Singing On a Wet Friday

Patti Paige: The Tennesse Waltz

Well, what else would I be doing on a wet Friday in November but singing my heart out in the upper echelons of the my local library with Aideen Davis, vocal couch and professional musician, courtesy of the Arts Council!
There are those that enquired, singing? As they gave me the Simon Cowell, Susan Boyle smirks.
Singing is amazingly liberating; especially in a group of 20 other women and 2 men.
We crooned our way through The Tennessee Waltz and more lively numbers like The Galway Girl.
What took me singing lessons? Haven’t I enough to be doing trying to meet my self – imposed deadline (Easter 2015) for my second novel?? We’ll, two reasons, the truth be told. Recently I heard Pamela Brown, writer and of Poetry Chick fame, give a stand-up spontaneous stirring rendension of performance poetry and I was utterly blown away.
The voice exercises and breath control skills needed to sing is not dissimilar to that needed to give a poetry performance, I reasoned. And the writer in me believes if you can dream it, visualise it, you can achieve it.
My second reason – is to write a song. Not just write it but sing it, yes sing it, at our next extended family get-together. And I happen to know there is just such a thing coming up in 2015.
That will shift the smirk off their faces. Of course I’ll wait until they are well inebriated – or as they say locally, well oiled, three sheets to the wind – you get the picture.
What else have I done? They say to be an accomplished writer (and I am writing diligently every day) you should read widely. So I joined a book club
This month’s book is Jodi Picoult’s The Storyteller.
I’m about a third-way through it. It’s like faction- fiction based lightly on the effect of the Holocaust on the three main characters: Sage (Jewish) Josef (SS Nazi in the past) and Sage’s grandmother who it appears suffered at the hands of the Germans.
I’m reliably told it has a twist in the tail. Maybe it’s me or the subject matter, but I can’t get into it – it might come yet.
I’ll let you know how I get on reading the other two-thirds.
And I am happy to report I was published in Women’s Weekly in October albeit in letter of the week – and they will pay – eventually.