a cooking pot and twisted tales
Thoughts and Tales…A Lifestyle Blog with a Zing.
Dear friends of mine,
Please help me choose the cover that catches your eyes from this link or below.
It’s for my poetry book due to come out this April, all things being equal 🙂
Just add a little comment and the number of the picture that you prefer.
You can help me share if possible.
Thank you for your support and kind regards,
Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
Writers are always selling somebody out.
—Joan Didion
This quote roused a chuckle out of me because I can personally testify to its trueness. Selling out doesn’t always connote something negative, especially for writers, even though we use the material obtained as fodder for our imagination and stories.
Simply said, when someone irks me, especially when their act is repetitive, they somehow find their ways inside a story or any article that I conjure.
It’s very natural that there are those who might rub us the wrong way or we simply don’t get along with them and this could apply to family members too.
Writing it out helps me to delve deeper into the reasoning behind the person’s actions and also serves as an outlet for my vexation or amusement.
A lot of times, by the time I am done writing it all out, I find myself laughing it off.
For instance, there are some irksome fellows that use the neighbourhood gym in such a bothersome manner, that it’s been on the tip of my tongue so many times to tell them off, but how do you tell a guy that his habit of scratching his butt often, gets on your nerves?
Oh well, with my tongue in my cheek, I turned him into a butt scratching caveman who can’t yet grasp the refined aspects of social skills in public places and that makes me feel a whole lot better.
Ha! I daresay, that there are so many of us out there selling out others.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
It’s been a real struggle trying to resist joining a whole lot of challenges that I see flying around the blogosphere.
They always sound absolutely interesting that a tiny voice in me keeps nudging me to do more. My reluctance stems from the real knowledge and fair idea what getting involved would mean in real-time for me. MORE OF MY TIME.
I honestly don’t know how not to give a 100% and over when I am doing something.
I like to be that dependable. When I do less, I gain no real satisfaction and feel as if I am slacking off and letting something down.
I know these are good ways of connecting with others as well as practicing new techniques especially since I advise people to push the boundaries of their comfort.
Ruminating over it, I said to myself, Jacqueline my dear girl, you can’t seem to resist the bait of A-Z and more. Maybe, you should just take a little nibble and shelve something else. Hmm! REAL tussle in the mind. So what do you think?
Now, to get to some real talk on this post of mine.
It’s really been occupying space in my mind of late and each day the question grows.
We writers write for refined, elevated and so many other reasons. A writer will primarily tell you that they write for the love of it and not for the money. Sometimes, it does seem to me that we fail to calculate the real worth of our writing simply because the words flow easily from our minds to the tips of our pens and my wondering is that there might be need for a paradigm shift in this sort of thinking.
When you think about it, that passion for writing that we have, is been paid for with our time and other odd jobs. Won’t it be lovely if we shed other odd jobs and earned decent Ka-ching from our blogging, writing efforts?
I love writing. I love arty things. It’s beyond a passion for me and it’s not an alternative. It’s a compulsory pull.
I am trying to make conscientious effort to explore honest means of earning real cash from my endeavours. That’s the bottom line and it doesn’t make me less a writer to want to earn from the sweat of my fingers.
To live the lifestyle that I want without being enslaved to anybody, it has to work.
My conscientious effort requires reading more, researching more, learning more, having the courage to jump out of the window and all that. All these things will take some real good chunk of my time. There are no hard and fast rules to them.
I am however convinced that with dogged determination, hitting some pay; I am not sure about the dirt part, will really sweeten the pot.
Well there it is. Thank you Linda for today’s prompt word ‘real.’ It’s made me to dwell a little bit more on an issue that’s been running around in my head.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
“I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide.”
—Harper Lee, WD
I can’t agree more with this quote above. I know one or two people, who for better want of a word to describe their predicament they ‘are ashamed of saying that they write.’
They are perpetually on the defensive about their hobby and hope to become a successful writer, so they chose to hide it.
Sometimes, I wonder if being a writer is such a terrible thing, except of course when we lop off your head in our stories and paint you black too 😉
For such people, I will say, grow skins as thick as that of a Rhinoceros, if you are definitely sure that this is the life you want to live. It’s grits, nerves and more grits.
If you feel shame for something that you love doing, then maybe, it’s not yet your thing, otherwise, how do you expect to make a headway with it?
Be prepared to hear things like the type of conversation I once had with man in the gym, who wanted to know what kind of things I write, he was sure that I wrote only housewife’s romance or sexy stuff *his words not mine*, which by the way I like to read, depending on my mood. I read extensively and across all genres.
I simply didn’t appreciate his stereo-typing and didn’t even want to bother educating him further. I cast him as a dirty villain in a short fairy tale and gave him a crooked, bumpy nose too 😉
I have had several requests to write articles for free because they feel that it will give me exposure, and in my mind, I am like ‘You don’t say!’ 
Be prepared to hear things like:
So, while you are getting on with it, saddle up and let the rude, inept comments roll off your back. Don’t sweat it, what they think doesn’t matter, it’s what you think that matters.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
Image credit: Pixabay.com
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A Writer’s mind
Is a junk yard
A filigree lace of windows
For flights of fancy.
A convergence of different World’s
Where we create hero’s and villains
Real and surreal.
Weaving intricate webs of words
and evocative imagery’s
That transports the mind,
Through apertures, down rabbit and keyholes
Through the wide expanse of French windows,
Into the boggling meadows of other minds.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
Window The Daily Post
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
– Somerset MaughamIt is perfectly okay to write garbage—as long as you edit brilliantly.
– C. J. Cherryh
The above quotes repeats in my head when I think of my writing and encourages me to trudge along.
Someone once asked me how I decided that I am writer and my simple response that I have lots of stories to tell which left a blank look on her face made me feel as if I spoke Greek. Now and again, her blank face surfaces in my memory and I begin to question myself.
When I am struggling to put down the riotous thoughts in my head into a readable format, the question rises again and sometimes, a tiny voice of doubt tells me, ‘YOU ARE A FRAUD!’ WRITER YOU ARE NOT!
I have learnt to slap and shut the impish voice down, to go ahead and scribble my nonsense and leave it at that.
Well, seeing such quotes from established authors does tickle my fancy bone, and I have come to realize that there is no perfect writer. We just write that which needs to be written and leave it at that.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha – Girl writer 😉
Written for Writer’s quote Wednesday.
One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I am going to do my 5 or 10 pages no matter what and I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing writing and tearing up fine pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off. Lawrence Block WD
This quote strikes a chord within me. I’ve given up trying to get the perfectly written material. I just banter along with what’s in my head and let all the string of words flow as they wish.
Some turn out to be fodder for my dust-bin and some turned out fairly good. The important thing for me, is to keep the writing going on and not give that imp called Writer’s block an excuse to manifest Himself.
I like turning the imp into a male in this case, due to the distractions that males specimens can be in female lives 😉
Before I started writing for public consumption, I happily wrote in my diary without bothering to tear out a page or gnaw at my underlips, but now that I am working on stories that would be read by others, there are times that the flow is not as seamless as my ears would like it to be, so I batter my laptop in a steady tempo, hoping to knock some sense into it and get it to say what I want.
I am quite doubtful that any writer even the greatest authors have flawless writing moments. Excerpts and stories of great authors that I have read are riddled with nervous moments, a couple of writers blocks here and there, bursts of inspirations, crazy habits a lot of times and lots of full waste paper basket and enough pocket change spent on jotters.
Bottom line, is to keep at it. Don’t stop. In the midst of the torn mess, there’s bound to be some sensible material.
I lick my lips in anticipation
My forehead beads in perspiration
I scribble in frantic desperation
Hurtled by uncertain agitation
They fall in sporadic precipitation
After some orgasmic deliberation
At last some seemly satisfaction
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
Silver’s writers quote Wednesday
It was an ugly Winter night!
Anna couldn’t believe the sheer horror of what he planned.
The winds howled and it stormed all night long, that to escape was not an easy feat.
Yet, she decided to flee into the wild night and take her chances, but she fell halfway.
In a slow motion, it all shattered as he descended on her.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
Image credit: Quotesgram.com
Carl was tired to the bones and felt disgruntled about his job. It was mere drudgery with little pay.
The new foreman was also an ass who kept yelling at people.
He regretted dropping out of college and wished he could start all over. Girls and booze was a pastime that got old fast and with Sue pregnant with a second child. He worried.
Break time was a little reprieve, so he ambled over to the deli where the other men gathered for a quick lunch.
All eyes were glued to the excited TV presenter who called out the winning lottery numbers. Each man read his ticket hopefully.
Carl paid no mind. He had bought just one ticket for reasons he couldn’t explain.
The cashier exclaimed that the ticket had been sold in the deli.
Each man checked his stub again and he fumbled in the back pocket of his dirty jeans to find his.
The ground rushed to meet him in dead faint. He had the winning number.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
In response to the FFAW photo prompt above. Thank you Ellespeth’s friend for the photo and Priceless Joy for this enchanting platform
She was on her way back to town when the call came in, her fingers slackened and the phone slipped, falling on the cobblestones with a thud, but she just couldn’t bend to pick it up as she stood rooted to the spot, her legs too heavy laden to move forward.
Staring unseeingly into the distance, tears filled Ellen’s eyes and brimmed over with a silent scream that tore through her head and her heart shattered in tiny bits.
She always knew that this day was coming, yet she wasn’t braced for it.
That single dreaded call, that she had prayed never to receive finally came.
……And the man died! Head bowed in deep grief, her knees buckled as she sank into bone-wracking wailing; like a wild animal, Ellen’s cry was not a pretty sight. She cried with all her being, but everyone who knew her understood why.
© Jacqueline Oby-Ikocha
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a cooking pot and twisted tales 