Rebecca Bloomer's Blog, page 5

Seanchai

The Irish have a word, 'seanchai'.  There are a billion variations of the spelling but it all means the same thing; it means 'storyteller'. In old times, the stories, traditions and old lore were formed into long stories and lyric poems that were told by the seanchaithe (which is the plural form).

This is me.  It's what I do.  I'm a storyteller.

When I told someone this recently, they replied "So you tell lies for a living then?"  I was a bit boggled by that.  I responded "Actually, quite the opposite."

I think I proved that yesterday when I presented a seminar on teens and the internet for  a group of forty school nurses and counsellors.  Afterward, one of the participants bailed me up and said, "You had some really good information and made some excellent points, but what made it great was that you're a grand story teller."  Another woman said "You make your stories vibrant with life.  You're vibrant."

It was very flattering but here's the sneaky truth. The reason I keep coming back to do these seminars is because I LOVE telling stories.  The most boring litany of facts can become , if you treat them well, the most amazing story. When I tell that story, the one that weaves all those facts into an engaging tale, I get to come alive.  Speaking, actually telling the story is a double pleasure because I get to play off an audience.  They gasp, they snuffle with laughter, chuckle over irony and encourage me forward, onward, with the rest of the story.  The audience becomes part of the story.

I like to think this is also what happens when I write, that I pick people up, carry them with me into my book, then deposit them neatly, happily, at the end, where they will sigh, close the cover, satisfied but still wishing for more.

Today, I may have accidentally started a new story.  I did a library gig about truth and fiction.  I did the mandatory PR thing but mostly, I took my group with me on an enjoyable hour and a half journey through the mind of a writer.  We laughed, joked, sipped tea and thought we should do this more often.

Now I've been charged with the responsibility of starting a writers group.  I'm looking forward to it with a mixture of excitement and trepidation.  Mostly, I'm looking forward to a regular storytelling session.  Wish me luck!

Change Your Mind, Save The Planet

My life is often interesting in the way seemingly disparate things will suddenly come together to make blinding, perfect, sense.  This happened recently when I was in the middle of reading The Sixth Wave, a great book by James Bradfield Moody and Bianca Nogrady.  While I was reading, I happened to get a phone call from one of my brothers.

My brothers work together in a company owned by the eldest, that turns landfill gas into electricity.  They both began their careers as electricians and have, over the course of their lives, collected enough cleverness, ingenuity and guts to create this company.  I love it when the eldest one rings to ask me science-nerd questions, when he's theorising about a new possibility or idea and needs someone geeky enough to join him for the ride.

I love it even more when he surprises me with his brilliant attitude.  When I told him about The Sixth Wave, and the definition of 'institutions' therein, he related this immediately to current process of marketing landfill gas technology.

According to Adam (brother in question),  the traditional way for companies to sell landfill gas technologies to their customers is basically to say "You've got this terrible problem, let me sell you a way to fix it."  Adam's way, which reflects his mindset perfectly, is to say "You've got this fantastic resource, let me help you utilise it."  It's a shift in attitude that completely changes the outcome.  We've moved from eliminating a problem, to maximising the productivity of a resource.

It was this attitude of his that led us to the next conversational topic; a new process and mechanism he's helping to research and produce, that might well revolutionise his industry.  He's so excited by the concept, it's like listening to a kid talk about Christmas.  The best part of this conversation for me, was to hear him say "Right now, I don't even care if it doesn't work.  At the moment I'm thrilled just to be doing this.  It's amazing stuff!"

We have this in common, all three of my siblings and I.  We love the adventure of learning something new.  Change has never scared us.  Our dignity is not bruised when we're proven wrong and required to change our minds.  In fact, sometimes changing our minds, changing the angle from which we approach an issue, well,  that changes processes and processes can change the world.

Stop Staring!

I had a 'moment' on Friday.  In order to understand why this moment shook me up so much, you need to maybe understand me a little better.  There are a couple of things to know:

I have never actually 'dieted'.
I don't own scales.  I figure if my clothes fit, I'm good to go.
I don't participate in exercise I don't actually enjoy.
I LOVE good food.
I believe that a functioning body is a miracle of mammoth proportions (just thinking of the number of perfect cell divisions that take place daily is mind blowing).

So there I was, looking for a 'take me seriously' dress.  Who knew they were so hard to find? One shop after another,  I went in and out of change rooms.

I know that the mirrors in change rooms are too close for anybody's comfort.  I know change rooms are badly lit.  I know they shouldn't affect a person's self-image.  Knowing all this, I make sure I always look at myself in the mirror in the change room across from my own (that's a nice safe distance).  I make sure I use the right 'self-talk'.  I say, "this doesn't fit me", rather than, "I'm too big for this".  So I was well armed for my dress-seeking mission.

Then I went into Portmans.  I have always relied upon Portmans for 'take me seriously' dresses, so I thought I'd be all set.  Portmans is also the place I remember shopping when I first started work, because it was the only place I could find clothes that fit.

Standing in front of a (very small) rack of serious dresses, I picked out a tiny piece of material.  Size 6.  Who, I wondered, looking at the tiny swatch of fabric, would ever fit into such a miniscule garment.  Then I pulled up short mid-thought.  Moment.  Me.  Back when I shopped here all the time, I fit this specific size.  In fact, this size was the reason I shopped here.

I put the dress back and left the store a little despondent.  To be fair (to myself and every other grown up female on planet Earth), I wore those tiny dresses twelve or thirteen years ago.  Not only has gravity had more than a decade to work on me, I've also had an extra child.  I deserve an extra dress size.

Still, indestructible as my self-image would seem, I found myself confronting my husband during dinner.  "I do alright…looks-wise…don't I?"

Instead of the usual male fear this kind of question generally invokes, my lovely man asked.  "Why?  What have you been doing that would make you ask a question like that?"

I twisted my napkin and picked at my food.  "Staring at myself."

"Stop it," he replied. "It's rude to stare."

I have, because he's right.  Staring is rude.

Leftovers

Every now and then I find myself with an abundance of leftovers.  Being averse to wasting perfectly good food, these are the times when I get inventive.  Tonight's dinner was a fine example.  For dinner we had scallops with blanched asparagus, soba noodles all drizzled with an orange and ginger sauce and sprinkled with toasted sesame seeds.

Only…I didn't actually have any oranges.  I had the juice I mentioned in my last post.  So I used that.  I figured that as the juice already had ginger in it, I was all good to go.  A splosh of rose wine (also a leftover), a pinch of salt, and voila!  The perfect sauce for scallops.

Dessert (which I don't often eat but which is great for using up leftover fruit) was, for me, a bowl of strawberries with mascarpone cheese and a good slurp of honey.  The child had berry frozen yoghurt, which was also leftover from a meal a week or more ago.

There are a couple of funny/interesting things about this meal: 1)if I'd served it up to a visitor, they never would have known they were eating leftovers. 2) The leftovers are all things I'm trying to get rid of before I go to the markets tomorrow (so I have a cleared out fridge when I get home) and 3) lf you buy fresh, good food, it lasts longer AND your leftovers are FAB.

What's your favourite leftover meal?

42

I learned from Danielle Ferries recently, that according to the BBC, 'most people' will only have read about six books from the list I'll post below.  I counted.  I've read seventy of them from cover to cover (I think…as I scroll I lose count.  So I can read but can't count), some of them multiple times.  It occurs to me now, that this is why nobody computes when, if asked a deep and meaningful question to which nobody can possibly know the answer, I often shrug and reply "forty-two".

Aside from the obvious problem of having a sense of humour only I can appreciate, I'm glad I've read these books.  There's not one on the list I've read that I would consider a waste of time.  Some, I would consider my all time favourites.How about you?  How many have you read?  Which were your favourites?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

47  Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

52 Dune – Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54  Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

55  A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce (Couldn't get through this one)

76 The Inferno – Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte's Web – E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Help!

I have a feeling I'm about to do something stupid.  This is what happens when I get tired of waiting.  It's fair to say that patience is not my chief virtue.  I have been described before as a 'go getter', a 'doer' and 'enthusiastic'.  My brother-in-law describes me as being just like my sister…on speed.  Imagine then, how it feels for me to have to wait four months in order to hear from an agent.  Four months is an eternity for an enthusiastic, go-getting, doer on speed.

Three months ago, I submitted my new manuscript to an agent in the UK.  They replied to my query letter overnight.  How flattering.  They warned me that they're backlogged and I'd have to wait four months to hear from them.  I was fine with that at the time.  I have other projects on the go, other things to think about.  At the end of the three month mark, I'm going CRAZY with curiosity.

Intellectually, I know that agents (and publishers) reject quickly and accept slowly; so the longer it takes the more promising things should seem, right?  INCORRECT! Right at the moment, the little devil sitting on my shoulder is whispering 'in four months you'll get a rejection letter and you'll be right back where you started.  You'll have waited all this time for nothing.  NOTHING!  Farm it out now.  Don't waste any more time.' That little devil knows, just as I do, that it's a (relatively) small industry.  Multiple submissions are generally frowned upon.  So I'm ignoring him and waiting…

While I wait, I'm writing a romance novel and planning the next book to follow along from the manuscript that's currently with the agent.  But I'm doing this with a despondent kind of feeling sitting in my chest.  That same little demon changes tactics and taunts 'Why bother?  If you can't sell the first, why bother with the second?'

Can anyone tell me how to lose this demon?  She's driving me crazy!