Tomorrow

How many times have we said to ourselves that we must write a letter to so-and-so.

Perhaps it is to be a thank you note or just a letter to say that we are still alive and hope that they, too, are alive and well.

But we do not. At the last minute we are unsure of what to write so we put it off. Tomorrow is a better day for writing such letters.

Then it never gets written. Perhaps our friend dies and we are riddled with personal torment.

“Oh, how I wish that I had written while they were still alive. There are so many things that I wanted to tell them but now it is too late. They are gone,” our guilt laden conscience will tell us.

Procrastination is, we are often told, the thief of time.

It is also the thief of our well-being; it is the root of our dissatisfaction with ourselves.

We constantly put off things until a later time knowing, in our hearts, that they will never be done.

It may not be a letter; it might be a personal visit or making something for somebody.

“I’ll do that for you—promise,” you might say.

A promise broken.

It may not mean much to you but for the intended recipient it might mean so very much.

There will be times when the possibility of doing something that we need to do is removed from our ability to carry it out by an external occurrence. An accident or sudden large bill; maybe an illness in the family.

How do we explain to the person to whom we made the promise that it is not to be? Any excuse, or reason, will sound hollow. We are backing out.

Disappointment.

Failure. Our own.

So it is with writing a story.

We all have stories in our heads. We promise ourselves that we will write them down. The ideas are bursting inside our heads, the epiphany has bloomed, our pens are poised ready to strike.

The first words elude us.

How to start?

Never mind. Write the second part. We can come back to the first part later.

It’s that first sentence. We cannot write it.

Giving up smoking? Same thing. We promise ourselves that we will stop. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow is a good day to stop smoking. We just cannot quite justify doing it today.

Justifying another cigarette is easy; it is the same with any addiction.

The trick is to give up the first cigarette of the day.

I went from three packs a day to zero overnight. Now? I have no desire to smoke at all. Sixty a day for hundreds of years to nothing. No problem.

Now I am addicted to this machine. I am addicted to forming words into sentences into chapters into stories.

It is just writing letters that is the problem.

Perhaps tomorrow...

Doors

There is, of course, a door that we shall all, ultimately, step through. Some of us are a lot closer to it, statistically, than others; it is a door through which no person has ever stepped back through with a message of encouragement—or despair.

I speak of the final door.

Death.

I understand completely the desire of people to know what is beyond that door but it is not for us to know.

Sometimes that yearning for post-mortal knowledge is so strong that it leads us to fantasise to the point of belief; to the point of seeing and knowing what it is that lies beyond.

We see ghosts. We visit clairvoyants who tell us, with sincere expressions, that our loved ones are not only here, in this very room, with us but that they bear messages.

The spirits pass us messages of hope, of beauty and peace. They never tell us anything useful.

We have never, for example, received the end to an unfinished symphony; Einstein has never appeared to a spiritualist and revealed the true secrets of the Universe; Uncle Harry has never told his lamenting family where the money is hidden.

We have all kinds of religions believing in all kinds of things.

Those that understand Reincarnation as the truth of all life on Earth know that failure to observe the morals of this life will result in a poor karma in the next life—perhaps returning as something barely alive. A slime mould, perhaps.

Most mainstream religions focus on ‘good’ and ‘evil’.

‘Good’ is rewarded with a sumptuous eternity and ‘bad’ is punished with hell fire. It is usually fire.

Atheists believe that there is nothing. No afterlife. Death is a cessation of existence. The ignition is turned off, the system powers down and goes to nothing. No thought. No ‘I told you so’! That last bit must be the toughest part.

None of us, irrespective of our belief system, seem to fear death unless we have been particularly bad and suspect that the fire pit is our destination.

Death is another state of ‘being’ or a state of non-existence that holds little fear.

The problem, as I see it, is that we all fear the process of transit into that state.

We fear dying.

How nice if we could guarantee a pleasant drifting off into sleep to never awaken. No pain, no suffering, no anguish.

Once you get old there is always a thought that the chest pain you are getting, especially in those small hours, is not wind but something more serious. Is this it? You ask yourself, fear chilling and damping the skin. You are aware that, one night, it will be “that moment”.

We were told, by the doctors, that my Mother was going to die fairly soon and that we should prepare ourselves for that eventuality. We thought we had. But when the moment arrived that there was no pulse we were not prepared; we were not ready.

So it is on a personal level.

You prepare, you know it is imminent but that terror still lurks in the corner of your failing heart.

Some years ago a student asked me a question in response to my statement that a neighbour had just had his 106^th birthday.

“Who,” he asked, “Would possibly want to be 106?”

“Someone who is 105, I expect,” I replied.

Stay in the Light

“Welcome to the dark side...”

We all know what that means. Even if we have never seen ‘Star Wars’ we recognise the inference in those words.

The word ‘dark’ is commensurate with the unknown and things that are unknown are things to be feared.

Hundreds of thousands of year’s worth of honing the survival instinct has led to us developing, if not a fear, a distrust of the dark.

Light is good; dark is bad.

As a young lad I was happy to wander around the neighbourhood in the dark. The night was like a protective blanket wrapped around me. The reasoning was that if I could see nothing then a potential threat would be, equally, unable to see me.

I am still comfortable in darkness. Of course, there is now the knowledge that there are things out there in the dark that have different senses than do I. There are things with different tastes, different visual ranges and things with acute hearing.

Ghosts? Ghosts, if they exist, are intangible. If we cannot touch them then they cannot touch us.

Darkness, for us human beings, is unknown. It is the fear of the unknown that constrains us in our day-to-day lives.

How often have we shied away from a possible adventure or course of positive action because we fear that unknown?

Some years ago there was a list passed around informing us that a new base of operations was opening up in a desirable part of the country. The list was originated in a place that was complained about. The majority of people there said that it was a dreadful place to be and how wonderful it would be if only they could relocate elsewhere.

The list was where people could append their names in order to volunteer to go to this new place.

A year later there was news that the new place was to open imminently. All those, and there were very many of them, who had volunteered to go to the new place could now confirm their wish to relocate; they could then be selected for a move.

There was, instantly, rending of sack-cloth and pouring of ashes.

Oh, how desirable it would be to go to this new place if only...

The excuses tumbled out. The wife has a good job here, the children have exams...

The dawn of a fresh start in the new place was glowing bright on the Eastern horizon and fear set into their hearts.  Hard, cold and brittle fear. The volunteers, so ardently desirous in the initial stages, were now faced with a door in their lives. To go through that door meant facing the unknown, a place of darkness.

Placing a hand on the handle of that door was a step too far; retractions came thick and fast.

We are all of that ilk. Every one of us dislikes something new. Opening that door to a new opportunity is just too much—far better to stay where we are, where it is safe, where we know our surroundings.

Familiarity is comfort, safe.

What if we open that door and see... darkness?

Chickens and Eggs

Green.

Chicken and egg.

The thing here is that green is the most comfortable colour for the human eye.

Now consider.

Leaves are green. Hundreds, possibly thousands, of shades of green.

It may be that green is also comfortable to animal’s and bird’s eyes, too; those that can see colour, that is. Their feelings on this matter are unknown to us given that we are told that animals understand every word we say (irrespective of the language used) but we do not, as yet, understand ‘woof!’

The fact of this matter is that the green in leaves is the colour of the chlorophyll within the leaves. It is this chlorophyll that enables the leaves to convert sunlight into something, chemically, usable to the plant.

Plants, like us, are living, breathing entities. They may well not be ‘sentient’ but they are alive in some form as opposed to, say, rocks. Rocks, in spite of what you may have seen on ‘Galaxy Quest’ are not alive.

Plants get their light from the sun. They are the root of all living things on the planet. Dead plants give us fossil fuel—along, no doubt, with a few dinosaur carcasses.

The bulk of the light coming from the sun is green and yellow.

Do we see an anomaly here?

Plants strive and struggle to get into the light and yet they reject the largest part of the light streaming down from the sun.

Why are plants not red or blue so that they use the green and yellow bounty from the sun.

Chicken and egg, you see.

Is ‘green’ comfortable to our eyes because leaves are green or are leaves green to make their colour comfortable to us?

How does Darwin fit that into his theories?

And then there’s life itself. Chickens and eggs.

At some point in the development of a chick inside an egg a spark lights up the process and the chick becomes alive.

We mammals have an umbilical cord that connects us with Mum pre-birth. Perhaps that should be ‘antenatal’ but I am not South African.

Living things (that ‘walk’ about the planet) all process food into energy that is combined with oxygen. This burning process drives our muscles so that our hearts beat and our lungs, if we have them, suck in air to provide the oxygen we need for the process.

It is that energy that enables us to feel surfaces, temperatures, emotion; taste food; smell flowers and to see and hear the world about us. A world that exists only within our own heads.

We are highly complex biological machines. Heat cycle machines that need fuel and oxygen to drive us, to keep us moving, thinking, feeling.

Where does the ‘spark’ come from that ignites this life? At what point is the ignition switch turned and we ‘power up’?

Maybe we get a kick from Mum along the cord.

Eggs?

One huge single-cell with one sperm cell in it starts reproducing. How? What tells it to do this? Where does it start? How does it start?

We don’t know.

Speaking of chickens and eggs there is another mystery that nobody has yet been able to solve for me.

It is this:

Some days, if you look up, you might see rooks nesting. At the top of trees. It is usually windy at the tops of trees.

In the hedgerows you will see smaller birds nesting. Breezes blow through even this sheltered environment.

Some birds are smart because they nest in holes. Holes in trees or cliffs or rocks. Perhaps they dig out these holes themselves but, sometimes, they will use any hole that appears in front of them.

Cuckoos are really smart. They neither build nests or feed their young. They leave all that up to others. Rather like having a maid.

Let’s go back to the nests.

How do they get that first stick, twig or piece of grass to stay there until they can get back with another piece?

Well?

Education - or Lack Of

Over very many years of involvement in training people in the intricacies of aircraft systems, and theoretical subjects associated with those systems, there have been hundreds of students pass by under my gaze.

My vantage point at the chalkboard or screen enables a great view of the general apathy out there.

There are some, a few, students who are attentive for most of the time and then there are those students who are ‘with you’ for some of the time. For every class there will be the odd one or two whose eyelids will droop almost instantly upon sitting down.

We are, are we not, inclined to blame them? Call them, perhaps, lazy and inattentive.

For many people it is not their fault. They are victims of subjective fatigue that has been driven into them in the same way that Pavlov’s dogs were trained to salivate at the sound of a dinner bell.

The fault lies with the system under which we are schooled from an early age.

Our parents were so happy when we spoke our first word. Perhaps there was some jealousy involved if the first word was the name of the other parent. Then we teetered on our trembling legs for a first step.

Joy.

“Our baby has been walking for three months now,” spoke the proud parent to the uncaring listener.

“No wonder he looks exhausted,” replies uncaring listener.

The thing here is that once we are past those first achievements we are encouraged to sit down, shut up and listen.

Scholastic achievements are often the product of learning, ‘parrot fashion’, a list of facts with nothing to back them up; nothing interesting to fatten the pot of knowledge.

In my formative years I was accustomed to wandering around hedgerows, along riverbanks and beaches and then going home to read. Anything. Mostly about plants, birds, fish, animals and stars.

Stars were fascinating.

The point, for me, was that the knowledge I acquired from the books could be verified by finding the objects in the pages in the hedgerows and trees and were, very often, part of the hedgerows and the trees themselves.

Fattening the pot of knowledge. Seeing, touching, smelling – all five senses could be brought to play in the search for information.

Education is not the same as learning or intellect. There are some great minds out there who have not had the chance to be educated and neither have they had the food with which to fatten their information base.

Equally, there are those who have intellect but no will to learn because they have had the desire to increase their information level squeezed out of them from an early age.

Dry facts on a repetitive basis will kill the curiosity of even the most ardent cat!

In these modern times the scholastic institutions are controlled by the cheque from the would-be recipients of knowledge; how fine it would be if the governments could see their way clear to fund education on a broad base.

Free education for all is the key to National success. To use the resources available in the Nation is a treasure that should never be overlooked.

Instead there is apathy.

Those of us in tertiary education are the recipients of the brain dead—or, at least, the brain numb.

Too many years of exposure to second-rate teaching methods that are ruled by the accountants have taught them only that they need to pass an exam and not formulate new ideas. Just soak up enough to get through and move on to the next level.

They suffer from subjective fatigue. The thought of sitting in a training room being given information by someone in a white coat is enough to send their minds into an oblivious state where the desire for sleep is overwhelming.

Never blame the student—blame the (cheaper) system that brought them to you.

Blame the lack of interaction created by large (cheaper) classes.

Blame the dedicated but unimaginative semi-trained (cheaper) teacher.

Blame the desire to get a certificate or diploma rather than knowledge.

Blame the crushing death of questioning, of curiosity, the desire to know.

Blame yourself for not making the information more interesting.

Ray Owen and 'The Hole'

“If I ever experienced writer's block, I didn't know it. I usually have a general ending in mind, but not always.”

This is a quote from Ray Owen, a well-respected author whose book, “The Hole”, is available on ‘Amazon’ and major bookstores in the United States of America; it was a kind response to my previous ‘Blog’.

It raises two very important points.

The first point is that many fiction writers are unaware of getting ‘writer’s block’. The situation that you will see portrayed in films and television series of a writer sitting at a typewriter hurling crumpled up sheets of paper at the floor in apparent despair is a rarity.

We do not, by and large, sit at our typewriters or computers with our heads in our hands exhibiting expressions of sheer anguish. If this horrible thing happens to us we will generally not sit at all; rather we will get up and go for a walk or a mug of tea. In my case I should go and watch football or have a sandwich. In either case the story is forgotten; it is dispensed with and other things are focussed upon—perhaps a fresh story. Some of us have many stories wandering around in our heads, often they clamour for attention and push their way forwards to be written next.

In casting the story that is being worked on aside it is often the case that an idea will form. The mind is a fermenting pot of ideas, one will push its way forward—presenting itself as the answer to the dilemma. Sometimes it is the answer but at other times it might be the key to unlocking the next part of the story.

We all get ‘blocks’ from time to time. It is a natural part of the process in our plotting a course to that destination point. The route to ‘The End’.

Ray Owen says that he sometimes has a general ending in mind. You do not need to have a precise ending. The details can be conferred upon the situation when you get there in the same way that you may go and visit a place where you have never before been. You may say to yourself that you will visit Florence, Arizona (as opposed to Florence in Oregon), but having never visited Florence you have no clue what to expect or what it looks like until you arrive.

Now you plot the best route, you describe the journey in detail so that the reader will feel the weather and see the view along with you as you travel.

It is not until you arrive that you can now describe the details of the destination. Now you can lay Florence out in intricate detail so that the reader can almost say that they feel that they have visited the town with you.

So it is with your story. This is, I believe, what Ray Owen means when he says he has a general idea of the end of the story before he starts writing but that he will not be able to fill out the details until he gets there.

Some writers can get away with not having an ending. These writers get a great idea for a story and then just ‘go with the flow’. They listen to the characters and follow their lead and conversations until, at some point, an ending will emerge like a light at the end of a tunnel.

For me a short story is sometimes like that. It is a situation that springs to mind along the lines of “what if this were to happen?” and then it goes from there and, hopefully, a story will emerge and an ending will happen to it at some stage in the writing.

This is an insecure way (for me) of writing; it is risky and (for me) excitingly adventurous.

Your method, your system, is one that will suit you. It is one that you are comfortable using and one in which your characters will feel at ease.

Your characters are important because, for you, they are real.

Writer's Block

My mailbox often contains questions. Some of them refer to jet engines but most ask about writing.

Shall we start with the second most ‘popular’ question first?

“I want to write a story but I don’t know what to write. What shall I do?”

This is actually two separate questions in one. It is inferred that, often, what is meant by this is, “I want to write a story but I don’t know how to write.”

In the first instance there is a major problem in that the enquirer wishes to write but has no story in their head to write down.

This is a major stumbling block as you may well imagine. If there is no story, even a rudimentary storyline, in the brain then there is nothing to start writing down.

You need something. You need some sort of notion about a plot and characters or you are wanting to drive a car that has no engine.

On January 2^nd, 2013, I posted a ‘Blog’ called ‘Start at the End’. This was intended to be a major help to would-be writers who were taking those first steps into story telling.

I do appreciate that there are many writers out there who do not do this but these are, for the most part, experienced authors who tend to have complete stories in their heads before they start to put anything down ‘on paper’.

If you have no ending then you have no idea where you are going with the story in the same way that if you have no destination in mind when you get in the car it is impossible to sort out a route for the journey.

But.

To do that you need an inkling in your head of what the story is to be about, the plot, the characters, the general storyline, the genre even!

I have recently written a war story or, at least, a story about military life in a combat situation that was thinly cloaked under the heading of science fiction because that is the genre where I feel comfortable.

Being comfortable with a story is a big help in writing it. If you have to stop to research at frequent intervals then the story will become disjointed.

Having nothing in your head to start with is a bad way to start a career in writing.

As regards the idea that you have no idea how to write that is somewhat less important.

Here the assumption is that you have a story in your head that you really need to get out and transfer it into a state that other people can see.

Perhaps you are embarrassed about your lack of grammatical skills or your poor spelling.

Do not worry about this. Some people have great stories in their heads but are unable to express the ideas adequately in a way other people will understand. This is where they collaborate with someone who does know how to write and can express themselves in a grammatically correct manner with the appropriate spelling.

Failing the possibility of a collaboration, write it anyway and then send it to some evil person who is cruel beyond words (called an Editor) who will deconstruct it and cover it in so much ‘highlighter’ that it will seem to be painted over with a distemper brush!

Do not let this dishearten you. Learn from it. Study it. The main thing is the story.

Beware. An American friend of mine sent me a story that was quite a good idea (if a little ‘twee’) that really needed a lot of work doing on the presentation. It also had to make up its mind if it was to be in ‘English’ or ‘American’ since the two are quite different when it comes to storytelling. Pick your Editor with an idea in mind about where you want this story to go.

The primary question is always about ‘writer’s block’. What to do about it.

They will say, “I have started writing a story but, after a couple of pages, my mind stops working...”

This means that you don’t have an ending or a story in mind.

Or.

It means that you have condensed your story down to about two hundred words and have completed it.

In the first instance the best thing to do is to stop and sit back in a comfortable chair and think about what you wish to achieve in the story. What are you characters going to do or say? In other words, compile a story towards that same ending.

For the second idea, it is hopeless writing, “Sally went to the market and was shot by John who ran away but was arrested three days later doing a drug deal. The End.”

Who is Sally? Why did she go to the market? Who is John? Why did he shoot Sally? What was his objective? Why did he go to the market? Was it a coincidence or did he track Sally there? What did he shoot her with? What was he selling in this drug deal—to whom? How did the police connect him with the shooting and the drug deal? When he shot Sally were the people in the market screaming in fear of their lives?

So much needs building up. Where is all of this happening? It needs a setting and atmosphere otherwise it becomes a journalistic report suitable for publication in ‘The Times’.

In other words, there is no real ‘writer’s block’. The difficulty comes in trying to thread your way through a story that may have several lines of plot worming around inside it.

I have two stories, right now, where I am trying to get around a complex piece of thought and experiencing difficulty with it. Answer? Drop it and write something else. Write a few short stories and a ‘Blog’, or two, and then go back to the one(s) where you are having trouble. Nobody says that you must only write one story at once.

Stop. Think. Breathe. Imagine.

Go to your other reality and begin again. Talk to your characters; let them lead you for they will know the way.

Let your imagination roam around inside your head and the answers will come to you without you realising it.

Chariot of the Gods

There might have been a time when an insomniac caveman looked out of the entrance of his home and observed that the stars had moved.

Cavemen would be hunting, fishing and gathering all day so the nights would be for sleep and... er... making more cavemen. Stars were something he noticed on the way into the cave and, maybe, as he crawled out in the morning.

At first, he might have thought that his eyes, or mind, were deceiving him but checking on subsequent nights would reveal the truth.

The stars move.

A revelation.

It would be quite obvious to him that the earth that he stood on was static. There was no trace of movement there.

Thus the stars move.

Then somebody noticed that there were patterns to the stars and that one pattern pointed at a star that never moved or, if it did, it was very little.

The star that stayed where it was became a navigational beacon. People could use that to find their way about the World although, that said, the World then was extremely small. Possibly the World would be a radius of around sixteen miles.

But now, using that star, the World became bigger. People could wander off, bivouac for the night and then find their way home. This was something the sun, that blinding light in the sky that rose out of the ground in the mornings, passed overhead, and then buried itself in the ground on the other side of the World each night, could not do.

The star had been placed there by some kindly soul to help them. That tiny point of light, whose shape and outline could not be seen, had been placed there by a magician.

Then there was the lightning. A great flash in the sky. Sometimes spread everywhere like a great luminous blanket and, at other times, it could be seen as a spiteful, jagged streak. Always that visual extravaganza would be followed by its brother, the noise. Thunder rolling sometimes as a threatening rumble and other times as a deadly crack.

People knew to keep out of the way of both the lightning that could turn trees to ash and the thunder that would, surely, crush you under its great feet.

Magic. It was all magic.

We still suffer from it. To this day we like to explain things that we do not understand by believing in magic.

We say we are rational beings. We tell people that we know there is no such thing as magic and yet. And yet.

We yearn for the supernatural. We watch programmes dedicated to hunting ghosts when we know, all of us, in our hearts, that there is no such thing.

We want to believe. Oh, how we long to believe that ghosts exist. They would be the proof we need in an afterlife.

But they do not.

The magic of science fiction has us clamouring for more stories about aliens; we have a series that explains to us, in detail, that aliens have visited us.

Certainly there are people, like Erich von Däniken, who are intelligent and reasoning human beings that will proffer convincing and plausible stories that we have indeed been visited in years gone by.

They will show us mysteries that can only be explained by the technology of visiting aliens.

Those mysteries are fascinating, surely, and have yet to be explained by the scientific community.

But it is not aliens and it is not magic, of that you can be certain.

A million years ago we had no clue what a star was and now we yearn to go there and see them for ourselves.

What we need to get there is a chariot. A magical chariot. Perhaps, somewhere, there is a scroll that will tell us how to build it.