Sandra Lindsey

That's what I've mostly been doing recently.

I finally read A Tale of Two Cities. ( It's the only Dickens book I'll bother making the effort for though )

After that, I read a book called Sheep. ( It's a history book, focusing on the importance of sheep in the history of civilisations. )

Sticking with the history theme, I then read Early Aviation in North Wales ( it turned out to be slightly mis-leading in its blurb )

And now my current reading - The Safeguard of the Sea ( Volume 1 of a Naval History of Britain, covering the years 660-1649 )

So yeah, I've been doing a fair old bit of reading. Still am. A lot of it is adding to my general historical knowledge, so hopefully will help with that part of my writing. In the meantime I'm still being regularly attacked by new ideas, so am doing my best to record notes on them for development at a future time :-)

(and if you really did read through that whole post, I recommend you reward yourself!)

...when disparate parts of the internet come together to give you a prod.

This morning I read a post on Behind Ballet (the blog of The Australian Ballet) entitled The inexplicable need to dance. Written by a member of the company, it opened with a famous quote: “I don’t want people who want to dance, I want people who have to dance” and expanded on that theme, encompassing other passions and the role of balance rather than succumbing to an all-consuming passion.

All very interesting, I thought, as I sat down to write a shopping list & drove into town, but do I have any kind of passion like that? Have I killed off any hope of that sort of thing by making consistently sensible decisions throughout my schooling etc.?

I might have started to feel a bit down about the whole thing, if I hadn't sat down on my return and read Jessewave's blog, which today featured "Oh no! The dreaded Writer's Block!" written by Victor J. Banis as part of the "Ins & Outs of M/M Romance" series which is on-going over there.

That post kind of made my day. I've been struggling to find time to even think about writing recently, but the number of times I went "I do that!", "I know!" and "OMG I'm glad I'm not the only one!" made me realise: I have found my 'inexplicable need'. It is to write; to tell stories. I may be years off being in a position to sell my stories, but I am a writer.

One thing which, for me, really linked Victor's post to the one about ballet was this:
"Jonathan Kellerman has a character in one of his novels remark that when an aspiring student says he wants to be a writer, he knows there is no hope for him, but when he says he wants to write, there is at least a slight hope."
I don't think I want to write: I think I need to. Otherwise I'm just a person who hears voices of made-up people in her head...

"What ho?" I hollered.
"Rather!" answered Spots.
"Absolutely topping," agreed Godders, and the whole thing was arranged in a jiffy.

No really, this snippet has been playing round my head all day. Please, please let it disappear overnight. I don't think my brain can handle any more characters swanning around in there right now!

Well, not quite, really. But my eye was caught enough by this article on the Scientific American feed to click through & read the whole lot.

Basically, archeologists have found evidence that tools were used to butcher animals for meat far earlier than previously thought - in fact by a species known as Australopithecus afarensis, of which "Lucy" was/is a member.

</geek>

So the BBC's got a "Normans" season on at the moment. They were trailing it on Radio 4 the other day, ad I was most baffled until something right at the end of the trailer/spot made me twig:
"Ooh! 'Normans' as in Battle of Hastings. Not 'Normans' as in 'people called Norman'."
*husband nearly falls off chair laughing*
"Well I did think it was a bit of an odd theme to base a season of programmes on..."

Spent yesterday afternoon over at the sculpture park by the dam - the RSPB were having a family fun day to celebrate International Bog Day, and our village line dancing group had been asked to do a display (of dancing! Get your minds out of the gutter!) and a 'have a go' teaching session. We weren't the only entertainment though - there was a singing group, a chap doing chainsaw sculptures, and a sheep shearing demonstration.

I've never seen shearing up close before - only on the telly (we were too far away to really see anything when we visited the Royal Welsh the other week) and it was really quite fascinating. I never realised they have to wear specialised clothes! Double-layer trousers (so they don't accidentally cut themselves) which sit higher on the waist (to keep their lower back warm because they have to be bending over all the time) and moccasins (to give them better grip on potentially slippery boards) which have to be bought new for each season because of how mucky they get. I also learned that these days they don't recommend a man takes up shearing properly, or tries to do fast-shearing, until he's at least 21 because of the strain it puts on your back. And also that professional shearers get paid around £1/sheep and will probably do around 280-300 per day during the season (of course, the kind of guys who get to the finals of the golden shears will do more than that!) (They also mentioned about only being able to sell the fleeces for 50p, but I knew that already. And yes, that *is* a 50% loss. If you want to know more about it, I'm sure you can find it out from a far more knowledgeable source)

So yes, not only interesting for knowing more about how life works, but all good for sparking off random plot-bunnies :-)

What with one thing and another - including this recent post over at Jessewave's blog and lots of m/m books I want to read being e-books only, as well as ebooks being significantly cheaper than paper-based ones... I've been thinking more often about maybe, possibly, someday getting an e-reader.

Not that I'm about to go out and buy one anytime soon (where soon = within a year) because there's other things need buying first. But this evening I realised that owning one could have a huge advantage I'd never thought of before: recipes.

Now, I don't know how many recipe books (if any?) are available as ebooks, but for someone like me it would be great - the number of times I've been struck with inspiration while I'm out doing the weekly shop, thought I've bought all the ingredients (or that I have most of them in stock already) and got home to find I've forgotten one thing... and it's usually something the village shop doesn't stock either so I'd have to drive at least to the closest town (8 miles away) and possibly to Welshpool or back to Oswestry (each being 20 miles away, in different directions). But if I had an e-reader and at least most of my favourite recipes stored on it - I could just look it up there & then (and check if it's single, double or whipping cream I need, and stuff like that).

On the other hand, I'd probably forget to take it with me which would result in the same situation as now, but with added frustration!

If there's one thing I don't need right now, it's story ideas.

Writing-wise, I need to get sat down and just get on with writing one of other of the things I've got started. (Rest-of-life-wise, I have a huge big pile of Stuff that needs doing. Yes, I probably am partly using writing as a way of hiding from the Stuff *sigh*)

...so although I do appreciate my brain for being happy and coming up with story ideas, at the same time it's almost more frustrating than when I can't get anything started...

Ah well, I think I'll just have to blame Jessewave. It's her post about sports-themed m/m fiction that set off this particular idea.

Guess I'll just have to note down as much as I know so far and then forget about doing anything more about it until I have at least one other thing finished.

I've just read Victor J Banis's excellent post on How to write M/M fiction (or rather just: How to Write), over at jessewave's blog, and it really got me thinking.

Firstly, he mentions listening to music as being a way of improving your writing - at school, I dropped English as a subject as soon as I could (age 16) but continued with Music until 18, when I left for University. I have an A Level grade C in Music, and I'm a damn sight more proud of that than I am of the B's I got in Maths and Physics (yes, I'm old enough to have done A levels before these weirdo new AS/A2 thingys came in, and in the subjects I took, Music was the most traditional).
...Anyway, to put it succintly: I have a fairly good grounding in classical music. My immediate thought on reading Mr Banis's comments on music was "perhaps that's why I get so hung up about the rhythm of my writing?" because I do, especially if the characters are talking in bed (/on the floor/up against a wall/in a lift ;-)

Following on from that, I went back to the old question of why could I not wait to drop English? I've always been a fairly prolific reader (and, like many other people, reading books which were supposedly way too advanced for my age) and I'm fairly sure I first announced my intention to become a writer before I left infant school. This enthusiasm continued - and was encouraged - by my junior school teachers, but then... I've never been able to figure out what happened at secondary school. I have certain memories (like seeing the first book we would be studying and thinking "I stopped reading books like this when I was 7" - the previous year, our class had been deconstructing Tolkein poems and greek myths in an effort to improve our storytelling...).

Coming back to today, this sudden insight caused by the linking of writing to music made me stop and think about the teaching methods I experienced in the different subjects. One thing I always, always hated about english lessons was the way they would go "Here's a really good book/play/story" and then pull it to pieces so we could see how the author had done it... but in doing that, we (or at least: I) couldn't see what the author had done.

What I'm on about is the method used where the teacher says "This term we're studying Macbeth", so lesson 1 the class read through / listen to the first scene. And then - immediately - it starts getting analysed, and notes have to be added to the text, and discussions are demanded about why such-and-such a word was used instead of this-other-one... and actually, you're lucky if you even get to the end of scene 1 before this starts happening...

Contrast this with studying Brahms's Violin Concerto for A level music:
Lesson 1: play CD of Brahms's Violin Concerto. Discuss immediate reactions to the piece.
Lesson 2: play the 1st movement. Discuss use of contrasts, orchestration etc. Identify 1st theme and mark on the score.

Do you see what I mean?

Ok, yes, I know there's a time element involved, but if you let people experience the full extent of something first, before you analyse it, they will likely be far more tolerant to your picking it apart. AND - perhaps more importantly - they will be far more likely to come back to it as adults.

As both a reader and an aspiring writer, it really upsets me how few people will turn to a book for an evening's pleasure, and I really can't stop myself from blaming it on english teaching destroying the joy of reading.

Yeah, I know, I don't need *extra* ideas, I just need to buckle down and get back to writing the things I've started... but then this idea involving a ballet dancer sashayed (or jete-d?) into my brain, and kind of snuggled itself down, ousting one or two other things which had been there previously

...and I kind of spent half the afternoon watching online videos of various ballet companies' rehearsals...

Which actually made me realise how much of the imagery that ballet companies use focuses on the ballerinas. I don't know how I never noticed that before - I guess most people think "woman in tutu" when I think "oooh, men in tights!" (even better: strong, athletic, muscular men in tights! I do love a good pair of strong arms). It's ok, I eventually found my way to the website for Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake which made me very happy indeed, if a little sad that I can't afford to go see it :-)