The Writer's Creed

Islam, Judaism, Christianity and even the Brotherhood of Assassins, they all have creeds. People who subscribe to these and other sects live by these creeds and die by these creeds. I am a writer and I need a creed that will be the force that drives me in that magical moment when fingers tap keyboard or thumb and forefinger clutch pen to jot down my brain noodles and present them as useful thought. I need a creed that'll set a fire to my mind and transform the words I conjure from mere to more.

I kneel here, in the darkest cavern of my mind, all voodoo ritual-like, and swear my fealty to my Muse: that from this day forth I shall live by this keyboard and pen, I shall die clutching these writers' tools and if I were to be resurrected by the likes of Dr Victor Frankenstein that I'll be a zombie whose hands are perpetually ink stained. With my last breath, as I stand facing Death I'll assualt her with a barrage of words worthy of a scroll in a dusty library. Thus I will be welcome in the mighty company of the legendary scribes.

I promise to write everyday, whether I'm feeling blue, green or grey. I promise to do battle with that white sheet of paper (digital or tangible) even though I know I will suffer defeat more often than not. I want to weather that 'long defeat' like Tolkien's Elves of old did their war against Morgoth, that darkest of lords. Like Liesel Meminger, the book thief, I want to fall in love with words; I want to stand up and hate them and always endeavour to make them right. 

"all voodoo ritual-like"

I write to tell my stories, the stories of people whose lives breathe and at times bleed into mine; I write to share my mind, heart and soul with other minds, hearts and souls. I write selfishly and I write selflessly. I seek to make sense of life and to be understood in life. I write nonsense when I find I cannot make sense and I'm misunderstood or I stand under amiss. I write with a lot of fear - it's always near, whispering caution and poison in my ear. I negotiate personal space with fear, it's a lifelong tug of war for the real estate of my mind. I write to play well (leg godt) with words like people play with LEGO bricks. I stick words together to construct grand structures I often have no names for but they make sense somehow - their lack of conventional sense make them so. As I've said before, I'm a wordslinger, my words, the pieces of my heart, are the bullets with which I shoot at readers and pierce souls. I aim for a gutshot and, ironically, I'm the one who spills my guts (blood and shit all over a page). My headshots rejuvenate brains instead of spilling them like secrets, like b3ans. I write to spread good rumours like a disease, but without the dis- affixed, I do it with ease. I give readers a good infection. I construct my words in simile in the hope that readers deconstruct them with a smile.

I am a writer. I always try my imaginary best. I frequent the Well at the World's End: I am well-read, well-informed and well-written.

Heaven's Magic Machine

This is the magical scene that will play out in Heaven as I awake from death, as though it were a dream:

‘“Well, Master Samwise, how do you feel?’ [Gandalf] said.
But Sam lay back, and stared with open mouth, and for a moment, between bewilderment and great joy, he could not answer. At last he gasped: “Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.’
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

I’m sitting here pretending to be marking first year English assignments but because I suffer from ADD (or whatever they call it these days) I can’t pay attention to another string of words that make no sense to anyone in the universe or any of the infinite ones parallel to ours – not even the person who wrote them. Unlike J.R.R. Tolkien my mind does not conjure up hobbits when faced with the deadly dull task of marking, mine wanders to random things instead, like whether or not there will be magic in Heaven. The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings have me convinced that there will be tonnes of it.

What sort of magic will it be though?

To use Terry Goodkind’s terms, will it be additive or subtractive? Will it be the sort of magic worked not by our souls but worked on our souls as Peter Kreeft puts it? Will it be the charming magic of animated Disney movies that sees dishes washing themselves and beautiful Princesses aroused from eternal slumber by true love’s kiss? I’m secretly hoping for dragons and centaurs. I’d love to have tea with a majestic dragon, assuming dragons care for tea that is. Imagine how big a dragon’s tea cup must be!

I went to see Thor some time back and if Heaven’s anything like Branagh’s vision of Asgard I’d be quite chuffed; all the best parts of a fantasy medieval setting merged with futuristic technology that has no side effects like pollution. It would have to be bigger than Asgard though, so as to accommodate my dragons. I’m a big fan of flashy and destructive sorcery I must say: Wizard’s fire, the fiery tempests in Dragon Age, crazy chain lightning and such. I doubt there’s place for destructive magic in Heaven though, especially since I’m referring to post-apocalyptic Heaven, when Satan and all his crazy minions have been smote down by Heaven’s awesome Secret Fire-wielding host and the Flame Imperishable has been sent to burn at the centre of the universe(s) forever and ever. Amen.

I should expect a behind-the-scenes sort of magic then I guess, only a little more overt than can be glimpsed in Nature. God is a big fan of espionage after all, what with Him always working His magic from the least likely of places and in a most covert manner. Take for an example in The Lord of the Rings He doesn’t make so much as a peeping sound but in which His presence makes all the difference.

Heaven’s magic is, no doubt, rooted in beauty – the lofty beauty of an Elvish Princess like Lúthien that captures the hearts of admirers the world over but can only be won by the most noble of beings, and yet it is a beauty as humble and accessible as a Samwise Gamgee of the Shire. Beauty alone is not enough though, for it to be truly magical it must be accompanied by truth, wisdom and all that good stuff.

Arcane arts like necromancy are out of the picture then; zombies, as cool as they may seem, are only a mockery of real life after all. Such arts are of a lower type of magic, not that of creation (or sub-creation).

I would venture to say that the purpose of magic is not to be seen but to be experienced. Real magic feeds a deep human need for wonder. It speaks to us as though we are children exploring the world and looking at everything in it with awe. Scientists experience the universe’s magic as they set out to unravel its mysteries and theists (the real ones) encounter this magic in their unshakable faith.

In the Middle-Ages it was said that God wrote two books, the Bible and Nature. The world in which we live is a magic making machine and many of us don’t even notice it. Nature is God speaking to us of love, beauty, perfection, imperfection, death and many other such lessons beside. The universe, as such, is a picture of what the magic of Heaven will be like, the sort of magic whose presence is never noted but whose absence is immediately apparent.

Attack of the Bloodthirsty Couch: Zombies of Doom

Dear Constant reader of a writer in peril,

Here I am again, still trying to escape the circular ruins with only minimal success. It’s been a few months since the bloodthirsty couch sent its arachnid minions after me and I’ve only just survived wave after wave of their attacks by the enamel of my teeth, until now that is... . Instead of just outright killing me the damned creatures enjoy torturing me and seeing me writhe in pain.

A few nights ago I woke up with a start at the sound something scratching at my window. Now, you should know that I’m a fan of cheesy B-grade horror movies and one thing I’ve learned from them is that you do not head towards danger because you will end up either dead or serving as a host for some alien parasite. Also, I’m the token black guy who gets killed first if he’s stupid enough to go anywhere near the danger. Being the survivor that I am I decided to just stay put and see what happens next. I sat up in my bed for five nerve-wrecking minutes and nothing happened... maybe it was a stray cat or something. Eventually I fell asleep again and pretty much forgot about the incident until the following evening when I woke up to the sound of voices at my window. With my heart beating a tattoo onto my chest I got out of bed as quietly as I could and grabbed the empty bottle of wine next to my bookcase and crawled towards the window. The voices outside turned out to be a couple of lunatics just having a merry ol’ chat on my porch in the middle of the night! I switched on my light and they left. Then I started thinking of the previous night’s incident and wondered whether they are connected. My brain is groggy at the best of times so expecting it to make complex connections at the dead of night was really just me expecting too much from the poor bastard and so eventually I gave up and went back to bed.

The previous paragraph has very little to do with what the rest of this post is going to be about now that I think about it... but it does serve the purpose of letting you know what the state of my mind has been for the last few months.

Some time ago our geyser burst and the guy who came to fix it didn’t put the ceiling cover back on in the bathroom and every time I go to the loo I have to stare into the inky blackness of the space above the ceiling and wonder what my bloodthirsty couch’s arachnid minions are cooking up. I can hear them crawling around in the space above the ceiling in the dead of night and I’m scared for my life. I’ve not been sleeping for almost two weeks now! I sit up at night, drinking copious amounts of coffee, with a screwdriver within reach just in case they try something. I’ve even taken to pushing furniture against my door in an attempt to barricade my room.

The sounds are getting louder every night and this has led me to believe that the spiders in the ceiling are more like the head crabs from the Half-Life games and that they’re dragging people into the ceiling through the opening in the bathroom and turning them into zombies to ensure my doom. I have to invest in a shotgun and a chainsaw before their zombie army is ready for attack.

Pray for me my dearest reader, for I very much doubt that I’ll live thought the coming week.