I am tired and so longer posts will have to wait. There is stuff I want to write, but I still don't seem to have time.

Yesterday I was scampering around cleaning and moving stuff from one room to another. There is still too much stuff in this house and I need to have another purge, starting next week, I think. The reason for the scampering was that our son and his wife were coming to visit.

The reason for the visit was that our son's friend was getting married. They stayed over with us last night and, because they weren't invited to the service^* or the reception, we went to Prestatyn to see my Dad. M doesn't get the chance to see his Grandpa very often, so it was a good opportunity. We chatted and Dad treated us to lunch at a nearby pub. M & M are now off at the evening do and will be back sometime late. We'll hang out together tomorrow morning and they they'll drive back to South Wales.

While they're out enjoying themselves, I'm sitting in a pleasantly cool draft from the partially open window, critiquing story openings posted by my students. Outside, it is raining hard.

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^* Of course they could have attended the church service just to watch, but the wedding is 1 hour's drive from our house, therefore too far to go and then come home and then go back again for the evening festivities.

Current Mood: sleepy

Every so often, usually just on a whim, I look back to see what I was doing on this day in previous years.

For some reason I did that today and discovered that the 9th of July, 2003 was my very first post to LJ. And herd I am, still posting! :)

Current Mood: surprised

As the final field trip of the course he's teaching, G had arranged for someone to guide us round some old lead mine sites near Llanrwst. This was just a surface tour looking at the locations of the shafts and adits and also exploring some of the old ore processing sites, one of which has been nicely excavated and made safe for visitors.

My pictures of the mine sites are really only good for a record of the visit, but I've polished up the prettiest shots and ( most of them are behind the cut here... )



While we were standing listening to our guide explain various details about one location, this confident little chap came and perched nearby. He or she is an immature robin.

Current Mood: cheerful

I just couldn't resist this. :)


see more Lolcats and funny pictures

Actually, with luck, there will be proper content soon. I'm busy processing lots of photos from yesterday when we went to see the old lead mine near Llanrwst.

Current Mood: cheerful

If I seem to have been quiet for the past few days, it's because I was away over the weekend at the Diana Wynne Jones conference in Bristol. I had a lovely time, met several of my old friends, met some on-line friends for the first time and made some entirely new friends. I also found a new LJ community that I intend to join.

I had planned to keep up with everything on-line while I was away because I had my Eee with me, but the promised Internet access didn't actually work. A very few people managed to log in with the usernames and passwords provided, but most of us couldn't and the IT staff don't work weekends, so they couldn't sort it out for us. It was rather frustrating as I had thought I could keep an eye on my students while I was away and I hadn't even looked up the times of trains for coming home because I'd thought I could do it from the conference. However, I did get home safely (despite the engineering work that meant that the "train" was actually a bus for the part between Hereford and Shrewsbury) and I've caught up with the most urgent student queries this morning.

Anyway, the short version is that I had a great time and there was lots of interesting and gently thought-provoking stuff that has had the side effect of progressing the new novel idea a bit further. I also (ahem) bought a few more Diana Wynne Jones books to add to my collection.

The conference was small and low-key and DWJ's books and writing are diverse enough that even though there were many papers, it was never boring as people found different aspects to examine or took a different slant on the source material. I found everyone very friendly, even though I wasn't a member of the mailing list and therefore completely unknown to most people there.

A big thank you must go to the organisers and I hope there is another one, perhaps in 2011? :)

Current Mood: cheerful

The weather has been very mixed here, but George^* has been out with me to a couple of places. I'm just catching up with processing the photos. Here are some taken last Friday in South Wales.

My husband had to go down to South Wales on business, so I volunteered to be his chauffeur and George came along for the ride and to see more of Wales.

Unfortunately, it rained most of the day, so this is George at the rather wet Roman Amphitheatre in Caerleon.



It was built in about 90 AD for the garrison stationed in Caerleon. Nearby are the remains of a large barracks complex. As it says on the information sign, "It would have been used by the troops for drills, parades and weapons training, as well as for the brutal amusements to which the Romans were so addicted."

( More photos here... )

Yesterday George visited a gold mine, but I'll post those photos later.

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^* The small toy monkey who is currently seeing the world by staying with various members of one of the Flickr groups I belong to.

Current Mood: cheerful

My Tweets for today ( can be found behind here... )

My Tweets for today ( can be found behind here... )

julesjones has posted a link to an interesting essay. However, I would suggest that it's possible to be more objective than the writer of the essay claims. Beyond what she calls correctness are things like: is the language fluent and are there vivid descriptions of character and place? Is there some originality in the language, for example in the similes and metaphors used, or is it full of hackneyed, over-used phrases? (It's perfectly possible for the prose to be grammatically correct yet full of boring clichés.) Is there a good balance between narrative summary (telling) and dramatised scenes (showing)?

These are the things tutors on creative writing courses have to assess and I've found that even though our tastes in reading may differ wildly, there is a remarkable agreement between the marks that tutors award for a story. (A random sample is always second marked for quality control purposes.)

That's because it's perfectly possible to award a high mark to a story that actually isn't to one's taste at all and I think that different genres actually have more in common regarding to what constitutes good writing than there are differences.

I also agree with shriker_tam (see comments to julesjones's post) that believability comes into it a lot, whether it's lit fic, fantasy, romance or any other genre. Some of my students use incidents that happened to them in real life and then get cross when I say that it's not believable.

"But it happened to me!" they insist.

"That's beside the point," I reply. "The way you've written about it in the story didn't convince me. Just saying, 'It happened,' isn't enough. You have to make it believable in the context of the story.

Some writers can make fire breathing, time travelling dragons believable. Some writers can't even make a chance meeting with a friend sound plausible.

I admit that some readers just cannot read some genres. (For me it's romance and horror.) However well written the FTL spaceship, some readers will balk at it because it violates the known laws of physics and the story is not set in the world they know. But if you train yourself to look at how well a story is crafted, it's still possible to admire the skilful way it's been done, even though the finished product leaves you cold. IMHO, anyway.

Current Mood: should be working but brain is tired

My Tweets for today ( can be found behind here... )