Over 1500 views!!!

Wow! I just checked in on YouTube to see how my Linocut animation is going and it has over 1500 views. I never would have expected it to do so well within just a couple of weeks.

According to the stats, most of the views are coming from the Craftzine blog, which I love so much. A lot of them have also come from the delightful Yellow Umbrella blog.

I also know that Imaginative Bloom posted it on facebook, for which I'm very grateful.

If you are one of the unlucky few that has yet to see the animation, check it out here:

Yellow Umbrella

This week my linocut animation is featured on the lovely Craft Mondays section of The Yellow Umbrella. It's such a great blog, I'm really happy to have been selected. Check it out.

Comic covers covered

I am loving this new blog, which has comic covers redrawn. That's not a great description, it's much better than it sounds. Check it out.

This is my favourite:


(by Chris Hoobler)

Sing out your joy

I have been absent from here, but not missing from the world of writing. I've decided that it's time to do The Artist's Way, having finally reached that stage where I could tell exactly how rubbish my writing was before I'd even put pen to paper. It is really good, but it requires about 900 words every morning and then possibly some tasks later. If I'm feeling good, there's also some creative writing.
It doesn't really leave much over for this blog, which is sort of a shame, but I'm appreciating the writing I'm doing, so I don't feel it as a lack. I will return to this at some point I'm sure, and perhaps I'll put some Artist's Way updates on here. I will be adding some writing pieces to Eating Your Own Heart, I think, so perhaps that's one way to check my progress for any interested parties.

Origins and new things

I work in the sort of place where a lot of 20 somethings who don't know what they actually want to do seem to gather. In some ways it's like being at university, especially in the way that everyone is so like you that you sometimes struggle to get out of yourself in any way.
Someone there passed the address of their blog on to me and it was a nice reminder that there are different people at work.
When I get onto a new blog, I always like to see their first post to find out where they started. With this one, I noticed that it started just a few days before mine, which feels nicely symmetrical. I don't tend to have many friends who blog, so it's a new experience to peer into someone's thoughts in this way, and it's pleasing to know that it doesn't feel intrusive at all. If you want more from the author, here's some music.

I'm reposting a link I found on the blog to an interesting article in which several authors give their rules of writing. It looks like there could be some things in there that trigger inspiration. I have quite a free weekend so I'm hoping to get some writing done. In a way though, I don't feel like I need to get into anything too urgently. I know how much better my writing flows when I'm away and mentally I'm already there.


Here are some graffiti photos I took in Germany last year that I just downloaded from my camera:







I took other photos as well, of a more standard kind. I'll post those soon I should think, but these stood out as my favourites since I took them all while exploring back streets by myself and I can really remember the free feeling of these places.


Finally, something fun and innocent.

Visiting Countries

One final post and then I'm off to do things with my day other than stay in bed.

I was just playing with the stats section of blogger, which they've updated a lot since last time I looked, and the countries that people read this blog from struck me as pretty amazing. Here's the list, ordered by number of page views:

United Kingdom
United States
Russia
France
South Korea
Germany
Canada
Netherlands
Brazil
Australia

They all have enough page views to denote repeat visits, and I've had visits from South Korea and Russia in the past week! That's pretty amazing to me as I have always thought that either nobody was reading this or it was just a couple of good friends.
I've never even been to half the countries on this list. It's such a lovely idea that I'm in them in this small intangible way. It gives me a very pleasant feeling of being connected to the rest of the world, and I hope I can keep that sensation with me for at least the rest of the day.

Any fool can get into college. Only a select few can say the same about Amanda Jones.

Thankyou to J for the link to this blog, it will cheer up my working hours no end.

Also, I'm loving Some Kind of Wonderful. John Hughes is my personal God, no boys are ever as charming and no girls are ever as beautiful as he makes them.

Keith Nelson: You can't tell a book by its cover.
Watts: No, but you can tell how much it's gonna cost you.
Keith Nelson: Wow, I never knew you were so deep.
Watts: You want shallow, call Amanda Jones.

If It's Hip, It's Here

This is not the usual sort of blog I like - it's very specific, based on design. But it's definitely worth a look, there are some stunning images on it.

Mindfuck

I am loving this right now. So much of it is getting hearted.

Well, winter's gonna end, I'm gonna clean these veins again

I am almost, but not quite, ready to return to this.

I thought earlier that I was finally back in a place where I could come to the page brimming with ideas - it's that feeling of running to find a pen before you forget the thing in your head and it's replaced by something else that's wonderful. I had a fleeting glimpse of that sensation earlier, and it's coming on the heels of a few days of feeling sociable and alive, but it didn't stay. I can't get any good feelings to stick around these days. Everything gets quickly swallowed up by worrying about what I'm doing with my life.

I watched An Education after the feeling had gone away. I borrowed it from work, and hadn't known too much about it, just watched it on a recommendation. But it turned out to be the best of films and the worst of films for me. There's a section when she's talking about how everything in this country is so flat and lost in its own dull self, and it's just how I feel. It is all too easy to get lost within this society, and to start to believe that jobs and marriages and families and money are all that matter....I really thought that everybody was just going along with this model because it was for the best and after a while it would start to feel good - a little like learning anything, it's hard to begin with but in the end it's worth it. But suddenly I realised that I was the only one faking it, and I just wanted to cry because I realised that I've been the only person holding me down. I have just been too foolish until now to understand that everybody is doing all of those things because that's what they want to do, and if they don't make me happy I should just go off and do any other thing in the world.

In An Education, that whole idea is ruined a little because the girl seems to only have the choice between a man and an education. There's no other way for her to be happy it seems....Everything is so diametric in this society, everything is always portrayed as a matter of one path or another - forks in the road like babies, marriage, university etc are made out to be a one or the other thing, and it's been making me sick to wander around in the wilderness without even a path in sight.

Well, no more. I'm just going to choose to do the things that I want to do and not fret about whether they're the right steps along some imaginary path or not.



Linked to the idea of getting back into this blog is getting back into writing in general. I was on the train today, going along the beautiful Hope Valley line in the sun, and thinking about writing and how it makes things more real to me.....maybe not real, but significant. When you look at something, you're viewing the whole of it, and appreciating it based on how you feel at the time. I think that a closer examination maybe comes with taking a photograph. When I take a picture, I spend time thinking about the composition of a scene and how all the parts of it fit together. But writing is the closest of all - you make the thing again for yourself, and to do that you must know it through and through. There are these trees in that area which are rust coloured all along one side of their trunks, and it is only when I really try and describe that in words that I come to fully appreciate the beauty of it. I am inside each speck of colour and shaft of light that makes up the image of the rusted tree, and I notice all of the shades of the scene because I need to find the exact right words to describe them. The wrong words ruin a description, whereas looking at something lazily doesn't ruin anything because you don't even notice you're doing it.

I don't have this all clear in my head yet, but that is the essence of what I was thinking today about writing. And obviously, I've only described my thoughts from the point of physical descriptions, but that's only because my thoughts sprang from looking at these pretty, rusted trees.


I can only hope that things are clearer soon...though there seem to be so very many things to get clear and never enough time to think enough about them.

Bookshelves

Oh oh this is the most wonderful blog in the history of the universe. Yes, this is my most geeky thing - an absolute love of bookshelves and libraries. I spend a little bit of most days book-shopping, but that's usually work related. I only wish that my department looked as beautiful as some of the libraries on the blog. But there's really only so much you can do with science books.

Travel by books

The Rejectionist is still crusading to bring to light the racist actions of major publishers. As part of their most recent post on the issue they put in several links to sites promoting books by and about people of colour. For some reason though, a lot of the links were aimed at YA readers so I asked for something similar that's meant for adults. One of the comments led to a really great blog - the author's 2009 wrap-up post made a map of the world and all the countries in it that she'd visited through books that year.
It's so easy to read in a very narrow vein, you want to read books similar to other ones you like and you're friends with people who have common tastes. But I'm going to be doing some more travelling by books this year and try to read outside of my norm.

Excellent photoblog

This photoblog is so incredibly mixed, I love it - it's a total view into the creator's life. It has some absolutely amazing photos. I've been hearting like crazy.

I have been posting, but not here

This is not an excuse for neglecting my blog, but I have been posting to the new blog I have with the beautiful girl.

Though, in fact, I'm a post behind on that as well. But I have got in 5 posts this week, which is uncommonly good for me, and quite distracting.


As for other things I've been doing (in a list because it's that sort of mood):

I learned how to do some Scottish country dancing. It was at a party, I was drunk and won't be doing it again. I was not good.

I've been asked to sell my felt in the lovely gift shop of John Rylands Deansgate.

I've made a big to-do list to stave off the mental breakdown that came scarily close earlier this week.

I took a break from the excessively long We were the Mulvaneys to read I, Robot. The second of those was better, but did have some really really awful snippets of prose sometimes. It's interesting that even though it's incredibly dated (since lots of the 'future' is now in the past and we still don't have robots with positronic brains of hyperdrives to travel to the far reaches of the universe) lots of the issues it raises are still very interesting. I didn't realise it would be lots of short stories, but I liked it, I enjoyed the suspense of each story and I loved the ending of the whole thing. Read it.

I've cleaned the entire house. Don't know what's come over me. My dad's away and I tend to let the house get really messy when he is, but not this time. Weird.

I've booked my tickets to get to London for the Elaine Feinstein book launch next week.

I've been reading lots of stuff in the archives at John Rylands. I've been reading up on the past of Madagascar, there were lots of English missionaries there is the first half of the 19th century. They had some very funny ideas about primitive natives. But they are often useful as well - it's good to see the changes in the country, makes me feel a part of it and hopefully it will help me figure out the plot points missing in my novel.

Felting

I mentioned my Etsy shop below. As an extension of that I've joined an Etsy team, FeltingTeam, and I now contribute to their blog. It's got some really great felting info on there and some of my favourite Etsy shops are part of it. Hopefully the members will help me find a way to increase my profile and get some sales. My absolute favourite member is Arlene Watson, who does some incredible nuno-felting.