Cats in the Kitchen, Flora in the Garden

Have you taken a look at Daisy Lupin's Halloween Story circle yet?
Only available to read until the end of November.

http://daisyshalloweenstorycircle.blogspot.com/

First of all, thank you for all your contributions to the above site. What a wonderful varied selection, from legends, true tales, poems and fiction. I certainly enjoyed reading through them all, though I have to admit, one or two of them caused me a certain lack of sleep. I do feel that it has been a great success and it is so lovely to read all the items from different sites in one place.

The copying, pasting, editing and adding little bits and pieces of various art images certainly kept me on my toes throughout Halloween evening. I came back to finish off a 1.00 in the morning and got seriously spooked. My computer was going crazy, it was as though the more spooky stuff I uploaded onto the site the more my computer got upset and difficult.

The first strange thing that happened was my favourites, bookmarked list. A couple of months ago I had a serious system collapse on the computer, it was just after I had started blogging, and I lost all my new contacts and favourite places etc and slowly had to build them up again. Well on Halloween they suddenly all returned, I kid you not, goodness knows where they had been, but they were all back mingled in amongst my new list, which meant some sites were bookmarked as favourites twice, so I am slowly having to sift through this giant list.

Secondly, I suddenly found that the computer did not want me to comment on anyone's site about the spooky contribution. It just stubbornly refused to put up any comments sections. Then it kept shutting itself down, I was starting to get a little jittery by this time. The final straw was after it had shut itself down the final time, it didn't start itself back up again, I tried to and was told I had no internet connection for the computer. After thinking about all the spooky things I had been reading, I just gave up and went to bed, before anything worse happened.

It was a beautiful frosty night the moon looked sensational and had a beautiful milky aura round it and the stars were twinkling and glittering all over the sky. A lovely end to Halloween. When I switched the computer on in the morning, everything was as normal.



I promised I would tell you some of the inspiration that led me to writing my Halloween story Hopkins and Sterne Preservation. I was on one of my bus rides and was passing a row of terraced town houses and in the front window of one was a sign saying Sandale Preservation. I began to muse about the sign and started imagining what if the sign was just a cover for something rather weird that was going on in the house, or if the house was a portal to somewhere. Then I have always been interested in Matthew Hopkins, and knew that there is great debate about where he came from and where he disappeared to, I remembered that his main male helper was a man called John or 'Jack' Sterne and decided to bring them back as torturers, at first I thought about bringing them from a future where witches were hung or burnt again and all seekers of witches where given Hopkins and Sterne as titles, then linking on from that I decided that when they disappeared from Essex all those centuries ago they had gone to a terrible parallel world, perhaps had even originated there. My final strand was to have as a heroine a very modern witchy girl, and that was how I pieced it all together and then got down to writing it.

We are having a real cold snap at the moment, the nights are cold and very frosty but the days, are so beautiful, sunshine, deep blue skies against which lie the yellow and orange leaves of the trees, the leaves which have finally turned. I went to town today on my little chugging country bus and the whole bus ride was just a joy. I went into town to buy, whisper it, art and craft supplies, lots of wrap, ribbons, etc to make my christmas cards, cones and ornaments, oh what fun I had in poundland buying up cheap christmas items to rip up to make beautiful things. Also bought the last few ingredients for my Christmas cake which I must make at the beginning of next week.



Also had a busy evening as I had organised the first public meeting for my Local History Group and had a speaker there to talk about the surrounding area. I had to introduce him, thank him and then give a quick description of what the Group stood for, its aims etc. Believe me, I just talked off the top of my head. I'm glad I didn't realise that I was going to have to do all that because I just HATE public speaking.

This is really just a short post because what I need more than anything now is a good night's sleep, I am just about totally exhausted, and then I need a couple of days in my artroom catching up on projects, starting new ones and generally messing around.

Have some fun

Coming soon in early November
Daisy Lupin’s stream of consciousness game
Pick one of the words or phrases
Let it take you where it will, Go with it,
See where you end up, then post it on your site.
Come on, join in, let’s ramble