Elephant Parade (by sarah)

I have applied to paint an elephant!

Yep you heard me an elephant! Of the statue variety - think the multi-coloured cows that were around London or the Pigs that were in Bath.

They don't have many left and I only just scraped in on the deadline - so I probably wont get it but I had to try!

The elephants will be paraded in London to help awareness of the plight of the Asian elephant. You can find out more about the event here.

I love conservation stuff and again this is for me at least a cross over of science and art - so for my design I went for the whole ecology feel - so yeah you guessed it I plan to paint one of my seascapes 🙂 Well to me the epitamise a bio-community in balance and in danger - they are also basically one of the oldest habitates on earth!

One of the things that doing this application has taught me though is that I need to get some sort of portfolio site up and running :/

New Years Resolutions/Goals (by sarah)

Of course I have all the normal loss weight, do more exercise and cut down the caffine ones but then there are the others!

These are more about the mind than about the body and are really more about setting myself goals.

So firstly I am upping the poetry stakes - I plan to go to more readings and the like and to compile at least as e-books 2 sets of poetry. One of these is The Little Book of Festive Poetry I wrote for Jean as part of the PiBoIdMo. I could do a similar thing with the book of Spoogy Poetry I did her for Halloween too but I am more interested in getting a collect of 50 poems together that aren't kids ones. I have definatly written enough poems for this but I sort of want to do nice borders and things for the page so it will take a bit of work!

I am also setting up and helping to organise WoPoWriMo (World Poetry Writing Month) which will be in February.

Art wise I want to finish my Art Journal for Escape Into Life and send it off - maybe do some other art stuff but mainly get illustrations done for my own writing.

Science - I need to get enough courage to talk to the college about that so can't really plan anything.

Other writing projects - I would like to release a book of my Friday Flash stories though I do not yet know what sort of length would be good for that - besides 3 of them are currently in for an anthology so I may not be able to use those ones :/

I would love to get The Punk in Pink finished but don't know if that is possible so I will settle for writing another 100, 000 words on it! That is twice the NaNoWriMo count so should be doable even if I just use November!

I also want to finish typing up the Drs Wife and maybe get into editing it :/

Music wise I want to pick up the guitar again mainly.

Falling over and bobbly knees (by sarah)

I've been having issues with my knee randomly swelling up and being painful then something at the back went pop and it looks all bobbly. Bizarlly this is niggly painful and feels like there is a string being pulled in the back of my thigh. I'm assuming its a vien and am not looking forward to going to the drs again 🙁

The calf of the same leg is painful too.

Then in the last couple of days I have managed to fall down the stairs and then again in Cheltenham yesturday 🙁

I don't really know what happened - I'd got myself over tired taking Jean on all the fun free things in one of the parks and we had gone for hot chocolate to revieve us. Now I wanted to have another drink and sit for longer and maybe even sleep if I was at home but no - Jean still had fun things to do so we headed back (at my insistance - Al thought I was getting too tired).

I'm not sure if I slipped on ice, tripped over the curb or if like the stairs my legs just didn't do what my brain thought it had told them to do.

So I ended up laying on the pavement unable to get up with Al, and dad clustered around me and Jean telling passers bys that 'Mummy's fallen down'. The main problem being initially I couldn't say anything for pain - I'd put my hand out instinctively and had jarred it and my really bad shoulder. The arm, shoulder and my ribs hurt (not sure why the ribs hurt). Just rolling onto my back made my stupid pelvis go click.

A concernced lady and her duaghter stopped and wanted to call an ambulence - which sort of made me panic so I just said - 'No its just my stupid pelvis.' no thankyou or anything just dismissive behavoiur. On the off chance that she ever comes across this - Thankyou I was the lady in the rainbow jacket.

When I eventually got up right again I thought I was fine but could berarly walk 🙁 And the pain got worse.

I hate this - this is one of the reasons I don't walk along the foot paths on my own anymore.

I spent the rest of yesturday in a little ball of pain on the settee, doing heat treatments and what have you, then in a warm bath for hours - on the plus side it ment Alaric made the house a nice temperature for me.

Of course now my left arm is being all rubbery and my pelvis is mobile again - This does not make for a happy Sarah.

The Art of Knowledge Unconference (by sarah)

This weekend 12-13 Dec 2009 in Bristol there is an Unconference part of the uncraftivism weekend and I am going to be reading some of my poems that I think appropriate! Like The Programmer's Lament and A Picture of Words.

Me and Alaric are hoping some of you will join us in Bristol 🙂

It looks like a really interesting event so I'm looking forward to it - lots!

BKU2009 on twitter and I think there's some online jabbery stuff occuring. There is also like a talk/culture cafe thing and a lot of free form stuff hence the Un- bit of conference!

Turquoise and Orange (by sarah)

Ok this is a follow on from why I've decided to not worry about my first publishing rights. I have expanded this to my poetry first off - this is now going up on Turquoise Monster this renders the poems I post useless for most anthologies and competitions but I'm sick of sending off all the poems wasting all that paper and enverlopes to get like £20 $6 etc... of course I still have a few poems that can't go up yet due to them being published in newspapers and stuff.

I decided it would be better to produce a book of my own - of poetry - I'll still send stuff off to the charity anthologies as I feel thats important but I feel that this sending off to have the poem appear once in something read by like 150 people is really starting to stunt my growth as a poet.

I have observed that most sales come from doing slams and talks and conferences and even those poets published the traditional way have ended up having to wave their books around saying 'please buy'.

I am also a 'niche' poet so finding someone willing to publish a poetry collection would be difficult. I plan to illustrate the poems for the actual 'books' and have infact been producing a visual poetry journal for sale in Ammerica.

I origonally decided I had to have a poetry website as people have been asking me where they can get my poems to read - and [A Picture of Words}(http://turquoise.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/?p=12) has been taken by two seperate teachers to use as a classroom aid which made me very happy - they did ask first 🙂

I think obsqurity is more of a danger to my poetry career than piracy to be quiet honest - plus poetry really isn't a big earner - the top poetry books still sell minute numbers compared to say fiction books.

So that is why I am doing this with the poetry - [Orange Monster}(http://orange.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/) on the other hand is where I am putting out my Children's books ideas.

There is a slightly different reasoning behind this one and it has nothing to do with the publishing industry and everything to do with Jean.

I came across a picture book alternative to NaNoWriMo called Picture Book Idea Month or PiBoIdMo the idea is you produce 30 picture book ideas in 30 days - I thought why not.

And I thought this becuase I've got lots of picture book ideas rattling about and none of them have been brought to completion and Jean is actually starting to get a bit old - at least for the board book ideas. After having made her the Little Book of Spoogy Poetry I thought I can use PiBoIdMo to give her all these stories - most of which she has inspired.

This way they might actually get written and enjoyed by her before she's too old. Weather I will go on to publish any of these I do not know but I plan to make the little books like I did at Halloween and one of the ideas you might all be getting for a christmas presant so you have been warned!

Right I suppose I should actually get on and do some work now!