The dog ate my homework

I had an email yesterday that gave me a proper telling off. I’m not disclosing the source - they can out themselves if they wish - but it’s not my Mum!

Take a look at how scary it is:

“The only other thing I'd say, and I know I've said this before, is that while I do understand why you're polishing this to get it where you want it to be for your mentor, and that makes sense, you do need to get the rest written. You can't truly finish this bit until you've written the whole thing. You've been back in Bangkok for over a week now and I haven't noticed your word counter going up. Nag, nag, nag, nag, nag... but I think that's part of what I'm for! I know you did loads in Koh Chang, and that was great, but let me quote back to you your own words from 30th September: 'Hopefully I’ve learned that if I can write flat out here, I can get on and do that in Bangkok too.' Well???”

I have just got a little bit of sorting out to do so that it’s ready to send to the mentor when she’s finalised. But I’m making a promise, that from Monday I am on fresh words…

Please feel free to send me frightening emails demanding explanations for why my word counter hasn’t risen.

♪ "I Have A Dream" la la la ♪

The mentoring thing is going ahead.

I had a conversation with the coordinator yesterday. This was to give her an idea of what I was like … so she can match me to the right mentor. She said ‘when we talk of a mentor, do you think male or female or doesn’t the thought occur to you?’ and I said ‘female.’

When I was at Art College a lot of my work was labelled ‘women’s art’ in a snotty, derisive way. Our lecturers (mostly male) were lovely, and tried to explain if I made work that was gender specific, I was wiping out half the potential viewers. I tried to explain to them that I couldn’t take my femaleness out of my experience of making art. I don’t accept that that makes my work less important, less good or less anything and I won’t apologise for it.

I am fairly sure my writing will be the same.

Let’s look at the evidence: the main character is a woman; of the next five characters four are women. There are two other main male characters and they are both dead! Hmmmm, interesting. The mentoring coordinator has read my first chapter and agreed with me.

Anyway this won’t do – I don’t know where that soapbox moment came from - I must pull myself together and do some work.

I should really turn off the soundtrack to Mamma Mia. I can’t write with music on … and particularly not when I’m warbling enthusiastically but tunelessly along with it. It’s most off putting.

But I’m rather enjoying it. In my dreams I sing so well ♪ ‘Gimme gimme gimme a man after midnight…’ ♪ although the snorting, mocking laughter that Husband’s just emitted might pour scorn on that idea.

Kindness makes the world go round

The first time I went home to the UK after moving to Thailand I told my parents about how some food stuffs are available in Bangkok and some not. “I have a friend, S,” I said, “who loves mushy peas, but she can’t get them. She carts them back from the UK when she can.” A week or so later I’m about to fly back to Bangkok, and my Dad brings me a box of dried peas “For your friend, S, JJ,” he says.

My friend S has moved to Delhi since then. Last month she visited Bangkok and she told me she comes to visit with an empty suitcase because she can get more things here in Thailand than she can in India. We chuckle about how all things are relative… I ask if she has space for a bedspread that I really want to get from Delhi – a replacement for one that’s falling apart after 20 years. She tells me she’s happy to get it and will bring it in November. We swap emails about details until she’s in possession of my bedspread.

Her trip to Bangkok has been cancelled, but she’s going to Singapore. With Husband’s help we arrange for his nice colleague A who is based in Singapore office to take in the bedspread at the office. (The bedspread is shown around colleagues to mixed reception! Cheek of it!)

One of Husband’s Thai colleagues, B, is going to Singapore. Would she be kind enough to bring back the bedspread for JJ? “Sure,” she says, “but I won’t release it into your care until you get me a copy of Delia Smith’s roast potatoes recipe.”

(Kind Thai colleague B collected the bedspread today, but was rather shocked as it turned out not to be what she thought she had heard Husband ask her to collect. She said to Colleague A, where is the "pest spray" you need me to take back?)

Bilingual Chinese whispers aside, I like to see it’s not just money that makes the world go round.

Research

‘Write about what you know’ the saying goes, so the mother of my MC is a university lecturer in the subject of my first degree (classics). As well as being a classicist, if I refine the character’s special interest, it enhances the growing symbolism appearing, quite of its own accord, throughout the story.

Classics, it’s perfect. I studied it at, in the words of Edmund Blackadder, “one of the three great universities… Oxford; Cambridge; Hull…” One tiny problem is that all my textbooks are currently residing 6,000 miles away in the attic of our house in the UK. But, there is another wee problem. I’m sure I’ve told you this before, Husband says I know so little about the subject that I did my first degree in, that really, I’m obliged to give my certificate back to the university.

So I got to thinking some more. One of our cohort went on with his study and is still an academic of the subject. Oh so, straightforward: a little bit of googling and I found an email address for him at a British university. I’m not sure … he won’t mind the twenty year break since asking him for help with my Latin…

Not a nanosecond went by and I got a bounce-back from Mailer-Daemon. Who the hell is Mailer Daemon anyway? And how did he know so quickly that clever friend from many years ago is no longer at said university?

Well, I checked, but Facebook, Friends Reunited etc isn’t his thing, but he was listed on the university alumni site – they will forward my message to him. But they may think he’s at the useless email address too. And how long will it take? Oh well, it’s gone now, so let’s see. There’s always his publisher too. I suppose I should try that next.

Next on the list of people to contact, is clever brother who’s a doctor. I’ve only just discovered the god complex of writing. I don’t feel it with all writing because crap stuff happens in books to nice people. However, when I’m killing someone off – even before the story starts, I take great delight in how I kill the not so nice characters off.

Finally, I’ve got a contact from my sister for someone who deals in secondhand books… but that’s written on the back of an envelope currently residing somewhere in my paper mountain: hmmm that could take some time to find too.

The Lost World

I had a bit of a bad night's sleep last night. There were three of us in our bed! Oooh er. None of that, though, it was daughter who crept in about two o'clock terrified by the mother of a thunderstorm. It went on for hours, and then started up again at 10am for two hours. I was desperate to print out my words ... millions and millions of them. Well, thousands anyway, but I'd got no printer ink.

When I eventually go to the shopping mall, feeling a bit peeved at the waste of time, I had to laugh, it had turned into The Lost World. It really is bonkers here.

Back in Bangkok

“Statement of the bleedin’ obvious”

I am feeling all relaxed and light of problems. This is my last day on Koh Chang and the rainy season has gone away for the day … but still I’m at my laptop. (I ♥ my laptop.)

Calistro left a comment yesterday that made me laugh; she said: ‘…that’s utterly astonishing… Have I missed something? How did you go from writing 100 words a day on Helen’s blog to well over a 1000? I want some of that fairy dust please!’ and then after chuckling again at her tone of total incredulity, it made me think. These are my tips:

1. Sign up for a mentoring scheme in which you will submit 10,000 words for critiquing when in reality you have only 4,000 words of your ‘masterpiece’ written.
2. Have a lovely Husband, who despite writing course being cancelled, lets you ago anyway to gorgeous jungley island all on your lonesome while he holds the fort at home.
3. Have people on your sidelines, shouting for you: encouraging, having faith and then shouting some more. (I know it’s not the most exciting blogging; me telling you how many words I wrote today, and what DVD I’m watching… so thank you for still appearing here!)

In truth, it’s not just those points, and it’s funny that it was Calistro that made me think about it, because it sort of started with her.

It’s hard work, this writing lark. I know that – if you came here telling me it was just sitting on my lardy arse and typing, well, I’d say ‘it’s not, it’s hard work.’ I knew that. I’d read it in multiple ‘how to’ books, I’d heard it from writers, I’d read it on the internet. I knew.

It started a few weeks ago when Calistro got her agent. I was so pleased for her – she really has worked hard for it … and she works full time. I felt utter delight; I knew I wasn’t near that situation so my reaction didn’t involve an iota of envy. I was 4,000 words in and I could see that I had a long way to go before justifiably feeling ‘why not me?’

It spurred me on. It made me think ‘I want that to be me…’ So I began to think about it: about how to do it, about how to get to that situation so that even if there are no guarantees, at least to get to a place where your manuscript goes out.

My TLC writing holiday got cancelled and I felt sad but I recognised my need for feedback. I’d got no real idea if what I was doing was right. So fast forward to the idea of mentoring with TLC: my excerpt came back with some good things on it. It was better than I hoped for and it had suggested to my reader that, albeit assessed only from one chapter, I might possibly be in possession of the skills required to do this.

‘I did that chapter,’ I thought. ‘It was hard but I shaped it and put the things into that she thought demonstrated that potentially I might possess the ability to do this. So right … (can you hear those cogs turning?) if I can do it with one chapter, I can do it with the next.’

Slowly – because clearly I’m not very bright – it began to dawn on me. The writing is really tough. It’s HARD. Am I the only one who hadn’t comprehended this? Am I the only total twit who hadn’t grasped the fact that, not only is it not easy, it’s actually, really bloody difficult?

So, if you’ve read this far, you’re going to say ‘Yes? And your point, JJ, is what?’

And, well, I suppose my point is – I suppose I have a couple of points: that ability or talent is irrelevant if you don’t do the hard graft … there really isn’t any ‘fairy dust’? And while I knew all along that it was tough, I guess I didn’t really quite believe it; until now.