Brain hurricane season

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

What is Brain Hurricane Season?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy reading! 

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!

Existentially challenged

For a woman I am strange, I think anybody who knows me in real life will validate that.

But what exactly do I mean by strange?

Perhaps I mean dorky, weird, and eccentric but also some people have labelled me as confused or having a split personality.

I might do, though I prefer the stance that I am existentially challenged.

I am a female, that occasionally wakes up and wishes for just that particular day to be a man, but it’s only occasional.  On another day I will wake up and want to be kawaii or gothic, or a child or an adult, or anything as the feeling grabs me and it is often a part of my depression when I can’t morph my body into how I feel for the day.

Mostly though, I want to be tall and strong athletic looking woman and have perfect long straight brunette hair in a long plait, wearing a tight white camisole and black jeans and heeled boots and don’t have the need to wear spectacles.

But alas, I am fat and hideous, my hair is the colour of straw with flecks of white and I indeed need spectacles.

Image aside, this isn’t what I meant when I first started the post.

What I wanted to say is that, I am strange because I am like an old fashioned man, or rather an old man.  I say this, because some people online believe I am not a woman at all, but I am.  I am just a weird one that’s all.

I was a weird little girl too. 

I was a bug catching little girl, who had pet snails that escaped in the night in my bedroom sliming the walls in the morning, creeping my OCD clean freak mother out with the things she’d find hiding in my room every morning.  One day she found a squirrel I had tamed, sitting on the desk looking like it owned the place and it screamed at her when she screamed at it.

I was a frog catching little girl too and I’d scrump my neighbour’s apples, well, I used to pick my neighbours apples from their tree that was above my swing, which she allowed – to be a true scrumper meant I stole without permission, but that wasn’t the case.

As a child my biggest emotional and creative influence was my dad and two male cousins.  As a child I had more male friends than female and as a child I loved things that most little girls shy away from.

I was the little girl who asked for matchbox cars at Christmas, Gremlin and monster toys, scalextrics, books, art supplies, dinosaurs, trump cards and anything to do with wrestling.

I was the kind of little girl who scoffed at soap operas and sat down with her father and grandmother on a Sunday afternoon watching horse racing and Laurel Hardy movies and other oldies.

I’d learn all the words from those old movies, so that when mum worked the night shift at the retirement home she worked in, me and dad would re-enact them together fully, like we were putting on a spectacular theatre production. 

Sometimes we did for my aunts when visiting grandma on Sunday afternoons if they were visiting gran too.

I was the kind of little girl who made solar system models and studied encyclopaedias like a bible, because my access to education was sparse.

My dad was mostly into science, war and film history and gardening and he was the most active in educating me those things.  I got heavily into understanding the history of automobiles and aviation and some of it still sticks to this day!

I was like a son to him, I am sure.

My mum I think was jealous and that is why she treated me badly, I didn’t grow how she wanted me to.  She wanted me to be image obsessed, watch all the soap operas with her, devour all the romance books she bought and gossip about people behind their backs viciously, like some plastic girl from the movie Means Girls.

Which was odd really, because she as a tom boy too! She never taught me make up etc, it was like she had hoped that me being a girl I would teach her those things – but its a mothers job to teach the girl!

But I wasn’t like that, so she made my life hell.  Really, it was like living with a school bully with no escape, she only backed off me when I caved in and pretended to be the Barbie she wanted me to be, which was difficult as I was a fat child who was a bit of a jock.  Yes, you do get fat jocks!

But I’d rather go to a local park with my dad in the evenings and play on their big adventure playground pirate ship and re-enact scenes from The Voyage of Sinbad or Blackbeard the pirate, with my dad and if I am lucky, my cousins.

I am still very masculine to this day in my ideas, hobbies, likes and dislikes.  I even took a psychological test once to find out what I am and found out my brain is a lot more masculine than an average woman, in fact, significantly so.

I am bisexual, I do like to cross-dress and be masculine from time to time and I don’t make friends easily with women, unless they are similar to me.  Usually creative, hippy or bohemian, or tom boyish too!

The strange thing about all of this is that I am also glamour puss. Weird contrast I know, but I love dressing up elaborately, like a proper classic Hollywood star, but I can’t be in perfection mode all the time, it would drive me up the wall.  I love maxi dresses and sandals, I like jeans and camisoles, rainbow coloured dungarees and weird shit like that, oh and cosplay. 

I am a chameleon I suppose, yes, I guess that’s the right thing to say about me – I am a chameleon.

You never know what you are going to get day to day and if you are comfortable in rigidity, we can’t get along, because I have to flow with my emotions.  Don’t judge me for changing my style yet again, get used to it, why so stiff and judgemental?  Don’t be stiff… unless of course… I digress! 

It’s the flow again, the water that is me.

I’m like a river, now isn’t that going to be a lovely poem?

I am off to write it now…

Happy reading…

My writing plans

How many novels am I working on?

I try to focus on about three at a time mostly, the same three, but I have more on the go than I admit.

Nobody will believe me if I said I have approximately one hundred and fifty unfinished works and about forty works stewing because I am pernickety and a perfectionist that just can’t seem to decide on the plot or another version of it.

It has been some months since I last said this, that when I whine about not finishing the project in time for my deadline, it is that one specific novel I am on about – project AD.

When I say I haven’t written anything I often mean to say towards the main project specifically – because in all honesty, even on my hardest of days, I am still writing something; be it poetry, songs, short stories, snippets of ideas or other novels, you can bet your bottom dollar I am still producing roughly three thousand words a day elsewhere.  But for me, it’s the main project that counts.

Along with my approximate 3k words on other works and approximately 3k words toward my main project on a good day, I am also in working mode whenever I watch YouTube, socialise on twitter and read books – which means all in all I work longer than anyone should!

There isn’t a time in my day where I am not working, unless of course I am eating, because I usually use meal times as a way to socialise with my nearest and dearest and all focus is on them.

When I read a book, it’s usually educational for me in some way.  I rarely read fiction books, but that is a habit that’s slowly changing.

I was asked on twitter recently, what would I call my writing niche?  It got me thinking, because I couldn’t answer straight away without thinking about it for about ten minutes and when I thought of what it might be, I had to google it to see if it was a thing and it is; abstract fantasy.

I suppose it is abstract fantasy because a lot of my works have a lot of abstract ideas, such as anthropomorphism, breaking down the boundaries of what is stereotypical of fantasy creatures and even breaking down the boundaries of societal norms as there is a lot of gender fluidity in some of my works.

Often whenever people ask me what I mostly write I give them a long list as a reply, something akin to; I write dark fantasy, or things of a dark theme such as descent into madness survival, anthropomorphism, dystopia and a bit of steampunk and vampires.  Those are my usual go to replies – however, it says nothing really of the giants and dragons I write about and it totally bypasses the fact that it is an abstract idea not the general run of the mill fantasy everyone is cosy with.

For example, I might have dragons who dress in regency clothing having afternoon tea picnics discussing the barbarism of humanity; or beautiful faeries with butterfly wings, heavily tattooed with shaved sides of their heads in intricate patterns getting ready to wrestle a badger as a ride to go to the summer solstice party.  You get what I mean here, though lovely and fantastical it can be a little dark in the way I write things, but still not too dark for family entertainment, that’s important to me!

So I have grown comfortable in understanding I am an abstract fantasy author with mild horror thrown in here and there.

Abstract fantasy is more doable than you think – although most people would consider Douglas Adams work “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy” as a comedy sci-fi it is often marketed as abstract fantasy. 

Terry Pratchett, Diana Wynne Jones, Clive Barker and Garth Nix are also considered abstract fantasy authors, to name but a few.

My current project AD is definitely abstract fantasy but it does have some steampunk elements to it too, so the marketing here can be difficult unless I decide which niche it’s actually going to be and personally – I think it’s going to be marketed as a YA science fiction because I think the steampunk elements are quite big, the anthropomorphism is due to genetic mutations, the animals are building a world out of the scraps of junk humans have left behind and they are building weapons to fight each new rising faction that is occurring out of the dust. 

I think this project screams Tank Girl, Mad Max and The Fly so this is why I have chosen to market it as YA Science Fiction rather than abstract fantasy, because science is quite a large theme in the series and yes, this is going to be a series of books and eventually I plan to make them into a graphic novel, but at the moment I am not confident in doing that – so they are novels right now.

I have also changed the species of a rival group, which is why I am falling behind on the project, because I had to rewrite four chapters depicting the new species which set me back about a week, I am happier with the idea that this rival clan is sheep rather than rats as I felt that rats are overdone as bad guys.

Also the main character has a disability, which I felt is often underrepresented in literature, so I am proud of that and it really makes the story, it really works well.

This story has bought back the fun in writing for me, which is something I haven’t felt since 2015, it has a lot of wacky ideas which work and I am so proud of.

But Project AD is definitely not my only project, no worries there.

This is part of a series, but it is not my only series I am working on and there are plenty of standalone novels too.

I have a vampire saga I am working, this is probably going to be my longest series of all my books and again I would market them as science fiction because of the fact that my vampires are not originally from Earth and they do space travel from time to time.

Another series I am working on has twelve defined stories and there will absolutely never be more than twelve books in this series because it would defy the plot, there is a specific reason why the number twelve is important to this series.  I have mentioned this story before as Steampunk 1 and this story will be marketed under steampunk because it’s quite rigid in that genre.  It is a lesbian romance of travel companions who explore new cultures and debunk science together.

Another is a dark fantasy about ghost children, this is a standalone book and I won’t say much else about the plot just yet.

There is another dark fantasy about a haunted teddy bear, which I’ve vaguely mentioned two years ago approximately.

There is a dragon trilogy I am working on.

A series of stories about giants in the same world, but all different characters, with their own stories, but it is a specific world; so far there are five planned, two half written.

A werewolf novel, which is a standalone – the plot isn’t exciting enough yet and needs a lot of work!

There is so much more than this, there is no need to worry about me being a one trick pony, honestly!

I can’t focus on one thing for too long it triggers my ADD really bad and I am always juggling ideas, some for years being remastered time and time again – but there is more to me than just anthropomorphic mutant warriors having gang warfare and vampires flying around in spaceships and lesbian balloon riders debunking science… much, much more!

I am also working on a series of books based on angels and demons and the bible etc., there is just so much fighting to get out of my head!

In my next post, I am going to be talking about how I structure my stories and how long my ideas can take to write on average.

Thanks for reading!

What do I do?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hope you enjoyed an insight to my weird little life!

Thanks for reading! 

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!

Tropes and scenes loved and hated

Some writer friends have asked me to list what I definitely will not include in my stories and what I am likely to include in my stories in regards to themes and tropes and just general stuff.

Apparently it is a thing that’s going around where writers are starting to share that sort of thing?  Ok, here goes…

Too many romance scenes (sex scenes in my adult works possibly but not romance, gooey eye rolling load of old trollop nah huh ) – this is not for me and won’t be in my stories much if at all!  But do expect sex scenes frequenting some of my adult works! 

Unless the story has historical scenes, it is unlikely there will be silly gossiping women, I hate gossip!  The only time this is acceptable in my works is at the ladies cream tea afternoons in a Victoriana setting, but I do find writing these things cringe worthy, being a gossip is generally cringe worthy as it is! 

Technological explanations and scientific terminologies – I don’t have the brain for it – it will be basic stuff!  Oh this big blue square button does that and this round yellow one does this, character pushes said button and hey presto, that’s as nerdy as I get! 

Helpless women who lose their mind over men and forget to defend themselves because their love is in danger – the women in my stories generally have their heads together!  I mean I know for sure if I was a character in some of these books I have read, my reaction would be “I have my own problems, wait you wuss”!

Stereotypical monsters that just do evil because… hey… they’re monsters!  So overdone and totally unfair!  Not to mention, highly discriminating and endorsing discrimination… just saying! 

Emotionally bland or emotionally devoid scripts – I have read hundreds of pages of emotionally dead characters who keep on telling me about why they need to do something and get somewhere, but there is no real descriptive emotional output at all – it’s like, it’s their duty to have to think this way because it is expected, but generally there is no real feeling behind the words… you get me?  If you get me, you’ll see that I mean to say, that the character makes you feel like they are lying to both themselves and you as a reader! 

Mindless barbarians bonking heads for no other reason than they’re simply bored or want to be barbaric.  There is always a motive behind an action, tell me about it… not just the mindless violence! 

Slow paced stories, there has been books I have read where nothing at all moves the plot forward more than six pages at a time and that’s being optimistic!  I need something to happen on every page, it’s not hard to do!  No one wants the second scene to happen fifteen minutes later!

Repeating scenes already seen in the story or having characters lull over past memories again and again – yawns, boring!

Constantly reminding the readers how emotionally affected the person is about so and so, it is OK to mention it around three maybe four times in the whole book but please don’t take us back there in every single chapter!  We know, we read and understood it – doing this makes your readers feel like you think they are idiots who just do not understand – don’t do that to them!

Other than generalising height as short, tall etc and the build of the person as well as the colour of the hair or skin, please leave other things to the imagination unless those other features deeply affect the story in some way – like an eye patch or a scar on the chin which is why there is a revenge plot or something – but generally, let people use their own imaginations about who they want to play the part in their heads based on who they know with general outlines.

I love to write very descriptive body horror scenes because I love grossing people out, I understand this is not everyone’s cup of tea – but it’s what I do in my adult horror stories!

I love found family tropes and close family tropes, I love tropes where there is a small team working together towards the same goal!

I like write historical scenes and be descriptive about the environment and landscape around the character!

I write a lot about isolation and abuse, because it is something I have experienced a lot over the years, therefore I feel it is easy to write in a believable way.

I am very good at understanding the hidden aspects of society, the things that people can hide from others, the secrets, the lies, the behind closed doors of Mr and Mrs Ideal-Citizen, the underground stuff, the dirty nitty gritty aspects of life.

I am very good at writing different points of view because I have had a very rich life regards to socialising with different classes and types of people just by being moved from relative to relative.  I have lived with rich aunts and certain members of the aristocracy because on one side of my family we have a very old family – on another side of my family they are gypsies and farmers – another side were refugees, lots of different religions and class systems.  The list goes on! 

I find it easy to write from the perspective of a social worker and a teacher who is worried about their abused pupil/client and then write from the perspective of a junkie about to lose their child – I have seen these things unfold right before my eyes time and time again growing up!

One thing I have experienced time and time again from lots of different people and classes is suicide and sudden loss due to murder.

I have a huge interest in environmentalism, so pollution and innovation is something I like to put in most of my books.

Because I love comedy and prefer books and movies with comedy aspects, I do tend to like to throw in humour whenever I can, including in my darkest horror stories – I can’t help it; it always gets in there somehow!

I do love vampires and I have to say at least a third of my work will have some kind of vampire in there!

I love animal companions and so that will be a thing – particularly fond of anthropomorphic animals pretending to be human or whatever.

I like over the top comic hero and villain tropes, so that is another thing that will be seen a bit in my works.

There is likely to be someone who is rather off key in my stories, a batty old aunt, a batty young aunt, the green juice hippy weirdo and the generally bonkers type of person – or the harsh out of touch with their emotions type who is learning to soften themselves down a bit.

There will be women who save themselves and maybe even male characters! 

There will be lots of free range children living independently and causing chaos or massive changes in their communities.

There will be a lot of subterranean places too; in fact this is something that is seen in half of my stories so far!

People who are incredibly lucky when things aren’t really going for them!

Also, I will always end up being just ever so slightly corny…

So that’s what you can expect from me… I won’t say anything else on the matter, so please stop poking around…

Thanks for reading! 

Project – Steampunk 1

Steampunk 1

This project contains the following scenes, tropes and types of characters;

Travelling companions

A lost love

A ghost

Debunked scientific theories

Debunked superstitions

A search for truth

New found freedom

Comedy elements

Hot air Balloon

Space travel

Trio of main characters, primarily an early twenties female, late twenties male and a recent widower

Eccentric inventor

And a mystery solved

Defining self update May 2021

Since 2012 I had been trying to learn how to define myself – why?  Because I had such a suppressed, isolated and abused life before that time that I had never developed my true personality, likes and dislikes etc; because I was never allowed to be nurtured as an individual.  I was literally born to become a facsimile of my mother’s dreams and wishes and because her dreams and wishes went against a lot of my own instinctive nature, both of us were very unhappy with the result and neither of us got exactly what we wanted from my existence.

Where it was my nature to sit quietly, drawing, cutting & pasting, playing Barbie dolls and watching cartoons, it was my mother’s nature to force me to listen to pop music, watch top of the pops, worry about fashion, gossip and EastEnders and to try and teach me to give certain people Hell on Earth. 

When I was bullied by other children, it was my nature to ignore them, but confide in my mother and hope that she would try and help to advise me or complain to the parents or head teacher on the rare occasions I went to school; but instead she responded with the concept that I had to play dirty and hit them back or I was considered weak and therefore would only get bullied continuously.  There was a situation with my mother’s close friend, where her two children bullied me and pushed me off my own swing in my own back garden, I ran indoors crying and both my mother and their mother dragged me outside with a broom and told me to hit those kids as hard as I could or else I would get it instead.

Looking back I still can’t believe how both my mother, her friend and her children would sit back and laugh in recollection of that day, especially as I chose not to hit the kids with the broom and instead scarper upstairs as fast as I could and bolted my bedroom door up with my bed to stop any punishment of my supposed cowardice.  I stayed in my bedroom for the rest of the day, because I knew once my dad came home my mum couldn’t continue her plans, as dad had a sweet nature and wouldn’t allow it.  A trick I had learned to use for most of my life – hide till dad gets home.

I had to learn to be partly how she wanted me to be, as long as it didn’t go against my personal morals within reason.  I am glad to say, I have a higher standard of morals than she does.

The amount of times she had tried to train me to be violent, it had worked in some cases, but in others it only taught me how to literally close my emotions off at dangerous situations.  I easily phase out when there is a dangerous violent person around me ranting and raving and throwing things around, I go blank, close down, and become almost robotic.  It is something I have been told I need to alert the doctor about, but I won’t because I feel that they might try to think it would be helpful to keep me switched on.  A lot of people state that switching myself off emotionally during these times can be very dangerous, a sign that I could become a dangerous person, but I am by my very nature, quite passive unless provoked too much!

I just want a quiet life where I am loved, that’s all.  I want happy people who dislike drama and just want to get on in life, not bored, arrogant people who thrive on bullying and drama.  That’s not for me.  I don’t want that kind of attention.  I just want love, peace, getting on with my art, games, gardening and pets.  That’s all.  Boring I guess to a lot of people, but I would be very happy.

I am learning that a lot of things I thought I loved when I lived with my mother are actually things I was taught to love because she liked them.  Since moving away, on every context of my life, I am unrecognisable.  I don’t hold myself the same way anymore and I certainly don’t have the same voice anymore, strange I know, but even my voice has changed a lot!

There are a few things I wanted to be, do and have, when I lived with my mother, that I still want to be, do or have now; but not much of it. 

I still want to be a writer that gets her books published, but I understand that for now, it is best not to get published before Autumn of 2022, for certain personal reasons.

I still regard myself as bisexual, something that I have never been open about to any member of my blood family, due to stigma, my mother has a problem with gay people – she wouldn’t hurt them, but she is ridiculously avoidant of them and I have heard the kinds of things she says behind their backs!  The rest of the family are kind of open to homosexuality, but they are very Catholic too, so it is a stiff subject to rise with them.  Some of those family members will now most definitely know, because I know they read this blog.

Despite being sick, I have always wanted a homestead or a smallholding.  But I have to be realistic with what I can physically do, but I am trying hard to find a way in keeping to this dream, but working around the disabilities too.  I don’t have a big enough property yet, to do it, but I am researching a lot about chickens and food forest permaculture style gardening and that sort of thing.

I used to regard almost shamefully how much of a gamer I am, but these days I am starting to feel a part of a proud community of gamer nerds.  It is becoming cool to be a gamer nerd these days and it is a huge boost to my confidence about admitting to people my love for PC games in particular.

I also used to feel slightly ashamed at being a reader, because in my mother’s side of the family in particular, to be a reader, was regarded as weird as you admitting that you are a lifestyle Klingon who actively understands the whole of the Klingon dictionary!  Actually I know some Klingon words, an ex-online long-distance boyfriend of mine was a lifestyle Klingon who moved to USA and became pretty famous for it… so there you go!

I have always wanted to be a larper too, which is something that Paul has always wanted to be too, so we might do that together someday.

But there is a whole host of other stuff I never knew I liked before recently.  Really strange things that are even starting to raise Paul’s eyebrows in confusion as to…. Why is this interesting?  But I honestly can say, I don’t know why I am finding life of bacteria, soil health and microbiology so fascinating lately; as well as the entire lifecycle and habits of bees.  I also read a lot of books on cosmology and physics and this is puzzling to Paul because I can’t do math, don’t understand any of the maths involved in all of this and therefore only understand the non-mathematical parts of the stuff I am learning.  I have dyscalculia, it is dyslexia for math, and it has been confirmed professionally by the OU.

I have been thinking about joining SkillShare to see if there are videos that would help someone like me learn math to as high as I possibly can despite this problem.  But I won’t be able to afford that for a while, until the debts have been bought down a bit.

I don’t know why I want to learn math, especially as I don’t really plan to do anything with it, other than learn stuff I don’t really need to learn because I won’t have a career in microbiology any time soon.  But it is fun stuff the bits I do understand.

I am very geeky, I admit it.  But there you go.

Another thing my family will not recognise is my eating habits.  I don’t eat like how I used to because of medical reasons.  I can’t eat lactose (dairy) at all unless it is vegan, because my stomach can process it anymore.  I shouldn’t eat gluten (wheat) because it irritates my skin and asthma, but I do slip that in more than I should and I should avoid eating more than 2 eggs a week.  Because all of this can aggravate my problems; my main diet looks like this – 70% vegetables and the rest meat or fruit.  I have less than half a plate of my usual dinner size meal per day, for the whole day.  This is regarding what my mother would expect.  When I lived with my mother it was normal to consume 4500 calories per day – since cutting out a lot of the allergen foods and because of my illness, I can barely manage 1500 calories most days.  I am on high doses of most vitamins and minerals because I can’t process a lot of them.

My mother would think I am starving to death if she saw me eating 1 chicken fillet with a Mediterranean style salad and 2 roast potato halves, which is my usual meal and often only meal of the day.  Because I just can’t physically cope with more than that anymore.  Weirdly, I am just not losing weight, but I am losing inches.

Funnily enough doctors aren’t too worried about this because according to blood tests, my iron is the best levels they’ve ever been my whole life, lately!  I used to have constant anaemia when I lived with my mother and even was diagnosed with an auto-immune disease called pernicious anaemia too.  I have problems with B vitamins or something, which is now worse because of the lack of gluten in my diet, bread is rich in vitamin B, but I can’t have normal bread.

The new me is becoming very different to how I imagined I would be.  A lot of the things I thought were my deepest desires are now considered things I no longer want.  I wanted a large family, but because the cosmos has contrived to make my family as tiny as possible I have gave up fighting for it and no longer want any more children.  I never wanted to live in a rural area, I always wanted to be a suburban homesteader, but now I want to be as rural as I can get, whilst maintaining at least an hours journey from a major British city, London or Manchester.

I never wanted to become vegan, but I have to say, that my body is doing better with a plant based diet than not – though I am not giving up meat anytime soon, just yet.  But I am surprised that my diet is literally 75% plants, whereas before, it was around 20%

I am having a problem with sugar lately and I am finding candies less enjoyable than berries and vegan vanilla ice-cream.

All these are in my opinion are major changes.

I had very little respect for certain types of art and music and now I love them and will even fight for them.

I am becoming so very, very different; it is both exciting and scary!

I am shocked at who I am becoming.

Thank you for reading.

March reading pile

Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson – as I didn’t finish reading this last month!

Entangled by Merlin Sheldrake – for the same reason as above!

Little Book of Wonder by Bernadette Russell – again for the same reason as the above!

The Spooks Apprentice (book 1) By Joseph DeLaney

World War Z by Max Brooks

The Library of The Dead by T.L Huchu

I am trying to read more fiction than I am known for; because I tend towards non-fiction more than fiction.  I am trying to broaden my horizons.

Since becoming ill I have become a very slow reader; but I am blessed with bouts of OK days and therefore my reading can speed up again to how I used to be.  This happened around January, but health has meant that I have slowed painfully down again.  It is frustrating because I get a sense of achievement for every book I persevere with and read to the end and I feel great about it when it’s finished!  But instead of finishing more than one book per week, when I am ill, I am lucky to finish one book a fortnight!

Will the above list be shown again for April’s list?  Probably, because my glands are getting swollen again and that usually means six weeks of health hell!