Walking into 2016

sunset at Avebury, December 28th 2015

I haven’t been blogging much recently- in fact hardly at all. 2015 turned into a crazy, exciting, busy year, creatively. As a result, I found at the end of the year that I had dropped some important threads, including my blog. I hope to pick up where I left off and carry on knitting this strangely-shaped patchwork blanket of random writings on a much more regular basis. Call it a New Year’s Resolution if you like, maybe it is one – my blog has been a writing rudder in the past, steering me through events, successes, failures, moods, frustrations and obsessions…and I hope it will do that again.

Lots of great stuff happened last year – I feel very grateful and fortunate to have met and worked with some lovely, talented and generous people, and to have achieved some of my ambitions for my writing. I will write more about this but I don’t know if that will happen here and now…it might happen randomly and at will, rather than any attempt to be chronological and consistent and comprehensive…

It was good to go away at Christmas and New Year and take a much-needed breather and see some new places and friendly faces.

hide and seek at the stones, Avebury

We traveled to stay in a tiny cottage on the edge of a farm in Wiltshire, where I hoovered up Viv Albertine’s memoir in a couple of days; wandered around Avebury re-acquainting myself with its stones and trees, after eating lunch in the Red Lion; found a tiny magical part of Calne; stayed in a very rainy Bath and re-visited the Roman Baths and Sally Lunn’s – amazing lavender cake with rose buttercream filling!

Then we were very lucky to be invited to stay with one of oldest friends and her partner and sons in Cardiff, where we saw the New Year in hearing socialist anthems sang exquisitely by members of Cardiff Reds Choir, who happen to live two doors down from my friend’s house, and who were having a party, which we were then invited to. The next two days were filled with trips to the funfair and Dr Who Experience, home-made curry and apple pie…a great way to see the New Year in – best one I’ve had in years. Thanks for everything, Tania XXX

 

 

Leaping

I have no time or energy to blog much at the moment. I am too busy doing the groundwork for the poetry collection I am working on and the PG teaching cert I am trying to keep up with. Things are changing, changing, changing… thank goodness. I wish I could get out more and get to a few of the amazing variety of poetry events in London but I can’t. And spending a quiet weekend at home with my son has been wonderful and we both needed some time to hang out together and not do very much.

Since I started the original LucyFurLeaps blogspot back in the depths of 2008 (?) I have been daring myself to leap further and have continuously challenged my boundaries. Sometimes I have leapt too far and needed time to recover; but I have also realised most of the objectives of my Five Year Plan, which is now coming to an end.

Now I have to work really hard over the next nine months to get the qualifications I have been focused on for so long.

Then things will get interesting…

News In Brief

I’ve not had a lot of time to spend here recently, and I think that may be the case from this point on, although I will still be popping in weekly at least. I am writing and developing projects for other, larger writing as part of my postgraduate studies, and elsewhere too.

The poetry continues but I am now focussing on prose fiction and writing longer pieces of non-fiction. I can feel at least one book taking shape in my mind, and there is the seed for another. The main ingredient required for these apart from energy, research, ideas, talent and skill, is TIME.

Time is my most precious commodity at the moment. Life is opening up in all sorts of new, satisfying ways, with new friendships being forged and with keeping up my son’s social engagements and interests. I am having to prioritise more than ever and be disciplined about how I use my time. The hours slip away like quicksilver.

The end is nigh…

Not much time to blog here at the moment as I am currently researching and writing the final three assignments for my degree, which were due in last christmas. I was too poorly to complete them then so I am finishing them now.

I hand everything in on August 22nd and at that point will have officially finished my BA!

The champagne is on standby…

The Day I Was ‘Freshly Pressed’

I had been struggling with a sore throat and fatigue all week, and  last Thursday I needed to have a day in bed. I hoped that I would recover speedily in time for a packed weekend with my four year old son: library trip (of course); pre-school friend’s birthday party; family christening and party on the sunday.

Two days before this I had decided to take the plunge after much consideration-okay procrastination-and consolidate all my blogs (and there are several!) into this one, which had previously been primarily focused on all things poetry.

I am currently in the final throes of a degree, three years full-time, in creative writing and journalism, and my book habits are bad enough without needing the excuse of  ‘reading lists’ and ‘research.’ It’s been one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had, as well as the hardest slog. Combining full time motherhood (I am a single parent) with full time studying at the age of 40 has been a challenge to say the least but worth every minute.

So, books bursting from every nook and cranny of the house, it was time to begin the onerous task of deciding which could stay and which could go. I now have two boxes to go, and more to clear, but taking stock made me think about  why I love books so much, where that comes from, and how my tastes and interests have changed over the years.

So while I was lying in bed I wrote a blog post about it, and then I put the computer down and had a nap…

When I woke up I looked at the WordPress ‘dashboard’ and wondered if there was some sort of glitch, or problem with my computer. I looked again and actually rubbed my eyes in disbelief, as they tell you people do in stories, I actually did. My page had received 600 hits in the time I had had my nap! There was a queue of lovely comments from people congratulating me on being ‘FP’ and ‘Freshly Pressed’ and telling me how much they enjoyed what I had written and that they identified with what I had said.

“What on earth is ‘Freshly Pressed’?” I thought to myself, vague bells ringing in my head. I looked at the front page of WordPress and there was my post.

I must admit I jumped up and down and cheered. This was very exciting, and completely and utterly unexpected. The hits kept coming and so did the comments. By yesterday morning there were over one hundred comments and nearly 3000 hits on that one post alone, plus a huge rise in people subscribing to my blog. It has been quite overwhelming and at the same time very heartwarming and wonderful that so many people have taken the time to read my post, and who feel the way I do about books and reading. I am very grateful for such a positive experience.

I started blogging in 2006, when I had a radio show on Resonance FM, The Shoe Show, a thirteen-part, weekly, fifteen minute programme about shoes. Yes, really. The blog accompanying the radio show covered the last few shows and a few other footwear-related posts after it finished airing.The other LucyFurLeaps blog, which I have now officially ended, was born when I knew I was going back to university to study creative writing . I also had a gardening blog, Roar! Earth, which charted clearing the end of my garden and setting up a vegetable patch.

After five years of blogging, and the difficult decision to invest all my energies into one blog, I am very glad I chose this one. I am taking it as a good omen and would like to say thank you to all the people who have been so kind and encouraging about my writing.

Love, Love, Love xxx

Happy Solstice! Time for a Change…

This site will now be accommodating all my writing. I have had a tendency to try and separate my various forms of writing to the point where I have been spreading myself too thinly across the blogosphere, similar to the way I like my marmite on toast. I would prefer my blogging to entice like a thick gooey dollop of clotted cream and jam on a freshly baked spongey, crumbly babel tower of scone…mmmm…here goes! In the spirit of the solstice it’s all about abundance…

Leaping Again

In 2008 I started a blog titled “LucyFurLeaps: Leaps of the imagination. Leaping to conclusions. A space to experiment with writing.” Since then I have rambled, ranted, raved and written more and more poetry, until I realized at the end of last year that poetry is where it’s at for me.

So here I am at a brand new blog with the same name but a different intent. My aim is to find out more about poetry; mine and other people’s. To pull as many threads together as I can and then weave them into a web of poetry and poetry-related information and resources.

Here’s a poem from the old blog, from October 2008, which popped into my head today and seems rather apposite:

Just

The world gets bigger.

The world gets smaller.

Macrocosm.

Microcosm.

Fancy.

Pants.