I WON!!!

I know I shouldn’t gloat. There weren’t very many participants, and if a couple other people I know sent a story in, I really wouldn’t have.

But I won!!!!

Saturday morning is the morning I get to sleep in as long as I could possibly wish – which is usually until 2 in the afternoon or something. It’s eleven, or so I am later told, and I am in that blissful, peaceful state between slumber and wakefulness when my mum’s voice breaks through like a disconcerting ray of light.

“You won!”

It took a few moments to register the words, and then I think my mum is making a joke: I’d won my self-induced competition to sleep longer than I had the week before.

There’s a sudden flurry by the door. Through my pillow, I can hear the distinct sound of someone running, and that sound is getting closer.

Ooookay, so whatever I won seems to be urgent enough to send someone running to me.

I sat up…

…and get thrown back as Yolanda barrels into me, her arms wrapped around me like I just saved her life.

“You won! You won!” she squealed.

Of course, now I realized what they were talking about.

Two months back, on My Activated Life,  a site dedicated to teens, I came across a competition. A 1000-4000 word story that was about a tiger, a museum, a mistaken identity, a train and a daffodil. Of course, I could think of a billion story lines which included those five, marvelously cliched points, each of them as soppy or pathetically actionfilled as Famous Five.

In the end, with the supervision and fortitude of dear Yoli, I wrote ‘The Tiger in Lily Steele’s Dorm’.

Then I waited.

I checked up nearly everyday for the first week after, but then I decided to just relax and let it go. This morning, two months later, I find out that I WON!!!

Celebrate with me!!

The Character

From a writer to the anti-hero.

A writer’s dream you are, dear sir.

For I alone to know

Each secret, how you are and were;

Over time, to grow,

With thought and heart both willed to stir,

You, precious sir, alone.

Your closest confidante am I,

For I know you too well;

Each time you live, each thought, each cry,

Each word you ever tell.

I understand your will and why

Your life is hurt and hell.

Your hate so long belongs on me;

Was I who made you live

With grief and stone-heart cruelty

And somehow still to give

Your life for whom you loathe and be

His enemy, yet friend.

Upon your head is placed disgust.

My fault, your pardon, beg.

From all you know there comes mistrust,

An evil to you pegged.

But you, dear sir, are more than just

The anti-hero in the end.

Your life’s the tale the story shows.

Behind the hero’s face is yours.

3/10/2010

The Tiger in Lily Steele’s Dorm

A story for a My Activated Life contest.

I don’t own a Tiger. I think it’s a silly thing to keep as a pet. Tigers have raucous tempers and are so independent and explosive that they’d just as soon kick you out of the house as allow you an accidental drop on their tail.

I wouldn’t own a Tiger if you paid me. But Lily Steele down the road has one.

There Goes

A little while ago, I read a few books outlining the Gratitude Attitude. There was one point mentioned which intrigued me: it was absurd, fantastical and highly unlikely. It was called ‘Extreme Praise’. It’s an art – an extremely difficult one.

It is easy to be happy and thankful when things are breezy. It’s only slightly harder to hold on to that positiveness when the going is tough, but you can still see the end of the road.

Try doing it when everything sucks and irrevocable damage is done and see how you pull it off.

As practice, the writer put out a list of terrible scenarios and the reader (me) was supposed to find ways to be positive and praiseful in that situation. One scenario was something like this:

You’ve been working on a project for three months; researching, compiling, and editing. It’s a large scale endeavour and you’ve been working overtime for days. Just before you’ve completed it, the computer crashes and you lose everything: your research, work and drafts.

I skipped that one over, because I couldn’t think of anything and because it wasn’t something I was really bothered with. Just another bad thing.

Until that exact same ‘evil’ decided that it was going to pick me to take the Extreme Praise course.

As I’ve said, I want to be a bestseller novelist. I have been working on a novel since the beginning of this year. 269 A4 pages and more than 100’000 words long.

It was the only item on my pen drive that the virus infected.

Not 3 months of work: 8 months – spending every free moment typing; details jotted down on KFC napkins and in the back of old school notebooks; character profiles and geography research – gone up in a streaming series of numbers and gibberish alphabets.

The first thing I thought was: “you have got to be kidding….” It only took a few moments of scrolling through the document to see that it was very, very real. My second reaction was to seriously consider throwing the laptop off the balcony and continue destroying the household equipment until someone got my story back.

Just before I was able to reach the peak of panic, I remembered Extreme Praise. I was getting so near losing it, that I grasped it immediately. It helped, because the laptop is still in working condition and I’m thinking a little straighter.

Being praiseful, even right now, is hard as hell. However, even literary idiots like Edison were able to use Extreme Praise. When the poor guy’s workshop burnt down, taking with it loads of equipment and experimental data, he said “There goes all the mistakes. Thank God I can start over.”

So I’m going to say the same thing, and keep saying it as I retype those lost pages. “There goes all the mistakes: thank God I can do it better.”