Tag Archives: books

Thank You for Believing in Me

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Many bloggers are contemplative during January, looking back and looking forward…I want to use this post to say THANK YOU. 
Thank you to everyone who has supported my writing and my blog, and to all who’ve taken time to comment on my pages, or review my book!

This time last year I began getting to know some amazing writers and readers online: Blogs, Twitter and Facebook…and I’d like to share a post I wrote a year ago (before I knew many of you!). Thank you for believing in me!

The Future belongs to Those who Believe in the Beauty of their Dreams.

Eleanor Roosevelt had it exactly right…the future really does belong to those who believe in their dreams…

How many of us started out with huge dreams…the kind that stretched far, far beyond what we can see? How many of us played in the woods building forts and defending them from intruders and dragons, or by the ocean building sand castles and trenches? Were you so lost in books that you felt the Famous Five were your best friends? Did you skirt the local park with dark glasses searching for villains and opportunities to spy or use your magic super powers? Did you build Lego towns and fill them with adventure? Did you play ‘Pooh Sticks’ or race paper boats down the river? Did you draw fantastical pictures and wait at night for them to come alive? Were your stories so magical you slipped into them when you dreamed at night? Did you make mud pies and feed a family of dolls and teddy bears? Did you dream? Did you have dreams so strong you were sure you would achieve them?

I did…I knew exactly what I wanted as a child… I wanted to own horses, to spend my days galloping across mountains and valleys… I wanted to live by the ocean and swim in the sea every day… I wanted to write and see my stories published… I wanted to draw and paint and illustrate… Yes, I had dreams…

To be truthful, some were just childhood imaginings, fun, playtime. I was never going to live in the forest and defend my homestead from dragons…
I had ambition, as a child I wanted to write and draw, and I did, making books from A5 paper…I devoured Cicely Mary Barker’s ‘Flower Fairies’ and made up my own, stapling pages together and inventing rhymes to go with them. I bought tiny A6 notepads and wrote stories, lost in a world of my own. I drew, sitting on my bed with a sketch pad, my tongue protruding as I concentrated on my art, sketching for hours.

Images by Lisa Shambrook (Please do not use)

My dreams grew with aspirations and ideas as I got older, just as my art did. From the crude pencil drawings of a ten-year-old, to more sophistication at thirteen and more mature at nineteen. My dreams grew up…but not always in a good way. I became cynical and reserved in my dreams, trying to think of things that could actually happen, things that weren’t too lofty for me to achieve…and perhaps that’s just where I began to lose them…

I began to doubt myself, my ability and question the reality of the things I once wanted. Was I good enough to illustrate, or to write something that people, real people, would actually want to read? That doubt, along with the realities of life, leaving school, getting a job, getting married and having children, stopped me from pursuing those things I’d dreamed of all my childhood.

I don’t blame anyone, I just let life take over and my dreams faded like an old masterpiece hung on a wall that no one does more than glance at, left to saturate in the glare of every day sun.
I could have been more than the sum of what I am right now…that does make me sad…there is so much more I could have achieved. It was when I was thirty that I decided I could become more, that those old buried dreams deserved a second look. And I began to write.

Self-belief has taken a lot longer…however, slowly over the years those shattered dreams have come alive, my writing has fed my aspirations and words that I thought would never interest anyone have become the tool for rebuilding those dreams.

So, yes, it’s true I have never found myself dwelling in the woods defending my little wooden fort from all things evil, but those dragons I used to chase off in my imagination, now live on paper. I believe in them, I believe in me…and that’s where it all starts…the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams…I intend to believe in mine.

Once again, thank you for believing in me!

Blogflash: Day Fifteen: Books

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Photograph by Lisa Shambrook (please do not use without permission)

Day Fifteen: Books
Flood Part Eleven

“Hold on! Hold on tight!”
“I am!”
The boat swayed violently and the squealing wind screamed across the fierce, churning waves.
“Go down below!”
The wind whipped words away. “…not leaving…”
“Then hold on to me…don’t you dare let go!”
Sea-spray soaked the deck and words had to be shouted to be heard above the crash of the ocean.
“I’m expecting a sea-serpent or the Kraken to rise out of this squall!”
“What was that sweetheart?”
“I’m waiting for a Leviathan or the Kraken!”
“Sorry dear, your literary references are going way over my head…much like this storm!”

(98 Words)

Back to Day Fourteen

‘Variety alone gives joy…’

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Looking at the themes of my own book made me wonder about books for children these days…It begins with the line ‘Freya was seven-years-old when she got hit by the car. It was a 4×4 with a bull bar.’ It deals with death from the outset, and continues with themes of grief and guilt. However it is balanced by the inclusion of Freya’s heaven…as seen from a seven-year-old’s point of view and purposely laden with rainbows and flowers and sparkly things…Hope and insight is gained from death, grief and terminal illness, dreams are wished for and ultimately our dreams are the things that give us hope. When we strive for the things we dream of…we triumph.
But these strong themes of death and grief made me wonder…Should we protect children and teens from specific themes in books?
These days any subject matter under the sun is up for grabs and writers contend with them in many different ways.
I enjoy books of all varieties and genres, and it made me think back to my own days of reading, curled up on a sofa or turning pages by torchlight beneath the covers, well past my bedtime…
My childhood was spent reading. I was a frequent customer of a tiny local bookstore in the backstreets of Brighton with a shelf in the back room full of second hand children’s books, where I spent a good hour or more choosing books while the little, white-haired, old lady who owned the shop sat reading novels or sorting stock. She kept a pile of ‘Famous Five’ books aside for my visits and it didn’t matter how ragged they were, I still wanted to buy them!
So what did I read when I was small?
Everything I could lay my hands on…when I graduated from picture books, I discovered Enid Blyton, ‘The Castle of Adventure’ had me hiding inside the gorse bushes with Philip, Dinah, Jack and Lucy-Ann as they out-foxed thieves and smugglers! Then came the aforementioned ‘Famous Five’, I wasn’t a ‘Secret Seven’ fan, I wanted to be tomboy George!  I also devoured ‘Malory Towers’ and ‘St Clares’ and longed to attend boarding school with Darrell Rivers and her friends… and can you believe it there’s actually a tongue-in-cheek website here informing you of Darrell and her cohorts whereabouts now…weird!
I spent the last of my preteen years reading horsey stories…I adored ‘The Silver Brumby’ series by Elyne Mitchell, I read them over and over and over again…Patricia Leitch’s ‘Jinny’ series, all the ‘Jill’ books by Ruby Ferguson, and anything by the Pullien-Thompsons.
Horse books were interspersed with ‘Watership Down’, ‘Duncton Wood’, ‘The Tuesday Dog’ any animal stories and anything by Malcolm Saville, especially ‘The Lone Pine Five’.
Then I will be forever grateful to my middle school teacher Mr Lawrence who introduced us to fantasy, he read Susan Cooper’s ‘Over sea, Under Stone’ with such enthusiasm and verve that I fell in love with the genre. I spent a whole summer immersed in ‘The Dark is Rising’ Sequence…

That was it…then followed Tolkien…’The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’…my life was complete and I would be life-long fantasy fan!
My teenage reading collection grew and grew and was eclectic. I loved Judy Blume, beginning with ‘Blubber’, getting my English teacher to let us read ‘Tiger Eyes’ as a class when we were fourteen, and my embarrassment with ‘Forever’ as a very naive fifteen-year-old! This is where the diversity in my collection began, reading about love, jealousy ‘Jacob Have I Loved’ Katherine Paterson, anorexia ‘Second Star to the Right’ Deborah Hautzig, parental desertion and adventure in ‘Homecoming’ Cynthia Voigt, Concentration Camps and escape ‘I am David’ Anne Holm,  pregancy ‘Dear Nobody’ Berlie Doherty,  and much more, death, guilt, murder, abuse, relationships, classics like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Harper Lee, ‘Little Women’ Louise May Alcott and (forgive me) a stage of ‘Sweet Valley High’…
Thus you can see that my reading was vast in themes and ideas!
I’ve even kept most of my books, but sadly many are boxed up in the attic after, I’m ashamed to say, my own children prefer the X-Box… sacrilegious! My youngest is my most prolific reader and loves to write herself, so at least I have one chip-off-the-old-block!
So, no I don’t think children or young adults should be protected from certain themes, obviously I don’t want young children reading about sex or being exposed to true adult themes at an early age, but most themes are relevant to teens and important in their lives.
It was my own book that made me ask the question…and ultimately I believe that books are what encourages us to dream…to capture experiences that we may never find ourselves. We find ourselves in the books we read, whether it be acceptance or rebellion, adventure or peace, love or hate…it’s all there…and books were how I learned to express myself. A love of vastly different books taught me to embrace this weird and wonderful culture in which we live!

As my character old Thomas says as he is told to let go of ‘his silly dreams’, “…it’s those silly dreams that keep us alive.”

Variety is the spice of life!

(Title quote by Matthew Prior-The Turtle and the Sparrow)