Idols For Writers Week One

The prompt for the first week was New Beginnings. This fitted in so well with a writing idea I'd had a while back, so I plunged in straight away, got my entry in early. Posting closed on Friday and voting closed today at 1pm EST. Out of a total of fifty-five entrants, the three writers with the least votes were eliminated. I was totally blown away by how many people seemed to like my entry - it picked up a ton of votes!

New Beginnings

Something is wrong. I’m getting that awful churning in my stomach that I always get when something isn’t right. It makes me restless, like I can’t sit still for another minute. I get out of my chair, walk through the door, then stop dead.

Something is wrong.

I’m standing in this long corridor and I don’t recognize anything. Not the arty prints on the wall, not the green speckled carpet, not the slatted blinds at the windows. I don’t remember any of this.

A door opens, away to the right and someone comes out, walking backwards. It’s a young woman in a white tunic - and she has red hair that looks as if she’s been hacking at it with a pair of blunt scissors. Her mother should teach her to take better care of herself! I wonder why she's walking backwards? Oh, wait a minute ...she’s pulling a wheelchair, and in it there’s a woman - a very, very old woman. Is that her mother? The old bat is as wrinkled as a prune and looks half-dead; I doubt she could teach a monkey to stick a peanut up its ass.

My goodness, I haven’t heard that one in a long time. It's what Edward always said. “Couldn’t teach a monkey to stick a peanut up its ass!” he’d mutter, pointing to some dimwitted cashier or sales assistant who’d kept him waiting. A very impatient man, my Edward.

The woman in the white tunic is looking at me as if she knows me, but I’m quite sure I’ve never seen her before. I would definitely have remembered that hair. “Hello Mrs. Carter,” she says. “Do you need the bathroom?”

Excuse me? Didn’t her mother teach her any manners? She could at least introduce herself before she starts talking about my toilet habits…

“I’m fine, thank you,” I say as politely as I can, although I’m starting to feel as if I need to collapse on my bed. I blunder past her, heading for the room she just left, but she grabs at my arm. “Wait a minute, sweetie - that’s not your room.”

I don’t care. I’m not her sweetie and I really need to lie down for a bit, so I shake her hand off and scuttle towards the room as fast as I can. But in the doorway I stop, appalled. This room is very small, and it smells. There’s a gaudy crocheted rug on the bed and a pile of yellow satin pillows with bows on them at the head. There’s some kind of medical paraphernalia in the corner—oh God. My stomach churns again.

She’s right. This is not my room.

Anxiety turns my legs to jello. I clutch the door frame and look back at the woman. She’s still smiling. “Come on,” she says, stretching out her hand. “I’ll take you back to the lounge. It’s warm there and you can talk to some of the other residents.”

I’m so anxious and uncomfortable that I start walking with her before I know what I’m doing. As we go down the corridor, I realize that most of the rooms we go past are bedrooms. What is this? A hotel? The woman pushes the wheelchair along at a steady clip, but there’s not a word out of the old bat. Maybe she’s more than just half dead …

“Is that your mother?” I ask, worried, but the woman laughs. “No, no,” she says. “My mother lives in Illinois. This is Miss Thomas, remember?”

I’m supposed to know her? My hands are getting shaky now and I feel tears building up behind my eyes. We go past an office and I see a smooth blonde in a navy-blue shirt sitting at a desk. She looks vaguely familiar. In an instant, I abandon the old prune to her fate.

The blonde is talking intently into the phone. “I need it today,” she says, sounding cross. “By four o’clock. OK? Don’t be late!” She drops the receiver back on the hook and looks up at me.

“Oh, please,” I blurt out before she can speak. “You’ve got to help me. I’m not supposed to be here. I have to go home. Please, I have to phone Edward.”

The blonde stands up and she’s a tiny little thing, not more than five feet. She comes round, takes my hand, strokes it softly. “Whoa, Mrs. Carter, slow down.” She looks at me seriously. “I’m sorry. You can’t phone Edward, dear. And you can’t go home because this is your home now. You live here, with us.”

“No, I don’t,” I whisper and I feel my lips quivering. “I don’t belong here. I don’t even know where this is. I want to go home. Please help me.”

Her eyes soften. “I know it’s hard for you,” she says as she leads me out of the office. “This is Fairhaven Rest Home, dear. You’ve been here almost three weeks now, although you probably don’t remember.”


I don’t. None of this makes any sense. I’m very close to tears but Edward hates it when I cry so I bite my lip hard. She takes me into a lounge and I look round. It’s a big room, full of elderly folk with rheumy eyes and age-mottled skin. The old bat is there too, tucked away in a corner. Her eyes are shut and her mouth is lost amidst a hundred wrinkles. Panic billows like a dark cloud and I feel it engulfing me.

“No, no!” I shout, tears clouding my vision. “I have to go home! This is not where I belong!” I try to slap her away but I’m shaking so hard that I miss by a mile.

“Oh God.” The blonde sighs and raises her voice. “Amelia, get over here and sit with Mrs. Carter. I need to get her an extra dose of Risperdal*, or she’ll be impossible for the rest of the day…”

“Edward! Help me!” I whimper, afraid of what’s happening to me. But Amelia, with her chopped-off red hair, just puts her arm around me and rocks me slowly.

“There, there” she croons. “I know it’s tough for you, but you’re doing fine, sweetie. Your lovely daughter will visit you again soon, shh shh. There, there …” I give in and lean against her, sobbing, as her voice flows over and around me, as gentle and as soothing as a lullaby. She slips a small pill into my mouth and the water is cool against my lips…

Sometime later, I realize I’m sitting in a chair with a rug tucked over my knees. My mind feels fuzzy and I probably should get up, because I really need to go to the toilet. I yawn, blink and look round.

How strange. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this room before. Hmmm... I wonder where I am?
____________________________________________________________

*Risperdal – a medication often used in the treatment of senile dementia.

The Bren LJ Idol - A Writing Challenge.

Ever heard of Idols For Writers? Me neither. But click on the banner above and you'll find it - a weekly writing competition based on the American Idol premise. I'm entering, as are a few writing buddies. How about you? All you need to qualify as an entrant is an active Live Journal or another creative journal with a lot of entries, and a willingness to write to a prompt on a weekly basis. If you don't have the time for that, you can join the community simply as an observer or as a random writer. That means you'll be able to read and vote for the various entries, which will be posted weekly on a Friday.

Join the community now, please! Season Two starts this coming Friday 19th September and the community will be closed at that point. If you can pick my entries out from all the rest of the anonymously posted entries, and if you like my writing well enough, it would be great if you can cast a vote for me!

Once voting is done, I'll be posting some of my entries in this journal ... maybe! :-)

Shadow Artists.

In Week One: Recovering a Sense of Safety, the first thing I read about is the Shadow Artist - the person who, from reasons usually arising from fear and low self-esteem, lives in denial of his or her artistic self. The Shadow Artist's life is often one of discontent, filled with a sense of missed purpose and unfulfilled promise. I said a big, fat YES to that one!

The way out of this place is to learn to take your artistic self seriously and with gentle and deliberate effort, to nurture your artist child. Creativity, says Julia, is play, but for shadow artists, learning to allow themselves to play is hard work!

So on to the exercises. There are a lot of them, starting with a daily commitment to the Morning Pages. Wake up early and spend time freewriting for at least three pages. No censorship allowed, nothing but free writing about whatever you like. Morning Pages are not art. They are just a tool to get you to open up and to clear out all the stuff that is cluttering up your head ... not to be reread or edited. Just written and set aside.

Then comes the Artist's Date - a once-a-week date of at least two hours where you spend quality time with your inner artist. It can be anything from a walk on the beach to a prowl through a junk shop to watching an old movie, to baking a batch of brownies, to creating a collage - whatever you like, you do it simply to spend time alone with your fledgling artistic self.

Exercise: Imaginary lives. If you had five other lives to lead, what would you do in them? This is meant to be just for fun, just a quick jotting down. So my list looked like this:

1. Medical doctor.
2. Investigative journalist
3. Cosmologist.
4. Film director
5. Archaelogist.

But what was even more fun and very interesting to me was to take a look at what drew me to each of these ideas and if there was any commonality between them. I see connections - looking for answers, pulling together information, delving deep, presenting findings, creating a cohesive whole out of the separate parts, looking at the big picture by way of the details - and telling stories, stories based in truth or at least in the search for truth.

Then I tried, as an addendum to this exercise, the list the five jobs I wouldn't do for anything in the world. And my second list looked like this:

1. Sales assistant in a clothing store - hate, hate, hate clothes shopping!
2. Catwalk model ...
3. Telesales consultant - actually, any kind of sales but cold-call telesales has to be the pits.
4. Politician - all those little boys fighting in the sandbox? No thanks!
5. Care worker in home for the mentally disabled - did this during my psych training and it was terrible: soul-destroying, repetitive and endlessly depressing.

More exercises to follow!

The Artist's Way.

For several years now, my dear friend Debbie has been saying that she wanted me to have this book. I'd seen it in the library, even had it out one time and browsed it for a week, but that was as far as it went. So last week, when we met for coffee during on of her bi-annual pilgrimages to my end of the world, we headed off to the bookstore and bought it - her birthday gift to me!

This book (by Julia Cameron) is a twelve week long course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self. It's interesting that this has come into my life right now, just after I negotiated a huge bend in my personal road (a milestone birthday) and just as an aspect of my life that I have been struggling with for years and years is starting to (hopefully) come under control - although that's the subject of another blog altogether. So for the next twelve weeks, I'll be using this blog for some of the exercises and thinkings related to the Artist's Way course.