy stool my granddad made. On the dressing table surrounded by scary mirrors that made you look every which way into the shadows in the corners in the fading lemon light. On my lap. On the couch in the front room with the big light on before tea. In my bedroom. In the garden, where steam trains whooshed by and sometimes sizzled to a stop at our branch line station, spiriting my imagination away to wondrous unknown horizons beyond our valley.

I was writing my world a word at a time but still I would dream of my writing attic. Was it out there, lonely, waiting for me?

I dreamed the Moon would peep in through the little window set into the roof, peeking encouragingly at my scribblings. The sparrows would twitter in their cosy nests under the eaves, urging me on to tell them stories.

I've lived in many houses, many manses, flats, digs and dives since those dreams first melted into maybe.

Then one day, illness sneaked up, smacked my hands off the wheel of working, dismantled my strength, drained my batteries, clogged my muscles and bones with rubbery uneven pain, fogged my clarity, burgled me of my old whirlwind of energy, pickled my possibilities.

I moved here, forcibly retired with half my life still not written.

A little rented house in a village where woods, streams, fields and wandery ways have crept close enough for me to visit them on my better days. A garden full of flowers that imagine themselves into colourful calendars of the passing seasons. Eaves laden with sparrows and a clear southern view to track the Moon sashaying her catwalk arc towards the west.

And guess what else was waiting here for me?

My attic.

My writing space. My rooftop chamber of dreams.

I feel so blessed. I feel its joy, its sigh of relief surrounding me as I write.

I hope I was as worth its wait!

SO FAR UNDER

SO FAR UNDER

So far under I can't swim back to the surface.

Was I ever up there? Stark in the sunshine?

Shifting ponder mouths me down, floors me.

Somewhere Moon is plucking up tides,

Distorting the equator,

Puckering cliffs,

Frothing rock-pools with crisps of dead kelp.

My ribs ache from the kiss of a flame-tongued chimera,

Thump of pantechnicon push in the seething dark

Breaking me utterly, no tracks to trace retreat.

I should be psalming howls and how longs

Yet I banter and jive from that place called normal

Bobbing my head with quotidian nods

Catching crabs in the slipstream undertow

Sucking me down askance

So cushioned and carried

You need never know.

ONE INTROVERTED MIDDLE-AGED SINGLETON'S TAKE ON VALENTINE'S DAY

What does it mean to me to be an introvert, middle-aged and single on Valentine's Day? Much the same as it feels to be the above on any other day of the year to be honest! I'm not one for labels!

Maybe a few years ago when I still had a functional womb, I had a few wistful wonderings. What about my unborn children and grandchildren I will never meet?

 I would have liked my mum to know what it would have been like to have had grandchildren and great-grandchildren to gather round her as she grows older. I know how blessed they would all have been to know her. How her wisdom and good sense would have made them stop and think when they were making life's tough decisions. How her dependable faithfulness would have lightened their lives whenever they talked with her. I know they would have met love in her company, because I do. That mother/daughter relationship, my best and most trustworthy friend, to me is something of more enduring influence in my life than the intense but too often briefly burning flames of romance and passion. 

I know many who have lost children they adored, others who have never met the beloved little one they were waiting for, or who have endured the heartache of not bearing the children they lovingly planned. Compared to their acute pain, my musings are just what-ifs and maybes. I constantly remind myself just how fortunate I am.

Now, this side of menopausal, I am at peace with my inner singleton. Not just given the conclusion that this is a dark world into which to bring brave new lives. No – because I still love this quirky, unbelievably beautiful, precious and fragile world. I hope if I had met my Valentine, we would have been able to share wonder and hope with our children, gathered them close to watch the Sparrows in the hedge, the sunlight bouncing off frosty fields, to recognise the music of the chittering outrageous Dunnock, to love and value the comical antics of Magpie and Squirrel and become champions for those who can't stand up so easily for themselves. To help them know their indoor from their outdoor voices, to treat others with loving respect, courtesy, compassion and empathy as a given, whoever they meet.

I have met my Valentine in a way. 

He's been hidden in my heart all my life. 

I've had the privilege of introducing him to family, friends, readers, the world beyond my heart. 

He is Bram the kindly, tender wildlife-whispering marshman in my books. Bram embodies everything I would have loved in a partner, and to me he is as real as flesh and blood. Not without faults, not without weaknesses, but a beautiful soul, that is my Bram. Thirza in my books is the personification of my genes and ancestry, myself embracing the other. In some ways Bram is her temperamental opposite yet her soulmate on life's journey. They are both aspects of my own spirit. That is my Valentine coupling in the realm of imagination. It is my joy to be able to share them with the wider world through words that offer their reality robed in fiction and fantasy.

Sometimes it's lonely to be uncoupled. 

I am the shadow that walks unlinked. 

But I rarely if ever feel lonely unless I glimpse myself as others do. If we glimpsed ourselves constantly that way, I suspect it would often end in tears (or giggles!) even though Burns averred it would be a gift to see ourselves as others see us! I try to focus my love and caring where I can to wide circles of friends, family and strangers. My relationships as a singleton are the kind that don't really need one day a year to trumpet them. They are beautiful background noise that lullabies and strengthens. 

The worst mauling you will ever get from me is a nip from my inner pedant, my geeky nerdish knowledge of relatively useless facts and words. But I will always endeavour with my peaceful Enneagram Type 9 empathy to make sure you don't feel bested, belittled or patronised, even though I sometimes can't resist my Enneagram wing 1 impulse to challenge you subtly when I think you're factually wrong, or if you're ungenerous with somebody you perceive as different or lesser that you.

It's sometimes unnerving to have to think through things when my compass is instinctual rather than reasoning and the ability to ask for help is never the first option for me. I do learn a lot, though, that way. Not always as quickly and seamlessly as I'd like. Mistakes are powerful teachers, even if we squirm at the embarrassment of making them. I mask and move through that embarrassment by laughter, getting safely alongside those who, left to their own devices, might have turned those blunderings against me. Even at school, nobody could bully me for long. My smile and self-deprecating gentleness gave the bullies no way to get a satisfying grip or a rise out of my reactions. In the long years since the schoolyard, my learning curve has risen by fits and starts, as I strive to find ways of being bold enough, courageous enough to speak out and stand up for every underdog with whom I can readily identify.

Often I'm flooded with a momentary feeling of being alone in a confusing, frighteningly hard world of people. Some days I feel my creativity is simply "peopled" out of me. A profoundly introverted soul who has made a living of challenging my introversion, I often find myself "all peopled out." 

A woman once startled me by saying, after a presentation I had done:

“Where do you get all your self-confidence?”

The fact I remember her words shows how hilariously far that lady was from comprehending my true inclination to hermithood! 

No. It's a weak excuse to say my creativity is "peopled" out of me. It's an aspect of writer's block that has been much discussed in literature about creativity, including Julia Cameron in her excellent "The Artist's Way". I can and do regularly overcome it. What is true, for me, though, is that doing the people thing takes an enormous amount of energy out of me. My first thought in almost every situation where I am meeting other people, even if I know them well, is 'where is the endgame here? When can I escape and be by myself again?' Nobody ever guesses, so I tend to find myself even more "peopled"!

In my youth, I did most of my writing at the dead of night, when people were kept at bay by sleep. More recently, chronic autoimmune illness means I'm denied the luxury of burning the midnight candle without consequences. I am mystified by those who feel bereft when they can't be chattering with people. My own deep heart-joy is when I am alone, preferably with nature, or when I am writing, with books, music or learning some new thing that stimulates my thoughts and my ability to weave these new insights into my words.

So is my ideal Valentine really myself? 

The old song says: "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world." I do need people, very much so, but maybe not in indigestibly mammoth portions! 

It doesn't always come easily to love myself, essential as that is. I have struggled with this in the past as so many of us do, not least those walking through life as a faith journey. As I mature into middle age, I find myself less and less able to gulp down platitudes and alienating ways of seeing others, or to tick the box of unbending doctrines like some nodding dog. It makes me feel diminished to try to shrink this messy marvellous world and cram it into a straitjacket with sharp unyielding seams. The upside to that so-called disillusionment is that it leaves healthy room for new perspectives that may prove nearer to the truth. The truth of love is even more important to me, as vital as breathing. It leaves more sweet space for supporting and valuing other people without tumbling over the tripwires of bigotry.

So these are my introverted middle-aged singleton's reflections on the day dedicated by history and card shops to Valentine. On social media, people are either embracing the heart and flower memes that abound at this time of year, or angrily rejecting them as smacking of stereotypes and shallowness. Meanwhile this unique oddball's here trying to spread the ripples of a calm pool of love in which anyone and everyone can bathe without drowning. That's me and maybe one of my missions in life. To help people see they are all special, truly loved in ways they haven't even dreamed, but yearn to discover.

In the end, writing this, I see more clearly just how much I am loved too as the earth caresses me in its cloak of serendipity and shadowy sunshine. That reassurance will last so much longer than a bunch of wilted roses on this day that celebrates the ways of the heart.

Hush your mouth, inner critic monster!

Every day as I plot, plan, daydream, research and write, I find myself battling that pesky inner critic. 

You know it well. 

We all know it, because it talks to each one of us in our own distinctive voice. It trips us with our own artfully devised stumbling blocks. It gloats mockingly back at us, wearing ludicrous hats, from the mirror of our own mind. It knows our doubts and hang-ups.  It devises procrastinating distractions from our own delights. It plays on the weaknesses only we see in ourselves. It knows our secrets and harps on every fear. 

Every day I do battle with that inner critic monster, just to kick off its leaden boots so I can swim down into the joy of free-fall risky writing. Some days I go paws up, frozen, timid, poorer; those days are sad because I let it win. 

Love and thanks to all those in my life who have faith in me to be the best writer I was born to be. So, hush your mouth, inner critic monster. We are too strong for you and your smug blank page.

Strength and solidarity to all those who muffle and silence their inner doubts and dithering to bring us their beautiful words, craft, images and reflections from the precious depths of their creative souls.

We are writers when we write. We win.

LAMMAS

I've been weeding (should that read "wildflowering"?) in my beloved South Yorkshire garden. This captures exactly how I'll remember these sunny summer moments.

NIGHT LIGHTS

Stargazers, Moon watchers, insomniacs and anyone living city or suburban life these days will relate to my tongue-in-cheek poet photographer's rant on modern light pollution! Hope this brings you a smile!

ALL HER FAULT

ALL HER FAULT

--a poem inspired by a glimpse of Thirza, heroine of my WIP "Cloudhover Solstice"--

Tries to stand

Soles rippling

Beneath the boil

Basso profundo boom

Inching purchase

On sea stamped sand

Plunge forgotten

Now razor balanced

Between sink and scull

Spray rainbow halo

Stinging eye and tongue

Frothing sodden

Tries to breathe

Less and lower

Lower to mute

Her eye discerns the heart

Between two swan necks

As breakers seethe

Molten gold

In the eye of the tide

Breaks her buoyancy

In the undetow

She grasps for his hand

The earthed root hold

Tries to rise

Wings wrung with salt

Drag to inertia

Anchor to halt

The cliffs' billed cries

Are all her fault

© 2016 Joyce Barrass

FREE Kindle download of "GOATSUCKER HARVEST" October 8th-11th

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Thanks for all the amazing reviews on Amazon!

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Dribbles and Dabbles with Drabbles

Dribbles? Drabbles?

Not altogether gobbledygook if you bear with me!

When you're writing, "dribbles" often describes the fragmented way the storytelling progresses: a dribble of inspiration here, a dribble of frantic scribbling there, seasoned with a dribble of banging your head on the keyboard!

"Drabbles" on the other hand, are a method I find useful to help pull my "dribbles" of creativity together along the writing journey. I hope this idea may help you, too. Sometimes when those "dribbles" seem to be drying up, a "drabble" or two can prime the pump and get your story-brain refreshed, released and ready to weave those words into gold.

I'm reaching the tipping point of my new novel. The research is done. The plot is arced. The procrastinating side-projects are frustratingly complete. The blind alleys of my storyland are cordoned off with Hi-Vis "Do Not Enter" tape. The characters are alive in my head. I can hear what they'd say and picture the situations they're about to get themselves into. The sense of place just off the Yorkshire Coast is so real to me I can smell the seaweed and feel the spray stinging my characters' skin and the change of light before dusk. I've chalk under my nails from clinging onto the sheer cliffs in my imagination. I'm raring to go! My first draft is beckoning me to plunge over the edge of those risky still-blank pages and swim for dear life to the shore at the end of the tale.

So, when your dribbles run dry, maybe it's time for a dabble with a drabble!

The wiki says: Drabble: A drabble is a short work of fiction of around one hundred words in length, not necessarily including the title. The purpose of the drabble is brevity, testing the author's ability to express interesting and meaningful ideas in a confined space.

In other words, flash fiction. For me, it's just a great way of getting my writing flowing whenever it stalls. If I have a scene from the novel that's in my mind for later, getting in the way of the current plotline, a "drabble" dealing with that character, that plot twist, that conflict, that setting, is a way of getting creative instead of blocked. Maybe the seeds from the drabble will be grist to the mill of a new story, an unexpected turn, a deepening of some exchange within the book. It doesn't even have to be connected. A drabble can get you writing again when you're overwhelmed. It's non-threatening, expendable, achievable almost anywhere, anytime. It's that blank page clothed in purpose, colour, forward motion.

It can even become a part of your work in progress. It can ignite a dormant creative spark. It can be your own private pool of light-bulb moments. It can be a short holiday break for your imagination to go exploring again before coming home rejuvenated to the work in hand. It can be just what you need it to be!

Wishing you joy and word-woven blessings, whether you're a fellow writer, reader, a fan of GOATSUCKER HARVEST or you've just wandered in to do a bit of procrastination from your own personal challenges today! Welcome!

"Tropical Storm Zeta 2005" by NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center 

Here's a quick 102-word drabble I've written which may or may not get its seat at the banquet in my WIP:



Waves roll upside down, sucking the sky beneath through lips like a dolphin's. Head spinning now.
A guillemot skittles out of a cliff-face inverted inches from her nose. A vortex of fish oil tang closes her throat. 
"Did you see it? Careful! Sit down, you'll have us overboard!"
Disembodied voices far above.
"Below, I mean..." Trying to correct herself, steady herself. The strap creaks. Too much give in it.
Blood-singing, suffocating closeness all around, yet the salt spray's icy, flinging itself down in an arc and falling back upwards into stormclouds.
The scream seems to be her own as the sea explodes.

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One percent inspiration: what makes your writing tick?

Whether you write for pleasure, for a living, for the hell of it, because you can't help it, we all know inspiration's an elusive butterfly that can be hard to harness.

It doesn't take a genius to know what Thomas Alva Edison said is true: "Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration."

But in between the sweat and buckling down to write in order to write, each of us snatches at precious personal muses that help to place us in the moment, with our words, our characters, our plotlines, our message, our soul-sharing.

When I felt a bit blocked with my second novel this week, I woke one morning from a dream encounter with my central characters. They reminded me not to be timid and self-editing while the first draft is humming along. Feel the fear and tap away regardless! Characters that are real flesh and blood to me, closer than family, will reassure or challenge me by living the next twist in the tale with me.

Yorkshire bard Ted Hughes's poem "The Thought Fox" explains the way inspiration came to him as a writer. You can hear the poet reading his poem here. 

Set on the Yorkshire Coast like my novel, below is my own latest poem trying to capture how one flash of inspiration for my work in progress came to me in the waking watches of the morning. 

Chatterthrow

They sailed through me in dream last night

My hero and my heroine,

His eyes reflect rainbows over marsh

Her scent of quay and salted sheets

Watched my hovering hand over blank page

Traced their fingers through knots of plot,

Unpicking and beachcombing unwritten words

Lips smiling at unmet characters

Over us, gulls of Chatterthrow

Wheeling and skimming the coffee cliffs,

Kittiwake held against her breast

As he whispers his breath under trembling wings

His palm facing the centred earth,

Her palm raised to the sky and spray,

My hand cradled between their warmth

Telling their story in woven waves

Guiding my grasp to the tiller of tales

Under the hush and howl of the fret

Cogs connect and the synapse sparks

Compass and craft over bar and block

(c) Joyce Barrass 2015

You can get my first novel, set on the peat moors and canals of South Yorkshire, "Goatsucker Harvest" here (some of the reviews may persuade you to dive in - it's FREE on Kindle Unlimited & crazy cheap on Kindle or in Paperback in UK & USA & some other parts of the planet.)