Mary is 2! (by sarah)

Mary was two on Monday - she spent most of the day in nursery with her friends who made her a lovely card complete with scribble signatures 🙂

When she came home she opened her card from Uncle David and Aunty Michelle and the one Jeany had made her with a little drawn birthday story in it! Then there was one present from Al's mother - a ball pit which both girls had much fun with.

We sang Happy Birthday in four different languages - English (all of us), Lojban (Daddy), Polish (Mummy - or what I cold remember of it), and French (Jeany).

Due to Dad being ill and me having med issues too we have posponed the official celebration ie the party until the 16th of Feb.

Writing and Stuff… (by sarah)

I did a lot of things last year like readings and festivals and what not but I realised I'd lost the time to actually write and draw. And that all my blogs and sites were in various states of disrepair. Some never recovered from the flood in 2007, some didn't recover from periods of no internet that subsequently happen, the last of which was me tipping coffee on myself and the laptop at the end of August.

There is also the issue that for 18 months after having a baby I just appear to function well below par and everything just takes me longer to do.

But I decided to try and get my writing stuff back on track - I submitted about 6 pieces of work last year, 3 got published, one won a prize and two got rejected and that was it.

SO I thought I spent last year trying to finish old projects off and barely dented the list but I discovered just how much material I really do have! It's time to start submitting.

But during November whilst sitting at the first NaNoWriMo meet I realised I've forgotten stuff I did know and the industry has moved on! I haven't really had the time or ability to focus on trying to get things published since before the flood - just a few bits a year basically. Main thing that has happened is I have some how ended up taking off as a crafter and poet for events with the help of twitter and two not well kept blogs, plus being the sort of person who ends up in conversations with people.

I tried not to just 'disappear' whilst pregnant which was excessively hard as we had no car until just before the birth and the last trimester I could not get up to the bus stop even using the crutches.

So I thought it's time to get organised and made lists and lists and more lists and Al got me a wall planner which we've put up in the library and I ordered Writer's Magazine and News again and got a free Writers and Artists Yearbook with it which was something I was aiming to get anyway - the last one was 2007 and the Childrens 2008 (again basically pre-flood).

My main plan came out something like this:

1) Get Alaric to extract that novel I wrote for the Terry Pratchett Prize a few years ago (the laptop died just as I was editing the 86 000 word story). Finish editing it, send it to friends to edit and send to publishers.

2) Type up The Drs Wife (everytime I start trying to do this something happens like the house gets flooded, or the computer dies (we are talking multiple computers here). Once typed up, edit, send to friends to edit and send to agents.

3) Sort out the 5-8 books (not sure how fat to make them!) that I have written for Punk's universe - sort their blogs, edit, send to friends to edit, do art work and self publish - but possibly not before I have finished each set of books (there are two series now set in the Punk's Universe The Punk and The Godex not to mention the graphic novel and film script both of which aren't finished).

4) Submit 10 or more pieces of shorter works, flash fiction, shorts and poetry a month.

5) Spend up to £10 on competitions a month.

6) Finish illustrations and submit various children's books via agents and direct (depending on how long an agent getting takes).

7) Sort out The Little Books of Poetry - these are children's books but there is no point in trying traditional publishing for children's rhyme - they don't like it as it isn't easy to translate nicely. Not a problem - The Little Book of Spoogy was downloaded over 100 times when I put it out there for free for three days and once I took it down people came and asked when it would be avalible again 🙂 There are a lot of these books with the poems already written and I have been recording audio and stuff too.

8) Sort out blogs.

9) Apply for Science writing stuff.

10) Create several arts, crafts and cooking books (both self pub and traditional depending on if anyone will take the brief) plus tutorials for etsy.

And it is sort of working - I have submitted 6 things so far this month and yes I realise I am running out of month but it is a start. I have signed up for another days writing retreat to help me finish the last bit of The Godex Trilogy and we scheduled Alaric time to extract my novel.

And that is were it has gone a bit wrong 🙁

We assumed that it was the bit were the power jacked into the laptop that was broken as it was on the wonk anyway but when he tried to do his technical wizardy it failed 🙁 So we have a quote for almost £200 from a data recovery company we know are good and are waiting to try something else a friend has suggested before we try and find that sort of cash 🙁

Now I hear you all crying - why didn't you back it up?

Well the laptop was on it's last legs so the port to plug a USB key in would no longer work. So what I was doing was a) printing out a hard copy just incase and b) emailing it too myself and c) Al was backing it up with his tech voodoo.

But...

This didn't happen for the novel as it was written incredibly quickly as the deadline loomed and I really really would have loved The Terry Pratchett Prize - out of all the things you can win for writing I wanted that one and it was the first time it had been avalible - so I wrote like a mad thing.

It was written at a point when we had no internet so I could not email to myself - we had no car and no spare cash for bus fairs and then the food to use free restaurant WiFi. Our printer died as I tried to print out the first couple of chapters and we had no way to replace it and Al was away doing lots of extra work trying to get our finances back on track so... he didn't get to do it's latest back up.

And WHAM! Me the paranoid saver lost her novel and didn't get to enter the comp and now may even have lost that novel and some photos for ever.

I now have a dongle, I am now in walking distance of a library etc... but I wasn't then. But this has put a crimp on my great plans for this year.

On the other hand I have been updating my blogs and have all the hand written story and notes and the printed back up for The Drs Wife. It will just take me longer to actually get something out there that is all - also part of me is worried that if I start working on that novel again something will happen to stop all my writing in it's tracks again. I'm still going to try though because I sort of don't know how to give up.

Oh and as a cross-genre generalist I am screwed for making money but I have found were I am going wrong with the drawings - I'm not an artist! I'm an illustrator and cartoonist! Dad will be proud - cartooning is something he should have done! Much better than that arty stuff.

Stegi the Fimosaur (by sarah)

I ment to mention before that I have an image/picture/photo thingy in the Stegosaur Gallery over on Art evolved 🙂 I only managed to submit two pictures last year. I normally draw my entries but have been known to enter cakes, textiles pieces and fimo - this is an image of one of my fimosaurs. I made these to show to a museum who decided they did not want to run them in the gift shop, so I have taken photos of them in the hope of turning them into something else - maybe a web comic or some such.

So I am very happy to have it on Art Evolved.

WoPoWriMo – World Poetry Writing Month 2013 (by sarah)

This year I find myself once more in charge of the WoPoWriMo website and it is also it's fifth year of existing as an event!

Set up for a group who met at Poetry Cafe in Cheltenham and who turned out to all be Screnzies (Script Frenzies is a script writing challenge run by the National Novel Writing NaNoWriMo people). They felt they couldn't do more than one writing challenge in a month and who therefore could not do National Poetry Writing Month, the website has grown into a place to inspire writers.

I am very pleased to be back in charge of it again as I haven't been for the last two years really - just been popping in here and there. We have participants from several continents and at least two languages other than English plus the constructed languages sneaking in there. I've organised guest bloggers and there will be web-badges to come 🙂

As always I am dragging the whole family into this madness with me!

The Danger of Quotas (by sarah)

Recently a Ruby on Rails conference was destroyed and never took place because feminists complained there were no women on the panels and talks etc... when it was pointed out that no women applied the response was that they had not tried hard enough to find women. This attack grew until the sponsors pulled their money.

This is a shame and horrible, a lot of work had gone into the event and I'm sorry but it is not the organisers fault no women applied. They should not be forced to look for women for fear of events not going ahead. Now what should have happened is that the event went a head and effort was then put in to encourage female programmers to apply to the next one.

Even if women had applied but were not as good as other candidates, there should not be an obligation to take them on just to fill the quota.

Now obviously there is the issue that some people for some reason still seem to think women are not as capable with things such as science and maths and programming but really forcing them to put women on panels is not going to help. The quota thing is being banded about in the science world but to me this can be nothing but damaging to the image of females in science and tech.

The reason is that it devalues what they do - ok so they are there because they are actually really good at what they do - but no one is going to be thinking that - they will be thinking oh she's the token woman isn't she? I wonder if she actually knows her stuff.

Now I had issues with this during my degree. I found out about the area I really wanted to study due to an outreach programme for getting women into the sciences and this was good. In conversations I've had since with various people in charge of universities they agree that the intake of girls on the courses suddenly increased to around 50% and that this was streadily trickling upwards through the science hierachies. There was some winnowing away with the issue of women hitting the glass ceiling with finding themselves at home with kids if they went for families in their 20's, they would often then find themselves also look after sick relatives or some such making a return harder but this was being metered out by older women joining the ranks once family were off hand.

This was great and I never experienced any problems with sexism from staff or established scientists (though disability was another thing and I believe a friend who found herself pregnant had one person say she wasn't coming back so why make a fuss - she got her degree and that staff member was horrible in many other ways). I agree that evidence of women succeeding is needed but it does not need to be rammed down peoples throats. The issue is that we are heading towards equality right?

Not female supremacy.

My main beef with quotas is that though I did not receive any sexism from the lecturers or those I worked with during my work experience I did from fellow students. And the main thing they bullied me over (and yes I mean that in all it's nastiness) is that I ticked three boxes, I filled three quotas with just one person so of course I got in. I was a disabled, poor, female, the only way I could have been better for the books is by being a minority preferable not the creamy pale white I am.

And the thing is there is no come back to this - how did I know that wasn't why I was on the course?

I already knew that I'd been offered a lower grade boundary to get in than others had - a correction made as those in 'normal' schools tend to score lower grades than those in schools you pay for but tend to actually work their buts off if they manage to get in. As it turned out I got the grades needed to get in without the concession which was a great help with the confidence when arguing my right to be there.

The most important thing for succeeding is self confidence but how can you have this if you yourself are worried that you are only there because of some damn quota. A female lecturer told me this was why women had to be better than men to get to the higher jobs in the modern science world, no longer is it to get noticed but more to keep the wolves away once you are there.

To me it is saddening to see that people are still worrying about this, and I have seen 'feminists' do and say some awful things. Things that make me not want to say 'I am a feminist' - when I say it I mean that women are equal to men. When they say it they mean women are better than men and men are all horrible and must pay for centuries of persecution against women.

Well you know if that's the case then they need to look at who's ancestors persecuted who's and start worrying.

People are people.

Scientists are people that do science - end of.