A very special RIP

You may have seen in the news at the beginning of May that Professor Colin Pillinger died suddenly, rocking the space community in which he had been a driving force for many years. 
I first met him eight years ago when he interviewed me for my day job position when he promptly threw the rulebook out of the window and we ended up having a good old chat, much to the bemusement of the rest of the interview panel.  One of the first things we worked on was his book "Space is a Funny Place" – can you imagine a better job for me than spending afternoons in The Open University library, trawling the microfiche archives researching and verifying facts!?
Colin was a man with real passion for science and pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology beyond what people believed to be possible. He had extraordinary determination and spirit and a great wealth of stories, both hair-raising and funny.  Those who witnessed our mobility scooter race across the campus when his new one arrived, which he won, are still laughing about it now.
One of the most humbling moments of my life was when we were in the clean room and he put one of the Apollo lunar samples in my hand and said "men risked their lives to bring this back".  
I'm still expecting him to come round the corner of the office on his scooter for a chat or to call me with a challenge "do you remember…?" or "can you find…?"   
If I could have added a reply to his mention of me in the acknowledgements of his last book, his autobiography "My Life on Mars", ' Karen, who looks after me like I was her fifth child',  I could only have said how lucky I was to have worked with such a lovely man with such an amazing mind. I will miss him for a long time.

Want something for giving?

The daughter of dear friends of ours lost their baby son when he was just 36 hours old at the end of last year. Instead of buckling under the weight of this tragedy, the bereaved parents threw themselves into fundraising for the hospital that battled so hard to save George's life. They have done a phenomenal job at raising money so far, culminating in the Milton Keynes marathon and half marathon today. My husband and daughter are running - so proud of them! - but, as my asthma won't let me do that, I'm currently donating all proceeds from my books to the charity. 

You can find my books here http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=karen+guyler

And George's charity page is here www.mycharitypage.com/georgestansfield

So now you can read funny, quirky and scary stories in the Celebrations anthology and find out what makes Maya special in the future UK I hope we don't live in and do something really great at the same time!

A spanner in my works

So I've had a lesson in patience lately. There I was busily hitting my tight deadline on my work-in-progress, working flat out at the day job and my wrists and arms said enough is enough and promptly went into overdrive - pain, pins and needles, and all the RSI symptoms you could want. Cue sound of screeching braking as everything came to a halt. I've done everything I can to stop this happening to me again - even to the point of relearning how to touch type on the Dvorak keyboard layout which is so much more wrist friendly than QWERTY - and yet here I was again unable to do anything and reduced to looking sadly at my knitting and laptop.

With all this fabulous technology at our fingertips, however, I thought I'd have another go at dictation software but when the system decided that my 'isn't it obvious' would be better typed as 'Disney or penis' (and let's be honest, those two words don't even belong in the same sentence), I gave up with that too. Enforced distance from my writing, right when I only had a handful of chapters to go on the wip. Hmmmm.

Being forced now to 'enjoy the journey' I've been tinkering with a few things and, after a fantastic brainstorming session with my creative son, realised I'd gone in completely the wrong direction on the wip and made it much weaker. So, handily, I currently have the headspace to be in my head with figuring out how to put it right. And that I'm excited about!

So I forgot

So did you notice? I forgot my own ‘blogaversary’! In my defence, I am writing a new book and we all know how blinkered I can get when I’m doing that . . . The writing is going really well, thank you for asking. I am very, very excited to share this one with you J It’s going so well, I’m writing in Stephen King numbers – he writes 2000 words a day so I know I’m in good company hitting that target every day!

Belatedly, then, happy blogaversary to The Purple Muse. It’s been a great year for me with some fabulous highlights (in the case of the trek to Everest Base Camp, quite literally high!). And I need to send a huge thank you to you for clicking the link to get here and having a read of my musings - it’s fascinating to see from where in the world the traffic originates.

Since my last blog post I’ve been a busy girl. I was interviewed on a blog here http://www.natwritesstuff.co.uk/ (second interview down) where I share what 3 things are essential for my writing! I also give you a sneak peek into my plans for 201, let’s just say it’s going to be busy!!

I was also invited to take part in Book Fest at Newport Pagnell library in Milton Keynes – 4 authors being quizzed by an audience about all things authorly and bookish. Great fun and real added value for readers from their local library and there was cake, what more could you want on a Saturday morning!? It's great to get out and about as an author, it's really good balance to all the nights sat in front of a computer screen, just me and the words, talking of which, my word count for today is calling . . . 

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?