New Camera! (by sarah)

I hunted around and got this camera as a late birthday present - my family gave me some money and so did Alaric (mainly I think out of desperation as I kept stealing his phone). It was in a sale so was £40 cheaper than it should have been and infact still is on the manufactures website - this allowed me to get a case for it as well and stick to my £100 budget. It's 14 mega pixels - there was a lovely 16 mega pixel camera but it was only reduced by £10 and I would have had no money for a case.

The above was medium light levels with no flash - it would have come out very dark with the previous camera and grainy.

I am ecstatic with it and am driving everyone potty with it - Jean is now ignoring it!

One of the first things I did was check the zoom and light levels.

The shape of the camera makes it easier to hold without shaking which was a big problem with previous cameras - I am having the problem of zooming in too far and I am still adjusting to focal lengths etc... so am getting a few blurry duff pics. Of course I have not yet read the manual and am 'winging' it which is not the best way but a very Sarah way!

Ruskin’s Mill Writer’s Retreat (by sarah)

Today I went to my second one day writer's retreat - this time at Ruskin Mill near Nailsworth. It was organised by the same people Writing Space Stroud and was once again lovely.

It was raining and I currently do not have a camera which is why there are not a hundred photos of chickens with feather flares and light sculptures on the water.

This time it was £30 instead of £20 but included a yummy lunch in the cafe.

I met more writers and had great conversations over tea and cake and lunch between mad sprees of writing. I got 9000 words of The Awakening written today which is amazing even if it does mean the novel is going to be much longer than I was expecting :/

I will finish off the last 1000 words before bed to round it up to 10K.

Once home Alaric made a lovely dinner whilst I made some visual poetry booklets out of card, pen, and old writing magazines. This lead to a fun discovery of using someone I know's story title as part of it 🙂

Poets Work (by sarah)

Saturday I went into Cheltenham to meet friends and write and what have you. It was great to see my friend Andy again who I orginally met at a writing group in Cheltenham back before the floods!

The postcards and stickers of my art work arrived for moo so I gave him some one of each which he seemed really happy about 🙂 He also told me I should be selling them.

Somehow three hours disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Then I went on to Centre Arts who are running an Arts Cafe on Saturday afternoons. I managed to fall off my chair - a prelude to passing out and stuff later in the day which was unfortunate but I recovered and they were very helpful and understanding as always!

I felt stupid but a cup of coffee and several poems inspired by the artwork later, I was having a fine chat with an artist/nurse who was in there drawing away.

I also managed to talk to my friend who runs the place about the Science-Art Exhibition we will be running in March which is very exciting and lots of organising needs to be done!

Alaric was concerned about me so bought me a four pack of irish stout which did seem to really help - he then made me lots of green veg for dinner and we discussed the bleeding problem :/

I've also had a neck spasm for the last week or so which is making typing and drawing and reading hard but I am steadily working my way through it. On the plus side the continual headache I've had for the past year seems to have disappeared with the coil 🙂

I finished the day off by sorted out my poetry mug - I love this cupcake tea cupe 🙂

It may not sound like work but with the aememia acting up it was very exhausting for me but it was definately worth it. I'd been in on Tuesday as well to watch a talk about The European History of Warewolves which was interesting by (Deborah Hyde)[http://www.jourdemayne.com/about-jourdemayne].

It was a narrowed down talk so covered a later bit of history than what I have been researching lately. However it did tie in with the time period of the first Punk storyline and I'd very much want to add in the warewolf, witch and vampire myths on top but within the context of actual history, science and the storyline itself. Well that was really the point of going!

From a writing point of view Tuesday was a very productive day - I spent it trying to get an overview of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Tudor period but completely side tracked myself in disease history (as you do!).

This was all whilst cuddling Mary who was in one of her slightly grumpy I am teething moods so wouldn't be put down.

After the warewolf talk, I wrote a horror story based on real accounts of the Black Death - I should have been sleeping but had brain over load!

I freaked myself out slightly and ended up having to wake Alaric up - this is a good sign though - I feel my best horror stuff is written in this way - though poor Al was not amused!

I have a story idea that came out of the talk too but it is very disturbing so can't face writing it yet. It maybe shelved until GothNoWriMo or something.

The talk was good in another way though - I realised as I miss people who think and know stuff. I was sitting there and some makes a comment about us and chimpanzees and I know it's wrong and before I can say anything someone else corrects the guy! It just sort of felt like uni again and I have always really missed that atmosphere.

Writing wise this month is being hectic with me running WoPoWriMo too and I really want to donate some more poems to charity cause - one for the disabled and their fight at the moment and some for Freedom - a book shop that was fire bombed in London on Friday.

So I am chugging along with the work thing - never as fast as I want but little bits will build-up.

Writing and Stuff… (by sarah)

I did a lot of things last year like readings and festivals and what not but I realised I'd lost the time to actually write and draw. And that all my blogs and sites were in various states of disrepair. Some never recovered from the flood in 2007, some didn't recover from periods of no internet that subsequently happen, the last of which was me tipping coffee on myself and the laptop at the end of August.

There is also the issue that for 18 months after having a baby I just appear to function well below par and everything just takes me longer to do.

But I decided to try and get my writing stuff back on track - I submitted about 6 pieces of work last year, 3 got published, one won a prize and two got rejected and that was it.

SO I thought I spent last year trying to finish old projects off and barely dented the list but I discovered just how much material I really do have! It's time to start submitting.

But during November whilst sitting at the first NaNoWriMo meet I realised I've forgotten stuff I did know and the industry has moved on! I haven't really had the time or ability to focus on trying to get things published since before the flood - just a few bits a year basically. Main thing that has happened is I have some how ended up taking off as a crafter and poet for events with the help of twitter and two not well kept blogs, plus being the sort of person who ends up in conversations with people.

I tried not to just 'disappear' whilst pregnant which was excessively hard as we had no car until just before the birth and the last trimester I could not get up to the bus stop even using the crutches.

So I thought it's time to get organised and made lists and lists and more lists and Al got me a wall planner which we've put up in the library and I ordered Writer's Magazine and News again and got a free Writers and Artists Yearbook with it which was something I was aiming to get anyway - the last one was 2007 and the Childrens 2008 (again basically pre-flood).

My main plan came out something like this:

1) Get Alaric to extract that novel I wrote for the Terry Pratchett Prize a few years ago (the laptop died just as I was editing the 86 000 word story). Finish editing it, send it to friends to edit and send to publishers.

2) Type up The Drs Wife (everytime I start trying to do this something happens like the house gets flooded, or the computer dies (we are talking multiple computers here). Once typed up, edit, send to friends to edit and send to agents.

3) Sort out the 5-8 books (not sure how fat to make them!) that I have written for Punk's universe - sort their blogs, edit, send to friends to edit, do art work and self publish - but possibly not before I have finished each set of books (there are two series now set in the Punk's Universe The Punk and The Godex not to mention the graphic novel and film script both of which aren't finished).

4) Submit 10 or more pieces of shorter works, flash fiction, shorts and poetry a month.

5) Spend up to £10 on competitions a month.

6) Finish illustrations and submit various children's books via agents and direct (depending on how long an agent getting takes).

7) Sort out The Little Books of Poetry - these are children's books but there is no point in trying traditional publishing for children's rhyme - they don't like it as it isn't easy to translate nicely. Not a problem - The Little Book of Spoogy was downloaded over 100 times when I put it out there for free for three days and once I took it down people came and asked when it would be avalible again 🙂 There are a lot of these books with the poems already written and I have been recording audio and stuff too.

8) Sort out blogs.

9) Apply for Science writing stuff.

10) Create several arts, crafts and cooking books (both self pub and traditional depending on if anyone will take the brief) plus tutorials for etsy.

And it is sort of working - I have submitted 6 things so far this month and yes I realise I am running out of month but it is a start. I have signed up for another days writing retreat to help me finish the last bit of The Godex Trilogy and we scheduled Alaric time to extract my novel.

And that is were it has gone a bit wrong 🙁

We assumed that it was the bit were the power jacked into the laptop that was broken as it was on the wonk anyway but when he tried to do his technical wizardy it failed 🙁 So we have a quote for almost £200 from a data recovery company we know are good and are waiting to try something else a friend has suggested before we try and find that sort of cash 🙁

Now I hear you all crying - why didn't you back it up?

Well the laptop was on it's last legs so the port to plug a USB key in would no longer work. So what I was doing was a) printing out a hard copy just incase and b) emailing it too myself and c) Al was backing it up with his tech voodoo.

But...

This didn't happen for the novel as it was written incredibly quickly as the deadline loomed and I really really would have loved The Terry Pratchett Prize - out of all the things you can win for writing I wanted that one and it was the first time it had been avalible - so I wrote like a mad thing.

It was written at a point when we had no internet so I could not email to myself - we had no car and no spare cash for bus fairs and then the food to use free restaurant WiFi. Our printer died as I tried to print out the first couple of chapters and we had no way to replace it and Al was away doing lots of extra work trying to get our finances back on track so... he didn't get to do it's latest back up.

And WHAM! Me the paranoid saver lost her novel and didn't get to enter the comp and now may even have lost that novel and some photos for ever.

I now have a dongle, I am now in walking distance of a library etc... but I wasn't then. But this has put a crimp on my great plans for this year.

On the other hand I have been updating my blogs and have all the hand written story and notes and the printed back up for The Drs Wife. It will just take me longer to actually get something out there that is all - also part of me is worried that if I start working on that novel again something will happen to stop all my writing in it's tracks again. I'm still going to try though because I sort of don't know how to give up.

Oh and as a cross-genre generalist I am screwed for making money but I have found were I am going wrong with the drawings - I'm not an artist! I'm an illustrator and cartoonist! Dad will be proud - cartooning is something he should have done! Much better than that arty stuff.

Stegi the Fimosaur (by sarah)

I ment to mention before that I have an image/picture/photo thingy in the Stegosaur Gallery over on Art evolved 🙂 I only managed to submit two pictures last year. I normally draw my entries but have been known to enter cakes, textiles pieces and fimo - this is an image of one of my fimosaurs. I made these to show to a museum who decided they did not want to run them in the gift shop, so I have taken photos of them in the hope of turning them into something else - maybe a web comic or some such.

So I am very happy to have it on Art Evolved.