The Canular (by sarah)

Robot butterfly

Turn leach

Tendrils reaching

Till mosquito

Injecting

Wasp sting

Bruising

Flutter away now

Please?

Seagulls (by sarah)

More hospital poetry

Seagulls

Soaring, roosting, perching

Above, in, on

Hospital peaks

City stretching

Inside Self

Fully contained

But the seagulls

Show hills

Disappearing mist

Blankets - clouds

Blue sky peeps

Monolith old

Religious relic

Dominates domiciles - weak

Hills wrap landscape

Steel giants

March endless

Communication

Gulls wings black - white

Strip

Eyes look

Me - glass cage

Concrete prison

Needles sharpe

Machines bleep

Time stretched

Monotony baige

Tread bare blanket

Yellow, Blue, Teal

Beyond flight

Trees puffed

Green, red luminous

Spring summer

Calling

Trapped, tagged

Stare

Seagulls, swallows

Night crisp air

Window ajar

My world

I am somehow there

Twitter Poetry (by sarah)

I have found a home for all those tacky rhymes I came up with about everyday stuff - and that is twitter. I started typing the poems into tweets and found that there is actually a communitee of poeple tweeting poetry which is interesting - Ella who has just joined pointed out that it was something that occured to her straight away although she was thinking hikus not the tacky dross I produce.

Mainly they are the sort of thing I make up to entertain Jean but I am chuffed that one of them has been pilfered (with credit mind!) onto my friends blog - I just couldn't resist making something up about the cat who had too many kittens (and yes I am going to keep on about baby animals - between pregnant cats and guinea pigs and people I seem to be surrounded by an over load of cuteness at the mo!).

Poetry is the one thing that I have had published multiple times - I think actual anthologies/peotry collections that have a poem (one has two in) from me is now at 4 and then a couple in newspapers (nationals 🙂 ). I haven't actually sent any poetry off for a long time last attempt was Myslexia which was a no go though I got a lovely letter from them.

I have been submitting short stories but have found this a bit of a struggle as the stories want to expand them selves into novals and this has obviously been evident in that the responses I've been getting are 'we loved the imagery and the characters but it needed to be a longer story it read in places like a summary' etc...

I'm taking the fact that people are responding positively about the writing even thought it is ultimatly a regection as a good thing?

Poetry quiet frankly doesn't pay enough for me to pay out the postage costs and the like. I have been unable to go to many poetry readings since christmas becuase of my course and stuff but found that was far more rewarding - plus I was reading it out so didn't have to worry about the spellings and gramma - I know what its supposed to sound like so that is how I read it.

Most of my poetry is also niche - it is sciencetific/technical so arty peeps tend to not understand what the poem is actually about and the science peeps go - why are you writing the concept in an unclear way? Sigh.

Short stories just quiet frankly don't want to be short - I am thinking that I need to face the fact that I am a novel writer. This is a bit depressing as when I was writing the Drs Wife I was obsessed with it and could not leave it alone - I have perposly not started another noval becuase of this - for a start I have seen 0 back for the invested time - I hope purely becuase I wrote the whole thing in long hand and have only typed up the first 30, 000 words! That was all pre-flood and I haven't typed up a single word of it since which is disgraceful - its a short novel at 85,000 words approximatly - obviously this is a guestimate I have avearged words on lines etc... I did this for all the different note books its in and there are alot of them :/

But why am I writing about writing again? I am concidering my future yet again - if I am just stressed out then I need to think about academia seriously thats if I can go back after ending up in hosptial a second time on them :(. The same goes for business plans - stomach ulcers and IBS are both apparently acted up by stress so I need to actually look at my life and not fall apart.

I want to achive something with my life but writing is a gamble - especially as I can not spell for toffee and I do try (well most of the time my blog posts on here are a bit erm... I just want to write what I'm thinking and send it live and so is often not spell checked). The spelling is my bottle neck - I have missed submission deadlines waiting for people to spell check things for me which is frustrating and not their fualt they are busy people and there's no way I can pay for proper proof reading at least on shorts.

This has turned into a bit of a ramble hasn't it?

I Believe I am Not a Writer (by sarah)

At the writing classes I used to go to we did a combination exercise - we had to write about how we viewed our selves as writers starting with I believe. I found out some very interesting stuff about myself during this excercise and it was part of the realisation that I really want to be writing pop sci and bringing knowledge to the masses via scientific poetry and art if nessascary. (please not I am not talking about the psuedo science that I hear spewed at alot of peotry evenings)

I believe I am not a writer

I believe I am a story teller

I believe I am an information conveyer

I believe I am an ideas creator, cemetor

I believe I am a scientist

I believe I am rationally irrational

I believe I am a frontier Finder

I believe I am an explorer of words

I believe I am a bridge between

I believe I am an embodyment of the duality of science and art

I believe I am dyslexic

I believe I am frustrated

I believe this leads to creation, adaption, and the sideways evolution that is known as lateral thinking

I believe I am bound to the earth in its intercasies of systems I love to explore

I believe I am cut free and floating in celebral space where the concept of super novae roam

I believe I am the colour purple, unique in my colour spectrum, 2 colours superimposed

I believe I am hurtling through life faster than I can handle

I believe this is inspiration

I believe I am a contradiction

I believe I like this

I believe I am jack of all trades

I believe I am more than the sum of these words

Tech Adventure Feb 2009 (by sarah)

Saturday saw us at the 3rd Tech Adventure in Bristol at the Trinity Centre. We attended the last one in the summer which was loads of fun and useful besides.

This one I got up at 6 am for and me and Al were wending our way to Bath by 7 am - why Bath I here you cry when it is in Bristol? The answer lays in the fact we have a van and that we had volunteered to help the organisers this time.

So we arrived after only a minor getting lost incident and begain loading the sound equipment and assortments of other tech gear.

We drove to Bristol with our navigator and then after a quick unload headed off to pick up John Honniball who has an amazing collection of old computers which I somehow failed to take a photo of 🙁 He also had a cool bubble car outside his house!

Oh and I had had to try and repair my glasses and had managed to cover about 30% of my hands with superglue - I was not a happy bunny.

The exhibits themselves where fun and I think I'll need to do some seperate posts for some of them plus I have vidoes I need to sort out of them.

There was a motion sensitive BB gun, with a targeting laser.

Guys with hand controlers that meant they could produce sound from motion resulting in me wanting to play with the concept and come up with a theatre production :/

Me reading Geek poetry and giving away Wiggly Pets to those who counted the correct number of programming languages in my poem.

The cutest robot ever which behaved like an animal, the camera looking like a little hamster nose and which maybe good research for a book me and dad are writing 🙂 Just a little fun fiction.

There was a random pirate duck but then what sort of event is complete without a mascot?

A 3D printer which had me @ndy who we dragged up from London, and Alaric all got very excited about.

Here are some of the things it made! It can make parts of itself too which is kinda cool 🙂 I really really want one for various craft applications.

There was a Wii set up, more old computers with ancient games on, a logic puzzels and game table, a swap shop which seemed to mainly consist of things we had brought with us - of which fortunatly all but one thing went from, DJ dudes, people with guitars and filming equipment.

Of course Andy got roped into cabling without even being asked if he was a tekki!

Plus there was a talk on high performance from computers - by a guy who was there last year - I ended up actually asking questions and talked to him afterwards - I feel this definatly deserves its own post however!

Alaric's Chicken Scheme T-shirt arrived just in time for him to wear it for tech adventure which he was really chuffed with - again somehow I failed to take a photo - sigh!