Category Archives: Mary Fails at Modern Life

27 Sep 2025 · 9:11 am

What in the name of Pete …?

Well, it’s September, getting towards the end, and I had thought I’d have my book finished by this time FFS! Or at least off to the beta readers.

As if.

In July I reckoned I had about two chapters to go. I still have about two chapters to go. I do not know what the fuck is going on. Seriously where in the name of Pete did that all that time bloody well go? I have run round like a blue-arsed fly this month. I’ve done digs, we’ve been away for weekends, I’ve done events, I’ve been to the theatre, indeed I’m going to two comedy gigs this week because heaven forefend they should come along neatly spaced out. I have Lived with a capital chuffing L. But two years out from Mum’s death I have also achieved a princely zero percent of the tasks I put off while my parents were ill. OK it’s 10 years’ worth of stuff. That is a LOT but you’d have thought I’d have managed some.

Oh no, hang on.

There’s been one success.

Fuck let’s celebrate that then! Yeh! I’ve managed to get my son’s ADHD diagnosed. I had promised him that. It’s only taken me six months of on-and-off effort but I’ve finally got there. I now have to sort some time for him to see the lovely education woman who will help him with techniques to get through the school day, hopefully with slightly less regular amounts of panicked last minute shit!-I-haven’t-done-this! shennanagins than his mother. Woot.

Go me! Winning at life, clearly.

If you’re wondering why I would bother to get a diagnosis for him, it’s obvious you don’t have ADHD. Put simply, a diagnosis explains the madness, the dysfunction and why it takes 900% more capacity for him to fill in a form and deal with government bodies than the normals. And also you can get medication that helps you concentrate. I do not have a diagnosis, but having been through one with my son, let’s just say it’s pretty blindingly obvious where he got it from. I cannot stress how much self-hatred and frustration fell away just being handed an explanation for my complete inability to organise my time, life, diary etc through learning about his.

How much better it made me feel about having a fucking genius intelligence level (well OK one point off) that is of absolutely fuck all use (welcome to the world of C grades with the odd A thrown in for encouragement. No Bs you notice)! If it was that bloody marvellous for me, God knows what a relief it must have been for him, because he’s way, way brighter than I am. How awesome to officially know IT’S NOT HIM, IT’S THEM, I suspect it’s bloody wonderful. I would have killed for that at his age.

Here’s an example of what it’s like. McSon had his driving theory test the other morning. The night before he looked out his driving license, ready (he’d had a lesson that day and has to have it with him for those so it was in his school trousers). He took it upstairs to put back in his wallet along with some bits of his drum kit that he’d used at a gig this weekend. He reassembled his drums, had a quick practise and then after doing some homework and a bit of this and that he had a quick chat with me and went to bed.

This morning I went off to parents’ swim at the school leaving the McOthers to get to the test centre.

‘Do you need your license?’ asked McOther, just as they were leaving.

‘I don’t think so, but I might,’ says McSon.

He goes upstairs, goes to his wallet where it lives and where he knows he put it last night and … it’s not there. He panics, they go anyway, but without his license he’s not allowed to sit the test (even though he had to submit a chuffing picture of it to book a test anyway so it’s not like they haven’t seen it). I come back to discover McSon in the dearth of despair.

‘How could I be so dumb?’ he asks me. Not to my face, obviously, but by text message to me, in the kitchen, from his bedroom upstairs, because … teenager.

How indeed? This is a question I felt keenly, having asked it of myself pretty much on loop growing up, and repeatedly over the years. This is why I always tell my child that charm will get you everywhere because sometimes, when you forget to do something that you should have done, and you have to throw yourself on the mercy of others involved in the task to help you to get it in the bag, they may help you. If you have treated them appropriately, they will go the extra mile and do it because they like you. So not only is being polite and respectful to people the right thing to do, but it gets you further, in the long run, than shouting and jumping up and down … unless you’re doing the shouting and jumping up and down for humorous purposes, and in a funny way.

So I went on to tell him about his rellies, about his grandfather who managed to arrive at the port to go to France, twice, before he hit the age of 30, with a passport that had expired. A man who was universally loved, whose ability to forget stuff was legendary, as a teacher at his school. Indeed, when Dad was head of the common room he had to organise the dinner, there was some doubt which night it was on, Friday 12th December, or Saturday 13th December. Dad soon cleared that up by sending a memo round to confirm the day. Trouble was it said,

‘I gather there is some confusion as to the date of the Commonroom Dinner. It will be on Friday 13th December this year.’

Then there was his great uncle, who managed, with some friends, to organise a trip to drive a jeep to Afghanistan one summer holidays while he was at university, to deliver a letter from the mayor of Brighton to the mayor of Kabhul … except after the ornate letter-handing-over ceremony in Brighton between him and his friends and the mayor, which was conducted in front of the press, they left the letter on the mayor’s desk, realised too late to go back and get it and had to have it sent on to Tehran or somewhere so he and his friends could pick it up along the way. I told him about his Uncle, who left his hired wedding suit on the train on the way down to the venue and then had to get the lovely people at British Rail to take it off the train at Pulborough and hare over there in a borrowed car to pick it up.

Picture of one of those red ropes they drape across bits where you're not meant to go at events but frayed so badly that only a couple of fibres are left holding the rope onto the hook.

Clinging on by a thread, this is how we live, my son and I. Welcome to our world.

I told him about the time I booked tickets to take him to a comedy show about ADHD … and then forgot to go. I confessed how one term, I started my essays at uni a ruthlessley efficient 3 weeks out from the end of term, wondering why it was so easy to borrow all the books I required from the reference library, only to discover I’d got the date wrong and term ended in four days. I explained how I arrived at the start of the next term a week late because … numbers … and I’d got the date wrong and nobody batted an eyelid.

I told him how I managed to fly home from Norway a day early by mistake. Yes, even when the plane came down in Bergen for half an hour while they tried to work out what the fuck was going on, I still didn’t compute that the date on my ticket was wrong (coz … numbers). On the up side, neither did they, so that was lucky. I told him the story of how I went to France on an organised tour for six weeks, managed to miss the hovercraft and spent the first week trying to catch them up. Also had a lovely night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley during that one (I’ve done that twice now; one star on trip advisor, NOT recommended). I should probably tell him about the time I called Dirk Bogarde by mistake or the time I answered the phone and said, ‘Fuck off Giles! That’s a crap Welsh accent!’ to someone who, I fear, may have been the leader of the opposition at the time.

And so on …

On the upside, ADHD does train certain useful things into a person. For example, I remember as a kid that something usually went wrong on our family holidays. I suspect this was more about the kinds of holidays my family booked than my father’s legendary forgetful nature, although I’m sure his vagueness helped, examples incoming…

There was the time we turned up in Crete for my second ever holiday abroad. There was no water so we had to spend the first two nights in the hotel owner’s flat. I remember wondering what the fuck we were doing there, but then I had a swim in the sea and suddenly everything was alright.

I remember another Greek holiday the following year when we had to spend the first week in a hotel up the road which wasn’t finished because they’d double booked our room by mistake. We got our revenge, my brother broke the bathroom mirror trying to swat a fruit fly with the flat end of a full bog roll. Or the next holiday on Lesbos, there was the fiesta we hired that we had to bump start every day until the embarrassed car hire man gave us his own ride, an elderly peugot 504 with a bench front seat and gearshift on the steering column that only Dad could manage to work.

Then there was the time when the French fishermen were blockading the ports so we sped along the cost, reaching each port as it was closed, until finally we managed to overtake the fishing boats leaving from Calais to block Dunkirk and get away from there. We arrived at 3 am and had to sleep in the car on the port because Mum and Dad had run out of money and had spent their last 10 francs on the petrol we’d used to get there … at one of the last garages that still had some and was open.

The company honoured our Dieppe – Newhaven ticket at Dunkirk and we got the last berth on the 6 am ferry, just in time for me to do the whole sorry thing backwards two days later for a school trip. We were supposed to be going Portsmouth StMalo for that one but had to go from Dover to Calais, which opened briefly, and then get a train to Paris, that was the first night in the waiting room at Gare D’Orley by the way. In those days, you had to buy currency in advance, or use traveller’s cheques. The only reason Mum and Dad had that 10 francs left was becase it was my pocket money for the 2 week school trip. Nobody panicked and after a few years I grew to like the chaos. Looking back on it, it was kind of fun.

Likewise, I’ve noticed my son is very calm and able to think laterally in a crisis, even when he’s panicking inside. As a kid, when there was trouble in the park or he and his friends saw someone being beaten up, it he who quietly called the police or shephered everyone to the nearest parent’s house, and safety. It’s always he who steps in and mediates between angry friends, often successfully. I’m incredibly proud of him for this.

Blowing my own trumpet here but I defy many people to be as calm as I am in a crisis. This, my friends, is because, if you have ADHD, your whole fucking life is a crisis because things drop off the mental grid and do not reappear until you are about to be supposed to be fucking doing them. If your entire existence is spent dropping what you are meant to be doing and sorting out shit that you’ve forgotten to do you soon become very adapatble.

Most of the time, you can learn make it work. Sometimes, yes, you have to apologise and confess that you’ve fucked up. It’s not great. I mean, lurching from one organisational crisis to the next is pretty exhausting but never let it be said that it’s dull. Oh no, people like us, we live an exciting life. And of course, you soon learn that fucking up and having to admit it isn’t so humiliating, because you are way, waaaay more used to it than other people, which means you have no pride and learn to give absolutely no fucks and just do the few things you are capable of organising without waiting for permission. That’s a win.

Frankly, if you have ADHD and you give any fucks about anything (other than not hurting others or being a cockwomble) your personality and general mode of existence means you will die of shame. The fucks are bludgeoned out of you early on in life because it’s the only way to survive. OK so weeing in your pants in the tack room after a riding lesson because you are too embarrassed to ask to use the loo also helps in that respect. Not my finest hour that one but definitely cured me of my fear of asking the dumb question and speaking up because even though nobody said a thing, they must have known and no way was I ever going through the embarrassment of that ever, EVER again.

Woah! LONG tangent there. But now you understand ADHD a little more perhaps? Although that last bit was probably autism. Anyway… onwards.

There’s another thing! Oh yes! And I’ve managed to sort it so that Mc(no longer)Mini is insured to drive a car to practice on outside his lessons … trouble is … it’s this car.

Picture showing a grey, low-slung, fast looking sports car against a flint and brick wall. The numberplate has been blacked out in the picture, so as not to show the real one on t'interweb, and the photographer has put a red line round the outside of the hole where the numberplate should be shown (as if it's a pair of lips) and drawn in teeth.

Obvs in real life it has a numberplate rather than teeth.

Yeh, I know. But the main car is an automatic SUV and the tic-tac with a boot we bought as a run-around, (a fiat 500 Abarth) is considered a hot hatch, so insuring McSon, McOther was given a guide quote of £900 to insure a learner driver on it for 6 months while they investigated whether they could even do it … and when they had researched it further, they came back and said they couldn’t actually insure him. So instead of the 1.4 Fiat 500 Abarth, he’s going to be doing his driving practise on the 1.6 Lotus Elise with the close ratio gearbox … because it’s only going to cost £150 to put him on there as a learner driver for a year. Because it’s not a hot-hatch.

What the fucking fuck, Insurance Land?

Seriously, you couldn’t make this shit up. So there we are. It now has L plates on it. He’s doing commendably well so far and more to the point, driving extremely sensibly. Much more sensibly than I do. So there’s that.

Other news: Events …

Last but not least, I am doing an event this weekend that ever is. Indeed as this goes out, today and tomorrow. If anyone is at Norcon, I am opposite the signing tables. Do feel free to come and say hello. I will be dressed as The Pan of Hamgee, as usual, in a cloak and hat. I have no new books to sell. I’ve written about 400,000 words since the last one, they’re just not on any one project unfortunately. I am just hanging in there for the year when I get all of this shit I’m working on actually finished at the same time. There’s something to be said for jumping from project to project every time you get stuck but it’s not exactly a short cut to a steady and predictable rate of production. Never mind. At some point there will be 12 books, probably coming out within weeks of one another.

Anyway, if you’d like to, do come along and say hi to me at Norcon, because all the other authors will be selling books hand over fist while I will be sitting there making people laugh and conspicuously not selling any books to them before they go on and buy a book from each of the authors next to me. Because this is how I roll. But I have fun so I’m OK with that.

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Filed under General Wittering, Mary Fails at Modern Life

Tagged as adhd, an author with children, author blog, humour, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic

1 May 2025 · 3:41 pm

Living the dream … as always

Hello there, yes, still alive. Things are busy though and I have books to write. I’m determined to publish a bloody book this year if it’s the last chuffing thing I do (and at this rate, it probably will be).

As a result I am working on two at once, the dementia memoir the first of the two sequels to Too Good To Be True. Yes, there are going to be two and Lord Vernon is in them as well. The first of those is so close to completion it hurts and is quite easy to write at the moment although I suspect that is merely because the dementia one is really hard and my brain’s Centre of Procrastination has turned to the only thing to hand.

As part of this, I’ve been working with a lovely blogging friend on this one, because I think I need to do it as part of the healing process. I’ve been trying to pin down what I want it to be about and I’m beginning to think that the only way I’m going to do that is to write a lot of it. BUT I’m also thinking that I may have hit on a way to write it that would give me scope to plait the three different strands of memoir stuff together coherently; funny stories, family history and Dad and Mum’s respective journey’s so … woot.

Garden Wildlife

No seriously, in a town, but yes, there is. For a couple of years now, we’ve had a hedgehog in the garden, who I have privately christened spiny Norma. Norma is fucking enormous, seriously, I shit you not. When I realised she had hoglets, I started feeding her. We use dry cat food, not hedgehog food because hedgehog food production is unregulated and they put things like mealworms in which are actually extremely bad for hedgehogs and make them ill. Kitten food is the best thing to use apparently, because the kibbles are nice and small.

This year, when I realised she was back again, I decided to buy a wildlife cam. I researched cameras and prices and found that one type seemed to get recommended somewhere on most of the top 10 lists so I decided that would be a good one.

Grainy black and white night-vision photo of a hedgehog crossing a patio towards a food bowl. The hedgehog is in the centre and the ground before her slightly over exposed while behind is the hint of folding table and darkness.

The retail price was £99 which is quite a massive wad to stump up for a trail cam so I shelved the idea until, doing more research to find a cheaper alternative, I discovered one that most of the top ten camera articles had a link to for less than £50 on Amazon. Much as I dislike buying from Amazon, it was a market place person rather than the company, itself, so I bought it.

It looks the business but needed an SD card. I have two 32gb SD cards which I used to use in a bullet cam I transferred between my car and on my bike. It was brilliant but unfortunately, after about 6 months, it started randomly turning itself off so I’ve stopped using it. I found the spare SD card I had for it only last week but this week when my new camera arrived could I find that spare SD? Could I bollocks? Could I even find the bullet cam to take the one out of there? Not on your fucking nelly.

Wank!

Never mind, I thought, I’ll have others. Indeed, I did have another one but I had to sort though the stuff on it and clear it before I could reformat it for the wildlife cam thingy. It took a chuffing eternity. I’m a dunderhead.

Anyway, net result. I’ve discovered that there are more hedgehogs bimbling around in our garden than I thought. I think it may be five, as my naked eye observations over the past week or so have been seeing three arriving early and then noticing another two had turned up later but I haven’t confirmed that.

However, I can confirm that there are four, by dint’ of the fact they have all appeared in camera shot at the same time. Also the vid has captured some courting behaviour which I’d seen with the naked eye from the kitchen window a couple of times, including a memorable moment when I discovered they were at it when I went to put out the food. I felt very bad for disturbing them. Luckily, since the breeding season lasts from April to September there’s plenty of time.

That said, while I know there’s hanky-panky going on, I’m not 100% certain between whom. I can’t quite work out if it’s one particularly randy male snuffing round and round in circles with two separate females or two separate males and one, or two, female(s). When the four turned up they arrived as two pairs so it could be two couples. I did see some light argy-bargy with the threesome who had been eating together happily for a week or so. One of them turned out to be Mr Randy and shoved another hog away from the food. It went limp and half curled up so he looked as if he was disposing of a body. Then she just lay there, inert, in the middle of the patio, while he huffed and puffed at the other one next to the food bowl.

There are two bowls now, which seems to have alleviated this.

Also, despite seeing a hog which was very definitely the original Spiny Norma doing courtship stuff with Mr Randy a couple of nights before I got the cam (they’re the ones I disturbed while I was putting the food out) I can’t now work out which one, in my films of courting, is the original Spiny Norma, or indeed if she’s there at all. This is mainly because with the best will in the world, night vision cameras are a bit shit. To be honest, I also can’t quite work out if there is only one Mr Randy trying to poink two females or if there are, indeed, two Mr Randys.

It’s a mystery. Hopefully it’s a mystery which will be solved with the aid of the camera. Fingers and toes crossed. Obviously, I have no definitive answers yet because I’ve only had it running for a few nights. I’ll keep you posted.

Other news: Helios at Ickworth

You what Mary?

Art, sweetie, art.

There’s this artist I follow called Luke Jerram. I happened upon him because some of his first pieces were these amazing models of bacteria made in glass. These things are stunning, although sadly, I haven’t photographed one myself, so I’m not sure if I’m allowed to post a photo. The fact I’m discussing it means that I can post one of his images under fair use. However, this is not the way copyright trolls see it, and having been caught out before—a process which involved about a year of negotiation over what was clearly a bullshit claim culminating in my paying for a photograph I’d used to illustrate a point (fair use) despite knowing their assertions were actually a load of old cock and bull, in order to to make them just fuck off already—I’d rather not.

Earlier this month Helios, an art installation by Luke Jerram was visiting Ickworth. I missed his Moon and Gaia earth installations, even though they came to a venue a few hundred yards up the road, because I’m a disorganised melt. As a result, I was determined that I would NOT be missing this one. It took a while to see it because it was installed outside and could only be on display when it wasn’t too windy. Naturally it was too windy for a lot of the week but I finally managed to see it on a gorgeous hot Sunday. Photos attached.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with gravel and viewers underneath on beanbags spread over beige mottled gravel. The top half of this view is seen through the foliage of an orange tree with a pair of oranges hanging either side, framing the orange ball in the middle.

I’m not sure it was as lovely as the other two but at the same time, it was outside, in daylight and because these things are lit, I suspect it would have worked better indoors or after dark. On the other hand, by standing with it between me and the sun, I got some lovely pictures of it looking glowy and orange against an azure sky.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with an azure sky above. This view is seen looking between a pair of blue flowering bushes (cyanothus) either side, framing the orange ball in the middle.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball set against a classical portico with hints of the gantry holding it aloft and behind it an azure sky.

Naturally because I’m smutty, I noticed at once that it had an anus.

Luke Jerram, Artist’s, Helios at Ickworth. Inflatable orange ball which is printed with a photograph of the sun. Close up to a part where we see a sunspot which looks a bit like an anus. Sorry I’m smutty like that. Phnark. This amused me.

Yet more Other news: I went to a marvellous party*.

*Divine Comedy fans might get that reference, no-one else will.

A friend of mine had a birthday party this week which involved a bookshop lock-in. Yeh, I know. Genius. As a result I have bought three books; one of which, the Grimoire Grammar School series (Parent Teacher Association) I’m already half way through. Although I’m reading Monument Men at the same time which is non-fiction and also excellent.

Anyway, off we went in a taxi to Clare where there is a fantastic bookshop. We arrived early so we went to the pub next door. I was offered a drink and asked for half a pint but got a whole one. It seemed churlish not to drink it so…

Then, slightly unsteadily on to the bookshop (I’m a cheap drunk). It was fab and I bought three books which I thought was fairly reserved of me. I am liking some of the ideas in cosy fantasy it’s not the horrifically clean, Ned Flanders style upstanding awfulness I feared. The one I’m reading is a genius idea; about a normal couple whose daughter has been bitten by a werewolf. The daughter is at magic school and they are feeling their way with the other parents (selkies, mages, vampires etc)..

My book purchases were oiled by the interesting gins I had which were all made by the lady who runs the book shop. It was particularly cool the way she opened a special cupboard behind the till and there were all the bottles lined up. Then she would pour a shot and ask us not to put the glass sticky down anywhere near the books. Mwahahahrgh! I had rhubarb and then damson which were fabulous. Next, I was tempted to try the rhubarb and ginger vodka but I was conscious that I might get a bit pissed and ebullient if I did that, and since I didn’t know everyone who was there, I decided it was best to call it a day at those two. Harris Books in Clare. Definitely worth a look.

We were also very generously provided with a £10 voucher by the Birthday Girl for more books from the store, so I was off to a good start. I bought three books. I could have bought more books. I could have bought a lot more books although I’m glad I didn’t because it meant I was able to buy four more at the Maker’s Market in Bury today! Mwahahargh!

Next, on to a fabulous brewery where they served up a very fine beer and baked or roast potatoes with various toppings to go with to absorb it all. This involved sitting outside, which was perfect, as it was a gorgeous evening.

Knowing I was buying books ahead of time, I’d bought a small rucksack to put them in because sometimes I’m surprisingly sensible (don’t get excited, it doesn’t happen often). I had elected to wear clothes that would be warm enough outside at night in a British early summer but at the same time, cool if it was warmer outside at night than … you know … British early summer.

This meant I’d packed a polo shirt in my bag and a scarf/shawl that was large enough to double up as a warm thing if the wind got up or temperatures plummeted. I appear to be permanently cold unless the temperature is over 24 (which is approaching 80 degrees in old/American money). On the bottom I was wearing voluminous pantaloons. I think they’re called ‘Harem Pants’ these days, but voluminous cotton trousers gathered in at the ankles, anyway. Think Ali-Baba and the 40 thieves.

Picture of messy room containing a middle age woman wearing a floaty dark blue vest top with red pantaloons. She is holding the pantaloons out to show how voluminous they are and grinning inanely.

The author clad in a pair of said pantaloons, although, not the original ones. Naturally. I have many.

Yeh. So I’m sitting there dressed as Aladdin and some other kind soul buys me a beer. I have not paid for a drink yet and I am distinctly half cut (being, as I am, a cheap drunk).

Anyhoo the table we were sat at was those bench table things that are ubiquitous to pubs everywhere; a slatted table with a bench stuck on either side. They were a bit shuggly, as they always are, and of course, you have to kind of climb into them to sit down. I put my beer carefully on the middle plank of the surface to avoid spillages and sat down.

However, then someone got up, or possibly sat down, the other side and … abracadabra! The plank shifted upwards suddenly, the glass tipped over and the entire fucking pint went down my front and on my trousers. Obviously it went between the planks as well as over them to ensure maximum coverage.

Do you know how much liquid a pint of beer is?

No? Well I can tell you.

It’s an absolute fuck-tonne of liquid.

There was only one thing uppermost in my mind when this disaster happened, well OK two things. First, naturally, was:

Shit! That’s a terrible waste of some really good beer.

The second thing—more of an instinct—which happened at the same time, was to leap up before any of the beer soaked through to my actual knickers.

Then as I stood, holding my sopping trousers away from my thighs—(my knickers don’t come down that low, I promise, but we are talking really soaking trousers here so … you know … seepage upwards was perfectly possible)—I had to decide what to do. The trousers needed to be wrung out, for certain, and possibly dried. Did the brewery have a ladies loo with a hand drying machine?

Did it fuck?

Arse.

Obviously, continuing the evening looking, and seeping, like someone who’d just had a bucket of water thrown over them wasn’t really an option. Then I remembered that I had a polo top and a scarf in my bag and, to whit, that if I’d been sitting about in a vest top and pasha pants, it was unlikely anyone would think it strange if that suddenly morphed into a polo shirt and a knee length ‘sarong’ because I looked that fucking weird already.

Except, could I get to the lav to change in private without a) getting slubbery beer-soaked trousers too close to my (currently) dry scarf and top to avoid soaking them too or b) getting slubbery beer-soaked trousers too close to my (currently) dry pants and then having to endure the entire evening with an unpleasantly damp mimsey?**

No.

**(That might just be the longest sentence in the world right there never mind, where was I? Ah yes onwards…)

What to do? The only thing I could do. I told everyone to look the other way, took off my top and put the polo shirt on. Then I took off the trousers, grabbed the scarf and wrapped it around me like some kind of shit sarong. On reflection I realised it was too long to tie like a sarong and also it would end up too short. Unsure as I was as to the tidiness of the topiary situation downstairs in the lady garden short seemed unwise. I didn’t want the world to see ‘spider legs’, giant black knickers, or indeed, the hairy thighs which I hadn’t bothered to shave. Hmm, would I have to hold the stupid sarong closed all night?

Yes.

But no!

Wait!

I had an idea!

Removing my ‘Kindness is as punk as fuck’ mum-badge off my bag I was able to use it, like a safety pin, to keep my modesty together. Then, just to be sure, I took the ‘I’m a little teapot’ badge off my jacket and fastened that the other side to keep both the ends I’d wound round me in situ.

This happened in front of everyone.

There was laughing.

But nobody gave a shit.

And someone bought me another beer.

Which was nice.

Even better my knickers stayed dry and having spread them out, my clothes dried enough to wear the pantaloons home so there was no worrying about losing my ‘skirt’ in the taxi.

Hoorah!

That’s me right there people, living the dream and winning at life.

Er hem … Sort of.

Fancy a change?

Fancy something a little bit weird? Why not read one of my books? A surprising number of people think they’re good and some are free. Woot. You can find those if you wend your way down the following linky-link: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot-3 https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot-3

Black and white photo on dark blue, fading to yellow background showing a street with two old ladies (cartoon silhouettes against the yellow bottom section). They are holding a cage with the silhouette of a parrot in it.

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Tagged as author blog, author blogs, funny, humor, humour, humour … probably, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T M Makes a complete tit of herself, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, off topic, writers

2 Jun 2024 · 6:04 pm

Meh.

OK here’s a TMI alert for everyone. This is far too much information, very much TMI. If that’s not your thing, please feel free to pass on this one. The rest of you… enjoy.

Last night I was unfortunate enough to have yet another visit from Cardinal Chunder and Mr S’hitattak. Jeez what is going on? Actually no, let’s stop me there, because I think I may know.

After the Stomach Bug That Would Not Die, coupled with the stress of possibly putting Mum in a home which I knew would devastate her, and all the money worries over the last two years, and then her dieing and all the gubbins and aftermath of that, I have been left a bit run down. When I am tired, the first thing affected is my digestive system which makes it much harder to kick a long-term, double-ard bug bastard with this level of persistence into touch. At the moment, I’m on HRT. After having two coils I now have pills for the progesterone bit and the same oestrogen infused alcohol gel to rub on my legs. The pills have to be taken on an empty stomach. I’m not sure what happens if they aren’t but I’ve assumed it means they don’t work as well.

The instructions suggest I take them an hour before food or two hours after eating. Before the Undead Stomach Bug I would take them when I went to bed which was usually anywhere between half ten and midnight which meant my 7 o’clock supper had between two and four hours to vacate my stomach beforehand.

However, when I am knackered, my digestive system slows down. I discovered this by din’t of throwing up A LOT while I was doing my A’levels. Usually that was caused by eating something too rich, or too late. The meal would then stay exactly where it was, until a few hours later when, if it was something really rich like a pork chop, my stomach would decide it couldn’t digest whatever it was, throw up it’s hands and admit defeat, at which point, I’d throw up.

So essentially, stomach bug aside, I think what has caused the last two attacks has been partly that I’m still recovering, and therefore tired, but also I’ve taken the HRT pill two or three hours after dinner on a stomach that is tired and lackadaisical—not to mention still very full of food. Ever since I’ve been taking the pills I’ve been much more menopausal and have had much more trouble getting a good night’s sleep. You need a good 3 hours to get proper REM in and I’ve been getting two hours unbroken rest if I’m lucky, waking up 5 – 7 times a night like I have a newborn or something. It’s been particularly bad all week.

I tried taking the pill later, in my regular 1 am wake up slot. I’m guaranteed to wake up at 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 at the moment, which is a pain when I usually have to get up at 7. This hasn’t made much difference so far. I could start taking the pill in the morning, which might work because it has to be an hour before food, but not if it’s holidays etc and I’m having a lie in and wake up at 9.30 or if we’re going somewhere and have to leave early and I can’t have anything to eat before I go, and spend the day ravening hungry.

Naturally sleeping really badly makes me tired, ergo the digestive system goes slow, and with each successive night of disturbed sleep the digestion is slower and presumably the stomach fuller each time I take the pill on a supposedly empty stomach at midnight. So, presumably the effectiveness of the progesterone pill gets less and less as there is more and more food on board later at night … so I get more and more menopausal symptoms, until I get so knackered that my stomach does a go slow, and, if I eat something rich like curry it throws up it’s hands and … yeh.

Last night, after feeling a bit more nauseous each time I woke up, I was finally sick at 5 am, while poor McOther was getting ready to go to a car boot. So I literally had to wander into the bathroom while he was cleaning his teeth, carrying a small pot, bid him a cheery, ‘good morning’ apologise, and then proceed to do the level up from farting and coughing at the same time; sitting down on the loo and cleverly emitting copiously from both ends of my alimentary canal. Mmm. Poor man. I bet he enjoyed that. Isn’t life a peach? Let me tell you, this is not an ideal way to start the day for me either. And despite being 5 am, it was clear that my stomach had not even given a nod to digesting my supper. I was also pissed off that I didn’t get to church or do anything fun today because I wasn’t ‘empty’ in time.

So I have to decide if I’m going to have another coil or if I’m going to try the patches first. I slept like the dead with the coil and gel combo and have always struggled with the pills so I suspect they may not be for me. I guess I should give the patches a go as they may work better, seeing as the coil did. So another trip to the Doctor’s on Monday, I think.

There are still another few weeks before my results come back but I think everything barring microscopic colitis has been ruled out.

Still feeling a bit nauseous as I write so it’s rice tonight. But I’ll put a tiny bit of ragu in it to make it more interesting.

On the upside …

I’ve been far too ropy to do anything today so I have sat in the garden, in the sun, in a deck chair in my pyjamas and read a book. I also repaired to McOther’s lounger where I had a very pleasant little sleep so all is good. I just need to be really careful what I eat from now on I think, until I get on a more even keel financially and the Mum admin is done.

I have money worries for myself now. Mum used to pay my brother and I expenses to go see her—‘Darling, you must pay yourselves because it’ll probably be the only bit of our money you’ll ever see.’—and I no longer get those regularly. I am feeling their loss, on top of a succession of enormous and thoroughly unexpected bills and in a very long month the housekeeping is supposed to arrive on 1st of the month but it’ll be the 7th or later this time because of the way the days fall. But somehow knowing the end is in sight helps a bit.

Other upsides, or at least reassuring things. I am having grief counselling about Mum which has started and is really helpful. The counsellor said that it is very common for illness to accompany grief so I feel a bit better about that side of it.

Other news this week …

Yesterday I had a very enjoyable day at Watford Comicon. It was a lovely venue and there were lots of lovely folks there, including, among the guests, an actual Dr Who (Colin Baker).

Picture of authors at a table selling their books

Thanks Simone for asking someone to take our picture!

There was also a fantastic bunch of traders with some amazing things to buy and look at. Unfortunately there weren’t that many folks in. Maybe everyone decided the last weekend of half term was too much hassle and they just wanted to stay home. Despite it being quiet the punters who did come along were great and I had some very interesting conversations with some lovely people.

The event was staged at Watford Leisure centre and extra bonus, we saw some wild parrots flying around in the grounds afterwards.

The noisy cricket now has two slow punctures so I’m thinking I should probably get my alloys recoated at some point as this is what usually happens, as they get older and more rusty, they start to leak.

Other comicon news, eyebombed the loos.

Although some things in the loos didn’t need eyebombing.

Writing…

Yes, I have done some writing this week. My main task now is to do the timeline. I couldn’t get it to gel and it was only as I tried to work it out in my head that I began to realise that what I really have is two books. Jolly dee. Both follow quite happily on from each other without cliff hangers so it should be alright once I’ve sat down and planned the timeline.

Probably …

So that’s grand.

Right that’s it from me. Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to post next week. In the meantime, remember you can always grab any books I have free from this page, here: https://www.hamgee.co.uk/cmot3

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13 Jun 2021 · 2:51 pm

Birthdays and some inane wittering

Do you ever wonder what you’re going to be when you grow up? I was 53 yesterday so I suspect I should hvae grown out of the habit by now. However, I still look to the future and wonder what I will ‘be’. Well no, I don’t wonder that, being an author is definitely what I’m here to do but I do wonder if I will ever ‘make it’. Making it, here, is earning £20k a year. Even minimum wage would be nice. I was going to do a long post today, trying to put my jumbled thoughts about selling audio books in order. It’s a bit rambly though, so I’m going to leave it to rest in the faint hope that if I come back to it fresh next week I’ll be able to make it more articulate. Also,it’s my birthday weekend and I decided that, instead, I’d just describe some MTM-ness … so long as I can make it funny enough.

It was a hot day yesterday but I did some gardening so I am still bathing in that warm sense of fitness smugglers I get when I’ve taken enough exercise to get my fitbit in a dither. I was expecting to wake up with vertigo or at the least hayfever. It was hayfever only, which was grand, although not so grand when I had to sing a solo in church. My voice went all crackly on the low notes which was a bit of a bummer so I had to sing very quietly to stop the low notes coming out as more of a yodel. Plus points, well, it was mostly in tune.

Other domestic news and general goings on. It was McMini’s birthday on Saturday as well as mine. This being the case, yesterday, I set about making a cake. McMini being not the biggest fan of chocolate and me loving it, I have resigned myself to the fact I will never have a chocolate birthday cake again. On the other hand … there’s always stealth chocolate. The white stuff. Among my family and friends, I am renowned for my horrible looking, but quite tasty cakes. Thinking about it, there are probably photos deep in the archives of this blog of my cakewrecks from previous occasions. If there are, I will try and find them and dot them about this post when I’ve finished.

There wasn’t much time, when is there ever? But I reckoned I could bash out a fatless sponge (swiss roll cake to the uninitiated) and I had some white chocolate which I could melt across the top of it (Bury St Edmunds market, £1 per catering sized bag). Excellent. I made the fatless sponge and it being a hot day the eggs and sugar took about five seconds to get to the right consistency. Believe it or not, it can take as long as 15 minutes on a cold day, I suppose that’s why they used to recommend you did this in a bowl perched over the top of a saucepan of hot water. That was in the olden days of beating it by hand, of course. Obviously, neither I, nor Mum, who handed this recipe down to me, can be arsed with that sort of malarkey. Also, two words. Kenwood and Chef. Yep. I have two of these babies but McOther has put one away in the pantry under the stairs where I can’t remove it without kneeling down so that one is temporarily out of action. Instead I had to use the, supposedly mothballed, back up machine, purchased some years ago for £5 from a car boot sale. Note to self, remember to mention to McOther that he has mothballed the wrong one.

When I’d finished the mixture I discovered I’d made a bit too much so there were seven bonus buns as well. Jolly dee. I rustled up some icing for the middle; butter, sieved icing sugar, a couple of drops of vanilla essence to taste and then just mix it about and add sugar or butter as desired until it tastes like butter icing. It was one of those days when it all comes together straight away and tastes as if a real chef made it. I was very pleased with the results and even more pleased that I remembered to let the cake get cold before I slathered it all across the middle. Cake pretty much constructed, next it was time to do the white chocolate icing for the top. The trouble with purchasing catering sized bags of stuff is that they are big and this can led you to believe you have an inexhaustible supply.

Over the past few weeks, since I purchased the bag, I have been grazing lightly, on the white chocolate. Just the odd couple of buttons here and there, but when I came to examine it, I realised I might have been grazing a bit more heavily than I’d anticipated. There wasn’t quite enough of the stuff to just melt it and pour it over the top of the cake, indeed, there wasn’t nearly enough.

Bollocks.

Never mind I would add icing sugar and butter, warm them all up in a saucepan and it would set hard with any luck. The result of my efforts was a ball of great-tasting stuff which, unfortunately, was not unlike pastry in consistency.

Right.

After a brief internal debate as to whether or not to ‘loosen’ it with milk, I decided not to because I didn’t have any ingredients left to start again if I fucked it up. Nope. I just spread it on anyway. It looked a bit flakey. In fact it looked like giant lumps of dandruff. And because fatless sponge has a sort of crumbly crunchy outside it didn’t stick.

Ah well, never mind. Nobody would notice if I decorated it with enough crap. I sprayed it with edible gold paint to give it a nice sheen, looked out the Happy Birthday candle that we light every year, and threw some white chocolate stars on it.

Cake: After, with the RIGHT date says the original caption. Yes I put the wrong date on my parents’ Golden Wedding cake.

Then I discovered some Halloween icing decorations; pumpkin faces, Frankenstein’s monster faces, an eyeball and two severed fingers. Perfect for McMini then. On they want and hoorah, we were done. After a bit of trouble, I managed to remove the airtight box I keep cakes in from the under the stairs bit of the pantry by using a strange grippy handle thing which has been in the family for years. My mother remembers her grandfather using it to reach for high up blackberries when she was a kid. From an early age I spotted it at my grandparents’ house and have been fascinated with it all my life. When my grandmother died, I inherited this strange thing and I am still fascinated by it.

Sorry, digression there. ‘Cake’ made I put it in the airtight box to have on ‘the day’. Birthdaygeddon dawned and McMini went off to town with a friend and disappeared. On the downside, he did not return at teatime and I was agog to try the cake. On the upside, he has grown out of wanting a party. Eventually texted said friend’s mother at five, and asked her to tell him to come home because I wanted to eat the chuffing cake. He arrived at half past five. On the upside, the cake was delicious and the dandruffy icing turned out to be lumps of crumbly fudge (tablet, basically). The most important thing was that it tasted wonderful. Yeh. Job done I’d say.

Having stuffed ourselves with cake at a point in the day which was, if we were honest with ourselves, a bit close to dinner, McOther got the bar-b-queue on and handed me a bottle of beer and some nuts to enjoy while I was upstairs having a shower and getting into my pyjamas. Yes, I put my pyjamas on at about seven pm because I have come to rather dislike going out in the evening. Well, I am fifty three after all. And I already have arthritis and one replaced knee so I may be even older on paper, so to speak. Not that I was going to have time to enjoy the beer and nuts either, since he told me, cheerfully, that I had five minutes. As I mounted the stairs I took a swig of beer from the bottle.

Big mistake.

You know how the first sip of beer from a bottle causes this foam eruption that just goes on and on and looks as if it’s never going to stop. Yeh, well the bastard thing did that. By the time it had finished bubbling it’s guts onto the stair carpet there was only about half the bottle left. Well fuck. Since I’d been gardening all afternoon I needed that shower. I was stinky and dirty and appeared to have a bad case of greenfly … almost as bad as some of my plants. Three and a half minutes of mopping them with a hanky later the beer stains had disappeared. I belted upstairs and hurled myself into the shower. Sod it, I was going to be late for supper which the cook does not appreciate. Never mind better late than stinky, washed the earth off my legs, feet and hands but didn’t have time to rinse the greenfly infestation out of my hair. Oh well.

McMini’s Donald Trump bun … obviously having a plate like that to put it on helps.

Luckily supper was a bit late so I wasn’t and the McOther was not upset that we’d failed to enjoy his smashing cooking. McMini peeled all the coating off his burger bun and it ended up looking a bit like Donald Trump which amused me. An evening vegetating in front of Montalbano and McMini went off to bed. McOther disappeared upstairs to put his light out and after about twenty minutes I realised he’d done that weird thing blokes do when they just disappear up to bed without telling you and you sit there watching telly for half an hour and then suddenly realise that the rest of the house is dark and you can hear snoring coming from the bedroom.

Realising that it was bed time I set about going to bed when McMini arrived for our evening chat. McMini likes a chat before bed. He arrived with a balloon pump and set about trying to puff me to death, at which point I want and got my balloon pump and before long we were puffing things at one another, or he was trying to puff the birthday cards off the mantelpiece while I puffed at them from the other direction, trying to keep them upright. Standard procedure for us then. McMini doesn’t have a sibling but as McOther pointed out, because I am merely another child, he sort of does. Having finally persuaded McMini that bed and sleep would be a good idea, I got to bed at about midnight.

First thing this morning, McOther headed off to car boots. I woke up and discovered that I could hear strange thumping sounds. I couldn’t work out if it was the cat in his ‘bedroom’ which is the room below our en suite, or McMini who is a demi-floor up from us. Our house is the same height all round but there are two rooms on top of each other at the front and three rooms on top of each other at the back, which is weird but just the way it is. Seeing as McOther was not there I indulged my Chaucerian side and ‘lette flye a fart’. Unfortunately, even when I am alone the sound of farts makes me giggle and McMini heard and appeared with a build-your-own hydraulic hand model that he’d been given for his birthday, the previous day. Yes, it seems he had built it over night.

‘Have you slept?’ I asked him blearily.

‘Oh yes, but I woke up at 4 am and was bored so and built this.’

Gads. Four am. Urrgh. Clearly McMini is like his father in that he has never really got the hang of going to sleep, or at least, both seem to be pathologically unable to go back to sleep if they wake up in the middle of the night. Me, I grew up in a boy’s school so I have no trouble with this. Mind you, not being able to sleep again after being woken up would have resulted in something like the Russian Sleep Experiment for anyone living there. As it was, I learned to sleep through the sound of fireworks – but not bombs, it seems I can differentiate between the two – drunken shouting, loud music and the fire alarm – I will be burned in my sleep if ever a building I’m in catches fire and there’s no one else with me to hear the alarm and drag me out of bed.

McMini was very much awake and ‘tested’ the robot hand by throwing a ball at me with it, stroking my face with it and generally being an evil troll. And now we are just on the brink of going out for a walk, except by the time I’ve found the pictures and phaffed with the stupid keywords, it will probably be evening and we’ll probably have been for the walk before you see this.

In other news …

The results of the K’Barthan invective quiz are in. Mwahahahrgh! Boy oh boy this was close. There were two run-away winners but the rest of the vote was comprehensively split between about six of them. Here are the results:

Smeck: Out-and-out winner this one with a huge 40% of the votes. Smeck is a word I made up that would sound a bit like fuck but not be as rude. I suspect I now need to think of something along the lines of Red Dwarf’s, ‘Better dead than smeg!’ Only in K’Barthan, using smeck.
Arnold’s Y-fronts! Not a huge surprise this one because lots of characters use it. It received 35% of the votes.
There are two in third position: Arnold’s conkers! and Arnold’s underpants! Hmm … do I detect a theme here? These two picked up 30% of the votes.
Fourth equal – because my list making thing can’t cope with jumping to five the way I’m meant to after a tie – with 25% of the votes, we have: Arnold’s bum! Smecking Arnold! Arnold’s smecking sweaty … and a suddenly clean, Arnold’s eyeballs! and Arnold’s Armpits!
Close behind these we have: Arnold’s earwax, Arnold’s toe jam! and Arnold’s plums.

There seems to be a theme here, which is that anything to do with bottoms and undergarments or the word ‘Smeck’ is a goer, along with dodgy effluvia such as toe jam and ear wax. I did write my books for people like me. Maybe there are more of them than I thought.

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Filed under General Wittering, Mary Fails at Modern Life

Tagged as an author with children, author blog, author blogs, crap cakes, humorous novels, I fucked this up so you don't have to, istuffedthisupsoyoudon’thaveto, M T McGuire, Mary Fails at Modern Life, writer parent, writing

25 Jul 2020 · 1:43 pm

MTM fails at modern life … bleargh and t’ing … but then again #AtHomeYALC

Mary fails at modern life

Good morning, I am feeling monster lethargic this week. I have two book reviews to write, and haven’t and I have to do this and we’re going out tomorrow to some friends. That bit is good, in fact I’m really looking forward to seeing them. But I always have to drive which will be less good. It’s just over 50 miles and 45 minutes, a lot of which is crappy speed cameras and pointless speed limits round Cambridge – lots of points potential for the semi-somnambulant driver late at night. And because the McOthers always fall asleep after the late ones it’s even harder to keep awake because it’s like being the driver for a mobile dormitory. A mobile dormitory that is my husband’s car, too, which always adds that little frisson.

This meh I feel is the famous lockdown fatigue. I’m pretty sure of that. I feel like it all the time, and for the exact same reasons so it’s just an extra dose. I’m just … properly knackered all of a sudden. I have no more capacity to deal with idiots abroad and I’ve had the worst month of book sales since October last year. I’ve also had some lovely correspondence from folks on my mailing list but it’s been slightly clouded by one really pissy one. Because I’m an artsy numpty and the dark side weighs heavy … fork sketch brain.

Re the sales … having managed to increase them I really hoped it might be going to stick for a bit but … no. Sighs. And I really have to release some more stuff that’s not K’Barthan. K’Barthan is marmite. People love it or hate it. But the hardest thing about K’Barthan is that despite many people liking it when they finally read it, I swear that persuading them to open the book in the first place is the actual thirteenth Herculean task.

That said, I need to refresh my facebook ads and I’m going to try some BookBub ads for audio and for a freebie I’m running. The first in Hamgeean Misfit series will be zero pence all next week. I think the sales situation is a part of the meh, too, because they haven’t just tanked, they’ve imploded. Without the new release I’d be back to $35 a month, and that’s with the advertising. This is where I point out that all my books, audio, paperback and ebooks are available from any library. Check your app and if it’s not there, just ask.

Also, despite feeling a bit meh, I know I’m not alone and if you’re with me, neither are you. It seems to have hit us creatives like the plague … oh no wait, that’s the Rona. Gareth and I are in the throes of doing another audiobook and he confessed to feeling totally lethargic, himself. So that’s two of us. I bet there are more. Lock down fatigue is a thing though. So much a thing that I’ve found this link about it. It’s all about the limbic system, which is actually the same thing that makes us suddenly think that cleaning the grout in the bathroom is the most important thing in the world rather than that urgent project we have to finish by this afternoon.

Anyway here’s the gen on why lockdown makes us feel totally meh…

I’ll be fine again tomorrow. I think part of it was because I had a very lengthy and vivid dream that I was taking part in a quiz game with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and my husband at a golf club somewhere. It went on for a sod of a long time and at one point Dudley went off to the loo and his suitcase burst and we were trying to stuff all his things back into it but they were just coming out of the tears in the fabric.

The whole ridiculous escapade ended up with me following my parents and uncle along a river with McMini until it went underground. It was hard to keep up because they were moving faster than us and when it forked I wasn’t sure which tunnel they’d taken and took the wrong one. Then we ended up confronted with a cave wall and I turned round to discover that the walls had closed in and we were stuck in a bubble in the rock that was about the size of a small car. That was the point at which I thought, ‘this dream is fucking stupid,’ and woke up. But after concentrating so hard on the quiz first and then on not losing sight of my parents and Uncle, and keeping McMini with me, I woke up absolutely fucking knackered. Mwahahahargh!

In case anyone was going to attempt dream interpretation, yes, I know that dream is about feeling trapped and that I have no control of my life. Every single dream I have is about that because yes, even now, I haven’t quite grasped that the only thing we have any control over is how we react to what happens to us.

And as for travel. What I need is a giro copter … or the fucking transporter off the Enterprise. Where the hell is science though? Seriously. I know I ask this often but, ‘where the fuck’s my flying car?’ Instead we can invent packaging for meat that is so strongly glued together that I’m beginning to suspect it’s held together with the same stuff they use to glue the wings on Jumbo Jets or put McLaren’s together. MTM rolls eyes. I spent five minutes releasing a rib eye stake from it’s plastic carbonite, yesterday. It was so bad I made a film of my attempt to release the second one. You can enjoy that, if you’re so inclined, by clicking on the thing below. Most of you already have I think.

Publishing Industry news: the storm in a teacup award goes to …

This week one of the big boys of the indie book industry, Mark Dawson, has caused a stir by allegedly gaming the bestseller list. I signed up for his Facebook Ads course back in 2014 … or possibly 2015, I think I was in the second or third round of students anyway. I liked his dry sense of humour and he had a different approach. Didn’t seem to be bothered by the trappings, which made this whole incident come as a bit of a surprise to me. That said, it could equally have been a case of curiosity more than anything. He is always trying new stuff.

The story is, he did a UK only hardback edition for one of his books and his readers in the states wanted it. He realised there was an opportunity to experiment and bought the books from one of the shops where sales count towards bestseller status. He needed 400 books and it got him into the top 10. This it didn’t go down well. He has since had the ‘ranking’ removed but only on the grounds that the books were for sale to people abroad. And people have done this before and the listing stood but was marked with a dagger, which would suggest this sort of stuff goes on and is viewed by the establishment with ambivalence.

What surprised me was not so much that he did it, I mean, a lot of people do. Brian Epstein went round all the chart shops buying Love Me Do to get it into the charts. What surprised me was that a) anyone cared and b) that Mark Dawson gave a hoot about bestsellerdom since he’s incredibly successful in his own right. Did he really need that stamp of approval? Personally I avoid bestsellers, if something hits the bestseller lists, it’s odds on I won’t enjoy it, you know, like the film Titanic, which was utterly shit and made worse by the fact the ending wasn’t even going to be a surprise.

He does seem to have recovered his sense of humour over it though. After a jokey facebook post, by another author wondering if he could get into the top 25 by buying some of his books and sending them overseas, I was amused to discover that Mark’s reply was, apparently, ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

To read the article that kicked it all off, click here

Do bestseller lists mean anything?

You know what, from my own personal point of view, I genuinely think the answer to that is no. Then again, that may just be me. The whole NYT bestseller or Times Bestseller thing strikes me as a load of piss and wind. I wouldn’t game them like that, and I wouldn’t say no to the label but … am I That bovvered? Ner.

As a dyed in the wool indie music lover, I don’t discount chart bands out of hand, some are great but the chart is not the place I turn to automatically. With books it’s pretty much the same. If you read all sorts of books you’re not necessarily going to be searching the best seller list for new reads. Then again if it finds new fans, I suppose it’s a thing and I should take some notice. Can’t be arsed though. One of my crimes is enjoying mashed genres, especially when they can’t help themselves. The fact that thrillers about real science are beginning to wander into the sci-fi zone is not just brilliant, it’s a whole blog post on its own.

Thinking about this writing gig, though, the big thing is still to share the story. It’s something I am completely driven to do. The title of this blog is the truth as well as a joke. I am an authorholic and it is like a bad crack habit. So earning enough money to not have to do anything else is my real aim I guess. I would be over the moon with say £20k per annum. That would be nice. If I work it out I probably earn about three pence per hour for my creative endeavours. But I keep hoping that if I carry on publishing books, eventually there will be enough cash coming in to draw a salary. Pretty much all the books I sell are the result of my own personal attempts at marketing. Also, the more books there are, in theory, the more people will read because there will be a wider choice, more books different series … win win.

But do I want to be a big hitter, mover and shaker? Nah, not really. Too much like hard work. Even so, the aim is lots of mailing list sign and giving people free books … MTM hobbles on stage in black child catcher outfit with a sack barrow full of books. ‘Try my K’Barthan crack people. Yesssssss. Soon you will be hooked and you will be mine all mine! Mwahahahargh!’ Etc.

A while back, you could do keywords to make your books more visible and I know Amazon used to recommend them to people (case in point Gareth). However, I doubt keywords work that well anymore or that sites like Amazon recommend books the way they used to. As I understand it, those spaces are given to trad, or in the case of Amazon, you now pay for them. As a result, because I still sell more books there than anywhere else, they’re kind of on the back burner as I would like to grow sales elsewhere. And also when I do free runs on other sites, Amazon often price matches so I get readers there that way.

Likewise, I’m not sure that anyone just happens upon my books anymore, except during a free run – but obvs, you have to limit those or they lose their effectiveness. The telling thing, for me, is other authors talking about how many folks have signed up to their mailing through the back of books. In my case, it’s hardly anyone, but judging from the feedback I get, this is not because my books, or list, is unpopular. I suspect it’s simply that most people who read my books are already on my mailing list. Which is good because it does, at least, mean that my efforts at marketing in that direction are reasonably effective.

Events! Woot.

Next week, I am hoping to do a podcast which should be fun. I’m going to be doing the, Biblio Files podcast with Bonnie K.T. Dillabough. The topic we will be discussing is jemmying writing into the kind of life where there isn’t really room! So if you’re interested that’s on Tuesday 4th August at 6pm British Summer Time, I think. Or possibly 5.00 … I’m going to be on standby from then because I don’t know if British Standard Time means British Summer Time or Greenwich Mean Time because I’m so smart.

Feel free to join me a week on Tuesday, or if you’d like to see some of the other podcasts you can find them here

It’s quite new but there are some interesting things discussed. I particularly liked the one about the process of cover design.

Today! At Home Yalc!

Yep, this afternoon, Saturday 25th, at about the time I publish this post – 1.00pm GB time – an author of Young Adult books, Rachel Churcher, is putting on an on line version of the Young Adult Literary Convention. Mainly because the real live one is cancelled. This is basically a whole bunch of authors posting readings back to back. There are giveaways and all sorts of other smashing stuff. The authors are all using twitter and making live broadcasts so if you want to have a look, you can find all the details here.

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Also, if that little lot isn’t enough to get your teeth into, starting on American Sunday – so that’s about 1 o’clock our time and sometime in the evening for my readers in Oceania. I am giving the first in series of the shorts away for zero pence. Hamgeean Misfit number one is going to be free from 27th July until 17th August.