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Archive for the ‘misanthropy’ Category

NaNoWriMo – The Verdict

Wednesday, December 8th, 2010

I didn’t write 50,000 words – so I don’t get the badge. But I wouldn’t have got it anyway, as I never bothered to sign up officially on the site. Even as I began I doubted that I’d complete the big 50k but I’m still a little disappointed.

50,000 words was a big and daft ambition as I’m mothering most of the time right now and I needed to check the proofs of Cold Light during November. But more than this, I couldn’t leave my research alone.

I’ve been reading up on cognitive dissonance. Researching the way people who have an opinion on something will filter out any evidence that seems to contradict that opinion. Even scientists, if there’s room for interpretation of their results and someone with an interest is paying them.

One of the ways we overcome a particular kind cognitive dissonance is called Sour Grapes.

Well, I didn’t want the stupid NaNoWriMo badge anyway…

I have been reading about historical revisionism – the way organisations do this and why, and how they’re able to resolve the dissonance between claiming to be honest and reliable while spinning / editing /  censoring and lying about themselves by claiming (and really believing) that they are enhancing, clarifying, simplifying and improving. And how on the smaller scale individuals in bad marriages do this.

I was reading more about memories. Revising things I already knew. We’re all bad historians of our own lives. We all revise. We all have blind spots about our own self justification (the means by which we sometimes resolve dissonance) but others’ is glaring.

We’re all biased, unreliable hypocrites.

I know these things have always been interesting and important to me. In one way or another all my writing is circling around the problem of telling the truth, and of using words to do it. But I have been realising why it is so important to me. I don’t want to say any more about it right now, other than it has been tiring.

I found it all so interesting that although I was able to plan the rest of my chapters and write a lot more than I thought I was going to, and that I solved a couple of plot and character problems, and found out what I needed to know about Crufts, and decided I needed to know a tiny bit more about postmen and about fixing cars, and I got over the blank-page doldrums, I didn’t get 50,000 words.

Oh well.

Hooray for everyone else who participated!

Posted in busy, lies, misanthropy, narrators, reasons for writing | 3 Comments »

Girls. Fun.

Tuesday, September 7th, 2010

A tiny bit of writing done today – notes on the second and third chapters of book three. The first chapter is provisionally called ‘fairy cake’. The third will be called ‘bovril’s walk’. Not sure about the second one yet.

I doubt the chapters will end up with titles, but it helps me keep track. I’m really looking forward to writing ‘screwdriver’ and ‘bites down on a towel’.

The note-taking was done in my car on the back of a class 2 NI contributions bill while McTiny was sleeping. We were outside West View Leisure centre waiting for a class to start. There was a programme about The Kennel Club on Radio 4, which inspired me.

The class itself was something to write home about. I could store it in the place where I repress the rest of my trauma, but that drawer is getting full. So for your reading pleasure: the class. A kind of yoga / circuits / physio / new circle of hell type of class where you can take your progeny and be taught moves to ease your outraged abdomen back together.

I talked myself into going. Like this:

Come on Jenn, you need to get out of the house. It’ll make you feel better. Don’t be a tit, you might make friends.

I should have listened to the other Jenn, the Jenn who was quite happy being a tit and urging me to stay at home in my brown cardigan and scribble on the back of envelopes, leaning on McTiny’s back while he slept on my knee.

Picture me, if you will, running about in a circle with my arms outstretched, making little circles with my hands. Sleep deprived, shy and angry. Not owning the correct trainers either, I discovered. They played music.

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun (that’s all they really want).

What girls want:

not to have fun of any kind, better trainers – without having to enter a shoe-shop,
two hours more sleep, Bombay Sapphire, cake, not to walk in the sun.

I was on the brink of pretending I was nipping away for a wee and not coming back, (when you gonna live your life right?) but they had a Health Visitor on the door with a sheaf of leaflets about breast feeding and drinking and I didn’t dare.

Posted in anxiety, blue, brown cardigan, misanthropy, mothering, multi-tasking | 7 Comments »

Good Things

Wednesday, August 18th, 2010

we did it!

Had a little bit of time out from the relentless editing (actually, I do about three hours a day, usually in the mornings and then have the rest of my time free so nothing to moan about) to travel to and attend a lovely family wedding, watch Small Fry do her duty as a flower girl, have a birthday and assist in the making of a birthday cake.

I forget to turn my face away from my computer sometimes: people can be kind of nice too. We are fairly anti social, keep ourselves-to-ourselves guys in this house but the last two months have seen a steady stream of supporting, helping, celebrating visitors and my misanthropy is gradually wearing down. It is sort of nice to be in a family.

In writing related but not actually writing news, I had a tricky and troublesome chapter of Cold Light given the five star reading treatment from my fiction group, who helped me see what I needed to do to fix it (tweaks rather than rewrites, which at this stage, is reassuring) and it was brilliant to have the kind of, ‘I wonder what happens next, I want to read the next bit’ response that I’m after from my talented crack-team of beta readers. I want to write suspenseful, gripping fiction. They claimed to be gripped, so I am happy.

A Kind of Intimacy has now been published in Italy – and the parcel of Italian copies arrived on my birthday. I can now say ‘that bloody sofa!’ in Italian. As well as that, news arrived that the Italian Vanity Fair has done an in-depth feature on the novel this month, and that the German rights for Cold Light have sold, and last but not least, due to my near constant feeding of him, the McTiny has put on a stupendous amount of weight.

Now allow me to digress onto Quotes From A Health Visitor -  a newly regular feature of my ranting on this blog. Took the McTiny to get weighed and measured and generally poked. The government likes to check these things now and again. We go into the waiting room, introduce ourselves but the two HVs, both older than my own mother, insist on calling us mummy and daddy, which in our sleep deprived state is nothing short of surreal. He’s bigger than he was last time. This works in our favour. So does the fact that we managed to put clothes on him – we were lavishly praised for this: oooh  – you’ve got his trousers on him! Well done! all said in a pitch only slightly lower than a dog whistle.

Do I really, really look like the sort of person who is not capable of putting trousers on a baby? Is anyone not capable of putting trousers on a baby? Who are these people? Next appointment – two weeks. I will have finished my edits on Cold Light by then and will, hopefully, be in a sweeter mood.

Posted in happy, misanthropy, mothering | 3 Comments »

I Make Stuff Up

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

I’ve had a week of furious typing, post-its, scribbling in pencil and… filling in forms. With the arrival of a new person into the world comes a whole host of forms needed to prove the poor blighter’s existence to the government / NHS / my landlord. He doesn’t even have a real pair of shoes yet (we have been remiss in this, but I’ve a novel to finish and in this house if you don’t walk, you don’t get shoes) and yet we’ve had to jump through all kinds of hoops to get him a birth certificate, registered with a doctor, alert the fine people at HMRC to his existence and justify my own continuing existence to a health visitor. All activities that are accompanied by forms, questions and questionnaires.

I’m a grumpy get at the best of times (you hadn’t noticed?) but PLEASE, when I’m working to a deadline, on much less sleep than I’d like and have a bit of a 1000 piece Disney jigsaw puzzle stuck to my hair with vomited breast-milk (he’s been easy on the crap, this past few days) DON’T look at me like I’m a deluded, sorry fantasist in need of intervention when you ask me what I do for a living for your bloody FORM and I answer honestly. Think of how many books there are in the world. Someone’s got to write them, haven’t they?

My favourite quiz of the week is the one they use to check if you’re depressed or not. Tick boxes. Do you feel like harming yourself and / or others a) never b) sometimes c) on a near constant basis. I answer C, and clarify that this isn’t a post-partum thing, but is how I always feel, especially when asked invasive questions by someone I’ve never met before who invited themselves around to my house and sneered at me when I told them what I do for a living, (really? That’s nice. And what did you do for a job?.) then followed it up by asking me what my husband thought of it… (very little, I should imagine).

I’m not going to tell these people I’m a writer any more. I’m going to say I’m a detective, a spy, a magician. I’m a consultant escapologist. I’m a private eye. I’m Columbo’s wife. I’m Mrs Hudson, Sherlock Holmes’ landlady. I’m Harriet the Spy. I’m a cross between Nancy Drew and Nana Mouskouri. I make stuff up. I type very fast in two hour bursts, sometimes at night, sometimes holding the baby, sometimes while eating breakfast.

Here’s an ambivalent review of A Kind of Intimacy from L-Magazine, ‘New York City’s Local Event and Arts And Culture Guide.’

Posted in anxiety, blue, busy, misanthropy, mothering, multi-tasking, tense, terrible, writing frenzy, yoda knocked me back | 2 Comments »

More Lists

Monday, April 13th, 2009

You know what gets my goat? What REALLY gnarls my chizzle?

1. Groups, clubs, scenes, schools, societies, churches.
2. Matching lipstick and nail varnish.
3. The phrase, ‘I think you’ll find,’
4. BT, the DVLA, TV Licensing people, landlords, estate-agents.
5. People who laugh while walking away, and try to hide it by ducking their head, but me being able to tell because their shoulders are shaking.
6. People being late. If you’re going to be more than five minutes late, ring me. I won’t wait otherwise.
7. Winking. After nearly two years of working in a prison, being winked at has lost its appeal.
8. The man on the beach yesterday whose dog did a poo on the sand. He put it in a plastic bag (black) tied up the top and then slung it behind a sand-dune. WHAT? I had to be forcibly restrained from giving him the poo back, and quite forcefully.
9. Ulterior motives/tact. Nine times out of ten I am just not going to understand if you say, ‘oh, do you think those orange socks work well with that suit?’. Just spit it out. Out.
10. Blogging. Ugh what a bunch of narcissists. It is sickening. I keep meaning to give it up. Really.

Posted in anxiety, grumpy, jealousy, misanthropy, narcissus, procrastination, reasons for writing, vanity | No Comments »

In The Bin Day

Wednesday, January 7th, 2009

Today is the day to chuck your Christmas tree away. Sling it in the bin. Throw it on a verge somewhere. Leave it to get bald in the ginnel. Carry it to the tip and lean it against the ‘garden waste’ skip. Heave it over the side of the bridge and drop it into the river.

I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with mine yet. It is still looking good and there are several uneaten chocolate decorations to get rid of so I will probably risk bad luck and leave it where it is.

What are you going to do with yours?

P.S Eager readers may have noticed the new Q and A format of this blog. I checked my stats the other week and realised I was getting many more hits than I thought. Loads more than the number of people I know. This Q and A is one way of me winkling you out of the background. I am curious. What are you going to do with your Christmas Tree? I need to know.

P.P.S I’ll be reading at an Open Mike night at the New Continental in Preston on the 15th Jan. Probably something a bit rude. It has the word ‘knob’ in it (not mumsafe).

Posted in cannibal goldfish, misanthropy, vanity | No Comments »

What I am Up To At The Moment

Friday, July 18th, 2008

1. Spending more time than I would like writing a portfolio about my last two years of being a librarian. This is so I can send it to the Real Librarian’s club and be allowed to be a Real Librarian too. Working in a library is not a pretend job I have until I ‘make it’ as a writer. I like it very much. So I am writing the portfolio and applying to join the club. I am going to put a bit in the portfolio about Sh. It is going into the section about new technologies. I like the Sh bit. It is a very different kind of writing. The prose is ugly, although I do like using bullet points and tables.

  • like this
  • and this

2. Practising yoga in my bedroom when no-one else is around to laugh at me. I used to go to a yoga class and I stopped because I felt daft doing it in front of people. Now I am doing it again to cure some persistent conditions. Such as

  • lethargy
  • insomnia
  • misanthropy
  • out of control imaginings resulting in anxiety
  • persistent borderline alcoholism

3. Writing a second draft of fishbook, adding scenes that should have been there in the first place, and trying to find a structure for it. This is hard and tiring but I like it better than first drafts.

  • I don’t have a relevant bullet point for this.

4. Working on a very short story commissioned by Flax.
5. Considering what I will read when I go here.
6. Getting ready to move house again.

Posted in library, links, lists, misanthropy, neurotic, plug, stories | No Comments »

I am Really Really Scared

Saturday, June 28th, 2008

I am off to do my reading tonight and I am scared.

Mainly I am scared because I don’t like lots of people in the same room all looking at me all at once.

And also because I will have to drive there and it is going to be on a motorway and that is worrying.

I am hoping to combat the fear by these two methods:

1. New windscreen wipers for the car, so I can still see if it rains.
2. Stripy socks and red shoes.

So if you are there and you want to talk to me but you haven’t seen me in real life before, I will be wearing stripy socks and red shoes. This might be a little bit of an ice-breaker.

Posted in anxiety, car, doubt, in two minds, misanthropy, neurotic, terrible | No Comments »

Big Dirty Plug

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

Pygmy Giant has got a new story of mine: My Boss is Amazing. It is a kind of sequel to an earlier story of mine that they published. I’ve got another one in the pipeline. I am a flash-fiction short short story machine.

I was going to write a long post about how many bloggers and writers in their twenties write about work and being employees and their stories are often humorous or surreal or absurd and it probably has something to do with crises of identity and over-extended adolescence. I was planning to use words like ‘Zeitgeist’ and wonder aloud in suitably vocabularied ways what we might be writing when we were ten years older. I might have digressed onto something that could have been called ‘Writing the Self’ and wittered about fiction and non-fiction, memoir and autobiography and lying. I thought I might take in the spate of bad mother memoirs we had a few years ago, (newsflash: sleep deprivation and bleeding nipples are not fun… zzzz) and how as a twenty-something single mother I should really be writing about hating my child rather than hating my job, (it’s fiction, fiction, don’t forget: that’s because we make it up and LIE and sometimes people can’t tell).

In the end I decided a post like that would be dull and provoke even duller arguments and would be too much hassle to write and I would change my mind about what I thought half way through. So I decided not to.

I bet you are glad.

Posted in in two minds, misanthropy, mothering, plug, stories, yoda doesn't know what he's talking about | No Comments »

Gets

Wednesday, February 27th, 2008

I can’t believe I am writing assignments and you people have not sent me my essentials of life.

I need Black Biro pens (one will do) and a colour picture of a peacock.

Posted in for sale, grumpy, misanthropy | No Comments »

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