Progress

I found this wonderful image of a barn owl on Google and it has helped me think about the role of the barn owl in my novel. I now have a role, responsibility and a name for him. Research has been fab, especially the Barn Owl Trust website as they have a live webcam of a barn owl nest here in Cornwall. I have made lots of notes and plan to write him into the book very soon.
I also did the What Kind of Book are you? thingy over at Debs and spookily I came out as Sci-Fi/Fantasy - exactly the type of books I read and am writing!!! Go and have a go it is very cool - though I am not sure everything in the description is entirely accurate?

Having a 'Hoot'

Yesterday I thoroughly enjoyed a wonderful day out with my kids at the local Owl Sanctuary. It is a fantastic place that not only displays these incredible birds, but also rears owl chicks and rehabilitates rescued birds, including those hit by cars etc. They also do a flying display with a couple of the owls and my son and I were particularly thrilled to watch the falconer fly a barn owl. Barn owls are my absolute favourite; they have a hypnotic and inspiring serenity and beauty about them. My son shares my love of them and he had the particular thrill of being able to put on the falconer's glove and have the barn owl land on it. He is a sponge for natural history and fact finding at the moment, so it was a fantastic day for him.
It got me thinking about barn owls for my 'tween' novel. It has introduced another potential thread for my novel, which is great, but also has me worried that my story may have more threads than the Bayeux Tapestry and may therefore be too complicated to complete without ending up in knots!!
Really enjoying the summer holidays, although resigning myself to having very little time and energy for writing and therefore resolving to put all that energy into my two little people until September 2nd, when my youngest goes full time at school and I have a larger window of opportunity to finish my novel. In the meantime I will content myself with writing ideas I have on index cards and filing them under ' to be written'!!

Stress, SCBWI, Songs and Sheep

Life in my little niche of Cornwall has been very stressful this past week or so, but there is light at the end of the tunnel. On Sunday we depart 20 miles south to Looe to do our annual Family Bible Week. I am heading up the 8-11 year old tent (with 40 kids in it!!). As well as helping to run the morning kids work I am puppeteering all week, which means six songs! I will have shoulders to rival olympic swimmers by the end of the week.

We are staying with dear friends of ours in Liskeard, so we will be having decent sleep (no ravaged tents for me this year) and good company! I also plan to take my little notepad and write virtually every evening (except maybe when we go and see Ice Age 3 with the kids!) Although Bible Week is hard work I do enjoy it and so do all the kids so it will be worth it.

On a different note I finally joined the SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) yesterday. It was a promised Mother's Day present and I have finally got round to doing it. I am really keen to go to the conference in November but a bit nervous about travelling to Winchester on my own and need to find £170!! However it looks FAB so I am saving all my pennies and seeing what possessions I can sell on ebay! Off now to write up song words for puppeteers such as "I just wanna be a sheep...baa, baa, baa-ba-ba" - Great song but don't ask.

Home from Holiday...there's lovely!

Well we are back from sunny Pembrokeshire and we have really relaxed! Thank you to all of you who were so kind and wrote encouraging things on my last post as I was having a terrible week. We had a fantastic family time away and although Andy had to leave the holiday for a couple of days to drive to Liverpool and then fly to the Isle of Man for his grandfather's funeral, we managed to have a wonderful time together. We did loads of activities including visiting Fun parks like Heatherton, where C got to Go-Kart, play Robot Wars and thrash his parents at mini-golf; and a dinosaur park with lots of dino info and things to do. We also indulged the medieval historian in me and visited Pembroke Castle, where I got some lovely photos and got to see some birds of prey they were flying there that day. My 4 year old suggested I took the picture below of one of the corridors in the castle, which has come out really well as an inspirational picture for a story. We also did some brass rubbings and C chose a knight that turned out to be the very same Earl of Warwick that I wrote my dissertation on!!!! I have included some photos for your pleasure,I am sure you will agree that the photo of the beach at the top looks like it could be in the Med rather than at Tenby! I also couldn't resist snapping this carpet of bluebells in the nature woodland walk near our cottage where we were staying.

On the writing front I had a wonderful week, planning my novel out in scenes and tracking its development, so it is planned out to the end now and I have a vision for the way forward which is a huge thing for me as I was beginning to worry whether I would get lost in it a bit. I also wrote another three thousand words on the novel itself, started a picture book story and wrote a 100 word competition entry about an encounter with wildlife. I wrote about a magnificent encounter I had with a barn owl at about 12 midnight on a country lane near us on the way home from ASDA. I feel refreshed and ready to write, all I need now is time and no more stress from work to keep myself focused. Got lots of research to do too around young carers and head injuries! I have been reading a great little book about the dangers of mining in Cornish copper and tin mines as part of my research and it has been fascinating in a macabre sort of way!!

Horrid week with a top 15% High Spot!

This week has been tough for a number of reasons and I have been a bit of a 'car crash' emotionally over the past two days. Work has left me stressed and unappreciated at times and it all hit a head today when I walked out of a meeting before I either exploded with anger or broke down in a weepy puddle. We are due to go on our first ever family holiday on Friday to South West Wales and the kids are so excited, however my hubby's grandfather passed away yesterday and the funeral is on the Tuesday of our holiday...in the Isle of Man. Hubby is trying to arrange transport to get him there and back over the bank holiday which is proving very difficult. Quite an emotional week! Although I have now finished work till after the holidays, we still have our warring chickens to sort out and all the packing etc to do. Stressed is not a strong enough word!!!!

However in the midst of all this angst I received a letter today which gave me a lift and made me feel good about me for a while. I had entered the Children's Academy of Writers annual competition to write a short story for children. I had entered a lengthened and revised version of my Echoes story (the original version is on my Thirtysomethings blog). The photo above was the inspiration for the story. I did not win, neither did I get second or third, however I reached the top 300 out of 2000 entries, which apparently put me in the top 15%. The letter I received said lots of nice things such as...

"To reach the final 15% you obviously have an understanding of young people that impressed our panel of judges. This is a quality that is invaluable to a would be children's writer...your 'way with words', indicates that with a little effort your natural talent could be developed to enable you to produce work of publication standard."

Now the cynic in me could say that these are nice things to say to encourage me to do their correspondance course, however to receive a letter like this during this week in particular has been an oasis in the desert. I have not switched on my book for over a week and was beginning to get that, " Who am I kidding?" about my writing. So to have a letter that gives me these comments, personal replies apparently only sent out to the top 15% (!), meant a great deal to me and gives me hope that I might yet one day see something I have written in print with a lovely cover sitting on the bookshelves in Waterstones.

Babies of all sorts!

I have become an auntie again this week for the second time. At 9.15am on Thursday 23rd April (St George's Day) my sister had a baby boy. She had a four hour labour ending with a beautiful 9lbs 7oz bundle of joy. His name is Kian Peter and he is very gorgeous. Mum, Dad and big sister and all doing well. It is strange but wonderful to have a baby in the family again as the last baby was my little lady who is now four and a half. My daughter thinks he is lovely and even my seven year old son was intrigued and enchanted by this little person (maybe because he doesn't have to live with him...he was less enchanted with his sister when she arrived!!!).

I don't know if this new life inspired me or not, but I sat down on Friday evening and wrote for nearly three hours on my new baby. My hubby bought me a 10.2" notebook for me to write on and I had to use it as soon as possible. It came with Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2007 preloaded so I just plugged it in and off I went. I was delighted with my progress and then went to bed happy having done a word count hat has gone up to just over 12,000 words. This is about a quarter of the way through the book, which feels like a milestone for me.

I have also been involved in setting up a new book club at our church, reading and reviewing Christian fiction and biographies. We have finished our first book and have begun on the second. I decided to set up a blog to post the reviews and discussions so if any of you are interested in what sort of books fall into this genre please feel free to visit. I did not know this whole genre existed so it has been a revelation for me! www.thefictionfellowship.blogspot.com

Travelling Tales

I have been away 'up country' as we say in Cornwall visiting relatives for half term and feel I have done a lot of travelling. Andy' s parents are in West Sussex, so we were based there, visiting old friends in Chessington (former home town) and have a fab day out at Legoland as well as a trip to the south coast. Feel well travelled around the south east but I am happy to be home again.

I have also been travelling in my reading experiences too. I have read all the Michelle Paver's 'Chronicles of Ancient Darkness' books to date and was hungry for a new series, so one of the twelve year olds at church loaned me ' Ingo, ' by Helen Dunmore. It is set down here in Cornwall and is proving to be a great read, though it has taken me a while to get into it properly. The picture gives away a little about what the book might be about, but I think I may be hooked for this series too. I am really enjoying reading the 9-12 ' tween ' fiction however I do find it hard to read ' grown up ' books sometimes!!

It was hard to get any prose written whilst away, however I had a twenty minute window of time alone when I was able to write pages of descriptive notes about the time travelling device in my novel. Really pleased as it has given me pegs to hang prose on now!!

Back to school tomorrow plus Mum's birthday, plus important church meeting, plus Kat's little boy's birthday...so busy day ahead. Might need to escape to Ingo again later on.

My First Ever Blog Award

Thank you to dearest Kat for my award, my first ever. Here goes:

1. Where is your cell phone? Alternate Universe

2. Where is your significant other? Tea-Making

3. Your hair color? Multi-tonal(!)

4. Your mother? Good friend

5. Your father? One of a kind

6. Your favourite thing? My family

7. Your dream last night? Forgotten

8. Your dream/goal? Published

9. The room you're in? Home Office

10. Your hobby? Crafts/Swimming

11. Your fear? Lonliness

12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? Writing for a living

13. Where were you last night? Celebrating daughter's 4th birthday

14. What you're not? Organised

15. One of your wish-list items? DIY Finished

16. Where you grew up? Chessington, Surrey

17. The last thing you did? Ironing

18. What are you wearing? Hubby's fleece

19. Your TV? On

20. Your pets? 4 Chickens

21. Your computer? On

22. Your mood? Up and down

23. Missing someone? Old friends

24. Your car? Noisy!

25. Something you're not wearing? Makeup

26. Favorite store? Bookshops

27. Your summer? Soggy

28. Love someone? Completely

29. Your favourite color? Purple

30. When is the last time you laughed? Today

31. Last time you cried? Last week

Enjoyed that, but it seems it is impossible for me to be monosyballic! I have had a busy but enjoyable day today catching up with some special friends near and far. I need to pass this on to five people, but most of you have had this from someone else, so I will pass it on to Jon for his chicken support; Frankie as a Cornish import like myself and Jan for her wonderful post about Michael Morpurgo.

My sister is expecting her second baby after waiting for six years, and I saw the scan picture yesterday. I am so pleased for her but I am really looking forward to being an auntie without having a trace of broodiness...my nappy days are done!!

I am frustrated with writing again. I am really busy with work, governors meetings, church stuff and general family life that writing seems to be being pushed out again. Having written three chapters and gained a momentum, it was then lost to demands from other corners. We are heading up country on Friday for a few days to visit friends, family and take the kids to Legoland. Mostly I am looking forward to a break from routine and time away from my mobile phone!!! Discipline is a necessary thing for me, but I genuinely find it hard to carve some time out in the week. Need to review my time management strategy I think!

Bookworming!!!!!

Dear Kat has done a fantastic job building the Bodmin Bookworm blog over the past few weeks. I had an idea in May that became a concept that I discussed with Kat, that became a proposal I put to my boss and then the heads in Bodmin and now that idea has become a reality. The Bookworm is launched officially with the schools on 22nd September, but the blog has gone live for constructive comment and ideas. Do go over and have a visit at www.bodminbookworm.blogspot.com and please do tell Kat how fab she is!!!!!

I have lots of ideas and some of them actually get to happen, but only because my boss was willing to let me fund it through my job and because I have a gifted friend who can build a blog into a thing of beauty!! I am very excited and for both of us hopefully our writing CV just got a little more substantial.

Once the site is being posted on after the 22nd please go in and comment on the kids work as it is such a boost to them to know someone outside of mum and dad and gran are reading what they have written.

Bodmin has some of the most socially deprived areas in the county and this is a real chance for every child to shine by posting even one line of creativity. The strapline came to me in a brainstorming session with Kat and I think it sums up the heart of the project.

Hope you enjoy your visit to Bodmin's new big creative idea!!