Tag Archives: writer parent

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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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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2 Dec 2012 · 10:27 pm

A little of what you fancy does you good.

Today McOther whisked McMini and I off to a wine fair. We met up with another couple and agreed that the boys would taste wine in the morning while we girls nipped off with the kids, we’d have lunch and then the boys would nip off with the kids while we did some tasting.

It was a beautiful sunny day, blue sky, bright sun and we headed to a local garden centre to meet Father Christmas… but to meet him we would have to trek back to another part of the site, buy Santa tickets, come back and queue.

On the other hand… outside… was an ice rink. It was all white (real ice) and the sky was all blue and it was calling…

Mmm, would 4 year old McMini take to skating? Probably not. Should I be skating with my comprehensively bollocksed knee? Absolutely not but what the heck? The timings didn’t quite fit, the next session didn’t start for 15 minutes so we would only have 15 minutes to skate but that was good right? Time to get the skates on and 15 minutes, half a session. Time enough to have fun but hopefully not to break any thing.

We decided to give it a go.

Now, me, I am the ultimate urban jungle bunny because I grew up in a school. We lived on site. Do you know how much smooth concrete and tarmac the average boarding school contains? A sod of a lot, I can tell you. If there is one thing I miss about having two functional knees it’s the ability to wear wheels instead of shoes. As a kid in the 1980s, I lived on wheels. Even when, aged 11 I was banned from all sport because of my dodgy knee, I was allowed to skate on the grounds that it was “low impact” and “the child has to be allowed to do something”. I liked taking exercise and since I wasn’t allowed to do anything else, I spent every Saturday and every evening after school with wheels attached to my feet, cruising the concrete cloisters and smooth bricked quads… and hiding when the bell went and the big, scary boys changed classes for lessons.

My Mum decided to turn a blind eye to my preference for wheels over shoes So, I was a pretty dab hand at it. Even after I reached the point where my knee was utterly shot, when I couldn’t physically run, I could rollerblade, and did, although the tricks were way beyond me by that time. First rule of aggressive skating; don’t do anything on skates on that you couldn’t try out with them off first. So that, for me, was everything…. except going forwards, and backwards, and jumping over the odd small obstacle… but nothing ritzy. Eventually that got too much and about 10 years ago, I had to hang up my skates. I really, really miss it but it is just not possible to do it with only one proper leg and until they invent some kind of skater’s zimmer frame (phnark) that’s the way it’ll stay.

Back to today… there it was… ice, white ice, blue sky. Mmm. Not as easy as wheels but oh so tempting. So we gave in, we hired the skates and stood on the rubber bit at the side with severe misgivings and butterflies wondering who would break which limb first. Finally, we got on and the four of us made one disastrous circuit with two petrified children; McMini almost in tears and me realising that my left leg was really, really not working, at all and that it probably wasn’t safe for me to do this unless I could find some way of skating with a walking stick.

The answer was a thing that looked like a banana with handles. Seats two, slides beautifully and gives just enough support for the dodgy kneed lady. We had a gas! We slalomed in and out of the other skaters at speed – controlled, of course – and on the corners I could safely throw the banana sideways, shouting,

“Feel the drift!” while the kids screamed with glee and shouted.

“We are going faster than anyone else!”

As the banana went sideways I went straight… leaning on the handle. Jeez, I could actually do crossovers! I was safe and in control. Indeed, leaning on the handle, I could skate pretty much normally, with the banana taking some of the weight, the knee held up. And the kids shouted,

“Faster! Faster!” and well… it was churlish not to oblige.

Eventually the pain hit the warning threshold and I knew the time had come to quit while I was ahead. We’d had our 15 minutes, anyway, and we didn’t want to be late for lunch. So we parked the banana and skipped off the ice, two cheerful rosy-cheeked women with two (equally rosy-cheeked) and utterly gleeful bug-eyed kids. Sure, I could be walking with a stick for the rest of the week but… bloody hell that felt good.

So the point of this story is this: every now and again we all need to throw caution to the wind do something a little bit out there. I confess I thought I did, but clearly, not enough. Many of us live lives which are hectic or busy and we can’t vary the mix that often. But I have always believed that if an opportunity crops up, everyone should. And I suppose, in my case, the exuberant glee I’ve been feeling all day bears it out! Because that ten minutes on the ice, doing something I’ll be paying for all week, something I really shouldn’t have been doing but that I miss, left me feeling absolutely fantastic. It was a tonic. So there we are. A little of what you fancy does you good. Especially if it’s naughty and you’re not meant to.

Even better, right now, I’m buzzing with ideas. And I know why K’Barthan 3 isn’t clicking. And I might even be able to fix it. Funny how sometimes, the the best way to find a solution to a problem is to stop thinking about it; and the best way of writing is not to. I suppose, if you’re endlessly dragging ideas out of your brain it’s only sensible to do something off piste now and again; to put things in.

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30 Nov 2012 · 10:49 pm

When real life treads on your hands…

I’ve gone and depressed myself again by looking at one of those ‘uplifting’ posts on Kindleboards about people who’ve had an e-book out for half as long as I have and are making a gazillion times more money. Sod it, just making any money. Maybe you just have to be American to earn a living selling e-books. I dunno. Or maybe you just have to have time. Lots of time. And maybe it’s something that you just can’t do in tiny slices of time, slowly, over years, like I’d hoped.

You know I am basically a happy bunny, I am surrounded by sweet people, I’m happy, I’m cherished, I cherish  others… I’m blessed with a very happy family. I also live in a lovely house and drive a car that, as an incurable petrol head, I still can’t quite believe I own. There’s really nothing wrong with my life except that not everyone in that cherished, loved support group around me is as they should be. I’m not one to spill my guts over the internet but let’s just say this. There’s something they don’t tell you about heart disease. A lot of it gives you brain damage. Because a lot of heart disease causes a lack of blood to the head. Over time, this gives similar symptoms similar to those of exposure only they come on very, very slowly. Every day you get a little more fuzzy. Every day another little piece of you, the essence of you, is carried away. Slowly but surely, inevitably, you lose your mind. Add a succession of really hard winters, because heaven forfend that fucking sod might pull any punches and you’re in the poop. Big time.

So, one of my cherished people is in the doo doo and those years and years of bitty, incremental damage are beginning to show. And I can’t do a fucking thing.  And I’m miles away from them when I should be there. When the simplest thing becomes a marathon slog for them, I’m not there to help or reassure when all my life, I believed I would be. I’m not there to fix the computer when it freaks, or go through the paperwork or deal with the admin that escapes; things like tax returns or driving license applications. I’m trapped here at the end of the phone and all I can do is listen. And it feels shit. Because to watch the people I love suffer from a long way away and not help; people who have given me everything and made me who I am, people I look up to. That makes me feel like a special kind of bastard.

So the wheels have fallen off my writing a bit. I can’t stop, I’m addicted, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be hitting any deadlines, and I probably won’t be very professional about it either. In short, if K’Barthan 3 is ready by next Christmas I’ll be surprised. But in my defence, although I can’t name names and be straight about it here, there is a good reason. Real life has painfully, comprehensively, trodden on my hands.

I feel a bit like this. As Arnold the Prophet says in K’Barthan Three.
“Life is a gift, reach out and take it with both hands.”
And The Pan of Hamgee says.
“That’s all all very well for you to say but the gift I’m being offered looks suspiciously like a dog turd in a paper bag, to me.”
It isn’t all pants and it’s a lot worse for them than me but there’s a very, very sad bit and I have to accept that I can’t fix it. And that rankles. Big time.

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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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1 Jul 2012 · 9:41 pm

Why Can’t Indies Punctuate Dialogue? I Think I Know.

Gah, welcome to the world of Victoria Meldrew. I was reading a post on a forum somewhere recently, complaining that self published authors are rubbish at dialogue. Well, sticking my neck out, I’ve just discovered a lot of my dialogue tags are wrong.

So once again, I am at home to Mr Cock up. Frankly, he’s going to be moving in at this rate. I dunno what’s wrong with me at the moment. I seem to be dead from the neck up.

So, now that I’ve bombed, I may as well tell you what I’ve learned so you don’t have to.

At school – and sodding heck, it’s only 20 years ago – I was taught to write dialogue like this:

“Writing speech is a pain in the arse.” Said M T McGuire.

Sometime, between me leaving school and starting to write books for a living it changed to this.

“Writing speech is a pain in the arse,” said M T McGuire. “Never mind. On the up side, entirely fortuitously it’s right in book two.”

So here’s what Mr Cock up has taught me on my latest visit.

Golden Rule Number 1, then: Even if you left school five minutes ago, question the rules of punctuation you were taught.

After all, you only have to look at how often government policy on education changes to realise that the shelf life of any received theories propounded to you as a child, will probably be out of date before you leave school.

So yes, I’m afraid those rules of grammar that it hasn’t occurred to you to doubt may be completely at odds with the way things are done now. And if they are, you will be looking like a spanner. NB, even if you write business English for a living, check the types of grammar you don’t use in your every day job that you will use in a book. Like speech! Gaaaah.

Can you guess who didn’t do this? For heaven’s sake, I have a very high IQ – I really should be smarter than this. It’s a bit like being one of those people who can build something really pointy-brained, like a satellite, but can’t boil a kettle… except that I haven’t got any satellite-building abilities against which to offset my piss-poor kettle boiling skills.

Bum.

Oh well, on we go.

Golden Rule Number 2: Don’t trust the internet.

Having realised I may well have ballsed up a lot of the dialogue tags in all my work, I tried to find out what was the right way on the internet. All I could really discover is that one, there is a lot of disagreement and two, none of it looks like the way I was taught at school.

You can google a lot of things but not grammar. There are too many strains of English round the world and not everyone knows which is which. Hmm… Which leads me onto number three.

Golden Rule Number 3: Ask the right questions.
Because I remembered what I’d been taught it didn’t occur to me to ask at first but when I saw what the editor had done, and failed to understand what was going on, I did ask her. The answer she gave was that I should treat the whole thing, speech and tag, as a sentence. That was right but it still gave me plenty of scope to do it like this.

“Punctuating dialogue drives me crazy.” said M T McGuire.

Which is still wrong, wrong, wrong.

Golden Rule Number 4: Ask the right people.

I now use a different editor who is pretty good. I was still confused when I first started working with him though. So why didn’t I ask him? I haven’t a blind clue. So when you find someone who knows what they’re doing and you trust ask them. If you can find somebody who is absolutely pukka writing, trad pubbed establishment ask them too.

Golden Rule Number 5: Always be open.

One day I might get this writing thing sussed but I suspect not. Language is a living thing. It’s always going to move and change. So even if you begin to think you know what you’re doing it’s worth remembering that actually, you may not.

Which brings me onto the 6th rule.

Golden Rule Number 6: Always use an editor.

This is really important. Seriously. Unless you are some kind of grammar savant, use an editor. Hell, use two. I do… and beta readers and I’ve still stuffed up. Ninety nine point nine percent of authors cannot proof their own work. Trust me on this. Get somebody else to do it. Then if you have any gimlet-eyed reader friends, get them to look at it.

Golden Rule Number 7: Keep an eye on what you learn.

As you learn more your work will get better and your punctuation more professional. Each work you produce is a shop window on your talent. If the punctuation is a bit dodgy, or old fashioned, it doesn’t reflect well on you so if you learn something new that hits you out of the blue or change the way you punctuate, I dunno, interrupted speech or something, remember to apply it retrospectively to all your work. Not just the one it’s cropped up in.

Sure your skill with the business of arranging words will grow but so will you knowledge and while your actual writing style may change, editorially continuity is best – a house style if you like.

So there you go, in a nutshell, think about what you’re doing. Always.

I hope that helps.

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18 Mar 2012 · 9:32 am

McMini Says

Some more gems from McMini who is currently hoovering up his supper, or at least, munching it crumb by crumb, at the same speed glaciers move.

He sighed and said, “I have so much to do… I must do driving and eating and measuring and running.“
“That sounds like a packed social agenda.” I said.
“Oh yes I am very busy.”

Then he looked at his toy aeroplane and said.

“That is made in a factory with a machine and then a man puts it in a box and it is sent to the shops for me to buy.” he said.
“Well, yes that is pretty much how everything works.” I said. “Where did you get that from?“
“I watched it on I Can Cook.”

I was quite chuffed that he’s worked out how a factory works from looking at a short segment about packing and shipping bananas.

This morning we were out for a walk and the conversation went something like this.

“Mummy. It’s been raining a lot.“
“Yes hasn’t it? I’m glad it’s stopped now.“
“Yes and the puddles have gone.“
“Yes they have.“
“Where do they go?“
“Well, some of the water soaks away into the ground and some goes up into the sky. It’s the same as the steam that comes out of the kettle when it’s boiling — that’s water too — except there’s not as much so we can’t see it.“
“Ah… I think that’s how rain gets up into the sky, then.“
“Yes, that’s exactly how rain gets up into the sky.“
“Mmm. I see.”

I think he’s probably quite sharp. I quake at the thought of his teenaged years. I will win many arguments when he’s a teenager (not).

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31 May 2010 · 8:04 pm

Erk

My writing is going incredibly badly, not just a little bit out of kilter but oh blimey I think I’m going to have to re-write the first 50,000 words badly.

It does happen with every book I write but I’ve never had a two year old to look after or had my in-laws turn up to stay for an unspecified time until they find a house at the same moment. Usually I have time to concentrate, this time, not.

Hmm… It seems there are finally too many balls in the air and I’ve dropped the fucking lot.

Oh dear.

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9 Apr 2010 · 1:17 pm

The Value of Re-reading…

Hmm… here I am formatting my book for print, ordering actual bound copies to look at and evaluate and thinking that I am pretty much finished when I discover a massive and pointless continuity error…

I’d never seen it before so I’m delighted (not to mention relieved) to have found it now.  I suspect the moral of this story is that you can never proof read your stuff enough times.

On a completely different subject, the p key on my computer has broken. It still types, but the plastic lid won’t stay on so I have to put my pinkie directly onto the strange squishy rubbery mechanism… I guess the moral of this story is not to put your computer on the ground so your mobile phone falls out of your pocket onto the keyboard when you stand up.

Another small disaster was averted, too, yesterday when scion came rushing through my nice clean house shouting “egg” and juggling a real one from hand to hand – he is one and three quarters so this was… alarming. I did manage to rescue it and get it back into the pantry… I also managed to rescue the three other eggs he had dropped into the cereal box. Luckily none of them broke either… so no eggy cereal and no horrible eggy goop stuck, for ever, between the floor boards in the hall!

Points to the little one for manual dexterity, too, he’d unhooked and opened a wire egg basket and opened a cardboard egg box inside it.

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