Turquoise Monster

I have create an audio book / album of various festive stuff – so that is poems from The Little Book of Festive Poetry, a story about a little mouse called Percival’s Christmas Wish and a song, not to mention some actual sleigh bells!

Unfortunately Bandcamp have decided the song is the main thing about it so everything is sort of stuck on that so if you just press play it will play the song and the end credits and miss the poetry and story out! I can’t work out how to stop that happening, I will try, but for now just click the arrows to take you back to the first track of the album. You can listen for free but download costs £3 which goes to buy books for my little girls school library.

Hope you enjoy it 🙂

Also tomorrow night (Fri 7th Dec 2012) I shall be performing as part of the Cirencester Festive Slam!

Well ok not quiet yet but with two weddings to attend and the presents only half knitted I need to think Christmassy. Also I wanted to try and get all the hard graft for The Little Book of Festive Poetry sorted. I was going to leave the audio version until next year but I’ve built momentum on the project now and Jean loves it so much… and with the weekend disappointment I need to keep it going or I think I would just give it up.

So this morning I composed a song whilst baby snuggling and recorded whilst she napped. Here it is 🙂

The Little Books are going out there into the void of the internet and as physical objects to share but the reason they exist at all is for Jean and latter Mary once she appeared. I need to finish recording the poems, edit the story and record that and add some slay bells and then the album will be ready 🙂 I may even have a little looky at producing some merchandise for it via the bandcamp site (I think they do a POD type thing and my Cafe Press Shop).

The Little Books are covered more on Orange Monster which is my Childrens books and Illustrations blog.

So yesterday I did the village craft fayre all profits were for charity and yet it was the worst one I have ever done. It was slow – all of them are being slow at the moment but something else was going on, people were still buying the odd bit from the other stalls. Now I had Little Books of Poetry and art prints for sale rather than my normal stuff (which I’d given up as it wasn’t selling) but it was not that change that was the issue, others were selling prints.

I watched the girl across from me sell pretty much all of her hare prints. They were lovely and she was lovely but I find that sort of thing boring especially since moving here to the Cotswolds as there are hare pictures EVERYWHERE. But people bought those. (And I bought some of her buttons as I loved the style she had done on them but the ones I liked were the ones that were left on her stall at the end).

People bought chutneys that I would never buy as I make my own and they bought ceramics and they bought fluffy hedgehogs from the hedgehog hospital stall but I sold one little book and that was to somebody who already had one. My science-art prints were looked on in horror by some with comments about them being creepy or scary. And then when asked what the actual pictures were done in I got sneers over ‘fine liner’ and as for my felt tip pictures such as Creativity and The Little Book illustrations… people kept asking if they were Jean’s work.

And yes I have imitated children’s drawings for the The Little Books but not drawn them childishly. The cat in the christmas tree was harder to draw than my space montage. I didn’t think I really cared about what people thought of my art anymore but having it thought of as something a child could do upset me – this is in contrast with the reaction I had at the Tate Modern to a book that entitled Why Your Five Year Old Could Not Have Done That. My objection to it was that it felt children could not think the deep thoughts behind the art and yet I know Jean can and she had already won prizes for art works by the time she was five – the issue is that she does not yet have the dexterity and refinement for the finished piece but the ideas, the concepts are there.

To be fair it was said by people who know Jean but still…

I would feel completely crushed except two things came out of this a) I came to the conclusion that I am not mainstream, I can do fine art I choose not to I have my own style and yes it is not most peoples thing, b) Kids picked up the Little Book and read them avidly – the target audience loves them but unfortunately they do not have the ability to buy things themselves it is the parents who need to do that. So now the problem is how to get them to buy rather than the style of the book being wrong. I also ended up letting kids colour in my trilobite prints that went wrong at the printers – these are just line art and it was a keep my kids occupied thing but Jean’s friends kept coming and joining and in the end I ran out of them! This has given me the want to produce a colouring book.

I also met some amazing artists, only one of which had a website but I think they live next do to each other.

I loved her camera man!

The other issue is that I need to make sure that people know the business cards are for taken as I had a number of people try to buy them! Go Moo.com.

So I am taking along copies of The Little Book of Festive Poetry to the Cranham Craft Fayre on Sunday the 25th Nov 2012! I will sign them if asked and profit goes to buy the school new books for their library. Its on from 10 – 4 and I will also have copies of Running to Stand Still an audio play by Barnaby Eaton-Jones to raise money for ME research and awareness.

There will also be my poetry cards and some prints of my art work.

Stars glowing bright
In plasma
Painting the cosmos
Elements birthed

Stella death pangs
Condensing down
Forming the new
Glowing bright

It is free to download until midnight October the 31st 🙂 I will get round to ading donate buttons at some point but they are just there if people want as it were. With the little books I am currently using the profits to buy books for the library in my little girls school.

I had a great time and even founf these lovely little knit poem things on the trees and bolards around the Lit Fest but I did not get through to the finals of the Cheltenham Literature Festival All Star Slam. Infact I think I probable was the second or third lowest score.

I did the poems Race Week and Star Stuff. In hind sight having multiple poems didn’t seem to be the done thing and Star Stuff had to be read from my note book, I did have poems memorised but people were doing more serious stuff so I didn’t want to do just all my comedic stuff. The other issue I had was that the microphone kept drooping!

But I feel I did really well, I performs I Hate Race week completely from memory without rushing through it – I could have looked at the audience more though. But hey – this is me moving up in the game and I was fed up with being the best ‘performer’ at events so being the worse is a good thing 🙂 Honest!

Plus I had people coming up to me to say how much they liked my poem – about 50:50 as too which one they liked.

This year has been amazing for poetry for me and having seen those little poetry knits has got my mind spinning with some new textural poem ideas – I have made several pieces of textural science art which have recordings of poems to go with them but this would be something else again!

I’m taking part in the qualifier event for the All Star Slam at the Cheltenham Litrature Festival. This is my second actual slam though obviously I have done lots and lots of poetry readings.

I am quiet nervous and seeing who I am up against I doubt I will make it to the evening event to perform but it has been really for me to try as I now have more poems memorised so I can perform them with lots of hand waving.

There are still some tickets left for the events of which I will be the lowest denominator so if you are in the area why don’t you pop along and enjoy the poetic whiles – likely to be more comedic than the book reading variety (well mine are anyway!).

ps. tickets have now sold out apparently!

I do love my writing challenges and as such I am taking part for the third year in a novel writing challenge known as GothNoWriMo, Gothic Novel Writing Month over on Black Monster but as always I’ve added on a childrens litrature challenge as well. I started the year off doing a 12×12 picture book challenge which I have to confess to have fallen behind on – the idea was that I would do 12 picture book manuscripts for 2012 that is one a month.

So I have combined and the result is that I have decided to spend 30 hours a holloween picture book but then I thought hand on a mo The Little Book of Spoogy Poetry has been sitting in the pipe line for too long and I should focus on finishing it. I tend to cover the childrens books and illustrations over on Orange Monster](http://orange.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/).

In the past I tried to make digital art for it from scratch but it looked naff – it looked like the sort of art you get in cheap books and that is not what I wanted. It is a children’s book so needs to be vibrant and I associate kids and childhood with felttip pens so… like the original little book I made for my little girl I have started making the pictures in felt pen (with some fine liner) and digitizing them. I did this for The Little Book of New Baby Poetry I made my little girl just before our baby was born last year (this is not yet for sale as I want to re-edit some of the poems as it was put together in the last month of pregnancy!).

Ages ago as part of a poetry writing challenge I had uped the number of poems to ten but they are still not typed up!

So here goes and hopefully I will have something to show for the work at the end of the month 🙂

Sometimes the word spill does not come
The page is blank and the pen still
The void aches, filled with tantalising edges
Glimpses of the worlds that would be

Sometimes they are un graspable
They are elusive things, ghosts of stories
Yet to be written.

Words tumble through the mind
Until the thought is obliterated
The void fills

Pens shifts, fingers clack
Via a compulsion of their own
First as gibberish until structure is imposed

Flowing sweetly onto the page
Barely aware, there is just the writing
To write, the written and be writing
Consumes all until that last word is down