Happy New Year!

I returned from a four-day trip to Madikwe Game Reserve today, to discover this wonderful review of A Ghost and His Gold by talented author, Dave Williams. Thank you, Dave.

Book Review: ‘A Ghost and His Gold’

Happy New Year. I hope 2024 will be a good year for everyone.

Dan from No Facilities blog has requested entries for the Thursday Doors Badge for 2024. You can read more about it here: https://nofacilities.com/2023/12/14/christmas-by-candlelight/. While you are there, take a look at Dan’s fabulous Dreamer’s Alliance book series.

I am squeaking in with this post as tomorrow is the last day for entries.

Any how, better almost late than never. Here is my design, it uses one of my watercolour paintings and I just love the colours. I think it represents all seasons because we dream of summer all winter.

I’m still on a blogging break, but I will respond to comments when I get the chance.

Teagan has written a super installment of her latest weekend serial using my song choice, White Rabbit by Jefferson Airplane, as inspiration. It’s a fabulous way to end 2023.

Weekend Serial — Atonement: Bad Bishop, Episode-3, Logic and Proportion, Featuring Roberta Cheadle

My final Dark Origins post for 2023 is about the origin of the letters to Santa. I’ve included an extract from one of my manuscripts which includes extracts of historical letters to Santa. Thank you for hosting, Kaye Lynne Booth.

Happy New Year to all my blogging friends.

Dark Origins – Letters to Santa #DarkOrigins #Christmas

Other than my Dark Origins post in collaboration with Writing to be Read later this month, this is my last post for 2023.

Having started 2023 with my husband in hospital with a venous sinus thrombosis and ending it with both my sons undergoing major 4-hour surgeries, I feel I need a break. I will be back on 8 January 2024. I thank all of you, my blogging family, for all you support, reads and comments during the course of this year.

For this last Thursday Doors post of the year, I am sharing the gingerbread and chocolate house display I created during Covid. Some of you have seen it before, but it is very cheering and worth re-sharing. PS, its a South African Christmas display so you won’t see any snow or ice. My little joke: These are the houses that Robbie built.

You can join in Thursday Doors here: https://nofacilities.com/2023/12/14/christmas-by-candlelight/

The house below is my niece’s contribution:

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I wrote this poem last week for Reena’s Xploration Challenge #309 but I didn’t manage to post it timeously. You can find other poems for this theme here: https://reinventionsreena.wordpress.com/2023/11/30/reenas-xploration-challenge-309/

The picture above depicts our theme for the week but is not the prompt.

I scanned the net for poems on Opposites and was stuck at two brilliant lines, in a poem by Dzejnieks.

It’s just… Me sipping through dimensions.
Both so different I consider them almost parallel.

You can read the full poem here.

Now, about the writing prompt.

You can choose any one of the following options. If you feel exceptionally inspired, feel free to write more than one piece, or get them all together in one. The choice and creativity is yours,

1. Choose two people, concepts or theories which are opposites of each other. Write a dialogue, two paragraphs or two stanzas to bring out the perspective of each side. You can use a conflict, war or a debate as a backdrop.
2. Choose the above image as your inspiration.
3. Weave in the two lines from the poem given above in your piece – be it poetry or prose. Give due credit to the poet.

Two Young Men

A Hay(na)ku series

Tall

And thin

Towering over me

***

Shorter

Powerfully built

Younger of two

***

Intellectual

A swot

Lives to learn

***

Lazy

Avoid studying

A stereotypical boy

***

Different

Polar opposites

Fight out differences

***

United

By blood

Brothers standing together

W3 host by The Skeptic’s Kaddish blog

W3 Prompt #84: Wea’ve Written Weekly

Selma’s prompt guidelines

• Imagine a person from an old memory looking in on you through an open window;
  • You’d all but forgotten about this person, but today their presence has given rise to this memory;
  • What do you see? What’s going on?
• Write this as a Memory Poem:
  • Purge this memory out of your system; allude to the memory; banish the memory; 
• Poem length: 100 – 300 words;
• The poem must end with these words: “Let him/her look”

A Memory Poem?

A memory poem reflects on and celebrates personal memories and experiences, often evoking feelings of nostalgia, joy, or sadness.

Granny Joan

The plaster of Paris figure

Adorned her dressing table

Pluto, hand painted by me

The quiet granddaughter

I recalled its pairing, Mickey Mouse

The one that didn’t survive

I tried to wash him in the swimming pool

Within minutes, he melted away

Returned to water in a cloud of powder

Absorbed into the surrounding mass

I was shocked and I cried

The survivor, I gifted, to Granny Joan

Her treasure, displayed with pride

One day she was gone. Dead!

My first experience of that black word

Death, that took Granny

And never brought her back again

Granny Joan, the artist

Taught me how to make a cradle

From a plastic butter tub

And left over pieces of material

Showed me how to make

A beautiful dolls house

From a wooden tomato box

The house had paper windows, curtains, and a door

She drew me paper dolls on stiff card

I learned how to make clothes for them

With little tags to hold them on

Under her tutorage I gained

The skill of embroidery,

Applique technique,

And how to design and sew

A variety of Cindy doll clothes

***

Granny Joan, the encourager

Of a young girl’s creativity

I wonder what she thinks

When she visits me from Heaven

I always leave my artworks on display

To let her look

Colleen provided a beautiful picture for this week’s Tanka Tuesday. Sadly, it doesn’t really fit into a boiling hot South African heat wave pre Christmas period. So … I picked my own picture to write a poem about. This picture also works for Terri’s red and green holiday colours Sunday Stills challenge.

You can join in Tanka Tuesday here: https://tankatuesday.com/2023/12/05/24-seasons-syllabic-poetry-challenge-no-11-12-5-23-part-i-heavy-snow-december-7-20-taisetsu-%E5%A4%A7%E9%9B%AA/

Heat wave Beach

Hot sand burns small feet

Child placed on reddened shoulders

Carrier moves forward

Slight weight causing sinking

Large feet roughly abrading

More poems

Bush co-dependency

Warthog spies

Abandoned burrow

Safe and warm

Residence

Aardvark digs, warthog borrows

Co-dependency

Colourful inspiration

Comprised of colours

The vibrant world around me

Decadent paintbox

Providing inspiration

For my writer’s eye and pen

Burned offerings

Overdone flowers

Baked brown and brittle by sun

Diminished shadows

Of last week’s magnificence

Heat’s collateral damage

Fairy nightcaps

Violet lace nightcaps

Designed for sleeping fairies

An enchanted tree

Sunday Stills

You can join in Sunday Stills here: https://secondwindleisure.com/2023/12/10/sundaystills-monthly-color-challenge-holiday-red-and-green/

This is the second last Thursday Doors challenge for 2023. I am taking the opportunity to share a few night time doors and a through the door picture. You can join in Thursday Doors here: https://nofacilities.com/2023/12/07/military-stuff/

Veranda dining area at Madikwe Hills towards the lounge and bar area.

Reception area at Madikwe Hills at night

This is a picture of TC having coffee in the coffee shop at the hospital on Tuesday. I took it through the glass doors of the cake display cabinet.

This is a clip of a leopard tortoise sighting we had during our recent visit to Madikwe Game Reserve:

This is a YT short of a ground squirrel which I thought was very cute:

The Evil You Choose by Dan Antion

What Amazon says

The Evil You Choose

Zach Amstead has kept his ability to participate in lucid dreams a secret for over fifty years However, in the high-tech world of the 21st century, he has been discovered by an FBI Special Agent who has a corrupt agenda and who is willing to employ illegal tactics while working toward his goal.

Thomas Slocum gives Zach a choice – cooperate in an illegal operation or be treated as a terrorist. Slocum’s plan puts Zach on a collision course with organized crime leaders, a corrupt politician and brings innocent people into dangerous situations. Worse, the FBI process which allowed Slocum to uncover Zach’s abilities threatens to expose the abilities of his best friend, Billy.

Zach must get ahead of the FBI in a precarious race. He must protect Billy, and he must choose which criminals he can trust.

My review

The Evil You Choose is the second book in the Dreamer’s Alliance series and focuses on Zach and Billy as older retired men who have developed their different abilities over the years, and amended their lives accordingly.

Billy, in particular, is very interesting as he lives largely ‘off the radar’ but has advanced technology at his fingertips to investigate and learn about anything he wants too. I liked seeing how Billy’s intelligence had developed and how he ran rings around the FBI and the ‘powers that be’.

This book introduced a new character, Thomas J Slocum, an FBI agent with a personal agenda. Mr. Slocum has come across records from Zach’s time at the Pathway School and learned about his lucid dreams. With his access to information due to his job and position, he has learned interesting information about Zach’s movements and formed his own conclusions about the reasonableness and possibility of Zach’s lucid dreams. He uses this knowledge to coerce Zach into working for him. His aims are to investigate certain well connected crime families, in particular the DeLitos who are a part of Zach’s past, and bring them, and their government connections to justice. Mr. Slocum’s primary aim is to push his own career goals. There are others involved, however, who have their own, different personal agendas.

Zach believes he has no option but to assist Mr. Slocum and he engages the assistance of Billy, his brother, Mike, and his daughter, Abbie, to try to stay one step ahead of both the FBI and the crime families he is being forced to spy on.

I enjoyed the development in Abbie’s character and abilities in this second book. I’m feel certain her role in the series is going to increase and become more important.

The story is engaging and fast paced and although the story line of the FBI exploiting people with unusual abilities is not new, Zach’s lucid dreams is certainly a fresh angle for me and makes the entire story interesting and unusual.

You can purchase The Evil You Choose from Amazon US here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0BCBQSHQZ

Colleen’s challenge:

This week: Your writing invitation is to compose a series of three dodoitsu.

“The dodoitsu is a Japanese poetic form developed towards the end of the Edo Period, which came to an end in 1868. As with most Japanese forms, the dodoitsu does not have meter or rhyme constraints, focusing on syllables instead.”

WritersDigest.com

Below you will find three kigo phrases that pertain to the northern hemisphere and the southern hemisphere (5 syllables each). Use one kigo phrase in each of your three poems.

• #1: “early winter dusk”
• #2: “chilly north winds blow”
• #3: “warmth around the hearth”

For the southern hemisphere:

• #1: “dusk in the garden”
• #2: “fine weather bird songs”
• #3: “early summer clouds”

1. Please write each of your dodoitsu with this syllable count: 7-7-7-5.
2. All the Poetry Resources links you need to create your poem are here: https://tankatuesday.com/2023/11/28/24-seasons-syllabic-poetry-challenge-no-10-11-28-23-part-ii-light-snow-november-22-december-6-shosetsu-%e5%b0%8f%e9%9b%aa/
3. You must use one kigo word phrase in each of your three dodoitsu poems.

Early summer

Sky still blue, clouds catch sun’s rays

As it descends in the West

Heavens burn with orange fire

Dusk in the garden

***

Perseverance brings success

Fine new nest gains acceptance

Weaver’s excited cheep joins

Fine weather bird songs

***

Stifling heat hangs heavily

Fine drops decorate hairline

People await relief from

Early summer cloud

Pretty in Blue (Shadorma)

Hydrangeas

In floral print frocks

Fifty shades

Of bright blue

Nature’s exhibitionists

Seeking attention

Spin the Wheel

Wheel of fortune spins

As threatening clouds gather

How will heatwave end?

With rejuvenating rain

or with destructive hail balls

Imagine

This poem is sad, only read it if you don’t mind being saddened.

Imagine

Taking your living

Beating heart

Putting it to sleep

With sweet smelling strawberry gas

Handing it with care

To men in white

With masks

And glove covered hands

To probe

And fix

And mend

Now imagine

Doing that

Forty-two times

The amazingly talented Resa McConaghy, costume designer and “Art Gowns’ creator extraordinaire, has created the most splendid post about my historical novel, A Ghost and His Gold. It has photographs and drawings and is an incredible exploration of the history in words and pictures.

If you don’t know Resa, you can find her photographs of artworks and street murals here: https://graffitiluxandmurals.com/

You can find her beautiful environmentally friendly ‘Art Gowns’ here: https://resamcconaghy.com/

Thank you, Resa!

A Ghost and His Gold – by: Roberta Eaton Cheadle