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Creative? Me?
There’s a new award in town! This award – the Imagine Award – was, I am reliably informed, created by Jenny over at My Fibrotastic Life – pop over and say hi! It was created in October this year, no less.
That’s last year if you’re reading this next year :-).
I’m in on the ground floor with this one. And look how cool it is – it’s got a unicorn and a rainbow in it!
It has been awarded to me by Teepee12 (Marilyn) over at Serendipity, and I have to admit I was deeply touched by her kind description of my blog – thank you! Let me tell you a bit about her blog, if you haven’t already found it. We’re talking amazing photos (sometimes aided by her other half), social commentary, light-hearted rants, all the time accompanied by a most wicked sense of humour. She manages to see the light side of many not-so-light situations. It is a most amazing blog – do visit!
The description of this award states that it was “made in order to recognize the bloggers who express their passion and dedication towards their blogs through their creativity”. Teepee has listed some qualities which make a blog “creative”.
- Words – my blog contains no end of words. They’re everywhere on my blog. Poems, fiction, musings and whatnot.
- Graphics – I have photos, doodles (both hand and computer drawn) and cartoons.
- Video – I’ve included one video. It was sort of a “Blair Witch Project” type of affair, except that mine was shot on my phone in a darkened bathroom while wearing a coat and sunglasses, illuminating my face with a torch (that’s “flashlight” if you’re in the US) and affecting a Scottish accent (and calling myself “Angus MacScotland”).
- Layout – hmm, moving on.
- Community – I have a little bunch of treasured bloggy friends plus some very welcome visitors!
Birthday Yay!
Yes, it’s my birthday again. It came around so quickly! It seems like only a year ago that I last had one.
Here’s a freaky thing. I opened my Chrome browser (Google’s browser) this morning and clicked on the little animation to “view today’s doodle” (for those of you who don’t know, Google do doodles for famous events, birthdays and so on) and this is what appeared:
Holy crivens! A doodle just for me! I knew signing up to Google+ was giving one of the world’s biggest corporations too much information. Am I supposed to write a thank you note, do you think?
I haven’t been posting much recently, apart from trying to keep up with the Friday Fictioneers challenge, and there’s a good reason (and this time it’s not laziness!).
I’m house hunting. This isn’t taking up a huge amount of actual physical time (“physical time?” – you know what I mean). It’s taking up a huge amount of mental time. Even when I’m not actually looking at house websites or talking to the bank, I’m thinking about it. My little brain doesn’t have room for anything else.
Why am I looking to buy a house (let’s say it like it is – why am I trying to persuade the bank to buy me a house)? I hate change, big time. I like my routine. I hate making phone calls. I hate taking risks. I hate suddenly having no money. This doesn’t sound like the correct mind-set for such an endeavour.
I’m getting older, fast. My pension, as it stands, will barely keep me in cheese and pizzas, let alone pay rent. So I need to get a house and pay it off before I retire. Otherwise I’m going to be living in my car.
So I’m just going to have to suck it up, take it one step at a time and let the cards fall as they may.
I’ve also learned some great estate agent terms!
- cozy – not even enough room to swing a cat
- compact – see cozy
- low maintenance garden – no grass
- green views – if you go upstairs, hang dangerously out of the window and squint a bit you may catch sight of a distant field
- parking for 2 cars – parking for 2 Smart Cars or 1 human-sized car
- 2 bedrooms – house built pre-90s, 2 bedrooms. House built 90s onwards – 1 small bedroom and 1 “bedroom” too small to actually get a bed in
- in need of modernisation – falling to bits
Wish me luck!
A Choice of Dark or Light
Approach-approach conflict is the psychological conflict that results when a choice must be made between two desirable alternatives.
I thought I’d do a DraliDoodle for this week’s PftP, brought to us by the marvellous Queen Creative!
The Light Side allows you to help out and makes you feel good! The Dark Side gives you the power to help yourself which sounds great in theory, but let’s be honest, it’s a bit “evil”.
Why is there not a Grey Side?
Unfortunately, by the end of the doodle I’m none the wiser. That’s me in a nutshell. I can’t make decisions.
Thanks to Lucasfilm.
The Curse
The late autumn wind howled around the old cottage, shaking the chimney stack and blowing the branches of the old oak tree against the window. Esme sank deeper into her favourite armchair and pulled the blanket up around her chin, her mind in turmoil. Tonight. After all these years, it would be tonight.
Esme had inherited the cottage after her mother had passed on, some sixty years ago. Her mother had been – to put it tactfully – “odd”. She had “seen” things, things that hadn’t happened yet. Esme hadn’t understood until she’d moved into the cottage. Now the Gift was hers.
People had come to her in the early years. Will this be a good harvest? Will the village fête be rained off? Will it be a boy or a girl? Now only the kids came – the world had moved on and nobody believed any more. Of course, she never told the kids what she really saw. How could she tell little Nathan from the village post office that the pain in his tummy wasn’t just stomach ache? Or bubbly blond-haired eight-year-old Stacy that she would outlive her kids?
No, she told them that they would find their prince or princess, live in a big house with two point four children and live a long and happy life. She wasn’t a monster.
Draliman Through the Ages Part 4 – Sir Drali of Dralishire
For part 4 of our epic journey through time, we catch up with one of Draliman’s most famous ancestors – Sir Drali of Dralishire. Let’s see what he’s up to!
We can learn three important lessons from this:
- An awesome reputation is all very well, but you may need to back it up one day!
- Arrogance and over-confidence can be your downfall
- Out of all the things I can’t draw, horses have moved up near the top of the list!
Catch up with previous episodes here:
Part 1 – Dralamoeba
Part 2 – Dralisaurus
Part 3 – Dralug the CaveDrali
Promptarama!
Daily Prompt: A Little Sneaky – Are writing prompts a useful exercise, or do you find them to be too limiting and/or hokey?
Okay, it’s a terrible title for a post. It’s not even a word. However, fully 10 minutes of Private Practice Season 6 Episode 8 have been and gone and I can’t think of anything else.
I love prompts! Here’s some history.
This blog was always supposed to be “my life musings”. Things that happened to me, “bloggable incidents” if you will. Things that occurred to me. However, it didn’t take long to discover the flaw in my plan.
Nothing ever happens to me. Nothing ever occurs to me.
It didn’t take long to run out of ideas. I limped along for 18 months like this. I posted maybe three or four times a month. I had a couple of followers (you’re still with me, you know who you are and thank you!), a few likes and maybe a comment or two.
Although I’m not writing this blog for comment-fuelled validation, everybody likes comments and “likes”, right? It shows us that people are reading our posts and are moved to say something”.
I’d seen the Daily Post but didn’t know much about it. I didn’t know if I wanted to get involved in writing posts to prompts, but in January of this year I gave it a go and did my first Daily Prompt. I really enjoyed it, and better, not only did a bunch of new people stop by to say hello, I discovered loads of great new blogs to follow!
I don’t find prompts limiting. I do the ones I want to do, I feel no obligation to do them all. They give me ideas and sometimes I can expand on them, or maybe find a different angle. I can see other peoples’ takes on the same starting point and discover great new writers to follow. And the more we write, the better we get (theoretically).
It gave my seriously flagging blog a new lease of life. It now contains musings, poems, flash fiction, doodles and cartoons. Armed with my little fifty quid point and click camera I’ve even participated in a couple of weekly photo prompts!
I know people say that a “focussed” blog is the way to gather thousands of followers, but I’m not interested in that. I hope that my blog contains something for everyone lots of people. Ignore the fiction and enjoy the cartoons. Read the fiction but ignore the dodgy poetry.
I’ve participated in Rarasaur/Queen Creative‘s Prompts for the Promptless. I (very) recently started writing to the Friday Fictioneers photo writing prompts, and I’m really enjoying that (I’ve done two so far) – I hadn’t written any fiction for years and I’m rediscovering my love for it and it’s amazing to read all the other great entries.
So in conclusion, it’s a big thumbs up to prompts from draliman!
Draliman Through the Ages Part 3 – Dralug the CaveDrali
For the third part of our series tracing the ancestry of Draliman, we move forward from prehistoric times to an age when man first walked the Earth!
We join Dralug, a member of the CaveDrali tribe, on an auspicious day, a day which changes the tribe forever.
Catch up with “Draliman Through the Ages”!
Part 1 – Dralamoeba
Part 2 – Dralisaurus
Thanks go to Arthur C. Clarke for the loan of his monolith.
On the Edge
L’appel du vide is French and translates to “Call of the Void”. It is the unexplainable urge to jump when standing on the edge of a cliff, or tall height. It can be considered a form of self-destructive ideation, or a protective instinct to let the brain play out what the body should not. It’s definition has been expanded to describe responding mentally to the call of the siren song– whether that means the desire to reach into a fire, drive into a wall, or walk into the eye of the storm.
He struggles to remember the early days, the good times. The times when drinking was fun, sociable, relaxing. The days when he and his friends met at the bar after work for a few drinks, to laugh and joke and relieve the stress of the day.
He can’t quite remember those days.
All he has now are memories of darkness. Hazy, muddled memories of fights with his friends. Vague recollections of arguments with his wife. The knowledge that he’d swapped his beautiful house and family for a tiny, grotty bedsit. A dank, dark little room to match his mood.
He remembers two days when he hadn’t drunk, when he’d tried to stay off the booze so he could see his kids. Two horrific days of misery until the siren’s song of alcohol drew him inexorably back.
His memory vaguely recalls a time when he had friends, friends he could rely on, but now his friends could no longer rely on him and they’d done their best but now they were gone. He’d pushed them away because they didn’t understand, couldn’t understand what he was going through. Those days feel like a dream, a different life.
Darkness, emptiness, helplessness, shame. Home, wife, kids, friends, job, self respect all gone.
And now his mind drags itself back to the present, as he stands on the cliff. He can’t go on like this, it has to end. He stands on the edge of the cliff, his mind remarkably clear, and stares out into the void.
Fade Away
Daily Prompt: Standout – When was the last time you really stood out in a crowd? Are you comfortable in that position, or do you wish you could fade into the woodwork?
I’ve had to struggle to remember the last time I stood out in any crowd. I think we’ll have to go back over ten years to “the dark drinking time”. Emboldened by Dutch Courage I was MC at a work pub quiz. I was the fill-in act – told jokes, gave away prizes, that sort of thing. Apparently I was quite good!
One year for a university Christmas party I wrote a song (a spoof on the university to the music of the Eagles “Hotel California”) and got together some backing singers and some amateur musicians (physicists are less boring then one might expect!).
Ritual and Routine
Ritual and routine. Watchwords for my life.
When I say “ritual” I’m talking about the personal things we do, rather than anything connected to religion. Little things like knocking on wood before performing a certain task, maybe. Things that don’t really mean anything, but make us feel better.
Routine – the things we do every day, the things we have to do, like checking all the windows are closed before we go to work.
I love my routine. I do the same things every workday morning, in the same order. Get out of bed, make lunch, shave, shower, brush teeth. That’s all fine. Next I check the kitchen plugs are off, check the water to the washing machine is off, check the washing machine and microwave are unplugged, check the side window’s closed, check the amplifier is off at the wall, check the amplifier base unit is off at the wall, check the bathroom fan master switch is off and leave the house.
There’s more, but you get the idea.
Here’s the kicker – I already know most of the stuff is fine. I use the washing machine on a Monday evening. It can’t magically plug itself back in, but I need to check every morning. If I don’t check I feel uneasy. That’s when routine becomes ritual. It serves no useful purpose but I need to do it to make myself feel better. If I do something out of order it feels very wrong.
Then there’s the stuff which my brain expects to happen. The other day I walked into a door at work. I flung my right arm at the door handle and missed. I tried with my left hand and missed. However, my brain expected the door to be open by now, so my legs just kept on going. Ouch!
Here’s what I imagine was going on in my head at the time, starting in the “Department for Hands and Arms”.
Once I’ve locked a door, I check it’s locked – that’s good common sense. If I wait around in the proximity of the door for more than a few seconds I have to check it again. That’s just mad! I know it’s locked.
Does anyone else have a routine which has morphed into a ritual?
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