Tag Archives: author blogs

25 Nov 2017 · 12:10 pm

Coming to terms with #dementia

For some time now, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a blog, or a website, specifically dedicated to my experience of dementia; with my dad, mainly, but also, these days, with my mum since she, too, is getting very forgetful.

However, it seems far more sensible to do it all on here. The subject matter on here is so random anyway that I doubt many of you will take exception to the more detailed post about my dementia-related experiences every now and again. If you look at the menu, there’s now a dementia section and all the posts which mention Dad’s Alzheimer’s are tagged Dementia and should appear there. Obviously, in true M T McGuire form, it would be pointless talking about my situation if I didn’t occasionally share a list of things that have either worked to keep me sane or that I’ve fucked up royally so that you don’t have to. This isn’t exactly that list but below are some of my less than ordered thoughts on the subject.

Here are the golden highlights of coping with dementia, in yourself or in others.

Be not proud! And be absolutely up front with people.

Yes, you read that correctly. All will become clear.

The first sign that something was amiss with my dad was when my parents refused to come and stay. Our spare room was on the top floor and the loo was in the middle. Dad always needed a wee in the night and he began to wake up in a very disorientated state.  Mum didn’t always wake up too and she was afraid he’d fall down our stairs. So for three years, from about 2004, they refused point blank to come and see us. Mum never told me what was wrong, she just made up excuses. She’s bollocks at making up excuses so I assumed I’d upset her but she said I hadn’t. I got very down. I didn’t know what to do.

Luckily, I have a brother so I rang him and asked him what the fuck my parents were up to. He didn’t know either but said he’d ask them. When he broached the topic with Mum she told him at once. So it was he who explained about the stairs, about Dad going weird in the night and Mum’s concerns. The last eighteen months we were in that house Mum and Dad started coming to see us again. We were in a small market town with a perfectly decent hotel and a lot of equally decent guest houses. We put them up in one, within walking distance of our house. The moral of this story then, be honest, because when trouble crops up, there’s usually a work around.

Mum could have saved herself and us heartache if she’d just admitted that Dad had a tendency to get dizzy when he got up in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t have even had to mention the dooh-lally part. Likewise, I could have saved myself a lot of heartache if I’d read the signs and worked out that something was wrong earlier or just asked my brother sooner. But hey ho, it all worked out in the end.

Act early.

These things are like the flight path of a landing aeroplane. You sink, level out, sink, level out and so on to the bottom of the chasm. If you can manage to think ahead a bit, to what the next level of deterioration might be, you can save yourself a lot of grief. It’s hard to look at the next stage of the illness when you,are losing your mind or when a loved one is losing theirs. Naturally you don’t want to think about it, but trust me, for the sake of everyone concerned it helps. For a long time, Mum and Dad seemed to be in denial. Mum kept a very close eye on Dad and I watched her sinking. Imagine if you are eighty and you are looking after someone who is, essentially, a giant two year old. As a mum with a two year old of my own, I knew how hard I found it to keep my eye on him all the time. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be to cope when you are elderly.

Talk about it.

Mum and Dad are actually very good at this, they have talked to me, extensively, about being mortal, I know what kinds of funerals they want, what kinds of hymns, what kind of goodbye. I suspect they’ve willed money for a piss up wake. They also talked to me about what might happen if they went nuts well in advance of any dementia appearing. In Mum’s case we have talked about how she felt when she was in a similar position to that which I’m in now, looking after my granny. My grandmother had lots of small strokes, micro bleeds at the back of her head and as Mum puts it, ‘she just faded away’. For her last year my granny was lying on a bed in a home. In those days there were no living wills or powers of attorney for healthcare. Even so, when my granny got pneumonia, they asked my Mum what kind of treatment she would want, Mum said to make her comfortable. They did, she got better without the life prolonging drugs and died peacefully a few months later.

In her last year, as well as being bed-bound, my granny couldn’t speak and made no signs of recognising Mum’s presence. Mum used to go and see her and sit there crying quietly for forty minutes. The staff in that home were wonderful, and were wonderful to Mum, too. They assured her that my granny was different, more peaceful, even calmer, after a visit. They took the time to see that Mum was OK too. Mum and I still talk about this, and I really wish I’d been able to have the same kinds of conversations with Dad about his dad, who also ended up in a home. It’s hard to talk about these things, but if you can open up to someone you trust it will help and it will also give your carers a feel for what your wishes will be, and how you will want to be treated, when you are no longer able to tell them.

If you are the carer, it’s worth making sure you have someone to talk to and if the main carer is not you it’s worth finding someone for them. There is a lovely lady who comes to see Mum who is the deacon at her church. I saw the lady talking to Mum one time when she was in hospital and couldn’t speak. I asked Mum, afterwards, if it would help to see this lady often. She said it would. She never rang the deacon herself, so I did and now she comes to visit Mum regularly. I know it helps.

People want to help you. Let them and if you can’t let them down kindly.

There are a lot of people around my mum and dad who love them almost as much as I do. They are sad to see people they love and respect struggling. Sometimes it’s hard to accept that the people who love you may be even more upset about your illness than you are. So if you or a loved one are in similar poop, and people offer to help you, let them. Mum and Dad have a big group of folks who give them lifts, pop in to visit, pick up shopping sometimes or generally help out. I think they had a hard time accepting help from these folks at the start but now they revel in it. They get continuity in that these are people they’ve known for some years, yet they also have variety in that it’s not the same old faces. Likewise for the helpers, there are enough of them to avoid fatigue setting in. Despite his dementia, my father is a very social animal, and this has helped him stay with us for far longer. Likewise, Mum and Dad have a four carer team but they also employ a cleaning lady for a couple of hours a week and a family who work in the garden. These folks all give support that goes well beyond their job descriptions. They do this because when Mum and Dad were fitter and younger they were good to these folks. I’m a great believer in karma now that I’ve seen it in action on my folks. So if people offer help, and it’s useful help, let them. Pride has no place in this.

But at the same time, set parameters for your helpers.

If anyone helping you, or your loved one, gets too clingy or too overbearing, tell them. When you are ill and losing your capacity to process everything but your emotions, you don’t have time to put up with anything that will make it worse. So if someone who wants to help is … well … not helping, you have to tell them. Or if you can’t, you have to find someone who can and ask them to do it for you.

My mum loves her garden. She sees it as a living thing, an entity which must be treated with kindness and sympathy. However, she is very arthritic and once Dad had started to get really forgetful, it was too much for her to do on her own. There was a point where the chap who was coming to do the garden kept cutting down the wrong things, pruning stuff wrong, planting vegetables in the wrong places, forgetting to water them etc and you could see that something inside Mum was curling up and dying along with her plants, but she couldn’t let him go. She couldn’t face the hassle of finding a new gardener while she was trying to look after Dad, or, indeed, the hard task of telling the current one she no longer needed his services. Her heart was so full from the pain of seeing her soul mate, my father, her husband, in such distress.

In the end, after a family holiday, my Mum became very ill with pleurisy. At this point, Dad had reached the point where he was so forgetful that he couldn’t cook or look after her the way he would have done. My brother and sister in-law went to stay and they gave the gardener notice and employed the people who do it now. My mum almost cried with relief and the ‘new’ gardeners are wonderful and love Mum and Dad dearly.

Moral, don’t wait for the crash. Take action first.

Avoid being too proud.

Mum is of the old school where she believes that if Dad is ill she should look after him herself and that nobody should know about his disability for as long as possible. But actually, when you’re in your eighties, you can’t look after someone who weighs about eighteen stones, can’t wash himself and has to be talked through the process of going to the bathroom every two hours hours, every night. You need help.

When Mum finally agreed to let someone come and sit with Dad for an hour, three afternoons a week, so she could get out into the garden, she blossomed. And the lady who came round did the ironing and all sorts of other stuff that Mum was struggling with fitting in around caring for Dad. So it helped in all sorts of other ways she hadn’t anticipated. It also meant there was no longer the danger of Dad coming out into the garden looking for Mum and falling down. The carer would bring him out, with his walker, and sit with him.

Even if your loved one seems gone, keep searching.

Dad is very different to how he was. He’s the same person, but he’s a different incarnation of that person, the raw genetic make up. He has lost his filters, his ability to moderate what he says and he has become very much more self centred. Just as a child learns to think about others, so as he regresses to a more simplified state of self, Dad has lost that skill. It’s not his fault. It’s just the way it is.

He can no longer read, his ability to read a novel was one of the first things to go but he is unable to read even short stuff now. It’s interesting that Mum writes herself notes, but even at the start, if she wrote a note for Dad and put it by the clock saying, ‘went out to garden at ten to three back in for tea at four’ he would not think to read it or look at the clock. This was so early on, when he was just my dad with no short term memory. These days he can be a little boorish, which is incredibly sad because Old Dad would be horrified if he could see himself like that. But a lot of the times, the boorishness is asking for help. ‘I can’t get a word in edgeways,’ means, ‘your sentences are too long for me to follow, can you slow down.’ The answer is to speak in short sentences, starting with a shared memory and then as the conversation gets going, you can bring it forward to the now. Lo and behold! Before you know it, back comes Dad. Reaching Dad is all about trying new things. When the landscape of his mind changes, you just experiment until you get him back again.

It’s OK to grieve for someone before they go.

Although I’d recommend keeping it to short bursts. But sometimes you need to cry. Or just drive up to the top of a hill and shout your anger into the wind – my parents live near the South Downs so that’s quite easy for me. But yes, while my dad is still himself in some ways, I still pine for the refined non-raw version. But I also hear him, I hear him in the way I talk to my son, in the anarchic conversations we share, I hear him as I tell my son to get into bed! And that if he could manage to clean his teeth sometime before I die of old age it would be wonderful. I hear my dad speaking through me as I comfort my son after a bad dream. I remember who Dad can be, over and above the raw genetic version I have now, and it’s extremely important to me that I do, that I keep sight of the man who is in there still, but who the present Dad can’t be. And I cry. But that’s OK. Sometimes you need to cry. Ration yourself, though. Indulge your grief too much and it’ll take you under but bottling it up is also unhelpful.

Sometimes your loved one’s disease will speak more loudly than they do.

My dad says some seriously inappropriate things but it’s just his illness talking. It’s hard to accept that sometimes, especially when the person says something that upsets you, but you have to let it go. If you can, it will allow the relationship between you on good days to be much more similar to the old one before the dementia came.

Make the most of the good days.

Need I say more? Enjoy them. Do stuff. Go out on a whim. My parents are the most social dementia sufferers I’ve ever met. They still go out, visit friends, have lunch with people … It says a lot for their friends, too, that they are so accepting.

Pace yourself.

Being a carer is hard. It can fill up your life, suck up your emotional energy, sap your physical energy, your strength of spirit and your creative mojo. Alzheimer’s is a long, slow death of a thousand tiny cuts. To put it in perspective, Terry Pratchett was diagnosed four years after Dad began to deteriorate. Dad’s still around. It’s been about fourteen years, the last nine or ten that we’ve really known something was wrong, but … fourteen for Mum, definitely. Not a barrel of laughs.

The truth is, no matter how much you may love the person in your life who is ill, you cannot give your all for that amount of time. You have to ration how much you give. You have to look after yourself, leave time for yourself, or you will go under and then you’ll be no use to anyone. And if you aren’t the main carer and they are neglecting their own sanity and health, you have to make them understand this as well. As it’s often said, this is a marathon, not a sprint. You can’t run twenty four miles at the same speed as Usain Bolt.

Do what’s right for them: it usually works out.

There was a point when I would worry that Mum and Dad were so far away. It was difficult to get them into a home because Mum was far too well to go into a home and she refused to send Dad into one alone. My brother and I discussed moving them nearer one of us but if we did that, which one of us would it be? We live on different sides of the country. So they stayed put in their own home and I worried that if something happened, and I couldn’t drop everything and be with them, I would have to let them fall. Indeed, eventually, I did.

Mum had a stroke and went into hospital in March 2016. At least by this time we had the afternoon carer and an agency helping Mum and Dad get up in the mornings. I had to ring the lovely lady who would look after my dad in the afternoons and ask her to sleep with my dad so I could drive down to Sussex and be with my Mum. I remember sitting with Mum in hospital at three am. They asked her where she was, she said she was at home, they said she was confused, I told them no, she was having trouble speaking and that what she meant was, she was with me. They finally got her onto a ward at five and at six they told me I should go because the car park was free until six am. I slept two hours that night. Mum came home at three in the afternoon. I had to try and look after both of them. It was horrific. I slept two nights with Dad while Mum slept in another room. Then my boy needed to go to school and my husband to work. I had to go home. I hired a care agency for the following week and my brother came down for the next three nights.

There was a week of special hell while we got a care team sorted. Mum refused to accept she needed live in care, but she kept falling asleep with things on the stove and burning saucepans, and she was getting very forgetful. My brother and I wanted to move them near one of us but they both refused. Now that we have their lovely care team in place I realise they are so much better off where they are, where they have friends and where they have lived for over 40 years.  Once they had twenty four hour care, keeping them in their own home was a no-brainer. Thanks to their fantastic care team, they now enjoy a social life far and above anything I could deliver if they came to live here. They are in the right place for them even if there were points when my brother and I felt like it was the wrong place for us.

Make time for yourself.

When you have children, people say you must keep something that you do just for you; continue your career, a part-time job, a hobby, whatever; something that validates your humanity as something other than your little one’s mum. Something that is not about motherhood. Something that is about YOU. It is very hard to squeeze that in when you are trying to care for elderly parents and a small person at the same time.

That is why, even though I have to fight for the time to write and struggle to find ways of putting my head anywhere close to a place where it’s possible, I can’t give up on it. Because I have to hang onto something that makes me who I am; something that defines me as someone other than Mum and Dad’s daughter, or McMini’s Mum, but ME; Mary.

You cannot self actualise though the job you do, but likewise, you are more than the visits, the form filling, the planning, the admin. Give yourself you time. Allow yourself to be human. You are a person in your own right, you are important as well. Allow time to be you.

Conclusion

Well … that was a bit of a monster, wasn’t it? But in a short snappy sentence, I guess the nub of it is this: when a loved one is long-term ill then, if you want to look after them, you have to look after you.

Chilling is important.

 

8 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , ,

12 Nov 2017 · 3:27 pm

When it feels right but is … wrong. #writing #indiebooks

This week: you have another opportunity to benefit from the vast store of wisdom I have earned by royally fucking things up so that you don’t have to.  

It started like this.

Wednesday; visit the parents day, and this week I arrived in extremely dire need of a wee. It is fairly usual that the pint of water and two cups of coffee I need to kick start my day turn into about five pints by the time I’ve driven fifty miles or thereabouts and I drive the next ninety in some agitation. This Wednesday was no exception.

At Mum and Dad’s the downstairs loo is just off the lobby before you go into the house proper and I usually use it before I announce my presence, otherwise the ten minutes of hellos can be a bit excruciating for my poor bladder. Into the loo I rushed, and breathed a huge sigh of relief as what felt like about a gallon of wee went into the pan. Except that each of the lavs at Mum and Dad’s has a riser for people with dodgy hips, and if you sit on the riser in the downstairs loo wrong, the wee runs down the inside of it and despite being positioned over the bowl, the gravitational wonders of surface tension bend the wee round and under the edge of the riser and it then falls over the side of the pan onto the floor. Well, it came from a skip, still in its wrapping, you can’t look a gift horse in the mouth. But yes, you guessed it. A significant portion of my wee deluge had missed the pan entirely and puddled on the floor.

Joy.

The original dribbly-wee loo riser of doom (centre) among other skip scored offerings.

There I was. I’d done the right thing, sat on loo, weed into hole but somehow, despite following the instructions it had all gone somewhat awry. I spent the next five minutes wiping it up with loo roll and anti bacterial floor spray. It’s not just me, the foibles of this particular loo riser are a known problem and I soon had it all ship shape again with no harm done. The point was, sometimes, even when you do things the right way it all goes horribly wrong.

So how does this tale of substandard urinary aim have any connection with writing?

Well, it’s like this.

There’s a quote that appears on something I use – my Kobo Writing Life dashboard, I think – that goes like this:

‘If you want to read a book that has not been written yet, you must write it.’

Way back in 2008 when I finally finished my first decent novel that is, exactly what I had done. But to be honest, while this is great advice, it only works if you are in touch with the popular Zeitgeist on some level. I sell my books on the internet which, to all intents and purposes, is American. It is devilishly hard to reach non Americans but back then it was even harder (except on Amazon at that point).

Therefore, I shot myself in the foot instantly by writing a very British book set, mostly, in a fantasy world but when it came here, it came to London. Yes Dr Who is like that but it was put on by the BBC and when they first did it, they had a captive audience comprising all of Britain. I wrote British because I was bored of books and films where the main protagonists are American and the setting America. I wanted to see some shizz go down in my own country. What I failed to grasp was that there is a reason the vast majority of books are about Americans in America. It’s to connect with Americans; the biggest and most easily reachable group of readers in the market place.

Yes, I’d done kind of the right thing but … wrong.

The problem wasn’t even that I was writing a book that could well hold more appeal to British or Australasian readers. It was that I hadn’t researched my market – I thought I had but, no. That’s why I didn’t understand how hard to find they would be. It hadn’t even occurred to me that I would be unable to reach British readers without taking special measures. OK so that was 2008 but even now, in 2017, you have to work at finding international readers and even harder at finding readers who buy from sites other than Amazon.

Likewise, I’d read a lot of Victorian and Edwardian fantasy: the Narnia Books, The Five Children and It, The Incredible Mr Blenkinsop (I think that was its name) the Borrowers, the Wind in the Willows, The Lord of The Rings. I’d seen films like Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Mary Poppins and Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang, I’d read Harry Potter and Terry Pratchett. In most of those books, the writer has invented a completely new world, or a new creature, or a new something. The point is, while they may have broad themes that are similar, good versus evil baddie, etc, each one takes place in its own fantasy world or hidden world within this one, often there are specific and new creatures created for purpose of the story. The notable exception is Terry Pratchett, who took the tropes other people used and poked gentle fun at them.

In the same way that I thought, at my parents, that rushing into the bog, sitting down on the ice cold, thigh freezing riser and letting it all out was enough, and discovered that oh it so wasn’t, I genuinely thought putting my book on sale and supporting my efforts with advertising on the big promo sites was all it would take to find readers. It wasn’t. I wrote weird books, that are funny and I had covers made expressly to say, ‘this book is like nothing you have ever read’ because when people saw my books, I wanted them to think, ‘Pratchett’. When I got reviews that said that, I quoted them. I wrote my book the old way. The E Nesbitt way. And I sold that as an asset … the wrong way.

When people talk about wanting ‘different’ I suspect that what they really mean is that they want the same old ware wolves and sparkly vampires but with … say … slightly different lighting.

That is where Sir Terry cleaned up. He kept to the standard tropes, and spun them differently. If you want to succeed financially, I think, possibly, the trick is to write something bang on genre that has a different angle; a standard, boilerplate, trope made interesting enough to you for you to be able to stand writing in it.

When it comes to making choices, I guess it’s wise to think through the ramifications, but with writing it’s hard to anticipate what they might be sometimes. If you like writing wacky but want to produce a well edited book with a professional cover, it’s worth looking at how much cash you have to throw at it and how long for. When I started this game, the estimate was that once you’d produced six books you’d reach tipping point; momentum would be easier to maintain and sales would rise.

‘Great!’  I thought, ‘I have budget for six novels.’

Now that I’m writing my sixth book, that magic tipping point number is more like twelve! Things change and move. How long can you sustain your business without making a profit? OK now double it. Hell, quadruple it to be safe.

Likewise, when you plan what you’re going to do to reach readers, I’d thoroughly recommend keeping as much of it under your control as you can. This is why so many writers ask readers to sign up to their mailing lists. I had an amazing three months back in 2014 when I optimised my book listings for UK readers and started getting a ton of downloads on Amazon and, even better, a really good read through rate – seriously it was massive, about 20% of the folks downloading the first book bought the others But then Amazon changed the algo – which they do around April or May each year, it seems. Overnight the downloads of the free book ceased. And that was that.

These days, however many author lists readers are signing up to, I still believe that if you can make your emails personal, fun and interesting enough they will stay with you. Just don’t make them too fun or your readers will sign up for the emails rather than your books or if they do, be prepared to monetise your blog posts, newsletter etc – either as non fiction books or paid content. The great thing about mailing lists is that if someone doesn’t get on with your books they can unsubscribe so you should end up with a list of folks who might, eventually, read your books! If you’re really lucky, some will part with cash for them.

Once you have some readers, it’s also worth listening to them. I always sold my books as fantasy and when asked to cite comparable writers I’d suggest Holt, Prachett, Rankin … When people started reviewing them, the bulk of them cited Douglas Adams. I now publish them in sci-fi. They don’t sell as well there as they did in the days when I could put them in fantasy and they’d be actually visible. But now that fantasy is kind of, ware wolves and shifters with a small corner for epic, my books definitely do better in sci-fi! Sci-fi seems a bit less rigid in the genre factors required, too, hence the next series, Space Dustmen, is going to be sci-fi with the odd planetary visit.

To sum up, what I am trying to say, I guess, is that now, more than ever, you need to think long and hard before you even start to write that book and you need to keep pretty nimble afterwards. So, if you’re thinking having a pop at writing or are working on your first book, maybe you should ask yourself these questions:

  1. Who are you are writing for?
  2. Where you you find them?
  3. Can you find them easily and inexpensively?
  4. How often do the authors they read release new books?
  5. Can you keep up with book production rates for your genre? or to put it another way …
  6. How much time do you have? Even if you give up your job.
  7. What kind of writing career will fit with your life?
  8. How and where will you sell your books – it’s no good being wide if everyone in your genre whose books you like and who might like yours too and do mailing swaps or promos with you is in KU.
  9. How long before you need your books to start funding themselves to keep going?
  10. Are there other ways you can monetise your writing to support book production until such stage as your book business is self financing.
  11. How big is your social media following? Are you up to a kickstarter to fund book production?

The way I see it there are two broad choices about what you decide to write.

The first choice is to conform. You, write to market, so if it’s fantasy, you write about ware wolves or witches and yes you light them differently or whatever it takes and you write about six books (minimum) a year. And you thank your lucky stars you’re not in Romance where you have to write one a month!

Alternatively if you really can’t face the prospect of writing about creatures someone else has already invented or making your hero American, or 101 other must haves for the best selling book, accept that you are unlikely to earn diddly squat for a long, long time and just go for it writing the kind of stuff you love, that fulfils you as a reader and writer, stuff you want to read that hasn’t been written yet. But if you choose this route, you have to be extremely pragmatic about your chances of earning anything for many years and extremely lateral and original about what you do to earn from your books in other ways.

It’s quite good if you can avoid combining motherhood to a small child and trying to look after sick, elderly parents, at the same time as trying to have any sort of career, too.

This is where I am right now. But hey, my sixth book will be out next year and who knows, 2027 I may even have written twelve and if I market the hell out of them, well who knows, they might pay for the thirteenth book.

Mwahahahargh! I can dream.

11 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

14 Oct 2017 · 2:22 pm

Excerpt from one of the W.I.P.s #amwriting #comedybooks

This week, another joyous example of the logic of children. The children in question being me and my brother. This is also another story that will be making it into my family stories book: Setting Tripwires for Granny (and other tall family tales). And yes, as per, neither my brother nor I is reflected in the best of lights. Anyway, enjoy.

No parking …

When he hit the age of eight, my parents made the difficult decision to send my brother to a nearby boarding school. According to Mum, he was beginning to strongly resent the amount of time Dad spent in the house and wasn’t enjoying living in a school. So off he went.  It sounds draconian but by the time the events in this story happened he’d been there some time and was thoroughly enjoying it.

Every Sunday, we picked him up and he came home for the day to have lunch with us. Four weekends each term he was allowed home for the night and these weekends were red letter occasions. At the end of each Sunday, my brother had to be back in school at around six pm. Meanwhile, the boys at Lancing who’d been out for the weekend, or the day, had to come back, too. Lancing operated with Saturday night out every other weekend and the boys (and the girls, there were girls in the sixth form at that point) had to return for evensong at six pm. This meant there was always a difficulty with us leaving when the tide of traffic up the drive was coming the other way.

The building we lived in fronted onto the car park for the next door house, Fields. We had a small fenced off terrace, but otherwise it was Fields House parking and then Fields House Lawn. Obviously, there were usually cars parked everywhere. There was one particularly tidy spot at the end of our terrace but if anyone parked there, the angle was such that you couldn’t get our car out of our garage. Usually Mum remembered to get the car out before the boys came back and then park it in a lay by a little further down the school drive so the family cars of the Fields House boys wouldn’t box it in.

However, on this occasion, our car was still in the garage. When Mum found out it was boxed in, we knew she would be all in a dither. She’d have to venture into the twilight zone that was Fields and find the owner. It was a job of sleuthing that always took ages and on one ghastly occasion the person was in chapel. Mum was not good company when she was all in a dither so as far as we kids were concerned, anyone who was inconsiderate enough to put her there was bad news.

One day, when my brother came home for the weekend it snowed. We were only a couple of miles from the sea so this was something of a rarity although it did tend to hang around slightly longer, on top of our hill, than it did in the valley. After a weekend of high jinx, snowman building and tobogganing it was nearly time for my brother to go back to school. With twenty minutes left, some parents turned up and buttonholed my Mum and Dad in the kitchen. My brother and I were upstairs, looking out of his bedroom window when we noticed that there was a car parked in The Spot; the one that blocked our garage. We knew two things about this car.

First, we knew that Mum had already asked the owners not to park there on other occasions, two, it was occupied. There was a woman sitting in it reading a book. We knew a third thing, too; Mum hadn’t moved our car yet, it was still in the garage.

My brother immediately had horrors about Mum failing to get the car out in good time and him being late back to school. I should point out here that, for him, being late to school involved missing a meal rather than missing evensong which was an altogether more disastrous outcome for a ten year old boy. And also there were plenty of other parking spaces, the car didn’t need to be parked there. As kids, it never occurred to us that Mum had probably seen it too, and seen the woman in there, so known she could just pop out and ask when the time came. No, all we saw was bad person parked in bad car.

We opened the window to get a better view and we looked at the car. It was something big, executive and expensive; a Merc or a Jag.

‘Let’s give it a couple of minutes,’ my brother said. ‘If it doesn’t move, I’ll tell Mum.’

It didn’t move and Mum was still busy with Dad and the parents in the kitchen.

Perhaps we could help Mum by making the car move ourselves?

We would ask but the lady was unlikely to pay any attention to our request because we were children. And anyway where’s the fun in that?

I think it was my idea to go downstairs, out of the door at the other side of the house, onto the upper quad, make a couple of snowballs and bring them back. One of the wonders of living in a school is the weirdness of the accommodation; a handful of rooms, miles of corridor and an astounding variety of exits, should the incumbent housemaster wish to escape from rampaging parents, or the kinds of talkative ones he couldn’t afford to let himself run into when he was late for lessons—housemasters pack a lot into their days so they are usually late for something.

Off we went, sneaking out quietly because we weren’t one hundred percent sure that our parents would approve of our actions, and into the upper quad where we made a couple of snowballs each. Back indoors we trundled, trying not to spill any tell-tale drips of melt water or giggle too loudly as we made our way back up the stairs to my brother’s room where we had opened the window, a fair bit but not too much. Standing well back so that we were indistinguishable to anyone looking up at the windows we lobbed the snowballs out. Our attempts to avoid being seen hampered our aim a bit as it took a fair bit of skill to get the snowball through the window on the right trajectory from a safely anonymous distance back. They landed near the car with a satisfactory splatting noise but not near enough to make an impression on the woman inside. We waited, just to see, but she didn’t react or move the car.

Back down we went through the house, out of the door, down another flight of concrete stairs into the cloisters and through the archway into the quad. We made another couple of snowballs each using the snow on the grass and retraced our steps to my brother’s room. This time one of our efforts skimmed past the wing mirror, sputtering the window with water droplets and the other landed on the roof with a hugely satisfying bonging noise. The woman inside was royally startled from her book and looked about her. We watched from well back as she tried to work out what had happened. Clearly deciding that a lump of snow must have fallen off the roof of our house and hit her vehicle in some freak episode, she settled back into her seat and carried on reading.

She didn’t move the car.

Foiled!

The snowballs weren’t doing enough. Or maybe the rate of fire wasn’t fast enough? Yes, that was it, we decided. We needed more ammo for a sustained attack.

We got the old nappy bucket the lived under the sink in the bathroom and headed down to the quad, filled it with freshly made, if somewhat claggy, snowballs and returned to my brother’s room. Standing well back from the half open window we subjected the car to what I guess you might call a fusillade of snowball fire, culminating in a particularly slushy one, thrown by my brother, which landed with a massive splat right across the windscreen. The woman looked up at the anonymous windows of our house and scratched her head. She seemed thoughtful for a moment but then she did, finally, move the car.

She never parked there again.

PS, if you like the picture you can buy it as a greetings card from here: https://www.zazzle.co.uk/frosty_the_abominable_snowman_card-137112259617806813

7 Comments

Filed under About My Writing, General Wittering, Tall Family Tales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

9 Sep 2017 · 5:46 pm

A surprise house guest.

Today, an experiment. This is a chunk of one of the many works in progress. This one allows me to write when my heart is too full of family stuff to do fictional things. Basically, it’s the folklore of my family, stories passed down, mostly by my Mum so far because they’re easiest to remember but I hope to get some more of my Dad’s, if not from him, then from my uncle. Some are about me and my brother, too. I thought it would make the blog fun but also, reading Dawn French’s biography, there might be some mileage in it as an ebook. If I can make it funny enough.

If …

The appeal is more in the characters involved than in what they actually did, I think, so a lot depends on how much I can bring their personalities out in what I write. At the moment, it tends to be just the bare bones of each story. The stories are officially true yet very possibly embroidered a little. Were we a tribe somewhere, these are the tales the shamen would tell. So this week, I thought I’d share a story about a hurricane we had in Britain. Here it is:

When I was at university, in 1987 there was a hurricane in Britain. They have happened on rare occasions and in this case the hurricane hit Sussex. Obviously, the trees and the houses of the Weald aren’t really designed to take this kind of punishment so there was a fair bit of damage both to houses and trees—half of Chanctonbury Ring disappeared and huge trees were blown down left right and centre, including one in my parents’ garden. Later the tree surgeon who came to fix it (a Mr Fish) said that on the morning of the hurricane it had taken him an hour and a half to drive five miles and he could only do that because he was driving a pick up with tree lifting equipment and a chainsaw in the back!

In the months afterwards, my Great Aunt, who had married a farmer, told me this story about one of the other farmer’s wives she knew.

The lady lived on a farm that had been in her husband’s family many hundreds of years and still occupied the original tudor famhouse. Like most of these, the house had a large chimney in the centre and the rooms were built around it so the chimney kept everything warm. As the winds began to rise, the lady decided that it was probably best to sleep downstairs so she got out a camp bed and bedded down next to the chimney in the central hall, which had the fewest windows. She reckoned it was also the most structurally strong part of the house and therefore the bit most likely to stay upright, and protect her, if the rest of it fell down. The power went off but she had a hurricane lamp and she sat and read for a while and then fell into a fitful sleep.

In the middle of the night she woke up, there was a massive bang and the sound of breaking glass. She guessed it came from the spare room, which was on the side of the house which was being most battered by the wind. She thought about going upstairs to investigate but decided that if the window had blown in there was little she could do other than get herself soaked for no reason and the door was closed, so the mess would be contained in the room, so she stayed put.
In the morning, she looked out of the window and could see bits of tree, garden furniture from the neighbouring farm and other detritus strewn about the lawn and farmyard. Taking her courage in both hands, she went upstairs to the spare room to see how bad the damage was. She opened the door and sure enough the window was smashed. However, the hole was a round hole and she surmised an object of some sort must have been blown through the glass. That’s when she took in the actual room and noticed what the object was. Standing implacably in the middle of the carpet, apparently unharmed, was a sheep.

What happened to the sheep? Well, believe it or not, it was fine. The lady discovered that it came from a field a couple of miles away and that it belonged to a nearby farmer. She had tracked him down and he’d come to fetch it by the end of the day—on foot, with a sheep dog I suspect since most roads were blocked with trees. It had been blown over two miles so it must have had a few stories to tell when it returned to its friends in the fold.

It’s Sean the sheep, it’s Sean the sheep … he even hangs around with those who … actually I’m not sure who he hangs out with to look like this. He was Meditarranean chicken.

11 Comments

Filed under General Wittering, Tall Family Tales

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

2 Sep 2017 · 3:43 pm

Sad

This is a difficult one to write.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I decided I needed to get my books a re-edit.  I’d rewritten bits, added scenes and generally jiggled things about and I wanted someone to go over them. Someone who knew the things I didn’t know like what sized dash to use when and when to use a semi-colon and when to use a colon. I needed a gimlet-eyed grammar spud and the fellow I usually used wasn’t around.

As I pondered whether to wait or find a second editor a post about editing appeared on a blog I follow. I’d give you a link but it isn’t there anymore. After a brief comment saying I thought I needed a line edit and a proof read someone popped up in the comments saying I might not. She said her name was Kate and what she said made a lot of sense. She thought what I might need was just an edit. After a brief conversation in the comments she suggested we moved the conversation to email. She said she was a professional editor and would happily look at some chapters and let me know what needed doing. I said I doubted I could afford her. She said.

‘I’m actually dirt cheap. But I wasn’t offering to work for you, I was saying I would look at something for free and give you a pro opinion.’

So I sent her a chunk – the first ten chapters, I think. She came back with an evaluation, along the lines of, ‘the story is interesting, don’t touch this, this and this it’s fine but I think you should probably fix this and this, and usually that is done like so …’ etc. She asked me a whole raft of questions about how I’d want to hyphenate compound words and other stuff that just wouldn’t have crossed my radar, explaining that I’d need to think about these things so they were always done the same way.

You know how sometimes, when you talk to someone, and you can just tell, at once, that they know what they’re doing? It was like that. I decided to hire her. If she’d agree to work for me. I couldn’t afford her but she was prepared to work in instalments which meant I then could. I asked the author friend who ran the blog where I ‘met’ her if he knew anything about her. Turned out she edited his books and he recommended her highly, so I asked her if she’d work on mine. To my delight, because I’d corresponded with her enough to be pretty sure she was an all round good egg, by now, she agreed.

To start with, she asked me more questions. This took a while and it became evident, very early on, that she had a similarly sarcastic sense of humour to me. She was funny, wise and incredibly kind with her comments – as well as perceptive. Her emails always started with – ‘I like this’ or ‘this was good,’ before she asked for clarification on something that didn’t make sense or suggested a change. She was completely gimlet eyed on continuity and was impressed that I could email her straight back with answers to her questions about the worlds we were working in. I was impressed, in turn, that someone as smart as her could be impressed by anything my brain did!

Kate was absolutely honest, she would not stint in telling you what she thought of something, whether it was bad or good but she could deliver the direst verdict and leave your pride and your feelings in tact. You knew exactly where you were with her. We we spent the next eighteen months exchanging emails most weeks as she sorted me out with a house style for the K’Barthan things and fixed my books. She could make me laugh out loud so the whole process was a complete gas and she was even unfazed when she received an email from my cat.

When we were done, she spent another few months wading through my newly completed book at the time, Escape From B-Movie Hell, then it was the K’Barthan omnibus. She continued to ask a myriad of questions, sought clarification on continuity issues and wrestled with those pesky compound words. All the while she quietly worked her editorial alchemy on my writing so that, without my actually being able to see how she’d done it, she turned my books from not bad to good. I pointed this out and she said,

‘To me, a good editor takes something, makes it better and people don’t realise what has been done, just that it is easy to read.’

She did the same thing for my confidence in my ability, too, because if someone that astute that smart and that mentally agile thinks your stuff is good then you can’t help but believe it is.

Among the talk about the projects in hand, the conversation ranged from pets to cars, to passing (or failing) the pencil test, Christmas, broken down cars, growing vegetables, adopting dogs (her) and cats (me). It really didn’t feel like work at all – I hope it didn’t for her either – yet all the while the project would move quietly onwards, despite the best efforts of fate, power cuts and other sundry disturbances of Gibraltese/Spanish (her) or British (me) life.

Frankly once she’d edited pretty much anything I’d written, and I had nothing new ready, I got serious withdrawal symptoms from our regular contact. But at the same time, we still exchanged regular chats on our respective blogs and as I knew she was working hard editing stuff for other people I tried not to pester her too often unless I stumbled upon something that I thought would really make her laugh.

However, after trouble with the Spanish power companies, she and Adrian, her partner, had to go off grid. So for some weeks the blog went quiet while she researched solar panels, gas fridges, windmills etc. I was therefore delighted when, six months or so after our completing work on the K’Barthan Box Set, I finally finished a short story. We started on it in July and I went on holiday, delighted that we’d be spending a month or so working on it together when I got back. But that was not to be. While I was away, Kate died, suddenly and unexpectedly.

Reading back our correspondence a few days after hearing the news, I found myself crying and laughing at the same time. I am so gutted that she is gone but at the same time, it struck me that I am also incredibly lucky to have worked with someone so multi-faceted, so interesting, such a genuinely good soul. Kate had principles, and she lived by them. I also try to console myself that, though she has gone, she lives on in the books she edited and the reviews she wrote. She is still vibrant and alive on her blog, Roughseasinthemed and in the many comments she wrote on the blogs of others. And she lives on in the hearts of all the people who were touched by her generosity of spirit and all round brilliance.

RIP, Kate Jackson. And thank you.

 

 

30 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , ,

26 Aug 2017 · 12:00 pm

Books anyone? A few words about MTMail, building a fanbase and Instafreebie. #bookmarketing

Building a mailing list or a fanbase.

Clearly every author wants to be successful, and the ones who are often make it look easy. But usually their success is the result of a great deal of hard graft behind the scenes. Yep, that swan-like author floating effortlessly across the retail waters is paddling like crazy under the surface.

There are many factors which can help an author to succeed but one that is key is an engaged and enthusiastic fanbase. People do business with people. Sure, they have to like your books but it helps a lot if they like you, too. Today, I’m going to give you a brief# explanation of how you can use Instafreebie to help grow your newsletter list and start to build that fanbase.

# Actually it’s not brief at all, it’s incredibly long, as usual, because I wrote it, but I hope it is useful.

If the idea of building a fanbase or a mailing list makes you feel like this, read on.

Ditch your preconceptions

Forget any tendency to view other writers as ‘the competition’. Since all anyone needs to access pretty much the entire world ebook market is a computer and an internet connection there’s room enough for each of us to find our niche. Think about it, one thing that unites readers is that they love books, and that means they read lots of them, and surely that means they’re going to love more than one author, just as they’ll like more than one band, or more than one TV show. Readers can, and do, follow lots of authors, while being big fans of them all.

Give your work away free.

Yes, I know this sounds counter intuitive but it does work. Preferably some of your best stuff so they’ll read it and think, ‘blimey this writer’s good! I must have more of that.’

Alternatively, only give your book away in exchange for the reader’s email address. That way you can let them know where to buy the rest of your books – should they want to – in a non-pushy, I’ll-just-leave-that-here kind of way. After which, it’s best to forget about trying to sell them things for a while and get on with the business of building a relationship with them. This is a long term strategy. Most readers have a big to read list and lots of books vying for their attention but the sooner you start, the sooner you will build up a rapport with them.

Work with other authors.

A group of people can be heard a lot more easily than one lone voice. That’s why authors often join together in groups and promote their books together. Target who you work with, make sure their books are in the same, or a similar, genre to yours so you are recommending the kind of things your readers are interested in.

It’s tempting to cast the net wide and go for numbers, but remember, you are aiming to bring together a group of readers who love your stuff and your genre. A huge list of 8,000 people sounds great but if only 100 of them open your newsletters you’re just wasting each other’s time. You’re building a fanbase, remember, and these are people, not Pokemon cards.

Once you’ve sorted some authors to work with, there are two main ways you can help each other:

  1. Individual Mailing Swaps. Find an author who writes similar books to you. Then organise it so they tell their readers about your book and you tell your readers about theirs. Caveat: Make EXTREMELY sure you’ve read their book before you approach them so you know you like it and can recommend it with confidence. Readers and authors alike will appreciate it if you write a quick review of the book and post it on some of the retail sites as well as in your newsletter.
  2. Group Promos. You can bundle the books by putting a page showing them all, with links to download them, on the website of one of the authors involved. Then you point people there, to browse and download the books that take their fancy.

Each author’s fans will discover new books to enjoy, while each author will be able to reach new readers. Bob’s your uncle. Happy readers, happy authors: win-win.

Making it easy for readers who want your book to download it.

This is where Instafreebie comes in handy. The whole point of their existence is to help readers find more books and help authors find more readers. Even better, gazillions* of authors and readers use them. That means it’s relatively straightforward to pull together groups of authors in similar genres who will join you in a promo. There are also organised promos you can join which you can find online in Facebook groups or places like kindleboards or Goodreads/Librarything groups.

Because Instafreebie want to introduce readers to new books it’s in their interest to reward authors who work at promoting their books. Keep passing the word on and your book or group author promo can get a mention in the Instafreebie newsletter – which will introduce a whole bunch of extra readers into the mix. On twitter they will often retweet about your promo, too, if you tag them #instafreebie.

There are two ways to use Instafreebie to distribute your free book as an author. If you are on a budget, you can use a free account to give your book away without collecting email addresses. If you put a link to sign up to your mailing list in the book, maybe in return for another one, or a short story or character profiles or the like, you will still get ‘organic’ sign ups but these will come more slowly.

Personally, I find it easier to have a paid Instafreebie account, and ask readers for their email address in return for their free book. If you do this, Instafreebie collects the addresses for you. When you’re done, you can either download the addresses from Instafreebie and add them to your mailing provider or you can join Instafreebie to your mailing service, choose a list and the addresses are automatically added for you. I really like this service.

* That’s a technical term.

Using Instafreebie for mailing integration.

I’m with Mailerlite and my paid Instafreebie account is linked directly to my Mailerlite account. You can do this with MailChimp too but they are a lot more expensive once you reach the paid tiers. At the moment, Instafreebie are doing a promo with Mailerlite so that Instafreebie paid account holders get a discount when they take out a paid subscription to Mailerlite. Mailerlite is free for the first 1,000 email subscribers but with full functionality so you can get a good feel for whether it will work for you.

It’s worth mentioning that Instafreebie are really good at letting you switch your account from paid to free so if you’ve no promotions planned for a while it’s easy to downgrade for a few months.

So once some readers have given their email addresses what then?

Woot! This is where you start to build a relationship with them. Start talking to them.

TO not AT, though, and act with integrity. After all, they trusted you with direct access to their email in box. That’s a big concession.

What to say to them.

Only you can answer this. Just be yourself, be genuine. Picture a good friend in your head. Got one? Good, now write your newsletter as if you’re talking to them. I try to always approach it like sending a letter to a friend.

Chat, ask questions, talk about books, share books you’ve read that you’ve loved. Give them things, previews of your work in progress, tell them interesting snippets you’ve discovered in your research, share jokes, silly names anything you like. Some of the most popular things I share with mine are quotes from my son, who is nine.

Experiment, with content, regularity, everything. I’ve tried sending newsletters weekly, monthly and every two weeks. As a general rule, my lot appear to like the personal stories and are happy with more links to click and a newsletter that arrives less often. Your readers may be different, the only way to find out is trial and error … oh and you can ask them from time to time as well. Google surveys is your friend!

Also, remember that if you want to turn intrigued readers into actual fans you must be patient.

Like any other relationship, an author’s rapport with her readers will take time to develop. This is especially true if lots of folks have downloaded your book. Give them time. If you force it, or expect them to instantly rush out and buy everything you’ve ever written you will be disappointed – and deservedly so.

That said, try not to fret when people unsubscribe. Far from making them ‘freebie hunters’, it’s more likely your book wasn’t their cup of tea. Be thankful for their honesty. There are few things more dispiriting than having a large email list and only a handful of engaged subscribers. It’s much better that folks who aren’t interested unsubscribe than that they sit there, costing you money, and never opening your emails!

But if you keep communicating, give your readers things they like and keep on writing books you will build a reader platform. And when you open your first email from someone thanking you for sending them a free book, or saying how much they loved it, it is a truly wonderful feeling.

Links.

If you think you’d like to give either Instafreebie or Mailerlite – or both – a whirl you can sign up using these links. NB, heads up, these are my associate links, so if anyone signs up to a paid account as a result of clicking these links, I get a voucher. If you’re not OK with that just delete everything that comes after the .com bit.


Instafreebie: https://www.instafreebie.com/authors?invite_code=CoufcgpalM


Mailerlite: https://www.mailerlite.com/invite/dd718ae601785

If you want a look at how it all works, you are welcome to view a giveaway I’m running right now, here:

https://www.instafreebie.com/free/QWCQM

Who is M T McGuire?

Well, you asked…

M T McGuire enjoys the real world but wouldn’t want to live here full time. That’s why she writes books. She grew up, or at least, got bigger, half way up a windy down in Sussex. Her home was also the first location choice for Hogwarts, in the Harry Potter films, so maybe it’s not so strange that she’s ended up writing spec-fic. Perhaps there’s something in the water up there, apart from chalk. She used to do stand up but sat down and started to write books when she got married. She now lives in Bury St Edmunds, in Suffolk, with a McOther, a McMini, a McCat and a selection of very silly cars. She hasn’t found a way to make any of the cars fly like the ones in her books, and none of them is fitted with ordnance either, but she and her team of evil scientists are working on that.

Despite being nearly fifty now, and supposedly, an adult, M T checks all unfamiliar wardrobes for a gateway to Narnia. She hasn’t found one so far but she lives in hope.

12 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

21 Jul 2017 · 2:06 pm

When the luck unicorn farts …

You’d better be ready.

Yes, smashing things are afoot, in writing world anyway, and for once it’s not me blundering into something and breaking it.

Escape From B-Movie Hell.

Something unusual and rather wonderful has happened this week, my book, Escape From B-Movie Hell has been accepted for a bookbub promotion.

Now, I can imagine you might be thinking,

‘Mmm yes MT,’ as you stifle a yawn, ‘but what does that have to do with me?’

Well, Bookbub is the mother of all promotion sites. You get your book featured on there and many, many folks will discover it. A Bookbub feature is one of the Holy Grails of authordom. Any author angling to have their book included will need a LOT of persistence, possibly in conjunction with aligned stars, the fumes of potent upwind unicorn farts, and a dash of fairy dust. But while the unicorns and fairies and proper authors were looking the other way it seems my book sneaked on!

What does this mean for you?

Well, if you want to read Escape From B-Movie Hell, then from sometime yesterday, 20th July, until Sunday, 23rd July, it’s going for a song.

Bookbub will be promoting my book to squazillions of people in India, Canada, Australia and the UK. And in return I reduce it to 99c, or p, or 65Rupees.

Now the squazillions don’t include anyone in the US, or RSA or New Zealand, which seemed unfair. So I’ve reduced it to the equivalent price in those places, too.

So there you go, if you are interested in reading it, click this link for more info and links to buy:

http://www.hamgee.co.uk/escape.html

There’s another thing I’d like to share with you. Today, I bring you a new word: the verb, ‘to bald’. McMini uses a lot of wonderfully bizarre language and this is one he came up with when I was talking to him the other today. He was talking about pretending to be a certain footballer, a fellow with a shiny round billiard ball of a head. No hair.

‘We balded ourselves and ran around shouting, “Goooooaaaaal!”‘ He told me.

The thing that made me laugh most was that I knew exactly what he meant straight away.

So there we are. If you have a LOT of hair, and you then sweep it back off back of your face and flatten it against your head, roll-on deodorant style, so that you can pretend you have no hair at all and show your giant forehead to the world, the technical term for your action is, apparently, ‘balding yourself’.

The baldest thing I could find at short notice.

14 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , ,

17 Jun 2017 · 12:00 pm

And now for something completely different … #eyebombing #eyebombthereforeiam

Eyebombing: the art of spreading googly joy

Saddled as we are with a thoroughly grim world landscape right now I thought everyone could do with a bit of cheering up. So it occurred to me that it would be fun to start a group about one of my favourite hobbies, eyebombing, possibly with a view to doing a book later on … if it goes well.

Eyebombing is the art, if that’s the right word, of adding googly eyes to inanimate objects to give them a personality. When I write, I love putting obscure jokes in my books; things that only a handful of people will get. Eyebombing has that exact same appeal. If I stick googly eyes on something, odds are only about one in ten people will see it. It’s a secret joke between a tiny and exclusive club of eagle-eyed, uber-noticing folks.

And it’s a little bit naughty …

and I’m not meant to …

and yet, it’s mostly harmless.

And it’s a lot more interesting than running through wheat fields! (Sorry, bit of British political humour there, although, to give her her due, running through wheat is a lot more outrageous than it sounds, she’d have got a proper bollocking from the farmer if he’d caught her.)

Eyebombing is something I’ve been doing since before McMini was born. Over the years I have built up a sizeable library of photographs. Looking at them with a couple of friends, the other day, they said, ‘why on earth don’t you do a book about this?’

So the long term project will, indeed, be to produce a book on eyebombing. But it will be a long ride because this is something that only, really, works in print, and as a result, it means that not only will it be a more expensive sell but I’ll also have to try and flog it to book shops and funny only sells there at Christmas which means I’ll have to work on the book all this year, get it ready to promote next spring – because book stores choose their Christmas funny in about March. Then I will launch it, officially, in October 2018.

To fund stock, editing and design I am toying with the idea of a crowdfunding campaign. If I do that, I can give backers their copy this year, a whole year before release, and sell any left over pre release copies at the Bury Christmas Fayre – if I get a stall this year – or keep them until next year.

Royal Mail being what it is, the postage outside the UK will probably cost slightly more than the book and the crowdfunding thing may not work. So I may have to get a ‘proper’ publisher. However, for now I’m setting up a group to share pictures, both mine and I’m hoping other folks will post their eyebombs too. It’s just something I thought I’d do and if it adds ‘social proof’ to applications to publishers, or my efforts to sell the book to bookshops, jolly dee. Going forward, if I do have to mount a crowdfunding campaign, am hoping folks in the group will share the link as much as possible.

If you want to follow the fun …

If any of these kinds of japes appeal to you, and you think eyebombing would amuse you, I’d be delighted if you joined me.

To follow the development of the book, not to mention any eyebombing activities undertaken, there are three ways you can keep up with it all online.

If you want to join in …

If you already have a packet of googly eyes burning a hole in your pocket are welcome to join in; posting your own photos, chatting about eyebombing and generally shooting the breeze on the very nascent – I formed it just a couple of weeks ago – EyebombThereforeIam facebook group. You can find that here:

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/369964093397829

Here are those links again:

Follow on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eyebombtheschoolrun/
Follow on facebook: https://fb.me/eyebombthereforeiam
Join the Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/369964093397829
Join the Eyebombthereforeiam e-mail Newsgroup here http://www.subscribepage.com/eyebomb

6 Comments

Filed under About My Writing, Blimey!, Eyebombing, General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

20 May 2017 · 9:49 pm

Welcome to my GORGEOUS Life! On humorous giveaways and being embarrassed by your kids.

Jeez, well, this week’s been interesting. Welcome to what the lovely Dame Edna Everage would call, ‘my gorgeous life’ in all it’s technicolour glory! (Phnark.)

So, this week McMini had pukka actual gastroenteritis. He started feeling ill, was sick a lot, and then he was sick a bit more and then, just for a change he was sick again.

Then he was hungry so I gave him some toast.

Which he sicked up.

Rinse.

Repeat.

On Tuesday he was so lethargic and ill that I left him to sleep, sat in the next room and wrote 3,000 words! Yeh, a week and a half’s quota in 3 hours. That’s a seriously ill small fry. I thought it would pass though and he hadn’t thrown up … until 3pm.

Tuesday afternoon, he started being sick again.

‘Hmmm,’ I thought.

McMini is lively, and alert, and … well let’s just say there are a lot of donkeys around here with no hind legs and it wasn’t me who talked all of them off. He is full of beans and a chatterbox even when he’s ill. But he wasn’t, which was a bit of a worry.

Early on Wednesday, finally, we got the lovely green sick.

‘Ah.’ I thought.

I don’t think he feels very well …

He was getting incredibly lethargic now and with the green sick and him beginning to hurl more often again I was wondering about appendicitis, or dehydration – except the … er hem … wee colour was fine – or low blood sugar levels – snortle I nearly typed blud sugar there … you’re sugar’s low blud! Thanks dude – sorry, where was I yeh, with a sick McMini.

Clearly the time had come to take my little boy to the Docs. I checked his wee colour again and it was ‘silver’ as he called it – to the rest of the world that’s normal green. So I convinced myself that something worse was definitely going wrong. Because I am not a helicopter mum or anything. Mwah hahahrgh! But I was thinking blood sugar. So I took him down to the Doctor’s for their not quite emergency oops-you-haven’t-got-an-appointment-but-we-appreciate-it’s-serious-so-if-you-come-and-wait-at-11.30-a-doctor-will-see-you clinic. Snappy title huh?

Long and short, we ended up on Rainbow Ward at the West Suffolk with suspected appendicitis for evaluation, hello LOVELY people on Rainbow Ward. Yes, they genuinely rock.

The first thing they gave him was anti-sickness drugs.

McMini didn’t like the flavour. He made a face.

‘This is disgusting!’ he whispered, because he still felt to sick to talk. ‘Persevere, you need this,’ I told him. ‘Take it in tiny bits.’
‘OK,’ he whispered .

I don’t like it.

The nurse went off to get a glass of black current with the kinds of salts and sugars in it that people who haven’t eaten anything for four days are likely to need. When she came back he’d eaten all but a tiny bit of the dose of anti sickness. He had a 20ml dose of the fluid with the sugars in and took the last of the anti sickness with it. Suddenly, he was talking. Loudly.

‘How can you give me this stuff?’ he asked her. ‘You do know it’s disgusting don’t you? Seriously, it’s completely vile.’
‘Well it’s clearly made you feel better.’ I told him.
‘Yes but seriously Mummy. It’s revolting! It’s like that stuff you give me when I have a cough’ [medised] he turned to the nurse. ‘You’ve probably traumatised me for life! You know that don’t you?’
‘That’s not the way to go on mate,’ I told him. ‘Sorry,’ I added, to the nurse, as I cringed with embarrassment, ‘my son is a fussy little bleeder and he’s a bit of a thespian, to boot.’
‘It is vile though!’ he said clearly to get a laugh but I was extremely worried she wouldn’t realise and might take it the wrong way. Luckily she didn’t. She just said,
‘You feel better, though, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ he said and then, beaming, added, ‘I can talk now, I felt so sick before, I could only whisper.’

We saw a student doctor first and while he examined us and asked questions, I had to feed McMini 20ml of salts and fluids every 10 minutes.  Two doses and McMini was firing on all cylinders again with added exuberance at feeling if not well then, a sod of a lot better than before. The Doctor was a lovely chap who laughed at McMini’s jokes and waited patiently while he answered yes or no questions with lengthy anecdotes and stories (can’t think where he gets that from). Then he got the non student doc he’d been shadowing in to see us. She was also lovely, telling us she was in hulk mode today (her top was green). We were probably quite lucky they had senses of humour as he did the whole ‘I’m traumatised for life’ routine again with them.

McMini has now served his 48hour purdah and I have unleashed him on the world again. Joyously, while I thought I was going down with it too, it may be that I just had an IBS attack. I love you Buscopan. Althogh McOther, ringing from Lisbon, had to hang up for a few minutes to hurl. Although he came back a lot perkier and thinks he might have sunstroke.

While I was telling to one of the lovely ladies who cleans our house about what McMini had said told me her daughter gave the nurse the bird when she had her polio injection. She was very good, didn’t cry but then as they got the door, her daughter upped her middle finger at the nurse and said venomously, ‘I hate you!’ She said she’d never been so mortified in her life and was wondering where the hell she picked it up. I told her about the time McMini got done for saying ‘Bollocks!’ at school and when they asked where he got it from McMini said, ‘Mummy.’ Jeez. Kids!

On the upside, on Wednesday morning, just before we went to the Doctors, ill feeble McMini said,

‘Sorry Mummy, I don’t mean to treat you like staff. I just feel so sick and ill it’s really hard to move.’ Which seemed surprisingly emotionally mature.

Then Friday morning, probably about the time McOther’s plane was taking off to fly him to Lisbon for the weekend, the phone rang. Mum’s carer. Mum had a ripping headache and thought she might be having a stroke. We had a chat about it. I did the whole fact thing with the carer and then I spoke to Mum. Mum does have ministrokes, and according to scans the bleeds are where her head was hurting, but her speech centre has always been the bit that goes first, so far.

So the carer and I discussed it a bit and decided that since we both know Mum hates hospital, rather than ring 999 and have her whisked in where she’d sit in a ward all weekend waiting to be evaluated when the non emergency staff came back to work on Monday, we would start by seeing if a local GP would come out to her.

Up side of that is that it’s probably not a stroke, Mum won’t have to go to hospital. But she might be sickening for something. On the down side, Dad has really sore feet and when the Doctor looked at those the news was not so good. She reckoned this was down to blood flow and that he probably has a blocked artery somewhere in his upper leg. She said they’d operate in a younger person but the risk would be too high to Dad. They treat this with blood thinners in the elderly and as he’s on those, anyway, there’s not much more to be done. So a bit of a worry about Dad but no mercy dash required which is, frankly, a bit of a … well … mercy.

So, after a week like that – spot the really unsubtle segue – I could do with some funny books to read, as you can imagine. So it’s just as well because there is a funny book giveaway going on. Mine is included, of course, along with a whole heap of others – 24 – from all sorts of different genres. These are all Instafreebie books so you are asked to sign up to the author’s mailing list so they can send it to you, but you can always unsubscribe and if you feel like a bit of levity in your life, this one is worth a go! It’s running until Midnight on Sunday 21st May which is probably midnight somewhere in America. And apologies for only posting this now. I meant to do it this morning but at least you have a day to fill your boots and some may still be available for a day or two afterwards.

Anyway, I hope you find some interesting books to read and I hope next week will be quieter or at least, a little less action packed. If you’d like to check out the books the link for the giveaway is here:

 

10 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , ,

13 May 2017 · 1:24 pm

This week, I am mostly ranting about … everything

STOP! There is swearing.

Aroogah! Aroogah!

Let’s kick off with a profanity warning: there will be some.

There.

So if you don’t like the F word, do not read this. Especially do NOT read this all the way though and then complain it’s full of swearing or I will flipping well lamp you. And if you’re a bit iffy about swearing, but can cope, you’re probably alright for most of this post but you will want to avoid the song at the end.

_________________________________

OK, if we’re all sitting comfortably, I’ll begin.

Right now, I feel a bit like this. Not crap exactly, just a bit … blergh … or possibly meh.

The fact is, while I think I might be quite loving, I doubt I’m a very nurturing person. I seem to be bad at caring for people. I need too much space and time alone to get my head together and that is not conducive to surrendering any sizeable amounts of your life to the needs of others, however many times the head says go, the heart sometimes says … well, not no exactly because it’s willing … more like, can’t.

But obviously, I have to. Can’t isn’t one of the options. I have a commitment and it’s nothing close to what most people have to put up with, but the mental and emotional energy it takes to do the negligible amount I do for my parents seems to be disproportionately huge when I add it to the other commitment of being a mum.

This week there was a small blip. Mum and Dad have some living aids in their house that they pay for on lease. It started last week, when they had a call asking if they still wanted all of it, and thinking it was cold callers Mum told the company to take everything way.

Yesterday, I get a panicked call saying, ‘They’re taking the red alarm button, and the alarm that goes off when your Dad gets out of his seat, stop them!’

Except I was at kid’s church, with McMini, so my brother got the call, and mistaking the carer’s phone number for a friend’s, and being in the middle of ‘Comedy Club’ – he’s a teacher and yes, it’s an extra curricular activity at his school – he proceeded to show the boys and girls a thing or two about the art of mimicry. In this case, by answering the call in his impression of David Bellamy (it’s absolutely tip top, I have to hand it to him; imagine a version of Lenny Henry in white, that’s my brother). He then suddenly had to transform to serious, which probably taught the kids far more about comic timing than anything he could have actually planned. I’m still getting giggleback about it though. Mwah hahahargh! I swear I couldn’t make this shit up! And if I did, I’d be panned for making it unrealistic.

So, as McMini and I left the service and I turned my phone on I got a call from my brother. Cue frantic ringing round and I got a company name and a number to ring. After a night stewing, I spent the next day ringing round to get to the bottom of it. Turns out that what we’re paying only covers a fraction of what is in the house. None of us know how we’ve had all this stuff for a year for free but they seem OK with that so long as we pay the full whack from now on or just keep the things we’re actually paying for. Mum remembers their call but didn’t understand what they were talking about.

As the cost of leasing the other stuff is a fair bit, 6 month’s rental is about the same cost of new equipment, I bought replacements for the bits that we hadn’t been paying for which arrived the following day, during my visit, so I was able to install those. The engineer came out to put the other stuff back the following day, too, so all is now peachy. In addition, I explained to them that Mum has dementia too and they will now ring me with any enquiries. I found out some useful stuff, too, like where the heck we got the seat and bed alarm from and whether we are leasing it or own it outright! I had no clue and if Mum ever had, she doesn’t now. So that was a bit of a bonus, even if the method of delivery was less than fun.

Anyway, on the Tuesday, after I’d organised this, I turned to the clock and, joy unbounded, I had a hour left before school run time in which to write. I’d had to send a form declaring my parents have dementia to get the VAT back on the stuff I’d ordered so I’d  photographed it and emailed it off. Needless to say, the moment I sat down at my computer, the company contacted me to say I’d done it wrong so I had to quickly do another one. Then at last, with 20 minutes in hand, which is 400-800 words if I concentrate, I sat down to write.

And I couldn’t.

I was just mentally dead. My mojo had flown and, indeed, it’s been AWOL all week. I like to think it’s pissed off on a drunken bender and will crawl back to me in the equivalent of the wee hours (next week sometime, probably) slurring,

‘I’m sho sorry. I really am. Are you angry with me? Schay you’re not angry with me. I love you Mary, I really really love you, hurrgh bleargh [splat]. etc.’

My mojo is the one on the right. Don’t look at the stain on the carpet or you’ll know I’m a slattern – as well as foul mouthed.

However, I also fear it may be sobbing in a corner somewhere so I have made the odd effort to find it. I managed about 400 words where I knew what was going to happen and just needed to describe it, in my time after sorting the crisis, no creativity required. You know, when you have to get a character from one part of the house to another kind of thing and they walk through a hall which you need to describe, briefly, for later. That kind of thing but there was still no sign of the mojo. Whatever it’s doing, I hope it comes back refreshed.

After that I threw in the towel and heated up some filter coffee, wrote a shopping list of the things I needed to get for supper on the way home with McMini and set off to pick him up from school. We walked home, past the supermarket.

Did I remember to go in and get the shopping?

Did I bollocks?

Did I remember before we’d walked all the way home? Of course not.

The distance I am away from the thing I’ve forgotten is directly proportional to the amount of knee pain I am experiencing at the time. Needless to say, I remembered as we walked into the house, so we had to turn around and go back up the hill. The only positive I can take away from this is that despite my temptation to turn the air blue with invective, the worst word that escaped me was, ‘sperm.’

Snortle.

Yes I said, ‘Oh … sperm!’

Mwahahahaharaargh!

But hey, at least I didn’t say, ‘shit! or fu-beep! or cu-aroooogah.’

Back we trudged, got the stuff, came home. I had to make biscuits with McMini, because I’d promised, even though we didn’t really have time and I was shattered and just wanted to sit down. Then I prepared the veg and the bits of supper I was cooking. According to my fitbit I did two miles back and forth around the house. I just finished in time to squeeze in a quick shower before we ate.

The following day, I did the Sussex run. It wasn’t quite such a good visit, they were both tired, indeed Mum fell asleep over her dinner prompting Dad to shout for me because he was afraid she’d died (bless), and they were less on form, but I did, at least, cheer them up and the carer was around when Dad filled his Tena boots this week, not me. Result!

And this is why I find the care thing difficult. Not because I don’t want to do it. It’s not like it would cross my mind to do anything else. Lord knows they’ve looked after me and now it’s my turn to look after them. I love going to see them because they are hilarious and they are still great fun. Even with the short term memories of a pair of goldfish they are like pied pipers of people – and it’s not as if the memory loss is very noticeable because neither of them has ever been able to find their keys, well … OK the lack of memory is showing with Dad now but he’s got away with it for 12 years.

They are wonderfully, gloriously eccentric and everyone who crosses their path is drawn in, grows to love them, grows to care for them. It is really extraordinary to watch, and kind of cool. Everyone always has, but then, they have always been dynamos in the community, caring for people, visiting them, looking after the elderly the sick and the lonely – even people who are alone for a jolly good reason – and generally just being epic. They’ve had a tramp to stay for the night and Mum has saved two people’s lives that I know of, while Dad, as a teacher, has shaped countless others. They are still working their magic and I want to make the most of it. Likewise, McMini is a gem so I’m not giving up on any of my mum time either.

In short, I wouldn’t do this any differently, I just get frustrated, sometimes, that I seem unable to do anything else as well.

FFS …

The events of those 36 hours sorting the alarms etc pretty much lobotomised the rest of my brain until I sorted it out, and then left it shagged well beyond functionality for some days afterwards. Perhaps that what pre menopausal dementedness comes to when added to the dementedness of the pre menopausal dementia sufferer’s actually, properly, demented parents, and everyone has a little bit of a go, and nobody remembers what in the name of Pete they did.

See how smart he looks? Yeh, that’s a lot smarter than I feel.

Who knows. But I have more and more admiration for people who have no cash to pay for care, who have to look after sick family members 24 hours a day, with no breaks, no let ups. How do they cope? How do they catch a bus or pay a bill or organise a fart in bed with that going on full time? Blimey, I have trouble stringing two sentences together and I don’t have it like them. They must be fucking saints. I have been trying to channel my inner saint. However, he is clearly not like theirs. It is quite clear to me that my saint is like those early hermits; you know, the kind of guy who sat on top of a pillar for 40 years in the desert without speaking – except to shout angry obscenities at anyone who came near so they’d fuck off again – probably while throwing handfuls of his own faeces at them.

And I also have a huge admiration for people who earn a living as carers. They don’t earn that much, and they take a serious amount of flack. My dad gets properly shouty sometimes, usually when he’s feeling undignified. He was heaping invective on the carer on Wednesday, as she changed his tena pants and she was just calm and kind and sweet with him. We all knew he was only shouting because he felt humiliated and wanted it to be over, but there’s a difference between knowing that and not letting it get to you. In her place, I’d have told him to get knotted.

Sometimes, I get how Dad might feel though, why he might be shouty! Jeez I feel like that a lot of the time. There is so much administriviatative shite to do and there are days I want to tell life to just piss off and leave me alone! It wasn’t helped by the fact I had multiple trouser failure this weekend and with one pair left – in the wash – I had to go buy more. All my trousers are through at the arse because I’ve been waiting until the effing shops came up with a choice that was wider than black, black, denim, denim or denim, dark blue or white. Although I do usually like to have one pair of dark blue canvas jeans, but I don’t wear them as much as the others. Indeed they’re not through at the arse, but the zip’s bust. Even so, finding anything else … it’s like the Monty Python Spam sketch.

‘Don’t complain darling, I love black, I’m buying black, black, black, black and black.’

‘Well bully for you but you can sod off! I’m not. I don’t wear black if I can avoid it and certainly not every day.’

I did find a pair of red trousers in H&M but they were three quarter length with faux rips in. I’m too old for faux rips and I’ll knacker them myself soon enough. Then I found some lovely pink ones but only in three quarter length. That said, I have hopes that the pink three quarter lengths may turn up in longs before the year is out. The gentleman in the shop thought they would. Even so, let’s chalk that up as another thing that can piss off! Fashion. I put ‘coloured jeans’ into google and I got a whole load of black, dark blue, denim and white trousers.

‘WHITE AND BLACK ARE NOT FUCKING COLOURS YOU BLIND BASTARDS!’ I shouted, making the cat jump.

Do you mind keeping it down? I’m trying to relax here.

On the upside, despite spending a whole morning looking for trousers, I did manage to replace the three pairs of threadbare-arsed winter trousers I own which haven’t quite gone through. Rock on Mistral’s basement outlet section. And there was me thinking it was a trendy shop for young thin people with no tits! Mwah hahahargh! But I was wrong. I got three pairs of moleskin trousers in light green, wedgewood blue and maroon for £7 a pop. A saving of £105 I think it was. They’re a bit flarey so I’ll have to take them in a little but never mind. Every cloud has a silver lining. I shall return there. Oh yes I will.

Swings and roundabouts, but the mental theme of the entire week in MTM land has definitely been, Fuck Off World!

And when I get like that, I often turn the work of Ian Dury because he was really very good at FOW but in the kind of amusing way that makes it faceable again.

For this particular malaise, a dose of one particular song, ‘Fucking Ada’, does wonders. I suspect it’s not really about a never ending quest for time to think, or the ensuing burn out, or at least not, per se. I should imagine it’s either about the failure of a relationship, or the humiliation of being unable to perform at a one night stand after a culmination of too many one night stands, too many drugs, too much alcohol and altogether too much rock and roll. It could be about depression, too. It could be about all of those things.

Bollocks to that though, because there are sections that perfectly sum up that FOW feeling. And when I’m sad, and angry with myself for not being able to bounce back, and I want the world to just bugger off and leave me alone – not indefinitely, but just for just ten sodding minutes so I can complete a thought – this song is a peach.

There are few things as cathartic as shouting along with Ian for a few minutes. Just make sure the kids are out and you don’t have the windows open. Here it is for your delectation. Words first, vid second.

Fucking Ada, by Ian Dury and the Blockheads

Moments of sadness, moments of guilt
Stains on the memory, stains on the quilt
Chapter of incident, chapter and verse
Sub-heading chronic, paragraph worse

Lost in the limelight, backed in the blaze
Did it for nine pence, those were the days
Give me my acre and give me my plough
Tell me tomorrow, don’t bother me now

Fucking Ada, fucking Ada
Fucking Ada, fucking Ada

Time’s at a distance, time’s without touch
Greed forms the habit of asking to much
Followed at bedtime by builders and bells
Wait til the doldrums which nothing dispels

Idly, mentally, doubtful and dread
Who runs with the beans shall not stale with the bread
Let me lie fallow in dormant dismay
Tell me tomorrow, don’t bother today

Fucking ada, fucking ada
Fucking ada, fucking ada

Tried like a good un, did it all wrong
Thought that the hard way was taking to long
Too late for regret or chemical change
Yesterday’s targets have gone out of range

Failure enfolds me with clammy green arms
Damn the excursions and blast the alarms
For the rest of what’s natural Ill lay on the ground
Tell me tomorrow if I’m still around

Fucking Ada, fucking Ada (ad nauseam)

S0ngwriters: Ian Robins Dury, John George Turnbull

Well, back to running with the beans … It’s Friday and it’s about blummin’ time I wrote something. Well, something other than this gargantuan rant, I mean book something, and hey, I’ve twenty minutes left this week.

In the meantime, here’s the video.

Don’t forget to sing along now.

18 Comments

Filed under General Wittering

Tagged as , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,