A Room With a View

In way of a continuation, here's another evocative skyline. This time its all orange and firey swirls, befitting of a warm July night at sundown. We truely do have a room with a view here ...

'Firey Sky' image by Dora Petherbridge.

Tonight I'm linking back to Edward Petherbridge's 'Petherbridge's Weekly Post' which is full of literary insight into the world of an actor and the theatre. He also posts some wonderful poetry - that rhymes, always the best kind I think. Edward will be 74 this year and he's been in the business for about 57 years, so he's bit of a veteran. On his latest post he said positive things about our free-writing exercises, so by way of thanks I'm mentioning him in the hope that whoever drops by here might fancy a look at his blog too.

Recently I read something on a blog that questioned the motives of some bloggers, namely those who self promote by posting their blog's address in the comments section. This blogger made a point of saying they do their blog for free. One of the best pieces of advice I was given when I made my first tentative steps towards telling people that I wanted to write was, 'do it because you have to and don't expect to get paid. Don't let that be your motivation because your writing will lose its spirit.' I hold this to be true, although of course no one's going to turn down a book deal. But it would be foolish to go into a blog with the words 'book-deal', 'fame', 'fortune', 'name in lights'. I certainly don't blog for these reasons and I think I'd be plunged into an existential crisis if I woke up tomorrow and I had hundreds of followers. I could never imagine my random musings yielding such interest. I see a blog as a way for anybody irrespective of class or education to explore creativity and probably the majority do them for free. Edward said on his blog in response to our 'free-writing' exercises that he felt that this should be the nature of the blogging experience, a place where ordinary people can write from a perspective outwith the confines of commercial media and its chosen few. Self-promotion? Whatever ...

Let's finish on a high note, here's a rather wonderful picture of Edward as Pierrot. It was taken by his son. Photography clearly runs in the family.

Photograph by Arthur Petherbridge.