Ailsa Abraham's Blog: Ailsa Abraham, page 66

Broad Thoughts From A Home: Gifts of the Spirit – a guest post by Ailsa Abraham

Broad Thoughts From A Home: Gifts of the Spirit – a guest post by Ailsa Abraham.

 

Fellow Crooked Cat writer Sue Barnard very kindly invited me over to her blog to chat about spirituality. Here is the result.

Meet My Main Character Blog Tour

Meet My Main Character Blog Tour.

The amazingly productive Jo Robinson has tagged me to take up the baton next week but this will be a very hard act to follow. Do go and read about her.

I secretly think she doesn’t sleep. The amount of blogging she does, she can’t have time but it’s all great!

Son of Cliché Rides Again

Rules of fiction-writing number (oh hell I don’t remember) avoid clichés like the plague (yes, that was totally deliberate)

Well this isn’t fiction so here are some very trite clichés for you:

We learn more from our enemies than our friends.

Without the darkness, there would be no light.

Adversity is our greatest teacher.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger (except for paracetamol overdose which leaves you with permanent liver damage).

 

Beginning to see a pattern here? Well good because yet again this has been inspired by a few exchanges on FB. It would appear that many of my good friends have been through the mill with serious health problems ranging from mental disorders to cancer. Some are fighting permanent disability or incurable illnesses. I can go with that because I have been there, done that, still wearing the T-shirt.

 

We have all discovered that being desperately ill does teach you something. It teaches you appreciation. If nothing else, it teaches you to appreciate good health if you ever get back to it. Otherwise it gives you a more profound joy in the small, simple but ultimately precious moments. The things that money can’t buy. A time of laughter spent with friends. A quiet coffee sat in the sun with a loved one. The sight of a beautiful flower or plant.

The problem with clichés is that they are only clichés because they are true.

I owe the inspirational quote below to https://www.facebook.com/UNFFTIndia?fref=photo

 

Custard comes home.

 

It is a fact long-acknowledged to be true that I cannot do anything in my life without complications and funny consequences.

Not only am I having to go around looking as if I have the World’s Biggest Bogie (Booger) hanging off my nose, today I wanted to pick up Custard, our new van.

First I was thwarted by the insurance office being closed until 2 p.m., but that was only a minor irritation. When we got up there, we handled the paperwork, wrote a cheque, got given one set of spare keys and were doing quite well.

He who shall remain nameless refused to believe that the key in his hand was an electronic one until I pointed out the padlock symbols on it. He chuckled cheerfully to himself, jumped into Myfanwe, our Renault Trafic and sped off.

I’m left asking for a photocopy of the service history etc., then go outside to find that my nice yellow van, Custard, is locked. When playing with the spare key, He who shall remain nameless had pressed the lock button. Yes, they do work over a considerable distance, don’t they?

Fortunately I had my mobile phone and could get a signal (the two occurring together is a rarity) so I rang home. He wasn’t there so I left a polite but terse message to the effect that he should haul his withered old buttocks back to the garage forthwith.

The owner’s wife, a kindly soul, took pity on me (either that or I was making their garage forecourt look untidy) so she drove me home, we picked up the spare key and shot back again. Bingo! Click! Custard is now open and I have both sets of keys, a situation I hate. However, Custard is also in dire need of a drink so I take him to the petrol pumps across the road and stand him 50 euros-worth of guzzle.

He’s a great little ride. Handles well, gear and clutch are lovely. He has a surprisingly high top speed for such a little van. We get home and I try to park him in the barn as I was instructed and realise to my horror that I have about 1cm of headroom. Backing out is going to take the aerial off and I have had enough. I down-tools, demand that a bottle be opened this evening and get on with dinner while the Nameless One re-organises garaging, puts the battery on charge and generally atones for being a dickhead with the keys.

Welcome home, Custard. Yes, I’m afraid it IS always like this here. You’ll get used to it. I have.

 

My Creative Process – The Grand Blog Tour

My very dear friend Annette Thomson of Meldrum Media tagged me to be in this blog-hop. It’s easy. I’m going to answer the following questions and then nominate three other people to pick up the baton and answer them too.

What are you working on?

Current WIP is book 3 of The Alchemy Trilogy which started with Alchemy and Shaman’s Drum. This one starts where Shaman’s Drum finished and there are a lot of loose ends to tie up because some characters from the first book have been away for a long time and are not aware of subsequent developments. The working title is Reunion as it is the book where all the character come back together again. There will be a few sub-plots and I think in style it will be more like Alchemy than Shaman’s Drum.

 2 How does your work differ from others of its genre?

In almost every way. It isn’t swords and sorcery style although there is a lot of genuine magic and ritual in it. Even though the motivation for “The Changes” is an ecological problem it is not a hard facts science book, but I did do a great deal of research on alternative fuels. There is big business intrigue but it is not a “board-room saga”. Mainly I think my work is different in that it is very matter-of-fact about the day-to-day use of magic and pagan religion. Everything is based on what I know from experience working with Wiccan covens or Shamanic practitioners, Druids, Odinists etc. As these people are very commonplace in my life, I tend to write about them as “just yer everyday Druid” in my work.

There are demons in my work too but they tend to prey on their victims’ own frailties. They are not horrror-comic book zombies and the general reaction to them is repugnance rather then all-out terror.

3 Why do you write what you do?

I started out on this kind of writing purely because it was based on what I know best. As a reader I can tell at a glance when an author has just googled info and get irritated when even then their facts are wrong. No, you cannot drive from Lyon to Calais in two hours. Also there seemed to be a gap in the market between the swords and sorcery fantasy genre and the misty legend magical genre. My characters are people you could meet in the street and some of them you might get on with. Perhaps I wanted to break down the barriers between the perception of magic-users as a different race and portray them as just people doing a job.

My next work after this will be a total departure. I want to write about where I live. Again, this will be something I know a lot about but I will enjoy having fun with observational humour.

How does your writing process work?

In a word? Erratically! I have Bipolar Condition so my energy levels are totally haywire. There are times when I don’t need to sleep at all, in which case I can write massive amounts. There are also times when I sleep 18 hours a day, no work gets done then. I tend to work in “patchwork”. I have the whole story laid out in my head, also written in longhand in chronological order. I then break it down into vital “scenes” and write the scenes as I feel inspired. Some days I might feel like writing like a man, so I work on Iamo or Adrrian’s scenes. When I have finished all the scenes that are essential, I “sew” them together, adding embellishment and other details. Often another scene will come to me while I’m doing that and I’ll go back and pop that in too. It makes producing a final M/S rather a long process but I find it the easiest way to write with my jumbled brain.

My nominees are:

Jo Robinson

and

Mark Ethridge

There is space for another nominee – if you would like to take part, please comment on the blog and I’ll include the first person to offer and add them to this list. 

And they then nominate up to three others. Simples!

I hope you’d like to take part – these tours are a good way of getting new readers to your blog.

The first two books in the Alchemy Trilogy are available everywhere! See on Goodreads

 

Bye Bye PandA

I’m sorry that my blog today is going to be a slightly sad one.

We’re closing PandA Promo. It was unfortunate that I set it up just before my car crash and wasn’t in a position to pimp for work for a long time.

Bye Bye, folks

Also, I think writers are scrimping to save their pennies for editorial, proofreading and cover-art services, so our stuff on top, reasonable as it was but less essential, broke the camel’s back financially.

All is not lost, however as Cameron is going to take over the blog we bought and as he is now working on another Jack and Rory title will have that as his blog. I’m hoping to get him back into the limelight a bit. Cancel Christmas  (over 18s only)  is a smashing detective story and is still selling despite having no publicity whatsoever for a year. The next title will be less detecting but more controversial and he is dying to get his teeth into writing it having worked out the plot completely.

So, everyone wave bye-bye to PandA and raise a glass to Cameron.

My Cameron persona

 

Happy Sunday everyone.

 

Inspired by and featuring Carol Hedges!

Carol Hedges: Hard Joyce or: Why I have Never Read Ulysses.

I am endlessly amazed by the number of times I find my blog inspiration from conversations on FB.

Today’s post by Carol rolled me up because although many of us are authors, or studied (or even taught ahem) English Lit, there are those books we just can’t handle.

One of the reasons is probably the boring, dull books that were chosen for “English” lessons in schools, certainly back in my day. Even if the books themselves were great, the method of studying was uninspired. I was lucky. My English teacher was way ahead of her time and used to use the book reading lessons as a half-drama class (which she also taught). She’d pick the girls who wanted to, rotten show offs like me, and assign them a character in the book. We would read that characters “lines” all the way through. I always got funny ones or people with silly accents like Spiros in My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell.  Those who hated reading aloud or were dyslexic could follow the book with their finger under the line and sometimes various girls would take turns in reading bits of narration.

Even though I studied English in University and taught it, many years had to pass before I realised that I was allowed to NOT finish a book. That is the “mountain to climb” syndrome that effects many folks, but then as an author I feel that if I haven’t engaged the reader by half way through they are perfectly entitled to give it up and say “Not for me”.

However there is a form of snobbishness about having to have read certain classics or “like” certain authors. It’s the same kind of intellectual snobbery that still divides “published” and “self-published” in some readers’ minds. It’s highly unfashionable and not politically correct to say you like Rudyard Kipling – well sod that, I love his work.

I fought my way through Ulysses but, like Carol, switched off the radio when BBC Radio 4 devoted the whole day to it.

How “War and Peace’ looked to me

My own “have to bluff my way through it” list are – Jane Austen (no I know I’m a woman I must love her but I don’t), Dickens because I could never forgive him for “Uncle Pumblechook” although I do quote him on a regular basis “Wot larks, Pip, eh? Wot larks!”

War and Peace defeated me  by being too long and the names being non-memorable. I had to keep flicking back to the list of characters and so gave up once I realised I was going “Cavalry Officer name sounds like salad”.

Anything that is a rip-off of anything else is a no-no with me – Tolkein wrote Tolkein and did it better. Sir Terry Pratchett is doing just fine on his own so don’t please try to copy him, you won’t succeed.

I’m also allergic to anything that is “this week’s must read” because they are usually badly written trash …I’ll just mention the number fifty, shall I?

Being something of a Maverick I’ll admit to liking airport novels (Dan Brown, Wilbur Smith etc) because sometimes we do just want a ripping yarn. Mostly I’ll try anything once (yes, that has got me into trouble in the past but the older and fatter I get, the less chance there is of that happening!) You must remember that I was stuck for months on end on Shell Tankers where the ship’s library was so sparse that one ended up reading the back of cereal packets in foreign languages just for mental exercise.

Grab my attention and you’ve got me! In this house we just read…

Bloglovin

http://www.bloglovin.com/blog/12279187/?claim=fvrzst7qrnk”>Follow my blog with Bloglovin

 

In my eternal quest to get this blog out into the stratosphere, I’m adding it to Bloglovin! Shortly to be available on Goodreads too! 

The Shaman’s Drum

ailsaabrahamwp:

Vivienne shares my love of this kind of thing and kindly mentioned my book title. I adore this article!

Originally posted on Zen and the art of tightrope walking:

The picture above is from an exhibition at the British Museum late last year. The drum is that of a sixteenth century Sami shaman, and is made of a birch bowl carved from one piece with a reindeer hide stretched over it. The paintings on it are thought to be a record of some of the journeys into the Otherworld made by the shaman.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end when I walked into the exhibition. This drum had been sung to life and it was still singing in the glass case.

This picture is of one of my drums; it’s made of Alaskan birch, carved into a bowl out of one piece of wood and the skin is elk hide. Inside there are feathers, seeds, herbs and stones that rattle when you move the drum. It’s a mini replica of the Grandmother Drum, the immense cedar drum…

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Techie twerp

Hello Goodeaders

I'm trying womanfully to arrange for this nice wee blog to agree to take posts from my main blog on WordPress.
This will join you all in to my daily musings, rants, poems and silly stories.

However I seem to have two choices. The first involves asking my dear friend from Meldrum Media to help me.

The second involves a large hammer and a lot of swearing. Having already dropped my motorbike this morning, causing it to knock over my antique Honda and break his clutch lever...I will avoid violence if at all possible.

In the words of the Terminator...I'll be back!