Caro Geelen

Writing

Nice Girls Don’t Bleed

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burst blood vessel in eye

I have shed blood enough to soak this dark soil four feet deep I have shed skin enough to fill a bathtub until it overflows and drips and covers the bathroom floor in an ooze of epidermals Enough of my hair fell and balled into the carpet to weave a carpet of its own I have thrown up enough to know the taste and smell of my insides should they ever reach me again Enough! Such horror Such thoughts Should be banished from the eyes and thoughts of a nice girl like me But I have seen blood be thrown...

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Underwater Lament

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coral

One day when we are all living under the ocean in coral houses because the air above cannot be breathed and we have mutated to grow gills and webbed hands and webbed feet and we fill our bellies with seaweed and shellfish and tell stories to our scaly children about how their ancestors breathed air and lived on land and even used fire to cook maybe then we will realise

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Pronouns

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amazing sky

It's international Pronoun day, and for those going through gender transitions or trying to decide what they want to be called, respect their decision, as you respect mine to be called she/her/hers. I once had a thought while watching a re-run of Star Trek Voyager that those aliens the Trek encountered were often mirrors of our own, with two sexes. Why not have more? Why not require three different sexes to procreate? And with that, why do they have to have humanoid pronouns of He/Her/She/They? So I made up some and wrote a short story. The Paonen people have three...

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Architecture

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A Plague of Dragons

Some might think that a novel should start with action, or a character. Well, what about architecture? I promise that this is relevant to the story, but at first glance the first part of my book "A Plague of Dragons" seems overly heavy on both the physical appearance of towers and the duties of a library assistant. Fun fact: I worked as a library assistant for three years during high school and nobody EVER put their books back, or if they did, it was never in the right place. Summer City was the centre of the Anidain Empire, a magical...

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Excellent Imagery

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pear

Suddenly the whole world had changed. From the dense blackness the sky on the horizon opened up, as a breeze, singing like the notes of a distant pipe, blew gently on the treacle night. The horizon greened, grew lighter, and glowed. Oranges and pinks reflected of early morning clouds, as the alien sun rose over the side of the planet, majestically reminding the trees of its existence. The trees knew, and remembered. The grasses at their mighty roots whispered to each other, and the piping breeze hushed them with caressing hands of air. The white fruits, plump and womb-shaped, swelled...

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Oh The Sickness

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slippers

[bt_bb_section layout="boxed_1200" lazy_load="yes" show_video_on_mobile=""][bt_bb_row][bt_bb_column lazy_load="yes" width="1/1"][bt_bb_text] Every author wants to write all day, all the time. But life has this horrible way of getting in the way. Three months ago I sat down with the third draft of a book about a secret service agent, a kidnapped Empress and some devious plot devices. I had time while my oldest kid was at daycare and my youngest was running around my feet bringing me plastic objects for me to admire. I got really into it. I was writing, and editing, and changing whole chapters and even the names of characters because...

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Finding time to write

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Sometimes I know what a book is going to do before I start. Sometimes I just start a book hoping it will write itself, and often it does. The book I'm on at the moment I have always vaguely known where it was going, it's just trying to get the characters there seems to be a hard one. This one grew organically. I started with a specific image in my mind and wrote that down. The characters came easily, and the first part of the story grew without me really trying. Then I got to a point where I figured...

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