Friday, September 12, 2014

Afternoon off

Lately I've been having nightly visits from my old friend Insomnia. He comes to chat, we hang out and drink tea and watch the sunrise. Then presumably Insomnia heads off to his black palace to snooze the day away and I struggle to function on 2 hours sleep.

I've been working on the Werewolf book - named now, Zora's Dawn :) The last couple of days though I've had a bit of a crisis, a bout of writer insecurity I guess it is. I write, and it comes so easily to me. Editing lightly is easy, hard editing which is taking out whole sections is more difficult. Then I start second guessing myself. If I can take out whole sections of the book that are irrelevant to the storyline then what sort of writer am I? If it comes so easy to me does that mean it's not actually any good? What if I've written a book that's not good, but cheesy and horrible? What if I suck at my chosen career and I'll never make any money, what will I do now that I've burned all my bridges? And so on...

Mr Insomnia comes to visit every night, we chat about all the things I worry about in a way guaranteed to take them from every day stresses to major life issues. I finally fall asleep around 3am and wake sometimes at 5am - I've got some great dawn shots to share though. Some mornings, like this morning, I sleep until 7.30am and wake feeling like death. It's a bit tricky writing in this sort of mood, which is why today I'll be working on turning a wee little ebook I wrote into the proper ebook format. I'm going to put it up on Amazon soon, as a little experiment. That's something that takes nothing more than focus on the tedious steps required for formatting. The cover is already made, and this one has photos for each page too so I've plenty to keep me busy and potentially make a little money down the track.

Yesterday I was up and writing before the sun dragged itself over the island I can see across the Red Sea from my balcony. But plagued by these doubts I didn't get that much done and found myself paralysed with indecision - is it good enough, does it fit in with the storyline, that sort of thing. So since I've received a teeny tiny amount of royalty payments (and I am not understating, it is really teeny tiny) I went along Sheraton Street and this time I took photos of some of the wares available in the shops.

These pics are only a very small slice of the things available on Sheraton Street and there are no pics of the many stores that sell the knock off designer bags, clothes and shoes. I've never understood why such a rich culture sells this sort of tat, but then I see all the tourists walking around carrying their designer knock off bags and I guess it's consumer demand. I daresay the sort of stuff I'm drawn to is considered by Egyptians to be tourist tat as well, but I always was a sucker for teapots and teacups.

There are a myriad of strange lights made up of I think coconuts which blows my mind - both because they look like something you would get in Hawaii and because some of them are downright scary! There are the egg lights that I love for reasons I can't explain except that I also have a love of flashy, trashy, lights. There are the usual tourist types of clothing - t-shirts, stylised belly dancing outfits which make me laugh, that sort of thing. There are fridge magnets, stuffed toys, sand filled camels, embroidered towels, wooden furniture which I adore even though I know it's aimed at the tourists, marble everything and of course pyramids,camels, and Aladdin lamps in all kinds of materials. You can get a marble pyramid light - kitsch but I have a weakness for kitsch. There is also a staggeringly wide range of complete junk in frighteningly bright colours. I meant to take a pic of a shop that has a huge range of this stuff, you almost need sunglasses in that section of the shop. Sadly, I forgot to take that particular pic so you'll have to wait for that one.

So, here are the pics, starting with my sunrises, enjoy :)






Cup, plates, etc.


Marble marble marble


Scary lights


See?


And a kangaroo in case I get homesick :)


Pyramids pyramids pyramids


Aladdin lamps, camels and assorted stuff


Stuffed monkeys (why I don't know), the egg lights, sheesha pipes


Clothes


A gift for the gamer son, a bongo drum :)


No comments:

Post a Comment