Wednesday, May 14, 2014

An Apple a Day update

I have been trawling through the recently liberated images at Wellcome  for the past few days. I am  nearly finished and have found a few very promising pictures to spice up An Apple a Day a bit.  Another day or so and I will be finished, then start to read through the manuscript again looking for good spots to post these, and any other places where I see image gaps.  Then, I will upload the  new version to kindle and to Lulu and begin a bit of a marketing campaign.  After?  I have begun a second poetry collection for the iBookstore which is waiting.

In the meantime here is an image from the Wellcome Trust:


Since I posted this, An Apple a Day, second edition has been uploaded to the Apple iBookstore. The other eBook retailers do not handle images well, so I am still working on the Amazon version - or rather a friend who knows a bit about CSS, etc. is trying to fix the photos for me. (September 11, 2014)

Saturday, May 10, 2014

Writing Happiness

How does one write 'happiness'?  I don't mean those singular moments when something unexpectedly good happens and elation occurs.  I don't mean those breaks in the general, default unhappiness of life.  I mean, how does one write a character whose default position is of being happy?  My default position is of a general, underlying sadness.  Life is something one gets through with perseverance and determination and well, an FU attitude.  I will persevere in spite of the normal situation of struggle, two steps forward, three back.  But I now know well some people whose normal situation is happiness.  Not that they are grinning fools, but that normally they sing, or look at the sun and the trees and treasure loved ones.  Once in a while, they experience bad times, bad moments, tragedy even, but this does not shake their general perception of life as being good.

I have no answers here as my life's situation does not allow for a normal position of happiness.  I would have to be a madman to be happy.  But I am a writer and to put it more particularly, a writer who is firstly a poet.  I write emotion.  So, how do I write happiness?