Poetry – Page 58

My graphic is of the Forth Road Bridge which amongst other things is famous because when the team of painters complete the job from one side to the other, they start all over again. I’m quite proud of this photo because I took it whilst on holiday and I found that there aren’t that many vantage points to capture this view. This is looking north across the River Forth, northwest of Edinburgh.

Chapters 1 and 2 of my HAWK story have been completed and in the hands of the competition judges for a couple of weeks now and within 48 hours of sending my efforts away I was working on the revised Chapter 3. The first draft of Chapter 3 is now completed and I’m on my way with some notes for Chapter 4. I enjoyed the experience of producing the HAWK series in poetry because it was written very much one step at a time without much planning. I then went on to tackle the NaNoWriMo Challenge in November 2011 using the same character and a fresh story idea. For the NaNo it was fun tackling the task and seeing the renewed story take shape but this new version is a different sort of thing again.

Since the rewrite of the early chapters I’ve now got my novelist’s head on and even before the present chapter is completed I’m thinking of and making notes for future chapters. I’ve finally discovered something that other people have talked about in the past, whereby the story, or the characters seem to help the writer. I find myself trying to argue why a character would or wouldn’t say or do a certain thing. What I have accepted is that as I complete one chapter I’ll be straight on with writing the next. My books on gangs, criminal investigation and police organisation will now come into their own.

Today I downloaded ‘The Girl Who Played With Fire’ by Stieg Larsson onto my Kindle 3G, but when I’ll be making time to read it I don’t know. One of my aims for today was to check out other blogs, and there may not be many I read but I do owe it to the people concerned.

I haven’t written much poetry recently and today I had the urge so I put a verse together titled, ‘All I Want To Do ….’, which surprise, surprise is about writing. No change there then.

My graphic is a photo taken at a point along the Mosel River in Germany. Not surprisingly there is a bridge featured which is why I decided it best reflected one of the main focus areas in the disappearance section of the story. The story is set in Sweden but I think this picture works.

The crime novel, ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ by Stieg Larsson has been in circulation for a couple of years now but never tempted me until it was recommended recently by a friend. The intro to the story sounded intriguing but was then followed by a detailed analysis of high finance which I felt took some concentration to get through. I persevered to find myself totally immersed in the story and taking a shine to the two leading characters, Mikael and Lisbeth (The Girl).

The story of a young girl’s mysterious disappearance alone is not a sufficiently interesting plot but when sub-plots are interwoven into the tale it becomes a gripping suspense story. An unlikely alliance is formed when discredited freelance journalist, Mikael Blomkwist finds himself teamed up with a young, self-employed Private Investigator, Lisbeth Salander.

Murder, sex, violence and moral dilemmas abound in this story where I only had two criticisms; too much detail in certain areas and an excessive list of characters, further complicated by their tongue twisting Swedish names. I understand that to create a good mystery a reasonable cast is required but I do believe in this case it could have been trimmed and still worked well.

Criticisms aside, it’s a well told tale with a surprising conclusion. Having now read this, the first of the Millenium Trilogy I now look forward to reading the other two. Due to my other current projects I’m planning to leave the next Millenium story until the end of March. My main competition piece (Hawk), will be out of my hands by then.

I’ve added another poem, ‘Mutual Satisfaction’ to my list at Starlite Cafe today which carries the tag of ‘mild adult concepts’. To be enjoyed by anyone who enjoys their poetry with a hint of titillation.