Two new movies for download

The two movies created by this year’s Film Club at Clounagh Junior High are finished and uploaded to the web. Head on over to the Film Club page and download them. You’ll get a laugh at me playing the part of a psychotic tramp!

Work on Snowball in Hell continues, with another thousand words flying out of my fingers last night. I’m going to try and stick to the old rule that got me successfully through the writing of Ulterior: write something every day, whether it’s one hundred words or several thousand.

New novel in the works

Yesterday, I knuckled down to writing the first chapter of a new novel, around 600 words. But today, the writing bug really took hold and I churned out almost 3000 words. I was quite apprehensive about getting this one off the ground because some of the details were quite sketchy in my mind. Now I’m realising that’s a dumb attitude, because you never fully realise a novel until it’s written, and seeing it all gradually come together is the whole excitement of the writing process. I’m really pleased with this one so far.

Like Ulterior, it’s another Clounagh Junior High novel, but completely unconnected from the first novel. I’ve been toying with various titles. One that I like is White, but that’s already a novel by Tim Lebbon. Another I like is The White Cage, but my current preference is Snowball in Hell. The idea is one I came up with a couple of years ago, whilst out walking in the snow at night. And like all good ideas, it gets better with age. I’ll not give much away about the story at this stage, suffice to say that it has something to do with snow. The first line of the book is In school, everyone can hear you scream. No prizes for guessing that this sentence is a variation on the tagline from the movie Alien: In Space, no one can hear you scream.

The story feels novella length to me at the moment, so I’ll have a decision to make later whether to publish it as a novella or as part of a short story collection.

Dealing with death

On Friday 1st July I lost my mother to cancer. For the past few years I’d been aware of my mother’s age and I’ve sometimes played over in my mind what it would be like to be at her funeral. The scenario never went well in my imagination, because my mother made no claim to being a Christian, and I always pictured some travesty of a sermon being uttered about my mother being at rest, etc. The way it played out in reality was very different.

A few days before she died, I mustered up enough courage to talk to her about the Lord. It’s always a hard thing to talk to your elders about salvation, because the gospel is a confrontational thing and generally it’s wrong to get confrontational with your parents. I was driving home the 25 miles from Belvoir Park hospital, playing over in my mind what I could possibly say to my mother, and just when I was almost home, I swung the car around and headed straight back to her, determined to get this done and avoid living with the terrible regret of keeping my mouth shut. I got a good response from her; no excuses, just a promise to put things right with God. It’s not an absolute guarantee, but I can live with that.

Death hits people in different ways. Some get angry at God, others depressed. I’m at peace with what has happened, and it’s because of the knowledge I’ve gained from the Bible. I understand that eternity matters far more than our short lives; that this life is a training ground for the life to come. I also understand that the pain and suffering we endure are part and parcel of living in a fallen world; whether you believe the Adam and Eve account to be factual or allegorical, the idea is that something dreadful happened a long time ago - some kind of fall - that put the world into the state it’s been in throughout recorded history; it’s too shortsighted to throw this back in God’s face and blame him for the death of a loved one. Being a Christian really helps you at a time like this.

Mum has always been a mystery to me. She took me to church now and then when I was a kid, but had no definite commitment to Christianity. If I could sum her up in one words, that word would be “selfless.” Over the past few years, I became acutely aware of how much she lived her life for me. And that’s not the moral quality of the damned, is it? To a lesser extent, I learned a little of this selfless devotion, when someone special drifted into my life for a couple of years - someone I just decided one day to start praying for on a daily basis, and never stopped. It’s a wonderful thing when your happiness depends on someone else’s happiness.

“It is more blessed to give than to receive.” (Acts 20:35)

Three films coming very soon

The premiere of Don’t Look in the Attic went ahead on Friday 1st July. A family emergency meant I couldn’t be there, but Andrew assures me the film went down a treat. Hard to believe we’ve done this premiere lark four times now. Rest assured, a DVD is in the works. Other film news: the lads at Clounagh Junior High School finished two films in June, and right now I’m busy encoding them for the web. You’ll be able to download them shortly. One of them has the very safe title Exam Stress, but don’t let that fool you; it’s even wackier than last year’s film. And in their second effort, the boys got stuck into the good old horror genre for The Curse of Clounagh. A special word of thanks to this year’s Film Club members, whose enthusiasm made it a great year.