The Cult of Ellen

New things come up and I retreat back into silence and a few bottles of wine, curling up like a curly thing. DH needs rather urgent eye surgery - stressful and scary stuff. He'll be having it done on the 8th of September iirc, and we don't know if this will be covered by Optical Express or if we'll have to pay for it. Erm.... So anyway, that reaction isn't helpful at all. I've ditched the wine and am trying meditation instead (better for my liver, waistline, head and bank account, duh). I've started up my ME diary again, keeping track of what I do and what I eat, my mood and energy levels, etc, which keeps me more aware of how I'm doing, too.

palmersperry is visiting for a few days; we've been round IKEA and have taken the dogs out to Tardree Forest for a (slow) walk. Later today we're off to see HMS Caroline in Belfast, and weather permitting, we'll be off to the Giants Causeway, the Glens of Antrim and Slemish over the next few days. Today I'm a bit tired and slow, though - trying to get my brain into gear and it's just not quite happening, eh. *shrug*

Hmm... Let's see, DH is at the end of week 9 of his 3-month probationary period in his new job; the dogs are doing fine; I caught up on my laundry the couple of sunny days we had, and I've cleaned out the parlour some (always more to do). I'm making time for meditation, writing and Duolinguo (Italian). I'm working on uncurling and staying out from under that rock. Oh, and I have a sneaky ninja slug in my kitchen (I think it's migrated out into the living room overnight) - I keep following the trail and then the trail vanishes and there's still no sign of the bloody thing. Gah!

Right, time for a cuppa, then a pootle down to Belfast.

I got almost 6 hours of unbroken sleep last night, more than I've had in a while. Slow start after everything yesterday, so of course we decided to go back to IKEA and get another one of those dog day beds. Hence more driving, lifting heavy boxes, picking up a carry out from the Chinese Court in Antrim, a bit of a row, flatpack-fu, furniture rearranging, general tidying and lots more hoovering and now I am stretched out on my day bed with Newton dozing beside me, Dante asleep on the floor on the other side of me, and there's the sound of snoring coming from the other room. I could just doze off myself, but if I do that I'll wake up in a bit and not get to sleep tonight, meh.

I have another fox cowl to finish, and Absolute 80s radio playing in the background, so I reckon that'll do me for the rest of the evening.

( Another photo )

Writing done: a very little, but at least it's some. Wine drunk: none, hurrah!

Tomorrow I shall do some tidying and some writing and generally take things easy - I'm overdue a reaction day and as I'm overtired right now I think tomorrow's it, oh well.

I took a day off from posting on Sunday, largely because I was very tired and mostly slept. I meant to start up posting again yesterday, but I looked at the clock and it had reached 1am, so I decided to post later on (i.e. now) and went to bed instead. And I forgot to put the bin out. Eh, meh, never mind. We should be all right for the next two weeks until the next general waste collection... *crosses fingers*

Dan has his parcel - he loves his copy of Where's My Tractor? and his Superman t-shirt. Hurrah! My twin wants me to put it into e-book format and stick it up on Amazon. Alas, some of the photos I've used in it aren't mine, and while I have permission from my twin to use her photos of Dan, I don't have permission from copyright holders to use some of the others, so I've been looking through my old photos to see if I have any that could replace those. I found a good photo of a Viking square-rigged sailboat which I took in Denmark on one of my glima course trips out there. I also indulged in an app for my iPad, the imaginatively titled Paper. It's surprisingly awesome and I've been playing around with it and to my surprise, despite my lack of anything approaching artistic skill, my drawings aren't terrible! *happy dance*

( photos etc under a cut because reasons )

So at the moment, I'm thinking I'll draw the illustrations for Where's My Tractor? and if I can find my stylus, I may write the text over the pictures in Paper, then pull it all together as an e-book and pop it onto Amazon.

And that's pretty much all my news, so I'll put together tomorrow's To Do list and tootle off to bed. Night, peeps!

It occurs to me that some people may find this LJ when they're looking for stories by ellenscult. Yes, that is me, but this LJ came first and is my way of keeping in touch with friends and family. Since most of them aren't too interested in reading my fanfic stories, I separated them out from this journal a loooong time ago. You can find my stories at the following locations:

• the_proofreader, here on LJ
• ellenscult at AO3
• ellenscult at fanfiction.net

You can also catch up with me (if you really want to) over on Twitter and tumblr, also under my 'ellenscult' username.

( Thinking once there was a sea here But there never was a door )

The state of my inbox: nearly 90 e-mails.

Today's reading:

• A Study in Doubles chapter 10 by Jupiter_Ash
• Reflections by KSL
• To Be a Man chapter 9 by closer

( in the wrong house, in the wrong ascendancy... )

The state of my inbox: under sixty-five e-mails!

Today's reading:

• Come at me chapter 4, by closer
• To be a Man chapter 5, by cernicalo
• A Study in Doubles chapter 9, by Jupiter_Ash
• To Shape and Change chapter 30, by Blueowl

My dad called to say one of his friends had died. Stan Barstow passed away on the first of August. He'd been one of my dad's close friends since some time in the 1950s, had been an infrequent presence in my life as I grew up, but he was a constant: kind, genial, wise, intelligent, gracious, good-humoured; a man who always had time for myself and my siblings.

He was one of the great British writers of our time; of course he was. But he was also the man who told my twin and I that he'd had a dream of beautiful women in long dresses flitting across his lawn at dusk, one summer party, making it clear that we were the embodiment of his dream. Exactly what shy fifteen-year-olds need to hear, putting us at ease among his distinguished guests.

Stan wrote A Kind of Loving, a novel that helped changed the face of English literature, following it up with other novels that cemented his justly-deserved reputation as a great writer.

He's not the only figure from my childhood to pass away; Glyn Hughes, novelist and poet, passed away at the end of May. Another of our unsung literary giants, Glyn encouraged me to write, going as far as to take my adolescent stories and offer me valuable feedback.

These men helped shape my childhood, helped shape my awareness of my heritage, of the bleak-hilled industrial background I lived among. They encouraged my literary pretensions and above all they were kind to a shy and awkward girl who fit in best among the pages of books.

RIP Glyn Hughes and Stan Barstow. Great writers both; I'll miss you.

So, I wrote a couple of pieces of short fiction. One was a writing exercise for alasdair1076 (which has had several weeks of writing group critique and polishing); the other is a '30 minute drunken flashfic' (exactly what it says on the tin). Neither of these is fanfic. Hurrah! And they're both over at my the_proofreader account. If you're interested. Apart from that, I'm in Cornwall at WriteCamp '09 with friends, attempting to get my head back into my own fiction, and occasionally succeeding. It's nice to remember that I don't suck at this, that I have actually sold stories to paying markets, and of all the things I can do, I do this best.

Of course, it'd be nice to be able to sleep properly, too. But hey, can't have everything. If the worst comes to the very worst, I'm going to grab duvets and pillows and puppy pile with anyone too polite not to get out of my way.

On days like these, my 'not quite an entire person on my own' is showing (aka being a twin, aka having been in long-term relationships from the age of 16, aka being very close to Aspergic, aka having a brain that really, really doesn't need drugs in order to give me funky out-of-body experiences).

It occurs to me, after all these years, that I don't like beds. I've never liked beds. I like piles of cushions and blankets and duvets. I love hammocks. I hate beds with a passion, but they're easier to snuggle in.

I miss ravenlas. I'll sleep properly when I get home.