Is it difficult to write a book?

 I don’t know how other writers put their writing in motion, but I find it easier to write when I’m reading a book that I love. I can’t read a book for longer than a couple of minutes without feeling the urge to stop and write at my own book. Reading is a powerful trigger for my writing. It will always be. Most of the writers are procrastinators, but I found that reading can break this curse. Each of us has our own story of why and how we postpone the inevitable, which is our writing time. It happens to me as often as it happens to others and some of the reasons may be one of the following:

 

1.      I feel I don’t have the right mood for digging deeper into my story or into my characters’ minds.

2.      I feel I don’t have the right location to put me in that mood.

3.      I feel that my mood is responsible of my writing quality and if something is not right about it I avoid writing.

4.      I feel I can be more productive if I do it later in the day. When I wake up in the morning, I feel I can do it better in the afternoon, and in the afternoon, I feel I can do it better in the evening. I can easily get trapped in this circle for a day or two or sometimes longer.

5.      I feel I’m empty. I feel I have nothing to say. I feel that I have to struggle to create a new scene or a decent dialog. But it’s just an illusion. Writers could never stop being creative.

6.      I feel I will write something I’ll be embarrassed of, something that will lack substance and make me feel I’m not as good as I expect to be. I’m afraid that a bad writing would kill my confidence, so I just wait for the right moment, which in normal circumstances will never come.

 

         Fortunately, something works for me in my fight against procrastination. Everything falls back into place when I pick up the book I’m currently reading. I need to have a reading in progress if I want to break the procrastinating spell. The moment I start reading from that book I feel reconnected to the flow of energy and inspiration a writer needs in order to get started. The more I read, the more I feel like writing, until a sudden urge takes control of my inner self and gets it channelled to the next step. I stop reading, sometimes mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, and get all my fingers back on the keyboard. I’m back again to my own story ready to give it the best of me. The words are pouring down like a rainfall and I could sense a presence of something greater than me taking control. A secret gate is opening and everything makes sense. My confidence gets stronger with every word that I use and every sentence that I put together. Somehow, the book that I read gets connected to the book that I write and the flow of energy that moves inside my body is nothing less than a bridge between what I found in that book and what I need to say in my own book. The book that I read feeds the book that I write the way a pregnant woman feeds her unborn baby. It happens in the same mysterious way our parents bring us to life from nothing.

          Writing is not something easy, nor complicated, but you can’t make it happen right now when you think you’re writing. You need to connect to the flow that runs through everything that has ever been written and let it grow inside yourself to the point where you feel that whatever you write about is not coming from you, but from somewhere else. That’s when the writing gets born. Or at least that’s when it gets born in my own world.

Excerpt from the novel 'A Gypsy Boy Called Shakespeare'

I’m Shakespeare. Funny, isn’t it? People use to laugh when they hear my name, but gipsy names can be funny sometimes. The day we are born, parents give us names to match their moods, or hopes, or idols. Some love it, some hate it, but as long as I bear the name of a famous writer I think I should consider myself a fortunate one. I had a colleague at school who had been named after a famous karate fighter: Bruzli. He was fortunate as well. Less fortunate was a cousin of mine. They called him Paracetamol. That’s really bad. How sick can you get in the winter and how desperate should you be to recover from a cold to give your child the name of a medicine?

The story goes that mom’s parents made arrangements to marry her with dad when she was just thirteen. But mom said no. She said she wouldn’t marry dad until she reads Romeo and Juliet. She believed that Shakespeare’s story was in fact her story and whatever love was, she needed to know about it from the famous writer. And here she had a valid point, as my grand-grandpa used to say. She was a Julieta herself in her birth certificate, and my father – don’t laugh! – a Romeo.

Reading Shakespeare’s play, mom found out that Juliet was fourteen when she met Romeo so she decided she wouldn’t marry dad until that age. Her parents got mad, but my mom wouldn’t move an inch.

 ‘It was Shakespeare himself who decided that, so leave me alone! If you marry me earlier I might end up with the wrong child and the entire love story would go totally wrong.’

Shakespeare’s love story would go totally wrong anyway, but at that point my mom wouldn’t know about that. She didn’t even finish reading the play. She was just looking to find a reason to hold on to her girlhood for as long as she could. She just needed a bit more time to figure out what marriage was all about.

‘I tell you! I’m not marrying!’ she’d cry out.

Her parents turned to their oldest for help. They waited for grand-grandpa to step forward and say something to cool her off. But the old man surprised them all.

‘I think this girl has a valid point, here,’ he said. ‘Without Romeo and Juliet, there would be no Shakespeare!’

And that’s how a new Shakespeare was born.

Home

You can rise or you can fall,
you can miss your only goal,
you can win or you can lose,
you can die of cold and booze,
but you can't deny your Gift...
It takes you Home
when you're adrift!

Vinnie the Mouse and The End of the Cats’ World

Vinnie the Mouse is watching his wife, Ada, as she puts her babies to sleep. She is sobbing. She ran out of milk in her breasts and she's worried about their lives. They are twelve altogether and in a week's time they might be asking for cheese.
‘We’ll need loads of cheese to bring all these babies up,’ Ada said. ‘You’re their father, Vinnie! You have to do something about that.’

Vinnie cannot sleep anymore overnight. He spends long hours out in the garden hoping that the moon and the stars will talk to him and tell him what to do. The fridge in the house is always full of cheese, but he is too small and weak to open the heavy door and help himself. The only ones who can pull that door open are just little Honey Dee, or her mother, or Poolfra the Cat.

There was a time when Poolfra opened the fridge and helped herself with a bit of cheese every single day, a time when Vinnie could find enough crumbled cheese around the fridge to keep his hunger at bay. But now Poolfra hasn’t opened the fridge door for ages. Since Honey Dee is feeding her with cat food from the superstore, Poolfra doesn’t do anything but playing all day long with her son, Foolbrick. She almost forgot there was a fridge in the house. And Vinnie has a family now. The crumbs are not enough to bring them up. He needs blocks of cheese.

As he worked his mind out to find a way to provide for his children, Vinnie remembers about Honey Dee’s collection of miniature books. In a tiny library placed on a desk in her bedroom, there are over fifty little books neatly arranged on shelves. They are all written in small print, as small as the poppy seeds he finds sometimes in the garden.

Thinking about them, a bright idea takes shape. ‘Those books can get me out of trouble,’ he says to himself and scurries over to Honey Dee’s bedroom. He jumps on the small table where the miniature library is mounted, pulls a book out at random and returns to his nest with it under his arm.

‘What is that?’ Ada asked him.

‘A book!’

‘We need food, Vinnie, not books!’

‘I know, I know, but this book will bring us food.’

‘A book that brings us food? How’s that?’

‘One day it said on the radio that books are magical things. If you hold one in your hand long enough, it can do miracles.’

‘The kids don’t eat miracles, Vinnie! They eat cheese! Books might do miracles for humans, but not for mice who cannot read.’

The following day Vinnie comes out of his nest with the book in his hands and opens it, leaning against the skirting board. Nothing makes sense in those pages, but he wouldn’t care less. All he wants is to make Poolfra curious.  

Poolfra has just finished her meal and she sees Vinnie with the book in his hand. She cannot believe her eyes. She thought that only humans can read. She comes over, rubbing her eyes.

‘Is that a book in your hands, or I’m dreaming?’

‘A book, indeed,’ Vinnie says.

‘And how did you learn to read?’

‘It probably comes with age.’

‘And what is it talking about, your book?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to know, Poolfra… It’s talking about you, guys. About the End of the Cats’ World.’

Poolfra gaped at him in terror. ‘No! You’re joking!’

‘Seriously!’

A long moment of silence followed. ‘Now don’t torture me, Vinnie! Tell me! I want to know everything.’

Vinnie slams the book shut and puts the heel of his hand on his forehead. ‘Sorry, Poolfra, but I cannot concentrate anymore. This reading takes a lot of energy and I haven’t eaten anything from yesterday.’

‘I can get you some cheese from the fridge, if you want.’

‘Would you do that for me? Oh, you’re a sweetie, darling.’

Poolfra goes in the kitchen, opens the fridge and grabs a block of cheese from the shelf. Her whole body is shaking. She drops the cheese on the floor, picks it up and drops it again. She’s thinking of her only son, Foolbrick. He means the world for her, and if the End of the Cats’ World is near, his life is obviously in danger. She doesn’t want him to die. She has to find a way to save him.

Vinnie takes the cheese from Poolfra and goes home to recover his strengths. As he pushes the cheese inside, he bumps into Ada and gives her a wink. ‘Told you it’s magic,’ he said.  

The following day, Vinnie is out again reading from his book, this time with a new plan in mind. One block of cheese is not enough. He has to secure his family’s supply of cheese, not for just one generation, but for many more to come. He turned the last page in front of Poolfra and closed the book with a worried look on his face.

‘How does it finish?’ Poolfra asked.

‘Very bad, Poolfra! All cats will end up in the street.’

‘In the street? After all these years of superstore food and expensive shampoos? When? How?’

‘It doesn’t say in this one, but I promise I carry on reading. There are still forty-nine left.’

‘Don’t tell me! This is ridiculous. Would you be able to read all of them in your lifetime?’

‘I have a son, Poolfra. If I cannot make it, he will.’

‘Oh, Vinnie, if you make sure he will do that, your family will always have some cheese at dinner!’

Vinnie is so proud about himself. His plan worked out. His family will never need to worry about food for long years to come.

Twenty three days later Poolfra and Vinnie die both in the same day, but not because it is the End of the Cats’ World. They just die like many other cats and mice – Poolfra, hit by a car, and Vinnie, caught in mousetrap.

In his will, Vinnie left a set of instructions for his son, Ginnie. After his father’s funeral, the young mouse reads the instructions and puts the plan in action. He takes a book in his hand, goes out of his nest and waits for Foolbrick to catch sight of him.

But Foolbrick is spending most of his days in the window staring for long hours at a beautiful kitten that just moved in the neighbourhood. She is white like milk, with a little pink ribbon tied on top of her head and eyes as blue as the morning sky.

After spending a couple of days totally ignored, Ginnie decides to make himself more visible. He climbs on the window sill where Foolbrick is set in stone and shuffles the pages noisily at his feet. Foolbrick gets aware of him, but he doesn’t move an inch. His eyes stay glued to the white beauty in the neighbour’s garden.

‘Is that a book, Ginnie?’ he finally asked.

‘A book indeed.’

‘And what is it talking about, your book?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t want to know Foolbrick. It’s talking about you, guys. It’s a book about the End of the Cats’ World.’

‘Oh! So that’s the book mum was talking about! Then would you mind if I ask you to read it somewhere else, please? I don’t really want to know about it. If I die tomorrow, I still have today.’

Ginnie went back to his nest and spent the entire night reading his father’s instructions all over again. He followed them in detail but it didn’t work. He would die of hunger. He couldn’t survive anymore just from the bread crumbs Honey Dee was leaving behind at breakfast. That was the End of the Mice’s World.

But all of a sudden, a bright idea formed in his mind. He placed the old book back in the Honey Dee’s miniature library and picked up a new one. This time he chose one with shiny covers painted in red and went straight to where Foolbrick made his usual habit to gape at the white beauty in the neighbour’s garden.

‘Is that a new book?’

‘A new book indeed.’

‘And what is it talking about, your new book?’

‘This one is about how you, guys, fall love,’ Ginnie said. ‘It’s amazing! Especially when it says how lovely the white cats are but how difficult is to make them fall in love with you. ’

Ginnie’s words made Foolbrick turn his head slowly to him. Now that was something that really caught him. His astonishment looked nearly human.

‘No! You’re joking!’

‘Seriously.’

Ginnie remembers how his dad ended up in that rusty trap he had always managed to outwit. He died with his eyes open, just an inch away from a meagre piece of cheese bait. Ginnie doesn’t want to end up like his father.

‘Don’t worry, Foolbrick!’ Ginnie continued. ‘Most of the books in that library are about white cats and how you can make them fall in love with you. I’m here to help, my friend. I’m here to read for you day and night until you win your beauty’s heart.’

Foolbrick gets really excited. ‘Tell me something! Anything!’

Ginnie closes the book and shakes his head a couple of times. ‘Oh, gosh! I can’t concentrate anymore. This book reading takes a lot of energy and I didn’t eat anything from yesterday.’

‘I can get you some cheese from the fridge, if you want.’

‘Oh, you’re a real friend, Foolbrick. Would you do that for me?’

Foolbrick jumps from the sill and disappears in the kitchen. Ginnie sighs deeply. He wonders how long it might take until mice will have their own food section in the superstore. Cats have their own. Dogs have their own. Even fish have their own. Does he have to carry that book with him until the end of his life? But then he remembers what his father had told him since he was a kid: “A book is a magical thing. If you stay long enough with one in your hand it can do miracles.” Such a miracle was now right in front of him: a block of cheese enough to last for a full week. And if a book can bring this today, who knows what it might bring up tomorrow?

An Accident in Bucharest

Since I was a little boy
learning how to use my feet
I’ve been always taught by mum
to make sure and pay attention
when I have to cross the street.

“Never, ever, on the red light!
Never where the traffic’s denser.
If you see no traffic lights
Zebra crossing is the answer.”

Black and white strips, orange flashing.
That day I could feel no fear.
More than that, a nice little granny
smiled at me and said: “My dear,
 if you need some help, I’m here!”

Up and down the street, no sound.
No cloud on the morning sky
just two headlights in the distance.
Enough time to cross the street,
enough time to get home dry.

As soon as I stepped on zebra
I could hear a crow’s shrill cry.
I could see a pair of wings
casting shadows at my feet
flying low, but aiming high.

Suddenly my nape went cold
sending shivers down my spine.
I could say, without a doubt,
there was something in the air
like an omen, like a sign.

Then I heard a rumbling thunder,
and I felt a ruthless pain,
crushing bones and stripping flesh,
I was kicked up in the air
just to land on a different lane.

I could see an ambulance
flashing lights and distant voices.
I could smell the anaesthetics
and I heard the little granny
sobbing between other noises.

Should I tell you what came next,
when my parents hand in hand
were invited in my ward
and they saw me tied to bed?
Mum just cried out once and fainted.
What a pain, such grief I brought!
Doctors, nurses, exchanged glances.
They all seemed to know my fate.
They all knew my neck was broken
and I’d never walk again.

Hours later, whispers floating.
It was little granny’s voice:
“He was riding like a ghost!
Switching lanes, at lightning speed.
In his black and shiny jacket.
leather trousers, smoky helmet,
I can bet he was Sorin,
our mayor’s only child
riding his black motorbike
he just got it as a gift
from his rich godfather Mike.”

Few policemen now showed up.
They took notes, they talked to granny.
Dad was calm but soon got hot.
First he listened, now he’s shouting.
Rage and hatred shake the huddles.
Nurses offer everybody
cups on trays and water bottles.

The policemen shrug and mumble
arguing on evidence.
They can’t blame Sorin, they say,
when they have no plate, no number,
not even the make for bike.
All they have is just a helmet
and a crow and then the strike.

As I listen, I agree.
They can’t blame him.
They are right.
Not without a plate, or number,
or at least a make for bike!

Mum gave me to drink some water
with a fond look in her eyes.
Couldn’t spot the make of water.
Daddy’s shouting, mummy cries.

A Jobseeker's Story

I’m looking for a job these days and the start point is obviously my CV. In my early twenties, I had one CV like everybody. I graduated Journalism, had a couple of jobs in Media, everything went smooth. Moving into my thirties, a new CV surfaced. I got into the Hospitality industry, managed a couple of restaurants, moving around the world a bit. With two CVs I thought that the chances to get a job would double up but when I wanted to make a change they actually halved. Now I’m well into my forties and I have four CVs. I worked in Property, sold some houses, do some viewings in Lettings, tried to open an Estate agency. In parallel I attended some courses in Novel Writing, published two books, wrote a novel, got stuck into this writing mania. Now when I’m struggling to get a job I realize that my chances of employment have fallen even lower, probably to a quarter. As you can see we have a geometric progression here with the CVs multiplying at a common ratio of 2 at every ten years and the chances to get a job going down in retrogression. A mathematician might look at this with a raised brow and increased interest. She might even pick up the phone and call her HR friend and ask her whether this formula could have any chance to be taken forward and give the jobseekers and recruiters some important advice on how they should approach each other. So should I expect as I move through the fifties to have eight CVs and the chances to get a job fall even lower, down to probably ten percent? Sure I can. I just need to put my hobbies in descending order and stretch the first four of them to look more or less like a career.

No Worries

My pencil lost its tooth.

Just like that.

It must be terrible
to have just one tooth
and lose it
when you have so many things
to write about
and there is just one way
to stay in touch with your words,
which is your tooth.

Mom watched me close

while I was sharpening
my pencil,
and said:
„You should spread the books
on your toast
and eat them
the way you eat
your buttered toast.

Give your teeth

some hard work in this life
no matter how much money
you have to pay your dentist
to sort out your cavities.

And if you won’t be able

to make enough money
to care for your teeth,
no worries.

We are supposed to lose them,

anyway.

But never lost will be your bite

from books spread out
on buttered toast.”