Bleurgh.

Didn't get anything done yesterday. My poor Principessa was very poorly.

Yesterday morning she woke up screaming "I have red in my mouth!" I thought she had had a nightmare, so I gave her a cuddle and she went back to sleep again. She woke up again complaining of the same thing, and then throughout the morning she complained intermittently about the red in her mouth. I gave her a colds and coughs pastille, and for a little while she was okay and happily went to the swing park. But when she came home she complained about a headache, had a cuddle and then went upstairs to sit with Nanny. The next thing I knew she was panic crying, and Nanny was calling that she had been sick. Oh, my poor little munchkin. Being sick frightens her so much. She was so ill all last night, but by this morning she was back to her normal demanding self. Well, not so normal. She has been very bossy this morning, making up for yesterday. Little monster! But I'd rather have her like that than the sickly Principessa. It's really weird though, as it is around this time every year she has a one day illness that always includes a puke fest. Very strange.

At the moment, she is making interesting Jackson Pollock type pictures on the computer, so I am going to read some more of the Big Red Book PDF, and do some freewriting. I am letting the clusters sleep in today.

And so it starts...

(Pic from http://www.prog99.com/Hillwalking%20in%20Scotland/2006/Ben%20Lomond%20-%20September%202006/index.html)

The self-doubt has made a fine log cabin in my head.

With acres of untamed fields and woodland of niggling questions and mountainous arguments. Wood for the trees? That's me. And each tree feels like a whomping willow, forcibly thwacking me with branches of self-deprecation, cutting deep rivulets in already low confidence. No tyre swings or fairy godmothers in sight. The sun is shining with a darkness, lining silver clouds and locking in the goodness. The fog refuses to give up its Brochen spectres, leaving me cold and lonely, warm in the knowledge of impending failure.

Yep. I am already writing myself off. (No pun intended there.) Do they do insurance deals for confidence? You know, in the case of serious self-doubt they provide you with a hire-ego while taking yours away to massage it back into self-belief?

Argh!

Intent to write weirdness.

Despite buzzing televisions, tons of washing and a demanding Principessa, I actually managed to do one of the writing exercises. Yay me! I had a go at the freewrite exercise, though I don't know if what I scribbled could be counted as a freewrite. You see, I can't write without putting in some form of punctuation, like I think in commas and apostrophes. I can't help it. But writing a freewrite, you are supposed to just write stream of consciousness stuff, so punctuation is superfluous to requirements. I just can't do it! Even if the punctuation might be a bit off - comma diarrhoea and the like - I have to put it in. Not only that, but the stuff I did write was a bit like sinister, surrealist fiction with environmental (as in noises around me) influences structuring the sentences. Anyway, enough of that. This is what I came up with (as written and unedited) for the "One summer's day" prompt:

One summer's day the world ended. Well. Not ended as such, but it stopped. Just for a split second. The washing machine trundled away on its own merry business, spinning the children like one of those rides in the fairground. They giggled and gurgled as the machine sprayed them with luke-warm water. After all, health and safety is rife now and using cold water can get you sued.

My mind piled up with all these strange, stringy thoughts. They tumbled out like so many hankies from a magician's sleeve. Red, angry thoughts. Purple, peaceful thoughts. Blue, cold revenge thoughts. But it was the yellow, summery thought that caught my attention, bouncing like tennis balls off freshly cut grass. That green, verdant smell was in my nostrils, the hazy summer sun buzzing with the intent of an angry wasp in the front of my head. Migraine, nausea and hayfever struck with one single, violent exploding jerk of my body.

Some of it I really like, but some of it seems just a bit too twisted! Eeps, I think my mind is slightly strange. And does it count as a freewrite, as that is exactly how it seeped from my brain?