Elevenses

Let’s have a catch up.

We’ll sip tea and eat scones with jam

while skipping along the borderline

of countries lost under the seas

and between the stars.

We’ll pick flowers, too.

Nightshade to match your swirling dress,

Foxglove to use as drinking cups –

best not keep it for soup.

We can chart out our own paths

using chalk and chlorophyll

and a compass of needle and cork.

We’ll sing songs heard in seashells

and whisper spells into bottles

to float amongst the sea foam.

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More Rainbow Bookshelf Videos!

Hello lovely people, as the title of this post suggests, I’ve made more videos where I go through my shelves and find books with specific colours from the rainbow. I was only going to link one video here, but then I remembered that I forgot to link the video I did last week, so here they both are:

For my orange/yellow selected books, click here

And for the latest one, all about green books in my collection, click here

Enjoy!

…though I do tend to ramble…

New video: Rainbow Bookshelf Tour #1

Hi guys, I decided to make a video about books off of my shelves all with red covers!

Enjoy!

Don’t talk over me

Chatting away to a piece of wired glass

is not unusual nowadays.

Communication, these magic mirrors,

across oceans and mountains and tonnes of fresh air –

well, perhaps not so fresh anymore,

not where we lurk at least.

Mingling human jelly babies,

both heat and cold make us stick together,

even when our bodies are so distant,

or our thoughts so far away

from the concerns groaning up from the ground

beneath our feet.

High tea

And you can see them now

Crocheted hats and grey hair still styled

In the same way as the aging

Black and white photographs

Packed into lace covered albums

Only retrieved on special occasions

Chatting away to each other

During the short bus ride

To and from the local supermarket

Neighbours, nephews, sisters, aunts

All discussed in the round during

This bumpy, fume driven high tea

Complete with silvered sugar cubes

 

I’m on Youtube!

So today I did something (kind of) impulsively – I made a video about books. I plan to make more, though I won’t have a specific upload schedule, it’ll be more of a ‘when I have time’ kind of thing, but this is the start to what will hopefully be an interesting Booktube channel.

As with all first videos, there are plenty of awkward moments, but it was fun to record and just talk book talk for a while. And yes, I say ‘fantastic’ a lot.

You can view it here.

Happy watching!

 

Why I write

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I write, and not just writing poetry and fiction, but writing in general. And the more I think about it, the more answers seem to boil up.

I think the first one is that it was probably an escape for me when I was bullied at primary school. I couldn’t do anything myself, but I could make up characters who could. I wasn’t very good at talking to other kids,  either, and if I was sitting by myself writing, then they were less likely to come up to me, so I’d feel more comfortable.

I’ve also always been able to come up with stories – I daydream all the time, and always have done – and writing them down allows me to have a creative output for them, which is important as I’ve discovered that if I don’t have some way to express my creativity, then I get depressed. And writing is what I’m most at ease doing over other creative pursuits (I love dancing and art, but writing is something I can always do even if I’m feeling ill – even writing just one or two lines while in bed with a virus fills me with a sense of achievement).

Inspiring people (and myself) is another reason why I put pen to paper. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a book and loved it so much that I felt fired up to write something great of my own. Without that initial wonder, I’m sure I wouldn’t be as enthusiastic about writing as I am now, and it certainly wouldn’t have been my dream as a child.

Linking to this is a basic desire for my work to be read by as many people as possible, so that they can see the worlds that I see. I want them to meet my characters and become so familiar with them that opening a book is like meeting up with old friends, with stories they want to return to again and again.

Finally, not only is writing a part of my daily routine (and I’m a very routine person), but I really don’t know what I’d do without it. The urge to write has buried itself so securely in my core that if I were to suddenly stop, I’d feel empty and unfulfilled. So I guess you could say that writing is therapeutic for me.

Anyway, this was just something I thought I’d chat about, because I always love reading details about other writers and thought this would be a good insight into what drives my work.