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Marty

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  1. Marty

    Remembering Hiroshima

    By Marty,

    Today marks seventy five years since an atomic bomb was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima, followed three days later by one being detonated over Nagasaki. No-one will ever know how many tens or hundreds of thousands died as a result.
    I was born just over two years after these horrific events, and grew up in post-war England where I remember a constant national worry about a possible nuclear war. The term "four minute warning" still echoes in my head to this day. That was considered to be the length of any warning we could expect to have between a long range nuclear attack being spotted, and the bomb actually reaching us. Politicians tried to assure us neither side in the Cold War would dare use any of the vast amounts of nuclear weapons they were aiming at each other, because of what they termed the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) that would cause. The world seemed to stand still when the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred in 1962. I was just 15 years old. For two weeks in October it seemed that the end of the world was about to happen.
    A little over two years later I was seventeen years old, and still at school, as the twentieth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atrocities arrived. (I make no apology for calling them atrocities, because they truly were atrocious.) Here's a poem I wrote at the time:
    https://gayauthors.org/story/marty/martys-poetry/3
    Many years later, the Cold War eventually ended. And suddenly the world felt a much safer place.
    So when I read this morning, 75 years to the day since Hiroshima was obliterated in one blinding flash of light, that there are apparently still "more than 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, many on ‘hair-trigger’ alert status, ready to be launched at a moment’s notice" my heart feels heavy. 
  2. Marty

    O Muse, Where Art Thou?

    By Marty,

    About ten or so years back I was doing a fair amount of creative writing and had even put a little of it online. One of my pieces even appeared in the 2007 Fall Anthology "The Rainy Day" here on GA. Then paid work (from which I am now retired), voluntary work (particularly in the LGBT-support field - in which I am still involved) and various other things (such as developing my creative skills in digital photography) all managed to get in the way and I reluctantly decided to put my creative writing on hold. I still maintained my love of the written word and so have still been doing a lot of reading in the intervening years.
     
    A few months back my muse, after she had been on a long holiday to destinations that are unknown to me, decided to pay me a brief visit to tell me that I should start writing again. That prompted me to log back in to GA for the first time in a while and see what was going on with the creative writing community. Although the site itself has certainly changed over the years, it's good to see so many of the old crowd still here - and to even see some names that I recognise from other sites (some of those sites sadly now no longer active). So, after reading some of the stories and poems, I decided to take out Author status again (I say "again" because I am fairly certain I did once have author status - but that probably got removed because of my long hiatus) and see if that would prompt my muse to return again. So in the past week or so I have uploaded a story and a couple of poems - probably really just to try to justify (if only to myself) having that status. But none of them have been new work, just old pieces of mine.
     
    And that's really what's bothering me. I want to write new stuff! I've a couple of ideas that I am playing with. There's two novels that I really should finish that have both been on hold for over ten years. I've over 50k words done on one and 70k on the other, but neither of them are any way near complete, and both have chapters missing (as in I have early chapters, later chapters, but in-between chapters missing - if that makes any sense). I've struggled with both in the past few weeks, but don't seem to be able to move on with either of them. I know some people will suggest that I just start uploading the existing chapters and that that will give me the impetus to complete them. But I tried that on another (now defunct) site 12 years or so back and it didn't work. I just left readers asking me to complete them and I never did. And I don't think it would be at all good of me to do that again to the readers on GA.
     
    There's also a completely new short story (maybe 4k to 7k words if it ever gets written) that's been going round in my head for the past while. I've tried numerous times recently to type it in. But every time I try it just doesn't seem to want to flow. I'll write half a page, read it through, and just not be happy with it. The idea is there! And I'm sure in my head that it is a great idea. But it just doesn't seem to want to leave my head and appear on paper (or on the monitor of my laptop). I sometimes actually finish up with a headache trying to write it. Is it writer's block? Has my muse deserted me again? I have the fucking story in my head! So why can't I write the fucking thing??
     
    I know I could just upload lots of my old stuff on here (and I may well do that with some of my pieces). But I would feel somewhat of a fraud if that's all that I do. If I'm going to call myself an author I feel that I ought to actually be writing some new stuff as well.
     
    Questions:
    What is the cause of writer's block? How does an author overcome writer's block? O Muse, where art thou?  
    The piece mentioned in the first paragraph that I wrote for the 2007 Fall Anthology "The Rainy Day" can be viewed here if anybody is even remotely interested. 😉
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