I had to work today. I nobly volunteered to do taster sessions at the new study centre in Ruthin which had it's grand opening today as part of Adult Learners' Week. Unfortunately it had to be a Saturday so that people who work full time could come along.

The centre is really nice: lots of pale wood and it's quite spacious compared to some rooms I have to teach in. I felt that the interactive whiteboard didn't really produce a good enough image for photography classes, but it may be that the setting can be tweaked. Of course I still don't know how much use the college will be making of that centre, which is on the grounds of the secondary school and I hope we will continue to use the present centre, which is more central, handy for my little 1 mile circuit around the town and conveniently near shops.

We hadn't a clue how many would turn up, but I talked non-stop for four hours and didn't even get chance to grab anything to eat. I therefore missed out on the chance to visit the themed cafes arranged for the language courses! (Welsh, French and Spanish, each with appropriate cakes.) By the time I'd finished, the cafes were closed. I was so hungry I had to pull over and eat part of one of the still lifes on the way home.

Anyway, I took lots of names for courses in the autumn. So it was worth going. If I'm going to work at a weekend, I want to actually work. :)



This wasn't the still life I ate. I'd also taken along a bowl of apples. ;)

Current Mood: sleepy

I'm surprised no one has linked to this on my friends list.

Swiss pilot Yves Rossy has mastered a mode of flying that's straight out of Golden Age SF. I saw him in action on the TV last night and it looked just amazing. Totally and utterly scary, but amazing.

More photos here...

Current Mood: amazed

New words written today: 532
Total words in the story: 532
Reason for stopping: Time to sort out stuff for this afternoon's class.
Other:

I have a tentative title Singing the gold home. I've also realised that one of the reasons for the stuckness recently was that I needed to evolve a radically new way of writing.

In the past I've always worked scenes over in my head, running them like a sensurround movie with smells and feelings and thoughts and sensations as well as sight and sound. I evolved this method in my youth when I used to day dream whilst walking to school. The better day dreams eventually got written down as stories.

But that only worked when what I was aiming for was a straightforward narrative describing what happened. Once I started to aim for better prose and more complex structures, it stopped working so well and recently hasn't been working at all.

The other method was to just sit down with pen and paper and write (or sit at the computer and type). Again this worked to a certain extent, but led to lots of beginnings where the initial enthusiasm would carry me a certain way and then leave me stranded when things got more complicated and I wasn't sure where the story was going. Trying to achieve a reasonably coherent draft in one feel swoop also stopped working.

So for this story I'm experimenting with building up from a sketchy typed outline, adding the rambling stuff from the transcribed audio files and then editing the whole thing into a polished story once I know how it ends and what sort of tone and mood I want to evoke. (See I never used to worry about that kind of thing and because I was only doing straightforward adventure fantasy in my default mode, it worked OK. But once I wanted to try anything cleverer, I was doomed!)

So far it's felt OK. Lots of chanting of the mantra, "It's just for fun, no one's ever going to see this," helped too. :)

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In other news: Tuesday (the day I don't work) seemed more unproductive than I had hoped. I had (as usual) written a whole list of Things To Do selected off the Next Action List. In the end I faffed around and didn't do anything much useful apart from sort out my Welsh study materials. ( Musings about progress here... )

Tags: welsh, writing_progress
Current Mood: determined

Someone on one of the Flickr groups I read posted a link to this post about comments on photos.

Some of it's almost like found poetry. :)

What's with all the natural disasters? The earthquake in China is occupying the headlines, naturally, not to mention the devastation in Burma. But closer to home (in a manner of speaking), one of my colleagues is currently stranded in Patagonia, unable, to fly out because of the eruption of a volcano that had remained dormant for 9,000 years.

He didn't time that holiday very well, did he?

The world seems so much smaller these days. When I was young, disasters happened and they seemed a long way away. We felt sad and donated money to the Red Cross or Oxfam, but it never affected people we knew. There was no personal connection.

But right now G is concerned about a very nice chap he met when he went to the conference in China and who is a lecturer at a university in the devastated region. I've heard my colleague and his wife are safe in Patagonia, so I don't actually have to worry about them (thank heavens for email!), but they don't know when they'll be able to get back to the UK.

People travel far more widely and it's so much easier to make connections these days, via the Web, so whenever things happen around the world now, I have to run through the list of my online friends to work out whether anyone is likely to be affected.

Current Mood: thoughtful

Story Title: Untitled Dwarf Miners story
Words written transcribed last week: 1236
Words written transcribed today: 3140
Words now in story: 4511
Reason for stopping: I have a zeroth draft!

If I can edit the very rough zeroth draft into something coherent, then I have a whole new way of working. :) ( Details behind here... )

Current Mood: productive

Walking to Rivendell

Miles travelled today: 4.5
Miles travelled so far: 415.5
Miles still to go: 42.5
Percentage complete: 91%

Point reached on journey: Marching on through the night. Frodo is riding Glorfindel's horse.

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Where I really went...

Just a quick cycle ride up the old railway to Penmaenpool. I spent the morning ferreting around in the folders on my hard drive, looking for unfinished stories so I could post the first lines, then, after lunch, I mowed some of the front lawn grass and sawed down some of the ugly shrubs that have sprung up again at the front by the parking area. Also uprooted half a dozen tiny holly saplings and two oak saplings. There is no room for more trees in the front garden! My arms still sting from where I was nettled and I was also scratched by the brambles that are trying to take over. Finally I transplanted a couple of sprigs of a ground covering shrub to the bank at the back and then called it a day because I thought it was about to rain.

If I wasn't trying to arrive in Rivendell for my birthday, I probably wouldn't have bothered with the exercise, but being away last weekend has put me behind schedule, so as the bike is the fastest way to clock up miles, I pedalled off down the cycle track.

Oh, and it didn't rain after all. The clouds passed over and it's now a beautiful evening, my lamb chops are almost cooked and I just have time to post this before I go and eat.

Current Mood: accomplished

I'm taking a leaf out of matociquala's book^[*] and posting a bunch of first lines here in an attempt to get one or other of them moving again. These are from stories that are either languishing half finished, are barely even started, or have been rejected and need a quick look over before going out again. They're approximately in order of newest to oldest, the newest having been started just a couple of weeks ago while the oldest goes back at least 10 years. ( First lines behind here... )

Some (if not most!) of these are probably no-hopers in terms of publication, but I want to get into the habit of finishing things properly, not writing half a story and then leaving it to languish for years. Even if they're not strong enough to sell, making them as strong as that story can be will be good practice. It should also help me look at beginnings, middles and ends and enable me to better see how one relates to the other, something that's difficult to do with novels because they're so big and I spend so long on just one story.

I want writing to be fun. Some of these were abandoned because I thought they were too slight to sell (there's that word again!), but so what? Until they're absolutely finished, how will I know that? I take photos that are rather blah straight out of the camera, but sometimes they can be tweaked in Photoshop and turn out to be some of my most popular. My big problem is that the ideas that seems so shiny and attractive when they first pop into my mind seem flat and trite when I start to get them down in words. The execution never seems to match the inspiration. Then, when it comes to the point of really working on a story to push it past the sticking point, I've got into the bad habit of abandoning it and rushing to the next new and shiny thing.

So basically my current writing target is to get as many of these as possible out of the Ongoing folder and into the Finished folder. They may end up in the Virtual Trunk rather than the For submission folder, but at least they'll be complete stories, not fragments.

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^[*] Actually my mother used to do this too, though in her case it was sewing projects. She did a lot of sewing but the less urgent things would sometimes languish in the "just cut out" or "cut out and tacked together" or "sewed up but needs zip, buttons and hemming" stages. Every so often, she'd decide to have a blitz on unfinished projects.

Current Mood: attempting to foster creativity

I don't know what's the matter with me today, but I just feel sooooo sleepy and can't stop yawning. Fortunately I don't work on Tuesdays or I'd have been sleepwalking through the lessons.

We went down to Cardiff and Port Talbot on Sunday/Monday. We were supposed to have gone on Saturday, but G had lost his voice because he had a cold. Visit was therefore postponed one day.

We had a very pleasant time. Arrived about 3 pm on Saturday. G took a box of work to do (he doesn't really do socialising!), but I went for a nice walk round Roath Park with our daughter and grand-daughter. Lounged around and nattered with Ali and played with Erin, who can now walk and says a few words. She is so cute. :)

Next morning after a leisurely breakfast we drove to our son's house in Port Talbot. Another walk, this time to the beach and this time G came too. Then lunch, more nattering and looking at the photo album of the wedding, finally headed back home.

I know it's a long drive (3½ hours), but I shouldn't be this tired. Either I still haven't caught up with last week or I'm going down with the cold. (Crosses fingers that it's a cold I've already had because I seem to have had a whole string of colds this winter and don't want another one.)

( Cut toddler picture behind here... )

Off now to the Co-op to replenish our supplies.

Current Mood: accomplished

These photos really belong here, but I hadn't done the necessary tweaking in Photoshop in time to post them with the others.



I've added this to my faerie set. It reminded me of the song Bilbo sang in Rivendell. In particular, this verse:

For still there are so many things
that I have never seen:
in every wood in every spring
there is a different green.

There's obviously something very interesting in the field off to the right, but whatever it was, it was much too far away from me to see. :)

Current Mood: accomplished