The Edge

A poem by Sally-Ann Hodgekiss

Is my world a lie;

Where I drift about in drug facilitated blue-sky normalcy,
Floating over mountains and crevasses on chemical wings?
Are the brilliant hues and endless, yellow wooded paths,
The filled glasses and soft promises of sunshine, smiles and hope,
A truth that only this altered, tempered version of me can perceive?
Am I just as deluded as those who swallow those ancient words
Meant to subdue and corral,
Head turned towards a glorious sky,
The promise of better blindly banishing the grit, pain and fear,
Curse-gifted with first, gasping breath?

Or am I truly broken; weak of will and soul,
My otherwise self too unbalanced to tear away a darkness synthesised from within,
And banish the illusion draped upon an otherwise welcoming world?

Or is that fraught place, that tangle of immovable and impassable, of impenetrable,
Of finite, of heavy and black and heartbreaking;
Too much, too far, too long, too hard, too painful,
Is that place of minds eye,
That hell on earth,
That cursed, aching, friable, pointless, trudging existence my truth?

But does truth matter? What is more important? An honest dirge or created melody? Which would distance chose, a step beyond the two, viewed from above or the side? If this was a tale of another, choice would banish thoughts of truth with clarity.

I choose joy. I choose potential and possibility.
I choose to tuck my crutch firmly beneath my arm…
And look forward.

OK. I know. I’m not the best of bloggers. It’s been two years since I set this up and I have only made two contributions. I have the best of intentions, a gazillion things to write about, but I lack the discipline it must take to post regularly enough to transform this from a poorly populated archive to the real ‘putting it out there’ blog I had intended.

So here I am, back at the keyboard after a frustratingly unproductive stint of editing some of my multitudes of unfinished novels (my own form of procrastination), prepared to give it another go. I can’t make any promises, but I must say that having someone out there who might actually take the time to read this has inspired me to try that little bit harder.

First I need to update things. Now that I’ve learned the difference between a blurb and a synopsis I intend to give that section a makeover (hopefully soon). 

My real problem is focus. I find it difficult to concentrate on one thing at a time.  I call it the “Ooooohhhh! Shiny!” effect. This means I start something with enough enthusiasm to see it done twice over, and then become distracted by another idea or dream that just has to be penned down.  This would all be fine if I could then return to the first writing project, but then 1000 words becomes 40,000 and soon something shiny comes along again and I move onto the next new story. Yes, this has left me with a whole lot of potentially self-publishable, half-finished manuscripts, I’ve got the quantity part down pat, but that’s as far as I get.  Those that I have finished I edit, and re-edit, not knowing if I’m actually improving thing or just crabbing back and forth. The one section of the manuscript that I did give to a professional editor was returned with some great suggestions and encouraging comments, but all I could afford for her to do was to give me an overview. Having the spelling and grammar corrected would have broken the bank. This is where I learned what a synopsis is, as the editor provided me with a great one, but this was only the first 60k of words in a ~250k novel that is part of a 6 book fantasy series of which I have written 5.5 of the books

Time for a deep breath. 

I think that’s enough of a rant for now. Hopefully it will not be my last for a while (fingers and toes crossed).