Forward Movement

I think I mentioned ages ago that I'd foolishly volunteered to help out with a local musical. I was also for a while in charge of the music side of things, which was very daunting. Luckily I was relieved of that responsibility earlier this year, and became instead a General Helper-Outer And Keyboard Player.

Well, we put it on this week, and it was utterly exhausting but very rewarding and I'm both pleased and sad that it's over.

And it's meant that there has only been a small amount of movement on the book front, but there has been some. I now have a vague idea of how I'm going to do it, and am gradually getting involvement from Clever Creative Types who will help me make this book A Beautiful Thing.

I can't write too much until I have a better idea of who's doing what, but I'm aiming to have a cover, blurb, quotes and maybe even reviews ready by the end of June / beginning of July, which is when I will start a massive campaign to get advance orders for the book. The number I get will determine the size of the print run.

I'm hesitating slightly over whether I can ask people to pay upfront. I'm tempted to accept promises rather than actual hard cash... but this is probably foolhardy. And I *think* I could get enough people to do it... or could I?

It's horribly easy to get ahead of yourself with these things. You think to yourself, "Well, I know hundreds of people in this context, and hundreds more in this other one... and thousands of people have read my [previous] blog... so that adds up to a gazillion book sales, right?" WRONG. You can't assume anyone will buy anything. Ever.

But... out of the literally hundreds of people who read and enjoyed my first book, and the hundreds more who have met me since and responded positively to the various writing-related things I've done... I can surely find 50* to commit to buying this book. Friends and family alone ought to cover that. Easily. But will they? And will they be happy to pay up in advance?

NEVER ASSUME.

Problem is... I don't think I can hedge my bets here, or start on one track and then switch halfway. Either I'm asking people to pay up in advance or I'm just asking them to commit to buying the thing after it's been produced.

But then again... NEVER SHOW DOUBT**. Assume a thing will work, act like there was never any question that it would work... and chances are, it will work.

And anyway. It was published by a major international publisher. It's not a complete punt.

Eek!***


*100 would be better, but 50 is a viable option. I think.

**Ahem. So this post doesn't exist, right? You're not reading it. Yes? Good. Glad we cleared that up.

***That's eek as in "Oh help!" But also as in "Eeee, how exciting!"

On Dreams and Growing up

In this post here I said "Did I spend too much time in the past on impossible wishes? Am I more rooted now, moving towards an achievable future for once? I don't know. I think I might be growing up. Finally.", and Sarsparilla asked: "Do you believe that growing up is a process of losing your dreams, then? What has made you come to believe such a thing?"

...and the whole discussion is salient to my New Plan, so I thought it was worth reproducing my response here:

"Not losing your dreams, but giving up on the impossible ones.

I have new dreams, and they're achievable. Before, I spent a lot of time chasing rainbows.

Now I'm more sensible and realistic, and yes, those feel like attributes one might give to a more mature person.

There's also that thing of having less energy and more responsibility. I'm not the only person I have to look out for now, and my mind and body are slightly more fragile and need protecting - by me - from more of life's dangers.

But this achievable dream thing... it's coincidental I think that you should have arrived here today, the first day in weeks that this blog had fresh content... content which details (see here) my latest dream. This new dream is an example of the less-likely-to-be-possible replaced by the definitely-possible. Not long ago I was a full time writer, chasing after a dream of stardom. Now I've given up on that, which means that instead of panting on the heels of dismissive publishers I can happily announce Fuck All That and publish my own book with impunity.

Self-publishing is inadvisable for a writer trying to get the attention of mainstream publishers. It actively disimpresses them. Getting the attention of these people is something you do if you want to be a "successful" writer, when success is measured by how many books you sell and how many good reviews you get. But there are literally millions of writers and not enough publishing deals to go around... and even if you get published there aren't enough readers either (if you're chasing "success" on publishers' terms), so you have to jump through a million hoops in your efforts to get the attention of publishers and readers... unless you stop, step back, rethink what it's all about. What if what really matters is that you produce a beautiful book? One that you are proud of, that a small number of people can read? People you actually know? People whose opinions matter because you genuinely care what they think, instead of strangers pitching into your meaningless popularity contest? If that's your aim, then self publishing is an entirely reasonable enterprise.

And I think that counts as growing up: working out what will really make you happy, instead of chasing miserably after things which won't make you happy even if you catch them."

... to which I'd like to add that another reason I was chasing mainstream publishers was that I wanted to make a living from novel-writing, which is impossible without massive book sales.

Why did I want to make a living from it? So that I could do it all the time and not have to lose all that lovely writing time on Making Money To Feed The Kids.

But why did I want to write all the time? Because I wanted a life of dreaming, instead of a life trying to make money. But what if the dreams become your means of getting money? Then they stop being dreams, they start being work, they stop being fun, they start to destroy the very soul you were trying to preserve.

I know there are full time novelists who are happy that way and find a route through all this, but I wasn't one of them.

Old Dream, New Dream

I'm always coming up with Grand Plans. I'm also naturally impulsive, so will often jump straight in with both feet*, only to discover later that it's not going to work - for whatever reason. But sometimes I jump in and keep swimming, and there must be some tipping point beyond which there's no return**, because once I really get going, I don't stop until it's done.

Well anyway. This New Plan I'm currently jumping into is actually an Old Plan, and I talked about it in detail here. But this time I'm going a little further, and think I might actually do it. Self-publish, that is.

My life is busy and manic and tiring and the new career is by far the hardest thing I've ever tried to do. It's also very rewarding and I'm glad I'm doing it, but I still get a little sad about Not Being a Writer any more. But there's no time to do any writing. I have a third novel sitting on my hard disk, but it's still only in Second Draft form and needs a good few months of work on it before it's publishable - months I just don't have.

But... what about that second novel? The one that only ever got published in a foreign language? There was a while when I really didn't like it or think it was publishable, but that was as much about self loathing as anything else. It's a good book and I put a lot of work into it. And it's bonkers that it's sitting there, fully edited and ready to go, and yet hardly anybody's ever read it in English. Plenty of people who know me and like my work are interested in reading it. And how lovely would it be to have a brand new book with my name on it, under my control, designed purely as an object of beauty with no marketing departments breathing down my neck? It's already been published by Random House in a major European country, so it's not like it has no merit or is a pure vanity thing.

That said, this IS a vanity project. I'm happy with that. I'm also happy that it won't lead to fame or fortune or a "proper" publishing deal, and the whole project will run at a loss. But it's this or nothing. It's this or the book never gets published in English. Ever. Which would be a shame.

So, I'm speaking to designers and getting quotes for printing costs and thinking about producing a limited run of gorgeous hardback books, which will be a pleasure to hold in your hand, let alone read. I will of course do yet another edit, which is good cos it's now nearly two years since I last edited it and I've got better perspective on it. It's a good book, but the dialogue needs work and I can make the prose flow better.

So, this is my plan: I'm going to contact everyone I can think of who might conceivably be interested. Friends, family, people who enjoyed my first book, people who have enjoyed my various writing/blogging projects. And I'm going to ask them to commit to buying a copy. I'd probably charge a tenner per book. Might have to be more, depends on production costs. But I'm aiming to subsidise the whole thing myself, so it's not about making money. But I do need to know how many people will buy one so that I know how much money I've got (cos I'm not earning much at the mo) and how small a print run I should go for. I'm thinking 100 is probably a good number, but it might be too high.

This is sort of the wrong place to introduce the idea, cos hardly anyone reads this blog or even knows that I'm blogging here, so it won't give me any idea of potential numbers. But it might be a good test for attitude. Am I mad? Would you commit to buying a book under these circumstances?

I think I'm going to do this. I hope I'm going to do this. I have a bit of spare time coming up, and it'd be nice to be a writer again.

* Thinks: How would you jump straight in with only one foot?

** Tipping point? In a swimming pool? Oh, shut up.

Dreaming

I was reading someone's blog just now. They were talking about dreams, about what the future holds. I had a small pang, as I realised I have let go of my dreams. I still think about the future, but it's more pragmatic now. As someone close to me said, it's nice to see me excited about something realistic for once.

Is this a good thing? Did I spend too much time in the past on impossible wishes? Am I more rooted now, moving towards an achievable future for once?

I don't know. I think I might be growing up. Finally.

I evpleaarticus

"It's stinthat I evpleaarticus"

Is it just me, or does everyone see occasional crap in the sidebar of this blog? I suspect it's something to do with the latest Firefox update. Yesterday I got this:

"It's stinthat I evpleaarticus=rof 80ficalvd'm domdosl whae caspowdaeethens,t,ae cassoc wasskillsut that are so twrovidblems: (a)m esetwrsrle Iythusiastic misut the 8s to i I evpthe mh. Bf gind I je lisvpthe mh. Bf giem as ve in do exssiveem. She I'd ve no advf in-coanus-res of ut thespeng lisup the habssive, wethefngers? O. (b)e bikle newtg is, Iomagned a pn I'm leanerv-re'm fm leanew a Youch of ratple su,e nt to be ressiveem, slo I faileelke makIould loodhis posson bl theloof thiff."

What's fascinating about this is that it looks as though, if you squinted and had the correct brain in, it might actually make sense. Like it's in code or something. And clearly it kind of is, as somehow some link in some computing chain has turned something that makes sense (to someone at least) into what you see above. How did it happen? What process turned sense into that? Do I have a virus? I'm intrigued.

Update: I've decided it's a rather fine example of some Vogon poetry.

It's stinthat I evpleaarticus
=rof
80ficalvd'm domdosl
whae caspowdaeethens,
t,ae cassoc
wasskillsut that are so
twrovidblems: (a)m

esetwrsrle Iythusiastic
misut the 8s to i
I evpthe mh. Bf gind I
je lisvpthe mh.

Bf giem as ve in do exssiveem.
She I'd ve no advf in
-coanus-
res of ut
thespeng lisup the habssive,

wethefngers? O.

(b)e bikle newtg is,
Iomagned a pn I'm
leanerv-
re'm fm
leanew a Youch of ratple

su,e
nt to be
ressiveem, slo I faileelke

makIould loodhis
posson bl
theloof
thiff.

My favourite bit: "Whether fingers? Oh."

Wonderings, Ponderings and Musings

Life's a funny old thing, innit?

Once upon a time not so very long ago I spent a large part of my life on the internet, and my blog was a central part of that. And not just my blog - all the other things wot I rote - novels, articles, stories, whatever - were a large chunk of how I defined myself, how I interacted with the world at large, how I got praise and feedback and general validation.

But things change. I had a baby. I got a bit fed up. I lost my agent, I failed to get my second book published in English, I threw my toys out of the pram, said "fuck this I don't want to be a writer any more" and buggered off to do something else instead.

And now I'm here in this new all-consuming life, getting validation in new ways and mostly forgetting about this corner of the internet which would once have been my home.

I've mentioned it before, so I won't go on about it, but in my new career my previous existence as a novelist is not only unknown, it's my dirty little secret. I live in fear of people finding it out. So within a short space of time it's gone from something I was proud of and showed off about at the slightest opportunity to something to brush under the carpet. That's a bit odd. And a bit sad. But there you go.

This is what I do though. Every few years I pick up the tablecloth upon which my life sits, and I shake it.

I get bored. I want change. I want excitement. I need projects.

Currently I am sitting in my study. I'm supposed to be tidying it. I'm supposed to be using some rare and much-needed Me Time to catch up on admin and jobs. But I'm hungover.

It's nice, this bit. The reason I'm hungover is that yesterday, when I returned from a long car drive...

OH, maybe I'd better explain that journey. It was originally dead simple: Drive my eldest son to my parents' house, a simple 1.5-hour motorway journey, and drop him off there for a week's holiday. But then he convinced us to have his friend for a sleepover, and then his friend had to be returned to his new house in the countryside, only once visited before, and then I had to find my way from there to my parents' house. So I checked on the map and worked out what to do, and set off and did it, and after a while saw a sign which pointed the way I was going and said "this way for a totally other destination in the opposite direction from the one you think you're aiming at," but I kept going anyway and suddenly found myself being shot out on to the roundabout I'd started at 20 minutes previously. This was a bit freaky. Groundhog Day. But I was sure I'd been going in the right direction so I set off to do the whole thing again, this time keeping my eyes peeled for a missed turning. Which I found, with barriers and "Road Closed" signs and all that malarkey, so I kept going and did the whole circle again.

Long story short: It took bloody ages, but eventually I arrived home again, late and sans eldest son. And what did I find? A bath ready run, with scented candles, and the instruction to strip off, relax and drink gin and tonic while my Lovely One put the finishing touches to the special meal he was preparing.

This was in addition to the card and flowers I found on my pillow that morning. The envelope was covered in hearts, doodlings and little loving rhymes which made reference to love and stuff as well as lots of clever jokes about my new career. Inside the card was a series of little puzzles, which when answered gave the message "I LOVE U". And more loving soppy stuff.

And then in the evening I was wined and dined and generally looked after in way that made me happy, drunk and eventually, now, hungover. But still happy. But not functioning very well in a tidying-my-study kind of way and deciding instead to type random musings into the internet.

You just never know what's coming. I'm doing something with my life that fills me up and throws me down and which I'd given up on a long time ago. I'm confounding my own expectations of myself. I thought I would be a writer. I thought I was too selfish to do anything with my life which would be significantly helpful to anyone except myself. I thought I was lazy, I thought I preferred the easy route.

It seems I was wrong.

Hurrah for being wrong.

xxx

Four and a Half

I've eaten two apples and some satsuma today. I left two satsumas (and two apples) sitting on the side in the kitchen, to remind me to eat fruit (I keep forgetting). It worked. But then my 18-month-old son came along and said he wanted some satsuma too. I kept giving him segments and realised he was having so many that he was significantly eating into my 5 a day (4.5 fruits (I also had half an apple in my muesli this morning) plus some random bits of veg scattered about half-heartedly) (I am now imagining a house with lettuce leaves on the floor at sporadic intervals) (are you?). So I peeled another one. He had some of that too.

It bothers me that I now don't know whether I had more or less than 2 satsumas, and by what margin.

Unsophisticated Taste in Numbers

I noticed the other night that I had managed to get over two weeks into the new year without getting confused about what the date was. Not only had I written "2010" or "/10" correctly several times, but I hadn't even noticed myself doing it. Indeed I can't quite remember or imagine it ever being 2009, as 2009 just seems a bit wrong. This is partly because of the new decade and all that, making the number of the year quite memorable. But it's also cos 10 is just a better number than 9. Ten is right. Nine is wrong.

This is because I prefer even numbers to odd numbers. The best numbers of all are those which have many factors, like 36 or 1024.

My mum, on the other hand, prefers prime numbers. She sewed an extra pocket onto her new coat so that the total number of pockets would be a prime number. I've always felt that my mum was more sophisticated than me because she prefers prime numbers, which are quite clever cool things, rather than even numbers, which are the white bread, the processed sugar, the ITV of the numbers. I am a populist unsophisticated fool in my numbers taste.

I suggested this to Him Indoors the other night and he said I was wrong. He said that it wasn't so much a question of comparing processed sugar with organic home made apple pie, but more like comparing posh caviar with cheap caviar. Most people just don't have favourite types of number in the first place.

The question is, was he right?? Do you have a favourite type of number?

Snow Family Rising

Behold!

Snow!

Woke up this morning to find ourselves snowed in... in inner-city Manchester. Astonishing. The 7-yr-old's school is shut, we can't get along the road to the baby's nursery, my partner can't get to work, and I had to go fetch a scraper and clear six inches of snow off the skylights in my attic office because no light was getting in. And the stuff's still falling.

This is How it's Supposed to be

A seven-year-old boy I know said to me:

"This is how it's supposed to work: Men look after babies and women do all the cleaning. But in this house it's the other way round."

Me: "Well actually, some people say women should look after the babies AND do all the cleaning AND do all the cooking."

7-yr-old: "Eh? But that wouldn't be fair!"

Quite Striking

I was handed a book last night, and challenged to find a single paragraph that made explainable sense.

I tried, and I failed. But I did find this gem of a sentence, which I read out loud several times because it was so tongue-warmingly nonsensical:

"Liberal cultural studies' enthusiastic misrecognition of the media-marketing apparatus as the supplier of malleable symbolic material to an autonomous, creative plurality external to itself - a theoretical development that occurred at the same time as the countercultural icon of the 'cool individualist' was replacing the responsible collectivist - is quite striking."

It's the pay-off that I love the most. "- is quite striking!" We were all in agreement that something was most definitely striking, we just weren't sure what. Granted we were a little drunk on tequila, pomegranates, port and stilton. I expect we could have made some meagre sense out of it if we'd tried hard enough. But that would have spoilt the fun.

Musical

Like the great big sugar-coated fool that I am, I volunteered to "help out" with a local production of a musical, and suddenly find myself in charge of all the blimmin' music. Help!

It's called Ocean High and is a Grease-a-like with a soundtrack consisting entirely of 80s pop songs. They were all in the charts when I was a teenager, or in some cases even younger, and I am becoming awash with nostalgia. Material Girl, Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, Footloose, all get me gazing into the middle distance and remembering the excitement, the angst, the sheer giddy giggliness of being 13. And then the other day, preparing for a rehearsal, I clicked through to a YouTube recording of Video Killed the Radio Star, and found myself in tears. It's just such a great song, and I loved it so much when I was ten. And I'd just been (rather foolishly, I suspect) looking at a satellite pic of my grandparents' old house, which hosted so many happy childhood memories and has now been turned into a sock factory (a sock factory!).

I was ten!! It's so long ago. 30 years ago. THIRTY YEARS! And what really gets me is that when I was a kid, various pop songs from the 50s and 60s made comebacks, and they were great (all that Motown and Atlantic Soul) but very old. Very much part of the past - the kind of thing that old-fashioned people once listened to. And now there's a whole new generation thinking that way about me and my youth, and I just can't get my head round it. Partly because I was quite sniffy about the 80s when I lived through them and I still can't think of them as cool, not in the same way that the 50s and 60s seemed cool to me. How can shoulder pads, big hair and rara skirts compete with teddy boys, leather and psychedelia? But partly because... it's not old! It was only yesterday. Wasn't it?

Unkempt

There's a bunch of rather lovely and unkempt women over here on unkemptwomen.com being, well, unkempt.

I recommend.

Personally I am permanently unkempt, to the extent that my employer gave me a mild ticking off about it today. How I manage to get washed and dressed at all is a bit of a mystery. It's not unusual for me to drag myself up after four hours' sleep (and I'm a woman who needs her slumber). My baby son is teething, and I'm struggling to remember why the hell I'm putting myself through all this.

I think it's known as challenging. And it'll get even harder in the new year.

Being unchallenged is looking a lot more attractive than it did before. This is the hardest thing I've ever tried to do.

Suspicious Requests

"Hi,

I have a client for whom I'm looking to purchase advertising from quality websites. I've had a look at your site at http://beleagueredsquirrel.blogspot.com/ and think that it would be a good match for our client, whose target demographic is similar to your own.

We would be interested in purchasing advertising in the form of a text-based link on your site. To reduce unnecessary administrative costs we prefer to pay a fixed annual upfront fee for such advertisements. Once the ad has been placed, payment can be made quickly by PayPal or check.

Please let me know if the above is of any interest to you. Thanks in advance."

How odd to send a request like this without even hinting at what the product in question is. Surely nobody would say Yes without knowing what they were going to be advertising? And how likely would it be that, given that I currently have no advertising at all, I would want to have just one advert for this product? It would surely make it look as though my blog was a cover, whose real purpose was to advertise this thing (whatever it is), which would just make people suspicious and unwilling to read on?

People are funny. I won't be taking them up on their offer. Not that I even have a clue what it is.

Bad Squirl

I am a bad bad squirrel. There you all are, visiting my world-wide-web-log in your dozens, saying delightful things in my Designated Commenting Area, and I am ignoring you all.

I don't mean to, and I don't want to, it's just that my new career is living up to all the dire warnings I was given. Rather impressively, in fact. It sucks the very marrow from my bones.

It's still the right thing for me to do.

But it is also all-consuming, and I am consumed.

The Chaos Hour

There is this hour every day, after the kids have come home, before their dad appears, when suddenly everybody is shouting in my ear, wanting stuff which I struggle to provide.

The baby wants boob and a cuddle. The child wants his tea. The dog paws at me with her unclipped claws, demanding moist chunks of meaty goodness. The phone rings, the doorbell clangs, and all of this waits until I am changing a stinky nappy, about which the baby is complaining vociferously. And then the sausages / fish fingers / unhealthy chunks of easily-cooked junk catch fire, just as my fingers are covered in poo.

I don't like that hour very much.

Smells of Wee

I got knocked off my bike this morning. I'm fine. The bike wasn't, but the car driver gave me a wodge of cash, which I gave to the bike shop, and the bike now has a shiny new wheel.

The driver also arranged for her husband to pick me up from work and take me and the broken bike home again. He had a van, which was handy. But it smelt of wee.

I was intrigued by this wee-smellingness. Why did his van smell of wee? Was he incontinent? Did he know someone who was? Was he an alcoholic? Was he in the habit of giving lifts to random smelly strangers? Or maybe...

What if he and his wife were Manchester's answer to Fred and Rosemary West? She lies in wait on side roads, waiting for women cycling to work. She drives into them, slowly and gently, careful not to harm them. She gives them money, then arranges for her husband to pick them up later in his van. He wouldn't really take me home at all. He would take a sudden wrong turning and drive me to his house, or one of those desolate industrial wastegrounds of which there are so many, and then he would do horrible things, so horrible I would piss myself in fright.

He didn't though. He took me home, and was blessedly silent throughout. We listened to the radio. And smelt the wee.

Patterns

I have identified a pattern. I'm pleased. I like patterns.

Thing is, I like the idea of being good at stuff. I want to be good at stuff.

I also like making lists.

So when I'm learning how to do something, I take notes. I make lists. For instance: Lists of things I need to remember / pay attention to when writing a first draft. Lists of things to do when editing. Lists of things to include in submissions. And so on.

So... guess what I have in my New Job folder? Yup. Lists of things I need to remember / do / include in order to be Very Good at my job. It seems so simple. All I have to do is follow my rules, and I will be brilliant!

But there are so many items on these lists. And it's one thing knowing I should be doing these things. I may even know how to do them. In theory. But in practice... well, that's just it. You can't carry hundreds of balls without practice, and lots of it. Which is fine and good and pretty bloody obvious really, but I'm impatient and keep forgetting that just because I've written everything down in a list doesn't mean I can do it all.

I pick one ball up, I drop another.

And then I look at my list and I say to myself, Look at that! Look at that list! It's enormous! How will I ever master those things? It's impossible! I'm rubbish!

And yes, I do think in exclamation marks.

Time to pat myself on the head and say such things as "There there," "All in good time" and "Chill out gel."

[sigh]

Yes

Me and a 7-yr-old I know were playing the game where you have to try and trick your opponent into saying the word "Yes". He had held out for ages, then he said: "You'll never catch me out."
"Are you sure we can't catch you out?" said I.
"Yes," said he.

And a little later...
"You do me now," said I.
"No, you do me," said he.
"Oh go on, do me," I said.
"No me," he said.
"Oh all right then," I said. "So I'm doing you then, yes?" I said.
"Yes," he said.

Hahaha. I love that he's old enough now for me to play proper games with him and not have to make concessions!