2010 - and I wish for you...

New Year's Midnight Blue Moon - 00:00:00 - 01:01:10

2010 and I wish for you a year filled with
love and laughter
peace and harmony
success and good health
joy and enlightenment
friendship and good fun.

I might look back on the last year - and the past decade - and see dark places and difficult times. Equally, I might look back and see a time of tremendous growth, challenges and opportunities. Mostly, I look back and see a time of balance, of profound learning and personal growth. And I realise then, in the immortal words of Robert Frost, I stood at the beginning of the new millenium and saw two roads diverge in the wood and I, I chose to take the one less travelled by - and that, indeed, has made all the difference.

And so where to now, eh?

Onward and upward?

Whichever way the road goes, it will bring with it more of the same - such is life. The scenery may change, the weather too (no, I'm not talking about climate change!), we will change - for to stagnate is to die, the world will change, for change is the one constant we can always rely upon - and yet, in many ways, all will remain the same, our human nature and our inability to learn from the past seems to ensure that. It depends, I guess, on how you look at it - whether you view the world from the high road or the low road.

But whichever road each of us takes - I still wish for all of us the very same - which is all and only the very best of everything - always.

They said last night was a blue moon. Down here we had shear winds too - blowing both from the north-west and the south-east and a cloud sky planted by Johnny Appleseed. There was powerful magic afoot and in line with the moon's promptings I followed the moonsong - and look what happened... Shall I take it as a sign of a time of still greater creativity...? I hope so!

I started with the New Year's Blue Moon...


Decided it really wasn't very blue - and headed into the digital darkoom...



I then wandered to the lounge and stared at the tree lights and started to play with the zoom lens...


I wondered about the moon again... and this is what happened...

Then I played with the tree lights some more...to create silent New Year's fireworks...


And then got this...


And called it "Ripley's Ride"... If this is anything to go by, it looks like it will be one helluva ride indeed! I'll see you on the other side, then, shall I...?

Have a wonderful, happy and prosperous 2010!

Drifting in Imagination

I haven't slept properly for two nights and feel like a crushed slug... Add to that, that the writing is happening again and I've been beavering away like a demented wee beastie. All of which means, I really have nothing terribly bright to blog about. Well, I do have, but I lack the energy to do it justice.

So instead I thought I'd just drag you into my imagination... Here's hoping you survive the experience!

Pachyderm Dreams

Heron Eclipse

Floral Notes

Buddha Dreams

Memories in Music

And now back to the tappity-tappity-tap-tap-tap and more feverish scribbling.

Power failures, scams and photos

"Painted" poppy heart

NOTE: I'm reposting this blogpost since a glitch has appeared in the works. Seems anyone viewing the post with Internet Explorer finds no place to leave comments and all of the sidebar down below the blog. Of course, this just makes my point that Firefox is so much better... I'm hoping that having reposted, things will now appear "normal" to IE users. Please let me know if it's still showing up "funny". Send me an email - the email addy is on the profile page.


Whew, what a week. And it appears to be ending as “entertainingly” as it started. On Wednesday night at about 7pm the power went out. It didn’t come back until 22 ½ hours later (some or other high tension cable had decided, after years of service, to die). It wouldn’t have been so bad if a) D hadn’t been away on business and b) the back up battery on the security system hadn’t given up the ghost after seven hours. Home alone and with no security in sunny SA is so not my idea of fun. As it is, my bougainvillea is only just starting to show signs of recovery after someone tried to hop over the wall five months ago. Needless to say I didn’t sleep a wink and then spent the rest of the day roaming around the house like a caged tiger in the hunting season. I couldn’t go out because I couldn’t get the garage door to open – I’m not that big and it is huge and heavy. Still, it was a good excuse to put everything aside and bury my nose in a book. The only thing was the book was about a world in the future where one lot of people had escaped the confines of highly controlled cities to live in the wild. So there I sat pondering how well equipped we’d be to live without all the things we simply take for granted. No electricity, no supermarkets, no cars, having to find our own food, make our own clothes. Survival of the fittest stuff, I’m guessing, and I promptly felt decidedly weak.

Then this morning (after I'd found a 419 scam breathing heavily in my inbox), I had my nose deeply buried in work – lots of catching up to do now – when my cell phone rang. The voice on the other side insisted that I had an account with a particular clothing chain which I hadn’t paid. Not only do I not have an account at said store, but I also don’t shop there. Nope, I said, you have the wrong person. The voice was insistent that I had an account and that I owed her money. She simply wouldn’t take no for an answer. It then transpired that she appeared to have my date of birth. Happily she wasn’t managing too well with my surname, most here don’t. She gave me my address, it was an old one, and when I said, no, sorry, I don’t live there and actually you’re wasting your time and mine, she insisted she had my identity number and would I please confirm it. Rest assured that by now not only was I smelling a rat, but it was a large rat that was rapidly decomposing. Nope, I said, not confirming the number for you, and if you think I am, you’ve got another thing coming. Strange, she then threw down the phone. Needless to say when I called the chain store’s head office, they’d never heard of me and had no record of my ever having had an account with them

You know, some days I really just feel like biting someone!

But I didn’t. Instead I finished what I was doing and then trotted into the digital darkroom to make these for you.

"Unpainted" poppy heart

Heart of a poppy

"Painted" poppies en masse

Memememememememe – and YOU!

I’ve recently been tagged for a few memes – but in time honoured, goal-directed tradition of a writer on a mission, I completely forgot who’d tagged me. It’s taken a few days of headscratching, whilst pondering what to blog about, for me to remember. I apologise profusely to both Val and Susan for having a sieve for a brain.

So Val’s meme first. I’m going to have ask Val to excuse me for not doing the first part of the meme but figuring out how to choose someone from my address book to tell the world about left me completely baffled - maybe I've just got the wrong kind of address book!

But here’s the second meme that Val tagged me with. It is a series of questions that must be answered in eight words;

WHERE WERE YOU TEN YEARS AGO? Dealing with my father’s death, preparing to get divorced. (oops, nine words there…)

WHATS ON YOUR TO DO LIST TODAY? Manuscript rewrite, grocery shopping, blog, email, water garden.

WHAT IF YOU WERE A BILLIONAIRE? Right now? I’d be stressing about the markets, looking to buy property and gold, and looking to pick up stocks when the market bottoms out.

FIVE PLACES YOU HAVE LIVED: Cape Town, Durban, London, Dublin, Guernsey.

THREE BAD HABITS Procrastinating, slobbing, not dejunking often enough

SNACKS YOU LIKE Chips/crisps, fruit, Lindt 70% dark chocolate

WHO AM I TAGGING?
Janey, Baino, Ropi, Mellifluous Dark, Lane, Susan


And now for Susan’s meme.

*Tagged bloggers post answers on their blogs & replace questions as they wish.
*Tagged bloggers state who they were tagged by & cannot tag the person whom they were tagged by.

1. What do you do before bedtime? Blog, watch TV or read

2. What is your favorite sound? Waves crashing on the beach, wind in the trees

3. What were your childhood fears? Being abandoned, finding thief under my bed

4. What place have you visited that you can't forget and want to go back? Tuscany

5. What has made you unhappy these days? The rank greed in the world – and thereby the state of the markets.

6. What websites do you visit daily? Facebook, online dictionary and thesaurus, Google search

7. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is? I think Susan is energetic, fun, focussed and determined. She’s also a great interviewer and is passionate about what she does.

8. What’s the last song that got stuck in your head? Puff the Magic Dragon…

9. What’s your favorite item of clothing? Jeans

10. What is your dream for the future? To get a lucrative publishing deal and be living in a place where I feel safe and secure.

Right, and now to the tagging:
Janey, Val, Aerin, Storm, Bonnie

Sneaky, eh? You notice I managed to tag both Val and Susan right back! Muahahahahahaaaaa!

All sorts

Dead Tree

Aaargh… Those of you “friended” to me on Facebook will know that I’ve been fighting with my manuscript of late – akin to chasing a ball of rapidly unraveling wool which is traveling down a hill at speed. It’s strange, I thought I had the darned thing pretty much wrapped up and then realised there was a major “incredibility” in the story. This struck me at about 3am on Sunday morning. Why these flashes of insight come at such ungodly hours is beyond me. I plotted out the thing in my head, figured what I needed to do and come Monday, set about putting things to rights. Only it was one of those things that had knock on effects. Change one thing here, must change another thing there. I swear I’ve written business strategies for start up companies and reports for the city council that have been considerably easier!

I am now in a state where my brain has turned to sludge and it’s taken me the better part of a day to get just one paragraph to read the way I want it. I used to scoff at writers who laboured over a single paragraph in this way – and now I are (sic) one of them. Whaaaaaah! And all this whilst periodically dashing off to check Sky News to see if the world has gone belly up yet.

You know, she said rambling on from one thought to another, I can honestly say that it strikes me that as unpleasant as it may be, this global economic crunch is in fact much needed. For the past fifteen years too many have indulged in an unsustainable life of greed and excess, trying to outdo the Jones’s and insisting on living in homes that look like wedding cakes while driving vehicles that screw up the environment. The ecological pressure we put on the planet with this kind of lifestyle is fatally destructive in the long run (and that run might not be that long really). I’m kinda hoping that the crunch, if we learn from our lessons (do we ever learn from our lessons?) will put an end to nonsense like overpaid and over-rated executives, celebrities and those daft “islands” and similar such things in Dubai and elsewhere. I’m sort of hoping too that a recessionary mindset will also foster a move to more traditional values where people, rather than money and “stuff”, come first.

Finally, all this credit crisis thing and muddling manuscripts got to be too much, and so I hived off and procrastinated in the digital darkroom. I know that when the going gets tough the tough supposedly go shopping – well not this tough, this one goes off to get creative and to play with colour saturation, tone mapping and other such digital wizardry.

Old Slave Bell

Rusty Gate

Harbour Wall

Old Window

Gone creative

Oh dear, short on words - mind far too occupied with next editing process. The last "big" edit was completed on Monday - I think it was Monday... where does the time go... So goal directed and utterly absorbed. Then I started the read through of the manuscript to pick up typos and such like. Ah, but cannot leave well enough alone, so I find I'm deleting more words, adding others in, pruning here, applying a little root grow elsewhere. It's got to come to an end, or like WH Auden, I'll still be editing long after the novel's published. How's that for confidence, eh - the bold assumption that this story will find a publisher. Oh yes, let's hear it for positive visualisation and affirmation!

But here I sit, in the middle of the morning, still in my jimjams, hair tousled, eyes focussed though perhaps a bit wild, totally away with the vampires, scribbling and then scribbling some more. Just had a new idea, another level of tension that might be added to the plot. Ah, but will it serve a purpose, perhaps, but only if the book turns into a series. Hmm, okay, so I'll put the idea aside for now - in the present context it will add nothing. But it's something to be kept in mind. Who knows... She dreams of the three, or four, or five book deal...

All right, so here's the deal - the bottom line is you're really not going to get anything sensible out of me today - so instead I'll share with you something from my playtime in the digital darkroom when I was taking a break the other day. What day? Don't know, days have been merging into a stream of words flowing together as I hurry towards my dream.

As you'll see from the images, I really am in a less than "real" genre at present...

Welcome to my Imagination - and Happy Easter

Oh woe... I'm still being a bad blogger. One post a week. The situation is dire. What can I say. I am gripped in the teeth of a story. I'm obsessed and distracted and barely know which way is up. I'm being tossed about by characters and consumed by words. And I'm loving it!

The word count is at about 45 000 and I'm on the home stretch. This will definitely be my shortest manuscript yet. But that's no bad thing. I'm guessing there are about three or four chapters to go. I've been writing between 3000 to 5000 words on good days - on bad days, I just stare out the window - or go and play in the digital darkroom while my imagination refuels.

But then, once this manuscript is finished, I have a brand new idea for the next novel - frankly, I feel like I'm being pursued by stories - I may well disappear into the Land of Story, never to be seen again. You may have to come and rescue me!

And aside from that I also have plenty of tales to tell you when I do come up for air - about the Silver Evil who was herded by guinea fowl - with pictures... the wonderful flower seller I found down a dirt road... the luscious grapes that tasted of honeyed sunshine that I bought at a roadside stall ... Oh, and there's other news... but I won't tell you that just yet. A bit of suspense is good in every tale.

Meanwhile, welcome to my imagination... And have a wonderful Easter weekend. Happy egg hunting!