The Prose Poem

As promised, here's the link to the prose poem that I had accepted by Shadow Train.

The Seahorse

It's a prose poem which many of you may be unfamiliar with. Poets.org explain a little about prose poetry but I guess the simplest way is for you to read some prose poems.
Largely speaking they are published in a rectangular form - yes, I know, explaining how they look on the page seems a little strange, but it does mark them out as different from normal poetry. There are no hanging line breaks as you see in traditional poetry but in common with other forms of poetry they use rhythm, imagery, metaphor and symbolism.

I suppose I'd say that for any poem to have real resonance and therefore be any good in my opinion, it should stay with you - something about it should continue to haunt you for a while. Recently I bought a copy of Poems for the Retired Nihilist, Volume Two and one poem in particular has continued to sit in the corner of my mind rather like a fat angry moggy waiting for its lunch and watching my every move just in case I should drop a morsel of food which it can pounce on. The poem is Turquoise and it was written by Mark Hartenbach, I can't find it online but he has a blog full of his work - please go and look at it because it's not about flowers or fluffy animals but because it's about living now and that's the most that any poem can do - tell us what it's like to live now, here and this way.

And being accepted

Yesterday I wrote about having work rejected and how hard I often find it to actually do the work to start with.

Last night I received some bad news - the magazine that I normally write for has decided to have a shake up in its normal columnists and as I've been with them with the same format for three years it's time for me to go. Bad news for me but not really unexpected news - many magazines would have had me out after six months or a year at the most. So I've been very lucky and had a great opportunity to get my words out there to a fairly wide audience in the UK - you can even buy the magazine in WHSmiths and Tesco - it is a reasonably well known one. However as we all know, nothing lasts forever, not even the good things.

So that left me feeling even more rejected!

This morning I felt like crap but I knew I had to get back up on that literary horse and write the pages.

I'd also received an email late yesterday (the same time I got the email telling me my column was cancelled) rejecting some poetry of mine but telling me that perhaps another journal would be more suitable and giving me the name of the editor....

Climbing up into the saddle I emailed off the same four poems to the suggested publication.

An hour or so later I received a reply.

I can't say I wanted to open the reply - I didn't need to see yet another kind 'thanks but no thanks' message.

But I guess you already know what was there....

They want to use one of my poems in their next issue.

Now while it may not provide me with any money unlike the magazine job, it has got a certain cachet - the other contributors all appear to have been in print in very worthy publications and many have collections in print too.

And how do I fit into all this?

Well like just about any other writer I'm beginning to wonder when they'll discover that I'm a fraud and not really very good at this lark.

It has managed to kick start me into writing more poetry though and I can assure any concerned readers of this blog that I don't write terrible doggerel about animals.

But what do I write?

Once this poem is online with the magazine I'll post the link.

Meanwhile it's back to writing for me, now with the renewed expectation of possible acceptance!

Writing and being rejected

Again it's been ages since I posted here - I've gone from being a regular blogger to a sometimes one and the only excuse I have is that I've been writing so much more elsewhere.

I've been trying to be very disciplined with myself and to follow the Stephen King advice of writing at least 1,000 to 2,000 words each day.

That worked for at least two weeks. I was very proud of myself.

My problem seems to be that life just gets in the way - kids to take to and from school and other places, parents who need dropping off at airports and hospital appointments, friends who have to be kept up with, animals needing vets, cupboards needing filling, wardrobes lacking shoes....

Try and keep writing through all of that!

But of course I do because that is what I do. It tends to be a bit haphazard and some days I get a few hundred words down and other days I don't. I do need to write more but haven't we all got things that we really need to get done?

I read on a website the other day about the idea of setting yourself a specific target within a particular time frame - nothing exactly earth-shattering in this, but it did resonate with me.

And it's no good whining on about not having as much in print as you'd like if you don't actually submit stuff to editors - no one knows you're there unless you tell them.

And what's the worst they can say?

Email is a fabulous invention - I can send off half a dozen poems and I never have to see or speak to anyone about it. When I receive my rejection emails I can weep silently into my coffee without anyone knowing the reason why.

At least they're sending out rejection emails now, I used to just be ignored so I guess I must be doing something right somewhere along the line.


And even including this particular image of writing says so much about my idea of Good Writing and the value I put upon it. It gives away my intentions and expectations for my own writing but most of all it shows how terribly romantic I am about writing.

The other day I was talking about Salman Rushdie's latest novel, The Enchantress of Florence and I was saying how much this was my type of book because it reminds me of my earliest reading memories. I remember being taken to the library in my village and chosing a large cloth bound book of fairy tales. There were three that I can recall, one orange, one red and one yellow. Each contained stories from Grimms, Andersen or the Arabian Nights I think. I know now that these were the famous colour collections from Andrew Lang and in fact I managed to find an image of one of them - I found this on an auction house's site, the book is valued at around £50-£75 and dates from the 1920s - it's the same sort that I read as a child in the late 70s. It seemed old and smelled old even back then but that added to the precious nature of it. Thick yellowing pages and the smell of old wood and mushrooms.



And that's what keeps me reading and writing - I love returning to the world that was contained within those colourful books.

A long break

Two months since I posted last...that's appalling and I'm truly sorry if you've missed me!

I've just come back from a week in Scotland - taking the air at Ayr (sorry...).

Recently I wrote an article for a magazine all about the good work that the Forestry Commission is doing up in Scotland to help support rural businesses and rural pursuits. In the last year the Scottish economy was boosted by around £9,000,000 as a result of the huge interest in mountain biking. Scotland is now one of the world's best places to go both mountain and downhill biking outside of North America - in particular the 7Stanes - seven Forestry Commission owned sites in Dumfries and Galloway.

So last week I had a crack at the blue route at Glentrool and it was quite easy, I'm pleased to say! In fact I did it twice and didn't get off and walk at any of the downhill tricky bits. All of this sufficiently buoyed up my confidence for me to believe I could have a go at the red route at Ae, also known as the Ae Line.

Foolish woman.

It says it's 25km, but the day we did it a large chunk of the route was blocked off as they're harvesting the trees. So they'd constructed an extra route in order to keep everyone 'entertained'. The first bit of this new route was a half mile hike up a wooded hillside.

Well, that's okay, you'd think...er....no. Hillside is perhaps a bit of an understatement....a mountainside covered by a carpet of pine needles would perhaps be a better description. The hike was almost vertical and certainly impossible to ride a bike up! It was also very dark in there as the fir trees produced a Hobbitesque atmosphere - sound deadened and only a weak yellow light made its way through the arboreal gloom.

The next section was a little more opened out but still deep in the forest. Fortunately this section was flat...well, if you can call a path littered with ancient trees and stumps flat. I could barely get a single bike wheel between the fallen trees yet clearly other more experienced (mad) and braver (barking) souls had skipped and jumped on their bikes from bough to bough.

I walked and lifted my bike over the hazards. I'm sure the ride is now around 30km - the Forestry Commission recommends anything from 1.5 - 3 hours.

It took me nearer to 5 hours.

5 hours of terror, pain, exhaustion, shredded nerves, excitement, exhilaration, adrenaline, crying, screaming, laughing and a large bruise on my backside caused when I had my one and only stack.

My fall from grace....

I've described the route as being like a roller coaster on two wheels...in a quarry with a side order of Lord of the Rings and an Ewok village. Scary stuff.

So, was my fall a huge stack taken on a table-top jump? A huge drop off? A steep bermed curve perhaps?

No. I was in the woods on a gentle bit of single track....I'd just had a short walk as my nerve had deserted me and one side of the track was a rather steep drop down the mountainside. I got on my bike and ever so slowly tipped to the right - the same side as the steep drop. I fell in a heap with my head much lower than the rest of me, my legs still entangled in the bike frame. I narrowly avoided sliding all the way down the grassy drop....how? My backside decided to fix itself to a large and very hard rock. The bruising is particularly nasty and not fit for photographic reproduction.

Once I sort through my photographs I may post some of the more challenging parts of the holiday!

Weather

Here we are, two weeks on since my last post. The sun is shining outside and I've done a little writing today - not much I grant you, but a little.

As a reward to myself for writing a bit I've been surfing the internet (well, Stumbling actually) and I came across this picture -



Black and white photographs are always atmospheric I think and the rain is always a little romantic, so this photo does it for me. I want to know what's around the bend. I imagine a young couple sheltering under an umbrella, both of them drenched to the skin. They are French and smoking gauloises. She is very beautiful and he handsome. They don't smile at each other, instead she stares off into the distance and he watches a woman walk past with a dog on a lead.


Why does my imagination produce French Art House Cinema?

Follow up....

This morning I checked my emails...there was one from the Ebayer. The 'holes' in the skirt are apparently in the lining - so not visible. They would like to keep the skirt as it would be nice as a gift to a relative of theirs, but could I still give some discount?

Ten out of ten for sheer cheek.

My reply?

Sorry I can't afford to give discount.

It was £5 for goodness sake! And to then give that as a GIFT?!?! Okay, I understand and fully accept that not everyone has money to flash about on expensive gifts for friends and relatives, but to buy something on Ebay, decide you don't like it yourself, ask for discount and then suggest you'll give it as a gift! If that was supposed to tug at my heartstrings it failed miserably. And what's wrong with the Ebayer getting out a good old needle and thread and sewing up the holes? To my knowledge they were not there when the skirt left me - suspect they 'appeared' when the skirt was either worn or just tried on by the purchaser....

Can you guess that I don't like meanness?

Ebay - good or bad?

Lately I have been trying out the wonders of selling stuff on Ebay. All seems rather good fun, I thought. Take a photo, write a few details down and then sit back and wait until someone purchases your old junk. They pay you, you send it off and everyone is happy. You end up a little richer and you have more room, hooray!

So far I've sold half a dozen things - nothing major : a couple of pairs of climbing shoes which I'd bought, worn a few times and discovered they just didn't suit me, a pair of china ornaments my mother had picked up at a boot fair and also a couple of items of clothing.

The clothing has proved to be the most difficult item of all to shift. Understandably people want to get a bargain on Ebay. They want to purchase designer names, or at the very least well known High Street names, at a fraction of the original price.

So I attempted to sell a beautiful silk skirt which had once had pride of place in my wardrobe. I'd only worn it once or twice, but these days it's just too big (hooray!). So I sold it for just over £5. A silk skirt. A very nice silk skirt from a very well known up-market shop. A classic silk skirt, wear anywhere, dress it up, wear to weddings, parties, etc. etc. You know the sort of thing. All for £5. Within 24 hours of the auction closing the buyer had contacted me - had I posted it yet? Erm…no actually I hadn't, but I would do the following day. The next day I was contacted again - this time the message was barely readable and it would seem that the buyer has some problems with the use of everyday English. Basically the gist of the message was that I had not put the correct postage on the parcel and the postman would not deliver the package to the buyer. Could I please sort this out. I had only just put the item into the post not more than two hours before, so this message was utter rubbish. Rather than reply with remarks along the line of, 'This is utter rubbish', I decided to wait until the weekend had passed (this was Friday) and contact the buyer to see if they'd received the parcel. On Monday they had indeed received it. Hooray. However, they now wanted a discount as the skirt had two holes in it. Erm…not when it left me it didn't.

So my reaction has been to suggest, politely, that they simply return the skirt.

I haven't heard anything since so I'm guessing that one of two things will happen - they'll send back the skirt because it was too late for an event they wanted it for (just my suspicion), or they'll keep it and I'll hear no more because they were just after an even better bargain and it was all a try on.

We shall see.

Oh boy, my life is exciting!

On Not Writing

So it's about four hours since I posted that last blog entry. You know - the one where I swore I'd write 1000 words a day. So far I've looked at a couple of 'finished' stories I had - they're both over a year old. At the time I thought they were pretty good and even now I can see some value in them. But the thing is that neither story has any real purpose. A story should have a beginning, middle and an end. It should be about something. It should have a story! Both pieces of writing are incomplete. They are small sketches. Short set pieces about nothing. Perhaps this has been my failing all along - maybe I simply write things and miss the entire point.

I need to draw myself away from the abyss of self-pity here, it can be found alongside the sea of pretentiousness - a place I know well.

Maybe I would be better served by my old Question of the Week answers - perhaps some of them could simply be shaken up a little and turned into pieces of fiction....

And then again, I'm sitting here, in someone's flat, I'm looking at their trainers on the floor in front of me. Shoes conjure up the spirit of someone so much better than their clothes for some reason. Why are shoes thrown out of cars? How often do you see a single, solitary shoe lying by the side of a dual carriageway. There's a story in that.

On Writing

How is it that I can see in other's writing where they have gone wrong? Yet in my own I am entirely blind? This isn't particularly the case for writing prose - that's a little simpler for me to see, but poetry…poetry is almost impossible. I can happily teach my students to magnify one moment, one important fact, keep it tight, tell the audience in detail about that one precious thing. Don't distill your ideas by having too many of them in one poem. All these little nuggets of advice, yet can I apply them for myself? No. I suspect I'm still too close to the poems I have written - I need to let them wallow for a little longer - to ripen off. But I want to start to submit poetry to various places, I need to get stuff out there…but I feel as if I have nothing right now, nothing at all.

The simple answer to that is to write more. Write anything. Just write. And perhaps it would be a good idea to go back through the things I have sitting in my virtual drawers - folders and documents within my laptop where old stories sit mouldering away. Revise, redraft, rewrite. Resubmit.

Work.

I could quite happily spend many, many hours reading advice on how to write, how to redraft, where to submit things. But how will this get me to write any more? Truly I am the queen of procrastination.

I think maybe I have to set myself a target of writing at least 1000 words a day. Every day. 1000 words of anything. Anything at all. Just write.

I'll see how that goes…expect regular updates as I shall count writing in my blog as part of that 1000 words.

Body ideals

Removed these two images - one of an extremely underweight woman, the other overweight as the blog was getting labelled as Pornography - yes, the naked female form without any genitalia or breasts in view is still pornographic - who knows how Botticelli paintings online get labelled....

For the first time ever in my life I've finally reached a feeling of equilibrium with my body - most women fight against their desire to consume vast quantities of chocolate and pies as it will make them horribly fat and therefore unattractive - of course. I'm not even going to get into the arguments about female body image, fashion, size zero, blah, blah, blah. We all know, we've all read it and quite frankly I'm sick of it. The fact of the matter is I'm happier when I'm slim, fit and healthy because my clothes fit better, look better and I feel better and look better. Right now I've got a good balance between eating and exercising - in the last week I've done around 20 miles (mainly off road) on my bike, about half a kilometre swimming and climbed around 120m. None of these are particularly impressive but they mean that I don't have to worry too much about what I'm eating. If I want to have that bar of chocolate I can. I'm a great believer in all things in moderation and eating what I chose to eat, when I want to, is all part of it.

For my part I believe that being healthy is far, far more important than being skinny. I don't want to be skinny. I want to be fit. I like having enough muscle to be able to pull myself up a wall or cycle hard up a hill. If during the process of all that exercise I lose some flab then that's terrific. I don't want bits that wobble, but equally I don't want my bones showing. Women, and men for that matter, all look better when their skeletons are not visible but their musculature is visible a little. I'm not keen on over muscled bodies, male or female, but both climbers and cyclists tend to have little fat and great lean muscles. That's the look I'm after - lean but most importantly, functional. No point at all, to my mind, in having either skin and bone or bulked up pecs. I want to see people who look as though they could work outside all day lugging around things or throwing themselves up or off things. I believe that's the idea for the human frame. In fact so did the Greeks and Romans...when I was doing my A levels I spent many happy hours looking at ancient sculptures....

There is of course a huge pressure on us all to look a certain way. The pressure isn't entirely fuelled by the Media as I believe a good deal of the pressure is from within - because I like the athletic look I want to emulate that. Likewise if I thought that the likes of Jordan or other glamour models were beautiful - which in many ways they are - and more importantly, ideally achievable, then I'd be working towards looking like an Essex Babe. But that doesn't do it for me. Added to which the day to day pressures of just what's going on in our lives does have a bearing. I'm not afflicted by fame - despite my magazine column with accompanying photograph - so I don't know how I'd deal with the constant hounding that some stars seem to attract. Stress always has an adverse effect on some personality types leading to either the gaining or losing of large amounts of weight. Drug or drink habits don't help. I can't stop being reminded of a picture I saw the other day of Amy Winehouse - not the terrible spotty one, but the photos showing the change she's undergone in the last few years from beautiful young woman to a bag of bones. It would seem that there isn't much hope for her as she appears to be self-destructing right before our eyes.

I want to Google my memory!

Have you ever had that? Somewhere in the filing cabinets and dusty boxes of your brain there is a name, the name of an artist, one artist in particular. I know he's a Russian artist - well, at least born in Russia, but living in exile. I think he's Russian…Anyway, I can remember one piece of his in particular - it was a series of photographs hung in frames along a corridor - the corridor was badly lit and the wallpaper reminded me of something you might find in the home of a serial killer, or at least an aging uncle - bad taste circa 1975. Under each photograph was a small write up which seemed to be a story explaining the photos - the people in the pictures, where they were taken, how their lives were unfolding at the point in which the image was captured. As you went along the corridor however, you began to have the slow realisation that the story was not a simple linear narrative - in fact it wasn't one story at all. The entire thing was just growing and growing and with each new piece of writing your mind was desperately trying to fit it in with what had gone before, until, in my case, I gave up and stopped reading.

Now I want to remember or at least find out, who that artist was, is. I know I've seen more of his work - in fact I've been a fan of his work for a number of years - and each time I try to recall his name down come the metaphorical shutters and I'm left grasping helplessly at the ether. I'm pretty sure it's not Christian Boltanski - although I am a fan of his work too, but when I think of him large rooms of woollen coats come to mind and not photographs.

I found it!

It occurred to me that the artist for whom I searched is an installation artist - so I searched that term on Google - as an aside, wouldn't it be good if we could google our own memories? Up came the Wikipedia page and on it a name was mentioned - not the one I wanted, but beginning with the same letter - K. And at that moment my brain fired up and the name KABAKOV suddenly lit up in neon.

If only it were so easy to access other bits of information.

Procrastination and other stories

This evening I'm off with my friend Jo to see Madame Butterfly at the local theatre. We went to the opera for the first time together in Berlin - I think I may even have posted about our trip. So this is by way of keeping up some sort of cultural life for us both.

I'm not sure what I should wear...should I go in full evening garb? Velvet, lace and satin and add the pearls! Or (more likely) should I simply go smart casual? Hmm....I shall have to ponder this one alongside all the other stuff that is currently floating around my head.

Today I should have been working on my short story, working on an article (due for submission on Thursday) and possibly having a crack at getting ideas for some poetry down too. Oh, and putting my seminar notes up online for my students.

What have I done today?

Erm....

I've looked at YouTube. I've read parts of the BBC website. I've read most of the Metro website and added comments to some stories. I've also spent far, far too much time reading B3ta.com and looking at Facebook and adding photographs.

I know, I know - lazy and the queen of procrastination. I hang my head with shame.

I've also eaten the last chocolate chip cookie - you know the giant ones that supermarkets sell in bakers' paper bags? Five in a bag - I've eaten two of them this week. It's only Tuesday.

High Culture!

I'm currently working on a new short story and thinking about how it could relate to or indeed actually become an exhibition piece - Art. I don't mean that my writing is so sublime that it has become elevated to Art (ha! ) but rather that the ideas I have would work well if placed in a gallery space.

Now I could go on about intertextuality , juxtapositions, and other such poncy terms….which I have to admit to loving just because they sound so elitist. However, it would be truer to say that I'm really drawn to the idea of telling a story to people with pictures - both created in their heads and also accompanying - possibly photographs, but not illustrations.

I'm rambling now about Work…

I do find myself so often in two camps - that of Artist and Academic - with all the juxtapositions and other such high falutin language. And also that of the ordinary 'punter' - despite having studied Fine Art for a number of years I can honestly say that sometimes I'll go into a museum or gallery and be totally at a loss, not able to understand or even grasp what it was the artist intended to communicate. Sometimes it does appear that contemporary art is the Emperor's New Clothes.

But….

I guess we could say that about poetry too - sometimes poems can be impenetrable until we return to them again and again and their meaning trickles through. In the same way some art work can be like that - one glance doesn't give the viewer the whole story.

On the subject of poetry…at the moment my favourite is a Ted Hughes poem - The Full Moon and Little Frieda - simply because it makes me think of cryptic crossword puzzles. I'm utterly useless at cryptic clues, but this poem seems to work in the same way - the hints are all there…it's devilishly clever.

Ted Hughes

Full Moon and Little Frieda

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket --

And you listening.
A spider's web, tense for the dew's touch.
A pail lifted, still and brimming -- mirror
To tempt a first star to a tremor.

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm
wreaths of breath --
A dark river of blood, many boulders,
Balancing unspilled milk.

'Moon!' you cry suddenly, 'Moon! Moon!'

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work
That points at him amazed.

-- Ted Hughes

Pasted from <http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/723.html>

Can also be found in Staying Alive p.231

Reading and Writing

At the moment I'm reading a Bukowski short story collection (The Most Beautiful Woman in Town and other stories). The writing reminds me very much of Henry Miller in Tropic of Cancer - it's vigorous, bawdy, honest and funny. But as both books are memoirs (of sorts) and therefore about writing as much as what happens in their day to day lives, it's making me think about how much (or how little) I write. And read.
There are simply not enough hours in the day for me to plough through my waiting list of books to read. So much information and tales that I want to gorge myself on yet time slips through my hands like sand.

I need to work out some sort of system for myself whereby I read a book that I class as Literature and then something purely for pleasure. Sometimes these might overlap, but generally the Literature requires me to engage my brain whereas the stuff I look at purely for pleasure doesn't. I suppose it's a bit like food - Literature is a good meal at a top restaurant, pleasure books are the literary equivalent of MacDonalds and Burger King. That said, there are the rare occasions when I pick up what I consider to be a MacBook and it turns out to be a real feast.

Stephen King said somewhere that anyone wishing to pursue writing as a career should read for at least four hours every day. Some days I can probably do that - although most of that will be made up of reading on a pc screen - not what I think he meant at all. I certainly used to read for a good four hours each day and in all honesty it's not a huge amount out of 24 hours. But in our busy 21st century lives it's a massive hole. Audio books I suppose could help - at least for those of us for whom driving is unavoidable.

Hmm…I should be reading now and not writing aimless musings to myself.

A Quickie

Just a quick one before I head off out into the gale that is currently battering the South East of the UK - okay, maybe it isn't a gale, but it's certainly very windy.

I've been thinking about changes and how our lives develop over time...the old thing of 'what if?' Not always a good thing to consider as you can so easily wind up feeling full of remorse and regret - If only I hadn't eaten that last doughnut! If only I'd walked instead of taken the bus!

Recently I've been teaching a bit and one of the problems some of my students have come up against is distance. Not how far they need to go to get to classes or to the pub, but how easy it is to put distance between them and their readers in their writing. I think often we keep the entire world at arms length - as children we are shielded by our parents (hopefully) from the worst that life has to offer and as parents we do the shielding. As childless adults we often protect ourselves from the outside world and avoid unpleasant experiences. Self-preservation and protection. Not a bad idea.

But what if it's stopping you from experiencing life?

What if your fear of the unknown because it might be nasty, is preventing you from having some amazing life-affirming experiences?

As I write this I'm reminded that I wrote about this subject months ago - clearly it's still something that bothers me - it's my personal bee in my blogging bonnet.

You know what? Switch this PC off and go out - go into your life, do something, anything but mostly something which scares you a little but will make you feel alive.

That's what I'm off to do.

Bibliophilia

No real secret about me – my love of books. It’s something I share with many of my closest friends and in many ways marks out individuals with whom I’m more likely to spend time.

Descartes said “I think therefore I am” for me I would alter that to “I read therefore I think”. In my opinion reading is an active pursuit not a passive one – when I read I am the author’s audience. I am the screen upon which the author’s imagination can project its images – yet they are always my images. Have you ever seen a film of a book you’ve read? Then you’ll know what I mean – you watch and think to yourself, ‘But that’s not how it was’ or ‘That’s not how they looked’. Reading is an active pursuit because one needs to conjure up the images in ones head – the author suggests them but the reader makes them real, fleshes them out in their head. Readers are also active in piecing together the clues left in the plot – even when the story isn’t a mystery or crime novel. All stories are mysteries – what will happen next? How will things turn out? Will it end happily? As readers we are constantly watching for clues and signs – even when we think we’re not. I could go on at length now about semiotics – film semiotics in particular is a love of mine. It reminds me of crossword puzzles – something in truth I’m lousy at – but the semiotics of a film – the why and how, the grammar and language of film – that gives me a perverse kick. Likewise the critical examination of a good book is something I have come to appreciate over the years.

But it’s not just what’s contained between those cardboard leaves but the actual bookishness of the book itself – its form, its smell – the promise of far off lands, other times, other lives, new ideas, new adventures, new people – all those things and the weight, the smooth page under my fingertip, the small file filled up in my head once I’ve finished the story.

Is it any wonder I once made an art installation of a book repository – a storage room full of shelves and on each shelf row after row of neat piled shoe boxes – each with details printed on the outside of a book I had read, the main or most resonating character for me and the age at which I was when I read it. Small children’s shoe boxes for “What Katy Did Next”, “Ballet Shoes” and an entire shelf devoted to Enid Blyton. One thing I forgot until the piece was being shown was a dark corner where I could have shoved all the Jackie Colllins and Danielle Steele boxes so they would have been almost out of view, my shame nearly hidden…

And then today I came across this wonderful bookcase/staircase – if ever I have the opportunity to design a staircase I want one of these!

And you can see more details of the staircase here.

Anger.

Anger is a strange emotion and one that thankfully, I don’t often experience. Right now though, I’m extremely angry.

I’ve had the last few days in a real oasis of calm and relaxation – good company and doing things I enjoy like getting out and about, talking and all the usual stuff that we do as our Leisure Pursuits. Today though my return to normality has been blighted constantly: first of all a horrendous traffic jam on the M25 which saw 10 mile tailbacks (it could have been 100 miles – it certainly felt like it) so my journey was not just doubled but actually near on quadrupled. The weather was beautiful and I was stuck in a car. Then I got home to a letter – a large bill actually for something unavoidable but equally something which I’ve been pushed into you might say – it’s too personal to go into but suffice to say after opening the letter I was ready to express my feelings in the strongest terms possible. Then I had to pick up my children from a match they were playing against another school. Firstly I had forgotten all about this until I reached their school and saw they were not there (yes I know - go on call me a bad mother!). I dashed to the other school and fortunately made it just in time to pick them up – the only redeeming feature of the day actually as I’m so often late.

Now this evening the kids wouldn’t go to bed, the house is so noisy I can hardly hear myself think (and that’s not just the kids, but that’s another story entirely) and to cap it all off the internet has gone down so I can’t even check my email.

All the calmness and serenity I picked up over the weekend is entirely ruined. I’m angry.

Unfortunately anger is one of those emotions which really harms the person experiencing it and also has a detrimental effect on those around you too. It’s an unpleasant emotion in every way. I don’t like being angry and I can’t see how it can be a healthy emotion to experience. Right now I could willingly go and kick or thump nine bells out of something (not someone – no matter how tempting that may be) and I can see that kick boxing would be a great sport to take up were one regularly troubled by anger.

Maybe when the bloody internet gets back up and running I’ll start to look for a kickboxing class I can take.

Writing

Just a quick one as I really ought to be sleeping now as I'm teaching tomorrow, but I have that nagging itch to write.

No idea what to write about this evening....I've written a short piece of erotica-lite for b3ta today in reply to another poster's request. It was fun to put myself into another character's mindset for a short while and reminded me just why I enjoy writing fiction so much. I do find though that I tend to write in two ways or rather, two styles - one which is rather distant and quick, almost journalistic and therefore Tells the story rather than Showing it. The other style I take is my favourite but far harder to do - that of Showing the story - avoiding adverbs, using lots of active verbs and rich description, really allowing the reader to inhabit the scene for themselves. It's more demanding to write, requires a real crafting of a story and a high level of skill which is hard (for me) to maintain. Often Showing a story can result in a filmic piece of writing - my aim most of the time as I want to put the pictures right into the readers' heads. However, when writing something short or with a short deadline then I fall back onto the journalistic style - quick and snappy and hopefully throw in a more crafted line here and there.

I need to get back to writing. Proper writing.

Must start thinking about plots and ideas for writing.

Perhaps I'll even post some of them here....

The Book Thief

I know, I know, it's been ages again since I wrote anything here. I have no excuse except that I've started this new job (I mentioned it in the previous post - it's temporary and only a few hours each week, but as it's an academic job it's demanding and I'm enjoying it).

I'm reading a great book at the moment - The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. It's a story set during World War Two in Germany. It tells the tale of an ordinary German family living in Munich who hide a young Jewish man. It's very much a cross between the Diary of Anne Frank and the film, The Pianist. It's also unusually told by Death. This morning I was sitting in a cafe reading a chapter over a coffee and it had me in tears with the following moving passage....


"On June 23 1942, there was a group of French Jews in a German prison, on Polish soil....



Please believe me when I tell you that I picked up each soul that day as if it were newly born. I even kissed a few weary poisoned cheeks. I listened to their last, gasping cries. Their French words. I watched their love-visions and freed them from their fear.

I took them all away, and if ever there was a time I needed distraction, this was it. In complete desolation, I looked at the world above. I watched the sky as it turned from silver to grey to the colour of rain. Even the clouds tried to look the other way.
Sometimes, I imagined how everything appeared above those clouds, knowing without question that the sun was blond, and the endless atmosphere was a giant blue eye.



They were French, they were Jews, and they were you."

Yes, I know it's very sentimental but personally I adore sentiment and strong feelings in writing - I want to feel the heartbreak of the characters or their passion, their fear, their joy - I'm not happy to simply read a clinical or cynical take on events. In fact in my opinion this writing isn't sentimental at all, but instead the huge events taking place are handled very gently without overblown baroque outpourings.

If only I could write that way myself...unfortunately I tend towards the baroque at all times in my writing.

Happy New Year

January is a depressing month I think. It's the depths of winter and here in the South of England we get wind, rain and grey, grey skies. It's cold and damp. No snow, no startling blue skies just turgid miserable weather.

I feel unbelievably tired - I'm getting a good 7-8 hours each night, I'm exercising regularly (climbing at least twice or three times a week and even some cycling in there too) yet I feel that I could retire to bed for the next month or so. Hibernation looks inviting.

Despite all my feelings of sloth I'm actually going through a really good period in my life right now - new friendships and relationships have developed, a new job has been started - even if it is temporary and with very few hours, nonetheless, it's an area in which I wanted to work. So things are good right now, much better than they've been for a long time.

Yet.

If you can imagine the slightly dreamy way you can sometimes feel when you've had a couple of drinks...no drunkenness but a sort of heightened awareness and increased sensitivity. That's sort of how I feel right now - a bit spaced out I guess, and tired.

Maybe it's because a good deal of my life is beginning to finally settle. I do feel a little like a giant snow-globe - I've spent the last year being picked up and shaken frantically and now, finally, everything is settling and becoming clear. No wonder I feel tired...and very probably a little seasick.

Alternatively I could simply be coming down with a cold.