So very hot and sticky
Unwanted insects at large
Maybe summer isn’t the best season
Maybe it is spring-time that begins in March?
Every year I dread it
Really I do – because I hate the summer, clearly I think it’s poo!
So very hot and sticky
Unwanted insects at large
Maybe summer isn’t the best season
Maybe it is spring-time that begins in March?
Every year I dread it
Really I do – because I hate the summer, clearly I think it’s poo!
Filed under Poetry & Songs
And so it came to pass, that the author who was struggling with which of the nine best ideas she had, should she focus on next? Got another great idea of which she cannot resist starting to write immediately and therefore forsook the others temporarily, yet again.
And may those ideas forever serve her still, although they are forsaken at present.
Filed under About my work
What do I do when I am not writing?
Quite a lot actually, because I don’t write much at all these days; I have lots of ideas for things to write but I think illness has made me lose focus and passion for it. I was a lot more passionate about writing than I am nowadays. It is simply because pain distracts me and makes me lose where I am heading – coughing fits and a severely runny nose are the biggest contributors for throwing me off course, yanking me out of the zone, as it were. As I have said before in many posts, I live with a perpetual chronic cold, with ear, nose and throat infections thrown in. It isn’t just a sniffle, I wish it were, but I can get through five hundred individual tissues on a bad day, two hundred being the norm for me.
Since the 21st December 2019 the only things I have written are what are on the blog and approximately 5000 words of non-posted works of other things, but nothing contributing to my novels. Hand written notes of other ideas are not included in this, I am spending more and more time in bed these days as I can barely move. All these problems are giving me severe insomnia and hypersomnia. What do I mean by that? Well I don’t sleep at night, I seem to sleep better during the day, for some reason my chest and sinus is worse at night. When I do eventually sleep during the day I sleep between 7 and 16 hours in a stretch, to wake up for 2 hours in a choking fit with a dry crusted mouth. Not a pretty visual I know. I can go 30 to 40 hours without sleeping, purely because I am too busy clearing mucus from my system.
So it isn’t any wonder why I lack focus and concentration really.
Basically, everything I do when I am not writing, are things I can do at home, in the bedroom. Primarily with my desktop computer, as I have recently had it moved to the bedroom due to the fact I am often too sick to get downstairs these days and I have moved my laptop downstairs for the rare occasion I am down there for more than an hour. Because my legs swell a lot sitting at the computer desk, I can only sit here for an hour before I have to rest with legs up for thirty minutes, to get the swelling down, so even if I am on a roll, my ankles start burning and that throws me off course and I have to go and put my feet up.
I read approximately 30 to 80 pages of a book per day and about half a magazine too. The types of things I read the most are fantasy, sci-fi and comedy fiction with a lot of non-fiction thrown in; the non-fiction I enjoy are self-help books, nutrition books, history books, theological research, mythology, folklore and cultural studies. My current reading list is Time Song by Julia Blackburn, The Toll by Neal Shusterman and Roy Vickery’s folk flora.
I do puzzles such as codebreakers, arrow words and gardening magazine crosswords – before my chest got too bad I used to love doing 1000 piece jigsaw puzzles, but it is frustrating having a coughing fit and losing pieces across the room all the time!
If I am not too busy fighting mucus, I get to knit, crochet, sew or practise my recorder and keyboard.
I watch TV only if there are documentaries I am interested in, I mostly watch Smithsonian and BBC four with some Drama channel thrown in. I will watch anything with Lucy Worsley, anything about the history of jazz, soul and classical music, nature and wildlife documentaries, documentaries about farming and country life. I like science too, so I will watch sky at night and space science programs as well as things in the past such as time commanders, gladiators and the occasional wrestling show. I love comedies, I only watch the comedies on the Drama Channel, but I am picky about which ones to watch. I like only connect and some quiz and puzzle shows like Countdown, but I don’t watch them all the time. I have to be in the mood to watch TV and before I was sick I watched around three hours of TV a week, these days it’s about two hours a day. We never miss Michael McIntyre’s Big Show if we can help it, nor do we tend to like missing gardeners world or shows such as the RHS show, cruft’s and BBC Proms. I’m pretty old fashioned I suppose for someone who is thirty seven. I dislike soap operas and drama llama stuff – yes I mentioned the drama channel, but there are three hours a day where it is strictly comedy and I tend to only watch that channel (at the comedy times) or food network when there is nothing else on. Sometimes I put on a DVD and I will often choose vampires or family animations and comedies.
The main things I do these days are play games online. I don’t even socialise that much online anymore, because I lose concentration and people who know me are starting to think I have memory problems. Because a coughing fit will make me forget what I have said or what I was on about.
The online games that grip me are… Roblox, yes Henry got me onto it and to be honest, Roblox has saved my relationship with my son! Because I find his kind of games hard to do since becoming sick – Roblox has opened a whole new world for us and we play hide and seek and various other games together. When Henry is at school, I still sneak onto the site and play bee swarm simulator, Ripull mini games and fairy simulator. Bee Swarm simulator especially!
Other online games I play are ovipets it is a cute breeding game on facebook and I have been addicted to that for nearly 5yrs.
Flightrising is another breeding game, but I go in and out of phases with that. Primarily I have played this for a whole eight months without a break, purely because Henry wants to see what dragons I breed and he loves to name them and do what we call “Dragon Lottery”. Dragon Lottery is where I look through the offspring possibilities scrying menu to see what will happen if I pair certain dragons up, sometimes I can’t decide, so I make a list of all the best ones that go with my chosen female that day and I number them, then Henry, Paul and I will choose a number from the list and put it through random.org and sometimes someone gets the number right, in which case that person must get a treat of some kind or get to choose to do something; I breed five pairs of dragons every five days, because that is how long it takes for the eggs to hatch and we have a limit of five breeding nests on this game.
I used to play online scrabble but I have got accused of cheating because I know too many unusual words. I don’t cheat on that game, I don’t see what purpose that serves other than the joy of creating misery on another person who loses and I am not a vindictive person like that. I really do have a broad vocabulary, though I rarely use it outside of scrabble and I love doing anagrams for fun, so I see a lot of seven letter words and I am a dictionary and language addict, so I know words that are weird to normal people. Here is a list of words I know for high scoring on scrabble, which have got me accused of cheating when used previously – plus, I have read books written by scrabble champions.
ZEBU – QAT – QUARE – SEQUIN – AWK – EUOI – AIA – QI – KIMCHI – VEX – VAV – TAV – EAU – UVEA – AEON – OXIDE – POXY – QIN – QINTAR – FATWA – QABALA – QADI – SJOE – KHAKI – EUOUAE to name but a few. I have to admit I was shocked when SEQUIN was considered a questionable word, the others I can understand, but I was sure almost everyone knew what sequins were?
I love words and word play so much I have considered about having a word of the week thing, but I am unreliable with keeping to things like that, as you can clearly see from past efforts or lack of.
Other than sketching with pencils or sharpies in bed and/or colouring in and story planning, I don’t do much else on a bad day. On a good day I can add about an hour of light gardening to the list but not much else anymore.
I’m pretty boring I suppose, by my peers. I can’t even cuddle the rabbit lately because I cough too much it terrifies the poor thing! I suppose I sound like some big barking bear or something to the poor creature.
I have gone out to the doctors and walked past dogs when I am like this and the dogs think I am barking at them, they react accordingly, it is embarrassing!
Filed under About Me
If you don’t like my literature, why do you still read?
Especially when things are hard to chew and supposedly make your heart bleed?
Why do you still watch me, every day and night?
It’s been a decade – get over me, I don’t think your head is quite right
You sit and curse and you watch me still
You know I am sick and very ill
But you keep watching, I think you’re waiting
Just sitting back and anticipating
I wonder if she will die?
Well fuck off you dirty rotten fly!
Just thought I should add, this is to certain specific people who I personally knew once, not people who read this and don’t know me! Ha-ha
Filed under Poems V - Z
Sunday word count four – I’m not on The Wall of Shame huzzah!
This week’s word total is…
12382
And possibly more as I have written approximately six pages of stuff by hand and haven’t typed them up on the computer yet!
It is good but I have written nothing at all for three of the days this week and my only excuse for that is I was exhausted and had gastric flu. Yes, sorry for the TMI (too much information).
The days break up as this;
11th August – nothing and that’s because our internet is still tetchy, in fact it has been tetchy again today too.
12th August – 1584 words, which is usually considered a low average for me.
13th August – 7483 words, that is amazing and I wish most days were like this! Especially as it is still the school summer holiday!
14th August – 637 words, quite low and not at all good in my opinion!
15th August – nothing, because I was busy with other things, mostly reading and calming Henry down and having what seems to be gastric flu.
16th August – nothing again because of the gastric flu!
17th August – 2678 words, which is my good average amount for daily writing. It is something I would do usually when Henry is at school; it is still the summer holidays so it is amazing I did my average word count for the day whilst he was home!
The writing I have done this week has been mostly notes towards my leprechaun fantasy, including a title change and rewriting certain weak characters to make them have more of a part in the plot of the story, because there was a lot of weak characters, some of which I will be deleting entirely once this fourth or fifth draft is complete.
I have not included the words towards new story ideas I have had this week, there has been three new novel ideas I have had, but I can’t start work on them until all this other work is finished. I am not bragging or anything but I really do have a huge backlog of ideas piled up in a corner of this room and it is getting ridiculous because I know that more than half will never ever be started, let alone finished as there is just too many! I think I must be the only writer in the history of the world who has her own slush pile for what ideas might work and what are weak!
I am also weighing up something in my mind a lot recently. I love reading and writing fantasy, horror, sci-fi and dystopian stories – I especially love and am addicted to my vampire stories, my saga I am doing. But I am reading a lot about how a writer shouldn’t really have too many genres under their belt and this is disheartening to me because I love them all. I can’t release my vampires or my fantasy in particular and there are at least four dystopian stories I really want to write; it seems to me that there are only really two horrors I have planned, so I can release the horror I guess? Though I have been told by so many people that horror is more of my strength than other types of fiction I write.
I thought I could just write anything and be appreciated just as much, but the more I research the more I am finding that this isn’t the case, I could be found unprofessional and disloyal to my original fan base. Even to have just the three genres could be too many. I don’t really know what genre vampires can be put into, because I have found them in so many different sections at the bookstore and in the libraries that they have confused me – they are put into the dark romance, dark fantasy, horror, gothic and erotica sections – so which is it? Dystopian novels can be put into science fiction, horror or thriller sections too. Fantasy also has about three sections, dark fantasy, adult fantasy, family fantasy.
I am struggling to decide which ones to say goodbye to. My fantasies tend to be comedy family fantasies and some of them are dark, very dark and borderline horror again sometimes with small interjections of dark comedy.
My Dystopian stories have links with science fiction ideas, new fictional type sciences and leans towards some religious or mythological ideologies or prophecies.
My vampires are more complexed as the sagas cross into so many genres, science-fiction, horror, romance and fantasy as even my vampires mingle with fairies and so forth.
It is apparently great to be different, but not so different that you can’t define your genre.
If I can’t define my genre right now, how can any of my future agents and publishers?
It is both a depressing and eye opening reality of being a writer.
It makes me feel so caged.
I really love and adore my vampire novels so much and they are a huge part of who I am, but I am not ready to kiss goodbye my leprechauns, mermaids, giants and dragons either. Nor am I willing to kiss goodbye my ripped up worlds full of warlords and surviving citizens and their struggle for salvation and freedom.
So who is going to take me seriously when I post out my stories to agents in a year or two?
Do you think I worry too much? Please post what you think in comments below.
Thank you for reading.
Filed under About my work
Today’s prompts are – A Llama – a prophecy – The colour black – A slayer – and a festival.
Good luck with that one. Nothing immediately comes to my mind, oh Random.org, you can be cruel and somewhat challenging at times.
How do I get these ideas? Basically I make up lists based on certain themes, such as types of people, animals, mythic creatures, colours, events, places, gems, weather phenomenon, etc. and I number the lists for Random.org to choose which list to do today – then I put in the number of items in that list and randomly generate a number as a lottery system to see what I have to work on today.
Why did I start this?
Because I am addicted to making lists and I discovered that whilst these lists and a random generator exists there can be no such thing as writers block.
I add new lists regularly, because when I have nothing better to do and I don’t want to read or write, I make these new lists to cut out boredom, it is that or watching YouTube.com videos or playing Ovipets.com and Flightrising.com which isn’t a very productive thing to be doing. Actually I will take that back regarding YouTube.com because if it wasn’t for YouTube my life would be more stagnant than it actually is, I find it very supportive and informative and I love the motivational archives on there, if you are ever in an emotional slump, you really ought to check it out.
So, yes! Though the random list generating things are great for solving writers block for me, sometimes it can make me over think things. Now I am determined to find an idea with the above, but it will probably be utterly ridiculous and maybe would be used someday as a writing sprint between novels (if I ever have time between novels).
A magical black llama discovers that he is the supposed hero of a prophecy to slay zombies hidden in the trees of the local forest?
No, too weak an idea, how is the llama going to do that? Llamas don’t climb trees and they can’t hold weapons… unless of course he befriends a monkey or a human to attach saw like tools on his flanks and saw the trees down and trample all over the zombies. Ha-ha, forget it!
I am insane, maybe I should stop this and go and get myself certified?
OK, because this is such a difficult prompt, here is a second one and let’s hope it’s a bit better eh?
A warrior – A costume party – A wrestler – Scotland or a Scottish influence to the story – Paint
This is a lot better to play with, but if you can think of something regarding the former idea, great, please post it below, it would be very interesting to see what people come up with!
Filed under Dailies
seasonal vegetarian recipes with a side helping of food politics
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Art. Craft. Living With Chronic Illness.
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H.E. Ebel | Author
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The beautiful picture of angels makes you happy.