Shakespearian Mock Tales (by sarah)

Last night we had the second ever Mock Tales - 2 hours of stories and writing creativeness with sticky non-alcoholic cocktails. They were Shakespeare themed as it was his 400th birthday at the weekend 🙂

I did 20+ pages of my comic book script/story board and now know how this story arc ends, Alaric managed 5000 words of our joint novel/series.

There were 3 of us so I was limited as to how many drinks I could make!

Above are Twelfth Night which was minty, Midsummer Nights Dream which was vanillary, The Scottish Drink which was fruity, and The Tempest which was Sugary.

We also had home made Pizza which was dairy and gluten free - Mary had opinions...

I remembered that when I was in secondary school I became obsessed with The Tempest as a story and drew the whole thing as a comic - I wonder if it survives somewhere? I loved the stop motion animations they did of the shakespeare stories I need to try and find them for the girls.

Jean tried a Tempest before she went off to best - she was a little horrified at it's stickiness - she still drank/ate it.

Recipes are being written down for Salaric Cooking before people start prodding again 🙂

A Stranger Dream – Virtual Launch Party (by sarah)

I am a poet, I am an artist, I am many things some of which seem contradictory - after the head bang last year the question of identity reigned large in my vision of self - not just my identity but everybody's and societies reactions to identity issues - so I started working on a series of images.

I was learning how to draw again and the ideas were appearing faster than I could create them, I spent 3 months working on the visuals for A Stranger Dream. And mainly I have had positive feedback though some people do hate the style and that is fine it is stark, it was meant to be.

But what is A Stranger Dream? Well for a start it is not A Stranger Dream it is A Stranger Dream: Love but it's not it is

Love: A Stranger Dream...

or both or neither or something...

It is a non-linear visual poem on identity, gender, our place within family, our concentric non-ecludian intersecting and exclusionary circles of all the cultures of us - it is the distorting mirrors within our own heads - the fitting and the not fitting - the fires within.

I know it doesn't look it but it was a hell of a lot of work.

Then someone said "it says colouring in book to me" and I thought... why not?! I thought people colour to relax, to sort thoughts, to just be themselves and that is fitting - plus colouring in book is on the list of to-dos and I have been producing colouring in sheets for my kids workshops for ages.

So I started by popping the images up as individual sheets for download and colouring - they are still there and they are free.

Then I made ring bound ones at home for shows and events... people far away started asking how they could get hold of them so I have created a colouring in book complete with purple spine and title box because... I am the Purple Poet!!!!

Here is a picture of the spiral bound ones at The True Believers Comic Book Festival earlier this year.

And this weekend (April 22-14 2016) I am having a launch party - sadly I am only running a virtual one but it is going to be epic!!!

I will be pinging around the internet - of course hoping people will buy the book but as I said don't feel you have to because I put the individual sheets out there for free download and I know times are tight (having said that I need to buy more art supplies... to you know produce more art!).

There is a Facebook Event, a Google+ Event, a twitter hashtag # astrangerdream and my patreon account (which will have hidden extras in it for patreons only). There are also the blogs namely this one and Turquoise Monster which is my poetry blog 🙂 So I think that is pretty much everyone covered - I am hoping to do a little film thingy too but we will have to see how the laptop holds up!

The colouring book is already up on Amazon and Book Repository etc... it is appearing as £10 odd - I meant it to be roughly £7 if you've bought the £10 copy let me know as I have a little goody bag to post to you containing some lovely tie-in items 🙂 (yes I am trusting people to be honest here! Thankyou 🙂 )

Oh and there should be a gallery unveiling where people can post pictures of their colouring in - if they wish 🙂

There are going to be give aways but there will also be merch for sale and special offers etc... (sorry guys I would love to give you everything for free but I do need a new computer!).

I am actually stupidly excited about this and am even making myself an outfit out of the art work! The poetry cards have arrived and are beautiful in a way I was not expecting 🙂

Most of all though regardless of weather you buy or take for free or just look - mainly I hope everyone will be enriched by the work itself, it was very important to me whilst creating it. It's kind of an imprint of the soul, maybe a darker one than people would like but it is... something - I'm not quiet sure what.

I hope you will join me for turning the starkness into a rainbow.

Mock Tales (by sarah)

Last night we had the first of what we hope will be a roughly fortnightly event - that can not be set in stone because we are just too busy.

And that is part of why we've set it up - Mock Tales is literally a night of tales and cocktails except there is no alc. this is an important factor as pubs are great but not always productive or helpful for creative works. People work in different ways.

So we created a creative zone of 2 hrs ring fenced for writing projects specifically and made sticky drinks with bits of fruit, gold lead and coconut!

We started by sharing tales with each other (see what I did there!!! SEEEEEE) around the table with a share alike curry. Then we took our second round of drinks into the living room and wrote...

I had plenty of writing stimuli incase people got stuck including a new deck of tarot cards with amazing art work, but as it turned out everyone had their own projects and were typing or scribbling away like mad 🙂

And Alaric broke the 90, 000 word barrier on his novel 😀 This is the novel he's been working on every since our first date really. We got into a conversation and... well discovered we both had a similar world story line mapped out in our heads and that it would be easy to make them be the same story from two points of view. We decided he'd write his bit first but what with me and illness and babies and floods and storms and roofs and so on it has only inched along with a little blast everytime we managed to have a holiday (which has not been every year).

So that is big achievement UNLOCKED 🙂

There was only 3 of us last night and that was fine and great 🙂 I only popped the fact we were doing a mock tales evening up on Facebook on Sunday (I think), which lets face it - is not much warning!

Basically if you are a writer or would like to try and write that book which has been languishing in you, then you are welcome to join us.

Also money!

Ok so Al's new job pays less than the old, it shouldn't be a problem but... for the cost of one drink in the pub I produced:

2 Decadent Coffee Pots (photo above)

2 Raspberry Fizzes (pint glasses and complete with frozen raspberries)

1 Mint Lush

1 Vanilla Lush

1 Vanilla Coke

They tasted as good if not better than the ones in the pubs - to be fair I this only works out cheaper because I have big bulks syrups that I use for my coffees etc... but by amount used the most expensive thing was the silken tofu that I marinated with coffee. And the chocolate was a bonza reduced find which I was very lucky with but even so...

And don't worry these are not instead of Creativi Tea - and yes I know I should organise the Spring one 🙂

Health, Weight and Stuff (by sarah)

So everyone has noticed I've lost weight - and yes I have 4 stone all told except that it's been stuck at 9 and 1/2 since about the summer. I ate loads and didn't have a clue about calories after the head bang but at the same time actually was kind of just randomly loosing weight too - the net result was that though I was eating lots including 3 breakfasts one day if Jean is to believed, I lost half a stone bring me to the 9 and a half. And there I have stayed :/ I put on a quarter of a stone over christmas - I have lost that again - I am still not in my target weight and I still have the dreaded belly flap which is as the Dr warned more flappy than ever.

But that's fine - I am keeping an eye on cals but trying to loose weight via exercise now - my pedometer is bust so no more gaming inspiration and it turns out that I need that as a driving factor 🙁 Due to change with schools and the climbing wall and Al's job there has so far this year been no climbing, swimming or proper running - boo and hiss.

I do however have my exercise bike which I believe is coming up for it's 2nd birthday! It is a recumbant and though I am surprised that people are still commenting on the weight as I haven't actually lost any I probably shouldn't be - the shape of my body has been altering to accomodate the weight lose. This means I get to wear stuff I wore as a teen again - it also means that my bum has less padding so that my legs are now apparently longer and the issue I had with being too short in the leg for the bike is no longer an issue. The upshot of this is that the special chocks my dad made me so I could cycle without damaging my knees had to be taken off the bike!!!

Also I finally reached the 1000 km I was hoping to reach on the dam thing the Christmas after I got it - instead a year later and I missed the christmas deadline again! But completed the challenge on valentines day 🙂

Of course I started a new challenge - a new 1000 km of which I have managed 200 km already 😀 the improvement from when I began on the bike is astronomical - I can easily do 300 cal burns on it now in one sitting! I really like reading whilst cycling or binge watching scifi or fantasy epics/series, it is set up in front of the TV.

Health wise I seem to have a few remnants from the head bang - still hopeful for a full recovery and am working my way through a concept of super better. I have been failing at writing, at blogging but that's ok - I will get there. Yesterday I was at the nuerologists and it was a struggle to do his tests and things like that still make me zonked.

But I played my first game of scrabble Jean beat me 294 to 234 - I think she is one of only 2 people to beat me as an adult the other being my friend Olly who had done stuff like remembering all the two letter words! I was alarmed at how hard it was to play though and that my score was way below 300 I would normally consider a score beneath 350 to be a bit pathetic 🙁

Anyway social board games are good but I have to be gentle, sadly computer games are right out at the moment. I've also set myself the challenge of learning the flute - it's something I've always wanted to do, it's a new skill, uses both hands (I am struggling with my left hand side).

I am water colour painting like a loon and trying to get my pencil sketching back - having issues with faces - if I measure and put guide lines in then it's fine if I don't it's all crooked. I'll get there - setting myself challenges and goals and trying to complete things and put them out there for people (I did set up a Patreon account for those who would like to help me in this).

For the first time since 1998, I’m unemployed and looking for work! (by alaric)

I'm really quite happy about this. We have enough money to live off of for several months, so I can afford to look around for a good job, and take a long-wished-for break to relax and work on my projects.

I'm going to:

1. Clear out a load of domestic TODOs that have been hanging over me. I've axed my "urgent" TODO list in just a few days.
2. Sort out my workshop/home office: fixing up the nasty power cabling, finishing my workbench, putting up shelves so everything's not all over the floor, that sort of thing.
3. Finish the home mainframe (no family should be without one!) off and get everything migrated to run on it.
4. Put out the next release of Ugarit, with performance improvements, replicated storage, and an improved archive mode interface.
5. Finish and publish a pencil-and-paper role playing game I started writing in 1994. Deary me, has it been that long? It's a wonder that I still have it, as it was on a FAT16 filesystem under MS-DOS when it was first written.
6. Do some work on that MMORPG I designed in the late 1990s and never got around to implementing more than basic proofs-of-concept of. I don't think I'll have a fully working game any time soon, but I think that if I have some uninterrupted time, I could get it to a level that I can then hack on in odd bits of time thereafter. I've just found getting started daunting when I've only had the odd half-day here and there to work on it; other projects have offered more immediate rewards...

However, I am looking for a job, to start around the end of March / start of April - two months' break should be enough fun for me! So if you know of anything I (CV here) might be interested in, given that I'm based in Gloucester (UK), please do drop me a message!