Tag Archives: an author with children

3 May 2013 · 11:30 pm

Note to self: Must buy fairy dust.

A slightly dodgy post tonight because my life is officially like pushing a rock up hill. I’m not sure what’s going on but the chaos gremlins won’t leave me alone… and I seem to be waiting… for everything. (sings, ‘the waiting is the hardest part… one more day sees one more yard’)

For example, I decided to put a thing on my bike and McMini’s bike that means the two are attached like a tag along.

In the whole container there was only one screw that was bespoke, that I couldn’t have replaced if I’d lost it. So after I’d put the rest of the contraption onto both bikes, which screw did I discover was missing? That’s right. And to be honest, while I know how to do some fairly comprehensively mechanical stuff to an engine, I couldn’t for the life of me work it out. I gave up. McMini has decided he likes the seat anyway, so we’ll stick with it.

My car. No fascia. No dash, no petrol gauge. The 50 mile journey to the garage down a road bristling with speed cameras… interesting. The solution, discovered by the garage, disconnect the battery. Doh! Why didn’t I think of that? Then again, if I had, I’d have only broken the alarm.

Other areas of life… Flat.

I think it’s book sales that’s getting to me. They look terrible, going backwards, but the demographic is different so I’m clinging to the hope that when I finally come to do the figures, it’ll be the same numbers over a wider selection of platforms. If it is, that’s good, but I have to face the possibility that my books may just be bombing.

Writing the books? Well at the moment, I feel like I’m chasing a mirage, the more I write the further away the end seems to be. I would like to finish the K’Barthan trilogy before I die but I’m really beginning to wonder if it’s going to happen. Rolls eyes. Yes it’s taking that fucking long.

Actually, I’m beginning to wonder if it’s a trilogy, I’m about a third into the last book and it’s already as long as the middle one but I think it best to finish it and see if there’s a neat point to halve it.

There are times, when I just have to accept that however ‘real’ writing feels to me I’m not really a ‘real’ author because the only thing I have the capacity to do full time is bring up my boy. Sometimes that’s quite hard, other times I wonder why it might possibly matter. At the moment it’s hard.

Different people have different commitments and also different capabilities – I really can’t write books unless I’m on my own in a quiet room. That does hamper me somewhat. I know other people who can sit to one side at a kid’s party and bash out a couple of chapters. I am in awe, and obviously, seething with professional envy. In any job you’re going to encounter this. There are going to be people who are more productive than you there are going to be people who succeed faster and you have to suck it up.

However, working within your limitations can be quite hard. I always knew my career was going to happen slowly but there are days when I wonder if it’s too slow. Is being an author like escaping the Earth’s gravitational field? Will it be impossible to escape the oceans of dross without rocket boosters? Will writing and producing books in slow motion render me a failure? Unless I achieve escape velocity will I be trapped here in the one sale a month club for eternity?  Only time will tell but very probably yes. Then there’s the really evil one. Am I deluded? Have I, actually, written two shit books? Is that why they are only read after prolonged begging… or at gun point?

OK, so we’ll put the maudlin, self-pity back in the box now and think about what can be learned. What are the lessons here? What have I learned that might be useful to anyone else? Hmm. Well it’s these things:

  1. Something that applies to pretty much any endeavour in life. Avoid looking at other people’s output except to learn positive things, like what works for them that might work for you, that kind of stuff. NEVER compare someone else’s output to yours. That way madness lies. Switch off the internet if you have to but don’t do it. Set your own targets. Make them realistic in the framework of your life and your abilities and then stick to them – if you can. Should you hit them feel glad and when other people produce six times as much stuff in half the time, chill. Yes you may not be achieving the standard norm but you’re achieving something and that’s better than nothing.
  2. Don’t worry about other people’s sales figures – yes I am a fool, I’ve been to kindleboards again and depressed myself reading the threads about how well everyone’s doing. There will always be people doing better than you and for many of us it will be most people. This is the way of the world, if you have less time, people who have more will write more books, faster and achieve success faster. Embarrassingly, people who are way smarter than you will use less time than you have more wisely and write their books faster.  Yes you will feel left behind. This is the harsh reality of life. Deal with it.
  3. Sometimes it will feel as if you are standing still and everyone is running past you and disappearing into the distance. Try not to think about it.
  4. Don’t start your writing career with a trilogy, or at least not unless you’re absolutely lulu. A series of stand alone books, yes, but a trilogy? No. Because a trilogy merely extends the first book angst for three books. That’s OK if you bash out a book every six months but if it takes you two years…? It’s been 16 years and counting. Mmm, I’m sure you get my point.
  5. Hard work begets success but unfortunately, so does luck and no amount of hard work will make up for that 1% of luck on top that puts you onto another level. This applies to anything. I’ve always had to make my own luck and to be honest, I’m piss poor at it! Phnark.
  6. Be patient; with your books and yourself. Yes Tom Petty was right, the waiting IS the hardest part. Aim to enjoy what you do and look upon anything else as gravy because however hard you work, the fairy dust may miss you.

So I reckon that’s some great advice, which I know and understand but seem to be pathologically unable to accept. Especially number 6. I think if I had the smallest modicum of patience, I wouldn’t be feeling quite so pessimistic. Or it could just be that it’s May and it’s sunny and although that’s absolutely lovely it does mean there’s a very high probability that it’s going to sodding tip it down for the rest of the year. If I’m not around so much it’ll be because I’m writing. I have to write because if I don’t finish my magnum opus this year, I fear I really will go crazy. After that it’s going to be short, commercially viable books. Oh yeh. No trilogies. Not ever, ever again.

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8 Apr 2013 · 9:00 pm

Treasure hunting. Naval gazing.

It’s the school holidays so work on my book has stopped for a week or two while McMini and I do stuff.

Today was particularly good. We went round to some friends; mine and his. The weather was lovely, we sat on the leeward side of the house, in the warm, out of the wind, and while the kids played together we had a gossip. Then, as their house is 14th Century I thought I’d have a go with my metal detector.

Despite owning it a while, I seem to be taking a terribly long time to get the hang of actual metal detecting. All the permissions etc required take time and so far, I haven’t got round to it. This has made it tricky, well, illegal actually, for me to practise outside my own garden. And therein lies the problem. The detector does several different tones of beep for different metals. However, in my garden it usually gets all the beeps in a single sweep. It makes it rather tricky to pinpoint any of the beeps individually or work out where to dig. Added to my severe lack of experience and you have a recipe for if not disaster then, very slim pickings. All that had come to light, before this morning, was one old nail and I was cock-a-hoop to find that.

However, today I finally felt I might be getting the hang of it. Just like my garden, it was a case, not so much of failing to find anything, as finding too many signals. Three or four different tones on one swing and no obvious indication as to where to dig. The truth dawned that it is not my garden that’s full of rubbish – well it is, I’ve never dug up so much aluminium foil but I digress. Where was I? Ah yes. The truth hit me that metal detecting isn’t walk, walk walk beep, ah yes, dig here, indeed it is clear that my garden is the norm rather than the exception.

So, clearly, I realised, it might be smart to filter out some of the beeps. I played with the settings and chose ‘coins’ because that cut out about half the spectrum including iron, which, frankly, seems to be in most things. I get signals for iron off everything, even the sodding grass. Thinking that there was bound to be the odd coin lying about and at least I’d start to get the hang, not only of finding things, but also of actually digging them out.

The machine reported some coppers – it’s American so it suggested they were 1c pieces but let’s not split hairs. They were pure signals, no interference, so I was able to pinpoint them fairly quickly and dig. So have I found a gold sovereign? Have I been like the blokes at my club who turned up last week with Edward II coins, coins from the reign of King John, Saxon beads and other amazingly ancient things? Am I like the guy who arrived the month before with an Iceni gold coin?

Well… er… no.

After digging two enormous holes in her lawn I came up with well… yes, two coins. They weren’t old, they were pennies, not even pennies, one pence pieces from 1971 and 1979, respectively.

For some reason this caused both of us an insane amount of mirth. Even so, both of us admitted to feeling a slight frisson of excitement that the machine had beeped, that we’d dug and that we’d managed to get something out. Even if it was only 1p.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? Success is relative. If I’d been using a metal detector for the last twenty years I’d be expecting to turn up some pretty good stuff. But I haven’t. This is the third time. I went there hoping that I might learn how to find a metal thing and successfully dig it up. So while today’s er… can I call it a haul? was laughable in most respects, I think I might actually have gained that knowledge. Job done then, right?

Food for thought.

Where does writing come in you ask? Well, here’s a short list of THINGS about my books:

  1. I’ve written two books and I’m writing another one. That’s something I never thought I’d achieve.
  2. There’s a chance they might be good books.
  3. People who have read them often like them. Some people like them a lot.
  4. People like the covers… and the merchandise.
  5. Are people buying the books? Are they buffalo?

What worries me? What do I dwell on the whole time? Number five. Because the other four, they make it look as if the K’Barthan Trilogy is a quality product that should walk off the shelves. But it doesn’t, and it isn’t. I don’t know if that’s my fault or if I’m deluded or whether it’s just a reflection of the difficulty of the market and if I think about any of that stuff I will be undone. That way madness lies.

What the metal detecting thing has taught me is that, actually, I’ve done quite well and that maybe I should concentrate on being happier with things 1-4 and on what I want to do next. In other words, I want to find something a bit more interesting than a one pence piece with my metal detector, but until I’ve gained the skill to locate one of those with a reasonable level of consistency, I probably won’t.

In short, when it comes to selling books, no-one really seems to know what works. So all an author can do is show people where to find them, or tell them – where permitted – and hope someone, somewhere will pick up on them. Because the only thing that’s really going to sell your book, ever is readers, who love it, telling their friends. So, let me leave you with the seven golden rules of happy authordom;

  1. Write, as much as you can. Write, to pick yourself up. Even if you can’t think of anything to write, write something. Because every authorholic needs authorhol, and when you’ve written it, get it edited, honed and primped until it’s the best you can possibly achieve. You owe yourself a decent product.
  2. Avoid checking your sales figures more than once a week it’ll only depress you.
  3. Avoid any places where authors who sell hundreds of books a month hang out, because you may find them complaining that their sales are piss poor almost as often as you do, that’ll make you want to weep. Also avoid the it-can-happen-to-you-too stories. It might but it probably won’t. Accept that and don’t beat yourself up.
  4. Try not to be disheartened if you discover that the only place you can persuade anyone to buy any of your books from is Amazon.
  5. Avoid going to forums to sell your book except in specifically designated areas. Go there to chat. If people like you and you’re lucky, they might buy your book eventually but nothing’s less appealing to them than a hard sell.
  6. Always remember that behind every overnight success are usually several decades of hard work.
  7. Remember that the only thing that will sell your books, ever, is readers who have loved them, banging on and on about them to their friends.

There you go.

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10 Mar 2013 · 10:33 pm

Hello. My name is M T McGuire and I’m an Authorholic

Jeez it’s a pain in the arse this writing thing. Let me explain. Chatting to a mate the other day I ended up having a debate about whether or not you have to be a little bit barking to be a writer… or creative generally.

I said, ‘no.’

Now, I’m not so sure.

There’s no doubt, in my mind that it makes a person a bit different. It’s not an accident that I’ve ended up married to somebody who’s had his ideas patented (yes we can all sleep safer in our beds knowing  that vending machines spit out a few less coins thanks to McOther, and less of certain brand of chocolate come off the production line stuck together, and robot hands can grip without crushing).

Sorry, going back to writing… I suspect a lot depends on why you do it. If you’re doing it to make money you’re on a hiding to nothing, that’s for sure. To be honest, I don’t know why I write, I only know that I can’t not. It’s a compulsion. My Mum was telling me about someone she knew the other day, who married, and then divorced, a compulsive gambler. Some of the things she described rang worryingly true.

Most of the time, I love writing. A big part of me lives in a fantasy world. It always has. I retreat there whenever I need to escape and recharge. I never spoke about it, I just went off on my own somewhere, sat down and daydreamed. It was years before it occurred to me to write any of it down. I am not really one for secrets, even good ones – long term, most secrets are battery acid to the soul – so writing my books has felt extraordinarily liberating in some ways. Suddenly, actual people know about something that has been as real and as necessary to me as air and food. But secret from everyone else. Completely. Utterly. Secret. For my entire life.

Now I am able to talk about Swamp Things, Grongles, Snurds and the like, to people who enjoy them as much as I do, without having to explain what they are. OK, so it’s a very select band of you who know – literally tens of people. But that’s not the point. The point is that, these days, someone, anyone, does.

That’s how it feels when it’s going well. Great. When it’s not… it sucks.

Everyone has a certain amount of ambient angst in their lives. I deal with mine by writing. Usually it works. I can control what I write – up to a point – and if it turns out well, I get a nice warm feeling of achievement. The thing is the basic business of being human involves the lives of others, live as an island and you might write a lot but you’ll experience little. However, if you want to live and love to the full you have to give up writing time to interact and you have to surrender control. You have to moderate your actions because they can affect those around you, people whom you love and don’t want to hurt, so you can’t write until four in the morning. Likewise, things that happen to your loved ones can affect you, whether you want them to or not, because you care for them.The more you love, the more you give; the more fulfilled you are but… the less control you have.

If things are dicey, there comes a point where the ambient angst gets too noisy and my heart too full to write. The quality and quantity of my output drops. More angst. There are times if things are a bit busy or just not going very well when every writer – unless they’re really lucky – has to stop spanking the monkey. If you’re writing a book with a really convoluted plot and things are going less than well, then, if you want things to ‘go’ at all, you may need to switch to a less complicated project, a short maybe, or possibly even stop until you are ready to resume. If your mind can’t even be bothered to wonder, the time has definitely come to call it a day for a while, and do things. Put stuff in.

If you are self-publishing, that should be easy, right? No publisher deadlines, no book-every-six-months anxiety for me. But it isn’t. People are expecting another book, some of them even want it and that makes for pressure.

The truth  is, I’m having a little trouble with the Real World at the moment. It’s encroaching severely on my writing activities. For the most part, it’s a pleasure. But when you’ve got two thirds through a very complicated trilogy it’s not helpful.

It’s a times like these that I don’t really like being a writer. When life gets a bit tricky, it can feel as if you are weathering a great storm in a small boat, rowing like buggery, and singing ‘For Those in Peril on the Sea’ for your life; and still you’re pathologically unable to remember what verse you’re on, or keep your eye on the ball – either ball – because I can’t even bloody write, either.

You see, I really, really do need my writing fix. If I don’t get it I am cranky, defensive and I lose focus on everything except my desire to set my thoughts in order and write them down. I start resenting every day administrative tasks of life. I ignore them and they build up. At the same time, I see them building up and start to worry or feel guilty, which impairs my ability to write. Sometimes I neglect my personal hygiene, choosing, instead, to spend that precious half hour when I should be having a shower, writing. Yes, if I’m smelly this week, it means I’m inspired and knocking out 2,000 words a day.

That sort of behaviour seems worryingly similar to the addicts of other drugs, who can concentrate on nothing but the next fix. Am I a compulsive writer? Is my addiction hurting people? I fear it might be. Should I try and give it up? Maybe.

For what it’s worth, I do know what’s at the bottom of the compulsion. It’s the feeling of wanting to know what happens to the characters in my head. I want to know so badly that I will stop at little to find out. Writing books is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Trying to strike a balance between writing enough to keep me sane, and yet giving up enough writing time to live convincingly among the normals, without harming them, can really do my head in.

Writing a book like watching a good film, you want to find out what happens, even if you’ve plotted it and planned it. You  want to savour every moment with your characters and yet you also live for the moment when it’s done and you can read it through and follow the plot from beginning to end.

Spare a thought, when you read an un-put-downable book, for the author who had to put it down at the end of every single sodding day, probably a lot sooner than he wanted to, for about six months (15 years and counting in my case) before that golden moment when he could finally know, for sure, how it all turned out. Yes, speaking as an author, I fear I may have been ill advised to start with a trilogy, or at least, to publish any of it before I had finished

While I’m having a good old moan, there’s another thing about being a writer that really gets on my tits. It’s the dichotomy between why I write and the circumstances in which I can. Obviously, I write because I enjoy it, and I’m reasonably proficient at it. As I mentioned earlier, it’s also a release, an escape and a generally wonderful thing. However, the more ambient angst, and therefore, the more I need to write, – the harder it is to do so. My writing Mojo is perverse, I think. No, it’s not perverse. My writing mojo is one of the most finely – or is that badly – tuned, temperamental things on earth. It’s prone to throw tantrums, down tools and get distracted by shiny things. As general bad behaviour goes you’d be hard put to beat my mojo. It’s about as co-operative and open to compromise as a 1970s union leader.

So here I am, a person who takes around two years, maybe a little bit more, to write each book (although it took eight years to write the first one because I had to learn how) and I decide to write a story that it takes three books to complete, which I can only produce any effective work on ‘when I’m in the mood’. Or to put it another way, not very often.

There’s me thinking I could control my desperate need for answers… I thought it would be OK… It’s not. I have never done anything this hard. I would love to go cold turkey, just give up on the bloody thing and walk away, kick the habit. But I am too stubborn, and people are waiting, and I want to know what bloody well happens and all. But if I write another trilogy, I’ll make sure it’s stand-alone books and I won’t publish it until it’s all done.

And don’t get me started on trying to produce any meaningful output with PMT (that’s PMS, my American friends). Gah! Next week I will mostly be writing… a short story. Although it’ll probably be lines and lines of ‘all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy’ The Shining-style, because frankly, I’m not sure if this is a gift I have here, or whether I’m merely a little bit tapped.

Honey! I’m home.

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24 Jan 2013 · 5:20 pm

I knew I shouldn’t have shown him that book on Florence Nightingale

McOther came home from work feeling terrible. He went upstairs for a rest. McMini and I arrived from school and went up to see if he’d like a cup of tea. He said yes please.
“When I’m ill I like to go to bed and have a little sleep and read my books, then I feel better,” McMini volunteered.
“Thank you,” said McOther.
“Come on, let’s go make Daddy’s tea,” I said and we went down to boil the kettle. While I was fishing a tea bag out of the tin and generally phaffing, McMini disappeared. When I went upstairs with McOther’s tea, there was our son sitting beside his Dad with a book on aeroplanes and a StarWars annual.
“I am just reading to Daddy, so he will feel better.”
“Good boy, do you feel better Daddy?”
“Yes I do,” said McOther’s mouth but his eyes said, “Help me…!”
“I think we should leave Daddy to sleep now though, eh?” I said.
“But I haven’t finished reading him StarWars.”
“I’m sure he would love to have a sleep first, it’ll be much more exciting if he has to wait for the next installment. Right Daddy?”
“Yes, that’s a great idea,” said McOther, with a certain amount of feeling.
“What d’you reckon?” I asked McMini.
“Hmm… Yes Mummy I think you’re right. OK Daddy. It is time for you to have a little sleep. I will come back to see you later and find out if you are better,” said McMini. “Let me turn the light off.”
He turned our three position bedside light onto medium, then bright then straight through off and back onto low several times, so I decided to save McOther’s retinas from a third searing by doing it myself.
“See you later Daddy,” he said.
I’ve managed to distract him with supper, TV and a game of football but he is very keen to take a star wars annual up to Daddy and read to him, even though it’s actually his Dad who’s doing the reading…

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25 Dec 2012 · 1:57 pm

Christmas Bonus

At least, I hope it is. I’m not talking about the Asterix character I mean a sort of present for you lot, who kindly read this. And it’s an excerpt. So what we have here, unedited, raw, unfinished but reasonably well polished is the first chapter from One Man: No Plan, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 3.

This is just to reassure you, that despite the efforts of the Real World, it is still moving. Yeh at glacial speeds but that’s not the point. The point, the big point, is that it hasn’t stopped.

So here it is, Happy Christmas. The sample is a pdf and you can download it by clicking on the link below.

One Man: No Plan, K’Barthan Trilogy: Part 3 chapter sample

Next week, I’ll post another random excerpt from later in the story.

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15 Dec 2012 · 4:27 pm

Hang onto this…

It’s been a tough few weeks. Decidedly grim in fact. My father’s health has taken a turn for the worst. It’s age and atrial affibrilation – which is treated in such a way that gives you brain damage over time so if the person doesn’t die of a stroke or heart attack caused by the atrial affribilation they die over ten or fifteen years from the treatment. It’s a bit of a worry.

So two weeks ago, I had to make a mercy dash down to Dad and Mum. We sorted out a lot of things they will need to help with this, the new level. They have decided to stay home rather than visit my brother’s for Christmas so they will be alone. This is the right decision but it’s sad for my brother and for Dad and Mum. I know they’ll miss each other. As it’s our ‘turn’ to visit McOther’s side of the house there’s very little I can do to help because they’re having an even worse time of it.

One of McOther’s brothers died. Like my Dad, he was unwell but he managed his condition with good humour, common sense and intelligence. We thought he would be around for a lot longer than this. It doesn’t quite seem possible. We got home to discover that my Dad has had another fall but that he and my Mum didn’t want to worry us while we were down at the funeral. They are being well looked after by their ‘network’, which is reassuring but a worry because I can’t see any way I will get near them until after New Year.

McMini was excused school last week and we took him with us. Doubtless some of you will raise your eyebrows at the merits of taking a 4 year old to his uncle’s funeral. The fact is, we wanted to say goodbye and if we want to do something, McMini has to tag along. Because the buck stops with me and his dad. There is no-one we can leave him with. In the event, he coped extremely well.

However, as you can imagine, everything has felt a little unreal the last few weeks. I wondered if that’s why I seem to have kept a level head. Those feelings of unreality insulating me from the truth, but now I think it’s something else.

When we got home we had some parcels to pick up from the Post Office Sorting Office which they’d tried to deliver while we were away. So while McOther and his other brother stayed home with McMini I drove up there to pick up the parcel. On the way home, I went to the supermarket to get some milk. As I bipped my bottles at the auto pay station I could hear the automated voice of the machine beside me saying.

“Unexpected item in bagging area.”

The ‘unexpected item’ turned out to be a two year old girl, ‘helping’ her Mum. It made me laugh and I realised that it’s been these small normal things; shopping, conversations with McMini, washing up the dishes, stuff like that – and, yep, even writing – which has kept me grounded among the unreality of grief. I am a mum and I must look after my son many of these things which, on my own, I might have let slide, have to be attended to. And now I realise that these small events are the solid earth upon which I stand.

It struck me that this aspect of Real Life is relevant to writing fantasy science-fiction. If you want people to get their heads round bizarre creatures and outlandish locations you have to build these things on a credible bedrock. Your readers have to have that level place. There have to be certain generalities of geography or custom – or personality in your characters – for your readers to hang onto if you want them to ‘get’ the rest of it.

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6 Dec 2012 · 10:12 pm

Hello, good evening and thank you.

Yes, thank you to Adam Sifre; Splinker, himself who has interviwed me on his blog here so that I don’t have to write anything. HERE.

Thank you Splinker.

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25 Nov 2012 · 11:37 pm

Glamour, glamour everywhere…

Reading another post today here made me think about whether or not being a writer makes a person a bit different. Is it one of those all-consuming jobs which all but consumes you or is it just necessary to be a couple of bricks short of a hod to even contemplate writing a book.

It would be nice if I could give you a snappy answer. Sadly, I’m not much of a one to give snappy anything. However, for what it’s worth, I do think that if you embark on the process of writing a book with even the remotest idea of what is entailed then you do have to be a little doohlally – or seriously addicted to that feeling of completion. To be honest, I think most people who write stuff do it because they can’t not. Trying to work out where it started in myself is impossible, I started daydreaming too early to actually remember the point when I began but I think something that has helped me to have ideas, or at least gestated the whole writing thing, is seeing the world cinematically.

Approximately 100 years ago, when I lived in London, I used to ‘enjoy’ if that’s the right word, a 50 minute commute – well it was 50 minutes unless I walked briskly up the hill to West Hampstead and took the train. Then it was a 20 minute walk and a 10 minute sauna courtesy of Network South East… if I took the tube, the sauna was 20 minutes but It didn’t begin until Baker Street. The exercise was nice but I have an idea that most people in the carriage with me saw their commute as a boring section of downtime – you couldn’t do anything constructive like read a book because by the time the train got to Kilburn (or West Hampstead if it was a non-rainy, let’s-do-the-20-minute-yomp-up-the-hill morning) it was rammed and a spare seat was rarer than unicorn pooh. For my own part, I saw it as an opportunity to listen to music without the remotest feeling of guilt that I should be doing something more edifyinge [I know, typo, but it’s so Pythonesque that I couldn’t bring myself to remove it… sorry]. So, even though you practically had to take out a mortgage to buy one in those days – a bit like buying anything made by Apple – I bought a personal stereo.

Nothing prepared me for the inside-your-head sensation of listening to a Walkman for the first time. Blimey! And when you actually… well.. walk about with one on, I mean, in a town. The minute the first notes hit my ears the rain-sodden drabness of North London was suddenly sparkling with cinematic fairy dust. Every dreary concrete vista gained a panoramic grandeur. My mundane, farty little life was all big screen drama. Soon it was impossible to go anywhere without the musical accompaniment required to turn each dull tramp into a music video, a cut scene from Bladerunner, a piece of film noir or a scene from StarWars… It wasn’t long before the music carried my imagination away beyond London, and every morning, while the rest of me blundered robotically through the streets; fodder for the foetid belly of the train, my mind wandered the roads and cities of K’Barth.

One of the few things I miss about my life pre-McMini is being able to listen to music like that. I miss the big screen experience of every day life. The curtailment of my own peculiar brand of ‘home’ cinema is probably one of the main reasons why I had to write things down. Because my brain had become used to wandering off and wouldn’t come in from the wild.

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29 Oct 2012 · 5:38 pm

Mini Man Says….

This afternoon, McMini approached me with his doctor’s kit and explained that he was going to ‘make me better’. He sat me down on the sofa with his medical case and protective knight’s helmet beside him and got to work. He selected the special looky-in-the-eary-thing. No idea what its technical name is.

“First I will look in your ear,” he says and proceeded to do so.
“Anything in there?” I asked him.
“No.”
“Do you need to look in the other one?”
“No, I saw right through to the other ear from this side.”

I admit I’m a bit of an airhead but not that much, surely. Then he gets out the reflex testing hammer.

“Now I must put on my hat to protect me if bits fly off your elbows. Please roll up your sleeves, Mummy.” He put on the knight helmet and proceeded to tap my elbows very gently with the hammer.

Then he listened to my tummy with the stethascope.

“Mmm. Your tummy is full of bugs. I will have to kill them.”
“Oh dear,” I said.
“Scissors,” he said holding them up. “Open wide.”

Other gems he has come out with include.

“Rain is like wee falling from the sky.”

“If you’re not careful you will get dirty and have purple skin and the purple won’t go away.”

“Turn the lights off please. Thank you. Look! I can see in the dark. It is because I have been eating lots of carrots. I have eaten so many carrots that soon my eyes will pop out and turn red like a dinosaur.”

He is very into dinosaurs at the moment. Last night, he squatted down, looking, to all intents and purposes, as if he was about to have a pooh and started to bounce slightly, humming as he did so. It looked as if he was doing the Mr-Whippy-having-a-crap-joke.

“What are you doing?” I asked, slightly bemused. He smiled up at me and said,
“I am laying my eggs.”
Later I found him squatting down humming but without moving.
“Hello Mummy. Now I am sitting on my eggs,” he told me.

Today we went to a Dr Who exhibition at my local museum. It was great. I’d like to go again, but I doubt I’ll make it. It’s only on for a week but there was a worksheet and a prize draw and I didn’t get to totally fill it in. Mwah ha hargh, no! Not for ME; for McMini.

At the end we spent a lot of time looking at a life size Dalek, one of the really early ones, pre my era (mine are the 73/74 ones). I came under heavy bombardment to buy one of the souvenir Dr Who action figures – the Daleks were well cool but £15 a pop – so I demurred and promised him one when we got home as I have a few spares in my collection of shame.

When we came home, McMini proudly told McOther about the ‘garlic’ he’d seen while I chortled into my hand. McOther didn’t seem to get it. I went and got a Dalek for McMini which he proudly rushed downstairs to show McOther. It was only then that the dear man realised what a ‘garlic’ was. He thought we’d been to the cook shop. Phnark.

Finally… he’s doing phonetics at the moment so he has a song about the letters c and k which he sings. He whispered it very quietly to me in church.

“Well done, that’s great,” I said when he’d finished.
“K, k, k, kite, kit, kate, can’t, CUNT!” he shouted. It was very innocent, he was just making noises but… hmm.

Never let it be said that having kids is dull!

Stop Press: He has just asked if I could show him some “pictures all about onions” on the computer.
“Onions?” I said. “Do you mean Daleks?”
“Yes! Garlics.”

Latest (20:30): Apparently he went upstairs to find McOther shouting, “Extra-erminate!”

He will kill me for this when he’s grown up… 😉

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5 Oct 2012 · 10:38 am

It’s World James Bond Day!

It’s World James Bond Day! And, as somebody who was never the same again after watching The Spy Who Loved Me and You Only Live Twice. I couldn’t let it go unmarked. OK so StarWars played a big part too, or at least the fact I saw The Spy Who Loved Me and the first StarWars film, pretty much back to back.

However, this is World James Bond Day so we won’t complicate things with StarWars, suffice it to say that I would probably write historical novels if I hadn’t witnessed George Lucas’ clever way of getting sword fights, which are, after all, BRILLIANT, into a sci-fi film. OK back to the programme… World James Bond Day.

The Spy Who Loved Me is not the best Bond film but it’s the first grown up film I saw, in a cinema… in Norwich, believe it or not. And it had that big base… with all the stuff… and of course… THE LOTUS.

Yes, THIS Lotus. Thank you instableblogsimages.com for the picture.

Let’s face it, that’s a snurd in submariner mode. Proof positive that I didn’t really invent them. Sorry about that. So for all my policy of only writing about things I’ve made up (so nobody can send me an irate e-mail saying ‘how dare you! You’ve got dwarves COMPLETELY WRONG!’) snurds, or at least the idea of cars that fly, go under water, turn into boats, shoot guns, blow caravans out of our path and other things we wished they do, is pretty much public domain. Snurds are just my version.

So after the StarWars Spy Who Loved Me combo, my dolls were suddenly spies with a space base. Imagine how overjoyed my Mum was when she examined the Pippa space ship I’d been taking to school for a week close up and discovered that in pride of place, as the central control panel, was the used Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-etc blister pack from her contraceptive pill. Suddenly I was gluing wings on my toy cars, buying airfix models of cars and aeroplanes and melding them into… well, yes, even then I called them Snurds.

Every day as I sat, in my Mum and Dad’s classy Peugeot 304 (don’t knock ’em they were brilliant) in the Worthing rush hour traffic (yes, we have rush hour in Worthing) on my way to school, I fantasised that it was Emma-Peel-Lotus-shaped and we were sprouting wings, executing a vertical take off and flying away. I suppose where I differ is that I did expect, at some point, to grow out of fantasising about snurds. But fortunately it never happened.

The year I saw The Spy Who Loved Me was also the point at which I found an old box, wrote “Lotus” on it in biro and started saving up for one. I wanted one of these.

Or do I mean these…?

I finally achieved my dream when I was 33. Sadly, in 11 years, I failed to access the All Purpose Torpedoes and I never found its wings button. I’ve just traded it in for a new one, although I’m afraid, so far, that one doesn’t seem to have a wings button, either.

Lotus Engineering, are you listening? You really need to make a snurd.

If you really like them, you can purchase snurd-related merchandise – and K’Barthan-related but let’s face it, the snurds are the best bit. It includes t-shirts, hoodies, mugs, post cards and the like from www.zazzle.co.uk/drawnbyhand*

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