Okayish Words

I thought I'd lost him forever.

That is until i was sent to the job which has been keeping me away from this. Well to be honest, it was that and the fact that we didn't have Internet at our house for two months that has stopped me writing. Anyway... the job.

I'm working at Lancaster City Council. I have been since the 14th September, and that was the day i rediscovered Buck Ruxton.

You see,I did my final portfolio on him for my degree. It was sort of an Inspector Morse type detective story. The only thing was that the readers knew who killed Mrs Ruxton by the second chapter, and so the intrigue was lost straight away. Never mind.

So there i was, the tentative temp, on my guided tour of the town hall led by the "former youngest person in the office".

I'll show you the mail room he said

OK i said. That's all i had been saying all day, because i was terrified i was going to get lost in the building. It's like the tardis except it's big on the outside and big on the inside.

Down to the mail room we went.

There i met Mary the post lady who mysteriously asked if i would like to see the cells.

OK.

We wound further into the warren.

What i found was a Silence of the Lambs style prison. Eight cells all still equipped with a toilet and a wooden bed. Paranoid this was some kind of newby initiation test i stuck close to my guides in case they locked me in. That is until Mary the post lady told my to go up the little stair case opposite one of the cells. The stairs were steep and slightly curved and i was very conscious of the fact that Mary the post lady was right behind me and i was having to stick my bum out slightly to climb.

I reached the top. I was overwhelmed by the smell of dust for a second and didn't quite realise what i was looking at.

It's the old courtroom. Mary said. This was where they used to sentence people to death.

Oh. Cool...

And there on the wall was his face. Kind looking at first glance but then smirking and more sinister as you thought about the crime. He had stood on this very spot and heard he was to hang. Bloody hell. And down those stairs, there was his cell that I'd put so much thought into how it would look. It was nothing like i would have imagined. It was much... lonelier.

Not that i'm saying he didn't deserve what he got, but what a way to go.

My Grandad died not long after that day. I was getting ready for work when the phone call came to tell me he'd had a heart attack and my dad was on his way to see him. I still went to work. I had to. It wasn't the council job it was my shop job on Saturdays and they wouldn't have been able to find cover at such short notice. I smiled when customers came in and Ithanked them when they left. And when i came home i lay on the bed and cried. Will was fantastic. He hugged me and told me it was going to be ok and that Grandad was going to be ok and i would be ok and Dad would be ok but it wasn't.

Sunday morning the call came to say he'd died. I sat on the back yard steps in the cold autumnal sunshine and Icried and cried.

I read at his funeral. The first time i've ever read infront of people not in class. It wasn't a particularly eloquent poem. It wont be nominated for any awards or become the new Kipling's If. I was honest and i told people what i remembered of him. It went like this:

Now that you’re gone

I remember the little things.

The you-shaped dent in your favourite chair,

your flat cap and pipe-And you

sucking Worther’s Originals

while shouting at the horses on TV.

It makes me smile,

when I think aboutthe front tooth you were missing,

which was fixed,

not long beforethe other tooth fell out.

I think about the last time I saw you,

your eyes sparkled with pride

as you told meI was beautiful

and how I was all grown up.

No longer the little girl who flooded your bathroom

by plugging up the sink

and turning on the taps,

and forgetting until the water

began to drip slowly

through the living room ceiling.

Now that you’re gone,

I want you to know

that every tear that has fallen

has been a tear of love.

Because I’m remembering those things

that made you you.

I’ll remember you always,

and love you forever.

Goodnight Grandad,

sleep tight.

A Not-So-Quick-Word

I've not been on here for so long. i keep meaning to but then something will come up, like I'll have the urge to go on the xbox or I'll really really have to watch a DVD or finish reading a book I'm only 20 pages into. very much like how i keep meaning to carry on writing the story I'm working on. Basically I'm very lazy and very easily distracted. Neither are good qualities for a writer to have.

I actually got on the computer just now to start writing again. Then i thought "oh heck I've not blogged for a bit" and now here i am, writing rubbish on here rather than adding to the actual work I've done so far: writing "chapter 3" and then making it bold, underlined and italicized. All very important, but that has now taken me 45 minutes.

I wasn't always this lazy. There was a time when i would get up at 7am every day, go to work til 5 and then come home and do my homework. Granted i didn't do my homework until the night before the day it was due to be handed in, but i got it done. now the draft of my first two chapters has been sitting on my desktop suffering from an abandonment complex for the best part of 3 months.

So what can i do? I'm not going to kid myself and say I'll get it done eventually. I need a deadline, one that someone will force me to stick to. any volunteers out there are welcome to try.







I went to the war memorial in Lancaster yesterday. I've always loved it because of the angel statue, but yesterday was different. As part of my procrastination i watched the entire box set of Band of Brothers, and have found myself more interested in that part of history than i ever have been before. Of course I've always know there were heavy causalities in both the great wars, but seeing all their names, some of them linked together with the word "brothers" was really emotional. I didn't try not to cry. I just let it happen.

I also went to have a proper look at the Victoria Monument (after living here for 4 years you'd have though i would have done it a while ago) and was fascinated by the depictions of so many illustrious Victorians, such as those who I've been very interested in lately: John Millais, John Ruskin and Darwin. Absolutely fascinating. As you can see though, this has got absolutely nothing to do with what I'm meant to be writing about so I'll be off now. I might let the hamster out for a run first though, or maybe play about on facebook for a bit...

Loving Words

I've been thinking, writing about love... romantic

love, is one of the most difficult things to write about and write about well.
Ok I've got two characters, Alice and Joseph. They've been married for 3 years, but together for 5.

So what next?

Does Alice come home to find Jo reclining gracefully infront of a coal fire swirling red wine in a crystal glass, beckoning her over to him with that seductive glint in his eyes that she knows so well and that made her fall in love with him that summers day in that meadow surrounded by those wildflowers? No.

Why not? Because people can't relate to that. I know people who fell in love because they were drunk one night at the same houseparty, because they worked in the same warehouse, went to the same school, through the lonely hearts column. No meadows there.
I fell in love because it was the last night of the play that i directed, and i was sad and drunk, and there was only person who's solution to the problem was to cuddle me, and that was the Assistant Stage Manager, who i'd held a grudge against for months because he said he didn't like my Eagles Of Death Metal T-shirt.

Every couple's "How We Got Together" story is stupid, filled with little insignificant details, that make people regret they asked for. But that's what makes them believable.

So if Alice and Joseph met because Joseph worked behind a bar, and Alice went in there one night and they just got talking, it's more believable because it's boring. But does that make for good writing?

As for love scenes themselves, it's all too easy for Jo to say in a deep baritone "come over here baby, i'm going to give you a back rub." But does that actually happen?

Basically what i'm trying to say is that i'm stuck. I don't know how to make this couple convincing without making them sound like they're in a 70's porn film. And what i'm lacking is those daft little things we say to eachother when we're in love. The silly little games and conversations you have that you find hilarious, but others find repulsive.

So should i even put them in? Do i want my readers to cringe? I dont think so.

I tell you what. This writing malarkey is much harder than people make out!!!

Big Words

I've never done a blog before... it's really quite hard to get started.

In class today (MA Creative Writing), one of my classmates wrote a piece about giving evidence of a murder case in court. I raised the point that she used a lot of medical jargon but didn't isolate me, as a reader, from the piece. I made my point, and then the conversation went in a different direction, which left me thinking...
I read an article on the BBC website last week that reported that some internet company or other, has decided that there is a new word, the millionth word infact, which is (drumroll) "Web 2.0"....

right...

but that's not a word is it? "Web" is a word. It has been for quite some time, but "2.0" is numbers and a decimal point isn't it...? Anyway, the dictionary people have said that it isn't a new word (thank god!!) so i presume we're still on 999,999 words, which has been giving me panic attacks. I've got a new word. I'm trying to spread it around:

Lithaloo


It's a word my brother invented and it describes the back of your knee. I think it works.

Anyway the point i was going to make about that BBC article was this: in the article they (the dictionary people) said that a fluent English speaker knows between 20,000 and 40,000 words. Crikey. But then that got me thinking. That means that someone like me might only know 20,000, but someone like Stephen Fry might know 40,000! That's a big gap. Actually i don't even know how many words i know. That could be my PHD thesis. I'll probably find out that i only know about 2000 and then the government will decide i have to be sterilised immediately to avoid contamination of the human race.

I'm writing a dystopian novel. Can't you tell?
I've decided to go ahead and keep working on it because i've had a few encouraging words from my tutor, and she's a proper writer and everything, so my head has swollen to twice it's normal size and tomorrow i'll get back to work on in with all the enthusiasm i originally had for the project... although to be honest i probably won't even get out of my jammies.

I've gone off on a massive tangent now. My point was going to be this: i've realised that when writing, you can't keep fretting over whether the register of language you're using is going to isolate your reader and make them feel stupid. If you did that, you'd have to worry about the people who know twice as many words and how you could potentially bore them by "dumbing down" the piece. Just write what feels natural to you. If you feel uncomfortable with writing big words, don't write them, or get a dictionary out and find out what they mean. Whatever you do though don't worry too much about it, you'll only flatten the writing.

Saying that, i have just spent the last 10 minutes redrafting a blog... and i had to ask my fiance how you spell "tangent".

Oh but if you want to read the BBC article for yourself it's here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8092549.stm

feel free to vent!!!