Thursday 14 June 2012

Snippets

I’m stuck on The Novel again, so here I am, back after an absence of over a month, for which I feel bad (as if you were hanging on my every word). Thank you for still being there.

The reason I’m stuck on the novel is that, when I wrote the first draft, I plonked chunks of my autobiography in it in what I thought were the appropriate places. Now, when I come to go through the book again, I find that the chunks are completely unusable. Because they’re ‘true’, they don’t expand and blossom like fiction does. They’re fixed and I can’t do anything with them. I’m going to have to completely rewrite them, using my Imagination. I feel daunted.

Reading Nina’s lovely blog (http://www.ninafenner.blogspot.com/) this morning I was honoured to find a mention of one of my posts. It was about sewing, so here is another snippet.

A few weeks ago when we saw the sun, I was inspired to go through my bin bag of summer clothes. As I tried the clothes on, I realised that I am now too old to wear above-the-knee skirts, so I let down the hem of one dress, sewed a matching band on to another (it was a dress I’d made and I had some material left over) and adapted the two items in the picture.



The band round the bottom of the dress comes from a skirt I shortened a few years ago (talk about ‘make do and mend’). The skirt I lengthened by extending the underskirt with a band of similar material – which is fine until the wind blows.



They look all right, don’t you think?

Another preoccupation at the moment is a course I’m thinking of doing. It’s training in something called the Lightning Process, which cured my niece’s ME. I’m wondering if it will help my migraines. Any comments?

2 comments:

  1. Hey, great to have you back, I was hoping your absence was due to you being stuck into (as opposed to stuck on?) the novel. Having dabbled in the autobiography/novel arena a tiny bit I can relate to true stuff feeling unalterable. But does it have to be, can't the autobiographical bits be altered, drift off into what ifs? love the underskirts, one day I want to get into the 'frilly petticoat' thing, so gypsy/romantic!

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  2. Hello Nina. Lovely to hear from you. Yes, I WAS stuck into the novel but also, like you, I have an ambivalent relationship with blogging.
    Thanks for the tip about the autobiographical bits. I shall think about what you say.
    I like seeing your paintings on your blog too, and I'm (sort of) interested in the sailing bits. I do sympathise with you. We spent most of our family holidays on a sailing boat as my father was a keen sailor. One of my brothers and I were both seasick and one of my sisters was always terrorised with fear. Lovely when the weather was perfect . . .

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