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Accept that some days you're the pigeon,
and some days you're the statue.
Ricky Gervais
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Petite Anglaise by Catherine Sanderson
Biography: Takes blogging to a whole other level!! In an idle moment Catherine starts a blog under the pseudonym Petite Anglaise and so all the trouble begins. As Petite is getting into all sorts of mischief, Catherine's personal life slowly begins to unravel. This book reads like a best-selling chic lit novel - full of romance, drama and suspense. I found myself so caught up in the story I couldn't read it fast enough. So lost was I in this book that there were times I forgot it was a biography - this was somebody's real life!! The realisation would hit me and I would sit squirming, a little uncomfortable with everything I'd been witness to; it was a voyeuristic experience. Catherine is unashamedly honest about this period of her life, all her actions, emotions, thoughts laid bare for us the reader.
It does raise the question -
In the land of blogging, is there such a thing as too much information?
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You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
The first four lines of Mary Oliver's poem Wild Geese. One of my favourite poems. Here's a link to her page on poets.org if you want to know more.
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1Ottoman Empire, 20 November 1666
From my window I have a view of the courtyard and the pyre the men are building. They are going to burn me tonight - at the stroke of midnight. It will be new moon and the darkness will be complete. I know his plans - to extinguish all candles; to shroud the castle in darkness and when the clock strikes the twelfth hour he will light the pyre and the flames will consume me.
Will I scream? Will I beg for my life? For a quick death? To have my throat cut as I once did for another? All of these questions go through my mind along with the one I cannot answer - if I give into his demands will he release me or will he burn me anyway? I have humiliated him, broken our alliance, and now he seems determined to make me suffer.
And yet, there is the moonstone to consider. Always that - before anything else; before my family; before the man I love; before my desire for freedom. My priority must always be the moonstone - even at the time of my death. The important question is not the loss of my life but how, if I die here tonight in this castle, five days before the appointed hour, how will the moonstone reach the temple in time? If I die now, all of it will have been for nothing.
In one hour the sun will set and with the darkness will come the priestess of the Scorpion Order. She has been waiting for this day too. There are many who wish me dead.
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If only this was the view from my window. I managed a thousand words today, despite my daughter having a cold and not being in the best of form. I'm so close to finishing a first draft...frustratingly close. If only there were more hours in the day.
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Let’s face it, as writers we’ve all been stopped dead in our tracks by the dreaded writer’s block. One day you’re feeling satisfied, productive and there’s nothing to stop you and the next day you wake up with a niggling feeling that something’s not quite right – you’re just not in the mood, the ideas won’t come or what you’re writing isn’t good enough. You decide to take the day off and before you know it the day has become a week and the week a month.
I have a few cures for this - First and foremost, Julia Cameron! I always feel better after reading one of her books. Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones is another great book. Both writers give loads of helpful exercises to get the writing flowing again... Both old books but two of my favourites. As for me, enough writing about writing - it's time to write!
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Recipe for a Perfect Marriage by Kate Kerrigan
Fiction: I found this book impossible to put down and read it in a day. Wry, witty and heartwarming. Tressa is a New York food writer who returns from her honeymoon convinced she's married the wrong man. This is an enjoyable and honest look into newlywedded "bliss" and makes for a lot of laughs. Tressa's own story is interwoven with her grandmother's. In 1930's Ireland Bernadine is married off to the local schoolteacher and must find a way to forget the young man she's in love with. Both women have a love of cooking and it is through Bernadine's recipe book that Tressa finds some relief from the troubles in her marriage.
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Living is a form of not being sure,
not knowing what comes next or how...
The artist never entirely knows.
We guess.
We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille
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Having a whole morning to myself... I am wallowing in the luxury of it and a new book - Kate Kerrigan's Recipes for a Perfect Marriage. Planning a long hot bath, a cup of coffee and possibly some writing. I haven't quite committed to the writing yet, hence the possibly. As I return to wallowing in the luxury of solitude I leave you with this thought... A quote by M. Scott Peck in The Road Less Travelled which can also be found at the opening of Recipe for a Perfect Marriage.
True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed.
It is a committed, thoughtful decision.
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Celia Rees is one of my favourite authors of teenage fiction. Here's a link to her latest blog post.
Celia's diary
Celia's diary
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Louder than Words by Jenny McCarthy
Biography: When Jenny's son, Evan, was two years old he was diagnosed with autism. This book tells their story. It is brutally honest but also inspirational. It shows clearly the lengths a mother will go to to help her child. For anyone with an interest in this subject I recommend this book. Jenny is honest about the frustrations of raising an autistic child but she offers hope and writes of the joy she has also found on this heartbreaking journey with her son.
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