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Archive for the ‘mothering’ Category

Linky + Sicky

Saturday, February 14th, 2009

I’ve been reading this blog a lot recently. I hate twee mummy and baby type writing, but this one is not like that at all.

There are so many stereotypes about young single mothers that when you are one, it is very difficult to be anything other than a walking, sleep deprived cliche. And when, as well as a pram-face, you’re also a writer, the cliche bit is a horrible thing to drag around with you. But this blog isn’t like that, and everyone should read it immediately.

A shy friend of mine has just joined blog-land with an amazing post stolen from a Facebook meme than turned into a bit of a rant.

I am not a fan of memes and internet quizzes and tagging and all that other strange stuff. But if I could work the ’25 things about me’ meme that’s going around Facebook right now as well as my friend the Capt’n has done in his new blog, I’d be more inclined to join in with them. I demand that you read and comment so he will carry on blogging.

I read this, and nodded a lot.

This should be a good-enough answer to the question I’ve been asked more and more often recently: how autobiographical is your writing? Of course it is. Yes, all of it. If I hadn’t have spent a lot of time thinking about it and experiencing it in my head, I wouldn’t have been able to write it. And for me, things experienced in the head are much more solid and real and memory-making than the other kind of experiencing, which mainly involves sitting in chairs or putting books on shelves.

Now – my Small Fry has spent twelve hours vomiting over everything in the house. Now is the time for me to turn off the computer and don my rubber gloves.

The next post will be about meeting web designers and photographers, planning launch parties, and getting my author copies. There will be real ‘author glamour’ in the next post. But not now. My whole house smells like sick.

UPDATE: Sorry about all the typos, especially if your reader got it before I corrected it. Put it down to the 3 hours of sleep I got, and the 10+ hours of nursing I’ve just done. And now she’s running about crazy demanding Santa, chocolate and ‘a type.’

Posted in lies, links, mothering, multi-tasking, soapbox | No Comments »

Disappointment

Monday, December 29th, 2008


I looked at this picture today. It is not mine, but from here. This is The Mount, in Fleetwood, Lancashire. A little bit more googling and browsing and I turned up this – The Mount’s official blog.

The Mount is the name of the hill – a pretend, artificially designed hill – and the thing on top of it is called the pavilion. You climb (not a hard job, unless you’re pushing a toddler in a pram, as I was) right to the top and, apart from the view, which is of a grey sea and a lighthouse and some memorials to lost fishermen and a lost fishing industry, getting up there is a disappointment. Right at the top, and the pavilion – not as nice in real life as it is in the photograph – is shut up and shutters down. It doesn’t have opening hours – it’s been like that for years and no-one I’ve been able to ask (including the very nice librarians at Fleetwood Library) knows what it is like inside. Although they did tell me all about Decimus (tenth child – his mother probably had better stories) Burton.

I suppose I was hoping for a tea-shop or at the very least a skanky public inconvenience. Nope. I took a note of the graffiti and moved on.

I was out in Fleetwood because I was wondering how to do research for a story I was planning to write. Going there and looking at things seemed to be a good start, although because I didn’t know exactly what I was doing – either with the research, or the writing, or even the pram, the trip seemed like a disappointment.

I’m just going through the copy edits on A Kind of Intimacy and have been reminded that the hill and the pavilion thing became a setting for a nasty scene towards the end of the book – my Annie climbs up there and – out of breath but hopeful – meets a bad man in a denim jacket who didn’t bring flowers but a bad joke I stole from my brother.

Posted in location, memories, mothering, multi-tasking, novel, writing method | No Comments »

Tea-pot

Monday, September 29th, 2008

I didn’t blog about the reading I did in Derby. That’s because me and Small Fry have been ill. She is still ill. In fact, she is asleep on the couch right now. I’m taking a big risk at the moment, because my couch is white and the Small Fry has been having a lot of nosebleeds the past couple of days.

Taking risks like that is what motherhood is all about.

I got a bit lost on the drive to Derby. There were roadworks and one way systems. I was ANGRY. And then we were there. The reading night went excellently well. It was full of ‘freshest up and coming writers’.

I read a story about an old man who was persecuted even unto death by a selection of recycling bins. Chris Killen read a love story about an itch in the tummy. Emma and Nathan and Biff all read stories. Biff played the guitar. I was consumed by a burning feeling of love and appreciation for my fellow human beings.

The stories are all in the book, and you can buy the book here. It comes in a hand-made green box with some extra surprises inside. You really, really should get it.

After the reading there was blue drinks, dancing and wine-theft. Then I woke up in the morning and felt like I was about to die unless I spoke very slowly and sat very still. I listened to the Simon and Garfunkel MegaMix on the way home. That sorted me out.

For better descriptions on the evening, including photographs of the book and my most special blue and white tea-pot, please click here.

For a full run down on who read what and more good pictures, please click here.

Posted in mothering, plug | No Comments »

Mystical Ways

Sunday, September 7th, 2008

Sometimes I am stuck for story ideas. That is okay. I do something else on those days.

The small fry is never stuck for story ideas. She told my friend and I that she had a friend called Mister Pancake who is a girl with small boobies. Mister Pancake’s mum and dad are dead and she can mainly look after herself.

She lives on an Island. We have a globe and a map of the solar system. She pointed to Saturn. That is where the island is. The island is called Mystical Ways and the leaves on the trees never turn brown and fall off there. Snow White lives there too, but she doesn’t have any eyes.

Small Fry said when she lived in my tummy she was a bit lonely because it was dark and there was no-one to cuddle her. She said she cried, and Mister Pancake came to live with her and tickle her until she was ready to be born.

When Mr Pancake isn’t on Mystical Ways she is under Small Fry’s bed in the baby photograph box. She tickles people in the night, sneaks about the kitchen. She takes a bite out of an apple and puts it back in the fruit bowl. Sometimes she wees in the bed, but it’s because she’s little so that’s okay. Sometimes she steals the chocolate mouse in the fridge, and leaves little finger prints on the white walls.

I got a form to put myself on the Electoral Roll. Will I go to prison if I put Mister Pancake on the Electoral Roll too?

Posted in found stories, mothering, shaggy dog tales | No Comments »

Bags of Not Writing

Saturday, April 12th, 2008

This is a picture of me writing on the new typewriter. I am typing so fast my hands are blurry. I like that.

The one above it is something I made when I should have been writing. Everyone needs more bags. Bags are useful things. But even at the time it smelled a bit like procrastination. My desk is almost clear of empty cans, mugs, crisp packets, felt tip pens missing their lids and all other things that normally collect there when I am in the middle of something.

I have found that I haven’t had much time recently. I still have twenty four hours, same as everyone else, but those twenty four hours tend to be more and more full of stuff to do that isn’t writing. I think it might be a bit of procrastination and I think it might be that I am quite busy, no excuses.

When I didn’t work I didn’t write during the day either. Writing has always been saved for the evenings. When I started working I thought it would be easy to carry on this way. But the things apart from mothering (like laundry and cooking and food shopping and cleaning the toilet) were also done during the day. And I had naps. Which meant the nights were generally longer. So it isn’t working out as well as I had hoped.

Here are some of the other things that I do instead of writing:

a) Making bags and shawls and other not strictly Essentials Of Life.
b) Reading.
c) Having very long baths – often combined with (b)
d) other kinds of writing: emails, blogs, book reviews, journals, letters, lists, plans.
e) talking to my friends
f) watching films
g) ‘pottering’ (this generally means rearranging the things in my house then putting them back where they were)
h) ironing trousers for work
i) housework (although I have cut hoovering down to a minimum)
j) dozing
k) watering houseplants

I think I need to eliminate some of these things so that I can write some more. I was going to get a hair-cut today but I decided to spend the money on getting five loads of laundry washed and dried and folded at the launderette. I even asked the man to fold my clothes and the Small Fry’s clothes in different baskets so they would be quick to put away when I got home. I think this is a good step forward.

Posted in lists, mothering, multi-tasking, not writing, photographs, procrastination | 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 »

Things that make me happy

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

I dislike Christmas quite a lot. I hate having to go to shops when there are other people there, and I hate STUFF you have to clean or put away or put together or find instructions for, and I get worried about buying presents in case I bought the wrong thing and then the person who I bought it for hates me because I misjudged so terribly.

But this year I am sort of excited because my little one is getting excited. I think she was too little to understand the lying before, but she’s swallowed the Santa-fib hook line and sinker this year. It has put me in a good mood. It is, possibly, the third good mood that I have had this year. I am taking advantage and making a things that make me happy list.

1. Being in the dark and listening to the radio.
2. Going to sleep with my head at the feet end of the bed.
3. Beeping the horn on the car.
4. Having a really good handwriting day.
5. My red coat with the hood.
6. Hot air balloons.
7. My nasty, too-fat, fighting cat.
8. When one of the cacti gets a flower.
9. Listening to little one have conversations with her bears.
10. My new stripy bed blanket.

Posted in balloons, lists, mothering, solitude, yoda doesn't know what he's talking about | No Comments »

Stories I haven’t written

Monday, September 24th, 2007

I’m quite curious about all the stories I haven’t written/started/finished. Some of them sound like they might be quite good.

There’s the one about the hot air balloon (there’s a sad story about that, which, if you’re curious, you can read here). There’s one about a man who couldn’t swim, but wrote books about deep-sea fish and another about a woman whose boyfriend used to steal colours for her, and then did something worse, something that was so bad she couldn’t stand to look at colours any more and had to stay in her house in the dark. There’s one about a woman having an affair, a trainspotter who thinks about Anna Karenina too much. One about mormons, and another about a girl writing paper-aeroplane letters to her dead boyfriend. One about a man who is driven mad by his recycling bins. One about a girl who wants a camera but her dad won’t buy one for her.

Some people advise that writers should have interesting and varied lives in order to provide fodder for their seething imaginations. They should (in between bouts of solitude, that is) be gregarious red-wine drinkers, smokers, revellers, travellers and lovers. They should work picking grapes, selling theatre tickets, making coffee, shearing pigs, painting caravans, pulling pints, selling drugs, robbing banks, playing football or winning big brother. These will make them have lots of stories to tell.

I can’t stand being bored, but I am too lazy to do any of these things either.

I am not a proper writer. If I ever became one and had to do a bit of writing about myself for an inside flap, it would not say any of these interesting things. I get up every day and have my breakfast, then I drive to work and talk to people about books, then I drive home and have my tea. Then I pretend to be a supermarket check-out lady or a doctor or I roll balls along the carpet or do jigsaws with very big pieces. Then I warm milk and brush teeth and sing You Are My Sunshine and Tortoise Plays on The Swing and Ally Bally Ally Bally Bea.

Then I sit in my bedroom with the light out and write about lots of things I would quite like to do if I wasn’t doing any of those things during the day. My characters are my deputies, doing all the things I don’t have the time, money or courage for. Hot air balloons, mucky affairs, stealing clothes from washing lines, stalking the neighbours, hanging about in train stations, swimming at the bottom of the sea, living in the dark, crashing a car, exploiting a staff-discount.

If I ever have to write something for an inside flap I will have to make it up.

Posted in empty head, ideas, mothering, narcissus, stories | No Comments »

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