Library wall

You never know what you might find if you take a look at Paraxis 02 which is now online.

One of my pieces appears on the Library Wall. It's called Talking books and you might enjoy seeking it out on the collage page. I wrote a number of pieces inspired by libraries a while back. I had such fun writing them that it's great to see that fun continuing in this web page.

Ok - if you're in a hurry, it's on a beige background, long and skinny in the lower right hand quarter of the collage. First line - The library is rarely silent. No.6 on the list. But hopefully you'll have time to read more of the pieces there.

Thanks to Paraxis for publishing my piece.

Get busy

Anyone who regularly sends work out, be it writing, visual art, music, film will be familiar with the words in this text. It's an extract from my outcomes list kept over the last few years. Read it on a bad day and it does your head in.

I created it earlier this year in response to Rosie's request for submissions for her Failure project. If you take a look at her blog you can read more about the project. And if you click on the failure label at the bottom of her post you'll find out how the project went, because it certainly wasn't a failure!!

The world of publishing takes time to respond, if ever, to the mountains of work it receives. So the only way I can move my work forward is to keep taking it elsewhere, to explore live work and blogs, ebooks and other alternatives. I guess this has given my work a new lease of life and enabled me to take risks in my writing that I wouldn't ordinarily have done.

The work has it's own life, doesn't much care about what anyone else thinks, just wants you to get on and get busy.

So it was great to hear that one of my poems made the top 30 longlist for the Lightship poetry prize. And then, a while later, even better to hear that it had been shortlisted to the top 10!! So, I'm thrilled that my piece will be published in the anthology due out next month.

I thought this week might be quieter, that I would be happy to take it easy, waft about a bit, smile a lot. Talk about a wordrush!! My pen has hardly stopped writing. It's been just the sort of boost I've needed and my words have rediscovered a sense of playfulness that they lost a long time ago.

So, guess what I've done this week? I've sent some more work out and have been smiling a lot!

Grounded

Click any photo to view as an image stream. What a great new feature, but I hope you'll read the rest of my post as well!

Grounded. Going nowhere fast. Scraped across the stones and dragged into the shallows. It came ashore on ferocious tide when the mist was pulled down like grubby curtains. And it looked like it was a light in the murk of that monochrome as I walked towards it, only me and it on the gloomy beach.

But now, it seems to have dug in and made itself at home on a place it always looked at from a distance. And I love that it's like a sculpture and how everyone looks close and feels the surface and scoops their hands in the great big dent where it hit something huge.

It was warm enough to work on the beach for a couple of hours yesterday and I liked the company of this huge globe, imagined crossing that equator, wondered about the new islands mapped there.

Found myself imagining the workshop that made it, welded the plates together. Wanted to be the one to spray it like a sun. Or the one to hoist it out on the sea.

Wires and Welsh weather

Go on! Before you scroll down. Guess what happened next.

(Back in July when I was in Wales.)

Wires and Welsh weather high up on the pass near Snowdon. The ice cream van behind us in this car park was still doing a brisk trade selling cones to bikers.

I had the window open, listening to the rain fall into all that space. And just as I was thinking that those raindrops looked like notes on a music stave......I wasn't fast enough with the camera to snap what happened next.

At one point, the whole family was lined up on those wires, with fluffy babes in dull coats. And then, before they all swooped off over the wall into their chattering hawthorn home, this one came to check if we had any biscuits....

We didn't, but he hung around just in case.

On my doorstep - Madeira lift

Just a few minutes from my front door, Madeira lift connects the main seafront road here with the sun terrace and the lower promenade. Open in Summertime, it saves you having to huff and puff up 98 steps to get back home from the beach. Better enjoy it while we can.

The street level is one of my favourite places to sit and write or read if I can't face the stones. Little details in the faded Victorian architecture always draw my camera.

I've sat and looked at these structures so many times, even before I lived right here, but I often spot something new.

September's 'back to work' means I hop on the bus a lot, so these promenade structures have been catching my eye again as I wait. And the gloom has brought some atmospheric skies while I've been taking shelter.

The best thing about a downpour? Sitting in here waiting for the sky to rush past.

That September feeling

Just a few days ago, before the dark swept in, before the gales found

the shore, before I ironed smart shirts and brushed sand from my shoes, I sat at the plot in the shade of the apple tree watching the bees visit every mint stem. The following morning, the tide fell low and I walked in the shallows for further than I've walked here without stepping on stones.

Now that feels like it was in another season!! I'm missing my sandals already, wondering if I should just put them away. Three days of weather and I'm like a caged creature pacing the floor.

Bonus is - back to work and resuming all the things that get left to one side in the Summer, my creative work is raising hands to wave at me. Better without the yawning spaces. Too much freedom makes my work hunch away from the attention. It prefers to be part of the everyday, the usual, the mundane.

So maybe it's okay after all to be listening to the rain beat the house. (I'm hoping it might do a bit of window washing for me as well while it's at it!) That September feeling has got me.