A new work in progress!

You may remember me mentioning in my last blog that I wanted to change the direction of this blog.  And as you can see we have a work in progress!  I'm not sure at this stage whether the change in layout will be the final one, but I think it's clearer and better laid out, although I'm sure that most of my regular readers will only notice slight changes, but I think the change is for the better.

As will be seen I've now added a photo of me, constructed from a warped mind that loves surrealism in all its many splendours.  I make no apologies for looking very weird and demented, except to say that I got very happily carried away with GIMP and trying to manipulate the mugshot in question, so that I'd look 30 years younger...I've always been a naive optimist!  What I was thinking of at the time of manipulating I've no idea but I do like the idea of combining punk with the romantics....it's also satisfying to see that I have a head of hair again.

I continue to work on my second short film, working title 'Penguin Amore!' and it's almost finished.  30 minutes ago I found a piece of music that I hope fits the film.  I never realised how hard it was to add a soundtrack to a film, especially when you come up against copyright.  Personally, as an author and film maker, I can understand your work being used in an inappropriate way, but music I want to use is 40 years old and hardly likely to reach the heady heights of the pop charts again, but we have to play by the rules.

I continue in my creative mood, last weekend saw me on Saturday getting wet due to the early autumnal rain.  Sunday a much brighter and drier day, and as the gods were smiling off I traipsed to a local fountain to take some surreal shots.  One of my glaring faults, yes I have one or two, is that I tend to become preoccupied with whatever I'm doing when in an arty mood.  The fountain was particularly well lit by a slowly setting sun, which added a sense of the cheerful unknown, tiny wavelets from the cascading water sparkled and glinted and danced merrily before disappearing into watery nothingness.  To take the shots I wanted I lay down so I was at eye level to the surface of the water.  Five minutes later I was wet, wet, wet due to lying in a puddle of water I hadn't noticed.  How one suffers for one's art!

Of course the week begins again and two hours of raw film footage has to be looked at, which is always enjoyable until that moment you realise that the camcorder is out of sync with your brain cells.  Thankfully I don't record such moments, a man crying into his pint mug of tea is perhaps too much for everyone to bear, and likely to cause the few friends remaining in my life to finally bid farewell to the antisocial, miserable git!

So it's now back to the drawing board and coming up with ideas for content.  Whatever I end up with as content I'm sure it'll be useful, at least to me.  There I'll finish, acknowledging that I do like me and thinking how cute I ended up looking when I'd finished mucking around with GIMP.  Anyone fancy a makeover?

Being positive!

Last night was something of a relief after spending two days on producing an ebook from scratch; lots of headaches and thinking that the word 'numskull' was purely invented for my own personal use.  The good news is that I'm nearly there, the only problem being the formatting, which leaves much to be desired; Oh the joy of enthusiastic ignorance, and men with new toys.

Returning to last night, I finally bumped into a dear friend I hadn't seen for a while, which was AB FAB!  I guess, thinking a little more deeply than I normally do, which probably accounts for the painful big toe, I'm blessed with friendships that can be separated by long periods of time, but reunited again seem to naturally continue from where they left off.

As we chatted, it was a lovely feeling having that all too rare ability to make someone smile and laugh.  No, I'm appalling at telling jokes, my comic timing died a very sad and lonely death long before I was actually born.  My forte, god that sounds pretentious, is my unfailing sense of humour when it comes to the moment at hand, or a particular situation I find amusing for some strange reason.  This I developed at primary school, where as a bullied 'fatty' I was the blob on the end of several beatings.  I discovered that wandering around the playground on all fours, acting as though I was a St. Bernard dog, was the cause of much merriment amongst my peers, and much to the annoyance of the teaching staff.  More importantly the bullying ceased for a while.  In the end I suppose I couldn't escape the attentions of my tormentors, but the respite was welcomed.

My friend, as I walked them home, said I sounded very positive.  I guess I am positive, much to do with finally working out what it is I actually want to do in life.  But to do what you really want to do, race south American sloths over the 100 metres, is going to be hard and you can't help but be positive.  If life's taught me one thing, bananas taste nothing like carrots; being positive is simply...well...not being negative.  And if you can understrand that much, you'll never put batteries in the wrong way again.

Thanks for joining me.  Keep smiling, it makes you either stand out in the crowd, or the cause for you being locked up in a mental asylum.  Either way, it makes you different...that's why your friends love you! ;-)