Between the years of 2007 and probably 2010, I reached the peak of writing creativity. I was always more of a poet, a troubadour of this modern age rather than a novelist I felt, but I did turn out Love Sex and Time Travel in 2007 which is still my biggest seller by far. It is also my favourite novel. I actually cried as I wrote parts of it such was the emotion I put into it, which came from my poetry.
In those heady four years, my brain positively crackled with new ideas. I didn’t write because I wanted to make money from it. I wrote because I had to. I didn’t have a future … I had a NOW. If I hadn’t have written my words down, I felt that my mind would explode, and so most days I would just write. I would write more and then more. Beautiful poetry, wonderful words seemed to cascade from my mind continuously it seemed.
Also, during those four years, my life changed totally. It was all down to my words. I gave up the rat race in 2008, taking redundancy, and vowing to never return to 9 to 5 slavery, I left the UK to be with my Sandra in the Seychelles. Ideas as usual poured from me spurred on by Sandra and her love of my words. But it was not to be, the Seychelles was not for me and I unhappily returned to the UK a few months later. But my words never stopped and in 2009 I wrote some of my finest work. I also started the Seer Of Albion, which believe it or not started its life as a simple Facebook status, then a very short piece of philosophy about reading people’s faces for emotions. Then it became my project for NaNoWriMo that year. That is a competition held every year to write a 50,000-word novel during the 30 days of November. I succeeded and won my certificate.
I was inspired in my writing of it and even parts of the story by my Raven who I had first talked to in late August 2009. We became online lovers and then real lovers in December 2009 and then she became my wife in 2012. I thought that my life was complete. My writing did continue into 2010 but something was different. My mind stopped crackling. Writing became something of a chore. I missed daily targets that I set myself. My inspiration faltered and instead of a natural flow it became a chore to try to find it. I had lost the plot. My writing became contrived and forced and so the flow slowed to a trickle. I put that down to being so very much in love with Raven. I was happy and very content and I suppose the need to write diminished because of that contentment. From then until now, apart from a few shining exceptions, I feel my work has been second class and pedestrian.
Yes through these years I did produce some wonderful poetry but it was the exception amongst a sea of dross. My follow ups to Love Sex and Time Travel and The Seer of Albion ground to a virtual halt over those years and that is where they pretty much stand now, along with The Anonymous Poet another novel started in 2014 which I felt had the potential to be my strangest but greatest novel yet. All lay, stuck between about 10 and 20 thousand words. I wouldn’t admit to it but my inspiration had just totally dried up. I became dead inside, mundanity bit, and my inspiration followed it. I had found love but had lost my words.
And now? Well a wonderful thing has happened to me but at a terrible cost to myself personally. The unthinkable, for me, happened and I lost my dearest love. But slowly my mind has started to function again. I wrote Three Castles, I rewrote Until the End of Time, I rewrote Beautiful Brown Eyes. Not by far my greatest work, they still lacked some of my previous fire, but they were a turning point. For 8 years my follow up to Love Sex and Time Travel has lacked direction. I could not see where it was going, I could not imagine the ending, until a couple of days ago. The ending had been there all the time. I had written it already a few years ago and not known that it could be the ending, a wonderful inspired ending that explains both books and will lead to another follow up. Now it will be. I have a direction at last. My end has a start…. I am a writer and a poet once more, if a very lonely and heartbroken one although as she knows, she is always welcome to call me at any time.
© 2018 Stan M Rogers. All rights reserved.
I thought I would finish by posting a piece of poetry from about March 2009. I do admit it was inspired by my very dear friend, Donna Marcozzi. It wasn’t the piece I originally looked for but it does show the emotional depth of feeling I felt back in 2009. Here is, ‘If I Were To Feel Anger.’ It is the past, the present, and the future…….
If I were to feel anger. Tears of rage
Loss of innocence even at my age
Would it be at losing you…before I knew you?
Feel your soul dissipating through my outstretched fingers
Like mist on a summer morning. Dew dissolving under hot morning sun
And a breaking heart in my chest. Feeling your sighs
Touching your face across a void, and mutual highs
But I am me. The guru of love lost.
I find it so hard to be…happy?
So hard…just so hard. Life gives me that as interest.
And I am never ready. Always behind
And where’s the sense in that?
Can I help this feeling of self imposed loss?
Going down with all hands baling
Angry with failing, and fighting my own devils
Punishing myself for imagined future crimes
And past indulgences….back to haunt me
And people feeling anger at me
And I wonder why. Because I dare to be happy?
Because I stepped into their lives?
I hate these feelings of trying to balance
Not to hurt and think of others feelings.
Guilty I suppose… I always am. Perhaps trying
Isn’t really enough.
Should I just lie down? Fulfil my own collapse.
Give up at all that lies before
Renounce myself.
And any anger I feel is at myself
Audacity at my own hope of being
Temerity at daring to think I could ever possibly be happy.
At daring to think that love isn’t possession
Not control…I want to give. But that isn’t right
Is it?
Anger at inner turmoil. At trying so hard
At being the person I aspire to be
Anger at the insults I receive?
No not really…just sadness at negativity and pain
And spite, the worst of human sins.
©2009 Stan Rogers
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Stan M Rogers 