Tag: Books

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others self

Do It For Yourself

A fascinating tree near Red Wharf Bay. Photographed by myself May 2025

Love your neighbour as yourself

Mark 12:31

I know I’ve mentioned this verse many times before but I had a new revelation today. And this is what I love about the Bible. It is the living word of God not a static set of rules. It has something new to say to us often if we are willing to listen.

I was doing some QEC work around writing my memoir novel and exploring why I’d stopped not just sharing on Substack but stopped writing almost completely.

What came from it was that I’d got into writing for submission, for sharing with the new writing support group I met whilst on the memoir writing course, and got into wanting to make it “right” – which is another word like “enough” which is not quantifiable.

What I had stopped doing was writing it for me; writing for the joy and love of writing. At the end of last year and the start of this I just let the words pour from my finger tips and learned loads about myself as I let it flow. Yes I do have a dream of publishing it but back then my first goal was to get it written for me; was to write for myself.

So where does the above bible verse come in? Well as I’ve said before it has been translated the wrong way round. The original read “love yourself so you can love your neighbour” and as I’ve said previously if we don’t love ourselves then we can’t love our neighbours, can’t love anyone else fully because too often we are trying to love people so they like us. If I love myself then I don’t need others to love and affirm me. I like it when they do but that isn’t my reason for befriending and hanging out with them.

So it struck me in the middle of this QECing was that I need to love and want to read my book, that I need to be writing it for me and no one else, that I am doing it for me not for publication, not for anyone else, but for me. Then I will be able to write my story my way which will then be the way it is meant to be [possibly the “right” way!!]

But that isn’t just for my story but for everything I do whether that be housework, running writing groups, speaking to others, when I’m on my dog walks, driving my car, cooking tea, being with my family. I must be doing it for me not for others and if I do that then it will flow and I will be at peace and I will be kind and generous, not fearful, not checking if it “works” or if I’ve “got it right” but will just flow, will just be me, will not be doing it to get a need met.

I think it is why I enjoyed my birthday this year because everything we did was what I wanted to do. Yes there were tweaks due to dogs not being able to walk as far as they use to and my children tired due to traveling up to us. But it was tweaks for me to enjoy it more not to make it “right” and trying to please others. And guess what? Yup everyone had a good time because I was going with my flow.

Too often we are taught that we are being selfish if we do what we want to do but I think that is a lie. Most of us, if we love and respect ourselves and are doing what gives us joy, will not do harm to others but actually will be nicer people and people others will enjoy being around because we flow with what we want rather than double checking what others might want.

So I would also write that verse as “do all you do with love, peace and flow, without worrying about what others might want, and then that will give others space so they can flow around with you in love and peace”

Renly by the fascinating tree. May 2025

Categories
Little Yellow Boat my book

An Ending

February 2021 The Little Yellow Boat was published; a children’s illustrated book, words by myself and illustrations by Danielle Chapman Skaines, now Danielle Littlewood. It was fun to do and to collaborate with an illustrator. Although both collaborating and writing children’s books are not my normal genre. Also I am not a natural marketer so the whole promotion of the book and myself was not easy. It was not helped by the fact that we are in the second phase of COVID and lockdowns and whatevers so by the time everything fully lifted my initial enthusiasm had waned.

I did get copies in my local library and did manage to go to a couple of craft fayres run by friends so my book will be out there forever.

Two days ago I received this from the publishers

… it is now some time since our company published your work. During that time we, as your publisher, and yourself as the author have put a great deal of hard work into your book.

Regrettably, these combined efforts have not proved to have been as successful as we had initially hoped, and we now feel that the time has come for us to remainder your work.

This will mean that all relevant areas of the trade will be informed of the discontinuation of publishing, and all rights to the work will revert back to you, the author.

Remaining stock will be pulped …

I have about ten copies of the book still in a box in my study which I keep promoting whenever I run writing workshops but it was a very strange feeling to receive this. Not a sadness but a definite glump!

It is an end of an era moment. And I think ends should be commemorated as much as beginnings. So I will honour this moment. Hence this post.

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There is still time to purchase the book before pulping in 10 days. It is on Amazon and also on The Book Store in the UK and I’m sure can be found in the USA and other countries.

These posts are free but you are welcome to Buy Me A Coffee or buy my book 🙂

Categories
migrants refugees UK government

Salt To The Sea

I’ve been trying to write a post about this book Salt To The Sea, which is set at the end of World War Two in the Baltic.

While the Titanic and Lusitania are both well-documented disasters, the single greatest tragedy in maritime history is the little-known January 30, 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea by a Soviet submarine of the Wilhelm Gustloff, a German cruise liner that was supposed to ferry wartime personnel and refugees to safety from the advancing Red Army. The ship was overcrowded with more than 10,500 passengers — the intended capacity was approximately 1,800 — and more than 9,000 people, including 5,000 children, lost their lives.

Sepetys also says, in her notes at the back of the book, that two other refugee boats were bombed or torpedoed as well as two boats carrying Jewish prisoners of war. All destroyed by either Russian, British or American fire. She says how divers do not like to go near that area because there is a strange atmosphere due to the over 20,000 innocent lives drowned there.

Straight after that I read Slaughterhouse Five another atrocity by the Allies towards the end of WWII which murdered refugees who had fled to Dresden believing it to be the city no one would bomb because it had not strategic value. Over 10,000 people were murdered there! As many as in both atomic bombs in Japan!

I’ve been wanting to write about how these things have been hidden and explore ideas around the so-called-good-guys narrative and why this happens. But I’m afraid on Tuesday morning I was staying in a cheap hotel, put on the TV for the dog to watch whilst I had a shower and saw the news that the British government had passed the atrocious Illegal Migration Bill had been passed.

I spent the morning writing angry poetry that I must edit and do something with and I still can’t quite get my head around it all. So for now I am going to park it safely, not blog any more about it, but work on something to say because I believe, even though you are a smallish audience, I have something to say. But I need to speak clearly.

There maybe other blogs to come on other subjects that drift through my sphere but I will get back to this and will expand more on what I see is the connection to the two books mentioned and what has just been passed by the UK government

Categories
Book Review Remembering

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich

I read a lot but don’t often do book reviews. My local library tries to encourage me but I don’t. Some of the reason for that is that I got into a “doing mentality” with reading. I did the “Read 100 books in a year” and was posting them on Instagram. But it became a task. It also meant I did not want to review them as I didn’t have time as I needed to be reading the next book to get to my 100. Or with me to read more than my 100. Always have to pass the goal!!!

But now I’m just reading to enjoy. Some books too I don’t even try to finish. If they aren’t holding me then they can go. It is releasing.

This book The Sentence by Louise Erdrich though really affected me so I wrote a review for my local library which is here

But it is the last page I am holding with me where Tookie says

Together we straggled through a year that sometimes seemed like the beginning of the end. A slow tornado. I want to forget this year, but I’m also afraid I won’t remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth. Ghost bring elegies and epitaphs but also signs and wonders. What comes next? ….

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich page 374

To me in the reading of this book this is what I felt – that I have tried to forget 2020 and fears and anxieties. I had forgotten the #blacklivesmatters. Things move on. I have forgotten. Do I want to remember? Yes because if I forget the bad, sad and mad then I also forget the good, the miracles, the wonders. And to remember one I do have to remember the other.

And I would love all that has happened and is happening – the pandemic, the wild fires, increasing climate changes, the Ukrainian war, the impending economic crisis, the backward steps in Western governments, the continuing racism, etc – for this to be the “the now where we save our place on the earth.”

Categories
Books family reading World Book Day

World Book Day is on Thursday 4th March

This is a pile of books that I need to read my way through for the Celtic Studies MA I am attempting

It is going to be World Book Day on Thursday and I’ve got a post going on GodSpaceLight which I will post on Thursday but this is a preliminary to remind everyone to be prepared to spend a day immersed in a book to celebrate.

I used to love World Book Day. I say used to because it was something to do with the kids who are now all grown up. Not that my kids ever needed encouraging to read. We spent a lot of time with no TV so once they were old enough they would curl up in a chair and read. In fact my daughter taught herself to read! Yes it is true. In the bedroom her and her brother shared there was an alcove which I had painted as a book cave with a bookshelf on the end wall. It wasn’t big but there was room for a small child to curl up on the floor. She would often be found there at 7am looking through books. One day she told me she could read. Because of where we were living I know she was between 3-4 years old. Because I read to them each night I thought she’d just remembered the words so we walked down to the library – which was one of those lovely old fashioned ones that was in an old Victorian house with bay windows. Not big but the children’s section was adequate. I got her brother to choose a picture book. One that we had not had before. She read it through. He then chose another one and another. Yes she did stumble over words she had not seen before but that child could read.

So even though World Book Day was set up to encourage reluctant readers my two loved it. From HEAS, our home education support group, we would be sent two £1 vouchers. These could be exchanged for the designated World Book of that year, with either a short story by a famous author, or snippets from other books to entice the reader to something new. My two would take their tokens to our local independent bookshop with some pocket money and then spend a good hour working out what they wanted to buy. There was often discussion between the two of them so that what one bought the other could also read. That was until my son got more and more into books about the World Wars or more modern conflicts. I think he still read hers though as she stay mainly into mythologies and he’s always loved those – probably because they have good fight scenes. 🙂

Like I say they are both all grown up. He’s getting married when covid allows. She’s living with us whilst on furlough as our house is warmer than her flat. But this Christmas he bought her a book and for his birthday later this month she’s buying a book for him.

Both do not read as voraciously as they did. My son blames his fixation with Facebook which he has given up for this year – hence the need to have a book! Both of them love to have books around them. My daughter, even though she on such a limited income with furlough, and having to pay for a flat she’s not living in, is still planning to buy some books because she loves to own them. I am much more of a library person and have stacks of books from the library. I even have a dispensation that I can borrow more than the allotted twenty.

So for me World Book day holds those bitter sweet memories that all mother’s have when their children have grown up, were they miss what was but that they can see that they have done something right.

Categories
2018 being me Books choice reading

Recommended Books

I am now not going to recommend you any books 🙂 Well I might.

the bloody chamberI am reading a book at the moment, “The Bloody Chamber” by Angela Carter, which was not recommended by someone I know. In fact quite the opposite. She said she had had to read it for her book club but had not enjoyed it. It was too dark for her. I must say I am loving it. In a way she did recommend it because she said that I, and another in our writing group, might like it.

I have just given up, for the second time of trying, on “Ulverton” by Adam Thorpe because I still can’t get into it. It does nothing for me and a long time ago a friend said ‘life is too short to finish a book you are not getting into’ and that is so true. So I’m afraid once again I am going to have to give up on Ulverton, even though I am hoping to write something similar in future, which is why I keep being recommended it.ulverton

Books, like art, like music, like food, like coffee have a certain taste to them and one likes them not because they are amazing but because they fit in with one’s taste. Interestingly both the above mentioned books are Vintage Classics. I did just check that because I was about to say that I don’t like what are commonly known as classics. I do have Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” in the pile of books I have from the library. I am plucking up the courage to read him soon.

When I look back on the books I have borrowed from the library I would be hard pressed to give my best 10. There are some I don’t even remember getting, so they won’t go down. I loved Emma Healy, both her books, have been stuck by joy of catching up with “old friends” in a Raymond E Feist novella, learned all sorts of different things, realised how much poetry I have read this year. But faves? Not sure

my study
Random pile of books on the desk in my study that I have to read at some point. They will have to wait until 2019 

So as 2018 draws to a close and everyone comes up with their ‘best of …’ lists. I think we all need to be careful not to think we have missed something just because none of what we liked is on someone’s ‘best of’ list.