Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts, page 2
May 21, 2022
link.medium.com/kZYmgJWndqb
May 18, 2022
Tired. Can’t go On?
You are capable of so much more.
Hello. Well we have survived the most horrific experience of our lives. We got through it.
Editors and publishing houses aren’t sure we are ready to examine ourselves or the impact this has had on our lives. I disagree.
When Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls, several years after his wartime experiences, he wrote that the effect of writing was one which made him feel happy. How can that be? I suspect, judging from the love story in both For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms, the answer is that he was happy to revisit old friends.
Despite all the criticism levelled at Ernest Hemingway, I always enjoyed his prose. I first read him when I was sixteen, and reread him in my forties because they tell writers to read work they enjoyed, and to then work out what it is that keeps them reading. This is supposed to help us with our own writing, and this has worked for the process of writing some of my books. With others, particularly the children’s fiction, I don’t want to be influenced, so I avoid reading while writing.
That is all I have for you today. I just let my mind wander as I sit on this bench in Wales with a fabulous internet connection. (after cycling 50k over two days, the powers that be decided I needed a rest, and my chain broke). Just like nature, I am embracing that.
Have a great day. Enjoy yourself. The years do go by….
Have a pink day.
May 14, 2022
Hope for our Beautiful Planet
Dear readers and followers. Thank for sticking with me.
Sepia; the good old daysToday in Wales I saw a stunning amount of very tall, majestic trees. Thank you, Wales.
Just to let you know that I am now on Medium writing with my pen name as some of you know is Hermione Wilds.
See you there.
Hermione
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War in Ukraine: a Question of Feelings?
By Hermione Laake
March 2022
Sometimes it takes just 24 little hours for something to change visibly on the surface, when underneath all manner of hell has been invisibly boiling. For now, as it was last year, we can continue to take photographs of peaceful and tranquil settings like this one, which I took last year. But shall we post them?
I woke up to hear the words on the radio, ‘I have failed to protect my lovely girls’ spoken by a Ukrainian woman. I woke up with the thought that I no longer wish to self promote, or to promote others on twitter, not when it seems as though people are being killed in front of my eyes, and all for the sake of history.
I then heard the news that a well known footballer has given up his twitter account to a doctor who is helping victims of the Ukraine because he has millions of followers, but I have to ask you what good will that do, because I cannot listen to this news anymore any of it? Can you? Do you feel duty bound to pay attention?
Tomorrow this will be yesterday’s news, but this war is still raging and I believe that until this war ends it is today’s news. Anyway, I am revising this short discussion and won’t post it for a few days. I sense that we feel powerless in the face of other people’s desire and responsible for behaviour which is beyond our control. Is this how it felt during WWII?
Can we allow ourselves to be bystanders? That is how this feels.
I ask you, as I have already asked you in my book, BERTHA’S JOURNAL: A PERFECT IMMELMAN (sic) N TURN, what is history?
Right now it seems as though a few buildings are more important than the lives of people. I tell you they are not if we have learned nothing from history. Why must we use history to separate ourselves? Why must we insist that we are different? Sometimes there is more difference between an introvert and an extrovert than there is between someone from one country or another. It is a difference in perspective. Sometimes difference is nothing but a thought, which is why William Shakespeare penned that immortal line, ‘There is neither good nor bad, only thinking makes it so’, and that is the biggest irony. This is a war of ideas. The idea that one way is better than another.
How do I know that we are all the same underneath our petty quarrels about our history? I know this because my family are from so many different countries in the world that I have stopped keeping count. My brothers and sisters and half brothers and sisters and adoptive grandparents and I know that war is a futile thing.
During WWII my orphaned father was adopted by a Russian who was living in England. I ask you, was my grandfather a Russian? How far back in history should we go in order to right wrongs?
Why, exactly, is it important that someone has access to a world heritage site? Is it because of money or prestige? Do we kill innocent children for that? I suppose that physical objects contain emotions. We become invested in the objects that were important to our ancestors.
I have to admit that I enjoy watching the TV documentary Who Do You Think You Are. I find I learn a lot of history from watching that programme, and there is the sense of the uncanny; for example, the day a researcher discovered two ancestors with exactly the same scar.
Members of my own family have a set of scars on their chins, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover another long lost family member with a similar scar. But people’s faces light up the most when they discover two things, a kindred spirit, for example, as Judy Dench who recently discovered a link to her own love of Shakespeare, and prestige; the idea that they are linked to royalty. Another observation I have made is that people who discover long lost ancestors are hurt and troubled when, after following a line of their family to an individual, they discover that he or she met an untimely end; that their lives were cut short by some personal tragedy or event in history which they were caught up in. But this is happening as we speak. People’s lives are being lost in Ukraine minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day.
March 1, 2022
The Power of Reading, and Flying Solo
I began reading to my children when they were in the womb. I would also read my books aloud deliberately. As a writer, you are told to read aloud as you’ll hear errors better that way.
When my babies were tiny, I would type with them spreadeagled on my knees, and sometimes they would press the keys on the keyboard.
MAGIC?
I was amazed when I first read to my toddlers because they would remember words as soon as I read them aloud to them. At first they would memorise whole sentences, and later they became able to read a word as soon as I read it to them. I sent my children to tutors to learn French, Spanish, and German.
By the time they are 7 or 8 children are able to read chapter books (short books of 5 plus chapters with no pictures), alone and unaided. We read Dick King Smith, Malorie Blackman, Anne Fine, Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton, and David Almond, Lemony Snicket, and later, Rowling, Ally Condie.
Ebooks
I have been writing children’s books for several decades. This year, I was awarded an MA in creative writing with distinction.
Why not check out some of my children’s classics on kindle. You can download kindle to your phone and read them to your children today.
Physical Book
If you prefer a read alone chapter book, my award-nominated work My Friend Alien is out as a comic style paperback too. The original looks like this the same as the image above. Please consider supporting the original My Friend Alien and not the book published by a similar name as it isn’t mine. I wrote my book years before and it was originally published in an anthology as part of a collection by Ursin Press as Flight. No prizes for guessing there is flying in this book.
February 21, 2022
Design and Learning and Tests. How Can Perception of Your Skills be a Problem or Barrier to Learning?
I have spent a great deal of time thinking about perception and this causes me to write this short essay in which I pose the question, ‘are you carrying a superpower around with you and believing that it is a weakness?’
Can you find the obvious error in the drawing below?
Illustration by Hermione LaakePerception is caused by a fixed idea of something. And nothing is fixed. Well a few things are; the drawing above or a typo in a book. But growth happens. How do we grow except through asking questions which help us change our perception?
I pose this question because it is only in the last week that I have realised that some of my issues in the workplace have stemmed from my excellent visual perception.
VISUAL PERCEPTION
I was in a role which required me to use the till. I won’t tell you where, and fortunately I have worked in several roles over the years and not all of them are on my CV, so you won’t be able to guess. The system had received a recent revamp and we were in the middle of till training on various processes because I was new to this till system. This new design threw me and set me right back in the training process. My manager was unsympathetic and stated that nothing had changed. Her words were ‘It’s exactly the same.’ I remember feeling utterly confused because to me everything on the screen had shifted; some of the icons had changed colour too. You see, like that robot, Klara, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s recent novel, I notice things. At the time, I didn’t realise my visual perception might be the problem. I had no idea I had excellent visual perception. I knew that I noticed things that others didn’t because on several occasions when something was new I had pointed out potential problems with the design of a process to bosses because to me they seemed very obvious. There was no problem with the design in this case, and my three colleagues were unfazed. The processes hadn’t changed, just the design. But I didn’t forget the experience because my manager was hostile toward me. She didn’t seem to understand that my visual perception was different from hers. To be fair, I had no idea what this meant either, but my experience training staff, and supporting teaching had taught me that we all learn and think differently, and I knew better than to argue. However, I was puzzled. Surely my three colleagues could see how much the design had changed.
GROWTH
This might have been an opportunity for us all to grow. I could have pointed out all the changes had my manager realised that it was my perception that was different. Yet I didn’t fully understand what had happened myself until I took a test last week and received 100% in it for visual perception.
I connected the dots, and realised what had happened. I was able to understand my habit of a life time, which had been to arrive early at work for the first few weeks when a new manager, once trained in processes, to memorise where everything was on the till.
VISUAL PERCEPTION AND CATS
Maybe I was a cat in a previous life because I seem to need to remember exactly where everything is like a cat. If you move a piece of furniture, it is likely that I will notice it. I am also one of those people who need to leave everything out on my desk in order to remember where it is. People call us messy. But it’s organised mess, a phrase I learnt from my first manager.
The thing is that not everybody notices things unless they are obviously messy in some way. We’ve all walked past a messy garden and wondered who lives there.
Some of us have more highly tuned skills than others in a particular area, and it turns out this is a skill I have. I noticed when several icons on a screen had moved to different areas. Because I had memorised the icons and their location, I would now have to relearn both, as well as any new designs.
I wish they would test visual perception at junior school and at different stages of education. I think we would be more self aware about our skills and areas where they might cause a difference in perception. Education shouldn’t be entirely predicated on learning fixed subjects and being tested on that knowledge. Education must be about effective methods of teaching and testing.
MATHS QUIZ
I remember working at a college in recent years where a colleague was designing a maths quiz to test knowledge. She asked me to take the test. We missed a learning opportunity then too, because my colleague wasn’t testing the ability of the design of her maths test to measure the results of effective learning, but she appeared to be sure that the fact that she had discovered that I couldn’t answer a question was proof that her system of questioning was a good and effective one, when in fact I felt frustrated because the design felt confusing and contributed to my failure to answer the questions correctly. I knew the answer to the question but the design or method of presenting the questions had caused the error. A learning opportunity for us both was missed because neither of us answered the question or posed the question, ‘why did you fail to answer the question correctly? Was it because you didn’t know the answer or was it something else?’
REINFORCING ERRORS
On another occasion, I was presiding over some students who were sitting at computers using a programme to test maths knowledge which posed the same maths questions over and over again. The students answered the questions right or wrong. When wrong the whole process would begin again, but what this system was doing was embedding the wrong answer. Why? Because there was no opportunity for learning. I quickly understood this and would walk around discussing the problems with the students and how to arrive at the answer. This enabled the students to progress to a better result and learning to take place. Whereas, prior to this all that was happening was that the testing process was reinforcing the error. You need to know the right answer to progress.
On the day I was leaving this placement, I was happy to learn that the flawed programme was being replaced.
February 11, 2022
Is your writing imbued with a certain religious tone? Themes and patterns in my favourite books
I had never considered this before, until I kept having to pitch my books to agents with a suggestion about what books they would sit next to on the shelf of the book store in the query. (I am not sure what this means, except, perhaps, what is similar? What do I know like this?) This led me to ponder several questions; is this question solely predicated on the genre? How important is genre? Is there anything else at work when we write?
Take the book I have just finished writing. Well I have written the third draft of my WIP. I couldn’t find a book that was like it. I stumbled on Kazuo Ishiguro’s KLARA & THE SUN when I was researching and writing my dissertation because this was the question I was answering for my essay question and I thought, ‘oh no, someone has written something similar exactly when I was writing’. But that isn’t true. What is true is that someone has written a book about a robot, a mother and a daughter, which, coincidentally, is the subject matter of my book THE MOTHERBOARD https://herziloph.substack.com/ written at around the same time during the pandemic and reblogged (you can read an extract on the above link). But the tone is different. When I was reading Ishiguro’s recent work, I was trying to work out why it is different from my work and what I would say is that the POV of the robot, Klara is quite naive; there are blind spots in Klara’s thinking, and whereas Ishiguro is exploring the complex problem of what makes us human in his work, in my book THE MOTHERBOARD, I am more interested in our relationships with one another in the sense that I believe we are often operating in a superficial sense, governed by rules and society, which makes our actions predicated on a controlling force of which we are not fully aware, something that Freud and Jung have both written about. And this is what influences our behaviour.
As the writer James Baldwin points out in GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, Penguin, (1953), we have physical needs which seem to be at war with society’s, and in this book, god’s, expectations. With this sort of thinking we are bound to subdue our natural impulses in favour of what is right. There is quite a lot of subduing of emotions going on in Woedy Bear and there is the crux of it.
Freud differentiated this phenomenom, which I have attempted to describe in the paragraph above, by dividing the personality up into the id, the ego, and the super ego. One holding the other in abeyance, and it is thus in Baldwin’s work.
In Octavia E. Butler’s FLEDGLING, Headline, (2005), there is something else at work in the power struggle between the sexes depicted here, and that is the power that money wields in relationships. The currency that Renee has in this work is the ability to provoke desire, and to withhold the ability to quench it at the same time.
The tension in Butler’s work makes it more similar to my work THE MOTHERBOARD, although the subject matter is very different. In this work the subject, Renee is undead and reborn as a woman with latent power. Power which she seems simultaneously both aware of and unaware of, since she is in thrall to those whose desire she is the object of. This then is an exploration of the subconscious. I touch on the subconscious in my literary sequel to JANE EYRE, BERTHA’S JOURNAL: A PERFECT IMMELMAN [sic] TURN. See the link to a discussion on Blog Talk Radio below:
But what got me thinking about this work was the need to market my children’s book, WOEDY BEAR. Desire features in this book, but only in the sense that the protagonist falls in love with a teddy bear and names him WOEDY. I was told by someone who had rejected it that it was a classic (aren’t rejections strange?). I wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret that praise. By the time I received that praise, I had been querying Woedy Bear on and off with an air of restraint not unlike that of Emily Dickinson, for almost two decades. Was Woedy Bear like Paddington Bear? That too is a lost and found story about a bear. But Paddington talked, and my bear, Woedy, doesn’t. Woedy is rather like the best sort of friend that you can tell anything to and trust they won’t divulge it. Was there another work of fiction that was similar to Woedy Bear? The answer came in a surprising place, when I was sent a book recommendation by Kindle. I had download around 30 samples of books and read the first 7 pages of all of them. Only 3 had held my interest enough to make me want to read past page 12. I thought I would never find anything to read this year.
What I discovered, only this week, almost 40 years since my rejections for this work started to come in, was that WOEDY BEAR has the tone of a work which is imbued with a religious bent:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hermione-Laake/e/B00FCATON2/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
There is no reference to religion in Woedy Bear, unlike the work that was suggested to me this week, I suppose, by a Kindle algorithm, that book was, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, but still the tone persists, in the syntax, style and dénouement. It is a tone I enjoy, evidenced by my current choice of books to read on my Kindle. I suppose some might call it archaic. But I like it. I grew up with writing like that. Something tells me that you may have too. And, after all, there is no accounting for taste. What has fashion got to do with anything?
Is your writing imbued with a certain religious tone: themes and patterns in my favourite books
I had never considered this before, until I kept having to pitch my books to agents with a suggestion about what books they would sit next to on the shelf of the book store in the query. This led to several questions; is this solely predicated on the genre? How important is genre? Is there anything else at work when we write?
Take the book I have just finished writing. Well I have written the third draft of my WIP. I couldn’t find a book that was like it. I stumbled on Kazuo Ishiguro’s KLARA & THE SUN when I was researching and writing my dissertation because that was the question I was answering for that, and I thought, ‘oh no, someone has written something similar’. But that isn’t true. What is true is that someone has written a book about a robot, a mother and a daughter, which, coincidentally, is the subject matter of my book THE MOTHERBOARD https://herziloph.substack.com/ written at around the same time during the pandemic and reblogged (you can read an extract here). But the tone is different. When I was reading Ishiguro’s recent work, I was trying to work out why it is different from my work and what I would say is that the POV of the robot, Klara is quite naive; there are blind spots in Klara’s thinking, and whereas Ishiguro is exploring the complex problem of what makes us human in his work, in my book THE MOTHERBOARD, I am more interested in our relationships with one another in the sense that I believe we are often operating in a superficial sense, governed by rules and society, which makes our actions predicated on a controlling force of which we are not fully aware, something that Freud and Jung have both written about. And this is what influences our behaviour.
As the writer James Baldwin points out in GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, Penguin, (1953), we have physical needs which seem to be at war with society’s, and in this book, god’s, expectations. With this sort of thinking we are bound to subdue our natural impulses in favour of what is right.
Freud differentiated this by dividing the personality up into the id, the ego, and the super ego. One holding the other in abeyance, and it is thus in Baldwin’s work.
In Octavia E. Butler’s FLEDGLING, Headline, (2005), there is something else at work in the power struggle between the sexes depicted here, and that is the power that money wields in relationships. The currency that Renee has in this work is the ability to provoke desire, and to withhold the ability to quench it at the same time.
The tension in Butler’s work makes it more similar to my work THE MOTHERBOARD, although the subject matter is very different. In this work the subject, Renee is undead and reborn as a woman with latent power. Power which she seems simultaneously both aware of and unaware of, since she is in thrall to those whose desire she is the object of. This then is an exploration of the subconscious. I touch on the subconscious in my literary sequel to JANE EYRE, BERTHA’S JOURNAL: A PERFECT IMMELMAN [sic] TURN. See the link to a discussion on Blog Talk Radio below:
But what got me thinking about this work was the need to market my children’s book, WOEDY BEAR. Desire features in this book, but only in the sense that the protagonist falls in love with a teddy bear and names him WOEDY. I was told by someone who had rejected it that it was a classic (aren’t rejections strange?). I wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret that praise. By the time I received it I had been querying it on and off with an air of restraint not unlike that of Emily Dickinson, for almost two decades. Was Woedy Bear like Paddington Bear? That too is a lost and found story about a bear. But paddington talked, and my bear, Woedy, doesn’t. Was there another work of fiction that was similar to Woedy Bear? The answer came in a surprising place, when I was sent a book recommendation by Kindle. J had download around 30 samples of books and read the first 7 pages of all of them. Only 3 had held my interest enough to make me want to read past page 12.
What I discovered, only this week, almost 40 years since my rejections for this work started to come in, was that WOEDY BEAR has the tone of a work which is imbued with a religious bent:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Hermione-Laake/e/B00FCATON2/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
There is no reference to religion in Woedy Bear, unlike the work that was suggested to me, I suppose by a Kindle algorithm, that book was, GO TELL IT ON THE MOUNTAIN, but still the tone persists, in the syntax, style and dénouement. It is a tone I enjoy, evidenced by my current choice of books to read on my Kindle. I suppose some might call it archaic. But I like it. I grew up with writing like that. Something tells me that you may have too. And, after all, there is no accounting for taste. What has fashion got to do with anything?
February 8, 2022
Woedy Bear, a true lost and found story
January 12, 2022
#TheSilverRagusaurus
Hello followers, I hope you are all well, and I appreciate your follows and likes and shares.
I have been away editing a crossover fantasy book about two father and son relationships which I wrote in 2006 and published with KDP in 2013.
This is a short post to share the cover, and from tomorrow the book will be available on a countdown deal with KDP. As ever, this is free on the Kindle library and all reading helps me keep writing. You can read a free extract on Kindle to get a flavour of the book. They have selected a lovely section from the middle for you.
WIP – If you were an early reader of #THE_MOTHERBOARD, then I will keep you posted on the progress of that as I am currently editing that one.
This year, I gained a distinction for my creative MA with Kingston university, London.
Keep reading and keep writing. Keep moving too.
All my love, Hermione.
Thoughts
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