A wee note before I dive into workshops – I have been very absent from life and writing lately, as an international move has once again landed upon me and with all of that I haven’t been doing much other than packing and stressing.
But I wanted to talk about workshops ….
Writers don’t exist alone in the wilderness, they need readers, but they also need other writers. At least in my experience this is the case. As I have mentioned I have Janet Armstrong and Shabs Rajan, who I share my work with and since 2022 I have been attending weekly online workshops with Bourne to Write, run by the excellent Roddy Philips. I love the Bourne to Write workshops, the people who attend are wonderful, funny, clever and just brilliant to spend a few hours with.
http://www.roddyphillips.com/?page_id=617
Workshops are wonderful, they give you a chance to try things, to come up with new ideas and to be inspired. I thoroughly recommend joining a local writing group or finding one online.
The following short story was submitted by myself as a piece of homework, a requirement for the Bourne to Write workshops – we are asked to write a story, or a poem normally with a word limit of about 800. Roddy Philips (who runs the workshops) provides a prompt – which you don’t strictly have to stick to (I seldom manage to!)
Travellers
The road was a universe of its own ruled by no being, not even natural law, and its one true trait was chaos. It wasn’t really a road when you got down to it, but a route that spanned space and time. It was not limited to one universe, nor was it really in any of them, it wove between the fabric of everything. Here anything was possible. Those who trod the road could encounter the improbable, the seemingly impossible, but when you got down to the nitty gritty of beings, most liked the predictable, the familiar, and the travellers who found themselves on the road often only experienced its most benign level for this very reason. They closed off windows and doors in their minds, they refused to see fully where they were. This limited them, but at the same time it saved them, for there were things out here that it was best not to know too much about.
Holm Williams-Jones had been walking the road for eons, but since time wasn’t really a thing here, its apparent passage didn’t seem to have left a mark on him. He was little older than when he had first found himself on the road. No older, but wiser for sure, indeed he had seen things your average Amman Valley boy couldn’t hope to comprehend. Holm was one of the travellers who dipped a little deeper into the true nature of the road, but despite and his experiences, he felt at home here in a way he never had in Cymru.
Right now, he was sat at the edge of the road, on a wall which slipped between a vineyard in Italy, a battlefield on another planet and a void. It was like fighting seasickness, you needed to focus on the horizon or else you got lost. A lesson hard learnt, he glanced at the stumpy remains of his ring and index finger, a betwixt beast had taken them when he had failed to hold onto the horizon.
The betwixt were creatures of neither here nor there. Fluid beings, slipping between the layers and shaping themselves from the minds of those they sought to consume. The one that had made off with his fingers had looked like a ginger tom, but it most certainly hadn’t been one.
He rolled a joint in his right hand and pondered many things, though none of them weighed on his mind. Holm’s father had believed him to be simple minded, but he wasn’t. He just took things at face value, accepting them for what they purported to be. When he had come to the road this quality had served him well, the expanse of this place hadn’t wiped him out, he had been able to slowly acclimatise and therefore had not been swept away. He had allowed himself to slowly open, to see the depths and layers of this place.
He was in no hurry for he had nowhere to be, so he savoured this moment of peace, taking the occasional toke. He watched a sunset, a planet being created and a dragon split the atoms of a timber warship as he smoked. But all the while he was careful to keep the road there at the edge of his vision, a steady horizon upon which to anchor himself. The clomp of feet drew him back to the road, an armoured column marched there, under a golden eagle. Romans!
Holm liked history, leastways his planet’s history, it had been the one subject he had enjoyed at school. He chucked his joint and sprung from the wall, slipping between places as he went, keeping his eyes focused on the road and the marching men.
The man at the head of the column was mounted on a stocky bay pony and when he drew alongside Holm, he called a halt. He stared down a hawkish nose at the Welsh lad, who wondered what this legate made of him. If he had been on the road for any length of time he would be used to sights, so a crusty nomad in a tie-dyed t-shirt probably wouldn’t worry him too much.
The man barked at him in Latin, Holm shrugged his shoulders, with a frown the legate switched to another tongue which also Holm answered with a shrug.
‘Celtae,’ the man spat with evident disgust. He then yelled something down the line and there was movement as someone stepped out of place. A tall man, with gold rimmed spectacles who trotted, panting noticeably to the head of the train. The legate snarled at him, then yelled at the legion and the column dissolved as the men set about making a roadside camp.
The man turned to Holm and with a broad Brummie accent introduced himself, ‘Rohan.’ He offered a hand, which Holm shook warmly. ‘From Birmingham University, Experimental Archaeologist and lecturer.’
‘Holm, wanderer and smoker of herbs.’
‘How long have you been here Holm?’ Rohan asked.
‘Long time,’ Holm nodded at the busy men behind them. ‘You? How did you come to be here? And who are your friends?’
‘My mother Deepti, she had a gift for seeing, showed me how to slip between,’ Rohan explained. ‘I use it to help with my research.’ Holm could see how this would be useful. ‘This is the Legio IX Hispana, more commonly known as the Ninth Legion,’ he finished.
‘Is that so?’ Holm sucked in his lower lip and looked around at the busy men. ‘So, this is where they got too.’
© Juliet Robinson 2023, all rights reserved
A Year of Time 