Well, I am finally trying to take the advice of my good friend Mr Spicy Cauldron, and use this blog as a writing diary. So, I can bare my writing soul live on the net....agh! I guess that this is my chance to reflect on myself as a writer. Where have I come from, where am I going, how am I progressing??? Goodness knows. I have written since I was a little girl, for years though I really only wrote poetry. I have begun now to move into prose as a medium of choice, skirting somewhere along the long-short-story and short-novella route. I think that's just because I'm too chicken to begin to call anything I am writing part of a novel...... I wrote from childhood really non-stop until the age of 28, including a few short creative writing courses, then the Community Arts course (Which is where Andy Spicy Cauldron and I met). Then I moved to France, and when I left, I lost most things I possessed, including the precious file full of writing, some of which dated back to when I was 11 or 12. In France between work and motherhood, and the strains of a difficult relationship, I never seemed to get time to write. It is only really since I came back to England in 2003 that I have had 'room of my own' and time of my own to start again. I find, unbeknown to myself, that my writing style has completely changed overnight. I also find that my writing seems to write itself, in a way. I am directed by it, it is not directed by me, it seems to find its own path. My writing has always been a kind of catharsis, in very simple ways as a teenager, for the chagrins of love and the troubles of stroppy adolescence. Now it is something much deeper, my way of working through all the black dogs and demons in my head, making sense of them and of myself. Obviously, a lot of people, my family included, see me as completely deranged for wishing to pursue this. They can't understand why it is important, or they think that it is something that you should have grown out of, a childish thing to be put aside when you are being a 'grown-up'. I love the look on peoples' faces when you tell them what the MA is in. Lots of lame jokes about being the next Helen Fielding, or a look of total incomprehension. This is part of me, part of who I am, like my silly clothes, my strange musical taste, or my obsession for Sylvia Plath. When it is taken away, part of me has gone, and I don't think I will ever let anyone do that to me again......