Writing 101 – Day One

I’ve signed up to a month-long writing course on wordpress – Writing 101 – building a blogging habit. The assignment for day one is to write for twenty minutes about anything. A sort of stream of consciousness type thing.

I’m kind of scared of doing this. I’m a harpist, not a writer. Doing a month-long writing course is like admitting to the world that I do actually want to write. The truth is, I love writing my blog and I would jump at the chance to do more and improve my writing, so here I am. Every weekday this month there will be a writing assignment – I still want to write my posts about gigs and my career – this is in addition to that. So if you are a regular reader of my blog, firstly, thank you! secondly, feel free to ignore these posts as they probably won’t be about the harp or gigs. It’ll just be me – expressing the innermost workings of my mind.

I have always written – I still have my first journals, from back when I was about 10. I would write every evening before bed about what had happened that day – I loved having the record of my thoughts and feelings, I also loved being able to look back one, two, three years down the line to see what I was up to, to laugh at how immature I sounded and to realise how much I’d learnt in the meantime. I even took my journal on holiday, I would keep tickets, programmes and leaflets from places we visited and write about what we did, where we ate, what the weather was like. I just loved it.

I probably got into it through a book I read as a kid. I was pretty much obsessed with ‘Harriet the Spy’ and loved that she would just snoop on her family and write about it in secret. At the risk of sounding old – when I was growing up, none of my siblings lived with me and the internet wasn’t around yet, so when I wasn’t practising either the harp, piano or cello (how did I have any spare time?!) I would write, draw, or read.

So I pretty much need to write. I would love to write for a publication. Being paid to write would be an absolute dream. Not instead of music, but as well as music. Ahh, the joys of freelancing.

I may be experimenting with writing some fiction this month too. I haven’t done a lot of this but I would love to try. Writing a ‘stream of consciousness’ post on a public blog is rather daunting. Plus, every time I think of a stream of consciousness I’m reminded of the novel ‘Catcher in the Rye’ by J. D. Salinger. I studied this book for my english literature GCSE and really enjoyed it. I loved the idea of seeing reality through someone else’s perspective and realising that what you’re ‘seeing’ may be very different from ‘reality’ – ‘The Wasp Factory’ springs to mind here too.

So that’s my twenty minutes of free writing done! Any feedback or comments, please do let me know.

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Katherine Jenkins in Bridlington

Yay an outdoor concert!

Last Saturday was a rather exciting gig. I was playing with the National Symphony Orchestra in Burton Agnes (near Bridlington) as part of Katherine Jenkins’ summer tour.

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I do love my Yorkshire gigs, it’s always lovely to be able to stay with my parents for a weekend, even though we mostly just eat, drink, and play Scrabble.

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The programme proved very popular. With patriotic classics such as ‘We’ll Meet Again’, ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’ mixed in with songs from ‘Chess’ and ‘The Godfather’. Seeing two thousand people all standing to wave their Union Jacks and sing along to ‘Rule Britannia’ was actually quite emotional!

Katherine was also supported by the vocal group Celeste, and the biggest selling string quartet in history – Bond.

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Playing for such a big crowd was brilliant, despite the fact that I hadn’t realised the gig was outside and had only brought a short-sleeved blouse… brrr!!

I had to move my car three times and another time someone else had to move it for me. That is simply not normal and highly irritating. The orchestra were all told to put our cars on the ‘land’ next to the hotel. What they didn’t realise was that it was private land (how did they not check this before?!) so to save us all getting towed away we had to find somewhere else to park – just before the gig – when 2000 other people had already filled up the car parks.

Anyway, a very nice man called Will kindly moved my car back down to the area near the stage, so I could load up and make a speedy exit – thanks Will!

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