Dark Half of the Hourglass: Daily Writing Exercise

Hourglass and pencil

I started this blog as a place to put in a bit of writing practice on a daily basis. It has been a while since I wrote here for practice, so here goes:

———

 

Curved glass walls bear me down. I slip and slide, slow but relentless as I scribble on the glass, pencil in hand, and think of Alice, wonder whether she would have written all that clever stuff down instead of blabbering it,  if only she had such a pencil as she followed the rabbit. My writing makes about as much sense as Alice picturing herself crossing the earth and coming out at the other end to find people hanging upside down, but that does not stop me using my pencil.

I’ve found out I’m slipping down an immense hourglass— I can’t go back up nor stop. I’m only given this pencil, and a few silent conversations with fellow sliders. We could compare notes about what we scribbled, but the trouble is, none of us can speak, and I’m not sure anyone can listen. We may not touch because we fall in parallel lines.

We’re all headed towards the dark side of the hourglass. I don’t remember when I figured this out, and how. But I know that in the dark side we would continue to fall, unseeing–only this time the fall would be much faster because we would not slip along the glass edges, but hurtle down straight, into the unknown. No one knows what happens then. Not that I’ve asked, but since we can’t talk and no one flits by telling us anything, I think no one knows.

Given that I have a pencil, and nothing much else to do, (I remember hunger, pain, warm and cold, cruel and kind as words I once scribbled, I no longer know what they feel like), I will live in my pencil.  I will now strive to forget the bit about up or down. In the length of pencil left me, I’ll stop trying to make sense of it all: I no longer  want to leave notes for someone who, who knows when, will slide down the same track. All I’ll do is live in the now, feel my hand, my pencil, my writing, the glass, and let thoughts and sense take care of themselves.

I think I’m ready for the dark half of the hourglass.

Kartar Singh on Hunger Strike

Kartar Singh has stopped eating.

He swims up to me when I try to feed him, looks at the food, and then looks up at me with his beady eyes, as if to say, What, you think I’m going to eat this crap? You have another think coming!

Betta Fish on Hunger strike

I’ve tried all kinds of food good for his kind, but he turns his tail at them, and flashes in indignation. The water parameters are fine so I can only try and imagine what is wrong with him.

I’m told Betta fish are moody, can go for days without food, and given my experience with thoroughly spoilt Bettas before, I’m holding on to that.

Or, our Kartar Singh has figured out the Gandhian way of protest, because the only change in his life so far has been the trip to my study desk... and now that he is back home in his own aquarium, he has taken to sulking behind the leaves.

He’s also ignored the mirror all of yesterday (beware the Betta who ignores the mirror, this indicates he means business). Maybe his charter of demands includes a room with a view of books, and the Singaporean skyline from the window.

I’m tempted to take a picture of the view from my study desk and paste it behind his aquarium. How would he know the difference? He is a fish, after all.

But something tells me that with a name like Kartar Singh, he might be on to me.

Homeless Kartar Singh and the Memory of a Fish

Kartar Singh is homeless again.

I’m the culprit, of course. Lured him into an old jam bottle and poured him into a flower vase.

I needed his home as a quarantine tank, you see. My Zebra Angelfish was getting picked apart by his black cousins, and needed rescue.

So Kartar Singh and his temporary home are on my study desk as I type. And yes, you guessed it. So is the mirror.

Mr Singh is shimmying, sashaying, flashing away at his alter-ego, no sign of missing his pebbled home decorated with plants. He rises up every once in a while to the surface to breathe, comes over to my side, as if to say, isn’t life Fun? and dives right back into his silent squabble.

Oh for the memory of a fish.

If only I could be as much in the moment as Kartar Singh— forget the things I’ve left behind, not carry a trace of past grudges or worries for the future, be happy wherever I’m put, find my obsessions, and enjoy them.

Wouldn’t mind meeting my alter ego in person either.

I meet her often enough when I write, but never more than a glimpse, a shadow of understanding and then I’m back to myself, leaving her far behind.

The Zebra Angel is going back to the shop where I’m hoping he will recover and find another home. Mr. Singh will back in his fancy home by evening, and would have no memory of his trip to my desk.

Kartar Singh, Homeless and under Alien Attack!

There he is, one very confused Kartar Singh, swimming about amidst the reflection of bookshelves, trying to figure out how on earth could an alien Betta fish be swimming down at him from his roof.

Yes, I’ve covered the vase with the mirror now.

A-Z: Z is for Zone

Writing prompt: ZONE

Provided by:  Claire Goverts,
a fellow A-Z challenge participant, yet again. Please visit her excellent blog. Thanks Claire, this is the 3rd or 4th of your prompts I have used. All letters done, now looking forward to the May 2nd Mega Blog!

Genre: Fiction

——-

With sacred rites we burn her. The funeral pyre sings and crackles in the riverside air.

This is what we come to, this cliche of ashes and dust. Our body hears nothing, sees nothing, feels nothing, just lies there and burns, spreading into the air in specks, and soon there is nothing where there was a person.

I sit down on the ground, Indian squat style, knees bent to my chest, my feet planted on the ground and feel the muscles in my thighs strain and pull against my skin. My eyes tear up from the smoke, and the stench of burning flesh pushes into me, under the incense, the sandalwood and the clarified butter we have offered the fire.

This is what it is to be alive, this moment when I can breathe, swallow, clench, scream. My love is floating around me, I’m breathing her in as I inhale the smoke, taste her ashes on my tongue. She has left me and joined me in many strange ways at the same time: she was my wife, but now she has become the air around me, my zone.

I take a step, then another one, faster and faster, I’m alive, and she within me. There’s a dazing whirl in my eyes as I run.

———————-

I’m tweeting A to Z posts at #atozchallenge  There is also the A to Z Challenge Daily with links to Tweeted A-Z posts over the last 24 hours.

Thanks and shout-outs to organisers Arlee Bird (Tossing It Out) , Jeffrey Beesler’s (World of the Scribe),  Alex J. Cavanaugh (Alex J. Cavanaugh) , Jen Daiker ( Unedited), Candace Ganger (The Misadventures in Candyland) , Karen J Gowen  (Coming Down the Mountain) , Talli Roland ,  Stephen Tremp (Breakthrough Blogs )

S for Sacrilege

S is for Sacrilege

Writing prompt: SACRILEGE

Provided by:  Joy fellow participant of the A to Z challenge.Visit her! Please PLEASE leave me prompts if you haven’t already!   I need prompts for T, U and V most desperately!!

———————–

Today is the day the rain on the window sill at night would bring fear, and loathing, and pleading for mercy. But not to me, for once.

It will stop her breath in her lungs, the words in her mouth,  the bile in her stomach, and the slaps and kicks she has marked me with, my mother.

That word seems an alien thing. Mother. I have seen bitches take care of their puppies inside the drain under the culvert. She feeds them when they whine, licks them clean, and nuzzles them from time to time.

But not ours. Today when I came back from school, I saw the same welts on my baby brother’s back that I always see on mine in the bathroom mirror. She must have been in one of her drunken rages. Even grown men are scared of her now, of who she becomes when her nostrils flare and her eyes shrink, and from her neck a slow red creeps up to her face.

I have no father, and my uncle, his brother, is the Father at the church. Sacrilege he would call it, wait for God to smite her.  I’ll remind her again of her duties, he’ll say, have Faith, my son. But my baby brother is six. My sister, three. They will not live long if she lives, and I cannot wait for God much longer.

I’m fourteen, my ankles and wrists are too long and bony for my clothes, but it is up to me to be the man.

Without her, I’ll have a family. Without her, the world would be a better place. If it is Sacrilege, so be it.

Tonight is the night I’ll stop her.

—————-

I’m tweeting A to Z posts at #atozchallenge  There is also the A to Z Challenge Daily with links to Tweeted A-Z posts over the last 24 hours.

Thanks and shout-outs to organisers Arlee Bird (Tossing It Out) , Jeffrey Beesler’s (World of the Scribe),  Alex J. Cavanaugh (Alex J. Cavanaugh) , Jen Daiker ( Unedited), Candace Ganger (The Misadventures in Candyland) , Karen J Gowen  (Coming Down the Mountain) , Talli Roland ,  Stephen Tremp (Breakthrough Blogs )

Writing about Migraines, Method-acting, Writing

Séance Characters

I spent the entire weekend battling a migraine the size of a tsunami, and now my faculties are returning, one by one, like washed-up debris on a devastated shore.

I think one of the major reasons I had such a walloping attack could be because some of my characters are taking over, and I have been expressing ( or struggling not to express) primarily their reactions, not mine, to any given stimulus.

A writer friend called this method-acting– I had not thought of this in those terms before. I’m currently inhabited by an uber-successful closet-lesbian writer whose daughter is making a rash marriage, a self-pitying ego-maniacal cleaner who is worried about how fat he is, and a woman who lost her pregnancy years ago and is still coming to terms with it.

All three took me over from time to time during last week, and made it impossible for  me to push through my real self, and behave as Me, not my characters. Meditation helps, but the effects are not long-lasting, because I’m not  a good monk, I suppose.

This kind of inner chaos is why I think I’ll never take up writing full-time.

I have too much imagination, and not enough good sense, which makes me an easy victim for my characters, who take my head over like ghosts are reported to take over mediums at seances.

If this is true, and not another of my imaginative hypotheses, it bears think about a little.

Write, stop writing?

Especially after I held in my hands a printed book which had my name printed inside it, above a story I’d written some time ago. The book would be available shortly in local bookstores, and it would be a strange thing to walk in and see it on the shelves.

I should probably push the answering of my write/ stop writing question under the house carpet till then. Perhaps by stamping on it repeatedly as I walk around, I’ll be able to get rid of it altogether.

Writing, philosophy, writing

Philosophy and Fiction: Writing Ideas

“It has been traditional in much of our culture to view God as omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing) and perfectly good. The existence of suffering poses a tough challenge for a theist who believes in such a God. How could a God who is perfectly good, can do absolutely anything he wants to do, and knows everything there is to know, possibly create a world in which so many of His creatures suffer so terribly?”—from Omnipotence and Contradiction, an Introduction to Philosophy by Thomas D. Davis.

I’m going through all the arguments and counter-arguments, and find the whole process quite engaging. The best part is, some of the theories are explained through fiction, and that opens a whole new world of possibilities, i.e, possible stories.

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Visit my website: Amloki.com

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

Donatella Versace on my blog

I was about to post my draft on a dray tip in Tokyo, Japan, with descriptions of Imperial palace, tea-ceremonies, bonsais and so on, when I happened to take a look at the keywords that landed people on my blog.

The top keyword, to my surprise, which brought about 70 % visitors to this blog, is “Donatella Versace”.
I know I have a post or two which mention her name and have her pic, but feel a little guilty because they really provide no info on the actual person.
During my work, I have written about Versace here and also about Donatella—I thought I should provide the links, so interested people can get to the right stuff. I’m not sure this is the sort of info they’re looking for, because usually the searches include the terms “without make-up” and “fake boobs”, but I can’t please everyone, can I ?

Donatella Versace, with her brother Gianni

In other news, I’ve been struggling with a brain in which random scenes and lines keep bubbling up, as if I had a cauldron deep within my sub-conscious brewing up story ideas.

So I think is down to the notebook with me, I’m dying to fill up the new one I bought yesterday. To my writer friends, happy writing, and if any bloggers still read this blog, happy blogging to you all.

And people looking for Donatella Versace? You know what to do.

Writing about wrong notes

Gustave Flaubert once said something that summarizes my state of mind today:

I am irritated by my own writing. I am like a violinist whose ear is true, but whose fingers refuse to reproduce precisely the sound he hears within.

Writing updates

I did not spend much time writing today. Attended a book launch, met up with people.

In other news, got a poem put up here.

Word count- 0 so far, but am determined to do a few lines before bedtime.

P.S: Did 500 very sleepy words.