© Brandon Keim

For the next month I’m planning to immerse myself in my YA (young adult, to the uninitiated) novel with the view to getting it ready to start venturing out into the world again in September.

Part of this involved getting to know the competition, which meant joining my local library. Shocking, I know, that it’s taken this long to do it, but when you get sent books to review, given books by friends and family for every birthday and Christmas, the idea of borrowing other people’s books seems a waste when there’s always a crammed bookshelf waiting to be raided at home.

But when it comes to research, a library can’t be beaten, so I skipped down there with my hubla on a sunny afternoon, relishing the sense of purpose and armed with evidence of my abode.

However, as I waited my turn at the members desk I gradually became aware I was losing my own certainty of my abode. Tremors were running through me, ever so slightly, and my brain was beginning to feel squishy.

Being diabetic, I’m well acquainted with my body’s messages, and this one said: Eat Sugar. NOW!

At that moment I found myself at the front of the queue, being invited to fill in a form and read the library’s membership literature.

It may sound weird, if you’ve never experienced it, but sometimes when I go low I find myself prioritising the need to hide what’s happening over actually dealing with the hypoglycaemic attack. So rather than ripping into my tube of fruit pastilles and blatantly disobeying the No Eating sign, I sweated my way through the qestions, tried to get the literature in focus, and politiely (if slightly slurredly) asked where the kids sections was.

Clearly certain she was dealing with a ’special case’, she pointed me in the right direction, which, thank god, was right next to the cafe - a legitimate place to scoff something sweet and get my levels back up.

I know it’s daft - I know that no person in their right mind would forbid a diabetic from eating food anymore than they would confiscate an asthmatic’s inhaler just as they begin to wheeze, but I also know my ability to clarify the situation reduces as my blood sugar drops.

And I did once have a polite but lengthy and ultimately unsuccessful argument with an employee at the Guggenheim Museum in London who was adamant that no food or drink is allowed in the building and therefore I had to leave my hypo supplies in their lockers.

Is it really that hard to grasp that to a type 1 diabetic, candy can be a medicine just as crucial as insulin? The Guggenheim Museum has a lot of stairs, each of which lowers a person’s blood sugar just a little bit, and for a diabetic there’s no knowing just how many stairs will result in blurred vision, shaking limbs and a squishy confused brain.

On the plus side, I do seem to get younger, mentally at least, when my blood sugar drops, which may well help me regain the innocence of my early teenage years and really get inside the head of my protagonist.

Last Sunday I went to Frome, a small town deep in the Somerset countryside, which is currently in the midst of its annual festival. There’s something about this pretty place that’s attracted an uncommonly high number of writers over the year, and this festival celebrates all that is literary, with last Sunday welcoming all kinds of word-lovers to the town for the official Writers and Publishers Day.

The Short Story Competition forms the central part of the events, and I was there because the tale I submitted ended up being highly commended. My story was one of 12 shortlisted out of 550 entries, so I was pretty chuffed over all. I was invited to the award ceremony in the local library, which turned out to be lovely.

For starters, they seated us in the children’s department - my favourite part in any library. There’s something about a well-written, beautifully illustrated children’s book that makes me go weak at the knees. Perhaps it’s because it remind me of the happy month I spent interning as a publisher’s assistant in Seattle, poring over submissions of magical tales.

The two judges, short story writer Paula Williams and author Kate Harrison, talked about their lives and the choices they’d made in judging this competition. Listening to them, and to the fabulous winning story, I felt I learnt a lot, so maybe next year I’ll be able to write the winning tale. I’ll certainly give it a go!

On Thursday nights at the moment I attend a writing class to try and get my completed young adult novel ready for submission to literary agents and publishing houses. It’s the same novel about the selective mute battling adolescence, family secrets and the occasional ghost; the same novel that spent several months being picked over, analysed and improved with the help of an interested lit agent who then decided they’d lost interest and moved on. So it’s had something of a rollercoaster ride.

My last lot of feedback on the novel came from the editor of a children’s publishing house, and pointed out all the novel’s flaws. Of which there were many. And I really wasn’t sure how to fix them.

When you write all day long for your job as well as your aspirations it can be easy to lose sight of what you’re trying to do. Signing up for an advanced writing class seemed like the only way forward, and I’m so glad I did it.

Each session we go over an element of the craft, from writing the synopsis to coming up with a compelling title, and each week we submit writing for critique not just by the class tutor, Glenn Carmichael, but also the 11 or so other students. And, my god, that feedback is invaluable. Often opinion wavers from person to person, but I’ve also found certain points repeated by a number of people, and sometimes you only need one comment to help you see a passage in a whole new light.

It’s wonderful meeting with other aspiring authors, many of which are hugely talented, and having the chance to see their writing develop.

But the biggest benefit for me has been the impetus to focus on the novel fully again, breathing new life into those exhausted pages in the hope they’ll catch alight.

Glamorous and clamorous, beautiful and grotesque - the Art From The New World exhibition at Bristol’s City Museum and Gallery takes the lewd, the elegant and, above all, the original, sets it inside exquisite frames and displays it for all the world to see.

I’ve always sought out art that’s transportative or transformative in some way, and this exhibition ticked all those boxes, reminding me of the most twisted of fairy tales. Nothing’s quite as it seems, which is just how I believe art should be, with sub-text galore that allows you to interpret and, most likely, misinterpret to your heart’s content.

The exhibition showcases the talent of 49 contemporary North American artists, here under the care of the LA-based Corey Helford Gallery, and to me it represents so much of what I love about the US, where ultra-conventionality and extreme radicalism can reside, quite comfortably, a mere block apart.

From a writer’s point of view, the artwork in the museum entrance had me almost clapping my hands with glee. Mike Stilkey’s sculpture-painting is built entirely from novels donated by Orion Books - novels that have been saved from being pulped, giving old texts new life and showing that reinvention really is the new creation.

Art From The New World will be exhibiting at Bristol’s City Museum and Gallery until Sunday August 22nd 2010.

Summer in the city

After three and a half months of slaving away for that pesky travel website, I’ve been set free (read: made redundant), and after much fear and distress have decided to embrace my plunge back into the world of full-time freelancing. Okay, the joy of a regular wage is gone, but so is the 8.30-6.30 working day and all the stresses that go with that.

Plus it helps that the sun has been blazing away, positively begging me to come out and singe my pale skin by wallowing in the golden rays. I have a few bits of freelance work on the go already, and am gradually sending round word of my new availability to all my contacts. But I also plan to enjoy this summer for as long as possible, taking long walks, sitting by the river or in the park, and generally getting stuck into some high-quality daydreaming.

On Saturday my hubla and I went to the zoo like a pair of kids and today we went to the City Museum and Art Gallery. On Friday we’re thinking a picnic might be in order if the weather lasts.

And in between all that, between bouts of panic about the rent and bills, I aim to focus on my creative writing and see if I can entice it to the next level.

Last week I had a call from a nice lady at the Frome Festival telling me my entry for their short story competition had been ‘Highly Commended’ and inviting me to their awards lunch in July, while yesterday I received a copy of Crab Lines off the Pier, an anthology about summer containing an extract of my writing. So things are looking good on the writing front if not the income front, and who needs money anyway?

(Don’t answer that - I’d like to enjoy this daydream a little longer, please!)

© Leandro Ercole

I’ve spent most of this beautiful sunny Sunday working on a feature about testicular cancer. The feature is far from done, but I think I’ve reached my limit for one day. I pitched the feature because it’s a topic I believe more people should be made aware of. My hubla fought it and won, but only because he was brave enough to go to the doctor before things got too serious.

My pitch was to look at it from a woman’s point of view, interviewing guys about it and finding out what could have or did make it easier for them. The more people I talked to, the more I found this differed, though most blokes said they just wanted to be left alone to get on with it.

One of the best coping strategies I heard about came from my hubla’s mum, who mentioned that she used to go to his flat whenever he was being treated and cleaned it from top to bottom. He was living with a bunch of slobby lads at the time and she was terrified he’d catch an infection thanks to their slovenly ways.

So, this way she kept him safe, gained some sense of control for herself and showed she loved him - an impressive feat of multi-tasking. I see cleaning as my mother-in-law’s equivalent of the all-powerful, all-fixing EastEnders cup of tea - there’s nothing that won’t benefit from a cuppa in EastEnders’-land and the same is true of a bit of dusting and scrubbing in my mother-in-law’s world.

So it’s been a worthwhile and inspirational day, if emotionally draining. Now seems like a good time to shut down my computer and go to the pub!

Today I’m riding the Tweet Train - experimenting with social media. Working on both EssentialWriters.com and a travel website is a challenge, time-wise, but in many way the two websites complement each other, to the extent that followers of EssentialWriters.com are likely to also be interested in tweets from SeethenGo.com

http://twitter.com/EssentialWriter has been live for far longer though, so I have well over 800 followers on that address, and only 19 on the other.

So I did what seemed to be the obvious, if very time-consuming, thing, and started scrolling though my EW visitors for people to follow.

What I didn’t expect was just how many very random followers I have, from NaughtyMuttNice dog-grooming services (how fab is that name?!) to the Insect Museum of Thailand…

There were also a few nice surprising, such as discovering the Hodder and Stoughton publishers are following http://twitter.com/EssentialWriter, which really made me smile.

Plus I found follows from lots of aspiring writers, journalists, travel writers and so on who might well be interested in  the travel website’s tweets, so I’m now following 116 of them, and this is just the beginning! I’ll be watching closely over the next few days to see what the results are.

Margaret shares Prague ghost stories

Every city in Europe has its legends, but few rival the Czech Republic capital of Prague, where each street corner and cemetery seems to have its own tales to share.

I found out a few on a recent trip to the city, mainly but going on one of the ghost tours that begin at nightfall. Out guide was Margaret, born in New York, brought up in Miami, studied in Boulder, Colorado, and relocated to Prague nine months earlier. Two of her friends had flown over from the states to visit her, and one had arrived in heels, having been told by Margaret that she was in for a night on the town.

High heels aren’t that suited to walking on cobblestones, but this girl did really well, though she did mention that Margaret owed her a big cocktail for afterwards!

One of my favourite tales of the night unfolded at the  old Jewish cemetery where a lack of space meant bodies were once stacked 12 deep.

Margaret told us of a man who converted from Judaism to Christianity simply so he could play the organ in his local church. Just before death he converted back so he could be buried in the Jewish cemetery.

His love of playing the organ didn’t die with his body, however, and every night at 11pm, Margaret told us, he leapt over the wall of the cemetery where a skeleton would meet him and lead him to a boat at the water’s edge, then row him across to the other side so he would go and play the organ at the Cathedral of sv Vit for an hour.

The town is full of myths like this - great writing fuel!

Tyn Church, Prague

I just got back from several heavenly days in Prague, romancing, sightseeing and gaining lots of inspiration! Then on Saturday, back in Bristol, I caught up with a friends just back from trekking the route of Hadrian’s Wall for a week. We swapped stories of our breaks and while she grimaced at the thought of spending days in the midst of so many tourists, I shuddered at her description of swollen ankles and blackened toenails.

How can two people with a relatively similar outlook on life have such different ideas about what makes a good holiday? It’s the same with my hubla and I, and we go on hols together! While he would be perfectly happy to sit outside a bar sampling the local brew all day, I have this endless desire to explore, discover, and see everything there is to see.

Somehow the pair of us meet a happy medium that means I come home more rested than exhausted and he comes home having seem more than he would on his own. Guess that’s what married life is all about!

But coming back to my way of sightseeing, this innate urge to explore is partly what contributed to me becoming a travel writer, as well as having the good luck to spot a staff writer advertised on Spanish Homes Magazine and managing to get my application in just before the closing date. The perfect job for the likes of me, combining writing and travel, plus daydreaming about travel. *sigh*

Now, though I still freelance for the occasional glossy mag, my day-job is still travel writing but now for a website instead. Times have moved on, and like all journalists who intend to flourish in the online era, I’ve been busy getting to grips with the ideas of SEO et al.

In addition to working on EssentialWriters.com, travel writing has been my daily focus for just over two months, and it’s been a fantastic way to learn a lot, write masses of travel pieces and seek out likely suspects to invite to contribute travel tales.

If you fancy trying your hand at travel writing, get in touch with me at judy@essentialwriters.com

Now, must get back to daydreaming about my next trip!

© Mustafa Pişirici

I’ve discovered a frustrating glitch on EssentialWriters.com, and now I’m wondering if it’s also affecting the blogs. No comments have appeared on the website since late March, and I thought people were just being a bit sleepy or shy, but then I tried to add a comment myself and it simply slid away into nothingness.

As soon as I typed the gibberish to verify I’m not a spambot, the comment disappeared and hasn’t reappeared since. It’s as though it never was. Sounds like a rather tragic short story for the social media era: The Comment That Never Was.

Spooky! What does this mean? I’ve searched for solutions online but no one seems to have the answers. I’ve examined the entire backend, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I’ve ticked in error (such as DoNotAllowComments), or unticked in error (such as AllowComments).

This is too techy for me. It makes me realise how dependent I am on comments to let me know the world is out there, reading my words. Or some of it reading some of them, at least.