I just realised I have never shown you, dear dedicated blog reader,  the 'after' photo of my nice tidy kit, post-Raleigh expedition. This is what my bag looked like after trek (albeit one which was cut short) and 3 days survival. 

Yep, they are my bleach damaged pants and shorts. Can you spot the machete???  

A photo says more than one thousand words...

Lou x

Don't forget to find me on Facebook and on Twitter! 

And now for something completely different! One of my aims of this week to start my writing fire blazing again after a long break is to write something new and submit it somewhere. So here it is, and hopefully won't be the only thing I manage this week.

Wednesday Write-In is a new competition run by Cake ShortnSweet, some of my favourite and most enthusiastic friends in the writing world. They give you a couple of prompts and challenge you to write in with your short story, submissions the following morning. This week, I chose 'a stiff drink' as my prompt. Take a look at their website and maybe join in the competition next week!

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OPPOSITES ATTRACT

Why does she insist on a stiff drink when something happens? I’d much prefer a cigarette, but that’s the crux of our relationship; opposites attract. Breathing deeply, I accept, is half of the relaxation in smoking, but because of that, smoking always seemed the better option to me. Poisoning your liver with no positive side-effects – not with the kind of drink she enjoys anyway. No heart boosting red wine or low calorie white wine for my girl – she even refused mixers. Just whisky on the rocks, please.

A ‘good, stiff drink to settle the nerves’ was never needed more than on last Tuesday evening. We’d waited to break the news in some appropriate place at an amenable moment in time, but you know what it’s like, there’s just no good time to break some news, and sitting on a secret gets uncomfortable sometimes. There was no sitting down quietly with a nice cup of tea, letting the chips fall carefully where they may. It was more like the plate of chips had collided front-on with an articulated truck and there was mess everywhere.

Andrea, a Bristol University chemistry student, and I had met in Kavos, Greece, at the start of this summer. We’d both been on holiday with friends; her girls were enjoying a sun worshipping beach break, while my group was living for the dark hours, barely seeing the island bathed in sun. However, staying in hotel rooms adjacent to each other meant we crossed paths several times. We hit it off immediately, much to the surprise and possible annoyance of our friends (after all, we were supposed to be on a ‘mates from home’ holiday!). Although many things suggested this was ‘just’ a holiday fling, we had a fantastic couple of weeks.

On our return to the UK, Andrea managed to convince me we’d probably just started a simple holiday romance which made no sense in the real world, and we reluctantly decided to part ways. However, Southampton (home for me) isn’t that far from Bristol, and as non-soppy as I am, we couldn’t stay apart.

Now it was September, and time for Andrea to return to University for her final year. It was time we made some concrete decisions and took our lives into our own hands. After all, ten months from now, we’d hopefully both be working, both be ‘real adults,’ and life would move forward. While we were sure the world would throw some challenges (sometimes the same repeated challenges) at us throughout life, we were sensible enough, loving enough, and sure enough that we could look after each other.

Time and space develops relationships to a degree which even living in the same town could not rival. You’d hardly see us apart on the few days off we snatched, and people had become used to seeing us as a pair. People, I say, excluding the families. We have taken our time telling them of our relationship. Andrea’s father, in particular, had been positively hostile towards any past boyfriends she’d brought home, and Andrea didn’t see why her parents should have any say in her romantic status and who she chose to date.

For me, it was the contrary.  My family had always been close, and I’d prefer them to know and understand a relationship as important to me as this one. They would be supportive and happy for me whatever decision I made. A prime example was when I decided to remain in Southampton, to find a job and discontinue my studies. They weren’t overjoyed, but they let me discover what made me happy. I envisaged the forthcoming news going down not quite like syrup, but definitely not like oversized shards of Goldschlager. My family would see how happy Andrea makes me, and would welcome another daughter to add to their tiny family unit. My father would undoubtedly joke, perhaps a little awkwardly, that he was still surrounded by women, but if I was happy, he was happy.  My parents would even open a bottle to celebrate, I suspect.

As sure as I was of what my family’s reaction would be, I wasn’t comfortable with only informing one set of parents without the others having a clue. This is why we found ourselves at Andrea’s home on Tuesday night. We had decided to begin with the family we anticipated would have the most negative reaction.

Negative wasn’t the word. Repulsed, angered and disappointed; those words would have gone some way to have explained Andrea’s typically Catholic parents’ response to the news of their daughter’s blossoming relationship. I wasn’t exactly expecting the warmest reception, the first serious partner of their only daughter among a crowd of sons, but I knew there would be a gulf of difference in our two families’ reaction to our news, like two opposing magnetic poles.

That’s one thing not so opposite in mine and Andrea’s relationship. Opposite sexes do not attract.


Louise Gibney

@MissWriteUK

Find me on Facebook

www.misswrite.co.uk

I’m worried I’ve lost it. It’s only temporary, I hope, but I may have lost my writing flow.

The cause: I’ve been working abroad for 9 weeks with Raleigh International in Costa Rica. I volunteered as a Project Manager coordinating groups of 14 young people through tough challenges and demanding environmental work volunteer project.

The effect: There was little time to breathe, let alone time to write. I’ve been back a week and haven’t had the inkling to write a word.

I did manage to complete a full travel/expedition personal journal while I was away, so it wasn’t like I haven’t written anything in the last few months, but it was hardly my normal cup of tea and hardly creative. It was more of an outlet for my emotions and a way of recording things so I had more memories a month or year down the line to hang on to. However, added to the small pre-expedition ‘dry’ period during which I single-handedly ran my town’s first literary festival (A Write Good Festival), sorted all my medical vaccinations, packed my kit, and visited friends and family before I left, I haven’t really written anything constructive for about 12 weeks now.

I’ve even hosted my first Towcester Writers’ Group meeting since I’ve been back, but I didn’t have any time to write anything before we met (3 days after I landed back in the UK) so didn’t feel overly inspired or even as much of a participant as I usually felt in the evening’s activities. That was partly due to my lack of new material, but I can also hopefully blame jet lag. The group did well though, I am glad they’ve been writing in the absence of their Chair!

How I plan to get my flow back

I know practicing writing is the best way to improve and to get in the groove to write more and more. I want to be as prolific, no, more prolific than when I paused creative production in June, but just need the kick up the ass to get moving again. I’m hoping secretly that this blog post will re-ignite something and the flood gates will open. Minus the metaphors. If anyone has any tips on how to get the brain going again, do comment below!

This week I will try the following to re-ignite my passion and creative flow:

Write a blog post – first job’s almost ticked off the list already

Write a (short) letter – today – a postcard to Costa Rican friend. Any kind of writing might spark some ideas or impromptu prose.

Work on improving an existing short story I never entered anywhere and submit it somewhere. I haven’t entered a competition since the Spring and feel like a challenge.

Start something fresh - the stories I have from working with Raleigh International should inspire me something… ‘Girl Meets Jungle’, anyone?! Kidding…

Catch up on reading the writing related blogs I follow. They’re crammed full with inspiration and tips on how to improve and sustain your writing. I recommend taking a look at my latest discoveries:

    1.  Elope From Harm  @JARiley92

    2.  Novel Girl @RebeccaBerto

    3.  Commas and Colons 

    4.  Warrior Writers @KristenLambTX

I'll leave you today with a quote from Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast'.

“It was wonderful to walk down the long flights of stairs knowing that I’d had good luck working. I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was started on a new story and I could not get going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ”Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”

Thanks Big H! I’m going to get started!

Lou x

www.facebook.com/louise.gibney.writer

@MissWriteUK

Image courtesy of Phillip Vickers.