Clachie Views (and a Neighbour)

It was just so good - the book was desperate to be worked on, and work on it I did.  In spades.  With a spade?  Any way, lots of words, so many in fact that that first-draft-done-by-1st-March idea just might not be so silly after all!

I'm in Aberdeen next week with Arts Across Learning, but I'm taking the manuscript with me - onwards!

In medias res and mirrors

This week I have a TINY story posted on Sidling Bears and a musing on writers and jack-rabbit starts on An Awfully Big Blog Adventure -

While I'm Away

I'm not here. That is, I'm away, up a glen, up to my eyeballs in the work-in-progress, and up a creek as far as internet access goes.  In the meantime, I've left you with some pictures of moss and bark and rocks, because I like taking photos of things that don't move, and I also liked the colours - and look forward to being here, properly, next week.

Till then ...

Plague Never Looked So Good

Two weeks in a stately home on the site of a 13th century leprosy/plague hospital?  Bliss!

I've just heard that I've been accepted for a Hospitalfield House Interdisciplinary Residency, from 23rd April to 7 May, to focus on a poetry project with exciting options to collaborate with the other inmates.  (I'm just not comfortable with calling them practitioners - the word suggests it should be followed by of the evil arts to me - not sure why.) 

I've pulled a few photos off the internet to show you, but rest assured I will be taking my camera with me -

(from Wikipedia)

(from Conferences uk)

(from Wall Street Journal (!))

Didn't I say February was going to be good?

Cat Pictures that Predate the Internet

Today I'm over on The History Girls musing about mice and cats -

Looking Up!

Let's face it, January was a bit rubbish.  Too much grey, too little energy.  Short on joy, really.  I can't tell you how many times I watched this video, but it helped.  

But February - now that's a different story!  A bijou month which started exhilaratingly last night with getting to read at Platform, a bi-monthly poetry and music event at Ladybank Arts Centre, and carries on with other good stuff, including 

a week away at Clachie (a cottage up Glen Clova) which will - really, it will - see the work-in-progress absolutely done (to a full first draft) (okay, so not really DONE done, but still done-ish)

two days of writing workshops with Arts Across Learning in Aberdeen

meeting up with the Reading Bus people there to get a new project off the ground

learning how to tweet (all right, not everything in February is going to be fun)

and

my birthday. 

And not only all that, today the sun is shining!  Pathetic fallacy or what!

Things are looking up.