A New Poem - Faded Flowers

At last I have something I can feel good about. I was writing my last post, a piece about my surname and its origin at the dining room table, and from time to time glanced up at a vase of flowers in front of me. A busy weekend meant that it had not been thrown out although some of the more delicate blooms were past their best.

before I had finished, I had a few words swirling around my head and decided that it would be worth spending a little time putting a few ideas down on paper (well on my laptop screen anyway) and perhaps keep it for future use. The next day I came across it again, and settled down to write this poem. I changed a few lines and very quickly the whole nature of the piece changed, and this poem started to come together.

I know that all the books and articles talk about editing and putting things away for awhile and re-editing but I have always been quite impatient with writing poems and lyrics. Maybe that's why I always feel that I should make changes everytime I read my older work. But Where does the process stop?

Anyway, here is the full poem as it stands:

Faded Flowers by John Dyhouse

A vase of dying flowers,

Sits on the windowsill.

Sadly waiting, bleached, forlorn

Now simply treated with such scorn

A faded memory.

I know the scent, that emanates

From across the silent room.

A cross between mown grass, and decay

At the ending of another day

A wasted memory.

A present once accepted

A gift with love and care;

But now they sit, neglected

Forgotten and rejected.

Redundant memory.

Sign of a soured relationship.

A metaphor perceived,

A troubled life, a rift

Don't let the feelings drift

Don't waste that memory.

The flowers now cannot be saved

Too late, just throw them out.

But carefully consider how

Think about your life right now,

Is it right to disavow;

retain that memory

A Short Piece Of Prose (normal service will be resumed as soon a possible)

I wrote this in response to a short writing exercise in a new group on Facebook, The CreateYourself Writing Workshop.

I had had this on my mind for sometime and a couple of things came together, so here it is whilst I am again finding difficulty  scheduling time for poetry.

The Dyhouse Family Name

I was asked yesterday where my surname came from; my wife has always asked about the name when we have been to craft shows or passed shops offering to print out histories of family names. However to no avail.

 I considered doing a little research once upon a time but found the free trial period on one of the largest genealogy sites to be particularly unhelpful and decided not to carry on with paid research. I found records for my parents but nothing helpful or definite for their family members. Maybe it was me I don't know? However I did not find the site useful enough to pay their inflated prices.

 As a carrot to make me return and pay the membership fee for the site, they e-mailed me (of course!) with a history of my family name, which I later found for free on a completely different site, crafty! This is almost the only data I have managed to find on the subject. Although I have had more than one query from Dyhouse's living in the US. But I have no information about a member of the family emigrating to the states.

 It seems that if you want to do any on-line research in this popular hobby, you have to pay for the privilege. I do not pay for information on the internet, unless I am sure what I am paying for. I do not throw hard-earned money after possibilities.

 It seems that one possibility is that it dates back to 1576 (or thereabouts) and comes from an alternative to the Welsh name Dai or David. This itself is derived from Hebrew.

 A second possibility is that the name is from a location in Shropshire, UK; Dayhouse or Lower Dayhouse. The earliest records of the name in Shropshire date from 1169 and mention a Henry Deyose.

 Surnames became necessary when governments introduced personal taxation. In England this was known as Poll Tax. Throughout the centuries, surnames in every country have continued to "develop" often leading to astonishing variants of the original spelling.

 I am surprised that no mention is made of the possibility that the name came from the garment or cloth making industries where early cottage industries must have made use of a special place for dyeing cloth, etc. Maybe it was too common; though of course we have surnames like Butcher, Farmer, Tailor, Baker, etc.

A fuller history is available from the source: http://www.surnamedb.com/Surname/Dyhouse

Published My First Book Of Poetry

I have finally done it!

I struggled through the process at CreateSpace, the site owned by Amazon to publish my first poetry book. I am waiting anxiously to see a proof copy before it goes on sale.

I say I struggled, but really the process itself is quite simple however I have always struggled with the images which accompany my poems. I originally posted copies of my first three ebooks on Scribd anad made them freely available for download. I have also embedded them into posts on this blog in the past. The images did not create a problem either on line or in printed copies.

They are mostly my own photographs which are at a resolution of 72dpi, but they are large so need to be considerably reduced for the ebooks. However, CreateSpace prints books at 300dpi and so rejected the intial images. I had to create images which were reduced but by a smaller amount for the createSpace proofs. hence I want to see how they really look.

Next time it should be much easier, having understood the issues. Or I could simply publish without the supporting images, which I don't really want to do.

I have selected my second volume (as published on Scribd) to be my first on Amazon. I have my reasons. However, I will be making the Scribd ebooks available for a fee once the physical books appear on Amazon. The e-books contain 37 - 40 pages but some of that is photos and notes about why I wrote a particular poem. If you want a copy of the ebooks then head over to Scibd and download soon whilst they are still free.

I don't honestly believe I will sell many copies of these books, although there are a couple of useful non-fiction books which are already written and which I will be adding to before publishing as physical books. I have higher hopes with these.

I would love to have a decent physical copy of the poetry books in my hands however, call it vanity but I do love books and have a large library. Much to the chagrin of my long-suffering wife.

I will mention this again when I get the proof copy of that first book, so don't forget. If you are interested, head over to Scribd and download whilst still free.

A poem - Stand Up To Fear

 My photo of a statue in The Abbey Gardens at Malmesbury taken on a recent holiday. Do you know this garden was featured on TV as the home of "the naked gardener". Everyone wore clothes on thte day we were there however.



I seem to have come to another halt with new poetry at the moment, however this is one which I did not post on this blog when it was first written, this seems to be an oversight since I am quite proud of this one.

very much darker than  my usual output but all the better for that; "a change is as good as a rest", they say. Read below how it came about.

STAND UP TO FEAR

Fear assails me

Analysing my body

with frigid hands

Fear disrupts my thoughts

My brain refusing to comprehend,

should I run?

should I hide?

should I fight?

Fear, like an improbable

thief in the night

plundering my thoughts

stealing away my abilities

for decisive action

I must think

I must exploit

my remaining choices

Fear seeks to freeze

my understanding

of the real world

Fear builds upon the unknown

the unbidden becomes tangible

feeling powerless.

wait awhile

be positive

Fear may be defeated

(Fear is not all-powerful)

assert the truth

demand the right

Now an explanation of how it came about.

One Idea is sometimes called mechanical poetry. There are a number of on-line poetry generators for what they are worth. I always thought of them as a bit of fun. I have in the past actually written programs in basic to generate poems from a list of lines either in memory or from inputted data. So I have an idea how they work. But in the spirit of a little fun, I was trying one or two of these. I did find one that I thought gave passable results, and one of the offerings actually caught my attention.

I took the half a dozen lines and turned them into three stanzas of similar length. I am not sure how this really works, maybe I should have sat on it for a few weeks but I am so glad to have actually completed something other than my other relief valve, a haiku. I have to admit that I actually used a thesaurus for the first time for this poem, it almost seems like cheating but it did help to provide a couple of words which I preferred to my originals.

I think the ending is OK, but may look at it again and attempt to edit one or two lingering doubts. So here it is for now:-

A New Novel Appears - a new blog.

I have decided that I don't want to submerge my poetry under the current outpourings in my enthusiastic gallop to start writing a novel.

This means that I have started a new blog called, A Novel Appears. I have copied the last three posts  over to that new location and will use that blog to write about my experiences as a writer of a novel. The story of the novel will also unfold in the pages of the blog. By making it public I hope to keep up the enthusiasm that I feel at the moment.

This blog will therefore be strictly for poetry, which was the intention when I first started it

My New Novel - time for a pause!

I did quite a lot of reading / research before I set ot to write my first novel. I did not have a plot or story in mind at the time and I was looking at the tools that were advertised as helping writers design their novel. In fact, I started testing them with quite simplistic ideas and wanted to see if they would really offer any help.

I looked at simple mindmap software which was great as a brain-storming tool but it seems that like all software, too many functions were simply superfluous to my requirements. It was just as easy to use a pencil and notebook. OK if I started to make a lot of edits, then my notebook began to seem a little messy and I did need to redraw. A free mindmapping software is Freeplane. Lots of features but far too many for my simple needs. Could work for you however.

I looked at Trello, which is a sort of on-line pinboard; lots of uses, in fact the link contains lots of ideas and I found the site via an articlec on writing an outline for a novel. However this was too simplistic. (does this sound a little like Goldilocks and the three bears?)

After this, I considered a word -processor, very simple and multi-layered; I could even start writing based on the  outline which was developed. But the aim of most tools in this genre was to keep track of not only the chapters and scenes but also the characters, locations, items (anything else pertinent to the plot) and 101 other things. Would a simple WP package allow me to do this easily? I have MS Word and had used it to write many articles; and I had always used an outline to write technical reports and an MSc and PhD theses. I had always managed before, but could I find an easier way.

My next trial was with Storybook. Another pinboard type of program but developed specifically for writers to aid in designing a novel. This keeps track of all those things mentioned above but I found it a little stilted and I must admit to having one or two issues. Firstly, there was no help available with he free download. Under the Help Menu were the choices to donate or contact, neither these nor the help file were accessible; simply giving a 404 not available error. The simplistic example file did not help a great deal, so I did not get very far with this at all.

After all these failures I hoped that yWriter5, a word processor, might be the one to ring the bell. It offers all that I could have hoped for. The main screen offers an outline based on chapters and scenes, and a datebase to cope with all the rest. Characters, locations, items. It has various tools and offers reports which may prove useful to monitor the efficiency of the writer. With the built in WP you can even write the basic novel in the tool. However it does not offer complete formatting so you will need to export the text ( several options are available) and use a more powerful WP package for tidying up before submitting to agent or publisher, depending upon your requirements.

Lastly, I had come across a method of designing the novel called The Snowflake Method, which I mentioned in my last post. I had said that I was hoping to follow this method to write my first novel, however after managing to get through the first few stages, I wanted to hop ahead. For instance, I could not list my characters without putting more detail  into my outline - which the method seemed to leave until quite late. So I am on the cusp of modifying the method to my own requirements. Each to his own as they say! I have been quite satisfied with progress so far and will give more details about progress in my next post.

One last, one very last note. The Snowflake Method suggests using a simple spreadsheet to define the descriptions of each scene. This does seem to have much to say for it, and I would probably have used MS Word and Excel together but I am slowly getting used to yWriter5. I will persevere with this software for a while as it does seem to have most of what I think I need without being too complex. It does take a little getting used to as any software but would be easier if it had an easier Help File. The help file has been written by a third party and is quite simplistic, based on a set of FAQ's.

So it looks as if I have a way to proceed, using yWriter5.

I will push on with my novel, and provide a little more detail of the introduction and the main characters in my next posts.

My new novel, stage 2

I said in my last post that I will be following a method, called the snowflake method to design the novel , and in my first post stage one was a single sentence of less than 15 words to encapsulate the entire novel.

The method uses the analogy of the description of a snowflake by fractals, i.e. a simple shape is made ever more complex by applying simple rules. Such as this image from a Julia set.

Stage 2 is to expand this single sentence to a full paragraph which touches on the novels introduction, the three main disasters (as used to design the novel, although of course there may be more) which affect the direction of the story and the actions of the main characters. And finally the ending, how the final disater is overcome and the ending of the novel.

Eadwyne's Encounter With FEAR*

Eadwyne recruits a force from his lands, to join his Kings’s army in a distant war. Before leaving his <court magician / friend / steward> attempts to use an ancient spell to provide protection for the detachment and ensure their safe return. He gets the spell wrong and Eadwyne (unbeknownst to himself) is <split> and an evil twin is created, to become his nemesis.

The war goes badly for the King at first, and lasts much longer than expected. Eadwyne eventually returns home to find his land is ruled by his nemesis who is known by the nickname FEAR. The villagers find their nightmares are stolen and their worst fears are becoming a reality.

Eadwyne is imprisoned when he tries to reclaim his castle and sentenced to rot in the dungeons with his band.

There is a successful escape attempt and Eadwyne gradually learns of who FEAR is and what is needed to put matters right. In the subsequent necessary <activities> Eadwyne becomes infatuated with a woman who helped with the escape, and makes her his lifelong partner. With the downfall and complete disappearance of FEAR, life returns to normal for the honest folk of Eadwynes villages. 

N.B. I have used the parentheses < > to bracket names, etc which I need to research a little more.

*A working title only

My biggest fear: PROCRASTINATION. I have already listed in my notebook two other ideas for plots and a way of finding more ideas from a dream notebook which I kept for several months a few years back. On the surface ideas which could be used in this novel ...... but still, I need to focus on one at a time.

I have been researching FREE software to help design the story, characters and landscape of the novel. I have found two or three which might help and I intend to select TWO to try out in parallel over the next few weeks. I will have more to say about these in future posts.

A last word:- the snowflake method is analogous to an outline but does include some helpful tips as you work through it. I will also be listing a few ways of creating an outline to balance the experience of creating this my first novel.

I should say that as the author of a number of technical reports/theses and many on-line articles, I would not attempt any writing project of a reasonable length without having a skeleton to build upon. I do however realise that writers like people are very different and individual. You must assess whether this process is the right way for you to progress. For example, I never seem to write poetry with any forethought as to where it is going. I start at line 1 and forge ahead - but that is another matter.