A blog, a poem and a moonlit howling.

This being my first blog post, I should probably say something about myself and the kind of things I’m going to write…

I’m a video games programmer by day and an aspiring novelist by night. I'd love to see my stuff published one day in one form or another. For now, I’m content to write short stories and explore the medium of the written word. I enjoy science fiction, horror and humour, and those are the kinds of things I aim to write - well, not so much the humour as I’m not really a funny person!

Anyway, on with the blogging. I’ve recently been reading The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry and have found myself enjoying it more than I expected. So here’s a really awful attempt at some non rhyming iambic pentameter that I wrote just now:

While lying in my bed at night, I dreamt
A ghostly face was close. I screamed but did
Not wake. Instead I found a sleeping fear,
And paralysed I waited for the thing
To leave. It watched with curiosity
At me as dream-like sweat fell from my face
Onto the soft pillow that lay below
My sleeping form. An hour in dream time passed.
And then without a hint of what would be
The ghostly face departed from this place.
An instant passed and then I woke to find
A darkened room. I heard another noise
Beyond the door like scratching by a claw.
I tried to bring my frozen self to life
But still unmoving I could not arise.
I saw shadows appear beneath the door.
A trick of light or maybe something more?
The only thing that I could do was wait
And hope I’d locked the door. One, two, three, four,
Five, six… I counted till my mind awoke.
I moved. At last, awake! I jumped onto
My feet, turned on the light and breathed a sigh
Of glad relief. ‘It’s just a dream,’ I said
Aloud. And now for me to go to sleep…

There you go. And as you can see, I’m definitely no poet laureate in the making!

Oh, almost forgot! I've been playing around with the templates and drew the little picture at the top of the blog. What do you think? Well, it's work in progress and I was just playing around with a new paint program to see what I could come up with. I actually think it's quite fitting for the poem that I wrote. Anyway, here's most of the image all by itself in case I ever change my template:

See you soon...