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This Week

This week has been a complete mess! Not all in a bad way but very little has been happening online for a few main reasons.

The bad reason first. I had a fault with the fan in my laptop, that was fixed but two days later when I came to turn it on it was sluggish and when I restarted my hard disk finally gave up the ghost. Now, this couldn’t really have happened at a better or a worse time. For all that I work with computers all day, every day I am terrible at remembering to back-up. Luckily it was all done because of the fan issues. On the downside I really need my computer right now.

On Monday I am launching my new line on Etsy of custom written poetry and I am spending the weekend doing some final tweaks and making sure that I have all of the listings ready to go. To make the shop cleaner I have taken out all of my art and now I’m just listing my cards. Because the poetry can be used in so many situations it will be listed across several different categories. I’m going to be selling (English style) haikus and longer form poetry as well. I’ll be doing a full announcement with details on Monday and there will be lots of promotion because I’m so excited about it all!

The stranger my work portfolio becomes the more I realise how glad I am that I don’t have a regular sort of a job. It just doesn’t work for me.

The other big reason that I’ve not been doing much online is because I was in Wales for three days. I have thousands of photographs that I am gradually working through (including the top image here which is the sunset from Capel Garmon). I had a great time and will be posting more about the trip once the poetry is up. I’ve pretty tired despite the holiday because of doing a combination of sunrise and sunset pictures so not a huge amount of sleep!

Hope y’all are having a good weekend.
Vick.

This Week

This week I’ve been trying to get back to a more regular schedule. I’ve finally started reading again with ‘Half Blood Blues’ by Esi Edugyan which I’m really enjoying so far. I’ve been thinking about my perfect dinner guests and have far too many so need to cut it down a little to fit around one table.

At the same time I have been working on a new line on Etsy based around my poetry. I’ll be putting the updates for that up on my Etsy FB page so that’s the one to keep an eye on if you’re interested in new poetry. I’ve posted about my entry to the New York Times’ competition on Found Poetry that I wrote about the death of Walt Whitman. I spent a good portion of Saturday going through all of the poetry that I have written and sorting out which I want to work on, which I am happy with and which are too bad to save!

I’ve reviewed the wonderful ‘Mugaritz: A Natural Science of Cooking’ by Andoni Luis Aduriz over on the Huffington Post UK Blog. I’ve got some other cookbook reviews up my sleeve as well, there are lots of great new books out at the moment and I’m working through several of them this weekend.

I’m going on holiday for a couple of days next week and am keeping my fingers crossed for good weather so I can take some photographs as well. If you want some beautiful art to look at I have posted a series of art links over on my business site.

Hope everyone is having a happy, sunny weekend.
Vick.

NYT and Walt

For a few years now the New York Times has run a ‘found’ poetry competition. I’ve never caught it at the right time to enter before and this was my last chance because you need to be 13-25 when you enter.
This is the idea:

What’s a found poem? A good nutshell description would be “poems that are composed from words and phrases found in another text.” A New York Times found poem, then, uses words and phrases taken from one Times article, past or present, or several — and since the paper has been publishing since 1851, choosing which Times article(s) to use is often the hardest part.

I chose the announcement of Walt Whitman’s death from March 27th 1982.

To start with I read it over a few (okay, nine) times. I printed out the article twice, and scribbled all over the first one – highlighting all of the phrases and words that I really liked. I wanted the poem to reflect Whitman’s own ideas about death. He wrote often about dying and the afterlife. He admired people who had a calm readiness for death and often attended vigils for people who were dying or ill. His poem ‘To Think of Time’ was influenced by visits to hospitals and seeing cholera victims. Whitman wrote of death as a divine mystery rather than focusing on the violent death on battlefields. He saw existence as a continuum and I don’t think was afraid of dying or doubted an eternal life of sorts. I read many of his poems and several articles from the Encyclopedia of Walt Whitman before I started forming the poem so I knew what I wanted it to say from the start.

Once I had something that looked pretty much as good as it was going to get I took my clean copy of the article and went through the poem to make certain that I’d not added anything of my own. The competition allows you to use two words of your own but I really didn’t want to do that.

So that has been entered. But more importantly I plan on writing more poems like this. Since I finished that poem I have been working on new poems from UK based newspapers – it’s a type of poetry I want to explore more.

If you are interested in poetry please do keep checking back here as there is going to be a seriously fun announcement coming up in the next couple of weeks…

Vick.

Coming to Dinner…

At the weekend I said that I would be starting a new series of blog posts this week entirely for fun. I’ve not really started I’m just chattering away today. This idea came from a series of conversations with a bunch of different people all asking me who I would invite to my ideal dinner party. It is a really daft question to ask me because I usually ramble on for hours afterwards as I keep thinking of new people and why I would like to invite them.

So I thought I’d put together a few lists, maybe with reasons or maybe not and have six people every week at my dinner table. My dining table would fit eight people so there is room for six fantasy guests plus myself and a friend (because what is the point if you can’t get one of your best friends to share it with you).

I’ll be adding people who I think would make a dinner party interesting so I won’t be including any (many) people just for decoration. I also only include authors/artists who I think would be fun to talk to rather than those whose work I like. I really don’t think the two things always go together. I’m not going to go for gender balance because I’m not patronising like that and I want groups of people who would start great conversations regardless of their genitals. Oh, and I’m including dead people – because there are a lot of them I want to have a good chat with.

I’m not sure yet whether I will do these regularly or just as I think of a new group of people I would really like to chat to. If people have ideas of who I should include I would love to hear them. Either suggestions of who would make a good group of six, one or two people you would like to have dinner with or people I have missed out. Also if I add people and you think they would make terrible guests do let me know!

In other news there will probably be a business announcement coming up in the next few weeks – will keep y’all posted.

Vick.

This Week

Maybe this shouldn’t be titled ‘this week’ but ‘recently’, I have been rather out of the loop. Lots of things have been happening and they have either been boring or non-bloggable. I’ve been working on getting some of the older posts I wrote for my previous blog up and in the right format as well as tweaking a few things with the structure of this blog. There has been a little bit more work than usual going on and I’m blogging about branding on my business website if anyone is interested in that one.

I have also been doing a lot of fudge making. This is not at all unusual however the different part is that I have been experimenting with new flavours. It has been suggested that I should look into selling the fudge that I make in a few places but before I even think about that I need to play around with amounts and flavours etc. So that has taken up a lot of time in both research and actually making the various batches. Fudge is tiring! More about this to follow soon.

I have mentioned that I am hopefully buying a house. It’s not a quick process and I’m not trying to push the vendors into moving faster than they want to. The last time I moved house it was a nightmare from start to finish and I really want this time to be better. I firmly believe that just because buying/selling a house is a business arrangement that doesn’t mean that you need to be cold and pushy about it. I love the house that we are talking about and I want it to become my home, I want the whole process to be as pain-free for both sides as possible. Plus the vendors are lovely people. If you’d like to see what sort of things will be going inside said house, or whichever place I do end up living, I have a dedicated board on Pinterest for it!

In other blog news I have been working on having a new regular bit on here that’s just fun for me. That will (hopefully) be starting next week on either Tuesday or Wednesday. I’ll promote it in the usual places once it’s online!

I’ve been writing loads of poetry as well but I still haven’t found a way of sharing it that doesn’t disqualify it from all competitions so for now I’ll be keeping that under my hat. Lots of classical references are going on at the moment though which is something that I love. If you’re very keen to read some poetry I blogged about a poem I have had included in the anthology ‘Dark Currents’.

I have signed up to 500px which is an absolutely brilliant photo sharing site. I have had niggling problems with a lot of the photo sites that I use and this one still has a few glitches but overall it’s great. Easy to upload (although you can’t rotate afterwards which is annoying) and great portfolio sites. There are lots of lovely people on board as well as a very cheap upgrade to unlimited uploads. It also has a store attached if you want to put your images up for sale.

As a consequence of everything that has been happening I have, very sadly, not even got any reading books to share with you. Mainly I’ve been reading cookery books. I currently have a pile almost as high as my head ready to be reviewed. I think there might even be two going online this week to keep up with them. I’ve also reviewed ‘Eat London 2′ on the Huff Post blog.

I shall now get back to the *very* long to-do list which is staring at me and try to get a little more of it ticked off before the new week begins.

Hope you are all keeping well,
Vick.

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