Poets Work (by sarah)

Saturday I went into Cheltenham to meet friends and write and what have you. It was great to see my friend Andy again who I orginally met at a writing group in Cheltenham back before the floods!

The postcards and stickers of my art work arrived for moo so I gave him some one of each which he seemed really happy about 🙂 He also told me I should be selling them.

Somehow three hours disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Then I went on to Centre Arts who are running an Arts Cafe on Saturday afternoons. I managed to fall off my chair - a prelude to passing out and stuff later in the day which was unfortunate but I recovered and they were very helpful and understanding as always!

I felt stupid but a cup of coffee and several poems inspired by the artwork later, I was having a fine chat with an artist/nurse who was in there drawing away.

I also managed to talk to my friend who runs the place about the Science-Art Exhibition we will be running in March which is very exciting and lots of organising needs to be done!

Alaric was concerned about me so bought me a four pack of irish stout which did seem to really help - he then made me lots of green veg for dinner and we discussed the bleeding problem :/

I've also had a neck spasm for the last week or so which is making typing and drawing and reading hard but I am steadily working my way through it. On the plus side the continual headache I've had for the past year seems to have disappeared with the coil 🙂

I finished the day off by sorted out my poetry mug - I love this cupcake tea cupe 🙂

It may not sound like work but with the aememia acting up it was very exhausting for me but it was definately worth it. I'd been in on Tuesday as well to watch a talk about The European History of Warewolves which was interesting by (Deborah Hyde)[http://www.jourdemayne.com/about-jourdemayne].

It was a narrowed down talk so covered a later bit of history than what I have been researching lately. However it did tie in with the time period of the first Punk storyline and I'd very much want to add in the warewolf, witch and vampire myths on top but within the context of actual history, science and the storyline itself. Well that was really the point of going!

From a writing point of view Tuesday was a very productive day - I spent it trying to get an overview of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Tudor period but completely side tracked myself in disease history (as you do!).

This was all whilst cuddling Mary who was in one of her slightly grumpy I am teething moods so wouldn't be put down.

After the warewolf talk, I wrote a horror story based on real accounts of the Black Death - I should have been sleeping but had brain over load!

I freaked myself out slightly and ended up having to wake Alaric up - this is a good sign though - I feel my best horror stuff is written in this way - though poor Al was not amused!

I have a story idea that came out of the talk too but it is very disturbing so can't face writing it yet. It maybe shelved until GothNoWriMo or something.

The talk was good in another way though - I realised as I miss people who think and know stuff. I was sitting there and some makes a comment about us and chimpanzees and I know it's wrong and before I can say anything someone else corrects the guy! It just sort of felt like uni again and I have always really missed that atmosphere.

Writing wise this month is being hectic with me running WoPoWriMo too and I really want to donate some more poems to charity cause - one for the disabled and their fight at the moment and some for Freedom - a book shop that was fire bombed in London on Friday.

So I am chugging along with the work thing - never as fast as I want but little bits will build-up.

One Leg Longer than the Other (by sarah)

So awhile ago Alaric started having horrible lower back pain which we thought was initially a slipped disc as did the Dr and he got refered to physio and he seemed sorted but then it came back, this time with exploding knee and things. It has been getting worse and more frequent though disappears in the intermediate stages - he had to be tested for various other nasty things like bone cancer etc... especially as he was having the night sweats and things but these were all clear.

Further prodding and pocking reveals he has a wonky pelvis leading to inflamation of the thorasic joint - he has siattica basically. He is fixable - especially as it appears the wonk has been caused in the first place by one leg being short than the other. He says in hind sight there has always been an issue with him getting into trouble for 'tripping people up' as he naturally stands with the longer leg sticking out.

So he needs manipulation and special shoes, but the nhs wont fix him, they will prescribe pain killers and send him to pain management but wont fix him as it will cost too much. His Dr has given him the contact details for the person she went too as she had the same problem.

I just don't understand the logic of the nhs - left untreated he will end up a cripple and dependent costing them alot of money. I suppose it's why save money for a tomorrow we shall not see :/

But more than that - when I was at school we had a medical in secondary school where they measured everything and checked spins were straight and all sorts - he apparently didn't have this - I can't help but think the leg issue would have been picked up then - the amount of damage all ready done which could have been solved by made to measure shoes with different height soles :/

So the mission is to sort him out - we can't afford for both of us to be cripples. When his back is bad we have to work together in the most ludicrous of ways to get the most simple things done. Not too bad at the moment as I am walking again but there were a few dicey weeks when I was on crutches and he couldn't lift anything last year. We had to work in tandum to get the baby seat in the car etc...

Poetry Madness! WoPoWriMo 2013 (by sarah)

It is the first of February and that means only one thing! That's right another one of my mad writing challenges!

This time it is poetry.

The objective is to write a poem a day for the whole of Feb. It is called WoPoWriMo and I am also looking after the website and stuff this year for it.

As with NaNoWriMo I have roped in my family - so far I have Alaric, Mum, Dad and Jean doing it.

I have had emails from several poets already who do not wish to sign up but are going to be using the exercises to help them get going with writing again which is fantastic!

I myself plan to take part in the challenge also! Which I will be writing about on Turquoise Monster, I will find out were Al is posting his. Many people are posting there's to linkedIn and to the WoPoWriMo site itself under the poems tab.

There will be blog alteration later today to put up web-badges and what not! In the mean time I'd best get on with actually doing some writing!

Sealing up the workshop’s eaves (by alaric)

I keep moaning about how the workshop roof leaks, causing rain to drop down on all my nice tools and supplies. But that's not the only problem with the workshop roof!

The workshop is basically a set of walls, with the roof resting on top. The roof is a large, flat, box with the bottom open (exposing the rafters that give it strength), slightly larger than the outline of the walls. The rafters rest on the tops of the walls, and the roof hangs slightly over the walls.

As you may have guessed if you've been following that, this means there's gaps all the way around the edge of the roof. Howling winds blow through them. These holes are enormous at the ends of the building, where the roof overhangs further; twenty centimetres high and occupying most of the length of the walls (interrupted only by the rafters themselves), but I've pinned up sheets of plastic to temporarily block them until I get around to cutting lots of rectangles of wood to properly cover them with.

Along the longer walls of the building, the gap is more like a centimetre, but again more or less the entire length of the building (which is somewhere around ten metres).

And the worst part is, the rear wall is close to a row of trees, which are covered in ivy. And the ivy has found the gaps and keeps oozing its way into the roof.

And as well as being faintly disturbing, the ivy also drops foul grime down onto my stuff.

So, although stopping the roof leaking is a long-term project I work on when I get entire days to spend building the ladder to get up there, I've been fighting the ivy when I've just had a few hours here and there. I've been cutting bits of thin wood (left-over cladding) and nailing them in place over the larger holes, and then liberally applying left-over bits of sealant to all the edges (I suspect the ivy attacks a gap if it sees light, so hopefully this will make it lose interest). The black marks on the ceiling are damage made by ivy I've torn out:

There's no less than three different colours of sealant there - two different cartridges of brown "frame sealant", one light and one dark, and some leftover bits of white stuff from the bathroom! Unbelievably, it looks miles neater than the mess of cobwebby, grimy, ivy that was there!

I have to climb right up into the eaves to get most of the gaps, however. This picture is not particularly clear, but there's a thin plank of wood that I've nailed down to the top of the wall in order to cover the two-centimetre gap between the top of the wall and the vertical wooden beam at the back, then I've run sealant all around all the gaps and joints:

I quite like working with sealant (I've been sealing gaps in the bathroom, and replacing existing manky mouldy sealant - and doing it neatly, unlike the ghetto job I'm doing in the workshop), and it's nice to think that I'm keeping out all those draughts and grubby plants! I want to properly seal all the gaps in the workshop - and then introduce an extractor fan over the welding bench at one end, and an air inlet vent at ground level at the other end, with a small heater under computer control so I can regulate the temperature and keep the humidity down in here!

I've also started varnishing a bit of scrap MDF that, I have realised, is exactly the right size to make a shelf to go over my workbench (not the welding bench, the one where I have the column drill). That will give me a place to put loads of things that currently sit ON my workbench for lack of a shelf. Also, I'll be able to fit a decent light to the bottom of the shelf; right now, when I work at the workbench, I cast a huge shadow over whatever I'm doing.

Aspiring to be Creative… (by sarah)

I have been working my way through the Writers and Artists Yearbook mainly lamenting that I am just not set up to be a conventional author - something we already knew. I'm too generalist, I am never going to settle for an area or one specific genre.

I think perhaps the closest I could get is saying that I am a blogger!

But one of the things that is starting to bug me with the book, if not with life in general, is this idea that we can't aspire to be creative. The main examples are Sheakespare and Neil Gaiman in the book. Neil apparently gets away with it as he is a genius and the same goes for old Will but that 'we' are not.

Well I'm sorry but 'we' or at least me are that creative. I never knew I wasn't supposed to be, I am by nature as I mention frequently A Jack of All Trades and I pride myself on picking up these new skills and trying new ways of doing things. I also get bored and projects stagnate if I don't do this (this does not mean I have to start lots of new projects though - before I realised what was happening this was the tendency).

To me Jacks are not less good than Masters - never ever and their works can be outstanding. But they don't sit in a rut, lay back and enjoy the easy way, they get on and find the next thing that is needed or interesting.

First off lets take Sheakspeare - he was a good imaginative writer and was represented to me at school as someone to emulate now for me what I saw was a guy who made his money by writing the equivalent of Eastenders most of the time with a bit of Dr Who thrown in. But he also worked on other things because of rich people liking him and a good fertile idea brain that could come up with new stuff.

He was a cross genre specialist; romance, horror, tragedy, comedy, fantasy, stories within stories, complex story arcs and sub plots galore and sometimes all in the same story. Of course I didn't know what any of this was called as a teenager it was all just 'books'. So this was my first model of what an author should be.

Then came the Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird, An Inspector Calls and so on at GCSE's but these were often one or two of the only works of the authors in question had written. And all seemed to me to have been written specifically to get so socio-political issue over.

Then A'level I was doing 4 A'levels - only one that touched on stories and they were of course all the old Greek and and Roman sagas and here I saw something of an attempt to record history and natural events before science gave us other ideas of why things might be happening. Or they were a way of people to feel emotional release such as the Tragedies and Comedy sets of the Greek theatre - these were there to cause strong emotional responses, to invoke a sense of lose and love and pride and fear and to then bring everyone back up with the ending fun of the comedy.

These narrow forms existed for specific reasons but I never thought that you would be stuck in just one - in Rome and Greece you often wrote plays and poems and sagas again you were a generalist, a cross genre writer.

Now during my A'levels I also did a short course in creative writing which I would attend at lunch times and here we would go through a different area each week pretty much and I would do the exercises produced by the teacher (who I have forgotten the name of 🙁 It was at Havering Sixth Form College though). And I loved it!

I got on well with all the different writing tasks producing poems and beginnings of stories and slices of life and what have you. Of course my GCSE English teacher had already introduced me to Response Writing which I still use to kick ideas off. The only thing I really struggled with was making short stories - I always saw what the story could be - it always wanted to grown into a novel or maybe three!

But I wasn't hooked up on genre - I wrote scifi, fantasy, horror, romance, comedy, thriller, crime, articles on life and science, and my old fall back poetry.

She sent what I produced off to various comps and submitted others to newspapers and they were all being accepted and winning something and I was amazed.

I was working on two main novel ideas at the time The Crystal Singer which has basically been adapted to The Punk and changed into scifi rather than the scifi-fantasy it had been - I may still write the original version but it would be for young adult.

The other was a vampire origin story involving dark matter and a judicial system that believed suffering was worse than death and so create the Forever Criminals (with the dark matter of course!). Each criminal had their own story and one of them should not have been there at all - a teenage girl who was a floppy sparkly veggi type who got caught up in it all by being empathic and thinking that in not trying to stop all suffering she was responsible for it. It was primarily a love story between her and her jailor a cloned cyborg.

The other criminals were more interesting and were products of their societies in many ways bar one termed as The Elephant Man who was a true sociopath.

I had more notes than story and bad biro sketches but I was working on it for about an hour before bed each night until boys and exams got in the way.

The creative writing teacher got the badly spelled printed on tractor paper first few chapters.

I prepared myself - by this point I had observe that most people in the group were writing 'serious stuff' and were taking some sort English A'level. It was at this point the concept that some 'genres' were more respected than others began to creep in. I had handed in a scifi story about Vampires - something which at the time didn't really exist Ultra Violet appeared on t.v. at about the same time and Blade and other films were just appearing.

The Teacher turned to me and said, 'this has the potential to be a best seller.'

The words didn't really sink in and I continued to potter on it though a bit more earnestly - my aim was to get it published before my 18th birthday - hahahahahahahaha. It is sitting in a box upstairs I found it in some A'level notes. It reads like a teen novel to me to be quiet honest and it is not finished and of course I only have the badly spelt version on tractor paper that is turning all yellow.

But she thought is was good and I've had stories I wrote at 14 published in the last few years - I just sort of corrected the spelling and sent them off realising that though I wrote them as introductions to novels they pretty much stand alone as short stories.

What I remember though is that she thought the novel had potential from a professional point of view but it was the poetry she loved and she told me not to read Plaith. She felt it would destroy my poet voice which was just emerging, it was too near and may well have just become a clone.

So yeah basically I have always been a mix and match type writer and even artist to be honest. Writing and Art were put on the back burner whilst I was at Uni as there was simply too much to do. I still wrote though, I found a floppy the other day with the title 'Stories for Alaric'. Early on I would write him a chapter of a story/short story and save it to floppy go to college and then email it to him.

I wrote down all the ideas in note books and margins and since having Jean I have been pottering at the writing stuff in a similar way though with added blogs. I unpacked more boxes yesterday to find a photo album for a talk with the cubs and found yet more note books filled with ideas and stories and poems. I am now facing the issue of the small bookcase I have for notebooks is not big enough for all the note books :/

I often worry about this and my almost career but Al thinks I will simply do a Stross and have loads of stuff to publish all at the same time.

Neil Gaiman himself says in the Yearbook that he can't tell you how to become a cross genre author. I think you probably either are or aren't and a lot of ares get lost and never make it. He established himself in one area first it is true so he had a fan base to shift around with him. I on the other hand get a few short stories and a few poems published a year and distract myself with deciding to write a song or draw a picture or make a papier mache space ship or make a discworld cake or workout a new irrigation system for the garden or reconstructing the first amphibians...

But you know this has somehow become my work - I'm already booked for two festivals for the craft stuff and last year was insane!

My blogs are mainly what I have been writing on and it has been peicemeal but then daily I am getting comments on old articles or posts on here saying they are useful and helpful (real ones not the spammers) or huge long rants disagreeing with my view point (though mainly that happens to Al's technical posts). And I am finding people writing to me for advice on stuff I wrote 4-5 yrs ago to do with the web which surprises me.

I confess the blogs are often badly spelled and a bit patchy mainly due to that writing in between playing with babies - talking of which I just need to go and rescue the bin!

One clean baby later...

I digress my main issue was that several of the articles in the Yearbook say we can't aspire to be like Neil Gaiman but I am doing just that. For a start he one of the few with a CV that looks like my todo list.

I don't want to be Neil Gaiman nor a copycat clone but I do find him inspiring as he has done stuff I want to do. Like me watching the TED talks of the scientists I admire I watch interviews of authors I like - some are boring - Neil is not. He is good at capturing his audience in person which helps.

I personally feel a bit more comftable with the idea of Cross Genre authors now as it is at least being admitted that they exist which pre the 2007 flood when I was looking before - it was not. Cross Genre at all was looked down upon as if people only read one type of thing ever.

I wonder sometimes if other people really do not have high levels of creativity or weather it is just that they believe they do not. Thinking and creativity are skills that need to be used or they begin to rust but even if they are unrecognisable under all that rust you can always clean them up!

This is one of the reasons that I am running WoPoWriMo again this year. Talking of which I need to go and prod some guest bloggers for their articles!