Blasts from the Past # 4 - "Accentuating the Personal..."

# “Slip inside the eye of your mind, don't you know you might find a better place to play?” # - Oasis

It’s been a pretty long 30 days this month – I’ve just moved house and apart from it living up to its reputation of being one of the most stressful things you can do in life, it’s left me with a merry medley of mixed emotions about leaving the old house behind as well as looking forward to our future life in the new abode…

So for this fourth “Blasts from the Past” post, looking back over the last 5 years of keeping my online journal, I thought I’d focus in on my favourite posts where I’ve blogged about more “personal” stuff (not issues, mind you, but “stuff” – and of course, as always, the personal stuff was linked to my writing exploits...)

The garden gnome collection lining up for the move!

Getting personal with my fictional adventures in “Scribbleland” helps to ground my writing in certain settings (times and places), and I love to draw on my own experiences and family tales to add more realism and excitement into my stories. Using real life as inspiration for fiction hopefully helps the author’s everlasting strivings to connect with their readers on a personal level too! Some of my favourite stories (be they written, sung or on screen) are my favourites simply because I am able to recognise and identify with something within the plot or an observation a character makes that I myself have thought at some point too, in my own, real life…

A new home for my very own "Inukshuk"...

So I always try to hold true to the belief that every good story should have a mix of fact AND fiction (“faction”, anyone?!) I have a reminder of this in the new garden, in the form of an “Inukshuk” sculpture I’ve just been building with rocks from the old house’s garden – I first encountered these Inuit waymarkers back in 2006 while honeymooning across Canada by train, but found the full-size monuments over there so inspiring that I knew I just had to build one of my own when I returned home... So my small garden Inukshuk stands as a personal milestone in more ways than one – it whispers to me on the wind with inspiration for my scribbles yet to be written, pointing the way to my potential future in writing...

Patent pending for the "U.S.B." - see my Indie Fiction page!

A couple of the recent pages that I’ve launched on my Official Writing site have “personal” plot points added in too... On my “Indie Fiction” page (click on an object on the main homepage that you could wear on your head) you’ll find a short story with the phrase “I’ll knack ye wor Jackie!” running through it. Growing up, my dad was a brilliant joke-teller but also recounted many tales of his younger delinquent days in the back lanes of Newcastle’s Westgate Road, riding bogies and playing ‘knockie-nine-door’, and this phrase and the character of “Jackie” are inspired by my dad’s stories of daring do from yesteryear... On my new “Adventure Fiction” page too (click on a photo of an object on my writing homepage which looks like it might be bigger on the inside than the outside) there’s a story set in the Old West and mentioned within it is “Pat Montana” who cut off the pigtails of a Chinese man but was then repaid by being kicked off a jetty – according to family lore, my great-grandfather shamefully did this during the First World War and received a broken back from his fall off a pier somewhere in Europe… Finally, my new “Occasional Poetry” page (click on a collection of objects on my Official Writing homepage that you could stretch out really far!) also has a personal memory stone or “signpost” to my past on it with the first story I ever seriously committed to paper – “An Old Horse’s Tale”, written at the grand old age of 8!

The "Sometimes Poetry" page is newest to my website...

Now, that IS going back quite a ways, but to round off this penultimate “Blasts from the Past” post, I’ll cast an eye back over a shorter number of years and leave you with a list of my favourite “personal” posts here on blog since its inception 5 years ago:

• In 2006, “I got personal” from the getgo, in my very first blog post, about my writerly monicker…
• In 2006 too, “I got personal” about the village I grew up in…
• In 2007, “I got personal” about the dreaded age game and the game of life as I turned 30…
• In 2007 as well, “I got personal” again with more detail about why I chose the writing name I chose…
• In 2009, “I got personal” about a sick summer…

Not sure the voices in my head can make sense of my stories...

p.s. The truth is, all my scribbles from Day One of embarking on a writing life have a personal touch about them – I guess, ultimately, injecting a touch of the personal into my fictional jottings helps me as a writer, a reader and a person of this modern age to decipher the mysteries of real life and the real world around me, day in, day out as they rattle around in my authorial scatterbrain of a mind (and then hopefully by some weird miniature Numskulls science experiment form into a cracking story!)