Right or Wrong?

Its a Bank Holiday Monday and I am not working. Public holidays always give me a sense of freedom that booked holidays or weekends do not. They are the norm - the days you book leave from work because you have something to do or the weekends when stuff must be done.

A Bank Holiday is a free day. A day you could spend queuing in traffic to go to some over priced amusement park or just sitting at your desk listening to the birds and watching your cat out of the corner of your eye as she try to navigate a net curtain to leave by the window.

I have a journal now to put in all my thoughts and to try to guide me into finishing this piece of writing.

And in that journal I have written the phrase 'a good man who doesn't know how to do the right thing'....

Her father is the person that has changed most in the journey of this story. At first he was barely mentioned; a dead character who had no bearing on that story typed on my Mum's old typewriter.

And then he was the good father. Someone the princess could rely upon, her only source of comfort in the otherwise cold life that she had.

And in the beginning of writing this he had turned into a completely different man. ``he was a borderline abusive partner and father to both his wife and his children.

I have written some horrific scenes on how he treats his young daughter.

I probably was watching too many programs on serial killers, I find it impossible to not be fascinated buy the reasons of why they behave in the manner they do.

And alot of their behavior comes down to how they were treated as children.

'..They fuck you up your parents..' as Larkin is often quoted, But even he goes on to recognise that you parents were probably fucked up by their parents.

In this world of mine there is a sense of tradition. And it is held on to like a security blanket. It is how things have always been done and, whilst people recognise it's weaknesses, they dont know any different or have the courage to change anything.

The King is a man caught in that trap. He knows he owns his daughter until she is married and his wife until death do them part. But those rules do not sit. comfortably with him and he try to stop himself from being as much a tyrant as his father.

Its not as easy as just stopping. This is a father that raised him to be King, taught him all he felt he needed to know. And he has nothing else to measure his behavior on other than the way his father behaved as a king and parent.

Maybe it is fear that stops the king from changing things, perhaps he is a tormented Hamlet feeling his father's ghost will visit him if he does not do right - even if it feels wrong.

And so the King isn't quite sure what to do. So, even if we hate him, we should understand him,

A once one dimensional character is looking at me now over his right should, his beard is the same colour as the fur on his cloak and he wears a silver crown on his head, His dark eyes stare at me and then look briefly down the corridor to his daughters room.

He understands the actions that I will make him take next. He knows that this would be the right thing to do in his fathers eyes,

But he is not his father, And, whilst he knows what he is going to do, he wants some understanding on why he does it.

It is harder to write a sympathic monster than a very evil monster.

People are complex and conflicted and sometimes they do the wrong thing but for the right reasons .

And I have now set myself to arduous task of making the monster I created human.l