morning pages 11.19 - 11.51....9 pages to catch up

I've decided to make my morning pages online.

There are reasons for it: one, that sometimes I find what I've written is actually good enough to use, so why leave it in a book that never gets seen, rather than in a place where it can be cut and pasted so easily for use elsewhere?

It also means that I can keep my morning pages in a place where I know I can always find them and refer to them.

I timed the last page I did in my notebook, and it came out to around four minutes, so what I'll do is make my daily entries 12 minutes long. It'll be the usual spew of thoughts, just put down here instead. I think that's a good idea, and it'll work - at least for the time being. Of course I'll take notes in my book, too.

One of the things that surprised me was how well I'd written fiction, so I'll attempt that, too. Again, just using stream of consciousness to let stuff come and go down on the "page". It's teaching me to be a faster typist, too, which isn't a bad thing after all.

So I've been thinking about how I can raise the bar with what I do artistically. I've criticised myself way, way too much over the years, and it really is just time to get on with doing stuff that I can call my own, rather than put myself down continuously.

What I think I'll do is start now on another fictional piece, using the same stream of consciousness I'd used before. Important, however, to remember to not let anything back. Here isn't a place to do something of quality. Here is a place to do something of quantity, and let the muses play with me.

Arthur hated his name. So old fashioned. Yes, it was his father's name, and his father's name before that, but Arthur had been lumped with the name that, although once upon a time was a modern man's monnaker, was now just an anachronism. And so aArthur felt that way, too: like an anachronism.

What's in a name? he asked himself often. Sure, Shakespeare had that one quite well put, but the reality of it was that there were so many unenlightened people out there. Kids were the idiot offspring of idiot parants, who named their children after movie stars and TV idols. So many people had no originality, and were so desperate to fit into the current sociological illusion, he despaired sometimes.

Arthur was different because of his name. He knew that. Had he been christened Michael, John, or even Jeremy his life would have been completely different. But "Arthur" had been thrust upon him, before he was even born.

Jemima thought the same. Living as she did on the north side of Chicago, and to the only white people in her neighbourhood, Jemima got it constantly: "Aunt Jemima" had been her nickname since kindergarten, and she'd been through the whole process of being ashamed of it as much as Arthur had his own.

When they met, Arthur and Jemima first of all greeted each other as though they knew they had something in common. It was if some kind of "old soul" within each of them knew exactly what the score was. Their eyes betrayed a sense of something different, something unusual, something special.

"How do you do?", Arthur said, his mouth looking slightly awkward as he glanced down at her legs. Arthur was a leg man. He knew he always had the habit of looking at legs, and he knew it was a habit he had to change. But he'd spent so much of his life looking down that he'd become something of a connoiseur of the female form - at least waist down - that much of his discernment regarding women focussed on their legs. And Jemima did have rather lovely legs, it had to be said. But he's acquired a peculiar habit, too, of making a slightly strange contortion with his lower lip that made him look as though he was a fish that had a hook in its mouth.

Jemima fidgeted having seen this slightly awkward look from Arthur, and proceeded to open her handbag - her defence mechanism when feeling exposed.

"Hello!". She smiled, her broad, confident smile she'd practised in the mirror since she was seven and her brother had told her she looked silly.
"I'm..." and at that moment, she decided she didn't want him to know her real name at all.

What had brought this about she wasn't fully aware of at the time. It seemed instinctual, perhaps, to her. But once the hesitation was there, she knew there was no going back.
"I'm Charlotte", she said, as a tiny bead of perspiration popped from a single pore on her otherwise flawless forehead.
"Pleased to meet you"

Arthur was momentarily breathless. Never before had he seen such an exquisite smile. Never before, in all his thirty seven years, had a woman's radiance touched him the way Jemima's did at that moment. He was smitten. The thunderbolt had stuck, and he was dumbfounded.

"Alex!", he stuttered, but somewhat triumphantly.

And so began an interesting relationship.

Well that's it. My attempt at speed writing some more fiction by using my morning pages again, and I'm quite pleased with the effort.

Some mistakes, of course, in that some of it didn;t make sense, there were some grammatical errors, and the story didn't go anywhere. It was a kind of nothing story, too. What did surprise me, though, was how I seem to want to write in some kind of elegant language that's probably Victorian or something. That's quite amusing.

Maybe comes from reading Thomas Troward or old literature.

But time's up. Them was my morning pages.