A split personality and her two blogs

I've been keeping TWO (that's right count 'em, two) blogs. The BLOGSPOT one which I rarely post to (and only really set up to boost the chances of GOOGLE picking up my website), and the one on my website, that I post to more frequently. I'm not sure if there is a way to post simultaneously, do one with my left hand and the other with my right? Can I kill two birds with one stone? From now on I'm going to cut and paste my writing so that both sites have the same posts. If you have missed my other blogs (not that they are very enlightening or exciting, I talk mostly about what I ate and what I've not been writing) then you can find my other one at: http://www.tinafreeth.com/page6.htm

I was all ready to go out today. I imagined myself at a Starbucks with my laptop occasionally staring out of the window, whilst my fingers typed away for hours. Now and then I would sip on peppermint tea that tastes like chewing gum and costs one pound fifty. However, it's miserable outside and I thought I'd clear up my blog mess instead. Back in the day I had a Myspace blog where only friends were allowed to read about my heartfelt feelings about someone or other who didn't reciprocate, yes, back then I wrote a lot about unrequited love. Or I moaned about my boss who ran her charity like a dictator calling it her 'regime' - apparently I was a threat to the 'regime'. Now I know that I don't need to blog that stuff anymore because I've got fiction and screenwriting to explore all the things in life I want to talk about. My overly-emotional blogging of the past did help me unburden things stored up that needed to come out in words, so you know, writing does help get all the crap out of you, a bit like a colonic.

I'm reading a few books at the moment and one of the authors has a kind of split personality, like myself. Peter Ho Davies has a new book out called The Welsh Girl...that's not the book I have. I have his short story collection called Equal Love and I didn't mean to buy it. It kind of winked at me from the shelf in Waterstones. I had only intended to buy a copy of Starfishing by Nicola Monoghan (my tutor at the NAW) and on way to the till, something pulled me over to the shelf, it's not the cover as I don't particularly think it's an eye-grabbing one. I think it was the HO in the middle of his name. As an amateur Chinese person I'm getting very good at spotting people with Chinese names. I'm not sure how I saw the HO sandwiched between the PETER and the DAVIES but I did. That's why I bought the book, the HO had me.

In the book, Davies does what I would like to do, and that is he writes about everyone! As a half Chinese/half Welsh expat in America he has the ability to write characters from all walks of life. His characters are white, black, Chinese, working-class, academics, English, American, children, and the list goes on. I love it. Right now my writing is very British, but I would like to write more American style fiction as that has influenced me a lot, I studied it and I lived over there for a short while during my first degree. I used to take yearly trips back to California and New York but I've been unable to do that recently. My mate called me from San Francisco and I told him about one of Davies' stories called 'How to be an expatriate' it reminded me of my friend who has moved from his West London environment to be with the woman he loves, last night he said the word 'awesome' far too many times. When we lived in Berkeley in '97/'98, I'd get a sharp reprimand from him if I said the word 'elevator' instead of lift.

I also just finished a great book called The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen. It is a very American book and its characters remind me of American people I know of a certain age. But what I liked about it most was its descriptions of mental health and how we cope when people we love have mental malfunctions and they don't know what to do and you don't know what to do. It was very touching and well done, and written with a wonderful pace and generosity.

I think I might tackle Atonement next as my expat mate said it was "brilliant" (not just "awesome", it was "brilliant"). After that I'll watch the film and hope that Kiera Knightly has a facial expression I've not seen her do yet. She is beautiful though.

As a multi-tasking reader, I'm also reading Syd Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. He talks about how everything in life and in the Universe is connected. It's like he's giving you a spiritual lesson as well as a screenwriting one, my new agey side likes that a lot. Syd's ok by me. I find that when I critique someone's work often I'll give it a intuitive/holistic once over before I look at things like sentence structure and character development. It's probably not the best way to judge somebodies work but I tend to do it, I'll think about the work and whether the author put their love into it, because often if they didn't, you can really see that. Yes, you have to work on editing and getting the little things right, the parts are connected to the whole, but I think it's very important that you do have a connection to your work as it is a little piece of you. I might be talking complete and utter bollocks! That would be the other personality.