Another paragraph accepted

Paragraph Planet have accepted my latest submission, a 75-word tale about a bicycle ride with an unexpected (and muddy!) outcome. This is another story which really, genuinely happened when I was about ten or eleven and might make you smile.

You can read the story free for one day only (at least until it appears on the archive page) tomorrow, Sunday 19th September, by following the link above.

New gay horror anthology

I keep forgetting to mention that QueeredFiction have a new collection of stories out, this time with a horror theme. The book is called Blood Fruit, contains stories by eleven new and established authors, and as with all their titles is available in both electronic and print formats.

I don't have a story in this one (couldn't get anything finished in time to submit) but if the standard of writing is anything like as high as their recent sf anthology Queer Dimensions, then it's well worth splashing out on a copy. Just follow the link above to QF's website and you'll see the book in the scroll-box in the centre of the page.

Apostrophe-itis?

Do you forget when to stick the little blighters in and when not to? Then look no further than this snappy little number on YouTube, which is to-the-point and just repetitive enough to help you remember the rules.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc2aSz9Ficw&feature=player_embedded

Some of the images on the accompanying video are worrying, though. Especially the ones from printed newspapers. I won't go off into 'what's the world coming to' type grumbles but it does make you wonder how much use an education system is if so many people get it so wrong so much of the time...

Oooh, shiny

A few weeks back I noticed that my trusty old laptop was getting distinctly slow. I've had it for the best part of six years and it's been everywhere with me on my travels, helping me to write and stay in touch. But it didn't have a huge store of memory and the little it did have was obviously clogged.

Dave kindly offered to do a rebuild of the hard disk, to clear out any accumulated rubbish and start from scratch. The other weekend we had some spare time, so I copied any vital files and then handed it over for surgery. "I'm trashing the hard disk... NOW," Dave announced.

Thirty seconds later he added, "Um, you do have the registration number for the XP install disk, don't you?"

You can guess what happened next...

Between us we'd rendered the laptop useless. It wouldn't load XP without that wretched registration number, and it's too old to take anything more up to date. I can use Linux but my favourite word processor, WordPerfect, won't run under Linux and nor will one or two other well-loved programs. So, there was nothing else for it. We bundled into the car, drove to a huge local Tesco which has an excellent technology department, and I proceeded to buy myself a brand new laptop.

This cost less than half the original one, with about six times as much memory, a larger keyboard, an HD-standard screen, and Windows 7 preloaded. It's easier to type on, faster, sleeker, has vastly more storage and a better selection of games for when I'm bored. I wouldn't recommend trashing an old laptop to get hold of a new one, but in this case I think I've done rather well...

Roar

Yesterday for a laugh we went to the Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery to catch their T-Rex exhibition, something we've been meaning to do for weeks. We only just made it, because today is the very last day. They weren't quite stacking chairs and sweeping the floor, but it was a close run thing.

And heaps of fun. It cost £5 each to get in (most of the exhibitions are free) but there was a lot to see including several life-size animatronic models of dinosaurs - three T-Rex, an Ankylosaurus and a very dead Triceratops. Unlike most dinosaur exhibitions, which simply concentrate on the history, this one was asking a very specific question: was T-Rex a predator or a scavenger? There were a whole series of displays pointing out the differences between the two forms, both in dinosaur times and in the modern animal kingdom. Differences that included predators being fast and agile, and having strong front legs/claws to hold onto prey - none of which apply to the lumbering T-Rex with its silly little front limbs.

By the end of the exhibition we'd come to the conclusion these huge beasts were probably scavengers, and even posted our vote in the voting booth at the end. But talking about it over lunch we realised that the whole exhibition had been subtly leading us to that conclusion ('Are you sure T-rex was a predator? Are you still sure?') and that reality might well have been fuzzier. No matter, it was a fun morning out.

We also popped our heads into a different gallery to see part of the famous Anglo-Saxon Staffordshire Hoard, discovered a couple of years ago, which apparently puts even the Sutton Hoo treasure into the shade. I have yet to be convinced about that (having seen some of the Sutton Hoo artefacts in the British Museum - they are utterly stunning), but the Staffs Hoard is certainly vast, and fascinating. Almost all the pieces are military, with none of the drinking vessels and jewellery you'd expect from, say, a massive royal grave, and yet they're exquisitely made with microscopic gold filigree and finely cut garnet inlay. Which begs the obvious question - what on earth was this hoard, and why were the individual pieces scrunched up before it was buried? I expect the arguments will rage for years.

Reading positions

The Guardian's book blog had an amusing article yesterday on the positions people choose to read, especially if they're reading in bed.

The blog's author seemed to think that lying on one's side is the most common position for reading in bed, and it's certainly the one I find most comfortable. If I lie on my back my arms get tired holding the book aloft; if I roll onto my stomach I end up with neck-ache and sore elbows. Oddly, though, I always lie on my right side, never my left. This makes no sense because I'm right-handed, so lying on my left side would free up my right hand/arm for turning the pages. But I don't, and don't think I ever could.

At least I'm not like one writer friend who doesn't read in bed at all, but in the bath. I'd love to know how she stops the pages getting soggy!

How do you read in bed? Book or e-reader? Sitting or lying? And do you ever fall asleep with the book in your hand?

Currently working on...

It seems like an age since I reported on what I'm currently writing - so much so you might think I've been sitting with my feet up, filing my nails and doing no work at all.

That isn't the case; I've just been concentrating on a couple of long-term projects which are going to take a while to finish. One is a whole collection of short, dark, crime-related stories which I'm hoping to submit somewhere as an anthology once I have enough gathered together. So far I'm up to about eight or nine, including one inspired by a recent story in the news, but obviously I need more than that before any publisher will look at it. And the second project is a brand-new novel, which I've been thinking about for some time but have only just begun committing to paper. Like much of my work it's a darkly humorous take on 21st century relationships (this one involving a landscape gardener and his wife). Given my current record on finishing novels, it's likely to be a couple of years yet before it's in a fit state to even think about sending off anywhere.

But rest assured I am still writing and I'll try to report back on progress from time to time.

Many a true word...

I've been decorating this week, in the little cubby-hole I use as a study. The previous owners of the house had it as a nursery for their young son, and had decorated it beautifully with baby-themed wallpaper which is very sweet but perhaps not entirely appropriate for an office. So I dug out an old pot of paint and got to work.

The wallpaper is mostly cream, with cute baby words on it like 'sleepy', 'hungry' and 'naughty'. I was busy obliterating one of these when the paint brush slipped out of my hand, did a few graceful pirouettes in mid-air, and landed with a pale blue painty splat on the pristine cream-coloured carpet.

So which word was I painting over at the time?

Clumsy.

:D

Paragraph lost, paragraph regained

A while back now I had a little piece accepted by Paragraph Planet, an online magazine that publishes paragraphs that are exactly 75 words long.

Owing to a slight misunderstanding I missed the publication date, which was actually back in June. However, the good news is that you can still read my offering by following this link, and selecting the entry for 7th June.

The piece is called 'Rollercoaster Ride' and is a (somewhat autobiographical) tale of a child's visit to a fairground. And all in only 75 words. Phew. I'm not going to tell you which bits really happened, though. You'll have to work that out for yourselves!

Quick march...

It was a gorgeous day on Saturday - sunny intervals, occasional stormy-looking clouds, warm but with a fresh breeze. We haven't done nearly enough walking in the Lakes lately - Real Life (TM) keeps getting in the way - but this time we were determined to make the most of the opportunity and chose the Grizedale Forest, a huge area of forest trails with the added interest of sudden mountain views and a fascinating sculpture trail.

Over the years we've done several of the trails but this time Dave picked one we hadn't done before, taking in Grizedale Tarn which is apparently the only natural tarn in the whole forest. The way to it was surprisingly rough with steep slopes and ankle-breaker tracks but we followed the white marker posts past some ingenious sculptures (a giant metal wasp, something that looked like huge animal droppings but was probably meant to be seeds) and were rewarded when we staggered out at the top onto rough heathland with a stunning view of the Fairfield horseshoe in the distance.

Although we followed the trail for what we thought was every inch, we somehow managed to miss the tarn completely (or perhaps it's a special tarn that vanishes and springs out at you when you least expect it) but it was still a lovely three-and-a-half mile walk. But towards the end Dave realised the two hours' parking he'd paid for was rapidly running out, and we'd have to hurry. I got back down the rough tracks and steep slopes in record time and we worked out we'd done the entire walk in one hour and forty minutes.

It was only when we were back in the car that Dave revealed the recommended time for the walk was... two and a half hours.

No wonder my legs were shaking!

Drying out

We are slowly but surely drying ourselves out. We've had visits from a local builder, our insurance assessor, and a decorator. We've stripped the vinyl wallpaper off the worst affected part of the hall, since it was acting like a massive waterproof jacket and keeping the water in. We now have two industrial sized dehumidifiers and two colossal air-blowers going, full-tilt, in the hall and pantry. I can hardly hear myself think, but gradually the damp patch is shrinking. And at last, our next door neighbours have also set up dryers in their house so the damp will hopefully stop oozing through the wall. It's all progress.

Mind you, talk about 'after the flood'. The night before last we had an earthquake. O.o

Only a tiddler at 1.7 magnitude, but it was a big enough bang to wake me up and shake the foundations of the house. Whatever next? A plague of locusts? A volcano in the back yard?

Somewhat damp apologies

Sorry, it's been an age since I updated this. I'm not sure where the last couple of weeks have gone, to be honest - I seem to have been working as usual, but the days have zoomed past and I lost track.

I do know where the last couple of days have gone, though, and they've been distinctly damp. During the week we'd noticed water dripping in our pantry (a long narrow space under the stairs) and thought we'd tracked it back to a badly-repaired joint in the main water pipe down there. By Saturday, it was significantly worse so we called out a plumber who banged and thumped and repaired the thing as well as he could (Saturday not being a good day for plumbing since all the builders' merchants tend to shut at midday). He left with profuse apologies for not giving us a permanent fix, and a promise to come back on Monday to finish the job.

On Sunday morning we awoke to find a pool of water on the pantry floor, and the ominous sound of dripping. Further investigation revealed that the joint in the pipe was bone-dry, which meant the water had to be coming from somewhere else - but where? It wasn't until I spotted a mysterious dark stain on the hall wallpaper that we realised the awful truth - it was coming through from next door. This takes some doing, believe me, since the party wall is nearly two feet thick. But coming through it was, and at an ever-increasing rate.

I gathered old towels, and sent Dave off on a neighbour-hunt. Our next-door neighbours themselves were away, but next-door-but-one had a key, and he and Dave went in to investigate. Seconds later Dave shot back, liberally sprayed with water, and hared off again with his toolbox. Turns out their boiler, which is in their attic, had burst, and water had quite literally been cascading down through their house for days. The men got the water turned off at the mains, which at least stopped things getting any worse. There was still an awful lot of water to drain away, though, and although it's slowly drying we've been left with a huge patch of sodden plaster in the hall, and a total mess in the pantry. It'll take weeks or even months to dry out completely and we're thinking of hiring a dehumidifier, to try to keep the damp, rot and mould at bay.

We're just grateful, though, that we discovered it when we did. Things could have been much worse for us, and a complete and utter disaster for our neighbours, if that water had continued to cascade...

In the style of...

This is a bit of nonsense, but fun - and a potential boost to your confidence if you're banging your head against the keyboard and the words won't come.

Enter a snippet of your writing in the box, press 'analyse' and hey presto - it'll tell you which famous author you write like.

I write like
Margaret Atwood

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I would love to know how this gadget works. I suspect it's completely random, since friends have entered different bits of text and it's come up with a different author name every time. On the other hand, it could be doing some impossibly complex calculations, based on common words and phrases...

I'm delighted with the result I got, but here's a word of warning. A friend of mine put a sample of her writing in and it came up with... Dan Brown. I'm trying to talk her down from the parapet of the bridge as I type. :D

Colourful sayings

Do you ever wonder where all those cliches and aphorisms come from? We seem to spout them on a regular basis and some of them are wonderfully colourful, even if their meanings have been lost in the mists of time.

It was usually the older members of my family who trotted these things out any time there was a gap in the conversation. 'It's an ill wind that blows nobody any good' was a favourite of one elderly great-aunt, along with 'it's a long lane that has no turning'; my grandmother preferred 'a little of what you fancy does you good' which is at least clearer, and a great excuse for a bit of quiet excess from time to time.

I don't think any of my family's sayings can beat this, though, taken from a quote on i-Google this morning: 'The black cat is always the last one off the fence.' The author, Solomon Short, adds, 'I have no idea what [my grandmother] meant...' No, nor have I, but I'd love to know whether she knew what she meant. And even more, I'd love to know where that saying came from, and which particular cats it was talking about!

Byker Books - ooops!

Anyone reading my blog post from last week about Andy Rivers' appearance on tv, and trying to watch the programme on Wednesday 6th July, will soon realise that either they're in an alternate universe or else muggins here got it wrong.

Well, as far as I'm aware we'll all stuck in the same reality, which means only one thing. Mea culpa! Sorry. Money Watch, featuring Andy Rivers, is on Tuesday 6th July at 8.00 pm on BBC2.

I'll be watching and, now that we've cleared that up, I hope you will be too!

All that jazz

For a complete change yesterday we gathered up a couple of friends, various chairs and rugs, and the makings of a picnic and set off for the 'Mostly Jazz Festival' in Moseley Park.

This is a brand new music festival in Moseley, which already plays host to the internationally-acclaimed Moseley Folk Festival each September, and whoever organised it clearly has some 'clout' in the music business because the line-up included Courtney Pine, Andy Hamilton and the Blue Notes, and several other luminaries of the jazz scene. (Whoever came up with the dreadful pun in the festival's name wants shooting, on the other hand...).

Moseley Park is the perfect venue for these smaller festivals - pretty, enclosed, intimate, yet large enough to house three separate stages, a food 'village', and space for several thousand spectators sat or laid out on the grassy slopes. Music, company and ambiance were all fantastic; sadly only the weather let us down. On Saturday it was sunny and around 26c. Yesterday iron grey clouds rolled across the sky and stayed there, stubbornly, all afternoon. A strong and surprisingly cold wind sprang up and by four o'clock it was drizzling. By five o'clock we were frozen to the marrow and decided, sadly, to call it a day. Of course, half an hour after we'd got back home the clouds cleared away, the sun came out and the temperature soared again, but at least we'd had four and a half hours of fabulous music and fun - which is better than most concerts when you think about it.

And our favourite 'act' of the day? Well, it had to be The Bright Size Gypsies, playing a range of 'gypsy jazz' and swing. They played brilliantly, and had the audience on their feet and dancing for pretty much the whole of their set.

Killing off dads

No, don't worry, I'm not advocating mass patricide, just pondering a fun little article on the BBC TV blog entitled 'Disappearing Dads'. To put it briefly, the author, Andrew Martin, realised that all his work to date showed fathers as 'mad, bad, just generally useless, or entirely absent' and that lots of other fiction followed the same pattern.

And you know, I think he could be right. A quick trawl round various classics reveals a trail of fathers who are missing, dead, or otherwise incapacitated. In The Railway Children the father is vital, but absent for most of the book. In Lord of the Rings, Frodo was an orphan and brought up by his older cousin Bilbo. Harry Potter's an orphan too, as is Garion in David Eddings' Belgariad series. Even where the hero is a (step)father himself he's absent in mind or body, like Dick in Daphne du Maurier's 'House on the Strand'. And in the two most recent books I've read, firstly the heroine was illegitimate and only discovered at the end of the book that her absentee father was the local lord of the manor; and secondly the hero's future father-in-law drops dead fairly early on. No exceptions to the rule there, then.

I'd love to know why this is. My immediate thought was that perhaps most authors have had terrible relationships with their own fathers and are either seeking revenge or simply have no experience of a good father-child relationship to write about. But Andrew Martin says this isn't the case for him, so it must be something else.

Is fiction simply mirroring the society of the time? In the past, lots of fathers were absent, perhaps because they were away fighting wars or exploring or setting up distant trade routes, and there must have been a good deal of 'seducing and abandoning' going on. These days dads are working away from home, or divorced from their kids' mother and living with someone else. There must always have been millions of fathers who've had a great relationship with their children, of course, but for some reason they don't seem to make it into fiction.

And me? Well, my relationship with my Dad wasn't particularly close and in much of my fiction I've realised to my shame that fathers don't really exist. Characters have doting mothers or bossy mothers or interfering mothers... but they might as well have been brought up in a test tube for all the mention I make of their fathers. Perhaps I should change that before it's too late, and actually write about a kindly, loving father for once.

Sheer brilliance in a book

Psst! Wanna read a book that's hilarious, poignant, intriguing and intelligent, all inside one cover? Then look no further than 'A Very Persistent Illusion' by L C Tyler, which is all of those things and more.

Blurbs can sometimes be vague or misleading but this one captures the book's tone perfectly, as well as summing up the plot: Meet Chris Sorenson - middle-manager, closet poet and co-inventor of the Sorenson-Birtwistle Revised Scale of Girl-Rage. He seems to have made a modest success of his life: he has a beautiful girlfriend (Virginia), two affable future in-laws (Hugh and Daphne) and a classic sports car with a genuine leather gear stick and one good wing mirror.

But Chris's apparently stable existence is about to be sent spiralling when Hugh dies suddenly. With Virginia in tow (as well as a certain French philosopher), Chris begins to uncover the truth about Hugh, Daphne, and his own dark past.

I fell in love with the very first line (Women have many different ways of showing disapproval, only some of which are immediately apparent to men.) and things just got better from there. Hardly a word was out of place and the sections of conversation involving historical philosphers (Descartes et al), which could have seemed awkward or out of place, were a scream.

I finished the book yesterday, after a marathon reading session in the afternoon. It took me less than a week, not because it's thin or because I was skimming, but because I couldn't put it down. I laughed, I turned pages, I identified with the hero, I even cried a little. I see from Mr Tyler's website that he's written several other darkly humorous crime novels. I'll be adding them to the 'to be read' list post haste. I love it when I discover a brand new author I knew nothing about, and they turn out to be this good.

Byker Books on telly!

Author Andy Rivers, whose crime novel 'Maxwell's Silver Hammer' has just been published by Byker Books, is to appear on tv next week. Look out for him on Money Watch, BBC2, Tuesday 6th July, at 8.00 pm, when he'll be discussing ways to find work during the recession. Including writing crime novels, presumably. ;)

Who needs football?

We were determined not to watch The Match yesterday afternoon, partly because we're not big fans of football and partly because we had a funny feeling England weren't going to do very well.

We have annual passes for the local aquarium, so thought we'd potter off there because it's slightly off the beaten track and, crucially, nowhere near any pubs with big screens. And it was amazing! The roads weren't quite deserted, but they were very quiet compared to a normal sunny Sunday afternoon. We got a table at the cafe with a view straight up the lake - normally you have to kill someone to get one of those. There was a chap outside giving an owl display and I got to hold a beautiful Bengali Owl on my arm (with a suitable Very Large Glove, I hasten to add), and fuzz his feathers. And in the aquarium itself there were only two other couples wandering about, which gave us ample time to look at all the things we like best (the poison arrow frogs, the pygmy marmosets, the 'underwater tunnel', and even to chat to the staff about the animals.

It was a hundred times better than slobbing around and watching England lose...