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.

Happy New Year.

Resolutions:

1. The Usual (weight, exercise, detox);
2. Abstain from Alcohol and Chocolate for the Month of January;
3. Get Through January As Fast As I Can;
4. Acquire No More Speeding Tickets;
5. Use Public Transport More;
6. Get Summat Published.
7. Find A More Suitable Man.

Theme For The Year:

We Might As Well Dance.

(From either: "We’re fools whether we dance or not, so we might as well dance" (Japanese proverb) or "Life may not be the party we hoped for… But, while we are here, we might as well dance!” (Maya Angelou) I like the sentiment of both...

He's Fired....

Sitting in the departure 'lounge' of an airport surrounded by itchy fellow travellers. We're ringed with shops, like a pioneer family circled by wagons, all trying to entice us into parting with our credit-crunched dosh. Lots of us do. Anything to lift the boredom of the wait for the gate.

In order to be able to sit down at a table and use my laptop properly, I have had to buy a skinny latte from Starbucks. The alternative is to slump in one of those rows of sling seats, fine if you want to practise contortionist typing, but not if you want to work. Behind me, tinkling faintly, is the sound of truly execrable covers of 'Christmas Classics'. Sung by what appear to be Pinky and Perky's tenor nephews. On crack.

I'm on my way home from a weekend tryst with the Part-Time Boyfriend. Great weekend, usual parting. He's been separated for a year-and-a-half and is wary of saying anything other than "be great to do this again, sometime." By the time I get to the airport I have decided that it wouldn't be so great, really.

Can you do P45s by email?

Free at last...

After much manoeuvring I am no longer a wage slave. I have officially given up my nice salaried prison of a job.

In the middle of the the biggest economic crisis since Jesus cleared the temple. Yes, I know. My timing has always been fab, I feel.

I aim to keep body and soul together by freelancing a bit, by consulting, in the things I used to get paid a salary to do and by not listening to Robert Peston anymore.

I have not done this, I hasten to add, because I have delusions of grandeur about my capacity to earn a crust as a writer. Perish the thought. (Although living in hope has always been one of the things I was best at. Or should that be "at which I was best"? Anyway.) It has been with a view to escaping the rat race. Downshifting. Living simply. That sort of thing.

I have been practising this downshifting thing for the last two years, saving as much as I could for the glorious day when I had enough to take the risk. It's amazing what you can do with a bit of budgeting, thrifty living and buying all your clothes on ebay. I did waver a bit, back in August, when markets were crashing all around and city financiers were fleeing to their summer homes in Barbados. However, faint heart never won fair lady, or something like that. Make lemon omelettes whilst the sun shines. That sort of thing.

I may be completely mad, or just unlucky, but I have to try to do this. The alternative is just not very pretty, really. I've been working full-time since I left college twenty-two years ago, without a break and something had to give. It was either the salary or my sanity and I'd rather be poor than unhappy. Of course, being poor is no guarantee of being happy, which is why I had better become the JK Rowling of romantic fiction. Or else.

Meanwhile the evil fuzz have given me a speeding ticket, which nearly caused me heart failure, when I thought I was going to be up before the beak. Had to phone a friendly brief, who chuckled at my failure to interpret the fixed penalty notice as a licence to print money for the boys in blue. He didn't relieve me of any cash, but he got a nice single malt nonetheless. I am the sort of a girl who knows how to do these things.

Even if I am on my way to the workhouse. In a handcart, via hell.

Falling Down

Note to self: get back yard powerwashed this weekend.

I went out to the bin yesterday to dutifully recycle some glass bottles. I took one step out the door and skidded into a clumsily executed crouch. Ten out of ten for degree of difficulty, but not so much for artistic impression. I remained on my knees for a good few minutes after I fell. Mainly because I had caused myself a fair degree of pain in my right knee and my right wrist and getting up from that position was requiring some serious concentration. Is this a sign that I am getting old? My knee and my wrist are still throbbing, 24 hours later.

The cause of the acrobatics was the slimy patio which hasn't been washed down this year and is consequently wearing the latest in green algae. No doubt my nosy neighbour, who seems to have a high definition telescope trained on the back of my house from her bedroom window, will have put it down to the empty bottle of wine I was clutching at the time.

If she saw me again this afternoon, she'll be on the phone to Alcoholics Anonymous. I took the dog out, between thunderstorms, or so I thought. Five minutes down the hill and another downpour began. Dodging under some trees, I missed my footing -- again -- and went down on my backside in a less than graceful slide. I now have a lovely skid mark on my green skirt and the abiding memory of a knot of sniggering schoolkids as they passed.

I wonder can I get fitted with stabilisers?

A Romantic Heroine Writes...

It would, as they say, take the skin off a badger's backside out there. I have just taken the dog for her daily bark and widdle and it is cold enough to almost make one forget about global warming. I wore my russian-style fur hat which usually only gets broken out in December and I spent the walk wishing I had dug out the woolly gloves as well. I haven't really worn a coat for about five years: the winter hasn't been really cold enough to merit more than a couple of fleeces and a chunky jumper. Yet already this feels like it might be time to get that new lining put in my decade old cashmere number. It's one of my favourite pieces of clothing -- floor length grey cashmere wool, bell sleeves and a hood lined in black velvet. It makes me feel like a romantic heroine, or at the very least, that dame from the Scottish Widows ad. All I need is the dashing hero to go with it and I'll be set.

Ah well, you can't have everything.

I spent the last two days waiting for a delivery: I treated myself to a lovely new Netbook, even paid extra to have it delivered on a specified day. And waited. And waited. And waited.

Several phone calls to various "customer service"* numbers later... the Netbook MIGHT be delivered tomorrow, provided the auguries are good, the van driver actually remembers to put it in his van and stuff like that.

The annoying thing is that I kind of expected this. The computing company concerned are notorious, but the durn thing was such a good deal I couldn't help myself. Should have stuck to Dell, who at least deliver on time, with mimimum fuss.

But worse than the customer service from the computer company was the rancid old bag on the end of the line at the courier depot. Her rudeness was almost refreshing, in the era of keeping the customer happy, if ill-served, where people murmur platitudes at you from the fastness of their call centres and hope you'll go away, quickly. I don't often ring head offices and track down customer relations managers to complain, but I did today. That'll teach you to hack off a girl like me, missus.

-----------------
* Why do they call them that when in fact, they are there to placate the customer by telling them lies, rather than serve the customer by actually providing a service?

Rain

It has been raining, almost solidly, for almost a month now. I don't mind a bit of rain, now and again. Sure, we'd all be living in a desert if it didn't tip down now and again. The reason this country is so fecking green is because of all that precipitation. It's a wonder we don't all have moss growing up us, to be honest.

But this constant, incessant, stultifying rain is wearing me down. You can't do anything, not even laundry. And it's cold, too. It's not the soft mizzling rain of a warm irish summer. It's more like the chilly, sinew-tightening rain of late october. It's not much fun being a pagan in summer anymore: try to dance round a handy phallic standing stone at midnight and you'd get your death. Not that I have ever danced round anything at midnight. Well, not unless you count the back garden during an infamous party a few years back. But that was down to the drink and the company, rather than any spiritual urges.

The thing is, I don't remember the summers of my youth being so wet. There was that dreadful June to August when I was seventeen, when it did rain almost every day, but that stands out in my memory because it was so unusual. This place is hardly the CoteD'Azur, but we used to have summers that passed for summer, with long, balmy days and warm evenings, where you could sit outside with a nice glass of wine and watch the stars.

Nowadays it's all rain. And I can't see the stars when it rains.

I was sitting in my garden this afternoon, beading and making jewellery.

Beading soothes me and I can lose myself in the rhythmn of it. That's one of the reasons I have always liked working with my hands -- you become lost in the task and your mind only works on that. Your brain gets absorbed by the problem of choosing the beads and the sequence to put them in and how to knot the thread so that the bracelet stays tight and true. Should I put charms on this bracelet and if so which ones? And those earrings: should I make them long or short? The only interruption is when abead rolls off the tray or out of my hands and I have to get down on my knees to retrieve it.

The dog lies in the shade to one side of me, only rousing to snap at a passing fly and the cat is tucked somewhere in the couch grass that will not be banished, no matter what I do. For once the neighbour with the loud radio is quiet: asleep or away somewhere and I have forgotten to bring out my radio, so all I hear is the birdsong and the breeze. The beach would be nice for a walk, I think, but that thought will also have ocurred to several dozen other people this evening, so I leave it and promise the dog we'll go tomorrow morning instead.

But tomorrow I will be a day closer to a bridge I don't want to go over. I try not to worry about it, knowing it is just a bridge from here to there, and I really want to be there but I know the land beneath it is swampy and infested with monsters and it's a bit like that rope bridge in The Temple of Doom, ricketty and with a posse of fierceness poised to push me off. The dog rolls over and sits up. I think she heard me think the word walk...

"First, realize that you are surrounded by prison walls, that your mind has gone to sleep. It does not even occur to most people to see this, so they live and die as prison inmates.

Most people end up being conformists; they adapt to prison life. A few become reformers; they fight for better living conditions in the prison, better lighting, better ventilation.

Hardly anyone becomes a rebel, a revolutionary who breaks down the prison walls. You can only be a revolutionary when you see the prison walls in the first place."


-- Anthony de Mello

I had a book returned today. Now, I know that one has to persevere with numerous submissions to many publishers before one gets even a sniff of interest, but it still dwindles one's little writer's heart when you get a rejection. Especially when it's from the premier pusher of pulp romantic fiction telling you to read more of their output. Clearly I need to ramp up the purple in my prose...

The difference between one friend and another is in their reaction to Grianan.

Friend no 1: "Where could you get as fabulous a view as this anywhere in the world"; "It's the air up here -- it's so clean."

Friend no 2: "Grianan gives me the creeps."


But then, she's the sort of person who prefers designer shoes to the open air.

Summer's Lease...

Finally a day that felt like summer. Warm enough to go bare-shouldered and to eat outside in my hodge-podge pocket hanky of a garden. Warm enough to run with the dog through newly cut grass. Warm enough to have to water the plants again this evening. Finally something like summer.

But also warm enough to notice the flipping litter strewn all over the place; plastic bags and fast-food containers and broken glass pock marking the hedgerows and the verges. Warm enough to hear the roar of motorbikes as they do double the speed limit with blithe impunity. Warm enough to hear the neighbours' dire choice of country'n'western dross on one side and teenaged metal rap on the other. And no matter if I was ill mannered enough to turn Radio 4 up to the max, I don't think the sound of The Archers would drown either of them out.

More and more I wish that I didn't live in the suburbs, where everyone sees you the minute you walk out the door; where neighbours impinge, however thoughtlessly and where the roar of the dual carriageway is never too far away.

When I first moved here, years ago, the countryside was still only a lane away and the road was a trickle of traffic. There were no grumpy teenagers with blue bags and loud music. It was peaceful here, then. It's still pretty quiet, here, tucked in my still little turn of a few houses. But it's no longer quiet enough.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date....

Happy Lughnasadh, by the way, to all.