Woodend Creative Industry Centre in Scarborough now has a fabulous new website showing the Sitwell Library in all its glory. And lurking in the corner is my installation Words in My Head. Of course, you don't get the full effect without the poetry and music, but take a look:

http://www.woodendcreative.co.uk/meeting-rooms.html

Coastival's Rather Splendid Day Out on Saturday (http://www.coastival.com/) was an inspiring mix of art, drama and music.

I particularly enjoyed Slung Low's production Converging Paths (http://www.convergingpaths.co.uk/) an hour chock full of lyrical words, intriguing images and music. It was performed in the Spa Sun Court and sunny it was not, I was particularly concerned for the actress playing Helen who appeared in a white cotton nightie and must have been in danger of hypothermia.

We, the audience, were seated inside, watching through glass windows, the audio brought to us by our own personal head-sets. It was an intimate experience. There was a lot to watch: live actors; back projection; some steaming fish tanks and fire effects. However, I spent some of the time with my eyes closed, being drawn in by the poetic language of the narrative. My companion, who had focused on the visual, said he had lost track of the story. Which was a shame because it was beautifully told and, to quote from the performance:

To listen to someone else’s story –
well, it’s the most compassionate thing a human being can do…
transformative, shape shifting. It’s nothing short of a miracle.

I am very excited to announce that I have a publishing contract. It is with Sense Publishers (www.sensepublishers.com) and it is for a book exploring writing blocks for people working within the academic environment.

I have found myself wholly enthralled by the process, writing around 3000 words a week and doing the attendant research and reading. What has been particularly satisfying is that I have been discovering as I've been writing, through the act of writing. Initially I was concerned that I had a collection of ideas which (a) wouldn't gel and (b) would only amount to a 1500 word article. So far this has not been proved the case. As I write and read, the ideas, the scintillas of insight, which I thought I had, have begun to expand, take on a life of their own and glow.

After some years of trying, I feel comfortable saying that we now have a local Lapidus group (www.lapidus.org.uk). I have to qualify 'local', as our members come from far and wide, indeed we thought we might describe our reach by the rivers Humber, Ouse and Tweed.

We met on Saturday to talk about the work we are doing and also to write. I found it a very stimulating, supportive and enriching day, I'd like to thank my fellow writers - who are becoming friends - for making it so. We have ideas for further meetings and even for inspirational trips away. Can't wait.

I was given an ereader - a Kobo - for Christmas and I have been exploring its potentials. I have discovered it is good for reading in bed and while travelling. It is bad for reading poetry (though this appears to depend on how the digitisation has been done) and academic books with end or footnotes.

Like most ereader owners I have been investigating the freebies (though as a writer this slightly goes against the grain as the writer (or his/her estate) presumably doesn't get paid). Most of the free downloads are out of print books which means discovering some volumes I would never have nosed into otherwise.

One such was Famous Women: George Sand by Bertha Thomas, a surprisingly pacy and fresh read given it was written/published in 1883. I also found out more about Sand, a woman I knew more by myth than fact.

This is what she had to say about the revolutionaries/politicians that disappointed her: 'What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and people them with perfected men.'

How apt even for today.

I've been enjoying reading The Plot, a biography of my father's English acre, by Madeleine Bunting. Beautifully and evocatively written it combines local and natural history with personal memoir. It also gave an excuse for a bracing walk around Sutton Bank followed by a cosy lunch in a near-by pub.

One extract, in particular, caught my eye, as she describes a time as experiencing: 'dramatic population growth and a new urbanization [which] saw towns and cities expanding rapidly. It was an age of anxiety. ... trade was accelerating. There were repeated laments about the commercialization of human relationships. ... "everyone has their price" was a common and bitter refrain. An unprecedented number of people were on the move, as migrants, pilgrims or vagrants. With these changes came a new impersonality, as strangers became customers and neighbours in the cities. It all caused great insecurity; money was frequently excoriated as a form of pollution. Greed was the great sin of the age...'

Could this be our own (painful for many) present? No, surprisingly, this is the twelfth century and these changes in society caused the Cistercian monks to seek out East Yorkshire to build their isolated and austere abbeys.

Over the festive season I very much enjoyed reading Author, Author by David Lodge. Not wishing, of course, to put myself in the same league as Henry James when it comes to his forté as a writer, I do feel a kinship with his frustration and depression at the luke-warm reception for much of his work.

Writing in the author's voice, Lodge ponders on the reasons for this response to James's literary output: 'Some huge seismic shift caused by a number of different converging forces - the spread and thinning of literacy, the levelling effect of democracy, the rampant energy of capitalism, the distortion of values of journalism and advertising - which made it impossible for a practitioner of the art of fiction to achieve both excellence and popularity, as Scott and Balzac, Dickens and George Elliot, had done in their prime. The best one could hope for was sufficient support from discriminating readers to carry on with the endless quest for aesthetic perfection.' (P348).

How familiar that sounds, and yet Lodge meant it to represent the situation in 1898.

I will finish with James's own words, from his short story, 'The Middle Years':

'We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have.

Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task.

The rest is the madness of art.'