Unconditional Love – A Eulogy for Elaine Proctor

Last Sunday (appropriately Valentine’s Day) my family had a Celebration of Life for my mother, Elaine Proctor. She died on 24 January 2016 from kidney cancer. She also had Alzheimer’s at the time which was considerably advanced. Initially diagnosed with four to six months to live, she went downhill very quickly and was dead within a month of diagnosis.

It wasn’t a thing she dreaded. Mum was happy to go. She was 87, had lived a good life and her Alzheimer’s had made her not want to continue. We respected her decision.

At her request, and our agreement, there was no funeral. not even at the crematorium. Mum didn’t want any fuss and certainly didn’t want anyone turning up in dark-coloured clothes all teary-eyed. She had told us well in advance that we were just to have a simple get-together of family and friends and have a few drinks.

So that’s what we did. A morning tea and a champagne toast. I gave the eulogy, and I thought in respect to my Mum and those who perhaps couldn’t make it, I’d put it here. So this is it:

When I sat down to write this eulogy, I wanted to be able to sum up Mum in a sentence, some concise few words that would embrace her essence, her character.

Eventually I came up not with a sentence but just two words: Unconditional Love.

Mum loved her family without question. She married a fantastic man who loved her just the same. In case you don’t speak French, the Edith Piaf song you heard at the start of this celebration , “La Vie en Rose”, is about how the love of a man and woman can make them both see the good things in life, see each other through rose-coloured glasses. That’s how Mum and Dad saw each other, through a filter of unconditional love. And we, her three sons, had the benefit of that love as well.

No matter what happened, Mum’s love was always there. She would stress over us, worry about us, try to solve our problems even when we didn’t want her to, correct our behaviour when she thought it necessary and always sought the best for us. Mum always had an opinion, but she was sometimes shy of expressing it to those outside the family or close friends. She was a woman of remarkable intelligence and ability, guided in all decisions by what she saw as the right thing to do.

I don’t know if many people knew it, but Mum kept a diary. It wasn’t a daily thing. Sometimes whole months or even years would go by without a record, but especially when we three kids were little, Mum recorded incidents and conversations which she felt summed up her family life at the time. She would show these to us, sometimes to our embarrassment, years later because she wanted to share those moments when we were too young to see the funny side.

So today, at the risk of embarrassing both myself and my brothers, and one or two other people present, I’m going to read some extracts from the early years. This then is the dark underbelly of the Proctor family during the 1950’s and 60’s.

Russell has six teeth and is crawling everywhere. I always grubby. We got the gates for the top of the stairs to keep Russell in. He promptly climbed to the top aged 8 1/2 months. He can say Dad Dad and click his tongue and never stops doing it. Such an accomplishment.

***

Jeremy and Susan [cousin] have had a field day with the car. One day’s haul was 3 rags, 2 pegs 3 ice cream sticks and a screw driver put down the petrol tank. Also on several days handfuls of dirt all over. They’ve also had my handfuls all over their respective bottoms.

***

Today Mark asked for 2 pounds of butter to hold so he could see how heavy they felt as baby polar bears always weighed 2lbs when they were born. This is the middle of the breakfast rush.

***

Tonight at dinner the children were playing guessing games. Jeremy said “Something small, beginning with ‘r’ and it lives under the water.” Russell said, “A hippopotamus.” :That’s close,” says Jeremy. “Actually it was a rabbit.”

***

Larry passed his exams and we are all pleased for him. Now we have had 5 months wonderful relaxation and he’s finding it hard to start study again. More exams in Sept. 2nd part DPM [Diploma of Psychiatric Medicine] as we have a wonderful offer of a year’s locum from Nev Parker.

***

Mark is a cub scout again and is loving it. He went to the pictures in town today by himself. I took all three on Tuesday to “Alladin” and “Tarzan” and even though Russell did spend half the time among the ice cream cartons on the floor at least this time we stayed the distance.

***

Larry and I, or just Larry really, has to finance 39 years of school and university. Still, I guess we are spending our money on the best commodity available.

***

Mark loving Churchie [school]. Is captain of his football team and captain of his school class. This is his third term at Churchie. We are very proud of him.

***

The purpose of these extracts is simply to show that Mum’s family was the uppermost thing in her mind. That she wanted to be where she was, doing what she wanted. When we had grown up and fled the nest, Mum went to university to study sex therapy in order to help Dad in his career. Now she was able to earn extra income because she no longer had to look after us on a day to day basis.  She still found a way to help the family even when she didn’t really have to. She was a woman who saw the importance of a career. She’d had one before she was married, and she still wanted one afterwards.

That’s what Mum was like. She could have taken it easy, but she didn’t. Contributing to the family was always in her mind.

Neither Mum nor I are spiritual or religious. But one day, when I was still going to school, I asked her if there was a meaning to life. Why were we put on this Earth? And she came up with an answer I didn’t expect. She didn’t know about anyone else, she told me, but she was put on Earth to have the family she did. Three boys who would grow up as three very different individuals and do things that no one expected. In other words, her purpose in life was to give life. Both her own to her family, and to help create the family itself.

And the family wasn’t just her three sons. She had grandchildren, Alissa and Emma, and now great-grandchildren, Maya and Arielle, who are also part of Mum’s legacy.

So, Unconditional Love. That was Mum’s gift to us. Love to show us that giving to others, for others, was what made her happy.

It made us happy too.

I will miss the good times and the bad. I will miss Mum’s smile, the way she obsessed over Humphrey the Cat. I will miss how when I was in primary school I would read Winnie the Pooh stories to her while she cooked dinner. Many other things. But we three sons carry with us the memories that will never leave us. If we miss those things such as those incidents I read out from the diary, then it was our pleasure and privilege to have experienced them.

So what do we say as our final words to Mum? Good bye obviously, We Love you, certainly. But there is one other phrase that must be said.

Mum – Thank you.

 

 

“Rafen” – Y. K. Willemse

It’s my pleasure today to interview a fellow writer and all round decent human being Yvette Kate Willemse, otherwise known as Y. K. Willemse, who has just released the first of a new fantasy series titled Rafen – The Fledgling Account Book 1 out now from Permuted Press.

(Y. K. Willemse in typical New Zealand weather.)

Yvette hails from New Zealand, and is a talented writer who has written a different and challenging epic fantasy series. A seven book series is no mean feat, and as you’ll learn from the interview below Yvette takes her writing – and her beliefs – seriously.

I am proud to recommend her fantasy series to you and I hope she earns the success she deserves.

1. Tell us a bit about yourself. Who is Y. K. Willemse?

Yvette Kate Willemse is a kid who was fortunate enough to be saved by God. Most everything I do is an expression of that – I kind of can’t help myself, to be honest. For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be an author, ever since my Mum put a pencil in my hand and taught me to write my name. There’ve been many times when I thought that there was no point in treading such a hard road, and I was close to giving up or actually did give up. It never lasted long, however. Not writing is a form of mental agony with me. For me, writing is a type of prayer – a liberation, therapy, and immense relief, because I seldom express myself properly in speech. Making music gives me the same high, but to a lesser degree.

2. Where do you get your writing ideas from?

This is the ultimate question! I’m a true novelist: I only have a few good ideas, which I stretch into books or a series of books. I pray for my ideas. But the best ones come completely unbidden, like a strike of lightning. They feel like a tangible pressure point on my brain until I get them out.

3. What inspired you to write in the first place?

Rafen inspired me to write. I’ve known my main character since I was five or six. Having a story to tell propelled me onwards. Without the story, I wouldn’t be an author.

4. Who are your favourite writers/influences on your writing?

I love Scripture, particularly the Psalms. I’m also a huge fan of Thomas Hardy and Katherine Mansfield – depressing authors, surely, but so exquisite. The blood and grit of authors like Stephen R. Lawhead and Matthew Lawrence have influenced me as well. J. K. Rowling has made a profound impact on me, and her critic Jim Adam (author of Destiny Unfulfilled: A Critique of the Harry Potter Series) has forced me to become more conscientious about my character development.

5. What are you working on now?

I’m working on The Fledgling Account, bouncing back and forth between different books. I’ve just finished editing book three with my editor, and I’m working on book five, preparing to submit that for publication at some point. I’ve also worked hard on book six this year, and put together some notes for book seven. A seven-book series is complicated!

(Cover of Rafen – Book One of The Fledgling Account)

6. Do you think readers are after book series these days, or is there still a place for the one-off novel?

A series is hard work for a reader to stick with. It’s effort to keep getting the books and pushing through them. However, I think people enjoy them because once they’ve found an author they like, they can keep going back for what first pushed their buttons. Nevertheless, there have been some one-off successes, so I still reckon there’s a place for them. However, depending on how commercial the author and their publishing company is, these one-off hits might become a series! Even Harper Lee wrote a sequel in the end.

7. Are you working on anything else besides The Fledgling Account? What else can your readers expect?

I have a trilogy I’m desperate to work on after this series. But I may have to wait for a while, as a seven-book series is such a job. The Window Trilogy is true children’s literature, with a boy protagonist who is intent on making as much mischief as possible. The only problem is, “every bad child has a window”, which appears beneath the culprit’s washing line and opens up to reveal a band of kidnapping monsters. Jerry’s trouble-making might not last long…

8. What do you like about fantasy stories?

I adore fantasy because it simplifies the world around us, enabling us to see patterns and reasons behind things. At the same time, it exaggerates particular sufferings and desires, painting a vivid picture that speaks to our souls. I like to think of fantasy as a metaphor that helps make better sense of the world around us. For me, the genre is a lens that distils reality.

9. What are your pet hates about fantasy, if any?

For a start, I can’t stand commonly used fantasy names like “Freya”. I just can’t. I also think there are too many female protagonists these days, and there are way too many vampires. In some cases, it’s almost like particular YA authors decide that because they can’t write a sex scene, they can pen the next best thing to it: the exchanging of blood! Such sensuality can never replace a good story. Also, I hate it when people write in the present tense. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m too fussy, but it drives me nuts.

10. What are the necessary qualities for a fiction hero/heroine?

I think one of the most important things is that they have a goal or desire to fulfil, and they actively work toward it. I also love it when they are genuinely good – when they inspire you to do better. Nobody likes a moralizing character, but I think there’s still a place for the hero that tries hard to overcome their shortcomings.

11. Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I honestly don’t know. I really hope it’s London! I’d love to have successfully finished my Fledgling Account series by that time, and to have done a good job on it. I also like to think that it will have gathered a readership that appreciates it. I don’t have any delusions of grandeur regarding fame. I’d be happy just to have a handful of loyals.

(Part of Yvette’s fantasy world of Mio Pilamur)

12. Music plays a big part in your life. Does it influence your writing?

Yes! So much! As a singing teacher and piano teacher, I love instructing my students to “tell the story” with their music making. I literally cannot write or edit without music. When I run out, my mind goes blank and I have to find a new CD to listen to. Music lifts me above drudgery and transports me to where I need to be to write effectively. Life would be very bleak without music, I think.

13. What would be your top three favourite books and why?

The Bible, because I can’t live without it. It’s totally changed my life. Then I love John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, because it’s probably the most incredible example of descriptive writing and character development that I have ever read. The dialogue is incredible. And J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is another essential for my bookshelf. I learned so much about setting up a series from reading this book.

14. What are your top three favourite films and why?

I’m going to be really uncreative here and just say The Lord of the Rings trilogy forms my favourite three. I’ve just never seen any other films that move me so much and that speak to my heart in this way. They’re not too idealistic either. I felt like the Harry Potter series was a bit idealistic – at the end, in the books, Harry’s not torn up by everything that he’s seen. He’s not struggling to go back to normal life or to heal. He’s thinking about Kreacher bringing him a sandwich, and in the background, Peeves the ghost is singing. Such a let down at the end of an epic series. Frodo’s state of mind, after all his travails, was much more realistic, even comforting. The idea that feeling old scars isn’t a sin was very reassuring.

***

(A sample of the script invented for the series.)

So there you have it. Yvette’s novel Rafen, the first book of “The Fledgling Account” is now available from various places around this turgid little planet. Here are the links:

Amazon

Amazon UK

Amazon Australia

Wheelers

Fishpond

I had the privilege of reading Rafen before publication and I can definitely recommend it. Something different in the world of fantasy.

Russell Proctor   www.russellproctor.com

Them’s Writing Words

I write in the mornings. I have to: I work in the afternoons and evenings. But I think I’d write in the mornings anyway, given that my mind is then fresh and I have some kind of enthusiasm going for me.

Now I have book contracts out there, I have deadlines. And meeting the deadline is what turns things into a need to churn out a certain number of words a day. I often hear other writers say how many words they do per day: 2,000, 3,000 – even one who boasted she’d done 22,000 in one weekend. Some do 20,000 words a week. Some can churn out a novel in six weeks.

I set myself at 1,000 words a day for five days a week. After 1,000 words my brain starts to scream at me to stop the pain, although the most I did once was 4,000 in one sitting. My first book, ‘Days of Iron’, too me ten years to write. It’s still due for another edit. It could be better.

Nicholas Monsarrat, author of ‘The Tribe That Lost Its Head’ and ‘The Master Mariner’, wrote 600 words a day. He did this after consuming two beers for breakfast. R. F. Delderfield wrote 23 pages a day. Georges Simenon, 20 pages. Jack London, between 1,000 and 1500 per day; Stephen King, 2,000. It took J. R. R. Tolkein eleven years to write ‘The Lord of the Rings’, which is a hefty 670,000 words. That works out to 245 words a day.

Every writer has their goal of words per day. I guess in the end it doesn’t matter, as long as the thing gets done.

Apart from words per day, writers have their own schedules for drafting, research, editing. I tend to research as I go. My current series, ‘The Jabberwocky Book’, (https://www.facebook.com/writerproctor) needs a lot of research as it’s set in London in 1901. While I’ve been to London, I wasn’t there in 1901. A lot has changed. In the first novel of the series, ‘The Red King’, there is a scene set in a hansom cab – an action scene involving an escape from kidnappers. My heroine (Dorothy Gale from ‘The Wizard of Oz’) fights off an attacker while the cab barrels along the road late at night. Only thing was, some of the things she did to escape were not possible in a hansom cab. I had to research about the design of cabs in order to re-write the scene. The second book, ‘An Unkindness of Ravens’, is set in New York. I have to research carefully as to what buildings were in existence back then.

Research is vital. I read a book recently in which the hero reads ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce. Problem is, the book was set in the Nineteenth Century and ‘Ulysses’ was first published in 1922. Readers will pick up things like that. So, I research as I go. I’ll write something and then stop to do research when the story goes in a certain direction.

Editing is another thing writers have to plan for. I edit my books several times over, changing things a lot the first few times, not so much in the end. And I still find things I wish to change even after the book is out. Getting friends to read what you’ve written and giving advice is another essential thing, although sometimes they take too long.

So, writing is hard work, and the results are not guaranteed. But, of course, we continue to do it. Simply because we have to.

So I write in the mornings and work in the evenings. It’s a good life. I allow myself Sundays off, sometimes. Often I’m doing research or whatever, or trying out other ideas. Or writing a poem.

So, back to the grind. I haven’t done my 1,000 words yet. And I need to research a few things about cathedrals.

Russell Proctor http://www.russellproctor.com

My Early Writings and Other Embarrassing Confessions

 

I haven’t posted anything for a while, as I’ve been hard at work writing the first draft of my new novel, The Red King. For more information about it, and an excerpt of the first chapter, go to my website http://www.russellproctor.com/.

What I want to tell you about here is my writing process and my early attempts as a teenager to write. Because sometimes I like to embarrass myself, okay?

Quite frankly, this is the fastest I have ever produced a first draft. I’ve been trying to write 1,000 words a day of The Red King, which I haven’t quite achieved, but it has been at least a goal to try and move things along.

My last two books, Days of Iron and Plato’s Cave, both took years to write. Literally. Days of Iron was started when I was just seventeen. I wrote a few thousand words (by hand) and thought it was load of rubbish and put it aside. Thankfully I never throw that sort of thing out, and years later I took it out again. What prompted that resurrection was 9/11.

Days of Iron is about terrorism 400 years in the future. But it wasn’t always. It started out as a book about a future society that keeps its citizens under surveillance rather like Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. After 9/11, I thought it might work better (and be more contemporary) as a book about terrorism, so I started writing it again and managed to finish it. It had its critics. There is a scene with a suicide bomber in it and an editor I had look over the book suggested that it might be “too close to home” and I should delete that scene. Thankfully, I didn’t.

Plato’s Cave began as a result of a lecture I attended at university about the allegory of the cave that Plato discusses in his book The Republic. I was fascinated by the concept and started writing a story based on the idea. It, too, was judged rubbish after a few thousand words and relegated to the filing cabinet. After Days of Iron was published, I was looking for something else to write, and pulled Plato’s Cave out of the cave. It was still crap, but crap with potential, so I completely re-jigged the story, took out some of the quite frankly stupid stylistic experiments, and managed to finish it, too, in record time (well, record for me).

I have attempted other books, like all authors, and have a filing cabinet full of seminal works. Almost all are total crap. I still have the manuscripts, however. My early teens were filled with efforts to write copy-cat fantasy stories based on J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis – but I guess most fantasy/SF writers had teenage years like that, emulating the giants. Two that I remember (and occasionally read to remind myself what a totally untalented wanker I was) were The Horsemen of the Wind (wanker title – sounds like a story about a troop of cavalry on a ration of baked beans and cabbage!) and The Grey Swordsman (better title, although still not good, and generally better story). Both were initially hand-written, but The Grey Swordsman was eventually typed up on a manual typewriter by me over the course of an entire school holidays. It remains unfinished – the last chapter concludes at the end of the cataclysmic battle between titanic armies of demons and dragon-riding warriors over a literally bottomless chasm, but the resolution breaks off in mid sword-stroke, as it were.

The Horsemen of the Wind, written earlier in time, had a half-written sequel, The Quest of Linhir, which actually had some attempts at characterisation, unusual for teenager-written action-adventure fantasy stories. The fact that every character in the book, including the female ones, acted like a teenage boy was beside the point. I was making an effort.

The Horsemen of the Wind was about two teenagers (boy and girl, although their names kept changing throughout) who are transported by some mysterious means (mysterious to me, too) to another world where they meet the only survivor of the Sheerdawn, the eponymous Horsemen, who have been wiped out by an invading army of totally non-scary warriors from a distant land. The teens help the survivor, whose name also changes practically from one page to the next, to warn a neighbouring country that they are the next for the chop from the invaders. There are two major battles, which said teens somehow manage to survive despite having absolutely no ability to fight at all and they stay there afterwards to live happily ever after until the sequel. In the first draft, they return home to our world, but I thought that was too neat an ending.

The Grey Swordsman was set entirely in a fantasy world that consisted of a series of ‘islands’ that were actually the tops of mountains rising out of a bottomless abyss that extended forever. In this story, the hero , the Grey Swordsman, inherits the title from his father, who is too old for the job of guarding The Sword (I was really good at inventing names back then) which had a legendary history of having one been a set of chains that bound an evil monster. The original Swordsman stole the chains and forged them into a sword to defeat an enemy attacking his country at the time. The Sword was then passed down father to son. The hero of this story is called upon by the ruling gods of the world to return The Sword as it is now needed once more because the original monster the chains were keeping in check has returned in the form of a black flame. So he sets off to return it and ends up having to defeat the flame himself with the help of a good-looking witch (who he actually has sex with in one chapter – racy stuff when you’re sixteen) and a rather unfunny bit of comic relief in the form of a wandering minstrel (whom he doesn’t have sex with).

Legendary stuff.

Of course, there have been other attempts by me to write books. Some of them are ideas I keep on the back burner as I may return to them one day. Phosphorus is set in a clockwork universe. Born and Become is a story about a race of time-travellers engaged in a civil war. I’d like to write the story of my climb up Mt Kilimanjaro (I really did that) and the safari through Africa that followed it. That one would be called Up, Down and Sideways.

But I need to get back to The Red King now. Set in Edwardian London, a serial killer is causing fear and panic through the streets and only two people stand in his way – Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He doesn’t stand a chance!

– Russell Proctor www.russellproctor.com