What's on my clipboard #1

Because I am thinking at a million miles a minute, I've got quite a lot of jobs on right now so I wanted to let you know them all!

I outlined my fiction in progress on a previous post, and my other irons in the fire are:

1. A post on 'fandom' - why people love what they love and if there are common uniting themes; is there a universal application for obsessive people? For example - are obsessive people also creative people? People who work in media or arts? Or express themselves in another way?

This fascination stemmed from an obsessive teenage me - music and specific bands I will detail in future were more important than 'real' people or situations. I want to investigate how these obsessions mould us into who we are, and whether the obsessions have influence over the rest of our lives. Do they make us more or less orderly? More or less ordinary?

Some orderly and organised oranges from Leicester market. Just because.

2. A post on 'possession' movies from a feminist perspective - why must the possession theme be an almost exclusively female issue? Is this only a rape/birth allegory? Or something darker?

I'm a major horror film fan - I love huge areas of the genre and I find myself coming back to the feminist perspective - here's a great blog on the trope of the Final Girl - but it's not final girls I want to particularly focus on. As a woman, I find it increasingly frustrating to see characters portrayed only as "strong women" once they have defeated the demon/entity/whatever is infesting their bodies. It could just be a simple pregnancy allegory, or the Hollywood patriarchy controlling women through fiction, but I want to find out more.

Gorgeous dahlias from the Eden Project - because we need colour to distract demons.

"What's on my clipboard" is going to be an ongoing theme - please bear in mind the clipboard is purely imaginary. I can't use physical clipboards or I'll lose the plot entirely.
Stayed tuned for these future posts - the horror/women one may end up being more of an essay but it's one I've been keen to write for ages.

Further adventures in caffeine

The girl poured a double measure of whisky - or brandy - into her coffee while no-one was looking.
I saw.
She saw me see her. I'm not saying anything.

I'm out quite late this afternoon to research any websites or publications taking open submissions this Spring - I tend to work better to a brief so I enjoy finding open ideas and having a think about what it means to me and how I can pull the story out.

Stories are always there - for me, it's like the Michelangelo thing: the statue is always there, in the piece of stone, and it's just up to the artist to uncover it. To paraphrase badly, that is.

Coffee holds my thoughts together and lets them string apart like mad bunting. This week I'm going to be working on my secondary WIP (work in progress) as my primary is sitting ignored on my external hard drive and there it shall remain until one day I gain the knowledge to be able to finish it.

My WIP is maybe a third through - it's a short story which is a dark comedy about what happens when you get what you really want. There's a goth, a doctor with sketchy morals and an elderly lady stuck in the middle. I'm not posting any snippets yet!