Pre-Autumn

Wednesday was a half-lit pre-autumnal sort of a day.  Necessitating candles, fairy-lights and a Kate Bush soundtrack.  Weird mossy light.  Rain pondering whether to drop or just spend the day in spectral oppression.  Just the day to procrastinate getting on with the studio tidy-up. 

This blustery pre-Autumn has put me in new pencil mood.  Pondering a course or two to look forward to when the evenings darken and start to sparkle.  So, have booked a wood engraving day, and two writing workshops at the George MacDonald Festival in September.  The writing ‘workshops’ are an hour-and-a-half each and a month apart.  Can’t wait to hear what she will teach us about fantasy writing in an-hour-and-a-half.  If it were me, I’d stick with tropes.  The orphaned child, for agency, the magical helper, for providing helpful information a child couldn’t possibly know, the magical item, which only said orphaned child is destined for, and something scary to shit all over everything, for happy tales don’t teach us much, keep us reading or sell.  Am amazed a giant seagull has never appeared in a fantasy story.  So far as I know.  Look, have half the plot already. 

The person who is teaching for one-and-a-half hours, the other session is for us to read her all our ideas, (so cynical), anyway, she has written for ‘Doctors’. 

Judged, found wanting. 

Have never watched it, not because I cancelled my television license in March, (they bought ‘Suits’, it was the last straw), but because my spider-senses told me ‘waste of life’. 

What do I know. 

She has written for television and has a Kindle series for young adults.  She’s out there doing it, I’m not.  Which is why I paid my fiver per session and am going along.

Well, that and I need to get out more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSOACab2t7k

Images for this journal have been posted on Insta @purplehaze_journals