OK, so it’s just me going on a summer holiday, but I got to sing the song in my head and that’s all that matters 😛

Once again it’s time for me to bid you all adieu for a little while. At least this time it’s not because I dying of some mysterious mojo-sapping lurgy

When I tell you that this is the first proper holiday I will have had since 2001, I hope you will appreciate how much I am relishing the prospect of two whole weeks where I don’t have to work, or study, or do anything other than things that amuse me. The first couple of days I am going back to the Homestead to spend time with the Triffid Tamer (my lovely Mum) then I am off to Guernsey for a week.

This all has the glorious side effect of making me internet-less for all of that time. Partly I have no choice in the matter: the places I am going have no internet access (the Homestead is still on dial-up and that is just too painful to count and who knows what the hotel has to offer). But even if the places I was going did have internet access, I wouldn’t use it. I want two weeks where I am not chained to my inbox, blog, and a gazillion other websites. I want two weeks of unhooked peace and quiet where I can wash the stress from my job out of my brain, unkink my back from the horrors of my office chair, and maybe even get some writing done.

Yes, writing. Not blog writing, not short story writing, but a full on, mulit-thousand-word book/novel/fiction-piece which I have had brewing in my head for years now. I have had this entire world, sitting there, populated with people who want me to tell their stories, but I just haven’t had the umph to do anything more than write snippets and glimpses here and there. Finally I think I’ve got to the place where I’m capable of doing them justice on the page.

I at least owe it to them to try.

You see, I have this ambivalent attitude towards writing. I love it and do it constantly, even when it’s just in my head. At the same time it bugs me and haunts me. I need space and a relatively awake brain to write well. Writing whilst stressed I can just about manage after a fashion, but writing whilst exhausted I can’t. Work being what it is, I’ve been averaging 40 hour weeks for the past ten months, and they’ve all be frantic and stressed 40 hour weeks to boot. Yes, I know that it could be a lot worse and I’m not complaining. There is no way you could say I was bored in my job and that’s a wonderful thing to be able to say, but it does mean that when I get home I barely have the mental energy to make a cup of tea, boil some pasta and collapse in front of SG:1, let alone write the next great Sci-Fi/Fantasy trilogy. *

So I’m taking two weeks to go into full hermit mode – just me, (hopefully) good weather, a quiet beach, a pile of notebooks, and the PocketCalculator. At the end of it I want to have something approaching at least a first draft, but I’m not kidding myself. It’s been seven years to get this far, I don’t think two weeks is going to make that much difference. But it will be nice to give it a go.

Whilst I’m gone, things are understandably going to go a bit quiet around the place. I’ve asked Neko and Moose to keep an eye on things, rescue comments from moderation, kill the spam and things like that. They may guest-post, they may not. It depends if inspiration strikes them, though both have said they will do a Sunday Roast to keep things ticking over.

I do also thoroughly recommend that you keep an eye on Tumbleweeds as I will be twittering on occasion, and that compiles them all into a pretty, readable format.

I will be back in Meadow Towers and firmly jacked in to my virtual existence on the 31st of August.

Till then, Tally Ho, Pip Pip and Bob’s your uncle 🙂

Endnotes:
Don’t worry, it’s not a trilogy. I have this distaste for everything being in trilogies – just because it’s a genre book, it does NOT mean it has to fit into three, damn it!

I want to tell you a story about how golf balls changed the world

The story starts on an inner city housing estate, twenty years ago. Pretty much any image you’ve got in your head right now about “inner city housing estates” is probably doing an adequate job at describing the scene. Deprivation. Vandalism. Hostility. Fear.

Then in one house at one end of the estate, one of the residents takes a chance and talks to his neighbour. They share a joke over the fence. Let their kids play together. Give the other a hand when a car fails to start on a cold winter morning. Provide a friendly cup of tea when a day hasn’t gone so good.

Fast forward to today.

Now that one end of the estate is a nice place to live. There’s little crime there. People talk to each other and they celebrate their successes and mourn their losses as a community.

One man looks beyond his street however and sees that, really, things are still pretty dire one block over and he knows there is a way to go.

As he looks out his front window most mornings, he sees a young lad walking down the street carrying a golf club. The suspicious part of him could find it easy to think what the curtain twitchers think – he’s a yob, a trouble maker, just out looking for something – someone – to bash up. He knows the kid has a reputation but few kids on the estate haven’t got a reputation. So he refuses to listen to that part of his mind and pops down the local sports store and lays out £2 on a pack of four golf balls.

Next time the young lad walks down his street, the man steps out of his front door and calls him over. “You like golf, right?”
“Love it!” the young lad’s face lights up. “I go down the playground every day and practice”.
The man hands him the pack of golf balls. “Take these. I’m not going to get the use out of them…”

And the young man walks off down the street with a grin on his face and goes to the playground to practice with balls he hasn’t had to nick off anybody. The next time he walks up the street, he gives a wave to the man. Then he stops and has a chat one morning. Later on, he brings his father over to say hello.

Now the next street over is getting to be a nicer place to live. The people talk to each other and they celebrate their successes and mourn their losses as a community.

The man looks out of his front door and sees some kids from three blocks over running down the street with a patched up football. He goes down the local sports shop and lays out £2 for a new ball.

Next time the young lads run down the street, he steps out of his front door and calls them over.
“You like football, right? My grandchildren don’t play with this any more, why don’t you have it?”

True story.

Perhaps there comes a time in every bloggers life where she needs to sit back and have a long, hard think about what she is writing and who she is writing for. I know I reached that point this past week.

I’ve said before that I don’t care about my audience, that I write for me and that still holds true. I say nothing on this blog that I wouldn’t say to someone’s face if I had to. What you read is what you get in any world, real or virtual (online I’m minus my planet-sized insecurity, but I have a crew of people offline doing their best to cure me of that).

And now I feel I have to hold my tongue.

I guess it had to happen. You get a readership that spans everyone from your father, your colleagues, your friends, to people you went to primary school with and others you have never even met, with a minister thrown in for good measure, not to mention everyone in between – commonsense dictates that you should pull a few punches. Not step outside the bounds too much. Play it nice.

Simply put, I’ve got to face the fact a fair few of the people who might end up reading Bright Meadow are going to think I’m a heathen sinner on the fast track to a firey place where all the sunblock in creation ain’t gonna help me.

Which actually is ok in a bizarre kind of way. So I’d rather not end up in whichever Circle is reserved for infidel bloggers, but I’ll accept I could be way off base with my lifestyle. I’m not going to call people on what they believe just so long as they return the courtesy and don’t outright preach to my face.

(If you just can’t restrain yourself on that score, please take it to email and not the comments – some things should be personal and telling me the way I live my life is wrong? That’s personal).

It doesn’t help that people who say I rock also think I’m going straight to hell, however they’ve made their choices along the way, same as I’ve made mine, and who is to say they are wrong? I try to live my life the best way I can just as they are living theirs. We’re just working off a different script is all.

But just because I don’t talk about my beliefs that often, it doesn’t mean I don’t have them. And at times it doesn’t mean I don’t want to reach into the computer screen and wrap my fingers round the throats of some patronising bigots who’s words I read.

But I don’t say anything.
Because I’m the friendly one.

There are times I am sickened by the people I am involved with, the people I spend time with and the things they say and do behind closed web-doors.

But I don’t say anything.
Because I’m the nice one.

My boss said it true when we were giving a presentation the other day about the work we do: it’s not the situations that get us down – it is the people who disappoint us. The narrow minded, the self absorbed and the ignorant.

Is it wrong for me to want at my little piece of the internet to be friendly, warm, welcoming, peaceful? To be a place where it doesn’t matter if you’re gay, straight, bi or interested in aliens covered in purple polka dots? Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Haven’t-Got-a-Clue, Couldn’t-Care-Less? Black, White, Purple-Polka-Dotted-Alien?

I really don’t care. Just so long as you have a nice word to say to your fellow readers, you are welcome. From the bottom of my heart I mean it. I truly cannot comprehend people who say hurtful things because they can. It escapes me. It depresses me.

Why it should be that the insignificant minority can trample my soul into the dust I do not know. The good should outweigh the bad, but it is the bad that keeps me up at night. I try to surround myself with people who make me soar and somehow the demons keep shouting down my better angels.

And I do not say anything. I do not rock boats. I sensor my own words that are screaming inside my heart because… It is who I am.

But I think there are times I should say things and I don’t because now Bright Meadow is what it is. It isn’t the place to unleash the sarcastic, vitriolic, seething beast within me. I don’t know where that place is, or even if it should exist at all, but I know it isn’t here. And just occasionally I wish that right here, right now, I could say some of the words I have bubbling up inside me.

I want to be able to fight back – to say I feel insulted, hurt, betrayed. Or to call people out for the horrendous things they say to other people – to say no, it’s not alright to say that, being a self-proclaimed cocky bastard is not clever, funny, or sexy. I want not to have to clothe my words in passive/aggressive ramblings written late at night when something has pushed me over the edge. I want not to try and say something nice about someone only to have it thrown back in my face twenty times over by the trolling element.

I want not to be in the situation where I type a response to something someone has said then hesitate over the ‘post’ button, and more often than not reach for the ‘delete’ button. Cas and Bright Meadow have built up a reputation, for better or worse and I don’t want to bring it all tumbling down around my ears because of something I said in an unguarded moment.

But why should I have to be the one who puts a gag on my tongue and my website?

We all choose our words for our audiences and the stages we talk from. It is part of being an adult and part of living in a society. Whilst I truly wouldn’t want it any other way, to borrow words from someone I’ve adored for a long time now – it’s my headspace people and I’m just letting you camp here a while. Just because I’m not saying something it doesn’t mean I’m not thinking it. And if I can restrain myself and refrain from ripping you a new one, why can’t you do the same?

Because I need cheering up – not only did my back totally implode over night leaving me unable to my torso or do simple things like lifting up a cup of tea without wincing, but office politics are making life nasty (damn open plan offices!) – I am going to ask y’all to do something for your beloved Cas.

I know that lots of you read the blog on at least a vaguely regular basis. I know that at least 100 of you are munching on my RSS feed fairly consistently. I expect there are lots more who read Bright Meadow the old fashioned way but I have no way in place of tracking you. But only a few of you actually comment.

So I’m asking, no begging that a few of you come out of hiding and say hello. I won’t be bribing you with prizes for the best comment (I’m too much of a Scrouge – in a cute, British way of course), but I am not above resorting to guilt…

I am in severe need of love, appreciation and an ego boost right now. So give it to me!

Oh, and this goes double for those of you who I KNOW read the blog but who have yet to say anything on it. Yes Mr Godhead, I mean you 😉

If y’all are very, very nice to me I might just tell you the tale of Baby Cas, Big Brother, and the Optimus Prime robot…