Jenny Bradley Writer

I have agreed to write something for the upcoming Hotwells Festival. How exciting is that? And how truly terrifying as I have nothing I prepared earlier.  My throat is throttled with a fluttering starling trying to get out. My brain is like ice cream, frozen. What the f**k is going on??  I'm not usually like this. I have stacks of material. I have stacks of ideas. Usually. Not this time.  Is it something to do with the Hotwells Festival feeling more grown up this time? It had its birth two years ago, a phoenix rising out of lockdown with fiery enthusiasm and a bunch of mates doing an Amazing job. Shoestrings and chewing gum come to mind. And it was brilliant. And this time? Is there an expectation it will all be more slick, polished, perfect?  Or is it simply I haven't written anything and I'm just in a plain old state of panic??

How do we find our next project? What sparks it off, gets us going, inspires us? I hear so many people talking about losing their way in lockdown with creative projects, stopping writing or doing art. People with a good track record and a desire to write or paint. What's with the painting in a writing blog?  I attended an all day art workshop recently. The tea and chocolate biscuits were excellent. So was the tutor. He gave us permission to be wrong, to mess up, to make terrible pictures, in other words, to experiment and find out. Quick pictures in mixed media, mixing wet eg water colour, and dry, eg charcoal. Sometimes - much of the time - nothing worked. But it stimulated my brain to let go and try anything, in any order. Finally, in the afternoon, after a morning of about a dozen quick sketches, I slowed down and picked two I enjoyed putting together, ink drawing and watercolour. Bravo. Result. What happened to produce that picture, one I was actually pleased with? Encouragemen

Yikes, last post, last year! In my defence, I have spent the year to date, 2022, wrestling my way through a major operation and trying to get back on my feet. To get fit enough to get to the computer and remember how to log back in... I have been writing - on and off - poems called things like 'Pain'. You get the picture. I've managed a few readings both planned and impromptu, great fun. And I'm back to running my poetry group. So many projects are waiting for my energy and to go out of the door. It felt good to get a radio play off to Radio Bristol last week after their email requesting material. I've also joined an art club for inspiration too. It's great to feel creative again. Watch this space.

The next book, that has been sitting on my floor as a pile of papers, is finally in order. It is in my computer in a word document. It suddenly looks like a book. Very exciting! This one was another born out of lockdown, inspired during walks by the sea in my home town. Strangely for such a dreadful, isolated eighteen months, it has been one of my most creative patches ever. Creativity was a way of saving my sanity. Whilst it produced something tangible and beautiful, the output was almost a by product of my need to engage deeply with nature.  Walking every day by the sea, as I did, was a very powerful way to calm myself and lift my mood. The Severn Estuary is a huge expanse of water that rushes in and out at 4 -6 knots, rising and falling over fourteen metres on the biggest tides. The water changes all the time, reflecting the clouds or sun to vary in colour,  anything from deep purple to turquoise blue to a fine mesh of silver. Extraordinary, astonishing and extremely beautiful.  As

 So it's the run up to a big event... I'm writing Lockdown Unleashed for the new Hotwells Festival. All very exciting but slightly nerve wracking.  I know I can do it. Write it, direct it, but I'm also aware no writer ever knows how an audience will respond to their work until, well, it happens. And it almost certainly depends on the audience. I just  have to push aside all the things that could go wrong. The three linked monologues - same character, each one slightly later in time and slightly different in circumstance, ie further on through lockdown - each have a story and each develop the overall story. A bit like a TV series but these are mini, each monologue about seven minutes long. Something akin to a flash fiction book where very short pieces of stand alone fiction are put together to form a book, which also tells a story overall. I always thought this was mind blowingly clever and I've somehow managed to do it myself with flash drama. Ooo now there's a new

I got a call from my literary agent the other day. Such a wonderful surprise. I hadn't heard from her for a while - life got in the way, as it so often does - and here she was, breezy, chirpy and above all else confident. There is something about someone else's confidence in you to give you confidence in yourself. Writers, probably more than any other profession, get many knocks, over and over and over again. Self belief is paramount and you just have to learn to get up again, do the proverbial dusting off, the type of dusting off that is definitely harder than the housework which I absolutely loathe. It helps so much if someone not only says kind things about your work but really really really good things like 'one of the best things in my last ten years',' it made me laugh and cheered me up. It's very funny'.  Now whoa, that's good marketing material. Especially now when we're all coming out of this long haul lockdown madness into a new world where