This is a recorded announcement

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?

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



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?

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



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...

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

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.