You Never Truly Appreciate The Intimacy Of The Expression “I'll Gut You Like A Fish” Until You Actually

You hurt me with your fragile words;

lonely is the new day's speech

and the quiet beholds a solemn time

filled with empty promises, I hear you speak

of nothing more than darkness folding

consuming all to sit and see

a new day filled with quietly spoken

words now absent

of your cruel mind and damning speech

Julia de Burgos, tr. by Heather Rosario Sievert, from These Are Not Sweet Girls: Poetry by Latin American Women; "Transmutation"

[Text ID: "To love you / I have detached the world from my shoulders, / and have remained desert in sea and star, / simple / like the light."]

Dont talk to me OR my gaping wound ever again

Somedays, my soul yearns

For you, as it spills itself

On my pages, prose or poetry

Words or thorns, just to

Quench itself, it does it all.......

I was a gifted child. Until I wasn't. I was the golden girl. Until I couldn't burn anymore.

My parents expected me to build wings of gold and fly further than anyone could ever try. I don't blame them, having a child to raise is like sculpting a clay pot, you can shape it the way you like, paint it the colour you fancy. To raise a child is to play God. To raise a child is to be God.

But to be a child is to fall, to make mistakes, to fail. The thing about being too bright at an early age means you burn out by the time you're 16 and suddenly the world around you becomes more gray and terribly, terribly lonely. The fire is never warm enough, nothing is ever enough. And one day you find yourself begging to a godless sky, begging for a new spark.

I was a gifted child once. I was the golden girl. And one day, I burned out.

-Ritika Jyala, excerpt from The world is a sphere of ice and our hands are made of fire

Blossom

A ghost is perched in the middle of the lane

softly swaying in a dull grey wind;

she has bloomed but now is still

full of ghostly feathers, like cotton

sheets fresh and waiting,

a new woven straw hat 

balanced on the crowded brass hook,

pillows of clouds and endless days

with no rain but the grass is dewy eyed 

and lost in a trailing book,

flyaways cutting a boundless sight,

some days are long and grey 

but then the nights --

           -- the blossom tree outside my window

tells me when spring is here

yet it is wasted in a silent darkness

softly perched in the middle of the lane,

feathers orange in the glow of a thousand sunsets

waiting to be seen again

Wednesday, 7th July 2021

As the thunder roars in such tumultuous pain, the sun singes the rim of every cloud until the whole sky is cloaked in a brightened sadness, a softening grey. And the world will sit in shallow wine while the teardrops of the encroaching night play in ripples across the sun's sleeping face, waiting for the moon blank and ghostly behind the starless sky. It is new tonight but hidden from sight, it bows in heavenly patience.

Colette, translated by Antonia White from “Gribiche,” written c. February 1937

Writing Notes: The Story Circle

The Story Circle by Dan Harmon is a basic narrative structure that writers can use to structure and test their story ideas.

Telling stories is an inherently human thing, but how we structure the narrative separates a good story from a truly great one.

The Dan Harmon Story Circle describes the structure of a story in 3 acts and with 8 plot points, which are called steps.

When you have a protagonist who will progress through these, you have a basic character arc and the bare minimum of a story.

As a narrative structure, it is descriptive, not prescriptive, meaning it doesn’t tell you what to write, but how to tell the story.

The steps outline when the plot points occur and the order in which your hero completes their character development.

These 8 steps are:

You - A character is in their zone of comfort

Need - But they want something

Go! - So they enter an unfamiliar situation

Struggle - To which they have to adapt

Find - In order to get what they want

Suffer - Yet they have to make a sacrifice

Return - Before they return to their familiar situation

Change - Having changed fundamentally

The hero completes these steps in a circle in a clockwise direction, going from noon to midnight.

The top half of the circle and its two-quarters of the whole make up act one and act three, while the bottom half comprises the longer second act.

In their consecutive order, the Story Circle describes the 3 acts:

Act I: The order you know

Act II: Chaos (the upside-down)

Act III: The new order

Working with the Story Circle enables you to think about your main character and to plot from their emotional state.

The steps will automatically make your hero proactive as you focus on their motivation, their actions and the respective consequences.

Sources: 1 2 3 More On: Character Development, Plot Development