As is normal for me, I didn't do any of these exercises in the right order (You can't tell me what to do!). So here is the article, entitled Your  First Writing Practice 

This was a tough one for me. I really overthought it, which led to me dismissing things i may have put in and running out of time. But here it is. Enjoy! Don't forget to leave me your thoughts in the comments section.

Writing Practice

15 minutes

A young woman/ man stumbles across a body in the woods. What does he/she do?

She always ran at dawn. That thin circle of gold along the horizon always lifted her spirits, contrasting starkly with the black outlines of trees and buildings. Her trainers crunched on the gravel of the poorly packed country road, the sound unnaturally loud in the stillness before the world woke.

She took a sharp right into the treeline, feet sure upon the track she had coursed a hundred times before. It was cold that morning, and she could see her breath misting briefly in front of her before she passed through it briskly. She knew these woods well, and even in the half-light, she could pick her way confidently, around a boulder here, over a tree root there and ….

She roused from darkness, confused. What had happened? Pulling herself to seated, she looked around. Behind her, half on the track and half in the undergrowth was a leg. A naked, soiled human leg. She crawled closer, tentatively reached out, pulled back the foliage and emptied her stomach on the forest floor.

The body was half-clothed, but in a way that would have been more decent had it been left naked. In her mind, it remained an It. It had to, lest she vomits again. Bloodied, bruised, broken, it looked like parts had come unhinged, bones pressing under flesh now cold. She fumbled in her waistbelt for her phone. She always carried it, her family insisted, although it worked better as an exercise tracker than a phone out here. Still, she prayed for phone signal as she tapped in 9-9-9.

Either, Neither, Or and Nor

As promised, here is the first of my writing exercises from The Write Practice. I did this one sat in my car outside college while eating my lunch.  The exercise explains the correct use of Either, Neither, Or and Nor and then suggests a writing practice based on the principles. Fun eh? Have a read of mine and leave me a comment in the comments section below. Maybe even copy and paste, or leave a link to your rendition?

Writing Practice

20 mins

Tell us about a disastrous camping trip. Use either/or or neither/nor to establish how much your main characters would rather be anywhere else.

“ Whose crappy idea was this?”

It had been raining for a full week. We had seen neither sun nor blue skies since we pulled up in front of the club house in our mustard Volvo, laden down with our camping gear on the roof rack like a small mobile mountain. We had faced two choices, we could either turn around and go home, or make the most of it. We chose the latter.

Now, staring at the closed sign on the club house door, we wondered what to do next. Each evening since we arrived, we had huddled together at the bar, with a drink and a plate of chips. We watched the cheesy entertainers vie for giggles and guffaws from the wet, irritated campers. Karaoke, mouse racing (one wondered where they found so many mice), cabaret acts; we had them all. Until tonight. Tonight the windows stood black. All as quiet.

With a collective sigh, we trudged back to the tents to find that one had collapsed, either from the abundance of rain on its roof, or someone kicking out the guy rope in the dark. We couldn't tell which. In any case, neither my husband no I felt like tackling it in the dark, so we huddled into the pup tent with the kids.

“Why did you insist we camp?” hubby said.

“Because I couldn't book either the log cabins or the mobile homes, they were full! We talked about this!”

“Why did we bloody have to come here at all? Neither camping, nor the rain appeals to me at all! Why couldn't we have gone somewhere warm and sunny? Either Spain or Greece would have suited me fine. I could have been basking in the sun and working on my tan.”

“Oh come on babe, you know very well that you like neither flying on a plane nor foreign food. You say it gives you dodgy belly.”

He sighed, and stared blankly through the unzipped tent flap into the cold, wet trees. It was going to be a long cold night. I hoped he would wake in the morning in a better mood.

Remember me?

Hi, Remember me?

Its been a while, and it has been a pretty eventful while, but I'm not ready to talk about my adventures just yet. Things are still too up in the air for me to put anything down in type.

I have, however, been playing around with creative writing recently. I havent written creatively since I left college at 18, other than the odd really crappy poem during my emo angsty early 20s. I still cant read those without wanting to vomit. At that time I chose a business degree (that i didnt finish) over an english degree (that i thought i wouldnt be able to make any money from).  That was a really long time and 4 kids ago (one of whom is now an adult herself!)

I've started small. I am doing the creative writing practice exercises from thewritepractice.com . One of the things they recommed is to publish, and publish regularly. Which reminded me of my blog here, lonely and unloved, abandonded in the hubub that has been our lives of late. So i decided to revive it, and torture my tiny audience with the word vomit that is my tentative steps back into the hobby of creative writing.

Sorry. You can hit unsubscribe if you like. But id really like it if you would read and let me know what you think. Just be gentle with me.

If you stick with me I will be uploading here my efforts, and with each blog posts, i will link back to to the original article at thewritepractice.com so if you want to give it a go too, you can!

Are you with me?