On, on to the next stage.

I really enjoy doing the activities for this course, and the tutorial activities have been great for boosting my imagination, and teaching me how to construct a decent story or poem, but my gears are having to be notched up a little, as I now start the preparation needed to produce something decent for the next two TMA's, plus start on my ECA!

Fortunately, my tutor has informed me that, with some major re-working, and adding on to the story, my Seasickness essay can be part of the ECA, along with some poetry. This means that I will be showing both my tutor, and whoever else has been chosen to mark my ECA, that I have a good range, and will show that I am absorbing all that the BRB is teaching me! I will also, hopefully, be able to impress them enough with my work, that I will get a good pass mark, bearing in mind that the ECA is worth 50% of the overall course marks. (I can but dream!).

I've already started the work needed for my 04 TMA and, apart from some final tweaking, I feel I've produced something decent, but I'm still blank with 05, as I need to produce something - either a fiction story, some autobiography, biography, or poetry, find a magazine that it would suit, and then go through the motions of preparing my piece for submission to the chosen magazine, without actually submitting it.

To further complicate things, I've still got to produce something within the O.U. parameters for the TMA, as well as fullfilling the magazine's rules.

I'm going to have fun, I can see!


In the meantime, here's some of my contribution to Activity 22.3, where we had to:

Think of a place from your past (not necessarily your childhood, it could be from your more recent past) – it might be a room, a street, or a garden, but not necessarily any of these. You choose. Spend ten minutes listing things about the place or creating a cluster for it in your notebook.
Then either write 250 words or write a 16 line poem about the place.

I decided to write about what was laughingly called the 'Dining Room' in an old farmhouse we used to live in. This was a room that had abandoned all hope of habitation well before we moved into the house and had, at one point, been used as the 'laying-out' room for any deceased member of the family prior to burial - something definitely not condusive to fine dining!
I chose to write a free-verse poem:

You silently watched the passing of the years,
with your dust-filled carpet, and grate full of ash.
Through the ages you reflected the lives within,
and became the resting place of the dearly departed.

With the sad, brown tones of the seriously neglected,
You had no choice of the use you were made.
Like a ghostly echo, you saw the fleeting lives of many,
all those empty lives, and useless ties, of nothingness within.

Mould patches fleck the rising damp that begrime your walls,
a testament to neglect, and barely-used empty rooms.
Fly-spotted window panes, dimmed by dirt and dust,
let in spots of sunshine, that show up grimy tiles.

The darkened corner of the farthest blank stone wall,
echoes all the yesterdays of nothing used, no life here.
Named the dining room, though no food has appeared
in all the living memory of those who lived within.