Aimee has just had a silly ten minutes or so running around in that demented way that cats do. She really did make me LOL. Now she's purring on my lap and I'm having to type one-handed because she's insisting on being stroked under the chin!

Still ploughing through all the stuff I have to do. I managed to finish my two poems for the creative writing assignment and wrote the reflection yesterday. Happily submitted the assignment, only to have an aaarrrgh! moment just now when I realised that I hadn't double-spaced the reflection bit. (Obviously the poems are single spaced, which is why I forgot.) After dithering for a moment, my inner perfectionist overcame my inner sluggard and I re-formatted the offending section and re-submitted.

The creative writing evening class that I teach started again tonight. We were doing creating characters tonight. It's good to have students to talk to. Over half term, I was missing the contact with people. In fact all my classes are on again this week. Tomorrow morning is Welsh and then Thursday evening is the BA Education class, for which I have to give the seminar. Oooh, er!

Must make dinner now before G gets in. I have been taking photos, but no time to process them. Hopefully there wil be photos tomorrow. Having said that, there is the little matter of the 30 or so tiny stories to crit for the OU fiction writing course I tutor. And there is the little matter of the assignment I have to write for G's module on the BA course.

Tags: a215, aimee, cats
Current Mood: busy

I have three deadlines looming next week. (Possibly 4 if you count the Research Methods assignment which I could take longer over, but which I want to get out of the way.) This might account for the rather stressful dream I had last night.

I therefore decided that I need to focus on at least a couple of things today and get them finished in order to take some pressure off.

First success this morning was finishing a poem for the A215 Creative Writing assignment. After being stuck for ages with 1.5 poems, I finally struggled the second one into submission. I now have the two poems^[*] required for the TMA03 (ie third assignment).

I still have to let the second poem (a sort of sonnet, ie it has the rhyme scheme, but the metre isn't strict) sit for a bit so I can see whether it needs a final tweak. I also need to write the Reflection, but the most difficult part is done!

---

^[*] The assignment asked for 40 lines of poetry (plus or minus 10%) and I had toyed with the idea of doing another sestina, which proved successful when I did the introductory poetry writing course, but the opinion in the forums was that doing two poems enabled you to show off more poetic techniques than just one, so that's what I've opted for.

Tags: a215, ba education
Current Mood: accomplished

The OU creative writing course is doing exactly what I wanted it to do. I'm writing again and becoming more critical but in a helpful way, not just the, "Oh, God this is crap, why do I bother?" way. Perhaps I should have said analytical rather than critical?

Anyway, we had to write a couple of pieces from the POV of someone totally unlike ourself, so (not wanting to start yet more stories) I thought of Mark who is male, 25 years old, blond, blue eyed, 6 foot tall and fit and athletic. Also far more physically courageous than I ever was or will be.

I am now considering shifting A Necessary Evil into first. What do you think? The extracts are behind the cut. ( just for those who are interested... )

---

In all its many incarnations, it's always been third person, but I am now tempted by first. It might be fun to try and this novel is likely to be unsaleable due to it being a terribly overused trope, but I would like to finish it, even if it only ends up on the Web.

Tags: a necessary evil, a215, writing
Current Mood: accomplished

Dear Internal Editor

Please stop poking your nose in. Why do I listen to you anyway? Your judgement sucks. My tutor just gave me 85% (a distinction!) for the first 750 words of a story that you said was crap. "It's not worth submitting," you said. "I don't know why you're bothering."

I am not going to listen to you any more. So there!

Please don't turn up tomorrow. I plan to do some more work on the neglected novel and you are not welcome.

Yours

Helen

P.S. I will let you have a look at the first draft once it is complete, but until then, stay away!

Tags: a215, writing
Current Mood: pleased

I drove up to Rhos-on-Sea today for the face-to-face tutorial for the creative writing course. We did the usual sort of exercises and it was interesting to see what worked for me and what didn't. A couple of activities just stopped me in my tracks and I couldn't really get any words at all -- and the few I did get down on paper were crap. Some exercises had me scribbling away furiously.

Thinks I have learned or re-discovered:

- I am totally unable to write about a character in a vacuum.
- I can't start with voice.
- Describing places comes naturally.
- Once I get some sort of situation or a character in a location, the writing takes off.
- First draft is often little more than dialogue and stage directions.
- Most academic creative writing course prompts are intended to get people writing lit fic, they are not at all inspiring for SF/fantasy.
- Things that work for one writer will not work for another. I love night as a starting word for a cluster. A couple of others couldn't do anything with it.

Possibly the most useful phrase learned was another way of describing a first draft as "laying down the tracks." It reminds me of this photo I took in the summer of the new railway line and very much describes my own process of trying to push through to get a bare but complete draft finished before I start layering in the details and cutting and polishing to shape.

Tags: a215, writing, writing reflection
Current Mood: reflective

I had great difficulty with Activity 3.6. We were supposed to write about a memory of a character or place. Perhaps I wrongly assumed that it had to be from childhood (the example we were given referred back to the author's childhood). That's not a problem. I have lots of early memories, but they're just fragments, like a little shard from a mosaic. At first I couldn't think of anything that I could make a coherent narrative out of.

But eventually my brain gave me this...

---

I stare at my grandmother. She is putting on her hat and I'm fascinated by her look of concentration, the way her mouth purses into a tight line and the tentative way her hands guide the long hatpin through the thick felt of the hat and into her head. I wonder why she shows no sign of feeling any pain, why there is no blood. My mother can do this trick too, though she doesn't do it so often. She usually wears a soft beret and only occasionally wears a hat substantial enough to need anchoring with a long pin.

The thing that bothers me is that I know I will have to master this skill when I'm older and I'm a little scared. I'm sure it must hurt, yet somehow you have to learn not to show it. Like an African tribeswoman undergoing an initiation rite, you have to pretend to be perfectly oblivious to pain. It must be like corsets and tight shoes and having babies, all the things I can forget about now but will have to face when I grow up.

It was only years later that I realised that my Gran's look of concentration was because she was desperately trying not to stab herself in the head, that in fact the long pin merely speared the hair and not the scalp.

I never did learn the arcane skill of skewering a hat to my head with a hatpin. I never wore a corset either. The 60s happened and women abandoned restrictive underwear, wore miniskirts and tights and serious hats only appeared at weddings.

---

Tags: a215, creative writing, memories
Current Mood: creative

One of the things the creative writing course gets us doing is "reading as a writer", that is looking how a published author has done things. Which of course means looking closely at the text.

To be honest, I'm not that taken with Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie. I remember reading it years ago in order to help a friend's daughter with her GCSE English revision. I can't really remember anything about it now, except that there was something about it I didn't like, something I found just a little bit creepy. But anyway, the course activity asked us to carefully read the opening, looking to see how Laurie Lee had used the different senses in the description.

First read was fine, it was indeed very vivid, very evocative. But reading it again to take notes, I noticed something wrong, which I've put behind the cut. Can you spot it?

"I was set down from the carrier’s cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.

The June grass, amongst which I stood, was taller than I was, and I wept. I had never been so close to grass before. It towered above me and all around me, each blade tattooed with tiger-skins of sunlight. It was knife-edged, dark, and a wicked green, thick as a forest and alive with grasshoppers that chirped and chattered and leapt through the air like monkeys.

I was lost and didn’t know where to move. A tropic heat oozed up from the ground, rank with sharp odours of roots and nettles. Snowclouds of elder-blossom banked in the sky, showering upon me the fumes and flakes of their sweet and giddy suffocation. High overhead ran frenzied larks, screaming, as though the sky were tearing apart."

( Behind here my inner geek finds something wrong... )

Tags: a215
Current Mood: pedantic

I'm now in week 3 of the creative writing course and enjoying it a lot. I've been diligently doing all the activities, but there's just one snag. A lot of what we're doing so far, like clustering and freewrites, is designed to generate story ideas. This is fine for people who are coming new to writing, but when one has nearly 50 year's-worth of ideas floating around on scraps of paper, on the computer's hard-drive and in the back of one's mind, the last thing one wants is more ideas!

Tags: a215

Walking to Lothlorien

Miles travelled today: 4½
Miles travelled so far: 68½ (526½ from Bag End)
Miles still to go: 393½
Percentage complete: 15%

Rivendell to Lothlorien:

68.5/462 (15%)


Point reached on journey: We're in a place where the paths are few and winding. We will camp during the day.

---

Where I really went...

Just along the old railway line to Penmaenpool and back. On the way out I met one of our daughter's friends, the one who's a firefighter, exercising her two cute little dogs. Otherwise the track was pretty deserted, just a fisherman returning home with his net slung over his back and a couple of cyclists.

Just before I reached the toll bridge, I stopped to watch the gulls and crows on the wide water-logged field between the track and the estuary. Every so often, the gulls would take to the air and wheel around in a mob for a minute or two before settling back.

When I reached the George III pub, that too looked pretty deserted. But the ducks inspired a haiku.

seven brown ducks asleep
bobbing at the water's edge
heads under their wings

That's not the only writing I've done today either. Nothing that's actual word count, but it seems my writer brain wasn't dead, just asleep and I've finally found the "on" button again. :)

Basically I was playing with some clusters and freewriting for the creative writing course (Open University A215) that I've signed up for. The course doesn't actually start until mid-September, but I've learned from experience that I need to get ahead at the beginning because Life The Universe and Everything soon conspires to put me behind as the year progresses.

Oh, and though I've never previously managed to use a piece of freewriting in a finished story, I've looked at the first assignment and that involves having to do a freewrite, so I thought I'd better get into doing some.

Tags: a215, eowyn challenge, walking, writing
Current Mood: accomplished