DID THIS SWEET HOPSCOTCHING STEAMPUNK GAL WHO LOVES THE COLOUR PINK & STUFFED ANIMALS REALLY WRITE THAT GRITTY, SOMETIMES DARK WESTERN? YES, SHE DID!
Hubby and I dropped in on Basingstoke's Milestones Museum's Cogs and Clogs Steampunk event in Hampshire recently.
Enormous fun! Loads of stalls, music and everyone dressed wild west punk, fairies, military, medieval, you-name-it... We were dressed to the nines - hubby as a befrilled sergeant in peaked cap and goggles who screams orders at rookies, and me as a glam pirate complete with small flintlock pistol. When I'm not a gun totin' westerner granny called Kitty Le Roy, I'm a pistol totin' pirate granny with the same name.
Milestones Museum is an indoor Victorian town setting open to customers to wander shop and factory settings. On one of the pavements are two hopscotch squares chalked up. Naturally we have to hop. He's tall and skinny, like a drainpipe, and he's good at hopping. I ain't. I used to be slim and beautiful but now I'm Rubenesque and beautiful. I've never hopped well and was terrible at school PE. (I'm great on a bike and striding briskly).
So hubby hopped like a good 'un and I sorta hopped on and off. (I'm not talking to him any more!) Never mind. Glad we did it. Good fun! And we filmed one another. Brilliant stuff. Hop scotching steampunk style.
Now, if you want to see it being done properly, here you are:
And there you have it. Ain't that great?
Another confession: I love the colour pink and hubby and I love Pig and Monkey.
Now, the point of this post is: Did this fun loving hopscotching, rather sweet gal (so my teenage twin granddaughters say, and I believe them) really write that gritty, sometimes dark and violent western? What? Really? Yes, really.
I'm either schizophrenic (shouldn't joke - I know all about mental health), or there are genuinely two sides of me. The dark side and the goofy, creative side. The goofy artistic side is predominant, but the dark side, when the mood strikes, comes crashing in. I had to write Alias Jeannie Delaney - Book 1 - Go West, Girl!. I had no choice. This girl gunslinger - female gunfighter - who's the fastest gun in the west, had to be. My fascination for the wild west decreed that I writ1e the story of a devastating and charismatic pants-wearing cowgirl. I know her inside out. I know what she looks like, her qualities and her likes and dislikes. I wanted to be her, it turns out, because my own family - parents and siblings, and their wives - didn't understand me and tried to make me what I'm not and didn't want to be.
Jeannie is powerful. Magnetic. Charismatic, hysterically funny, scary. Terrifying sometimes. Tremendously stylish in male clothing. Sexy as hell. Tomboy beautiful. She looks like a beautiful youth, then she's figured out. OTT. Irresistible. She's bisexual. All things to everyone. I was horrendously embarrassed about her, which made things even harder. I tried to tone her down but it didn't work. Finding out just how much people appreciate her has made things so much better for me.
I wanted to be like her to make up for my largely alone position within my family. I managed to cope with that when I was young, but having children made matters harder and my mental health, exacerbated by childbirth and post natal depression, suffered, along with the drip drip of family pressures and opinions.
That's why I wanted to be Jeannie. That's why I needed to write her story and 'get her out there'. And that's why I have two sides to me. Which would I rather be? Both. Gladly.
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