The Long and Short of it
It’s been a really long time since I’ve posted here. It doesn’t mean I haven’t been writing or blogging – I’ve been mostly blogging on Cats and Chocolate, my main blog. I think I feel as if splicing my focus on a certain number of blogs was going to be difficult anyway, even though they are all in the same place on WordPress.
Since I last wrote, I signed up for the Open University course in Creative Writing, and I’ve been enjoying it very much. I’ve filled two 200 plus page notebooks already and am halfway through another one! I have never finished a notebook before and I’m pleased that it’s becoming a daily habit to at least write one thing a day. Daily writing means that I’m being productive and it can only mean that my writing gets better. I’ve written another story, which I will put up in due course when I’ve edited it a bit more. I’m learning about where my strengths and weaknesses lie, and how I can edit pieces to improve on them and make it the best it possibly could be.
I have to say though that the novel I was writing before may have to be scrapped because it’s been ages since I’ve worked on it. The course has taken precedence, so I think over the summer may be the best time to figure it all out, and work out what story I want to tell. I still feel that it’s a good story, and needs some work, maybe a reworking on the plot and characters. I feel like I put too much description in it but I will eventually go back and re-read the stuff I’ve already written to see where I can go from that.
I’m also considering writing parts of my own autobiography, partly because that is what we are doing right now in the course. I’ve had an interesting life so far and also want to tell the story of my ancestors, if I can dig up some stories. My Gran has lots of interesting anecdotes that she occasionally tells us. Apparently we have a suffragette somewhere in our family and this intrigues me as I’m a feminist. Sometimes when I think about what my ancestor’s lives were like, I’m stunned by how traits seem to pass down through generations.
My sister and I love baking and making jewellery – and these things feature in our previous generations. My Dad’s Dad was a fabulous cake maker – particularly his chocolate cake. We actually nicknamed him Grandpa Cake! My Mum’s Dad was a jeweller and his family have a jewellery shop in Newmarket. My sister and I have a small jewellery home business, which has fallen by the wayside recently but which we plan to sort out in the coming months.
The ghosts of generations past also seem to play a part in how I feel about going to certain areas of the UK. My partner is from Edinburgh and part of my family also came from there. I also went to study Sociology for my degree in York, and Yorkshire is where my Mum’s Mum comes from. Every time I go to Yorkshire, it feels like going home, for some reason I can’t place. I feel at home there, more so than I do in my native London. I miss Yorkshire very much when I’m not there.
I also think it’s interesting that people have remarked that my sister and I look Irish – we both have very different colouring but I have green eyes and poker straight fair hair, whilst my sister is dark eyed with dark, almost black, brown curly hair. I take after my Dad’s side of the family whilst my sister is said to be like my Gran’s father (from my Mum’s side), who was very dark haired and dark eyed.
My Dad’s Dad (lets call him Grandpa, for now), was a severe man, even though he was mostly severe with me and my sister in jest. He had a walking stick that he would pretend he was going to wack us on the legs with. It was very alarming, but he would never have hurt us. My Dad’s Mum, my Grandma, died when I was a baby. My Mum has said before that I look a bit like her, and have some of her calming nature. Maybe this manifests in my laid back attitude but I try to keep calm when the world is falling around me.
My Mum’s Dad, who we called Pop, had a big influence on me when it came to music and Science Fiction. He loved watching Star Wars when I was at their house in Cambridge, and I still love the films to this day. It takes me back to childhood and the dreams and fantasies I had of space and other worlds. I’m still very much drawn to imaginary worlds and other realities. I can’t imagine a life without imagination and the possibilities of the human capacity to dream.
I had my first encounter with music that I fell in love with whilst I was up there in Cambridge. I was in a huge sulk about something and my Dad came in the room and put Michael Jackson’s Thriller album on, maybe in an effort to cheer me up. The more I think about it, the more I recognise that my Dad and I have always been alike in some ways. We’re both very stubborn, and moan a lot when we have something to moan about. We both love music – but then, my Mum and Sister love music too, so it runs in our family. I’m becoming less afraid of being like my parents because they have some admirable qualities, and I’m very interested in their pasts – they were very much weekend hippies and went to many gigs in their time.
Anyway, I’m hoping to come back here and post more often, because on the other blog I tend to focus on things that I’ve been thinking about everyday and not always on my writing or the progress of my writing. So I’ll be back here sometime very soon…
