Belle's Gateway

I have varying stints of renewal from time to time, waves of ideas and way outs crashing over my cynical psyche, I figure write a blog post while I’m upbeat enough, last week was a bit of a high wall I hit: A piece of childhood was lost, a career avenue hit a dead end and I was injected with Cement!

No, I’m not an Anti-Vaxxer but you don’t expect a proverbial CAT truck to hit you the day after. Provisions must be made if it becomes an immunisation shot, especially for children, it’s no walk in the park! Anyhoo, glad to do my part and bear witness to the mobilisation of Good, complete with directional stickers, tent cubicles and congratulatory mini-chocolates!

This age is scary at no mistake, this is where Muse puts her armour on and sets us to work, in poetry and song. Protest via social media and art – Dear Writers of today, we are the archivists of tomorrow – Whatever we write about from this moment on will have a conscious or unconscious connotation of these present events. Those reading False Providence in the future WILL see Donald J.Trump in President Craven, then again others might see Jair Bolsonaro or Narendra Modi or Janos Ader – Hell, I don’t even know where British Democracy is now or where it’s even going…

My brief sense of renewal may bring a new path ahead, another branch of the arts: Photography – again, another method of recording current events through the muses. I hope it works, I’m running out of ideas and a milestone birthday is on the horizon. We are what we do and what we fight for and against.

There are many weapons for many a battle, the sword, the gun Yes but also the Pen, the Guitar, the Camera, the Canvass. Muse makes use of us all, we feel useless until she says otherwise until that Eureka moment that unfortunately, not many get. My Resistance membership came from a young age, before it was a trend, before 2017, authority let me down seven ways to Sunday and Twelve months to Christmas. I don’t do well with it, I don’t trust it – But don’t you worry none I’m civility itself! Lol

Dear writers and artists, the fellowship of Muse, we are entering choppy waters. We are witnesses to this story, our records may inspire some and may warn others. Heart Of Darkness was based on a true genocidal Frenchman, To Kill a Mockingbird could easily define any decade in The South these days. Bear witness and open that laptop/art studio…

We have work to do.

Let’s face it fellows scribes, this isn’t plan B, this is the last name on the school register, the highest number in the line, the last plane out. Some of us may have the fortune of knowing what to be from the get-go, like a costume you always wore in Kindergarten, the books you like to read about. Then there’s the transitional folk; the journos to Novelists, sketch artists to illustrators, snappers to professional Photographers. These special, wondrous few have a Fate’s skipping rope, jumping over obstacle over obstacle with unfathomable ease, we all know one or two. I know somebody who was a Jeweller courier, A nursery Nursery and a R.N all before her 35th Birthday! Some Fates are just written in Cursive

Others are done with jagged edges, clotting ink and an unsteady hand, survival instinct is not always about facing Death but the absolute worst of life’s uncertainties – You’re on a precipice and while some may look at the majesty of the view, others might see vast emptiness and solitude. In a personal level I was handed a curveball this week, one I should have anticipated but didn’t. I felt my share of despair before cracking on to find Plan HIJKLMNOP, nobody wants to know how Labyrinthine an Artist’s life really is. After all, would you want to spend your days proverbial wandering in Hampton Court Maze?? Of course you don’t!!

And So the secret is kept for a manuscript or two, by the third try you begin to get suspect and by Story Number 5. You’re wanting to claw your way out but as with all mazes the only way is forward, so forward you go.

Desperation in the Artist is not like the average desperation oh, no, no we are a whiteboard of ideas and way outs. It’s probably the most harmless mania there is, one minute you have a poetry bundle, the next you’re writing songs and applying with a Artist name not that similar to Enya.

You try out contests in photography thinking maybe you can win because to have a good eye despite never being near a red lightbulb in your entire life. The drive to succeed distracts the despair but only just because you can’t be still even for a moment, because the reality monster is hungry so by all means, run, run until you can’t run anymore

Even then, keep running because my fellow scribes, running is all we have left to do

I’m having an odd time of it, due to a saga of intended violence a few years back I am transformed. A layer of myself was stripped away from me, I didn’t notice at first, nobody does really. But a funny thing happened that made quite the revelation, not all phobias are straightforwardly arachnid. Mine was the telephone – Yes, it’s real – It came about in a horrendous work experience in my teens, even before that I hated it! Hated making queries, hated talking to friends as I was no Joey Potter.

Anyhoo this wretched, knee-capping phobia disappeared overnight! I’m as awestruck as I am baffled, takeout, bank queries, they’re all a piece of cake now!! But a frequent downside occurs – I have become stupendously blunt, I was making a recruitment query and I told them in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t deliver what they needed, no fluff, no meandering just…Ipso facto -I have yet to get a reply from them!

BUT…WHAT IF IT AFFECTS THE WRITING??

My thousand-Odd year old hometown is both the cradle of industry and cynicism. It’s quite amusing how cynical Londoners are, that has turned up a notch too and I fear it may influence my writing eventually. God forbid I become so cynical as to invent a Becky Sharp or Tess Durbeyfield. Is there a beauty to both? Yes. Does reality knock you for six in the end? Of course it does!

Scribes must maintain the balance and bet how far down the rabbit hole the reader will follow you. Frankenstein is a warning against Man’s vanity, Dracula has the most surprising allegories. The Chronicles of Narnia is consumed with a man’s Faith before being destroyed by a man’s grief.

Writers must always ask that question, how far is too far? When our reality goes so very wrong it can act as a spilled ink well, blotting our most precious plans to escape it. We must maintain this balance and watch the wall between the world we have and the world we build to cope with it, otherwise they’ll be no point in writing them at all

I can’t imagine a more time-consuming, thankless gambit in The Arts than The Writer, especially The Writer That Never Makes It. Sometimes I wish Muse never found me in that way, like most I wish the chance encounter was a more bankable one. It was, once upon a time, the writer’s bread and butter was made via niche magazines and freelancing columns, for some reason a bad assumption formed somewhere….

The damaging assumption of writers is that journalism is your way in, your only way in. The assumption gets worse as Americana has invented the idea of the High School Paper and how that’s the go to for starting out NEWSFLASH: Not every country has that, we’re barely out of ‘Children are meant to be seen not heard’ phase! Now suddenly you expect a profession from a new born platform???

This is obviously not about the present but back when the internet was small and media wasn’t yet social. We live in a meritocracy and that’s a very hard world for a writer to dwell in, the things we do are not put in a Resume; either we make it or we don’t. Nobody knows of the many times Louisa May Alcott tried to be a Gothic Writer, we just know about Little Women. We’ll never know how many names two sisters made up before Currer and Ellis Bell, we just know Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

We need to get beyond accomplishments being the only mark of existence, writers and artists live beyond the grid and have always done. We need to be let in from the cold and for someone to say the struggle is real, we’re of a vagabond, unreliable trade but one where the entertainment industry is sourced. There just needs to be more Keys to the Kingdom and a world beyond the Lock chain Resume

I stumbled across my poetry collection, a following up to The Shrinking Violet Verses… I thought they remained stashed away from being published because of funds or my indecision of finding a nice Owl cover. Upon reading them again I remembered why I left it alone, they each come from a very dark place.

A harsh place, cold and pitch-black, in fact there’s a poem of such savage, vengeful intent that I may not voice of aloud for fear of sending soon some seven thousand miles away – It would be deserved but that’s hardly the point.

When people think of Muse they think of Either the rock band or the renaissance, the Fifty-odd year Vanity project of man, where Michelangelo and Shakespeare made it the Age of Wonder instead of the Age of really was – Conquest. And as beautiful as he made a Midsummer, he also made a Scottish tyrant quite mad.

I watched Titus as a dumbstruck teenager, by the end I wondered how troubled Shakespeare was to write such carnage, begging the question: Where does it stop, how do you pull yourself back from despair in a soliloquy? Sure some despair are transformed into butterflies – Bram Stoker’s fear brought about Dracula, John Keats ‘ sorrow brought about To Sleep.

But then there’s the Virginia Woolfs, the Sylvia Plaiths, Thom Hardy and it’s this watermark where a writer must pull up and out from. I’m sure I’ll publish then eventually, people might mistake it for a Book of Shadows that rhymes! And if spoken to the person who started it all? Who knows what would happen!!

Every single story has a silver of truth, every single one, Macbeth is supposedly based on a real King, Montecchi and the Cappeletti was a real blood feud in Cremona, Italy. Muse takes us to dark places or she cultivates the darkness already there, it’s up to the writer to get out of the water before the shark gets us – That story by the way, is also true!.

Yes, I’ll publish the poems, I may even make a little poetry corner here and I may even narrate them some day. Just to wonder if an old Southern Crone, turns into a toad or gets struck by lightning, again with muse this dark? There’s just no way to tell….

However great the phenomenon of reading parties and Author Table Concerts of J.K Rowling were, she did us a disservice – She made it look easy to the outside world. Yes, she was struggling but she has a career as some writers do, the old stereotype of writing being the profession of rich retirees has hardly waned. But what about the rest of us?

Muse has been known to drop the ball on several occasions, Van Gogh was not present when the world saw his work, our most beloved and Brilliant Jane Austen sacrificed a great deal to be as esteemed as she is. Thomas Hardy was likely bipolar and was victimized by a world needing a happy ending. If they didn’t occur in his life how was he expected to write them??

The new Standards set by pop culture means you’re only a writer if you make it, not only make it but produce the film adaptation and agree on merchandising!! Anne Rice made her debut novel in 1976, the Rembrandt -like Film Adaptation took Twenty-Eight years!!? I don’t wanna wait twenty-eight years for validation via pop culture!

And yet most of us are not even that lucky, most of us are no different than children writing in the sand, then watch as the tide washes our words away. In the Era of Self -Publishing, vagabond writers like myself thought it would be easier, it’s not. For the wet Sand was replaced by cold cyberspace, where your overlooked, neglected, little book is one among millions – Like a Scholarly Milky Way.

The older you get the harder it is to convince yourself your novels will find the light of day. It’s even harder when it’s all you’ve ever really done as all your other crazy ideas to wrangle a profession have failed. Yet for some reason, nature gave writers the most perseverence because I doubt any other creative line of work is this thankless and unrewarding

And yet at the same time we have our own reward, we have characters and story arcs that nobody else has. If we’re lucky enough we’ve made worlds and there’s design capabilities that help you realise those worlds. The reward most writers settle for is the idea that these stories will be our only will and testament of being here, of trying. And maybe some day…it’ll be seen. After sixteen years of trying that’s all I really want…That’s all any of us want.

The dawn of the internet was Panoramic, unfathomable and over the years it has chipped away certain mysteries and conundrums. It’s a microscope to all that was previously unseen and roughly guessed about, certain things were out of your hands; fame, research information, the publishing world itself!

Back in the day some infamous publishing houses were impenetrable, fortresses and distant islands only seen by those who were invited: agents and their best book sellers. Us mere mortals and vagabonds would sigh and carry on writing in our own quiet unseen world.

Then the internet came in the shape of a boxed man walking from one side of the screen to the other, a computer byte key-turning ceremony. We didn’t know it then but a curtain came up and a show began and the show is still running…

Introverts found it a God Send; emails, making queries and all without going out, out! But then came social media, the extrovert’s favourite toy with Friends Reunited and Tumblr and Facebook as an infant. Writers are lone wolves by default, suddenly we had to publish ourselves, agent ourselves, PR OURSELVES.

And suddenly just like that we’re in nursery (kindergarten), hanging on to our mother’s calf for dear life cos:

‘We don’t know anybody’

‘We wanna go home, we don’t like it , waaaaaaah!!!

My point and my question is, can a Lone Wolf remain a lone wolf in these cyber forests? Are they allowed to be in these times of connection? Is it okay to be abysmal at connection? It’s still a new and important ingredient to the writing recipe, to engage and gather an audience for your grand ship, Author

Is it a necessity for the writer as a lone wolf to find a pack and be a lone wolf no longer??

I am so not the computer whizz I used to be, sure we’ve all adapted quickly from the cranky keyboard of the AOL server that took forever and a day. But those days of the mouse finding the tools you need are long gone…

I’m more miffed that melancholic, I’m sure even with my poor sight I will get a Apple Watch one day. Those superfluous buys they mean I made it somewhere, it’s quite the Meritocracy these days and I can’t imagine anything worse to us Vagabond writers

Authorship hasn’t sailed smoothly for many years, I’d find myself very jealous when Winona Ryder’s Louisa May Alcott came home where her humble little royalty check was waiting for her. Now freelancers run the gauntlet over networking and fads, I watched an entire fiction genre be destroyed by a character that saw sweat beads as diamonds!! It was a beloved genre both rich and old and mysterious, now nothing more that a Graduation tie on an immortal’s wall!

But we never despair for literature and film reinvents itself again and again, we just wish there was more to our creed than either succeeding or failing a fad. We’re not like soccer stars and actors, our triumphs are not obvious and marked by a new film or play or contract or goal. Our triumph is marked by somebody else helping us to be triumphant by a book deal and that’s it. Our moment in the sun begins by a letter, ONE LETTER of acceptance, until then we chug out stories because sometimes it’s all we know what to do…

LIGHTNING FAST FADS

Apparently the subject I’m writing is already unfashionable? Well isn’t that nice of Pop Culture to say? ‘Sorry, as relevant as this is it just doesn’t have enough Chanel in it!’

How very charming!

People wouldn’t believe I finished my Vampire novel around the same time one came and demolished it all? Well I did but dystopia is much more fun! I got to build a world at last with borders and funky names and such.

I came by the idea of False Providence while being an unwelcome alien in Trumpland and yes it was as crazy as people say, especially for the Foreigner.
Questions arose that did not come before, I found that sometimes my manuscript would turn into a crystal ball. So much so that I would have to put it down from time to time!

I’m the daughter of divorce who found herself married – Irony loves a joke – my life is the sun of 3 countries: America, Ireland and the U.K.

Was an Army Wife, now the wife of a Veteran and the reason I could write such a novel. Among the other ideas I really need to finish –

You’ll like them, I promise