charles barrow's writing

It's autumn, and leaves are on the turn. I took this photo of an Acer (I think) in my favourite park. It's definitely responding to the shorter daylight hours and cooler temperatures and is on the turn, changing into its autumn apparel. As the tree withdraws the supply of chlorophyll from the leaves, the green colouring that that chemical provides slowly recedes, and it happens by degrees along the length of a branch. So, the leaves on the outer tips of the branches can be the bright red seen in the photo, while the next set of leaves further up the branch can be part red, part green, and the leaves closest to the trunk retain, for the moment, their bright green colouring. This is Autumn arriving slowly; leaves turning by degrees. This coming Sunday, the last in October, here in the UK, we'll turn the clocks back by one hour. Always an adventure in time, and space, when this happens. The change officially marks the end of British Summertime, and the beginning of winter, at ...

More than a week of January has passed already. It's usually such a long (seeming) month that it's a blessing that a quarter of it has passed before I really noticed. The weather has been continually wet since the new year began, and I've been feeling rather under par since Christmas, so what outdoor exercise I've managed to get between showers has been welcome but short lived. I have, however, very much enjoyed catching many signs of an emerging spring - emerald spears of the early daffodil, crocus and snowdrop. Songbirds singing to ward off trespassers in their territory, and nest building. Buds on the hydrangea. All of these things help to lift my spirits. My mental health has not been good recently, so I've actively been thinking about what does bring me joy, and what brings the dark clouds into my life. I'm making lists. It's difficult to find any consistency when it comes to self care, it has to be worked at. And life has a tendency to poke a stick in ...

Some five years ago I blogged on here about a stressful time at work and how it was impacting my creative process, and my writing habit. Reading over that blog post this morning I easily remember the anxiety of that period, and how it bled into every area of my life. Anxiety and stress are like poisons that seep through the blood, affecting every part of the body, as well as the brain. The solution I found, back then, for my inability to write anything, was an eight minute daily exercise. I'd sit down each day and write for eight minutes. It would seem that hardly anything could be achieved in such a short amount of time, and if a daily word-count is all important then that might be true,  but beyond the matter of a word tally was the not inconsequential matter of confidence regained. Over time, an eight minute a day habit worked wonders for that. And I also found that those manageable eight minutes could easily stretch into ten, fifteen, twenty, often without any effort ...

 Pleased to share the news that I had a drabble published yesterday at 101words.org Do please have a read, and leave a comment, or Tweet, or share. Many thanks. 'Pain lances through her chest, stealing her breath. Foolish to be exerting herself like this, but damn the doctor’s orders.'  Read More Here

Time for some good news.  I've had a (very) short story accepted for publication by 101words.org I've mentioned before that I've been focussing on writing drabbles recently. These are 100 word stories, that I find challenging but fun to write. I visit them everyday, and tinker around (add a word here, cut a word there), and I find this a really good way for me to keep writing when I'm not really in the right place to focus on my main work in progress. Earlier this year I had a drabble finished and polished, and I sent it out to a website that was running a competition, I was so pleased with myself for actually sending it out, and literally the day after I sent it the site crashed. It completely disappeared from the internet, and has never returned. Sigh. I took that as a sign that maybe the story wasn't great, I mean, it literally blew up a website. So I filed that story and started another, and found another site that accepted submissions. This one is the above men...

Thirty years ago, or so, I wrote a romcom. It was a gay romcom, set in a karaoke bar, called Dolly Would. It was a musical gay romcom, all the characters sang country songs, when they fell in love, or when their man done them wrong, and broke their heart (which happened a lot). I wrote is as a film script originally, it morphed out of another script about rent boys and working girls in Brighton. That script, Fairy Tale, had a producer attached for a while, but the deal fell through, and I lost my way with it, put it a drawer for a few years and forgot about it... until I fetched it out and re-worked it into that county+western themed love story. Eventually, as in years later, it got re-written again, this time as a novel. It changed a lot in the transition, but I always felt that it lost more than it gained, so I put it back into that drawer, where it remains; the drawer where many of my favourite stories go to die. I mention it here because I made a momentous decision about it this we...

I've lost my way a little recently, with my writing I mean. I finished my last writing project, John Mann - At Day's End, and published it over 18 months ago, and I've struggled to find a project to focus on since then. I've had plenty of story ideas, and that's probably the problem, I've had too many ideas. It seems like a good problem to have in many ways, too many ideas, but a problem is a problem no matter how it presents itself. I've followed each of those ideas for a distance, a period of time, be it a matter of hours, days or weeks. I've outlined the whole story of one, written a couple of chapters of another, noted detailed dialogue from a scene for a different one altogether. I'm a bit like a dog whose attention keeps getting sidetracked from the stick, to a scent, to a butterfly, to the ball. I focus intently, for a time, and then something else catches my attention and I move on. Is this a personality disorder, a form of writer's block...

I'd been giving myself a lot of grief lately, because I'd not been working on my current writing project (WIP = work in progress). I just couldn't settle down to it. The weird conundrum of lockdown is that I suddenly have acres of spare time but no drive or energy to do anything much with it. And that time has been passing, those days have been racking up into months, and my WIP hasn't gotten any fatter (unlike yours truly). But, what I'd been forgetting is that I have been working on drabbles, in a different notebook, all this time. Everyday, in fact, I work on the latest, like some people might work on the daily crossword. I do think of them as a form of puzzle to be solved...'write a story, in exactly 100 words.' They are tricky things to get right, using the exact right words (as I've said here before) and I enjoy the challenge. Anyway, what I've only just realised is that these ultra short stories I've been working on are directly related to...

I took this picture 15 years ago. I was walking home from work, along my usual route, and I saw this piece of graffiti, which had appeared overnight, and it stopped me in my tracks. I remember it made me feel uncomfortable to linger in front of it, I felt like a voyeur witnessing the miserable end of someone's relationship, and I felt very guilty taking this photo and freeze framing their pain and despair. It is such a personal message to Theresa from the wo/man who wrote it and yet it's been very publicly declared. All these years later this kind of thing would pop up in someone's Twitter feed, but back then graffiti was about the only option for posting a message to reach an audience. Although the graffiti appeared on a wall only two minutes away from where I lived at the time, I had no idea who the people involved were. I have to assume that Theresa lived nearby and would walk past this wall on a regular basis, perhaps this is even the wall of her house, otherwise what...

I'm re-reading books 1, 2 and 3, and giving them a buff and a polish: a comma here, a carriage return there, a shiny new adjective dropped into a sentence. No major changes, then, just a few tweaks. All of this is in preparation for them being uploaded to Amazon, to make them available on Kindle. I have had qualms about doing this, but I have to concede that Amazon is the largest shop window in the world, and if I want to find a wide audience for my writing, for my stories, then they need to sit on a shelf in their store. I don't think I can afford to have moralistic qualms when I'm an unknown writer looking for readers. I've given myself thirty days to get my reading and editing done, and to get the books uploaded and launched.

I'm sticking with the Couch to C5K challenge. Today's exercise was interesting. On previous days a topic has been set, but today I had to write to my own tune. I had to get down the scene that has been running around in my head for days, if not weeks. I had to make a start on my own story. Which was a canny idea of Writer's HQ, who are running the course. For 5 days I've been working hard, stretching my brain, sweating to complete the challenges that they've set, on topics they've chosen, and this all made making a start on my own work so much less daunting. No worrying beforehand, no finding excuses, no running errands instead of sitting down in front of a blank page, which I might have been tempted to do in the past. I got straight down to it and wrote a couple of hundred words, in the time allowance. And in so doing, I've set the scene, got it underway, so that I can return to it, pick it up, later.

I signed up to Writer's HQ February writing challenge - Couch to C5K. Everyday they are going to email me inspiration, encouragement, and a task. In response, I write my arse off. Hopefully, by the end of the month, by completing the challenges (or assignments) I will have formed a strong idea of the next story I want to write, and even produced some pages. I felt really smug this morning when I completed the first challenge; a ten minute exercise, not too onerous, I know. I Tweeted about my accomplishment, and then I posted about it on FaceBook. And then I checked my February calendar... I have four free days in the whole month ahead. Four! This is going to be a challenge of Herculean proportions, I now realise. Finding the time, making the time. I could steal ten minutes from my morning routine before I set out to work. I could find ten minutes each evening while the dinner is cooking. This is going to be more of a challenge than I bargained for.

John Mann - At Day's End will be available to download very soon, as soon as I upload it to Smashwords in fact. It's the third, and final, book in the John Mann trilogy. And it needs a cover, of course, and working on it provided me with an opportunity to revamp the covers on books 1 and 2. This is their first public outing.  I'm almost happy with them. I think I'm too close to be objective so I'll live with them here for a few days to see if they still sing to me at the weekend. They may, of course, have started to nag and shout by then, but either way I'll have my answer. Photos are the author's own

I've hit a real hitch. My latest story is written and is being edited now (self edited - yes I own a fine toothed comb). I've been feeling good about the whole enterprise when, boom, out of nowhere I see a book cover that torpedoes my heart. It's the book's title that actually poses a problem for me. It name checks its main character in the title, an uncommon name which, unbelieveably, I've also given to a main character in my story. W.T.F? I'd not seen this book before, so it is a complete coincidence. I might have thought 'Ah well, whatever.' and still gone with the name if the book in question had been a little backwater publication, but it isn't. It's had great reviews, I notice, and some prominent publicity - which makes it all the more weird that I'd not seen it in bookshops or online thus far. Anyway, the upshot is that I have to find a new perfect name. A difficult, fraught, exasperating process which you'll know all about if you...

Who was it said that genius is 99% perspiration? Einstein? I should probably Google that. I don't think it was him, although he'd know better than anyone. I've recently read that Woody Allen reckons that 80% of success is just turning up. He turns up a lot in my local multiplex so I'm happy that he knows what he's talking about too. These are both high percentages but then sometimes the stakes in success are high. I've been turning up a lot at my writing desk recently. My day job work pattern has changed and I have much more time to devote to writing, and I'm putting in the hours. I'm showing up, I'm perspiring (but I'm still no genius).

I'm keen to put John Mann to bed. If you've read either of my published stories then you'll understand that sentence on more than one level. What I'm saying is that I'm impatient to finish this last John Mann story. I want it finished so I can move on to writing other stories. It's been a great experience, one big, long learning experience. And it will, for me, have been a big achievement. A trilogy of self-published stories? I'll be very proud to admit to that. But I've been thinking about what I'll do afterwards. I want to avoid resting on my laurels (whatever they are) for too long, because that period of 'afterwards' could easily stretch from weeks into months or even (whisper it) years of resting, doing nothing. Any hot irons (whatever they are) will be colder than a very long-dead thing. So I've been making plans, sketchy plans, but plans nontheless for more John Mann stories, short stories, follow-up stories, linked stories, preque...

I Tweeted this earlier, 'Turned up at the empty page and filled six. Happy day. #amwriting' I've begun writing Book 3 and it's going well. I have seven chapters under my belt, although my chapters tend to be shorter affairs than most. I'm happy. I'd been circling my opening scene like you might circle something small, furry and unmoving on the pavement, unsure wether to prod it to see if there is any life in it or to assume it is dead and walk on. In my head I couldn't find the voice of a new character I've introduced. When I finally sat down to write the scene, assuming I'd have to leave blank spaces where I hoped to bring him to life later, he arrived fully formed. Hal Scarrot, teenage, street-smart thief. He'll need work, of course he will, but he's joined the cast now and I'm pleased to have him. Some author, and I'm annoyed that I've forgotten who, said that if you want to be a writer you just have to turn up at the emp...