(ooh, this one-a-day thing is harder than I thought it would be!)

I’m feeling monumentally crappy right now and the only thing that’s keeping me from annihilating the world and it’s dog is a tasty flapjack from the local bakery. MMmmm sugar. So I thought I would do the neighbourly thing and post a trusty recipe for flapjacks. Men, take note – make a batch of these for the hormonal woman in your life, and you’ll be safe.

For a while 😉

You will need

• 250 gms margarine
• 8 tbs golden syrup
• 500 gms porridge oats
• or
  250 gms porridge oats & 250 gms rolled oats

How to make them

1. Melt margarine in large saucepan
2. Add syrup and keep heating slowly till all dissolved and mixed in
3. Add to oats and stir
4. Press into greased and floured baking tin
5. GAS MARK 4 for 20-25 mins till golden brown
6. Cut immediately into size desired
7. Leave in tin till cool

Tips

• Don’t let the butter/sugar mixture boil as you don’t want caramel/toffee! Well, you might, but that’s a different recipe…
• Don’t use a non-stick tin. You cut the flapjacks when they are still in the pan, so you’re just gonna bugger up that fancy tin with knife cuts
• Do leave the flapjacks to cool totally before you take them from the tin. It might be tempting, but they have little-to-no structural integrity when warm, so you’ll just end up with a sticky-oaty-mess. Tasty yes, but not very nice to look at!

Oh me-oh, oh my-oh, oh Cleveland Ohio…

Man I love The West Wing, but you know what? I don’t think I love it enough to dream about it. Especially as I haven’t watched any episodes in a good year or so. Despite that, the other night, I dreamt about The West Wing. Not a particular episode of The West Wing you understand, rather the whole universe of the show. I even referenced an old episode when our political opponents pulled a particular trick, and our side was grumbling. I said “well it worked for us, so why shouldn’t they try?” to a very aggrieved Sam Seaborn.

Even in my dream, I knew I was in a television show, but it was also the real world, and that was fine. Seemed perfectly logical to me. As did the bit of the dream where I was trying to persuade a grumpy American publisher to publish my authors book by getting the author to bully him into homing a stray dog… Then humiliating him by giving the dog to a friendly homeless couple… Oh, and this was set in a bizarre amalgam of Oxford, Glastonbury and Street.

Because that all makes PERFECT sense, right?

Yeah, not really. Which gets me to my point – describing dreams is hard, almost impossibly so. Always the truth that you saw and experienced behind your eyes slips away till you only hold a bare ghost in your fingertips. And that is what writing is. You have the idea and the story shouting in your head, but whatever you finally get down on the page is the palest of reflections.

Right now I’ve got one poor characters death scene fixed, vividly in my brain. I’m trying to get it out and into the draft, but it keeps fighting me. It’s so upsetting in my head, I don’t want to keep going back into it to get the fine details. So I sketch over it, and then when I read it back I can’t tell if it is making a clear image in my mind because I am writing it well, or if the words are just an aide memoire, and my memories are filling in the blanks.

But isn’t that what all reading is? Filling in the blanks, interpreting the spaces in an authors work with your own experiences and desires?

Before you all start telling me off for falling off the post-a-day band wagon before it had even got rolling, I should have made it clear: I meant a post every week day. Part of the reasons I stopped the Roasts was that they were just taking up to much of my weekends.

So now we’ve cleared that little misunderstanding up, what to talk about today?

Well, I am feeling rather 🙁 because lots of Americans have been hiding from me. I’m starting to think I smell or something! Perhaps they know if they get me on the phone I will lull them into a false sense of security with my cute British accent, then *wham*!

Or not. Still, it’s hard to stay cheerful after a week of no responses. Sob.

Now, despite the fact I haven’t written a Roast in a long, long time, I still collect links constantly. So I figured Monday could be Movie day? Lots of trailers (I know this will please Abi at least!)

Up grumpy old man, ballon, kid. Sillyness.

The Cake Eaters

Funny People – I’m on the fence about this one. Could go either way.

Public Enemies – Johnny Depp and Christian Bale. Come on!

Love the Beast – Eric Bana being silly about a car. Adorable. And hot.

Gigantic

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past – I must have been in an odd mood when I bookmarked this one.

Dragonball Evolution – even my love for James Marsters, which is pure and never-dying, cannot make me want to watch this movie.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen – I found myself trying to defend Transformers 1 at my brothers BBQ on Saturday. That will teach me for trying to convince geeks the film was good! I just like Michael Bay, ok? Hot men, women, cars, robots, explosions… There is nothing else I NEED in my movies!

Alien Trespass – one for Moose with her B-movie obsession I think 😉

500 days of Summer – so the synopsis doesn’t do it for me, but I enjoyed the trailer

Merry Gentelman

The Escapist – supreme cast. Let’s see if they can pull it off.

Easy Virtue

My Sister’s Keeper – not a fluffy by ANY stretch of the imagination, and stiring some emotions I’m not sure I want stirred in a public cinema. But definitely one for a DVD in the privacy of my own room with a big box of tissues!

Adam

Cheri – doesn’t Michelle Pfieffer ever AGE?

The Princess and the Frog – clearly, you’re never too old for Disney…

And I think that should keep you all going! See you tomorrow 🙂

I’ve decided I am going to take a leaf out of Lilith Saintcrow’s book (book, she’s an author, get it?! God, I should never write this early in the morning) and try for a daily blogging routine. Well, it’s that or watch Bright Meadow slowly wither and die like week-old cut flowers in a vase. The move to Oxford has been supreme on all fronts bar the blogging – I’ve simply been unable to find my groove for the past six months.

So in the light of new beginnings, fresh starts, and every other cliché my flapjack-induced-sugar-high can think of, let’s all (re)introduce ourselves. We’ve been a big and happy blogging/commenting family in the past, and I dearly wish we can get back to that.

I’ll start:

Hello, I’m Cas and I’ve been hanging around online for longer than I care to admit and have been blogging since February 2003 (go, look at the archives if you don’t believe me. We’ll wait for you to come back. There’s a handy drop-down in the top banner). By day I go by the name Claire Louise Kemp and work in a Children’s Rights department for a major publisher. This is step one in my cunning master plan to one day rule the world/become an editor. By night I am just one more in a legion of aspiring authors. I’m in the middle of writing a swords’n’magic fantasy fest which all my friends think is the best thing since bread came sliced, but we’ll see about that when it comes to the finding-an-agent time. I’m putting off thinking about that fun-and-rejection filled process for as long as I can!

What else?

Um. It’s pretty much all here on the blog. You name it, I’ve written about it in the past. The wisdom of which I have doubted on many occasion, not least when the first question I was asked at the interview for my current job was “so tell me about Bright Meadow then?”

The stalking opportunities abound in this modern connected world, and I do like to make life easy for people, so if you want to see even more of my life, you could do worse than visiting my Flickr stream or following me on Twitter.

And that’s me in a (sizeable) nutshell. Maybe a walnut? Mmmm, walnuts… How about you?

When did I become the girl in pink?

I look down at the outfit I am wearing and I see I am in top-to-toe pink, all the way down to the skin. Not baby pink, I do hasten to point out. Rather, a vibrant pink, an ironic pink, but still. Pink. And I wonder; where did the tomboy goth go? How did I become so comfortable in three inch heels? It’s happened so gradually over the recent years, I couldn’t pin my finger on the point it started, but I have become the girl in pink, perfectly happy in 3 and 4 inch heels. Certainly a few years ago, this wasn’t the case.

I have got to the point that people comment when I wear mostly black, let alone all black. To be fair, I never made a very good goth – I’m far too bubbly, and I am cursed with an English Rose complection, so I just can’t pull off pale-and-interesting – but… well, I look around at the people I spent time with at the weekend, and I am far and away the most colourful of them. Where did she come from, this girl in her mid-twenties who can pull off a creditable Miss MoneyPenny impression at the office. I like her, this person. She’s beautiful. But sometimes she scares me too.

Because on the inside I’m still not sure she real. Parents complain that children grow up too fast – hell! I’m looking round wondering how I got to be mid/late twenties all of a sudden! It’s like I sleepwalked through that transistion from child/teenager to grown-up, and I feel like a fraud in my adult clothing.

A damn cute fraud in gorgeous shoes though.

You know that it is time to start blogging again when you have dreams where you are feeling guilty for not blogging in a while… Yes, I dream about my blog. I think that my life is now officially inextricably linked with the internet.

It really has been an age since I wrote anything, hasn’t it? I’m almost not sure how to start back in. I do know that the old-style Bright Meadow where I waffle on for 2000 words at a time about something possibly isn’t sustainable much longer. The joy has been gone from the Sunday Roasts for a while, and I always said I would stop doing them when they were no longer fun…

*hides behind the sofa whilst people throw things*

I know, I know, you all like the Sunday Roasts! And I’m not saying they will never return, it is just that – for now – I need to think through how best they can be made to work. The problem with moving to a new city to get the dream job and get a life is that, well, you run risk of actually getting a life! Lots of stuff to blog about, not so much time to actually do so.

Also, I have to admit right now that I am writing this post, in part, because my father told me to. It’s like I have to do my homework before I get a cookie, which really isn’t helping the whole “fun” vibe 😛

(Love you Dad)

Shall I catalogue my reasons/excuses for not blogging? Two instantly spring to mind: Twitter and writing. My twitter stream has taken over a lot of the things that might, once upon a time, have become blog posts. I know I am not alone in being seduced more and more by the speed, ease, and community on Twitter. I find it hard to fit in an hour to craft a blog post, but I can easily spare thirty seconds to tweet something. As for the writing… Oh, the writing. Well, we’re at 10,186 words, six chapters, and growing on a daily basis by between 300-500 words. It will be a finished manuscript, I promise you. I have totally committed to it, even going so far as to show what I have to date to a tame(ish) editor-friend and my brother. I kid you not, of the two, I was more scared about my brothers feedback! (For the record, he liked it and wanted more *sigh of relief*) What it will become once it is a finished manuscript is another matter entirely, but I will help these characters tell their story. I will.

And that’s it for my reasons. Other than that I am still, at heart, a lazy cow. And going on lots of dates does tend to take up the evenings as well. I don’t know – have three dates with three different guys in one week, and they start to think you’re a hussy at work! 😉

Life, frankly, rocks right now. There was a small wibble back in February, but it really was a minor wibble compared to what went before. Minor wibbles are to be expected and are, perversely, a good thing. Everyone wibbles and the fact I can wibble now without falling apart is a good sign 🙂

Wow, think there’s a limit on the number of times you should use the word ‘wibble’ in a paragraph?

So what for the future of Bright Meadow? Well, if my dad has anything to say in the matter, I won’t let it die. I don’t want to let it die for the truth of it, I love it too much! I am totally split on whether a strict schedule is a good thing or a bad thing. Let’s face it though, I’ve tried the whole “blog when I feel like it” modus operandi, and it’s not been doing too hot lately. So perhaps it’s time to try a different approach? Maybe shorter daily posts?

Hang on, I’ve got to go and open the door. It’s the Blogger Police. They want a word about over-use of the word “wibble”. Assuming they don’t decide to lock me up for crimes against the Internet, I promise to be back in a few days 😉

Cxxx