Bloody Writing

Posted on by taniacreations

This is something I’m writing in my book… a manuscript now in the second draft. Something I hope to have ready to send to publishers by the end of the year or early next year.

The book is written in second person, the older me, talks to the younger me, putting in perspective the conquest of the consistency in creative process I have achieved and how I have gotten there.

This is an extract:

“Do the best writing that you can with the time you have.

It will always be a work in progress.

The second level of brain dump is the first draft. You must hear what all the famous writers say about this. It will never be any good, you can’t be worried about making it good or it won’t come.

You have to let it free to be bad, so it can be born, dirty and bloody and screaming into the world. This messy ugly thing, that will become a work of art one day, when it is fully grown.

It has to be completely free to cause pain, and to burst blood vessels, to make you scream yourself hoarse like only childbirth can.

Remember that this level of freedom in the writing is the most enjoyable time of the writing journey if you let it free. Remind yourself of that daily while you are in that part of that journey because it doesn’t last.

Soon enough you will get to the revisions, editing, criticising, workshopping and the freedom will be curtailed.

Remember what you want to achieve with your writing, you want to set people “on passion” about their artistic pursuits. Remember and write until the blood taints everything and the child comes forth.”

Ducks in a Row

Posted on by taniacreations

I’m in between jobs, my ducks are aligning for the new position, so fingers crossed, all will happen soon.

I’m envisioning a place full of people for whom I will bring radiance every time I’m at work, and who will be wells of inspiration and engaging conversations for me; while together we will make the world a better place.

Meanwhile, I see myself having a few days where I can become a full time writer. I’m having days of writing, publishing, doing online courses on how to create an e-pub file, and nights of dancing or roller skating; swimming in the middle of the day, or sitting at coffee shops with my tablet for hours, or going to libraries… 

Ah… life as it is meant to be lived as an author. 

Wake up without a set time, the freedom of it all, it’s humbling and makes me so profoundly grateful. 

I have been doing the same for a few years on my writing days, once a week, but still, it’s good to do it days on end. Even if I have done it before while on holidays, or on writing-retreats-at-home that I created for myself during the lockdowns, still, this feels so unique. 

I’m taking this fleeting time at its fullest. It is as if I’m inhabiting a house for the first time that has always been mine, and now, I’m calling it Home. 

Where the Ripe Fruit is

Posted on by taniacreations

My writing intuition is pushing me towards writing about dancing and publishing old writings I had about the scene. I’m not sure why.

I’m overflowing with ideas suddenly.

I’m working on so many projects, it’s hard to fathom where the energy should be focused on, so I trust where the inspiration goes.

I take note of the ideas, I capture what comes. I trust.

And deliver what is ripe to be collected and proudly displayed.

Sensuality abounds.

www.taniacreations.com\the dancing bug

Going Verbal

Posted on by taniacreations

I think most days you forget that with each action, reaction, decision, word, you make, take, utter, you are deciding who you are that day.

Most days you function in the automatic, being the same person you were yesterday and the same person people around you — based on the image you have created of yourself externally — expect you to be tomorrow.

In reality, every day, at every moment, you are deciding who you are to be. Every day I can decide, for example, if I will be a powerful storyteller, or if I’m a being amidst chaos at work. 

Week after week, I’m choosing the storytelling path, and recently, I woke up inhabiting the same body, in the same bed I had gone to sleep, but with an idea so powerful, that it has been transforming my life since.

This idea is making my storytelling going verbal, oral I mean, like our forefathers. I have several projects cooking up, watch this space, (this is a keyword, more on that later) and I am preparing for it!

The Snowball Experience in Writing

Posted on by taniacreations

I was talking to my best friend the other day and we were wondering if the concept of snowball was for real. We remembered the snowballs you see in cartoons, rolling down getting bigger and bigger getting memento and engulfing bears, beavers and other characters.

When I decided to go skiing we decided I had to make an experiment and we laughed with the imagination of me releasing a small little ball at the top of the mountain and it growing taking many skiers before it got to the base of the mountain.

snowball trail

When I went to the top of the world I make good on our promised and released the ball. I made sure there was a structure on the way to stop the disaster from happening. I released a small one, the size of a tennis ball and it rolled surprisingly quickly, getting slightly bigger and rounder. But it got stopped by any imperfection on the snow surface. A ski trail, a slight depression was enough.

I think that if the balls were bigger, at least big enough to not be stopped by shallow creases on the snow, it would become a cartoon-like snowball. It was at least as large as a soccer ball…

That got me thinking about writing and the way you need to get to a certain body of work before your ball rolls without being stopped by any intersession. If you take the time to create your soccer ball, eventually, things will become easier, growing and rolling unimpeded.

You will still need to keep creating and offering the ball enough snow-words to amass and keep going.

One little ball won’t go very far, but a good sized amount of writing will get you somewhere with many surprises and new characters being picked up on the way.

Up the Lift

Posted on by taniacreations

I’m going up the lift, the skis weighting heavily on my feet, feeling happy. I’m looking at the slope below me and writing what I see in my head…

Group of students

Fallen skier

Fallen snowboarder, bum down

Mom with the pink hair and the little girl who gains mastery each time

Snow fight

Fallen snowboarder, bum up

Skier almost in a split

Father trying to untangle the baby’s skis both feet are looking backwards with skis firmly locked

A boy skiing with a pair of extra skis on his hands

Fallen snowboarder, making snow angels, completely given up

Little boy running down with no skis screaming ‘Jaaaaack! Hey Jaaaaack!’

‘Mommy, mommy, can you wait for me?’ I hear. I look downhill and mommy is sprawled on the floor, she couldn’t move if her life depended on it. Guess she will wait.

A little red bullet with orange helmet flies straight down bawling ‘INCOMING! INCOMING! INCOMING!”

What Happened to Orble.com?

Posted on by taniacreations

Orble.com, a large community of bloggers, disappeared overnight taking with it years of work and sweat of thousands of writers.

What I find strange is that I couldn’t find anything explaining what happened. No chat over the internet, no emails advising it would happen.

It is so disrespectful to the writers. I know it was a free community but there is responsibility even if the currency wasn’t money. We have offered the community our most precious gift, our talents, passions in words. Even a post-the-fact announcement would have been better than nothing.

In my last statistics report, from the 27th August, 2015, one of my blogs “Aussie Folly” stated:

Rank for www.orble.com (Aussie Folly): 477 out of 21910

21,910 blog sites gone…

I am fortunate to have had all my writings backed-up offline but it still makes one sad to see the history, the work I have done, simply vanished. I noticed things were going badly once the special domains went offline and I managed to copy the main blog here.

In the end this has made me move to WordPress and learn how to make the best of it. It gave me incentive for the change and developing new blogging skills and knowledge.

If you have been an Orble blogger and knows anything of what have happened please post a comment. Just knowing more about it would help with the feeling of loss not only mine but of all the community members.

New WordPress Writtenlife, Away from Orble

Posted on by taniacreations

Over five years ago I took over a blog inside the Orble Community. I have also created a few others. I wrote in Writtenlife at least every 60 days to keep it active; I have accumulated 85 posts in total. (There were posts on the site writtenlife before I took it over, that is why the final number is higher than my 85 posts.)

One day it simply went offline. I tried everything to get in contact with the community’s administration team and nothing worked. I posted inside my other Blogs (http://www.orble.com/orble-where-is-my-blog/) to try to get them to contact me but it seems they are running on automatic.

I find it very disrespectful. They let the domain name lapse and I couldn’t get it anywhere either because it is still registered to them or because someone else got it.

I decided to move everything across to WordPress. It has been a time consuming job, copying the text, finding the images (or as close as I could) inside my old files, noting how many votes I had in Orble, the date and time they were published. I wanted to keep as close as I could from the original for historical data.

But finally here it is! What a sense of achievement! This is the new blog, ready to receive my new writing thoughts.

Here is the final statistics of the Orble Site:

149 Posts + 81 Comments + 10,735 Votes

“Don’t Dis my Ability” – “Disabled” people are Super-Humans!

Posted on by taniacreations

How many times have you heard: ‘don’t complain, there are lots of people worse than you.’

I hate this phrase because it can make people not try for better things or a better life. But I have to agree that not being able to use my left arm for a few days (I’m a rightie) is a ridiculously small problem.

I feel like an idiot because things that were so easy and quick are turned into a drama. Fixing my long hair for example, I look like a mess with a tiara but it’s the only thing I manage to put on. Even though, I put it right inside my eye once…

I’m eating on paper dishes, just so I don’t have to clean them; and I got really envious of my sister just by seeing her wash a knife with both hands.

I’m in a constant state of alert, looking everyone around so they don’t accidentally strike my arm; children specially; and people not holding themselves firmply on the bus.

I’m avoiding crowds and I cross the street if I see a drunk coming in my direction.

Because of all that, and a few days into sporting a fractured arm, I got to the conclusion that people “worse” than I am, are actually much better.

Someone that manages to live with one arm, is actually a super-human as you can say this person has an “extra-human” ability, wouldn’t you say so?

Now I really got what that amazingly intelligent advertisement campaign was saying… even calling it a “disability” is inexact.

Whatever a person has to compensate for, it means he or she has something more than the rest of us. This is coming from someone who is typing ridiculously slowly with their dominant hand and feeling the meaning of this on her skin.

Read later today the story about this amazing guy dancing at the Sydney Salsa Congress last night… super-human for sure! (See: Super Human Salsa Dancer Don & Rae)

(Orble Votes: 54)