So this is it … my new course blog!
It’s scary and exciting all at the same time which is exactly how I feel about A215.
What’s A215, I hear you ask? Well, it’s one of a plethora of distance learning courses run by the Open University here in the UK and the ‘A’ designates it as an Arts course. Actually, it’s ‘Creative Writing’ and the third presentation begins on September 29th so I’ve got a whole month to wait yet! Hopefully the course materials will arrive a week or ten days before the start of the course proper and I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the course textbook, nicknamed the BRB or Big Red Book. If you check it out on Amazon, you’ll see why!
In the meantime, I’ve been exploring the open course conferences on First Class, reading oodles of messages and saving loads of information (I know I wouldn’t be able to find it again if I didn’t …) There seems to be a great ‘camaraderie’ amongst the A215 students which is always nice to see and a huge range of experience as well from complete beginnners to published authors. There’s the prospect of a fair bit of group conference work which can be time consuming but I’ve done courses with lots of groupwork before so that’s not too scary.
I’ve written and scribbled and jotted for almost all of my soon-to-be fifty years. As a small child in a tiny village primary school in Somerset, I remember painstakingly forming my letters in thick black pencil on the wide-ruled pages of my writing book. The class was under the eagle eye of the fierce moustachioed headmaster (very military in his bearing and always dressed in a check tweed jacket) but his traditional approach and strict lessons have stayed with me. To this day, my handwriting is neat and rounded, almost always legible and quite slow in execution (painfully so when I was struggling to keep up with note-taking during lessons at Grammar school).
I remember winning a prize in a nationwide writing competition for primary schoolchildren run by a tea company ( Brooke Bond? Typhoo?). It was an Encyclopaedia and it had a specially produced gold-and-white commemorative bookplate on the inside of the front cover with my name written in beautiful copperplate writing. I nearly burst with pride! Sadly I don’t know where it’s gone but I suspect it might have fallen apart from use/age and been thrown out many years back 
At Saturday morning secretarial college, I learned to touch-type at a good speed and this was an invaluable skill when I took a joyful leap into the world of computing in 1990 (I also used it as an excuse for evading my responsibilities as Centre Forward for our school hockey team on cold wet winter mornings and afternoons …) I’ve been an avid computer user since then, even learning enough to build three of our own machines in the 1990s, and my beloved hubby has just bought me a new HP-Compaq laptop which is, even as I write, travelling to me in the (hopefully) careful hands of Amtrak.
Since then most of my writing has been functional. I kept personal diaries throughout much of the 1980s including the births of our two children and then, when our daughter was diagnosed as Autistic with Moderate/Severe Learning Disabilities, I kept daily diaries from when she started school at rising five to when she left secondary school at age sixteen.
Over the past decade or so, I’ve dabbled a little in poetry, humorous writing, factual writing, informational writing, travel writing but haven’t had anything published in a formal sense. Maybe A215 will change that? Who knows? I’m not even entirely clear in my own mind what I’m expecting from A215. I do know that I find critical commentary, however expert and constructive, to be a very bitter pill to swallow and I can foresee me struggling with denial when my assignments are returned. It’s so personal, you see? Offering your thoughts for others to read is a very ‘exposing’ experience and I’m viewing it with a certain amount of trepidation ….
Nevertheless, A215 is a new and exciting challenge and I suspect it will teach me an awful lot about myself over the nine months of studying 
