Coastal Girl to City Girl

Control. I’m trying to control myself over these next couple of days. Whilst my fiancé Dave is away from me for the first time since we’ve been together I now have to control everything. It’s kind of strange for me to be feeling this way as a woman but it’s not like I don’t have control over nothing. However this is a slightly different feeling for me. I feel lost sitting in an empty flat & to me it feels colder & quiet…no matter how loud the TV might go. But I’m finding myself wandering around feeling a little lost. So I’m taking control. This means amongst other things I have to remember not to forget my keys when I go outside for my naughty habit of smoking, making sure I turn all the sockets off before leaving or going to bed & the obvious of making sure all the windows are closed & locked! I’m not saying I don’t normally check these things but when there’s two of you doing the checking & calling out to the other “have you locked the windows?” or “don’t for...

I actually found this topic difficult to think about. It’s probably one of the first times I have been stumped as to what to write about, I don’t think I even found it tough to write about things when given a random topic on my writing course. I thought the usual thing with this one though: what have I lost & then perhaps found…an odd coin at the bottom of my bag that would go straight into the money jar, an old button that I have no idea which piece of clothing it now belongs too, an odd sock that has been swallowed up by the washing machine sock fairy…yes that drives me nuts too. But nope. I felt none of these ‘ideas’ fitted with what I wanted to say. Hence the stumped feeling. Should I go for something funny? Something sad? Should I do a picture write up of things many have lost & found? Then I got to think some more…discovering that my brain was beginning to hurt from too much thinking…when I thought about the time I lost myself. I found myself in a dark, painful place. ...

I thought I’d start a bit of feline writing. This shall be a slight history lesson for the cat lovers out there as to what our beloved felines went through before becoming a true household pet. Now let’s go back in time… Delving into some cat history takes us back to the Egyptian times when they were considered sacred & if anyone was caught killing these special felines then the punishment was death. If however a cat was to die naturally then the whole household had to go into mourning. Before burial the felines were embalmed & a full ceremony was given where they were bound in cloth of different colours & a wooden mask was placed on its face. Bast (where the cat goddess ‘Bastet’ comes from meaning She-of-Bast) was the city in which the main feline temple was situated & where millions flocked for the sacred festival every spring. It not only provided a place for thousands of mummified cats to be buried but also showed how special & worshipped cats were to ancient ...

I seem to have a new impulsive side to me. Recently I have been going a bit OCD with scissors, staplers & my writing magazines. Every interesting article, website address, writers information, publishing houses & competitions I come across, I find myself grabbing a pair of scissors & begin chopping away at the lovely glossy magazine that the postman kindly delivers each month…thankfully I’m not actually standing on the doorstep waiting for the delivery with the scissors firmly clasped in my hands! But I might as well be. The minute I start reading it I start cutting it to shreds. The recycle bin loves me. My new notepad however hates me. The nice crisp pages are being destroyed each month as I go staple mad placing each snippet in the note pad in some kind of order…well what I thought was some kind of order. Looking back through the recent months of my cuttings collection I realised I just squeezed each article into the spaces provided! At least it makes interesting – i...

I’ve now become a friendly observer of visiting felines into the (overgrown) garden. Having moved from a first floor flat into a ground floor one complete with own garden, I forgot how often cats visit other peoples gardens when living down a quiet street. I don’t mind this, having been a cat owner & when the time is right my fiancé & I shall own cats, yet I love watching these felines creep into the long grass for a good lie down in the shade. So far I seem to have invited one very fluffy cat – dread to think what the owner’s house is like when it moults – who although was very nervous when it first appeared & I tried to approach it, now seems to have accepted that I am a friendly human being that when approached will stroke this fluffy cat. So I have now set a hobby for this poor cat that if I am standing outside & its out & about it will come over & start rubbing against my legs wanting attention! However there is one cat that appears to have adopted a cert...

As someone who loves to write & read I have been thinking quite a bit about books vs. technology. Having recently started to subscribe to a writer’s magazine there’s been a lot of topics & debates surrounding this certain topic. Will technology take over the need for us to buy & own books? Will we become a society addicted to reading e-books rather than physically browsing, buying and then opening up a good book? What will it mean for authors if all novels become digital instead of witnessing their words on a page being thumbed over for many years to come even when it’s falling to bits? Surely that is a sign of good book! I can see the viewpoint though of the digital era. It makes sense when say for example you’re bedridden or before you go to sleep to pick up an e-reader & read ‘a book’ on one screen instead of trying to balance a book while finding the right position to lie in, it makes life easier. But surely that could also equal laziness? Just staring at a scree...

Success comes to us all in many different ways. It could be getting your first car, passing exams, completely a degree, getting your dream home, finding your feet in a new job, even getting that first job or ones after that, perhaps for some just being able to get up & out of bed in the morning is a success. Success can take many different shapes and for some it might not even be welcomed into their lives. For others though success can mean a great deal, for instance take Shakespeare: a man no one really knows anything about, he grew up in a world surrounded by illness & disease & yet that didn’t stop him doing what he loved best….acting & becoming a playwright. Now his success is one of greatness really, producing a huge amount of work that is studied again & again, writing by hand each word, line, sonnet, script & not using his ‘celebrity’ status to take over his life, hence no one really knows much about the ‘mystery man’. Amazing! But if you look at today’...

It has been a while since I have put my writing ‘out there’ for people to see. But when I received an email inviting me to get writing again I jumped at the chance. I had already been planning a way for me to write & it was going to be based on my love of felines, but when this opportunity came about I decided to combine the two passions of mine together! So I shall be writing about felines & admiring the cat companion as well as writing on set topics/themes each week for the new GBE 2. I shall also aim to write about topics that bug me, make me happy or want to provoke a debate within my mind. I’m quite excited about this new found writing buzz in my fingertips & shall enjoy the challenges ahead of me, especially the deadlines for posting for the GBE 2. It’s definitely one way to keep us writers on our toes! So as the good old saying goes….. ‘it’s show time’.