I’ve been trying to set up First Class on my laptop and failing dismally. It keeps complaining that a tcp-ip file is missing – even if I carefully copy my ’settings’ file across from my desktop computer so it has all the details on hand. It’s frustrating and making me feel pretty cross.

I did another Morning Pages shortly after I woke today and then wrote another page at lunchtime. For someone who is pretty obsessive about writing/editing/polishing, I’m not finding the Morning Pages as difficult as I expected. It’s actually quite ‘freeing’ to just write without really thinking about the words you are writing.

My tutor group seems to be about seventeen students and six of us have posted already (the females seem to outnumber the males) but it’s not exactly buzzing with life. On the other hand, the A215 07J main Cafe forum is positively overflowing with messages. Maybe once the rest of our group find their way to the TG forum, we’ll get busier. Of course, there might be several on the list of students who decide they’re not going to go ahead with the course and become No-Shows which is always sad.

In the meantime, our cat is sulking

She’s an elderly lady now, nearly seventeen and a half, black as coal with pale green eyes and a hefty dollop of oriental blood in there somewhere. She always lived in the shadow of our big friendly noisy tabby cat, Mog, who sadly had to be put down when his kidneys failed at the end of January this year. Now she seems to have emerged more as a personality in her own right and has rediscovered her voice, a little faint and squeaky at times, but nevertheless she ’speaks’ to us much more. But she’s a LapSitter and always has been.

Trouble is, her ‘Lap’ is currently away on the mainland on a Very Important Mission to secure a solo exhibition of his artistic work in his home city. She’s missing him. Quite badly actually. I’m only considered a Reserve ‘Lap’ because I don’t snooze in an armchair for fifteen minutes after the lunchtime news neither do I vegetate in front of the TV in same armchair for hours of an evening.

For the last three days, whenever I enter our sitting room, she rushes across to greet me, mewing expectantly as if I am a long lost friend and she hasn’t seen me for centuries… never mind the fact that I probably fed her only a few hours ago. When I sit down on the settee after my lunch, she inches up alongside me and inserts herself nose-first under my right elbow. This makes drinking tea or writing in my notebook very difficult.

She also gives me the filthiest of looks when I rise from the settee and head upstairs back to the Gallery or the Office. So I’ve realised that she’s lonely, poor Soopy (yes, that’s what our son christened her when he was about six) and desperately missing her ‘Lap’. Fortunately, he is due to return tomorrow evening (weather permitting) so hopefully she’ll forget her sulks and make a big fuss of him when he collapses into his armchair after dinner…. for he has Good News

And with that, I shall be off to ‘enjoy’ the dubious pleasures of dripping icy cold antibiotic eyedrops (straight from the fridge) into my poor left eye … shiver.

So here is the study brief for the first week:

29 September

• Course text: Part 1: The creative process

• Chapter 1 Stimulating creativity and imagination what really works?

This is where we get to practise Morning Pages and Freewriting developed by Peter Elbow (this is a link to an 80.5 kb Adobe Acrobat .pdf file) and Clustering so there’s plenty of writing to be getting on with despite it having the appearance of a fairly free-form week.

I did do my morning pages today! I put my notebook and pen on the bedside table and, once I’d surfaced sufficiently to be able to muster a coherent thought or two, reached for them and started writing. Unfortunately I’m also suffering from an eye infection at the moment and it’s difficult to see what you’re writing when your eye is a mess So I did the best I could and was hardly able to read the writing when I finished. But I did do a full A5 page non-stop so I feel quite pleased with that.

Of course, I shouldn’t really be blogging at midnight so I’d better head for bed. See you all tomorrow *waves*

P.S. winks at my regular Liverpudlian visitor – I’m a Liverpudlian too, you know

From reading about A215, I gather that notebooks are ‘de rigeur’ for the course and students are strongly encouraged to use them. I don’t know what the collective term for notebooks is but I might suggest a ‘nervousness’ of notebooks, drawn from the feeling often experienced when faced with a blank white page … or multiples thereof.

I’m now the proud owner of a ‘nervousness’ of notebooks which lurk in the depths of the document bag that appeared as a free gift when we purchased a large number of envelopes from an online supplier recently. I picked up a couple of new ones this morning from a local shop – they are dressed in matching vertical wavy pastel stripes and one is A5 while the other is smaller (A6? A7?). The smaller one should be suitable for keeping close by and jotting down those sudden thoughts or ideas that arrive unannounced in the middle of the washing up. I’m thinking the other one might be useful for ‘Morning Pages’.

When I read about ‘Morning Pages’ I was … well … taken aback, might be a good description. Write three pages longhand of random thoughts first thing in the morning???? Don’t get me wrong, I’m quick on the draw with a keyboard but I also do quite a lot of longhand writing as well. Additionally, my handwriting has been described as ‘delightful’ and ‘beautiful’ so I shouldn’t have much difficulty reading what I’ve written. But the idea of hanging loose and just jotting down the random thoughts that bounce around my brain first thing in the morning is a daunting challenge.

You see, I’m your typical Virgo – definitely a perfectionist, conscientious and well-organised. I don’t do ‘hanging loose’ very easily and I can worry at a piece of written work ad infinitum until I get as close to perfect as possible. Drafting and rewriting are second nature and I can see myself doing a lot of that over the next nine months. It’s actually the ‘creative’ part of A215 that will be hard for me, especially at first I think, because so much of my writing tends to be formal and factual.

So I’ll leave you with a limerick that bounced fairly effortlessly into my mind on October 30th 2002 (according to the notepad file where I saved it)

The problem with being a perfectionist
Is summed up by one word – rejectionist.
If things are not right
I get all uptight
And swiftly become a trajectionist!