Okay, so that wasn’t quite the whole story.

When this cute little ginger and white kitten showed up and strolled into my house like he owned the joint, I really wanted to keep him.

I thought he might have been dumped, but I was also concerned that there was a family pining for their cute lost kitten.  So I did the ‘right thing’ and took him to the RSPCA to see if he’d been microchipped.  There was no microchip but there’d been a phone call about him, and very sadly I said my goodbyes to the little boy who thought he was a parrot and delighted in knocking over the Christmas tree.

The next morning I received a phone call from the lady who’d picked ‘Benny’ up from the RSPCA, asking if I wanted to give him a home. Of course I did and I arranged to pick him up the next evening. I decided I wanted to call him Elvis. I went out to dinner that evening, happy that ‘Elvis’ was going to be coming home to me. But when I got home from dinner, I got another phone call. Little Elvis, along with his brother Bobby had wandered off again — and while Bobby had been found down at the roadside, there had been no sightings of Elvis. I couldn’t believe he’d disappeared again, couldn’t believe they hadn’t ensured he was safe.

So I went and met the neighbours and Elvis’ brother Bobby. A huge cardboard sign about a lost ginger kitten was placed at the start of the road, and I made up leaflets and did a letterbox drop.  I sent calls out to the universe to send Elvis back to me in time for Christmas, but he didn’t turn up outside my window and meow as he did that first night.

Two days after Christmas, I had a call on my mobile while I was shopping.  A kitten had been found in my road at one o’clock that morning. I was so excited that Elvis may have been found, and when they got out of the car, I realised the kitten in their arms was not my boy, but his brother. I made some quick phone calls to find out if Bobby was missing then took him home and his owners collected him 30 minutes later.

Weeks later, I was still hoping that Elvis would make a comeback. Each afternoon I would drive the extra couple of kilometres down the end of the road, just in case. Then I noticed that my diary looked like the description of Nikki’s diary in my manuscript Diary of the Future, where she can make events happen by writing them in her diary as future entries. I opened my diary and on the next day I wrote ‘Elvis the kitten came back to me.’

He didn’t.

But the next day I got another phone call from the lady who’d picked him up from the RSPCA about a ginger 12 week old kitten who needed a home. Would I like to meet him? So I made the phone calls and went to meet him on the Saturday and brought him home with me. He was unnamed for a couple of days while he demonstrated his personality, his pechant for literature, and his habit of lying across keyboards.

It didn’t take long for this little fella to fill the gap that Elvis had created.

Meet Lord Qwerty Byron!

(after a hard day’s work on the computer)

He’s also adapted very quickly to my other constant visitors.

Tina the shi tzu and Qwerty are best mates now, but Lou has his nose out of joint, and yet still chooses to visit.

It’s very nice knowing that I’m coming home to this little fella each day.

So that’s how Lord Qwerty Byron came to live with me.

Considering his predecessor Dorkus had his own blog and Qwerty’s love of the laptop, do you think Lord Qwerty should continue the tradition?

2011 was a year of discovery for me.  A year where I moved away from the past, away from the previous relationship and started creating the present and the  future I want.

It was a year that I focused on my writing development, my fitness, and creating real-life support networks. It was a year that I met new people, people that I think will be in my life for a long time.

It was a year I did an administrative review of my life:  became organised, took out health insurance, paid off loans that had originated with the past relationship.

It was a year that I tested the boundaries of my comfort zone, took leaps of faith, felt the fear and did it anyway:  travelling for work to unfamiliar towns to deliver training to strangers, stepping into a management role at work, bellydancing on stage.

It was a year where I seized opportunity. Sometimes seizing opportunities had great results such as the interview with Alex Smith from Moving Pictures here, followed by the Moving Pictures concert.

I published a zine of collage poetry Sliced and Diced, which  led to me giving a collage poetry workshop to Bellingen Writers Group.  Sometimes the results of seizing the opportunity weren’t what I hoped for, but at least I put myself out there, instead of wondering ‘what if’.

It was a year I spent a lot of time in Sydney – enough to whet my cultural appetite, enough to catch up with friends and family, and enough to remind me why I don’t want to live in that mad city rush atmosphere anymore.

It was a year that I fell in love with Melbourne (again) and for one day considered it as a place I could live — and then it turned wet and miserable again.

It was a year that I learned lots about writing craft and editing — and learned to love editing (sometimes). I did in person workshops with Linda Jaivin, M J Hyland, and Everything You Need to Know about Publishing at the NSW Writers Centre. I did online workshops with Margie Lawson, Angela James and others.

It was a year that I felt the joy and despair of the writing life: finalling in the STALI and bombing out in other competitions with the same manuscript. Finding my readers and finding people who are so NOT my readers. Words flowing, words not flowing. Learning not to compare my dirty drafts with others polished, published writing.

It was a year that I discovered that I work best in binges when it comes to collage poetry. My goal had been to create a collage poem a week – however, when I do start playing with cut-out words,  I often have 4 or 5 poems on the go. I went on a collage poetry binge after presenting the workshop and created 18. So this year I am going to have a collage poetry weekend once a month, starting today.

Here’s a couple I prepared earlier (during the binge). I LOVE both of these. I think they should be my theme for 2012.

The first one I will call

COLLECTOR

The second one is called

DANCING

I also expanded my creative expression by exploring the combination of words on a photo background. First I wrote the text, then I had to take the photos that complemented or juxtaposed the text. All of the photos were taken at the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne. The ‘photo essay’ was about body image and the constant battle of weight. This was published in the Nambucca Valley Writers Group anthology Food for Thought. Here’s one sample page:

I’d like to explore combining words with images more in the future. And with this project, I discovered the joy of photography again.

It was a year that I learned that doing the right thing is not always the best thing. Sorry, Elvis.

So that’s 2011 in review: a year of growth in mind and spirit (and thanks to Curves and bellydancing, not in body) and creating just the right amount of independence and support.

My 2012 goals are posted here.

May we all have a wonderful 2012 full of love, friends and fulfillment and lots of words.

So five years later, here’s  the progress on a list I’d forgotten about:

1. Be published by a major publishing house – not yet, but since the writing of the list, I’ve had a short story published in Wet Ink magazine.

2. Visit the Grand Canyon – not yet

3. Learn to bellydance   – YES!!!

and I even performed in the Hipnotic Bellydance concert with the rest of the Sacred Lotus students.

4. Visit Tasmania – came close this year, but it didn’t happen

5. Publish an anthology of collage poetry - I published a zine of collage poetry this year, and taught a workshop.

6. visit Stonehenge – not yet

7. visit Frida Kahlo’s museum in Mexico – not yet

8. go on an Arts Festival crawl around the world – not yet

9. visit the Hay-on-Why book festival – not yet

10. Have a bidding war over my manuscript – not yet

11. Learn to create a web site – yes! examples – my website,  Nambucca Valley Writers Group

12. visit the Salvadore Dali Museum – not yet

13. ride the Ghan from Adelaide to Darwin – not yet

So what’s on your bucket list?

You can record your own bucket list right here or get some inspiration from Life Lists.

The problem with a bucket list is that ‘before I die’ is such a wishy-washy concept. I do not have a (working) crystal ball so I do not know if it’s next year, 5 years time or 50 years time. I have no idea how long I have to achieve these particular goals.

There’s a lot of travel goals on the list and they certainly would need to be paced out over a long period of time, unless I win lotto. And some of them seem to be dependent on the mood I was in at the the time I wrote the list.

There’s a few other things that I did this year that were either on earlier bucket lists or just should have been on my bucket list but were so far removed from my reality that they were never written down.

• Go on a Rod Quantock comedy tour – this was never written down on a list though I’d wanted to particpate since I first heard about his crazy ‘Tram’ or ‘Bus’ tours. In March, I went on the History of the Comedy Festival Walking Tour with 50 other people wearing Groucho Marx masks while Rod led us around with Trevor the rubber chook mounted on the end of a stick. It was a scream watching people’s ‘We are not amused’ reactions to us.
• Buy a new car – I picked up my beautiful new car on Friday with 13ks on the odometer. A serious step up from the 21 year old red beast with the built-in swimming pool.
• Be a VIP at a Moving Pictures concert.  Well for that matter, I never thought I’d see the band play again so this was definitely not on a list, but was one of the highlights of 2011.
• Read a piece of my writing at a writers festival.
• see Cold Chisel perform (I’d only ever seen Ian Moss and Jimmy Barnes do their solo thing)

It’s that time of the year again – time to focus on goals and this year I will consciously plan to do something on the bucket list (once I’ve worked out the new one).

My ongoing bucket list is posted here.

Once upon a time, I worked in Sydney.  And every day, my train would emerge out of the railway tunnels to Circular Quay station, overlooking the azure of Sydney Harbour. Then I would walk through The Rocks to work – Sydney Theatre Company in 1989, and Bell Shakespeare Company in 1991 & 1992. I loved my glimpse of Sydney Harbour each day – the sun gleaming on the water was a vital start to my work day.

Prior to that, I worked at Luna Park  (making doughnuts). You can glimpse Luna Park in these photos under the right hand side of the Harbour Bridge. It was my first job out of high school, during the holidays.  So I do have an attachment to the harbour.

Even when I spent 4 weeks in Concord Hospital following a car accident, the staff took pity on me and gave me the Bed with a View, looking out at Sydney Harbour.  The little red light at the top of the Harbour Bridge stops blinking in the early hours of morning (maybe 2am). I know, I was awake and I was watching.

On New Years Eve, it seems that all of Sydney gathers around the harbour to get the best view of the fireworks. One year I was privileged to be invited to a rooftop party in The Rocks where we had a superb view of the pyrotechnic display.  Another year, when I was young and silly, a friend and I ventured into the streets of The Rocks for New Years Eve and were kissed by strange guys at midnight and accosted by drunks. Not so pleasant. Plus there’s always the nightmare of trying to get home in the early hours of New Years Day.

Last week I went to Sydney to catch up with family and friends and have some down time. I caught up with my ex-flatmate who works at the Sydney Opera House. You can drool over the view from a desk in the above photos. Seriously? People pay millions of dollars for a view like that, and he gets paid to sit at the ‘Desk with a View’.  He gave me a tour of the backstage labyrinth of The House, ending with lunch in the green room. Contrary to the popular opinion of people who know my theatre background, I haven’t been past the stage door of the Opera House many times.  Once at 7 years old  for a poetry recital, and another time to visit a dressing room.

So the tour was fun and made me yearn just a little for my previous life. But not for long.  The thought of how much money a week I’d need to pay out in Sydney compared to what I pay now, quickly extinguished any nostalgic longing to return to my former life on a permanant basis. It’s so easy to view the past through nostalgic longing and rose-tinted glasses, and yes, compared to my day job now, it was more glamorous. Sure there were moments of glamour – particularly at opening night parties – but mostly it was hard slog.

Au revoir Sydney – it was fun and I’ll be back to visit again.

This year has also been a year of transformation for me: embracing change, stepping outside my comfort zone, working on the fitness, expanding my mind and learning more about the craft of editing and writing, and jumping at new experiences.

I will stop short at expanding my mind through a university course — been there, done that (twice!) – the first time for free, the second time through HECS but I marched against the introduction of fees during the first stint. Fat lot of good it did us – the fees came rolling in and now have you seen the price of a Masters or a Ph.D?  I have more useful ways to spend my money than add more letters after my name. Not that I flaunt the letters now.

I don’t think I have the stamina to do another degree — or a purpose behind it. I’m proud of my workmates for taking it on and admire their passion. But I will be sticking to short courses (and it suits my Gemini ascendant so much more).

This month I’ve been doing an editing course with Margie Lawson – Fab 30.  We concentrate on 30 pages of our current manuscript, deep edit with an editing partner and Margie deep edits the pages as well.  I’ve found a fabulous editing partner Amy, and we are challenging each other and our stories. Cindy, Edward, Henry and Snow White are growing, developing, finding new depths and motivations.  I can totally recommend this course.  It’s given me motivation, focus and tools to write.

On Saturday, I’m catching the train to Sydney for an early family Christmas get-together. The train trip is a deliberate ploy as it will be 8 plus hours away from the internet — just me and my manuscript. I will get to inhabit the world of my characters for the duration of the train trip, and hopefully fill in the missing scenes.  On Monday, I will be going to the Harry Potter exhibition – it should be a lot of fun. I’ve decided to leave Picasso until my trip in March. By then the Sydney Picasso fever may have abated.

Two nights before I leave, loads of stuff still to do but for now my bed is calling…

Perhaps they should have filmed the remake of Footloose in Townsville. Seems very appropriate for the power-hungry security guards, whose main purpose to be stopping people from enjoying themselves.  What is it with these security guards and their power plays? It happened at the Moving Pictures concert at the State Theatre, until Alex Smith said it was okay for us to dance (and I filmed the power play on my mobile phone – clip below), and I remember at the last Eurythmics concert at the Sydney Entertainment Centre, the security guards keep pushing people back from getting down to the floor until Annie said ‘Come on down’. Towards the end of the Moving Pictures concert, everyone was standing and dancing, so if you were in the stalls, you had no choice but at least be on your feet swaying slightly, if not bopping up and down.

So why is it not an expectation on both the part of the venue and the security, that people are going to want to dance? C’mon, we’re not at the opera!  Don’t make out that rock music and dancing don’t go hand in hand.

Poor Richard. He was just enjoying the concert and getting into the music, and ended up in court. Then the magistrate told him he was ‘too old to dance!’  Are you kidding me?  The guy’s 43 years old. I’m 43 years old. I want to dance at concerts. No-one’s telling Barnsey, Mossy and the rest of Chisel that they’re too old too rock. These bands might have started in the late 70′s but they still have an energy and passion for their music that is unmatched by some contemporary acts.

Okay, so Richard might have gone a bit too far when he slapped a security guard. That probably got him in court, rather than the dancing. Perhaps the magistrate should have told him he was too old to be slap security guards, rather than too old to dance.  But the magistrate’s comment makes me wonder if the magistrate has ever danced in his life.

Thankfully, the Coffs Harbour Cold Chisel concert was general admission under a huge marquee. I’m betting that every one of the 10,000 people who attended danced at some point on Friday night. Though my attention wasn’t focused on the crowd behind me (and I’m too short to see them anyway), my attention was focused on the band.

I never saw Cold Chisel when I was young. Listened to their albums in my teenage years and twenties, but by the time I was old enough to be going to gigs legally, they were doing their solo thing.  So I saw Jimmy Barnes and Ian Moss play separately at Sweethearts, and Ian Moss play at some venue at Circular Quay, but I never saw Chisel as a unit. Until now.

As soon as the tour was announced,  I knew I had to go. And the fact that they were playing in Coffs was a bonus, and an inticement to support the tour.  Knowing it would cost only the price of the ticket and incidentals on the night, I wouldn’t be forking out for travel to Sydney or Brisband and accommodation or dipping into rec leave, made the ticket seem like an absolute bargain. What was even more astounding – I booked the ticket on my netbook while on the train in Sydney. In my days of lining up in the early hours at a Ticketek outlet, I would never have foreseen such a convenient future.

Friday night was fabulous – even though I forgot my gorgeous new camera and had to make do with my mobile phone. I was pleased to see that marquee was divided between the booze and the non-booze sections, and we headed down the front to stake out our position as we didn’t plan to drink anything but typically overpriced water.

After You Am I finished their set, the front of the marquee started to fill up. I was trying to keep hold of our position down the front, to the right hand of the stage, while my friend ducked out to the portaloo. Suddenly there were tall guys standing in front of me and I was ducking and weaving trying to see over their shoulders. The marquee continued to fill in the half hour before Cold Chisel were due on stage, while the roadies reset the stage. I wasn’t sure how much  mosh there was to be, and I was hoping the majority of the middle-aged moshpit would mean it would be relatively civilised. While I might not be too old to dance,  too old to mosh is apt.

Then once Chisel came on, more people crammed their way into the marquee, squeezing between the bodies, trying to ensure there was not a skerrick of personal space left down the front. One particularly obnoxious boozer ended up next to me with his girlfriend, bopping along, trying to swing her out in dance moves, when there was no space at all. Very annoying. I tried to keep my focus on the band, but the idiot kept belting into me, and shoving back in their direction has no affect, as they just think it’s part of the mosh. I was very thankful when he decided he was thirsty and needed another beer, and headed back to the bar.

When we managed to position ourselves on the right hand side of the stage, I was hoping that Ian Moss would be at the mic near us. You see – while the singer in my manuscript ‘I’m with the Band’ was inspired by Alex, the guitarist in the story was most definitely inspired by Mossy. But we were in the wrong spot. Mossy was on the left side, but the concert was filmed and closeups were appearing on the screens positioned either side of the stage,  so I could admire his magic guitar playing. Whoever was mixing the vision did an amazing job with three picture fades, switches from colour to black and white, and switches between different members of the band. The screen footage definitely enhanced the concert experience.

They played for two whole hours. And played hard. No holding back at all. The sweat was pouring off Mossy as they tripped through the Chisel back catalogue, and took us all for a spin down memory lane.  When the War is Over was a poignant tribute to drummer Steve Prestwich. Khe Sahn was presented as a karaoke singalong. During Flame Trees, the lighting was suitably red and yellow.

As we neared the end of the concert, more people pushed their way into our section, including a bunch of next generation fans, who were used to moshing. Personal space had shrunk to a minimum and bumping into each other was the order of the night. I saw a flash of bare skin and for one panicked moment realised someone was taking their top off. It was a young guy, but really he needed to put his top back on, instead of waving it in the air like a flag and blasting everyone in close proximity with his sweaty armpits.  Then the band was gone, and the audience was yelling for the encore.

The first song of the encore was Saturday night, accompanied by photos of Coffs at night, and concert attendees. A slower number with Four Walls, Letter to Allan, then finally Goodbye Astrid, and it was goodbye Coffs Harbour.

Everyone was relatively well behaved, the music was awesome and the concert well-organised, including the security. (even if I had to tip out my free water when I arrived)

As Tim Rogers said, for one night, Coffs Harbour was the centre of the f*** rock and roll universe and Chisel made it so. Thank you Chisel for a rocking night out in Coffs and the opportunity to dance. Come back soon!

I know it’s new and everything is all shiny and wondrous and passionate but Saturday night clinched it for me:

I attended the first ever Coffs Harbour hosted roller derby. It was a great night out for me and my new toy.  I went from the wide shot above to zooming right in on the band (Smash Mystery) without moving my own position:

(and that’s a derby doll rolling past)

I love love love my Olympus SZ-30MR and I’m sure it will be the beginning of a beautiful relationship (especially now I know the right buttons to push).

Already I’m part way through Angela James’ course Before You Hit Send, which looks at the finer details of editing. This has been an interesting course as the first half has focused on grammar. I went through the period of schooling where grammar was not ‘taught’ – it was assumed you would pick it up by reading, or that grammar would stifle your creativity. I’m not really sure of the logic behind the principle, but enough to say the only grammar I picked up school was in my French class.

When Margie Lawson held her Open House at the Lawson Writing Academy, I won an online course of my choice. I chose her Advanced Edits System: Turning Troubled Scenes into Winners course which started yesterday. Now Margie asks us to highlight our manuscripts with highlighters and she recommends the retractible kind.  Well, I’ve yet to find a retractible highlighter in Australia. Officeworks, help me out! In our introductions, Margie asked what parts of her Edits system we do well.  My answer: highlighting! I love how pretty my manuscript is with all those colours, but I’m sure it would look even prettier with retractible highlighters.

We were also asked to identify our weaknesses and one of my writing weaknesses is writing action and body language. I’m great at dialogue – I’m always hearing my characters speak (note: I said characters, not voices in my head. I swear they are characters, really!) and I hear full scenes of dialogue. I consider myself to be an auditory writer. What is harder for me is to imagine what my characters are doing while they’re having these fabulous conversations. (and this is despite spending my wayward youth at the local theatre group)

So I also enrolled in the course: Triple Threat Behind Staging a Scene, presented by Tiffany Lawson Inman. Here is the blurb:

Action creates a rhythm allowing the reader to breathe in sync with your characters. Physicality has the ability to highlight personality, relationship, and motivation. Choreography, in a fight or love scene, can expose the intricacies of your ever moving story.

Topics covered in this course:

- Fight Scenes: Physical. Learn how to brawl on the page from a certified Stage Combatant.

- Fight Scenes: Verbal. Words can be stronger than swords.

- All Scenes Have Rhythm: Plain Jane and G.I. Jane show how action plays a role.

- Multiple Character Scenes: As easy as 1-2-3.

- Emphasize personality, relationship, and motivation through small, simple details.

- Spotlight on the Backdrop: Using props and setting to move your story forward.

- Audition each character: Making sure each movement matches their personality.

- Manipulate the reader’s focus using tips from Broadway directors.

- Write your character deeper into conflict, with a flick of the wrist, and a punch of emotion

 

Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?  Just what I need to kick my characters’ butts into action. And perhaps at the end of the month, my characters will be so busy ‘acting’, they’ll stop talking so much.

Tiffany is holding enrolments open until the end of this week, so why don’t you join me in the course and kick your characters’ butts into action!

Enrol here: Lawson Writer’s Academy

The weather was beautiful and with a view like this, I knew we were going to have a fabulous afternoon.

The workshop was held at North Farm, which is both a place for yoga and for retreats of all kinds, with gorgeous accommodation.

The participants are all looking very seriously but they had a fun time, exploring creativity without the constraints of plot, grammar or syntax.  There was much chatter, much laughter, and many collage poems created in the process.

I created a couple of poems in the course of the afternoon and it ignited my passion for collage poetry again. My desk and dining room table have since been covered with poems in progress. Here is one that I created during the workshop.

The one thing I find about collage poetry is that it often reflects your mood at the time, so the above poem is pretty much my frame of mind at the moment.  Scary, isn’t it?

I made 4 collage poems during the workshop, another 4 completed since, and there’s 8 in progress on my dining room table. I don’t think I’ve ever had that many on the go before, even when I was doing my 365 days collage poetry challenge.  If there are that many on the go, maybe I can do the challenge again. Something to think about for next month…

Instead of writing a short story with recipes, I decided to do something a little different, a little out of my comfort zone, a bit of a creative stretch for me. I decided to create a collage story.

The text was easy – once I started, it just flowed out. It became a story about body image, about the media’s schizophrenic obsession with body image, about how my body image has been shaped over the years. I had many food magazines I could cut up for background collage photos along with the usual gossip magazines and sensationalist headlines. But then I was advised new parameters for the artwork: everything had to be in black and white, so it would reproduce okay.

That condition vetoed my use of magazine reproductions – photos of food in magazines do not come in black and white. So here I was with 490 words of text, and nothing to stick it on. I’d even worked out the layout of the text in a visual diary, but I was still waiting for the vision.

I started thinking about an artwork I’d seen many years ago, most likely in a Biennale at the Art Gallery of NSW. It was by Barbara Kruger and called “I can’t look at you and breathe at the same time.” The text was superimposed over a black and white image. This long ago memory became my base inspiration.

I bought a new camera. I thought about the words, and I thought about the text and the images that would suppport or juxtapose the text. I decided to take photos on my trip. Surely in Melbourne I would come up with some great photos for the project. My photos of chocolate on the chocoholics tour did not meet my requirements for the backgrounds – something about the way handmade chocolate is laid out for sale doesn’t really make it photogenic. Nice in reality, but it doesn’t make the conversion to two dimensions.

On my first free day, I went to Queen Victoria Markets. I gazed wistfully at The Drunken Poet pub and remembered the night back in April when I had watched Chris Wilson play, and thought briefly about the matchbox accommodation I’d stayed in that night. I’d picked much better accommodation this time around. Then I headed into the markets, only mildly distracted by clothes, because produce was my target.

And I took photo after photo of yummy stuff:

When I got back home, I had the images printed in black and white, cropping so that they were all in portrait view rather than landscape. I ordered 5X7 prints as that is the closest to A5 – the format the anthology will be printed in. Then I printed out the text, cut it up, and laid the photos on the table, matching the text against the background images.

And it worked. I didn’t need any extra text cut from magazines. The food photos and the text are enough to make my point.

Now I’m wrestling with double-sided tape to get those words into place. Who knew it would take so long to stick the words down? Then I will scan the images and email them to our Food for Thought editor.

I have decided to consolidate all my creative endeavours on the Write on Track blog, so this is a reproduction of a post from my collage poetry blog. This post was written a couple of weeks ago:since then, the Food for Thought photo essay was submitted, very well received and will open the anthology. And I think I may experiment more with this photo essay form, especially as I’m in love with my new camera.

This afternoon, I will be presenting a ‘Sliced and Diced’ collage poetry workshop to Bellingen Writers Group. Later I will publishing ‘how to make collage poetry’ tutorials to my website.

Stay tuned and cut and paste!