Will You

I'd forgotten all about this song, but I heard it recently and remembered how much I loved it. Memories came flooding back.

Sometimes...

...such as when you find the downstairs shower room and adjoining laundry room flooded with sewage at 8.30 on a Saturday evening, it is useful to be married to a man who owns a drainage company.

A man who, although not a drain tech himself, does understand how the drains work and keeps a set of drainage rods in the boot of his car. A man who, with the help of Son 1, is prepared to persevere with rodding until the solid blockage at the base of the soil stack finally clears itself in a rush of backed up water.

A second round of cleaning and disinfecting continues today, after we finished just before midnight. The flood water even got into the base of my huge ironing pile and a mound of clothes I was sorting for the charity shop, so there is a lot of washing to do.

We blame it on Son 2, who likes to throw things down the toilets and flush quickly, before we can even see what went down. The blockage could well have contained cardboard, broken DVDs, teaspoons and chunks of soap and it caused the water from his bath upstairs to overflow through the downstairs toilet and shower, as it had nowhere else to go.

I'm just thankful it didn't all happen a day or two earlier when Hubby was away in Europe!

Breaking the silence

Sorry about my recent absence here. Over the last two weeks I have spent far too much time in the doctor's waiting room and the dentist's chair, culminating in a dreaded root canal treatment this week.

As a result I am way behind with my work (the sort that pays) and, with a deadline looming and a summer holiday approaching, I'm having to keep my head down and try to catch up.

Normal service (whatever that is) will be resumed as soon as possible.

How not to react to a review

As writers we all get stung by criticism of our work, whether it is published or just writing submitted on a course or at a writers' group.

But American author Alice Hoffman took her dismay a step too far when she launched an angry tirade against a newspaper reviewer on Twitter and worse still, published the reviewer's personal contact details, enciting her fans to attack her too.

The excellent How Publishing Really Works blog has a great summary of the whole fiasco and its ramifications here.

[For the record Alice Hoffman is a writer I feel I should like, but when I borrowed a couple of her books from the library some years ago I gave up on them. I hope she won't attack me for that...]

Novel Racers and wet feet

Yesterday I travelled to Birmingham for the latest Novel Racers' meet up. It's not a difficult journey from here, but did involve a bus and two trains so I planned it carefully in advance and took the risk of booking my tickets early, to get a good price. On the morning I left home far earlier than I needed to, so as to avoid any possibility of missing my connection at Watford Junction. The journey went completely to plan and I finally arrived in Birmingham at 11.45 for a 12.30 meet.

That was when I discovered that Google Maps are not accurate. But despite the dubious directions we all eventually found the pub and took over a corner furnished with sofas. It was lovely to see everyone...most I had already met at a meet in London last year, but I had the pleasure of meeting DK, Rachel and Ellie for the first time. There was lots of chat, about writing, of course but about many other things too. It was so incredibly humid, that I kept turning round to look outside to see if it was raining. Eventually we heard a spectacular clap of thunder and the heavens opened.

All too soon it was time for me to wander back to the station in the now light rain. Once again my train was running on time and we sped south, eventually hitting black clouds and torrential rain not far north of Watford. When I had to alight the rain was lighter again, but due to flash flooding the underpass used to move from one platform to the other was inches deep in water, the station staff fighting a losing battle with brooms and buckets. Everyone had no choice but to tiptoe through it.

My connection was standing almost ready to go and by the time I got off again the rain was light. I had about a fifteen minute wait for my bus, all the time praying the storm would hold off until I reached home, and it did.

Despite my eventual wet feet I had a most enjoyable day!

The death of two icons

Let me take you back to your youth. Back to the time when our heroes were allowed to be normal sized people with slightly chubby faces and curves.

First there was Farrah Fawcett-Majors (as she was then known) in Charlie's Angels. A pin-up for the boys and a sassy role model for us girls, her hair was copied by millions. The Angels led us to believe that girls really could do anything, at a time when we were trying to escape the dull domesticity experienced by our mothers.



Then there was Michael Jackson, whose personal journey led him from the legendary familial Motown pop group to become the creator of some of the best and most purchased pop records ever made.



Let's hope that in time Michael Jackson will be primarily remembered for his musical and showmanship achievements, rather than the the excesses and weirdness of the 'Wacko Jacko' years, with all their dark undertones.

And I also hope that Farrah Fawcett will not be forgotten, despite being pushed from all the news bulletins by the death of an even bigger star on the same day.

In the last week...

I have reached, and gone past the half way mark in my novel. That felt like a huge achievement, as I have been writing this novel on and off for two and a half years!

I have decided I am not a fast writer. I never have been able to do the fast and furious 'shitty first draft'. Instead I think a lot about each section and edit lightly as I am writing. I am hoping that this means that subsequent edits will be quicker and easier, but we will see.

I have also been thinking a lot about where my novel might fall in the market. I don't write chick lit, I simply can't do the comedy. It's certainly not literary fiction either, though I suppose it may end up falling into the Richard and Judy book club 'lit-lite' category of commercial fiction. I would be quite pleased if it does.

But after giving all this a lot of thought I decided just to think about some of the authors I particularly like for various reasons and who influence me: Anita Shreve, Maggie O'Farrell, Kate Atkinson, Sue Miller, Anne Tyler, Margaret Atwood, Jodi Picoult. I guess that gives you an idea of where my book is (hopefully) going...