Awards!

My hearty thanks to the wonderful Madeleine at Scribble and Edit who awarded me not one, but two awards! I wondered for a moment if "versatile" and "wholesome" were euphemisms for unpredictable and boring, then realised that this would actually make them mutually exclusive. So I'll take them at face value!

	In which case, I would like to pass on the Versatile Blogger award to (drum roll please!) The Golden Eagle at The Eagle's Aerial Perspective. This blog makes you think, makes you laugh, and even makes you better informed! It's worth a visit (and a follow).
	For the Wholesome Blogger Award, I would like to nominate Jai Joshi at her Tulsi Tree for her fascinating series on the Mahabharat as well as the other interesting articles she posts. An excellent blog you should visit!

I will be back in a few hours to splash Talli Roland. At least I think that's what we are meant to be doing.

Consider the Moon

If you are looking for my poem, I have taken it down for a few months while I submit it as a competition entry. If you would like to read it, e-mail me at dominicdem(at)gmail(dot)com

Dominic de Mattos
Nov 2010

Microfiction Monday 29 Nov 2010

Welcome to another round of Microfiction Monday courtesy of Susan at Stony River. Each week Susan posts a new picture and invites us to write a story in 140 characters or less.

Today's picture:



Doris sighed as the two men argued. It looked like the old man hadn't given them a bum steer after all. He'd given them two!

I couldn't resist a second one:

Dr Suess wasn't entirely happy with the early draft of "The Cat as a Hat".

I look forward to reading all the other entries!

Advent Sunday

Today is the start of Advent. I know we don't start opening our advent calendars or burning our advent candles until 1st December, but the season of advent really has started!



So what is advent? The word comes from the Latin Advenire - to approach and it covers the four Sundays approaching Christmas. It is a time of preparation, of self examination and (traditionally) self denial. It is very similar to the period of Lent which precedes the celebrations of Easter. Many people will be familiar with the idea of "giving something up for Lent" and it is because of this principle of a season of self denial. Somehow a similar period of abstinence for Advent seems to have been lost in history, although our New Year waistlines might be all the better for it if it had not been!

For many preparation for Christmas means cooking food, buying drink, wrapping presents, writing cards, decorating trees and houses (inside and out!), making travel plans, calming excitable children (of any age), soothing frayed nerves and checking the bank balance (with trepidation).

Try adding something new this year.

Make time to sit still in quietness for ten minutes, five if you are unnerved by the experience of quiet.
As you sit still ask yourself three questions:

• What part does kindness play in your life and how can you make it more central?
• Do you hold resentment in your heart and if so, how can you let go of it?
• When was the last time you told the people that you love most that you love them and when is the earliest time that can do so again?

Resentment or unforgiveness is a poison that will destroy our happiness and peace of mind. Forgiving others, for our own good, is the only cure. Kindness and love are a soothing balm that restores our soul. How we arrive at Christmas is up to us. We can be frazzled and over-wrought or we can arrive burden free and in the mood for singing carols!

Dropped in it!

I have been exceptionally busy these last few days with a to do list that would make Hercules blanch. So when my vicar asked me if I wanted to lead the Exploring Belief group tonight, I e-mailed her back and said that I had a mountain of things on, and I would be very grateful if I didn't have to do it. I should mention that I had half prepared something two weeks ago, but had had to cancel the session because I was ill. Anyway, I went along tonight and just before it started, she said that she hadn't got my e-mail until earlier in the evening and had e-mailed me back saying that I didn't need to go tonight. All was well. So the seven of us sat down with our coffees and after a brief chat, my vicar announces, "Now I'd like to hand over to Dom."
HELP!
I'm not sure any prayer of mine has ever been so heartfelt!

How well read are you?

Thanks to Jodi at Turning the page for alerting us to the BBC's lack of faith in the reading public

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible - why only the KJV?
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John SteinbeckLolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Twenty eight - I guess that's better than six, but hardly well read when I look at all the classics I feel I ought to have read!

Why not copy the list and see how you shape up.
Do you exceed the BBC's not so Great Expectations?!

Microfiction Monday - 22 November 2010

Each Monday Susan at Stoney River hosts Microfiction Monday

Today's Picture:



John Doe wept. This once proud beast, killed for pleasure, now mocked in death, showed true nobility where none was shown.

Those of you who have seen my MM in past weeks will know I tend to go for the humour. I thought I would go the opposite way today!

Welcome to my newest followers Lola Sharp, Lynn Obermoeller and Summer. Thanks for joining and hope you enjoy the ride!

Verdict on Harry Potter

I am going to make some comments on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1, and although I will be careful to avoid spoilers, if you haven't seen the film yet, and want to go without any pre-conceptions, how about visiting Emma's blog instead?



Ok, so if you are still with me, I will take it that you have seen the film too.

I deliberately did not read DH again in advance, so that I could enjoy the film as a film. You see, I am very firmly of the opinion that books should be books and films should be films. In a book I want to see the world through the eyes of our hero/ine, I want to experience their thoughts and views, I want my vision to be coloured by their opinions. In a book I want to be given insider information and I expect my story to progress at pace that suits reading. A film however is completely different. I want a visual feast, I want drama, I want to be swept along by a story delivered at a film's pace. The film communicates through vision and dialogue, through expression, body language and through the musical score.

The film of DH delivered the book in exquisite detail. The inner thoughts and feelings of the trio were delivered in acres of face shots, portraying every shade of their emotions. The sets were created in loving detail and the location shots saw the tent pitched in an impressive array of glorious scenery. The visualisation was brilliant, and the acting of high standard. If I have criticised the trio for woodenness in the past, there was no sign of it here.

BUT ... you have probably put two and two together and worked out that I have a problem with the film. When I read the book, I felt the tent section was overly long and unnecessarily so, but in a film, it seemed interminable.

I absolutely loved the books, and my criticism of the pace in the book of DH really was only a minor niggle, but the film could have been so much more. My favourite film was The Goblet of Fire, because it was made as a FILM. It took liberties with the book, it cut out loads of material that was important to the book, but it entertained AS A FILM. Back to DH - am I glad I went? Yes! Did I think that it was money well spent? Yes! Will I get the DVD and watch it again and again? Hell, yes! It wasn't that bad really!

I am however looking forward to the second part - that should be one barn-storming action adventure!

Reject!

So there you have it - my first rejection.

I reckon that makes me a real writer!!

Perhaps you can help?

I need to find a magazine which appreciates a lighter touch than the rather gritty dramas you usually find in SF magazines - any ideas?

You can help in another way too.

How would you pronounce "Mikal"? With a long i or a short i?

How would you pronounce "Anwe"

I ask you because of a difference in opinion at home and it seems to me that the pronunciation affects how the characters are viewed!

Writers Oasis Blogfest

Thanks to Madeleine at Scribble and Edit for hosting this blogfest, and for inspiring a lovely dreamy reverie about my ideal hidey-hole!

I absolutely love the mountains. Mountains evoke a sense of awe and majesty, a reminder that we are not the centre of the universe and ground us in humility. They have a permanence and reliability in a frantic world, and yet with the mercurially shifting weather, the play of light and shadow across the ever changing cloak of the seasons, they offer a fresh vista of inspiration every day.



My hideaway cottage in the mountains

I love the loneliness of mountains, where the only sounds are the buffeting of the wind, the quiet song of the insects, the chuckle of water and the laughter of the sheep. I love the warm moistness of the air in the boggy moorland and the fierce exhilaration in the wind at the mountain top. And the view. The heart pounding glory of a world stretching out into the hazy distance, full of life, yet captured in the stillness of distance.

My luxury would be a fan heater. Yes, I know, very strange. There is something about the focussed source of heat in a cold room (or even out on the decking on a cold evening!) and the quiet, rhythmic drone of the fan that frees my mind to wander.

My five books. Only five? Well, if I am supposed to be writing, I had better not have too many distractions! On the recommendation of Nancy Williams I recently bought some books which look fantastic and I am really looking forward to reading:

The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Christopher Vogler)
45 Master Characters (Victoria Lynn Schmidt)
Self Editing for Fiction Writers, 2nd Edition (Renni Browne / Dave King)

and I'll take a Bible (spiritual nourishment) and the Harry Potter series in one super volume, because I want to de-construct it to work out for myself what magic ingredient makes perfectly sane people queue at midnight! (and because I love the books, of course!)

My Appreciation

A big thank you to N R Williams for choosing me for a lovely shiny blog award ...





It is my privilege to choose three fabulous bloggers to pass this award to, and to share with you three of my favourite words.

So let me introduce you to:




Septembermom (Kelly) at My Voice, My View whose posts are filled with warmth and light, like walking into a sunny glade in the gloomy woods.


=====0oOo0=====




Clarissa Draper at Listen to the Voices whose blog is a wonderful pot pourri of interesting articles, advice and smiles.


=====0oOo0=====




Lisa Ricard Claro at Writing in the Buff who has a wonderful sense of humour, and a sparkling blog. Anyone who owns writing dragons is pretty awesome!

As for my three words ... I will share those with you tomorrow!

====================================

Other news today is that BBC Children in Need 2010 has so far raised £16,152,347



This is a nations effort to raise money for UK Children in every kind of need. This is an annual event which culminates in a whole night of television entertainment geared towards teasing out everyone's natural generosity.

Harry Potter Tribute

First off, If you haven't read yesterdays post about Jessica's photography, scroll down NOW ... you are not allowed to leave until you've seen it and been blown away! :D

OK, back to Harry Potter and in honour of the release of THAT film, I wanted to share a little fan fic with you. A group of us from harrypotterforums started a rpg in 2006 (a year before the release of DH) in which we tried to second guess the plot of the final book. I have to say we made some spectacularly right guesses, and some crankily wrong ones, but it was great fun. I was writing as Harry and this is my favourite post. They are visiting Godric's Hollow and have seen the mouldering mess that is all that is left of the cottage.


Harry felt totally numb inside. He hadn’t known what to expect, but this neglected, soulless pile of rubble felt totally alien. There was no sense of his parents, of their love, in this place. He focussed on Tonks and realised she had asked him something. He struggled to remember what she had said for a moment, then merely nodded.
They trooped out of the cottage grounds in silence and walked slowly up the lane back into the village proper. A green lay at the centre of the village, with a duck pond surround by old sagging timber framed houses. A weather beaten sign outside a pub announced that it was ‘The Dragon’ and showed a passable rendition of the Welsh Green that Fleur had faced three years before. They walked across the green to the tiny parish church and stopped to look at the notice board outside.
“Saint Godric’s?” exclaimed Ron.
Tonks laughed. “Well, it goes back to the legend of a dragon that terrorised the people of the village until Sir Godric defeated it and rescued a princess”
“What princess?” asked Hermione.
Tonks shrugged. “The daughter of some local Saxon chieftain I expect.”
Next to the notice board a large red thermometer announced that the restoration fundraising was nearing completion. The sign underneath read
Saint Godrics Restoration Appeal.
Help us to raise £20,000 to preserve the
fabulous frescoes of Saint Godric
defeating the dragon, recently discovered
in this church.
“You go and look,” Harry told the others. “I’m going to wander round the churchyard for a bit.”
The others exchanged glances. “I’m not sure Harry, we ought to stay together.”
Harry looked around the deserted churchyard and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll be fine,” he said and turning he walked away from them. He didn’t hear footsteps behind him, so he assumed they had agreed to give him space.
It was a warm summer morning. The smell of new mown grass was heavy on the still air. There was no sound except the buzzing of insects and birdsong overhead. This felt a good place to be. He had travelled about half the way around the churchyard and had entered a stand of ancient yew trees, when he saw an area separated off from the rest of the churchyard by iron railings. He walked up to the gate but found it locked. He was about to turn away when he realised that there was no lock, chain, bolt or any other fastening on the gate. He smiled and taking out his wand, looked around to make sure he was unobserved and said quietly, “Alohamora.”
Instantly the gate swung open and he went inside. Looking around he quickly spotted two newish graves. Taking a deep breath he walked up to them. The first one was neither his mother’s nor his father’s. The gravestone simply said In loving memory of Nathaniel Potter 1910 – 1978 and of his wife Dorothy 1916 – 1979. Harry stood rooted to the spot. He had been looking for his parents; he hadn’t expected to find his grand parents as well. They had died just before he was born. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly he felt hot tears roll down his cheeks. These people he did not know, and knew nothing about were part of the family he had been denied. He wiped his eyes harshly with his sleeve and moved over to the second grave.
“James and Lily Potter 1959 – 1981 Love knows no bounds”
Harry sank to his knees. He had been determined to be strong, but the tears had been released and there was no stopping them now. Seventeen years of anguish poured from his heart in a wordless torrent. He buried his face in his hands and surrendered himself to his grief, as the sun warmed his back and a warm summer breeze ruffled the trees overhead.

Photography - Seriously - come and look!

A self portrait by my daughter Jessica

I visited Clarissa Draper's blog this morning Listen to the Voices where she was talking about getting a photograph for an author's bio, and this made me think it was about time I blew my elder daughter's trumpet. She is in her third year at the University of Wales, Newport studying Photography for fashion and advertising and she will be heading into the big bad world in just a few months time to earn a living. I wanted to share some of her pictures with you and invite you to visit her website: jessicademattos.com. The first picture you see on her website is my younger daughter by the way.

This next picture is one of my all time favourites of hers

Probably closely followed by these ones

She has been commissioned by young bands, hopeful actors and actresses, hair salons and even company executives!

Enjoy! Please feel free to contact her if you like her work or if you hear of anyone needing a photoshoot, of course! (She doesn't do wedding photography I'm afraid)

... or maybe not!

Part Two

I get the impression from the response to my previous post, and indeed the careful avoidance of comments as well, that what we call ourselves is actually quite a sensitive issue.
As a civil engineer I went through many years of training, most of it on the job, to achieve the status "Chartered". I know there was, at one time, a lot of muttering in the trade press about the over-use of the word engineer in society to mean anyone who did anything remotely technical, and how this threatened to devalue the worth of someone who had spent perhaps a decade achieving an engineering qualification.
So, am I wrong? Do you have to prove yourself to be above a certain standard before you can legitimately call yourself a writer? Should the term "writer" be reserved for people judged to be worthy of that title by the publishing world in general? I respect published authors, writers and journalists who feel that they have earned their titles through what may be years of hard graft.
So, maybe it should be "I write therefore I am ...... someone who writes!"
... but inside I feel like a Writer ...
and I am all the more determined to prove it!

I write therefore I am ...... a writer

Whilst blog hopping recently, I visited numerous sites of people who describe themselves as “aspiring writers” or “would-be writers”. Almost universally I have found their blogs to be interesting and well executed, well worth reading. To me they are writers! The fact that they may not have been commercially published is immaterial. 

For myself, I really was an aspiring writer for 30 years or more. My great aspiration was to write, but instead I kept the stories in my head. Now I have started writing, I believe myself to be a writer.

I would urge anyone who strings words together for the pleasure of others to see themselves as an actual writer. It seems to me that this self belief is the right place to be when finding the discipline needed to commit thousands or tens of thousands of words to paper. 

The writer is within, the words on the page are what happens when the writer is released.

Microfiction Monday 15 Nov 2010

Susan over at Stony River hosts

Here is this Monday's picture

Juan-Carlos was having second thoughts about the new fold-a-mule ^TM he'd stowed under his poncho. He was beginning to feel a bit of an ass.

Happy Monday to you all!

Violence breeds violence - discuss.

My daughter has to write an English essay along the lines of, “Violence breeds violence. How does Emily Bronte portray violence in Wuthering Heights?” I became a sounding board for Emma’s ideas as she trawled through the episodes of violence in this gothic novel. It made me think. What are the attitudes to violence of the people who live in countries where there is the death penalty, or other forms of violent punishment? Are they more prone to believe that violence is an acceptable action? If violence is seen as the right, and justified, course of action by the state, does it follow that the citizens will also feel that violence is right and justified when seeking their own justice?

In asking these questions, I am not seeking to take a political stance, or even to say that violence is right or wrong. It is just that intuitively I would expect to see elevated levels of illegal violence in societies where there is legal violence.

We bring our children up with fairy stories which say that it is right for the hero/ine to kill the witch / ogre / giant / dragon / evil person and steal their gold. To be fair though, the non-human varieties of antagonist are usually threatening to eat the hero/ine, so it is an understandable view to take. 

(Are fairy tale witches non-human by the way?)

I realise that the fairy stories would lose some of their appeal if Gretal had picked up the phone to the police and the witch had been arrested and tried for false imprisonment, or if social services had taken Cinderalla into care whilst she was still sitting amongst the embers to keep warm, but what does it say about our view of natural justice?

This is relevant to those of us who are involved in world building, whether in science fiction, high fantasy, alternative reality or even urban fantasy. How do we portray violence and attitudes to violence? Can our hero/ine kill with impunity just because the antagonist and his / her henchmen (henchpeople?) are bad? Usually we contrive killing to be in self defence, but rarely do we allow our hero/ine to suffer the consequences. How many books can you think of where the evil destroyer is still alive at the end? At the final end, I mean, not the end of Book 1! Is it that we tend to polarise our characters? If the antagonist is unremittingly evil and is hell bent on murder and mayhem, then his/her death is necessary for natural justice, but would we be comfortable killing someone who is a tortured soul who does evil things in his/her spare time, so to speak?

How we treat violence colours the whole of the societies that we build. We owe it to our characters to understand the cascade of violence, from the children’s tales to the state executions (not suggesting one leads on to the other, you understand), so that we can honestly portray their actions and their reactions to the hell we put them through.

Haiku Wednesday 10 11 10

Wednesday again!
So, today's theme for Haiku Wednesday at youknow...thatblog? is Preparation


Hang up the stocking.
Sherry, mince pie, carrot, note.
Bed before midnight.


What you don't know is that it is gone midnight and I fell asleep mid haiku!
Edit: which is why I had to change the last line this morning because I realised that I couldn't count in my sleep befuddled state.

Microfiction Monday 8 Nov 10

OK, I know Monday has passed, but I didn't leave the office until nearly 11pm yesterday and by then my creativity wasn't up to it!

Susan at Stony River hosts Microfiction Monday ... head on over if you want to know the rules!

So here is this week's picture

"Take a leaf out of your sister's book," her Mum said.
Hmmm.
So ... which one is it?

If a thousand words paint a picture ...

Ok, I know that is not the quote we all know and love, but it seems to me that when we write a story, of whatever length, the parallels between writing and painting are quite profound.
First and foremost a painting must have good composition. The eye should be drawn to the focus of the painting, background objects should not compete with the foreground and there should be a good balance to the painting. Easy to apply that to writing.

(Eye-catching composition courtesy of David Webb's Beautiful Northumbria)

There should be good tonal balance to the pallette chosen, use of complimentary colours adds definition but clashing colours are only applicable to certain types of paintings. (Complimentary colours are those opposite each other on the colour wheel, like red / green, yellow / purple etc) In writing our characters need to balance one another without being all the same. Contrasting characters add tension and conflict, but should not jar, neither should they jar with the landscape of our story.

(Lovely use of complimentary colours courtesy of Richard Taylor Art)

Perspective is very important, it gives depth and believability to the painting, It aids composition by drawung the eye into the picture and helps to set the various elements of the composition in relationship to one another. How do we achieve perspective in our stories? By introducing elements of back story, sharing glimpses of possible futures; through world building and context.

(Perspective courtesy of Raphael, School of Athens)

In the end however it comes down to the basic skill of the artist; the ability to choose just the right brushstroke, with the right colour in the right place. Some artists paint in exquisite detail, while others apply seemingly haphazard blobs and splashes, which the brain somehow converts into a detailed scene. The same is true of a talented wordsmith. The choice of exactly the right words, phrased just so, allows the writer's vision to enter the reader's consciousness without snagging their attention. Sometimes in just a few sentences the wordsmith can create whole scenes which the reader's own imagination furnishes with layers of detail. Another wordsmith might lovingly fill in every lush detail, delighting and entrancing the reader with the richness of the wordsmith's vision.
For me the test of a great painting is whether it is believeable, whether it connects with my emotions and whether it tells a story. Which, if I am not mistaken, is more or less where we came in!

Haiku Wednesday

Come join the fun!

This week's theme is "Direction"

I am assuming that the strict interpretation that a Haiku must contain one season word and one cutting word is not necessary for this bit of fun. Do others think that the last line should be a seemingly independent statement that somehow sheds light on the first two lines?

Traffic jams caught by
Satelite navigation.
Dreams of the seaside.

Caught in the headlights
Bright white lines glow in the dark.
Blindly I follow.

Microfiction Monday

Each Sunday night Susan at Stony River posts a Microfiction story and the picture that inspired it, and invites readers to contribute their own microstories. A microstory is tweet-long - so a maximum of 140 characters including spaces and punctuation; and therein lies the challenge!

Today's picture is (not surprisingly) hallowe'en inspired.

Every Hallowe'en in Pandemonium, demons compete for the title of "Scariest Mask of the Year". This year's winner, complete with familiar.

137 Characters