My work and my interests are pretty much the same thing! However I do also go for long walks, play tennis once or twice a week, watch GOOD movies or comedy DVDs and almost never watch TV these days but have DVDs of my old favourite shows. I read endlessly and listen to music - anything to put off housework.
My favourite pastime is meeting up with friends for a lot of laughs, usually aided by alcohol.
Music
Diverse to the extreme - a bit of everything really.
Movies
The first four Alien films, Jabberwocky (and various other Monty Python films, Carrington, Manhunter, Iris, Rear Window, 28 Days Later, Leon, The Prophecy, Fallen, Signs, Truly Madly Deeply, Blade Runner, The Big Lebowski, Calendar Girls, Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Ladykillers (and most Ealing comedies), Wonder Boys, Midnight Run, Agatha, Thelma and Louise, The Terminator films, An Affair to Remember, Shaun of the Dead, Field of Dreams, Educating Rita, The Hitcher, anything with Robert Downey Jnr - especially Chaplin, Chances Are and Air America, anything with Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Steve Martin, Robin Williams, Peter Sellers or Hugh Grant in it, especially The Green Mile, Punchline, Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Planes Trains and Automobiles, All of Me, The World According to Garp, The Fisher King, All the Pink Panther Films and After The Fox, Four Weddings and a Funeral, About a Boy, Notting Hill, anything with Aidan Quinn, Billy Crudup or Sean Pertwee in - not just because they are great actors but because they are HOTTIES! Especially Benny and Joon, Blink, Blue Juice, Dog Soldiers, anything with Richard Dreyfuss especially Always and Stakeout, Working GIrl, Almost Famous, Misery, Stand by Me, The Shawshank Redemption, Highlander, Point Break, Willow, Reign of Fire, Fifth Element, Somethings Gotta Give, Patriot Games, The Birds, Panic Room, The Village, The Bodyguard, Peggy Sue got Married and many many more that I will remember when I have finished this...
Television
Good comedies - British and American or good dramas.
Extras, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office, Red Dwarf, Father Ted, Cold Feet, Friends, Nightynight, French and Saunders, Black Books, Men Behaving Badly, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Taken, Vicar of Dibley, Ab Fab, Long Way Round, Pride and Prejudice, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, Q.I, TV Heaven, TV Hell and of course the addictive Big Brother - and I hate myself every year for watching it!
Books
The Scarlet Pimpernel - Baroness Orczy,
Watchers - Dean Koontz
(also Lightning, Midnight, Strangers, Hideaway, The Face of Fear, Dragon Tears and a lot of the rest!),
Rose Madder - Stephen King
(also The Talisman, IT, Salems Lot, Lisey's Story, Misery, The Green Mile, Bag of Bones, The Dark Half, and fave short stories - The Mist and The Long Walk plus most of the rest of his books!),
The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
(also love the rest of his books, particularly The Killing kind),
Dracula - Bram Stoker,
I Am Legend - Richard Matheson,
Lord Of The Rings - J.R.Tolkien,
e. - M@tt Beaumont,
Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain,
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde,
The Bell - Iris Murdoch,
C - John Diamond,
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding,
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen,
Among The Dead - Kevin Wignall
(and all the rest),
Lifeless - Mark Billingham
(and all the rest),
Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton,
P.S.I Love You - Michael Sellers,
My Autobiography - Charles Chaplin,
James Herriot's books,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy,
The Birds - Daphne Du Maurier,
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee,
Red Dragon - Thomas Harris
(and Black Sunday and The Silence of the Lambs),
A Woman of Substance - Barbara Taylor-Bradford,
The Thornbirds - Colleen McCullough,
And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
(or as Mark Billingham calls it, 'Ten Little Unmentionables'! Also like Curtain: Poirot's Last Case),
A Good Day To Die - Simon Kernick
(and the rest),
The Naming Of The Dead - Ian Rankin,
Raven Black - Ann Cleves,
All the Harry Potters by J.K.Rowling,
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott,
Nineteen Seventy-Nine - Rhona Cameron,
The Yes Man - Danny Wallace,
The Artists' Way - Julia Cameron
(A life-changing book),
The World Accordig To Garp - John Irving
(and the rest),
Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf,
Heart-Shaped Box - Joe Hill,
Swan Song - Robert McCammon
plus books by the following authors:
Jeffery Deaver, Alex Barclay, Bill Bryson, C.S.Lewis, Jake Arnott, Kate Pullinger, Harlan Coben, George Pelecanos, John Rickards, Sheila Quigley, Lee Child, Laura Lippman and Stuart MacBride.
Also many many art books, general non-fiction, books on writing, children's books and the beloved Asterix collection.
About me: Sarah, who first studied Fine Art, Theatre design and Photography, then Spatial Design at Kent Institute of Design, Rochester, left college in 1990 at the peak of the recession and took on a vast range of mediocre jobs ranging from bar work to selling concrete block paving.
Sarah married fellow KIAD student, modelmaker Paul Higgins in 1992 and pursued her writing ambitions with some success, while still keeping up with the occassional artistic commisssion.
After becoming a parent in 1997, Sarah also managed to find time to design the covers and produce the internal illustrations for a few books (children's novels and a gay-themed short story book) for a UK publisher.
She had success with a short story as part of the Canterbury Festival Celebrations, coming second in their Canterbury Tales Competition and the story was dramatised and broadcast on BBC Radio. As a result, she was contacted by a leading agent who showed interest in her first novel. She was also interviewed by Mariella Frostrup on BBC Radio Four's Open Book. She has since been published in magazines, online and has had a story included in a collection of short stories called 'The Creature In The Rose'.
In 2005 in conjunction with her youngest child starting full-time school, Sarah finally realised that she does not have to 'choose' between being a writer and being an artist. She decided to go all out to do both and in 2006 she joined the New Art Centre, Chatham as one of their studio artists.
Portraiture and figurative work are her speciality but Sarah will follow a whim to wherever it takes her. "For me, the essence of painting a good portrait is not merely acheiving a likeness; it is creating an image that tells more about the sitter than a photograph. A good portrait steals a bit of soul from both sitter and artist, developing a presence of its own."
Sarah is currently finishing the final rewrites of her first novel and hopes for future success. She combines her love of art and literature by persuading good writers to let her paint their portraits!
View her art website at www.sarahlangstone.com
(And now a bit especially for the search engines...
Commission a portrait, art, artwork, portraits, paintings, drawings, fine art, contemporary art, detailed work in acrylics, oils, watercolours, pastels, ink and wash, pen, charcoal drawings from small scale to large scale. Interior scenes, landscapes and still life work incorporated into portraits. Artist is happy to take on demanding, dynamic large scale work, the more challenging, the better!)
