Price of ink and financial rants

My situation is such that when I write I will print off as I go along, because I don’t trust clouds and data saving technologies, because they have failed me numerous times before.

Recently my finances have become worse and this has affected my novel writing more than anything, now I am able to get back into novel writing since I had Covid, it has meant that because of the decline in my finances I can no longer print the seventy pages a week I used to, I can only afford to print twenty a week at most and one week in the month, nothing at all.

If it is novel writing, I will print it as I go along, because of two reasons – I do not trust data saving technologies and I find it difficult to read and edit from a screen, whether I create a blue background to read from or not.

It’s frustrating because I want to write towards four ideas immediately and I can’t write by hand anymore because my arthritis is getting bad.  Every time I write more than an A4 page of handwriting, my hand swells up to the extent I can’t properly hold the pen anymore and if I ignore it, the cramps come on.

My arthritis has meant I have had to give up my knitting hobby altogether, because not only does it exasperate the arthritis, but it has also reawakened my carpal tunnel problem too!

I miss knitting, because of the style of gloves I used to make for myself and the scarves – because the style and colours I like can’t be bought cheaply, like it can be made!

I don’t have the money to buy a knitting machine or else I would do that, I also liked making toys for children I knew, but now I have been thinking about learning felt crafts or sewing the toys instead – because for some reason or another sewing doesn’t affect me.

At the moment we have a printer that is breaking down, because it appears not to be getting a hundred pages per cartridge anymore and we can’t afford to replace the printer for at least a year.  The cost of the ink is always £15, cheap in comparison, but for us it’s three days meals.  We’re near the brink of needing food bank help again – and no Lee Anderson, I can actually cook thank you very much, in fact I cook most things from scratch and manage left overs very well so there is never food wasted here!

Amongst my cooking skills are homemade pies, cakes, soups, casseroles and pasta dishes, not to mention the fact that I have been fakeaway cooking at least ten years before it became “fashionable”!  But when your colleagues Mr Anderson insist that because I have a bus stop outside my house which is within the walking distance I can do without an asthma attack they cut my mobility money by £100 a month, which meant that I could no longer afford to manage the finances which included getting medical help to try and get me back on my feet (in order to work), because you took the money I needed to travel to the local hospital 20 miles away in another town, which costs me £20 a time and I need treatment around twice a week quite a lot of the time – which meant I had to decide to become anorexic and get treatment, or just give up fighting to get my life back and make sure my family doesn’t starve to death!  Which one would you choose? 

Because when I had to do the above we had £10 for the week for food and I often had to cancel at last minute the doctors, because I couldn’t afford to get there – because doctors don’t house visit anymore, no matter how poor you are!

Along with this, we’re still not getting a lot of free stuff sending our child to school.  We had to cancel his eleventh birthday last year and all household birthdays and have the crappiest Christmas ever just to save up to get him school uniform for his new secondary school, because you can’t get it free here and there was no way in getting second hand, we checked.  The child gets reprimanded at the school if their uniform is not complete, whether you can prove poverty or not!

We would love to give up the internet in order to get £6 a week more in our pockets to eat better and maybe get some medical attention – but that would mean my son can’t do his homework so losing the internet is not an option for us!  The irony is, they say that they are doing more and more for kids in poverty these days, honestly I don’t see it!  His meals aren’t free at school; it costs him an average of £3.50 a day for a hot meal in winter.

Don’t you dare blame the poor for poor management!

Free schools, meals in schools, the NHS was all originally created for the poorest in the community, but these days the poorest in the community are not reaping the rewards of yesteryear, it basically is slowly turning back to how it used to be.  Everything is slowly privatising again and they think we don’t see it!

I don’t normally turn my posts into political rants, but this Lee Anderson has a lot to learn and remember about the society he is trying to lead!

Funny thing is, despite being bed bound and housebound sick for around twenty weeks of the year, I could work, at the pace I can.  There is some work I could do, but the problem comes with practicality – I’ve tried slogging on looking for a job outside of the house whilst managing my sickness and nobody wants me!  No one wants someone part time three hours three days a week, even on a check out, because I have ailments which embarrass the company!  I have what appears to be a permanent streaming cold!

No one wants to work alongside someone who is sniffling all year around and then needing three weeks off four times a year because she can’t even get to the bathroom she’s so sick!

So I told the benefits OK, there are other things I can do, I can write, I can do art, I can upcycle things to sell, help advise me in how to set up my own business to do that and teach me what I need to know to run a business from home.  They won’t.

But understood only this… you said you can work?  OK we’re taking your ESA away and making you go to job search centres five days a week all year around and if you don’t turn up for three consecutive days because you are sick, we’ll pull your benefits again and it will take six weeks to reapply for benefits again, meanwhile there is no transitioning money…

So, who is going to opt for all their amenities to be switched off and starving your family for six weeks solid?  What sort of incentive is there to actually get your ass off benefits if you are sick?  What kind of incentive do they give the sick to try and work out their own ailments in order not to be a scrounger?

Because seriously, this is how it is here!

So people who call sick people on benefits scroungers, talk to your government about their crackpot schemes, and don’t go attacking us!  It’s not our fault!  Most of us would love to be independent and work and get even £5 extra a week in their pockets, because no one likes going through those humiliating interviews every year!

Paul and I had thought about going to Ireland as they take care of artists and writers on sickness benefits more than they do here in England – but lately we’ve seen the news, there are political issues cropping up – will we be welcomed in Ireland?

I know my great grandfather was Irish (from Roscommon) and I know that genetically I would be accepted with opened arms, but it’s still looking complicated…

I am very frustrated, because there are lots of things I need in order to get myself a job and there is absolutely not help at all and the money is being cut again and again, to the extent, that I haven’t impulse bought a thing since 2017 and I am losing a huge amount of weight, but can’t afford to replace my clothes as the weight falls off and I am looking ridiculous!  I have lost four dress sizes in nearly a year.

Doctor says that they don’t find that a worry because I was so large to begin with.  I was a size 28, I am now nearly a size 20, they won’t worry until I am a size 12 potentially – potentially I might be dead by then, before they investigate why!

They know I have an IBD because of my high markers, but they won’t investigate until I literally start screaming in pain at A&E, seriously, been told that, NHS is so badly stretched financially that they are now only dealing with life threatening conditions as they appear, cancer not one of them, government recently warned the UK that if you get cancer now, you are more or less fucked if you rely on NHS!

Also, I have a new cholesteatoma growing in my left ear, but my ENT specialist said his department is in so much debt right now, he will not deal with it until it is life threatening! I have been through this before when I was a teenager, I really don’t want to go there again, but I have no fucking choice, because he won’t help me! That means, if the worse comes to the worse again, I won’t be able to physically care for myself bathing wise for nearly three years again nor bend down! I will also be 100% deaf!

Anyway, I am going to close this rant up, because people are home now.

Happy reading everyone… if it was that kind of experience, which I doubt. 

P.S sorry for being an Eeyore today!

Just couldn’t read more…

Because I found a certain sentence indigestible in one of my previous reading books, I had to stop reading it.  So, I added another to the reading pile and I hope that it will be finished by the 1^st march too – the newly added book is called “The library of the dead” by T.L Huchu.

The book was “The Prophets”.  I was finding the book very enjoyable and had rated it 4 stars until I read just one simple sentence which I felt did nothing for the book or the writer other than causing racial provocation.

The whole book is racially provocative anyway, because the subject of slavery can’t get any more provocative than that, but in my mind – there is a fine line between what is acceptable to write and what is acceptable to keep to yourself.

Coming from an ancestry where my many times great grandmother was a slave in Boston USA, I can appreciate books like these, but I cannot endorse something which could talk of revenge killing an innocent baby – that is just not on.

My ancestor was raped by her master’s son and her daughter was raised by her white grandfather and educated, both he and she had problems within both communities, especially when my great great grandmother was being educated as a governess – nobody wanted a “mulatto” for a governess in Boston in the early 1800s.   So rejected by the American community my great great grandma moved to Gibraltar and a couple of years later met an English sailor who took her to London to be his wife, she had to live a life of pretence in London, pretending to be of Spanish descent just to fit in with the locals and they bought it. 

I just can’t visualise these people in my ancestry who could bring themselves to sneak murdering a white baby in cold blood, just because of their situation.  I just can’t.

This little rant of mine will probably fall on deaf ears because as the years has gone by the family have got whiter and whiter and I am white, but I have black slave ancestry too and that is something that some people don’t realise – they don’t realise that some white people have black ancestry too and quite recent!

The book definitely touched a nerve and I know it really should, because slavery is just horrible, it is more than that, it is utterly disgusting!  But still, there are some things that should be said and other things best unsaid to prevent further racial division in the world!

A freedom not suicide poem

You deny me of health

You deny me of wealth

You deny me of friendship and love and games

You deny me of faith, you deny me of hope

You deny me of living and you drive me insane

That’s why I left you

That’s why I am gone

That’s why you won’t see me from hereon

That’s why I rant and that’s why I rave

You denied me of life, the things that I craved

So now I have gone, I will piece things together

I will find my hope, faith, love and more

I will carry on, night and day

And I don’t care if your heart is so sore

For I am through with living for you and I live for you no more!

Is this procrastination?

I am curious as to whether or not I am alone in how I write, or more to the point, what I write?

This has been posted because I am sure I am the world’s biggest writing procrastinator that ever lived, yet, I love what I do whether it’s productive or not. I don’t sit around all day long writing poems, stories and songs. I sit around and write mostly about what I have done, my opinions based on current events and my own personal philosophies and reviews of the world around me. None of this has been published on my blog and nobody except for my husband reads them. Why? Because I feel that the world doesn’t have an interest in unusual babble.

Forgive me if I am wrong, but are people really interested in my written lists of meal options I make for myself? Are they remotely interested in all the facts I know of edible weeds and insects? (Some might be – but I am no professional on the matter); are people interested in reading my weird dreams and thought processes? I am not certain, but I am pretty sure I am not very interested in a non-celebrities thought patterns and so therefore I think that is a majority of the world, isn’t it?

So therefore, in spite of me sitting around writing junk, is that really procrastination or is this a valuable source? I eventually include some of these strange writings or habits in some fiction I write, but it’s a rarity. So is writing anything, whether its unpublishable junk or not, really worth my time and effort and could it still be considered writing?

Actually I think it would be interesting for you to know that what you are reading right now, is one of those times I have every day – my unpublishable garbage; I often have arguments like this with myself that I never publish on my blog due to the fact that I feel you will all be disinterested to read it.

Many times things similar to this seem almost like ranting, but it isn’t. They are just thoughts flowing from me onto the screen at full speed ahead, none of it is planned and it is oftentimes derailed.

Am I alone in this? Or am I a budding professional? You tell me.

 

 

 

art, feminism and technology

Yesterday I decided to paint something that was emotionally lead and unplanned; the result was a horrible mess of gloomy colors around a shadow person bleeding from the upper thighs. When done, I reflected on my emotions and they took me to a place I wasn’t sure was a factor mentally. A place where I am screaming about feminism going too far, a place where I see lackluster mothers at the school gates waiting for their children to come out, only for them to act like they’re not home when they go, ignoring their children’s existence and having one child after another.

I was feeling strongly about this because I am a mother, I have a five year old little boy and I wanted so much to give him siblings, but due to ill health I was and still am unable to fulfil that. I come from a family where having lots of children is expected by and large (particularly on my father’s side), but also a family where fertility doesn’t last past 35 (on my mother’s side) and I am 32 right now and so far, I seem to have all the health problems of my maternal side of the family.

I crave to play with my child, go out with my child, have fun with my child, but due to sickness a lot of events I have to miss due to being bed bound. Unfortunately or blessedly in many cases, I have a child that is far too independent for his age, he is strong emotionally, he doesn’t need me as much as most five year olds need their mothers. He is unusually mature and above average intelligence academically. He would rather read quietly alone, listen to Lady Gaga music, play dress up, do painting, all alone. I offer to play with him regularly and his response literally is “No thank you, I want to play alone” or “Not now, I am listening to music”. I can’t even tempt him with treats, because he is unusually moderate for a child. You give him a whole bag of candies and he will never eat more than 12 small ones. Now you’re probably thinking he is a dream child and to many modern mothers he is, but to me, he is a nightmare come true in some respects. I wanted children, because I am a big kid, I am imaginative and naturally playful and I have to admit I am rather crestfallen at how serious my little one is turning out to be.

I see children running around screaming, playing tricks, wanting attention all the time; “mummy play with me”, “mummy hug me”, “mummy, mummy, mummy”. My little boy isn’t like that.

I am surprised he likes being alone at home and playing quietly because he is also naturally gregarious; he will super socialise with everyone outside of the house and will do things in large groups of friends, teachers at his school has said he is unusual for this. He is very caring and sharing, creative and fun with other children and even other adults outside of the house – but inside the house and with other relatives, he acts too adult for me.

I am not sure which personality is his natural one, the one when he is at home or the one when he is at school or going out with me.

I scream at feminism going too far because a lot of women these days are forced to be equal whether they like it or not, to the extent that women’s rights have taken rights away from the traditional women. Women have to work to support the bills even if they are married because of their financial difficulties. Therefore a lot of women have careers and in my opinion, hardly know their children because of it. Feminism and women’s right’s aren’t the only factor here though; the increasing dependence on technology is another problem. Women are known to be very social at the best of times with other women, therefore women are never away from their mobile phones or tablets or social media websites. Women are more dedicated to their relationships with other adults and their gadgets than they are with their children and what is worse, they are encouraging their children to have the same unhealthy relationship of being plugged-in to any type of computing device, just to get them out of mummy’s hair.

Feminism and technology together are slowly killing the mothering instinct. It has been proven through generational breeding various animals that after several generations of having their off-spring cared for by others, the mothering instinct dies and even if forced to rear their young the mothers usually have forgotten how; breastfeeding for example, is a skill lost to a majority of women these days because of the access to formula milk, so much so that breastfeeding has become a taboo in public and a taboo subject to discuss. How ridiculous the world is becoming! I truly believe this is a serious problem and I plan on writing a story about this soon.

Keep in tune.

A writer’s thoughts

I have read somewhere in the past, that you are what you read and I believe that. The more I read the more defined my tastes have become, my skills, my genre leanings and this influences my writing and art.
With each good book I learn how I want to write and what I want to write about.
With each bad book I read, I learn how I do not want to write and what I dislike.
I do not believe that as a writer you must write things outside of your comfort zone, I believe you should be comfortable with what you are writing – although on an emotional matter, that’s quite different. You must write outside of your emotional comfort zone if you wish to write fear, pain and heartbreak effectively, unfortunately that means opening up your old wounds.
A lot of the time, I like to write about horror, trauma etc. and each time I do, I open up real and old wounds, this is why I often become quiet as a writer and have prolonged periods of not writing, whilst I emotionally recuperate.
I was once told that writers and artists generally go mad after a time and I believe it, we send ourselves mad for our art and stories because we are constantly reliving the horrors of our past for your entertainment and as a collective, we seldom are known or recognized for it.
I am not moaning about my lack of recognition as a writer and artist, because personally I think that’s my own fault. I think I am generally a lazy person and have not bothered to find myself a publisher or to advertise my work very much over the years at all. On the one occasion I did contact a publisher to see whether or not they liked an idea of mine, I was lucky enough to get a letter back within three weeks, but this terrified me, because they loved what I sent them and praised me highly for it; I never contacted them again, I was worried about becoming famous and at the time I was young and didn’t know about pseudonyms.
These days I am more prepared for whatever life throws at me because I will be totally blatant about what I can and cannot do and what I will and will not allow.
Other than twitter, my blog and magazines are there any other steps I should take to get myself known?
Please comment below.

More subjects in the blog

Time to expand this blog a bit; there will be new categories and tabs for you to choose from within the next few days, they will include;

 
A page about my experiences with Cosmic Ordering

 
Game reviews

 
A rant page for me to let off steam and see if my fellow readers also suffer the fools I do

 
Art, my own, my friends, and those that inspire me

 
Alternative lifestyles, a page about witches, vampires, Goths and the BDSM community and much more

 
My pet’s page, where I will update about the lives of my many pets as sometimes they inspire me

 
Contests I’ve entered

 
Health update as I am often sick

 
Daily Pages dedicated to the work of Julia Cameron, the author of the artist way

 
Food and places to eat reviews

 
And last but not least, recipes

coincidental writing

This blog is starting to represent morning pages more than my actual work and I am trying desperately to avoid that; I am over emotional lately, a lot of my time is taken up trying to get myself back on track, but once I’ve eliminated one problem, something else wants to take its place and that’s usually either more family problems, like a death in the family or an announcement of cancer – or anything really, anything.

There’s a lot I should be doing and procrastination shouldn’t be an option.

I have noticed my 3500 word count goal is on cue every day, but it’s most certainly not creative writing it is non-fiction essays based on my life mostly.  I write an average of two and five poems a day but that’s not what I am here for, I am here to write actual stories, not just poems and rants.

I am saying that whilst writing yet another rant, I see that now.  Whilst I am ranting on there’s a question coming to mind, which I will ask in a separate post.

Meanwhile, I dislike the sleaziness that is in my blog these days when it’s short stories; I don’t want to be known for sleaze, but actual solid dark fantasy that doesn’t concentrate on sexual themes.

I don’t like reading too much fiction from other people either, because it makes me clamp up and think “Oh my God, someone is already onto my great idea”, or I think that someone has used a name for a character similar to my own and I would be the one blamed for plagiarism instead of mere coincidence.  Since I was ten years old I’ve had a character and a massive story in my head for vampires, yesterday I found a blog based on a character similar to my own with the same name – oddly enough, she isn’t copyright thieving off me because that story has never been announce publicly anywhere, it’s pure coincidence, so now I am going through the hard task of trying to think up a new name for a character I’ve known for almost seventeen years.  Believe me, when you’ve been very familiar with your character for that length of time, the idea that its name has to change is heart wrenching.