Indie Magazines

I love magazines, here are some of my magazines

For more frequent posts go to my tumblr: http://zomzara.tumblr.com/

Partially moving out.

I'm moving some of my blog over to tumblr, but don't worry I will continue to post stuff up here at the same infrequent pace that I always have. The difference between my two blogs is this:

Blogger = serious writerly posts, articles, news, stories, recipes.

Tumblr = photos, little tweet-type things, generally immature and impulsive/ responsive rather than mature and well-thought through.

Take a look on my tumblr to see the difference http://zomzara.tumblr.com/

There will be occasional cross overs. Like this one, which appears on both blogs

10 things I encountered on a recent walk through the Dorset countryside.

1) A smashed hard-boiled egg on the roadside near the river. The yolk was missing but the white was basically intact.

2) Asbestos

3) 22 glass bottles.

4) a tennis ball

5) An exceptionally well-hung gate.

6) A white-haired man in a flat cap burning things on a bonfire. He said “afternoon.”

7) A builder has been chipping the pebble-dash render off an ugly house, revealing an old red brick wall underneath. It’s like Beauty was wearing a Beast mask and is slowly taking it off.

8) A Lindt Excellent dark chocolate wrapper (caramel with a touch of sea salt flavour). This is a middle class area.

9) A deer bounding across the field towards the larch wood.

10) An old man hoeing moss off his driveway said “The wrong things are starting to grow again.”

Owls and Antiques

I got this bag for Christmas. I love it, it's especially good for shopping.

I live in a little cabin with thin walls and a single pane skylight. Owls often sit in the tree above the cabin at night and call very loudly. The cabin is in the middle of nowhere, so the owls are the only sound. It's magic.  

Here's a close up of a cushion I bought last year. I got it from a brilliant antique shop in Semley, near Shaftesbury. I've bought some amazing stuff from that shop (Dairy House Antiques) If you're ever near Semley, pop in - it's an amazing building with amazing things inside it.

this image is from their website 

http://www.dairyhouseantiques.com/

All the books I read in 2013

All the books I read in 2013:


(50  books)


Best adult: Andrew Kaufman - Born Weird

Best YA: John Green - The Fault in Our Stars

Best children's: Jon Klassen - This in Not My Hat

Best non-fiction: Stephen Grosz - The Examined Life

Worst: Tim Dee - Four Fields

Looking forward to 2014's reading (got a load of goodies for Christmas - Maze Runner, Skellig, Killing Woods, Picture Me Gone, Shock of the Fall, and a present from myself: The Silver Linings Playbook)

Tea

I'm tea-obsessed. I think most British writers are. A few years ago my boyfriend lived in Winchester. This was the same time that the tea shop Char opened. I drank a lot of crazy teas that year, and then he moved away and it was back to cheap tea bags. Save for the few interesting tea-gifts I received from friends and family, I've not been particularly adventurous since. Until...

Autumn last year, my boyfriend found the Char website and realised you can mail-order their tea online http://www.charteas.com/.

My Christmas list featured a lot of tea. My boyfriend's family mostly got tea for Christmas. Christmas should be re-named The Great Tea Exchange.

Char are sneaky (in an awesome way) and they include a few samples of similar teas to the ones you order. There's a massive list of so many different teas, and it would be expensive to try something new just to find you don't like it. Char have realised this, so their policy of sending samples is spot-on.

Two sample teas I will now be ordering in greater quantity include Winchester Caravan, which is an amazing blend of smoked black tea, green tea, oolong, rose petals, osmanthus (not even sure what that is!) and Jasmine. I'm a huge smoked tea fan and my favourite Char tea is probably Smoky Gunpowder. The Winchester Caravan is very subtly smoked, not at all overpowering; perfectly balanced.

The other tea they've hooked me onto via their samples is the Evening Calm infusion, which is a blend of chamomile, nettle, lemon balm, peppermint. I went through a big chamomile phase about five years ago and overdid it to the point that I couldn't drink anything with chamomile in anymore. The Evening Calm infusion has plenty of chamomile in, but the other flavours create such a good balance that my taste buds don't do that "ew, this is so 2009!" thing and I can now enjoy a calming hit of chamomile without taste-association overload.

(all images above are from the Char website)

So from Autumn, myself and my boyfriend were drinking loads of loose leaf tea, but we didn't have a teapot*. All we had was an infuser. So if we both wanted the same tea, we had to brew it twice over.

I'm studying in Bath, and my favourite place to go for tea and lunch is Jacob's, near the Pump Rooms. They use the For Life (stump) brand of teapot: a really stylish design (stylish enough that Tate Modern stocks it in their shop). It comes with a metal infuser and an attached lid. I asked my mum for such a teapot for Christmas, and she bought me a lovely lime green coloured one (the best colour if you ask me). I cannot express how much this has revolutionised my loose tea drinking. There's something about a stylishly designed thing that makes it a pleasure to use, and I'm always excited to make a fresh brew (I know I'm a loser).

* I did actually have a teapot before, which I purchased from Char back when my boyfriend lived in Winchester. I don't know if they still sell this set because it was a few years ago now: it's ceramic Japanese style and comes with four cute cups with little lids on. I only use this set for green tea because I worry that if I infused smoked or strong flavoured black teas it might nestle into the pores of the ceramic and affect the flavour of later delicate green tea brews. Also, it's so Oriental in style it feels wrong to have a strong Western-style tea in there.

Ideas Bank (MA MS)

I've started my MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa.
It's a lot of work.

I'm collecting things for my novel or a future novel or a short. The stuff below is actually for my own benefit, so I can find these links again in the future. If I email them to myself the emails will get lost in amongst boring stuff. So that's the justification for this post, which to other people will probably seem out of place.

Character scrapbook: older man, well dressed:

http://www.chictopia.com/HajimeTakahashi



character scrapbook:
point of interest: cardigan.



Fi's housing estate

The world/ the kinds of people who populate it:

Most of my novels have a playlist attached to them, or a style of music or a particular musician that represents something about that world or a character within it. The idea behind this is that I begin to form an association between that music and the novel, so if I need to work on it and I'm struggling to get into the zone, I can put on the associated music and be instantly in that zone. It's always difficult at the beginning because I've not yet formed that association. Here's some music that I think will form the association for my MA novel

character association: Ross (and Fi)

(four tet in general, as well as the four tet/ Burial collaborations.)

(awesome video!)

character association: Fi

Balam Acab's entire Wander/ Wonder album 

character association: Mark