Puppets and Books and Language – Oh My! (by sarah)
First off I am running a kids workshop at The Cheltenham Poetry Festival, it costs £5 and there will be stickers and monsters 🙂
I've been stupidly busy lately:
Today I am getting ready to run a workshop on puppetry, for this I am mainly using my Cuddly Science Crew plus a dragon and rabbit that were bought and not made and designed by my mum and me. I am hoping the Ada puppet is going to get lots of outings this year as it's Ada's 200th birthday so she needs to have outings really.
Ada has already had a couple of outings this year - including Science Show Off which was videoed - this was my grown up only show so the vid is not suitable for children!
My performance is still not top notch but when I think of my first Science Show Off verses this one there is just such a huge difference!
In part that is due to the lovely Joy-Amy Wigman and her Cuffing It course that I did in the autumn. Realising that I am still so damn shy and that my stage craft really needs to be better if I am going to be taking Cuddly Science out more, I went for the thing that scares me most - Improve Comedy.
The course was a huge confidence booster and has just given me a few little extras to fill gaps with extra when I forget words or can't read my script (yes I should have had it memorised but I didn't!).
Regardless of my performance everyone seems to love the puppets - they really really do and the responses on twitter when ever she appears is amazing 🙂
Me and mum are planning on starting on the next five puppets over the summer even though I failed to get the funding I hoped would pay for their construction.
But enough about puppets!
I am also in a Dr Who anthology called You and Who Contact Has Been Made Vol 2 😀 And it is all shiny and new and released 🙂
Now it's not Dr Who stories but more essays on how Dr has impacted on mine and the other writers lives. I really enjoyed writing this and it is the beginnings of what I call my Coop de Who. After all if I don't start writing stuff about Dr Who how can I write an episode/series with Alaric as the Dr (or maybe the evil mastermind villian)?
I failed to get the traditional publishing stuff I was aiming for in more mainstream areas, that some of you knew I was working on at the beginning of the year. There were several, they all fell through, was I dishearted? Yes of course, but there has been plenty of other stuff to snap me out of it.
This morning I wrote a short story of 2000 words and this month I am working hard on scripting and/or story boarding a comic book series based in my Punk Universe - now even Alaric is nagging me to get the stuff out there and soon there will be a novel cover release I promise.
I'm in a submission fug, I keep meaning to and then forgetting and that can not continue - it's an issue I have with rejection and it is a cycle I can't afford to get into. Fortunately the script writing challenge has helped somewhat and I even had Neil Gaiman respond to a tweet question on comic book writing and that was most helpful.
Part of the issue is that I get Monday's and Friday's to do child free work - until 3 pm. They are also the days I have for Drs Appointments, meetings and driving lessons plus I find I just have to blitz the house a bit to keep ontop of the weekly mess/make sure I'm not hunched over the desk all day.
This is actually working really well but there I was fretting that I had only done 15 pages on my one completely clear lets sit down and do it day. Turns out Neil only did 4 pages on a good day, this made me feel a lot better and then conversely worried about quality - how had I whacked out that number of pages? They must all been ....meh - I'd done a lot of research during the day as well.
But then as Mary helped me garden and clean and count chickens and Jean helped me build cold frames and there were jujistu and climbing clubs and muddy shoes lost in bogs and baths and nitt treatments I began to think - no this is just how I've found a way to work. I am still working on my art and stories and science when I am not at a desk. It tumbles around my head and sometimes I have to text Al the idea I've had and sometimes I let it sink to see if it will bob up to the surface again.
So walking Mary her toddler climbing I came up with the premiss for the story I wrote this morning. Yesterday she was a bit under the weather so I did stuff with her until about lunch time when she had a little bit of a temperature and I calpolled her and put a film on and just sat next to her with my sketch pad working on the comic book. I got 20 pages done - I got 20 pages done because a) the girls like my stories and b) I'd already prepared dinner ready for the oven and c) I'd spent the 3 days since Monday thinking and planning how it was all going to go and looking up little bits of info on my phone and discovering I have voice memo!
And that leaves language - Mary is being brought up as bilingual with lojban - this is known to my friends as geek esperanto and is a constructed language made using mathematical logic to form the grammatical structure and waitings of sounds from the 6 most widely spoken languages. Alaric is learning it, he was not far enough ahead with it to teach Jean from birth but he was for Mary.
Jean is picking it up too, I am picking it up and Jean's friends are picking it up though this has lead to the concept of Mary Lojban. Jeany was asked by one of her teachers if it was a real language and wanted to take some info into school on it. Ages ago now I was working on Mother Lang and her farm which includes a Lojbani Chicken. The girls love these characters so we threw together a little introduction explaining what a natural and a constructed language is and what types of constructed languages there are.
I popped Mother Lang on the front and Lojbani Chicken on the back saying {shoi} and Jean took it shyly to school whilst moaning that it is not actually a language prima.
We will pop the actual leaflet up too - it is currently just in English. I need to get on and do some more stuff with this as Mary is learning fast - Mother Lang was drawn to teach Mary the lojban and English for things like eyes and nose. Al is nagging me to get the colour flash cards made but we had a linguistics disagreement on what a colour actually is (only in my household!).
So whilst I actually go and do some work - here is a cute video of Mary being lojban.
Uncategorised | sarah | 
Fri 17th Apr 2015 1:11 pm
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