Gibbous moons and magic spoons
Apr. 25th, 2005 01:16 pmI took my mum to see Dead Can Dance at the Barbican before I went on holiday. She's heard them in my car and said she quite liked them so I gave her my spare ticket. As we approached the venue mum spotted two people with bleach blonde hair and trench-coats and shrieked: " O, Laura! Look at them! Are they Dead Can Dance people?"
Inside the foyer mum was in peels of excitement, cooing at girls in corsets and long skirts. She was very taken with one guy:
" Ohh! He looks like a skeleton! He's got a lovely bag. Ask him where he got it from!"
So we hung around the balcony watching people wandering back and forth. Mum commented that it must be nice to go somewhere with "your own kind". Makes me sound like some sort of alien... but maybe I am! Turns out the skeleton guy was sitting behind us, but I didn't tell mum as she might have started shrieking about him. DCD were excellent.
Anyway, talking of your "own kind" I've started a creative writing course at Birkbeck on Thursday evenings. Having had some difficulty sitting down and writing for any length of time for quite a while I've been looking for something to get my motivation back, and there's nothing like a deadline to get me going. It was a good class and I think it will result in good things. I read out the first three pages of my Lovecraft story, which went down well, even though only one person had read HPL. It had lots of tension apparently. So, inspired by some positive feedback I spent the weekend working on the second draft. I'm yet to read it back through again, but it's slightly improved I think. Reading your work out to a class is surprisingly insightful: you end up realizing how messy some of your sentences are when you try to read five lines in one breath.
Writing short stories is still going to be an issue for the final assessment. Short in my world usually comes in at 5000 words. Perhaps a small collection of poetry...
Inside the foyer mum was in peels of excitement, cooing at girls in corsets and long skirts. She was very taken with one guy:
" Ohh! He looks like a skeleton! He's got a lovely bag. Ask him where he got it from!"
So we hung around the balcony watching people wandering back and forth. Mum commented that it must be nice to go somewhere with "your own kind". Makes me sound like some sort of alien... but maybe I am! Turns out the skeleton guy was sitting behind us, but I didn't tell mum as she might have started shrieking about him. DCD were excellent.
Anyway, talking of your "own kind" I've started a creative writing course at Birkbeck on Thursday evenings. Having had some difficulty sitting down and writing for any length of time for quite a while I've been looking for something to get my motivation back, and there's nothing like a deadline to get me going. It was a good class and I think it will result in good things. I read out the first three pages of my Lovecraft story, which went down well, even though only one person had read HPL. It had lots of tension apparently. So, inspired by some positive feedback I spent the weekend working on the second draft. I'm yet to read it back through again, but it's slightly improved I think. Reading your work out to a class is surprisingly insightful: you end up realizing how messy some of your sentences are when you try to read five lines in one breath.
Writing short stories is still going to be an issue for the final assessment. Short in my world usually comes in at 5000 words. Perhaps a small collection of poetry...