Big Red Cardigan

My last diary post touched on this (welcoming the incoming cardigan weather), but here I am devoting a whole post to cardigans, and in particular my massive, beautiful, and infinitely comfy red cardigan.

Any time it's gotten a bit cold, or I want to swaddle myself and wail like the overgrown baby I truly am, I throw on this, the king of cardigans. It's the closest I can get to wearing a duvet in public, and for that I am super duper grateful. Because it's extra large, I can wrap it all around me and waltz around as a big red blob. It also has two big, low pockets that come in very handy for carrying water bottles and small teddy bears, and it has some nice stripy detailing around the edges.

It's perfect. I am going to nap under it right now.

Autumn Light

I wanted to make some simple black and white scans this week, but I hadn't anticipated the sun shining so brightly through my window, so there's an unprecedented amount of white light in these scans. Luckily it's quite a pleasant intrusion. The sun and I are pals (sometimes).

Björk On Bread

I found this beautiful full-page photo of bread varieties neatly slotted together in squares and thought it would be a great collage background. It's from an M&S print advert, and I thought I'd mention it, because I think M&S have a great ad campaign at the moment (here's their current TV ad) - these adverts aren't patronising, they don't use unpleasant/forced humour, and M&S seem to be turning away from their over the top, weirdly sexual adverts towards more genuine-feeling adverts that focus on the beauty and design of the food itself. I think these adverts are proof that you don't have to make a harmful, annoying, or false advert to sell your product.

Anyway, here's Björk, a lizard, and some other stuff on bread.

Moon Land

There are lots of shapes and textures here again, making torn and watery landscapes of each page.  I feel like these pages are effectively building some kind of world together. There's a reasonably jumbled nature to them, which I like for its childish surrealism, but they're not without consistency. It makes sense for this happy crescent moon to be here, glowing green and watching over a cartoonish, notebook landscape.

I use the moon motif a lot, largely because I really do find the moon a source of security. Someone said the comfort I find in the moon's presence lies in its position as a constant fixture. Its continuous presence has a kind of safety and comfort to it, so I think this is why I tend to include it in my worlds as a benevolent, watching figure in the sky.

Ink Mountain & Friends

These pages incorporate lots of pretty old work I've kept, so for me it's a little odd looking at them, because everything is new and old at the same time. Stencilled Will Smith, painted book pages, a picture of me in the sea, and the quick, messy "cute eyeball" painting which spawned a song of the same name. All these things have significance to me, and now they're ripped and rearranged together, the sum of their parts - just as I am the sum of my parts, forever tearing up pieces of me to make new hybrids, new versions of me.

Diary: Cardigan Weather

This week has been full of general temperature confusion as I've had to re-adjust to the changing weather, which is firmly slotting itself into that weird place which is at once too hot and too cold. This reasonably sudden change, whilst making me feel a bit like a confused child deposited into a new body, does have some nice effects in that when forced to pay acute attention to tactility I tend to end up in this odd, simple mental place where I feel very natural and like a cool part of nature that exists amongst so many brilliant, interlocking things. Basically, I'm a happy bug who likes to drink hot drinks. I'm also reading Tove Jansson's Sculptor's Daughter at the moment, which very much adds to my therapeutic enjoyment of lots of little natural and human things around me.

Peter Pan & Stripes

When I first saw this dress I was bored after college and trying clothes on in New Look to amuse myself. I tried on some stripy things and a pair of comfy dungarees, and then this dress, which I fell completely in love with on the spot. I actually detailed this in what is both my first fitting room post and actually the very first post on this blog. You can read it here.

This dress has lots of lovely details, including the sheer fabric used on the arms and outer skirt, the cute collar, and the super sweet lace detailing. It may be all black, but it's pretty light, so it's great for reasonably warm weather and more typical I-can't-make-up-my-mind weather. I decided to wear it with these cute black thigh highs with white stripes to further the black and white theme. I think these socks were given to me by my grandma (nice one, Norma).

Me & Materials

I was piling all my bits of paper and other things back into a box after working on my journal the other day and I thought, why don't I scan myself against some of my materials? So here are some of scans of me and a tiny selection of my scrap paper.

Blue

I have one leftover tube from my old paint set: the ultramarine blue. How this became the last colour left out of all of them is a bit of a mystery, because it's one of my favourite colours, but I guess I made an effort to use up the colours I didn't like so much and ended up saving the blue for later. In light of this lonely leftover blue paint, I decided to make some blue paintings the other day and I these were my result. There's something 'off' about them, but since I used a lot of white paint too, there's a lot of beautiful, icy texture, especially in the clumpy hair of the second painting. I love the spooky, straight-on stare of the first painting, but I think my favourite detail is the nose and lips - just the right shadowy shapes.

This painting style is not one I use very often, so it feels and looks a little weird to me, but it's nice to try to do different things, because there are unique things to notice and learn about every possible style and method.

Rebellious Ladybug

YouTube is weird. I've been making videos for a while now, but I've also been wondering where my videos fit in. I find I gravitate towards vlogging because it means I get to run around and do stuff and comment on everything around me, which feels so natural and enjoyable. My vlogs also sometimes gravitate towards a more random kind of video collage style which splices fun moments together without much explanation. This approach is so much fun and feels a lot like I'm making a home video just for me.

Here's a very short and quick recent video:

Thoughts On Writing

I'm now 11 days into my sustained 70,000 word writing project, so I thought I'd talk a bit about how it's going and what I've learned.

One of the toughest things about long form writing is that you can't veer off into a different project. Most of my creative work is done in a sort of stacked way, hopping between several different things. This lets me keep motivated as I can switch to a different project if I'm getting tired or frustrated with something. The problem with a long from writing project is that you need to work on it continuously and concertedly. There can be some switching about, but you do have to make sustained progress on that one particular thing, so for me that means I have to find ways to jump about whilst remaining inside this project.

My most useful realisation has been that many novels are really several short stories spliced together - look at the symphonic time jumping of Cloud Atlas, for example, or the way Ancillary Justice's chapters switch back and forth between two different time periods. Different narratives, points of view, and timelines are present in a million novels, and these are some great ways to move to something as new and different as possible whilst still working on the same story.

As well as jumping around as much as possible within the story, I'm also keeping a separate document for short stories so if I get really stuck, I can just jump over to something totally new and different until my creative brain feels engaged enough to return to the big one. I try not to rely on this too much, but sometimes it's exactly what I need.

I keep catching myself thinking the story feels empty, but then I remember that it's inevitably going to feel that way a lot of the time when it's such a big project. When it's only 5000 or however many words out of 70,000, it's natural to feel like your story is lacking,, because you still have most of it to write and figure out along the way! There's so much I don't know yet about my expanding story, but that doesn't mean it won't get here. Some writers plan out huge amounts of their story beforehand, but for big projects like this, I jump in with a pretty bare skeleton. Everyone's different.

It's been hard to keep up with the daily word count, but I didn't set that goal to be rigid in the first place - it's just a guideline. Some days you have to prioritise other things, and some days you get ill, and some days you just need a rest. Personally, as long as I'm writing something reasonably regularly, I'm happy with that, and if it takes me an extra month to reach 70,000, I'm okay with that. If I take a long break or write nothing more than 2 sentences some days, that's okay too. I find that I really need to keep my goals fluid for them to be as effective as possible. What I like about an 800 word daily goal is that (for me) it's reasonably easy to achieve, but at the same time it doesn't seem like a huge amount of work to have lost if I don't meet the target.

Diary: Covered In Blankets

This week has mostly been about me trying to do lots of writing and being sleepy and lazy and also eating Kettle Chips.