charles barrow's writing

The circus. Equal parts exciting and terrifying. I see this big-top appear, overnight, in the local park and I'm powerfully drawn to it, my inner child suddenly as excited as he used to be on Christmas mornings. But, grown-up me is very slightly unsettled by it. I never read a book, or saw a film wherein a circus coming to town didn't bring something sinister and wicked with it. I n the next few days, t here will be much joy, and laughter reverberating inside that big-top, but not all of us will sleep easy in our beds until it leaves town.   Photo is the author's own

Day 23 of the Couch to 5K words writing course and I'm still hanging in there. Though I have fallen two days behind, one deliberately - as in I deliberately chose to save one of the exercises for a later date. And then yesterday I was too ill to write. I had a vice-like clamp of pain around my head and couldn't have strung a sentence together if I'd tried. And the exercise was a difficult one to unpick - introduce a well known fictional character into a different well known plot, and see what ensues. My thumping brain couldn't deal with that at all, at the time, so I set that exercise aside too. Now, today, I can see the fun and challenge in it, though I'm still not up to tackling it. Not all of the exercises have been so taxing. Occasionally we get a day away from creating to recharge on someone else's creativity, by reading a book for 20 minutes. Permission to read, that's my kind of writing course. I was reading Fahrenheit 451, so chose to continue with...

I just spent an hour in my local library. I usually read novels but I went in to find a short story to read. Any short story. I want to study short story writing, good and bad. Finding time, making time, to sit in a library and read is a surprisingly hard thing to do for some reason. I could of course take books out to read at home but this exercise is about sitting in my local library and reading whichever story I pick out from the rather small selection of volumes that my local library stocks. Perhaps short stories aren't very popular amongst borrowers so the library doesn't stock many titles or, conversely, maybe they are incredibly popular and all out on loan. It's an enjoyable project. I have read a Dickensian whodunnit (Edward Marston), a pulp fiction mystery (Micky Spillane), a sci-fi classic (Ray Bradbury) and a couple of dreadful horror stories - as in horror stories that were dreadfully bad and so I will leave the authors anonymous. There have al...

I took a trip to the zoo. A friend told me it seemed a very retro thing to do, and so it was I suppose. I remember a visit to London Zoo when I was a youngster although, oddly, it's the crowds of people I recall rather than the animals. On this recent visit I was taken with the big cats, as opposed to being taken by the big cats, which is a rather different thing altogether and one which stirred another retro memory. I recently re-read some Ray Bradbury short stories, amongst them a tale called The Veldt. I won't spoil the ending if you haven't read it, but it involves some creepy kids, some far future technology and a pride of lions on the open grasslands of Africa. This story made quite an impression on my young mind that has stayed with me down the years, so it was interesting to return to it recently and discover that, while it had lost some of its power to unsettle it was still enjoyable none-the-less. And thoughts of it returned to me as I strolled around the big...