On Tuesday, time arrived in packets of blur
Accruing a substantial mass for my profligacy.
The sun does not take it lightly on my residence for complacently encapsulating this waste of efforts.
I flounder on the warm bare floor inside, baking in the heat disbursed; and hiding from my terrors.
The pacification sought in the arms of academic books ultimately fails when that knowledge offers resistance to being transposed to other media.
A scholarly stronghold is the only resort when all other life vocations prove unprofitable.
Yet, each compulsive attempt at acquiring it only encourages despair; and dwindles delight; and invokes a haggard assertion:
That life appeals elegantly to those lacking it.
But it doesn’t. Not always.
Some of us were genuinely privileged and should saddle ourselves with the responsibility for life’s seeming indignation.
Some of us should proactively accept that we are marooned on this world as we majestically await the day we are gouged out of it.

Check here

fikfaknuel:
Good day, sir. I really admire your style a lot. You also seem to be a voracious reader. I want to read too.

Please do you have ebooks? Prefferably African. I've been itching to read Ben Okri's 'The Famished Road' for ages now.

Thank you For African novels, which I think is what you mean, http://okadabooks.com assail a rich reserve of those. Whether or not they are accessible at no cost is left to uncertainty as I neither patronise their medium nor any African writer except the one mentioned in this earlier entry. Good luck!

The new state of the economy—without much difficulty—convinced the powers that be, that they would aspirate if some of their employees weren’t evacuated from the workforce. Not long after this conviction, most of us were tossed out; some gate crashing the pangs of farm work in their hometown; while others with effective helping hands had a softer landing. In my case, they cited my—now powerless—first degree. Four long years of fortuitously toiling at some crappy state University, plus an extra year of youth service to rehearse for a lifetime of civil slavery, all for what: An embellished piece of paper capable of securing a 15-month employment. My ex colleagues will argue my ration was tampered with clemency—unlike Bernard, who got the sack for farting and allegedly harbouring malevolent intentions towards the insurance Firm’s cooling system.

It was their loss anyway. I hastily applied as babysitter at my home and—as HR to my wife’s household—sufficiently satisfied requirements for that vacancy. At the end of the day, it was like a perfect vacation that would only end by September, when our children resumed.

Come September, we had preyed on the children’s school fees despite the beggarly liquid compounds disguised as soups which had plagued said vacation. We’d owe for the entire academic term and that avuncular midget headmistress would think her money was exchanged for lavish dinners and has since dribbled down the latrine’s throat. In fact, I couldn’t claim the children’s books until this month, after telling an old friend that an insightful, unexplored but niche-focused and promising business idea was on the brink of fruition.

“Aboy it’s always dark before dawn—no be so den dey talk? Just free 50 grand come my side, I swear to God, I go see you eye once ground level small.” I’d mused before his hearty laughter gave credence to his gullibility. I was sure when he makes accounts at the end of the year, the money would be written off as part of the year’s losses. Not entirely a loss though—after all, my children weren’t entirely a lost cause. He’d soon remember the reason he became an ‘old friend’, just in time to save some lives though.

I never managed to surmount the nightmarish hurdle of parking their books and clothes till the resumption morning.

“Bonny this one you’ve not sorted out the children’s clothes yet—” My wife shrugged last Thursday.

“It’s like we should even postpone this their resumption to mid-term.” She continued, looking nonplussed.

The consequence of thinking along those lines manifested in a lump in my throat. But she was right and I felt defeated, the only rejoinder I could cook up after looking back at her reproachfully was,

“Is it your fault? I no blame you na! No be me use that saucy hand first follow you?”

"I was just suggesting o!"

"It is 'suggesting', not zuggezting."
*********** ************** ***************

4:18am was the time. I rolled over dreamily and jolted at the thought of the children’s yet ill-equipped paraphernalia. It was still dark anyway so what better time to face my fears and live my dream? The children were quaked awake while I hurtled in between our rooms, sweating from the crown of my head to the skin of my teeth. That indolent woman I married lay there like a pile of dirty clothes for two more hours before deeming me worthy for any assistance whatsoever.

We then rumbled through the gate en route the school at about a minute past seven. Our punctuality had paved the highways in anticipation of our passage. When I arrived—to my utter dismay—the other wards looked so dashing and snazzy in their pinafores that, I could swear they were all beneficiaries of an established fashion couture poised on impressing their brand on those of us with charge and bail clothing designers like myself. Those pupils even had their shirts ironed! I think I heard my wife make mention of something like ironing. Not before I dismissed her with,

“Iron ke? Oti o! Is it nursery school they are going to abi job interview?”

Presently, I ticked their list of received books, signed the register quickly and excused myself before my face would be marked as the father of those deprived and underprivileged children [whose faces had been laced with cheap talc (to crossfire against the layers of pomade my wife had soiled them with)].

Grinning internally as I rode home, I’d gotten myself a much better deal: messing around with baby till 1:30, go pick his siblings. Easy peasy. When we got home, that boy shed lugubrious tears over his unfortunate pairing with the leader of the home, slept, ate, and got over it all like guys always do. One of those napping bouts unfortunately protracted past 1:30; which meant I had to scamper again and arrive at the school’s premises swaddled in my own sweat. 2:12pm. Those other children looked so neat and pristine, it was as though they’d collectively played the truant. To be quite honest, I hoped for the worst from my progenies. In the end, they proved that I could always count on them to never dash my hopes. It was as though they’d gone on a private excursion to the sanitation agency and were mandated to practise what they’d just witnessed, as pro-bono of course. I herded the two of them into the car and we headed home—to unveil the newest Fanatics of the Lunacy and Chaos Movement. Even their younger brother was perplexed over what had dawned on his older ones. They really did seem quite liberated though—like school is such a great place to be. Sometimes, I wonder if I started out just like them.

Excited about this veritable goldmine shared with me by a delectable friend of mine. I could relate with some of the quotes but with others, I received a personal admonishment geared towards veering me off a wayward path.

I'll be posting my favorite portions for my future accessibility but if you feel the same way, don't hesitate to conduct private explorations.

Margaret Atwood
1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with a memory stick.
5 Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6 Hold the reader's attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don't know who the reader is, so it's like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What -fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7 You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there's no free lunch. Writing is work. It's also gambling. You don't get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but essentially you're on your own. Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don't whine.
8 You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You've been backstage. You've seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a romantic relationship, unless you want to break up. My sub
9 Don't sit down in the middle of the woods. If you're lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10 Prayer might work. Or reading something else. Or a constant visualisation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.
Langston Hughes

How to be a bad writer (in ten easy lessons): [size=18pt](PERSONAL FAVOURITE )[/size]

1. Use all the clichés possible, such as "He had a gleam in his eye," or 'Her teeth were white as pearls."

2. If you are a Negro, try very hard to write with an eye dead on the white market - use modern stereotypes of older stereotypes - big burly Negroes, criminals, low-lifers, and prostitutes.

3. Put in a lot of profanity and as many pages as possible of near pornography and you will be so modern you pre-date Pompeii in your lonely crusade toward the bestseller lists. By all means be misunderstood, unappreciated, and ahead of your time in print and out, then you can be felt-sorry-for by your own self, if not the public.

4. Never characterize characters. Just name them and then let them go for themselves. Let all of them talk the same way. If the reader hasn't imagination enough to make something out of cardboard cut-outs, shame on him!

5. Write about China, Greence, Tibet or the Argentine pampas — anyplace you've never seen and know nothing about. Never write about anything you know, your home town, or your home folks, or yourself.

6. Have nothing to say, but use a great many words, particularly high-sounding words, to say it.

7. If a playwright, put into your script a lot of hand-waving and spirituals, preferably the ones everybody has heard a thousand times from Marion Anderson to the Golden Gates.

8. If a poet, rhyme June with moon as often and in as many ways as possible. Also use thee's and thou's and 'tis and o'er , and invert your sentences all the time. Never say, "The sun rose, bright and shining." But rather, "Bright and shining rose the sun.'

9. Pay no attention really to the spelling or grammar or the neatness of the manuscript. And in writing letters, never sign your name so anyone can read it. A rapid scrawl will better indicate how important and how busy you are.

10. Drink as much liquor as possible and always write under the presence of alcohol. When you can't afford alcohol yourself, or even if you can, drink on your friends, fans, and the general public.

If you are white, there are many more things I can advise in order to be a bad writer, but since this piece is for colored writers, there are some thing I know a Negro just will not do, not even for writing's sake, so there is no use mentioning them.
George Orwell

Putting aside the need to earn a living, I think there are four great motives for writing, at any rate for writing prose. They exist in different degrees in every writer, and in any one writer the proportions will vary from time to time, according to the atmosphere in which he is living. They are:
(i) Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one. Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen — in short, with the whole top crust of humanity. The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all — and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery. But there is also the minority of gifted, willful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centered than journalists, though less interested in money.
(ii) Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations.
(iii) Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.
(iv) Political purpose. Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It can be seen how these various impulses must war against one another, and how they must fluctuate from person to person and from time to time.
Francine du Plessix Gray
Recently the compulsion has been less intense, a week or two can go by and then I catch up in my big streak: angers and anxieties and sarcastic reports on overhead conversations, any snazzy metaphors that come to mind, phrases and ideas for current projects, a lot of nature notes — smells, sounds, colors, birds. I sometimes wonder whyI have to look back and record precisely what I was experiencing on such and such a day. No one’s given a satisfactory explanation for this compulsion writers have to keep a laundry list of the soul: Virginia Woolf, her need to jot down who came to tea every day, and the pitch of Lytton Strachey’s voice and the kind of cucumber sandwiches she served. It’s as if we feel constantly other from the person we were the day, the hour before, and this sense of flux is terrifying, we have to crystallize, fix every moment of ourselves in order not to disappear altogether, as if our very identity were constantly threatened with dissolution.
Joyce Carol Oates
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments. Running seems to allow me, ideally, an expanded consciousness in which I can envision what I'm writing as a film or a dream. I rarely invent at the typewriter but recall what I've experienced. I don't use a word processor but write in longhand, at considerable length. (Again, I know: writers are crazy.)
By the time I come to type out my writing formally, I've envisioned it repeatedly. I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind's eye, the pages I've just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
Gene Wolfe

Every so often I get optimistic and explain the best method of learning to write to students. I don't believe any of them has ever tried it, but I will explain it to you now. After all, you may be the exception. When I read about this method, it was attributed to Benjamin Franklin, who invented and discovered so much. Certainly I did not invent it.

But I did it, and it worked. That is more than can be said for most creative writing classes.

Find a very short story by a writer you admire. Read it over and over until you understand everything in it. Then read it over a lot more.
Here's the key part. You must do this. Put it away where you cannot get at it. You will have to find a way to do it that works for you. Mail the story to a friend and ask him to keep it for you, or whatever. I left the story I had studied in my desk on Friday. Having no weekend access to the building in which I worked, I could not get to it until Monday morning.

When you cannot see it again. Write it yourself. You know who the characters are. You know what happens. You write it. Make it as good as you can.

Compare your story to the original, when you have access to the original again. Is your version longer? Shorter? Why? Read both versions out loud. There will be places where you had trouble. Now you can see how the author handled those problems.
If you want to learn to write fiction, and are among those rare people willing to work at it, you might want to use the little story you have just finished as one of your models. It's about the right length.

SOURCE

My niece has defied the abolishment of martyrdom and wilfully submitted herself, a most qualified candidate for that office; for, no other rationale goes further in enlightening us of her attachment to her extruding navel despite the fatality of the repercussions it has earned her. Under feisty indignation, both her parents have threatened—even sworn by the new gods and old—to strain her through dastardly measures of torment; from amputating her arm, to offering her to the ferocious family dog, Molly—to be devoured—to soldering the protrusion flat with blazing cooking knives and pressing iron, her recalcitrance has been borne of transcendental loyalty to the great god of navels. These days, her practices are shrouded in great secrecy, often times stealing off to seclusion, lying supine while her feet reclines on the wall to expose that device; then the fingers can be seen, strumming sacred praises with the navel as the tool to contact the supernatural. She wholly believes, her body—with an exclusion of that device—is far dispensable and in fact, extraneous to the divine mandate of evangelizing the good news of the navel god to us ignorant sons of men.

Yesterday evening, you visited me. Again. And just like the first time, I woke up thinking it was no dream. I know you were there in the room both times. All my senses cannot be attuned concurrently in a dream, moreover, I sensed your features, to a point of knowledge.
.
The first time, I had a bad day and you visited that evening so I bought a beer; half cutting a tough look to match the numerous facades and the other half, to pacify the turbulent view of my unsatisfactory existence. Just like yesterday’s, you just sat over the dining table as we talked. You didn’t seem as vivacious as my brother tells me his lover is. That makes me feel like I’m foisting myself on you; like a mantle. You know the mantle is ugly. So do I.
.
It’s a bad time to be my friend—so many responsibilities and no division of labour for the few, if not negligible labour force. The job description of letting me perch on the rims of someone’s mouth like a bacteria and inspecting the pores on their skin must be too daunting for one individual—more so when I’m the employer. Ok. How about not constantly saying you’re not ready for these things right now?
.
Anyway, that isn’t the worst part of my many predicaments: I smile at the world but the world does not smile back. It doesn’t, regardless of how wide my smile spreads. Subsequently, every night, I hope I’m cold and stiff by the next morning.

DavidEsq:

Good one bro. The touch of melancholy really gets to me, cos melancholic poems have this strong feelings with outstanding imagery. Do u rmbr these lines: "and here he was laid, on lap of earth, a youth to fame and fortune, unknown. All he hath, he gave to misery; a tear, t'was all he gained, from heaven...". That poem broke me many times like most of Shakespeare's dramas.

lol. Thank you. I can't even remember when I wrote this particular piece; it's been so so so long lol. But it reads quite cool and the feel is as though it was written by someone else. Maybe I should go back to reading my old stuff I've since abandoned poems by the way.

Thank you for stopping by.

princenat:
First, I apologise for derailing the thread. A friend's BAJAJ Tricycle with REG. NO.: WER800VL (IMO), FLEET NO. 00939, YELLOW was snatched in Owerri on 2/9/16. It is brand new less than two weeks before it was stolen. I want to make an appeal to the public to please report to the nearest police and call 07032417234 if seen anywhere in the country. The left bumper had a scratch, one can as well look out for alterations on the FLEET NUMBER or take a picture if in doubt. Please any useful information will be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Huh?! Dude, are you fvcking kidding me Even if I were a traffic warden, how do you think I can spot the dent on a random tricycle in the melee of rush hour if you aren't being mischievous? What if its current driver decides to pass my duty post by 8pm as commercial drivers close by that time? Abeg. Idk if it's your family inheritance you bought the keke with but this your trolling campaign will not cut it. This thing you're doing can only fetch you NL awards like Mr or Mrs NL--in your case, keke misplacer of Nairaland--if you really take this serious, what you should do is report to the vigilantes--whose duty it is to spot intermediate thieves (a category of which keke thieves fall into)--issue a circular to automobile engineers. Furthermore, you could get in touch with all the alayes at bus parks and broker an agreement where their own portion would mandate they inspect each tricycle for you. That is far more realistic and serious minded. If it sounds too far-fetched. strong indication that you should forget about a return of your prodigal keke Take it in good fate and move on fam.

https://www.nairaland.com/1459127/nmeri/2#49279622