Notes from the Slushpile: Build Your Own Website: Designing Your Page With Bananas

Fabulously useful post from our Top Banana, Candy.

Notes from the Slushpile: Build Your Own Website: Designing Your Page With Bananas

Notes from the Slushpile: Build Your Own Website: Who is Your Audience?

Notes from the Slushpile: Build Your Own Website: Who is Your Audience?

Extremely useful and engaging post form Candy Gorlay of 'Tall Story' fame.

Moved

http://kmlockwood.com/

Gone here now!

...suffer a sea change

Be careful what you wish for - you might just get it.

I had wanted the freedom to write: time to call my own - and now I've got it.

I am surprised by how much I miss the routine of the school day now that I'm not teaching, There are no bells to tell me when break is, when to change subject or when to eat lunch (though we do tend to go by Radio 4 and listen to the Archers). I am on my own.

The muse should find me busy . I strive to write - easiest in the first draft where the word count rises. Echoes of s.m.a.r.t. targets. I pummel the writing into shape, scan it for every last redundant adverb, any hint of the passive voice and make marks appear on the screen. So much extracting of teeth.

House elf duties mute my jabbering conscience. I should be this, I should be that. Tutoring gives me some structure and cash. Crutches, the both of them.

Thalia stands behind my shoulder and sings the phrase I need when I  water the strawberries. She drops a tern's feather for a quill into my lap while I'm on the bus. She leaves messages on the strand-line for me to find when I'm  picking up sea glass. She won't be ordered.

She chooses to come and inspire when I'm just being.

It's all a bit Buddhist for a lass from the West Riding, a scholarship girl . I feel like the third little pig finding out his brother's hut of living willow is the one to have in an earthquake zone. How do I find that shy dreamy girl, the one I had to outgrow, and tell her she's needed?

Self-discipline and creativity - what a pairing . For me, trying to nurture these two dizygotic twins is like coming to terms with drift diving.   You have to be organised. There are rules: depth, air, time. Yet it is letting the current take you that leads to the freedom and the fun. You can't control it.

I pray that in time this new way of life produces something rich and strange in my work.

Seven Stories - and other Northern inspirations

1...of rain and racing

A downpour pocks on the gravelly concrete slabs of Elvington Airfield. Arias from the Ferraris and Lamborghinis belt out over the generators and thrumming marquees. I smell the testosterone over the chargrills. Did a Brylcreem Boy in the old control tower watch the Hamster's crash or Stephen's jaunt in an Aston Martin?

2 Stone circle at Stoke Flatt

On Frogatt Edge, gritstone frowns over rumpled Derbyshire. Climbers' carabiners jangle and cottongrass bobs like rabbit scuts over the peatbrown bogs. In a wiry huddle of birch trees I find a small stone circle carpeted with green tussocks. Old bracken like bad thatch besieges it. I smell the campfire, the rocks for backrests. The branch-built stockade digs into Bronze Age ribs.One stone stands taller - the story teller's place.

3 Lastingham - ancient crypt and carvings

Four saintly brothers settled in some high and remote hills says The Venerable Bede.Sculptured stone and candles shimmer in this thin and holy place. Who was the Viking buried beneath the hogsback tomb? And what of the Curate, his Violin and The Blacksmith's Arms?

4 Falling Foss

If you cannot find a story sung by the cascading waters, or whispered in the Hermitage hewn from a single rock; if there are none buried in the shale-backed cave, then clamber up and sit in the wishing chairs.Or try Midge Hall. Tea and cake should do it.


5 Azaleas and Knights Templar

Temple Newsam with my dear old dad. The scent of yellow azaleas pinches at my nose with nostalgia. Christopher's face when he saw the Steam Rally - eyes stretched wide to pull the spectacle in, too happy to smile.

We swirl sagging icecream dangling in swags from our cornets in the Stable Courtyard. I read servants lived in the 'Dark Rooms' above. What did they see, what did they hear from those small square windows?

6 Alnwick Castle

When would you light a lantern spikier than a verdigris dragon? What would you chain up to wyvern shaped rings? I wonder at the lion on the bridge with an antenna for a tail; and the rocklobbers -oversized statues ready to chuck boulders from the ramparts. They have cousins on York's City Walls. There are caged plants in the Poison Garden, little gates in little keeps for hobs and starsprinkled pavements. I come upon a boat of candles and books abandoned in a twilit wood.


7 A Piratical Pairing
A buccaneering bride and potent punch all by the sea at St. Abbs. Plastic parrots and skull-and-crossbones bunting beat limp roses anyday. Cute little corsairs rampage amongst the wenches and curly wigged captains - two policemen arrive astonished.
Beneath the waves dead men's fingers, fangtoothed wolf fish and brittle stars congregate. The night sky rains fireworks and lanterns. 
 
And I haven't even got to Seven Stories yet!
A former flourmill with a licence to moor ships of dreams. Children's drawings - a zombie scarecrow in a medieval frame, a five eyed purple flying space-elephant creature ( with a timid alien tucked inside) - demand the tale to be told. The roaring shark beast and the bubble blowing mermaid peek at me through portholes and future authors' work is trapped in Perspex boxes.

A breath of Northern air and my notebook bulges with bits - please help yourself.

Titivullus the word snatcher and other demons.

I am besieged.
I am irritated by the tiny ambush predator that is Titivullus the Wordsnatcher. I search. I know I had the perfect word for that simile - now where has it gone? Whipped away.

I hunt round - where is that enthralling action verb? Gone.

At least that nasty little sneaker-away-with-half-remembered-words can be fought off with the trusty Thesaurus. How do I combat Belphegor who leads me astray with useless but fascinating inventions? I have great difficulty blocking my ears against the Procastination Imps - they speak in the voices of Facebook friends,then lead me off on will o'the wisp tours of Blogland to 'inspire' my writing. I see them wave the highlighter over the how-to books. It is a magic wand and I am enchanted.

But these are the minor citizens of the encircling Pandemonium; the boys at the back of the class. There are far worse.

One she-devil, soft and yielding as a bog, undermines my defences. In my ear she whispers, insinuates, plays on my guilt. She poisons my well: no good as a teacher; no good as a mother; no good as a writer.

These are the heads of my companions catapulted over the battlements. The Spirit of Self-pity wraps her sodden sleeves around me in a familiar embrace.

Despair and her minder Lethargy now lurk behind my shoulders. They offer me their counsel: I don't know what children want to read anymore; I am out of touch; I am too weird.

It is like sand trickling from a drying dune.

But still I stay at my desk and will not surrender.