For today’s adventure, I visit Murlough Bay to soak up the atmosphere and to find places to weave into The Merrow Of Murlough Bay.
I spent time looking at various maps and researching some local legends before setting out to visit the coast. I knew what I wanted to see. I knew what I needed to be able to recreate in my mind’s eye to help me write.
Today I got to see Lough Doo, the residence of a devil horse who shapeshifts into The Grey Man, lulls people into a false sense of security, and then pulls them into the dark waters of his home!
I also visited the shoreline to find the spot where the merrow crawls ashore and to find places where he might be able to hide.
I managed to locate the entrance to some disused mines. And (after quite a bit of huffing and puffing) I eventually found the ancient church of Drumnakill (the place that has the magic clay)!
You can see all these places on today’s video blog.
For today’s adventure, I started doing some off-line research for my new story. The storyline is complete. The next step is for me to anchor the story to a place and time.
For this story, I didn’t really need to look for a place. A place has been calling me for a while. The place is called Murlough Bay and is on the Antrim coast, Northern Ireland.
The last time I was at Murlough Bay was in July 2012 at the time of the Venus Transit. To see the transit, I had to be at the cliffs above the bay just before dawn. Unfortunately, I arrived 24 hours early for the transit (:P – I’m very keen) but I did get to witness a fabulous, eerie sunrise.
As the sun rose, it illuminated the Mull of Kintyre, Rathlin and the Scottish islands of Islay and Jura. It was beautiful. And it was very spooky. The kind of spooky that magics your feet into the ground. The kind of spooky that turns your breath to glass.
I got out a map of the area and soaked in all the place names. I then ploughed (yes, it was quite a demanding read!) through the relevant sections of a book called The Moyle Shore. This book offered me some fascinating information that will be really useful for building the story’s set.
The book described how local fisherman would have caught glashan (coalfish) and lythe (pollock). It talked about coalmines and lime kilns; about an ancient church surrounded by healing clay; about pilgrimage routes; and about rocks in the sea with special names.
Yup. There is magic in this place. And if I can weave the magic of this place into my story… well, that story might just be potent enough to unmagic a body’s feet from the ground or turn glass breath into stardust.
Oh – and the story has a name now : The Merrow Of Murlough Bay. The story likes it 🙂 .
Today’s adventure feels exciting! The full manuscript of The Faerie Thorn is now with the publisher, and I’m awaiting a decision. The fact that the publisher liked my work is brilliant : up until this point, the only people who had read my story, or listened to it, were friends and family (my cheer-leaders 🙂 ).
The landscape suddenly changed when I read that the publisher liked the story. I somehow felt more like a “proper” writer.
The thing is, proper writers have proper critics and proper reviews. And so for today’s adventure, I am asking a young reader whom I have never met , who doesn’t know me at all, to review my story.
The reader is a 13 year-old girl. She’s an avid reader and up for the job of casting a critical eye over my work. I requested a “no-holds-barred” review.
For my corporate work, and for some of my webinars, I have to create presentation slides. I normally use PowerPoint for this : it can often be time-consuming, and the results aren’t always that great!
Today I tried out a new on-line slide creation platform called Haiku Deck. The good news is that it’s free, fast and FUN. I managed to work out how to use the platform in minutes (it’s really intuitive) and created a very short presentation to show you the kind of thing you can create. You can check out my presentation here (it’s one of my haiku poems 🙂 ).
You can share your presentation via a private link (as I have today) ; you can share it on-line for the whole world to see; and you can download your presentation in both PDF and PowerPoint format. In the Powerpoint download, the Haiku Deck branding is less obtrusive than it is in some of the other formats.
So, today’s adventure was really worthwhile. I think it will save me a lot of time – and I think the slides are a little more captivating than the ones I’ve created in PowerPoint!
My head got dangerously near exploding point today. The big conversation of the moment is all about the new VAT regulations for supply of digital products in EU members states. As I’m thinking about launching some digital products, this will affect me, and I really needed to spend some time understanding the implications and deciding what steps to take to support my business.
It was such an odd experience. As I got more and more into the detail, I felt one side of my body being pulled right down. The other side of my body was trying to pull the “VAT side” back up! I felt all out of balance – and I felt all sorts of anxieties and feelings come up too as I waded through all the regulations.
That’s when the insight came. Right now, some stuff is going on behind the scenes that is quite challenging for me. The VAT stuff just adds to the pile of stuff. But that pile, and those feelings, cause something very brilliant to happen in me.
The pile of stuff I’m talking about is unspeakable stuff. If I were to attach words to that stuff, the words would be so sharp that they’d cut the life out of me on the way out. And when stuff becomes unspeakable for me, something very special happens : a new story gets born.
This was the same for the genesis of The Faerie Thorn : unspeakable stuff got spoken in a way that soothed rather than cut (okay, there was some pretty painful cutting in there – if you remember the bone-ghost scene – but the telling of the tale soothed.)
Today, as I felt one side of me try to pull the other side of me back into line, something inside me moved. It was a new story. I recognised its tickle immediately. And a word came straight to mind : merrow.
A merrow is the Irish word for a mermaid. You can find out about merrows here . I spent my lunchbreak researching merrows and was particularly captivated by the contrast between mermaids and mermen (mermen are not “lookers” at all!) I think my story hook has caught something 😛 .
To help the creative juices flow, I read some short stories from The Kingdom Under The Sea & Other Stories. My body soon came back into line – and I felt completely soothed by the experience.
For today’s adventure, I’ve spent a few hours tying up all the loose ends for The Big Renga project, so that we’re all good to go on the 1st December.
Today I updated the About The Poetspage : there are 14 of us now. On this page. you’ll find an image and a description for each of the poets.
I also added a new page for The Big Renga Round-Up. From the 1st – 25th December, people will be able to watch a live show which shares the daily news from the project. On this page, you’ll see that I created a new introduction trailer too : it’s much shorter than my first attempt!
The poets themselves have been invited to join me “on the sofa” for The Big Renga Round-Up and they’ve been given details about the video clips they need to submit with their verses too (at the end of the project, I’ll have 25 clips that I can edit into one short film!)
So, that’s us. We’re all set. During the last week of November, we’ll be doing a bit of practice behind the scenes, and on the 1st December, we go LIVE!
For today’s adventure, I took two versions of the Edinburgh handedness test. What’s interesting about this test, is that it does not seek to answer the question “Are you right or left-handed?” Rather, it seeks to answer the question “To what degree are you right or left-handed.”
The results from both tests show that I am a “mixed right-hander.” So, I have a preference for doing some things with my right hand, some with my left, and for some things I have no preference at all ~ but the lean is towards the right.
In the first version of the test , the scale ranged from -100 (completely left-handed, or complete left hand preference), to +100 (completely right-handed or right hand preference). For this test I scored a laterality index of 45 on the basic test and 43 on the augmented test, putting me in the middle decile. There was no interpretation key for this test, but the conclusion I drew was that I had a slightly expressed preference for the right hand, but had a fair degree of “mixed handedness” (I think that is the technical term!)
In the second version of the test , the scale ranged from +1 to -1, and I reported at +0.4 . This test does offer an interpretation of your results, and labelled my score as “mixed right-handedness.”
It is certainly true that I have a distinct preference for doing some things with my right hand and some with my left, I also know that there are some activities for which either hand is used without preference. I’m not exactly sure what conclusions I should draw from this test, or what my next line of enquiry should be. What I can say is this though : I’d never considered the degree of my handedness before taking these tests!
If you’re curious about your own degree of handedness, why not take the tests and let me know what you discover!
For today’s adventure, I decided to visit some alien territory!
I’ve been a member of LinkedIn for several years now. For my corporate work, my LinkedIn profile acts as handy curriculum vitae. Other than that, I’m not really sure how it works or how to make it work for me and my business.
Last night I watched an introductory level video about how to get the most out of LinkedIn. Today I set about giving the advice a whirl.
It seems that LinkedIn groups is where all the action happens – and that if you want to make LinkedIn start working for you, then joining active groups and networking with other group members in those groups is a great place to start. The groups I join should reflect my ideal client base and/or offer networking opportunities helpful for me and my business.
Now, I did join some groups several years ago, but I never really participated in them. Okay, I didn’t actually participate in them at all 😛 . So, here’s the action I’ve taken today :
1. Reviewed my current group memberships.
2. Joined some new groups.
3. Interacted!
My decision to stay in a group or join a new group was helped along by me asking the following questions :
1. Is there interaction in this group? (If no, leave the group or don’t join)
2. If there is interaction in this group, am I interested in the conversation? (If no, leave the group or don’t join. If yes, stay in the group or join).
3. Can I add to the conversation? (If no, learn from the conversation. If yes, add to the conversation).
I was pleasantly surprised to find a poetry group and a writing group on LinkedIn (with very large memberships!) I have joined those groups and joined in the conversation too. As I joined in the conversation, I suddenly could see how I may be able to offer help to people in these groups. I also joined a positive psychology group and started being active in some coaching and learning & development groups.
So, I’ve thrown in a few pebbles. Now I’m going to see what happens. I’m not sure what will happen. I’m not sure how far the conversations will go. I’m curious to learn the rules of this new place and see if it’s somewhere I’d like to stay – or not! (I’ll keep you posted!) If the water’s warm, I may even set up my own groups (which, apparently, is the way to really get LinkedIn working for you.)
It’s raining really heavily here today. It’s nearly dark. Winter is on the way.
After lunch, I sat down on the sofa to do my sketch for the day. I noticed that the rain caught my attention ~ in fact, today it seemed like the only thing in the world was rain. I watched the rain. I listened to the rain. I noticed how the rain made me feel. And then I drew the rain.
I let myself draw automatically, without thought. I had a sense of discovering what I was sketching rather than knowing what I was sketching.
As with some of my other sketches, I created a colour key. I noticed which of the colours in the sketch drew my attention first, and the second, and so on. I waited for an association to come up for each one. This is what came up :
1. Black = stability
2. Pink = optimism
3. Red = enthusiasm
4. Green = new growth
I think the sketch is a good reflection of how I’m experiencing both myself and life right now!
This is the final day of my sketching adventure. Now what I’m supposed to do is leave the sketch book for a while and come back to it later. When I come back to it, I should be open to noticing what I notice : maybe emerging patterns, colour combinations I might want to explore further, common themes and metaphors.
I’ve got a lot out of this adventure. Much more than I expected I would. I can see how I might integrate art into some of my other work and practices (like journalling and storytelling). And I was pleasantly surprised by my inability to judge my own art one way or the other : it’s just my art. It’s my art and it’s another way of becoming connected to the outside world and to the inside world. And that’s pretty cool.
Today I sketched the tree seeds I planted back in October. I’m not sure what called me to sketch them, but I listened to the call and sketched them anyway.
As I was sketching, I got to thinking about all the metaphorical seeds I’ve planted over the the last 316 days. Some have already grown and blossomed, some I’m not expecting to blossom for some time ,and others may not blossom at all. That’s just the nature of planting seeds!
When I returned to my computer to upload the image of the sketch, I opened my emails only to be completely surprised and delighted to have received a letter from a publisher who is interested in my children’s story, The Faerie Thorn.
So that seed is beginning to grow! The publisher has requested the remainder of the manuscript and we’ll see what happens next 🙂 . I’ll keep you posted.
For today’s adventure, I visit Murlough Bay to soak up the atmosphere and to find places to weave into The Merrow Of Murlough Bay.
Humans Resourced 