The Bluestocking Arms Women's Pub, where women make friends with Beetles, Androids, Cakes, Dragons, Hedgehogs and other women, where wit and wisdom flourish

[inkymoose]

Here at the Bluestocking there's a place for all women. A break from Reality, and many laughs and stories to share. Have your fill of Tunnocks bars and tea cakes, sing feminist anthems, drink as much beer or gin or hot chocolate as you desire. It won't make you fatter or drunken but oh, it's fun. Sit in the garden with our Lion resident or the Quokkas and Capybara. Express your opinions loudly in Pedantry Corner. Ask for whatever you fancy to be served by our obliging Gerbil staff. Come in, all women, welcome!

I was crap too - never managed to get 12inches off the ground when climbing the ropes. In the obligatory blue knickers. Just had painfully read, rope-burned hands and a bucket load of humiliation.

It was never important, big things, just little family sayings or habits, or places I recognised.

This one looks lush…

Thanks for that @CautiousLurker01 ☺️

I’d bravely and politely drink it if someone bought it me for Christmas. But I’m not tempted enough to part with my actual own money for the experience. I’m not really that convinced by it. I mean, whatever next!

Am hoping DD never reads my book just incase I upset her. It’s not about her (or my DS), but I’d hate her to think it was. I am guessing that the habits, turns of phrase that you put in because it makes it feel real, can also be very specific without you realising. Things you observe and detail thinking it helps a reader connect: I describe the china in the church hall in one scene, for example. My male tutor/supervisor wondered why I’d laboured it, but my female tutor said it tickled her because every church hall she had ever helped out in had the same glazed, pale green crockery I described. To her it had been ‘real’, she could see it, feel the heavy stuff in her hands, remember the sounds of it clunking against the industrial, stainless steel sink and drainer.

I’d hate it if references I make thinking it add colour or nuance, infringed upon family memories, but I have a feeling I do it all the time. DH has never read any of my writing, though. Loves me, supports me, but never read a word. So maybe he’ll never know!

Leurve Richard Armitage.

Ooh, I’ve just remembered I was going to check out that benchmark practically outside my house when I got home. Well, that’s something to look forward to at the weekend. Things are looking up.

Fabulous thread:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5321218-i-have-a-confession-and-this-is-really-difficult-for-me-to-share?page=1

Couldn't stop laughing about the bunny's ears.

Sat on his table at a crime writing festival and he was serious lurvely. (He’d just published his book). Absolutely charming and surprisingly shy man.

Well, they're not very sociable with each other outside the courting season, so some of them will probably see the others off. On the other hand, at this time of year some of them may already be in kitteñ, so stand by for multiplication.

I didn't like to say anything 😕

I've been very patient.

@lcakethereforeIam

🤣🤣🤣

I’d love to keep it going but I’m laughing too much.

I will keep you updated though, come the exhilarating freedom of the weekend.

So, we'll just wait for the gerbils doing the stage adaptation.

That will be epic.

Sue Grafton wanted to kill her husband but knowing she couldn't she turned to writing murder mysteries.

"Her experience as a screenwriter taught her the basics of structuring a story, writing dialogue, and creating action sequences. Grafton then felt ready to return to writing fiction. While going through a "bitter divorce and custody battle that lasted six long years", Grafton imagined ways to kill or maim her ex-husband. Her fantasies were so vivid that she decided to write them down."

I was really crap at some aspects of games and PE, but the one thing I was really good at was the ropes. I used to zip up to the very top, then climb from rope to rope and come down the last one.

It was probably due to all the hours I spent roaming the countryside with my mates, climbing tress, gates, garden walls, barbed wire etc.

I was utterly shit at hockey, tennis, rounders, touching my toes or liking the PE teachers.

Will defo get my agent to put the gerbil adaptation in my contract…

Here’s my agent, Gerald McWhiskers. Bloody brilliant negotiator. I’ll have a free supply of Tunnocks at every book signing and a case of marmalade gin when I’m on book tour. (Apparently they’ll throw a bottle of chocolate vodka if I win the CWA prize in 2027, too.) Total legend.

I was also crap at PE. But I can get up from sitting cross legged with no hands, albeit via knees. That’s at least somewhat useful unlike netball, handstands or backward rolls.

FFS! This is now getting completely out of hand. I could spend all day doing nothing except reading the latest updates on FWR and I would still fall behind. Please may I have a serious (triple) Plymouth Dry gin from the freezer and a small bottle of Britvic tonic water to help me relax. Oh! And stick whatever everybody else wants on my chit.
O mores! O tempores! Or something.

@CautiousLurker01

same glazed, pale green crockery

Beryl Ware?
I think it came in blue and in yellow, too, but green was more popular. I don’t remember going anywhere which had a mixture of colours.

The church I grew up with had green and blue, iirc.
The only issue I can see with describing that crockery is that it’s liable to take people back to a specific church hall kitchen rather than your plot location.

I think that crockery is called Beryl. It was always church hall crockery and then I found out that my exDH's parents had it in blue. I hadn't realised it came in anything other than green.

I discovered it also came in yellow and, as of one minute ago, I can tell you that the colours are called Iris and Jasmine.

thevintagekitchenstore.co.uk/en/woods-ware/145-ber.html

God, yes. Had no idea it was a specific brand but the patterns on the cups and plates match perfectly.

Tbh until my prof highlighted it, I hadn’t realised there was any sort of universality about it, but I realised it was used in the church hall I went to as a teen (head chorister, but just to piss off my parents as step-dad was muslim 🤣); and then at two local churches more recently where I ran the most secular under 6s Sunday creche on the plant (think Nativity scene reenacted with star wars lego characters…) and the other where I lead a Brownies pack. Until I described the pale green glaze contrasting with the colour and texture of lemon drizzle slices, I don’t think I consciously connected it.

Am thinking Beryl Ware must have had a special deal with the CofE; perhaps other colours were for Presbyterians, Baptists, etc… my mind is boggling now!

It was ubiquitous in church halls and schools. I was raised Catholic and we had green too, so I don't think the CofE had a monopoly.

I am also writing a novel. The characters have been wandering around my head for 15 years in search of a plot. I found it in December and mentioned it to my BFF who used to be a fiction editor in the 1990s and she said, "I'd read that!".

So I'm now on structure and at some point will actually start writing it. I did read recently though that getting the planning done and the structure down is most of the work. And I thought you just started writing and see where it went. So I'm quite pleased even though I am just thinking about it, I am actually doing a lot of work.

Am in 3rd yr of Phd (did MA previously) and tried the ‘just write it’ method, also known as pantsing. But it didn’t work for me - I’d get 25-30% of the way through and just hit a wall. It helped me ‘start’ and breathe life into my characters and setting, yes, but until I sat down and planned the novel in detail in the last year, I really couldn’t grapple with how subplots, themes, individual character arcs properly flowed through the entire novel arc and interwove. The writing of the novel now I have most of that pinned down is fairly straight forward. For me, the planning was 70-80% of the creative/intellectual process.

How lovely to have another writer. Perhaps we need an InkPenCorner for those of us who are writing? Strangely (perhaps because being a SAHM of SEN kiddos and also because PhDs are all online research done from a table in your dining room) I have loved rabbiting on about it here this evening. Writing and doing a PhD is a tad bit lonely and you forget why you bloody bothered in the first place.

Cannot thank all the punters in the Blue Stocking tonight enough for reigniting my passion again. Was feeling seriously jaded.

Disclaimer, what I submit as part of my thesis may be a steaming pile of 💩
I’ll just be delighted to produce 75,000 vaguely coherent words and type THE END on the last page!!

C of E here, blue Beryl in the church hall kitchens of my youth.

I also write, but only the factual stuff ever gets published. I incinerated some of my fiction recently as being too rubbish to survive.