i wrote a happy story. have a read if you like....

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There are plenty of ducks on the lake

A mallard flapped by the drake, a green-eyed hen, a flurry of wings, feathers and beak. She caught the twinkle of his eye like cloth on barbed wire. He, of course, was lost in the drolls, splashes, bristles, chirrups and the generalised orchestrations of life on the lake (such glorious tapestry), but there was something profoundly attractive to him about the wings of the hen, her beak, her profile, the flecky glimmer of her beady little eyes

The lake was an inexplicable place, a great expanse of water, flecked with woody islets. One could travel to the horizon, but the horizon seemed to move with the viewer, so as such, an inquisitive mallard might chase its tail around the lake and arrive back where it once began. The mallards often flew into the depths of the above, this thing that they called the sky, a collage of placid blues and lurid reds, but their was a prevailing fear amongst the ducks; a "quackgoo", they called it, that if they were to fly too high the great orb which illuminated their days and drowned their nights in frigid misery would melt the filaments between their wings and send them plummeting into the depths of the lake.

This drake could not really be bothered to try to fly into the path of the Sun. The heat discomfited him. He prefered to splash around the islets, on his own, enchanted by the drizzlings, the musings of the water and the chantings of the wind in the reeds. He would cock his head and stare at the ripples in the lake for hours. He was gloriously happy in these environs, but the other ducks puzzled him. Sometimes he would sit amidst the reeds gazing, surreptitiously, upon their comings and goings, their vagaries and their flitterings. But the thrall of the music which danced around him, kept him from ever venturing out into the open.

This particular hen had found him in one of his reveries. He wasn't sure what had drawn her to him. But she drew him out from his bed in the reeds & he began to follow her, entranced by her shape, her form and the blazing tingle she made him feel in his body. Sometimes, she flapped off into the distance, until she became a fleck on the horizon. The drake was a little sad, and he went back and nestled in the reeds and listened to the sound of the wind, not sure where it ended and he began. But she would always return, and he would always follow her onto the water again.

Eventually, after a few weeks had passed, the drake became a little disillusioned with her. She drew him on, but then pulled off into the yonder. He became disgruntled and withdrawn. She didn't seem to be coming back. He gazed from his bed in the reeds into the psychedelias of life on the lake. The music of his life had deserted him. The ambiences which had once evoked such wonder now just seemed to be barren cacophonies & discordances. Some fabrication, some substance in him was amassing, agglutinating in his veins, his capillaries, in the brown hemispheres of his eyes.

He saw her, that dreamlike waif of motion that had so enchanted him, trawling a pathway across the horizon, pursued by not one, but two drakes. Strong, wilful, purposeful drakes. His heart palpitated like the lightning which frizzled around the lake from time to time. This thing boiling up inside of him, was going to be ejected from his bill. He thundered, into motion, delivering two swooping flaps to the air and lofting himself into the sky. He flapped again, and again and again, and with each flap the febrility which had captivated him was unleashed like shockwaves, thundering like shockwaves, he climbed inexorably into the lofty heavens, the warmth of the Sun comforting his frame, he flapped again and again and again, releasing, he flapped again and again and the Sun was baking, just like they had said it would, he flapped again and again.

He felt a strange equilibrium, the potency of the Sun transpositioned onto his skin, into his skin, warming his bones. He gazed downwards onto the lake, seeing the other ducks as anonymous flecks on the blue sheen of water. He suddenly felt like he was coming unstuck, this immense heat beating down onto him, he flailed for buoyancy, sucked the air into his bill, croaked it out and fell like a rock, the air ruffling his feathers, cooling him.

He didn't struggle against a thing. The harmoniousness he had once felt seemed to return to him as his muscles relaxed, falling like a meteor, he was calm now, falling like a meteor. Falling.

SPLASH.

Oh wow, that is so beautiful. Beautiful images and beautiful writing. May heaven rain grace on your endeavours. You are quite the writer - is writing your path in life?

Thank you very much indeed

I wish I was a writer - life would be much easier for me if that was the case, but I got caught up on the musicians treadmill.... the whole "I don't like words anymore. I would rather communicate in sounds instead". Pretentious and rubbish. So now I work as a session keyboardist, & also trying to put something money-making together musically. The day will probably come when I decide to chuck it in & go back to writing properly instead of just messing about with 500-odd word short-stories.

But really, thank you again

Oh, honestly, why not send that out? I subscribe to WD's 'where to send' - I'd be glad to find some places to send it to. I got $35 for a little 200 wd thing, hey, it's better than leaving it in a drawer. They say that fillers are a great market these days. I'm saying that you could get your toes wet but not swim.

I'm so jealous. In a million years I couldn't write like that. Tell me, the sensory detail, how do you do that? Personally, I don't even notice if it's raining.

a) I would muchly appreciate you telling me how I can subscribe to this thingy which you mention.... I wouldn't mind trying to make some money out of this writing lark. After all, like you say, it makes more sense than having it all just sit in a drawer.

b) Erm.... A combination of synaesthesia, ripping off other people's poetic adjectives (Ted Hughes, William S. Burroughs, Thom Gunn, Aeschylus, D.H Lawrence, Oscar Wilde, Saki), listening to the sound of the wind, feeling the soppy blush of rain on one's sleeve, the cantankerousness of the cuff of your damp jeans mopping as you wallow along the same street you wallow along every day on your way to work, the sky emptying in bucketloads around you & snarling-up brutally in monochrome as it does so. I love poetry & I want to make prose as poetic as I possibly can. I remember reading Georges Lemaitre (Belgian Priest-cum-cosmologist) talking about humanity's place in the cosmos:

"Standing on a well-chilled cinder, we see the fading of the suns & try to recall the vanished brilliance of the origins of worlds". This was not poetry, nor prose, but a paper on his cosmic egg, which was later renamed the big bang. As far as I am concerned that is about as poetic & lyrical as it gets. I wish I could write like Lemaitre.

c) Thank you again.

Sorry to be so slow!
I got sidetracked.

Here's the url -
http://www.writersmarket.com/

It never occurred to me before, but there must be one for England? Do you happen to know?