Viking Girl Scribbles

There's been so much going on lately. I was sick, Pumpkin was sick, twins went back to daycare after the summer holiday and I've started work again. Really, I haven't got a clue as to where to the days have disappeared on me. One day there was lots of holiday left and now here I am at the beginning of the semester. I would be lying if I said that I didn't feel stressed out thinking about school starting. Feels like I haven't planned a minute of lessons, though S and I have planned one course up to the autumn holiday ... only three courses left to plan then. I do have some ideas as to what we should be doing, but other years I’ve had time to plan some before going on holiday, having something half-ready when I get back to school in August.

Last week was my husbands last week of summer holiday and I had thought that with him wanting to be as much as possible with the kids I could get some writing done. Yeah right! Who was I kidding! Tuesday morning I woke with a sore throat and a few hours after that my voice was gone So instead of sitting down at my laptop, I lay flat out on the sofa drinking tea and feeling sorry for myself. The day after Pumpkin started to sneeze, and we had some fun nights with a very fussy baby resulting in me feeling even more poorly. All the writing and editing I had planned didn’t happen, but I did get to write some poetry.

A while ago I wrote a short story (YA): “Samuel & Alexandra”, a story of how love sometimes comes to us when we least expect it. I spent quite some time on it, writing about one page per day and skipping between the characters; one part from her, and the next from his point of view and so on. Hers I wrote as a first person narrative, his as a third person. I don’t know why I did this, maybe because I could relate to being a teen girl, but not a teen boy. I tried writing him as “I”, but the words wouldn’t come to me and I had to change back to “he” (this happens to me all the time; my male characters just won’t let me get inside their heads! Stubborn men.). They gave me more trouble than that, about three days they spent sitting in his car and not getting on with the story! I mean, come on! They could just have told me what they wanted instead of just sitting there waiting for me to get the story going again, right? Finally I asked two of my friends what they thought, their sug...