Budding something....

I have be so busy going to a Starting to Write course at the local uni that I have forgotten to continue to write on my blog.

Anyway, as I currently undergoing what we writers call a mental block, I have copied my homework from the course for this week. It is about settings and we were asked to write 150 words set on somewhere in your childhood.....

It was 1974, the NZ dollar was strong and the tropics were a great place to temporarily spend your childhood. I was nine years old. My father was in the army and our family of four were ‘posted’ as in stationed and not in mailed, in Singapore.

My hair was long, brown and fringed. It’s style complemented my purple flared slacks. Our interim home was airy and tiled. It was large enough and empty enough to roller skate around in my tiny satin shorts. The windows bars kept out the visible intruders and a little contorting on my behalf made for a fun game of breaking and entering.

The garden outside held all the right colours of greens and oranges and the lushness belied the seething movement underfoot of tropical insects. The adjacent monsoon drains were deep and treacherous and warned of danger and disease......

Wow, deep eh? Should knock the sox off my fellow classmates.

The course is nine weeks long, and two hours a pop. It's attendees vary from week to week with the odd no show from some and a never come back from others. The tutor is an older, vibrant English rose, slightly zany with a wicked smile and sense of humour called Barbara Arnold. I want to take her home to be my friend and relish in her intellectual diatribe. My 'take home message' from this course is an interest in all that has been written and how but not what I can see a future in for me. I will try more courses to get the literary juices running but more in the write for magazines/papers area than as a budding novelist.

Enjoying the hedonistic lifestyle though....