Skeleton Architecture

Back in 2013 a quiz had me pegged as Batwoman (Batgirl? Surely not?) but I fancied myself as more of a Wonder Woman/Misfit/Sookie Stackhouse mashup, if I had to have super powers. We have just been to see Justice League (which was OK, but would have worked much better as a TV series), so I'm again pondering my superpowers. Now that I'm in my 40s, it seems to me that like so many women in films like Justice League (because we can't see them, ya ken?), my main powers are invisibility and inaudibility, with a heavy dose of empathy thrown in - not so that I can read minds or anything, not so I could send anyone to sleep or make someone afraid, but just so I will cry genuine tears for a sad advert. Sigh.

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.

Happy New Year! I hope you've had a great Christmas and New Year. We did, although it was a bit quiet. The last week of the holidays dragged, mainly because I got a stinking horrible cold on January 1st, which is making me feel totally rotten. Ugh. Anyway, things are going pretty well on the writing front. I had two poems out last month, and I also got shortlisted for the Great British Write Off, which was totally unexpected, and kinda lovely. I've also had lots of things rejected, and failed to get placed in my local writing group's competition. I worked really hard on that poem and I'm annoyed with myself for not doing better, I'm trying to tell myself it's all subjective, but the usual suspects got placed again. Maybe it's just not my audience. I am slightly gutted that Maddy at Writing Bubble is going to be too busy to run the What I'm Writing Linky this year, but so glad that she's got lots of interesting things on. However, Sara at Mum T...

That prompt from Sara at Mum Turned Mom, 'Embrace', has got my mind wandering down all sorts of rabbit holes, I shared one with you yesterday , and here's another, about the sort of embraces you probably shouldn't have ever had. Probably. One peculiar night when there was just us we drank the bar. I said  you could do  better than that whispering nothing who dangles your heart like a bored cat's toy. I said  you could have me and knew I'd gone too far to stay. I walked home on feet that wanted to return to you. Buried my fear of repurcussions in instant noodles and there you were! Swinging on the lampost, grinning through the window. I smuggled you in. Drunkenly fumbling in bouts of incompetence. You kissed me, said we could brave the storm if you could shelter in my heart. I offered shelter but you caught her sparkling thread and returned to whispers. Ⓒ Cara L McKee 28/2/17

I have tried to do yoga in recent years. I have had babies and required physiotherapy, and got older and stayed fat, and had years of not getting enough sleep. I wanted to regain the feeling that my body was strong, that I was flexible. I also wanted to focus on the breath. I went to my local yoga class where the teacher was lovely, but I don't think she was experienced in dealing with fat bodies, perhaps she just wasn't experienced in dealing with mine. She gave me blocks and things to help me get the positions rightish, but I simply couldn't breathe in some positions, and I was acutely aware of what I looked like. That said, I know that no-one was looking at me, but I couldn't relax for imagining my oxygen starved frame toppling over like an elephant on stilts , domino-ing into my neighbour and causing havoc. When it came to the relaxation I was able to breathe. In the quiet of the room I told the tears running down my face to stop, but they didn't. I wipe...

Hello! The prompt over at Mum Turned Mom is History , which immediately makes me think of Herstory, and how History is written by the victors, and there are many stories to explain the same event, and even one person's story changes over time, and memory is malleable and all that stuff. I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't want it to be too big and too heavy, and I've had so much fun working on a short story I'm submitting to a competition, which is weird because I usually hate writing short stories, but this was perfect, so I celebrated that story with a cup of coffee, in a cup my sister gave me which she didn't realise would match my new wallpaper/curtains - I can't remember, I was pretty sure it was wallpaper, but have no memory of wallpapering, although I am still pretty sure there was wallpaper, particularly on the wall with cupboards and a fireplace, because that was a total pain to do. There must have been wallpaper, but there were ...

Did you know that I have actually had proper jobs? Not that this writing biz isn't a proper job, but I mean something that people actually expected to pay me for, where I was employed because I was clever and had certificates to prove it. Where people in suits (and people in uniforms) listened to my advice (I'm not saying that they acted on it, or listened particularly attentively, but they were quiet while I was talking, sometimes). Poems like this are basically me saying "you're alright, Civil Service, I don't really want to come back." (to which the Civil Service would probably say, "and you are?"). I still feel like I shouldn't say it, and I'm not going to argue poetic beauty for this one, it's just something that I had to say, so I wrote it down in my notebook and then realised that even though I'd not written it as a poem, it was one anyway! So here you go (written as a poem this time): Tories are Wrong The Tories wer...

If you follow me on Instagram , you'll probably know that at the moment I #amediting. I wrote a first draft of a story that had been tickling away at me for a while back in November for National Novel Writing Month . It's a modern retelling of a traditional Scottish fairy tale which has fascinated me since I came across it. I'm going to call it the Rose book. Once I'd tidied up that first draft I put it away for a while.  I was intending on working on another book. A high fantasy tale which is really rather huge, and which I'd finished the first draft of a while ago, but had then realised it had a massive problem, requiring lots of changes (more on that here ). I'm going to call that the Chaptershill book. I started rethinking things for the Chaptershill book over Christmas and realised that changing little things about the way the society ran had some small impacts, which, like the butterfly effect, ended up having drastic impacts on the plot, a...

Having had a bit of a rant about gratitude the other day, today I'm clearly in a better mood, because I'm doing one of the posts I missed out in last year's gratitude challenge . Today I'm talking about my job. For the last ten years, my job was being a full time Mum. That was what worked best for our family. This year my youngest child started school and that changed. After 3pm my kids are still my top priority, but while they're at school, I get to focus on other stuff. That has been overwhelming. This six hours a day between 9am and 3pm seemed to stretch ahead of me, full of boundless possibilities.  But then reality struck. There are never enough hours in the day. I started doing all the stuff I'd not had time for - more writing, more crafting, more photos... and I didn't manage to finish anything. But, you know, that's OK. I don't have to do all the things. Having the chance to do more has enabled me to categorise... Making stu...

I wrote this post before... and then I decided to use the Blogger app again, and lost half of it. Last time I used the Blogger app, the same thing happened, but that time after a lot of digging, I was able to resurrect my work. This time it's gone.  And so's the Blogger app. UN-IN-STALL. And with the mood I'm in I'm not sure I can be bothered to do it again. Meh. Well, maybe. OK, I'll do it, but I'm going to change my favourites. Today, once again, I'm sharing my top 10 favourite fictional characters (favourites for various reasons, which I've explained below. I'm hoping you'll return the favour and share your ten favourite fictional characters. Here's mine, in no particular order: Izzy is on the left. This pic is taken from here 1. Izzy Reubens (from Love and Rockets by the Hernandez Brothers). I love Izzy, I would still like to look like her. She is also gloriously tragic and broken, furious, and demonic. The Love...

In these days of social media, we're sending less letters to each other.  But not to worry.  We're keeping the Royal Mail alive delivering our online shopping. Thanks to Dave and Neil for this pic of teenage me Teenage me wrote a lot of letters.  I wrote poetry too.  It was all rather heartfelt I'm afraid. Desperately worried about talking to actual human beings, and hiding all my fear in a shroud of Goth, I put an advert in Raw magazine for penpals. I suspect some of the people who responded weren't looking for penpals. Anyhow, I ended up writing to lots of young men, most of whom were not in prison.  It was brilliant.   Most of them sent me compilation tapes (not that that ages me at all), and pictures of themselves.  There was one who sent a picture of himself in a tent, wearing a sleeping bag.  All long hair and cheeky monkey.  There was one who said he'd pop round when he got out of prison - my Mum wasn't keen.  The...