Re-imagining

Last night I was lucky enough to go and see a performance of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake. I love the ballet, I adore Matthew Bourne productions but this was the most extraordinary dance show I’ve ever seen. In a traditional Swan Lake the corps de ballet are women and, as the swans, they usually wear tutus and dance en pointe. And their dancing is beautiful but you never lose sight of the fact you’re watching beautiful dancers. In Matthew Bourne’s version, the swans are men and clearly they’d spent a lot of time studying swans as watching them dance, we experienced the strength, raw power, majesty and sensuality of the birds through a head movement, the flick of a wrist, the stamping of a foot  – they weren’t dancers, they were the swans. It was amazing and mesmerising and heart-breaking and funny and if you can get to see it, do!

In an example of what out-of-the-box thinking is all about, Matthew Bourne has taken something steeped in tradition that you expect to give you one thing and thrown it so completely on its head that you experience something else entirely. And it reinforced exactly what I’m trying to make 2014 for me – the year of looking at everything differently.  

I’m starting small, with Mondays. Practically everyone hates Mondays and our perception of how a Monday should be quite often colours how it actually turns out – if a thing can go wrong, it will absolutely do so on a Monday! So I’ve been practising loving Mondays. What’s not to love, it’s the start of a new week and who knows what amazing things we might learn or create during that period? It’s a whole 168 hours of new time and the more you think about that, the more amazing that is! Okay, I haven’t quite managed to leap out of bed on a Monday morning, and my fourteen-year-old isn’t at all convinced Mondays are anything to be happy about,  but it’s really refreshing turning Mondays on their heads - try it!

 

 

 

In my humble opinion

So how have you been? Is it still a happy new year for you? It’s been a very exciting week for me as Celebrations, but not as you know them has received two fabulous reviews which are here if you wish to read them

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Celebrations-but-not-know-them-ebook/dp/B00HDFXGPG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1389725471&sr=8-1&keywords=karen+guyler

I find it really exciting to get new reviews of my work – that feedback is so valuable and it’s really interesting to see how people are enjoying the words I wrestled with. It’s also nice to be told how an element isn’t quite working or when I could have improved something. My youngest son, just fourteen and beginning his GCSE syllabi, said to me the other day ‘we don’t stop learning, do we?’ and, expecting him to go running for his bedroom at the thought that life might end up being like school forevermore, I had to agree with him.

It’s also surprising how subjective it all is – I recently had some feedback on a work-in-progress and it’s extraordinary that for one person the thing that made the book is the same thing that, for someone else, made them not love it so much. I’m busy reading a series of books that I had for Christmas which I’m really enjoying. I wouldn’t let the family watch the movie of the first one until I’d read it and could watch too but halfway through the movie, the story and character dynamics diverged so much from the written version, it could have been a different book altogether and not, in my opinion (again with the subjective!), for the better. The vision of the director seemed to be wholly removed from that of the author. A while ago I attended an author event given by a big name author and when asked what he thought of the movie version of his book (Hollywood killed off the serial killer that he had returning in another story), he said the important thing to remember is that Hollywood writes damn fine cheques!!

Perception, it’s a funny thing.

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Year and that you were able to spend some time with those you care about and doing things you love. I had a lovely time with family and friends and, while being up a ladder decorating for three days can’t quite be classified as doing something I love, youngest son, who just turned fourteen, now has a very grown up bedroom so he’s happy!

It’s that time of year when we all think about the best of the last year and resolve to make the coming year the best we’ve had so I’ve been busy wondering which moments to include in my ‘best of 2013’ list. Want to know what they are? Actually I’ve decided that none of them should be on a 'best of' list (insert sound of needle scratching record à la film soundtrack coming to an abrupt halt). But, I hear you say, in a year where I reached Everest Base Camp, got another book out and wrote two others, got fit, read lots of great books, built my website, started my blog etc. some of these things should make my list.

But I’ve decided I can’t make a list because I can’t do justice to the moments that moved me in 2013 that way. Instead I can revisit them in my head and they will be the fuel for this coming year, blocks on which I can build. I got fit in 2013 so now I want to try running again (I used to love it until asthma stopped me quite literally in my tracks). The books I wrote I want to polish up and share, and the ideas I have for new ones, I want to turn into stories that move you. And this is exciting stuff! So far each day has felt like a new start - okay, we’re only at the 3^rdJanuary, I’m still writing 2013 on everything, and we’re yet to have a Monday – but I am loving this new attitude.

How about you, how has your New Year been so far?