Dear Santa...

Dear Santa,

I have been exceptionally good this year.  There may have been one or two unavoidable mishaps, particularly in the Edinburgh part of the year.  Granted, I probably shouldn't have thrown my shoe at Jackson when he called me awful names at work.  And I probably shouldn't have hit Evil Bob over the head with my handbag for teasing me about my red hair *I did receive payback for that one, by the way so I don't think that it should count, Santa.  I broke my drivers license in the process and had to carry my passport around with me for six months until I returned home to Perth*.  All in all though, I have been very, very good.  Here is a little list of things that would make my christmas:

1.  A plane ticket to somewhere exotic.  Anywhere will do really.  Somewhere tropical, like Fiji or the Maldives.  Or a European winter wonderland, maybe Switzerland or Russia.  I can't bear to be cooped up in one place for too long so pretty please Santa! With sugar and whipped cream on top!

2. A 'Wicked' dayplanner.  2008 and 2009 were a flurry of new experiences for me, from moving to Scotland, camping in Alpine climates and learning to didgeridoo (not very well, I might add).  I intend to make 2010 even better.  Plus, I am a social butterfly and with all of the parties, dates and events I have planned for the new year, I absolutely must have a day planner! Besides, I'm obsessed with stripey socks and who wears them better than the Wicked Witch? ;-)

3. A Nigella Lawson cookbook.  A domestic goddess, I am not.  Even after a year of living on my own, the best meal that I can come up with if I absolutely must cook is sausage and mash.  I despise cooking and I'm definitely not very good at it so if there is one person in the world who can inspire me to broaden my culinary horizons, it is Miss Lawson.  But be warned: I may begin using adjectives for my food like luscious, succulent and 'scrummy yummy'.

4.  Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  If you could possible arrange for him to be underneath my tree on Christmas morning or even just get him to deliver my presants, I would be very, very much obliged.  It's not that I don't love you, Santa.  I'm just a fool for an Irish accent ;-)

5. At the risk of sounding like a Miss Universe candidate, I really would like world peace for Christmas, Santa.  I realise that you probably can't manage this in one Christmas Eve but even if you were able to relieve just one person's suffering this Christmas, that would be very nice.  I feel mighty selfish sometimes enjoying all the merriments of the season when there are people in the world who are suffering and alone at Christmas. 
Lots of love and gingerbread kisses,
Rach xxx

P.S. If you happen to receive a letter from a Miss J. Kurowski from Philadelpia, I promise that there were no signs saying I couldn't climb that tree!

Reading is good for your brain

Ok, so that last post was really blergh and I am sooo tempted to delete.  But I'm not going to!

I am doing the NaNoWriMo thing this year!  For anyone who doesn't know what that is, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month.  The idea is to start and finish a novel in exactly one month.  Yikes!! 50, 000 words in one month! This is going to put my procrastinating to the test!! :-) I've thought through some ideas and I'm writing on this idea that I had when I was studying but never had the time *too lazy* to do anything with.  I'm not gonna say too much because I am EXTREMELY particular about people reading or knowing too much about what I'm writing until it's polished and finished.  Borderline pedantic, really.  All I'll say is that the title of it will be 'The Wind Chasers'. 

I have also just finished two books for my 50 Book Challenge and am half-way through another so that brings me to a total of three and a half books (one being Twilight, so I'm not really sure if that counts).  Book #2 was 'Remarkable Creatures' by one of my favourite writers, Tracy Chevalier.  The story is about the life of Mary Anning, the famous British fossil hunter.  Seeing as this is the woman who wrote 'Girl with a Pearl Earring', I was expecting greatness.  I was disappointed.  The book was bland, lifeless and really 'unremarkable'.  I have been waiting months for this book to come out and have been checking her website regularly to see if there were any updates.  While discussing the book on her website, she comments that her one challenge will be to 'make fossils sexy'.  Well, I hate to say this Ms Chevalier but it just wasn't achieved.  Two stars for this and only because it's obvious that there was an immense amount of research here.

Book #3 was 'A Voice in the Wind' by Francine Rivers.  I cheated a little bit on this one as I've read it before but I love it so much that I wanted it to be in my book challenge anyways! The book is part of a trilogy called 'The Mark of the Lion' series and it's about the persecution of the First-Century christians.  The story focuses on the life of a Jewish slave girl whose family are killed in the destruction of Rome in A.D. 70 (I think!).  It's absolutely brilliant and there are so many tidbits of information that I never knew about the era that are just so interesting! This is actually the book that got me interested in historical fiction and after reading it five times, I still never get sick of it. 

I'm so sorry that I have been so slack with updating this blog lately.  I don't even have the excuse of being too busy or anything like that as I've had nothing but time on my hands for a while now! I do, however, keep my dailybooth quite current so if anyone would like to check that out from time to time, the addy is:

http://dailybooth.com/rachmanship

Hope everyone is having a fantastic day! If anyone has any book recommendations for me for my 50 Book Challenge, please leave me a comment!

Toodles!
xxx

*sigh*

Today, I was determined to write a complete blog in one sitting. Normally, I have three or four blogs that I work on at a time and add and edit bits and pieces until I feel it's ready to publish. Not only could I not complete one whole post in a sitting, I couldn't write anything! My mojo is completely off today :-( Grrr!!

Will try again tomorrow...

Toodles!
xxx

8 True Things

A week or so ago, I was tagged to do the 50 Books Challenge.  50 books in a year!  Easy peasy man! :-) I'm gonna make an effort to review all the books that I read for this little challenge so by......21st September of next year, I should have read and commented on 50 books. 

So the first book that I finished (and I'm cringing writing this) is 'Breaking Dawn' by Stephanie Meyer.  I read the others a few months ago and just didn't get into them so didn't bother reading the last one.  However, I got bullied into reading the final one and, I have to say, it wasn't that bad.  The writing is atrocious and it's a killer anti-climax ending but the storyline is pretty more-ish, I have to say! 

I'm not in much of a writing mood today, so I'm gonna steal a little '8 things' quiz thing from Fras (check out his blog, it's good reading!).

8 Things I look forward to

1) Spending Christmas this year with my family in Australia! :-)
2) Starting my post-grad at Murdoch. Finally, my brain will be in function again!
3) Spending nine glorious days in the beautiful Bali sun.  Bliss!
4) Summer this year! I'm normally more of a cool weather person but after about two years of living in Narnia, I'm looking forward to being warm for a change.
5) Celebrating New Years in Sydney with my Edinburgh pals. Yay!
6) Going for dinner on Saturday with my good friend, Cheresy (,")
7) Having a Quinton Tarantino film night with Ash
8) Many more travel adventures!


8 Things I did yesterday (in order)

1) Had left-over chicken for breakfast
2) Listened to some toe-tapping 80's tunes
3) Worked for a measly three hours
4) Played with my new phone (sooo cute and pink!)
5) Wrapped Ashley's birthday presant (which is about 2 weeks late)
6) Took way too many stupid pictures of myself for daily booth
7) Washed my car for the first time in three months (poor Agatha!)
8) Danced my socks off :-)

8 Things I wish I could do

1) Fly :-)
2) Have my own creativity button.  Push 'on' and churn out amazing writing everytime
3) Play guitar
4) Speak French and Italian
5) Travel whenever I want
6) See all the people in my life that I miss so much
7) Get my revenge on all the people in my life who annoy me! Mwahahaha! (kidding, kidding...)
8) Get my dream job of being a travel writer

8 Movies I love right now

1) Amelie
2) Virgin Suicides
3) Braveheart
4) Legends of the Fall
5) The Other Boleyn Girl
6) Stepmom
7) Across the Universe
8) Troy

*Now Fraser's last list was was '8 Albums I currently adore' but I'm much more a book kinda girl so mine will be '8 Books I cannot live without!*

1) Bible
2) Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
3) Voice in the Wind - Francine Rivers
4) 'Chocolat' and 'The Lollipop Shoes' by Joanne Harris
5) 'Girl with the Pearl Earring' - Tracy Chevalier
6) 'The Bell Jar' - Sylvia Plath
7) 'Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
8) 'The Virgin Suicides' - Jeffrey Eugenides (loved both the book and movie)

Miss Manship and the Bible of Dreams

When I was in my final year of uni, I took a psychology/writing unit called 'Writing Therapy'.  The purpose of the class was to examine the therapeutic benefits of writing and to discern whether writing can be a help or a hinderance in some situations (using writers such as Plath and Sexton...was the outlet of writing a delaying of the inevitable or could it have been the cause of them taking their lives?).  Anyways, one of the exercises for the class was to put a pen and paper right next to your bed and start writing the minute you open your eyes in the morning.  Apparently, because you are still in a semi-dreamlike state when you first awake, you are likely to be more in touch with your subconscious.  The idea interested me a lot and so I started setting my alarm five minute earlier in the morning and writing down my dreams.  Once I started writing down the dreams, they started getting more and more vivid.  Every night my dreams were getting stranger and stranger and I was enjoying capturing them on paper so much that I was even setting my alarm to go off in the middle of the night so that I could write down more of my dreams.  Slightly obsessive, I know but some of the material that I was getting for my writing was unbelievable.  I would get up in the morning with notes from the night before (usually stuck to my face or written on my arm) and have no recollection of the dreams themselves.  I have notebooks full of these dreams and not I want to start recording them on my blog but I don't really want them to get in the way of my regular blog so I've set up a separate blog purely for the purpose of recording some of my more elaborate dreams.  It's just an experiment at the moment but if anyone is interested in having a squiz, the address is

http://missmanshipandthebibleofdreams.blogspot.com/

Sweet dreams (,")

Marmalade Musings

*Dream from the eve of September 10, 2009*


In this particularly vivid dream (not too long after watching 'Coraline' by the way), I had a bit of an Alice in Wonderland moment and stepped through my bedroom door into a nightclub.  It was a bit of a 'Jazzbar' type club, three levels underground and quite cosy.  The weirdest part of the dream (not the fact that I had a club connected to my bedroom, of course) was that everything in the club was orange.  It was called 'Zest' and absolutely everything in the room was a shade of orange.  Coloured lampshades threw a tangerine glare on the faces of the club-goers (who were all Scottish redheads apart from two 'Bugsy Malone' white rabbits sat at the bar, mixing gin and tonics with carrot stick stirrers). There were baskets of orange tic-tacs on pumpkin-patterned tablecloths and big, orange thought bubbles floating above people's heads, popping every now and then and dousing the thinker in a citrusy spray.  Coldplay's 'Yellow' and Simply Red were playing over the soundsystem.

It was almost like being trapped in that Beatle song...

Picture yourself in a boat on a river
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies


What does this all mean??  I don't even like orange...

Untitled Piece of Prose

*AUTHOR UNKNOWN*

I stood on a grassy embankment,
And at my feet a precipice broke sure down to infinite space.
I looked but saw no bottom, only cloud shapes, black and furiously coiled.
A great shadow shrouded hollows and unfathomable depths,
I drew back, dizzy at the depth.

Then I saw forms moving single file along the grass
They were making for the edge
I saw a woman with a child, holding onto her dress
She was on the very verge

Then I saw that she was blind
she lifted her foot for the next step
It trod air
She was over and the child with her
and, oh the cry as they went over

And then I saw more streams of people,
Flowing from all quarters
All were blind, totally blind, all making straight for the precipice edge
There were shrieks as they suddently felt themselves falling
And tossing up of helpless arms
Catching, clutching at empty air

But some went over quietly and fell without a word

I wondered with a wonder that was simple agony why no-one stopped them at the edge
I couldn't
I was glued to the ground
I couldn't call, though I strained and tried
Only a whisper would come

And then I saw along the edge
There were centuries set at intervals
But the intervals were far too great
There were wide, unguarded gaps between them and over these gaps people fell in their blindness
Quite unwarned

And the green grass seemed blood-red to me
And the gulf yawned like the mouth of hell

Then I saw a picture of peace
A group of people sitting under some trees with their backs towards the gulf
They were making daisy chains

Sometimes when a piercing shriek cut through the quiet air and reached them
It disturbed them and they thought it a rather vulgar noise
And if one of their number started up and wanted to go and do something to help,
The all the others would pull that one down

'Why should you get so excited about it?
You must wait for a definite call to go,
You haven't finished your daisy chain yet
It would be really quite selfish,' they said, 'to leave us to finish the work by ourselves.'

There was another group
It was made up of people whose great desire was to get more centuries out
But they found that very few wanted to go
And sometimes there were no centuries set for a mile on the edge

Once a girl stood alone in her place
Waving people back
But her mother and relations called and reminded her that her time was up
And she mustn't break the rules
And being tired and needing a change, she had to go and rest for awhile

But no-one was set to guard her gap,
And over and over the people fell
Like a waterfall of souls

Once a boy caught a tuft of grass at the very brink of the gulf
He climbed convulsively and he called
But no-one seemed to hear

Then the roots of the grass gave way
And with a cry, the boy went over
With two hands still holding tight to the torn-off bunch of grass

And the girl who longed to be back at the gap
Thought she heard the young boy cry and she sprang up, wanting to go
But they reproved her, reminding her that no-one is really necessary anywhere
The gap will be well-taken care of

And they sang a hymn,
And then, through the hymn, came another sound
A sound like a million broken hearts,
Wrung out in one fearful sob,
And a horror and great darkness was upon me,
For I knew what it was,
It was the cry of blood