Strawberry Fields

Hi readers!

I’ve inherited these 20 odd strawberry plants from my uncle. They were at the bottom of his garden and when I went to help my mum clean out his house, we found them and decided to bring them home. They needed lots of TLC and a lot of water, but now they are happily sitting at the top of my garden and flowering in the sunlight. I’ve never been that much into gardening, but I have to admit that The Secret Garden is one of my favourite films and has been for an age now! So I’ve rescued these strawberries in the spirit of that film really. It’s amazing how much they have grown in the last few days as well and I’ve been out checking on them and chatting to them…well they have proven that talking to plants does make them grown! But these guys are not my first strawberry plant and I’m hoping that most readers will remember Hairy Von Baron Strawberry.



He was given to me last year by my best friend and now he’s grown abit more and spreed out. So there’s more of him in the garden now! My new plants are out shining him though, because they have flowers already, but he’s showing any signs of bursting into bloom just yet…..Anyway I’ve got my hands full with guarding my strawbs against slugs and other bugs, luckily I’ve some help!





Gargoylesto keep away evil and Patch to keep me company. She looks so cute! So it looks like there’ll be a lot of homegrown strawberries for me this year. I’ve developed a taste for gardening now and I was thinking that if my writing falls through I’d take up being a gardener! Though at the minute it looks like things are taking off for me. I entered a competition with the first chapter of my novel and they accepted it for the first heat! So now, next Wednesday I’ve to go to Liverpool to read it out in front of the judges! I’m scared and excited and really not sure what to do with myself. I’m going to go for it though and try my best. I know my novel is still a mess, but someone might be interested in it and you don’t know what will happen till you give it a shot. So I’ll let you know how that goes next week!

I’ve been busy trying to do my project today, my Victorian English Lit essay, which is about the characters of Heathcliff and Mr. Rochester and how the Bronte sister as women writers created this powerful male characters. I’ve done about 300 words today, so it’s just over 1,000 out of the 3,000 it needs to be by Tuesday. It doesn’t help that I left the novels with all my notes in at my uni house, or the fact I’ve been distracted by a million other things! So tomorrow I must try harder, though I guess this is sort of like writing a story, it can’t be forced, though my deadline is nearly here. I know once I get back to uni and have my books I’ll be able to do it like that! But till then I’ve to chip away at it and try a different approach each time. I’ve to redraft my other essays too and make a plan for my last one. Still can’t believe that I’ll be starting my final essay soon. It’s a very scare thought.



And this is me sporting my new jacket! My mum finished knitting it for me the other day and I love it. Been wearing it every since really. It’s the perfect spring/summer cover up and it’s so nice. I’d love to knit something myself, but I just can never seem to get it right. I can knit, but I twist my wool up and I’m forever adding and losing stitches. Here’s a baby blanket I started the other day and well most of it is mum’s work, because the wool rebels against me too much. I’m getting back into the swing of it though, just takes awhile to get straight in my head….



That’s mostly it for today, though I’ve got a few more pics to put up….

Me and Patchy

Duck family!

Writing Stories

Hi,  I thought today I’d write a slightly different blog. Which should be good for me because I’m having a writer’s block with writing my essays. Truthfully, I’m not sure why, but I’ve some different theories; 1. the fact I’ve a loan laptop and the keyboard is strange and I don’t have any of my stuff on here, (Also just found out that nothing could be saved on my hard drive, so I’ve lost everything on that. Have new hard drive and getting laptop back tomorrow though.) 2. I’ve lots of other thoughts in my head right now and I can’t rid of them. 3. the idea of leaving Uni is scary! 4. I want my final essays to be really good. 5. I’m stressing about other things too now. So, yeah that’s about it, so I’m hoping to snap out of it soon!

So I might have writer’s block on my essays, but I’ve not on my novels. I’ve been writing one I started last yearish and the idea was that the reader was on the outside looking in, so they were always at a distance from the world and characters. Thus means that I and the characters are in the same boat, on the outside, not sure what’s going on or who to trust. It’s working out really well tho in a strange way and it’s not really about vampires!

Doing a creative writing course has taught me all about the craft of writing, but not really ‘how to write’ that comes from practice, experience and your own talent and imagination. Reading and writing every day is an important part of it too! Plus you have to love doing it and writing for yourself. That’s how I got into it really, writing as a hobby and often in reply to books I had just finished reading. I strongly believe as well that having a really good or over active imagination helps too. I’ve always had one, mostly because I was a bit of loner for most of my childhood and thus creating worlds and make believe friends was a great comfit for me. I also believe if you want it badly enough you should go after it and for me being a novelist would be my dream come true. I already know, from my course, that getting something published and making it popular in the world is hard to do and seriously not as easy as most people believe it to be. This is due to the fact that publishing is like any other business and they always want to make money.

Moving on and focusing on me for a min, I started writing stories when I was 6, but because I was dyslexic (I didn’t know officially till I was 16) no one knew what I was going on about, but I got a taste for writing, though it was so tough for me! But I loved reading and books, thanks to my parents. Then when I was 12 I found inspiration from R .L. Steins’ Goosebumps stories and  wrote my first novel part in high school, part at home. The only evidence I have of that novel is a single paper copy. From there though and without any guidance or anything, I took that novel and redraft it. From there was born the first in a series of novels about a group of teenagers who went to a summer camp every year and I wrote like 10 novels. Then I got writer’s block and wrote nothing for a year.

Sorry, I’m so going off on something here, but it’ll explain things in a minute. Sometime whilst I was in college during my second year a character suddenly popped into my head and so was born my first official vampire. I then spent the next two years of my college life writing 3 novels about this vampire and his friends.

So, and I only discovered this by reading J .R. Ward’s The Black Dagger Brotherhood; The Insider’s guide, which is a great great book! That my characters would come into my head and start mapping out their own stories. Thus all my novels are driven by the character not the plot. Like Ward, I also see the images of my characters, their actions and their worlds in my head and that really helps when you’re writing a story. Being able to see images so that the words become more like pictures in your mind is a great skill to have.

I’d tell anyone to give writing in any form a shot and see how you feel about. I’m still surprised when my friends talk about something I’ve wrote and tell me that they couldn’t have written something like that or where did my idea come from. Just because for awhile I believed that I didn’t have a talent for writing, but now of course I do. So I think that giving some thing new a try and seeing if you have a knack for it is really good.

So, where do you now begin if you want to write a story? Well, the blank page bugs me, so I always try and fill it really fast. Often I’ll start with the weather- either outside or a make it up. Like ‘it was a bright sunny morning’ and then make the setting or add a character, ‘the street was quiet and the gentle breeze was blowing through the cherry blossom trees.’ then it’s character/setting, ‘Laura walked down the street, glancing up at each house as she past. What was the number again? she thought.’ so I’ve got my character’s thoughts now, but you can have speech too and now to hook the reader into the story (This is highly important to grab the reader so they’ll read on for sure!) ‘she paused before garden gate and bit her lip, how am I going to tell him? she thought and dropped a hand to her stomach, that I’m pregnant?’

See? you’re drawn into that now ’cause you want to know more about both characters and what they are going to do about the situation. I made that up on the spot too, as an example but also to do away with the white space on the page! And of course there are lots of different ways to get started and lots of guide books on writing out there. So give it a try!

PS. I might think about making my idea into a short story and posting it on here if I get enough people commenting with their interest, so get in touch, cause I do read them all- even tho right now I’ve over 5,000 to read! So bear with me but thanks for the support everyone!

More coming soon!

All In The Name Of Poetry!

Hi! I’m hoping to have some new readers today, because I’ve been giving out my business cards to people about my blog. Today was an applicant visit day for people doing media courses and I’m hoping most of them will now be reading my post!I had a good day helping people and showing off the uni, though it is tiring being on your feet, talking and smiling all day, but I don’t mind. I love being a student guide it’s just get fun and easy money! I like writing my blog too. I’ve had lots of tasks to do throughout the day, though my fav has to be the campus tour, only because I get to chat to lots of people and talk about the different buildings on campus and the useful facilities. I’m working this Saturday too, so no doubt I’ll get to find more people to read my blog.


Of course that and my title have nothing to do with my first photo! It’s of the pie I made last night. I’ve been teaching my housemate how to cook and this pie, plus the pasta bake I made on Sunday, have now been added to his cooking list. The pie was tasty and there’s still lots left. That’s the issue with my cooking-when I make a meal for people, there’s always enough for twice as many people that I’m cooking for! So no one goes hungry for long around me.

So, I guess I should explain my title now. With it being so close to the end of my 3rd and last year at Edge Hill Uni, I’ve many essays on the go right now and one of them is poetry. I’ve my last four poems to submit after Easter, but I’ve been trying to come up with a creative way of displaying my poems. The tutors often encourage this- special with poetry-as its one of those subjects that needs a little more creativity behind it. So over the past 2 years I’ve displayed my poetry in a handmade book, scrapbooks and just normally. This year I wanted to do something different and I’ve had a lot of ideas- orgami and writing with chalk on the street-where just two of the crazy thoughts I had. My housemate and fellow creative writing student has had the best idea though. He wants to take sections of his poem and write them everywhere possible, so these photos below show his first practising;

He’s not a hoodie, by the way! It was raining and he’s writing on our house wall and slates that fell of our roof. He also washed the chalk off once we were done.

Don’t panic about this either! It was ketchup on the bathroom tiles. We washed it off soon after, but the bathroom does still smell a bit ketchupy.

So with him planning that, I decided that I’d like to do something with photographs. So I came up the idea of making a photo collage and placing my poem on top of it. Also because of the poems have to be connected either theme or style, I choice to do emotion and one of the current things that is effecting so many people right now is the earthquake in Japan. So I choice to write a poem about that.

It still need some work but it is only a first draft!


That’s it for this post now, but since I’m working on Saturday and then off to a gig in Liverpool on the Sunday night, I’ll posting another blog soonish.

When is Poetry not Poetry?

Hi, I've a question title today and that's because I'm writing about stuff I learned in class today, stuff which I'm against, but feel it's important to share with everyone. So, I've been doing some intense work in poetry these last few Fridays and we've been looking at poets who's poems are out of the circle of 'normal poetry.' Poets like; Lyn Hejinian and her prose poem My Life, Ron Silliman, Tom Raworth and today Tom Phillips, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Amiri Baraka and Kenneth Goldsmith. (I've posted some links below for these poets, which you can go and visit. I didn't want to post up any of their poems in case I get in trouble, so please go and check them out, 'cause then you'll see what I'm trying to show you.)

So, most of these poets sort of fall under the area of poetry for the ear, eye and mind, which means they make great use of sound and often the poets perform them so that the full benefit can be reached. The eye or visual poem often involves a sort of collage, mashed up style of words, letters and images, sometimes the poets may use other people's writers and make something out of them. There is also the idea of conceptual poetry- take Goldsmith and his poem which is in fact a newspaper typed up and turned into 900 pages worth of words. Lastly there is the experiment writing and the very Modernist view of producing something that is so fresh it has never been seen before by anyone else.

That sort of gives you a rough idea of the stuff I looked at today and the links will give you even more. It sort of is like the extreme side of poetry really or like mixing music or art with poetry, unfortunately I disagree with it, for me this is not poetry, its something caught in-between these areas and in a strange place of it's own that sort of is like marmite- you either love it or hate. Though, hate is a strong word and I don't hate the poems or poets, I just don't agree with them over this. I guess to achieve these things you must see the world and language in a different light and I guess- though I hate to use this, (irony there!) being dyslexic might be the issue here! I'm not setting it all down to that, but more of my own idea about what poetry should be and should not be!

I wanted to add another image to show you some visual poety, but scared of copyright iusses, I thought I'd try one of my own, so here's one like really quick, no editing poem, that I did about trains;

I think everyone should be able to make their mind up though, so please let me know what you think.

http://www.tomraworth.com/
http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/
http://www.geoffreyyoung.com/thefigures/day.html
http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com/
http://www.amiribaraka.com/
http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/
http://mylifebylynhejinian.blogspot.com/

Here's someone who's put up their Modernism Visual poems on flicker. I think they are good.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/virtue_fern/3112597938/

Lastly, my friend asked me to post a link to his blog. He's a comic book writer in the making:
http://voicesofa-distantstar.blogspot.com/

here's one of his drawings that I like!

Oh and here's my personal twitter, in case you want to follow me there;
http://twitter.com/#!/ironmaidenfan9

Rainny days

Hi, this is my 80th blog post! Well so it says on the dashboard and I think that's been the most interesting thing of my day. I've not been doing a lot because of this;

Rain. It's been like this all day and for most of the last two days as well, though we've not had gale force winds today yet. I did brave the weather and go to Ormskirk for pop tarts and cake, but then I've spent the rest of the day in bed. I've been making notes in Wuthering Heights- getting it ready for my Vic Lit projected in March and watching TV movies; first the Corpse Bride and now Jane Eyre a black and white version, but as I'm soon about to be studying the novel- I read it over summer- I thought having it on in the background couldn't help. I still have Brent Weeks' The Way of Shadows to finish- 6 chapters left now. I've been busy doing other things though.
My uncle died on the 26th Jan and it was really sudden, so I've not had the will or the mind to be doing much. Luckily, I've had little work to do though, its about to change. I've an essay to write for Lit Modernism- 2,000 words on Kathrine Mansfield's short stories and her Modernism symbolism.

Guess watching the Corpse Bride has made me lit these. I like candles though, but the only tea light candle holders I have are Halloween ones. Still it doesn't matter, I like Halloween too much. Anyway, the candles are for my uncle tonight.
I've been baking cakes too. This is my latest design; a full moon with bats, misty clouds and stars. I don't think it was cooked in the middle but my housemates still ate it!

So I've not been doing anything else lately, though I've been thinking about giving Bob the cactus his own twitter account, though I've two of my own on the go right now, but it would be easier then his blog! He's doing okay, growing fast, though he still hurts when he gets you, but it seems he likes watching the world go by and everyone hurrying to and throw and missing the simple things as they pass.

So lastly for today, I've been trying to get my TV sorted, by upgrading the channels. It took me awhile to find the channel scanner button though, because this TV is a bit funny. So I found the button and scanned and then the TV lost all the BBC channels. It really loves doing that, so I had to watch the start of Star Wars 4, till I could rescan it again-not that I didn't mind, it's an okay one-and then it did it again! So had to go for the 3rd time luckily step and now I've all the right channels and I'm still watching Jane Eyre!

Gremlins are stealing my stuff!

Hi, I'm sure that Gremlins like the cute Gizmo above have been stealing things from my room, because items appear to be missing like my pen drive and my mobile phone memory card. There's a notebook too and socks! I keep finding odd socks all over my room and I've no idea how they got there or where their pairs now are......I had another idea that maybe borrowers had been involved too.

I'm hoping that whoever has my things returns them soon, because I really did want to load some pics up from my phone of my two new dogs and also save the start of my new essay. I guess I'll have to write about them first and then take some photos on my camera. I might tidy my room and see if that turns anything up- I might have simply misplaced these items. So I'll have to do that once I've finished here!

So my new dogs then; they are actually my uncle's dogs but he died on Wednesday, so my family have had to take responsibility for them. It is a little too soon after Sandy though and I don't think any of us were ready to take on two small and full of energy creatures, but there's no one else to take them in and I'm sure my uncle wouldn't have liked them going to a dog's home. The chances of them being rehomed are slim too, because Cindy is a lurcher cross yellow Labrador and Patch is a jack Russell cross staffie, being a pair and being not very desirable breeds is the most possible cause. They are good dogs though and they do have some obedience and are good on lead. I guess its just getting use to them, because they are so unlike Sandy- yet they did know her-Patch likes sitting on her hip and licking your ears and Cindy is the noisy one and barks at everything. Hopefully I'll find a pic to put up soon!

In light of that I've not been doing much and I've not written my other blog or do a webcam post because of the news, but I do want to carry that on, so I'll find some time to do that soon enough.

                                                                   Sindy and Patch

Webcam update

Hi, please go to the youtube link below to view webcam post
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5WU0kvtbzE
thanks.