City Rain

Rutted eaves, a furrowed sky-scape settled like blankets, slate and shale, felt and lead, lain on red brick, mortar, reinforced concrete. Sponge porous, the slatted roads suck drain-like down the city rain, whose clouds have skidded punctured against spires and phone masts and age-stained tower blocks. Windows peak out on seventh floors, skylights face up and out at ninety-thirty-fort-five degrees, catching desperate grasps of shaded light from betwixt the sundial towers. Drainpipes sag and moan, rabid pigeons sodden with pH unbalance stagger on concrete slabs while far, far below a sea of black umbrellas undulates in currents and tides, swelling against doorways, rushing like clouds of sediment, unsettled and frivolous beneath black canvas, metal spokes and hinges. In the gutters, newsprint flakes and congeals and names and faces dissolve into nothing, while heels grind and retreat and leave nothing but stale breath that is lost in the moment and the wind.

A weekend in Paris

Nouveau lintel, flaky pastel
Champs de-Leave-me. No not now.
Grainy. Shimmers like flash bulbs.
Streets like spidery gauze,
Monsieur are you Gallic?
Eyes cut like absinthe;
Green fairy sits, alights, flutters;
she settles like a smutty dream.
Leafy, grassy, limestone,
Rue de Whatever. Pay the Euro-Francs
for Metro-crepe-souvenirs.
Double diex Vogues, dancing, wilting,
Bullet up Eiffel lifts,
Climb Renaissance stairs.
Napoleanic nothing.
Champs de-Everything.

Writer's Block

Hand me a pen,
clutch in fist,
stroke like Nigella-
sweep and dust and mop and curl and dance,
sing for me Barcelona,
sing for me!
Oh my arm aches.
It buckles, it sags,
it warps in flagging nodules;
the pen is weighty.
Touch floor with my heel,
touch table with my wrist.
Pins and needles, numbness,
I can't feel my arm.
Left hand- not ambidextrous.
I'm stuck.
Stick in the mud,
Toad in the hole,
Camel through the needle's eye;
Writer's block.

The box and the beach.

At my writers' group this week we were iven a really interesting task to complete- There was a box on the table and it contained two objects. We didn't know what was in the box and weren't allowed to open it. We could lift it, shake it and pass it round, but never open it. We were then told to decide what was inside and write a descriptive passage about our relationship to it. It was actually very hard, but here's what I came up with-

A timely timepiece, it sits in cardboard dark, slithered with halogen lamplit roomlight sneaking in and through and dissipating. It fades. The light bends; it skews in sharp and gentle spirals and razor sheer lines. It settles or slips or doesn't exist at all. For inside that box - is there an inside? Pandora is nothing without the grand unveiling, the letting loose. The box is merely box. The inside is self-contained; a wormhole, a chink in dark and space and time. A vacuum. Empty as a whaling warehouse, a Svalbard glacial chamber- watery, lightless, darkless, shimmering, fastidious deep-down cavern. A lounge; sofas packed in crushed ice. The carpet is a pool of water, the walls clad in cold cold cardboard. The box is sealed and closed and there is something solid in its Tardis belly. A grand piano. An island. Two vases; Ming but chipped and bruised. The outside is nothing; inside is deep and vast and claustrophobic and cramped and overwhelmingly tepid. Not the ice chamber. Not the family lounge. Just a box, and, inside- who knows? I say a clock.

We then all shut our eyes. The box was opened and the items passed around though we never got to see them. They were then sealed back in the box and we wrote another piece, this time knowing vaguely what they were. Here's the second one-

The seaside is sandy at this time of year. Dry sand-blasting sand. Hot, parched by a dry-wood sun. Combustible, carbon, splintering, varnished, beaming, blooming sun. Eight-pointed. A compass. A sunflower. An angular spiderous dark white orb. Summer is unforgiving. In sunbleaches lemon-juiced fair skinned Northern European I-can't-tan-I'm-ginger boys and girls. Men play French cricket and stumble lumpishly through furrows. Anonymous women flip flop flip flop down the shoreline where the water is beige, silt whipped into clouds of micro-fossils and shards of mighty headlands, buffeted and battered to become merely the family two week holiday. They are but shades of ancient seahorses, the bones of plesiosaur, mammoth and man; an earlier man. And on grey November days (always grey, always dawn) the fishermen lost at far far sea juggle onto the rocks and pestle grind to match ancestors and cousins and the deepest furthest bedrock. The sea, voluble, liquidic, seamless- it smashes the pre-fragmenting, crumbling won't-be-long-now land. The planet is hot. The water rises. Tides are higher. We cool down the planet with freeze-pops and a Calipo or two. We save it, sunny side down.

In case you're wondering, inside the box was a conch shell and a candle-holder in the shape of a sun.

Imprisoned

This is just a short piece of descriptive writing about a woman trapped in a room in a deserted old mansion on a Scottish Island. I was plotting for a while to write a Stephen King-esque horror novel, whch may eventually come into fruition, but here's the very first bit I wrote:

Behind the thick black curtains pulled tightly across the grime-smeared glass were shutters bolted from the outside. The electric light, pulsating in low surges as it always had, hummed through the empty stillness and lit only the centre of the room. The dust-spores from the divan had settled now on the threadbare and musty rugs that slid across the misfitting boards. The fire had long since died out and the ashes in the grate skipped lightly as the wind whistled across the chimney some three floors above. A grandfather clock was silent against the wall, its face frozen with rust. The wallpaper warped with damp.

Esther’s eye was pressed to the keyhole. The door, carved from solid oak and made to withstand attempts to force its lock, had served its purpose and stood firm against her vain attempts to free herself. And beyond the door, far into the depths of the shadowy corridors, Esther saw nothing but stagnant shapes and solid furniture. She felt no air seep through the keyhole; it was outside as it was in here, cold, damp and still.

Her throat was hoarse from shouting, but she had been answered only by the same deathly hush as had blanketed the house since the door had closed several hours before. There had been no footsteps, no doors closing. The house had groaned in the Atlantic winds and shuddered as the walls were sandblasted from the beach, but there was no flesh and blood in the house beside her.

The light persistently flickered as the hours rolled by, and the roar of the sea swelled and pitched until, as the sun rose, the wind moved on, and the sea, pacified and content, slid into a placid sleep. And the light in the corridor revealed nothing more than textures and colours of the unmoving and sagging objects that delved through the carpets and fused with the floor. And Esther, her face clammy against the wrought iron lock, had slept only a few moments as she battled to watch and wait for the feet she knew would come. She knew she wasn’t alone.

A velvet chord hung from the ceiling near the fireplace and once again, as she had countless times that night, she fought with the rope, pulling heavily as the distant bell clattered in the pantry below. But there was no response. Through the hallways and drawing rooms, bedrooms and stairwells, the bell echoed, to be greeted only by a fetid hush.

She sank onto the carpet, her waterproofs clinging to her limbs and her hair matted with sweat and blood. And she lay back, her vertebrae sinking one by one onto the mildewed floor. Her lungs caught the close air around the legs of the furniture, and she finally let out the howl that had been building since she left the boat. And only now did she understand.

PublishingAs

As you can probably imagine I now sincerely want to get myself published. I've been writing for so long now that I actually want to so something with my work. The last novel I completed I submitted to twenty publishing agents and got rejections from every single one. I now realise I missed the bandwagon on that one, so I've been trying to write what I perceive to be the kind of book that's selling well at the moment; family sagas. There are whole stands in bookshops of family sagas, so I don't see why my epic tale of a Welsh family couldn't join them! ...Have to finish the book first though...

As for plays, I now have three completed plays that I would say are of good standard. The last one, Pillow Skies, I submitted to the Manchester 24/7 festival but got rejected from that, which was a bit of a kick in the teeth. The feedback they gave really undermined the whole play as well, pulling out some of its central themes and devices and saying that they didn't work... and they do... and I've had quite a few people read it now and had some excellent feedback about it... So why not the people in the know?? Grrr.

Rant over.

The Inevitable Death of Saint Derwyn

Sooo, this is the start of my current novel that I'm writing. I'm about halfway through and I'm properly stuck in. Basically, the book is about a Welsh family in the twentieth century. It spans 100 years and deals with lots of internal dramas but explores how the changing world of the twentieth century effected family, village communities and people's mentality as a whole. It's very much influenced by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and also has a few supernatural elements thrown in there too for good measure. Have a read and let me know what you think.

The Inevitable Death of Saint Derwyn:

Evan Evans had been promised to Aelwen Hughes. There was nothing written to ratify the agreement, which had never even been formally declared, but it was an unspoken understanding that had been realised over eighteen years of crawling together, playing together and eventually, discovering that innate difference between being a child and adulthood together. They had shared toys, textbooks and kisses, and their parents were more than happy with the match. Evan Evans was, after all, descended from a long line of farmers, who had tilled the land surrounding Llanderwyn since Llanderwyn had sprung up centuries before. And Aelwen Hughes was the daughter of a hard-working and assiduous labourer who had proved strong of body, mind and soul. Even the Reverend Joseph Jenkins now saw the nuptials as a mere formality.

Similarly, Aelwen’s slightly younger sister, Anwen Hughes was betrothed to Bryn Rees. The match had been made by both fathers who, having shared more than a few cups of ale in the Black Swan one cold winter when the pair were no older than ten, had reached the agreement that Bryn, the son and heir of Idris Rees’ fishing boat, would be able to provide Anwen with a comfortable and happy home. And the children didn’t protest too much, but merely blushed when they passed each other in church and smiled shyly behind hymnals and creeds.

Evan Evans was from farming stock, and Bryn from fishing, and though the two primary industries in Llanderwyn had little in common, the boys grew together knowing that one day they would be kin. And the sisters grew in beauty, shedding their childish niceties and developing bosoms and curves and smiles that Reverend Jenkins thought maybe a little too saucy. But the vicar turned a blind eye when he would see the pairs skipping up the hill in summer towards the poppy field where lovers had cavorted for centuries, and who was he to stop it now? It made him feel old to remember that one summer when Bessy Cornbrook had frolicked with him in the sand dunes at Ogmore. But it had only been one summer, and it cheered him to know that the Hughes girls would be coupled with the eldest sons of those fine families that he felt proud to call his flock, for the rest of their lives.

The Evans family had lived and bred in Llanderwyn for generation upon generation. Not one had moved away and when an Evans left home, a home was built for them if there was nowhere else to go. This was the way it had always been in Llanderwyn. And sons were farmers and daughters married labourers who worked for the farm. It was a simple business. It was just the way things were.

The Rees family had moved to Llanderwyn some hundred years before. The rumour was that the first Idris Rees, Bryn’s great-great-great-grandfather had been driven from the docks of the nearby Milford Haven for sabotaging the nets of their whaling rivals, but the Reeses had always vehemently dismissed these claims as libellous and their repetition was a strict taboo. The Rees family were eminently respectable now.

Llanderwyn itself lay at the entrance to a spit of land that jutted into the sea known as the Pengelly Peninsula. To the untrained observer, Llanderwyn contains nothing of note. It’s squat rough rendered cottages are terraced into the hillside and painted pastel pinks and blues, and the church of Saint Derwyn’s leers above the roofs like a medieval blessing on the land, it’s people and it’s trade. And for centuries generations have lived and died tending the fields and hauling in the fish from the rusting trawlers that lean over the mudflats at low tide. There is nothing ostentatious about Llanderwyn. It just is, as it always has been, a sleepy Welsh village where no-one of note has ever been or will ever go. It’s mixture of bramble jelly and fish-scales are not everyone’s cup of tea, but for the Evanses and Reeses, Llanderwyn would forever be their home.

But it is only time that can ravage the traditions that span back beyond the Normans. And while Llanderwyn had ignored the industrial insurgency that had been erupting further up the coast, it would be impossible to ignore the fact that outside the village, the rumble of motorcars shook the roads and far away, in Europe, thinkers were wanting a change. And the trouble was, Evan Evans thought too much.

Pillow Skies

This is an extract from the beginning of one of my plays called 'Pillow Skies'. It's the story of a girl who is raped whilst living on a farm in World War 2. In this passage we are introduced to the antagonists, the farmer (Llinos) and his wife (Mair). The play is performed in a very Brechtian style and the Narrator, who is omniscient and detached, speaks directly to the characters and interact with him, even though he doesn't exist.

Narrator: It was no secret that Llinos Owens beat his wife. And it was no surprise to hear that in her own secret rebellion Mair, his long suffering and outwardly patient spouse, had been cumulatively sabotaging the farm in silent hatred. She tore a whole in the chicken-wire for foxes to scramble through and every time Llinos stuffed an old shirt and trousers with hay in a vain attempt to assemble a scarecrow, within two nights the shirt would lie limp across his bird-savaged potatoes and the hay would blow across the field, skipping in the wind.

Mair would sometimes leave gates unlatched and Llinos, alert and furious, would trample around the farm night after night, not understanding why gates were always open and cattle roamed free, trampling crops and churning the ground to pot-holed mud and pea-soup puddles.

Mair: I hated him.

Narrator: And far beyond the jades of hell you hate him still.

Mair: I hate him only for his own hatred.

Narrator: And he hated you because of the way you looked him in the eye and told him that he meant nothing.

Mair: And that’s when he first hit me.

Narrator: And you hit him back.

Mair: And I miscarried his child.

Narrator: Llinos Owens was overlooked as a child. He was unimportant, showed no signs of brilliance or insanity. He played with other boys, but in secret had a china doll that he kept under a floorboard that, until the age of six, was occasionally glimpsed by his parents, but as soon as he developed a sense of guilt, Victoria was cradled by the cobwebs and the dust and never saw the light of day. He wasn’t ashamed of her, but his yearning to cherish and possess pretty things made him into a selective and snobbish magpie.

Llinos: I liked jam-jars and pencils and matchboxes and floral print tablecloth and little booties for baby girls.

Narrator: But Llinos had no desire to better his own appearance, his yearning was to covet and own. And his inanimate collection would be lined up docile, placid and unresisting and the more difficult the object to attain, the more he loved it. The more he wanted it.

Mair: I gave him no illusions that I wanted to be his wife.

Narrator: She was a pretty little thing when she was younger.

Mair: I was delicate and my cheeks flushed and my eyelashes were dainty and soft.

Llinos: She looked like a gossamer pillow made of bone china. She was a Russian doll with tiny versions of herself piled one inside the other and I wanted to expose the central tiny delicate version of the blushing white exterior. I wanted to hold it in my hand and I wanted it to be mine.

Narrator: But Mair hated Llinos.

Mair: I hate you Llinos.

Narrator: And in time Llinos hated Mair.

Llinos: I hate you Mair.

Narrator: And he no longer cared when he bruised her perfect skin and he watched as she ground down her perfect hands against the scrubbing brush and the now perfect floor. And Mair took to making jam and filling jar after jar with preserves and chutneys, which she delivered with letters filled with dreams and fantasy to loose friends and tenuous acquaintances and anyone who would reply.

Mair: I dream of sleep and death and plateaux strewn with wild horses and coelacanth peeping between broken shale and cracked earth. I dream of nothing and my husband blowing in the wind and flying across the Presellis on the back of an empty cloud. I dream there is a child and she screams from my belly and it opens up like a door.

Narrator: And never before had the farm felt such discord or suffered such pain. Pengelly Farm, nestled on the hill that would one day be blanketed with an oil refinery, was just a few miles west of Pembroke, and in the shadow of the thirties the land grew dark, and the soil turned grey and pests spread like Biblical plagues. And when the war came Mair prayed to God:

Mair: Let them call on Llinos and take him far, far away. And let them shoot him so his body is riddled with bullets and they eat him from the inside like maggots. Let him fight. Let him die. Oh Lord, let him die!

Narrator: But the call never came.

Inspirations etc

OK, so I'm gonna talk about things I've seen and read too, inspirations etc. Hopefully it won't turn into film reviews too much, but here goes.



So today I saw Angels and Demons at the cinema. While I was a big fan of the book of The Da Vinci Code, the first film kinda disappointed me and I didn't bother reading Angels and Demons. And I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by this film. It's very entertaining. It didn't offer any other surprises however, as it did exactly what it said on the tin: action, excitement, thrills, Catholics. If nothing else, Dan Brown knows how to entertain his audience. I might venture to say it was a tad formulaic, but there's nothing wrong with having a good old twist at the end. And as I was watching, I thought to myself; "In the Da Vinci Code there's a twist. There's a goody who turns out to be a baddy... I wonder if it might happen again..." and sure enough, ten minutes later: Ta dah! But still, it was a great twist, even if I did see it coming. And there was a red herring along the way too.

You see I love a good twist. Some of my favourite films are only so good because of the twist at the end: Sixth Sense, Vanilla Sky, The Usual Suspects, to name but a few. I've employed the same method in one of my books 'The Northern Initiative' but I think I made it a bit too twisty. It wasn't a particularly long novel, so adding twists all over the place was maybe a bit too much. Stick to one twist is my mantra for the future. It was an ambitious project I guess, and I took it too far. It's all written in the first person, but there's more than one narrator. Initially it was supposed to be told by two narrators who told the story from different angles, but it ended up having six narrators. It got so complicated that the only way I could make it make sense was by having people telling the story who KNEW what was going on. Admittedly, some of the narrators only narrated short passages, but maybe it was too much. Plus I had the problem of killing off two of my narrators when no-one else was watching and able to narrate, so the deaths had to occur in the first person. That was a bit of a challenge.

I shall put a couple of sections of that book up at some point; show you some of the characters etc. I enjoyed writing a conspiracy theory thriller like this, but I think it's passed it's time. Maybe a few years ago, when the Da Vinci Code was at it's peak, but not now. Which is hopefully the main reason why I got so many rejections from publishers. Oh well. My current project is hopefully what they want at the moment; I've tried to think from a publisher's point of view. What do people want to read? Fingers crossed!

Fat.

This is a monolgue I wrote for a friend. Sounds a bit Vicky Pollard...

When I were a kid it were like dead easy to be pretty. Brush me hair, put on a pretty dress. Look at me now! It’s such a fucking effort! Need new clothes, need makeup and hair-dye. Loreal Elvive, Maybelline, Clearasil by the bucket. My skin should shimmer with a youthful glow, but it don’t. Looks like a fucking cheese grater. And there’s fat on me hips. I’m subsiding like I’m forty. And me tits are barely there. Look at them! I mean seriously. Look at them. You can’t, can ya? I’ve got lumps in the wrong places and I try to make meself sick and I can’t even do that right. I just gag and bring up some Monster Munch. It would be OK if I could just suck in me tummy all day, but I can’t. I’ll have to get a corset. And a tummy tuck. And a boob job. And while I’m at it I’ll get me eyes fixed too. And me nose has a hump, can you see it? And do you not think I look a bit like a furby?

I’ve got hair everywhere! Serious like! I knew it would grow in some places, like you know, by me smooch, but I shave more than me brother. And me eyebrows are like dead bushy if I don’t tweeze. Holly Roberts tweezes her whole eyebrows off and then draws ‘em back on wi’ pencil and she always looks dead surprised. And she really likes swimming and they wash off in’t swimming pool and she don’t realise. And she’s got hairy armpits too! I saw ‘em in’t changing rooms. It were disgusting. And Jenny Phillips smells like BO and Jane Terry smells like fish. Told her she needed some Femme Fresh and she ‘it me with her gym bag.

I wanna look like Paris Hilton. Or Keira fucking Knightley, not Michelle Heaton. I know she’s lost loadsa weight, but she’s still a fat cow. I’m afraid if I don’t lose weight now me skin’ll be all stretched like those women on Extreme Makeover. Gotta eat right. Gotta eat me fruit. I’ll ‘ave an apple and a banana after me Double Decker and pack of Quavers. Had some Nice ‘n Spicy Nik Naks earlier. And the Monster Munch… I’ll cancel it out by havin’ a satsuma. Shazia says all she ever eats is fruit though and she’s dead chunky and got spots all over her face. Told her once that a Chocolate Orange don’t count. She told me to piss off. I said “Shazia, I’m just trying to ‘elp.” She told me I looked like a trollop and said I should listen to me own advice. I were like “Whatever” and she were like “bitch” and I were like “slag”. But she’s still dead fat. Maybe it’s glandular.

Bought a pair o’ jeans last week. Suck in me bum so it’s tiny. Holly Roberts wears trousers for eight year olds. She’s dead proud of it like, but she’s got the chest of an eight year old too so it don’t bother me. But everyone else has got much bigger boobs than me. They’re like a pair o’ fried eggs. And no boys look at me. Serious like. Jamie Smith, who’s like well the fittest in my year, don’t even know my name. Called me Claire. Who the fuck is Claire? If I had bigger tits I bet he’d be like clawing at me knickers and I’d be like “I’m waiting till I get married” and he’d be like “Yeah whatever” and then I’d let ‘im finger me behind the Science block and if he’s lucky give ‘im an ‘and shandy; suck it a bit. But ‘e only ‘as eyes for Danielle Marchant and she’s a right skanky ho, but ‘as enormous tits. Serious, it’s like she’s ‘avin’ two chest babies. Heard she gave ‘er dog a blow job though, so I don’t give a shit bout ‘er. Filthy bitch.

In sex education lessons they teach us we should learn to respect ourselves and others. Well look at me, ‘ow am I supposed to love this body? Mum says me skin’ll clear up when I’m twenty but this lady ‘elps out in me Maths class and she’s twenty-eight and she looks blotchy as fuck. She’s well spotty! I’m never gonna look like Paris. I can’t even drown me sorrows in booze. And now I gotta be eighteen for fags? Like ‘ow am I supposed to smoke now? Seriously? It’s like the whole bloody world is against young people; government, God. ‘Ow am I supposed to turn into ‘t well rounded individual? ‘Ow does anyone? Jus’ look at me. I look like a fuckin’ car crash.

At Prayer

This is a piece I wrote at my writers' group. The exercise was to take a member of your family and place them in a room of the house you grew up in, and then simply describe them. This is what I came up with:

Her legs are folded double beneath her, perched on the stool, the six inch bench. Her hands lie on her thighs, her palms upturned. There is a dull breeze that rattles through the window and disturbs her silence. Her lips move, but she is silent.

"Mum?" I ask from the door. "Mum?" No response. No reaction. She is still. Brown, squirrel, goldfinch, a lamb, etched on wood. She stares; ikonostatic, iconoclastic, Ikon of Assissi. Frozen and alone - but not alone. There are words on her lips, foreign words, alien words. Are they even words? Sounds and assonance and clattering consonants that she shares with only Him- a tongue that is barely heard; muttered or spoken. She will not look and I shouldn't break the silence. I turn, leave and know that I must not question this, as I haven't my whole life.

Hello! King Jem here!!!

Stupid name I know, but for now I am KING JEM. It's a bit grander than the pseudonym I swore I'd write under when I was a kid, but Cameron Tropez sounds a bit too gay, even for me. Anyway, hello, hi, I'm King Jem. I'm a 23 year old writer from deepest darkest Wales who now lives in Manchester. Currently I'm unemployed, although I prefer redundant, but at least all the free time I'm having is giving me the chance to do lots and lots of writing. But the money's gonna run out pretty soon... So if anyone knows of any jobs...? Lol.

Basically I'm going to use this blog to share some bits and pieces. On the whole I'm a playwright and novelist, but I come up with the odd random short piece now and then. Plus I'm a member of a writers' group, and the exercises we do sometimes comes up with some interesting short pieces too, so I'm gonna pop them on here too. Also some musings, diary entries of interesting stuff... Maybe even some bitching too (I'm good at bitching). Anecdotes. Yeah, basically anything I can think of. I hope it's interesting reading! Feedback is always gratefully received.

KJ xx