Dare to Be Square.

I definitely have been writing more, but procrastination is a wonderful thing. This week I tidied out my office, which I have been meaning to do for ages and was, of course, a good way of actually putting off doing any writing. Which is what I am doing now, kidding myself that making myself post on the blog is a way of limbering up the writing muscle, a sort of pre-race work-out.  Before you know it I'll be powering down the writing strait, a regular pulp fiction Usain Bolt. 

Well, at least I am writing.

Of course, my Sunday morning enthusiasm is not helped by the foggy head I have after a night out with my best friend. It wasn't exactly wild dancing on tables in a dive in New York, more a gentle lean up against a bar, followed by dinner at a local restaurant. These days my head gets foggy from three glasses of wine and a digestif. Well, we are both pretty middle aged. Actually, I'm a lot more middle aged than she is, despite the fact that she is 12 years closer to official retirement age than I am. She'd be away dancing on every table she could find, if I wasn't such a middle-aged kill-joy.

But the thing is, I like being middle-aged. I like the comfortable evenings at home on the sofa with the mad dog and the sly cat and "Celebrity Masterchef" on iPlayer. The joy of middle age means no pressure to get out there and "Enjoy Yourself!"  For me, that rarely co-incided with the purgatory of the local disco, where the opening notes of the slow set were a signal to hide in the toilets, away from the shame that none of the sweaty youths out there had bestowed their favour on you.

I never actually enjoyed being young -  I hated the weekly cattle call at the disco or bar. You'd go through the routine of getting glad-ragged and be-rouged, spending ages deciding exactly what outfit minimised your worst parts and accentuated your best bits. As it turned out, I had no idea of which was which: I wore polo necks and short skirts when it should have been the other way around. Eyes would be lined and lips glossed and your hair would be sprayed til it could have walked around on its own.  (It was the era of Seriously Big Hair, which I gather is back in a Big Way). You'd then traipse down to the bar or disco and admire the array of boys from a good safe distance, as actual contact was pretty unlikely. You'd dance around with a few of your mates when a suitably appropriate song came on and almost inevitably go home on your own.  Occasionally one of the boys would get slaughtered, fall up against you and hope that you took the hint. Alas, I was spectacularly bad at getting the hint and usually spent the evening looking out for the quirky cool bloke who wasn't remotely interested.  Now, before, this starts sounding like a karoke rendition of "At Seventeen", I did have a lot of fun back in the day, but it was rarely a result of a night out at the disco.

I also hated the notion that 'fun' was to be had at a concert or gig in a muddy field half way down the country, where the accommodation was a tent pitched in the mire and the toilet facilities would have shocked a developing nation. Several miles away - or so it seemed - was a dark blur which turned out to be the stage upon which, if you really squinched up your eyes and concentrated, was an even blurrier thing which was the band. That's if you could see through the pouring rain. I was inevitably homesick, cold, pissed off and cranky, mostly all at the same time. If this was fun, you could have it.

Give me an indoor seated concert anytime and only, these days, if the taxi can drop me off at the door.  Or better, still, a quiet night out with a friend.

Back.

I am actually going to try and blog a bit more often. I swear. Not least because it's good for the writing discipline.

Still nothing published, but then, I haven't really been trying very much of late. The business is now established enough, I hope, to keep me, the dog and the mad cat in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Enough, anyway, for me to have a serious go at writing and getting something published. Something very readable, a bit trashy but good.  Popular but decent. Commercial, but which doesn't make you wince when you read it. Something that sells: not just because I want to make some money at it, but because I see no point in writing anything that no-one reads.

Check back for progress reports.

Strange calls, credit cards and borders...

There was a message left on my mobile and a text as well. Could I please call my credit card company? I had just had a lovely lunch, on the terrace at Il Segreto. The missed call and the message dented the nice relaxed feeling a bit. Credit card companies never call with good news: clearly summat was up. I had better ring back right away.

The only problem was that I was in Dublin, my mobile phone was firmly in the IRL zone and it was refusing to make calls to UK freephone  numbers, no matter how many times I prefixed it with "+44" and knocked off the first '0''.

Never mind, I would soon be on the train and when we got to the border I could try again. Except that the 0800 number was only open until 7.30pm and by my calculations, it would be at least 7pm before the border heaved into sight.

Sweat began to bead on my furrowed brow. This was getting to be like something out of a 1960s spy movie. Yer man Bourne never has these problems when he's dodging the bad guys across borders.  I was half expecting a swarthy bloke in a greatcoat to march up and down the aisle of the train demanding 'passporten, bitte' whilst I twitched in my seat and planned my escape.  That's the great thing about an over-active imagination - it may wreak havoc on your peace of mind, but you're never bored on a long train journey.

As the great white north approached, I stopping the filming in my head and rang the number.  After much automated nonsense I got a human being on the end of the line. A human being with a Vairy Strainge Heesturn Huropeein Haccent. The plot thickened. Mr Big's Henchlady vas taking no proisiners, as she barked questions at me about my identity.

Now, in addition to an over-active imagination, I have also watched far too many episodes of  The Real Hustle, so I know how this thing works.  Scammers ring you up, pretend to be your credit card company and get all your secret details out of you, including your date of birth, your postcode, your mother's maiden name, the name of your cat, your pornstar name, the name of your second cousin thrice removed and so on.  I was saying nothing.

Things got even more suspicious when Henchlady could only tell me that there had been suspected fraud on my account but not what that fraud was. When she read back all my transactions for the past three months it became clear that (a) she was either for real or Mr Big had hacked into my credit card account and (b) there was nothing remotely suspicious about any of the transactions on my account.  The plot was now so thick it was like the gravy they serve in seaside hotels on a Sunday. My overly active imagination had by now convinced my rational brain that this was some sort of a scam and that I had better ring the real credit card company pronto on a landline.

When I did, I got put through all the way to Mumbai or Jakarta only to have the very nice man on the end of the customer service line put me back all the way through a hissing line to the Fraud department, somewhere in Surrey.  Apparently it was nothing to do with my card, really. Somewhere, out there, in the fuzzy reaches of the internet, some blokes had been randomly generating credit card numbers (me either, but then, I'm not a criminal mastermind). When the bizzies raided them, they found my credit card number amongst all the others.  Henchlady had been dispatched to track me down, across wild country and bad phone lines to a rattling train crossing a border on a dull summer's day.

Do you think The Bourne Imagination is a good title for a movie pitch?

keep writing...

No, I really do write a lot more often than it might appear. But most of the time it is in other places. I've been writing since I was a child and old enough to pick up a crayon. I even wrote once on the wall of my bedroom, but my mother put paid to any graffitti aspirations I might have had with a sharp clip to the ear with a bottle of Jif. I spent a very long afternoon removing the crayon from the wall and never did the like again. But I kept writing, on paper and then on computer. I couldn't stop then and I can't now. Even on the days when I retch with writer's block, I still write.

I've had a lot of stuff published, mainly in a former life when I wrote specialist stuff for tiny audiences in ivory towers. I gave myself an ulcer trying to get into print, working long hours trying to satisfy 'the academy'. Until I had an epiphany. I was being 'trained' to use a new library archiving thingamjig and picked a journal in which I was desparate to get published. I downloaded the edition from around the time I was born and there they were -- pages and pages of blood, sweat, cat-fighting and tears, in the form of scholarly articles. None of which anyone had read in 30 years and which probably only a handlful of people had ever seen.

And there and then I decided I wouldn't be expending any more time on that sort of thing. So now I write travel pieces, articles about antiques and reports about the paranormal. Oh, and these blogs. Do let me know what you think.

The Editor Regrets...

Another bloody rejection. This time from Woman's Weekly. It was a nice, polite rejection, but a rejection nonetheless.

It is true what they say though, the first one is the hardest. After that, getting rejected gets easier. Hardly dents your tough writer's carapace at all. Pffft, you think, sure I didn't expect they'd publish it. Indeed there isn't a mark on many of the ones that come back, which makes you wonder if it got read at all. Anyway, I'll revise it and send it on to someone else. And wait another two months to be told that the editor regrets.

Part of the problem -- leaving aside the ridiculous notion that the story just didn't cut it* -- is the limited markets for short stories these days. And most of those, now, just want very short stories indeed. When I was growing up, there were several stories in every woman's mag and I loved them, especially the ones with the glamorous illustrations of willowy, doe eyed women in floppy hats. I still have a few I clipped twenty odd years ago and kept. But the days of the three two -page romances in every issue are gone. We seem to have substituted those with celeb revelations and gossip: instead of inhabiting the lives of those long haired sylphs we now follow the habits of the rich and dim. And they really don't make for heroine material at all.

* Perish the thought!

Fecketty feck

Okay, writer's block.

Having banged away on the keyboard (oooo-er, missus) like billy-o at this historical gothic thing I have skidded to a complete halt. I am trying to write in the M & B house style and frankly, I am having some deal of difficulty.

I think part of the problem is that in trying to stick so closely to an accepted format, I have lost the passsion for the plot and the characters. I am so focused on the technique that I seem to have misplaced my rhythmn. When I began writing this thing, it consumed me -- I loved the setting, the heroine and the dark, difficult hero. Now it's tiresome, trying to make sure it fits the format. I think I need to just write it as I want and then revise for format.

The really annoying thing is that I can see the setting and the characters so vividly that writing this ought to be easy. Drat.

Wannabes

I was listening to a programme on Radio 4 this afternoon. It's that one about numbers and stuff, that I only ever hear by accident, but every time I do I forget that I disliked maths at school. Anyway, they were talking about means and medians and the like and somewhere in the middle of all that was a fascinating bit about how we all think we're much better than the average bear. These over-inflated expectations of ourselves lead some of us to believe we can sing/dance/model or whatever. Hence the cringe-making auditionees at the X-Factor. (The best bit, in my opinion.) As I was scrubbing the sink ( I was cleaning the bathroom at the time) it occurred to me that when you look at (most) of the people who actually win those talent show contests, they're people who have actually tried to learn a bit about singing and the art of performing and so on. It's the ones who only warble to their deluded relatives at weddings that are the loopers who think they have talent.

Which led me to wonder about would-be writers and if there are loads of X-Factor type wannabe scribes floating about who really, really think they can write, like, you know and if you don't just really really, like get their stuff, then you're just so wrong, like. Indeed, I have run across some of their badly written stuff on the internet. And it is teeth-clenchingly bad.

There are bound to be loads of letters on fiction editor's desks, telling them just why they were so wrong, like, you know, to, you know, reject their NOVEL and, like how they're just going to SEE, right, when they sell gazillions. Probably lots of them on perfumed notepaper and written in pink ink. And just like all those scary X-factor wannabes, surrounded by their adoring family -- the ones who run in and shake their tattooed fists at Simon Cowell* -- somebody must have fed the delusion that they had talent.

The thing is, I've written loads of stuff and about 90% of it has been published (all non-fiction, alas). I can spell and construct long sentences and use big hard words, but I would never, ever expect that my fiction would get published (and so far, it hasn't). I have a had a few rejections, most of them very helpful, in terms of improving what I write. And I pay attention to the advice and try to apply it. So why is it that people who can neither write nor construct a story nor seem to have had any practice at writing, other than rambling on the internet (okay, a bit like this) send stuff in to editors? And then get volcanically annoyed when they get rejected?

Now I no longer think that editors take far too long to get back to you. Now I am amazed they manage to get to any of the half-decent stuff at all. Er, not that my stuff is necessarily half-decent. It may be, someday....

*I actually like Cowell. Most of the time he tells people the truth about their performance. I just hate the way the process has made stuff ever more bland than before.