Skeleton Architecture

This morning I hid real live human beings in drab, contained their hair, but whispered that I knew they were still in there, and I sent them to their undercover work as schoolchildren. This morning I wrestled electric cats into a fairy faraday cage, and took them to the torturer, who weighed their hearts and found them wanting. I rubbed magic potions onto the electric cats gums, and we widened our eyes to each other. This morning I cornered the laundry monster and labelled its parts. It still lives, but the first of its limbs has been wrestled into submission. This morning I bargained with the weather gods and won, for a while, and took the tribbles out to work their way across the grass. And then I stopped for coffee and while I drank the coffee I wrote a tanka on a scrap of paper I've now glued in a notebook and shared it with you. What have you done this morning?

Most of the time I do my writing in the living room. Sometimes, before I'm done, it will be invaded by small people. When I wrote this it was invaded by small people who were watching Avatar, an episode where they were in caves and had to find their way out in the darkness, letting love lead the way.

It has been ages since I've joined in with Sara at Mum Turned Mom's regular Prompt. It's on my list, but my list has got out of hand lately, so I was delighted when I got a reminder from Sara in the form of her very own tanka, go check it out here . Her theme this time was 'CAPTURE', and this is what I came up with: I'm joining in with The Prompt. If you're quick you can join in too!

I set this up to publish in advance, because today I am not doing anything remotely useful (unless you count eating ice cream as useful), because today is my birthday. Yay! I wrote this on another day entirely, when I was filling in a lot of paperwork for an actual paid job I'm starting (I have started, when you read this), scanning and sending off said paperwork, and speaking to various people in the company to get the paperwork swiftly through non-swift systems, plus there was lots of completely irrelevant activity on one of my family Whatsapp streams (Steph, love ya, and I'm going to send you photos of my next boring thing). My phone was pinging away, and with the job stuff I HAD TO KEEP CHECKING IT. Glad it's done, but it was just a wee tad stressy.

Many thanks to my little sister for letting me use this picture. My little sister has been obsessed with America for as long as I can remember. When she was little she was determined she was going to go live there. I think she's realised that she's actually a bit of a homebody, and she only lives a few miles down the road from our Mum, but she has been over a few times. Speculation soared when she said she was off to Vegas with her remarkably smashing boyfriend. But any ideas that I put on them were mine, not theirs! They are a brilliant couple, currently working really hard together on renovating a house and coming up with ideas that are miles and miles from anything I could dream up. More importantly than that though, they are kind and loving towards each other, and I'm chuffing delighted for my little sister that's she has found a man who might actually be worthy of her.

The photo prompt for the Fat Mum Slim Photo a Day challenge the other day was 'favourite'. Favourite is a contentious issue in my house. Miss 7 is desperate for me to admit that she's my favourite and Miss 10 is annoyed that I always describe her as my favourite 10 (or 9, 8 etc) year old.  I know some parents have favourites, and truth be told there are moments when I find a child particularly lovely, or particularly not, but surely a favourite has to be more sustained than that? If so, then I could not possibly say, not even if you hypnotised me! Just a quick note to my favourite sister before you get to the picture... I know you hate fish, and I'm sorry.

My Dad challenged me to write a tanka about a Tonka truck. I was going to ignore this challenge, but then he got his friend to publicly shame me into it on Facebook. So here you go father and friend. 😝 My brother had a Tonka truck when we were little. I thought it was yellow, my Dad thought it was red. My brother says it was red and  yellow. Nobody has it anymore, and it's not in any photos I can find (I have looked for the amount of time you spend on these projects when you should really be doing something more useful), but that was a really good, sturdy, truck. I've definitely attempted to use it as a skateboard when my feet would fit in it, I've also loaded it with animals, Sindy's, and of course, lots of stones. It was the kind of toy you look at and declare that they don't make them like that anymore. My brother is pretty awesome too. He started off as my little brother. Now he towers above me. He's had plenty of health issues, including collecting a...

Do you do any of those photo challenges on Instagram? I used to do it more than I do now, but I still take part in the So Good in Every Way  fortnightly themes (sometimes), and the Snap Happy Britmums daily prompts (again, sometimes). Todays prompt was words, and I was sitting in my kids' school this morning, waiting to help out with walking a bunch of kids to another school, and thinking about how the rhyme, 'sticks and stones' has changed as schools have become more cognicent of the long term damaging effects of verbal bullying. When I was a kid we taunted bullies that words would never hurt me. My own eating disorder, other self harming, and so much other stuff can testify to the nonsense of that. Now my kids are taught the rhyme 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can really hurt me.' and it's true. Physical violence is rubbish, but we should never underestimate the long term harm of verbal violence. Hence my poem today. It's almost a ...

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 ...

What can I say? Nothing sensible. My beautiful, massive cat is sick, dangerously sick, and I am beside myself, but writing about it helps. Nothing fits into a poem like the ones I usually write though. I can't make this fit. I can't make the feelings fit. So I'm going a bit freestyle. I don't know if it's good. I don't know if it's worthwhile sharing. But I'd have liked to have read it while I was Googling this stuff recently, and it helps me to write. So this is it... ...this was it (edit 18th June 2017). This was the first terrible thing that happened to Katsuma, in summer last year, and we did our very best for him, and as I mentioned above, I was beside myself.  I miss him. I'm not the same. I'm still scared about leaving my kittens because leaving Katsuma, even though he was well looked after while we were away, was the thing that caused him stress and led to his death. It still doesn't matter that logically I know Katsuma had somet...

I'm clearly having a bit of a Spenserian stanza moment, because here's another one! You have already had The flame so bright  and Clematis dance , but I wanted to try it again for this poem inspired by something the Dalai Lama said: Judge your success on what you had to give up in order to get it. So the thing in my life that I have given up the most for is my children, my family. It's actually staggering how much I've given up when I try to itemise it, although high on the list was watching Columbo, and I guess I can learn to live with that. If you judge success by what you have to give up, then I suppose my children are my greatest success, so far. I'd best keep at it.  Children came I have forsaken acres wide of time. I've given up on sex and sleep and rest. I have quit smoking and I drink less wine. No longer am I someone of interest. I've given up on cosy sofa nests, abandoned spur of moment trips away. No clubbing now, no going dancin...

There's something so special about gifting something hand-crafted to someone. It's created with (lots of) time, love, and consideration, and is something that they can always keep which will remind them of you. When the nights are long, the wind is wild, and the weather's awful, I'm a big fan of crocheting, and in the last year I've made a couple of blankets. You can read about the first one here  (an Attic 24 Ripple ), and the second one (pictured above), here  (that's an Attic 24 Cosy Blanket ). The first lives on the sofa, and is shared by everbody, but the second was made specifically for my boy. It was that one that I was thinking of when I wrote this sonnet for this week's Prompt ( in between ). The love between Between each stitch resides a point in time: the programme watched, the laughter shared, the love, the cat's keen eye on dwindling ball of twine: swift catching claw is greeted with a shove. Between each shift in colour ...

Louise Gluck Louise Gluck is an American poet who I cannot believe I hadn't heard of before a friend shared one of her poems with me the other day. You can find her poem, Fable, here , and if you're anything like me, you'll be thinking 'yes, yes, I know where this goes, until she pulls the carpet out from under your feet' - awesome and so interesting. Andrew McMillan Mr McMillan has been winning a lot of awards lately after the release, in 2015, of his first book of poetry, Physical. There's a list of all the good things that are happening in his career on his website , and his poetry is astounding. You can find Finally here (and do read it because it stays with you), and for a real treat check out this Guardian Books Podcast wherein you can hear Andrew talk about and read his own work in his beautiful South Yorkshire accent (after around 12 minutes). Nordahl Grieg Nordhal Grieg was a controversial Norwegian poet who is perhaps most famous for a...

We decided long ago in 2006 that we were going to shake up the way our family worked. My husband, Kenny, would go for a job with a bigger salary, with the flexibility which has to go with that, and we would move our family as required. I would look after our children, and make sure that things at home worked, even as Kenny needed to work away for his job. It's worked out well for us. Kenny's doing well in his career, and our children are happy and secure, despite having moved a few times, but nothing is all good. Everyone has something they don't like about their work, and being a full time Mum, while being very rewarding, and completely worthwhile, can also be dull, repetitive, and frustrating. For me, I need to have another focus as well. When we first moved for Kenny's work my other focus was on the charitable organisation I was running (in Suffolk). b.a.b.i.e.s (Babies and Birthing in East Suffolk) was fun and so very useful, and gave me plenty of adult foc...