books

Let’s get back to it…

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[Photo: a glimpse of my time on Lamma Island, HK, while sipping a Fresh Lemon Soda and writing in my travel notebook]

The other day I got the notification telling me that I’d been a member of the WordPress community for a whole year… a whole year of finding my feet in this never-ending online world of blogposts. I had two overwhelming feelings: pride, and disappointment…

Anniversary w. WP

I felt proud that I’d stuck something out for that length of time, something semi “creative” too. Over the past year, this blog has changed quite drastically in content, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. I mentioned this in an earlier post somewhere; my posts started off very personal and a way to help me understand and work through things (the Trainee Medical Photographer position), and then when that was over, it was just somewhere for me to tap away during my office hours, drawing inspiration from the Daily prompts, and I really enjoyed writing those; it was fun and interesting to see where my mind went and where I’d end up at the end… but then came the Continue reading →

Transformation: 25th Oct Prompt

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[Photo: Taken on Monday 24th Oct while sat wating for the bus heading to Dong Yuan at lunch time. Within 2 hours the weather transformed from this bright blue sky, to heavy dark and angry storm clouds that drenched the gardens.]

So this one is a few days behind. Transformation was the word prompt for October 25th. Today; the first day of me sitting down to attempt this post, laptop on knee, Tom Petty singing about losers and American girls, cuppa to my right, is October 27th. I used to do a “prompt a day” a couple of times a week when I started this blog, but, at that time I also had more spare quiet moments at my desk with not much to do. Things have changed. Things have…. Transformed. I’m sorry, that was cheesy, but I stand by it! A friend who is currently up to June in trawling their way through my long winded and self-absorbed posts mentioned that they miss when I used to “explain my idea of stuff”. Meaning, they liked the posts where I take this one word, the selected jumble of letters that WordPress presents us with each day, and run with it. Sometimes I run head strong in one focused direction, other times I may as well be trying to dodge bullets with the amount of zig-zagging and tumbling over myself I do while trying to explain my thoughts and feelings of the word. I noticed this word pop up in my inbox a couple of days ago and it’s been on my mind since. So here we go…

Transformation – 

  • a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance

  • a metamorphosis during the life cycle of an animal

  • the induced or spontaneous change of one element into another by a nuclear process.

Shamefully, one of the first things that pings up into my mind when I read this word is not the incredible journey a caterpillar embarks on during its life. Nor is it the leg sprouting, tail loosing changes a wee little tadpole goes through to become the frog. No. My first thought was: #TransformationTuesday. It pains me to even admit that and see it here in my ever growing Word Document that I type my blog post drafts upon (currently at 74 pages; 40,000 words). Yep. A bloody hashtag about body changes, diet achievements, when puberty hit hard to a lesser than average looking kid etc. is what I think of when I read those 14 letters strung together. Maybe that’s an embarrassing and awful insight into my social media habits and slight addiction (which, I must admit, I’m slightly getting over). I recently posted a somewhat #TransformationTuesday post myself, except, it was on a Sunday. I’ll start by admitting how much I wasted a perfectly good weekend. Did I go out and explore my new surrounding some more? No. Did I go and Continue reading →

Getting Lost in Documentation

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[Photo: a collage of some of my New Zealand photos from Dec. 2015 to give an overview of my time there]

Ok, so this blog post did not grow from a Post-a-Day Prompt, nor was it inspired by a wild and wonderful adventure. I don’t quite know where it’s going to go; I’ll figure that out along the way, I guess that’s how some authors work right? They don’t always know where their characters will end up, they don’t know what the grand finale will be, it’s just as much a surprise to them as it is to us, the reader.

I’ve been wondering for a couple of days what my next blog post will be about, I was starting to worry that without some amazing travel experience, I have nothing to say. When I started this blog, it wasn’t about that. Truthfully, when I started this blog, I was struggling to internally process some things, (mainly the whole Medical Photographer opportunity/moving to Foshan on my own), and I was able to just write and write with relative ease. I’d sit at my desk in work, and, shamefully, with such little photographic work left at the end of the academic year, I was able to spend some of my time tapping away at my school laptop and post a “blog-a-day”. Now I’m not at work, I’m sat on a friend’s sofa, surrounded by no one and nothing apart from my music, I’ve been struggling for inspiration, and the words haven’t been flowing as easy as before. My last post was easy, Thailand. Who wouldn’t be able to write a (relatively long) blog post about 5 days in that beautiful country? This one however, is very different. This one is much more personal, and goes back to Continue reading →