I come from

I come from the smoky rooms of former North London cottages

A place where, as time goes by becomes more urbanised and exotic as does its people

A close peaceful community nudged out by hordes of shoppers, losing your family in the chaotic crowds as the familiar becomes ever increasingly strange

The cosy smells of fish and chips, apples, fruit and wool, overtaken by spice and petrol as new buildings pop up like toadstools in the night

The meadows I played on with dogs and cousins too polluted now, the solution?  More pollution of course, another hundred toadstools pop up to house more strangers, till the village is devoured by the ever starving beast called London

I come from the gossiping nurses and the nagging sheet metal workers, sitting around smoking their money and complaining that making it is too hard!

The smell of bleach stuns your senses and makes your eyes bleed but at least it’s clean

Helicopters sing you lullabies as you fall asleep and police sirens wake you up the next day

I come from neighbours leaning over your fence, giving you gardening advice and cake and eventually curry!

Stray dogs chasing loose cats and getting run over by milk carts

Pigeons swamping the garden pecking at stale bread and the last lizard I’ll ever see gets taken by a fat crow, falling down roof tiles and into a gutter unceremoniously

I come from two sides of a road that society says shouldn’t be crossed

But here I am and I am me and both sides are equally mine

I come from sugar, fat and bread, fizzy drinks and tea

Pure white walls broken by ivory and chrome

Vacuums replaced yearly due to overuse and the bigger the telly the more kudos to you!

I come from a large garden, a sanctuary and au pair

I come from fashion critics, jealousy and violence

In books I hid myself in multiple worlds so that it could never touch me

So I would be free to be me and not them

Finding my own way to a new place

A place that is more like me

It is lost forever now, that place, where I come from.

Top of the wheel

I’m not setting goals anymore in regards to novel writing, they get done when they get done but I haven’t given up; Yes I’ve had a respite since September 2022 and that is a long time, unreasonably long, but I had to have it due to mental health healing.  I had a hard time, there were lots of things happening in my life I had to think about – think a lot.

Lots of things in fact, lots of different problems to solve and many of them just needed me to try and calm myself enough to allow myself to think, then once I had managed to do that, I needed to calm myself again and stop thinking in order to heal from it all.

There was grief, death of a relative, a revelation I wasn’t sure was a trick or not, an announcement, an opportunity, a break up, a diagnosis and so many things all rolled into one major thing for me – that I could not cope.

Ultimately my entire life has been turned upside down and I am still in the situation of not really knowing if it is a good or bad thing just yet, I am still teetering on the edge of trying to determine which – it could be either!

It’s a strange situation to be in.

I feel at the moment I am standing on top of a wheel and if I fall backwards I will land in shark filled waters and if I fall forwards I will fall safe into someone’s arms.

At present I am still on top of the wheel.

It’s like sitting on a bomb really.

My mind has been so preoccupied with all these things that I haven’t been able to keep to my reading goals, my writing or practising of my art.  I haven’t even been able to hold a conversation without my mind wandering off, worrying about things.

It’s only been this past week I have manage to slowly and surely restart my habits.  I have started to write a little again, I have started to read a little again and I have even done some art.

Not as much as I would normally do in a day, in fact, I am doing less than ten paragraphs every couple of days towards anything, my one poem a day has become three or four again; my art practises are happening every couple of days.  It’s more than what has happened between September 2022 to March 2023 in any case and I am proud it’s coming back together again.

The frustrating thing is this – my typing speed has got extremely slow and I can’t seem to speed it up again.  I used to write 90 to 120 words per minute and now I struggle to get above 40.

I am making a lot of spelling mistakes and errors, cognitively I am suffering a lot and I don’t know what to make of it.

My Easter Project and Project AD has hopes to be finished before Midsummer, but I am not going to force myself, it’s still early days for me, I still haven’t fully healed.

In reality, I need a holiday – get out of this environment, get out into nature and remember how to laugh and play again – playfully scream – wash my hair with the rays of the sun – chase faeries – hug trees – and try to learn how to feel happy again.  Because happiness is a distant memory, one I am not sure I can remember how it feels anymore.  Strange as that sounds…

I also need to learn to trust again.

Trust in the process, trust to love again, trust that I have self-worth, that I am someone deserving and someone who can be free to laugh without someone complaining about the noise or worrying I am going to get over excited and hurt myself.

Because a couple of years ago I was bedbound sick and laughing really did hurt me, because it would cause a coughing fit and my spleen was swollen and so it genuinely was rather painful to laugh – but those things are behind me now.  But still, out of habit I have people trying to calm me down, because they’ve forgotten how much I have healed.

I need to lose myself in feelings that are opposite to negative ones – I need to, because I don’t feel very human anymore.

There are times I have sat back and realised all the negativity around me, all the bitterness, envy, jealousy, contempt and discomfort and I wonder what am I becoming exactly?  Am I becoming a demon?  Because the only things I can feel are variations of darkness…

It’s a scary place to be – see, there – fear – another negative emotion… but you see, I try to remember something a motivational speaker called Mel Robbins once said – that fear is the exact same chemical in the brain to excitement and that you have to change your perspective and realise when you fear something that you might actually need to try and tell yourself it’s exciting, rather than something to fear.

Odd… but I am trying this trick.

I am on the cusp of something amazing which is about to happen in my life and all I can think about is how scary it is – I know there are wonderful things coming with it, especially a lot of love and tenderness and protection – but I still can’t help but focus on that one major problem.  I have like 30 pros and only around five cons to this chance, yet it’s the cons that are taking up brain space!

When you see it like that, you realise there is something seriously wrong with how you are wired!

Wired might not be correct actually… trained is perhaps the best way to describe it.   Because I used to be such a Positive Pollyanna and it has only really been in the past decade that the Pollyanna in me has started to die.

I need to do what happened in the book Pollyanna – I need to find my tribe to help resuscitate me, bring me back to the light.

Although saying that, I think I don’t need to, I think – if I am reading things correctly, my tribe has come to find me and all I need to do is wait a little while longer, then reach out my hand fearlessly and say to myself – I am excited to be a part of your life!

Thanks for reading!

Creative expression plans

I am starting to think about doing some new approaches to my creativity soon, at the moment it will be difficult to do the changes that I want to do, because of the environment I am living in – but I am hoping soon, in the near future things will be different and I will have more freedom to express myself in an environment that I can thrive in.

A place where I am able to write when I need to and my personal time and space is respected, a place where I can do my art without fighting mess and a place where I practise my music without having arguments about overriding a television or making disturbing background noises because someone wants to listen to their laptop gaming noise instead of music.

Most of all, I am looking forward to an environment that is organised and clean most of the time and where nobody slobs about without a care for weeks on end, until mess gets so out of hand everyone moans and chips in finally for half a day, only for three days later it would seem nothing has changed at all.

It would be good to get back into the habit of watching movies again, because doing that here has always been impossible.  Nobody wants a movie on, unless it’s the same old, same old.

As a former movie buff, this has been a hard pill to swallow.

I haven’t kept up to date with the movie industry since I moved here in the early summer of 2009.

I am very behind.

Right after I have written this post, I am going to write something for myself and myself only. 

I am going to write a list of plans for my creative future and I am going to store this on my computer to read at a later date, a date when I am no longer living here in this environment.

I am doing this because I have been prompted to think about it by a book called “Art for happiness” by Val Andrews – they’ve set a task in which I am to think about any new ways I would like to express myself that I haven’t done already and there is quite a few actually and some I want to combine to create what I believe could be a new creative art form.

I have always had an interest in stage plays and the theatre and it is something along those lines.

I’ve composed music in the past, written lyrics and poems, done some amateur dramatics at college, did some private designs for fashion and dreamt up stories, painted pictures and even danced.  I have been known to decoupage and embroider, knit and crochet.  I have also been classically trained in opera as a child and was the main lyricist and singer of a rap/rock band in college, even though I was always more of a jazz, rock and soul singer in my heart.

Jazz and soul are the preferred genres my family and friends like me to sing.

As a child and into my teens I had always had an interest in burlesque but it was aggressively shunned by my mother, yet my paternal grandmother encouraged it as it was something her own mother did in between being a professional ballet and cancan dancer – my grandmother herself was a majorette and was known to do small amateur dramatic theatre work as a volunteer at weekends, usually to entertain for free the elderly visiting from residential homes and she did this along with two of my aunts and sometimes my dad.

My dad stopped going because mum didn’t like him doing it and she didn’t like my aunts encouraging me to think about joining them in their acts too!

They loved my singing, they said that my voice often moved them to tears and several old people in the audience too as I sang no less than twice for them all.

When it appeared I had some kind of talent, mum soon put a stop to my singing lessons too!

Some of the old people who lived in my street knew my mum did this and their hearts went out to me, because they knew I was home-schooled, they knew the house was noisy and didn’t sound very happy and they knew I lived in the garden.  They were sad when they used to hear me sing on my swing in the garden, people could hear me several houses away. 

Some of them tried to guilt trip my mum by telling them she should let me sing again and go back to her music classes, but she wouldn’t have it.

I lost my confidence when I was around ten years old to sing in the garden, when some new children moved into the house at the back of us and started to bully me for it, because it was opera and they felt I wasn’t cool not to mention I was fat and sad and lonely, as they called me.

Those children became the bane of my life from then onwards, as from 3pm until 8pm most days I would be self-conscious about being seen in the garden by them as they’d deliberately throw balls to bounce off my head and mock me by trying to knock me off my swing.  So I tried to keep nearer to the house, this meant that I couldn’t play with my rabbit called Toffee at the time or sit near the pond, because they’d make entertainment of me.

When I was around thirteen mum wanted more control of the garden and to make it family space as the summers were getting hotter and hotter and so because she was bothered by the children too, she put up a 6ft fence all around us.

This meant I felt free to exercise in the garden again without being mocked at any time I liked again.  I loved netball practise and swing ball, I played squash up against the house too and wasn’t self-conscious in practising my judo either.

I still don’t know when I will move out; I know I can’t really finance that yet.  But I am looking forwards to leaving – I’ve always believed this house is the thing that made me ill.

I never felt easy living here, it was like the house is alive and it didn’t welcome me – ever been in a house where you have an innate feeling you’re unwanted?

Paul told me his house is haunted and that since I moved in, within weeks the spirit seemed to have gone.  I promised him I had done nothing to scare it off, but Paul has always felt it was weird how the ghost seemed to have just vanished when I moved in.

Perhaps I made it insecure?

Who knows?

Thanks for reading…

My authenticity as an author

What is my authentic self as an author?

What are my passions and experiences which seem to flow into my work effortlessly?

Basically, what makes this author, this author?

It’s not unknown if you have been following me for some time now that vampires are a huge passion of mine and that once they were all absorbing and my main if not ultimate focus?

They are still in my mind but is now swept away into a corner and regarded with a sense of guilty pleasure nowadays, which is a shame. 

But other than my vampires who am I as an author?

I like anthropomorphic animals (human like animals) and animation movies which have animals as main characters or heroes; to me I can’t get enough of movies like that!  I love reading books on the perspectives of animals, such as The Animals of Farthing Wood, Fluke, Charlotte’s Web, that sort of thing.

Being shamanic off and on throughout my life, I regard myself as having an unusually deep understanding for both nature and animals and anything primal really and yes, that does make me a Walt Disney fan.

I am a deeply spiritual person too with very philosophical ideas – this can be seen in some of my work but not all of it.

I do believe in miracles and magic, I believe in soul connections and spirits, so this belief of mine goes into my work a lot.

My work can be very profound and intense; it’s what I’ve seen in past reviews on my blog, in emails and from other people who were fortunate enough to get snippets from me in private.  Because I tend to throw in my philosophical thoughts, my spiritual education and I forget that sometimes for some people, they’re not ready for that kind of depth yet.  It’s a part of me, it’s a part of who I am and mostly I don’t realise I do it.

That’s my magic, that’s unique to me and when you follow your authentic path in your own writing, you will discover things about yourself you never knew too, it’s a kind of therapy a kind of gas-lighting oneself.

I love dragons and monsters, I like seeing them as misunderstood creatures, creatures that aren’t bad at all and in fact could be rather helpful but have their boundaries and they expect respect.

I like characters that are inventive and quirky, a little strange, maybe forgetful and definitely misunderstood by societies they live in, because they reflect who I am.  I am proud to say I am an air-head with little understanding of logic, that has an interest in science though not a brain to really fully grasp it and a memory of sieve – put all of this into a pot steaming with spirituality, creativity and free love and you’ve got me… a messy soup.

I am a mixture of Caractacus Potts from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Carl from Van Helsing 2004, Miss Bat from Worst Witch, Miss Trelawney from Harry Potter, Lucille Ball, Wendy Froud, Bjork and Bob Ross!  You get the message… I’m a mess!

I love writing lengthy descriptions of natural scenes and observations including as many if not all of the five senses all at once.

I have a deep sense of decay of both mind and matter, I understand the damaging effects of humanity on the Earth and I write plenty of dystopic sceneries in some of my stories.  I love the idea of nature taking back the world, after humans sought to destroy it! 

I love characters like Poison Ivy, Pocahuntas and The Lorax for this.

I have a deep sense of survival in me, from both being raised semi-feral in a North London garden with a violent family and because I have a Girl Guides attitude of “Be prepared” and a deeply seated understand of impermanence – that you can often see survival as a theme in a lot of my stories.

This is why I love characters such as Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games, the TV series The Tribe, Rambo and so forth. 

Because I have experienced severe mental health issues over the years and lived with several people who have far worse issues than I do (I have never needed to be medicated for example, like they have) I can fully understand what it means to live in an asylum and how the public treats people who have a history of that environment.  I also understand and have witnessed several times people literally descending into madness to the point of both murder and suicide.  Yes I have seen a person killed in front of me that is something I’ve kept to myself until now.

I have also witnessed several people trying to take their own lives, dying of a stroke right before my eyes and other horrible things.

Experiences which are hard to write, but can’t be wrote properly unless you’ve truly experienced it.  I am not saying try to experience that sort of thing, goodness no!  But you can understand how an author’s authentic self can further their writing by putting in their life experiences into it!

Characters such as Jack Torrance from the shining, John Kramer from Jigsaw, Janet Frame from Angels at my table are reflective of very similar people I have known as well as several characters from the movie The Crow.  I’ve known very edgy, scary people who don’t hide the aspect of who they truly are to anybody!  A few of these people have been put into isolation by the authorities but there are others that have evaded this somehow!

In my experience it is the weak ones that get caught and dealt with, the really nasty buggers never are!

Injustice is another thing that crops up in my stories from time to time based on this.

I am afraid to say some readers may find some of my darker materials frustrating as justice are rarely served in a fair way; I tend to take people to a very primal place.

Some of my characters are kooky, childish and fun, but should really be responsible as they are adults but they struggle with that reality – therefore I like characters such as Mr and Mrs Luxury from the blue bird, God from Dogma, Brennan and Dale from Step Brothers and Sarah Sanderson from Hocus Pocus. 

I have a passion for characters with big egos and sarcastic humour so I am often drawn to personalities which are played by actors such as Alan Rickman, Tim Curry, Glen Close and Robert Downey Jr.  Those characters seem to be fighting against the odds with a pack of brainless lucky heroes who are out to ruin their plans or gas-light them in some way in my stories.

Comedy is becoming more prominent in my stories as time is going by as I am no longer hiding my sense of humour from the world; this is a transition that is not welcoming from Paul.  He prefers my more serious stuff, but that’s not being authentic to myself!

There is even comedy in my darker stories and horror these days, lightly thrown in.

I was given an article to mull over by Paul the other week about how dark humour is an early sign of dementia; I am not paying any attention to that!

Societal changes and upheaval are a theme in several of my stories, hence my love for dystopia.

I dislike romance, so that is at a minimum – but there are some saucy scenes now and again in my adult works, in fact I have been known to write full on erotica in a past blog as short stories, but I deleted them after a while and that blog – I also did it here for a short time too, in the early years of my blog as I was told I was too graphic and should really have it as a subscribers content.

That is something I am thinking about doing actually, subscribers short stories of both my erotic works and vampires, as well as a subscriber incentive of giving 50% off the purchase of poetry anthology E-books I am planning to publish by the end of summer.

I love certain sports and you can see which I am into by the books I write, I love wrestling and combat sports in general so there are plenty of fight scenes in my stories as well as ancient warfare.  I am very keen in ancient warfare history and gaming.  I know a lot of the terminologies and so there is little research needed for me when I write those scenes because it’s a passion of mine.

I am not afraid of killing off characters but I am not a maniacal character serial killer like George R.R Martin, but not far off it either! 

Death sells as good as sex in my opinion.

I like hard-core no nonsense and dominant characters that don’t like a lot of fuss, so there is at least one in every story.  My favourite character is a wild hermit woman from the Dragon project I am writing; a sort of mix of Miss Trunchball meets Nanny McPhee and Tarzan!  Again, crazily based on people I’ve known, as I have said before… I’ve known some strange people in my time and exaggeration can go a long way, especially when story writing!

So you see a lot of my ideas wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for life experience and a knack for exaggeration for entertainment value.

Though I keep my non-fiction as honest as possible, I can use that experience and exaggerate it for fiction!

This is how we writers do things; it’s how we give you the books we write.

Or those who have actually given their work to an agent to get published, that is!

I’m not far off to be honest.

I won’t give you a deadline or update until I send my work to an agent, but for now – let’s just say, I think it’s going to be sooner than you think – a lot sooner!

So there you have it – my experiences, my passions and my work and why it is uniquely mine and why you will struggle to try and copy it!  You are not me and even if you were to go off and research the character references and include the subjects I’ve mentioned in this blog – you won’t ever reflect me, but only I can be purely me and only you can be purely you!

Thanks for reading!

Food sustainability

My relationship with food is awkward, because although I am a fat woman, I actually don’t eat all that much.

I like the idea of sustainability and eating locally grown produce etc. and I even like the idea of a predominantly plant based diet, though not entirely a plant based one.  But I can’t ever go full vegan even if I wanted to because of my health issues and that’s not a cop out!  I have a protein metabolism and I have intolerances to soy and mustard as it makes my spleen swell and become painful. I also cannot stomach a high fat or sugar diet.

I have heard this puts me potentially into the “Flexitarian” bracket if I could afford the diet change, but I really don’t know! I know right now, my finances could not support my body on a flexitarian diet as we’re struggling to eat full-stop right now.

My health has improved vastly since I have started to eat a minimum of 75g of protein per day, any less than this and the following day I have problems with pain and lethargy.

I understand that other than vitamin B12 there are many foods out there for vegans which will give me a high protein diet, I am very aware of what is available.  However, my other problem is, I am a person who cannot eat big meals and I cannot eat too frequently.  

What I am saying is, I struggle to eat in quantities, I can’t eat more than a sandwich in one sitting and I need to stay immobile twenty minutes after eating, so the idea of having seven meals per day to make up for it is not ideal – because I will spend half my day on my bum!

What is frustrating is, I love a lot of veg and salads – really I love it a lot!  But, if I eat that, I won’t be getting enough protein.  Because I can’t make it up with the soy, especially on my budget!

Because I love sustainability etc. and I have been working hard for the past ten years to get abundant knowledge about how to have a sustainable life, I have learned a lot.  Some people really believe veganism will save the world, I am not going to say anything against that other than this one thing…

The thing that is killing the world is a farming system known as “monoculture.”

What is that?

It is where farms only grow one to three crops on several acres of land without including anything beneficial to the local environment and its wildlife, whilst stripping the land bare at the end of the year.

Veganism will work in regards to the fact that there will be less pasture for the meat industry, but it doesn’t solve the fact of monoculture being used to grow vegetables and fruits, does it?      

Now, I am supporting you guys, believe me!

But a lot of people have a huge oversight on this matter.

What people need to do is make more farming suggestions along the lines of polyculture farming or most ideally, food forest farming – where at least you can still have meat in your diet if you are so inclined.  Because chickens and other poultry, like ducks, geese, and turkeys can live in a food forest and will help with pest control whilst maintaining natural biodiversity.

We were never meant to create monoculture farming, it is not natural and as you can see, it is very damaging to our environment. 

What we need are food forests. 

Because vitamin B12 is virtually impossible to get in a vegan diet outside of fortified cereals and without it can cause a lot of damage to people’s health in the long run – the idea of having a food forest where you have poultry is ideal.  You can just eat the free range eggs and don’t need to worry about the meat factor if you really are anti-meat.

Orchards can have certain other creatures in them; in fact in ancient farming we always did, it has only really been since the Victorian period that people moved further and further into monocultural design.

Polyculture is where you have a multitude of different plants and flowers in the area; only thing is you need to get rid of the social mind-set of perfect food.  Food is food; it doesn’t have to be perfect, it doesn’t have to conform to a standard, just be edible!

It’s not our diets that have to change its our mind-set and our food industry that has to change, it has to be designed better, going back to basics, going back to polyculture and food forestry and becoming organic. 

Biodiversity is key to our survival and you are not going to do that with modern monocultural farming.

Another thing that is destroying our world is the idea of digging – I am a no dig gardener and that means I am a gentle gardener who understands that it’s not just what grows above the soil we need to care for, but what happens beneath it too!

The microorganisms that are in the ground are key to our soils health and the health of our soil will also improve the fertility of our land and our crops, making our food industry produce on average 10% more yields than those farms and gardens that dig.  Sometimes as much as 20% has been recorded!

I have learned all of this with the years of research I have been doing and through books written by various people, but most notably Charles Dowding. 

Another factor to our climate crisis is the trade industry – though it’s great for our economy it is not environmentally sustainable.  Though our diets need to be very diverse, it is nonetheless killing our planet.  You need to eat locally grown foods and I know I don’t practise what I preach here, because I am a huge lover of exotic fruits, vegetables and spices.  I eat a banana a day and they certainly don’t grow in the UK.

So with that being said – I can cope with a largely plant based diet as long as I can still eat in small quantities and still maintain a minimal protein intake of 75g per day – but I can’t go full on vegan.  I believe chickens can actually save the world!

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*

Technology and specie inclusivity

I like to read from time to time cyberpunk books, so how comes up until recently I have been a luddite?

Although I have read cyberpunk books, bio-punk books and such the likes, I read them with a dim view.  I enjoy those books, but I lived in fear of technology taking over, like it has in many of those books!

I saw those books as a warning sign!

A flag up for society a shout out of do and doom!

Dramatic I know!

But forearmed is forewarned, that was my philosophy anyhow!

You are beginning to see now that I am a frightened creature, a creature that is easily made tensed and living with a sense of perpetual panic… about mostly everything!

You’d be right in thinking I a prepper, because I was a girl guide “be prepared” was our motto too you know!

But just because I read books, doesn’t mean I am very smart in everything.  My intelligence lies with literature in general, languages, the environment, animal welfare and social sciences – not technology!

You can’t learn much from the average cyberpunk and bio-punk novel, other than developing a sense of fear or excitement over it.  It doesn’t tell you how to use twitter set up an YT channel and upload pictures on Instagram.  I wish it did, but there you go!

But I still stand with how deeply concerned I am that as society is progressing to becoming more and more cyber oriented, we are not increasing our understanding of nature and working designs out to be more wildlife inclusive.

Really, you’d think that as we’re now so technologically and scientifically advanced these days that we’d have developed cities akin to the Venus Project and that more cities, especially in the 2020’s would look like Singapore or better versions of it!

But lo and behold… no!

We’re still making concrete coffins to cover the land, it’s spreading like a virus and I don’t like it!  It’s not pretty and it’s certainly not healthy!

You know this technology is amazing and it really can be a much more amazing thing if we think outside the box and thought more inclusively about nature.  Never before has humanity bragged its sense of inclusiveness so dramatically as it has now, but failed to include other species within the spectrum of inclusivity.

Until we do so, maybe then, we will find alien life as they will know that humanity isn’t speciesist!  That should be a new word in the dictionary – speciesist, meaning disrespect of other species and anti-biomutualist. 

It’s something to consider.

It’s something also that is mentioned a lot in my books!

Specie inclusivity, bio-mutualism and so forth; why not?  Hardly anyone has touched on the subject to the degree I have.  Except of course, our precious David Attenborough, and to me he is a precious member of human society that if bio-technology needs to save one human in the world from death, it is him!  Forever may he live!

Thanks for reading!

Truth of a luddite

Where the blazes have you been woman?  I suppose that is something you all have been thinking since learning about my forays into technology?

Truth is, I rebelled against my much older brother for years as he demanded that I learn everything about technology and be a techno-head like him.  I pushed against the idea that technology really will drown the old world out and replace it to such an extent that money will eventually become extinct for cyber points instead etc.

We’re close to that kind of society now and it is a sobering thought, because as much as I pushed against it, I am being dragged in by the tidal wave of millions of people who are going in for all of that!

I really believed that more and more people will think like me, drag themselves away from the zombie mind-sets of technology and run for the hills to save the environment from the onslaught of iron, plastic and wires and being pounded by invisible waves of energy because they’ll see the damage it is doing.

I’m sad to say they haven’t and it’s been a long time.

Where have I been indeed?

The honest answer is curled up with a book in the corner of a room, until the bad neighbour came, I would venture into my garden growing everything organically and in permaculture style and trying my best to stick to traditional life.

But I want a writing career and I am not going to be that successful in it, without all the technological stuff. 

Though learning it is fun, I still learn it with pangs of guilt that I am not being true to myself – my nature – my environment and beliefs.

I just wished that technological advancement was more environmentally friendly, healthy and inclusive with nature; instead of drowning out the sounds of nature to the extent the birds are going deaf to each other because of human noise and infrasound.

I want to be trendy like other people, knowing all the new gadgetry off by heart and going with the flow, but I also crave the old ways – the self-sufficiency, the living at one with nature, not fighting with it for space and resources.

This is what I have been struggling with for nearly two decades and I am giving in, I am giving in like all the other millions of people around the world have – but I hope that I still hold true to some traditional ways in spite of this.

I’m not an Amish, but for years I have come close to being like one.  Gardening in traditional ways, no electrical tools, no poisons like pesticides and herbicides, walking barefoot in the garden, knee deep in soil and eating fruit straight from the bushes and trees without thought;  I don’t really want to change that much and I am likely not to.

But I like having a social media presence.

I know I am quiet, but I am one of these strange people in the world who don’t like to talk unless I have something to say or that I feel the words that come out of my mouth have to have some kind of meaning… I don’t like engaging in very negative conversations or gossip, so this makes me an anomaly to many.

I don’t follow people just because they’ve followed me, I have to like what they have to say, I have to connect somehow – if I don’t, I won’t follow, because I don’t believe in boosting a person’s ego and presence, unless there is something about them I like. 

Why?  Because I am old fashioned, I believe your connections represent who you are as a person and if I connect with the wrong kind of person, because I don’t really know who they are, then that could be damaging to me.

I think this is something that is wrong with social media; people don’t understand that association can affect your own reputation.  It might not be like that these days, but to me it still stands.

These are what have made me hold back with technology a bit.

But I am open to change; I am not that stubborn or stupid.

But I do have a big hang up on my looks, I believe I am hideous and I struggle on an emotional level to share photographs of myself.

But I have to get used to it.

It’s the way of the world now.

I am not happy in my own skin and I would appreciate some love as I have had way too much abuse and negativity in my life, that it’s darkened me as a person, my light is almost going out – I need to regain my spark.  It went years ago.

I am very apprehensive online and I make loads of mistakes when trying to chat with people, by sending posts before they’ve finished etc.

Thanks for reading!

Sunflower solution

Today Paul and I have thought about the sunflower oil and sunflower lecithin crisis that has hit the world, because last year was a very bad year in sunflower production due to climate and weather disturbances but now there is another factor that has affected sunflower oil production – the war on Ukraine; this war has contributed to the sunflower crisis because Ukraine produced 46% of the worlds sunflowers and safflowers.  This means that the sunflower oil crisis has certainly lengthened, but it also poses a threat to people who have food intolerances like me.

Without the use of sunflower lecithin in products they will now use soy or flax and I am sensitive to both of those things, which means it has affected me directly!  My diet is going to become further reduced as a result of it.

Paul and I are uncertain whether or not I will react to flax lecithin’s, because so far as we know, I am mostly affected if I eat whole flax seeds or linseeds, so whether or not I will be ok in other forms, time will tell!

We do know that I am no longer severely gluten and lactose intolerant, that it was products that contained soy, that didn’t make itself obvious until recently.

We know that gluten causes a slight rise in my blood pressure if I eat, say more than a sandwich worth of bread in a day of wheat, but that it does seem to be mostly a wheat rather than gluten problem potentially…

Lactose only really causes an issue with my digestive system if I eat too much fat in one day, but I can now drink a milkshake or have a chocolate bar with no ill effect, if I am easy on other fats throughout the day!

So this has helped improve my diet choices again and there is a noticeable increase in my health since going back to these foods.  But it is not anything to celebrate really, as the changes are still rather small, just a change in hair, nail and skin quality and deeper, longer sleep sessions.  I am more tired these days, but we’re not sure why.

Because of the sunflower crisis, I told Paul that when we get some money, it might be worth investing some of that money in sunflower farming?  But Paul feels that many other farmers are already on the ball with that and may neglect wheat farms to do so, meaning that he feels there could be a wheat shortage soon as people literally chase what they think is a golden opportunity.

I am not happy about doing wheat farming, I am not into grasses because of the lack of biodiversity and Paul failed to remember that my sunflower farm would not be a monoculture, because you can grow other things underneath the big blowsy heads of flowers!  Beans, tomatoes, sweetcorn and squash for example are excellent companion plants for this crop.

Because aphids are attracted to sunflowers on mass, ants will actually farm those aphids for their honeydew and therefore the crops underneath the sunflowers would not be affected by the aphids as much as they would have without them. 

Because ultimately any farming or self-sufficiency I do is 100% organic and polycultural.

Not only this but farming the sunflowers like this would also bring in the three sisters philosophy too, corn, squash and beans, corn in particular increase their yield when planted next to sunflowers it is just a matter of alternating plants, sunflower, with a block of corn, sunflower, block of corn, you get it?

So it would be a very productive system in my opinion, so I guess, in a manner, Paul gets his way when he suggests we really should consider a grain…

Let’s get it on

The world is screaming in this heat

Life is on the verge

And it isn’t meat!

It’s all the toxins you consume!

All the chemicals are our doom!

Drown the world in oil plunder

Kill us all and all the wonder

Choke us with your smog and know

That we have no other place to go!

So think on that and change the world

A new mission for you has unfurled

We are super heroes you and I

And together the world will not die

One action and then another

We can save the world and build another

A newer greener happier place

On this same planet that we’ve disgraced

If we do it now it won’t be too late

So let’s get on cleaning up our mistakes!