Climbing to the light

Time to recognise the enemy within and conquer it

2012-02-10T12:22:00.001Z

I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to work it out. I have a little bit of obsessive -compulsive disorder in me to go with the inner control freak that I accepted and embraced a long time ago. I can't tell you how much more I could have gotten done with my time if I'd realised this earlier.

It shows at work in the form of insanely complicated computer models which are far more extensive and detailed than needed. Not necessarily a bad thing, except I spend about three times as long on a job as anybody else. Still, they haven't fired me yet, so I'm going to call that a win.

Online, it shows as a determination to read all the tweets.

Like many newbie writers, I read the blog posts which tell you that you have to have an online presence; start now before you even have something to sell. You get infected with this sense of urgency, because you might be doing it wrong. It's all: Platform! Blog! Tweet! Do it now! And so the plan, devised on a computer with tick boxes and printed out and glued into a diary (because I'm that kind of scary person) includes Join Twitter. Develop an online web presence.

And there the compulsion sinks its claws in, because whenever I'm on the computer, it's nagging me that I haven't read all the tweets yet. It is a task uncompleted. I cannot tick the box and move on. I need to tick a completed box before I can move on. Seriously.

Now I'm not talking about all 200 million tweets per day, or whatever it is now, because I'm just a little bit nuts, not completely off my trolley. Just the tweets from the 270 some people that I follow. But even so, by definition it never ends. It's why I had to quit Farmville and Treasure Madness and make my facebook feed a game free zone. It's why I gave away my Playstation when gaming became more important than food or sleep. I find I seldom tweet myself, because I'm too busy reading all the tweets. And worse, still, they're not even fun tweets, because most of my feed is from follow backs. I am paralysed into inactivity by a giant wave of I am a writer, buy my book tweets, which I don't even enjoy reading, because the compulsion to read all the tweets is there. I can't tick the box and move on. I need to tick the box.

But this morning, I feel... I don't know, awake. Objective. Looking at my twitter feed, I've noticed that one person tweets exactly every half hour to ask a random question, like 'what's the last colour you painted your toenails?' When I check their page, these questions never result in interaction, never turn into a discussion. So what's their purpose?

I like using twitter to engage with people about their lives. I want to know about the thing their kids did that made them laugh, about their new puppy, about the joke their friend told them. Really, truly, I don't want to hear about the review of someone's book that I haven't read and don't plan to. Not any more. I guess I could buy every single book promoted by every single person that followed me as a means of building their list of followers, but I'd end up in one of those smart white coats with wraparound arms.

I'm not going to quit twitter, because I like following authors whose books I've loved, and I like talking to people like Hagelrat, Mhairie Simpson and Margie McNulty, people who are happy to chat, but I think I'm going to cut right back on the other stuff. People have every right to promote their stuff on twitter, but it isn't for me.

The same as this blog is just a diary that people can read if they want rather than a writer's promotional tool filled with platform building content, my twitter needs to be social and not driven by the great god, Platform. It's the only way to stay sane and enjoy writing enough to want to carry on.

I'll never read all the tweets, but now I know the task ahead of me. I beat Farmville. I beat Treasure Madness. I can beat this. And to that end, this is what it looks like where I live this morning:

Pretty, huh? No doubt my son will be taking his sledge out when he gets home from school. Are your kids having fun in the snow? I really would like to know.

Their day will come

2012-01-24T00:24:00.000Z

They may be beautiful, but I firmly believe some of these flowers are waiting for the day they will grow up and become triffids.

Life of flowers (Жизнь цветов) from VOROBYOFF PRODUCTION on Vimeo.

One day, when we least expect it, they will strike, and when that happens?

♫ The guy sure looks like plant food to me ♫

Word count will stay my problem up to and including my headstone

2011-12-31T14:38:00.000Z

I finally pulled my procrastinating thumb out of my arse and did some writing, in that wonderful quiet spot between Christmas and New Year when you can live on leftovers and stay at home while the rest of the world hits the sales. I quite like my tale of satanic paper cats and their reluctant hostess.

Unfortunately, this was supposed to be my entry for an annual writing group competition with a word count of 2,500 to 3,500, and I'm at 4,500 and rising. Oops. It seems the engraved Writer's Block is destined to spend a year on someone else's shelf. It will probably be happier on a shelf that gets dusted more frequently anyway. I wouldn't want to interfere with the dawn of a new dust bunny species which is likely to occur in my house later this year.

Grinch alert

2011-12-21T23:59:00.002Z

Okay, I have to hold my hands up to it: I'm a grinch.

Which is not to say I hate Christmas, heck no. I love the way The Boy's excitement increases as the open doors on his advent calendar add up. I love our little family walk with the dogs on Christmas morning, and the big family gathering in the evening. I love decorating the tree and baking mince pies with sweet pastry so thin they crumble in your hands.

Nope, it turns out, what I don't love is involuntary exposure to Christmas music. Christmas songs on the radio and in the shops drive everybody nuts, so I'm just going to add myself to the end of a long, long list there, and declare that the only Christmas song I can tolerate is Fairytale of New York. 'Nuff Said, and thanks, Tesco, for using it in your advertising and potentially spoiling that one for me too. If that makes me a grinch, then we are legion.

I might, however, be in a minority when it comes to choirs singing carols.

Now I quite like choral music. A friend sings in a choir and The Old Git and I go to their twice yearly concert. Good stuff. However, I don't expect it in the middle of a crowded restaurant.

It was the occasion of our Writing Group Christmas dinner (I do enjoy having four or five different Christmas dinners), and when the group on the next table broke into a rendition of Ding Dong Merrily on High, I thought it was spontaneous and wonderful.

Then they did another one.

And another one.

And another one.

And another one.

Then they did the first one again, and I looked over and realised that this was not a spontaneous outbreak of song. They all had songbooks in front of them, and they were set up for a night of wobbling their tonsils in public. And I started a slow, irritable burn.

I'm sorry, Pain the Arse Choral Society, but it's the noise inspector in me. It doesn't matter what you are choosing to sing, or how well you sing it. What bothers me is that you decided a crowded restaurant was the place for your singalong, regardless of whether the people around you wanted to hear it or not. It's the fundamental 'up yours' inherent in that decision. One carol, sung off the cuff would have delighted me. Planning it in advance? That's just rude.

I will retire with grinchly dignity to my kitchen, and start baking mince pies. When people open their mouths to sing in inappropriate places, maybe I can just pop mince pies in. I figure with a little bit of planning, I can be both grumpy and Christmassy.

It's Panto Night (oh no it's not!)

2011-12-12T23:52:00.000Z

What do the following have in common?

Ripperella, the East End tart whose fairy godfather, Don Corleone, set her up with a man called Jack,
Jack the Intellectually Challenged, who went to London to become the Lord Mayor with the help of a pig called Trotter,
Maid Marion, who left Robin to marry Aladdin, the man who could find her hood,
Silvio, who helped grow the European beanstalk for the Banking Giant by fertilising it with used banknotes.

Answer: They were all characters invented by the deranged imaginations of the Watford Writers and assigned to me to ham-act for Panto Night. So, so much fun.

You guys have strange, warped minds and I love you for it. Poor Chris might not, since you made him be King Kong and ape his way across the 'stage' to have a discussion with Tarzan about loincloths.

The million dollar question now is whether the guy who came for the first time tonight will be back next week or whether he'll run away screaming.

Divine Hell blog challenge - Heresy

2011-12-10T18:28:00.000Z

I am dying on my arse with this challenge. Just way too busy at work. It's leaving me with a headful of sludge in the evenings. Nearly a week late and 100 words over. Oops.

“Hello Steven.” There is infinite sorrow on the Bishop’s face as the guards plant me in a chair on the other side of his desk, my hands spread out on the top. “I had hoped we wouldn’t have to talk again.”

So had I. I thought I’d hidden well enough this time to die and wake up with God instead of the Church’s doctors.

He leans forward and puts a hand over mine, stilling the tremors that rack it. “You can’t keep doing this. Please, repent and walk with us in the footsteps of Jesus.”

I don’t answer him. My throat is locked with remembered pain of the razor that opened it and spilled my life onto the ground.

“Well?”

I want to spit in his face and tell him he’s wrong, that God never meant us to keep re-animating these tired bodies as we suck the world dry. But the resurrection process has left me weak. All I can do is shake my head. Lights flash behind my eyes as nanobots falter in their painstaking task to reassemble my thoughts from darkness.

“Oh, Steven. How many times must we go through this?” He looks over at the doctor who stand in the shadows. “Steven rejects the words of the holy prophet Dr Pearson and his gift of resurrection. Execute him tonight.”

My heart soars. They are going to give up and let me go.

But... no. “Steven, we’ll talk again tomorrow. I pray that you will be thinking more clearly.”

Divine Hell blog challenge - Limbo

2011-12-06T00:11:00.003Z

Oops. It's past midnight. I wonder if my flash story will turn into a pumpkin? A limbo pumpkin. What would a limbo pumpkin look like? Pale, maybe. Wraithlike. Anyway...

http://ladyantimony.blogspot.com/2011/12/december-blog-challenge.html

The letters on the sheet in front of me swim and ripple into new configurations as I stare at them with stinging eyes. There is nothing here that means anything, nowhere I can insert the crowbar of my mind and twist.

I have not passed. The vehicle of my future will stall here.

But, until I walk out, neither have I failed. I occupy interstitial space, where nothing is decided.

I turn my gaze to the clock and will time to stop, will my mind to have this new power to make up for my failure in mathematics.

Just… stop.

Tuesday Tales - first judging appointment

2011-11-30T22:15:00.001Z


Judge's word: Twist

I had my first judging appointment today, for the weekly microfic competition at Tuesday Tales. So impressed with the quality of the entries; they did not make my job easy. My winners are up, together with what appealed about each entry.

Check them out.

It was a great experience. Far, far more fun than my one and only agility judging appointment. That one still gives me a nervous twitch. Note to self: If you are ever stupid enough to find yourself judging an agility competition again, do not set the A frame up next to the window to the cafe, so that every armchair critic can second guess your judgements on the contacts.

No, not "everyone has klout". Some of us don't want it

2011-11-21T23:39:00.000Z

I read an interesting post today, on why someone deleted their Klout profile. I've read several posts over the last few weeks where people have been discussing the algorithm that Klout uses to determine how influential you are on social networks, and thought, "I wouldn't sign up for that mess of social-anxiety-in-a-jar if you held a gun to my head." As a shy person who doesn't make friends easily, to me it represents the same kind of soul crushing popularity contest that made me feel like a worthless waste of oxygen in my teens, and like hell am I am going to subscribe to it as an adult too. Having fun with social networks? Who cares, let's talk how important you are.

How lucky I am, then, that I didn't need to sign up. Those lovely, thoughtful people at Klout, who know nothing of my contempt for popularity contests or concern about things being done in my name without my knowledge, just made me a profile anyway. Thanks, guys.

Now you can damn well delete it again. Now.

Tuesday Tales - because microfic is addictive

2011-11-15T22:23:00.002Z

I won another round of Tuesday Tales, go me! The fact that I'm posting it now instead of last week has nothing to do with me procrastinating my tail off faced with three books to beta read, my word no. Nothing could be *cough* further from the truth. And I'm not stalling because I can't come up with anything for this week's round either.

No I am not looking shifty. You take that back.

Prompt word: Effervesced

I tip the powder into my water glass with shaking hands. It effervesces with a happy sparkle that promises forgiveness of my sins; a fresh start in one fizzy mouthful.

The wrappers of a dozen chocolate bars surround me, as much a part of the autumn as fallen leaves and fireworks. I bend down to gather them up and hide the evidence of my shame for another year. They disappear in the dustbin, lost among coffee grounds and cardboard. The wrappers are gone but I am left with my belly, as soft and sagging as the rotting pumpkin underneath them.

Genre hopping - choose your destination wisely

2011-10-24T11:12:00.002+01:00

One of the best things about Fantasycon was that I found out about a lot of great authors. Thrilled with my new discoveries, I dived in and am just now emerging from a huge reading bender of British urban fantasy, gritty eyed and with a head full of monsters and mayhem. It was wonderful. These are the books I read and I would recommend any of them:

The Sweet Scent of Blood by Suzanne McLeod
The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey (I *really* wish I'd read these in order instead of grabbing five before three and four. It would have been even more awesome)
Into the Nightside by Simon R Green (an omnibus of Something from the Nightside and Agents of Light and Darkness)

However, I have learned the hard way not to stay in one genre too long. The corpse of high fantasy lies broken behind me on this path, burned out and lost to me, maybe forever. Can't let that happen again. Time for a change.

I've been meaning to read some of Georgette Heyer's books for a long time, because I've heard so many good things about them. Sarah Rees Brennan has talked about them in glowing terms, and I like her own books so much that I'll read pretty much anything she recommends.

Unfortunately, regency romances: possibly not a good choice of genre coming straight after an urban fantasy marathon. I like me some romance, I really do, but when you've just read books where vampires and demons are threatening everything the world holds dear, it's really hard to get excited about someone risking their position in the echelons of those born rich and entitled just by marrying someone not quite as rich and entitled as they are. None of them seem to work for a living. It's enough to make me come over all Bastille Day.

I don't plan to quit just yet; I'm only a few pages in. However, I might need to pick a different genre first and work my way down to that gentler level of sex and violence, where a bad marriage or being caught with your voluminous knickers down is possibly the worst thing that can happen to you.

Microfic win

2011-10-19T13:14:00.000+01:00

I love microfic. It's a great way to keep writing when you're contemplating whether to print off your manuscript just so that you can set fire to it. To keep my fingers away from the matches I've been playing the Tuesday Tales at Glitter Word for a while and it's really good fun. Weekly 100 word microfic competition based on a photograph and a prompt word.

And this week, I won! Yay! Thanks to Stevie for a gorgeous pic and to Lady Antimony for ~~accepting the bri~~ judging. Go read the other entries too. Lots of awesomeness there. I think the pic brought out the poet in everybody this week.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Prompt word: Ensorcell

The girl sits on the opposite bank and watches me through hair that curls like water weed. Her bare skin glistens with the pond water that drips onto the grass.

“Are you a witch?” I ask. “Here to ensorcel me?”

She tilts her head to listen to the sound and smiles at me.

“Will you talk?”

She smiles again, showing needle-sharp teeth made to tear and rend, and slips into the water. I should be running. Instead I lean over to look for her, a pale wraith in the reeds.

Her smile widens as she drags me into her pond.

You know how sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words?

2011-10-18T00:24:00.000+01:00

Totally.

On Fantasycon 2011

2011-10-08T08:38:00.002+01:00

I was right to look forward to Fantasycon. Well, except in the financial sense, because boy, you don't want to go there if your TBR pile is too big and you don't want to buy another book, ever. Everybody I met, I wanted to go and and buy their books afterwards. I'll never have time to write again.

It's a very strange thing to be in a hotel around people that make you want to squee like a fangirl and realise that they are normal people. Well, on the cool end of normal, actually. SFF writers know how to have a good time.

Brighton was bizarre and wonderful. I can't think of anywhere else you would walk past a group of drunken stormtroopers on the way to the restaurant. Darth Vader was out for the count on the pavement. It is a place where you can expect to see guys heading for clubs wearing pink furry boot covers and stockings. Better than television.

And the best, absolutely the best thing, for me, was that the people I was around were proud to be SFF authors. No genre shame here, no 'I wrote a book, but it's just fantasy, a bit embarrassing really but it pays the bills'. They write amazing, imaginative books with the brakes off. They made me stand a little bit taller just by association. A few days before I was ready to quit, but I came back with renewed motivation to revise my manuscript and start querying. No small part of that was down to Mhairi Simpson, who is one of the nicest people I've met and tolerated my efforts to twist her YA shapeshifter romance into furry erotica (It's all about the CLAWS, baby).

I am so going back next year.

Conference time

2011-09-29T20:26:00.003+01:00

I am writing this blog post in my current very favourite place in the whole world. It's a little laboratory just off the hospitality lounge where conference goers have lunch and what makes it my favourite place in the world, is that I'm at this conference and I have a key. Since the conference is chock full of exciting equations, I will put this in equation form too:

Conference = lots of strangers.
Lots of strangers + lifelong social anxiety = Acute social anxiety.
Acute social anxiety + key to bolt hole = Foregone conclusion = Rosie holes up like a rat with her plate of sandwiches.

There has to be something wrong with hiding away at a conference so that you can post about how much you are looking forward to another conference, but this next one is my first Fantasycon. The only thing I know for sure about it is that this time I won't have a key to a convenient bolthole. Not unless I mug a cleaner, anyway. That seems extreme, so I'm putting my faith in the fact that they have a first timer programme and that a friend is going too. I met her on twitter and she's giving me a lift to the hotel.

So, going through my checklist:

- Programme of events, check.
- Too many clothes for one weekend, check.
- Pretty business cards that make me look more like a romance writer than a fantasy writer, check.
- Copies of Helliconia Spring and Salvage Rites to sign in case I get a chance to stal... bump into some writing idols, check.

As long as Mhairie doesn't bring an axe, I think I'm good.

The madness, it is contagious

2011-09-24T00:07:00.002+01:00

Seriously? Two more Versatile Blogger nominations? Be kind to Glitterlady and Charitygirl. They appear to be somewhat confused.

Now I have to come up with some more things about myself that won't make people step away slowly. This sounds like a job for *drumroll* ex-EHOgirl.

1. I once stapled my thumb, all the way in, and had to stay silent because an asshole was ranting at me on the phone about my inspection of his cafe. I would rather staple my thumb again than talk to that man.

2. I haven't eaten a doner kebab since I saw one of them raw when I was doing a restaurant inspection (a different one).

3. I once demonstrated exactly why you have to mark up fully glazed doors with a sight bar, by walking smack into one. At the end of a health and safety inspection.

4. I was once cross examined in court for half a day about a box I ticked on a form as a student. Definition of not fun.

5. I am currently climbing out of a fit of the sads that left this post in draft up to here for a couple of weeks. Excuses: I haz them.

6. I sometimes question how wise it is to seek publication given the damage the journey can do to your day job, your family and your mental health. You are free to read this together with the previous point and draw your own conclusions.

7. I have a very awesome day job, which deserves to have far fewer distractions in the form of pretty, publishing butterflies dancing just out of reach.

And I now aim this shiny blog award at: Dee, who can write a haiku for any occasion. You now get to blog with seven facts about yourself and nominate someone else. I've seen several versions now of how many recipients, so I'm going with up to five.

Endings

2011-09-16T14:00:00.000+01:00

There is a sorrow to throwing away stored baby equipment, one that isn't there if you give it to another new parent. It is an acceptance that the time for babies is over. When you give, it is part of the celebration of new life, a passing of the torch. In the recycling centre it is an ending, the first real step towards your death.

A matter of priorities

2011-09-07T09:29:00.000+01:00

A colossal overcommitment fail is in progress at the moment. I missed my first campaign writing game and my first dice games flash prompt because I had something big on at work that demanded my full attention. I also deflated with a sorry 'pfft' sound when I received the first less than glowing crit of my manuscript last week, and writing dropped below house cleaning on my priority list while I regrouped. That is possibly no bad thing.

Anyway, normal service will be resumed shortly.

Hurricane time

2011-08-28T15:23:00.003+01:00

Waiting to hear from friends who were in the path of Hurricane Irene (they're fine) had me thinking about our one and only English hurricane that I can remember, in 1987. I was all of 18 and in my second month away from home, and because this was 1987, we didn't have televisions in our rooms, or internet or mobile phones to be aware that there might be a hurricane. Or not, depending on who you listened to. It may have been on the radio, but frankly I was busy discovering cheap rotgut alcohol (oh Thunderbird, beloved drink of penniless students and winos), Indian food and Pink Floyd. Oh, and wondering what to do about being a non-smoker when the pot got passed around (they baked me flapjacks! I mean, I'm sure they would have. But they didn't. Because of course I did not try it. Never. Not even in flapjacks. Because that would be bad. Ahem, so, moving on).

Our halls of residence were in the middle of a beautiful wooded park. It did occur to me that evening that the trees were swaying an awful lot in the wind, but I shrugged my shoulders. Windy. Big deal.

Quite a big deal, as it turned out, although I suspect not on Irene's scale. At breakfast, we found out that we had all slept through our first ever hurricane and some of us went out to look.

Our baby trees around the edge of the park were all bent and sad. One had fallen over, and being fine upstanding youths, who never smoked pot or ate interesting flapjacks, we thought, poor Sad Fallen Tree. We will save you, Tree! Together we pushed Sad Fallen Tree up, to stand next to the path once again and have a new chance at life. Proud of our efforts, we moved on in our quest to explore our wind-ravaged land and offer help, or at least be nosy.

Of course, a hundred yards up the road, we realised that Sad Fallen Tree might fall over again, and this time might hit someone on the way down. We raced back down the road and pushed over Sad Fallen Tree again, so that it didn't kill someone in its second tragic demise.

Being a fine upstanding youth is hard sometimes. You might even look like a vandal. Just as long as you don't get caught eating the flapjacks.

Making some new friends

2011-08-24T18:15:00.001+01:00

I just discovered a rather wonderful sounding campaign to build platform and make new writerly blogging buddies. It's run by Rachael Harrie, and it's called the Third Writer's Platform Building Campaign.

Check it out

Sounds like a lot of fun, and a great way to meet other bloggers. Since I have been a lackadaisical blogger in the past, and this must change, I'm in. Hopefully it will deal with my tardy blogging ways. I will report back at intervals.

Things I learned on my holidays

2011-08-23T13:21:00.000+01:00

Image courtesy of http://dir.coolclips.com/

There is no point at which nine year old boys get bored with chicken nuggets.
It's good to keep an eye on the river as you eat the the giant spherical fish cakes in the Ramsholt Arms in Woodbridge, just in case Neptune comes back for his nuts.
Tents function far better in the rain with the roof vent covered up.
It takes a long time to boil a kettle if you don't realise your gas has run out.
Take the map with you into the corn maze.
People who think they can write anywhere should try doing it while sitting on a tree stump in the forest.
It is only when you have to sleep on an airbed for six nights that you realise how much your memory foam mattress topper keeps the rest of the world safe from you.
Being next to a colony of rooks as they all take off from the trees together makes you wonder if you're in a gothic horror story and don't know it yet.
Getting on a bouncy castle aged 42 makes you the coolest parent on the planet in the eyes of your offspring.
Forty year old brains experience bouncing differently to nine year old brains.
It only takes a nest of spiders three hours to create a cobweb scene worthy of a horror film in an unattended tent.
When you are camping in bad weather, angels sing over the door as you walk into a centrally heated pub.
It helps to tie your bikes to the bike carrier on the back of your car as well as to each other.
Hearing drumming practice in the distance in Rendlesham Forest makes you feel like you're on the set of an old Tarzan movie and the natives are about to come after you.
It's always good to discover the flying ants preparing to rise under the tent after you have packed up to go home.
When you see hundreds of birds circling overhead, tell yourself it's the flying ants they want and don't make any sudden moves.

Seven virtues - humility

2011-08-13T10:00:00.002+01:00

Links to all the participants here

And so we come to the end of another Lady Antimony challenge. Thank you so much for all the great stories I have read. It's been fun.

Humility

Sam studies in secret, late at night. During the day he looks out of the window as he listens to the teacher, and he loiters behind the bike sheds with the others.

Nobody is going to accuse him of thinking himself better than the rest of them. He can do without a target painted on his back until he leaves school. He will walk into his exams as an also-ran, destined to lift and carry until his back fails, the same as everybody else.

His savings hide in a drawer, waiting for his exam results to join them and take him somewhere else.

Seven virtues - kindness

2011-08-12T10:00:00.006+01:00

Links to all the participants here

Kindness

It is a burden beyond telling to know that the world is going to end. Lauren weeps for mankind as they ignore the sermons of her leader, his pleas to repent and to give. Every day he preaches in front of the camera, strong and handsome enough to stop her heart, but the credit card pledges are paltry. A few hundred believers will not avert the fires of the apocalypse.

She takes a deep breath and pours the poison into the fresh water pumping station. She cannot prevent the deaths to come, but at least she can make them painless for a few.

Seven virtues - patience

2011-08-11T10:00:00.003+01:00

Links to all the participants here

This is my favourite one of the seven. I would probably have put it first or last if we weren't doing them in a specific order this time.

Patience

William lines the tiles up one by one in a long serpentine of black and white, the spots forming an infinite mathematical equation that describes the universe in a way he doesn't quite understand. When it is finished he will know what no man was meant to and he will control everything. The world will know him as God and he will be merciful as they cower at his feet.

"Time for your medication, Mr Davis."

The opening of the doors sets the dominos to falling in a gentle ripple of numbers.

"Oops, was that me?" the nurse asks.

William sighs and sets the first domino upright again.

Seven virtues - diligence

2011-08-10T10:00:00.002+01:00

Links to all the participants here

Diligence

The man shakes as I straighten his fingers and staunch the bleeding from where his fingernails used to be. "Shh," I murmur. "You must keep still."

Blood weeps from cuts all over his body. If he moves too much I won't be able to save him. I stitch every slice closed so that he can live another day. When I finish my fingers ache, but my lord will be pleased.

Tomorrow we start again, then the next day, and every day after that, until the man has told me everything he knows and we have all his friends too.

Seven virtues - charity

2011-08-09T10:00:00.002+01:00

Links to all the participants here

Charity

The boy is delighted with the skateboard. "It has glow in the dark paint," I tell him. "Pretty cool, right?" Giving it away makes me feel warm inside, like it's the best thing I've done in a long time.

I go to different parts of the playground to give the X-box games away; don't want the same people to get everything. I want to see as many happy, smiling faces as possible. Every time someone thanks me I feel good.

Plus it will make it that much harder for my horrible, Barbie-beheading brother to get all his stuff back.

Bonus.

Seven virtues - temperance

2011-08-08T10:00:00.007+01:00

Linkies to all the participants here

Temperance

Mark grins as he produces a bottle for the party. "I nicked the brandy. Mum will never miss it."

I take an interest in my lemonade as he pours the liquor into the punch bowl. It disappears, swallowed by the orange juice and cherryade.

He offers me a cupful. "You man enough?"

"You know we're not allowed." I'm sticking with lemonade.

"Stay home next time, loser." He drinks the whole cupful and takes more. His friends crowd round him, wanting some too. They don't even taste the pee I put in the brandy this afternoon.

Mark and his idiot friends 0 - loser little brother 1

Seven virtues - chastity

2011-08-07T22:14:00.001+01:00

Linkies to all the participants here

Oh nightmare, for I am Not Ready For Kickoff. I wanted to have all my posts cued up and ready to go, but instead my first one is just going to scrape under the wire. They are all scribbled on paper - a weekend spent sitting on a hillside at Gatcombe Park writing microfic while watching the cross country was blissful - but I just got in and I'm going to be typing feverishly.

I plan to read all of the other stories, but I have just entered into an agreement with someone to beta read each other's manuscripts, so I may save the commenting for a few day's time. I am playing though, honest!

Titles went by the wayside this time - I'm just going to use the virtues as titles and call it done.

And so, off we go with:

Chastity

Dora strokes the cat sitting on her lap as she waits. "Now you have to be good. No getting jealous." He is about to lose his spot in her bed, his for too many years; guilt makes her squeeze him until he mews in protest.

She hesitates at the knock on the door, not wanting to appear flustered when she answers it, but the postman doesn't even look at her as he hands her the box and walks on.

She wonders if she should wait another year before opening it, but twenty years of chastity is too many to bear. Eventually, Mr Battery-powered becomes Mr Right.

Say what again?

2011-08-05T01:31:00.003+01:00

I got a Versatile Blogger Award, courtesy of the sweet but evidently misguided Rebecca Clare Smith. I am somewhat stunned, since at the point I first read the words 'blog' and 'author platform' in the same sentence, I started to feel like I was under one and all the bloggity words evaporated from my brain. I just hoped they found new and loving homes.

Now apparently, as the recipient of this *holy crap I got an* award, I get to nominate more bloggers to receive the goodness, and also have to dish out seven previously untold facts about myself.

So, I point the happy finger of cool green and yellow iconage at.... Lissa for having some great discussion of the issues raised by Disney princesses as well as lots of other interesting posts.

On to seven facts about me. Um, okay, right, so... shut up, I'm trying to think...

1. I think steak and kidney pie tastes like pee. I'm not sure whether it's the power of suggestion or whether I am the only person who is aware of this. Seriously guys, can you not taste the urine? It's kidneys; processing pee is what they do.

2. My science brain and my fiction brain have a no-fly zone in between them. It takes at least half a day for the neurons to apply for the appropriate permissions and switch over. This is why I can only crack out a decent word count on holiday, with good old fashioned pen and paper.

3. I have an approachable face. This is the only reason I can come up with for why every time I go out surveying, somebody ambles over to ask what I am doing. They never ask my colleagues. Never. Actually, maybe I just look suspicious.

4. Boy, this is tough. Time for that good old fallback, environmental health. In my previous career, I discovered that in a microwave, cornflakes begin to smoulder and people begin to phone the fire brigade a long time before the larvae infesting them are more than mildly annoyed. I also learned that you cannot seal infested cereal in a plastic bag. Mealmoths laugh at plastic bags. And then they infest the laboratory and all the other samples.

5. I learned that I cannot kill. Not even to put something out of its misery. This made covering for the pest officers something of an embarassment. Unless you mean The Boy harm, you are safe from me.

6. I learned that nothing disturbs a man more than walking into the pub toilets to find a woman with a white coat and a clipboard. Good times.

7. I am a fair shot with an air rifle. Doesn't that make you happy about fact number 5? We won't mention the fact that when I fired something with some stopping power, I fell over backwards.

So how do you market kid's books?

2011-07-22T22:00:00.007+01:00

A popular blogger and writer of middle grade books, Nathan Bransford, recently received some negative criticism for suggesting that users of the free and hugely helpful publishing information on his blog and forum might consider buying the book (harsh, right? Your site, your rules as far as I am concerned). The post is here.

Now I think it is fairly common knowledge that you're pretty much on your own as a debut author when it comes to book publicity, and you have to do things to try to sell your book yourself. I have to be honest, just the thought of it makes me nauseous. Given that the internet is where a very large number of books are sold, an internet presence is necessary.

So what do you do if you are writing for an age that has limited access to the internet? This was raised in a comment by Maureen Crisp on Roni Loren's blog, and I think she has a huge point.

Children of 9-12 don't have unrestricted access to the internet and they don't exactly read a lot of blogs. They are too young to (officially) use social media, and as a stranger, you shouldn't even be trying to reach them directly. It's clear that you are trying to reach them via their parents and teachers.

Now I think that Nathan did exactly what you need to do to reach readers in a previous post, which was to post his first chapter online. Check it out. In fact, sit down with your offspring and check it out together. I follow his blog because I'm a baby writer, so I saw it, and I sat down with The Boy and we read it together. The Boy loved it, so I ordered the book and he is reading it now. But how many parents use the internet to read with their child?

It strikes me that I can't be the only parent of a child who finds an author he likes and ploughs through the backlist. We have hammered Roald Dahl, Dick King Smith, Francesca Simon and several others. Box sets abound in my house. He reads one, and he wants the rest. Writing tasters are what float my boat too. If I read a short story I love on the internet and the author bio says they have a book out, I go looking for it. Disappointingly, I haven't always been able to find it, which means a lost sale for that author. Note: if your bio mentions a book, make sure we can buy it, please.

So wouldn't it be great if there was a site or a network dedicated to free short stories or first chapters from published authors, where we can introduce our children to their writing in a safe online environment and see if it's a hit? The Boy's school gives them limited internet access to use sites like Cool Math Games. How about Cool Stories too? Maybe with enhanced content like games and puzzles to go with them.

Or is this wishful thinking?

Fun with the seven sins

2011-07-15T21:51:00.002+01:00

Image courtesy of Mark du Toit

Well, the dust is settling from the Seven Sins writing challenge and I'm back up to my elbows in the big scary book project. I really thought it was worth noting, though, just how much fun it was just writing for the hell of it. It reminded me of the days when I had just started writing and I wasn't researching publishers and agents and revising again, and again and again.....

There is something freeing about a group of buddies and a game of being the best storyteller you can under a set of crazy conditions. Maybe you'll have a theme, a word count, a set of words you have to include. Your challenge is to do something with them that nobody else has, to do something interesting and entertaining. No worries about publishability or trends, or what agent might be interested, just how much can you entertain people within the rules of the game.

I truly believe that anybody starting out should aim for a couple of years of challenges and fun and thinking out of the box before they settle down to craft and researching the industry. I think it is when we play that we lay down the foundations of our future skills, in exactly the way that children learn motor skills with the aid of play bricks and cuddly toys.

And with that, thank you to my Seven Sins playmates for making this a whole lot of fun, both to read and to write. I have found some great short story writers who I will be keeping an eye on in the future.

I would like to give a big round of applause to Antimony, our play leader, and all the good folks who played the game.

I had a blast and read some great stories.

Thank you.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-13T12:00:00.002+01:00

The seven sins challenge

I thought I'd finish up with something a little more light-hearted after six days of darkness. Thanks to Lady Antimony for coming up with the challenge. It's been a lot of fun. My poor, oft-neglected blog must be wondering what has hit it for the last seven days.

Somebody

The sports car engine croons its song of supressed power and easy money as Gary cruises down the road with the top down. As people turn to look he takes a moment to nod and accept the accolades that come with the car, the assumption that he must be Somebody.

A blonde girl in a short skirt waves as he passes and he stops, preening, to see if she would like a ride in the car. He is about to ask her name when her accomplice hits him from behind.

The girl blows him a kiss as they drive away in his car.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-12T12:00:00.001+01:00

The seven sins challenge

I'm cheating today. This is more of an opener to something I might carry on with one day.

Beauty and the beast

I gulped my coffee and savoured the pain of the burn as Sasha batted her eyelids at the waiter and smiled her oh so perfect smile with her oh so perfect lips.

She turned the smile on me and murmured something inconsequential about the food before laughing the tinkling laugh that got her whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. Flight upgrades, free gifts, my boyfriends, anything.

She always did take her looks for granted, ever since we were friends in primary school. The beauty that shone even brighter because she stood next to the beast. She probably couldn’t even imagine a day where it might all be taken away from her and she’d be ugly like me.

But that was okay.

I could wait.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-11T12:00:00.001+01:00


The seven sins challenge

I really struggled with Sloth. In the end, I looked close to home for inspiration. Not that I want this to happen to the Old Git really. Well, only when he really annoys me.

Soon, I promise

Lilah has that look again, the one with narrowed eyes on me. "There's still water leaking downstairs whenever someone showers, you know."

"I'm going to fix it soon. Just keep the water off the walls until then."

She glares at me as she walks out.

* * *

Lilah puts a towel under the wet patch on the ceiling before she has her shower.

"Soon," I say before she can start on me.

"Yeah, yeah," she says wearily as she goes upstairs.

A creak makes me look up as I stir my tea in the kitchen. As the bath crashes through the rotten ceiling and hits me, the last thing I hear is Lilah's scream.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-10T12:00:00.002+01:00

The seven sins challenge

Day 4, and time for someone that doesn't suffer a nasty end. I think I was most pleased with this one of the seven, not least because it actually came in under 100 words.

Monster

Matthew huddles in the darkness of the cupboard as the monster rages outside, shrieking his name as it hunts for him. A bottle breaks as it hits the floor. If Matthew had his way, he would break every bottle in the world before she could get to them. He just has to stay hidden until the drink is all gone and then his mother will cry and kiss him and promise that it will never happen again. The handle of the knife engraves itself into his palm as he prays that he will never have to use it against her.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-09T12:00:00.001+01:00

The seven sins challenge

Day 3's microfic. Dear me, I am mean to my poor sinners, aren't I?

Investment Plan

The stacks of money make the rooms smell musty, their coating of dust an attack on the sinuses of the unwary. Samuel revels in the itch and the sneezes as he lives in the tunnels between the piles.

Another year and the case will be closed, and he can start spending. The paper will become property; solid and profitable and his. He will leave this collapsing hovel and buy an apartment by the beach in Spain.

He sweats in the sunshine of his dreams as the lights sputter and short and the stacks begin to burn.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-08T12:00:00.004+01:00

The seven sins challenge

Today's seven sins microfic is brought to you by the letter G.

Eatslim3000^TM will change your life

"It's a miracle," the salesman says as Susan writes out the cheque. "Truly negative food. The more you eat, the more weight you lose."

She goes home to gorge herself on Eatslim3000^TM Pate and Eatslim3000^TM Chocolate Cake, ready to look the way she has always wanted.

* * *

Susan looks in the mirror and traces reverent fingers over her protruding collar bones and the knobs of her hips. So close. Just another month.Maybe an upgrade to Eatslim3000^TM Foie Gras and Eatslim3000^TM Brie.

She totters to the motorised wheelchair she needs to get around now her leg muscles have wasted, and wonders if the salesman will deliver.

#7sins microfic challenge

2011-07-07T22:12:00.006+01:00

The seven sins challenge

I'm participating in Lady Antimony's seven deadly sins microfic challenge this week: seven sins, seven days, seven 100 word stories. Just do me a favour and don't count the words. Especially not for this one.

One Night Stand

I've been here too long already.

"Don't go," Luke says. "Please, you have to stay with me."

"I have to work." I pull my shirt on and stuff my ripped panties into my bag.

"I'll die if you leave me."

"Don't be so melodramatic." I let myself out and wonder how a one night stand turned into three days.

* * *

My skin feels too tight; my body hollow. I need something but I don't know what. I find myself in a bar, flirting with strangers, hungry for contact. I meet Ryan.

We fall into bed and the pain stops. When he's inside me I feel alive, feel whole.

In the morning I try to stop him leaving. "Please stay. I need you."

Ryan looks at the floor. "Look, I like you, but..."

"I'll die if you leave me." My body is raging, burning me up from the inside out.

"I'm sorry, I have to go." Ryan closes the door behind him.

I call Luke to ask what he has done to me.

His phone is dead.

Microfic time - lost

2011-06-16T03:14:00.001+01:00

I had to do 100 words on the theme of 'Lost' last week. It get's tricky when the word count goes that low. I was amazed how much people could pack into it. I opted for monologue as a strategy.

Under the Bed

Hello!

Look under the bed.

Under. The. Bed.

No, not in your sock drawer. When have I ever been anywhere near your sock drawer? I'm down here, behind the crisp packet.

It's really nasty under here. You know that, right?

Look, this is getting us nowhere. Get your mum to help.

No, I'm not behind the radiator. How would I even fit... oh. So that's where my boots went. Right.

That's it! Just reach a bit further in. Mind the old apple... yeah. That.

Finally! Action Man reporting for duty. Let's get this battle started. But first, find me some bloody clothes.

Waterstones and dark fantasy

2011-06-10T19:55:00.001+01:00

I was browsing the genre shelves of my local Waterstones today to pick up a book for my flight on Monday. While I was there I thought I would do that writerly thing they all tell you to do and check out what's on the shelves in general. You know the sort of thing: what's selling, what's getting promotional coverage, etc etc.

I have tweeted before that Waterstones has a dark fantasy shelf. Yay, said I. Clearly this stuff is selling. Maybe they'd like an English one to go with all the American ones on the shelf. Maybe my book will not be the subject of agentish sniggers and coffee expelled in the direction of monitors.

Got to be honest though, after a closer look today, I have my reservations. They seem to have lumped all the paranormal romance and urban fantasy featuring female MC's onto this dark fantasy shelf. Okay, fine. Except the Jim Butcher books, which are urban fantasy, are across the way in Science Fiction. So is American Gods by Neil Gaiman (bought that one for the plane, can't wait). High fantasy and comic fantasy were also in Science Fiction.

So why is urban fantasy split across the two shelves?

There are two reasons that I can think of, and I don't like one of them very much. Have we got into the situation where the bookshops think we need a separate shelf of urban fantasy for girls? Heaven forbid that they should corrupt the proper books. Better keep them nice and clear in case it's contagious.

The second one is that the whole shelf was paranormal romance, which I was mistaking for urban fantasy. That makes me wonder where the line is. Does an urban fantasy become a paranormal romance as soon as there is a relationship in there somewhere? Would any urban fantasy with romantic elements be viewed as a paranormal romance for the purpose of shelving?

What I really need to do, I suppose, is make a note of all the authors and see where they fall on the spectrum. As for where my book would fall? I haven't a flaming clue any more.

What did you read in your teens?

2011-06-05T12:29:00.003+01:00

This morning I woke up to the big twitter kerfuffle #YAsaves about a Wall Street Journal article. I read a lot of young adult fiction and follow a few YA authors on twitter, so it pretty much jumped out at me.

In the article the author slated modern young adult books as being overwhelmingly dark and violent, and unsuitable for teens. This led to an avalanche of twitter posts and blog posts about how many young people are trapped in dark and violent lives and value something which makes them feel less alone. This came from YA authors who have received letters from teens saying this, and direct posts by teens. Sadly the spammers latched onto a trending topic and drowned the feed in garbage, but a wonderful person preserved some of these tweets on storify so you can see what I mean.

I tried to think about the books I read as a teen to see how this alleged flood of darkness compared with the late 80's (yes, I know I'm old, shut up), and to be honest, I realise that I didn't read young adult. I had a library card and the freedom to read whatever I chose (no censorship in our house. Love you, Mum!) so I ploughed through the children's section and read everything in it, then pretty much without looking up moved onto the next available shelf, which was adult genre fiction. For some unknown reason, they put what young adult books there were on the other side of the library. I didn't even see them until I had exhausted the adult genre fiction and was eyeing the non-fiction shelves.

So, the books I read as a so-called impressionable teen were adult horror (every one I could find), fantasy and thriller, with the occasional old-skool rapetastic romance thrown in, the kind that the Smart Bitches have a field day with occasionally. If this article author thinks YA darkness is bad, she should have seen what I was reading.

Those horror books didn't do anything to change me. What shaped me were my real life experiences, not things I read on a page. I don't propose to censor The Boy's reading, even if I did chicken out of reading the Tales of 1001 Nights to him.

I am really curious about the rest of the world, though. What books did you read as a teen? Do you feel that you were scarred by inappropriate books or saved by loving censorship?

Careful who's listening

2011-06-02T23:43:00.002+01:00

Cartoon courtesy of Mark du Toit

I'm in the opening stages of another book at the moment, and researching my little socks off. This has caused a certain amount of domestic alarm. Beloved mother, you see, was a nurse before she retired, so when she rang her eldest daughter to ask how she was and how The Boy did in his school cross country race, she got a barrage of questions I had been saving up to ask her. They went a bit like this:

How often do you turn someone who is completely paralysed to prevent bedsores?
Would you feed them through a tube?
How soon would muscle wastage set in?
What kind of physical therapy would they receive?
If someone was just pretending to be paralysed, would the therapist be able to feel it?

We wittered on for about twenty minutes about the care and treatment of paralysis, until suddenly I hear: "No, stop it. Give me the phone back, go away. Everyone's fine. Stop worrying."

Then in a tone of complete exasperation: "She's writing another book."

Turns out that esteemed stepfather was having kittens listening to her end of the conversation, thinking that someone in the family was paralysed and in hospital. I suppose it's slightly better than being caught trying to find out how to be an effective terrorist.

And so my personal contribution to the craft of writing today is: when you do your research, be careful who's listening.

My writing challenge is going to be how to cover do-it-yourself catheter removal when breaking out of hospital. Sexy, huh?

Microfic competition result

2011-05-16T23:15:00.003+01:00

Big cheer up moment for me tonight. I came second in my first writing competition, 250 words on a prompt of 'dirt' for Watford Writers. Amazing what a little bit of positive reinforcement feels like after weeks of revisions.

I've been trying to avoid flash fiction lately and force myself to write longer, because for a while, everything I wrote seemed to come in at 1500 words or less. I think I naturally write short, which causes me no end of pain as I try to expand my MS to something approaching novel length. Microfic is great fun though. It's a challenge to see how much story you can pack into 250 words. This was what I came up with.

A blessing on your fields

I have never seen an uglier thing as I turn the little statue over in my hands, all lumpen breasts and belly and huge buttocks. It doesn’t even have a face.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Laura says. “I saw it in the souk and knew you’d love it. It’s supposed to bring fertility to your fields.”

“It’s wonderful,” I lie.

When she’s gone I throw my fat, pregnant statue out onto the lawn. Stupid statue and stupid, insensitive Laura who has no idea how her gift makes me feel. The dog retrieves it and takes it to her favourite spot under the honeysuckle.

The postman brings my letter the next day. The dog bites her tongue in her frenzy guarding the house, but the spectre of bad news always finds its way in. Tooth marks and bloody smears on the envelope won’t change anything.

I shut her out in the garden to drip blood and calm down as I open it. I already know what it will say.

In the morning a swathe of wheat has grown out of the dirt under the honeysuckle. The dog looks confused. In the afternoon she comes into season and breaks out of the garden, returning late and smug. There might be puppies.

She’s spayed.

That night as my husband sleeps, I lay under the honeysuckle on a bed of immature wheat. I pull a knife across my palm and let blood drip on to the dirt in front of the statue.

I can’t wait.

A not very dauntless book reviewer abandons ship

2011-05-09T15:57:00.004+01:00

I've decided to abandon ship on book reviews because I suck at them beyond all measure and the last thing I want to do is damn books with faint praise where they deserve more. For example, The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston, which I just reviewed, is beautiful and compelling and I'm not sure I really got that across. Think I'll leave structured reviews to the experts.

What I really want to do, I think, is explore what interests me in the world building of books. For me, The Freak Observer raised all sorts of questions about poverty and universal health care. I love reading YA, but my thoughts often drift to the protagonist's parents.What must it be like to raise a child when you can't afford for them to get sick or injured, when it's that or food and utilities?

In Demon's Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan, Olivia was driven mad by something, which I won't mention because it is a huge spoiler if you haven't read it yet. She still had to hold herself together and get a job. What must that have been like, to have to go to work and be nice to your boss and your colleagues when your world has collapsed and you are living a nightmare which has you screaming inside your head? Olivia deserves a prequel book of her own one day.

A YA book with world building that just blew me away was Divergent by Veronica Roth. In my new approach of not doing a structured review, I will just say that Divergent was amazing; it completely de-railed my day yesterday because I couldn't put it down. She painted a powerful picture with very simple and straightforward prose.

It is when world building is this strong that I get the urge to explore it and think about other POVs than the protagonist's. In this case, what would it be like to be a Dauntless mother? We saw young Dauntless, including very young instructors, and we saw corrupt Dauntless leaders. We encountered one older woman, going by the streak of grey in her hair. Then again, I had some of those by the age of thirty. I don't think we saw any old Dauntless anywhere. It made me wonder, do they fade away, hand over the flag to their children and take no active part in society?

I am no stranger to the quest for adrenaline, but motherhood sucked it right out of me. How would you reconcile the motto of your faction with the bone-deep need to keep your child safe? The internal conflict would be acute. Would you fear for them so much that you would quietly encourage them to choose another faction? Would faction allegiance survive your concern for their life?

The picture painted was one of Dauntless youth, and it was an alluring one, even if few of us would survive it in real life. Given the little nugget in the book that the city gates are locked from the outside, there appears to be the foundation for more books in the Divergent universe. I would love the opportunity to find out more about the world Roth has built, including the eventual future of that youth, when I read them.

TBR challenge April - The Freak Observer by Blythe Woolston

2011-04-20T23:36:00.002+01:00

Hardcover, Carolrhoda Books, 2010

Disclosure: I didn't buy this book, I won it in the draw for contributors to Maureen Johnson's Next Little Shelterbox campaign on twitter.

High school student Loa suffers a series of losses, one after the other. One of her few friends is killed in a road traffic accident, another leaves the country, her father loses his job, and most profoundly, her disabled sister dies. Caring for Loa's sister is the glue that binds the family together, and when she dies, grief affects them all.

The main thing that stood out for me in this book was Loa's voice. The author has nailed the sense of isolation and suppressed pain that carries Loa through her life not quite caring about anything that happens to her in the face of all the things that already have. Death is the Bony Guy, and he is never far away from her thoughts, which she expresses with a certain wryness. Despite this she never disconnects completely. She works to deal with her losses and keeps going using her own unique outlook on life.

Her family's new poverty makes even the simplest things difficult, and I found the lack of a safety net for the family quite shocking. This makes the book sound depressing, but it wasn't. Things get better for everyone, and I finished the book glad I had read it, even if I did wipe away a few tears in the middle. Loa felt very real.

Not my normal genre by any stretch, but a welcome change, and a book I would recommend for anyone wanting to read something a little different.

On werewolves and packs

2011-04-13T23:14:00.002+01:00

Photo by Harlequeen, used under Creative Commons Licence

I find the concept of werewolves very interesting, although I read my fill of them some time back and they are more likely to make me put a book back on the shelf these days. I certainly don't plan to write a werewolf story to join the hundreds out there, but they still exercise my imagination when it comes down to social organisation. How much werewolf social structure would come from the animal, the pack and how much from human society with its complicated, messy dynamics?

It interests me because for quite a long time I had a three dog one bitch dog pack at home, not including us humans. We are down to two dogs now. I have seen three pack leaders, and for the sake of argument I am going to exclude the people. Yes I know The Old Git is technically alpha dog and I am alpha bitch, but I want to look at the relationships between them with as little of that human misunderstanding as possible. Looking at canine behaviour in a household gives me a picture of what it means to be pack leader.

One of my dogs was what I would describe as a true alpha. He was a mild-tempered border collie, lovely to live with, but the other dogs didn't cross him on food and you didn't threaten his family. I remember once we had a new arrival, a very traumatised young border collie, and out for a walk one day someone else's dog decided to go in on him. I never saw our alpha move, but as this dog came steaming in on the youngest, suddenly the alpha was there. The aggressor bounced off him and changed his mind about the attack and headed off in the other direction. Likewise, any rough and tumble at home and this dog was there, interfering and making it difficult to carry on.

And yet, I never saw that dog fight. He maintained everything through sheer presence. The others automatically deferred to him.

His two successors are what I would call wannabe alphas. They got the job because no better candidate was available. Huge difference, which showed as aggression. They wanted the job and they worried about keeping it. They exercised control over the lower dogs with an iron fist; they were bullies.

Did the pack benefit from it? No. The pack was more uptight and more likely to misbehave. There were frequent spats, and when one matured and became stronger than the other, the pack balanced on a knife edge until the older dog died because he would not relinquish control.

I also have a natural omega dog. You can see he doesn't want the responsibility of a high position, but that doesn't mean he will be bullied. When he arrived, the wannabe alpha of the time rushed in to bully him and omega dog saw him off with a full display of the pearly whites, and settled down to being just that. Nobody's whipping boy, just not the boss.

Back to werewolves, where the human factor comes into play. I have spent some time looking at the men in my office, and how they fit into their roles at the office (the women are much trickier, possibly because I am looking from the inside). I can see the natural alphas, the wannabe alphas, the oh-crap-how-did-I-end-up-alphas and the natural omegas.

That being the case, where the boys are concerned at least, I see a werewolf pack working much the same as a dog pack. A strong pack would be characterised by a mild natural alpha showing little overt control. Omegas in that pack would not necessarily be weak, more horrified at the prospect of taking responsibility. Where a pack didn't have a natural alpha, they would be more aggressive to each other and show more dysfunction in their ranks.

The girls, now that's a whole 'nother story.

Waiting to hear

2011-04-08T15:31:00.001+01:00

Time of stress in Rosieland. I just sent the big scary book project off to beta readers. This is where I start to lose the plot in a very short space of time. I always mislay a few marbles at crit time, and this one is really messing with my head. It goes something like this:

WORRIED ROSIE: They hate it. They all hate it and they don't know how to even start telling me all the things that are wrong with it.
SENSIBLE ROSIE: They haven't even read it yet. People have lives.
WORRIED: But it's been two days.
SENSIBLE: And when was the last time you looked at something somebody sent you in under a week?
WORRIED: But I can't concentrate on anything else. I'm biting my nails.
SENSIBLE: You were the one whining about needing a break. Think of the calories and write something on the blog.
WORRIED: Nooo, not the blog. Anything but the blog.
SENSIBLE: Okay, not the blog. How about any one of the three open projects from writing group. Or, and this is just a suggestion, get out the spade and flamethrower and clean your house.
WORRIED: I hate you.
SENSIBLE: Just shut up and write something else. You're making me tired.

Worried Rosie needs a slap upside the head, to be honest. One like in the old black and white movies where Foolish Woman gets hysterical so Manly Man has to slap some sense into her.

... Okay, maybe not quite like that. The Old Git would have a life expectancy of about ten minutes if he tried it. He favours the Turtle method of dealing with wife-induced trauma. He will just be waiting, ready to talk to me when all the marbles are back in their rightful places and he doesn't have to hide sharp objects away from me any more. Wise, wise man.

Review: A Madness of Angels by Kate Griffin

2011-03-23T23:24:00.001Z

Paperback, Orbit Books, 2009

Not part of the TBR challenge this one, just one of those books you read and are desperate to tell people about. I've already bought a second copy and sent it off to the US as a gift to a friend.

While a-lurking on twitter recently I saw the campaign to help the Big Green Bookshop in Wood Green. Now Wood Green is not a million miles from me, and the BGB is probably the closest independent after the Chorleywood Bookshop, so it seemed only right to do something to help them stay afloat. I picked through their recommended reads and mail ordered this one and Weirdstone of Brisingham (haven't read that one yet - soon my pretty, soon).

Oh my. This is the point where I should give an accurate precis of the plot and say what I liked and what I didn't. However, I'm a lazy so-and-so and a terrible reviewer who just wants to immerse myself in a book without sitting outside it and noting what I liked and what I didn't. I'm just going to copy and paste the blurb at the end of the post and squeal, you have to read this book. London just pops off the page at you, the way it does in China Mieville's Kraken, even more so. It becomes a character itself, and if you have ever lived in London you will recognise it.

And now that I have got that out of my system maybe I do have a few little objective comments. Some of the sentences are huge and would earn a beginner writer like me a swift kick in the pants, but they work. The prose is dizzying; it drew me in and painted me a picture, and I found myself embracing the style and running with it, and so what if I'd be wheezing if I was reading it out loud. I loved Matthew Swift, who remained so very ordinary despite being anything but, and who made the very ordinariness of London work for him.

Most of all I loved that sense of place, the use of the real London and not just the shiny bits in the guidebooks. To me, books like this and Kraken are what urban fantasy is all about.

I think karma gave me a big kiss on the cheek with this one. Help an independent bookshop and be rewarded, because clearly those guys know their onions when it comes to recommending a good book. I'll be buying the next two books in the series from them too and reading them as soon as they get here.

A Madness of Angels, by Kate Griffin (as lifted from Amazon)
When a man is tired of London he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford - Samuel Johnson In fact, Dr Johnson was only half right. There is in London much more than life - there is power. It ebbs and flows with the rhythms of the city, makes runes from the alignments of ancient streets and hums with the rattle of trains and buses; it waxes and wanes with the patterns of the business day. It is a new kind of magic: urban magic. Enter a London where magicians ride the Last Train, implore favours of The Beggar King and interpret the insane wisdom of The Bag Lady. Enter a London where beings of power soar with the pigeons and scrabble with the rats, and seek insight in the half-whispered madness of the blue electric angels. Enter the London of Matthew Swift, where rival sorcerers, hidden in plain sight, do battle for the very soul of the city ...

TBR challenge March: Humans

2011-03-16T21:24:00.001Z

Tor books, 2003

Humans is the middle book in a trilogy by Robert Sawyer, the others being Hominids and Hybrids. It tells the story of a parallel world to Earth, where Homo Sapiens was the human species to die out and the Neanderthals went on to become the dominant, technically advanced, species. In the first book, which I haven't read, an accident with an experimental machine on the Neanderthal world led to a Neanderthal scientist, Ponter Boddit, becoming stranded on our version of Earth.

In Humans, Ponter reopens the portal and revisits the friends he made in the first book. He also rekindles a friendship with Mary Vaughan which becomes a romance.

This is very much a hard sci-fi book. It spends a lot of time exploring the differences between the two worlds, and the Neanderthal world was fascinating. A world where you live apart from the men for most of the month then get together for a few days of 'Two Become One'. Hmm, I could live with it, as long as somebody was around to do the heavy lifting.

I found it a bit sermonising in places, and although I saw it described as a sci-fi romance in one amazon review, I don't think it was. The romance was more of a hook to hang any number of scientific and social observations on than what a romance reader would recognise as a romance.

Not a page-turner, but interesting, and aspects of the Neanderthal society have stayed with me and given me a certain amount of food for thought. Of course, that might just be the prospect of not having a husband under my feet for most of the month then the fun of squashing a month's worth of happies into a few days. On second thoughts, sons live with their fathers. Cancel that plan. I couldn't live without my Boy, even if he does borrow my computer when I want to write.

Hey, I was actually on theme this month. Robert Sawyer was a 'new to me' author. How 'bout that, go me! On to April.

Sexytalk is sexy, right?

2011-03-09T11:18:00.002Z

In the meeting of the chatroom coven last night, beloved writing buddy Mud mentioned a book that she was enjoying, Pack Challenge by Shelly Laurenston. She liked the banter, and I have to say, any book with a discussion about werebunnies has something going for it. After all, why just have predator weres when you can have werebunnies or werebovines.

MUD: Never walk under a tree containing a werebovine at full moon.
ROSIE: Unless you're wearing a really big hat.

So as well as werebunny discussions, apparently there is also lots of sexytalk in the book, which got us to wondering, do lots of people talk during sex? And is it sexy? We came up with some of our own sexytalk to test the theory. Thank you ladies for letting your creative efforts out to alarm and disturb the real world:

1. "Did you pick up milk?"

2. "F*** me hard, big boy"

3. "Where did you put that saucepan lid the last time you did the dishes?"

4. "Shut up, you're interrupting my fantasy..."

5. "Where's the remote? Leno's almost on."

6. "What the f*** is that?"

7. "Ow, you're on my hair." (borrowed from a twitter post)

8. "That reminds me, we need to buy noodles."

9. "These sheets really need washing."

10. "I think I hear the dogs outside."

11. "I think it's time to paint the ceiling. There are 123 cracks."

12. "When are we getting rid of your mother?"

13. "While you're there, could you take a look at that mole on my neck?"

14. "Dya think you're gonna be much longer? I had beans for lunch. Fair warning."

15. "Does this pillow make my butt look fat?"

16. "That reminds me....I think the car's misfiring again."

17. "Hey. Make that sound again and watch the look on the dog's face."

18. "The nose hair trimmers are in the medicine cabinet. Right beside the mouthwash."

19. "Do you smell something?"

20. "Sorry, I kinda nodded off there."

21. "How many gallons would it take to do the ceiling, dya think?"

My conclusion: sexytalk is possibly not sexy the way we do it. C-, could do better, and it's a good job none of us write erotica.

I think my personal favourite is no.17. Congratulations En, your reward is for us all to improve our sexytalk ready to try it out on you when we meet up in June.

En's link of the week

2011-03-07T23:14:00.001Z

My good buddy En finds the best stuff on the internet. I have no idea how. This week, she found a new way to help me put off revisions, playing

Circle the Cat

Can you catch the cat? He's a crafty beast. It did occur to me that maybe in the next edition the game creator could make it more like real life. In real life if you pin a cat somewhere he can't escape, he comes at you claws first. Maybe the kitty could launch out of the screen, which gets splattered with blood or carved up with claw marks.

Maybe not.

I promise I am thinking up a new blog post which has something to do with, gasp, writing. My take on the werewolf alpha male, coming soon.

When books and families collide

2011-02-24T12:20:00.001Z

The Boy has de-railed me in his candy sledgehammer Boy way.

The Boy: Mummy, are you going to write another book when you finish this one?
Rosie: That's the plan. Daddy is even going to build me a little office in the loft.
The Boy, in wobbly voice: I like it better when we do stuff together.
Rosie: *feels like the worst mother in the world*

I confess I don't know what to do next. Do I stop writing until he's a vile teenager who will be happy not to spend time with his mother? What if he stays this sweet forever?

TBR Challenge February: Kraken

2011-02-16T23:26:00.002Z

Paperback, Pan, 2010

Deep in the research wing of the Natural History Museum is a prize specimen, something that comes along much less often than once in a lifetime: a perfect, and perfectly preserved, giant squid. But what does it mean when the creature suddenly and impossibly disappears?

For curator Billy Harrow it's the start of a headlong pitch into a London of warring cults, surreal magic, apostates and assassins. It might just be that the creature he's been preserving is more than a biological rarity: there are those who are sure it's a god.

A god that someone is hoping will end the world

I'm cheating a little. This book hasn't been languishing in my TBR pile because I forgot about it, or wasn't in the mood for it. It was sitting there as my reward for finishing a draft, because I knew that if I read it, I wouldn't be doing anything else until it was done.

I really don't know how Mieville comes up with his ideas. Billy disappears into another London populated by strange religions and mysterious characters. This London has talking tattoos and guardian angels, and horrors hiding below a paper-thin surface. Although Billy is the protagonist, for me, London is the hero of the book. Despite the craziness of what's going on, it doesn't feel like some alien city; it feels like London. Magic is called 'knack', and if Londoners had magic, that's exactly what they'd call it.

I found it easy to immerse myself in, but I struggled to understand the final twist of the plot. That meant that I felt a tiny bit unsatisfied at the end. If I read it again with the benefit of a little bit of foreknowledge, I think it would be easier, and I probably will read it again because the imagination of it just takes my breath away.

3.5/5

Brains it is?

2011-01-31T17:32:00.001Z

I'm writing a story for an anthology at the moment, and thought I would use a random word picker to mess about with the themes. I would roll the die a few times and see what combination of the themes I should use. It came out:

First roll - undead
Second roll - punk
Third roll - undead

Looks like the gods of randomness want a zombie story really badly. I have to decide now whether ignoring them would mean I wake up tomorrow as a zombie and have to propitiate them with an offering of brains. If my butcher can't get them I would have to give them the Old Git's, and nobody gets his brain until he's finished repairing the central heating. After that, we can talk.

How kickass are you?

2011-01-25T12:39:00.004Z

There is a subject close to my heart, that I rant about often in real life, but which I have never blogged about. Don’t know why, but here it is.

It’s a question for the girls: How kickass are you? Really?

I mean really really. Physically.

I’m not talking about how you don’t take crap from anyone in your personal life or how gutsy you are in business, or how you manage your life. I’m talking serious, physical fighting. How strong are you?

Have you uncovered fightin’ skills you never knew you had, donned leather pants and gone out to take the world on?

How many times have you even been put in a situation where you had to discover how kickass you really are?

I have.

And that’s why I love urban fantasy, heck I write it, but I'm tired of reading about kickass women, and I doubt I will ever write one into a story.

Once upon a time, I was an environmental health officer. Probably not the best one out there by a very long way, but I cared a whole lot about the people whose problems the council employed me to solve. Neighbour making your life a misery with noise? I was your woman (if I had some evidence to prove it, which is a *whole* other story).

So, when I went out a-gathering evidence for noise nuisance and sat in someone’s flat listening to thumping bass downstairs, and read his diary of recent noise events and saw the exhaustion on his face and the anti-depressants on his table to match it, I was on the job. Go downstairs, talk to the budding home DJ, warn him that the music level had to come down or he’d be getting a piece of paper from me that said in flowery legal words, shut up or we’ll see you in court.

Rosie saves the day, right?

Except my budding DJ, who was oh so friendly at the door, had a little anger management problem as well as some other psychiatric issues. My budding DJ lost the plot when our friendly conversation didn’t lead to permission to play his music as loud as he wanted because his decks ‘are really important to him’.

And my budding DJ, who was about a head shorter than me and weighed a damn sight less, managed to overpower me, stop me leaving even though I was right next to the door, and lock me in while he threw his decks out of the window in a rage.

I, the council enforcer who was paid to take no crap and had received two days of self defence training from my employer a few years before, could do nothing but stand at the doorway and say, “Please let me out, you’re frightening me,” until he calmed down and opened the door.

Bad, bad day at work. He was prosecuted for false imprisonment. I quit the profession and went on to do something that doesn’t make me nauseous with stress in the mornings. All over. Happy ending.

But I occasionally get comments, friendly ones, about my female characters being weak. They hide instead of fight. They don’t come out slugging. That’s because I *know* that a lot of ordinary women just won’t have the strength, pound for pound, to physically take on an angry man, and won’t discover some secret reservoir of physical kick-assity to make up for it.

Discovering the reality led to a change in the way I look at life and people. To me, kickassity (if it isn't a word, it should be) is another impossible standard, like beauty, that makes me feel diminished in comparison.

Paw down time

2011-01-21T18:22:00.002Z

A couple of weeks ago our dog numbers doubled overnight to four as we looked after some of our friend's dogs while they went to the States for a funeral. They were beautifully behaved, but I had forgotten the wading motion you use in the kitchen when you have four dogs milling around your feet. Not going back to four dogs again, no sirree.

What tickled me was the way that our two boys sat back and let the girl visitors take over their beds and special spots, such as next to my bed while I use my laptop. Youngest girl visitor welded herself to my side and my dog, Buzzy, just let her get on with it.

For a while.

After the first week, the boys decided that clearly the girls were permanent additions to the household, and things had to change. Suddenly, Buzzy was in the spot next to my bed even if he had to sit on youngest girl visitor to get there, and he reclaimed his bed. Youngest girl visitor whinged all night, but had to find somewhere else to sleep. The Old Git's dog, Buddy, decided he had to sleep in the bedroom when he's normally happy downstairs. The paw was put down. Hard.

The girls just went home. The boys are celebrating.

TBR Challenge 2011 - January

2011-01-19T16:46:00.001Z

Paperback, Arrow Books, 2007

Dr Temperance Brennan is on an archeological dig on Dewees Island when her students find a set of remains a lot fresher than the rest. She finds herself the de facto coroner for the investigation as she covers for her friend, Emma, who is fighting a life-threatening illness. Just to complicate matters, her ex-husband and her current lover turn up to share the house she is staying at in an uncomfortable triangle. One body becomes two, then three, and her suspicions turn to the local free health clinic and the doctor there. When her ex-husband is shot, the threats come close to home.

I like the older and wiser Tempe much more than her youthful TV counterpart, Bones. She is engaged with the world, with her grown up daughter and her endearing but unfaithful ex-husband, and with her tentative new relationship with a Montreal detective. Kathy Reichs kept the mystery cracking along while still giving plenty of time to Tempe's personal life and her struggle to put aside the affection she still feels for her husband despite the end of their marriage. The characters were interesting, although Boyd the dog stole every scene he was in, and I remained interested to the end.

I have read one other book by Reichs, Fatal Voyage, and I had a slight problem with the book in that I had a nagging suspicion through the first third that I might already have read it, when in fact it was Fatal Voyage I had read. I don't think I would want to read the whole series, because forensics only hold a certain amount of interest for me. I hope that Tempe and Ryan can make their relationship work, but I don't plan to buy more books to find out.

I give it a 3.5/5.

First one down. For February, release the Kraken.

The Further Adventures of Freddy and Jason

2011-01-13T22:12:00.001Z

Last year, The Boy and I wrote a story together. Freddy's Itchy Bottom was a riot to write, and one of the best things we have ever done together. I am no education expert but seriously, try it with your kids. It brought his literacy back from the grave of lost small boy interest. I printed and bound a couple of copies and he is sooo proud of them.

He wants to do another one, and since the second draft of my solo endeavour is out for critique at the moment, tonight seemed a good time to start.

He has blown me away. We plotted out the first section tonight in lieu of a bedtime story, and only stopped because it's a school night. It is going to be a wild adventure of secret treasure, a race to find it and pranks. Many, many pranks.

I can't wait.

Milestone!

2011-01-08T22:24:00.002Z

Image courtesy of Mark du Toit

Good day today. Really good day.

1. The second draft of the novel is finished and out for crit. Unless you count the rewrite which happens in between pen and paper and the keyboard, in which case it's the third. No matter. Point is, time for a few days off and that thing called life. First step, render the house fit for human habitation again. That deadline led to some serious lifestyle collateral damage.

2. Unexpected pressie arrived from bestest writing buddy in the post. I'll be reading Magical Words and reviewing in due course.

3. The Old Git has just installed me an in-the-wall vacuum cleaner. I have wanted one of these for years. Just plug the hose in the wall and away I go. I have been using his builder's cleaner, Henry, for five years since the Vax died from dog hair abuse.

4. The Boy ate spinach tonight for the first time and loved it. Small Boy + Leafy Green Vegetable = Major Maternal Score. I have a foolproof recipe for Spinach Pie that can convert the most die-hard green vegetable hater. It is bundled up with bacon, egg, onions and lots and lots of cheese (cottage and cheddar) in a puff pasty case. It is yummy. And probably horrendously fattening, but the spinach cancels that out. In my humble opinion.

5. Big glass of madeira wine and China Mieville's Kraken next to me. I have been hoarding it as a reward for finishing the book, and it will be my February review for the TBR 2011 Challenge. January will be Break No Bones by Kathy Reichs, which I just finished.

On with the reading.

So what kind of a blog am I?

2011-01-04T23:06:00.003Z

Image courtesy of Mark du Toit

Last night I read an entry on Rachelle Gardner's blog about what she doesn't like to see on writer's blogs, to the extent that it might give her second thoughts about representing them, and it made me wonder what the purpose of this blog was. I wondered because of the last two categories:

- a writer whose blog has irregular and infrequent posts
- a blog that is really unfocused and doesn't know what it's about.

Um. Guilty. Of the first, definitely, and probably the second too.

I'm not seeking representation, because there's that whole pesky write a great book thing you have to do first, so first of all I guess it isn't a shop window. In six months I'll start sweating about that one, maybe.

I'm the last person in the world who should be dispensing writerly advice to people. I figure getting a clue is a necessary precursor before you start trying to influence other people, so that rules that one out too.

Links to useful advice and interesting things by other people? That would be cool. If I could find them. I'm usually the last to any given party. On a side note, it is a great tragedy that my good buddy En doesn't blog. She finds the best, most mind boggling links on the internet, ever. Maybe I could just pass them along and take the credit? Nah. Not cool.

I have many things I would love to blog about, but I think a measure of respect for your workplace and the people you encounter day to day is important. I have so many health inspector stories that go untold unless I'm with other health inspectors. Or tipsy. A table of health inspectors can clear a circle around them in a restaurant once they get going, especially if there's wine on the table.

Nope, I think most of all, it's a way to keep up with friends I've made on posting boards that I drifted away from. People who liked my stories and encouraged me to keep going. I like to let them know what's going on, and to ramble on about The Old Git and The Boy, because I love them and find them endlessly interesting.

In the end it's not a writer's blog, just Rosie's blog, who may be a writer but is a lot of other things first. I can live with that.

Coming out to play

2011-01-03T12:12:00.002Z

I have built up a rather alarming to-be-read pile over the last year or so. Books that were given to me and books that I bought and forgot about are scattered all around the house, and I have promised myself a catch up session for a long time.

Then I found Wendy the Super Librarian's blog. She is hosting the TBR challenge this year, where you pick a book a month from your to-be-read pile and review it on your blog. Awesome idea. I am so in. I will be dipping into my hotch-potch of books, which are a mixture of SFF, chick-lit and thrillers, and jumping into the fray.

On a side note, Wendy has a list of librarian romances on her site. Who knew there were so many? Since my current WIP has a love affair with a librarian in it, I really had to come out and play. I consider it serendipity.

First review is due on the 19th. Time to pick over the pile and find somethhing to read.

A year in Rosieland

2011-01-01T16:09:00.001Z

There were high points and low points in Rosieland this year. Pictures feel like the way to go:

Goodnight Ted. We miss you.

Proud mother is proud.

Who says you can't make great friends on the internet?

13m drop + 41 year old mother = audible abject terror.

It snowed, and it snowed, and it snowed some more.

And finally, there was the labour of love and horror that morphed from a flash piece to a novel under the gentle whip hand of Hurricane Cathy. I didn't enter it in the competition in the end. Too many words in too short a time, and I wanted the time to polish it and make it as good as it can possibly be.

58000 / 80000 words. 73% done!

2011 is the Year of Finish the Damn Book.

Heh heh, hair

2010-12-17T22:42:00.001Z

Beloved baby brother has just been given a kitten for Christmas by his wife. He is smitten with his itty bitty kitty.

Of course, it occurs to me that after years of enduring, and occasionally complaining about, the dog hair that is a permanent fixture in Rosieland, he's going to have pet hair to vacuum up himself.

It would be unfair of me to give an evil laugh, right?

Introducing Rosie Lane

2010-12-10T13:14:00.003Z

My tutor is a very scary woman. Her positivity drags you along in her wake and makes you dream dreams you thought you'd shut away in a box under your bed as 'things that would be wonderful but aren't going to happen in this lifetime'. My box had a ribbon round it. It was pretty and closed and I was in a nice cosy comfort zone where I didn't have anything to measure up to.

But no longer, because I signed up to study with Hurricane Cathy. The upshot is that I now have a pen name after years of vacillating. The first Rosie Lane short story will debut at Agilitynet soon.

This is a recorded announcement

2010-11-20T19:53:00.005Z

My tutor read the first 7,500 words of the story that I started for my creative writing course and delicately suggested (translated: you will do it, I do not accept that you can't) I complete the novel in time to submit to a competition in the middle of December. The only good thing about this is that I know millions of NaNoWriteMo gluttons for punishment are suffering too. I would be delighted with a target of 50K. Try 80K.

Since this, frankly terrifying, target leaves me precious little time for eating and sleeping, let alone blogging, housework or childcare, I will provide a song to listen to in the interim.

Big Bad Handsome Man by Imelda May

I'll be back around before Christmas if I survive.

Eh? What was that?

2010-11-05T13:40:00.001Z

Image by Yaron Jeroen van Oostrom

Today is not a good day in Rosaland.

The Old Git has always given freely of his professional expertise to help me in my work. He is a gift to the consultant who works in a profession allied to the building trade: A builder willing to answer any technical question, no matter how stupid, who will take you to sites to show you installations and develop your technical expertise before you are let loose on the paying public, and who will tell you all the little sneaky cost-cutting tricks builders get up to that might explain the problem you are trying to troubleshoot for someone.

When he never heard the oven timer going at home, I started wondering why. When he couldn't hear the background jungle sounds I was playing on my internet radio to keep me company while I wrote, I got worried. The Old Git is not really that old; only 47. It was time to pay him back for everything he has done for me professionally.

I hauled him into my audiometry lab for a hearing test this morning, and established that he has noise induced hearing loss.

This is a very unpleasant discovery. Hearing lost through noise damage will not come back, it is gone for good.

Now the Old Git is more careful with his health and safety than most self employed builders who have to arrange their own health monitoring. He owns a pair of high spec. ear defenders and wears them whenever he thinks he is around very loud noise. The problem was, the Old Git didn't think his noise exposure was significant because he already couldn't hear how loud it really was. I played him an example of the highest level of noise you should be exposed to without ear defenders, and it wasn't that loud to him.

Existing hearing damage, whether it comes from occupational noise exposure or an Ipod turned up too loud, means that you cannot trust your ears to tell you that they are being damaged.

"I know not to play it too loud" doesn't work if you can't hear how loud it is.
I know from experience that most self employed builders don't want to hear about protecting their long term health, especially when a test will cost them money and they don't have any option but to stay in the trade, but really, truly, if you have a family member in the building trade, *make* them go and get a hearing test before it is too late.

And if you are in the south east of England and need a hearing test from someone who understands the building trade, I can help with that.

Ending Alice is out

2010-10-27T11:07:00.001+01:00

Photo by kind permission of http://www.freefoto.com/

Ending Alice is now out at the Science in my Fiction blog and will be available in an anthology in the future. Please check out their site. Lots of interesting thoughts about the reality of science and how it fits into fiction. As the owner of a good natured but over-strong and rather silly dog, the post about keeping the giant mammals of the past today tickled my funny bone. Boy can I see how that one would work. Sunday mornings in the park would never be the same again.

Oh son? A word?

2010-10-22T14:20:00.002+01:00

There is no picture to accompany this post. The reasons will become apparent shortly.

The Boy is in trouble when I get home.

I use my own camera when I need to take photographs at work because it's easy to use. That being the case, the last time I needed to take it out on a job, I downloaded all the holiday photos already on it and dumped them in a folder on my work computer so that I could put them on a memory stick later and take them home. I forgot about them until today.

ROSA: It is lunchtime. It is cold out. I know, I will read blogs at my desk while I eat this sandwich.
ROSA: Maybe my blog could stand a new post too.

Rosa thinks for a while.

ROSA: Posts are hard. Posts are work. Maybe I'll just add some pictures along the bottom instead. I have photos on this computer.

Rosa looks at the holiday pictures in the personal folder on her work computer.

SON OF ROSA AND FRIEND: Hey, did you ever wonder what happened when you left the camera unattended in the tent and went for a massage? Observe these photographs of our bare bottoms.
ROSA: This is my WORK COMPUTER! I am so fired.
SON OF ROSA: And here are some photographs of my winkle.
ROSA: Never mind fired, I am going to prison.

The Boy is in sooo much trouble when I get home.

Siren Song is out

2010-10-18T12:23:00.001+01:00

Image by kind permission of Mark du Toit http://www.marktoon.co.uk/blobs.htm

Siren Song was published today at Every Day Fiction. It's an interesting one because the stories can be voted on by readers. They can also comment, which is always a nail biting experience for me. I tend to spend my life with my hands over my eyes whimpering, "Like me like me please like me." Yes, I've heard all about this constructive-feedback-helping-you-to-grow-as-a-writer thing and it sounds eminently sensible on paper. However, in all things approval related the emotional part of my brain has a death grip on the steering wheel. The logical part of my brain is keen to see what strangers think of the story and doesn't want my friends dropping in to give it a 5/5 in the name of support. The emotional side reserves the right to torture me about what people might think, and whisper that it has been at least five minutes since I checked for new comments.

At what age do we finally manage to jettison our insecurities and be whole people? And since that day is not yet for me, does anyone know how many calories there are in a set of fingernails?

And there's more...

2010-10-04T13:35:00.004+01:00

Image by kind permission of Mark du Toit http://www.marktoon.co.uk/blobs.htm

I am a very happy bunny this week. I received another story acceptance, from Every Day Fiction for a 500 word flash story called Siren Song, and a request out of the blue for a bio to go with my little ten minute practice pieces at Thinking Ten. It seems they are thinking of using one of them to use in their published collection.

At this rate I'm going to have to drop the idea that I write just to entertain friends and family and produce some new material for submission to outside markets. I also have to decide whether to revive and submit the three or so I have left in storage or retire them gracefully. I would quite like to find homes for the shorties. The chapter story is going into the 'what the heck were you thinking' file as too depressing and showing disturbing early signs of Mary Suedom. Sorry, folks, if you were waiting for the long threatened Shadow Puppets prequel. Morwen is headed for the round circular file as part of my self-education and improvement programme. Since my right index finger is now aching on a daily basis and I plan to cut my mouse-using time right back to the essentials, surfing the web daily while I delude myself that I'm about to start the next chapter is not an option. Time to move on.

Moving on is very much a core theme of my life at the moment. The Old Git and I have been working hard at home for the last couple of months. He is decorating like a madman and building us a new kitchen, while I remove years of clutter from corners and cupboards. It feels good to get rid of the heaps of stuff that were crowding us and were never going to be used again.

Thing is, I'm in chuck-happy mode and the fanfiction is starting to feel like part of the clutter. I will soon delete the fanfiction pages, or at minimum break the link from this blog. The best thing would be to bookmark the stories at Perfectly Plum vault 2 if you want to keep reading them. I had a world of fun and made a lot of friends writing the stories so I don't plan to delete them altogether, but there won't be any more.

Ending Alice has a home

2010-09-19T15:46:00.005+01:00

Image by kind permission of Mark du Toit http://www.marktoon.co.uk/blobs.htm

The last few weeks have been long and tortuous, a series of horrible deadlines and urgent requests jockeying for position. It has almost been a flashback to the old environmental health officer days of having a stack of work on your desk, in order of urgency, that you reshuffle continuously as phone calls come in that change the priorities.

In this job, fortunately, it's four projects instead of forty, and the phone calls tend to be more businesslike and less hysterical. Did I ever mention I've never regretted leaving public service? I really haven't.

Nonetheless, it has been a hairy few weeks where I repay my employer for the way they don't object to my normal, rather erratic schedule that twists and turns to handle things domestic and small boy related.

It figures, then, that The Boy had to fall off his friend's bike on Wednesday evening and sprain his ankle. His left ankle and foot puffed up and he has lost two days of school so far, which were covered by The Old Git and a friend. We spent all yesterday evening in casualty when our GP practice wouldn't strap it and sent us off to get it x-rayed in case it was broken (it isn't). It's hard work giving 66 lb's of not-so-small boy a piggyback everywhere.

As soon as we got back from the hospital on Friday night I carried on downloading data from noise analysers, and Saturday and this morning were spent writing reports and creating computer noise models.

With all this going on (why yes, I would like some cheese with my whine), It feels like karma to get an acceptance for a short story in the midst of it. Crossed Genres are starting up a new magazine called Science in my Fiction, and Ending Alice by yours truly is going into the inaugural edition. The really exciting thing for me is that I am getting paid at semi-pro rate. I have received a token payment for one of my stories but up until now nerves have kept me to the free markets. Add to that a lovely personal rejection from SNM Horror magazine that loved Letters to Mother but asked me to resubmit it for a month with a different theme and this feels like a huge step up, and a great position to be in for the start of my creative writing course in a couple of weeks.

So, consider me tired but happy. I've stepped up to all my challenges and life feels pretty good.

I still have to take The Old Git and The Boy out for dinner next weekend to say sorry though. It seems that there may have been a certain amount of snarling along the way. I can't think why.

A Darwinian question

2010-08-22T23:56:00.001+01:00

A Darwinian question currently exercises my mind. It is turning over in my head as I sit in my car for five stolen minutes before I re-enter a fray that has me *this* far from snapping.

What is the evolutionary purpose of PMS? In a species which relies on vesting massive amounts of long term care to ensure the survival of offspring, and therefore genes, why gift the women with the potential for unprovoked anger which combines with existing parental irritation to create a murderous, young-eating rage? I don't get it.

On the plus side, the Old Git saw it coming and took over before I terminated our shared genetic heritage with extreme prejudice.

My reluctance to start the engine and drive back into the campsite where our tent is pitched brings to mind my mother's comments when I told her we were going camping as a family for the first time.

"I'm really happy that you have such wonderful memories of camping as a child," she said, "but speaking mother to mother, don't do it. Just don't."

Too late, I realise what she meant. I suspect there isn't a mother out there who wouldn't be tempted to smother squabbling offspring using a damp sleeping bag as rain beats down on her canvas prison.

Fun with physics

2010-08-11T00:33:00.006+01:00

Son of Rosa is now officially eight and growing up fast. I am enjoying the small increases in freedom ("You're a big boy now, so you can get your own breakfast"), although it comes at a price ("Why is there weetabix and milk all over the floor?").

Birthdays always seem to be a voyage of discovery in Rosaland. Last year I discovered that a bouncy castle party for 25 seven year olds is a whole different ball game to a bouncy castle party for 25 five year olds. Seven year olds are adventurous. They want to go higher and faster. My nerves were still jangling two weeks later. That was the year we terminated proper parties in favour of outings. Since Son of Rosa had copped an accidental headbutt on one of the inflatables and had the mother of all nosebleeds on his birthday, he didn't object.

The year before we learned not to even bother buying pizza with vegetables on it for a party of six year olds. Forget healthy eating and just don't. On the plus side, the dogs were thrilled with all the leftovers.

This year's learning curve had more of a physics flavour to it, courtesy of Aerial Extreme in Milton Keynes.

ATTENDANT, HOOKING UP ROSA'S SAFETY LINE TO FOLLOW THE GROUP OF SMALL BOYS ROUND THE COURSE: Is one of them yours?
ROSA: Yes, the one in front wearing the yellow tee-shirt.
ATTENDANT: Oh, the dramatic one.

Indeed. The one shrieking as he hung on to a rope bridge further up the course. Son of Rosa is a bit of a ham.

The course was straightforward enough, though, once he got over the urge to scream at everything. The physics lesson came when we did the big jump. The big jump is a 14 metre drop from a high platform wearing a harness. Faced with five nervous but eager boys, I wasn't about to chicken out; I couldn't afford to scare them and spoil their fun, plus I wasn't about to be left behind by a bunch of kids (and yes, this attitude has got me into a few hair-raising situations over the years).

Like a mother duck on a river bank, I watched them jump off one by one and float down to the ground. As Son of Rosa got near the bottom, his voice floated back up to the platform, "Awesome!" closely followed by: "Can I do it again?"

Then it was Mummy's turn. A turn where I discovered that mummies who weigh three times as much as their sons reach the ground a bit quicker than them. The word we're looking for here is 'plummet'.

They are building an even higher drop soon, called Goliath. Son of Rosa wants to do it.

Son of Rosa is on his own.

The Scream is out

2010-08-04T21:28:00.002+01:00

It's available to read in the August edition of Static Movement. The picture above was taken by my niece, DarkPhoenix15, specifically to go with the story. She's studying photography at college so I commissioned her to produce a photograph to use with the story on my website. Got to love those talented nieces to pieces.

Scream has a home

2010-07-23T12:41:00.000+01:00

Static Movement has accepted The Scream for its August issue, which has me jumping up and down with glee. I'm back on the horse. Now to brush the rust off the armour and think about submitting some new material.

Image by kind permission of http://www.foxtrotters.tripod.com/

Back on the horse

2010-07-18T13:28:00.000+01:00

After a long, long break I'm writing and submitting again. I'm having fun, although that will probably change when I get my first rejection back. I plan to start with the flash stories and ignore the full length projects that buried me last time. That way lies despair and blank pages that laugh at me and my pencil until we both sag like chocolate teapots.

The owners of the magazine that folded before The Scream saw the light of day have released it, so I'm starting there.

Wish me luck.

Permission to comment?

2010-06-19T04:38:00.005+01:00

A friend recently asked a question on her blog about why people look down on romance. I planned to give my opinion as a comment on her blog but, as sometimes happens with me, it turned into a long ramble that really needed its own space.

So, permission requested to (affectionately) state an alternative position, complete with weak analogies and personal preferences.

I think a disclaimer is called for here before I begin. Everybody should be allowed to read what they enjoy without judgement. Bottom line: peeps is peeps and there are no wrong answers. However, that said, I have my opinions.

First of all, I put my hand on my heart and state that I'm a genre person. After a long period reading sci-fi and fantasy, where I started to feel I'd already read the same story several times whenever I picked up something new, I branched out into chick-lit comedies, mysteries and thrillers and enjoyed them. In the same vein I tried to branch out into romance and literary fiction. With both I found myself unsatisfied.

In the case of the literary fiction I couldn't quite believe that I'd got to the end and still nothing had happened. I felt like I'd wasted x hundred pages waiting for them to get interesting and they never did. After a few experiences like that I shrugged my shoulders and moved on, having decided that clearly it went over my head and I would just stick with the populist stuff.

I was more surprised that I couldn't enjoy romances. In most of the books I had read in other genres, the romance and human interaction was what made the book for me. Yes, I wanted to know whether they saved the world or found the killer, but whether they got together was equally, if not more important to me. So why couldn't I enjoy a book where the getting together was the main theme and not the side plot?

The best way I can put it is to compare it to food. To me, eggs on hot buttered toast is delicious comfort food; one of those magic combinations. In an ill-considered flirtation with the South Beach diet a few years ago I tried to give up the toast and just eat the eggs. Within a week I was ready to kill someone if I saw another egg without bread. It just lacked everything that made the combination so appealing.

Romance is my egg; it just doesn't work on its own. That is not to say that it is impossible for me to enjoy a romance, ever, but I need more. Give me suspense, some action and adventure, or mystery, and I'll lap it up. Snuggle that romance up with a comedy, the way Jennifer Crusie does, and I'll beg for more. Combine it with fantasy or sci-fi? Well first of all, you'll have to be a superb writer because they are uneasy bedfellows. A bad sci-fi romance can set a new definition for bad, but do it well and I'll worship you. I have yet to see it, so if somebody can point me in the right direction that would be wonderful. Paranormal romance isn't it. That's just romance with added fangs, fur or ectoplasm (delete as necessary).

It occurs to me as I scribble that perhaps our problem is the labels. Why do stories have to be one thing or the other? Why does so much romance lack other content to make it interesting? I'd like to read more stories that challenge genre and open my reading experience up.

And just because snark is my nature and I can only suppress it for so long, I will say that good romance is my egg waiting for bread. In my dabbling in the genre I have read some terrible ones where both hero and heroine failed my 'do you want to push them both under a bus' test with honours. Please protect me from sappiness, plotless potboilers and TSTL (too stupid to live) protagonists, because even bread can't save some things.

Thought you'd quit writing, huh?

2010-06-16T11:23:00.000+01:00

Alas, not fiction, but an article about LED lighting to submit to a trade journal.

The moral of the story is never let your boss know you write as a hobby. It will come back to haunt you in unexpected ways.

Coming soon to an island near you

2010-05-31T21:54:00.006+01:00

Treasure Tim is back!

Nobody knows where he's been, but now he has stubble and a wicked smile as he digs his way across the archipelago fighting angry natives and ravenous crocodiles.

Will his supply of Splish last out? What is he thinking about as he grinds his hips next to his conquered chests?

But Treasure Tim is not the only thing that has changed. Treasure Isla has arrived and has her own tropical islands to conquer. Will Treasure Tim find her and her tiny corner of paradise? Are the Treasure Islands big enough to hold two treasure hunters, or is the only question whether her hammock is? And can he overcome the treasure madness of chancer Burt Savage?

Two sets of stubble, one beach babe and a heap of treasures to find. Who will win Isla's hammock rights and who will end up as long pig?

Coming soon to a facebook page near you.

You called it what?

2010-05-06T14:58:00.001+01:00

The Old Git is a whiz at plumbing, electrics and getting under site manager's skins while managing to never do anything they can punish him for. He is often the most irritating man on any given building site; convinced that he knows better than anybody else and not slow to tell them. The most irritating thing of all is that he's usually right when challenged, and it would take more reading time to prove him wrong than anybody has to spend.

What a shame his talents don't extend to spelling and emails.

I had to interrupt the hour before school when everything is rushed to show him how to attach an invoice to an email. While he was searching for the email, I spotted an invoice titled 'Vaginia' in his work folder.

He refused to tell me what Virginia thought when she received her invoice. He also claimed that my horrified laughter was putting him off finding his document.

Still, at least it was sent months ago. The time for angry phone calls is probably past. Maybe he gave her a paper copy and she never saw the document title.

I really, really hope so.

The great British general election

2010-05-01T15:58:00.003+01:00

I know somebody has to run the country, but it feels like looking into a tub of rats and having to decide which one you're going to put down your trousers.

And judging from his blog, my brother in law feels similar about it.

Domesticity is overrated

2010-04-25T00:29:00.002+01:00

Dinner tonight was two promotional miniboxes of Cheerios and Nesquik, served together with milk in a pyrex mixing bowl and followed by a couple of bananas. Something of a low point in meal planning and preparation but tasty and remarkably satisfying. The Boy was a willing accomplice. We discussed it and agreed that the bananas made it acceptable overall. I'll try to be more grownup tomorrow.

Gambling

2010-04-18T11:01:00.000+01:00

... when the dog wants to play fetch with the water balloon bomb toy you're trying out for the first time.

Liking the 11th Doctor

2010-04-16T20:17:00.001+01:00

Sometimes I get to watch Doctor Who. Not on television, my word no, because idiots put it on at times that seven year olds are still awake. Seven year olds that get scared. Seven year olds that get scared and have nightmares. Seven year olds that can only sleep after nightmares when they are in Mummy's bed. Seven year olds that can only sleep after nightmares when they are in Mummy's bed with a big handful of her hair to pull and twist and....

I guess mummies have their own versions of nightmares.

But, in a move that makes me forgive the BBC and accept that they are not, in fact, idiots, the BBC give me a chance to download the episodes and watch them on my computer with their I-player. It's a big moment in the world of Doctor Who because the Tenth Doctor just exited and a new actor took over to be the Eleventh Doctor.

(For those that have been tragically deprived of the Doctor Who experience, he's a time travelling alien that can regenerate into a new body. Everything you ever needed to know and probably a lot more that you didn't here.)

I was a very big fan of the Tenth Doctor, as played by David Tennant, and when he announced that he was leaving the role I was disappointed. The new actor, Matt Smith, was so young, I just couldn't see him pulling it off.

Wrong, Rosa. Very, very wrong. He is fantastic. His first episode was fantastic. I will be downloading many more episodes to watch in the dead of night when scaredy seven year olds are sleeping.

In their own beds.

The Eleventh Hour
(I think you have to be in the UK to download it though)

You know you've led a sheltered life when...

2010-04-13T17:51:00.000+01:00

... you need to keep Urban Dictionary open in a separate window to cross reference and translate the Fairy Song from Legend of Neil. I discovered Legend of Neil when I was casting my vote for The Guild in this year's Audience Choice category at the Streamies. Cracked me up.

Oh, and I should definitely place a parental advisory warning on the Legend of Neil link. Probably both.

When a whisper doesn't get it done

2010-04-07T15:12:00.001+01:00

I'm getting rather irritated with Soft Whispers magazine. They accepted a short story, The Scream, months ago with a publication date of January 2010. Start ups being the precarious thing they are, I was disappointed but not surprised when they folded before January and it didn't make publication.

I was pleased on their behalf when they re-launched as a poetry blog with occasional themed fiction anthologies, but they have yet to respond to my polite emails asking about the stories they had already accepted. All I really want is confirmation that they are releasing The Scream so that I can do something else with it. Whether that would be submitting it elsewhere or just posting it on my website I haven't decided, but I don't want to risk breaching a contract.

I do hate having loose ends, and The Scream is loose and waving at me. I might have to stop whispering and start shouting.

To tweet or not to tweet

2010-03-31T20:33:00.000+01:00

I'm flirting with the idea of a twitter account to go with this blog. My last encounter with twitter didn't last long because I was worried that people might read my tweets and think, "Who is this idiot and why on earth would we employ her?" Got to at least pretend to be a professional.

I realised the problem when a colleague friended me on facebook, and a few weeks later my feed informed me that he was a fan of rough sex. Kind of hard to see someone the same way after that. That and having my boss, in-laws and teenage nieces and nephews on my friends list rather puts me off posting any silliness myself.

It makes me sore tempted to do some Rosa tweets, or at least post some one liners here now and then. Who knows, I might even start writing again.

Yeah, maybe not.

New layout

2010-03-27T16:47:00.000Z

Blogger just updated their templates and I decided a change would be nice, since I know no code and rely on others to do it for me. I rather like this one.

Cute moment at about midnight last night. While I was standing in the hallway watching, the Boy got out of bed still largely asleep, picked up a fleece blanket and tried several times to put his arms into non-existent sleeves. I took it off him and put him back into bed, and he went back to sleep without ever properly waking up in the first place. He didn't remember a thing about it this morning.

Say it how it is

2010-03-27T00:01:00.000Z

From The Boy this morning, after The Old Git left with our youngest dog surgically attached to him as usual:

"If Daddy went to heaven, Buddy would be flying after him shouting, 'Wait for me!'"

Lost for words

2010-03-15T10:45:00.000Z

I enjoyed a rare sight last week: The Old Git lost for words. It doesn't happen often so it's something to be savoured, especially when something nice has caused it.

Actually, cancel that. Make it a unique sight. I've never seen it before.

He has been working to get a new restaurant set up in Chalfont St. Peter, Hertfordshire for the last few months. As usual, he went in to do one job, the heating, and turned into Mr. Fixit, the man who can think around corners and fix everybody's problems. Unusually, though, he didn't do that many late nights. Just one to keep some machines working and another on standby before the engineers could get there. We've seen more of him at home than usual.

When it was all set up and the place was running, he took the family there because he wanted us to see it. We went on a midweek night because we had a seven year old with us, all dressed to kill in his smart suit and tie that we got for a wedding last year.

A quick note here on the subject of fussy eaters. I had never thought of tapas as a solution to eating out with children, but it surely worked. Little portions of lots of things:

Look, we got you some frittata to try. You don't like it that much? Okay, no problem, try these ham croquettes. They're nice, aren't they? Yes, very nice. Ah, is anyone else going to get to try the ham croquettes? No, that's fine, you can eat them all if you like them that much.

Actually, the frittata was excellent, and the fish croquettes were even better than the ham ones, but it's all good; if he liked them as much I wouldn't have gotten any. Homemade lemon sorbet to die for too. And the Boy did a very good job of being grownup in a grownup's restaurant. No bedlam or glares from the adult diners.

After a lovely dinner The Old Git went to pay the bill and they wouldn't give it to him. Instead they gave him a thank you card from the owners and all the staff.

He was speechless. I think there might even have been a lump in his throat.

Yep, even tradesmen have feelings. A thought to take away with you. We would have been happy to pay the bill, but that thank you gesture was worth five times the cost of the meal.

Go try the food at El Boncena. They're nice people, and they deserve to be a success.

The end of winter

2010-03-11T13:49:00.002Z

Picture from freefoto.com

It's spring. We have snowdrops and crocuses, and afternoon sunshine.

It seems strangely fitting that Teddy spent the coldest winter for decades sleeping on my bed and dining on pate, fresh liver and any other delicacies I could think of for him, then went to sleep on the first day of spring, after a gentle walk in the first true sunshine of the year and one more tub of ardennes pate.

He was my Winter King, and he left spring in his wake.

Goodnight Ted

2010-03-02T12:46:00.000Z

Sleep well.

You know you want to do it

2010-02-22T14:27:00.001Z

Photographs from thisisphotobomb.com

When I finally get around to writing, I find myself fascinated with the primal parts of human nature; the parts of us we can't control. Fear, lust, desire for power, parental love, photobomb.

Yep, photobomb.

A deep, primitive desire, a base urge that screams into your hindbrain the moment you see a camera pointing at you by accident.

I was sitting in a coffee shop in Knightsbridge today, steaming slightly and complating the meteorological misfortune that had governed my site visits all winter. My last three site surveys had gone: snow, sleet, thunderstorm, and I was stuck in a touristy part of London paying inflated prices for a lunch whose main purpose was to entitle me to get out of the rain for half an hour. Okay, the tea and tuna melt were to get me out of the rain. The almond croissant was down to sheer bad temper.

So I sat on my tall stool facing the window, expecting my pocket to get picked any minute and glaring at the sullen grey sky that London does so well as I shoved overpriced calories into my mouth disguised as flaky pastry. My attention roved around the crowds, playing 'spot the worker' among the tourists--you know them; the fast walking ones whose body language says, "I wouldn't dream of saying anything because that would be rude, but please be so kind as to read my thoughts and get the hell out of my way because I actually know where I'm going"--when I realised that a woman over the road was pointing a little white camera right at me.

My first thought was: is any London tourist's experience entitled to pictures of a tired, grouchy daylight consultant looking like a waterlogged hamster? My second was: she's not actually pointing it at me. I'm in it by accident. She's pointing it at her man, who's standing outside Costa Coffee under a union jack umbrella.

I don't know what made a picture of Costa Coffee with an umbrella so appealing, but whatever floated their boat. Much more rain and they would be floating down the Thames on it like Winnie the Pooh, but that was beside the point.

And it was at that moment, staring into a little white camera belonging to a stranger, that I realised photobomb occupies a place next to rage and lust and hunger. A building block of human nature. A basic need to respond.

They'll find out when they upload their photographs whether I gave into it or not.

Advance reader copies and stories, oh my

2010-01-31T20:16:00.001Z

Too much temptation this week.

1. I swore that we were getting no more dogs. We were going to let the numbers run down by not replacing them until we got to live normal lives free from noise, hair and poo bags.

Except my uncle, who owns the most delightful working cocker spaniel I have ever met, just texted me to say that he'd just seen her puppies on ultrasound and I could have one. Now what do I do?

2. I swore that I was done with fanfic. Original or nothing from now on.

Except that one of my favourite authors is running a competition for a copy of her latest arc, and I could enter a 500 word story using her characters for it. Her characters are complex and dark and one of them has been preying on my mind since I read Demon's Lexicon.

I am weak. Help me.

On the subject of winning

2010-01-28T00:19:00.000Z

When you have lived with someone for a while, you start to recognise recurring themes in the things they talk about. When you have lived with them for a long time those recurring themes start to shout at you so loud that the words become a kind of meaningless noise around the outside.

The Old Git is a competitive man. He knows it, I know it, anybody that spends more than an hour in his presence knows it. It is a sad fact of his life that he loves chess, draughts, scrabble, and any other board game that allows you to use strategy to destroy your opponent, but that he can't find anyone to play him. He has played a lot of people like me, who know the moves but just play for fun, but strangely enough, after enjoying a taste of the full on play-to-win meat grinder, we usually aren't in any rush to repeat the experience.

Frankly, I'd rather stick pins in my legs.

So, he doesn't have a steady supply of willing victims, and this disappoints him. Now I may not want to play him, and I may frequently want to stab him, but The Old Git's happiness does mean something to me, so I do sometimes try to find him a new victim, oops, I mean opponent.

I thought I had cracked it when some friends introduced me to lexulous on facebook. It's a variant of scrabble. Eight letters, different layout of scoring squares, but essentially the same game and you get to play other people that aren't on your friends list.

My simple little strand of Rosa logic went:

--> Playing strangers
--> Playing people who like to play a lot
--> People like The Old Git
--> people he can play
--> SCORE!

Problem solved, right?

Wrong.

Now we have a new problem.

He is playing. Oh my, is he playing. When my friends saw his active game list they said, "This dude is obsessed."

The Boy would concur. Most evenings he complains that Daddy is always playing lexulous. Some of that is jealousy, though; he wants to play too but facebook doesn't exactly have a junior section. He too has a competitive streak a mile wide.

And then we have the game talk. As with other obsessions that have come and gone, he wants to tell me about it. This is where those themes come in.

"I don't understand how the rankings work."
How is everybody going to know that I'm winning.

"This game allows nonsense words. No way is that a word."
The game is letting the other person cheat and stopping me from winning.

"I found out how the top ranking people stay up there. They delete any game in which they think they might get beaten."
They're using cheat tactics to stay up there. If they played fair I'd be winning.

"My opponent got 400 points and still lost. That's got to hurt."
Look at me winning. Am I not awesome?

I guess it could be worse. You should have seen him in his paintball phase. Imagine Rambo with a paintball gun. Now imagine him half the size and armed with a devious mind and an evil grin. It was The Old Git who proudly announced that he took out half a dozen people at one time firing up into the air so that the paintballs dropped down on them as they hid behind the barrier. Boy did they complain. He's also the one who worked out that you could rack up some serious points if you hid near the Quasar gun recharge point and shot all the people coming back with empty guns.

No, I don't play him, at anything. I'll just carry on running a victim procurement service. At the moment he's dragged himself away from his lexulous victims for a while to teach The Boy how to play chess.

I'm scared.

In a nutshell

2010-01-23T15:08:00.002Z

Some moments sum up the family dogs in a nutshell.

It is morning. I go downstairs, open the stairgate and let the dogs out. As they come back in they assume their positions.

Teddy goes upstairs, greets The Boy and takes up his position on the stairs to guard the family.

Buddy goes upstairs and surgically attaches himself to The Old Git.

Buzz stays downstairs on his own to keep an eye on the breakfast toast crusts.

A tale of tales

2010-01-12T23:13:00.003Z

Sit back and I will tell you a tale. A tale of a woman telling a tale of a woman who told tales. With musical accompaniment.

Once upon a time in her youth, Rosa discovered classical music, and discovered that she liked it. She liked the music of Rimsky-Korsakov very much indeed, and her favourite of all was Scheherezade.

Fortunately for Rosa, many other people also liked classical music and Scheherezade, and she listened to a radio station that played it for her and all the other people that listened.

When Rosa discovered she was pregnant, she was very happy. She played classical music in her car, and in her house, and on her computer. Nobody knows how much the bump heard as it travelled around with her, but it is an undisputable fact that Son of Rosa also liked classical music, and his favourite was Scheherezade.

It came to pass that one day, Rosa and Son of Rosa were on a long drive together. As they drove along the motorway, Scheherezade came on the radio and they turned it up and listened to it together. Son of Rosa was a very curious boy much given to asking questions, which Rosa did her best to answer, for she felt that being given answers to your questions in life is a Very Good Thing. And so Rosa and Son of Rosa found themselves discussing the tale of Scheherezade, and from there the tales of Sinbad the Sailor, and Aladdin, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, for these were tales she remembered from her youth.

Just like Rosa, Son of Rosa loved reading and tales even more than classical music, and he begged his mother to read to him the tale of Scheherezade, and from there the tales of Sinbad, and of Aladdin, and of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Rosa remembered that she had read the Tales from One Thousand Nights in her youth and promised that she would.

In fact, Rosa still even had the book from her youth, and when Son of Rosa asked, she found it and opened it to read to him at bedtime.

But the book was old, and things were not as Rosa remembered from her youth. She feared that she had made a terrible mistake when Son of Rosa asked what it meant that the Queen was found in the arms of a Negro slave, but she tried. She explained about the Bad Things that are slavery and racism, and why he should never use That Word. She explained that the Queen had been found kissing someone that was not her husband, and that this too was a Bad Thing. She feared that worse was to come, but she loved Son of Rosa very much and she had promised, so she continued with the story.

She read, and she read, until she came to the next page. When the next Queen and her slaves all took their clothes off and the Queen prepared to be unfaithful to her husband, Rosa closed the book with a snap and would read no more.

Son of Rosa was sad and asked why he might not hear the rest of the tale, and Rosa did confess to her son that the tale was Too Naughty For Children, and picked up the tale of the Fantastic Mr Fox instead, and Son of Rosa was happy.

Rosa suspects that, some day soon, Son of Rosa will find the Tales from One Thousand and One Nights in the bookcase and read it for himself. She knows that this is the way of children everywhere, and that it is as inevitable as Son of Rosa one day playing the collection of rap CDs with naughty words belonging to Husband of Rosa. She feels that, while Son of Rosa's life will be improved by contact with classic literature, her own life will be much improved by not knowing. And so she has returned it to the bookcase and not hidden it.

Much.

Reasons to be cheerful, 1-2-3

2010-01-04T23:33:00.007Z

I'm going to America this June to meet some of my dearest friends, whom I happen to have never met before.
I just got paid for a story for the first time.
Best of all, I still have my dog. He's a fighter. Always has been, and he's not quitting now. Happy New Year, Teddy. Keep fighting.

A short hiatus

2009-11-11T23:11:00.004Z

I have a very sick dog right now so I'm taking a bit of a break. Normal service will be resumed... sometime.

What price honour?

2009-10-31T12:30:00.005Z

I very rarely watch television these days. Anything I would have watched invariably clashes with The Boy's bedtime or worse, gives him nightmares; no more Doctor Who for you, Mummy. Might as well give up that idea right now. The internet has snuck into its place instead, until I find myself not even thinking of the television as an option. The noise irritates me, and I find myself looking for excuses to switch it off.

Since The Old Git comes home around his bedtime anyway, this has given The Boy that child's holy grail: control of the television remote. Subject to parental approval, of course.

He likes the Challenge channel, which screens wall to wall game shows, so up until now that approval has been pretty much automatic. Indeed, Ninja Warrior, which is the Japanese show Sasuke edited with a new voice-over, has been the subject of more than a few last minute sprints to the school gate. It sucks all three of us in over breakfast. It's hard to look away from with its mixture of cannon-fodder hopefuls and dedicated competitors pushing themselves to the limit on the assault course from hell.

What I love about it is the way they perform astonishing feats of agility and endurance pitting themselves against the course. Not against each other. If an all-star, a serious contender, fails, you see that the other all-stars are gutted for him. It's about making it past the post, not being the first one there or getting one over on the others. And if no-one wins... no-one wins. Train hard ready to try again next time.

I think it would be a wonderful example for British game shows, but somehow we seem to be locked into a cycle of beating the other guy at all costs.

Nowhere was this more apparent than when I saw for the first time another game show on the same channel, Goldenballs. All homegrown this one, and I am ashamed of the fact.

I watched competitors bluff and lie to each other to keep themselves from being voted off by the others and make it to the final, where the last two standing co-operated to maximise their winnings. I didn't like the arguments and the accusations of the earlier rounds, but fair enough, bluff has been the language of card games forever.

But then there was the last part of the game, where the contestants had to each secretly decide to split or steal the money. If they both secretly chose split, they shared the money. If one chose split and one chose steal, the stealer took it all. If they both chose steal, they both went home with nothing.

The sheer treachery of the outcome took my breath away. The successful contestant would promise to share, entreat the other to and then steal it all, to the horror of the other, more trusting, soul.

It celebrated the lowest of human behaviours and I felt soiled at the end. There will always be people who will lie, steal and betray, but I think making it into a prize tarnishes our collective souls.

Compare that to the honest endeavour of the Ninja Warriors. The Boy will not be watching it again.

Ninja Warrior

Goldenballs