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The address for all my posts: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551

3  The Evolution of Love - in the courthouse

These are the tags specifically used for the posts on the evolution of love :
writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 3

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

Italics show what was previously written in 'Writing by numbers without numbers 1 '. Normal text shows additions for today, Good Friday 2025

In 'Writing by numbers without numbers 2' (Winter) Toby plans to leave twenty pounds on the ground for a young woman, Mimie, to find. I am changing the five pounds he finds in the courthouse to twenty pounds and the person who calls 'Wait' to be that young woman, Mimie, who found the twenty pounds in Winter.
It is now Spring. My task is to populate the outside area with Spring and have parallels in the courthouse. I think my intention is to have Mimie as a distraction to Toby's love for someone else, Kate.

stung by a stinging nettle; emergence of the people from their warm homes; time of hope, of tentative dreams, of seeing plans begin to take shape; energetic season; an assurance that things are going well; “Lovely weather!"; insects and bumble bees; neighbours more obvious; annoying power tools are used

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

(Addition part 3 on Good Friday) He plucked an emerging stinging nettle from near the self-seeded snapdragons. It stung his finger-tips but not really unpleasantly like a sting on the back of the hand or on an arm or leg; more a tingle; more an 'ooh!' than an 'Ouch!'.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. (Addition part 3 on Good Friday) A jogger, recently happy to exercise now her face wouldn't get cold, dodged the waiting passengers. The bus, unusually, arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned. (Addition part 3 on Good Friday) In any case the passengers were hopeful that things would go well for a few months

This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’

new on Good Friday

I want to have a feeling move past Toby, the protagonist, like a spirit blowing on him, but I also don't want to stop exploring love in the real world as possibly being completely earth-bound and wholly contained within our minds. Cortisol?

The new love interest will now be Mimie, and the below speech, which was previously due for deletion, is relevant because it provides a connection to an earlier event.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s twenty pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along'

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

        ‘Wait!’

Toby turned to see the normally weeping woman who had smiled at him today.

       'Have you got a moment? I need to talk to you. I know what you did.' Most people never want to hear this because it makes them think about when they slightly bumped a car in the supermarket car park and drove away, hoping no-one had noticed. 'It wasn't too big a bump was it? Was it?' Toby had no such fear, because he regarded himself as honest. In any case, he recognised the woman, and she was not unattractive in a dark trouser suit. Instead of the heightened perception that precedes fear, a half itch and half stinging feeling moved invisibly within him.

      'Okay, what's up?'

      'Can I buy you a coffee, at lunch-time?' Bought coffee in a courthouse came from a vending machine, and a cup of coffee that was made in the courthouse was made in the presence of other court officials, in the kitchen. This was going to be a psuedo-date, off the premises.

      'Meet here? One o'clock?' Toby smiled. Mimie smiled back. (Way too twee) Breakfast seemed too small again.

      Toby was intrigued, she didn't work here and was dressed expensively well. As duty-solicitor he hoped she was not in trouble. He wasn't expecting to meet Kate until this evening.
 

2  Plotting how the evolution of love will unfold

The tags for this are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story

These tags will be used only for posts that directly relate to this story and character evolution, so clicking on them in the list of tags will show only this evolution with the related posts. Because they will not display in chronological order the posts are numbered. This is number 2

Black font is pretty much final but subject to change. 

Red font text will be changed. 

Green font text is a replacement for the red font text.

I am going to also use blue font for comments and bold typeface and italics for something else.

So, green font is the replacement for the red font. Like this: Toby walked down his path. Toby ran across the lawn towards the path

It seems to me that I should start at the very beginning of when love is first discovered in someone for someone else (or even something else – dog, cat etc.).

In the 1944 film ‘Meet me in St. Louis’, as Esther Smith, a daughter of a wealthy man, Judy Garland is about to leave the home, for a short time, and gives the black housekeeper a squeeze, and says, ‘I am used to you!’ There are two obvious reasons why her words were so: First, because those words convey the type of love she has for her ‘friend’ – of some years; or / and secondly, because it is set in 1905 and a white young woman saying she loves a black woman would probably have been scandalous, in 1905 (the setting of the film) and 1944 in the cinema. Nonetheless, her love is conveyed, at least to me. It is easy to meld these two reasons for the choice of words the screenwriters chose, to understand that the film is about a young woman full of excitement and discovery and now about to leave the house servants. It is important to show that Esther (Judy) is kind and not complicated.

I think we get 'used to' a puppy or a kitten as it turns into an adult animal and mourn our loss when it dies thirteen or fourteen years later. Yet, if it died on the same day we acquired it, many of us would be more upset at its demise than our own upset at our loss.

Certainly, a sense of attachment makes a difference to us. Our baby animal dying on the first day we have it is different to hearing about our neighbour’s new pet dying. There is an immediacy to having our own pet.

So, perhaps there is making room in our emotions for someone else and an immediacy of interaction necessary for there to be love. Yet, some say, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, and others say, ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’. I suspect from this, there is a different type of love for our siblings than for our neighbours, or people who study or work with us. In our early years we don’t get to be away from our family members. It follows then, that platonic love is so pervasive that romantic love cannot grow roots.

So, my character, ‘Toby’, must be attracted to someone or recognise something in someone else that he finds exciting and would miss if it wasn’t available to him, albeit intermittently. This recognition must be new to him. 

There are times when there comes a diminishment in faculties for good operation in the world by our partners; through accident, age; or illness. Then, we are in the position of being ‘used to’ that person being there, and we love them that way - the 'spark' is absent. I am not going to explore 'sentiment for something that is no longer there', as much as I would like to.

In order to ‘show’ love in my story about Toby, I shall describe his garden growing; from its Winter bareness through early growth in Spring, Flowery Summer, Abundance in Autumn, and back to Winter. However, this last winter shall have rewards from the careful cultivation of his garden and further afield throughout the year. For this to work, Toby needs to gather nuts and fruit (and other stuff) for eating or presentation, during a shared time with at least one other person.

My target length is 2500 words for the very short finished exercise in learning how to write about love, but the background and drafts will take more than 12000, I suspect.

So, my story needs to begin in Winter.

 

Toby and the garden fell in love

It was mid morning in mid-April, but it felt like late Summer to Toby. A warm yellow sun low in the sky shone on damp full leaved plants. It seemed that all the plants had already flowered and were now preparing to make seeds. Toby felt a simultaneous surge of bitter-sweet disappointment and contentment because, despite a late English Summer being his favourite time of the year, he somehow thought that he had missed the exciting journey of getting there. The flowers seemed to have already thrown a free festival with a riot of colour, and the bees and insects had been and gone. They hadn’t, of course, and Toby, returning from a memory of the past that had snuck in and masqueraded as the present, didn’t care, because Toby was in love.

His toast hadn’t burnt this morning. On the way to the bus, the miserable and lonely mother with the ever-crying baby in a stroller had smiled at him today. He was glad because normally he felt helpless when he saw her; helpless and unsure what to do. The bus arrived on time, and he didn’t have to sit next to the man who smelled of wet dogs, because the waiting passengers at the bus stop had unthinkingly complied with some innate and arcane reasoning to let happy people go ahead of them. If these people had been sword-wielding warriors arriving at an ancient battlefield already populated with vicious barbarians, they would have looked at any man grinning at the thrill of battle and laughing in the face of death, then looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let him go first.’ Today though, in modern day peaceful Suffolk, the waiting commuters had silently and morosely just shuffled aside out of the clump of bodies that was their queue, and Toby got on first, the corners of his mouth slightly upturned.

I am spontaneously moving towards his new love interest being the magistrate / judge who sentences him for some misdemeanor. We'll see. This paragraph with speech may not make the final cut. It is italic red so I know that it can be deleted because nothing following it rests on its existence yet. Italics are also used for different reasons.

In town, at the courthouse, Toby passed through the metal detector and collected his belongings. A five pound note lay on the floor near his foot.

       ‘Hurry up, move along, Sir’

       ‘There’s five pounds here,’ Toby said, pointing down.

       ‘Move along.’

Scowls came from the queue on the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through,  and called, ‘Wait!’

Scowls came from the other side of the metal detector. Toby moved on. The person behind him had only a phone, so was quickly through. 

       ‘Wait!’