Free Kindle Book!

It's been a year since The Eye of the Beholder came out!

To celebrate, this weekend the Kindle version will be available free for download.  So if you haven't got it yet, now's the time to grab it!

It's been a very busy summer, (and early autumn!) but I promise updates on my other projects are coming soon!

A Reminder

It’s halfway through 2013.  It doesn’t feel like it is, since apparently we skipped spring this year while winter hung around, but finally summer has arrived!

With the days long and (sometimes) sunny, and the plants bursting into bloom, now is a great time to remember what your New Year’s resolution was.

How have you been doing on it?  Made progress?

My resolution was:

“Try not to worry so much.”

How am I doing?  Really badly!  And this is why I need the reminder.

The UK is undergoing a massive land grab by developers.  The plan is to build “affordable” homes for first time buyers and boost the economy.  All its doing is forcing people into shoe box houses, while older houses that they could afford but can’t get the deposit for are left empty for years on the market.  It’s not going to fix the economy, but it will destroy the green spaces that wildlife and people rely on for survival.

My hometown is not going to have any green space left around it at all if this goes ahead.

It has been a huge worry, not only for the environment (which would upset me anyway) but also because on a personal level, they want to bulldoze a beautiful bluebell wood that I played in while I was growing up, and means a lot to me.

This all also got me worrying about the future in general.  I never understood why everyone didn’t want to reach the Star Trek ideal of living in a beautiful place where everyone works to better themselves.  Can you imagine it?  Wide open spaces, fresh clean air, abundant wildlife, free education, spaceships. :)  Sounds nice to me.   

On the positive side of things, the community has come together and now are working to try and find a better solution to try and get the houses built on brownfield land and save the greenfield.

So after the tricky month of May, it’s time for a reset.

Six months left to fulfil that resolution. :)  Good luck!

Can you help me find a story?

This post has “spoilers” for a children’s story.  So if you are bothered about that kind of thing, don’t read ahead!

One of my favourite stories from when I was little went something like this:

There was a ghost who had a real sweet tooth.  The ghost ate a lot of sweets and for reasons which I entirely forget, ended up being chased by a policeman. 

To escape, the ghost climbed a ladder to the sky.  It turned out that the sky was made of lovely blue glass, and because the ghost was light he could run across it.  The policeman was too heavy and so fell through the glass. (I think the fall caused the policeman to swallow his whistle, but I’m not sure on that part.)

The ghost found that the stars were made of sugar and so ran about eating the stars.  As he runs about he leaves muddy footprints on the blue glass that is the sky, and the clouds have to follow him about cleaning them up.  That’s why the clouds are white, but then go grey as they get muddy and have to wring themselves out (causing rain) to clean themselves.

I think it was in a book of bedtime stories, but I no longer have the book, or if I do, I’ve misplaced it.  I wondered if anyone recognises the story and can tell me where it’s from and who wrote it?  I seem to be the only person who remembers this one, but I thought it would be fun to see if I could rediscover it with the help of all you fine people on the world wide web!

Goodnight!

How can you save the world?

This is a picture of a wood.

It is a very special wood.

In this wood, vampire hunters and space marines have battled.  In this wood, pirates and mystical warriors have hunted for treasure.  There have been walks where the sun shines through the canopy making it glow like a green and gold palace, and walks in the rain, hopping over squelched up leaves and puddles, where the smell of the earth and of autumn are rich in the air.

In this wood live snuffly hedgehogs, darting dragonflies, hooting owls, flitting bats, slithery snakes, and more!  It is a remnant of the great Forest of Arden, which you may have heard of as being the setting for Shakespeare’s “As You Like It”, a magical place full of history and discovery.

It is earmarked to be bulldozed to make way for houses.

Never again would people be able to walk through the carpet of bluebells in the spring, or see the sparkling frost clinging to bare branches.  The birds would cease to sing, and the air would be full of the noise of traffic and construction.

This wood and the adjacent farmland had such an impact on me growing up; I would say that they are part of the reason I became a writer.  How can you help not to have your imagination fired when you are running through fields watching Sparrowhawks drift on the clear blue sky, looking for mice in the golden stubble?  Or trying to sneak up on lizards sunbathing in the grass, but only catching a glimpse before they scuttle away?  Not surprisingly the novel that I am writing now does have the characters spending a fair amount of time in wood and farmland; and this is the place that inspired it.

I hope to save it.

How?  I don’t know.  I’ve done all the normal things; try to raise awareness locally, collected information about the proposal and the history of the place, found the form to fill in, and the consultation meeting time.

Even so, I’ve been feeling a bit hopeless.  I just can’t imagine it gone.  Never to be again.  I’ve even had nightmares where the trees are already being torn up and concreted over.

Will the council listen?  Will they see the beauty of the land and understand how important it is to protect it?  Will they realise that it isn’t just a bunch of trees, but a part of me, and a part of so many others who have walked its paths?  It is part of what makes it home.

This is a local fight, so I know that not everyone can help with this.  However I do ask you to help where you can.  Look around where you live.  See the beauty.  See how you can share your space with the local wildlife. 

For those of you in the UK, please take a look at the Campaign to Protect Rural England; you don’t have to give any money, simply use their form to send a letter to your MP, or find out about how you can take action to save our countryside.   

I hope that in the coming weeks I can make a post about how people coming together can make a difference… I suppose all I can do now is wait and hope.

A bit of spring inspiration!

The weather finally started to warm up!  Time to venture out and get a bit of inspiration, and where better to do that than the home of one of the greatest stories known to the world?  Nottingham!

All photos copyright © Sarah Cosgrove 2013

An Easter Story

Once upon a time there was a bunny.  He laid an egg.

Within the egg was a white of dark matter and dark energy.

Within the yolk, atomic matter swirled.

The atomic matter formed clusters.

Within those clusters, fusion reactions sparked to life.

Around those reactions, debris and dust coagulated into balls of rock and gas.

Upon one of those balls of rock water thrashed and churned.

Within the water a small creature struggled and swam.

As the water receded it clambered onto land.

Among the plants and trees it crawled.

Then it ran.

Then it hopped.

Then, it laid an egg.

Happy Easter! 

Image credit: Wikipedia

Procrastination and that.

Isn’t it a weird spring?  The snow is blowing past the window, the sky is grey, and the burst of fresh green we are supposed to be witnessing is being held in check by the frozen ground.  Apparently the cause of this is easterly winds.  It’s not actually the coldest March on record; but it’s not far off.

One side effect of this is I am still in winter mode, a time I spend in semi-hibernation.  I hate dark grey days (I don’t actually mind the cold if it’s sunny with it), and it’s amazing how much more I’ll get done on a day when it’s sunny than I do on a rainy day.

This week has been a struggle.  I hit a wall with my novel, and no matter what way I came at it, I was stuck.  I sat at my computer and stared at it.  Nothing happened.  I tried scribbling in my notepad.  I got a very nice doodle of a dragon, but no further on the plot.  I tried just bashing out words in a stream of consciousness, but that just gave me a garbled winding story that didn’t really have a lot to do with the characters or moving the story forward.

Then the answer came in two parts.

Part 1: Asking for help.

This is something I am terrible at.  It was written into one of my school reports once that I would struggle through something on my own rather than ask for help, and unfortunately it’s something I’ve not improved on.  So I can’t exactly say I asked for help; rather it was offered and it turned out that I did need it.  Talking through what I was stuck on made me realise what had been bothering me about the story, and what I needed to change to move forward.

Part 2:  Procrastination. 

Yes, really!  Yesterday I read a very interesting article about how procrastination is not necessarily a bad thing for a creative type person.  (Funnily enough, I read this in a random magazine supplement out of a week old newspaper that I don’t normally read, and was only reading because I was procrastinating.) 

It has always been assumed that if you are procrastinating, you aren’t getting anything done.  However now people are beginning to recognise that if you are procrastinating, you are getting something done; not necessarily the thing you are supposed to be doing, but you are completing something none the less. 

So I looked back at my week and I noticed all of the things that I have done when I should have been getting thousands of words written.  I’ve cleaned the house.  I’ve done my banking.  I finished reading “The Two Towers” and started on “The Return of the King.”  And suddenly I don’t feel bad about it.

This is why: because firstly, I realise that I haven’t “not got anything done” this week.  Secondly as soon as I let go of the “I should be doing this” and just started to enjoy what I was doing, the words came back.  I’ve had to go back and rewrite several pages, but I’m progressing again.

 

I may have been going in circles all week, but the circles were getting bigger and I’ve found myself on the other side of the wall.  Instead of punching through it, I just went around it.  I’m about to start another circle now, since I’ve gone back about twenty pages to slightly change the direction my characters are going in, but I’m ok with that, because this circle is going to be even bigger than the last and at the end of this one the final stages of the tale will be in sight.

But first, I’m off to have some lunch. J