Tag: #amwriting

The 2 a.m. Rant: When you know you’re getting old

You know that you are getting old when sitting at a table where only one person is less than 65.

There were just over a dozen of us, meeting up a few years back for my older brother’s 70th birthday.

I have to say, from the outset, that I never expected him to live that long, but when you take into consideration the longevity of our parents, my father reached 99 and my mother 96, it’s no longer a surprise.

As for me, I’m 73 this year, and there are three years between us.

Something else I hadn’t realised, but what possibly seems coincidental is the age difference between our granddaughters, which is also three years. One is 23, another is 19 and the youngest 16.

But…

It was interesting to finally meet a number of the guests, as, for many, many years, I’d only heard of them in passing conversation. This is because we very rarely manage to get down from Brisbane to Melbourne to catch up, and almost never when my brother has had one of these rare get-togethers.

Of course, these people had known him for years, and there was a thread that bound them together.

Stamps.

They were all stamp collectors.

I remember a long, long time ago, I used to collect stamps, but I did not have the same passion for collecting as my brother did, and if truth be told, I was a little jealous.

And he had a Stanley Gibbons catalogue that could put a value on every stamp. That, to me, showed dedication.

I just bought stamps that were big and colourful from obscure countries no one had ever heard of. But, in another sense, it was where I learned a lot about the British Commonwealth. Some of those African member countries were those same obscure places I had stamps for.

Then, when I could no longer be bothered, I just handed the lot to him and said he could do with them what he would.

Naturally, at this gathering, we didn’t talk about stamps.

In fact, after describing myself as the black sheep, well, grey sheep on account of the hair, it seemed we became the centre of attention.

To be honest, I expected the lunch to last an hour, but who knew there was so much to talk about, even though I really can’t remember much of it other than it lasted almost three hours. That’s a lot of time talking about nothing.

But I guess when you reach that golden age, time ceases to have any real meaning.

We now have a standing invitation to return, and since time is running out for all of us, it’s probably wise to not take so long to return.

The 2 a.m. Rant: The march of progress inevitably destroys the past.

There is this thing called the march of progress.

It can be good, or it can be bad.

But the inevitability of it means that we have to destroy our past in order to build for the future.  It’s a pity no one around a hundred years ago worked out that a certain amount of land needed to be set aside for future infrastructure, and then built around it.

The pity of it is that those same practices are with us now, and unfortunately, either the infrastructure is too costly to build because of the necessity to buy back, or it will never change.  No one, sadly, is thinking of the future.

So, all I have of my childhood years, some fifty to sixty years ago, is memories, and when I go, they will be lost forever.

I remember, a long time ago now, the many holidays I spent at my grandmother’s place in the ‘country’.  Back then, it was.

Now it is just another suburb of Melbourne.

I remember the drive, and it used to take about half an hour, perhaps longer, and as we travelled, it was mostly the countryside we saw.  Little towns like Beaconsfield, Officer, and Berwick are oases in the middle of farming land.

The last time I went for that same drive, there were endless houses.

My grandmother’s house was very large, and the land it was built on was extensive.  There used to be gardens, several garages, several old cars, and a huge workshop.

My brother and I used to spend our Christmases exploring, and on a particular one, we found some tools and decided to recover some of them.

We found a huge fountain buried beneath the overgrowth, the centrepiece a statue, part of what must have been a remarkable display.

It was like we had our own secret garden.

There was also a fernery, also overgrown.

Now, sadly, all of it is gone, and in its place is a multilane highway that follows an alternate coastal route between Melbourne and Sydney.

All I have left are the memories of a time that will never return.

Perhaps it’s time to write it all down and preserve it for future generations.

I scored a window seat – it’s like winning the lottery

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So, what do you do when you finally win the lottery?

Well, not the monetary one, the aeroplane one, where you get a window seat, and a window seat you can actually see out of?

Because most of them are not aligned with the windows.  I remember drawing a window seat a while back, but …. you guessed it, there wasn’t a window.

I mean, really!

But now you have one, what do you do?

I’ve seen a lot of window seat travellers pull down the blinds to block out the view.  Seriously?  It’s obvious they travel a lot and have seen everything there is to see.  Why they would want a window seat is beyond me.

Like would they be looking for a lightning bolt to hit the wing tip?  An engine falling off?  Another plane flying too close alongside, like a menacing jet fighter?

Not today.  Not flying near a restricted airspace or a foreign border.  Just going from one state to another, out of Melbourne, on our way to Brisbane.

I look at clouds, check every so often that the engine is still there, watch the wings flex, or the flaps move.

The last time I had a window seat, we arrived in Brisbane from the ocean, and the plane got awfully close to the water on its final run to the runway.

This time it was over the bridges after flying past the city, and over the Brisbane River.

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Sometimes you can see cruise ships.  There might not be another one of those for a long time to come.

And, yes, the engine is still there.

It was an uneventful flight, but I took a lot of photos anyway.  The grandchildren like looking at oddly shaped clouds.

 

The 2 am Rant: Life’s little experiences seem to have disappeared

I’m on a riverboat, sailing slowly down the Nile, ahead of us the Pyramids, a sight, I’m told, to behold despite the ravages of time.

There are others, a curious bunch of people, drawn from all over the globe, and from different classes, in a time when that seemed to matter.

Of course, it’s 1935.

And it’s all in my head.  Something I’d seen somewhere, or read perhaps, and now that I come to think of it, it was an Agatha Christie murder mystery.

Even now, nearly a hundred years later, it may have been possible to replicate it; only a world war, British Empire aspirations and later abandonment, and civil strife made it difficult, but not impossible.

And then, closing off travel anywhere, COVID-19 finished the job.

For someone who likes to travel the world, looking for locations and inspiration for my stories, that had made life far more unbearable than just having to remain locked up for fear of catching it. And, even though it is gone, we now seem to have was popping up everywhere, closing off things that we just took for granted would be there forever.

Not any more. Nationalism, greed, and in some cases, utter stupidity, are closing off countries that are no longer safe to visit. Even the United States was once thought to be the safest place on earth.

Gone are those treasured moments…

Like sitting at an outside cafe overlooking the main piazza in San Gimignano, having a pizza, an authentic pizza, and a bottle of Moretti beer.

Like wandering the narrow cobbled streets of Florence, staying in what was once a 12th-century monastery, having wild boar pasta, and just a short distance away, a gelato.

Like wandering around similarly narrow and cobbled laneways in Montmartre, stopping at a corner crepe restaurant, where the crepes are to die for.

Taking that away is like taking away a hand or a leg.

How long will it be before the world returns to normal, or will it?

In my conspiracy theory mind, it seems to me there is more going on than just viruses and greed; it has overtones of world domination, or worse, watching the destruction of the world economy, and capitalism for want of a better word, at the same pace that climate change is changing the planet.

Neither occurrence is new; it’s happened time and time again over many millennia, and it’s just that we don’t seem to learn from it.   

Well, maybe not in my lifetime. 

Let’s hope generations to come do.

 

 

What I learned about writing: Characters can be the sum of our experiences

Our view of life, love, relationships, and marriage comes from our own experiences. This is basically the same for all of us for everything that happens to us through life, as young children, at school, at work, at leisure, and as we grow as a person.

Our ideas about life will come from the experiences of having our children, watching over our children as they grow up, from our relatives, both our own and those acquired by marriage or relationships, and from our friends.

No two life experiences will be exactly the same. There will be similarities but differences, which may or may not give us a different perspective, whether that might be for the better or for the worse. Not everything that will happen to us will be good or bad, but just an experience that we will remember or forget, take notice of or ignore, helps us grow, or cause us pain.

There will be the experiences we have when interacting with others that are outside our family sphere, but have an influence on us directly or indirectly, like politicians, doctors, government officials, and police. There will also be experiences involving those at work that we interact with in a professional manner, and others who have influence in ways that sometimes can be unimaginable.

These interactions will influence our feelings, thoughts, and how we react and behave, the highs and lows of having children and grandchildren, and interactions with aunts, uncles, and our parents. Equally, there will be moments of despair, of losing a job or missing out on a promotion, of dealing with people in the workplace that make life difficult, dealing with relatives who are not very nice, in short, all of those interactions with all these people around you, and more.

Yes, your life is steered by all of these influences, and your views are often coloured by any or all of these people. They make up the sum of who you are, who you will be, and what you want to be. Those dreams will seem, sometimes, within your grasp, but quite often they will seem as far from your grasp as touching the moon.

But all of this, while it makes up who you are, will also make up who your characters are in a story.

They will be people you know, people you’ve met, people you’ve interacted with, people you’ve seen.

NaNoWriMo – April – 2026 – Day 7

After the cat dragged me out of bed simply because he wanted me to refill the food containers, he did the usual trick of sitting there, watching patiently until I walked off, then went over to the bowl, sniffed, and walked off.

OK, he didn’t need to wake me up if he was going to do that.

Stern words are spoken, but it’s water off a duck’s back (or cat’s back if you like).

I’m annoyed, and he’s, well, he’s just a pain in the neck.

So…

Now that I’m up, I might as well get some work done.  I think about breakfast for about a minute, and decide it’s too hard to make toast.  Yes, it’s that kind of morning.

Coffee?

Maybe.  I put the kettle on as a token gesture of doing something, and go out to the writing room.

I’m calling it that for now, because we’re at the end of the first week of NaNoWriMo, and it’s proceeding well, which means, of course, that something is going to happen, and the wheels are going to come off.

I turn on the laptop, and after waiting the usual five minutes, I have the logon screen and no mouse.  It’s been acting erratically for a few days, but that’s Windows anyway.

So, I have a dead mouse.

Should I give it to Chester to play with?

I changed the batteries, usually the problem, but to no avail.

Good thing then we have a few spares because when the granddaughters are over, they are prone to dropping them on the ground and breaking them.  I have a drawer full of dead mice.

One day, Chester will be happy, or not.  It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking.

New mouse, wait for it to install, back to work.

Kettle’s boiled, new distraction, might as well get coffee.

Maybe I’ll get back to work later.

NaNoWriMo – April – 2026 – Day 6

The Maple Leafs are playing, and so I thought I would juggle watching them play and work on my NaNoWriMo project at the same time.

It seemed like a good way to get in 3 hours of work and a little entertainment on the side.

But…

First period down, and the Maple Leafs are 2 goals down.

What I first thought was going to be easy is now becoming mission impossible.

After the second Philadelphia goal, Chester, my stalwart anti-everything cat, comes down to see what the commotion is.  By that I mean, almost yelling at the TV screen.

A lot of good that’s going to do when they’re 12,000 miles away on the other side of the world.

And by the look on Chester’s face, I think he thinks it’s a waste of time too.  Or maybe that’s his usual, I don’t give a $%^^%$ expression he has most of the time.

We have the Philadelphia feed, so we’re getting the joy from the intermission analysts at their team’s lead, but it does take me back to Philadelphia when we were there a few years back, when America was worth visiting, when they cut to shots of the city.

And, of course, instead of having my eyes on the story, I’m now thinking of a subplot, yes, you guessed it, in Philadelphia, which is not very far from New York, where the main action takes place.

Then…

We score.  It’s now a more respectable scoreline, but Anderson has his work cut out for him, and I’m thinking of turning off the sound because I don’t want to hear any more praise for their young stars.

The story proceeds, taking out the outline pages and looking to see where it can fit in.  Yes, I see a gap where I can fit in an interlude and scribble a few notes.

End of the second period.  Still 2 goals to 1 down.

Start of the third period.  Chester decided to jump up on the table and, seeing the pencil sitting there, started to push it around with his paw. I snatch it away, and he gives me a chastising swipe.

Blast him, while my attention was diverted, we score again, and I missed it.  Thank heavens for the replay.  Over and over.

I finish the notes for the interlude, and the game ends in a draw.  We now move to overtime.

I get the first few lines of the chapter I began working on at the start of the game, and just as the words are flowing, overtime ends with no score, and we go into a shootout.  And before you know it, the game’s over, and we’ve lost.

I swear, Chester is smirking, so I pick him up and put him on the floor with a very stern admonishment.

No, I’m not taking the loss badly, but there are a few bad guys about to die horribly.

NaNoWriMo – April – 2026 – Day 5

Although the main reason for its existence is to follow Friday, in some cases, it is the first day of the weekend.

Once upon a time, Saturday used to be a working day, you know, those days when we worked a 48-hour week.  Then it became a 44-hour week, and we only worked in the morning.

As time progressed, we started working 40 hour weeks and had both Saturday and Sunday off.  Sunday, of course, was always a non-starter.  The church made sure you were able to go to church on Sunday.

As time progressed, weekends started to begin on a Friday, with the day in question being granted by employers as a Rostered Day Off, provided you made up the time during the preceding two-week period.

Now it seems the standing joke is we should work weekends and have the week off.  Odd, it hasn’t quite caught on yet.

But, as usual, I digress…

After a week that got out of control, Saturday was supposed to pull it back into some sort of shape.  In a sense, it happened.  I looked at that list of things I had to do, picked one and got on with it.

PI Walthenson is now about to get a second case, as intimated at the end of his first, involving not only the search for his missing father, but also the search for those who kidnapped him.

That done, I moved onto the helicopter story, otherwise titled ‘What happens after writing an action-packed start’, and I have been researching and making notes for the third section of this story, starting at episode 31, and it looks like we’re going back to Africa, and the remoter part of the Democratic Republic of Congo to rescue the two agents he failed to the first time.

And it is NaNoWriMo time, and I have to keep the writing project going, a story that has now been tentatively renamed to Betrayal. Very spy-ish, isn’t it?

With that, there is the upkeep of the blog.  I never thought maintaining material for a blog would be so hard.

But…

Now I can say last week wasn’t a total disaster.

And, tomorrow the Maple Leafs are playing.  Can’t wait.

NaNoWriMo – April – 2026 – Day 4

It’s an unusual topic, but I was looking for a distraction from the rigours of NaNoWriMo, and this fitted the bill perfectly.

For someone who doesn’t really care about sport in general and is rarely able to find the time in between all the writing to actually sit down for several hours, and, in some cases, all day, today seems to have been an exception.

I got through my NaNoWriMo exercise earlier this morning, and since the Maple Leafs were playing today, I thought I’d fire up the computer and take a look at how they’re going.

By the time I’d found the streaming site, the game had started, but it was nil-all, so it was much the same as not missing the start.

I thought it odd that an Australian would be interested in ice hockey, but it seems I’m not alone.  Nor that others barracked for Toronto, Ottawa, and Edmonton, and all seem to dislike the New York Islanders with varying degrees of intensity.

Maybe because they’ve won ten straight games.

So, it takes a long time, almost halfway through the third period, for the first goal, and it’s the opposition, the Vegas Golden Knights.

Damn them.

And now I have this sinking feeling the game might slip away.  Their form can hardly be labelled stellar, and I thought I heard the home crowd booing them, but that must have been my imagination.

No, my dismay is misplaced, there it is, Mathews comes to life and evens up the scoreline.

And for the rest of the period, the goalie keeps the Golden Knights out.  As only the new, is he, goalie can when he’s on his game. Goalies all seem to look the same.

Once again, we’re in overtime, with more heart-in-mouth stuff, and, of course, the man we’ve been missing, Tavares, finally pulls the rabbit out of the hat.

It’s a pity we couldn’t be there in person to see it.

Maybe I could incorporate a hockey game into the spy story…

NaNoWriMo – April – 2026 – Day 3

Having got through my quota of words for the NANOWRIMO project, I turned my mind to another story I’m writing.

It started out as a bit of a lark, just to see if I could write a story that fitted around with an old castle we’d visited in Tuscany, after hearing stories of the pockmarks on the walls attributed to gunfire.

It conjured up a group of men occupying it with a single mission: to capture and return a high-ranking German boffin who wanted to defect to the Allies.

The twist is, of course, that the occupiers are British, sent there to facilitate the repatriation to England, but the men are really German double agents.

A bit far-fetched, but from some of the stories I’ve read and shows I’ve seen, it’s not quite beyond the realms of possibility.

And, after all, it is fiction.

So, parts of this story have been running around in my head, waiting for a time to put it on paper.  Now is that time.

So, three more episodes have just been completed, and I’m thinking of watching Von Ryans Express again just to keep the mood going.

Oh, and the NANOWRIMO project, it’s proceeding apace.

My spy survives the action-packed start, battered and bruised, and contemplating his next move. It’s tough where the only retirement plan you have open to you is death