more from margy and the cake shop

I've been struggling with a little story, and the idea for this blog was always to put it all down on show - mainly for my own discipline to put it down on the page - but perhaps too, out of vanity and the hope that by exposing the process it might throw up some insight into how I will gain some level of mastery. Here then is some more of hte story, in draft and unworked through - clunky bits 'n all. In this bit we meet Vlad, the vampire baker (not his real name but he hasn't told me what it is yet...).

writing and the subtle art of cleaning house

I've been a bit stuck of late and I thought I might share some unsticklish, in case it helps someone else. Doesn't matter if you are a blogger, short story writer, poet or bid writer, everyone needs a little unsticklish now and again.

Been a bit distracted...

So here we are then. I set myself a target, and within a week or two I am failing spectacularly to meet it... I throw myself into a pink snit about my general uselessossity and my particular creative failings and before I know it I am habitually not doing the thing I most want to do...

It's too boring and too too shaming to go on about it - so I intend to simply pretend that this recent gap in the process has never happened. I did not get poorly, I did not spend way to long applying for a little job, I did not get distracted by decorating, cooking, mooching or crap telly. No no no no no  - I was involved in some important research.

So while I was not managing to actually arrive at the page for some uninterrupted #mywriting I was in fact doing something jolly important. I was cogitating.

I know believe that what I need to do on a daily basis is cogitate. It's like meditating except you don't have to faff about with yanking your limbs into the lotus position, or demanding the whole household go into semi-shut down while you 'om' your way to inner knowledge and try to ignore the itch that has developed behind your ear - dangerously close to the usual nit site.

No cogitating is the go for all writers, mothers, people over 40 and anyone who needs to create a pause in their day - or if you are like me it's the comfy hiding place from the 'do-nothing' blues.

I no longer waste time staring out of the window, marvelling at the regimented front patio of the scowly lesbians across the road. No no, I am now cogitating. Buidling up characters in my head, wondering about what curtains, pictures, nick-nacks such a couple would have - noseying around their wheely bin for clues. From a safe distance in my imagination of course. I would never EVER actually rootle around in a neighbours bin to figure out what they eat for supper.

Hmm how would that be, if you started watching your neighbours and discovered they were up to something sinister. What exactly are they doing at 6.15 every night when the curtains get drawn.... I wonder ....

Hey I've just written my way out of a pickle and into a story ... you see this turn up and write lark might just work!

Monday 18 October | margy and the cake shop

Last week I had 30 minutes before heading off to meet Hils - so I started to write with no real idea of where to. This half a story popped out - and I quite like it. It may be the first I go back and rework. I'll go for the second half this week... or you could finish it and we'll put the alternative endings up. I doubt you'll have time, but it's a cool idea huh? xxx

The idea came to margy a few weeks ago on her way past the cake shop on Gloucester Road. From the moment the shop opened it had struck her that the owner would struggle to sell her dainty doll like cakes, sandwhiched as she was between a seedy comic shop with graffitti decorated walls and security grilles and a pointless independent supermarket that sold only things in tins. If it comes in a tin - Parminder sells it. Fray Bentos pies, channa dahl, grapefruit segments in syrop- all available in tins, all sold in the weirdly shaped little inconvenience store.

"Eating tinned things makes you fat" margy reminds herself regularly when she passes the shop.

bloody blimey crikey ... we pixies grow old just like the humans do - but we stay pretty and minxy and cleverish too xxx

/Wednesday 12 October | Excuses - what lies beneath...

Here are my current list of thinly disguised excuses not to turn up and write.

• I have to look for work, this is time consuming and soul draining 
• I'm too tired, because looking for work is time consuming and soul draining and tiring
• I hate everything I write so the effort to write is not rewarded with any sense of achievement
• I want to be brilliant, I am just shaving mediocre - this makes me tired and cross
• I am now too tired and cross to attempt to write
• I really do need to do the washing up, washing, tidying, filing, putting away first
• I can't write after 6pm, I've never actually tried, I just feel I can't
• I'm bored and being bored is not a good place to start to write, it also makes me feel tired
• Other people are way better than me so there's no point
• I'll just straighten those cushions before I start
• I'm too cold, hot, hungry, thirsty, fat* 
• I can barely bring myself to care, no-one else will, this also makes me feel tired.

On and on the excuses come, tumbling over themselves, pell mell. I like that word pell mell. I also like higgledy piggledy, helter skelter and lickety spit. It's my joy in language that prompts me to write along with the desire to tell stories that make life seem bigger and bolder.

I've been telling stories since I was a kid, only back then it was called lying. I liked to embroider the truth with coloured silks and flashes of gold - to make the telling all the more compelling and to make me seem far more exciting, prettier and way more clever than I believed myself to be.

Monday 11 October | Exercise 12 retelling of a spontaneous story

Sometimes in the morning, I tell Podgey stories to wake him up - they are mainly designed to make him laugh enough so that falling back to sleep is no longer possible. Finding myself in a good mood but without much hope of writing anything 'weighty' today - I thought I might try retelling the story in written form.

Recapturing something that was spontaneous, silly and completely improvised seemed like a worthwhile exercise in writing. I'd say it has been only somewhat successful - and to really work, it would need editing further - time I don't think this little story really deserves... It didn't have a theme this morning - and my attempts to insert some sort of moral colour are clunky at best.

The next couple of posts will be a catch-up affair for completeness sake. I am aware that if I am really despondent about my effort, I demure on the write up. Which is silly and counterproductive.

Permission to fail cap'n Luli...

Permission granted ensign David...

For the tale of Puddington Podge and the enormous fart ...