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Linguistics lessons throwback on this moody Sunday evening…

The Architecture of the Sentence:

‘The architect is the master of the represented space of every kind, and that means he is the master of the making mind.’    William H. Gass and Mary Gass.

 

 

If you follow Joanne Harris on Twitter, check out her #TenTweets from today all about Rewriting. Very helpful little nuggets of info if you’re in the rewriting stage. Good to ask yourself these questions…

N.

Wartime Liverpool, with a twist. The twist is Little Italy. An area of the city occupied at the time by Italian immigrants and their families. When the May blitz of 1941 attacks Liverpool, 10 year…

Source: Novel

I walked into work and saw this message stuck to my desk. It doesn’t take much to spread a bit of happiness.

N. 

 

22:03 on a Sunday evening and productivity rears its head. Who am I to say no?!

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind, is written large in his works —Virginia Woolf

N.

 

 

This world is frantic. We’re forever running around; either with work, family, children etc etc. So how do we find our peace, our quiet, our stillness?

I’m thinking about this type of thing after reading Matt Haig’s current bestseller Reasons to Stay Alive. Now that is one cracking read. Even if you haven’t experienced any mental health issues, it’s still beneficial to everyone in order to scratch the surface of what someone might go through at the hardest points of their life. The book is full of tidbits of advice and ways to change your thinking. After I turned the last page, closed the book, and got over the initial ‘bloody hell’ feeling you can sometimes get after a good read, I became increasingly conscious of all the things I do to calm myself or relax. Of course, reading is one of them – more of an escapism from stress, but mostly I just need to be still. The image above shows the sea front in my home town. This has always been a place ‘where I go’ when needed. A space to take in the fresh air (well, the freshest of air we can get nowadays), and to compartmentalise my thoughts.

When those moments come when life can get that little bit too crazy and there’s perhaps no thinking space, stillness is the best route I can take. And I’m not talking about being frozen, rigid, or mute. Just time to breathe; in, out, in, out. To let my shoulders drop, and to feel my spine straighten out, to look outside of myself and tune into life. That’s the solution for me. Hope you can find, or already know, your calming effect.

So the darkness shall be the lights, and the stillness the dancing. 

T.S. Eliot

 

  
Always lovely to see the world in a fresh light. Be awake. 

N.

Whilst becoming further submerged in research for my novel, certain quotes wave at me frantically from the page. Today’s is quite apt considering the conflict continuously occurring across the world:

‘What a pity it should take the greatest war the world’s ever seen just to make people be kind to one another.’

Taken from The Great Liverpool Blitz, 1987.

 

Be kind, be nice, and pay it forward.

N.