I am upset that Red Monster thinks that I am selfish but Green Monster, who is a Revue Monster, is going to go live towards the end of this week with his blog. I’m still a bit uneasy about the amount of Monsters now in cyberspace but what can I do?
I have been so distracted that B poetry has been appealing to me, so here is some. You should write a short poem or piece of prose where every word begins with B –off you go.
B
Blue, bubbles burst But better bubbles bounce
Due to the unfair pressure placed upon me by the other Story Telling Monsters I have selflessly spoken to Green Monster who is actually a Dude and have convinced him to start his blog. Well I couldn’t have a fellow Monster not writing at all, could I? Especially as I am supposed to be infecting the indigenous population of this planet with the writing bug.
Hopefully Green will stop all this nonsense and start writing soon. And hopefully Red and Yellow will see that I have made a great sacrifice for the good of the greater Writing Project.
Now this week think upon the construction of words and take note that T is the most widely used letter in English and try to write a sentence or two without it – here is my attempt:
Omitting the letter T
Assembling a piece of work, which has excluded one symbol, is very hard and having a whole book of such would be agony surely? Now you shall have a go!
Yellow Monster does sort of have a point about Revue Monsters but they are just not like Gurgitation Monsters nor even Regurgitation Monsters. They are not telling stories or finding a style, they are just writing about other people’s styles and the like. Well it just seems a bit pointless to me, though I do love a good review.
Anyway I think that this week I think you should all look at symbolism within a piece of writing preferable with a microcosm of meaning, or like me you could just write about the rose for five minutes.
The Blue Rose
The young man had a dream and that dream was to breed the most exquisite rose on the surface of the Earth. He was fortunate in that he was a young man of means in a large house, in a time when such horticultural exploits were seen as a constructive thing for young men to do, like becoming a vicar or sailing to foreign parts.
He had always found religion wishy washy and he became seasick in a horse and cart so the other two options were out. His Aunt Pieter happened to be an award winning flower breeder and he had sat avidly at her knee through his otherwise uneventful and neglected childhood.
And so for his 21st he had requested the correct set-up and he was away. That young man strove and produced many beautiful blooms which adorned the gardens throughout Europe but the elusive blue remained stubbornly out of his reach and he grew older and older.
At some point he had given thought to family and had sought out young ladies but they never seemed to engage him and he had withered under their blank stares. One or two had exclaimed over the roses in the greenhouses and he had almost married one frail thing who had pronounced a desire to have a garden festooned with different roses but alas consumption had carried her away and his roses had covered her grave instead of the garden she had coveted.
Thoughts of family and that sort of thing died with her and his only passion had remained the roses and so he grew even older. And now the young man had become ancient, 87 to be precise and he pottered, watering the last experiment, his hands too gnarled to do any of the delicate work. It had not yet bloomed and he felt his life drawing to a close. There was one small bud covered in green. He noticed it and gingerly touched it, sighed, coughed and went back into the house.
And so he never saw his blue bloom, though it was placed upon his own grave several weeks later after a swift pneumonia had taken him.
With relief I have noted that no Green Monster has yet to appear to steal the glory of my limelight. But the negativity I am receiving from Yellow and Red Monster is making me feel very alone and isolated :(.
I really wanted to have a great blog and for everyone to read it and now the web is being flooded by Monsters and I feel that my work is just not being appreciated.
Still, putting that all aside, here is what I want you to do this week:
Recently I have heard of the plight of the honeybee and this makes me too Blue to be properly Blue so I think that today’s exercise will be to write a poem or short piece on the honeybee.
The Honey Bee
The bee buzzed no more no more Its stripy coat lay forlorn No more honey No nectar to suck The honeybee was out of luck
And so are we If the buzzing bee Should fade away to nought For who will pollinate our crops And who will bring honey to our chops
As little bees do miracle cures And hayfever’s misery is fewer But without those buzzy fuzzying bees Working away so merrily Who will stop the sneezing stream? Of pollen so small and unseen
Buzz bees Should hum and buzz But they are sick and ill it seems Disappearing from the scene So say I ’til they recover Perhaps we should use honey sparingly And leave the little bee to be And dance and prance so merrily
I cannot believe Red Monster! I feel betrayed; there I was last week, saying how we three are the best and everybody else should butt out and what has she gone and done?! Well I will tell you what she’s trying to do. She is trying to get a Revue Monster to start up a blog – of all the types of Monster only the Grammarian Monster is more despised! I will not tolerate sharing my cyber space with a Revue Monster.
Anyway be that as it may I shall continue to be professional, in spite of being upset, and so here is this weeks little ditty: You all need to write for 10 minutes on the smell of bacon – it may be the best or worst thing you can imagine or just conjure up memories – well, off you go.
The Ranger
The smell of bacon permeated the room as Sandra sat contemplating the day. It was too early and too wet to want to do anything much other than sit there in front of the mock fire with her fluffy slippers but unfortunately she had to go to work.
The bacon would soon be crispy beyond her liking so she stirred herself to make the much-coveted breakfast roll. She was starving and the day would entail lots of cold and damp and wet. It was days like this when she wished she had an office job – hell even a day job would be preferable.
Instead she found herself a warden of quite a lot of woodland. She would say she hated it but she didn’t. She would say she wanted a desk job but she’d tried that and almost died of boredom. She would say she was lonely but how could she be when she had the deer and badgers, the rabbits and, though she was trying to exterminate them, the grey squirrels. Then there were the birds that squalled and twittered and cheeped and cooed, their shapes silhouetted so serenely against the sky, regardless of the life and death struggle that may be occurring.
The trees even kept her company with the smell of sap rising – all tangy and sweet and the whisper of the breeze through the canopy.
No, the woods were her home now – they had always been really. So she would get cold and damp but it meant that she could eat a bacon butty in the morning and not get fat and it meant she appreciated the warmth far more. It made everything mean more.
Sandra zipped up her waterproof and grabbed her dripping butty. She opened the door to the incessant drizzle, sighed and went out to work.
Ok, so maybe Red and Yellow Monsters are being nice and maybe the world is a better place for there being multiple monster blogs, but I really do think that three is the limit and no more monsters – regardless of type – should come on the internet for any other reason that to bask in the wit, humour and genius that is the Monster Blogs. And of course under no circumstances should they entertain setting up their own.
This week, write for 20 minutes on wool or knitting – this could be anything from sheep to the textiles industry to multicoloured jackets. It’s completely up to you.
Wool
Tangled in the bottom of a green woven bag sat a scone of blue wool. It was the vibrant type blue of Thomas the Tank Engine and was hoping to be knitted into something for a kid, but unfortunately it was excess to requirements and had no bright future of jumper wearing ahead.
It sat in the bag becoming more tangled, watching other colours coming and going, bright pinks and purples, oranges and yellow. Then, just to add insult, more blues of every shade imaginable. They were all knitted away, but not that little scone. No, it sat there still hoping, becoming tatty and fluffy.
Then one day a hand much smaller than that which it was accustomed to reached in and extracted it with care. To the wool’s delight it was turned into hundreds of friendship bracelets, a couple of hair braids and an impromptu wick for a homemade candle.
Why being chopped up, twisted and knotted should have made it happy I cannot say but it did.
I am not entirely sure that Red Monster and Yellow Monster are not taking the mickey out of me and frankly I feel hurt. This week I decided to just play with reversing the order of words. I decided that I would concentrate on colours and emotions too; you should do something similar for 10 minutes.
Blue black Black blue Purple rain Rain purple Onto black Black onto Blue
Yellow Monster has finally seen the error of his ways and has pronounced my stories excellent! He even mentioned the word depressed which as a Blue Monster makes me happy! It is, after all, just another word for being blue is it not?
And with that this week you shall all write about ammonites! If you do not know what they are look them up!
Spirally shells
Deep in the mists of time lay the ammonites. These creatures swam or more accurately propelled themselves through a primordial time. Related to the modern day squid they were and they roamed, thinking little cephalopod thoughts.
Then wham bam mass extinction and bye bye little ammonites and bye bye big ammonites, in fact bye bye all ammonites with all their swirling patterns on their shells. The wiggly lines that mark the beginning of one shell chamber or another; all of it gone. No matter how simple or how complicated, just gone.
Well that is the fleshy alive part of them was gone but their intricate shells were preserved, at least some of them, and they were made into stone and then later into jewellery and paperweights or cut up for science.
But sometimes you can still hear their little squidy thoughts and when I hear their thoughts I hope that there is no such thing as reincarnation because they are vicious and are planning revenge.
Red and Yellow Monster are unfairly ganging up on me and this blog stuff was originally my idea. It is so pathetic.
Anyway this week I think we should write on the concept of food and I don’t mean comfort food!
Blight
The Blight struck due to it being the wettest August since 1912 and the young family surveyed their crops. The potatoes had gone first, the leaves mottled and dying with the fungus underneath. They had not taken heed of the warning due to the fact they were already plagued by burrowing creatures that had stripped most of the other root vegetables. They assumed it was the same thing.
Then came the caterpillars. No one had ever seen so many and they came and they consumed the brassica – all of the brassicas – the cabbage, and broccoli, the cauliflower and the brussels. Then the badgers had dug up the sweetcorn and the deer had eaten the lettuce and spinach.
The final blow came when they realised that the potatoes’ blight had knocked out the tomato crop also. Honey fungus had also wiped out the fruit trees, leaving the family with nothing to eat other than flax seeds, a few half chewed hazel nuts, and the Jerusalem artichokes which seemed resistant to everything but did give you horrendous wind.
Sadly the young family shook their heads and reassessed their food budget, taking their last £20 they went to the supermarket to stock up on tins of food.
The end
Mellow the Yellow ‘I’m not mellow’ Monster is getting far too big for his boots. How he could possibly think that Red Monster’s post about pretty little princesses in glass bubbles was anything compared to my work of genius I just don’t know.
And what did he produce? A piece about what appears to be a discarded children’s handbag and some soppy humans. I think all the other monsters should go away and leave the writing to me. They are all just so bad at it.
And as for the rest of you, you need to write for 15 minutes abou this that you hate!
Fluffy Butterflies
A pet hate of mine is fluffy butterflies, whatever possessed anyone in their right mind to make fluffy butterflies? Do these flying insects in the natural world have a coating of fur like mammalians? I think not, nor do they come in such lurid shades of purple and pink – and they certainly are not glittery!
Oh I know they have golden shimmer upon their wings and some are a deep dawn blue that is luminous but they are not fluffy and they are not of the sort of size a small child can hug happily. Besides, have you ever seen a magnified image of one? They do not exactly inspire cuddly thoughts but more – oh my god this thing can fly! Where can I hide?
I have very specific things I want to do to people who make purple and pink fluffy butterflies.
The end