I'm doing a refresher writing course and we have to do assignments...and be critiqued...here are a couple of them...the first one had to be slightly autobiographical but with a couple of huge changes in character.


  I'm a writer damn it

 I created a person this morning.  He was tall, dark, and handsome in a worn craggy sort of way and he rode a horse without squashing the masculinity out of himself.  He is a widower or divorced, I didn’t know which yet.  
     Okay, he wasn’t flesh and blood but constructed out of prose, similes and metaphorical mountain ranges but still yay.  
     My laptop glowed happily on my knees and I wondered if its giving me cancer then dismissed the thought; worry didn’t fix anything.
     I leaned back against the bedhead with a creak and a grunt; writing in bed was doing my back in, but it was so bloody cold.  My fingertips and eyes were now the only thing visible under my layers of duvets, balaclava and fingertip-less gloves.  
     I look like an invader from outer space.  No, I look like that guy from Scott’s expedition to the south-pole, the one who left the tent for an after dinner stroll and never came back.  I look ridiculous.  
     No wonder my wife doesn’t want sex anymore, I wouldn’t want to do it with me either.
     As if by magic she sticks her head around the bedroom door.  She looks adorable in her supermarket checkout uniform, but I am not allowed to say so, I just have to acknowledge her sacrifice grimly and look as if I am working hard on my Novel that never seems to end.
     ‘It’s freezing,’ she said rubbing her arms and shivering, ‘turn the heater on.’
     ‘Did you see the last electricity bill?’  I gasp, horrified.
     ‘Yes.’  She gives me one of her pained looks that runs through me like a serrated blade.  ‘I paid it.’
     ‘Well…’  I trail off helpless; whatever I say now will be confrontational.  There can only be one martyr in our relationship and it better be her.  ‘Oh, okay love, can you turn it on for me my back hurts and—’
     The loudest sigh in the world cuts me off.  She whirlwinds in on steps that shake the furniture and throws the switch as if she’s turning on the electric chair and I’m in it.  With another sigh, that could oxygenate Mars she flies out again, wordless.  Her judgement bared down on me like a sumo wrestler.  
     I’m sorry, I want to yell after her, I’m sorry I’m a writer, I’m sorry my stuff is so crap publishers headline me as a joke, I’m so, so, so sorry.  But I don’t say any of this out loud as she might expect me to stop doing it, and get a job.  I shudder.
     The front door slams and she trots off to work a lobotomising double shift.  
     I sit up, tuck pillows more firmly into the small of my back and pull off the balaclava revealing a smile that I am not allowed to have.


Short shorts


     Sarah wasn’t the sort of girl a boy like Colin should bring home to his mother, but here they were, standing on the front door step. 
     ‘She’s gonna kill me,’ He muttered under his breath.  
     ‘If she does, I can carry your dead body home.’  Sarah twined her fingers through his and touched her platinum blond head to his shoulder. ‘Don’t worry.’  She smiled up at him, her lips a bright fire engine red.  
     He winced.  She always wore too much make-up.  His mother was going to freak.  Could he ask her to tone it down a bit; maybe just blot her lips?  He was about to say something when she tugged the brass zip of her shiny leatherette jacket down a good ten centimetres; the upper curve of her breasts popped out to say hello.  
     He dragged his gaze away, it dropped down and he wished she hadn’t worn shorts; her legs looked so...naked.  So did her toes, also fire engine red, in pink flip flops.
     ‘What?’ Sarah snapped, dragging his gaze back to her face.  ‘You’re staring; I don’t like it.’
     ‘Nothing,’ his voice rose to a squeak, 'honest, it’s nothing.’
     ‘What f*cking difference does it make what I look like?’ she hissed at him.  ‘I’m not the one here to tell my mother I’m Gay.’

---o0)0(0o---


The course is great and fun and writing hasn't been fun for me for a long a time.  its been stressful and I havn't wanted to create anything new.  Also having other new writers to talk to has been great.

Love Livxxx