Monkey Bread & Ant Lions!

Hi. Outside our house, the ground’s frozen solid, but at least the sun’s coming up and for once it ain’t raining. Have a view of three or four miles across the valley, then the hills start; their top bits covered in pine forest and snow. Between the hills and me, a good sized river where we’ll take the dogs for a swim once the warm weather comes back.

Good place to write, but it never comes easy – not the quality stuff. So far so good though; I write what I think people will enjoy. What I enjoy – just stories, with a beginning, middle and satisfactory ending. There is no secret recipe, no mystical, magical way to writing success. Everything hangs on the readers, not the publishers’ ideas of what will be the ‘next big thing’.

If the writing’s good, the story entertaining and the cover catchy, then you, the reader, will part with hard-earned cash and give the book a home – sort of sells itself – that’s the way I like it. Hope your day is a good one.

 *

More of our day at The Falls – an extract:

After decimating the food supplies, the adults flopped into deck chairs with their beers, fags and burgeoning bellies; us kids, with our batteries recharged went off to do things that, by our parents, were looked upon as the sum of all their nightmares. Scorpion catching and feeding ant lions ranked as all time favourites, hunting for snot apples and monkey bread came in as a close second, both of which tasted crap, but we ate them anyway because they were free and our mothers told us not to.

Here’s a shot of our gang. The kids with bottle-on-string contraptions are water bug catchers – the Zambezi was full of them (bugs not kids). I’m the cool kid leaning against the tree.

Ant lions live at the bottom of cone-shaped death traps. From an insect’s point of view, once you step over the edge you’re history; no matter how many nippers or stings you’re packing, the creature waiting at the bottom will grab you, stick you with its ‘sticker things’ squirt you full of venom and then suck out your insides (a bit like the tax man). We, as delightful, well-balanced children spent many giggle-filled hours herding unsuspecting ants towards their cone of doom, poking them with grass stalks to hurry them up, urging them on to the more exciting, being eaten bits. From a more sensible, scientific view, ant lions are the larvae of a winged, damselfly type creature. Hatching from mother-bug eggs they excavate cone-shaped traps in sandy ground and wait for some poor sucker of an ant to fall in.  Once the insides are all sucked out the ant lion chucks the empty out of his hole and settles down to wait for the next ‘full one’. Almost forgot to mention; ant lions don’t have bum-holes. My mother in particular found this fact quite disturbing and dragged her chair to the other side of the table. However, scorpion hunting was an altogether different game...

*