Dublin Book Festival 2010

I've an ambitious plan for the rest of my life - drama queens don't do mere plans for the day or the week, you know - which is to write 10,000 words a week. Sounds overly ambitious in that it's a lot of words, and overly arrogant in that not many people can write 1,000 good words a day so why blather? But a girl's gotta do...
And a girl's gotta do other things too, like keep the garden tidy, her wits about her while interacting with strangers and managing to wear the right outfit to the right do. All of which I've been, shall we say, a bit slipshod lately. Anyway, The Cunning Plan (thank you Ben Elton et al), is to remind myself when I wrote what on this blog, as it kindly provides a date stamp at the bottom of each post. So there'll be links to the hubpages essays I write and others that I've found stimulating over the course of the previous day. I've a diary posted in hubpages too that for intuitive reasons need to keep updated, so I've to give myself a clue what topic I wrote on when, through this date-stamped blog. If this reads as though I'm muttering to myself a tad antisocially, please forgive me. Experience has taught me that the nuances of why decisions were made can be crucial to one's identity, and can be lost without aide memoires.
So two of today's hubs are book-related. One is on a fringe event organised by author Kate Kerrigan called The Good Room, an event that was a resounding success. It was great fun and promises even more throughout the year.
And the other is about Pauline McLynn's new series Shameless, which is a television series about English people with Irish names and accents that is a gritty slice of life. Apart from exfoliation, I love grittiness once-removed, and when you see the fast-moving, funny and frightening drama that is Shameless, you'll see why.

Posted on hubpages today: The Good Room, Kate Kerrigan; and Mrs Doyle's Makeover, Pauline McLynn, (plus the Maura capsule).

Up with the lark: 5.50am and blogging

I'm still getting used to this internet thing. Don't get me wrong. I love it. I love that I can be sitting in my kitchen all on my ownio, using pre-historic phrases in a letter to the world. But this blogspot for now is part of the great experiment that is getting used to the internet's reach. I like blogspot because the designers have chosen an elegant format for people like me. The font for the banner, the white space and the very cute, squat and chubby B it has for its logo. I'll discover the rest of its charms as this gets filled with more interesting content. See? I have faith.
I've no idea yet of the importance or otherwise of backlinking, or how it fits into the concept of getting traffic, which seems a crude and ugly term for inviting people to like and enjoy your essays. I understand that linking is probably best if done with the reader's convenience in mind, but I've found so far from writing on Hubpages that I usually only add links to people I've found enriching.

Irish handbag makers

If anyone I know gets this as an email or a personal notification, can you mail me and let me know so I can see where it's distributed. Sorry if it's peeving people, but this is part of the web course I'm doing

Irish handbag makers

gung ho fat choi

Happy New Year to everyone subscribing to the Chinese calendar. Having written off the whole month of January 2010 as being a false start to the year, the start of the Year of the Tiger is now officially the moment when the year starts here.

Irish handbag makers

Irish handbag makers

Turning Japanese

Seeing as the month of January was something of a black hole between the snowfest and consequent hibernation, I'm going to take the Chinese new year - Feb 14 - as being my new year. It's the year of the tiger afterall and as a water tiger I just know it's going to be a good one. I can feel it in my water.