August 2012; London, U.K.; my garden, on an outrageously hot
and humid day (yes I’m going to start with the weather, look at all the great
novels, they do it too).
It’s nearing the end of summer, and in precisely 26 days I’ll
be leaving the safety, familiarity and wonderfully prompt magic of the laundry
fairy (aka: my mother) to, for the first time, go forth into the land of
University; to read wonderful books, drink incredibly alcoholic drinks, and
generally try to convince everyone, including myself, that I’m a “mature and responsible
adult” and give this whole independence thing a go. And I’m looking forward to
it, really... I just need to get the images of drunken humiliation and
compromising photos on Facebook out of my head, and I’ll be raring to go.
But until then there are still 26 days to fill; with coffee
dates with friends, shopping dates with IKEA, and this; writing. Something
which, since I was a kid, I have proclaimed to the world as my passion and
destiny, but forgoing any verbal storytelling, have yet to give any kind of
proof of said ultimate passion. That is where this blog comes in...
Things I will be writing about:
·
Books, films, theatre performances, and other
things that generally have to do with the Arts and my experiences with them,
both of other peoples work and my own.
·
Travel, food, fashion, food, and possibly more
food. Places to go, things to do, stuff to eat, and the characters you’re
likely to meet along the way.
·
Links to fictional stories of my own creation
which will be posted in full on my DeviantArt profile (http://thelazyartisan.deviantart.com/)
and these will probably include anything from on-going series of my original
stories and characters, to ridiculous crossover fanfictions that will probably
only make sense in my head.
·
Pictures may or may not crop up now and again,
if only so as not to alienate all of you with the unbearable length of my
ramblings...
·
... and speaking of ramblings, if you actually
enjoy my bouts of insanity, head on over to my Tumblr (http://thelazyartisan.tumblr.com/)
– we’re all mad over there.
·
Also included, though not as frequently;
adventures, shenanigans and all manner of stupidity, the kind which only a
student can pull off gracefully, and rarely does so anyway.
Those are the details but this is the over view, the main
point; all my life, stories have been a part of who I am. My great grandmother,
I am told, was an extraordinary woman filled with memories and anecdotes, which
she would tell at parties with a wonderfully dramatic flair. My mother is a
great lover of language and literature, and instilled this same love of words
in me from a very young age, gifting me with the printed imaginations of writers
like C.S. Lewis, Phillip Pullman, Eva Ibbotson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Dickens,
Robert Louis Stevenson and J.K. Rowling. And I, like so many others, have grown
to want to follow in their footsteps, constantly hearing the words I will be
describing awful parties with in my head, and doodling elaborate fonts rather
than stick figures in the margins of my notebook when bored.
As I got older that love for literature extended to a love
of films with great actors such as Ingrid Bergman, Cate Blanchett, Gary Oldman
and Christopher Plummer, or by great directors like Hitchcock, Cameron, Coppola
and Spielberg. Dance recitals and theatre productions also entered the fray,
along with the inspiration afforded by discovering new cities, eating incredible
meals and watching handsome women swathed in luxurious fabrics walk past.
But the point (which I’m finally getting to) is that all of
these interests and passions and cultural love affairs boil down to the fact
that they are all rooted in a story, in the intense magic of the human
imagination where they are conceived, and that it’s about bloody time that I
made my own, tangible, contribution.
So here’s to the next 26 days; a time in which I hope to kick-start
a vicious obsession with actually getting things written and done, force me to metaphorically
drop the ‘lazy’ portion of my screen name, and (I hope, I hope, I hope) to entertain all of you.
Love and future word vomit, C.
