You will know me by the trail of unfinished manuscripts

here's yet another thing i started and will definitely finish one day... definitely...

All around me, spreading out beyond my visual range, out to the curvature of the Earth, lays London. As I gain height the city crawls out before me, each road and alley, shop front and pedestrian are mapped out, and as the height gains they all merge together to take new shapes, becoming like moving things, snakes, or worms, pulsating around the streets. The buildings out to the edge of the horizon vanish i      the haze of the falling rain. As it falls the rain is illuminated eerily by the sun on its early morning rise above the buildings. I gaze out at it and try to feel inspired. A London city sunrise. The blazing sun  glows  bright orange, peeping through gaps in the blocks  of flats that are between it and my eye.
The booth is filled with tourists. I guess even ten am isn’t early enough to beat the morning rush. We all gather a respectable distance away from each other around the window facing east down the Thames. We stand, mesmerised. An American couple that look about my parent’s age and dressed exactly the same as me fished sunglasses out of their bags and put them on in order to avoid glaring at the sun for too long. They were dressed in shorts, hiking socks, hiking boots, fleece, backpack, and as it was raining they even wore the same rain coat as me, transparent and hooded, covering even our backpacks. A group of two German students noticed commented, I recon, on what a good idea It for them to bring shades with them.
Two Japanese (or Chinese, if I am honest I have never been able to tell the difference between the two races, something I am not proud of) take endless pictures from every conceivable angle. They take pictures of each other, they take pictures of the other people in our egg. They snap the floor, they get the huge metal poles that are holding us up, and they get me. I stare out of the glass toward the Houses of Parliament. Everywhere I look there ar   cranes poking thei    eads up through the tangled mess of city. Here I am, finally, in one of the most exciting     busiest      tals of Europe, perhaps t      rld, and it looks as though it i       being built. How old is this place? I lapse in to my High School history classes to try and raise a memory that might give me a clue. I remember the date Lincoln was shot, but thats no use.  And the plague, that was even longer ago, right?  What date did we declare independence? Two hundred years ago? I seem to remember a bicentennial recently. Now I wish I’d paid more attention. So I guess London is at least two hundred years old, and they still h          nished it. Even this fails to fill me with any inspiration. How do they keep finding room to build things? Or why, if they knock a building down, dont they just leave the space it left behind as space, instead of squeezing another bui ding in the


Everyone I know who has been here has come back spurting endless tales of how wonderful the place is and how I simply must go one day. Now I am here and the emotion is lost on me. Perhaps they weren’t as impressed as they made out. Perhaps they just said it was such a wonderful city because it took them so much money and so much time to get here, and as everyone always comes back  saying how amazing it is, they didn‘t want to look out of place by telling everyone what an over populated mess it place is. An occasional green dome of leaves surfaces above the sea of buildings like a great whale taking a breath on its way across a much much greater ocean. Once, I try to remind myself, it would have been trees as far as the eye can see. Two hundred years or more of progress hasn’t made the city any better or more efficient or futuristic, as the ancestors of todays occupants then might have imagined it would. The city simply spread out, like an organism, a giant bacteria. Twisting and tangling itself amongst the congested roads and smoke dirtied buildings. It incorporated any organic matter it touched, making a high rise sardine can full of miserable people who don’t talk to each other. I ponder what the average height of London must now be. From up here it looks as though there are no roads or pavements. They could easily put a lid between the roofs and start building again on top of the buildings that are already there. I look out to the horizon. If the buildings weren’t there, how much lower would the skyline be? A false horizon of a fake view.
One of the Japanese tourists approaches, trying to give me her camera and saying ‘Prease?,Prease?’ She gestures at herself and her friend. They’re wearing matching raincoats that reach the floor. They need them in this glorious English summer of rain forest sized downpours. Poking out from underneath are the bare toes of sandaled feet. Around both their necks they have a matching black ‘Nikon’ camera bag each, the big type that holds all the electronic equipment they’ll need for the day. People from anywhere else on the planet would take a packed lunch out with them sightseeing. These girls are taking a myriad of equipment for capturing the moment. Both bags probably hold all the exact same gadgets. I accept the digital camera and take several identical pictures of them standing together. In the background London slowly ascends toward us the London Eye reaches it peak and keeps turning forever on wards. The other lady then produces an identical camera from her Nikon bag which she hands to me with an identical  ‘Prease? Prease?’ I take several identical photographs on this one too. I hand back the second camera and they both bow at me wearing big excited smiles. ’Frank roo! Frank roo!’ They’re young, though as far as I can tell older than me. I decide that they are Japanese, though this is not based on any evidence or information I’ve received and is for no other reason than I don’t want to remember them as being simply ‘Oriental’. I wonder how far it is from London to Japan, and from Japan to America. I begin to lapse back in to High School Geography classes but stop myself to laugh at the two Japanese ladies looking at the same pictures of themselves on the two different cameras. I imagine them when they get home having two sets of the same photographs of the world to bore their friends with. I didn’t even bring a camera. I could barely afford the airfare so all optional extras were out of the equation.
The Egg, or Pod, or glass death trap or what ever you want to call it reaches ground level again and we are ushered out quickly by a polite English girl with bad teeth. All stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, and today they are out in force. We, that is me, the Chinese (or was it Japanese?) girls, the fat Americans I am trying to avoid, and surprisingly a couple of English couples, all exit in to the rain. The Egg rotates a few yards to the awaiting masses, and a few more desperate tourists are hurdled in to our Pod. The intimacy is lost. It is no longer our Pod, it becomes their pod. From the Pod we are hurried down a ramp and out of the way. My fellow pod dwellers disperse into the milling of the never ceasing crowds of London streets. Our time together is now over, though we will remain forever united on the memory cards of their digital cameras. I fish my umbrella out from beneath the other junk in my rucksack; pantyliners, lipstick, a spare pair of socks, my purse. I risk a look at a tourists guide to London which I had previously been too afraid to use in case a potential mugger saw me and decided to pick me as his next target. Thers no hiding that I am a tourist though really. I look lost and I’m wearing a plastic Mac and a backpack.  I stand in the rain for a minute staring at it and try to decide my next move. From the other side of the river Big Ben chimes it’s way lazily through four bells, as it’s been doing for hundreds of years. To me it’s four in the morning. I have been awake all night, and all I want to do is sleep but I am determined to see London while I have the chance. There are trendy bars and coffee shops lining the bank of the Thames, over charging people for burnt coffee. I decide to head toward the Tate Modern, and pick up a strong black coffee from a Starbucks stall along the way. What looked like a quick walk along the river on the map soon begins to feel like a never ending trek when the rain increases its intensity and I begin to wish I had found a tube station and taken the time to decipher the tube map. I stop for a rest on a wet bench and warm my hands on the coffee. There are plenty of empty place to sit, as no one seems to want to sit in the pouring rain next to a cold dirty river, and I can’t blame them. I put the polystyrene cup up to my face and breath in the heady fumes, closing my eyes and allowing myself to dream of being back at home, sitting in a Starbucks in town, taking advantage of the Wi-Fi to download the answers to the test  I have to take at school. How can I be home sick already? I have barely set foot outside of my beloved America and already I’m dreaming of being home again, no worse, of being sat in a Starbucks at home doing school work.

Long time no blog

if youre wondering why there havent been many blogs for a while... well i would like to say its because i've been sooooo busy working on books and such... ant to an extent that it true... but im actually awful at remembering to do it.. and how to log in to the damn thing.

the worst thing about being distracted is that i'm good at it. what i'm not so good at is keeping my mind on one thing. hence while writing Firestone Copse I have been been dipping in and out of several other things, two i particularly like and i am tempted to write them before attempting to finish the behemoth that is FSC is becoming.

a discovery

does anyone even read these? oh well... i found an ancient lap top in the loft, managed to get it working and had a look through some of the old files. i found this amongst some other treasures that i had forgotten even writing... this is very john wyndam and i will be finishing it one day... honest! there was more but this will do for now!

The Meek.

Chapter 1. Life in the tunnels.

I make my way through the familiar passage ways as I do most days. Out of the sleeping quarters, through the steep incline up to one of the main through ways that lead out of the cave we are digging out and to the larger tunnels. We’re lucky in our cave, as we haven’t told the council that we have finished digging yet. This means that only those digging it out are allowed to sleep and live it, as it would be unsafe for anyone other than a digger. There are only fifty of us there at the moment, usually it would be fit to bursting like everywhere else. How long we can get away with such luxury is anyone’s guess. Certainly no one is willing to give up their hard work easily and inform the council.  Eventually the inevitable inspection will come, and our tunnel will be deemed officially finished. Then we will have to succumb our efforts to the masses. Those too ill, tired, old or weary to work, and there are many of them. Life is short in the tunnels compared to the old world. It is said people used to live as old as seventy or eighty, though the oldest person I ever heard of in here was forty when he died. I’m not sure why, it may be the dark, the damp, or it could be that people just give up.

The tunnels drip cold chalky water continuously, which is channeled in a never ending drainage system to the cleansing farms and out again through leaky old pipes around the tunnels to communal pools where people drink and wash. As I make my way through the dark, I see ahead the flickering oil lights and my eyes stop straining and relax a little. Having lived and moved through the tunnels all our lives we know them well enough not to need light, the council decided, so only the bigger main tunnels are lit, and even then only a few of those. Being one of the only places that there is light, these tunnels are always hot and over crowded.

Charlotte had always been my best friend. I can’t really remember when or how I’d met her, but I had always known her. We weren’t exclusive to each other, we both saw different people. There had always been something unspoken between us though, like we always knew we would be together one day. Not that either of us mentioned it.

We spoke of everything, and when we were younger and still at school we used to question what we were being taught all the time, like what had really started the war, and whether we were on the good side or the bad side, but some nights we would question life in the tunnels.

‘Where do you think the council sleeps?’ she asked one night. That day we had learnt about the council, and how important their work was.

‘They told us today, don’t you remember?’ We had snuck in to the dome in a tunnel my father had told me about. It came out at the very top of the dome where it was too hot for anything to grow, so you could look down but be to small to be seen from below, and look up and out and almost image you could see the low flat horizon stretching off in a million directions in front of you. It was our place, where we would often escape to just to say what ever we wanted without having to worry about being overheard.

‘Yes, they told us, in the main chamber, but where is it?’

‘Only the council know...’ I tried to make it sound mysterious. ‘In case we spread disease!’ I laughed but she failed to see the humour. She had heard me imitate my father before, but she rarely didn’t laugh. Realising what mood she was in I became more serious.

‘I know what you’re getting at’ I told her. ‘But just because we don’t know the way through the tunnels to somewhere doesn’t mean there isn’t one.’ That was a saying I had heard my father tell my mother once and I felt a twang of pride saying it to her. Charlotte hadn’t heard it before but didn’t ask about it.

‘My dad says these tunnels stretch for miles.’ My father was a tunneler, as I would be as soon as I was strong enough. She was to become a gardener working in the glass domed green house where we now hid, as had her mother and mine. We shared classes in school such as history and geography, but there were some, the majority, that we didn’t. When she was spending a day learning about crop rotation on the steep hole below the dome, I was being taught the perilous job of digging out tunnels to house the offspring, waste, and deceased of the population.

‘I know your dad says that, but has he ever seen any other tunnels than our own and those he has dug?’

‘I don’t know, I had always just thought...’

‘That he had seen them.’ She had a habit of finishing my sentences.

‘Yeah’

‘Well, what if he hasn’t seen them?’ Perhaps he was just sat in class one day and was told by the council that the tunnels stretch on for miles and there are millions of us all living in tunnels. And as that is all he knows, that’s what he’s told you!’ We both laughed at that, as it was just about ridiculous enough to be true. We were at that age where nothing about the adult world seems real or important. This time was our last breath of freedom before we would leave school, take our jobs, and we would be exposed to the reality of life.

One day, in a history class so we were both there to witness it, we were told about the tunnels.

‘The tunnels stretch for thousands of miles from community to community in an elaborate network connecting the entire country.’ Mrs Armstrong was old and bent over and almost blind but she could have been my father if I shut my eyes for their words and voices almost could have been the same.

‘The council live in the main chamber, working tirelessly to devise new ways to make the surface clean so as to return mankind to his natural habitat. Only the council travel from community to community, to reduce the spread of disease.’ We never sat next to each other at school, and Charlotte had to turn right around in her spot on the floor several rows in front of me so as we could glance at each other as Mrs Armstrong repeated the words I had so often joked at. Charlotte was hiding a smirk, and it took me a long time to work out what she found so funny.

‘To prevent unprogressive behaviour in the network, the councilors assigned each community a small team to help them work toward the collective goal. The retaking of the planets surface.’ The thirty or so children sat on the floor shifted uneasily at these words. One of the Councils helpers had to be in attendance at each lesson taught. He stood by the door, silent, huge and domineering. The helpers never uttered a word. They just watched, intimidating people in to behaving how they… we… had always been taught to behave.

There was only once a week now that Charlotte and I had the chance to meet.

When we had finished laughing, she said ‘What if there are no councilors, only helpers.’

She was suddenly serious again. I thought fast. ‘Then we’re all I a lot of trouble.’ We didn’t laugh or take the matter further. For all the talk of the tunnels this was a worrying subject. No one had seen a council member in living memory, yet their helpers were seen everywhere everyday.

I walked on, and as the light grew so did the crowd. I basked for a moment in the natural light flooding in through the dome. It was easily a mile above my head, massive transparent and life giving. The walls around it sloped down steeply, each covered in vegetation, fruit and vegetables, the ancestors of which had been rescued by the council from the radioactivity and grown here to support those that made it to safety before the radiation killed everything on the surface. At the domes base a huge arena in had been left for people to gather. It was here that everyone was stating to assemble, as they did every day, despite the impossibility of their numbers to the size of the arena. Not all could fit in at the same time, so everyone’s time in the sun, like everything else, was rationed.

I skirted round the outside where the crowds were thinner. Here the old and sick gathered, sat against walls, exhausted anxious looks on their faces. I continued passed them in to a smaller access tunnel, that sloped upward and round to the left gradually for a while, following the gradient of the sloping wall under the dome. After fashion the way split in to what seemed two ways, but there was a third secret way through the low ceiling that lead up to where charlotte and I had been meeting for years. She was already there. It took my eyes a moment or so to adjust to the light out on our perch, and the radiance and warmth filled my being, ridding me of the darkness of the tunnels. 

cover FSC

Firestone Copse; chapter 1

I'm in a generous mood, so thought i would post chapter 1. not even first draft quality at this stage. i dont like giving too much away, but this gives an idea of what the book will be like. its a murder mystery. sort of.

1.

The storm has taken firm grip of Firestone Copse, battering the Tudor buildings and blowing relentlessly through deserted streets. Lashing on every tile of every roof, the rain is torn this way and that by the indecisive winds. It forms puddles with ambitions of becoming lakes. It batters windows with smearing globs the size of a man’s palm. No patch of ground goes unsoaked by the searching fingers of icy water. Most of the towns Eighty or so occupants sleep uneasily, tortured by the howling winds and the fear of what conditions daybreak will bring. At the southernmost point of the hamlet is an ancient church, still in weekly use but only on the Sabbath and to a dwindling congregation. Next to this is a small cottage, where the vicar sleeps peacefully despite the weather. If you walked to the bottom of the graveyard you would find a barrier of angry trees fighting against the wind. They form a wood that surrounds the buildings of the town with a ring of trunks and unkempt undergrowth. The wood’s grip around the town is only broken by the one road that sweeps through it, allowing people to dash through without needing to stop, without needing to pay any mind to the old buildings or the people that make them their homes.

???The time is 12.30 am Sunday morning.

Along the road struggles a car, driving as fast as it can against the wind it heads doggedly toward Firestone Copse. The wet road is dangerously slippery, the rain splatters ceaselessly against the windscreen turning the road ahead in to a patch of bleary grey in the weak headlights. The car suddenly screeches to a halt, skidding for five yards and narrowly missing a fallen tree that lies across the road, a victim of nature’s murderous onslaught. The car edges around the branches carefully, trying to avoid being scratched by the thinnest branches that up to a few minutes ago were reaching toward the murky cloud above. Once safely around the driver zooms the car away again in to the night, and in to the beleaguered buildings.

At 2 am, the vicar’s sleep is rudely disturbed by a knocking at the door. It is not a loud knock, and the first was not the one that woke him. The knocks come ceaselessly, but it takes five minutes for them to wake the vicar. When he finally hears them, he sits up  and leans over to his bedside table to begin fumbling in the dark for the switch to his lamp. He finds it, flicks the switch, and his eyes peer squinting through the brightness at his clock.

‘My lord.’ He curses in surprise, climbing sleepily out from under his duvet. The knocks continue, thumping unhindered through the cottage. His feet slip in to his well worn slippers. He sways sleepily to the door where he pulls on his big comfortable dressing gown. Still the knocking comes, echoing up to his ears. He walks out to the landing, switching on the light, and clumps down the stairs. He switches on the hall light at their foot, unlocks the front door but leaves the latch on. He takes a deep breath, and opens the door. He glances outside but there is no one there. It was only on opening the door that he realises the intensity of the weather. His sleepy disposition had robbed him of the faculty to consider what conditions awaited him behind the door. The wind and rain immediately bluster in to his face, rushing past him and in to the house. The cold rids the house of heat, the rain soaks his dressing gown and sinks through to his pyjamas. He tries to slam the door shut against it, but finds it blocked. At the foot of the door is a man he hadn’t noticed, slouched in to the foetal position. His head tilts forward and lurches back, slamming against the wood and this, the vicar realises, is the cause of the knocking. The man’s coat is muddied and torn and he is soaked through. He realises that his presence has been acknowledged and stops banging against the door, raising his head he turns gingerly to face the vicar.

‘Oh bless you father.’ His voice is almost inaudible against the storm, and with the effort of speaking he slumps unconscious on to the porch. Lying on his back reveals him to be an elderly, but not older gentleman. He has a prominent moustache and a few days growth on his cheeks. He is pale, almost grey, and looks very ill. The vicar doesn’t need to think, he immediately opens the door, and pulls the drenched man awkwardly in to the house. With him over the threshold closing the door against the storm becomes easier, but is still an effort against the elements. His unexpected guest is heavy, and the vicar is old and lacking the strength of his youth. It takes him a considerable toil to drag him in to the small living room of the small cottage. The vicar prepares a makeshift bed for him out of sofa cushions in front of the fire. He removes his coat and shoes, and rushes to the spare room for blankets. On his return the man has not moved, and does not move, save the shallow rise and fall of his chest. He rolls him on to the cushions, making him comfortable in the recovery position, and then covering him with the blankets. He quickly sets about getting a fire lit, constructing a pyramid of logs and filling it with newspaper and twigs from a conveniently placed basket. After a few minutes the kindling is relenting to the heat and flames begin lapping hungrily at the logs. The vicar returns to his room and takes the blanket from his bed. On returning to the living room he makes himself comfortable in the armchair, covering himself with the blanket. Once settled he sits looking at the man. He wears a well-tailored suit, his shoes are drenched and covered in mud, but this does not distract from the fact that they are obviously expensive. This is no vagrant, the vicar realises, this chap is in some kind of trouble. Perhaps, he hopes, this man’s car has broken down and becoming lost in the copse he stumbled upon his front door. He hoped it was nothing more serious. He did his best to stay awake in case the man stirred, but he soon drifted off, sitting upright, back in to his deep sleep. There was of course no way he could know just how serious the business involving this man was, or how it would affect his life over the next seven days.

experimenting with an idea for a short story

as usual unfinished, unpolished, first thing that came out of my brain one night!

…that familiar rushing in the ears, and the distancing between myself and time. Responses slow down, reactions wait a moment more than they otherwise might. There is no imagining it, I slip out of this reality and in to a close neighbour. Objects pick up on it, and become a little further away from me than they were. Phones stop working, televisions turn themselves on, the consequences of dimension hopping. Technology hates the waves you make as you break through the surface.  Everything moves a bit slower from this angle, but for everyone else it all keeps rolling. So they all speak at hundred miles an hour and move in a loud blur. That’s why it’s good to stick around other people doing the same thing. You all move at the same pace. It gives a new perspective of time from here, you appreciate how fast it travels, how little of it you have and how quickly it is running out. It gets you thinking, what to do with the bit you were lucky enough to end up with. People rush by, trying to beat the next deadline, trying to arrive somewhere before they have to try and arrive somewhere else. They leave a snail trail in their wake, a snapshot of themselves drawn in to the scenery as they go. Watch it for long enough and it merges in to the background, like trees or grass. Always moving, always growing, but no one notices because they never stop to watch it. The people lose meaning. Just living out their time, peaking through their window to see what their lot is. There are always choices. You chose to be there. I am choosing to be here. Merging with the blur is easy, practically mandatory. It’s opting out that’s the challenge. Differing from as opposed to differing to. Those in the blur want to be in there. They don’t understand why I don’t. They want me in there, and have the power to force me to get in there. If I didn’t want to then I would obviously be crazy, wouldn’t I?

Suddenly it’s an hour later, and everything catches up with itself. I’m left a little giddy and sleepy, but lying horizontal is not an option so I opt for stimulants and pain killers. The pills cure a head ache I didn’t know I had and the spinning wears off with the sweet black liquid I made from bitter little grains of brown. The coffee isn’t great but at least it’s free. The clock on the wall permanently says 11 o clock. Suddenly a bell rings and a line forms, so I get in it. When I reach the front they hand me a cup full of small solids. I swallow them drink the rest of the coffee, and before I know it I feel that familiar rushing in the ears…