Thursday 29 January 2015

Solutions then Snow...

Today's post won't be very long, nor writing related.

Our house has had a very bad case of Water Hammer recently- so whenever anyone turns on/off the hot taps there's a horrid noise.

Fortunately the heating was okay- I don't work well in cold.

The heating Engineer visited today and the solution is a valve being inserted into the pipework - seems we have a water pressure issue.

It will be a couple of days before it can be done, but it's not going to be too costly a job - thankfully. But it has limited writing time. :(

I thought I'd share a few of my snow pictures from today with you.

At lunchtime we had a sudden downfall and the snow settled quite quickly, but now most of it has turned to slush and the sun is shining again.

It's Snowing


One minute it was just cold with a dull sky - I was in the process of refilling the bird food containers when the phone rang just as I was about to go back out, and in the 30 seconds it took to go from the kitchen door to the phone, the sky's opened...







Blue Sky Arriving...


After about half an hour the snow eased up and started to melt.

I just caught the back edge of the snow cloud as blue sky appeared again...







Turned to Slush...
We often miss the snow in the lower areas of Nottinghamshire, so when it does arrive, even half an hour's fall is interesting to watch.

Though I know it can also be very hazardous for others, so if you're deluged with snow at the moment, stay safe...

Strangely enough there's a light snow flurry just started outside...


Sunday 25 January 2015

Digging Out Those Forgotten Stories...

Today I was thinking about my old stories, and how none of my teenage attempts survived- I do regret that.

When I started writing again in 1999 (after many years of not touching a keyboard of any sort)  I began using a Brother Word Processor - much better than a typewriter as I could move words around and carry on without having to retype the whole page.

Recently I retrieved a number of my old floppy disks whilst I was sorting through some old boxes. They were from the time I got my first computer that was running XP.

(Fortunately I can still read them as I have a floppy disk drive that just plugs into a USB port.)

They didn't have any full length stories on them, but there were ideas, and on one a copy of the articles I wrote for a (now defunct) online magazine. I even became their 'Lifestyle correspondent'. :-)

Despite no stories on these disks, I know that I have another set somewhere in the house, including half of the first novel I tried to write- I got to 40,000 words. Along with these are all my printed pages, research notes and images.

No doubt they're all in a box somewhere in a cupboard probably behind other boxes. I didn't have my office area then, so they got packed away in one of our major move rounds...

Meanwhile I do have a couple of short stories that I need to do something with, and I do have those on my computer, plus on memory sticks, a disc, and there's also a printed copy - okay that's overkill, but I won't lose them completely like those earlier efforts in an unreadable language.

Looking back at my old writing is strange. I can see how much I still had to learn then, but also, there were glimmers of the writer I've become, and there were also the first hints of my 'voice'.

I'm still learning, and quite honestly it's important to do so...


Have you ever lost your early writing, or do you still have it?