the humble local freak

It's been a funny old day. And yes, here I am, it's Friday Night, typing away at Task B of my course work.

Oh, hang on actually, I better save the buggering thing. Haha. Wordcount 800-1000 and I have written... 1,880. And still feel like its not enough for me to pass. It is ridiculously unrealistic.

We still have next to no lights upstairs in the house. Mum did have a brief look in the loft when it was daylight, but realistically I think it needs an electrician.

Also realistically, we've needed an electrition for two other jobs for over twelve months so it's going to be hard work pushing the mother to accept this and I may be dressing in the dark for the forseeable future.

It's been a funny old day today. Lots of good things but also quite a lot of worries for the future...and money...and things like that. But I am going to do my best to ignore them because I can't do anything about them and, also, I need to get on as I am off to Sheffield tomorrow to visit a friend of mine who has just become engaged and it will be LOVELY. I'm getting the ten past nine train, so everyone pray for an early sunrise, as I will have to pack my overnight bag in the morning when I can see my bedroom further than the lamp by my bedside will reach :-/.

Just finished reading The Quarry by Iain Banks.

Three years ago I nearly had the chance to go to a writer's conference at which he was one of the keynote speakers and was running a workshop. But I'd just started my job, and only two people allowed off at a time, and Induction Week and ...and...

So I couldn't get the time off. But I consoled myself thinking "He seems to go there quite often. There'll be another chance."


How bloody wrong can you get.

(Also, I love the book)

With the money I've made from selling some old stuff I didn't want anymore on ebay, I've entered two writing competitions. *gulp*.

It was especially painful because I was considering using that money to give me an excuse to buy one of the many e-books I currently have my eye on. I suppose I should feel a little virtuous that instead I stuck to fulfilling my New Year's promise (a minimum of two writing competition things a month).

Off to church in a minute to set up the DVD for Mum's Liturgy before preparing for Mass. I'm quite jealous of the liturgy kids- they get to watch The Miracle Maker. Also, how can it be 13 years since that came out?!?

I might get my DVD back afterwards and watch it for myself. :)

I broke my Lenten promise yesterday. I am SO STUPID. I’ve been doing so well even with daily emails from archive of our own that fics I’m subscribed to are updated, let alone another throwdown on tumblr and copperbadge posting a list of recs. But Mum has been recently motivated to go through some of the boxes of papers in The Hovel (I know!) and when I got in from work yesterday I thought I’d show solidarity by going through the Last Unopened Plastic Wallet in my room, the first page of which was an innocuous hand-out from a parish sing-a-long with lyrics to songs like My Old Man’s a Dustman and Maybe It’s Because I’m A Londoner. Underneath? Ahahahah.


When I was fourteen we had a dial up internet connection that was rather pricey considering how little money we actually had coming in, so I was only allowed a very short amount of time per week on the internet. What I would do, then, would be to click as many pages as possible in my allotted time and then read through them via the history buttons when I was offline. Sometimes, particularly in the case of fics where the sites’ history didn’t always save, I put them on word and printed them off, for enjoyment and/or distribution among friends. In this folder, discretely hidden away, were three such fics: two Savage Garden onesand a Bucky O’Hare one. I read them through and made the executive decision to recycle them, so I brought them downstairs, popped them in the recycle bin and sat down. Then realised what I’d just done. DAMMIT FANFICTION. DAMMIT SELF!

I spent the evening re-reading last November’s failed attempt at Nanowrimo. I still like it, I still think I have something of a story there, even if it isn’t as strong an idea as some of my others, but I’m also still stuck on how Gerry (my main character) is actually going to find out (and stop) the blackmailer before he ruin’s Mask and Ophelia’s lives forever. I know who the blackmailer is, but trying to find a way for this to be discovered still eludes me.
I started reading another of my library books Mobile Library Mystery #1: The Case of the Missing Books by Ian Sansom it was blurbed as humorous but I’ve had to give it up after a few chapters. Some of it was funny but I found it very frustrating as the ‘humorous’ disasters that happened to the main character went on, and on, and on. Not really my kind of humour. I’ve started re-reading Charitable Getting by Sam Starbuck instead.

But I need to stop all this for now and get on with some uni stuff.

A day off today for essay writing purposes. I am happy to announce that I have completed: A First Draft. For possibly one of the first times in my life I am under the wordcount (if I include the bibliography at the moment I'm still within the 10% marker, without the bibliography...well. I have a little more work to do. Ahahah) however I am immensley pleased to at least be this far along. I have another Study Day on Monday so my aim is that by next week I will have completed both the essay and the redraft of my presentation submission in plenty of time to quadruple-check and submit. I just have to be focussed for a little while longer *tries very hard*

Yesterday was a write-off in work anyway because we had team meeting and then I was doing an IT drop-in-and-let-me-teach-you session so I got very little of my own work done, which was frustrating. I also had some sort of melt down on the way home: I locked up with the others, tramped the long walk to my car, de-iced my car, half way through the commuter crawl to get home I realised I had the master key, which they would need today to lock up with, so I turned around drove back, bombed it into the building, put the key somewhere hidden and then realised that I didn't have what I call my 'double set' - a set of keys that will only open the front door and one office door- in order to get out, so I had to get the master again, go and borrow someone else's 'double set' from their desk and lock all the way up again and drive home all whilst...wait for it...DEVELOPING A MIGRAINE. Because that's what anybody can't do without for an evening. So I took the pills and lay down in the dark for the rest of the evening. Damned wasted time. I blame our team meeting which began with the beautiful sentence "Welcome to our monthly team meeting, we have these meetings once a month for the team." I AM NOT EVEN JOKING. I had to bite my pen and not look at anyone for ages. Actually I think that sentence encapsulates everything we dread about meeting days.

Anyway, migraines, yargh. Topped off by a horrible horrible nightmare last night involving people I love commiting suicide and me getting into a fight with a yob.



So today was okay! (Apart from the 'I woke up at five with a bad dream' bit). Mum went out and I have pretty much worked consistently today on the essay, with only one break for dinner until around three. At which point I cleaned the bathroom, because I promised myself I would.

THE DRAFT is printed off ready for my Red Pen of Doom all over it, and hopefully I can think of something to plough out an extra couple of hundred words about. But I'm having a pause for now and making posh coffee (posh as in it doesn't come in a jar that says 'Nescafe' in a foreign language, although it did still come from B&M...). What I really want to do with my break is write either a poem or a flash fiction piece just to get my brain going again but I'm running short on patience. And high on procrastination.

A good day today, all things considered. After a brief conversation with the Uni yesterday we have settled that yes, I am doing international history but I have also made sure that they are aware that I do feel concerned about my ability to cope with the module. I am actually hoping that, once I get going with it, it will magically be revealed that my incapability is mostly neurotic. I'm not fooling myself in the sense that yes, there does appear to be a section on Empire and one on The Cold War (topics of which I know absolutely nothing about) you see history and I have a very twisted backstory here. On the one hand I am convinced I am shit at History I like it, always did, but am shit about it. I don't particularly read 'Historical Novels' for the most part, my Mum is nuts over History which is why I find it interesting but somewhere in my brain there is a little goblin reminding me that I am shit at history. Point the fact: When Lycoris, Mum and I played Trivial Pursuits on holiday History was always my most evil of triangles to get.

In actual fact I took history up to GCSE Level. We did The History of Medicine (which I loved, even though Galen and it was really hard to remember whether it was him who did the Pig Thing or someone else, and which person did the first sucessful transfusion recorded ete) The Economic Situation In Germany between World Wars and The Vietnam War. It was interesting. I sat next to a guy who used to spend the whole time quoting episodes from Blackadder under his breath.

I remember all of this, cramming trying to remember before the exam to get the right names in the right places, remembering who did the survey of the streets and discovered that Typhoid carried in water and so on and, for coursework, wrote about the factors leading to, and the political climate of The Vietnam War, hampered only a little by the fact the school, in its wisdom, had recently installed a Safe-Search internet wall that for some reason decided that 'Vietnam' was a banned word for a while. I worked really hard at that coursework and I got a B.

When I got my GCSE results (I was already a bit of a mess that year to be honest) I gave them only vague glances and I told myself I would not do history at A-Level as it was obvious I just wasn't good enough. I'd got a B(!) and that meant I should gracefully sit back and say 'Okay it was fun, I'm just not good enough'.

I applied to University with my GCSE scores saying I had a B in History. In fact it was only years later when I dug out my transcripts for some job interview or other I found out that actually I'd got an A overall in GCSE history. My crippling disappointment at the B, with critical commentary, over my Vietnam piece had completely blinded me to Reality.

So maybe I'm shit at history, but also maybe my brain is having a bit of a barking mad moment. Time (and cramming) will tell.

I got four books out of the library today, anyway, three of which are about History- I couldn't find anything that said 'The Cold War For Dummies' but I got an overview of the British Empire, Andrew Marr's History of Britain from 1945-2000 (It won't due hugely well I know in terms of the international aspect but there was a bit of a dearth of material in the local library) and a book about the Berlin Wall.

I also caved and took out Stephen King's 'On Writing' again, which is a terrible temptress of a paperback. Every time I go in on Floor 1 I start convincing myself to re-read it. So I am.

After the library I tried on some things as I require outfitting for the Staff Christmas Party which is a masquerade and then went and got my hair done to stop it before I could no longer see my face. I sat with Nanny's and drank tea whilst she showed that, with Auntie Irene and Fern off visiting Auntie Maura, she had sewed four purificaters, three lavabo cloths and a corporal. Then I went home and read until now, when the noise of the TV (and the flickering lights, mostly the flickering lights to be honest, I am very used to TV and radio noise although it does sometimes drive me up the wall) have driven me out of the room. I love my computer chair but somehow it isn't Right for curling up with a book. As a kid, I would oven lie on the floor- here or on the lino in the kitchen, bruising my elbows- but it is cold down there and I am an old fogey now I suppose- I can't quite get comfortable and besides I take up too much space.

Last week I went back to the poetry group again. This time we all did an excercise where we each made a word out of scrabble tiles and then had to write a poem containing all (or as many as we could) of the words.

I don't know what happened. I don't know how. But literally the minute the words were listed and the challenge given I was pen-to-paper hammering away, knowing just what rythm I wanted and everything. A couple of lines took a bit of drafting but by gum I was away.

And yet for the whole month before that the only thing I'd written was the poem for C's leaving do, which, yes, I'd sweated over but that was it. Nothing else had come. Or maybe it is more that I never give anything chance to come any more. I'm always doing something else. Start to stare at a blank page? Wikipedia, the OED online (which my library card means I get access to), blogs, facebook where I'm playing scrabble with three people, twitter, youtube, fanfiction fanfiction fanfiction. Another refresh on AO3 and that's it, time has just gone.

So I pulled out my writing magazine today, took it to the park opposite where I work and had my lunch far away from people talking to me or asking questions or me having to be sociable. When I came home I did a bit of fanfiction-reading and then I decided to try and write flash fiction. I am shit at short stories, and truly I didn't have any ideas but then- wham- a bit of quiet and there's something written.

I'm not saying the challenge poem or the story I've just done are good- they very likely are not, but it's the first actual writing for random fun that I've done in ages. That feels good all on its own.

Yesterday, whilst at work I started thinking about writing. I am mostly quite shit at it these days- chiefly due to lethargy and a fanfic addiction, if I'm brutally honest about it. With my current existential little crisis (mostly being dealt with by Ignoring It As Much As Possible) I have been thinking how shit it is that I write stuff I never finish, and even when I do finish I don't get my arse into gear for rewriting. Pondering this I made myself a list. It went something like this:

1. Convert 'Cath and Jim Story' into screenplay (two parts?)
2. Rewrite MARKed and make longer (don't be afraid of bulking things out)

and then overleaf, I listed three short stories I currently have half-written somewhere on my computer:

1. Graveyard Children's Book (man meets Smiths-style emo?)
2. The New House Children's story (change it to a short by making the new baby arrive?)
3. Molly and the haunted cottage.

With this new determination that only ever comes upon me when I'm meant to be doing something else, I resolved that yes, I would DO THESE THINGS.

But so far it's not happened and now, on a Sunday afternoon, replete with my dinner and pudding, would be the perfect time to work on any of these. And I'm not.


I know that I could block it out on a calender, make it regimented, formalise the listing process but in all honesty I know I wouldn't stick it out. My course readings should be appearing next week ready for my next module, and between regimenting my day during working hours, where my day is made up of lists and segments of allocated time for this and that, fitting in the coursework (allocated time), the extra job (monthly allocated time) and the hovel clearing & health stuff the only time left would be these Sunday afternoons. There would be no time to just be Outside of a schedule.

I may love deadlines and being on time but even I need a break for a bit!

Productive today though- took three lego sets and the skateboard to Nanny's as Auntie Irene knows someone who would use them, and then two boxes of books and things to the charity shop. There's still mountains more already sorted (and mountains more still to sort) but at least it's something.