The tags for seeing only the evolution of this story are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story. If you can see the list of tags to the right you can click on the suggested (above) links to eliminate all the rest of the posts. If you can't see the links click on the link above and then they should be visible when the page reloads.
PART TWO OF THIS STORY IS ALREADY POSTED AS 'Writing by Numbers without numbers 6' and is below this post.
I am not a writer. If you are on a writing course, particularly with the Open University, your first focus should be with your course material and tutor advice.
I have been trying to write about love; the purpose of which is to
force myself to confront something that is difficult for me to do.
Throughout my effort, I have been looking to eliminate worn out
cliches and avoid simplistic declarative statements. Overall, I
wanted to discover characters and characteristics that I could use
elsewhere in understanding diverse topics. I like to anthropomorphise
dry subjects to make them easier for me to understand. The 'plot' of
the story is clear to me; but the whole thing is incomplete because
to give it substance I still have to have a parallel environment that
follows rules we are all familiar with; I have chosen a full calendar
year, a garden, and the weather throughout the year. This, I hope
would add a canvas on which the story is overlaid. Since I have
experience of a few seasons I can hold the way seasons change from
one to another in my mind, and how a garden is affected. This,
however, is not yet written into the story.
Here is the story without comments and corrections in
two installments.
There will be constant changes to the story in content, but not plot, over the next couple of weeks. The reason for writing about love and publishing it is for me to delve into a subject that is difficult for me to write and in the process discover new ways of understanding how I can make shortcuts to imply something is happening. I have, so far, not tried to write a smooth and finished piece. This is because I wanted to share how difficult it is for me and how and what I have learnt.
Blue text is used for comments
Red text is used for intended deletion
Green text is used for replacement text
Bold and italic is used for other stuff
Toby fell in love Part One
PART ONE
Mimie and Chloe
(Spring 2023)
The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was
enhanced by her closeness to her sister.
‘You make me laugh so much,
Chloe!’
Mimie looked fondly at her older identical twin sister.
‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly
when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment
passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m
pregnant.’ she said happily.
‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God,
I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light
danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.
‘Owen is delighted, he insists he
will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to
celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks
it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’
‘He
is such a man!’ laughed Mimie. She was delirously happy.
January2024
(The following year)
Kate
Toby hated Winter. The
greyness of the sky with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket
of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable
to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his,
usually substantial, breakfast was not large enough to stand in for
satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not
lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around,
during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to
do so, and not for fun.
The bare stems of hazelnut near his front door, despite being
three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind; a
gusting wind that had travelled countless miles from the East and had
no gift of value except a few dead leaves it blew across his path.
His flower beds still showed signs of frost.
A young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed
him, coming the other way on the footpath to the main road. She
miserably passed him every day. Toby thought she and the baby looked
cold, and he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would
have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These
days, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she
needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he would leave twenty
pounds on the footpath for her to find, he decided. He kept walking,
feeling helpless, and ashamed.
No-one looked at him at the bus-stop. A couple of them moved from
side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. There was
silence, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small
islands of late snow.
Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from
the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the
resident puddle. Toby could not recall there never being a puddle
there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the one
that everyone avoided every day.
Dave, occupying one half
of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-haired
covered clothes spoke for him. People with head colds and wet tissues
were deaf to the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh
air.
For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he
would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the
passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when
they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and
again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward when the bus
braked sharply at the roadworks.
Toby got off on the High Street, outside the
supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where
he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side
street, conveniently opposite his office.
February 2024
Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the
condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the
inside humidity down it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat
needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.
The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was
probably hungry and scared too. Tears 'stung' her eyes. Skipping her
own breakfast she, after making the baby as comfortable as she could
gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she
could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the
living room. Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and
headed out on her usual route around the block. The suited man
blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did.
Today though, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her,
then he hurriedly turned and continued.
The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one
of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie
carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and
vibrations. A seed of something new has been planted, though it has
not yet sprouted. This is in keeping with Winter in which there is no
evidence of growth, only chances.
The next day, she found a dry twenty pound note on the wet road.
Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. She picked it up. Over
the next six weeks, she found twelve more. It wasn’t long before
she realised what was happening. She passed the good-looking suited
man and then found twenty pounds. She kept them. She didn’t spend
them, she saved them; each time she took them home and dried and
ironed them, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.
March 2024
Kate, the prosecutor on his current case eyed him
with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that
cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that
the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day they took it
in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates
in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful
the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though,
Kate had a seed of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would
share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead,
in the little Greek restaurant nearby.
The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed
and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt
the relationship between them had thawed a little and he had a
hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him
would become longer and more frequent.
In the restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times
at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely
raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her
eyes.
‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at
all like her courtroom persona.’
Eventually, after three consecutive lunches together,
Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be
skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested.
Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby
out of the corner of her eyes.
‘I would
love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her
straight dark eyebrows.
Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully
veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her
profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and
had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach
her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and
went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with
the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at
night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something
came up.’Yet, why not? It was after all her that
had precipitated these meetings.
They agreed
to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.
Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly
enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head.
They were seated, yet despite being formally familiar with one
another in court and now over the first bumps of courtship in the
Greek restaurant at lunch-times, they were still a little stiff.
Nonetheless, they both prepared the ground for a shared experience
that evening that would potentially result in a more intimate
introduction to one another. This, however, did not occur until two
more dates had passed. By then, Toby and Kate were thinking of one
another a good lot of the time, but Kate had decided that they should
not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed
sound. She protested that their dates, and nights out, should be
fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their
cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they
settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to
make way and accommodate affection and then love. If an emergency
vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they
worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love
brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is
boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and
things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while
one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.
Each
day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new
shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby
smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast
together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or
their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another,
seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of
anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.
Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself,
would eat breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and
jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some
scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it
falling off the fork back onto the plate.
April 2024
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; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She
was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her
words or actions.
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 would be, or on an arm or a 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. A jogger,
recently happy to exercise, now her face, and especially the bridge
of her nose, 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, 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.
Writing by numbers without numbers 5
The address for all my blogs: https://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=zw219551
The tags for seeing only the evolution of this story are: writing by numbers, the evolution of a character, the evolution of a story. If you can see the list of tags to the right you can click on the suggested (above) links to eliminate all the rest of the posts. If you can't see the links click on the link above and then they should be visible when the page reloads.
PART TWO OF THIS STORY IS ALREADY POSTED AS 'Writing by Numbers without numbers 6' and is below this post.
I am not a writer. If you are on a writing course, particularly with the Open University, your first focus should be with your course material and tutor advice.
I have been trying to write about love; the purpose of which is to force myself to confront something that is difficult for me to do. Throughout my effort, I have been looking to eliminate worn out cliches and avoid simplistic declarative statements. Overall, I wanted to discover characters and characteristics that I could use elsewhere in understanding diverse topics. I like to anthropomorphise dry subjects to make them easier for me to understand. The 'plot' of the story is clear to me; but the whole thing is incomplete because to give it substance I still have to have a parallel environment that follows rules we are all familiar with; I have chosen a full calendar year, a garden, and the weather throughout the year. This, I hope would add a canvas on which the story is overlaid. Since I have experience of a few seasons I can hold the way seasons change from one to another in my mind, and how a garden is affected. This, however, is not yet written into the story.
Here is the story without comments and corrections in two installments.
There will be constant changes to the story in content, but not plot, over the next couple of weeks. The reason for writing about love and publishing it is for me to delve into a subject that is difficult for me to write and in the process discover new ways of understanding how I can make shortcuts to imply something is happening. I have, so far, not tried to write a smooth and finished piece. This is because I wanted to share how difficult it is for me and how and what I have learnt.
Blue text is used for comments
Red text is used for intended deletion
Green text is used for replacement text
Bold and italic is used for other stuff
Toby fell in love Part One
PART ONE
Mimie and Chloe
(Spring 2023)
The Spring air had brought a flush to Mimie’s face that was enhanced by her closeness to her sister.
‘You make me laugh so much, Chloe!’
Mimie looked fondly at her older identical twin sister.
‘I am glad, because you’re so ugly when you don’t!’ Chloe smiled back. A long and drawn-out moment passed while her smile slowly grew to a wide grin, ‘I’m pregnant.’ she said happily.
‘That’s great! Oh Wow! Oh God, I love you so much right now! I am so happy for you, Chloe.’ Light danced in Mimie’s eyes and she hugged her sister.
‘Owen is delighted, he insists he will be a great dad and he has put in for overtime. He wants to celebrate by taking me, us, to Rome just before its born. He thinks it will be easier to carry inside me than push a buggy in a crowd.’
‘He is such a man!’ laughed Mimie. She was delirously happy.
January 2024 (The following year)
Kate
Toby hated Winter. The greyness of the sky with no obvious depth to it, except its blanket of dull, disinterested, clouds, gave him no hope of being comfortable to idly make his way to the bus-stop today. On days like this, his, usually substantial, breakfast was not large enough to stand in for satiation of a need that he barely recognised, aloneness. He was not lonely, it was just there was a distinct lessening of people around, during the winter months. People came out because it was necessary to do so, and not for fun.
The bare stems of hazelnut near his front door, despite being three metres tall, gave him no shelter from the frigid wind; a gusting wind that had travelled countless miles from the East and had no gift of value except a few dead leaves it blew across his path. His flower beds still showed signs of frost.
A young woman, sobbing and pushing a crying baby in a buggy passed him, coming the other way on the footpath to the main road. She miserably passed him every day. Toby thought she and the baby looked cold, and he opened his mouth to say something, but stopped. He would have taken the day off from work if he could help her somehow. These days, offering help came across as pity and contempt. 'Perhaps she needs money for heating', he thought. Tomorrow, he would leave twenty pounds on the footpath for her to find, he decided. He kept walking, feeling helpless, and ashamed.
No-one looked at him at the bus-stop. A couple of them moved from side to side, and everyone kept to their own space. There was silence, apart from little crunches from their shoes crushing small islands of late snow.
Like every day, the bus driver stopped the bus a little way from the kerb, causing the passengers to take a large step over the resident puddle. Toby could not recall there never being a puddle there. Last in the queue, Toby took the only available seat; the one that everyone avoided every day.
Dave, occupying one half of the bench, was a dog-lover. He never spoke, but his dog-haired covered clothes spoke for him. People with head colds and wet tissues were deaf to the conversation that Dave's damp clothes had with fresh air.
For Toby, it was predictable, almost fate, that he would sit next to Dave every day. It was as predictable as all the passengers' heads synchronously nodding in the same direction when they hit the pot-holes just before they entered the High Street, and again when their bodies simultaneously tilted forward when the bus braked sharply at the roadworks.
Toby got off on the High Street, outside the supermarket he usually bought his lunch from. The courthouse, where he worked locally as a defence solicitor, was just down a side street, conveniently opposite his office.
February 2024
Mimie looked at the mildew on the bedroom ceiling and the condensation on the windows. No matter how hard she tried to keep the inside humidity down it still touched the cold walls. The whole flat needed a complete overhaul and not just a wipe with diluted bleach.
The baby was crying again. It needed changing and was probably hungry and scared too. Tears 'stung' her eyes. Skipping her own breakfast she, after making the baby as comfortable as she could gently laid it in its buggy. Carefully, she covered it, as best she could, with blankets warmed by the small electric heater in the living room. Weeping now, she left the block of maisonettes and headed out on her usual route around the block. The suited man blankly stared at her as they passed one another; he always did. Today though, she looked back at him. He was standing looking at her, then he hurriedly turned and continued.
The twenty pound note, Toby had left, was under one of the buggy's wheels, and stuck to it for a few turns as Mimie carried on walking, trying to soothe the baby with its motion and vibrations. A seed of something new has been planted, though it has not yet sprouted. This is in keeping with Winter in which there is no evidence of growth, only chances.
The next day, she found a dry twenty pound note on the wet road. Obviously, it had been recently dropped there. She picked it up. Over the next six weeks, she found twelve more. It wasn’t long before she realised what was happening. She passed the good-looking suited man and then found twenty pounds. She kept them. She didn’t spend them, she saved them; each time she took them home and dried and ironed them, all two-hundred and sixty pounds.
March 2024
Kate, the prosecutor on his current case eyed him with mild interest as he passed her entering the court. She knew that cases never got to court unless there was a very strong chance that the defendant was guilty, they both did. Day after day they took it in turns to go through the routine of explaining to the magistrates in their bored voices how bad the defendant is, and then how pitiful the defendant is. Usually, they avoided each other. Today though, Kate had a seed of an idea. She was going to ask Toby if he would share his lunch-hour with her; not in his supermarket queue, instead, in the little Greek restaurant nearby.
The second lunch with Kate was a little more relaxed and just as the sun always shone for a week in February, Toby felt the relationship between them had thawed a little and he had a hopeful belief that the genuine smiles that Kate briefly gave him would become longer and more frequent.
In the restaurant, Toby inwardly winced a few times at his clumsy verbal blunders, which Kate telegraphed with minutely raised eyebrows and an almost invisible smile which only touched her eyes.
‘At least, she is open.’ he thought. ‘Not at all like her courtroom persona.’
Eventually, after three consecutive lunches together, Toby was confident that a refusal for dinner with him would be skillfully and tactfully handed to him if Kate was not interested. Kate turned her head slightly down and sideways and looked at Toby out of the corner of her eyes.
‘I would love to,’ she said. Her lips remained straight and level with her straight dark eyebrows.
Toby was intrigued by her mixed message of carefully veiled sensual promise and simultaneous firmness. He found her profoundly alluring. She, on the other hand, was merely cautious and had been about to turn him down, so the smile never had time to reach her lips. She had decided that a simple ‘Okay’ was blasé and went, instead, with convention. At this stage, she was on par with the girls that give a false telephone number to chancers at night-clubs. ‘I would love to’ could easily become, ‘Something came up.’ Yet, why not? It was after all her that had precipitated these meetings.
They agreed to meet on Saturday night. It was Thursday.
Kate arrived at the restaurant with a light make-up that subtly enhanced her Eurasian features. Her dark hair was piled on her head. They were seated, yet despite being formally familiar with one another in court and now over the first bumps of courtship in the Greek restaurant at lunch-times, they were still a little stiff.
Nonetheless, they both prepared the ground for a shared experience that evening that would potentially result in a more intimate introduction to one another. This, however, did not occur until two more dates had passed. By then, Toby and Kate were thinking of one another a good lot of the time, but Kate had decided that they should not meet for lunch anymore. Her idea, presented to Toby, seemed sound. She protested that their dates, and nights out, should be fresh and not mundane; in any case, they were both embroiled in their cases during the week. Soon, through Kate’s contrivance, they settled into a smooth and relaxed relationship where respect began to make way and accommodate affection and then love. If an emergency vehicle siren was heard and they could not see each other, they worried that the other might be injured. They were silly, but love brings with it divergent, almost psychotic, thinking; Confidence is boosted and people become friendlier, which tricks the mind, and things that would have been considered trite and meaningless, while one dwelt in loveless solitude, become important and relevant.
Each day, subconscious inspection of their relationship revealed new shoots of discovery. Kate was ticklish behind her knees and Toby smiled whenever he was asleep at Kate’s house. They made breakfast together and let their fingers touch when they reached for toast or their coffee. The shape of their lives, shared with one another, seemed to be conforming to their combined values in an environment of anticipated warmth and brightness. They saw no clouds on the horizon.
Toby preferred tea with his breakfast, and at home, by himself, would eat breakfast as he readied for work; toast in one hand and jacket in the other. Then put the jacket down, and scoop some scrambled egg, which never made it to his mouth without some of it falling off the fork back onto the plate.
April 2024
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; Kate had inflamed his desire and he had found satisfaction. She was strong and feminine; she hid her body yet was not modest in her words or actions.
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 would be, or on an arm or a 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. A jogger, recently happy to exercise, now her face, and especially the bridge of her nose, 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, 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.