Not NaNo 6 November 7a

This NaNo thing makes you quite creative, not just about the actual writing, but also about finding time to do the writing and places to do it in. For instance, this piece is being written after breakfast and efore I have to leave for work. I’ve got about a quarter of an hour so I could write a fairly long bit of creative flow but I’e also got the TV on and I’m being distracted.

Back in the past I used to be able to write at work because my employers frankly didn;t care what I was doing most of the day. I should have left that job earlier but somehow there was always a reason to give it a few more months. I was convinced that things would get better if I just hung in there. Never did, of course, and eventually it became so awful that I gave up altogether and took voluntary redundancy.

Here I go again, muttering about things that really aren’t relevant to this narrative. I’m supposed to be writing about my writing. I suppose that telling whoever reads this that I’m writing in brief stints whenever I can is about my writing isn’t it? I could actually do a whole section on where I’ve written in the past.  After all, I’e had a long enough history of this writing thing to have a variety of interesting places and methods.

Does it count as writing if you don’t actually have a pen in your hand or a keyboard at your fingertips?  Back in the old days of journalism before the world went electronic we sometimes had to phone in copy. When we were close to deadlines and didn’t have time to get things back to the office we ad to find a phone. Remember those days when we didn’t all have phones in our pockets? We used to have to watch out for the big red boxes on street corners and we had to make sure we carried enough change that we could make a call.  Lots of 10p pieces rattling round in our purses . When we were out in the field we had to gather the information then call up a copy taker in the head office and dictate the story down the phone line.

Sometimes it was so tight that we didn’t even have time to write anything in our notebooks. We just told the tale off the top of our heads. It wasn’t easy, but we could all do it. You have to come up with a sentence before you write it down. You might think you’re composing as you go along but you usually know what you’re going to say. Might not be obvious. Anyway, we had to dictate our story down the line and someone at the other end would type very quickly to put it all on paper so it could go through the print system.

You had to remember to give full instructions. Let the copytaker know when you wanted a capital letter. You ended a sentence with stop. stop. all punctuation all difficult spellings had to be explained carefully to make sure the story was what you intended when it finally saw light of day in the papers. Of course you knew that everything you did was eventually destined to become chip wrappers and fire lighters, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a sense of pride!

Not NaNo5 November 6

And so we continue with the story of my writing life. I’m currently a day behind with Nano. I’ve done four pieces but we’ve had five days. I wrote two yesterday, so I am slowly catching up.  Maybe I can write more than the regulation 1667 words tonight, which would help build up my total. I’m not good enough at maths to be able to work out how many words a day I have to do this week to catch up by the weekend.  Let me see. Five days till the weekend (counting tonight ) and an extra 1667 to make up. It’s not, of course, because I’ve over written slightly every day so far but let’s say it is for the sake of arguing.  If we divide 1667 by 5 we get  five into 16 is 3 and one left over, five into sixteen again is another 3 and one left over ad that leaves five into 17 which is another three and a bit.  So that’s 333 extra words a day, making nought on the end, carry 1, six plus four is another zero, oh I think it makes 2,000 words a day till Friday.  OK. There’s a challenge.

Of course I probably wrote a couple of thousand words at work today. I’m working on an awards submission that’s a thousand words and  200 word summary to go with it. Then there’s a couple of letters as well so yeah, I have taken all day to write as many words as I hope to do tonight.  Silly, but there you go.

So what were we going to talk about today? I did primary school yesterday, and a thing about Glastonbury that was mostly waffle but there you go. I’m currently running at nearly 300 words of waffle tonight too. I’m getting good at that. It would make sense if I went onto what happened to me at secondary school to follow that, wouldn’t it?   I started secondary school early because I had spent a lot of time in hospital and mostly I read books and learned tings. It didn’t take long for me to get ahead of my school friends. I’d already been pushed by my teachers, as I wrote a couple of posts ago. It was clear at the time that I had more hospital time to come, so mother pushed for me to take my eleven plus early. I didn’t think much about it at the time because I’d been pushed to be a swot for as long as I could remember. I had to be top of the class in everything. That was ow I’d been brought up. So I didn’t question it when the school put me forward for the 11 plus. I knew I’d pass it too. There was no doubt in my mind. I knew  i was as good as anyone else at school.

I wasn’t prepared for the outpouring of bullying that happened when I passed.  Another girl who was the right age to take the 11 plus (der – 11!) didn’t pass. My pride at getting through was knocked back by the barrage of accusations that I had robbed her of her ticket to high school.  I took her place, apparently. All my class knew it. And I suddenly became very unpopular. As usual when life gave me lemons, I read. Books and books and books. I’d had an operation the year before and someone bought me a copy of The Hobbit to pass the time while I was in hospital. But I never read it. I couldn’t get into it because I was quite distracted and I needed to read things I already knew. I couldn’t handle a completely new species off on an adventure in a mythical land.

However, when I found myself alone after the 11 plus, when the entire street blamed me for the fact that the girl from number 3 wasn’t clever enough to pass her exam, I turned to The Hobbit. I read it more or less in one sitting when I finally got into it. About seven years later I did the same thing with Lord of the Rings. I read the whole thing in the space of 24 hours with only a short break to eat dinner. I’ve digressed again.

When I started secondary school I went from being top f the class, goody goody swot to just one of the cream. Not top any more. I always ended up in the top half of the class. I was about twelfth in a class of 28 or so. Good, upper middle class stuff, but nowhere near the crème de la crème! It was a disappointment for my mother, and quite a disappointment for me. I was used to being top and getting praise from my teachers but it didn’t transfer to high school. I was just an also ran. My reading habits changed by force as I was given te classics to study. Shakespeare and Dickens and the bloody awful Bronte sisters. Not to mention Jane austen who had an unhealthy fixation with who married whom. Yes I know it was important to her and her kind and her class because women needed to make good marriages if they were to have comfortable lives. At my level of society the best you could hope for was not being beaten up or dying of exhaustion after having a dozen or so children. That’s probably why Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility never appealed.

Eventually, when I started getting interested in social history I began to read Dickens for what I could learn about poor Victorian people but I still never took to the upper class twits and Misters Darcey however good looking they were in wet shirts. That was a long time after though.  I remember one of the first books we were given to read was about a Greek boy called Theras and the first chapter was called Theras in the Agora, which means market place in Greek.  One of the first things we had to do with the book was cover it in brown paper to protect it. We were expected to cover all of our books in brown paper. We actually hd to take them home and do it. Can you imagine today if you sent kids hoe from school with a pile of books and the instruction to make dust covers for all of them? Oh yes parent, you’re paying for the paper and the sellotape. You’d have a riot on your hands. You can’t even tell them off if they rip the covers off these days.  Not that kids want books any more. They want electronic everything. But I’ve digressed again. So Theras was my first experience of reading t secondary school and let me tell you it was enough to have put me off for life if it hadn’t been for my settled love of books that Dad had instilled in me.

I think we also had A Midsummer Night’s Dream that year too. Not the best  of Shakespeare’s plays. I think it’s hard for young people to get the comedy out of The Bard just by reading him. You need to get used to the language and it’s a lot easier to get sense out of it if you hear him spoken out loud, rather than translating him in your head. Either way it was about four years before I had experience of a Shakespeare play that I enjoyed when we did Julius Caesar. I quite liked that one.
At the same tme as this I was also being asked to write, but the sort of stuff they wanted wasn’t my whimsical, creative writing. I was expected to do a thing called comprehension. Read something then answer questions about it. Not complete the story the way you tink it should go, like I was used to. But actually answer questions about what the text means and what te author intended. My English teacher was called Mrs Cross, and she and I never seemed to agree about what the text meant n a comprehension exercise.  I never had good marks from Mrs Cross, which is odd really because many years later when I took the JMB Use of English exam and got a grade 2 she apparently told someone she was disappointed because I should have got a grade 1. Bless her.

She was also our librarian and, when we reached sixth form and were given a list of classics we ‘should have read’ by now she was extremely understanding after I said I really didn’t want to. I asked for recommendations for things I might prefer and, after a conversation that rather reminded me of the things Dad and I discussed, she came up with Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White. She was right. I loved it.  But my writing didn’t impress her.

Some time after Theras I studied Wuthering Heights for O level and was taught by a Miss Addinall. Just as an aside here she was actually a very good teacher and was one of the people who inspired me to read poetry. She awoke my senses to the music of words – the poetry. Before her I’d really only taken in the story of poems. Mr Wilson with Lochinvar and how the knight rescued his lady love; Hiawatha and Nocomis; The Highwayman and so on. Although I could appreciate the rhythm of poems I still didn’t really get the music. I can remember learning about Hiawatha rhythm: By the sores of Gitchee Goomi, By the shining big sea water etc. Every line of Longfellow went dardy dardy dardy dardy. So I could pick out the rhythm. I could pick out rhyme schemes. Which lines rhymed with which, and why. But still no real beauty. Then along came Miss Addinall and that lovely onomatopoeic line about the skaters: all shod with steel we hissed across the polished ice. I must look that up.
So she was an excellent teacher. She never tried to teach through fear or embarrassment like others did. \It wasn’t her fault that when she came in one day and wrote on the blackboard ‘gambolling’ I blushed like a tomato! As soon as she wrote it I realised it was my mistake. I had, of course, meant ‘gambling’. The essay was about Heathcliffe winning the house by playing dice against one of the Lintons. He didn’t, as Miss Addinall was kind enough to joke, skip joyfully across the moors like a spring lamb. I’ve never made that mistake since!

So secondary school almost killed my writing bug. I always wanted to be a science writer. I had dreams f joining the staff at New Scientist or Scientific American, but my forward thinking, blue stocking school wanted me to be a scientist first and a writer second. I was taught by women who mostly had sacrificed a marriage and family for the sake of their career and who felt we should do the same. (It was a girls’ grammar school) Science was a respectable way to challenge male supremacy but I didn’t really want to do it. I took science A levels but my best result was in general studies, where I was expected to write something creative.  (It was an essay about ‘natural’ countryside and humankind’s effects on the world. All about how the so-called natural world was actually the result of millennia of crafting by farmers, industrialists and gardeners. Hedgerows, fields, ponds, ditches, all created for some purpose to make life easier for humans. Not natural in any way since prehistoric man cut down the virgin forest to create fields for his new activity of agriculture. )

So my best exam result, when it counted, was for creative writing. That’s why, when I messed up my post school science course I redesigned my career and trained to be a journalist. Because I could do it. I wanted to do it, and I realised it would help me start my dream career as a writer.

Not Nano 4 November 5 b

So at this stage I’ve covered November 5 totals and I’m ever so slightly ahead if only it was still last Friday. I guess I could talk about all sorts of things to try to get caught up. If I could just do another 1,000 or so words I’d be catching up. But if I’m honest I need closer to 3,500 to be right. That’s not  going to happen today. But I can write anything I want, of course, nobody is saying I’m writing a novel and no-one is pretending this is going anywhere except on my blog. It’s an exercise, nothing more. It’s like being at the gym. It doesn’t matter whether I’m on eh cross trainer or in the pool. It’s exercise. And that’s what this is. I need to make sure I can still write quickly and create something to fill a page or three.

OK, so the word count currently says 155 and it’s 12 minutes to six.  So if I type about something for 12 minutes I’ll be able to see how much I’m writing at any time. Not sure what I should write about though.  Jut recently we went to Glastonbury .It’s one of my favourite places ever. I’ve been interested in prehistory, and indeed history, if it’s early enough, for a very long time. I can remember when I was a kid I wanted to see all the archaeological sites in the country. Back then I thought archaeological site meant prehistoric site, but it doesn’t does it?  But when I was about 12 I thought that archaeology meant the stone age. It’s all to do with the school I went to. Not my secondary school but my second primary school (if you can follow that) where my teachers were interested in good stuff. We had to learn maths and English and all the basics. We were taught that the ‘standard’ subjects were tools. They were what we needed in order to study the things we enjoyed. If you can read you can learn anything. If you can use a dictionary you can understand anything.

These days everyone thinks the internet is the answer to everything, but you actually can’t browse information on the internet. You might think you can. Because they call it browsing, but you don’t actually browse. You go to the point you ask about and then browse various versions of the answer. You don’t flick through pages and catch sight of things you never even dreamed of. You can catch all sorts of stuff along the way when you look stuff up in an encyclopaedia. Sometimes the things you encounter are more interesting than what you set out to study. You can follow up a trail that leads from one place to another. Between H to He, (who am the only one) you could find hairdressing, helium, head lice, hawthorn, happiness, handicrafts, and heaven. Of course you might have been intending to study hallmarks.

Just as an aside it’s now six and my word count is 506. That’s 351 words in 12 minutes. Or just shy of 30 words a minute. That means that I should theoretically be able to complete my daily total in an hour (or my lunch break for a better way of describing it.) Never happens though.  OK. Back to the narrative.

I was talking about research and how proper books are better than the internet. But what about being up to date?  Yes, the internet might be more immediate,  but reference books are more fun! Specially reference books with pictures. although there are some fun books that don’t have pictures. There’s a great thing called Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. It’s full of all kinds of fascinating but useless information. I love looking things up in it because I always end up following trails through its cross references. At the bottom of every entry there’s usually a collection of words in bold that tell you to “See October” or whatever, and so you head off to October, where you find out all about  hallowe’en traditions and it’ll say ‘see jack o lantern’ so you go to that and it’ll tell you all about how they’ve been made from every kind of vegetable you can imagine including mangold worzels and so you head off to the page on mangold worzels and find out they’re grown in Lincolnshire so you look that up and before you know it you’re looking up the Lincoln imp, and that leads on to green men in churches  which wasn’t your intention but is a fascinating subject.

Then people ask me why I know so much stuff.  It’s a trick, of course, and it’s down to reading again. A long time ago when I was first starting out reading my dad used to talk to me about books. Every morning he would question me about whatever my latest book was. I have such fond memories of it. “What are you reading? Who wrote it? Tell me the story so far” and I would tell him what had happened. Describe the characters and  outline the narrative. He’d ask about which characters I liked and who I didn’t like and why. If I ever got the story wrong he’d tell me, gently but firmly, that perhaps I should go back and read that section again.

I was convinced that my Dad had read every book in the library because he always knew when I’d got it wrong. It was years before I realised that he was reading the book along with me, after I went to bed, so he’d know what it was about. He could question me about it and hold a meaningful conversation with me. At the end of each book he would then ask me if I enjoyed it and why. It meant that for ever afterwards he’d be able to hand me a book and say ‘ you’ll like that’ and he was never wrong.  It also meant that ever afterwards I would remember whatever I read in case Dad asked me about it. He’s been dead 18 years but I still do it. I even talk to him in my mind sometimes about  the book, why I enjoyed it, or not, and whether I thought he would. I miss him desperately.

I can remember a time on the run up to Christmas when I visited my parents and mother said Dad had insisted on buying a book for me but she didn’t think I’d like it.  When they told me what it was I said I’d already bought it, read it and loved it. Sure enough Dad did his usual thing. “What’s it about? Who are the main characters?” So I told him.  Then he asked me an odd question that he’d never asked before. “Does it have pictures?”  “Yes” I said, and described them to him. Half page black and white line drawings. I could see them in my head. Clear as day. So he suggested I should fetch the book and show him. I was stunned to discover that the pictures didn’t exist in the book. Only in my imagination. I can still see them in my mind’s eye.  I know the scenes so well. But they still don;’t exist! That book was Duncton Wood by William Horwood. How did he know? How did my Dad know that the story was so clearly embedded in my mind that I had created illustrations? Had we really formed such a strong bond that he could read my mind like a book? I think so. I just wish that I could draw well enough to make those illustrations.

How on earth did I get here from starting to write about Glastonbury? It’s the way my mind works. I wander from topic to topic, like the route through Brewer’s Dictionary. It doesn’t make a lot of sense maybe, but it’s interesting nevertheless. It also means that I’m very good at general knowledge quizzes as long as I’m not pitched against the clock. You see my brain has to follow similar lines in order to bring something out of my memory. I can’t take a direct route to a fact. I have to track along the line that put the fact in place originally. I follow a trail from fascinating idea to fascinating idea until I eventually reach my destination. Once in a while, particularly as I get older, I don’t actually reach my destination. Sometimes I’m close but just can’t remember that word or that fact or that memory that I’m trying to access.

So should I stil try to talk about Glastonbury? It’s a magical place and it’s been on my list of favourite places for years. I first went there as a child and remember going to the Abbey wth my parents to see the tomb of King Arthur who is reputedly buried there. He’s not real, of course. So he can’t be buried anywhere, but Glastonbury has been cashing in on him for years. It’s supposedly the place that Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus during the bit of the Bible that’s missing, between arguing with the elders in the temple and turning up to preach as an adult in his late 20s. There’s a myth about Joseph touching his staff to the ground and a white thorn tree sprang up. Several generations of tree later and they’re selling seedlings from the ‘original holy thorn’. Yeah right.

But I’ve been back to Glastonbury several  times since and it isn’t for any Christian purpose. It’s spiritual alright but it’s the natural spirituality that’s grown up around the town that attracts me. Tales of th goddess and the green man and loads of other gods and spirits who belong to the greenwood and the wild. The sight of the huge hill called the tor in the distance, with its tower at the top, lifts my heart and gladdens my spirit. And so I return when I can. For hares and dragons and incense and candles and the weird costumes in green and red and blue, and the ribbons and the lace and the light and the crystals and all the rest of the strange and mysterious things that make the town unique.

Not NaNo 3 November 5

I’ve missed a couple fo days beause we’ve been away so I have some making up to do. I’m not going to lie and say that I did this on the right day. I admit I’m a couple of days late but at this stage I have the rest of the month to make up. I probably won’t till next weekend, because I’m not sure what time I’ll be home every day. I took my laptop to work to do stuff at lunchtime on Friday but it didn’t happen. Oddly I felt insecure about doing it. I intended to spend an hour doing my own thing but it didn’t seem to work. Maybe I’ll try again this week. I just need to find somewhere that I can sit on my own without anyone to interrupt me, but I have no idea where that could be. I thought about the car, but it seems rude somehow.

Anyhow, I have some writing to do to keep up to date – or more accurately to catch up with where I should be.  I guess I’ll have to start somewhere. I was going to talk about my childhood and how I got into this word smith thing in the first place.

I was very young when my parents first decided to teach me to read. I must have been about three because it was a long time before I started school. My Dad thought that reading was important. He read every day. His job was sedentary and most of the time he didn’t actually do much. He had to be at his post in case something happened, but for huge parts of his eight hour shifts it didn’.t. So he read. Sometimes it was a novel. Sometimes he read things he’d read before. Captain Blood was a favourite and he probably read it twenty or thirty times that I knew of, not to mention others before I was born. It was one of his favourite films too, with Errol Flynn in the title role.

He was fond of historic navel stuff too, but he also read classics. He felt he’d missed out at school. He was forced to leave at 14 and went to work on te land. His family weren’t too bothered about learning an were more bothered about earning a living and making sure everyone was fed. Probably to do with their backgrounds. No-one in my history has been rich. I guess I don’t fully understand the need to earn all the time. I’ve always had a reasonable amount of money in the bank. We had to watch what we were spending from time to time but we were never really poor. We always ate well, if not excessively. (Even though we’ve all quite big!) We went places, we did things, and we were surrounded by books.

There was a monthly magazine called Argosy that we had delivered regularly. It had short stories by well known and lesser known authors. It was paperback so nobody was too worried about damaging it, and piles of them were kept on the side of the bath where mother could read them while she soaked for hours on end, avoiding the films that Dad used to watch. Captain Blood wasn’t one of her favourites. Of course, just because books were all around me didn’t mean that I could read them instinctively. I was taught to read, ot with children’s books, but with what was around me. For example, my parents were avid crossworders. Some of my earliest memories are of Dad reading the clues: “Is it made straight for the hive? Seven letters, ends in e.”  It’s beeline, of course, and I can remember early on asking why the answers were what my parents wrote in to the grid.

I  can remember sitting with my dad while he read out each clue, running his finger below the words as I watched. Eventually he started asking me to read the words to him. It was a faltering start but I made progress.  So I learned some very strange words very early on. I mean, have you read crossword clues?  They make no sense in a conventional way. So I had to be able to work out the actual words. There are no hints within a crossword clue about what the next word will be.

For very long words Dad taught me how to break down each one into smaller components so I could say them out loud. I probably had no idea what the words meant. Such as convalescence, for example. I could break it down into con val es cence and say it to me Dad and he’d tell me I had it right. And then he’d explain to me what the word meant. But mother would work out the answer to the clue and then we’d go through why it was so.

That’s how I had such a huge vocabulary by the time I started school. I can remember the first day, being asked to read a list of words to my teacher. Far from Janet and John, I had lots of very long words at my fingertips. Did I know what any of them meant? No. But I could read them and pronounce them, so it was decided that I had a reading age of about 10. And by the time I left primary school at the ripe old age of 10 they said it was 16 (which was as far as the measurements go. That just meant ‘grown up’.

I’ve gone off track a bit here. I’m supposed to be talking about my childhood writing, it’s just that reading came first. I had two primary schools, and I don’t remember much about the first one. I can picture it and I know where I had to walk to get there, but there’s not much about my life there that’s stuck i my mind. The second one, though, that’s different. I had some corking teachers who decided to support my skills, rather than just record them.

We were taught all kinds of complicated things under simple headings. Under the guise of ‘how things began’ my vocabulary grew even further as words like Ordovician and trilobite were added to it. As part of ‘seashore life’ I learned Laminaria saccharina and Patella vulgata. (That’s a sort of seaweed, and the common limpet, if you want to know.)  It soon became obvious to my teachers that I had skills in English, both reading and writing. A wonderful, inspiring teacher called Mr Childs encouraged us to take part in writing contests and I can remember one that was run by the chocolate manufacturer Cadbury. I wrote a story about a chocolate bar that didn’t want to be eaten, so it ran away. It had a very bad time of things as a result and ended up cold, wet and miserable after being swept through a storm drain. In the process its wrapper fell off and it was depressed and lonely when a dog came along and ate it, so it realised its true destiny.

Of course I’ve learned since then that the dog would have been very ill as a result, but I didn’t know that when I was a kid. It seemed like a good tale, and the Cadbury judges must have agreed because I won a first prize certificate and a huge tin of chocolate things. I was told I was imaginative. These days they call it creative, but I’m not sure what to call it. I suspect I just like iving in a world where everything eventually works out for the best.  I’ve always thought my version of the world is better than the real one.  In fact I still have an active fantasy life. I sometimes see people walking past me and create whole back stories for them to suit what they’re wearing, how they walk, what they are carrying. I imagine where they are going and what they plan to do. I create whole stories in my head about their lives and what they do. The worse I feel the more creative I am about their stories. It’s amazingly cheering.

Then there was Mister Wilson.  He was the headmaster and he was a great believer in expanding children’s horizons. He had a theory that, if you’d learned to walk, talk, interact with people and generally live by the time you’ve five why should you slow down the rate of learning? So he felt that kids should hear the classics, and try to understand what they were about and try to understand where the story was going. If you hear the start of a story you should be able to predict where the tale is going. Or alternatively you can create a whole new direction for it and make something totally different happen. So he would read us the first half of something then make us write our own ending for it, in the right style, even if it was poetry.

I remember one day he read us the first half of the poem Lochinvar. “Oh young Lochinvar is come out of the west, through all the wide nation his steed was the best” or something like that. The tale is a proper story of romance and heroism in which Lochinvar eventually rescues his love from an imminent marriage to the wrong man. Sure enough, I wrote the correct ending because, like I said, I always want the world to have a happy ending!  So Lochinvar gets to ride away on his fine steed with his lady love.

So my creative writing was encouraged early. My teachers wanted us to be imaginative and to write as often as possible. And I was happy to take part in it. By the age of 10 (which is when I moved on to secondary school ) I was recognised as being ahead of my school pals in writing, spelling, reading, using words. I was already a writer and already wanting to do it for a living when I grew up.  At the age of 10 that was how life seemed to be going. I knew that words were my friends and I already felt that they would do what I wanted if I asked them.  

Not NaNo 2 November 2

Before I go much further with this I suppose I’d better explain that I’m currently posting all this onto my blog as is. I’m not editig except where I miss out a space between words (because that reduces my daily count) so it’s very, very poorly written. The sentiment is there but it’ll be full of typos and spelling erors and repetitions and all the other stuff I would normally remove before my text sees daylight. But I don’t have time on the NaNo scale to do all that. This is true stream of consciousness stuff. Beat generation eat your heart out.  So onward to the next bit. If the mistakes bother you, just edit them in your mind.

If I'm going to turn this writing exercise into a NaNo project I might have to give a thought to what headings I should use to complete it. If I use these words as part of today's total it'll mean I have to edit more heavily at a later date. As if I'm ever going to try to publish my memoirs. I mean, who'd want to read them?

I suppose that depends on what I actually write about. I could probably create something to rival 50 Shades of Grey if I gave it a go, though punishment has never been my bag. But a lady doesn't kiss and tell, at least in print! So I won't be discussing my love life except when it becomes absolutely essential. (That's called a teaser. Now anyone who's reading this is going to continue in the hope of some juicy bits further down the line.)

I plan to write about my Writing Life and that means I need to discuss all the times it's been relevant. Such as:
- at primary school when I used to get top marks for my words. I could read well and write creatively and so my stories would earn praise from teachers, and sometimes even outside bodies. Cadbury (or was it Rowntree's? I forget)
- at secondary school, when my style was less than popular and I was forced into doing science that I didn't want to.
- The Sheffield year, when I learned to hone my skills and spent an evening in a bus station feeling homesick.
- The Lincoln years. Spectacular they called it and spectacular it really was.
- Durham and the great freeze. Is that a relevant chapter? I guess the Elton John episode would earn a place in teh greater story.
- Have you ever met anyone famous? Well of course I have. I was a journalist.
- Court reporting and the case of the Bald Barrister. Le Petit Prince and cups of coffee.
- Council meetings and the phantom planning report.
- Poetry. Oh yes. I write poetry too. Badly.
- Diaries.
- Blogs.
- I forgot Mr Wilson. How could I forget Mr Wilson? The way he'd read half stories or poems to us then make us write the endings. Oh Young Lochinvar is come out of the West and all that. And he were 'ung by a thread of scarlet! The Monkey's Paw.
- There's Dad, of course. I could hardly miss him out because he developed my love of books and that fuels my writing.
- I haven't got to Wellingborough yet. Although the phantom planning application was there. But there must be other things from nine years working my way up the ranks.
- The pub. Did I write at the pub? Or was that where my inspiration took its first knock?  I could write about teh pub. But then I'd be off topic rather. So I probably won't. Except that was my letter writing phase. So I ought to mention Dougie and the place where Annethology first appeared.
- The post-pub years took me to University and the serious business of getting a degree. There was a lot of essay writing there. And 'let's go beat up the Iceni'.
- Sent to Coventry and the great Midlands canal survey. Learning about the gentle art of storytelling and weaving a few of my own.
- Derby and case studies. Marketing is not journalism.

There must be more. But my half hour is up and I have to go at the moment.

Can I really write 600 words in a half hour? That’s a rate of 20 a minute, or one every three seconds. So I probably can, as long as I know what I want to say. The journalist in me says of course I can, but the human being suggests I might not. And that implies that journalists are not human beigs, which they are, even if some of them are cynical hacks. I don’t think I ever became really cynical while I was a journalist. No, that was reseved for the post newspaper days when I was a pub landlady. That made me realise what a horrible bunch of slime some people can be. The liars and cheats and bullies and arrogant bastards. All life eventually passes through a bar.

No, while I was a journalist I was still driven by an innocent dream of helping the underdog. That’s why I joined up in the first place. I remember I had to write an essay about why I wanted to be a journalist before they would accept me on the training course in Sheffield. I wrote a glowing piece of prose about how the pen is mightier than the sword and I wanted to help poor embattled Joe and Josephine Public cut through the maze of red tape and officialdom. At the interview they called me a naive kid, or something along those lines, but decided that the newspaper world could handle a few more like me, and they let me in.

Of course I didn’t always want to be a journalist. I wanted to be a science writer. I saw myself as a permanent feature producer for New Scientist or Scientific American and felt I would have been good at it.  My teachers, however, thought I should do science first and writing afterwards. I was shoe horned into a practical microbiology and entomology course that was no use for anything I wanted to do.  Half way through I realised I was being trained to wash test tubes and would never be a proper scientist who dreamed up the research. I’d just be the over-educated charwoman who cleared away the mess and wiped the work benches down after the brains finished their work. Not for me buster! I quit cold at the end of year one and vowed never to go back.

I had no idea what I wanted to do next. My dream of being a professional writer seemed to have gone out of the window. I didn’t know how to retrieve it and looked around for just any old job to fill in the time while I thought about life, the universe and everything. (which, as far as I remember, was published round about the same time. Or at least broadcast. Maybe I need to look that fact up to be sure.)
So I spent a summer selling shoes and serving coffees and clearing tables in a nightclub and washing glasses and generally having a good time. I worked as a waitress in a local pub and met a ghost from my past who ultimately saved me from a fate worse than death but also taught me to like Scotch, so I guess that’s evens then. Scotch is a vicious drink and I know why a lot of sots people are punchy. Whisky does that to me. I’ll hit anyone if I get drunk on whisky. I even nicked a policeman’s helmet once but that’s a whole other story. On the other hand, whiskey (with an e) from the Emerald Isle is a different thing altogether. They triple distil it, so it removes some of the junk that makes the other stuff so harsh and presumably makes the scots angry. In Ireland they sip it, wth plenty of water, and sing amiably until they slide not so gracefully under the table and snore gently till morning. Some bitter Irish widows might disagree about all that, but I digress. Where was I?  Oh yes, the dream of being a writer.

One morning I was most surprised to find a cutting from a newspaper on the table in the lounge. I was back living at hme, of course, and having difficulty adjusting to the fact that parents expect you to tell them where you’re going and what time you’ll be back and all that other rigmarole. I’d had a year of being my own boss so I wasn’t happy about it, but give Mother her due (not something I do often) she seemed to understand what was actually missing from my life. The press cutting was an advert for a course in journalism: 12 months of learning how to write for newspapers with a fair chance of finding a job on one at the end.  I applied. Mother was deeply surprised that something she suggested had gone down so well and told me the tale of the gypsy fortune teller who said  she would one day have a child who worked in the newspaper world. Mind you, the woman also told her that one day she’d live in a cottage with roses round the door but she never did. I’m not sure what else was in the tea leaves but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and say two out of three ain’t bad!

It was a great course. There was law and public administration which I enjoyed immensely and even considered giving up on journalism to become a solicitor, but I stuck with the Sheffield year and never really regretted it. Particularly when I found myself becoming a court reporter and writing about the law, rather than practising it. I was good at law, and even remembered enough of it years later to upset a fellow student because I could have done her case law exam and she couldn’t.  I’d been a court reporter for more than a decade by then and she was on her first year of lawyer learning.  And so the dream came true, albeit a long way round. Eventually I even wrote about science.  But first and foremost I was a journalist and that taught me a whole raft of skills that I’ve put to good use ever since.

Not NaNo November 1

There’s a thing called NaNoWriMo that I’ve taken part in over a few years. The idea is that you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days during November. That works out at 1,667 words a day, which is no mean feat in itself. But the big challenge is, of course, telling some sort of story. If you’re going to write a novel you need a tale somewhere in your head to weave the words around. This year I have nothing going round in my head at all. It’s not like me to have no idea of a way to entertain. I have been known in previous Nano years to start typing and hope for the best. Sometimes it works and other times it goes awry.

For instance, a few years ago I started what was supposed to be a comical tale about a magic necklace and its effects of the girl who bought it. The first few paragraphs started well and I found myself tapping the keyboard merrily and chalking up the word total without too much thought of what I was actually composing.

It must have been a couple of pages in before I realised that the story had taken a very dark turn. There was a body, for a start. The girl used a phrase I’m fond of: “Go play on a railway line”. Someone had annoyed her and she used the term lightly as her way to deal with the irritation. Much like I do.  Of course, no-one I’ve said it to (or about) has ever actually done it. But her victim did. The man went off into town and followed the enchantment. The next thing I knew he was hit by a train. Bam! Dead. You don’t expect that when you set out to write a comedy.

Then there was the year I started on an epic four generation tale of a family whose members never reach their 60th birthdays. OK, I admit that wasn’t ever going to be a laugh a minute. It had a few moments of wry humour but it was short on belly laughs. All was going well. The dates all fit together and I found some interesting ways to kill off some of the family members. One died of exhaustion after giving birth to about 14 children. (Most of them died young!) One was hit by a tram in the centre of Manchester. Another died in prison after one of the other inmates took a dislike to him and shanked him with a sharpened comb. Then there was poor old George. For narrative purposes he had to be so depressed that he killed himself by drowning in the canal. I got through most of his history but found that I was hating myself for the horrible things I was doing to him to drive him mad. Incidentally, it was his wife who was hit by the tram! I couldn’t actually bring myself to finish his chapter. That book still languishes on an old laptop somewhere, missing about 17 chapters. To be fair I was a bit stumped about how I was going to get around five of the family into one place so they could all be hit by a German bombing raid.

The book was historically accurate and the bombing raid really happened. I did a lot of research into the life and times of people from the late 19th century through to the start of the 21st. It should have been a very good book, and still would be if I could bring myself to return to it. But I can’t force myself to go back and torture poor George. While I leave the text alone he isn’t dead – even though he was born in about 1920! I’ve written the last chapter, so I know how the book ends. I just have a huge chunk of nastiness missing from the middle.

The magic necklace book ad a similar effect on me. I gave up on it after I’d killed off the guy on the railway line, but I went back to that one the following year. I did eventually manage to turn it into something readable and even got a few laughs into it. I managed to upset a friend because I based one of the characters on her. She was a very large personality and clearly recognised herself in the early chapters I let her read. Big mistake. She gave up reading. So she never found out that she was the heroine of that tale. A little bit like those 1950s school-based stories where a plucky first year saves the lives of a bunch of stupid sixth formers. She started out appearing to be a bit of an air head but in the end she was keeping a deep secret that helped her to overcome the baddie. I was a bit fond of my baddie in that story. He was an enchanted member of the fae who could use glamour to confuse people.  I’m not saying who he was based on, but |I’ve been divorced twice!

The good guy – or one of them – was based on somebody on TV that I thought was a bit of a looker.  Anyone who reads it and knows me will be able to work it out. Who it’s based on, that is.
To be fair I have a bit of a problem with what my characters look like. I’m usually pretty good at coming up with names (when in doubt I go graveyard hunting. You can find some corking names on headstones that you’d never invent yourself!). I can dream up back stories. If you doubt that just you read my collection of short stories about the retired  theatre dresser.  His back story is amazing and so are the backgrounds of several of the bit-part players. So I can string along a convincing narrative but the problem is I can’t start writing until I know what the characters look like. I cannot, to save my life, dream up a face.

Back in the day I would watch TV and pick out suitable faces from the also-rans. You can’t really use big names because people recognise them. So if you need a romantic hero from the Victorian era you can’t really use one of the Doctors Who. Except maybe David Tennant because he would make an excellent Victorian romantic lead and people would forgive you. So you need “that bloke third on the left in the jury in Law and Order the other night”. But these days it’s easier to find a face for my characters.  These days I go hunting online.

It’s surprisingly easy to put something like “blond good looking man early 40s” into a search engine and get a string of photos that look like an identity parade. With a bit of effort you can sometimes get a whole back story to use with the face. Some people are stupid about how much information they put online.  Take this as a warning. If you ever post a selfie from your phone make sure you’ve switched off the location data. Particularly if it’s in your back garden! Otherwise you might just find yourself being stalked by a frustrated author who liked the look of your face to be a serial killer in their latest book. (Of course it could be worse. You could be stalked by a serial killer who just likes the look of your face. )

Take care on where the hunt leads you though. It’s hard to avoid that ‘put your name into Google’ moment. Resistance is futile. That’s how I found out that I run a fire service in Canada; I work for an accountant about 10 miles down the road; I’ve written at least two history text books; and I’m buried in Cambridgeshire.  Scary stuff!

So what was the point in starting this exercise tonight? I don’t have a Nano novel in my brain and it’s not like I don’t spend all day at work writing these days. Why do I feel the need to write 1667 words a night to meet some self-imposed standard?  I don’t NEED to write anything. But somehow I feel better when I manage to keep up the pace. And you never know, I might come up with a workable idea between now and November 30.  Even if all I do is craft a few short stories along the way it’ll be more than I’ve done in a long time. I used to write regularly. I used to have ideas bursting their way through my skull. They knock on the inside of my head and demand to be put into data form. But not lately. I’m not sure where my inspiration went. In fact I wrote a poem a couple of years ago that was precisely about losing my muse. But that was inspired by a sculpture in Leicester Botanic Gardens. It was big and red and angular, I remember. The sculpture that is, not the poem.

I guess I need to have an outlet for my creativity, even if what I create is rubbish. There’s no such thing as wasted words. Any one of these sentences might be the springboard to something better. Or then again it might just languish in my laptop like previous efforts have.

It’s refreshing to know that I can keep up a stream of words until I reach 1,667 and that some people will be daft enough to read to the end. Not many, of course. The ones who love me; the ones who are curious; the ones with nothing better to do.  I just wish I’d noted down my start time to see how long it takes me to get to the target. Because I’m not far off now and I know I’ve been typing for at least half an hour.  Maybe longer. Now I just need 12 words to get to the end. Five, four, three, two, one. Yay!

The Business of Dying

A writer friend once told me that all the best stories start with a great "what if?" and that might explain what makes The Business of Dying such a gripping read. It begins with one of the best "what if?" assumptions I have ever encountered. What if a mid ranking police officer became so disillusioned with his job that he decided to moonlight as a professional hitman? It's a thrilling place to start a book because within a few pages three men have been murdered in a gangland style killing and the reader does not discover that the gunman is actually Detective Sergeant Dennis Milne until a roadblock forces him to use his warrant card to escape. (Unless you read the jacket blurb, of course.)

It soon becomes obvious that he has been set up, however, when news reports show that the dead men were customs officers, rather than the drug dealers he thought he had assassinated. In spite of his part-time occupation Milne is not a bad man. He joined the force to help remove some baddies from the world. He took up shooting them only after it became clear that modern policing was unlikely to have any long term effect on crime rates or to apprehend the real offenders. There is some interesting and thought provoking discussion on how he justifies his double life and readers are left wondering whether, in the same circumstances, they might not be driven to doing the same thing.

Given that Milne is a senior detective it is no surprise that bodies arrive thick and fast in this tale, and not all as a result of his handiwork. There is enough police procedure to satisfy the amateur sleuths who want to work out for themselves whodunnit but this is not a polished forensic drama. It has none of the glib crime-fighting paraphernalia that has taken over a lot of detective fiction since the advent of CSI.  Neither are the murders quite as straightforward as many writers would have us believe. Guns jam. Victims fight back. Blood squelches. Corpses make revolting noises. The business of dying is truly messy.

The book is Simon Kernick's first, and is a much better novel than an author's debut outing usually achieves. It has been re-released on the strength of his later success with Relentless, but this one deserves to be widely read too. Milne comes across as a real guy, facing real dilemmas in a very real world. He is also lacking in many of the now clichéd world-weary copper attributes that have littered crime novels for the last decade. For example, he drinks because he enjoys it, or because he has had a bad day at work, or because he has just killed someone. We imagine we would have a glass or two for the same reasons. His habit is not a plot device, it is a genuine part of the character.   OK, so his love life is not too promising, but police work is often cited as having a high divorce rate so that is also believable. (It does mean that he is free to sleep with a suspect, however, even after she makes some startling admissions, which is a little far-fetched.)

Beyond that there is little to detract from this cracking tale with its unusual premise. It spins along at a good pace and is far from predictable along its route. Read it soon. Because life’s too short. 

The Business of Dying

Simon Kernick

2002