Holiday Reading

I’m going on holiday soon to an area that I’ve never visited before. We’re off to Hastings, and one of the things I always do before any vacation is to research what’s there and who used to live in the area. After I’ve done that I try to find some holiday reading that is relevant to where I’m staying.

Apparently Dickens was fond of Hastings and gave readings at the old music hall (which is now a Yates’s Wine Lodge). The source I’m using online says “Hastings features in many of his works” but fails to identify which ones.

Another son of Hastings appears to have been Lewis Carroll who, in spite of being born in Cheshire, spent time there as a student with his good friend the artist Harry Furniss.

Catherine Cookson moved to Hastings as a young woman when she became laundry manageress of the local workhouses (later a hospital) and was married in the town. She’s a Northerner really though, and most of her books, as far as I am aware, are set in Northumberland (or at least Tyneside and higher latitudes).

Dante Gabriel Rosetti stayed in Hastings in the 1860s and apparently married Elizabeth Siddall there but he’s an artist. I suppose I could find something non-fiction about him and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood but it’s not really what I want.

Six miles east of where we’ll be staying is the town of Rye, which also has a lot of literary connections. The town lays claim to several such as Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H G Wells, G K Chesterton and E F Benson, who wrote the Mapp and Lucia series.

So what does everyone think?  Which of the many literary giants with links to East Sussex should I choose?

Very well then, I contradict myself

The writer who needs a home of her own is not the one who composes press releases and promotional leaflets. She's the creative writer who is trapped inside someone who has to work at short-order writing in order to earn a crust. This one has to write because she has things to say, ideas teeming around in her head that need to be given voice. I have often been accused of having a butterfly mind and flitting from one idea to another but that is not really a fair assessment. True, there are lots of ideas in my head and they can sometimes seem to be a little random, but that is because there was nowhere to lay them out neatly and let them take their proper form and order.

Some of them have been released onto scraps of paper in the past. There are samples of my prose all over the country. I have been a journalist and have had many by-lined pieces published. The nature of the work means that I am on record in the British Library. Even I have difficulty accepting that idea. My name in print (or more probably microfiche or electronic records by now) in the nation's repository of words. My work alongside the likes of Dickens, Beowulf, Shakespeare. Maybe not on the same shelf, in fact probably not even in the same room, but in the same store. Albeit at some distance!

But even before I was a journalist I wrote. As a child I entered story contests (and won sometimes). I kept diaries as a teen. I created scrapbooks and projects and wrote endless pages of dreary poetry about how life was so unfair and nobody loved me. It wasn't very good. But it was all grist to the writing mill. I would turn out strings of words and sometimes people would say they liked them and ask to read more. And so I realised that I am a writer. That is who I am. And so it became my job as well as my passion and so it has become my life.

Words. Words, words and more words.

And they are bursting out of my mind and down my arms and into my fingers and in this modern age they are being translated into electronic beeps and blips that appear on computer screens all over the world. Sometimes people say they like them and ask to read more.

And that is how this blog came about. Because I realised that the readers who want to see my writing do not want to read recipes or look at my paintings or hear about how I had an argument with the people at the insurance company or lern about what I buy at the supermarket. All of that can stay in the original blog.

This one's all for the writer in me.