Learning Experience (by sarah)

So yesterday I did the village craft fayre all profits were for charity and yet it was the worst one I have ever done. It was slow - all of them are being slow at the moment but something else was going on, people were still buying the odd bit from the other stalls. Now I had Little Books of Poetry and art prints for sale rather than my normal stuff (which I'd given up as it wasn't selling) but it was not that change that was the issue, others were selling prints.

I watched the girl across from me sell pretty much all of her hare prints. They were lovely and she was lovely but I find that sort of thing boring especially since moving here to the Cotswolds as there are hare pictures EVERYWHERE. But people bought those. (And I bought some of her buttons as I loved the style she had done on them but the ones I liked were the ones that were left on her stall at the end).

People bought chutneys that I would never buy as I make my own and they bought ceramics and they bought fluffy hedgehogs from the hedgehog hospital stall but I sold one little book and that was to somebody who already had one. My science-art prints were looked on in horror by some with comments about them being creepy or scary. And then when asked what the actual pictures were done in I got sneers over 'fine liner' and as for my felt tip pictures such as Creativity and The Little Book illustrations... people kept asking if they were Jean's work.

And yes I have imitated children's drawings for the The Little Books but not drawn them childishly. The cat in the christmas tree was harder to draw than my space montage. I didn't think I really cared about what people thought of my art anymore but having it thought of as something a child could do upset me - this is in contrast with the reaction I had at the Tate Modern to a book that entitled Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That. My objection to it was that it felt children could not think the deep thoughts behind the art and yet I know Jean can and she had already won prizes for art works by the time she was five - the issue is that she does not yet have the dexterity and refinement for the finished piece but the ideas, the concepts are there.

To be fair it was said by people who know Jean but still...

I would feel completely crushed except two things came out of this a) I came to the conclusion that I am not mainstream, I can do fine art I choose not to I have my own style and yes it is not most peoples thing, b) Kids picked up the Little Book and read them avidly - the target audience loves them but unfortunately they do not have the ability to buy things themselves it is the parents who need to do that. So now the problem is how to get them to buy rather than the style of the book being wrong. I also ended up letting kids colour in my trilobite prints that went wrong at the printers - these are just line art and it was a keep my kids occupied thing but Jean's friends kept coming and joining and in the end I ran out of them! This has given me the want to produce a colouring book.

I also met some amazing artists, only one of which had a website but I think they live next do to each other.

I loved her camera man!

The other issue is that I need to make sure that people know the business cards are for taken as I had a number of people try to buy them! Go Moo.com.

The Little Book of Festive Poetry (by sarah)

So I am taking along copies of The Little Book of Festive Poetry to the Cranham Craft Fayre tomorrow! I will sign them if asked and profit goes to buy the school new books for their library. Its on from 10 - 4 and I will also have copies of Running to Stand Still an audio play by Barnaby Eaton-Jones to raise money for ME research and awareness.

There will also be my poetry cards and some prints of my art work.

Of Chocolate and Art (by sarah)

Tuesday Morning we went for a stroll around various bits of London on the way to Paul A. Youngs Fine Chocolates in The Royal Exchange. I have to say that a) I was surprised the Royal Exchange was a shopping centre and not a bank or something and also it was quiet boring as shopping districts go but there was lots of pretty buildings and statues around it to photograph.

The Chocolate Shop itself was something else! I was could have just spent all afternoon photographing the chocolates to be honest! Plus the shops were obviously designed with me in mind - see even the bags are purple and the boxes tied up with little purple ribbons - tell me why there is not one of these in Cheltenham? Next to the Cheese Works would be best - just saying.

I may have ended up with a book on cooking with and making chocolate etc....

Alaric is going to try and get it signed for me at some point 🙂 I'd really wanted to go and look in the kitchens or do the tempering course but when we looked they seemed to only be for Chocolate Week 🙁 But I have coffee beans covered in chocolate - t my mind there is slightly too much chocolate on the bean but it is a lovely roast! Alaric got a Marmite bar. The chocolate still contains soya lectin unfortunatly so I can't exactly eat a tonne of it - but then shouldn't really anyway 🙂

I then took more pictures of London 🙂

We headed over to the Institute of Contemporary Arts to have lunch and meet a friend. This statue was on the way and is of Uri the first man in Orbit!

I didn't even know the ICA existed!

Lunch was veggi curry of butternut squash and chick peas for Al and tarragon chicken with mushrooms for me 🙂

It was really tasty!

We looked around some of the exhibits the main one was The House to Die In which had a large narcotices theme running through it though I thought the structures looked like space ships. We found the perfect present for mum but had fortunatly had already gotten her a sketch pad as the blanket was £450!

We mainly sat in the coffee shop with all our stuff and wrote things and drew things and designed things and made things.

We had tea and ginger bread men and chatted lots to Dez who I some how failed to get a photo of :/ Though I took this sequence...

Alaric kept moving his eyes about which was funny 🙂

We then headed over to Padington Station to make our journy home - I filled up my dragon note book mostly on this four day adventure 🙂 And I haven't arted Alaric out - I think he almost Artied me out and I've ended up with a set of Tech/Net/Web/Geek tarot cards from the ICA which I love and am going to write so many stories from. Al broke the 10K barrier on his novel and me the 40K barrier which is just fantastic

Polyps Together the Colony Unitied 🙂

Of Biopsies and Dreams and 5 Dimensional Poetry (by sarah)

Today I went to the Drs for my biopsies and de/re-coiling and a chat but unfortunatly the chat took up too much of the time - what with the fact I've had a biopsy that showed polyps not being in their records for me etc... But I am actually feeling alot happier about the whole thing after the chat - I've signed the consent forms and have another appointment when it will all happen and have the good news that the swabs were all negative drastically reducing the chances of nasty things like pelvic infections.

I had to go in with out Alaric as the baby was being full of beans and as always I found it difficult to get the words out to the Dr. It's like my brain goes - ARG! A doctor!

I'm going to have another coil put back in as it is pretty much the only option open to me to thin the womb lining down and having looked at family history it seems the best course of action. Unless something happens like perforiation or the biopsies show something nasty up all this should not have an impact on my fertility. But due to the thickness I am looking at a good long stint of bleeding once the coil is put in (hopefully in the right place this time). So I maybe going onto the pill aswell initially to reduce just how much it will bleed.

The coil is going in specifically to thin the womb lining - I hope it works but I have to wait a month for this next bit due to the over capacity nature of the Drs Surgery.

So that is that and then there is my dream!

Last night I had a dream in which I had made this poetry book out of fabric and lace and different textures. It was a textiles visual poem but more than that - it had my written poetry in and the words actually spoke, the words were woven in and around the substance of the book and the substance of the book told it's own story as did the type and placement of the letters - it was a bueatiful thing.

And then David Tennant (spiky haired Dr Who) appeared and he looked at this textile book and was in love with it and the power of my words and he wanted me to write Dr Who episodes with Neil Giamon. He was convinced that anyone who could produce such a book as that would write amazing Dr Who episodes. In my dream I was embarrased and was trying to explain that I had once been asked to try and write an episode before the new lot started but that I didn't as I thought I had to take into account the film that shall not be named! (This bit actually happened to me whilst I was at Uni but mainly as I was on the right mailing list at the right time).

As I was trying to explain assasins from the future appeared to destroy the book and maybe kill me - I had been encoding the concousness of the universe in the patterns within the book and other pieces of my work - that is why they had such awe and power.

Just as it looked like it was curtains for me Alaric (hubby) appeared and turned out to be an actual Dr Who and defeated the assassins with the gadgets within his coat of many pockets (those of you who know us will be laughing at this bit!).

This was a great dream and I was sad to be rudely awoken from it by Alaric asking where the school uniform for Jeany was this morning.

Now last night I went to sleep mulling over the story line/arch for the series I am currently working on - I plan to write the middle book for NaNoWriMo and I have gotten a long way into the first book of this trilogy. This would sort of explain the book being a code but more than that - I have actually been trying to work out how to make a piece of textile visual poetry since seeing the little knitted bits at the Cheltenham Lit Fest. Also last night just before I went to bed I was noodling around on this blog. Add in the Placebo music and the dream makes a bit more sense.

From this dream I now have a much better idea of what I want to make with regards to my poetry and textiles. And that is 5D textile and wearable electronics highbred of visual, audio and the written word. It is not 4D as though there is a sense of narrative there is no one correct direction of flow. The whole thing can fed back into itself and go round in loops, jump over several pages and so forth. I may have it as a ball book rather than a standard bound tome. It is forming in my mind and it is beuatiful and complex.

Wow! And things I learnt (by sarah)

I had over 100 downloads of my The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry yesterday and lots of lovely feedback - people seem to like the poems and love the illustrations. I am aware that it was basically friends or other writers from various social networks which might explain the lack of any negative feedback.

But I was thinking that I would only get 100 downloads over all and that I would probably be begging people on the 31st to download it to make it up to that number 🙂

I now have a cute vid of me and the girls reading some of the poems.

Mistakes I made - I forgot to sort out the IRC channel, and though I remembered Facebook in both personal, writer and artists page and the event itself, I completely forgot about MySpace. I discovered I didn't really know how to use Google+ Hangouts and that keeping tabs on what I'd posted to which twitter account, linkedIn and FB was a bit of a headache (plus keeping three blogs upto date) - the solution to that is to get around to sorting something like tweetdeck out on this laptop which would allow me to see and post updates to all of them at the same time!

I should have also made more banners in a larger variety of sizes and made sure that my websites could express the example images ok.

Another mistake that I only really discovered this morning is that I run the launch party on British time but I have very few actual readers in the UK. This ment my timezones were out and people arrived on the online stuff after I was asleep 🙁 This ment they missed out on author interaction but all the freebies were still sitting there for them.

Also as I haven't have my laptop for months I had sort of drifted off the radar of all the writing groups and chats and things like that and infact found that less people than normal spoke to me on Facebook yesterday :/ But it went well and I am happy 🙂

Having a few people actually physically here helped 🙂

In the future I think I would combine the virtual launch with the physical especially with The Little Books but I'm not quiet decided on that one yet 🙂 I think a listening party is needed at the bare minimum 😉

Jean and Mary thought it was all great.

The PDF will still be available for free download until the 31st of October. Click the image below to download it 🙂