Tables, tarts, and writing projects.

I'm very proud of this seat/desk/table/small bookcase that g'son designed and made himself at school. The top revolves. I can sit on it to use my laptop or have it next to me as a table and laptop perch.  

I'm also rather proud of this tarte au citron I made this morning with french pastry which has to be the easiest pastry I have ever made - no rolling required.

I’ve been neglecting this blog. The reasons are simple. Firstly, I don’t go anywhere or do anything worth photographing or reporting. Secondly I have been focused on reviving, editing, making in all ways better a novel I wrote at least 12 years ago for pre-teens called ‘Turn Right at Jupiter.’ That involved getting friends to drag it out of the dark ages and put it into a form my current laptop can read. Sadly I have lost the floppies on which the two sequels were written but the first book had been put on a CD so - phew!

It’s coming along. I saw things that were terribly wrong with it - over-long sentences, not enough paragraphs, too-long chapters and too little dialogue. Hopefully it is more reader-friendly now. The good folk at the writer’s group have been giving it the once over, a few chapters at a time, as has Sophia, my poet daughter who worked for quite a number of years with publishers.

Soon I shall have to be brave enough to submit it somewhere, and another somewhere, and another somewhere.....   not looking forward to that, but at least it can be done electronically nowadays so doesn’t involve hundreds of sheets of paper, expensive cartridges of ink, and trips to the Post Office.

The writer’s group organised a workshop with a young woman who writes scripts. She has had plays produced and written episodes of TV soaps. It is always interesting to listen to someone who really knows what they are talking about.  Her talk also covered some of the information I got earlier in the year from a free university course, ‘The Future of Story Telling.’ (All the free courses available on-line now - I could spend my whole time on them, The variety is amazing. I nearly did the ‘Higgs Bosun’ course offered by Edinburgh but decided I wouldn’t have a clue what they were talking about after the introduction so didn’t join the thousand who enrolled.) 

I rather like the idea of writing for radio (which she didn’t cover, but did say it was a much easier and supportive market than the cut-throat world of TV soap and screen.) So many ideas, so little time. Or rather so little time when I’m not feeling sleepy or needing a change of scene. 

To my dismay, disappointment and general displeasure I have missed the wonderful displays of Aurora Borealis that have played above out heads recently. Drat! Once upon a time I had a dog that I walked on the beach in the dark. Then I saw them. Now there is no dog (Dizzy Thursday lunchtime) and the beach is too far away.  Sigh!