For the Love of Air Con...

We're currently in the 'three-weeks-out-of-fifty-two' period of the year, where I consider spending gazillions to kit out the house with air-con. 

Live scenes from my living room

Those thoughts will pass. Soon, a whisper of a breeze will remind me that, over the course of the year, my heating bill is where the money goes. Annoyingly, these brief, stifling weeks simply need to be endured. 

It's useful, in these sweaty, red-faced times, to consider how much worse I could have it. I could live in London. (Thoughts and prayers to the capital) where it's even hotter than in my close-to Liverpool home. Or, I could still be expected to facilitate the learning of a class full of equally hot and bothered Y4 children. (More thoughts and prayers to school staff.) Basically, I could be expected to do all sorts of things, beyond wearing my thin cotton PJs and banging the keys of a laptop. When you look at it like that, life really is peachy. 

Writing News

The editing is going apace. I'm whipping through my to-do list, and smoothing out the wrinkles in all sorts of plots. The fact that it's going so well, though? That makes me worry. Maybe I'm still surface-editing. Maybe I'm still only ironing out the obvious stuff - the typos and the cumbersome sentences that could be simplified. Maybe I'm skirting over it, never once delving deeper into the real nuts and bolts of the thing. 

I gotta go deeper

Bang2Write - a marvellous resource for writers -  recently shared an Instagram post. One of the suggestions for better writing, was, 'Be braver, go darker, weirder, funnier, messier.'  And this is where my problem is. My desire for Leeza to be a calm, reliable narrator, means her own actions tend towards the sensible. She's hitting the teenage years in this book so I know I need her to be more... angry at the world? Or angry at someone or something. I need her to be messier and less glued together. So far, she's decidedly non-messy. Whilst I carry on editing the surface stuff, I can see that's what I've got to be working towards. 

Hapless Sven - my favourite 
character in Kleo.

Culture

Oh Netflix. You churn out so much nonsense, but now and again, there's a real gem. Kleo is a two-series drama about a Stasi-assassin, who - after the fall of the Berlin Wall - wreaks vengeance on the people who betrayed her. It's a thriller, I guess, but with real moments of comedy and light relief. I've been enjoying it tremendously. Other than that, the Women's Euros is currently taking place in Switzerland. I've been happily cheering for the Lionesses from my sofa. After a wobbly start, they're back, and it's glorious.

Food and Drink

It's too hot for cooking. Yeah, I said it. The Asda tapas aisle is getting hammered right now. It's so much easier to open a few packets of stuffed peppers, olives, and hummus, than to create kitchen magic every night. Mashed potato - the definition of kitchen magic, and I won't hear a word against it - will be back soon enough, but for now, it's small, cold, plates of Mediterranean bits, ad nauseam. Ah, summer!

Garden party fun

Out and About

My friend had a garden party on Friday. It was lovely. I sipped my Aperol spritz and felt all was right with the world - and as we know it's not, then that was quite the feat. On Saturday morning, our new car arrived. This meant air-conned road trips to practice how it drives. (It's another leccy one, but with different sticks coming out of the wheel. A whole new world.) 

Hopefully you're coping. And if you're not, you will be soon. That's how these things works, you know. See you next week? Yeah? Excellent.

Have a lovely week, folks.