Skip to main content

Things to make and do

I'm learning quite a lot at the moment. This is mostly coming from this years NaNo attempt. On the plus side I'm learning how much easier it is to write when you have a plan to work to, on the minus I'm learning that I really should stick to first person perspective, as my thrd is very weak indeed.

However, it's proving to be enormous fun to write, and several ideas are spinning out from the central themes. I do love the sensation of a story mutating before my very eyes.

The other fun thing was sitting in today on the stuff that I'm going to be teaching next semester. It's been a few years since I've been in formal education, and the most striking thing about it was how fresh it all felt; specifically the sensation of learing things for the first time. The best example I can think of is that, as I was reading through the course bumf on haiku writing a haiku suddenly seemed like a refeshing idea. I've written god knows how many in the past, years ago when I was learning it all for the first time, and it almost felt like I was learning it all over again, quite exhilerating,really. The workshop itself was on Imagist poetry, not really a main area of interest of mine in the normal run of things, but tt reminded me of how easily we neglect processes we learnt in the past, as they don't seem relevant to us any more, or we feel we've moved on. Food for thought, anyway, and I suspect I'll be writing a few imagist poems over the next few weeks. An old idea feels like a new one.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A whole new world.

I appear to have moved into the pub. Now, I don't wish to give the impression that this has come as a complete surprise to me, we'be been planning to do so since shortly after I bought it, but still, it's sort of snuck up on me and now I'm waking up and thinking what happened? How come I'm here? The reason for this discombobulation is that this move was initially a temporary measure. Mrs Coastalblog had some relatives coming to stay, and it made sense to put them up in our house while we decamped to the flat. It's still a work in progress, but a mad week of cleaning and carting stuff around made it habitable. I had a suspicion that once we were in we'd be back and forth for a few weeks. As with many of my hunches, I was completely and utterly wrong. As it turned out, once we were here, we were here. Things moved at pace and, now our kitchen appliances have been installed, there's no going back, the old house is unusable. It's left me with slightly mi
Post a Comment
Read more

Mad Dogs and Immigration Ministers

It is with no small degree of distress that I'm afraid to say I've been thinking about Robert Jenrick. I know, I know, in this beautiful world with its myriad of wonders, thetre are many other things about which I could think, the play of sunlight upon dappled water, the laughter of my children, the song thrush calling from the sycamore tree a few yards away from where I type this. Yet the shiny, faintly porcine features of the Minister for Immigration keep bubbling up into my consciousness. It's a pain in the arse, I tell you. A few years ago on here I wrote a piece entitled The cruelty is the point in which I argued that some policies are cruelty simply for the sake of it, pour decourager les autres . I was reminded of that recently when I listened to Jenrick defending his unpleasant, petty decision to order murals at a migrant children's centre to be painted over. You've probably heard the story already; deeming pictures of cartoon characters "too welcoming&
Post a Comment
Read more

20

Huh. It turns out that this blog is, as of, well, roughly about now-ish, 20 years old. 20. I've been doing this (very intermittently) for twenty bloody years. And, I cannot help but note, still am, for some reason. I've done posts in the past, when this whole thing was comparatively blemish free and dewy-skinned looking back on its history and how it's changed down the years, there's not really a lot of point in doing that again. It's reflected what concerns me at the time, is, I think, the most charitable way of phrasing it (a  polite way of saying that it's been self-absorbed and solipsistic, but then, it's a blog, this should not come as a shock), it's interesting for me to look back over the lists of posts, but not so much for you, I imagine. Likewise, pondering how I've changed in the intervening years is also fairly pointless. It's painfully obvious that I was a very different person at 25 to 45, my experience of jobs and kids and marriage
Post a Comment
Read more