The Homeless Babies (by sarah)

Today I am doing the front cover of Percival's Christmas Wish as part of my Draw-a-thon to raise money for Shelter. I have only been sponsored £10 so far but that is half a family who wont end up homeless in the first place! So it is all good though making it a whole family by the end of today would be brilliant 🙂

In total I need to draw 14-16 pictures before Christmas Eve! I am currently on number three which is the hardest of the pictures as it is the one for the cover as well. So far all pictures are only sketches and some of that quiet rough but I am going out later to pick up some new colouring pencils as mine were damaged in the move.

I would like to just emphasis that there are over 75, 000 homeless children this christmas the likes of which has not been seen since the 60's! I know it seems like a sea of faceless people but it's not - those people are people like you and me, things can change so quickly where finances are concerned.

Also last week a baby bunny was dumped outside a pet shop near us in a cardboard box, which we said we would take if it was adopted by yesterday - it hadn't been adopted so we now have a new addition to the Snell-Pym zoo - Fluffy Obsidian!

Guess which part of the name was mine and which bit was Jean's? :/

She reckons that rock names are too hard in that they are not fluffy and they are hard to say! She gave Alaric the option of Hedgwig or Fluffy for the rabbit and he opted for Fluffy as a bunny isn't an owl and though it is also not a three headed dog it's genetics would be closer to that than a bird.

If we could adopt the homeless kids we would but they don't need adopting - they need to be with their families and taking them away would be taking us straight back to the horrors of Victoriana, therefore we help the whole family. I am really hoping that someone will donate another £10 so that we have helped one whole family instead of just half.

Here is a donate button.

And thankyou so much for the donation/sponsor that I have already received 🙂 The money goes directly to Shelter so they can start doing stuff straight away 🙂

Fandom (by sarah)

I have a couple of hundred fans, this is odd, it's weird in some cases and has already led a few years ago to issues that was quiet scary. I refused to meet up with someone as I felt they were being too fanatical and this resulted in a hate campaign against me. This was resolved mainly due to the behaviour being against the law.

This has not put me off of having fans as most of them are lovely and more so a lot of them have become friends in one form or another and with some of them the fandom is mutual. Add in social media and the fact I take part in various author/writers chats and I end up talking to C J Cherryh and Anne Rice and the like in recipricol conversations. The same goes for the science writers and artists and in some cases bands.

Now I have a mix on my various feds of people I know and people I don't but who's work I like - people I suppose I am a fan of. Mainly it is people I find inspiring or interesting. But I don't tend to follow the fashions as it were so I don't really know who is famous and who is not. I have countless stories of me turning down going for noodles with someone who was going of to have lunch with Nick Cave and of informing Cory Doctorow that his coat was really zippy and that I liked it. Al has tried to tell writers that I am a writer too and I have just shrugged and said things like, 'yeah but its only scifi and horror and a bit of poetry', and this years piece de la resistance turning down the chance to read my poetry out to a room full of important and famous people as I had Jean with me and she needed to be in bed early as she had a jujistu tournament the next day - with hind sight this are miss chances but I just don't really segment people in my head.

I am my own worst enermy and have even suffered the 'oh my god I have fans and they expect the same stuff from me all the time... I can't do that!' when I first found out people were reading this blog I struggled to continue and by people I don't mean our friends we'd told about it but all the others who had found us and found what we had to say interesting. And then I found the oppersite, the feeling that I was only writing to audience and that I could not be true to self as it might offend or bore or worse upset my mother. These were the demons of fandom as I saw it.

After the stalker incident I did worry and I stepped back a bit from public stuff both real life and electronic as I was realised that I feared becoming too famous (I know it's unlikely that that would happen and that it is probably arrogent to think that way but I am giving you my thought process here). How much did I want to be in the public eye etc... but I couldn't not write so I tried a psydonyme and that worked and got me back on track.

Part of me is always nervous of being 'fan-like' about people who's work I admire, having had the stalker, and others who hate my stuff and yet others who think everything I do is amazing and just stare at me waiting for me to say something. And then I realised that I am in this sort of bizar state of mind where the whole world is a sort of extended village for me. Social media has shrunk things but so has the activities I take part in in the physical world. I go and see my friends play and I tweet them to say I enjoyed it as I had to leave before the end of the concert to catch the train and then I go and see Gotye and do pretty much exactly the same thing.

I just find the concept of fans and fandom and fanfic and everything a bit strange even though I am part of it from two different sides.

Of course being shy means that I get as nervous over saying hello to the girl who had organised the charity performance I did Thursday night as I did when meeting members of the Royal Family.

This is something I puzzled over after the weekend as well, I get prizes for my art, I get them shown at International Conferences and so on and yet in a village that I lived in for 6 years... meh. It's like the issue of me being invited to read in Oxford and Bristol and so on and yet the towns near me.... I get completely over looked. Part of it is going to be that I am not main stream so I suppose that I am not in an area with enough population density to have people who appreciate my work.

Voting in the Police (by sarah)

Today I am popping out to vote - this time police commissioners. I really don't like this - not that I have a choice of vote but that it is linked to political parties. I like the fact that our police force is separate otherwise they are just a branch of the military in my opinion or hired thugs - with issues such as privatization sneaking in I am very concerned.

The police need to be separate and a public service, I don't want people with the power of arrest over me that are doing it for the highest bidder or because one faction has decreed it so. I want them to be looking out for the polis - the people. I want them to retain the power to retain those in power in the country if those people are misbehaving - if those people are paying them then that balance shifts.

I've been looking at Gloucestershires candidates and only one of them is an ex-cop. Now I'm not saying the others can't do the job but I am fearful that you could get such a position without at least seeing what it is like to work on the 'shop floor' as it were.

Also the information for this round of voting has been almost none existant - you need to be internet savy to have gained any info on who is even standing in your area. This is not how you get people to actually go out and vote. Now I hate the leaflets through the door that are party specific but really a summary sheet with more info can be found here and here covering the basics of the candidates would be a good idea.

Democracy is more than being able to put your mark on the card it is being given the power to make an informed choice. I will go bannanas if I find flyers for specific parties in the booth again like I did with the voting referendum.

In the process of looking up info I have also discovered that there is planned closer of like two thirds of this counties police stations - who could possibly think that is a good idea? Centralisation can only make this effecient up to a level and then you start to have issues with time lag which when we are dealing with the emergency services is bad news indeed.

We have already lost our fire station which was also a place for the rapid response units etc.... it is now too far away for me to happy. As in it is now as far away as the nearest was when we lived in a village - village is one thing this is not a village. High population centers need visible policing. I saw more cops in the village than I do here - what is going on with that?

I am once again scared by the politics in this country.

Green Unconference (by sarah)

Today I attended the first ever Green Unconference in Long Ashton near Bristol, organised by Daniel Lewis. It was an amazing setting with brilliant speakers - I only wish more of the people I'd invited had turned up but apparently most of them hadn't seen the FaceBook invite until the event was actually taking place 🙁

I have come away saddened but optermistic and re-energised about the stuff I do to try and be a bit more friendly to the planet. Everything from government policies to how to garden to how to save/use waste food to feed those who are increasingly needing to use the food banks in this country was disguessed. I myself did an Upcycling and Junk Art workshop - complete with a mini talk and slides.

It was the most gorgous setting for a workshop

The girls were about as well behaved as I think I could realistically expect :/ I think Jeany eat most of the buffet before we officially had stopped for lunch!

I'm glad that people are taking on board that the average family can not afford or percieves at the least that they cannot afford organic food and that steps are being taken towards sorting this out. I wish I had managed to catch a few more of the talks but they clashed with my workshop and we had to leave early due to having triple booked ourselves for the day :/

I am going to attempt write up a few more of my junk art and upcycling projects. In making the slide show I realised I had a lot of material which I may try to collect together into at min an ebook.

(There will be a follow up post or two of the fantastic photos I got of bits of the church though I forgot to take one from outside 🙁 )

And talking of e-books don't forget to download your copy of The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry before midnight on the 31st of October! Click the image below for your free PDF.

Green Unconference 2012 (by sarah)

Saturday I will be running an Upcycle and Junk Art workshop as part of the fantastic programme for the first ever Green Unconference.

This pot of flowers made from an old New Scientist mag, a tin can and a jumper will be on of the things I will be showing people how to make 🙂

I will also have some other bits with me including stuff to make visual poetry greeting cards, collage and maybe a festival sheep (if I can fit it in with the kids in the car!). There are going to be some really cool talks going on at the Unconference so if anyone is in the Bristol/Bath area they should check it out 🙂 Its all free by the way.