A short short reprieve.

I was clearing out files and emails today and came across this very short short. I think it was a National Short Story Day Twitter challenge.  A story in a tweet. I kind of like it (I'm starting to say that a lot, lately), so I thought I'd share it before it was consigned to the recycle bin. Who knows maybe one of these days I'll develop the idea behind it. I'm pretty sure there was one...

She entered the room, a silence fell.
The kind of silence that screams through your soul.
That says 'From this moment, life changes".

Comments and suggestions welcome. Feel free to develop the idea if you have any inkling as to what happens next, or indeed what has gone before...

James

Written for the final exercise at the Shepherd's Dene writing workshop I attended last week.
We were given a photograph as a prompt and asked to write something about the person in the picture. The photograph I was given was of a man/woman sitting on a bench in the grounds of the house, looking out across the autumn gardens. The picture was slightly out of focus and taken from behind, so the face could not be seen, the person could have been male or female. I decided on male, and called him James.
This is my piece. Feel free to comment.

James sat, hunched, on the bench. He stared out across the gardens, but he didn't see the trees bathed in their autumn reds and golds. He saw a different scene. A different red.
To the casual observer he could just have been someone enjoying a moment of calm in a busy day, but his calm, still exterior belied the turmoil of his thoughts. Images from earlier in the day crowded in on him. He struggled to make some kind of sense of the events, to find some hint of what he should do next.
How had he gotten involved in it all? He tried to pinpoint the moment when things began to go wrong. Had he done somethingto cause it all? Was it all his fault again?
In his mind he replayed the events of the day. Minute by minute, turning this way and that, trying to see all the angles, every point of view. But he couldn't see it. However he viewed it, it all just seemed inexplicable. He couldn't see that anything he had said or done could have caused the chaos that had errupted.
This time, he was sure. It had not been his fault. This time, someone else was to blame.

No mackintosh required.

Saturday 22nd June was the second ever National Flash Fiction Day.
To celebrate it, I invited Amy Mackelden to run a Flash Workshop in the library.

Cue a deluge of 'fnar fnars' and grubby old mackintosh jokes. You can come to your own conclusions as to whether the joke or the mackintosh was grubby! I have heard such jokes in some form or other before and am well used to dealing with them - hey! I'm a librarian, when it comes to nudge, nudge and wink, winking I can out-innuendo the best of them.

A flash workshop is not about learning to lurk in a grubby mac and, with sudden and surprising alacrity, to jump out and reveal your hidden attributes. But in actual fact, I find that there is a similarity. Flash fiction wraps a story up in a few well chosen, well placed words. It either wraps you in a familiar cardigan, comfortable and relaxed, or it presents you with a grubby mac, alien and perturbing, hiding who knows what? In either case, just as you are thinking that you know exactly what's what, flash whips open its chosen vestment and reveals something unexpected.

And it has to be said, our workshop surprised us! Innocuous everyday objects revealed deep dark secrets! Who would have known that Amy's pretty box might contain a clutch of macabre treasures! Holly Golightly's underwear, Schroedinger's cat, severed digits and unsavoury pickles, parallel worlds and alien universes. All these and more lurked quietly in the box waiting for their moment to jump out and surprise us!

Celebrating words - written, spoken, sung, or simply implied...

In November last year the central library where I work celebrated its 21st birthday.

This is, of course, the "new" library on York Road. The "old" library on Clarence Road had been around for considerably longer but we out grew it and so a replacement was conceived and finally born in 1991.

Of course the new building was a bit of a Marmite experience. People either loved it or hated it. The old library was well, old, and quiet, it had that musty book smell and the hushed restrained atmosphere. People whispered while they were in there...it felt like a library. 

The new building was new, bright and airy.  It was ugly and brash and modern, and it has to be said, noisy!  People who had never set foot in the old place came in and talked, noise carried. On top of all this the books had some new-fangled "categorised" shelving system. How were people meant to find what they wanted!? Where was the peace and calm, the quiet solitude that our borrowers expected from their library? In some circles the old building was mourned and the new usurper shunned. 

The Old Library

The old building was also situated at the edge of town, on a traffic island. You took your life in your hands some days crossing the road to get there. The new library was built smack bang in the town centre...nestled among the banks, building societies and wine bars. Right next to the bus-stop and the entrance to the shopping centre. A prime location! When it first opened we had to daft in extra staff to man the counters. We had queues of people waiting to join, waiting to bring books back and take books out, waiting to reserve the latest Catherine Cookson! It was fabulous and exhausting! One member of staff actually brought in a pedometer to measure how far she had to walk in a single day! 

The newly refurbished Central Library

Twenty one years later and it's quieter. We would give our eye-teeth to have those queues back. Well, I would. Not so sure the staff on the front line would appreciate it quite so much. Queueing is seen as a bad thing still. Possibly even more so now than back then. Today if there are more than ten people on a waiting list for a book it is regarded as unacceptable; people start asking why more copies haven't been bought. Back in the day we might have over a hundred waiting for Ms Cookson and there might be 20 copies in stock. Times change. And so do libraries. 

In 1991 we opened our lovely new library with one author event: Ken Follett came and cut the ceremonial ribbon, all the council dignitaries turned out for it. Not so many of the public. Having actual authors in a library rather than just books was a bit new to us back then.

Mari Hannah and Russ Litten 

Twenty one years later, after a much needed and long sought after refurbishment, we celebrated with 21 events over a six week period: authors, song-writers, poets, illustrators. They came, they talked, sang, recited and drew...and they were fabulous. They also said lovely things about libraries - and in particular ours. And they said they'd love to come back and see us again, which is good because we are doing it all again this year...without the 21 theme, obviously. 

Thanks to the following who helped us celebrate! 

Trisha Ashley    Guy Mankowski    

Beda Higgins  Malcolm Green   Elizabeth Gill   

 P A Morbid    Lee Maddison   Mari Hannah and Russ Litten    

Peter Brunton    Dan Smith    Pauline Rowson   Alexander Gordon Smith  

 Paul Torday   Andy Briggs   Valerie Laws    Steve Cole   Phil Dunn  

 Keith Robson  Jeff Price and Aidan Clarke   Sean Cooney