Jumping in the Dark
"You don't jump ... you step, like walking off the pavement when you cross the road.
It's noisy but you don't hear anything as you are concentrating on what you are going to do.
Smell is the sense that is heightened the most when you are scared and can't see anything and your ears won't work. It stinks of piss and puke with a waft of pure freshness coming at you in insufficient quantity to clear your gut from being scared and taking away the metal taste in your mouth.
Now it's your turn with the rear-front shuffle taking you to the black hole while your arms are aching with holding onto the weight and I want to throw up but I didn't eat anything on purpose.
It's pointless looking up because the cloud blanks out the stars you otherwise would expect to not see, a double negative on a good night that tells you it's open.
Now your ears tell you what's happening. Shouts from others that have gone before and are coming after.
Helium – A Writers Marketplace?
Helium has just turned one year old. You may have seen the Google adsense marketing blurbs when you are researching writing and resources for writers, and I think they are probably the number one writing services advertiser at the moment.
Helium is a site that allows you to submit your articles in anticipation that they will be sold (by them) and you get a percentage of the fee. You can also earn a share of advertising revenues generated by the site and there are writing competitions which may can earn you extra pay as well. The big issue is that you are not being paid for the time you spend crafting an article and getting paid any realistic amount is totally dependent upon the article being sold.
I've never contributed to Helium as I always shied away from submitting work with no guarantee that I'll be paid for my efforts. I wrote for a short while for a similar site Suite 101, but nothing ever really came of it and I stopped as work with upfront pay began to dominate my working time. The buzz on the various writing blogs regarding Helium is very mixed in terms of the effort required for no certain return but like almost everything else in life, it is a gamble.
FuN wItH wRiTiNg
In this post, let me share ideas with you to allow your creative juices and imagination to flow, by me naming people, objects, places and incidents in their own terms. Not necessarily to mock them, but to bring out their actual trails. The greatest writer of all, who we knew played around with the names of their characters effectively, was Charles Dickens. Remember his characters Fagin, Uriah heep (yes, later to be an 80’s band), Mr. Bumble, Mrs. Sparsit and so on. Contemporary Scottish writer, Irvine Welsh, also often plays with this form, through his otherwise dark and brooding characters.
So, let us start by playing with names to extend our imaginative faculties a little. Choose a couple of unnamed photographs. After you have a considerable number of them, sit down and makeup you own nicknames for the characters. Closely observe their body language, background, and attire. Now spin write a fun account of the reasons to the origination of their names. Have their caricature play on the group photographs, the result is intoxicating humor. After you have names and explained the origins of the characters, give a name to the entire group and have a fictive reason for them coming together. You can do similar caricatures for the people around you. The next time someone bugs you at the office you can just take a look at your creation and laugh to yourself. From time to time, add and subtract features so your characters reflect reality more.