wurdburd

Crackers! Yep that’s me. I put it down to the cleaning fluid - my advice? Get someone else to clean your oven! Get someone in to pack up your house, get someone else to have the kids if you have to do the above by yourself. Don’t arrange it for the half term break! Above all - to sign up to a second year of NaNoWriMo surely shows signs of complete insanity. Especially if you haven’t got a plot clearly in mind. Maybe I had one and completely lost it. I have a poem and a plan to write in the meantime.

So if you know me and see me about looking a bit dazzled - and yes it is a usual look, thanks - I hope it is now clear why that could be. Give me a pat on the back and wish me luck. Before you turn away and snigger at the loony who thinks she will have time to write a novel, study for a teaching assistant course, and unpack loads of boxes and make a house a home for her family - all before December 25th. This year that is.

And those cleaning fluids? Harmless stuff, bicarbonate of soda. But mixed with washing up liquid? who knows what creative chaos will come forth?

If you’ll please excuse me - I’m off in search of a plot

something completely different to what you were looking for…but if you haven’t seen it -or them - for a while, it’s like Christmas. Without the debt that lasts until April, the turkey - that does the same, and the fairy lights - that don’t last at all.

Still, while looking through, no, sorry, packing to move house, the contents of our garage, many things have come to light, old stories and poems I have written, photographs, some more flattering than others. The worst only have a matter of time before they end up on face book, so if you want a laugh at a small girl with curly hair, dimples and a luvverly yellow gingham school dress complete with huge white collar, straight from the 70’s, I’ll keep you posted.

I am terrible for sorting things out - and keep stopping to look more closely at things, play a cd I haven’t heard for ages. Or watch a dvd. Bill and Ted were great, weren’t they?
The photos, bags of clothes - baby clothes I cannot bring myself to give to charity, the toys my children have not seen for ages, and have claimed, until we found a boxful, that they are past the My Little Pony stage.

But sort and get rid we must, for it is only five days until we move house, lock stock and saucepans, maybe we’ll take the kids. Though sometimes things get left behind? Surely the new residents will welcome three happy children with a penchant for food - of most kinds, and a love of all things Spongebob Squarepants.

Wonder what will turn up tomorrow?

Boy do I know how to have fun on a Wednesday evening. Actually, in my own defense, we went out as a family and had a really nice time. This family thing doesn’t happen much, but after spending the day with a lot of school children and admitting to my daughter’s teacher that I couldn’t help her with her homework - it was nice to be silly for a few hours.

The theme of the evening was potatoes - jacket potatoes with various fillings, a potato quiz - where do you suppose potatoes originated from? Ok smart alec, don’t answer like the witty husband and say ‘the ground’. Or, I believe one child whispered to his mother -the supermarket, Mummy.

There were crafty bits for the kids, potato printing, a relay race where they could only move the potato with their noses - on hands and knees , rather than balancing them. Though I ought to clarify that! Then the apple bobbing, because potato bobbing would just be silly - and taste disgusting I reckon. Potato peeling - because I obviously need practice, after all I don’t do it much. The longest unbroken strand won chocolate - nobody offers me chocolate for peeling potatoes here, I should point this out to husband, I might be more willing with this goal in mind. Like the dangling carrot - just out of reach - maybe if I could reach it and peel it I could get more chocolate?

My son decided he would quite like to bring home a big lump of playdough - now soggy with over modelling in hot little hands, and even more fun to get out of the carpet once trodden in. We played the obliging parents and brought it home, where it met a sticky end in the kitchen rubbish bag.

Finally after some time, all children sleeping peacefully, and two foil wrapped jacket potatoes waiting for our 7 year old who insists she wants one for breakfast -?- it’s time for bed - and the many mice at midnight scratching at the skirting. Might yet be down for a further posting…..

Incidentally, potatoes apparently come from Peru…..

I’d rather not thanks. When thinking about the depth I have gone into with my characters, each has a job - or way to spend their waking hours - that I have a little bit of knowledge about. Which is exactly why you will not find an accountant or any other kind of number cruncher among them. Give me words any day. Much more fun to play with. I know what I need to know and thankfully nobody has asked me about algebra since I left school, or Pi (3point something I think) though I might have got that wrong as well

But tonight confirmed to me that my talent probably lies in the world of words, not numbers. This came in the form of my daughter’s homework - now doing the sum is fine, but then she has to show the working out. I’ll just get my axe and chop down a few trees, we might need to find extra paper. Perhaps another dozen pencils, that is be optimistic. Well I spent an hour and got several different answers using the methods she had been taught. In the end I used a calculator and got yet another answer - but couldn’t see how this was right - technology, must be a blip

Down comes the husband, does the sum and gets the same answer as the calculator. Oh it’s like this, he says, you just flip the sum…

Talk to him about number lines, grid systems and partitioning and he is now as stumped as I am. Why is there a little part of me that is pleased about that?

Soon is NaNoWriMo, and I was really looking forward to taking part for the second year running. For those who have done and doing it again, I am envious and I hope everything shapes up nicely for you. For those doing it for the first time - just go for it and get those words down and enjoy yourself - I am envious of you too.

So why am I not doing it again this year? Well moving house at the end of October could be a reason, filling in many applications for jobs could be another. Though written down, both sound a bit lame. So knowing that I shouldn’t do it, I have been keeping, or trying to keep, a closed mind to ideas.

But it seems wherever I go, they leap out at me. Niggling away, when I should be thinking about packing, I am people watching and the stories leap out me, incessantly. No matter where I go, even taking rubbish to the local landfill site, there is a plethora of inspiration laying in wait, crouching behind the van full of house clearance goods. Whose house was cleared, why, is there now an empty house, maybe with a lonely old spirit floating from room to room? People get rid of stuff or all sorts of reasons - plenty of food for all the novelists.

So don’t just go to landfill sites with the idea of clearing out your car, your garage, your child’s bedroom as they leave for college. Sure, lose the unwanted and unnecessary, but fill up on ideas to bring home with you.

So if you are thinking of trying for NaNoWriMo 2009 - join up. Have go - what a ride! Hey might just meet you on the site - just don’t tell the husband…best of British

This is no reflection on my manuscript by the way. It’s my new talent which I expect the rest of you worked out ages ago - taking music off a compact disc and putting it on another. In fact I am a little behind in the technology stakes, everyone else has moved on to mp3’s and iPods - downloading from the net. That’s probably beginning to date by now too…

I guess really I want to point out the virtues of at least knowing what is current, even if you are still winding up Grandma’s gramophone, or rock and rolling around your kitchen to Elvis on a sunday morning. Though in the right context, this might work.

But when you are telling the stories of twenty - or thirty - somethings, it pays to know what is what and who is who. Be up to date and give the reader a tale to believe, something they might hear in the local, whispered scandal over the WKD blue.

There are many things to remember when writing, perhaps the best thing is to enjoy what you do, or you get to the end of it and are not happy with the outcome - the solution?

Rip and burn, maybe?

Ernest Hemingway - most disparaging they were too - the first draft of anything is s**t. Feeling sorry for everybody I might offend by that and feeling particularly sorry for myself - but I actually really like the first draft of a recent poem I wrote.

I have done what is advised and gone back to work a few days later. And if adding a comma has taken it to second draft stage, so be it. Even if I sneaked back and removed said comma later on.

What does he know anyway? He is no longer with us and has never seen my poem. Am I committing a terrible sin by liking what i have written, and not wanting to alter it? It’s not about being precious about my work, it’s about owning it and being happy with what I have written.

And I am.

Well at least until the morning. But I know from experience the pair of them will play me up all night, scratching and scrabbling at the skirting until I get up and write their story. Why us - why now? But at least it is temporary. For us it is anyway, in less than three weeks we will be somewhere else and the threat of meeting with the furry ones will have long gone.

It takes all my will to stay upstairs once I hear them. The tiniest noise and BAM! I am awake and firing on most cylinders - won’t say all, not at two thirty am.

I have to say I cannot decide if I don’t like them or am scared of them. And I don’t know who would be more alarmed if we ever came face to face - myself and the beady-eyed ones.

Still they have a story to tell - maybe more than one. None of this pretty dainty Brambly Hedge type stuff - these two mean business. Breaking out into the big wide world - Steve McQueen has nothing on them, and don’t be surprised if in a couple of years they have their own slot on Christmas Day TV - right after the Queen has said her bit.

Right, off to get down a few particulars on my two new acquaintances.

Squeak well - sorry, meant sleep. They are inside my head….

There’s no going back now.

Friday afternoon - I am looking for something, can’t even remember what now, but the hunt itself sent me some words. So today’s entry is a little different. Off to restore normality - or something vaguely resembling it

I’ve been looking everywhere
On the table, under the chair
Could they be here, behind the door
Over there, in a pile on the floor
With eyes wide open, I search the room
Nothing here, just dust and gloom
So what to do, what steps to take
This trail of destruction in my wake
Slowly slowly sifting through
Sunday papers, a doggy chew
Minutes tick by the light grows dimmer
Hope has gone, not yet a glimmer
Soon it will be much too late
The sinking sun will seal my fate
I’ve been searching now for over an hour
My humour gone my mood is sour
I can’t see my future its out of range
All my ways I’ll have to change
Something I could use in their stead
So I sit with hands on head
What’s this perched behind my ear?
My glasses – when did they appear?
And so I need to search no more
What’s missing now is my bedroom floor

Still cannot remember what I was looking for, but it wasn’t my glasses!!

Waiting is something I do badly - still I tell my kids not to be so impatient. Especially my ten year old when it comes to around eight in the morning and she wants to leave for school. Her brother and sister are eating breakfast, half dressed. Hannah is pacing up and down, schoolbag slung casually over her shoulder.

Here is my public apology to you, dear daughter. Mummy is lacking in this virtue they call patience, nearly as much as you! That was nearly, by the way, I admit to no more than that.

About six weeks ago I was brave and sent off a childrens story to a publisher. The guidelines said to allow up to 12 weeks and here we are about halfway in to that period of time. Oh boy is that time passing slowly………

What do you do to pass time? A crossword, knitting maybe, play a game? What do I do? Arrange to move house. All those distractions, packing, emptying bedrooms, finding things that have been lost for months. Yet here I am, bringing my attention back to the waiting by writing about it. The bittersweet torture - oh I just can’t handle it.

Now where’s those black sacks, I have a ten year old’s bedroom to clear……..