You know how much I already love you all right now?

Well, imagine how much more I will love you when you go over to www.elephantwords.co.uk and start reading?

And imagine how much more you will love me!

Elephant Words is a new website that will feature six fresh and inventive writers interpreting and being inspired by one new image every week. New writing will be posted every day, and there are no limits on the styles or genres that the contributors can use, so it will be worth visiting regularly to see what they have come up with!

To start reading new and exciting writing, go here:
http://elephantwords.co.uk

To find out more about the Elephant Words project, go here: http://elephantwords.co.uk/about/

And to start giving feedback (which we would love to hear) go here:
http://elephantwords.co.uk/forum/

All of the contributors are very enthused about working on the project, and some weeks, they will be worked pretty hard (just look at the schedule over there!), so please go along and offer them your support.

So I doodled this out, based on some things that were occuring to me while looking at other people’s awesome efforts.

There’s a kind of “not too much text” rule on the forum, so I’m going to just meander a bit about the subject here.

First off, it’s no coincidence that I based this on a photo from the movie Pi… reading through the entries, and finding myself thinking more and more about the flat and emotionless, scientific “voice” that Holmes has in my head, I kept going back to the robotic repetition of Pi’s protagonist’s scientific observations… I could see Holmes moving around a crime scene, and vocalising constant, clipped pieces of evidence, and free-association, like a less paranoid version of Milton Dammers in The Frighteners.

My Holmes is, like the original, a genius, and very detached from his fellow man. And he has absolutely no interest in solving crime for any moral reasons. I believe the original did it for the sheer intellectual challenge, whereas this Holmes only gets involved in sleuthing as a by-product of his obsession. This Holmes was a child prodigy… he is a mathematical and scientific genius, constantly absorbing information, and has been at a distance from others for his entire life. Agnostic and driven, he has become obsessed with unlocking the secret of the nature of the universe, and his ingrained feeling is that, by constantly taking in data, finding mysteries (criminal or otherwise) and unravelling them, and collating this data constantly, he will find the key or rosetta stone… put simply, I suppose he wants to “solve” the confusing nature of reality.

His lack of empathy with other people naturally finds him drawn to humanity at it’s excesses… in murder, in lusts, infidelity, debauchery, and chemical recreation. He finds that human nature is the thing that confounds him the most, and so believes that the biggest clues to the secrets he’s searching out lie in working his fellow man out.

He is quite obsessed, and as such, his constant notes are indecipherable to most people. Watson would be another extremely intelligent man (although not quite in Holmes’ league) who translates Holmes’ tiny scribblings into publishable academic papers. Perhaps Watson uses the small salary that Holmes’ provides him for this to supplement some kind of military service disability pension. As their relationship has progressed, he now accompanies Holmes and transcribes the constant verbal notes that issue forth from him. From an admittedly Hollywood viewpoint, Watson would also provide a necessary humanising conduit, both between Holmes and the world outside his offices, and Holmes and the audience.

As part of his earlier attempts to gather data to help him divine reality, Holmes found himself progressing from the physical sciences to number theory, and then on to a structured and prolonged series of experiments with chemicals. Most of his observation work from testing various concoctions on himself has been done, now, but he still regularly uses them as a means for replicating emotional or cognitive states, as they pertain to his work. This has, understandably, taken it’s physical and mental toll on Holmes, and whether or not he realises this, and recognises the cycle of dependancy that he is most certainly in, I haven’t yet decided, but the potential for pathos and black comedy is huge.

This version of Holmes can be of the original period, or contemporary… either works. The only differences would be naturally of surroundings… and the present day iteration would number advanced modern forensic evidence gathering and computer science among his large mental toolkit. There’s a charm to a period approach, of course.

His fashion choices, or lack of them, are as described on the picture. I’ve ditched the pipe and deerstalker… the big, eccentric hair provides a similar visual motif to the hat anyway, and the pipe is a fond and nostalgic affectation, but I don’t think it’s as central to the character as his vague arrogance and reptilian coolness, which are at the core of my take.

(I’m probably never going to write this, but I’d love to hear any comments on the ideas… it’s been a fun process that’s taken an hour or so of time where I would have been preoccupied and struggled to sleep…)

Thank you to those of you that have been asking after my progress, and a bigger thank you to those of you who have had to put up with me being absent and absent-minded for the last thirty days. Normal service will be resumed shortly, whatever that means.

I’m back!

And now I am going to go and sleep. For a week.

I’ve normally got a pretty good memory for what I intended with a piece of writing, or I get it done in one sitting, so more often than not, I can finish a piece, even months after starting it. But sometimes, I’ve just lost the thread of what I was intending to do. This sucks badly enough, but if I’m actually quite pleased with the work that’s left behind, it’s even worse. Those pieces, the ones that I’m almost proud of, but just not capable of finishing, will come under Broken Narratives.

I’m hoping not to put many posts up under this category.

“Life Isn’t A Box Of Chocolates etc” wasn’t ever intended to be the title of this piece… It was just going to be a meandering journey through a city at night, similar to a piece I did for my old column at Themestream (which got me thumped by a girl, and I may put up here at some point, as it’s a bit lovely), and the focal point of the piece was the rising storm, rather than any one of the characters in it. The title I’ve used here was just a line that I found at the end of the unfinished draft, and I have no idea what it was going to refer to.

But the first part, about the girl who has a hospital in her past, stands alone, I think, and the conversation in the second part is so similar to one that actually happened to me as being noteworthy. I should mention that I wasn’t trying to say anything specific about abortion or teen-pregnancy here; in fact, I think I was attempting to take a believable, measured look at one girl’s life. I always remember an article by Stephen King in which he says that “Carrie” was as much an effort in seeing whether he could get to grips with writing a pubescent girl’s life experience, much to the (slightly sadistic) amusement of his wife. I may have been trying the same thing here.

This was only written a few months ago, but my life now is so completely different to how it was then that I’m struggling to remember exactly what I was getting at. But I loved some of the turns of phrase I managed to find, and I hope you do too.

The fact is that it hasn’t been the same since the hospital.
She still fetches the kids, smiles as she tells them stories about being grown up, or settles them in front of the telly while she does the dishes, to make it easier for mum to do dinner when she gets in.
Dad still comes home around the same time as mum, but he always wants to get in the shower first thing, wash off the garage before anyone has to kiss him, so there’s still the half hour of chatting at the kitchen table, the two women of the house, before he swoops down the stairs and fills the house with his booming laugh.
She still shares a quiet smile with mum as the sounds of the kids laughing at dad comes from the front room, before he bursts in and sweeps them both off their feet. Mum pretends to be irritated, but that’s just what mums do. Dad asks about college; she answers as best she can.

 After dinner, she goes out with friends, or sits in with family. They laugh. They drink. There are boys. There are always boys, but not as many as for some of her friends… her parents’ biggest gift to her has been a sense of what she’s worth, so she only gives the boys what she wants to get from them, and she never regrets anything. She’s always fair and careful.

Except, some nights, that’s another thing that has changed. Some nights, the hospital preys on her mind more than others, and there doesn’t seem quite so much point to caution. Fun doesn’t seem so easy to come by. You have to chase it harder. You have to take the corners that little bit faster. And coming off the road is always a regret.

Most of the time, she’s fighting to keep the despair out of that shared smile with mum, and dad, with his trustworthy smile and his big protecting arms; she just wants to scream at him: “You let me down! You were the one who told me life should be an adventure! That it was worth something! You said you’d always protect me! You LIED to me!”

Since the hospital, her glass always feels two-thirds empty. The big joke is on her, with her best foot forward and her rock-solid belief in karma.

It’s not like she even wanted a kid.
The guy wasn’t in the picture any more, and she hadn’t pined for him… she’s never been the kind of girl who mistakes a few weeks for endless love. She’d been dreading the idea of having to decide whether to tell him or not.

The morning before the endless afternoon of the emergency room, she’d been weighing up the pros and cons of a termination. The debate hadn’t touched her much deeper than a stack of practical “fors”, against the all pervading “againsts” of her abject fear of doctors and a deeper distaste for what she saw in herself as a failure to take responsibility.

Then the bleeding started.

She was in town when it happened, and didn’t get a chance to think about what to do; she passed out in a shop changing room, clutching a pair or lacy red knickers she was thinking about buying, and by the time she’d come to, she was already in an ambulance on her way to the local General.

She pretends to forget about the next few hours; likes to imagine that nothing happened between the last squeeze the paramedic gave her hand, and the journey home in dad’s car, the knickers that no-one had had the heart to take back crumpled in a tiny ball in the bottom of her college bag, put there by a well-meaning nurse. But it doesn’t matter how convincing she makes the fun stories about being a grown up; she can’t bring herself to believe in karma any more, and things just aren’t the same.

These days, she can’t watch mum and dad share a cuddle over the chopping board like she used to. She looks out of the window, more so she doesn’t have to see than anything else.

The sky’s already dark with clouds, bringing on an early, ugly sunset.

On his way home from work, he doesn’t really know where to look… it’s been like this for months, now. He barely remembers the old days, when it felt safe out here.