Curious lost lines

Brain hurricane season is still present; I have had more ideas in the past few days than I knew what to do with.

This appears to be a long one and I blame it all down to the “Bluewater technique” I spoke about in a previous post.

I really did try to force myself to write something every day whether it’s going to be published or not, whether it’s more than a sentence or not and I got thinking about some very wacky things!

You’ll see them as posts such as “If I were a fairy” or “life of a mermaid” though the latter is due in the first week of June, so you won’t see that just yet.

Somethings I consider unpublishable or are unfinished poems or plays.

I don’t like to leave poems unfinished but it is a habit I am trying to get out of because a book I’ve been reading called “How to grow your own poem” by Kate Clanchy says, it is easy to lose a good line, never delete the line when you don’t know where its taking you, store them in a folder called “lost lines” and come back to them later, a poem doesn’t need to be rushed.

So I’ve done that and have accumulated approximately twenty unfinished and would be deleted poems in just a week!

They don’t even have to be poems actually; they could be good prose lines for a short story or a novel.

Who knows where those lost lines will lead us?

There is a whole paragraph which seems exciting, but I don’t know why yet.  But it’s very intriguing and it’s called “The Masters of Dream”.

I haven’t been able to add more to it yet, because in all honesty I was busy with other things today and working on those things with a raging head and ear ache.

But I could not ignore that paragraph, which started like that.

I hope I have time tomorrow to think about it and see what this is!

Thanks for reading!

If I were a fairy

If I were a fairy, my season would be autumn, my flower would be sunflowers, I would magic in the harvest and paint the leaves of everything in the autumnal colours and I would play tricks on mortals around Halloween by tickling their ears with my breath!

I would smell like spices and apples and have autumn leaves hairclips in my hair and spiders looping their webs into my earring holes and dangling there as fashion models.

I would help the stork deliver babies in big pumpkin carry cots and corn husks as blankets.

Because, why not?

My familiar would be a fox or raccoon and I’d throw peach pits at people who disrespected nature and magically create an instant tree where it lands to serve them right if they walked right into it!

I love faeries; I could get really into writing a book all about fairy culture etc.  it would be smashing if I could do the art I see in my head as well.

But never mind.

I am overloaded with other projects right now that one can wait.

Thanks for reading!

Lessons & time

Everything that happens in life is a lesson!

Well that is what has been told to me time and time again by various people of all walks of life and I sit and I wonder, well, what am I learning from what I do?

What can be learnt from sitting down three hours per day skipping between three YouTube Livestreams of nesting birds? 

What can I learn from watching a solitary albatross chick pulling grass on the edge of his nest, ducking from incoming adults of neighbouring nests as they land?

What am I learning from watching five little owlets being fed rats by its parent in a dingy dirty owl box in Florida?

What am I learning from watching Osprey pulling apart fishes given to her by her mate to feed her two little chicks?

What am I learning by scrolling through various female artists throughout history?  Especially when I can never remember their names or the names of the pieces of their art?

What am I learning from collaging bits of paper onto a canvas and then painting the edges of it?

What am I learning when I am laying down staring out the window cloud gazing?

If everything that happens to me in life is a lesson, then what am I learning from everything that I do?

Somethings don’t make any sense to me, other things are very clear – but not the so-called mundane things of sitting and watching or just sitting and thinking; the most nonsensical thing about my life is how often I sit down and imagine conversations I want to have with people dead or alive, or imagine creatures or people having lives within stories I’ve made.  I understand that imagination makes me productive when I use it to make stories, but what exactly is its lesson when I am more or less making it up as I go along?

The lessons I have understood and learned, yet still appear to be a student of nonetheless, which must mean I’ve not entirely grasped them yet are these…

Dropping food I am eating – I have presumed the lessons here are;

Don’t take anything for granted

Be grateful for what you eat

Don’t eat so much

Yet I still appear to need to learn that lesson – not that I am in the habit of dropping food on the floor, but you get my drift?

I’m bored and philosophical right now, so I am coming out with a load of crap – but its thought provoking nonetheless and I do waste oodles of time thinking such things!

When I was little my grandmother said there is a very good reason why we drop food or spill drinks and it is to do with the fairy folk around us!

I asked her… what fairy folk make us become slobs?

She tutted and swiped at me and said, no silly – when we drop food or drink we’re to remember not to forget the fairy folk and give them an offering – it’s a kind of magic where we get accident prone with food and drink because it’s a sign they’re hungry or thirsty and feels neglected by us!

At the moment I am inclined to believe this house has a fairy who is particularly fond of sausages, because Henry is constantly dropping his and Paul has been known to drop them whilst serving them on plates too… so whatever fairy we have in our house sure is a sausage lover!

We used to leave offerings out for the fairy every night but we’ve got a rodent problem right now so can’t.  People have become very accident prone at dinner ever since.

My grandma would say (if she were still around, bless her) that it will only get worse till we make an offering.

But we really can’t right now!

I have been thinking about playing my recorder in the dining room to see if the rat will think I am the Pied Piper of Hamlin and follow me dancing out the door, or whether or not that idea is completely ludicrous, a waste of time and liable to get me called weirdo by Paul again.

It’s irritating having a rat, especially when you live with someone so jumpy and fearful of the things.

It’s tried eating the window to get out at night – our window frames are wood, there are gnaw marks all along it, I said to Paul unless you’ve got a spare 15k I suggest you try to flush the rat out because we’re going to lose our window!

The terror immediately hit Paul and he plans in a couple of days he will try and get rid of it, it’s always in a couple of days though with him on everything.  It’s been a couple of days since summer of 2016 that he promised to fix the shower… it’s been a couple of days since 2017 to finish painting the living room green… my goodness I feel immortal right now, a God… 800 million years is a day isn’t it to God?

They said he made the world in 6 days and rested on the 7^th, which means according to science this planet is approximately 4.6 billion years old meaning a day is around 800 million years, so I have to presumably wait 1.6 billion years for him to do it?  Because I am pretty sure he is not using Earth human mortal dates here!

I have the strangest life.

Never mind.

Thanks for reading!

Being an authentic author

Great literature comes from the heart.  A great writer put their heart, their soul and their experience onto the paper.  They write what they love and are passionate about and they ensure to put as much emotion into their piece as they could possibly muster!

People want to read amazing literature, people want to write it too; but some people seem to think that they can’t trust themselves, their passions, their ideas because they have a low self-esteem and value for what they believe they are worth – so these sorts of people tend to be what I call “the idea stealers” and then they wonder why they aren’t as successful as Joe Blogs down the road and to me it’s purely a matter of just being you.  You weren’t being genuinely yourself when you are writing and that’s why you aren’t as good as someone who has their own path, their own ideas and put their heartfelt passions into a word format, like a book.

You’d be surprised at how many people would read a book about a character that is passionate about stamp collecting, if the author has the same passion – because the spirit of the author leaks onto the page and makes it feel genuine and fresh regardless of the subject matters general popularity in society.

I’ve read books with such a boring synopsis but were riveting reads, because I believe the author had done that – put their spirit into the pages of that book, by being themselves!  After researching the authors I find out that they do have similar lives to their characters and that’s why they are a success – even fantasy authors, though magic isn’t real, the power of belief and imagination is so strong in them as a person, they can trick you into believe it is!

Trend chasers do not tend to be very successful authors or at least not authors with readership longevity.

Don’t chase trends, don’t think that one author is doing really well on her blog or her sales that you must try and copy the frame of her work as your own in order to succeed as you think that’s a trend – you are not harming that other author, but you are harming yourself and your authenticity.  If there is nothing more that can sell better than talent it is a person’s authenticity – their brand. 

You being your authentic self is your brand.  Can you really keep up the pretence for the rest of your life that you love fairy romances when you by your very nature is a conservative person who doesn’t believe in magic and dreams coming true and love at first sight?

There is a time when it will become a grind for you and your mental health will suffer.  I have seen this happens to many authors over the time I’ve been online and befriended a few.

They tend to crash and burn out and give up.

The catalyst is usually the time when they choose a prompt and they are led by that prompt and the stealing of multiple ideas of other authors which reflect similar subjects of the prompt.  This is a thing, I’ve seen it time and time again and I actually have friends who are the writers of these prompts and they’ve cheekily used some of my ideas in their prompts to prompt other writers to write.

This has caused a surge over the years of certain subjects swamping the publishing industry with the same old subject and similar storylines, which gets old for author agents very quickly and it is why many book trends come and go erratically fast!

Trend chasers exhaust the idea pot because they are frightened of their own authenticity.

They feel that others will judge them as harshly as they judge themselves and that is not the case at all.

I am not sitting here being all high and mighty, I have succumb to this kind of pressure myself and I have sat down and seen the industry exhausted by vampires, so I have chased the other trends, witches or werewolves or demons and I wasn’t as happy as I was when I was writing my vampires and it is clearly seen in my works.

The heart isn’t there.

So where is my heart?

Where is my authentic self?

That’s another post…

For now, I want you to ask yourself the same question.

Thanks for reading!

Queen of Winter

Skipping bare foot in the snow, dancing and laughing is the crystal fairy of winter’s chill

Tapping frost onto cobwebs and lacing the ground white with each step, over mountain and over hill

Icicles worn like gems decorate her silver neck and frosted leaves make her shining dress

A gown fit to impress, the faeries at the Yuletide ball

She will be much loved within the dance-hall of Oberon and Titania

Bringing a dancing mania to one and to all

An ice dance supreme, like a tremendous dream as she decorates streams of icy walls

For she is The Queen of Winter and she will stand tall!

Changes

I am struggling to eat and sleep properly, not sure really what’s wrong with me; I am barely able to eat more than 900 calories most days now and I am sleeping an average of 5 hours per night.

This is why I am going quieter than normal again.

I am trying hard to keep my activities up but I am just zoning out a lot during the day because I am tired and uncomfortable and there is this strange feeling as though, something in my life is going to be turned upside down… whether for good or bad I am not sure…

I know something big has already happened in my life, I have gained two new freedoms in this past month – one could be life-changing, the other was kind of predicted by me a few years ago.

Paul and I are living together but we are no longer in a relationship – we have our separate rooms and we are starting to kind of get separate lives too – but we’re still friends.  He is more of a guardian of me now, really.

The other change is my personal finance, I have paid off one of my personal debts which helped us get by Christmas to Christmas over the years and soon another debt will be completely gone too.  This will make my £25 per week treat money go up by another £15 in January!  Now that’s not all, because Paul is now officially retired, it means I have the option of self-employment without the guilt of cutting family funds down if I fail.

So Paul is trying to help me learn how to use technology in order for me to do the YouTube channel I am interested in doing and to also learn how to monetise Pinterest, Instagram and this blog.  So for the next month I may be quieter than usual, only doing one to two posts per day whilst I get educated about what I need to do for self-employment.

I am trying to write a business plan out to see where I could potentially earn an income and how; whilst improving my creative outlet, because ultimately I want my job to be creatively based – not just promoting and advertising.

Paul has a good concept I am thinking of running with – putting my poems on Instagram with royalty free videos as one of the things to do. 

As I am getting healthier and able to do more things physically, I think I may be able in a month or two to start going for walks at the local wildlife reserve again and take photographs to sell as postcards and other things.

I particularly like taking photos of dawn and dusk – the twilight hours, I love twilight!  I am not talking about the sparkly vampire novels and movie; I am talking about the time of day!

Our wildlife reserve has a very high hill that is perfect for landscape photography at those times of day for you can see for miles around you – the problem is getting up there when you are sick and not as fit as you used to be!  Five flights of stairs over a twenty minute walk; each step is a different size from 2 inches to 2ft!  Some of the steps you have to hoist yourself up or jump down!  They are wooden and rickety and look like something in a fairy forest because they are covered in moss and lichen and go through the darkest depths of the woods, which can be spooky at times!

Especially as these woods have something the locals call “Screaming deer” a small deer that sounds like a woman being murdered from time to time, unnerving when you get to the shady depths of the wood and you get to see the glimpse of one in the darkness scurrying out the brambles and hopping over the dark stream away from you!

They are a kind of muntjac, not native, but escaped into the British wildlife a few years back!

There are quite a few things I am planning to do, unfortunately a gardening blog and vlog will have to wait until I move away, because the bad neighbour practically lives at his window waiting to see me do anything in the garden before he comes out and harasses me again.

I had thought the garden blog and vlog would actually probably be 50/50 with my writing up until 2yrs ago when that horrible man move in next door!  He is so unpopular in the village he has been more or less banned from three of the local pubs for his obnoxious behaviour and nobody will employ him as a handyman either!

The dog he has he has made vicious lunged at Paul the other day and Paul fell into a dog rose bush and has really nasty gashes all up his forearm – Henry has a phobia of big dogs like that Dalmatian because of what happened when he was a toddler when he was playing in a park, a dog jumped at him and bashed his head hard.  He is OK with little dogs though.

Henry and I don’t use our garden path anymore because of both the man and the dog, we cross to the left and use an alternative neighbours path, which takes us about 300ft out of our way whenever we want to go out to the right side of the street, but at least we don’t get harassed! 

When the dog is in their back garden we can’t be in our back garden either, because it uses their outdoor dining table as a means to jump over the fence to try and attack us yet still Paul won’t complain to the police about it all.

So we are one of the lucky families to have a garden that is bigger than 20ft by 20ft which is rare in this country and area, but we can’t use it because of one neighbour and his dog!

My child stuck indoors all day every day summer or not – just so he is safe!

I am only thankful that I have a washing machine with a dryer, I would hate having to go into the garden risking all sorts of things to hang clothes up like how we used to a few years back!

You know this neighbour has affected my mental health so badly that whenever I so much as think about gardening, I have nightmares of him doing things to sabotage my efforts or hurt me or the family, that night?

Something as simple as a flippant comment about wanting to grow Blue Himalayan poppies as a goal, made me have a horrendous dream about him last night and no doubt today I will have a worse one!

What really ticks me off is that the man isn’t supposed to be living next door, he is a tenant – so it would be easy to have him moved on, but Paul is too nice and passive, just because he is fond of his nice step daughter.

Paul is trying everything he can to appease me about the situation whilst not solving it – he is doing everything he can to try and get me an allotment so I can garden again, but that would mean I have to go 10 minutes down the road to grow my flowers, fruits and vegetables on land that isn’t my own whereas I have a 50ft by 30ft back garden and a 20ft by 30ft front garden which we own!  Not only that but it will cost us around £80 a year for the privilege and we’re limited to what we can and cannot grow there!

Before this bad neighbour became a problem, I gardened so much it saved us £60 a month in fruit and veg, right now we need to garden more than ever – but we’re going hungrier than we should be, because of peace sake.

I’ve never known a man like it and I am talking about both Paul and the bad neighbour here!

I do know one thing – if an apocalypse was to happen Paul won’t help defend me against other men and that’s a scary thought!  Very scary! And I know my fears aren’t unwarranted because I first learned of Paul’s cowardice when Henry was 3 months old, when a man tried to attack me when I was pushing Henry in the pram – Paul was walking several feet behind me, whilst I dealt with the man myself, Paul walked right past us like he was pretending he didn’t know us!

I called after him about what happened when I chased the guy off – he claimed he never saw a thing!  I said, you heard shouting and roaring though didn’t you?  No.

So when I say I literally do a lot by myself, I mean it.  I can’t rely on Paul for anything, the house is falling apart – shrug, too tired and busy to do anything oh and play the poverty card too!

Very convenient for him!

So in the past few weeks in particular, he is becoming less like the Paul I know and more like someone I don’t want to.  He has changed a lot since he felt he could reject me and then reclaim me at the drop of a hat without ramifications… he had a shock when he learned I don’t work like that.  You reject me for someone you haven’t met yet, and then you reclaim me when she turns out to be a fake… on your bike!

So that’s why I am going self-employed and this is why I won’t be giving any of my money to Paul to help with anything.  I will give to my son and for us to eat, but that’s about all I will do –  I have had enough of him sitting pretty thinking I am totally helpless and I want a life – I can’t bare this mediocrity any longer, even I or this lifestyle has to die – one of us and I would rather it not be me!

I would rather not be lonely either, but hey ho, sometimes we’re lonelier when we live with people!

To say I am not heartbroken by how my life has turned out is an understatement; I had hoped I would do better than this!  Much better!

Thanks for reading!

The dream me

In my dreams I am not me

My hair is white and crimply

It shines like glitter in the light

My eyes like topaz shines in the night

I am dressed in white with a gold band

And there stands my gentleman with me hand in hand

I’m not fat in those dreams of mine

I am slim and lithe and look so fine

I am like a fairy of the night

In my dreams a beautiful sight

When I wake and in the mirror see

That I am not who I want to be

It’s like a horror story unfolding

This real body of mine needs some moulding

So this is why I work so hard

To try and fight off all the lard

And someday I will happy be

When I look in the mirror to see me

This poem was a long time coming. I really do have dreams where I look like that, I am pretty sure its what my soul looks like; but my real body is literally its polar opposite.

What I find weird about all of this is that when I was a baby till I was 6yrs old my hair was white just like that and I was underweight, then suddenly I got dark and piled on the pounds.

So weird, it was around the time my hair went dark that my mother started to turn against me. I think she thought I’d always be like that.

Today, I feel glamorous and playful. I might be in one of those days of being undecided what to wear. But I do feel like its a red day for me and I would probably make more effort in putting on make up and doing my hair today, if I could afford the cosmetics.

I also feel sexier than normal, so I would opt for split skirts and cleavage boosting clothing and sexy boots.

I’d probably wear daring make up too, I feel daring today.

I know into yesterday evening my looks for the day started to change into the idea of being a peachy or cerise kawaii. That often happens, I shift my ideas of fashion some days where I would want to be two or three things at various times in the day.

But today it’s sexy red clothing, like some kind of silky vampire, with silky clingy knee high sexy boots and vampiric make up. Figure permitting! This is an idealism if I had a body to match my vision.

Instead I sort of look like a saucy sailor.

Happy reading!

The spirit of everything

The weird thing about me is that I have a lemon tree in the living room window called Cyril.

Why is he called Cyril?  Because Paul named him it, when I was thinking about what to name him?  I thought Citroen, but Paul thought Cyril was a good idea, so it stuck.

Yes, I am in the habit of naming my plants as though they are individuals, the same as I used to name any fish I can identify in an aquarium I had in the past.

There is no shame in naming animals, plants and things in general.

I was bored four years ago and found a nice ghost shaped rock; I painted the said rock blue and white, attached googly eyes on it and named it Rocco.

Rocco sits on a bookshelf in my bedroom, amongst perfume and little gnome ornaments.

When I walk into furniture or walls I apologise to it, sometimes if I am in a bad mood, I will slap it and say how inconvenient it was to move just then! 

I am the sort of person that sits watching TV and talks to it like the people in the TV can hear me – no don’t do that you stupid person!  Or, yes, I just read that in this book over there called “what not”, Paul has grown used to me talking to anything; it’s what we call our normality. 

Paul laughs when he hears me accuse the furniture of moving to block me, but I am still not so sure that they don’t move occasionally… because sometimes, it’s like they see a danger I wasn’t aware of, because usually when things like this happen to me, there is someone else charging around the corner of a door or other things. 

I still can’t help but remember what my grandma said about the fairy ancestry in Ireland she claims we have.

Paul was a complete atheist before meeting me, but he admits since knowing me and seeing the strange things that go on in this house since I moved in with him – he can’t deny there is something else.  He has said, since I have moved in, this is definitely a fairy house!

Why did he say that?  I asked him – he said well, since I moved in there is a new energy in the house, he sees shadows and coloured lights occasionally, hears strange mutters in the dark corners of the kitchen at night and food goes missing! 

Although I am a fantasist, I am also quite analytical.  So I said to him, how do you know that I haven’t sleep walked downstairs in the night and ate things?  He said, because when you were in hospital for a week having Henry, it still happened and the mutterings got worse.

I said, did you forget to feed the house spirit?  It was this time that Paul didn’t realise I left offerings every night for it, and so, he didn’t leave things for the house spirits whilst I was away.

Paul heard a crash downstairs one night, after I gave leftover beer as an offering in the kitchen, when we came downstairs we saw saucepans everywhere and Paul claimed he heard a woman mutter about “giving blooming alcohol to him, never leaves him alcohol”!  Then we heard what sounded like a cat fight outside.  So now we never leave alcohol, because the female house spirit doesn’t like her man to drink it!

My grandmother told me that the house spirit always follows the family, they don’t belong to the house – they belong with the family as they are family too!

Whether they’d follow me when I move out or stay with Henry, I am unsure, maybe they’d split the family, some will stay and some will come with me?

We’ve discovered there are seven fairy occupants living here, with lots of occasional overnight visitors.

As much as Paul used to be a sceptic, even he has claimed at the corner of his eye he has seen what they look like and he describes them exactly as I know them to look – because I am clairvoyant; or mad, whatever the case may be.

Dora Lilac-Switch is the head of the house and she does use a lilac cane as a switch to keep the others in line and Paul has complained he felt a sting across his calves when he spilled something in the kitchen and couldn’t be bothered to wipe up after him!

Paul has talked me into eventually writing a book about the brownie goings on in this house, but it might not be done for a while yet.  I have about seven other projects to do first.

Ray our house rabbit used to get tired regularly to the extent he wouldn’t move the next day, Paul started to worry about him, but I drew up a diary about when it happens to see if maybe he was allergic to fruit and veg we gave him.  It turned out the tiredness coincided with common fairy and pagan party dates, which made me consider – has the faeries took him to the party with them?  Fairies do get along with their animal housemates according to legend.  So, it seems they do.

Especially as his fur it usually roughed up and after he is over the exhaustion of it all, almost like a hangover and he goes into a bad mood for three days, like he missed the freedom!

My brother was also a sceptic when I lived in London, but claimed one night he saw a little man in his bedroom eating the leftover pizza on the floor – though my brother was drunk, he still saw it and that little man visits here from time to time, I think he follows my dad, so he doesn’t live here with me anymore; though dad has never said he has seen him, I knew his name to be O’Hara.

There is another little fairy called Lara who is childlike and she has the habit of knocking my drinks over if I have forgotten to water my houseplants for a while.

Dora helps me remember not to burn things on days I forget to put on timers, by chinking glasses in the kitchen loudly together.

Dora also helped me with the bad neighbour by talking to the magpies and they swooped down to attack him one day, but one nearly got knocked to the ground as he managed to swipe at it.

If it is mental illness and not reality all of this, then it is something I don’t want cured as it is excellent story material if nothing else.

But Paul and my brother were hard-core sceptics, scientists and physicists and they won’t let me think that it’s just my imagination – because how could they see my imaginings? 

Being analytical myself and also a former student of psychology and social science, I said this; “it’s quite simple, it is a form of mass hysteria”.  They won’t have it!

I never finished my degree in psychology and social science, I wished I had, it was fun.

The meaning behind this post?  None specifically, just something I wanted to share and something a bit fun about me and my home.

Happy reading!

Snow fairy

With tinsel hair and twinkle toes a little fairy glides

Spreads ice and snow from her wand and wearing rabbit hides

She spreads her wings above us all and snowflakes flutter down

To rain joy upon us all and making smiles from frowns

Each and every winter, the little fairy comes

To paint the world white with snow so you can play in it with your chums

Hip, hip hooray for snow fairy

In her pearly gown

She brings such joy to everyone, when she has come to town!

Types of stories I have finished or are working on

Types of work that I am currently doing;

I have mentioned in several posts that there are certain themes I am writing in my novels and there has been a question of just how many novels are you working on at the moment?  Personally, I don’t know!  I know that sounds really funny to some, but I have been writing loads of stories almost my whole life and I have never really sat back and wondered how many I am working on, because I just write what I feel like at the time.  Yes, there are many novels which are 100% finished now, but to me they could still be in redrafting stages and many have been redrafted umpteempth times since two years ago.  I only started redrafting my 30yrs of work two years ago, simply because I never thought it would be necessary and also because I was never sure if I could cope with writing as a career.

I think I am ready to say, I am now ready for this career, hence why a lot of my writing habits have changed recently.

I am totally self-taught, I have no formal education and I was home educated by a dyslexic parent throughout most of my childhood and pretty much neglected by social services to get on with it without too much interference.  As an adult I have been kept too busy to take up education, but even now, I am trying to teach myself.  I can’t afford even the cheapest monthly fee on skillshare yet, but I am hoping by the end of the year that I can do some of their courses to learn how to punctuate properly and use grammar and anything else I need to improve my writing for both my blog and my novels, before finally approaching that agent I want to.  I have found an agent I like, but whether or not they will like me this time next year is another matter!

This post is going to tell you the types of novels I am working on or that have been finished, without revealing too much of the plot; but the list is not conclusive, these are just stories I am willing to throw out into the world in the next couple of years, with any luck!

1.  You all know how much I love my vampires; so it shouldn’t be a shock to tell you that I have twenty seven different stories already completed in both my mind and on paper, along with full encyclopaedias and fictional historical booklets based on that world.  I have been working on this massive project since I was ten years old, yes ten years old!  That’s a whopping twenty eight years!  However, there is a list of seventy eight other stories I haven’t even finished yet, not even once that has been on the go for years, some are new. 
2. Recently you have learned my second favourite creature to write about are dragons and there are approximately five books I have been writing, three of which are near completion with hopefully their final drafts. 
3. Pirates are another fantasy thing I like to write about regularly and there are three separate pirate books to date.  One of which is near its final draft and another is an off-shoot book to one of the dragon novels. 
4. Gargoyles also have their own books with this author, I have six novels with those and in two of them they are the main characters.
5. I have written two novels with phoenixes as the main theme too.
6. I have a whole series based on a character that lives in a hot air balloon, this is currently five books long, but there are more being planned.
7. There are seven books based on robots. Half of which are fantasy more than sci-fi.
8. There is a big series about giants, that is almost ten books strong and again, they are off-shoots of a dragon novel I have.
9. There are loads of mermaid novels I have and various other new sea creatures, I haven’t actually counted those, but I do know that there are at least six finished.  These are standalone novels, not a series.
10. I have four separate series of werewolves, one of which I am very passionate about and spend a lot of time on.
11. There is a demon erotica series I have been working on for the past eight years; the series is actually nearly complete now.
12. There are three zombie books that are both standalone novels, too, two of which are more fantasy than horror and very comedic.
13. There are five separate afterlife series I am working on, some are fantasy, some are horror and some are dystopian.
14. There are fourteen dystopian series I am working on too, two of which are based on religious ideologies.
15. There is a series of fairy stories for children too, which is approximately seven books and I regard as novellas.
16. There are four Christmas themed books I have written too.
17. There are four comics too, or, I think one of them is actually graphic novel rather than comic – this is dystopian and steam punk in style.
18. I also have two ghost stories.
19. I have a selection of horror too, which could be considered a series, but they are all standalones really.
20. I know I have 777 poems on this blog, but there are at least 5000 off the blog that have never been published online anywhere.
21. I have nine musical compositions as well, that has never been published anywhere.
22. I have six operas written too as well as musicals for theatre, but I am so not confident about those right now.
23. I have a series about little people that were inspired by Land of the giants and the borrowers. 

There are probably more I haven’t mentioned yet, but these are the only things that come to mind right now for me.  I do have a lot of work here, but I just haven’t had the confidence about really throwing myself out there.  I am terrified of the consequences.  I don’t want fame, I want my work to be enjoyed and I really want to see them as movies, but I don’t want to have a famous face.  But I am getting used to the idea that maybe I will have no choice someday?  I can’t keep my work hidden forever, I didn’t write it for it to be hidden and forgotten – those novels are like little people to me, they are like creatures that need to be nurtured and their only food is recognition.  Their only source of nourishment is to be enjoyed and read, it keeps them alive!  I believe in BIG MAGIC, I believe ideas are alive!