Posts made in September, 2010
Writing Prompts #37 – Imperfections, first steps and priorities
Hurray! Just managed to get this finished before Monday turned into Tuesday. Welcome to your writing prompts for the week! See? Not TOTALLY useless…
For any newbies (and it’s never to late to join in), here’s how it works: I’m going to give you 5 writing/blogging prompts. Pick one, pick two, or do them all if you’re really keen – it’s up to you. How you respond is your choice. You could share a real-life story, or make one up. You could write a poem or just free-write without thinking too hard and see what happens. It can be funny; it can be serious; it can be emotional. It can be whatever you want it to be. The only rule is to enjoy writing your post and get something out of the process.
Prompts each week take their inspiration from blogs, current affairs, daily life, or just whatever everyone happened to be talking about that week. If you’d like to suggest a prompt for a future workshop then send me an email or catch me on Twitter – I would love to hear your ideas.
And remember! We’re not looking for perfection here! Just have a go! The best way to get better at writing is PRACTISE. All the best writers aren’t afraid to write badly. So turn your inner-critic off for a while and just see what words come out.
Here’s this week’s prompts!
1. What’s your biggest priority right now? Do you need to rethink yours?
- Inspired by Cosmicgirlie’s beautiful photos of her boys over at Mocha Beanie Mummy.
2. A time you got lost.
- Inspired by lovely Paula at Battling On who ended up in completely the wrong place last week.
3. First steps.
- Inspired by Young and Younger and her gorgeous twins’ first shoes.
4. Tell us about something a little out of the ordinary that you did over the summer.
- Inspired by Rosie who is blogging this week about her amazing trip to Cameroon on behalf of Pampers and UNICEF. Can’t wait to read all about it!
5. Imperfection
- Suggested by Debbie from I am not a Colour!
Now here’s what you have to do. Write your post and publish it on your blog between now and THURSDAY. On Thursday come back and use the widget that will be up to paste in the URL of your post to share. Then take some time to read some of the other entries and leave some comment love! We’re not here to critique – just to have fun and support each other in our writing experiments. So be kind please. Anyone who would like to submit something via email, or even anonymously will be more than welcome to do so. I’ll post them on the site here and include the link in Thursday’s round-up.
Feel free to use the Workshop badge on your blog or as part of your post if you like. Code is here:
Note: I’m told Blogger does something a bit funny with the code so you’ll need to copy and paste it and then retype the quotation marks (“) as Blogger changes them for some reason.
See you Thursday then!
——————————————————–
This Writing Workshop is brought to you in association with Mama Kat’s Losin’ It – who’s lovely author came up with the concept and runs her own workshop in the U.S.
Read MoreWriting Workshop – What prompt did you chose?
Welcome back to this week’s Writing Workshop…
Our writing prompts this week were:
1. Write the story of a ‘first’.
- Inspired by Mother Without a Bath contemplating her first flight with her new baby.
2. Tell us about a time you stood up for something you believed in, or challenged someone breaking the rules. What were the consequences?
- Inspired by Insomniac Mummy and her battle with the queue jumpers.
3. Taking stock: where are you now?
- Inspired by It’s a Mummy’s Life and her beautiful post exploring that question.
4. Write a post telling someone in authority the words you wish you were brave enough to say or feel they need to hear.
- Inspired by Sian in New York right now with Save the Children busy meeting political leaders as they discuss the MDG targets and the issues of global poverty, disease, hunger and inequality. Keep up the great work Sian and fingers crossed for some powerful changes this week.
5. Waiting
- Inspired by all the people I know waiting for the arrival of their babies or who have finally had them! (and their seems to ruddy hundreds of you). Good luck to @pinkyaks, @pantswithnames, and MummyMatters and congratulations to @cartside, @jax2000, and @SuburbanMummyUK and anyone else I’ve forgotten!
Which one did you chose?
Leave your name and the URL to your post in the MckLinky below (the URL should be to your post not just to your blog) If you have the time it would be great if you could try and read and comment on at least two other entries. And be kind! It’s supposed to be a bit of fun – we’re not looking for the next Booker Prize winner here.
If you haven’t had chance to respond yet, then you’ve still got till Sunday to enter your link! Or just wait till next week, when there’ll be five brand new prompts to get you thinking.
Read MoreNotes from the Universe
So, I’m struggling just now. No big secret. And I’m not going to harp on about it (well, no more than usual) but it’s a little like pushing through very thick treacle. In the fog. Wearing a strait jacket and very high heels.
I guess I find myself in a time of flux. A lot is changing or needs to change and I’m a little lost in the swirl and rush of it all. I’ll find my way out of it again, I always do, but in the meantime I’m not feeling quite so great. I’m not entirely sure who or where I’ll be on the other side and that’s a bit scary and my body is tired, my mind is tired, and that might mean I’m a bit absent for a while, or, at least, a bit intermittently absent, while I figure it out. My retreat instinct is kicking in. Lots of sleep, lots of reading, lots of talking to the people that love me most and make me feel good and avoiding everything else.
Yesterday on Twitter, the very lovely @LittleStuff (either Laura or Katy, not sure which, who write a particularly beautiful parenting blog that you should go read immediately) sent me a link to a site called Notes from the Universe. “I know it looks a bit dubious and weirdo”, they said, “but sign up for the emails – they’re genuinely brilliant, and never fail to cheer.”
Well as a big fan of all things dubious and weirdo, I did. And this morning this landed in my inbox. It’s just words. Random words. Probably received by thousands of other people today. From a bloke that lives in Orlando, Florida. But wisdom has got to come from somewhere, right? And why not him?
In any case, it was pretty much exactly what I needed to hear this morning. So thanks Mike. I’ll look forward to tomorrow’s…
Read MoreWhat if, Josie, loneliness was simply a feeling of impatience, telepathically sent to you by friends you’ve yet to meet, urging you to go out more, do more, and get involved, so that life’s serendipities could bring you together… Would you still feel alone?
What if illness was just the signal a healthy body sent to urge clarification of your thoughts, feelings, and dreams… Would you still, at times, think of yours as diseased?
What if feelings of uncertainty and confusion were only reminders that you have options, that there’s no hurry, and that everything is as it should be… Would you still feel disadvantaged?
What if mistakes and failures only ever happened when your life was about to get better than it’s ever been before… Would you still call them mistakes and failures?
And what if poverty and lack were simply demonstrations of your manifesting prowess, as “difficult” to acquire as wealth and abundance… Would they still cause you to feel powerless?
Well, whatever you feel, Josie, I still consider you my only begotten, my champion, and my equal.
Are we close, or what?
The Universe
Meeting Nick Clegg and a time for action – #blogladesh
Can people really make a difference? When we’re talking about such global, evasive, complex problems such as poverty, disease, hunger, and on such large scales, can small groups of people speaking out really have any impact?
I guess that’s why we’ve been trying to find out over the last few weeks. We’ve blogged and tweeted and made videos and travelled half way round the world. We’ve pushed YOU to add your voice to ours and to the voice of Save the Children and you have – nearly 60,00 of you in this country alone. 10 million of you have heard about #Blogladesh. You’ve read about watched the stories of the people we met, and you’ve cried tears and you’ve been moved to talk about what you’ve seen.
This week, the little voices, our voices, are being given over to the hands of 150 of the World Leaders as they meet in New York to discuss what action will be taken globally towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals, targets set to finally ACT on the poverty and inequality affecting such a huge proportion of the world’s population and which are currently way of track. If any one can affect change, pushed by the global community’s passion and outrage and strong will, it’s these guys.
Last Thursday I got the chance to meet Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg before he left for the UN Summit in New York. I had five minutes. Five minutes to try and get across everything I had felt and experienced in Bangladesh and what he needs to DO, what he needs to be fighting for. I was nervous but felt so proud that we had been able to get our message this far. I just hoped I could do the team and the project justice in such a short space of time. I took photographs I had taken, blown up big on card, photos of the faces of two of the people we had me in Bangladesh, a mother and a child called Bibi Nurtaj and her son Shanto, who’s story you can watch here. I wanted him to see their faces, I wanted him to remember them, as I told him briefly of Bibi Nurtaj’s story, of the conditions she was bringing her child up in, of how Shanto had barely survived severe acute malnutrition and was now facing life blind in one eye as the result of prolonged diarrhoea, and still vulnerable to barrage of infections and illness. I told how Bibi Nurtaj had asked Sian to take Shanto away with us, of her desperation, how as I mother I could only begin to imagine the kind of life that would make you want to give up your own child.
And to his credit, Nick listened. I spoke emotionally, finding myself getting upset remembering, and he did listen. And I told him, as he must have been told so many times but I was glad to be able to tell him again, that he had the power to help change situations like this and that he should. I encouraged him to go out and meet some of these families himself, that I thought it would change the way he saw things, like it had me, and he responded that it was something he wished to do very much and he was committed to fighting for the reduction in maternal and newborn mortality and that those were the targets he was focusing on next week. I challenged him that the problems don’t stop when these children have survived babyhood, that we had seen with our own eyes the ongoing challenge to keep children alive in the face of poverty and hunger, and he agreed but said this would be a good start.
It is a good start. And I was glad to hear some fire and some passion in his voice as he spoke. These ARE issues he cares about.
And that was that. I left him with the photographs and my five minutes was up.
I guess the question now is will he keep his promises? Will the World Leaders find a way to unite and aggressively tackle the travesty that is 9 million children under the age of five still dying easily preventable deaths? Will they give it the will and the priority that it demands? Will they see that we CAN’T let this keep happening, that we have a moral responsibility, irrespective of the economic or political climate, to give these children a fair chance at life?
The money needed to fix this is small. But the resolve needed to make it happen is big. It needs a united and committed plan of action.
Our Blogladesh team mate Sian is out on New York following the events of the UN and reporting back. The UN Summit has revolving around it a whole week’s worth of campaign and awareness raising events which Sian is attending, interviewing important political figures and experts on issues of International Development. You can follow her reports on her blog and through the great videos being posted on the Save the Children YouTube Channel. And don’t forget to keep following @SaveChildrenPR for news and coverage of the Summit as it unfolds.
Back here at home the enormity of what’s happening keeps hitting me, the POTENTIAL for change has never been so great. All my thoughts are with the people in New York and the decisions being made. The realist in me expects that what comes out of it won’t be enough, that our voices will still need to find a way to keep shouting, and God only knows I will, because I can’t stop now, but let’s hope it’s a start, a good start.
Now’s your chance Nick, and all the rest of the people in power meeting in New York right now.
Don’t let the world down.
I’ll leave you with a video made to celebrate our trip and the people we met there, showing you what we’ve been fighting for and what we will continue to fight for.
Read More
