Colleen’s  prompt words this week, power and allure are just up my alley!

So here’s a short extract from my YA fantasy manuscript followed by a haiku.

The Curse of Time: The Bloodstone – excerpt. 

Stealing a glance at Ryder I drew in a sharp breath. I had been so absorbed in the drama back at the river that I hadn’t noticed the subtleties flickering like wraiths across his face. I took the time now to note that he had blue-black hair that gleamed in the gloominess of the day. As the rain began to fall, I found myself drawn to his unusual eyes. His inky black eye contrasted with his green eye and had to be his most stunning, and unique, feature. He had long lashes now slicked with raindrops that gleamed in the failing light.  Unable to look away, I stared into those captivating eyes as if they were two dark, mysterious pools pulling me into their depths. I imagined myself sinking into oblivion. I felt light-headed as if I’d lost my grip at the top of a high cliff, free-falling, tumbling over and over again, but instead of fighting against this frightening sensation I welcomed it.

© Marjorie Mallon 2017 – aka, Kyrosmagica. All Rights Reserved.

My good friend Colleen Chesebro has taken me under her fairy wings and is working through my manuscript at this very moment….  I can’t thank her enough for all her kindness. She has been such an incredible help….

Just recently, I started a club on Facebook for authors, bloggers and book bloggers – Authors/Bloggers Rainbow Support Club.

Colleen Chesebro, Debby Gies (D.G. Kaye Writer) and I run the club together, we are quite some team. The three of us had such fun recently working on a new header for the club (which you can see at the very bottom of this post.)  Guess what? We’ve been looking at rainbows!

During my search I discovered a lovely rainbow fairy, so this one’s for Colleen for all her hard work and help with my manuscript. xxx

To join in with Colleen’s weekly poetry challenge follow the link: Colleen Chesebro’s Poetry Challenge

Bye for now,

My social media hang outs:

Twitter: @marjorie_mallon
My New Facebook club : Authors/Bloggers Rainbow Support Club

Goodreads

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

Tumblr

The prompt words really attracted me to Ronovan’s Haiku Challenge this week…. (It’s a long time since I’ve joined in as I have been so busy!) as they relate beautifully to my manuscript – The Curse of Time, which I am close to finishing! I’m doing what I hope are the final edits – you never know if it is truly completed until you send it to your betas/editors!

I’ve written two haiku and used Canva to make them visually pleasing. The second one is using my own photograph of a nasty looking shadow!

To join in with Ronovan’s Prompt – I think the deadline is today, hope I haven’t left it too late: https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2017/04/17/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-145-beautifulcurse/

Bye for now,

Have a lovely Sunday.

I’m in the mood for poetry today! Started off writing two Tanka poems for Colleen’s Tanka Tuesday and then realised I hadn’t done anything for Valentine’s.  To remedy this faux pas I decided to take a gander at Ronovan’s prompt words this week hoping they were a little valentine related and sure enough Eye and Fade were perfect, so I wrote this haiku…

To join in with Ronovan’s Haiku Challenge follow the link: Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge

Happy Valentines!!!

Much love,

It has been an age since I have written any haiku. Sigh!

Recently  Denis at haiku hound commented on one of my posts, but added – where are your haiku? Good point Denis – his comment prompted me to write this post! Thanks so much for the encouragement. 🙂

Denis is a keen haiku poet, photographer and also has some stunning afghan hounds – do check out his blog:  Haiku Hound – Afghan Hounds

I have really missed joining in with Ronovan’s weekly challenge. Unfortunately I have just been so busy job hunting, editing my manuscript, etc, etc.

Good news – I now have a new job… More about that soon. It’s a bit of a secret. Kyrosmagica likes secrets but all will be revealed soon. But one things for certain I doubt that you will guess what my new job is, as it is quite unusual.

This weeks prompt really caught my attention… Magic and stars. Kyrosmagica is all about the magical moments in life whether it’s simply reading a book, walking and observing the beauty all around us or engaging in creative endeavours. Kyrosmagica also tries to reflect on the deeper aspects of life – you can’t have light without a touch of darkness… But today, I’m feeling lighthearted so let’s celebrate love with Ronovan’s beautiful prompt words magic and stars!

My haiku is inspired by my recent visit to Tavira, in the Portugese Algarve. To find out more about Tavira do visit this excellent website: Tavira Uncovered. In this quaint town there is a bridge dedicated to love! All along the bridge padlocks are attached, with the names of partners, husbands, wives, and lovers!

This particularly bright pink padlock caught my eye. I do hope that Stefan and Claudia are still together!

Magical Fireworks Explode

Stars twinkle brightly,

Magical fireworks explode,

When I’m near to you.

Stars padlocked our love,

In magical Tavira,

Love you forever.

The key’s ours alone,

No one else can break the bond,

Magic star of love.

This bridge links our love,

A magical star glistens,

On this pink full heart.

© Marjorie Mallon 2016 – aka, Kyrosmagica. All Rights Reserved.

Tavira is such a lovely quaint place to visit, with an oldie world charm, so with that in mind here are some of my photos to tempt you:

Two views from either side of the lovers!!! bridge ….

 My daughter looking tiny amongst the quaint old buildings!

There are some lovely churches in Tavira:

Of course when love hits the mark it’s truly magical, and so is Tavira. If you’d like to see my other Portugal post do visit here: Portugal Missing You

I hope you liked my haiku. Do join in with Ronovan’s challenge.

Here’s the link to find out more: Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge – Magic and Stars

Oh and see if you can guess what my new job is…

Bye for now, much love. Happy Sunday!

I really feel in the mood for a Haiku Challenge this week. It’s been ages since I’ve joined in Ronovan’s challenge, sigh, I seem to be struggling to keep up with all the things I want to do, such is life. Never mind I’m here now at this present moment ready to write some haiku. Yippee!!

The challenge words this week are rain and lightning. Very fitting.

On one day this week I was on playground duty in the local primary school supervising the kids at lunch time, except it started raining so we had to have wet play… no this isn’t some kind of water fight as the name would suppose … it’s when the kids have to stay inside when it’s raining. Not the most desirable outcome for us adults or the children. Children need to let off steam… Especially, when the Year 6’s have their Sats…So I was really pleased for them and for myself!!! Ha Ha ….that it stopped raining and they were able to go out and play ball and run around a bit.

The first haiku is with the kids in mind:

Puddle Temptation

Enormous puddles

Draw kids near sweet temptation

Lightning burst they run

The above photo is of my hubby getting very wet in Brighton – he’s very fond of thunderstorms so this haiku is for him!!

Rain Cleanses The Soul

Rain cleanses the soul

Lightning palpates heart’s desires,

Thunder struck we yield.

© Marjorie Mallon 2016 – aka, Kyrosmagica. All Rights Reserved.

Hope you enjoyed my haiku.

To finish off here’s a word spiral that I discovered how to do via Vashti – Do pop over to her blog to see her fabulous word heart graphics and haiku from last week: Vashti Vega Haiku and Graphics! and also Ritu did a post too : Ritu – Creating A Spiral Word Graphic

Festisite Text Layout – Spiral

Here’s the link to Ronovan’s Blog to join in the challenge: Ronovan Writes Haiku Challenge

Have a lovely Saturday.

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

My Links: 

Wattpad

Goodreads

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

Tumblr

Ronovan’s prompt words this week, class and firm seem to be very appropriate judging by my new part-time role working in a primary school.

It’s been quite a week. We’ve had rain, fog, cold days, mishaps, sharing issues, arguments, little fights and then…. one day this week the fire alarm went off during the lunch break and the little ‘uns were very upset. They thought their school was about to burn down, and they wanted their mummies! So I did my best to reassure them that this was not the case and it was just the kitchens getting too hot!! Poor wee mites, when you’re little every drama ends up being a major crisis of disproportionate proportions.

It didn’t help that just before the fire alarm went off one of the little girls hurt her lip, adding even more drama to an already raging inferno!

So the Monkeying Around haiku below is with them in mind…. sometimes, I’d advocate a fair old dousing of over imaginativeitis – only in extreme cases you understand!  But if all else fails a big hug from mum is always a good idea:

MONKEYING AROUND

Raging school drama,

Classes monkeying around,

Firm, but fair dousing!

Oh and today I came across one of many little cherubs. This one with curly blond hair and the brightest blue eyes,  but even little cherubs can be challenging! This little fellow only responds to the words kind hands when he’s been a bit naughty – kind hands involves putting your little hands up in the air and proposing kindness to your  fingertips… miraculously it seemed to work, perhaps he is a bit theatrically inclined. I hope when I ask him to do it again his hands oblige!

I mentioned it to my youngest daughter and she laughed and admitted that she was really naughty in reception!!! In fact she was so naughty that she used to have to stay in sometimes as they wouldn’t let her out to play! And I thought she was an angel, us mothers, huh!!! She sounds like a cherub too….

BE KIND

A little cherub,

Not naughty just challenging,

Firm words then kind hands.

Do pop over to Ronovan Writes, to join in with the haiku weekly challenge fun:

https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2016/03/07/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-87-classfirm/

Hope you liked my haiku.

Have a lovely weekend, have fun, but remember no monkeying around!

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

The prompt words this week from Ronovan are Flash and Dance.

I’ve just started a part-time job in my girls’ old primary school, a bit of a change from my last job working in John Lewis over Christmas!  On Monday I was on supervisory duty in the playground mainly keeping an eye on the kids playing on the climbing frame. On my first day there were kids leaping on kids, a boy with two scrapped knees, a girl who got bark in her eye, and a group of year four girls who came and introduced themselves to me and told me all about the play they were in. They were telling me about their parts, how many lines they had or proudly boasting that their part was a baddie! How outrageous! All in all it was quite entertaining… So I said that my two children used to go to their primary school too and I asked them to guess my daughter’s ages. The first one said, ‘ twenty five! ‘ I said, ‘Do I look that old?’ Then of course the next girl said,’forty five,’ but after that the numbers started to come down, thank heavens! Cheeky devils !

It brought back a conversation I had with my youngest daughter recently. I asked her what she liked to do in the playground when she was at primary school, she said skipping, and playing games but she mainly just danced with her best friend! How very theatrical, and artistically inclined, she’s not changed a jot – she still loves to dance. Her friend likewise is still keen on performing, just recently I watched her acting, and singing with The Young Actor’s Company  in their sell out performance at Cambridge Junction.  Jack Drum’s Entertainment will be playing in Oxford on the 5th of March, and London on 7th March at Bloomsbury Theatre. To find out more about this play being performed by such a talented group of young actors, follow the link:   

https://www.facebook.com/JackDrumsEntertainment/

I can’t say that I saw anyone dance in the playground apart from a tiny hint of a dance when one of the year four girls did a little bit of dancing from the show, just before she got called to have her lunch. That was the moment I was waiting for…… but it was gone in a blink of the eye.

So this week’s haiku is inspired by my daughter’s love of dance:

Primary dancers

Playground extravaganza

A duo flashdance

Here’s the link to Ronovan’s blog so you can join in the haiku challenge:

https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2016/02/29/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-86-flashdance/

It’s good to know that there are some theatrical types in the playground, but perhaps that’s enough melodrama for now!

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

In honour of the Chinese Zodiac Year of the Monkey I thought I’d join in Haiku Horizon’s prompt which happens to be Monkey.

https://haikuhorizons.wordpress.com/2016/02/14/haiku-horizons-prompt-monkey/

I watched a very interesting TV programme last night, Chinese New Year The Biggest Celebration on Earth. I hope to complete a children’s book about Chinese New Year so I was drawn to watching this.  It featured the Snub Nosed Monkey, such a charming fellow. These monkeys are an endangered species. They have been hunted to near extinction. That is beyond horrible…….  but the good news is there is a rescue operation in hand. A dedicated man  looks after these charming fellows and collects their nuggets of poo so it can be analysed to check their health. That must be quite a job, plastic gloves are a prerequisite, but he takes it very seriously. In fact he is so skilled that he can glance at each sample of poo and tell exactly which monkey produced it! Quite an unusual skill.. He must love those monkeys..

Do find out more about the snub-nosed monkey, he seems to be a delightful monkey full of character:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_snub-nosed_monkey

More than one billion people travel from the cities to the countryside at Chinese New Year to be reunited with their families at this all important time. Can you imagine? That is a huge migration of folk, involving all manner of transport: plane, car, motorbike, and police car….  The Hairy Bikers couldn’t rev up in their usual style in China without the necessary documentation so they ended up travelling in the back of a police car!  These Hairy fellows learnt how to make Congee, a warming porridge made of pork, rice, and spring onions, served at the roadside to travellers returning to see their families at Chinese New Year.

This programme continued to fascinate me with its commentary on the Ice City, a massive winter wonderland carved out of massive slabs of ice in Harbin, the largest city of Heilongjiang province, in China.  It is so cold in this province of China that the elderly locals are acclimitised to the extreme cold. These hardy pensioners dive into a swimming pool to engage in a spot of …… ice swimming! The thought just sends me into an extreme shiver ……

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbin

My haiku:

The snub nosed monkey,

Forest high flier, cool dude.

Keep him protected.

Hope all you Monkeys out there are having a very Happy and Prosperous New Year. I’m a rabbit in the Chinese zodiac…. I like to hop about and put my feet up with a good book. What about you?

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

Well with a prompt like that from Ron there is just no way that I wouldn’t join in with the Haiku prompt challenge this week. Who could say no? Not me for sure.

Here’s a link to Ron’s blog if you’d like to join his weekly challenge:

https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/ronovanwrites-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-79-crystalhope/

I just love Crystals, and they feature in my writing.

Hope and Crystals kind of go hand in hand don’t they?

But perhaps with light there is always a touch of darkness, so with my haiku I am going to focus on the idea of unrequited love.

We all have at some time in our lives experienced differing degrees of unrequited relationships. In my experience I remember one such case when I was very young, it wasn’t love,  it was a touch of infatuation.  I fancied this young chap, and to be honest I kind of made it pretty obvious that I liked him. We did go out on a date but it was no fun at all, he  just dumped me in the middle of the night in Edinburgh not caring how I got home or if I got home.  In his eyes I think it was a bit of a prank to play on me, he must have thought I had been chasing him and perhaps he didn’t even fancy me. Anyway it was very upsetting and the memory of it still remains with me to this day. But it did teach me one thing, anyone that behaves in such an uncaring and unpleasant way can’t be worthy of my attention let alone of a relationship with me. So this curly haired young chap did me a favour in a way, his behaviour made me a little more reticent perhaps in chasing after a boy. I never went out with curly haired boys ever again! Instead I chose dark haired guys with straight hair, played it cool, let the boys do the running and the boys seemed to like that! So girls, take a tip from me, keep an aura of mystique and let the guy do the chasing.

Thereafter nobody broke my heart, not that he did, but he dented my pride. I have been lucky in love, and for that I am very blessed, so the haiku at the end of this blog post ends on a positive note.

So with that in mind let’s return back to Ron’s prompt words Crystal and Hope, by introducing you to a photo that I took of a very special crystal grotto,  isn’t it spectacular?

I wrote a post way back about this amazing place called Juniper Artland where I photographed this grotto, “The Light That Pours Out Of Me,” by Anya Gallacio, so perhaps if you’ve been following my blog for a long while you will remember it. If not, then here it is, (it’s always worth a multiple visit, so do click on the link):

https://kyrosmagica.wordpress.com/2014/06/15/jupiter-artland-the-light-pours-out-of-me/

Juniper Artland is a must see recommendation f you are ever in Scotland, it really is an amazingly inspiring place, here’s some of the other links on my blog in which I feature my response to sculptures at this wonderful Artland (via my photography and poetry) :

https://kyrosmagica.wordpress.com/2015/02/06/my-friday-image-juniper-artland-sculpture-firmament-by-anthony-gormley/

https://kyrosmagica.wordpress.com/2015/02/27/my-friday-image-and-poem-landscape-with-gun-and-tree-cornelia-parker/

https://kyrosmagica.wordpress.com/2015/02/20/my-friday-image-and-poem-a-worldwide-web-shane-waltener/

https://kyrosmagica.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/my-friday-image-and-poem-the-weeping-girls-laura-ford/

So this is my haiku inspired by Anya Gallacio’s magnificent Crystal grotto:

The Grotto of Unrequited Love

 ;

His  promise ring sits,

Crystal bright on my finger,

Mockery of  hope.

 In  tearful pieces,

Hope’s sweet embrace lost in stone,

Cruel, a clear cut edge.

Pain’s ocean rages,

Knife to fortune’s longing heart,

Hope’s pathway crumbles.

Crystal deep ridges,

Bury far inside my soul,

Desire groaning.

Luminous moment,

Lips lock hope’s tomfoolery,

Final kiss goodbye.

Fool I, to want you,

Curly haired lover,

Hope’s cheeky prankster .

Reverberating,

Darkness fills my soul, echoes,

Past sorrows return.

Transient moments,

Now, forgotten, forgiven,

Replaced by love’s light.

In Crystal Grotto,

Forever, hope, sparkles bright,

Love finds its sweet way.

© Marjorie Mallon 2016 – aka, Kyrosmagica. All Rights Reserved.

Do comment and let me know what you thought of my haikus, and of course the amazing  Juniper Artland.

Today I’m off work, so I’m doing a bit of blogging this morning, then off to Tai Chi, later in the day I have lots of chores to catch up on, sigh, if only I could do them like this!

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica xx

This week Ronovan’s prompt words are Vast and Clear let’s see, what can I come up with…. tricky… I’m feeling melancholy today, not a usual state for me, but one that often follows the aftermath of all the Christmas festivities. I tend to be prone to a large dollop of the New Year blues!

Instead of fighting against this like I usually do I thought it might be interesting to try to focus on this sense of sadness and despair because like an actor, an author has to get into role and use feelings to good effect!

I intend to utilise this in some of my New Year writing so please do forgive the less humorous approach!  Kyrosmagica blog is all about the lightness and darkness in life, in my experience both go hand in hand, and the interplay between the two fascinate me.

I’ve called my miserable haiku Nothing New,  Kills Me.

I made a mistake when writing this I thought the prompt words were vast and new instead of vast and clear so apologies Ronovan, I’ve edited most of the haikus with the word clear!!

Nothing New,  Kills Me

Your words lodge bitter,

Vast oceans of clear sadness,

Nothing new, kills me.

New heartbreak lodges,

Vast cruel, unsurmountable.

Terrors playing friends.

A new morning comes,

Light Trickling through clear windows,

Whispering vast nonsense.

New and old mingle,

Clear, lengthy fragments, spoken,

Vast,  unstoppable.

New light promises,

Vast, clear, illuminating,

Ruin of darkness.

New guilty footsteps,

Clear no one will find me love,

Vast oceans away.

© Marjorie Mallon 2016 – aka, Kyrosmagica. All Rights Reserved.

Hope you liked the angst laden haiku! I feel a lot better, writing sad haiku is so therapeutic…   enough melodrama for one day, now it’s time to do the washing…

Bye for now,

Marje @ Kyrosmagica x

https://ronovanwrites.wordpress.com/category/haiku-prompt-challenge/