Forgot an important birthday...

The big day completely passed me by... no card, co cake, no celebration of any kind.

Ooops. Poor Scribbles.

Because - can you believe it? - Squidge's Scribbles has been up and running for 2 whole years as of last weekend! Two years!

Happy Belated Birthday, Squidge's Scribbles!

And what a year it's been... all 135 posts of it!

As regular readers will know, this blog was set up first and foremost because I'm an author.

The last twelve months have seen the publication of several short stories in KlicBait Volume 1 and A Seeming Glass, as well as the second book of Granny Rainbow stories - More Granny Rainbow. I've been on author visits, held reading sessions at the library and helped to set up a local creative writing group, NIBS (otherwise known as the Nanpantan Improving Body of Scribblers!) I went to the Festival of Writing in York again, and raised money for charity through auctioning my books for Comic Relief and Authors for Nepal. I continued to write bits of flash fiction and shorts, posting them here on the blog for you to enjoy.

The highlight of my authorly year was the news that, after spending last November editing StarMark (I did NaNoEdMo instead of NaNoWriMo), the novel was picked up by Bedazzled Ink in the US and will be published this autumn.

I discovered that I like writing 'nasty' and after a setback on Ani's story, I began a brand new story as part of my 100 days of writing challenge I set myself (working title - The King Stone) and I'm delighted to say that after 65 days (out of 76 days since I began) the s****y first draft is almost finished!

Oh - and the Scribbles won their first award!

But it's not just writing that I blog about. You're just as likely to find me writing about home and family. Like the problems we had with the new bathroom, or when the stove was fitted. Or I'll tell you about flower arranging with toilet rolls, or wedding bouquets or the Miss Piggy rose... Being a photographer's model... Relaxing with some colouring in... My skiing holiday... Perhaps even what Mr Squidge has been up to...

And you - lovely reader of the Scribbles - you've probably been with me for a goodly chunk of the past year, haven't you? There are over 50 of you officially following this blog, but I know many more dip in and out to see what's going on in my life. It's still a surprise to me when someone says they've seen my latest blog post, especially if I don't know they 'follow' me - it can feel sometimes like I'm just writing this for my own pleasure. (Which I probably am because it's my on-line diary!) I forget that I've invited you in to share it as well...but I love the fact you're here! Thank you for still being interested.

So - Happy Birthday to the Scribbles, and let's see what this next year brings to celebrate around the time of a third birthday...

Back into the swing of things

Our week in Obertauern, Austria, was pretty good. Mr Squidge had decided at reasonably short notice to go skiing again, and it was a whole lot of different to our experience last year in Reit im Winkl on the Austro-German border.

Our apartment is in there somewhere...

Haus Meilinger

For a start, in Obertauern you are surrounded by mountains. And snow.

Note the avalanche protection...

Looking from the lounge over to my favourite run... 

The view down into town...

And skiers. And snowboarders. From every window in our apartment, there was just this dazzling whiteness, spotted with trees or rocks, down which little black specks wove or hurtled or occasionally tumbled.

The first morning we were there, I woke early and found the mountain-tops backed by a rose-pink sky; I watched the sun kiss the highest of those peaks and move on to illuminate the rest.

Rose pink dawns do not just happen in books...

The first kiss of sun on the peaks

The view was equally as stunning in the evening. Venus appeared, ultra-bright, in the early evening and as the blueness turned ever darker, you could see the lights of the snowcats at work. I never got tired of watching their headlights travel up and down the various slopes - some of which I'd dared to try, others I knew I'd never be able to manage. I really, REALLY, wanted to sit in one of these huge vehicles and see what it was like to come down an almost vertical snowy slope in the dark...

The bright spots are the snowcats

We had wonderful weather. Bright sunshine, no fresh snow, reasonable temperatures around or just under freezing, with no real winds to speak of except when we ventured onto the high tops. And yet on the day we left it was -4 degrees with a bitter wind, and it has apparently been snowing today.

I'm not the most confident of skiers, and after a fall on the first day (too steep and narrow a track for my continuous snowplough), I wasn't sure I'd manage any of the blue slopes at all.

Just one of several over the week...I'm actually lying head first
down a rather steep slope after I hit a mogul.
And I'd been doing so well up to that point...

A private lesson with Clements later, and I was able to get down some of the steeper runs. It wasn't very elegant or particularly technically correct, but it was controlled and I began to understand where I'd been going wrong.

As was the case last year, the kids and Mr Squidge spent quite a bit of time sussing out the runs first, then taking me up on the chair lift to coax me down. And yes, they probably did two runs for each one of mine, but I did get better over the course of the week. They ended up doing maybe one and a half to each run of mine...

Always lunched together - the Weiner schnitzel and grostl were winners!

A rare trip to the tops for me.
And I seem to have snow pixies on my helmet...

A surprise during the week was the Winterfest, held on Shrove Tuesday. One of the local ski schools put on a bit of a free show and we went along. We arrived just as around a hundred instructors wove their way down the slope, flares in their hands, waving at the crowds. We had formation skiing, youth ski club demos, tricks, turns, fire shows, fireworks, mad rabbit mascots, snow motocross (say what?!) and to top it all, my personal highlight: a snowcat formation dancing team. I kid you not.

We had some lower points... the nine young men in the apartment next door had a thing about staying out rather late, imbibing copious shnapps and returning rather noisily in the wee small hours. 4am was the latest I think they returned. Not conducive to a good night's rest after a day spent on the other sort of piste. I went down with a rather heavy cold mid-week, which meant the last couple of days I didn't get quite so much skiing done as I'd like, and we also spent some time (and a fair number of euros) at the Unfallstation (Austrian equivalent of A&E) when T fell and hurt his wrist. Fortunately there was no fracture, unlike the others we saw in various stages of cast-sling-and-crutchness. (We had a bet between us, as to how many pairs of crutches/wheelchairs there would be on our flight home to Luton. I think it was two wheelchairs and a crutch in the end...) Oh - and our camera died, luckily the day after Mr Squidge had downloaded everything we'd taken to his netbook.

But on balance, a fabulous week. I have built my confidence so that next time I go (see - I'm talking about next time already, when once upon a time I'd have refused to consider it at all) I'll be even happier.

Oh - and writing-wise? I managed to plot Ani's story on the flight there and started to handwrite the ACTUAL story in a dedicated notebook in the evenings and on the flight back. It's a naff first draft, but the story is there and taking shape. Perhaps the mountain air is good for creativity? I'll let you know how it goes now I'm back in rainy Blighty...

But for now, I have to get back into the swing of things...prepare for two author events the week after next, get Granny to the printers, and prepare some writing exercises for a writer's weekend away in Oxford. Oh yeah - and get the holiday washing done. *sighs*

I'm definitely home...