Blessed are the weird people

Yes!

It's all too easy, sometimes, to despair. No, let me rephrase that: I find it all to easy to despair, sometimes, about my writing. (I suppose, especially when I've not been well and my natural resilience is low.)

Plenty of people advise me - Yeah, just write what you love. Anything else is a bonus. Rock on!

So I do.

But sometimes, just sometimes, it would be lovely if someone else loved it too. By which I mean, someone who will publish it.

NO - that wasn't the reason I wrote it in the first place, whatever it was - in this case, Of Night And Light. I wrote it because it was in my heart and bursting to get out.

Confession: I haven't even read through the latest report. At the moment, my heart and spirit won't take it.

By the way, I don't even know what the report says (well, obviously I don't - duh - since I haven't read it!) and it might say some very positive things and then I'll feel a fool.

At the moment it feels just a wee bit too risky.

So, if you don't mind, I'll just carrying on torturing myself.

The chief beauty about time is that you cannot waste it in advance.

The next year, the next day, the next hour are lying ready for you, as perfect, as unspoiled, as if you had never wasted or misapplied a single moment in all your life. You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

From Arnold Bennett, prodigious novelist, 1867-1931. I like his style...but I find using...how many fingers do I use? Let me check. It's forefinger and thumb on LH and middle finger, forefinger and thumb on RH - plenty enough to be getting on with without employing toes as well.

This is how I've been feeling for the past ten days or so:

No, not feeling like the woman (Could that be Margaret Thatcher?) but like the limp rag going through the mangle.

Today, I DON'T feel like a limp rag going through a mangle.

By Victoria Kirdy

Ready to test my wings again...

Note to self: Don't fly too close to the sun.

The experience of sunshine

 “Even trained for years as we all had been in precision of language, what words could you use which would give another the experience of sunshine." Lois Lowry

Ashdown Forest by Eva Thomas

 Somehow, everything seems better when the sun's shining.

Happy SUNday!

When I was a kid we played cowboys and Indians...

and I always wanted to be an Indian when I grew up.

Ville Valo, front man of Finnish rock band HIM (yes, I know them so well) said this. But it could have been me.

It's funny, I didn't think children played cowboys and Indians anymore, really. There's me bought up on a diet of The High Chaparral, The Lone Ranger and The Magnificent Seven.

Most often, Indians were cast as baddies in that era but I never wanted to be a cowboy. I must have had perception beyond my tender years.

Back to the question - Do children play cowboys and Indians these days? The answer is YES.

This morning, on Ashdown Forest, poor Alfie was traumatised by Indians - whole tribes of them - crashing through the trees, leaping out of bushes, whooping, and shooting each other with imaginary bows and arrows.

It was wonderful to witness but Alfie was paralysed with fear. The whooping...

It was a very long ride.

So much for my Sioux dreams of galloping across the plains of whichever plains you galloped across on my faithful steed, the wind sweeping through my long black plaits, a jaunty feather in my head dress...

But my childhood affinity with Indians was justified (to me, at least) the very first time I saw Soldier Blue 
in 1970.

And here's that wonderful song by Buffy Sainte Marie.

Success is a little like wrestling a gorilla. You don't quit when you're tired. You quit when the gorilla is tired.

...from Robert Strauss, American freelance writer.

It's not even success at the moment but life being like wrestling a gorilla.

Remember the Vitality Diet?

I have adhered to it rigidly, doggedly, determinedly since Monday but instead of getting fitter and better I've been getting weaker and sicker...

Not a complaint. A fact. It's difficult to tell what's as the result of detox and what's as a result of a flu bug or more likely it's a combination of the two.

Sometimes, common sense has to prevail over gutsy determination. While I'll still keep away from caffeine and alcohol, I really have to start eating proper food.

So this particular gorilla has defeated me. Temporarily.

But don't venture too far away, Mr. Gorilla...

I'll soon be ready for Round Two.

I claim there ain't another saint as great as Valentine.

Ogden Nash.

I don't know...I rather like St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes. I pray to him quite a lot.

Here he is, looking a little like a poster boy for British Gas:

(The flame, I discovered, is to symbolise his presence at Pentecost)

Valentine's Day is pain free for me, in my thirty sixth year of marriage. The fact that Peter forgot about it and I didn't doesn't mean anything at all, except he'll be extra nice to me all day out of guilt!

I do remember the horrible peer pressure and angst in my teenage years - I simply didn't have a boyfriend until I went to university. It was painful in the way that only adolescent pain can be.

One time, I sent two Valentine's cards and disguised my writing. The only trouble was, I disguised the writing identically on both and the recipients compared notes and worked out it was me. The taunts. The humiliation. (You know who you are, Martin Oliver and Neil Scott-Evans - except you probably don't.)

So, here are some cheering Puritan Valentine's Cards to make you smile.

Or not...

Happy Valentine's Day!

What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.

I believe you, Hemingway.

I'm not sure, however, that publishers agree.

I've had the report back on Of Night And Light - the novel. In all honesty, I haven't read more than the first page. Feeling really rough isn't the right time to absorb constructive criticism in a positive way - constructive criticism that will entail a lot more work.

I was stopped by the phrases '...difficult to place. Publishers are looking for the next...' (insert your own choice here, like Harry Potter or Twilight.)

And here's me thinking that publishers would be looking for something DIFFERENT.

When I feel 100% again, I'll read the whole report and no doubt I'll do another re-write because I believe in that novel. But there must come a point, eventually, when I'll lose that.

Until then...

...onwards and upwards.