The Madness of May...

Sometimes I consider ditching this blog forever. *Is deafened from desperate cries of 'Noooooo! Don't say that! Please keep writing!* Oh all right then. If you insist.

Quasi-journalism
archives right there.

Blogging on a weekly basis can go one of two ways. Either, I wake up in a cold sweat, drag the corners of my brain for a topic, and try to conjure upwards of eight-hundred words whilst trawling my camera for random photos that might illustrate the contrived notion. Or, it's really hard work. Some weeks I cop out and give you a recipe. A good recipe but still, something that takes mere minutes to upload. (Those are the times I'm on holiday.) Other weeks, when an idea has bugged me and the thoughts need to be explored, I give you potentially-Pulitzer-winning quasi-journalism. I'm sure we can all agree on that, yes? Excellent. We're of one mind.

I know from experience there
is no signal in this pub. And
 look how happy I was about that, last year.
I'll be recreating this photo at the weekend.

So why am I giving you a peek behind the process? What's my reasoning in explaining the grind of a weekly blog to the single-figure readers that might care? Well, the grind of the whole thing is on my mind at the moment. This time of year is when my top-notch organisational skills are really tested. 

From the first May weekend onwards, the month is a mass of annual events, squeezed around any writing schedule I'm trying to attempt. The family caravan holiday kicks it all off, setting the tone for the madness that follows. That tone peaks on the Bank Holiday Monday morning as I hunt for elusive WiFi in a pub with a children's play area, attempting to post and promote that week's blog, before getting into my car and driving home to sleep in an adult sized bed once more. Identical scenes every year.

Chatting nonsense with Martin
Adams from a previous time.
When I talk Eurovision I do
it via the phone. 

After that, there's Eurovision prep. I'll probably be on Martin Adams' Saturday afternoon radio show on Eurovision day (radio show TBC but Eurovision is May 18th) and I'll need to know my stuff. Other than reading the odd fan-blog, I know nothing. I need to get up to speed. Then there's Eurovision itself. A week of live-tweeting, and party-planning, as friends message me because they know how much it means, whilst I try to find a non-cruel-yet-witty takedown of the costume choices of a former Eastern bloc country. It'll be intense.

But this is what happens every May. It's standard May. Usual May. Nothing out of the ordinary May. But this year - the year of our Lord two thousand and nineteen - May is anything but these phrases. This year's May is intensified, riddled with one-off experiences, and off-its-tits. This year's May is going to be huge.

Breaking in the best bit
of my wedding outfit. (NB: Doctor 
Who is not part of the hat.)

It's all based around a family wedding. My brother and his girlfriend are getting hitched, and facilitating all the excitement that entails. There'll be a family mini-break in a cottage, a day of wearing posh clothes, unwalkable shoes, and lots of cork-popping and toasts to the happy couple. Hurrah! It's going to be so bloody marvellous. On top of that, there are Australian cousins flying in for the shebang. My house will be a hub for family get-togethers. The contrast of having a houseful of people in a place where there's often just me and my thoughts, will be stark. It'll be loads of fun, but won't result in much work being done.

Just contemplating some
witty musings. Natch.

So far, I've got brief outlines of the next few posts for this blog. I try to keep things topical and not write ahead of skej, but it'd be daft to wing it, hoping I find a quiet few hours each week. I'm assuming I won't. My plan is to do my best to avoid reverting to a weekly recipe. Instead, I'm going to write sentences and thoughts, brushed up into something readable, and loosely based on what's happening at the time. Or as the header above states, 'Weekly musings on all kinds of irrelevancies, with occasional book updates and a smattering of author insight.' Snappy, yeah?

Annnnnd breathe...

I've planned ahead as much as I can. It'll all pan out, I'm sure. For now though, I am SOOOOO happy to be going to the seaside at the weekend. From the second I smell the ozone and hear the seagulls, my mind and muscles will involuntarily relax. By the time I open the wine, I'll have all the tension of a melted marshmallow. May your own weekends be as lovely, and as weirdly described as mine.

Have a lovely week, folks.

Leeza in the Making...

Over the past month, I've been emailed, Whatsapped, and verbally anecdoted by people in my life and beyond, who are enjoying Leeza McAuliffe Has Something To Say. The book has been out for six weeks yet feels like it's always been in the world. To me, anyway. It's been eighteen months since the first draft was completed, and even longer that the ideas that informed it, have been festering. 

For those that care about such things, I trawled back through these blog posts. I wanted to see when I'd started to mention Leeza McAuliffe. It seems it's as far back as May 2017, even though there was no name back then. 

In the spirit of a TV episode that's cobbled together from the best bits of the previous series, I thought I'd dig out a few past posts, to see how far we've all come on the Leeza journey. It was interesting to me, even if everyone else feels cheated and disappointed at the blatant cop out. Soz like. It's the Easter Bank Holiday. I can't be expected to be at full whack every week. If it was good enough for Friends, it's good enough for me.

That Tricky Second Album
The first mention, including photos of the planning file.

To Research or Not Research 
Includes photos of a real life location I pictured for Applemere Bridge.

Calling All Stattos
I talk word counts, do a bit of research from similar books to the one I'm writing, and generally stress that I'm winging it all as usual.

Comma Comma Comma Comma Comma Chameleon
This one is all about editing, my obsession with commas, and then the reason I overuse them in the first place. Contains Victoria Wood.

Back to School for Bond
World Book Day 2018. I share the planning process of the book with Y5 and 6.

An Elevator in a Skyscraper Works Best
First mention of the blurb. 

Climb Every Writing Mountain
I panic here about accidentally ripping off one of my idols, before realising it's alright. We've just been exposed to the same chaotic upbringing.

Consider This a Naming Ceremony
Why did I call the book what I called it? More here.

The Universal Mysteries of Being Ten
Ten year olds are ten year olds, aren't they? How things have changed from 1988 to now.

Leeza McAuliffe Has Arrived
The moment I had an orderable entity online. I was a bit excited. (I definitely used up my ration of exclamation marks on this one.)

World Book Day and Leeza, Together as One
Publication day, and all it entailed 

So there we have it. If you've made it to this point and read every old post, I'm afraid there's no certificate or gold medal. Instead, possibly get out more, breath fresh air, and find a hobby. Yeah? However, it's a nice way to show a snapshot of the overall process in making a book. From the initial ideas to the wanging on about it to the public. It's been quite the journey. Well done all of us.

Have a lovely week, folks. 

All True at the Time of Writing...

Last night I left my phone in a taxi. I know. I'm ridiculous. 

Yeahhh. That's how it was.

I'd had a lovely evening with friends, visited three bars and a restaurant, then got a taxi home. As soon as I walked into the house I realised I didn't have it. For a nervous half hour, I worried, sweated, and mentally retraced my steps. Using another phone, I contacted the restaurant and left my email, rang my friend in the taxi to check if it was there, and tried to get in touch with the last bar I'd been in. It was at that point my friend in the taxi rang back. It had been on the floor, unlit and elusive until he'd got out. It was found. Panic over.

A dramatic reconstruction of my phone
speeding off into the night. In New York.

As horror stories go, it's not really up there, is it? The Mystery of Nicky's Lost Phone is hardly going to sell out cinemas. Nor would the paperback hit the best seller lists. It's just one of those things that happens. And in a few hours, there'll be a happy conclusion to the narrative when I meet my friend and am reunited with my phone once more.

But the past twelve hours - for indeed that's how long my phone and I have been apart - has been challenging. Once the fear of having lost the thing went away, the practical realities kicked in. I didn't have an alarm clock. I was unable to add the food I'd eaten to my WW app. I couldn't fall asleep to Netflix. Straight away - well at least within an hour of being phoneless - my routine was all over the place. 

Don't say you don't miss it.

I want to be better than this. I don't want my world to feel empty and frightening because I've lost a piece of technology. A piece of technology I grew up without, managing perfectly well until my mid-twenties when I got my first Nokia. And yet, as I've outlined before, phones are more than phones. Lives are organised through apps. Work priorities, friendships contact groups, banking - it's all there. Until the time it's not. It's in a taxi and you can't set an alarm.

This is all I can do.

So, how will I cope for the rest of the day? Well, it's not as facetious a question as it sounds. I'm genuinely not being sarky. I have to rethink a few things. My work To Do list was on the phone. I can't remember all the things I'd planned to box off so I feel a bit untethered. My shopping list for Tesco was also on there. I'll have to spend sometime recalling that - and because I think I'm Nigella, it was full of random and specific ingredients rather than just 'pies'. It'll take some time. Then there's the family WhatsApp group. They won't have even clocked my absence. Instead, when I get my phone back, I'll have 9675 messages, focusing on banter. Plus funny vids of the Niece and Neph. Catching up with all that will fill an evening, no mess.

The good news, however, is that the top priorities for today have already sorted themselves out. My main To Do list - the one that starts with 'Get up' and  'Drink tea' - had two main tasks to complete. These were 'Think of blog topic' and 'Write blog'. I can now tick those off my list. My paper list. All I need to do is find a pen.

Have a lovely week, folks.

I Never Claimed to be Virginia Woolf...

I'm in a writing group. 

This has been the case for the past six months. Once a fortnight, I rock up to a Portuguese cafe in town, have a Diet Coke (or wine if I've trained it) and listen to other people read their short stories, poems, or chapters from their current works in progress. And sometimes I read too.

The reading aloud thing is nerve-wracking. I can't lie. It's like being at school. Except instead of indifferent, bored peers who are just waiting for the bell, these are interested, opinionated, fellow writers, whose sole reason for listening is to tell you what isn't working. Yet despite those high stakes, it is enjoyable. It is certainly useful. I'd been looking for something like this for a while, so when I found it, everything felt a little easier. I had people with whom I could talk about writing. People who understood.

The only slight problem is that I joined after I'd completed the vast bulk of Leeza McAuliffe Has Something To Say. I was down to the tinkering and spellchecking stage. So when I read a chapter or an extract, the feedback from peers was happily welcomed, but ultimately ignored. It had to be. I'd already commissioned the front cover, which included the dimensions and spine width. If I added any more pages, or reduced them, the whole thing would have been off. Any tinkering had to maintain the 388 pages that the spine covered. So when someone picked up on a typo, that was fixable. But when someone told me it might be better to include extra detail about what the rest of the class were doing while Leeza was describing the Medieval Banquet that Ms Archer had set up - well, it might have been good advice, but way too late.

Since Leeza McAuliffe has been in her final stages, I've not read anything out. There's been nothing new to share, and it seemed daft to cover old, completed work. It's meant I've been fairly quiet over the meetings. I've missed being as much a part of it. Meanwhile I've been writing up a frenzy in Book Three's planning file, (outlined last week) but am still a while off from paragraphs and pages. But that's when I had a good idea. I could share my planning process.

Book Three at the embryonic stage

Last meeting, when it came time to share, I outlined how I'd been working out the details of the next book. And in the spirit of (over) sharing, I'm going to do the same thing here. Mainly because, despite being with some other novel writers, people seemed interested in what I'd done. There's no one way to plan a novel, and everyone does it differently. That was clear at the meeting. We've all approached our work in our own way. Here's how I've done mine.

Book Three 
Working Title: Tilda Returns

This is a follow-up story to Carry the Beautiful. It follows the lives of three of the characters - Tilda, Bea, and Stewart - and takes place a couple of years after the end of the novel. All three are in different places in their lives (geographically and emotionally!) and individually going through 'something' at the beginning of the book.

The chapter planning sheet

Every chapter of the next story has a completed planning sheet. So far - before I've started to write the thing - there are thirty-five chapters. As I get writing, that'll probably increase as I split some of the unwieldier ones. 

Each chapter document holds the plan to the entire chapter. We see whose perspective the chapter is from. (Everything that happens has to be from one person's view. It can't swap about.) We know where the action takes place and when it happens. The plan means that the key information that the reader learns within the story, can be eked out. 'What do we still not know?' makes building suspense a little easier to judge. And the beat of the chapter? That's just the cliffhanger, or the punch of information that's dangled and then delivered as the chapter ends. It's the reason someone would want to keep turning the page. By planning those moments before writing, I can be assured there'll be some drama and suspense, even if I can't see it when I'm knee-deep within the typing and waffling of it all. (Typing and waffling - otherwise known as writing.)

Apart from all that, I've also got a page of themes I want to weave in. They mostly focus on ageing, legacy, and the meaning of life. You know, standard blah blah blah stuff. And I've got a page of title ideas. So far, there are about thirty possibles jotted down. I've not found The One yet. It isn't there, but I don't need to worry about it for another year or so. Bags of time.

Ah. It's nice to brush off an old ad. 

So while I continue to use the working title of Tilda Returns (it's so not going to be that, don't worry) I'll keep scribbling notes in my file, keep cross referencing chapters with nods to the themes, and keep making sure that when mid-June comes, I can sit down with my plan for chapter one, and type and waffle until it's done. Look, I never claimed to be Virginia Woolf*. I'm not writing highbrow literature to be studied by scholars. I'm content with creating likeably flawed characters that take people away from their own lives for a bit. I want to make readers smile, laugh, and be moved. That's about it. But the fact that I cannot wait to dive in and get started has to be a good sign. Hasn't it?

Have a lovely week, folks.

*This is true. I have never claimed this for a second. I included a Virginia Woolf reference here because she was a female writer I studied back in the day, and I felt she represented the 'highbrow art' end of the spectrum rather than the 'enjoyable beach-read' genre I seem to fit. Despite that, I love the idea of writing as a stream of consciousness. Indeed, this blog often does that without even trying. Amongst the fairly dull stuff I had to read and discuss at Uni, To the Lighthouse was one of the less dull ones. Plus I really liked the film, The Hours. So there. I just didn't want you to think I was slagging off Virginia Woolf. Not on my watch. 

Thanks for the Divine Inspiration, Fleabag...

I do love a good plan. A future project, broken down into bullet points, priorities and a timeline. Thrilling. I have plans for everything - archived past events, or ongoing current stuff. At the moment my desktop contains documents relating to the clothes needed for an upcoming mini-break, money everyone owes me for booking my brother's wedding accommodation, and a multi-foldered file containing the planning and research for Book Number Three. I do love a good plan. 

Indeed, the file for the next book is filling up nicely. Snippets of dialogue that I've noted as it popped into my head, photos of locations where the action happens, a basic plot - it's all in there. I've even got a date set in mind to start writing. Mid-June. That takes me to a part of the year when all the busy-ness has finished. Birthdays, weddings, and holidays are over. I can type through the summer heat whilst taking full advantage of the air con in Costa. I have a plan, it's going to start in June, and my life feels ordered and calm as a result. 

Perfection

Except of course it's not. Best laid plans, and all that jazz. Obviously there was going to be a spanner in the works. Nothing runs smoothly, even when there's a colour-coded timetable to guide proceedings. The reason that things are up in the air at the moment is simple. I watched Fleabag last week and now all I want is to be Phoebe Waller-Bridge and write utter perfection. 

I wrote notes about Fleabag
instead of sleeping. 
Ep 4 notes wouldn't 
fit on a screenshot.

OK. Let's back track for those not up to speed with my head. Series Two of BBC1's Fleabag airs on Mondays. Tonight's is episode five. Phoebe Waller-Bridge writes and stars in it, and it's perhaps the most perfect half hour of television I currently watch in the week. The characters, the dialogue, the situations, the humour, the poignancy, the layers, the questions I have after every episode - all lead me to conclude that PWB is an absolute genius. Last week's episode made me hyperventilate. Then it made me go right back to the start and watch again. Then, a few hours later, I watched it a third time. Then I followed the Fleabag hashtag (#fleabag #justsaying) and saw everyone else's thoughts, which were - unusually for a Twitter hashtag - a hundred percent positive. More than positive, they were completely reverential. Then I had a sleepless night thinking about all the things I think about this series. And then I watched it again. I won't lie, it's been quite the week.

But I digress. I'm not here to write paragraph after paragraph about how good Fleabag is. I don't need to. You've either seen it or you haven't. You know or you don't. What I'm digressing from is how my best laid plans of a writing schedule have gone awry. Put simply, by immersing myself in quality writing from PWB, I've been given a creative boot up the backside. My juices have been flowing (now then) all week. What was boxed off to start in June, when all of life had calmed down, is now rearing its head nearly three months early. I am gagging to start writing again. I cannot wait. I want to do it now.

The past few days have seen me scribble away in my planning book. Asterisks, arrows, and PTOs are littered all over the place. I've developed my three main characters with loads more depth and backstory. Loads more nods to the past and echoes of previous behaviours. Loads more good writing. I'm desperate to dive in.

This wasn't so full last week. 

I realise it's hugely arrogant to say I've been busy doing 'loads more good writing'. (And that sentence alone, suggests I'm lying or delusional.) When the book is finally finished, it may turn out to be a big fat pile of rubbish anyway. The point is, that in watching the execution of absolute quality, I've been inspired to do better myself. No plot detail or character trait is the same - I'm not knicking anything from someone else's TV programme. I've just been pushed towards cracking on with the ideas I had, but making them work better. June might be when I set aside the time to prioritise this project, but I'd be stupid to ignore the rush of adrenaline I've got right this second. If inspiration is striking now, I have to go with it. I have to ignore my schedule! 

So what's my point this week? I concede it's a ramblier ramble than normal. (Blame Fr. Kneel!) I suppose my point is that when plans go off track, it isn't always a bad thing. The past few days have been a creative hotspot. And if I'd waited until June to start, what are the odds that I'd have been dragging myself out of bed to look at a blank screen for hours, more times than not? No thanks, I'm not a gambler. I'm not taking that risk. All I can do now, is squeeze in as much writing whilst the juices are flowing. Crack on whilst the buzz is at its buzziest. And as for the quality inspiration that's kick-started it all? I'll be keeping Fleabag firmly on the planner. For ever and ever... Amen.

Have a lovely week, folks.