Child Benifit 0.o (by sarah)

Thankyou government for giving me a mini mental break down tonight - the issue is not that our Child Benefit is being taken away, as we no longer need it for food (which we have in the past) but more the complete lack of notice and the only reason we knew was a random thing on the radio sending me into a panic.

So now I have completely mis-budgeted for the year, feel like a complete waste of space, had a worse panic attack that I would be done for fraud as I have no idea what my this and that numbers are and there is now not time to find out.

Another issue is that I now can't afford the child care (that is already arranged) that I need to launch me back into the work space. Poor Jean overheard things and came down to ask if she would still be able to do Ju Jistu and the answer is I don't know.

Alaric has had to calm me down and help me with the form and site as it was the classic dyslexic's nightmare. Now I am sitting here with my decaf coffee, sense of nonentitlement and pain from yet another balls up nhs palava - a cardboard box has been destroyed whilst a string of bad words such as 'I hate F..... Politicians and cr.. how are x, y and z going to manage - they need it for their rent'

I have never before declared that I hate a section of society and this makes me feel bad and worse. 2013 was going well but to be honest tonight I feel like I've just had the rug pulled out from underneath me.

Merry Christmas On And All (by sarah)

Merry Christmas on this dreary Christmas Eve!

Here at the Snell-Pym Household we are recovering from mulled wine and minced pies with friends and are about to under take some lovely craft activities followed by christmas food prep!

Until then here is the outline of the Cathedral I have drawn for Percival's Christmas Wish. I have only so far managed two complete drawings both in outline but will attempt some more later on! I have a confession - I'm not very good at drawing buildings - I've never really done it to be honest and it took a lot longer than expected and I'm not entirely happy with it but it will none the less be going up on Wiggly Pets with the story a little later today!

The Dawn of a New Age (by sarah)

The Dawn of a New Age marked by Solstice Light - the Singularity is coming.

On this the darkest day of the year - sunlight is streaming in through the windows and through my garden crystals as seen above. I am steaming forward with my projects whilst welding rods are baked in the oven instead of Christmas Cake but then I have made chocolate christmas trees and finished the most complicated out line sketch of Percival's Christmas Wish. Life is odd but good and with the production of the DOOMSDAY COLLECTION it led me to think that yes this is a dawn of an age one in which I hope our species comes into it's own and stops killing and hurting one and other.

Technology and a greater understanding of the world and universe we live in, more minds coming on line via cheap tech who can interact and learn, and talk and solve problems. Give a person a loaf and you feed them for a day, give them farming tools and they feed themselves until the next drought, give them a cheap knock off i-pad and watch them find their own solutions.

It is already happening, even when the tech is in different languages and given to kids who can't read, within weeks they are making their own improvements to the tech. With such tools they can find the info they need to drag themselves and those around them out of poverty.

I am... Hopeful.

The Homeless Babies (by sarah)

Today I am doing the front cover of Percival's Christmas Wish as part of my Draw-a-thon to raise money for Shelter. I have only been sponsored £10 so far but that is half a family who wont end up homeless in the first place! So it is all good though making it a whole family by the end of today would be brilliant 🙂

In total I need to draw 14-16 pictures before Christmas Eve! I am currently on number three which is the hardest of the pictures as it is the one for the cover as well. So far all pictures are only sketches and some of that quiet rough but I am going out later to pick up some new colouring pencils as mine were damaged in the move.

I would like to just emphasis that there are over 75, 000 homeless children this christmas the likes of which has not been seen since the 60's! I know it seems like a sea of faceless people but it's not - those people are people like you and me, things can change so quickly where finances are concerned.

Also last week a baby bunny was dumped outside a pet shop near us in a cardboard box, which we said we would take if it was adopted by yesterday - it hadn't been adopted so we now have a new addition to the Snell-Pym zoo - Fluffy Obsidian!

Guess which part of the name was mine and which bit was Jean's? :/

She reckons that rock names are too hard in that they are not fluffy and they are hard to say! She gave Alaric the option of Hedgwig or Fluffy for the rabbit and he opted for Fluffy as a bunny isn't an owl and though it is also not a three headed dog it's genetics would be closer to that than a bird.

If we could adopt the homeless kids we would but they don't need adopting - they need to be with their families and taking them away would be taking us straight back to the horrors of Victoriana, therefore we help the whole family. I am really hoping that someone will donate another £10 so that we have helped one whole family instead of just half.

Here is a donate button.

And thankyou so much for the donation/sponsor that I have already received 🙂 The money goes directly to Shelter so they can start doing stuff straight away 🙂

Fandom (by sarah)

I have a couple of hundred fans, this is odd, it's weird in some cases and has already led a few years ago to issues that was quiet scary. I refused to meet up with someone as I felt they were being too fanatical and this resulted in a hate campaign against me. This was resolved mainly due to the behaviour being against the law.

This has not put me off of having fans as most of them are lovely and more so a lot of them have become friends in one form or another and with some of them the fandom is mutual. Add in social media and the fact I take part in various author/writers chats and I end up talking to C J Cherryh and Anne Rice and the like in recipricol conversations. The same goes for the science writers and artists and in some cases bands.

Now I have a mix on my various feds of people I know and people I don't but who's work I like - people I suppose I am a fan of. Mainly it is people I find inspiring or interesting. But I don't tend to follow the fashions as it were so I don't really know who is famous and who is not. I have countless stories of me turning down going for noodles with someone who was going of to have lunch with Nick Cave and of informing Cory Doctorow that his coat was really zippy and that I liked it. Al has tried to tell writers that I am a writer too and I have just shrugged and said things like, 'yeah but its only scifi and horror and a bit of poetry', and this years piece de la resistance turning down the chance to read my poetry out to a room full of important and famous people as I had Jean with me and she needed to be in bed early as she had a jujistu tournament the next day - with hind sight this are miss chances but I just don't really segment people in my head.

I am my own worst enermy and have even suffered the 'oh my god I have fans and they expect the same stuff from me all the time... I can't do that!' when I first found out people were reading this blog I struggled to continue and by people I don't mean our friends we'd told about it but all the others who had found us and found what we had to say interesting. And then I found the oppersite, the feeling that I was only writing to audience and that I could not be true to self as it might offend or bore or worse upset my mother. These were the demons of fandom as I saw it.

After the stalker incident I did worry and I stepped back a bit from public stuff both real life and electronic as I was realised that I feared becoming too famous (I know it's unlikely that that would happen and that it is probably arrogent to think that way but I am giving you my thought process here). How much did I want to be in the public eye etc... but I couldn't not write so I tried a psydonyme and that worked and got me back on track.

Part of me is always nervous of being 'fan-like' about people who's work I admire, having had the stalker, and others who hate my stuff and yet others who think everything I do is amazing and just stare at me waiting for me to say something. And then I realised that I am in this sort of bizar state of mind where the whole world is a sort of extended village for me. Social media has shrunk things but so has the activities I take part in in the physical world. I go and see my friends play and I tweet them to say I enjoyed it as I had to leave before the end of the concert to catch the train and then I go and see Gotye and do pretty much exactly the same thing.

I just find the concept of fans and fandom and fanfic and everything a bit strange even though I am part of it from two different sides.

Of course being shy means that I get as nervous over saying hello to the girl who had organised the charity performance I did Thursday night as I did when meeting members of the Royal Family.

This is something I puzzled over after the weekend as well, I get prizes for my art, I get them shown at International Conferences and so on and yet in a village that I lived in for 6 years... meh. It's like the issue of me being invited to read in Oxford and Bristol and so on and yet the towns near me.... I get completely over looked. Part of it is going to be that I am not main stream so I suppose that I am not in an area with enough population density to have people who appreciate my work.