Skeleton Architecture

The prompt over at Mum Turned Mom this week is Lonely, and it got me to thinking about poetry, Wordsworth wandering lonely as a cloud  strikes me as odd, it is rare one seens a single cloud in the lake district, surely if there was one by itself, it would be relishing that moment of freedom? I also thought of Henri's mash up of Wordsworth's poem , and of how things can be taken out of the familiar context to give new meaning, both to the word and to the context. The other thing in my head when I think about 'lonely', is poor Tallulah, who is perhaps the loneliest person at Bugsy Malones when she sings the song about not having to be lonely. But that's what we do. We put our best foot forward, paint on a face and go on with the show. Anyway, I wrote a poem which doesn't want to be very long, about that little cloud. There are lots of clouds in the sky as I write, but I can't see her. I think sometimes we can feel most lonely when we're surroun...

Oh there has been so much happening in 2016 that I'm not a fan of. Death's guest list has got way out of hand, and then Brexit and now Trump, not to mention the terrible situations that lots of people around the world have found themselves in. Things are changing, and not in the way I had hoped for, but that said, we have made remarkable progress in the last century. I'm hoping that we're like the frog jumping out of the well. For every three feet higher she jumps, she slides back down two feet. It's dispiriting, nobody wants to slide in that nasty goo, but it is still progress. Not long ago I went to a writing workshop in Glasgow where we were asked to write a long list of five things we loved, five things we hated, five things we believed etc. All these things, we were told, could be written about. So today I'm writing about one of the things I hate. The thing I wrote was:  "I hate Tories." But that's not fair. It's not just Tories. ...

October was glorious up here on the West Coast of Scotland. A month of pretty good weather, and fantastic colour. Halloween was warm enough to not wear coats, which was brilliant. But now we're in November. The grey month when the cold and the dark come. And it has come. We had our first frost on the 1st, our new tree (a Katsura which has come up from Yorkshire) lost its leaves in horror at its new climate, although I'm hoping this is an Autumn thing.  The colours on the trees are fading to muddy brown and black, and the wind, the rain, and the hail, are becoming more frequent visitors. At home I'm attempting to get my hygge on to see through the winter. I've gone right off gin and tonic, and need something more wintery to sip while I snuggle under a crocheted blanket and watch the Westworld (does anyone else sing this every time it's on?). Any suggestions? Anyway, in order to keep my little mind sunny during these dark days I've taken up two new...

Hello! It's November and I'm doing NaNoWriMo, which for those that aren't involved in this crazy world of writing means that I'm trying to write the first draft of a whole novel in one month. Some people have finished already. Somebody allegedly finished in the first 24 hours. Imagine that! I'm hoping that slow and steady wins the race for me. I'm trying to get more than my target words of 1,667 words a day written, and so far, after a glitchy first day, I am doing just grand.  The novel I'm writing is a reworking of my first Chaptershill book which I first wrote a while ago, but then realised it was fatally flawed. If you recall I had a meltdown last year about what was wrong with it - that it was infested with the worms of other fantasy, much of which is uncritical of patriarchal culture, and that I couldn't buy into that in good conscience. Besides which, it didn't work for the story. I tried amending the story but it was so riddled with ...