Life and Stuff

So I haven't blogged in a while. Life got a bit busy and if I'm honest my feeling of wanting to write/draw/do anything creative has been horribly absent. While we all know that you shouldn't let your feelings interfere with creating, the practical real-world situation is; sometimes you just can't help it.

So I have a brand new shiny flat to move into, which should happen this coming week. As ever nothing has been simple. There have been "snag issues" (i.e. paint peeling off in the kitchen and the
bath side panel falling off), and an apparent inability to pick up a phone and call workmen to fix said snag issues by the company managing the place. I've now been reminded how much I hate chasing people - in my view if if you say you're going to do something then you just bloody do it. And if you can't then you tell the person waiting on you what the holdup is...

Charlie Brown - a kindred soul who was surrounded by idiots.
Apart from Snoopy who was smarter than all of them.
 (Original art by Charles M. Schulz, this bad copy by moi.)

Hoping it all works out in the end (if not I will use superglue and my own inventive nature to fix the damned problems myself) so I can start to get into a pattern again. I'm also hoping it will go some way to cheering me up, as I've been a bit in the blues these last weeks. Can't go into too much detail but let's just say I've been reviewing my life and making note of improvements that would be nice and, in some cases, that are desperately needed. Feeling a little like I'm trying to ascend a mountain with nothing but Uggs and a fork, but the choice of doing nothing isn't really an option. Anything to break out of my Groundhog Day life would be welcome at this point but I'm determined to keep one eye on the future and not make any hasty decisions.

The one thing that has been going well is my reading; I have read some truly stupendous books lately (you must read Silent Land by Graham Joyce - it's fantastic), and am currently working my way through Sofia's Secret by Susanna Kearsley. It's about a writer who moves to Cruden Bay in Scotland, to write her historic novel about a period of the Jacobite rebellion. But before long she realises she knows things she couldn't possibly have heard about before and wonders just how connected her and her main character are. It's a fabulous and magical story, and has extra significance for me because of it being set in Scotland. Kearlsey writes the Scottish Doric accent phonetically, and it delights me every time. My family are from further south and west, in the Ayrshire area, but I've always fancied seeing that part of Scotland, though I know the accent will throw me due to how different it is to the Ayrshire one (not that there's only one accent in Ayrshire, mind you). I'm very tempted to book myself a couple of days up at Stonehaven, especially as I've been missing Scotland. The last time I was up there was when my gran died over two years ago and anyone who's from there, or spent a lot of time there, will know the strange longing feeling you get when you haven't been to Scotland for a time.

Stonehaven harbour. Despite never being there it looks really familiar.
And very pretty.
 (Image by Onderwijsgek, cc license, via wikimedia commons.)

And finally, I was very excited to see that Harper Voyager are going to be open for digital submissions between the 1st and 14th October. Not necessarily because I have anything to submit but because it's a good sign of things to come; not all publishers are blind to the new digital opportunities out there and if this works for Harper Voyager I suspect we will see others doing something similar in the future. And that's all to the good for future wordsmithing opportunities.