How time flies by Faith Puleston

I can’t believe that it’s nearly 2 years since I visited Red Bubble on a regular basis. I am going to try harder from now on!
I’ve been writing, painting and making music, of course. But less painting, and more writing. I’ve just published an account of the first 18 years of my life on luludotcom. It’s been transfering from PC to PC for donkey’s years, getting revised and edtted, added to and curtailed. Having no idea whether the book is saleable, so I decided to commit it to self-publishing online. That gets it out of my hair and is very convenient. I haven’t sorted out any marketing yet, but there is a link on facebook at Faith Puleston, where I also use my real surname of Jones for practical reasons. People who knew me before I dropped the Jones for brevity as an opera singer do not know me by my artistic name (which is a middle name otherwise). The book is called “A start in life” and I discovered that other books exist with the same title, but decided to leave it. I’ve already had so many titles, e.g. “Looking for Faith”, which is now the subtitle, and “A little Faith goes a long way”. Which ever way I turned, the name Faith produced a pun! However, the book is a humorous and seldom completely truthful account. I tried to reconstruct myself then realized that I’ve been doing that all my life and had plenty of material to choose from. For instance, the mirror element. I can remember conducting the orchestral piece “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” that was one of my first records in front of a mirror, though I left that out of the book (an oversight?). Mozart’s requiem reduced me to tears even as a child. That’s another memory that just popped into my mind. And I was an avid tap-dancer, but my mother would not let me go to classes because she thought the other children were nasty. Oh dear, better get back to that file….
That was the main problem. New things occur to me all the time and I had to stop somewhere. I could publish a revised edition, I suppose!
But not right now. I’m on exactly page 400 of a fictional novel, a sort of compendium of stories about an English village. Originally the stories were written and published as an English reader for students of English as a foreign language. Later I borrowed the characters and started developing a whole book on them and like Topsy, it growed and growed and growed. But the end is in sight after 4 agonizing weeks that ensued when I landed one of the characters on Dover station with amnesia and couldn’t think of a way of extricating her. Now I’ve solved that mystery for myself I hope to finish the book in the forseeable future.
It’s true. Like it or not, the characters take over and you get stuck if you fight against it. This latest solution involves a bishop and is a bit more suggestive than most of the book. I don’t enjoy violence in books, so there isn’t any in mine and I stick to erotic innuendoes rather than going the whole hog and inventing bedroom scenes. The unsaid is often more intriguing and I do leave space for the reader to use his or her imagination!
I should mention that I have never lived in an English village, nor do I belong to the Church of England, or to any other church for that matter.
I’m going to the UK on 11th May, mainly to attend a school reunion. I’m dreading it. We’re all old codgers now!