Anglophile's Delight: Poldark! A brief book review

1/27/2012 

 Just discovered the Winston Graham and Poldark Literary Society! Wahoo! A place to indulge my Poldark inner FanGirl! My screen name comes from the heroine of the Poldark novels, Demelza. (The “sleepless” part comes from my nocturnal ways…) 

 Anyone not familiar with the fabulous historical novels by Winston Graham is in for a treat. Set in 18th century Cornwall, the first book, Ross Poldark, introduces our brooding hero, and his tumultuous life as he kicks against the societal rules of his era, copes with the loss of his first sweetheart, struggles with economic hardships in mining and farming, and discovers the irrepressible Demelza, the urchin he rescues from poverty. 

Over the course of the series, the readers will fall in love with Ross and Demelza, but also with Cornwall! So Anglophiles be warned, these books will enflame your desires to go to England! 

 The first seven books were made into a wildly popular miniseries in the 1970s in England, which is how i came to find them. As an 11 year old, I watched them with my mother on our miniscule black and white tv, and became an instant convert.

Update

1/20/2021

Many years later, a reboot of the Poldark miniseries happened, and now there are oodles more Poldark fans out there, than there were in 2012. I guess I should confess... I have not yet finished watching this newer version of Poldark. I started watching it, and loved it, but life got busy, and I developed a concentration problem that caused me to struggle with watching ANYTHING longer than about 15 minutes long-- or reading anything sustained, for that matter.

So I have yet to finish the newer television show. Something to look forward to... 

Meanwhile, even though my reading abilities are still greatly diminished, I stand by my prior belief that the Poldark saga, in book form, is brilliant, and well worth a read.

Blogging baby steps

My first attempts to blog happened in 2005-2006, after the death of a dear friend and mentor. The grief was devastating, and I used a now-defunct blogging platform to explore my feelings. It was cathartic-- up until the moment when the blog site shut down without warning, and ALL MY POSTS were utterly lost. 

I was such a newbie, I hadn't saved anything to any other site or in any other format. Not so much as a WordPerfect document. This was rather demoralizing, although a very vivid way to learn the crucial lesson of ALWAYS SAVE YOUR STUFF in multiple ways.

In January 2012, I created this blog within the Googleverse. I was a busy mother, working part-time, and didn't know how much sustained effort I could dedicate to it. It turns out-- not at all!

I dabbled a smidge on Tumblr, back when Tumblr didn't censor as much; when the site tried to clean itself up, I lost interest and removed my account. Most of my content had consisted of some small paragraphs about erotic topics-- nothing I felt I could use under my actual identity. I moved everything relating to erotica or sexuality over to FetLife, under an alias, of course, where it remains to this day.

I have many varied interests, so part of my dilemma has always been finding my "voice," and my "theme." The first blog was really just about "grief." The Tumblr and FetLife platforms housed anything having to do with "sex," "kink," "sensuality," and "erotica." 

Sticking to just a single topic sounds so... limiting. Boring. As a person with ADHD, I knew my motivation would be crushed if there was zero novelty to my topics. I have a wide range of interests, and life throws a wide range of curve balls at us, so why not figure out a way for my blog to encompass an equally wide range of subject matter??

The problem, of course, is that that is probably no way to attract a dedicated audience.

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