Unfortunately we only caught an hour or so of the final night party Poetry Riot of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival - but what an hour with Trevor Meaney (yes not good photos but light levels were really low by this point as was my energy!):
And the sadly hilarious Clayton Blizzard with his whispered poetry and folk/rap songs that you are either going to laugh or cry or both too.
It was great fun though we sadly missed Mark Neil performing though I almost crashed into him at the top of the stairs and said my normal hello and he responded with his (I can't remember who you are) smile like normal 🙂 - Alaric appears to have transmogrified into Luke Skywalker from Return of the Jedi.
No really look!
I took embarrassing photos of the interns 🙂 (who should start a comedy show up!)
And I took arty pics of people taking much better pictures than me!
Other photos of events can be found at Write Out Loud and Bilt Photography (which is where my current profile picture on FB comes from!).
You can probably tell that I really really enjoyed the festival 🙂
It's been hard to get the veggies going this year but yesterday thanks to turning our dinning area into a make shift green house, we had our first home grown salad of the year.
Mary has been helping me pot out seedlings most of which actually survived the lovings of a two year old!
I have courette and pumpkin plants planted out in grow bags - I am in dispare over getting an allotment at the moment, there just simply is not enough space to grow what we want. For a start I didn't want to really be growing stuff in the 'grassy' area, for a start it is supposed to be a nice garden area and secondly we can not make it look nice whilst I am growing things on it.
At the moment we radishes almost ready for first pickings and various salad leafs, there are peas and beans and root crops in various containers. The apple tree and blueberry bushes have all survived the winter though the new redcurrents and black current bushes did not survive a late frost much to my upset.
Jeany is being very good about watering the pots and has her own little butterfly corner developing, also I shouldn't moan as the salad was very tasty and Mary eat the bowl of it I was going to put in the fridge for today's lunch!
And also we have been enjoying the sunshine and having summer cocktails and everything 🙂 Still no BBQ this year yet though 🙁
This month I am gearing up for Festival season proper as well as doing my normal two challenges - this months are National Picture Book Writing Week (NaPiBoWriWee) in which I will be attempting to write 7 picture books in 7 days. I have already completed the first draft of number one. This is obviously only the first week of May so I normally then follow it with a month of working on my kidlit stuff. The aim is an hour a day working on editing, redrafting and illustrations.
The second challenge is a month of writing flash fiction - the aim is one a day. Flash fiction are stories under 1000 words. I wont be posting them daily but rather getting ahead of myself for the Friday Flash postings I take part in.
Apart from that I have a lot of blogging to catch up on and editing of short stories to be sent off there is also the processing of festival photos to happen this month!
Children book and illustration stuff appears on Orange Monster
Poetry Festival write up stuff will be on here and Turquoise Monster
Flash Fiction is Magenta Monster
Photos in general go out on Salaric Photography
Yesterday I sort of forgot to do any work - after 9 days of intensive festival coverage I awoke tired but happy and helped get the girls off to school mind buzzing with more things to write up about the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. But I had to go to the bank at 10 and somehow this took up the entire morning!
I did find some fantastic bits of wall art to snap whilst out though!
Then my parents and Al had conspired together meaning that I was taken for lunch were I relaxed and ate and drunk and produced the rough first draft of a childrens picture book.
I then came home and slept!
When I got up Jean was home from school and I ended up watching Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs whilst buried in children and kittens. It was then tea time which was eaten in the garden.
With a rabbit for company!
My dad also tried the trampoline.
Then I had a bath and read the book I was given as part of World Book Night during the festival, in bed I wrote two poems and babbled about arty stuff.
Of course today I am staring at the state of the house going eep! And Mary isn't going to let me get much done as I've basically been missing for a week and she is determined to catch up on snugs!
After proddings from several friends I decided to get a Pinterest account. I really love the site - it allows you to share cool photos and images but it also allows you to nicely credit the site it came from and has a policy to help you point out and correct copy right infringement.
I was exstatic to find that some of my images were already on there and linked back to my sites 🙂
I'm 5affy on there but a search of my name will do 🙂
Alaric, Events and Outings, Poems, Sarah | sarah | 
Fri 3rd May 2013 1:56 pm | 
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