Shrivelled Heart

It’s dark in my heart

It’s cold in my heart

It’s tight in my heart

There’s no room

All the wounds have made it shrink

Shrink so tight

I don’t think there’s room for love

I don’t think I’ll love again

Because my heart was torn out

It was squeezed so tightly

It dried and shrivelled when he took it

And tried to break it in half

But my heart is made of some kind of rubber

But it is bruised and beyond recover

Will I ever love again?

Will my heart ever mend?

Who knows…

Who knows…

Maybe if life’s clown watered my heart it will beat again?

Maybe if I found someone it will love again…

But I don’t know

Who knows…

Who knows…

Coming from that horrible place again, from 2004 – seriously for four years I couldn’t see myself in a relationship with a man again, not a normal one and to be honest, I know it sounds weird – but going into the BDSM lifestyle actually helped me recover a lot!

I owe my ability to love and trust again due to the guys I met during that time!

But I love cautiously and when I can sniff bad memories resurfacing in someone new, I can be abrupt with them.  Be warned!

I don’t ever want to be in the place again.

The only thing I have ever truly wanted in my life was to be loved and cherished without any indication that the feelings are fake from the other person – a genuine person who loves me for who I am.  Someone who likes snuggles from time to time, someone who cares enough to ask how I think and feel about things – someone I can trust enough to love back and when I love, I love deeply and I am a nurturer – I live to nurture others. 

I know a lot of guys have got a problem with the nurturing type – “hey, I am not your baby” kind of thing – but I can’t help it, I show my love by hugging, talking a lot and asking how you are, do you want to talk about things?  Get things off your chest, unburden yourself by being open with me… but people I’ve experienced don’t like that kind of thing and I sit back and wonder – well then… what is love?

To me love is where you can be totally yourself with the person you are with, without the fear of being judged and criticised – yes constructive criticism is good a little conflict is healthy, but you know what I mean right?  You don’t actually want those criticisms to hurt the person you love, just guide them gently… yes?  Hey you really should think about so and so, it’s not healthy to do so and so… that’s gentle – not words like hey stop scarfing all the pizza or you’re gonna get fatter gordita and if that happens I’ll dump you!

To me past is past, I don’t like bad past being bought up as a weapon when in relationships – to me that’s love, love contains forgiveness and if you forgive someone in one moment and then weeks later remind them of their failure a few weeks back, you haven’t truly forgiven them!

But that’s me.

Yes, OK, some of my poems seem like I haven’t let go of my past, but sometimes as stupid as it sounds it’s OK to relive those places if you are a creative person, because creativity is more appreciated when it comes from a place of authenticity – when you know the writer has experienced that, you know they know what they are on about… you get me?

This is why, when I was in college a few years back I did so well in drama classes, because I can make myself relieve those memories so authentically, that I can bring myself back to the place I need to be when acting.  But I had no support back then about going into theatre like I was cajoled into doing by my college friends, outside of college. 

Except of course my oldest brother, he did try to encourage that, but when you have a mother who tells you, you’re not doing that and won’t let me go out to do it, what can I do?

My brother took me to the theatre once a month over a four year period, I enjoyed it a lot and I miss it a lot since moving in with Paul.  I made friends at the theatre and they asked me to join them behind the scenes and learn about it, when they knew I did drama as a side subject in college – but I told them I couldn’t do that, because my mother would have a problem with it.

In fact, most of my life before I moved in with Paul, my mother was bought up a lot socially – because she had such tight control over my life.  I couldn’t even say, yeah, sure I’ll go to the pub and have lunch with you at lunch break to my colleagues – because my mum had set me a packed lunch and if that wasn’t eaten she’d be furious, but that’s not all – she’d sometimes sit in her car outside my place of work anticipating things like this might happen.

I know it sounds unbelievable, but really, she was that controlling!

But anyway – she is out of my life now and I have friends who know about my past, the drama classes and they know that my son goes to the performing arts school up here and they are trying to talk me into approaching the Rugby Theatre, even if it’s just helping to make props – just to get me out a bit more, now I am getting a little better again.

I don’t want to act though, not now, I am not body confident.  But prop making would be fun!

Henry is getting into the idea of acting a lot now, because he is interested in playing in Matilda.  The school is helping him a lot with that and recently an actress has seen Henry and has suggested, depending on Henry’s audition next year, that she may actually sponsor Henry for outside of school drama classes to help him along as she runs a charity for underprivileged children who is interested in the craft. 

Henry also wanted to be a child model, but Paul won’t support that as he is afraid it will interfere with his schooling.

Henry is very upset about that, because Henry wants to work ASAP and he keeps asking – he knows I will support him, but he also knows I won’t do anything behind Paul’s back.

Thanks for reading…

Being the balance

I will only talk about the progresses of my novels from now onwards and I am not going to reveal as much as I have over the past few months, because of good advice from a published author friend of mine.

I will go back to my outlines I used to do a year ago, I won’t go into depths about the inspiration and so forth as it is too revealing and some people have rightly guessed what some of my work might be before it has even got out there and has played with the ideas themselves.

This hurts – but I knew I shouldn’t have done that, but the writing community aren’t social with those who conceal their work too much, I can see why actually.

In fact people have been using my poems as prompt ideas on their own pages and some are using them as short stories for their blogs.  Shame people can’t think for themselves – but never mind.

Recently I have been trying to learn how to write in comic and graphic novel formats as well as learning the business side of writing, because despite my obstacles, I am still determined to do something with my creativity.

The obstacles are increasing, there is nothing I can do with that, because the biggest obstacle is a toxic atmosphere with a family that just can’t get along with each other and I am in the thick of it being forced to be piggy in the middle a lot of the time.

But enough of that – I am not going to lose focus today.

I am trying ear plugs upstairs and I am trying to get used to writing without my usual stimulus of music and I have to say it’s hard.  Silence gives me a headache, I’ve never liked long bouts of silence, I am weird like that, and about an hour is all I can take when I am awake – when I am asleep, silence helps me but other than that – no thanks.

If I am ever unfortunate enough to lose my hearing I know I’ll go madder.

I am in terrible need of good luck with these new tactics.

Especially as only thirty minutes in writing just this and a poem beforehand, Henry rushes into the room makes me take my ear plugs out because he wants to talk to me about wrestling news for the umpteenth time today!

He knows I follow the wrestling news on Twitter, I don’t need this!

It’s hard to stay happy and positive for him when it happens so often, but I have to put on a false happy face for him and tolerate it because there is no balance with the other parent for him – I have to be that balance or my child would fall apart faster!

I have to be happy to see him, be the smile he needs and give him those hugs he requires.  The guilt is too much on the times when I snap because I just want to work!  Those times are Hell because Henry will go off; rightfully upset about the rejection and then his dad sets on him like a raging Rottweiler for twenty minutes solid and there’s a screaming match.  There is no civility between them and there is no compassion from Paul to Henry.

That’s what I am living with.

I said I wasn’t going to lose focus, but look what just happened! 

I have to re-read what I have said because I’ve lost my flow, its worse when its fiction, it’s hard to get that flow back, because sometimes I believe the stories I write might be channelled by some spirits of bygone authors as some of the ideas are too clever to come from me!  I’m not smart enough to write like that on my own volition!

So yeah, ear plugs help when they’re killing each other downstairs but it doesn’t stop them barging into the room with news.

My AD project is still in my head and not fully on paper yet, I will get there, my steampunk will get done as will my Christmas and Easter project, because these ones are the ones driving me into the asylum as they don’t want to be ignored!

Actually being driven into an asylum might be beneficial for me because at least I can write in relative silence because I’d ask to sit in the library with my laptop to write as part of my creative healing process.  They have libraries in asylums you know; well they did the last time I was in one, when I was a teenager.  I don’t think they’d allow the lap top though, because some doctors believe any outside link could cause setbacks.

Funnily enough I am trying to be upbeat about it all and ironic, lol.

Today I am in a pickle, I have these tools to get around the interruptions, but I want to write towards two things at once and it’s the decision I am battling with.

Something instinctively tells me that the AD project needs to be the priority because this one is going to be a huge success, but I can’t help but think about playing with the Easter idea as the main character is just super fun!

As much as I want to write the Easter project, I can’t listen to the music I want to whilst I do that today – so, meh, has to be project AD right now I guess?

Thanks for reading!

Spirit & energy

It is vitally important to always make sure you have your own personal space in your home, so you have a chance to heal and a place to make a sanctuary; it is important to fiercely guard this space and for twelve years I had to fight to find mine and it was genuinely a battle.

It has only really been two months now, since this space has been truly mine in every sense of the word; a place that I can decorate and design to my will, a place where I can relax and sleep and even sometimes write on the quiet days.

This house has a lot of negative energy running through it, which is what you can expect when you have a polluted stream running right under your house and this stream is drying up.

I have never been happy in this house, because I felt this house made me sick and it wasn’t until two years into my ill-health that Paul told me about the stream under the house; had I of known before I moved in with him, I wouldn’t have moved in with him, not in this house.

Why?

Because living on water like that is not good for a witch, or so my family has told me as there are some ancestry from Salem, the Howe’s, my ancestors were the ones who got away.  Living on water can do two things to a proper blood born witch; make you sick because it affects your energy at a consistent pace and can affect your spell crafting abilities negatively whilst overloading your instinct for fortune telling and clairvoyance.  That is of course, if you are not a sea or a water based witch, those are different.  Yes my Chinese astrological element is water, but this is not a good place for me to live.  I can live by water, as long as I am not on top of it and as long as it is not constantly flowing beneath me.

This is a shame because I have always liked the idea of long holidays on barges and cruises, I know for a fact I used to love going rowing in the summer with my dad and cousins and I don’t suffer from seasickness.

I am a non-practising witch these days, I only do crystal healing, fortune readings, clairvoyant stuff and I still feed the faeries and the house spirits, hug trees and that sort of thing – but I don’t actively do spells anymore, as I believe it negatively affects the balance of the universe.  I do believe however in cosmic ordering and that the cosmos knows how to balance things better than we do, in my opinion, cosmic ordering or wish-craft is far superior to witchcraft.  It’s gentler, it’s balanced and it is not forcing anything and you build a relationship with the source that is deep and loving and protective and always knows best!

Since gaining my new space and doing my little cleansing rituals and a little bit of Feng Shui (only a little) I have noticed something about my particular space that I have never felt whilst living in this house and that is a lightness, a clean energy, a vibrancy developing here.

The other members of my household, Paul and Henry have noticed this energy too and try to spend more time in my space than their own, but I quickly rush them out after twenty minutes, because this is my space and I can’t lose it again.

I am relying a lot on crystal energy for this space.  I do a cleansing ritual every time someone comes into my space with anything negative; it’s become almost an obsession.  But you have no idea how quickly the energy darkens and becomes depressive if I am not consistently on top of it.

All I do is use my quartz crystal to make a protective star in the room, circle me thrice and if necessary open the window for half an hour.

This is my bedroom and it is not shared by anyone, this is my space and I love it.

My room has become known in the family as the rainbow room, because my crystals make about fifty little prisms all over the walls when they are poked to swing in the window and when those rainbows light up the room, the energy is so soothing and beautiful, I can’t get rid of anyone who comes in until they fade.

My clairvoyance and my instinctive abilities are increasing exponentially, where I am becoming unsurprised by events happening in my life now.  But I am also driven with excitement by something I can sense, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

All I know is my world is about to turn upside down and become completely unrecognisable soon, but I understand that it’s all positive and good and I will be ecstatically happy for a very long time after this event.  What this event might be?  I am unsure really, but it indicates a new person coming into my life that will just drastically change everything and heal me emotionally and help me become strong and vibrant again.

My spirits are sometimes mischievous but never harmful or toxic, whenever I ask who this person is? They laugh at me and told me, I will not be able to speak when I see them, I won’t believe it’s true and I may be tempted to run away from them when they approach me.

They also said that this person will be the best thing to ever happen in my life!

They told me that we will work together in a similar or same career, that together we will be a power couple that people will look at us as Emperor and Empress because our ideas coming together are so spectacular that the world will literally be in awe of us.  Which sounds exciting – I wondered if it is another writer or someone along those lines, Paul guesses I might fall in love with the agent I get.  Who knows?

They said that our creativity will be a huge legacy for literally generations to come!  We will not be forgotten, it’s that kind of big energy.

They also told me that my new prospective partner will be ecstatic because they knew their intuition was right about me, that they are happy that they can change into doing something they’ve been wanting to do a lot for the past few years, but circumstances have meant they had to go in another direction they weren’t as passionate in, but just generally liked a bit.

I was told he will love how playful I am, how changeable I am, how pliable I can be in most situations and ultimately he will see me as a very inspiring person and he will get on my case about not using my abilities to the best that I can.  He will be very pushy about my talents, all of them and I won’t be able to hide any from him or the world, he won’t allow it.

He will push me into the world and have a “have fun” attitude and will stick around waiting to push me back if I try to wander away from what I am supposed to be doing.

He sounds impossible, but supportive, cheeky and fun.

He will challenge me on every level to be the best that I can be for myself, he won’t let me belittle myself or make do, he will always make me strive to take better things.  Apparently there is a couple of things which will frustrate the both of us being together… for him, it is my idea of moderation and accepting less than I really want and my apparent, needless frugality.  He is apparently here to teach me how to grasp abundance, but according to my spirits, he is fighting a losing battle as I am just so naturally happy and grateful for whatever I have and I never overdo things for myself.

I overdo things for others, but it is hard for me to digest and accept doing it for myself.

He will also have a challenging time with my insecurities, but after as little as two years he would have the victory he was vying for regarding that!  This is what the spirits promised, I laughed as two years is too short a time for that!

But they are determined that he knows me more than I do!

As for my reaction to him, apparently he will know how to push all of my buttons for any reaction he desires and this will sometimes scare me, because he will challenge me a lot!  He will not do anything to harm me, or make me feel bad in anyway, but he will scare me by putting me into situations and teaching me how to cope with them and have fun, because in his opinion I have missed out a lot in life and he is determined I won’t miss out on anything else!

My lesson to him apparently is improving spiritual connection and emotional healing as well as filling the void.  Oh and apparently although he is known to be a little eccentric already by people who know him, apparently us being together will make him stand out as being even more outrageous, because we’ll do it as a couple together!  We are apparently two peas in a pod!

The spirits said we are the couple that get the most invites to places, simply because we liven things up with our presence and vibrancy.

To be perfectly honest, it has to be a dream and this can’t really happen for me.  Because in my opinion, I am past it; I am forty years old, I am not very attractive, I can’t see how all of this is going to happen in such a short space of time.  I have got myself into a homebody rut, so how am I going to meet this guy, huh?

Is he going to just turn up on my doorstep?  I don’t think so!

But OK… email me first?

Thanks for reading.

Brain hurricane season

It’s what time of year again, a time I call “Brain Hurricane Season”.

What is Brain Hurricane Season?

Brain hurricane season happens approximately twice a year for three weeks and inundates me with new story ideas that I have to plan out; but they come so fast I often have to pause current projects and oftentimes I never get to write all the stories I dream up!

The catalyst for this brain hurricane season was an idea I had for Marvel, thanks to discussion Henry’s friends had about Iron Man.  Can he be saved or not?  Is there hope?  I did some research but not much, only about four hours and I have got side-tracked by other things.  But still, interesting stuff nonetheless.  I need to get watching the last two movies though to fully understand what the kids are on about.

Anyway, the kids moved on and now they’re talking about three or four other Marvel movies, such as hearing rumours that Tom Hardy is giving up Venom, is that true?  I did some research and it doesn’t appear to be!  We’re big Venom fans here in this house, it is a recent movie that made us cry laughing – it was so funny!

So I can blame this little bit of research and playground gossip on being the catalysts for my brain hurricane season.

Turns out some of the new ideas are connecting to a current project; my so-called standalone Christmas novel is now going to be part of a small series, hence why subconsciously I have been holding off it for a while.  I thought it was just Christmas music as to why I couldn’t write it.

For some reason or another, the Christmas novel is going to contain poems and songs and is going to be connected to another story about Candyland and The Easter Bunny.  This idea was brand new on the 16th October 2022 and will be known as my Easter Project.

I think another catalyst to all this is the fact that Henry and I realised we listen to a lot of songs related to candies and chocolates and so we created a playlist last month called “Candy” on our only luxury, Amazon music.  It’s funny what the brain does when you listen to certain types of music!

Henry is excited by my new plans as he loves movies about candies and anything Willy Wonka related, he just loves food that kid!  But put it in a dream world where you are having adventures it gets him all excited, but my Henry is ever the businessman – he said to me “ma, think of the merchandise”, oh yes, he is already acting like my manager!  I just wish he would let me write!

I have also decided that although I love writing horror, I want to downplay the gore and darkness of it to make them into family friendly Halloween style stories, as I have decided to focus mostly on family entertainment more than just doing whatever I feel like doing at the time.

I sat back and thought the other day about what kinds of responses from fans will I enjoy the most?  I thought, I love kids, the kids of the world mean everything to me and I am most likely to respond to a child in full if they ran up to me.

Then I had the idea of, wouldn’t it be cool if I became a bestseller and I had mini merchandise toys in my handbag of the characters I wrote and handed them to a kid who recognised me on an off chance?

Thanks to Henry I am thinking about the other business behind writing, not just the book sales now.  Good to think big I suppose?

So I decided, well then, that settles that, I am writing for family entertainment with kids in mind and my inner child has been singing about it all day!

It means I can be more light-hearted and playful and I love seeing kids laugh! 

My inner child has also been insisting that I revert back to being a nine year old but I told it, OK, on some conditions… we don’t eat like we did when we were nine years old and we don’t laugh hysterically in people’s faces when we are nervous and put on a show for them and then hide behind the sofa because you forgot your senses and realised what a nitwit you made yourself out to be!

My inner child nearly cried, I was too harsh to it, so that’s why I said sorry to it and gave it 4 individual jelly babies to make up – she wants the whole bag, I said no, she cries and I am trying to ignore it – it’s for her own good!

I am not saying I can give up horror for good though, adult horror that is, because it’s a major part of me – but it’s just not as big as it used to be in my heart anymore as I am healing a lot of my darkness lately.

All I really want in life now onwards is light hearted fun, lots of love, good friends and a comfortable home, health would go a long way too – but hey, I am working on it!

There is a children’s picture book series brewing in my head too, for kindergarten age.  It’s about a friendly community of monsters that are friends with each other. 

Another story is about an angel who decides to become interviewed by a chat show.

So many new things coming to me and this is only the start of the Brain Hurricane Season, I still have two weeks to ride out, if this is a normal storm!

I wanted to do NaNoWriMo this year, but there are lots of problems in the family right now where I can’t concentrate on more than a paragraph or two per day; so this year I am just not going to bother.

I really wanted a project completed by now, but it wasn’t meant to be, I guess.

To be perfectly honest, I am losing hope to do anything creative these days as I am simply not allowed the time to myself to do anything.

I can’t rely on working on anything whilst Henry is at school, because at any moment Henry is sent home early in the day and I lose my flow.  He is being sent home as often as twice a week!

Since Henry overheard the school suggesting he has an autism assessment, Henry seems to have taken it upon himself to emotionally play up all the more, like he enjoys the attention he is getting about it.  Henry is really play acting towards the teachers concerns and I have told him, this is a dangerous game for his life long-term, but he thinks it’s all a game!

I suggested to Paul he is only doing this so he can be sent home from school to create his robots all day long and play for twelve hours a day on that darn laptop of his!  When he is sent home from school, we should ban him from TV, laptop and his robots until his proper home time comes.  But then Henry plays the suicide card and Paul relents and lets him have the things!

Then I hear the arguments and screams between the two of them because they are getting in each other’s way, and Paul can’t move around the house because of the mess Henry is causing!  I try my best to help, but every time I open my mouth it just fuels the fire in the both of them! 

I tried to take myself upstairs to my bedroom to write upstairs, but they shout so loudly to one another so often, it’s hard to drown them out unless I put earphones on and I don’t like to do that because of increased ear infections. 

I am dying of embarrassment because neighbours walk cautiously past the house, staring at it because of the hysterical screaming that goes on consistently.  I tell them about it, but Paul and Henry are so self-absorbed, they just don’t really care. 

I hate this kind of environment, it doesn’t help my PTSD at all, in fact I am often drained and can’t eat because of the stress of it all, because a lot of the huge arguments are at dinnertime at the dining table and nobody can eat when this goes on! 

I don’t wear my hearing aid when Henry is home, because to be perfectly honest I don’t need it – that’s how loud things are here as soon as he gets home.  Besides, there are times Henry will randomly screech loudly for the slightest thing and it blooming hurts if I have it in my ear at the time!  I even lost hearing a couple of years back where Henry did a screech so loud my ear bled, found out I had a perforation over it!  Henry was two feet from me at the time! 

This is what I am living with.  It’s not excuses to not working, you have to be here to experience it for yourself, because I am telling you, it’s constant!

I do most of my blog posts when they are all in bed at night; this means my sleeping pattern is badly out of sync for a healthy and social lifestyle.  My sleeping hours are anything between 3am and 1pm depends on the day!  Mostly its 4am to 10am, not enough I know, but what else can I do?

I rarely watch TV as nobody respects the fact I want to watch something, reading is getting less and less for the same reason – practising art is almost non-existent, my meditations are slowly going out of the window… it’s tough to have a decent life here on any level!  Even when I am asleep, from 7am until I wake up, someone checks in on me every 45 minutes waking me up, so it’s not even undisturbed sleep.

Lately Henry’s behaviour has been so bad, that I have often forgotten to take my meds because he has been so demanding! 

Anyway, just a heads up about why I can’t finish things.  Never used to be this way! 

Happy reading! 

What do I do?

What do I like to do when I am not writing or doing art?  Strange to say, that creativity is such a big part of my life it is actually really hard for me not to be in creative mode in one way or another.

Outside of actually physically writing, I do think about things to write almost on a constant basis I am a chronic daydreamer!  I can’t hold conversations very much travelling in a car because I zone out to daydream and for me, it’s just as well because it is my coping mechanism for car travel sickness – hence why, I have never learned to drive.  I am actually going to try next summer to have my first ever driving lesson, but I don’t think I’ll have more than three before deciding that driving isn’t for me!

I like to talk about sceneries when travelling on trains, I love trains, but again I daydream a lot on trains.  Unless the conversation isn’t specifically towards the scenery I tend to zone out on people.

It’s easy for me to zone out completely and sometimes it takes a person shaking me by the shoulders to come back to reality again!

But outside of this one big daydream of mine, what do I do?

I like tending to the garden, but I am never without my creative quirks there either as I imagine faeries or trolls peeping out at me from behind bushes and dark corners and so forth.  Whenever I garden, I garden with nature and unseen forces in mind; I have to have fruits, herbs and vegetables every few feet, because it helps the fair folk, animals and birds.  It’s either my active imagination or my witchy roots and shamanic past that allows me to see things that others say aren’t there.  I have never decided which is true…

But whatever I grow in the garden to eat, I always ensure that at least a quarter of what I grow is never harvest as because I don’t want to be seen as greedy and because I feel that you should leave things for nature, to go to seed or for the fair folk.  Did you know in actual fact that ancient humans used to always farm and garden like this until humans developed more of the greed gene? 

I am not a tidy gardener, I am a cut and drop type and I have the healthiest soil for miles around because of it; I know that some diseases and weeds should not be cut and dropped and I am wise to those things and they go either in a bucket of water to rot down or they go into a bonfire at the end of the month.  I have a special area for the bad stuff.

I grow with companion planting in mind and bio warfare – I am completely 100% organic and chemical free, what I do is I learn about nature and what feeds on what and I try to mimic the natural balance in my garden by trying to encourage pest killers into a problematic area.  If I grow nasturtiums the nasturtiums tend to encourage caterpillars and they generally leave my cabbages and other things alone, if I have an influx of aphids on my peas I grow sweet peas that are inedible nearby and umbellifers such as dill, fennel and yarrow to attract ladybirds and lacewings which eat aphids, as well as calendulas… no calendulas don’t eat aphids, they attract the things that do!

I am loved by frogs and toads and it used to freak my mother out every summer about how they’d hop or crawl after me if I was near the pond, because I had nurtured them since tadpoles and they became tame enough to be touched (make sure your hands are wet before you touch them as your skin can burn theirs).

I try to ensure a lot of mini ponds around the garden or makeshift ponds in the forms of buckets and ponds half inserted into the ground for them, because they kill slugs and snails and also we have a family of five hedgehogs in our garden most of the time, we’re quite lucky because our garden is small really – but we have so much life here!

My back garden is only 30ft wide and 50ft long, my front garden is 20ft wide and 20ft long, so it really is quite small for what it gives us!  We get a lot of food out of it and there is plenty of nature here – we always get comments from people in our neighbourhood about how we’ve bewitched wildlife and stolen it from their gardens because they don’t get all the bees and butterflies we have and they’ve never seen hedgehogs or woodpeckers in their gardens!  I just simply smile, shrug and say – plant more, get rid of your horrendous decking and fake plastic lawn and grow wildflowers, and then they’ll come to you.  Most snobbily sneer at the idea and look disgusted at my suggestion, but there has been one or two who have listened and nature is spreading, as it does and as it wants to and as it should!

When not gardening, I am bonding with animals, either in the form of pets or those in my garden; I am known to be quite mad by some neighbours because I click at magpies to call them down from the trees and some eat out of my hand and give me presents of egg shell and the prettiest stones they can find!

My magpies are my biggest influence in my writing, they are the main characters of a particular book series I am writing and they are based entirely on magpies I have befriended in reality.

I know it sounds nuts, but my life has been saved by a crow I cared for when it got heat stroke, this crow has long since died, but its family remember me and watches out for me.  I am profoundly deaf with inner ear auto-immune disease, which means a lot of the time because of ear infections I can’t wear my hearing aids at all, so I become completely deaf regularly – but one day I didn’t hear a car coming after I thought the coast was clear, it was one of those young teenage drivers who were racing down the long road and they nearly ran me down, but my crow, the one I saved earlier that year swooped down knocking me off balance just as the car nearly hit me, making me fall out of the way of the hit!

This crow and its family gets upset if they don’t see me for more than three days at a time and will shout their caws loudly and fly around the house until I either open the window so they can see me or go outside for a few minutes just to let them know I am OK – Paul is fascinated by this, but to me it’s normal!  They quieten down once they see me!

See it’s hard to have a “normal life” when I live the life I do.  My life is certainly not normal for everyone out there (points to the world) but it is normal for our ancestors and tribal people.  I consider myself an ancient human trapped in modern times.

I find it hard to have a “normal life” and talk about “normal” things.  I think normal is very suggestible, different to everyone and it hurts me when people feel they have the right to judge someone like me!  Because, in reality, had humans maintained their tribal existence and had maintained living as nature intended, then based on that, my way of life would be considered normal and conservative… it would be strange, not to be like me!

Other than having my head in the clouds and playing with nature like some kind of Disney princess, I do like movies and I do like doing puzzles.  I love 1000 piece puzzles and have a big collection of them and I have a love for word games, scrabble and codebreakers, that sort of thing.

I love feeding people too, I love to cook and I am often accused of making people fat when they stay here for more than a week!  Most people have to go on diets after visiting me, because they grow an addiction to my food!

I make as much as possible from scratch, including various jams, chutneys and sauces.  I am not scared of making pastry and I often cook too much deliberately, just to freeze them for later.  That’s how a home cook can manage their life better, cook and freeze – it’s safe, probably a lot safer than bought produce.

It’s funny but I get comments from people about how unsafe it is to put my lasagne in the freezer if nobody eats it all, but then they go out and buy microwavable frozen lasagne meals… the irony is both sad and laughable.

I find it hard to make friends with regular people; it’s easy for me to make friends with witches and creative people though.  Unfortunately I live in an area that is famed for its culture, but most of the people who live around me are science based workers, unemployed or in catering.  For the creative folk I have to be in the centre of town or a village five miles south from here, that’s where the creative folk are.

Paul is a scientist, he is a little bit creative because he used to be a photographer and he did once become a lecturer for art history in a university; but he is really a doctor of geology and that’s what he has been most of his life.  So he fits in here in our village, because a lot of people who live around us are doctors or nurses.

But he admits, though he loves some of my work he doesn’t love it all and it is hard for him to be enthusiastic in partaking an active role in being creative with me and brainstorming with me or even encouraging me beyond his scientific “get on with it” kind of way.  He is rather picky about what he likes and what he doesn’t like.

It is hard for me, because I am the type of writer that when she writes her stuff for the day she wants to share it with the person she is living with, immediately, because I am a person who likes to brainstorm with others – I like to talk about what I have done, because I am emotionally shallow and needy.    I am easily knocked off my perch if I think someone is disinterested, this is the hardest thing about me being a writer, since moving in with Paul.

My mother on the other hand was very good at feigning interest to buck a person’s creative confidence up, but Paul doesn’t like to even pretend and I appreciate him for that – but it is also frustrating for me.

So, what do I do outside of writing?  Basically play with animals, do puzzles, gardening, fatten people up and just generally connect to my inner being and nature.  I think that’s entirely me… I do love music, I love art, I love practising on my various musical instruments, but when I do that – I tend to go back into creative play again, then write songs and compose music!

So that’s me!  A creative child of nature; surrounded by a multitude of other species; that is spiritually connected to her little world and loves to entertain people with food, story and poetry.

Hope you enjoyed an insight to my weird little life!

Thanks for reading! 

Watery writer

I’m going to throw caution to the wind and publicly admit via this blog, that I am not a confident person and I feign intelligence. 

I am a writer but I am uneducated, everything about me is self-taught and I am not a good teacher. 

I blunder my way through life, please take that seriously, because I really do!  Blunder Woman was a character that was in Russ Abbot’s show, but I am pretty sure someone saw into a crystal ball and knew that Blunder Woman might someday be a real person… me!  I think I might look like her when I am eighty; actually, we’re kind of alike!

But anyway, I digress!  So easily distracted like a dog with a… SQUIRREL! 

Right so, now that’s out of the way, I think it has something to do with my Chinese astrological sign – I am a water dog, a poodle or a Labrador I am not sure which, but a water dog nonetheless! 

Water goes with the flow, I always go with the flow, I am always flowing somewhere and even I never know where I end up or what I am about to do; I am true to my element, I am spontaneous, usually best at peace and generally calm but occasionally turbulent and rarely tempestuous!

But generally I am like any water, that if I am not in the right environment I go stagnant – and who wants stagnant water around them?  It’s quite easy for me to flow into stagnation, I am very much affected by those around me and if I choose the wrong sort of people to flow with, I do generally stagnate a lot or become tempestuous.

I am very self-aware, I know it’s my nature to be like this because my astrological element is water and this has helped me a lot to understand myself.  I love Chinese astrology and since I found it, I have found my life has been working more towards what I want from it, rather than just having life happen to me outside of my control.  But as a water element, I don’t like to control too much as I love going with the flow and I am easily dejected when the people I choose to flow to, aren’t good for a water spirit like me!

It’s easy to get me flowing into the right things, with gentle persuasion, love, conversation, I am easily motivated to flow anywhere and that does mean I am occasionally prone to finding manipulators that like to take advantage of my nature.

My main life partner Paul is a fire elemental (fire monkey), you are right to think that this sounds like chaos waiting to happen, because there are many times where I feel that I flow around him and dry up a bit.  Contrariwise he suffers as I can over suffocate him when I try to calm him down and he is easily exhausted by my high energy and my spontaneity.

My Henry, my son, is a metal tiger.  I consider him a huge support but I can’t help but think I am not good for him, as I sometimes feel I corrode him, like water does to metal over time.  Perhaps I am overthinking things, but this is how I feel!

Perhaps I should try and help balance him more by making lemon drizzle cakes and homemade lemonade to help maintain his metal spirit?  Lemons are good with corroding metal restoration!  Thing is, the boy hates lemons, so what is a water mother to do?

You may think I wrote this entry in jest, but it is my life, it is quite serious for me.  An insight to my brain like this can often terrify the sensitive, but at least I am honest!

I am drying up, or becoming stagnant, I am not quite sure which it is yet;

I say this because I am wanting to write more than ever these days and I am – but I am not focusing too much on novels anymore, because I can’t flow how I want to or how I used to, when being creative.

I used to brainstorm with a close circle of family or family friends, before I moved in with Paul and it would be good energy for me to make me want to write so I can tell them what I have done and what I might plan and to see what they have to say about it all!  But Paul just isn’t into my genres or my sense of corny humour.  I have no one where I can do this to, without the worry that they are going to steal my ideas and use them because I am too slow as I am a meticulous planner.

Because I have no one to share my thoughts with, I am being boiled within the inch of my life and becoming despondent with my storytelling, because, well, what’s the point?  If I don’t have someone who wants to share my creative journey with me on a personal level and talk about things as I do them, how else can I get the fuel to want to finish what I started?

I am easily downcast; I am easily demotivated by other people’s disinterest and I am a worry wart, who is fearful of anyone new who wants me to talk about my work – I have trust issues because I have been bitten a lot in the past.

I need a mentor or a friend I can trust, preferably a small group of them – but how can I find them?  I am at a loss… I had thought about joining a critique group, but there is a problem with that… I am a slow reader, I can’t read three or four extra novels in a week as well as my usual two books I need for research and my own pleasure reading, I just can’t read that fast!

So what is a water dog girl like me to do?

Flow into stagnant waters again I guess… I don’t like it there, it’s too murky and stinks and it’s a bit boring to be frank.

My confidence has taken a huge bashing recently; I feel lame in my sense of humour and I feel alone in my creativity because I am overly cautious and don’t trust the internet very much – sorry people!

But recently I am starting to feel a little bit ashamed of the comedy aspects of my work, because it’s too corny, stupid, over the top and it hurts!  It hurts a lot.

The only genre I can openly talk about without boring the only person who will listen to it, is dark humour in my horror or some dystopian works, outside of that, I don’t have any support.  I wrote a list last week of all of my current WIPs, there are nearly two hundred novels and eighty nine are fantasy mostly, half of which are comedy.  There are only thirty seven horrors that are not vampires or dystopian based.  I have to admit, this person is trying to make me refocus mostly on horror and I am more fantasy and family really.

My main project – the anthropomorphic dystopian is really loved by my listener and only one fantasy novel about dragons and magic is loved by them too – the rest gets a meh or a snore, if it’s not traditional horror.

I prefer fantasy because it heals me from remembering the crap in the world; horror was originally written because my life was horrible, I experience intense violence and been in survival situations that were horrid and I was excellent at writing nasty things like that because of experience.  But I don’t like reliving that kind of thing all the time, fantasy is more healing for me.

I need the pretence that life can be utopian and magical and miraculous and lovely, but I also know that leads to a boring story and I know there are always people out there who wants to destroy a perfect thing for someone else because they are jealous of it, so that is seen in my fantasy a lot, but it is more tame than my horror because my fantasy is written for a family audience.

I’ve personally had enough of pandering to ogres and monsters and being submissive to them and their demands – my horror stories have been developing more and more into revenge style plots, where nature gets its own back on humanity for tearing apart paradise bit by bit.

My reader has noticed and he misses the horror I used to do, the gore for the sake of gore, the horror where anything is possible just because it is meant to be horrible!  Although he likes my new take on horror, he doesn’t like it nearly as much as when I used to write descriptive body horror and taboo scenes.

At the moment I feel like my watery self is forming a whirlpool and it is getting scary, because I have never been a whirlpool before and I am not quite sure what’s going to happen if my instinct is right!

Thank you for reading and hopefully understanding *love you all*

Do you show yourself up?

I have started my writer’s journal yesterday (6^th June 2022) and I was finding it insightful rethinking how my projects developed over the years and how I have grown as a writer.

Because I get so wrapped up in my projects I often forget to post on my blog, so I often do blog posts around two weeks in advance, just to help maintain activity here – because if I don’t, the blog goes quiet for three months at a time and I don’t like to do that!

Anyway, going back to my first paragraph of this post, I discovered that certain projects were bland when I originally started them – but over time, they fleshed out really well and morphed into something completely different, even character names changed to suit the new situations that ensued.

For example, I had a young child protagonist who was originally seven years old, she then became twelve and now the character is going to be fifteen.  Simply because of how the story developed into something much different and my goals are very different today than they were back then!

I also only had around five characters that were friends of the hero and helped her on her journey; this grew to become nine solid friends and a small number of fly by helpful friends.

I decided the villain dies in the end and that so does the heroine too, but this changed, I leave no spoilers as to my current decision or you’d be looking for it in any book that sounds alike, when it gets published.

But what threw me was the fact that the book developed when I developed – I don’t mean creatively developed, I mean, its subjects developed with what was going on in my life at the time of writing…

The heroine was a runaway –then she was not.

I was a runaway at the same time this story originated in my mind, the characters plot of running away changed, when I no longer felt the need to run away in my real life. 

This is a development I didn’t notice until I revisited the writing process to add to my current projects journal – it is interesting.  I used to pooh-pooh the idea about creative people subconsciously putting their lives into print and that people psychoanalysed everything that wasn’t really there, but, you know… I think there is something about all of that!

If you write a certain theme, it’s because you think or feel or have experienced it in the past or at the present and it is coming out in your writing. 

So be careful at what you are writing out there, I know a lot of real life bitches who tend to write a lot of romantic dramas where there are mega bitches and they just think, their work is set apart from themselves… but… hey… what will literary psychoanalysts say about you in the future, what will they see in you through your work?

It does reveal a lot – I have a writer friend who writes a lot of childish roles in her stories that are not entirely based around children and she struggles a lot with her inner child, she is trying to be mature, but she just can’t hack it and she doesn’t mind I am writing this, I asked her!  But she found it amusing about how accurate this seems to be even with her!

I know another writer who always wanted to be a rock star or a Goth, but was always nervous to do so because of societal stigma, particularly within the Jewish community – so, they write those kinds of characters.  Sorry I didn’t ask them about this, but being that they aren’t named… do they really mind?  I hope not!

You don’t know it until you see it!

But you write yourself in everything!

Since learning this, it has kind of made me paranoid about what people will think about me… but then again… I am happy with who I have become and I am happy I am not who I used to be anymore, so I won’t stress too much!

I just don’t want the analysts to harp on about my mental illness all the time and look back on me with pity!  I don’t like that.

The journal has been a revelation.

What is included in the journal is my journey and thought processes about what is happening in the book – any movies or books that influenced those pivotal scenes, are my characters actually a mock-up of say, my favourite movie characters?  Yes, actually, I can see that a lot in my work!  But it is unique enough to not come across as a total rip off!  That’s very important!

I have even included lyrics which also helped me think of scenes, with references to the singer and the song name. 

Why am I doing this?

Because these journals are on a work by work basis, when I get a piece of work published I have this goal that if I sell ten thousand books, I will send out to publish these snippets from my writers journal to show my readers how I got it done and what influenced me, because I don’t know about you – but I am a very nosy reader!  When I read an author’s book, I want to know more about them as a person, what they think and what they like so I can see who influenced them!  Because I love evolution!

Being a creative, whether you are a writer, song writer, musician, artist etc; you are going through an evolution which will influence and inspire other creatives in the future.  This is exciting and I love this sort of thing!  I am obsessed with evolution, particularly the evolution of the mind, culture and society!

At this point in time, there are hundreds of works by other people who have influenced all seventy nine of my nearly finished works, yes, seventy nine!  There have been many things which have influenced me several times over in most of my works and those are;

Nox Arcana music, art and lyrics

Neil Gaiman’s works, particularly his prose and comics

Colleen Doran’s Raphaelite style artworks

Various wrestling shows with their gimmicks and storylines

Aurora Aksnes lyrics and music videos

Anne Rice vampires

Vampire movies in general

Modern gothic art, particularly by Anne Stokes

Tim Burton’s movies and artworks

Ancient myth and legends worldwide

Roald Dahl’s works and movie adaptions

Lady Gaga’s music videos and lyrics

Stephen King’s works and movie adaptions

Brian Froud and the Froud families’ artworks and puppet movies

The Mad Max series and franchise

Mafia movies and history

Max Brooks works and movie adaptions

Children’s classic bedtime fairy-tales

Marilyn Manson music videos

Queen music and music videos and adaptions

The Rocky horror picture show and its adaptions

Suzanne Collins works and adaptions

The Animals of Farthing wood

Watership down and its adaptions

Wind in the willows and its adaptions

Monty Python TV shows and movies

Terry Pratchett’s works and adaptions

Johnny Depp’s characters

Robert Downy Jr’s characters

Gabriel Byrne’s characters

Al Pacino’s characters

Bette Midler characters

Kathleen Turner characters

Pam Ferris characters

James Earl Jones characters

Bon Jovi lyrics

To name but a few, I know it’s really a lot, but its few in the real number of influences I have had over the years!

So you see – you are what you are and you can’t hide it!

Happy reading everybody!

Oh to Hell with it…

Even though I have said I am not doing NaNoWriMo this year, I have joined it anyway for the community spirit; I have joined the UK, Leicester region there, let me know if you are in that region and maybe we can say hi to each other?

My personal goal is to finish six novels by 1^st November 2022 to be sent for the first time ever to a literary agent – this is a goal and it may very well be unrealistic, but I am hoping it can be achieved!  The writing of six books is very realistic for me, because I tend to always be in writing mode anyway – the writing I have shared with my blog, or at least my word counts are not accurate according to Paul, who realised that I have not been sharing my handwritten notes in those word counts and I write more by hand than by computer!

What I meant about being unrealistic was my idea that an agent would take on all six projects in such short notice!

I understand no literary agent will take six books at once, I am not dense, they will be sent with reasonable gaps between each book!

I am a perfectionist and my own worst enemy regarding my writing – I was often told by tutors in my past that I overwork things and rewrite when it is not necessary, this is something I have never really learned to stop doing!

I do have OCD in many things in my life; this is another difficulty I am trying to overcome.  The OCD with my novel writing has got a lot worse since seven years ago it was suggested to me that I need to redraft some work, a notion that was alien to me at the time and now I redraft each novel at least three times a year and when you think I have over ten near complete works, this is nightmarish to some people – who may even find what I say unbelievable!

Paul has told me this is why it is important to send my work out there, so people know just how manically I do write and how it is part of the fibre of who I am!  I am never not thinking about writing, I am constantly in creative mode!

My brain cannot switch off from work of any creative type! 

When I am not writing, I am thinking about writing.

When I am not doing that I am drawing pictures or painting or planning art projects; then when I am not doing any of those things I am crocheting or knitting!  My mind is constantly creating something – it is not work for me, I don’t regard this as work and Paul finds that irritating, because to me, this is a lifestyle!  I can’t feel pressured doing any of this, because it is a lifestyle for me!  What I do feel pressured about is other people’s expectations of me when they know that I am working on something!

I don’t fear the blank page because of lack of ideas; I fear the blank page because my brain will fill it up with unplanned stuff before I can write down what I wanted to in the first place!

I don’t struggle with ideas for new projects, I am drowning in them!

So with that said,  I am now going to get back to my novel which is a steampunk adventure with an adult female main character – a novel of which has caused me to only have fourteen hours sleep in four days!

Happy reading!

To pants or not to pants that is the question…

“I don’t think I really want to wait for NaNoWriMo to start this new story idea, but would it be considered cheating if I started this early?”

This was posted on my twitter @CreativeTardy yesterday and I can only imagine my friends sitting there staring at their screens in disbelief shouting “oh, for fucks sake, just start, will you!”

Well, you see, I have never been one for breaking the rules… well… certain rules.

“Bloody Hell, what rules?  Fuck rules! Just get on with it, creativity has no blooming rules”! 

OK, tone down the language please.  No these are not real actual replies on twitter… but, I do know there are friends who talk like this to me from time to time in private.

I frustrate them no end, I can see that it takes a lot for the poor dears not to slap me one when I get like this!

 Usually I plan my stories a little.  I have certain ideas about what I would like to include in the story and the types of characters even if I have no idea of the direction of the book, I usually have some sort of idea about some of the future of the story before I write it – sometimes I don’t know how the stories end, sometimes I don’t know the middle but I know its beginning and end.  I don’t usually pants it, as the NaNoWriMo vernacular goes, I am or was a planner.

I am thinking this new story idea called Dragon 2 will be totally and completely pantsed, but I am fighting against it at the same time.

I am, in my personal life, a little bit of a control freak – I don’t like micromanaging people, I am not that type of control freak, but I like things organised and simplified in my own personal life and I don’t like surprises!  I am prone to panic attacks when surprises jump out at me, my brother often described me to his friends as the “rabbit in headlights”.  I am the sort of annoying person who always asks for reassurance and a reminder of what to expect at certain events and so on and Paul has a lot of patience with me as he tells me for the fifth time that day that it will assuredly be such and such.  I am only like this in certain things, not everything.  I am not constantly like this throughout my life, just things that could potentially… terrify me. 

Funnily enough, I am not somebody who suffers from stage fright or being surrounded by large groups of people, especially people I know even a little bit.  I am not like that.  I am more likely to be jittery around small circles of people I hardly know or never met and I am more likely to be this way around my birthday, Christmas, parties hosted by other people I don’t know well or anything regarding health… occasionally I can be like this when food shopping, I don’t like being around small groups of strangers alone, at all.

Never really understood why – but Paul reckons it has a lot to do with things that have happened in my past with my mother.  My mother is usually antagonistic with strangers especially if she feels there are no witnesses to dispute what happened!  She often dragged me along with her for whatever ride she hoped to have from the event she caused.

I like to be organised – artist friends are astounded at how neat my areas are when they used to visit, how as I painted I would wipe up spills and go back and forth from the kitchen cleaning the water jars I used as I did my work.

Reader friends who note my bookshelves look twice at my shelves and cannot believe that my books are in genre and alphabetical order and that I had at the time eleven bookcases around the house, now I have twelve.

I also have around thirty box files all with different genre story ideas, poems, research files etc., those are not in order at the moment because I am struggling for space and that is damaging my mental health no end, the torment knowing that those are not in order when everything else is – it makes my writing work very hard!

They mostly reside on the upstairs landing balancing on our very wide bannister at the top, that acts like a half wall and guests who use our bathroom sometimes sheepishly quiz us on why there is a box marked vampires and another marked dragons by the bathroom door?

One such visitor joked that they thought perhaps I was some kind of cryptozoologist as a secret life.

No, but it would be interesting…

I know I was a pantser before 2006, but I was told that planning is key, strangely enough my writing habits have been declining slowly ever since! So I became a planner, I know being a pantser should be as easy as it was in the past, but I don’t really know anymore.

Anyway, back to the NaNoWriMo story – I would like to start in a few days’ time, but at the moment I am trying to decide whether I should plan the characters and some of the scenes now or let it flow naturally?

Paul suggests naturally – but I have never worked that way before… I have had a lot of dreams regarding this book; a lot of the dreams suggest it will be very successful if only…

Happy reading!

new working areas

Writing has been difficult in the past few weeks, due to the annoying fact that my arms are losing strength when typing and the computer desk has been too high for me to type for longer than 10 minutes at a time, without going numb.

I have become almost unbearable to live with because of my temper in regards to not being able to type or even play many online games as my arms won’t let me. 

Paul has helped massively, he has an adjustable table for me now for my laptop and that has meant I can do more things again.  But, typing on my laptop is laggy and frustrating and I make many mistakes, not to mention the lighting on the screen is very sharp.  So, once again Paul decided to take measurements for me and has moved furniture around the living room and bedroom for me.

The new areas for writing are a corner in the bedroom and living room.  Bedroom because I have insomnia and often want to write at night, but also because I get very tired during the day sometimes and often find myself upstairs.  We are planning to maybe make a change again next year; to make the spare bedroom into an upstairs living room for winter, because downstairs is far too cold! 

The corner of the living room will have an L shaped desk at the end of my art table by the end of the week, because I have become a grumpy living nightmare since I can’t work as much as I want to creatively.

Paul is doing all of this for me, unfortunately it has meant that my rabbit has been moved to live in the hallway now, because we don’t have the room anymore in the lounge. 

I will be learning on skill share soon to set up a YouTube channel and editing videos, so I will become a vlogger as well as a blogger in the near future.  I cannot commit to more than once a fortnight for a video just yet though.

I do intend, once the desk I set up properly, to do NaNoWriMo this year, because there are four books nagging me like mad lately in my head.  I am also doing inktober and I will be posting my art daily all of the month of October, with any luck!

Doctors are taking all of my symptoms as a matter of urgency and I have to admit, I am scared.  Normally, I am told that there is a two year waiting list for neurology in this area, but the doctors are pushing for me to be seen within 16 weeks.

I am told what they suspect might not be good.  So there is a lot of stress in my life right now and a lot of limitations as I am literally struggling to do everything! 

Because I am a determined and stubborn person, this lack of being able to do anything, has made me very snappy and I have been losing my will to think positively or even plan for a future to be honest.  Despite what I have said about my creative plans, I somehow feel I am just setting myself up for failure, simply because I don’t have the energy to be as consistent as I would like.  I am also scared that if I become successful in my ventures in the future, that I won’t be able to keep up with the demands of the work or the demands of my agents.  Because I am rarely able to keep up with the demands of going to the doctor surgery because I can’t wake up, or my mucus production is so strenuous on a day, that no taxi will take me to the surgery on the account of me choking and coughing so much as they think I have covid – when I don’t!

So, this is the update of what’s going on here with me and what I hope to plan to do in the future.  Let’s just hope I can actually get to do these things and let’s hope that the doctor hasn’t any real reason to worry, shall we?

 Also, my mental health has had a huge bashing over this; I am literally bawling my eyes out at the slightest thing and becoming a complete emotional train wreck!

Anyway – happy reading and I hope to write again next week at some point.