Unclean, unclean

Oh, I am a bad, bad blogger! I'm sorry!

In my defence, I have either been phenomenally busy, on a writing spree or both, but even so. I'm never going to earn myself eager readers if I cant even update!

So please: be updated....


Alas, I am unwell!

Over recent days I have developed insomnia. I lie awake at night, tossing and turning, running over the most mundane things in my mind. If the city is placed at point x, how long will it take to reach point y? Check on google route-planner, then add half again to the total time to factor in bad roads, traffic and rouge lycanthropes. I no longer eat proper meals – instead I find myself drinking a small oasis and snacking at odd intervals. I shun human company for the voices in my head. My arms constantly flail in delirium.

In other words, as well as generally turning into the mad woman in the attic (Why oh why did my family thwart me in this by procuring a house without said attic?) I have a serious bout of the writing bug. The evil novel which has spent the last year+ trying to eat my brain (and there aren't even any zombies in it), has, over the last two days, finally decided to co-operate. Which means that nothing else in the world is half as good. I shake like an addict when they try to pull me away. Yesterday, in the supermarket, there was a particularly disturbing moment among the cereal bars.

Unfortunately, much as I would love to surrender myself completely to this sickness and never recover, I don't actually get the chance. You see, this is the weekend of festivals, and I am working at one particular one, selling water-bottles by the way-side. From Friday morning to Monday night there will be no laptop in my life. I am prepared. I will probably survive without too much scarring. I am fully loaded with notebooks and pens, but the idea still terrifies me. (Usually, I must hasten to add, I adore festivals. There is little that is better. Unfortunately, that “little” includes writing.)

In other news, I have a Deep And Meaningful question for anyone/everyone/lily. When The Indelicates play Sixteen at gigs, do the sceenagers forget themselves and sing along? And if so, is it with irony or conviction?...

The Problem with Red Pills

also translated as "why live in the world when you can live in your head?" And words to that affect. Actually, I think this post is probably a cracked out cross between meta and introspective self-obsession. Intro-self-meta? Yes, well...*

So, I have a slight problem. Not a Big Problem, true, but nonetheless something that is Not Ideal for a girl determined to be a writer. An inconvenient occurrence, perhaps.
In other words, I have mistful's voice in my head.


I was walking along the road yesterday, happily thinking about stories, when I realised I had an internal narrative running. And mentally blogging. And this was before it started talking in scripts.

Now, see, the thing is that I love Sarah. I think she's amazing, and if I was given the opportunity I would totally, completely and utterly go and live in her attic and bake her cookies. And we all know that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Only, that doesn't give me the right to accidentally steal her voice, and its not a good idea for either of us. She is wonderful, brilliant, unique and so shiny, and I love it, but I need to be able to write as me. Because, if I cant, I'm screwed.

Well, that's one side of the issue, anyway. My other reaction (which was worryingly enough my first one) was to question the validity of my existence. A lot of the time, things happen in my life that seem to follow a story format. My eventual and blissful acquisition of a pony, stumbling towards the kilvites, my Cardiff life. In fact, a lot of it seems to follow a series format, with a season finale each summer. (The most recent, in case you wondered, was results day. Yum) So I realised I was hearing mistful's voice in my head, and my brain went wild. I quickly drew the conclusion that I was a fictional character and that, joy of joy, I was being scripted by one of my favourite writers. Unlike Sophie, I was oddly unworried by this. Then colucio came over, and we went on a mammoth quest towards Castell Coch (incidentally? Total quest format. Small mistake, bigger mistake, biggest mistake then success) during which I asked him about it.




Me: So, you know how you occasionally wonder if you're real?

colucio: Actually, I tend to speculate that I just made everyone else up, but... yes. Matrix style, right?

Me: mm... Well, I think I'm a fictional construct created by mistful.

C: wow! Thats just... cool!


We debated it for a while, flitting through the question of freewill towards the realisation that, probably, we had both just been over-exposed to Jostein Gaarder (if, of course, such a thing is possible) while we were Young and Impressionable. But I'm still not sure about it. I honestly seem to have such a charmed life sometimes that I worry. At some point the shit inevitably has to hit the fan. Its just when this will come. If I am living in a book (which I'd prefer by the way. Its the smell) then I'd assume it will leap atop me when I leave my university haven. If I am in a series, it can hit at any moment from September onwards. And if I am a bit player, which in some ways seems most likely, I'm almost certainly destined for some death or tragedy very soon. Unless
[info]mistfulis actually my narrator of course, in which case I might be lucky enough to get some girl/girl, girl/boy or girl/monster make-out scenes instead...




So what do you reckon, oh my lovelies? I very much doubt I'm existing in a matrix world, because I don't think a computer would be this involved in my day to day existence, but that doesn't mean I'm not being skilfully narrated. Which begs the question, really, of whether it is possible to contact the great creatornarrator through an internet blog. Ho hum...

xxxxxxxxxxx

*N.B. This post is probably not taken from the pen of Sarah Rees Brenan** and definitely not to be taken very seriously!
**actually, it came out sounding far more like me than expected. I think that qualifies for YAY status

A rose by any other name...

Okay my lovelies, I need help. And not just in a men-in-white-coats way. You see, recently I've been somewhat obsessed with names.

I love both my parents, I really do, even if I don't like them that much very often. But, for various reasons that you may or may not know (if you don't, don't worry – if you need to know I'll tell you), I feel incredibly uncomfortable at the notion of writing under either of their names. At my birthday party in January, I approached the amazing Beth Webb to ask her if I could use her surname instead of my own. She told me that I was welcome to it, but that I might well not want it. And then she explained that, as a writer, the alphabetical position of a name is the most significant part. If you're standing staring at a great big bookshelf in a shop, your eyes are inevitably drawn to the bigger displays, to the titles by authors who are prominent in the literary market. Beth's advice was to go along to a bookshop, analyse the shelves, and see which letters are the best. So, yesterday, I went into town, visited the bookshops, and cross-referenced. Using three shops and every genre I thought I might one day write in. For several hours.
The end result of my research? The best letters for me are P, R and S. T is good, but occasionally it gets skipped and ends up in the wrong place. After this, I read through the phone book. I could hear the voices in my head, emerging like an XKCD cartoon.

1: So, what did you do on your Sunday?
2: Well, I cross-referenced three bookshops, and then read the phone book.
1: Wow... when you said you were giving up the internet to get a life, I never thought it would be so fulfilled...

Needless to say, I have not given up the internet. Nor am I planning on it. Even so, I occasionally worry about the ways I chose to pass the time. Fortunately, Babiji and I had a very fulfilling evening in compensation. Unfortunately, none of that is relevant. This post is, after all, about Names.

Eventually, I narrowed an infinity of possibilities down to five. Prior, Ruskin, Swallow, Sparrow and Stanton.

I've put a poll up on my livejournal, so please - go along and vote.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Once upon a time...

I have spent the last few days locked in tense warfare. At war, that is, with my tenses. The book I have been working on gradually for the last three/four years is taking shape slowly before my eyes, but getting the tenses sorted out has been an utter nightmare. Throughout the last few years, you see, I have been writing this in 1st person present. And I love first person present. It's immediate and personal and stops things feeling too contrived. It fits with my words, and they all flow together into prose. I'm quite tempted to give it a fetching nickname, but, since all I could think of the last time I tried was Percy, I gave up. But anyway – I love it. The only problem is that the novel is not only recounting past-events, but recounting them in varied chronologies, with different times and fragments interweaving. Its confusing enough for me trying to keep track of it, and I'm the writer. I don't want to lose readers, and I cant help thinking it'll be easier to lose them if I pretend its all happening in the present. So I tried using present and then past for flashbacks, but that felt inconsistent. I tried using present perpetually and italicising flashbacks, but that was too... italiscied. And doing everything in past tense was clearly wrong.

So for the past few days I have been running around like Goldilocks, only there was no preferable porridge. My lovely housemates of the moment, Babigi and Essy*, have got used to me flapping about with big cups of tea and dry cereal, muttering darkly under my breath. My head has not been so thoroughly massaged since I left the Thai hairdressers behind. I have written, deleted, and rewritten the same few paragraphs c.fifteen times.

Today, thankfully, Essy caught me. She practically had to tie me down in the kitchen to impart her particular brand of wisdom. Such as go away, write something else, and come back to it. I went away and ignored her... for approximately two hours. Then I wrote something else. Suddenly, everything slotted into place. If that went in there, then that went in there, and that went in there. And then this bit fitted with that bit, which meant it could be past and present for the first section, and then present for the rest, and...

Before I realised it, I was flying high on the euphoria of eureka mode. I had rearranged 5000 words and written an extra 3000. I had switched the entire order of all I had written. I could hardly speak without using excessive exclamation marks! All I can hope now is that I haven't slipped on the Snakes'n'Ladders ladder by tomorrow...

So, to distract myself from the fear, I took pictures of my wall hanging. I painted this at the end of last summer, but have only just found a wall tall enough to hang in on. I'm very pleased with the addition of The Veils' butterflies





my tree, my desk, my mess, my mirror and Bat For Lashes :)


xxxxxx


*Babigi & Essy – two examples of my housemates choices of pseudonyms. Others include Isaclue and S'bean. I do love my housemates. And, after all, I can hardly talk when mine is hattie ghandi on my mum's blog...

(cross-posted to parenthesised)

Growing Pains

Ironically, I have spent a large amount of my life obsessed with growing up. When I was younger, wrapped up in books and writing pleading letters to Peter Pan every summer, I was terrified of it. Growing up was a little like dying - an inevitable ending I was desperate to starve off and knew I couldn't. Wendy Moira Angela Darling, who was the 'type who wanted to grow up', was clearly an idiot. I couldn't imagine it. Even now, the end of Peter Pan leaves me in tears for this very reason – they have grown up. And, once you have grown up, that is it. There are no more trips to Never-Never-Land.

Well, that was what I believed then, at least. I remember howling while my mother tried desperately to tell me that this was not necessarily the case, but I never believed her. It is only now that I find myself wondering whether she was right all along. You see, on some levels, I may have, finally, grown up. But whenever I cone to think of it, I find that I'm no longer sure exactly what growing up entails. When do we, finally, grow up?

British society suggests that you have magically become a grown up by the time you reach eighteen. True, there are a few previous rites of passage to move through before this. At sixteen, after all, you can legally abandon childhood by having sex, which is (in my experience) at once anti-climatic and empowering, while at seventeen this new power in your life is taken further still, you are trusted enough to drive a vehicle, and therefore given some degree of power over the lives of other people. At eighteen, you are not only allowed to drink (although why you can have sex before you can buy alcohol is beyond me, but I think legal ages are probably a matter for another day), but also get your say in running the country. However the situation is, inevitably, more complicated. I was a very young eighteen. I was responsible enough to think very carefully about how to react to my various rites of passage (aside from the drinking one, which had clearly been happening for years), but I was by no means adult. I had not grown up. I went halfway around the world for two months, came back and went to university, and I still had not irrevocably grown up. The only answer is that growing up seems to be an individual process, dependant upon upbringing and personalities, as unique as fingerprints. And, just as when growing up occurs changes for each person, so too does the nature of the beast.

As I sat happily watching anime the other day, someone suggested that you have grown up when you no longer cause unnecessary worry for others. They can worry clearly, and indeed it would be hard to imagine a world without consummate worriers, but there is something about inspiring anxiety that does seem a uniquely childish/teenage state. I clearly remember various occasions where I was desperate to make someone worry about me. I think in some ways its almost more accurate than classing certain behaviour as a “plea for attention”. You want them to worry, because if they worry then they care. On this basis, growing up perhaps requires realising that you can be cared about without requiring constant proof, and means that the focus has mostly shifted from the self to everyone else. You are aware of them, both through analysing their opinions of you and through thinking about the affects your actions will have on others before you act. If you are actively trying not to worry them, then perhaps you have grown up, in some ways at least. And maybe it is only a maturity that can fully occur when you have children, or are in a very close relationship?

But I don't think that this can be the whole story either. The problem is that I'm really not to sure what the whole story is. You're supposed to just Know when you fall in love (although actually I disagree. I only realised I had probably been in love with one person months later, after it ended and I told him that I didn't love him) but growing up is probably different. And I was really wondering what you all thought about the issue. There doesn't seem to be any real emotional or intellectual cut off points, after all, only bureaucratic ones. I'm not too sure if I've grown up yet, or if I'm any closer to getting there. All I'm really sure of is that, at the moment, I can still visit Never-Never-Land whenever I want.

xxxx

(cross-posted to parenthesised)

Phew!!

...this isnt so much of an update as a huge sigh of relief. For the last month +, I have been completely incapable of accessing this blog. And there's been a lot to tell you, which I am currently too sleepy (dear body - four am is not getting up time and 8am is not sleeping time. Please learn), too full of self-realisations, and too relieved to recap on.

I was going to spam you with Wyrd Sisters photographs too, but blogspot refuses to uplod them. So instead, know that not only was it truly great (really) but to add to that....

MY WYRD SISTERS COSTUMES GOT THEIR OWN MENTION IN THE STUDENT PAPER!!!!!! ^_^


...and have a prologue. Would you read this? And if so why? And what would you change about it, if you could?


**

The storm clouds were swollen, heavy, waiting.

In the last gasp of sunset, moments before night fell, they stretched out; yawning across a darkening sky, their edges hemmed with light.

Ravenous, turgid. Waiting.

The humid tumescence grew heavier each moment, pressing down on the quiet Cotswold countryside below, sucking the daylight from the sky with more greed than the advancing hours. In the twilight, the bloated mass of clouds looked ugly and sinister, a dam about to burst. Lingering, threatening.

Waiting.

And then the night, and the storm, descended upon the land.


***

Glad of Another Death...

I love Christmas Eve. For one moment, the world hangs full on the brink of something, and every slither of skin seems to stretch towards it in anticipation, waiting and wishing and tingling to be ready. And its the magic night too, the one time I have very little trouble believing in an awesome, loving God, when all the possibilities and stories and characters I have loved gather themselves about me in solemn anticipation and -
...well, suffice to say thast christmas pales in comparison. Christmas eve is where its at.

Last night though, due to a careful calender, was the carol service, which was almost a beginning in itself. And I woke up this morning already tingling with the quiet excitement that doesnt usually seem to set in until about 5pm today, and...wrote...



So early its still almost dark out, as the
hours and minutes meld into
vague wakefulness, something,
somewhere, starts. Nothing
special, not yet, no
fanfares firing through the hazy half-night dawn, no
breaking news blazoned across a screen, just
silence,
and stillness,
and sleep-stained
waiting.
And, somewhere in the dulled down dark,
the fresh onset of pain.


and then, from a prose perspective....



The night was cold and dark, with a wind that bit against their bones like a wild dog prowling around the houses.
In a room upstairs, the women waited. Even above the clustered bustle of visitors, the screams were unmistakable. Somewhere in that dark night, life was slowly dying.
The women glanced uncomfortably from one to the other; familiar, welcoming faces weathered to weary self-interest, and tried to ignore the cries.
“We could have housed them here?” one, still young, ventured at last.
The elders shook their heads.
“In a house of whores?” another asked, her eyes dull despite the bitterness whipping through her words. “The likes of them have little time for the likes of us.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room once again. And, outside, the screams continued. In the room upstairs the women waited, and tried to hope that the new day would not begin with a babe and mother dead, left to fade to a memory in a manger.

Early that morning, while it was still dark, the women went to the tomb, and saw that the stable door had been left ajar. From the stillness within, they thought that they could hear a voice singing. They glanced at each other, barely daring to hope, and crept closer.
In the dusty darkness of the make-shift stable, a baby began to cry.


***

Am I, I wonder, the only person who goes to church and comes back with stories, rather than any interesting theological development? Because I have two new, more adult, tales hovering on the tip of me pen, and I want to write them both. And to have the luxury of time in which to do so. Whereas other people occasionally seem to go for theology.

Oh well.

Happy Christmas to you all, anyway

xxxx

*'so early its still almost dark out', I should add, is a line from a poem called Happiness by Raymond Carver, and the line 'life is slowly dying' is a reference to Philip Larkin's Nothing To Be Said. And, obviously, the prose piece deliberately references the bible, most notably John's gospel. To prevent being hauled away on charges of plagarism... ;)