My potting shed...

...undertook a revamp recently. It is not finished yet...well, not so much a revamp but changing its function. It was an art studio but that has been relegated elsewhere.

Since the beginning of the year I was sorting all my stuff. Bits and pieces over the years were everywhere but not in coherent manner. I had no idea what I had. So it was grouping stuff into various places. It was a mammoth task.

So the potting shed now is my writing area...poetry, stories, and books. Writing books I mean. But also for books. You can see the plastic containers in one of the photos...there are 44 of these plastic containers holding all manner of books on poetry, writing, play writing (no I am not going to write plays...that would be a step too far...but the advice in them is very applicable to writing novels). Books on place names, people names, Saint's names and more.

There are books on how to write novels, grammar and punctuation. I couldn't hear in the school classroom, as a child, with being deaf so I am lacking in this kind of learning. I did write a novel ten years ago. It was in pencil on lined paper. I was proud of it at the time and asked someone to type it out for me. They did it on some CD whatever it is called for when I got a computer and said I could still edit it or something.

But, they gave me a severe criticism of it. Grammar, speech, the lot. I never looked at it again. I never asked for that criticism. My cousin had given me some revelation on something I did not know about me and that book, although not autobiography, was a part of who I was and it was to find out who I was, and the biggest part was to explore and understand. It was stuff from my life that I used as the basis for the book. I knew the book needed a lot of work on it but I didn't need someone to criticise it. I was still far too sensitive because of the issue. So I bought books on grammar, went to college to do English Language for GSCE and A level...the qualifications the kids get at school. I hated school when I was a child and I hated doing this college learning too. Every fibre of my being fought against it. The college said I had dyslexia and they put a lot of extra work with me. It was all done with one on one tuition. I couldn't have done it otherwise. I do have special tinted green lenses to read because the words won't stay still on the page and there are faded out words. Yes I passed and with good marks, but I still have this block against learning, and it didn't help me with grammar and speech and stuff that I wanted for my novels.

I wrote more stuff and stories and more novels just for me. Some are written to the end. Some are only a hundred or so pages in the novel. Most are pencil on paper and some are typewritten on a manual typewriter. Then my father was ill and dying, and the evil stepmother pressured and pressured me to tell her 'the family secret'. I didn't know any family secret and she wouldn't believe me. Even as my father was gasping his last few hours of life she was pressuring from the other side of the hospital bed to reveal to her 'the secret'. I kept my mind blank deliberately and would not think about what she was saying.

On the way home from this, I am reflecting and I realise the family secret could be what my cousin said those years ago, which was a shock to me that day and a shock to the others there that day because of what transpired.

Somewhere in this potting shed, amidst all these folders and files and notebooks is that book and the CD. I have no idea what to do with the CD if I find it. But the actual handwritten notes of the novel will still be here. It needs to be written again anyway and possibly I have learnt something over the past ten years.

I am beginning to realise I have done far more story writing and novels than I had realised.

This is not what I intended to write on this post. I was going to describe the stuff in this potting shed.

Next week I need to go through it all properly, all this stuff in the potting shed. It needs sorting out, decide what I keep or throw away. I have promised some history books (there are 4 boxes of them) to a history group. But, some of them are late 1800's, wars and stuff written at the time, as are the stuff I have of the First World War. So some stuff I am keeping for research for my writing.