I received an email today from Robert Moriyama, the short fiction editor at Aphelion magazine. He sent me a very complimentary acceptance letter for a story I submitted earlier in the year. It will be featured in the next issue of Aphelion, which should go live this Sunday. Obviously I’m over the moon about this. Aphelion have also recently accepted a poem of mine, which should run in the same issue.

Robert said it was a good entry in the John Wyndham genre, of a disaster seen through the eyes of an ordinary person. I’m a big fan of Wyndham so this doesn’t come as a surprise, although being told it is good was a nice lift, after a string of rejections.

With the final month of university being a mad scrabble, and the new job taking up a lot of my time, writing has taken something of a backseat over the last couple of months. However I’ve got a couple of other stories ready for submission and some more poetry, and this has given me a much needed boost to carry on and get things done.

I’ll put a short update post on the site, and through my Twitter account, when the story and poem are up.

I hope you enjoy them!

Later.

The haiku is a Japanese form of verse that found great popularity in the West, mainly America, from around the 1920s onwards. In English the traditional form is 3 lines of 5,7 and 5 syllables. Of course in its orignal Japanese the haiku is simply a column of characters running down the page, but with the 5,7,5 morae.

Ezra Pound was a big fan of the haiku (and other Easter forms of poetry) and the similarities between haiku and some of the Imagist poems is evident: the compression, the distilling of an image into as few words as possible. Pound also had a real thing for Japanese and Chinese ideograms because they mean the thing that they represent (this isn’t the place to start talking about language and the limits of representation, but he has a point).

It is taken almost for granted that Western haikus don’t compare favourably to the original Japanese ones. Indeed many Western haikus (my own ones included on the poetry page) don’t adhere to the Japanese “rules” such as nature imagery, a seasonal representation (e.g cherry blossoms = spring) and so on.

Nonetheless they are a fun form of poetry to write, and if taken seriously can be very hard to write well. I don’t claim that my own are anything special but I enjoy them anyway. Hope you do to.

Bye.

Poetry has not been my main focus in my creative writing but it feels great to have something accepted from a reputable on line sci-fi webzine. You can follow the link above or go from my weblinks page if you want to check the magazine out. It’s a good read and I’m delighted to be published in it.

Well, hopefully this will be the thin end of the wedge. I’ve got other poems and some ideas for stories to work on once I hand in this darned dissertation next week.

Onwards and upwards! To infinity and BEYOND!

I’ll shut up now 

I’ve posted a new flash fiction story on the fiction page and also added a poetry page with my first sci-fi poem on it. The poem was inspired by recent work I’ve done on the Imagist poetry movement, check out Ezra Pound et al for examples of proper Imagist poems.

As usual any comments on anything are welcome.

Later,

Ben

Before going to university I had worked a string of largely no-brainer 9-5 jobs: shop work, call centres, office admin. At that stage I had no inkling that I might enjoy, or want to try my hand at, writing. I was playing in bands and generally enjoying it. Going to band rehearsal from 7:30 to 11 three nights a week, doing recording sessions, or coming back from gigs in the early hours never seemed to bother me much. Having a dead end job had its perks.

I have noticed since being at university that, despite having more time, my sense of creativity and enjoyment has been somewhat stifled. With all the books to read and essays to do the last thing I want to do some times is write or read anything, and the quality of some of the literature is frightening. I haven’t picked up my bass guitar in months, except for the odd noodle.

Let’s face it, I’m lazy. Sometimes I wonder how writers keep going and find the space and time for writing. Most of them have a day job (and not necessarily a no-brainer), plus families and other interests. On top of all that they manage to keep writing and submitting short stories, novels, plays, poetry, journalism. Are they superhuman?

Not really. They just have a passion and a work ethic: something student life has completely destroyed in me during three short years. They fit the writing in, an hour here, fifteen minutes there. It all adds up.

One of my tutors at university, Martin Goodman, told me that he gets up at five each morning to squeeze a couple of hours of writing in before coming in to take his classes. Writing is something he has to do, and he’ll find a way to get it done, even with all his other responsibilities. When I told him I find it hard to motivate my self sometimes (OK, most of the time), he told me not to focus on finishing a story or novel etc. as that can be de-motivating. Looking at the task ahead you can feel like giving up, it seems unmanageable. But, he said, you can do the next paragraph, the next sentence, and it soon adds up. Do some writing every day, without fail.

I read an interview with a writer, whose name escapes me, and he said he sets himself a target of 200 words a day. It seems so low, so attainable, that he doesn’t get disheartened. Then if he beats it great, if he doesn’t – well he made his target. If you write 200 words a day, five days a week, you would have the first draft of a 50,000 word novel finished in a year. Baby steps.

So I’ve made a new resolution. I will write something creative everyday. It might be some flash fiction, part of a story, a vignette or even some poetry. But get into the habit and keep writing. 200 words a day sounds fine to me.

Today I drafted out a bunch of poems, all with a sci-fi/speculative theme. Poetry is something I’ve always been nervous about, much moreso than fiction, but I figured, what the hell. And I have to say it felt good. I’m no Keats, Tennyson or Hardy but it was enjoyable and got the creative juices flowing. One even gave me the idea for a short story.

I’m investigating possible publication routes, but I guess sci-fi poetry is a really niche niche.

If I’m feeling brave I might put up a couple of sci-fi-kus (a science fiction haiku) or some other stuff on my writing page. Or if you’re particularly unlucky 

Ta ta for now.

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