Collaboration with a Cat & Other Stories

Photo by Oriol 'Oli' Benet

I’m back!

And I've got a good feeling about 2012.

My year began with the news that my short story ‘Five Pounds Short’ is to be published in the Earlyworks Press anthology. It’s about the domino effect that occurs when a woman loses a fiver.

Ironically, I shaved a thousand words off it so I wouldn't have to pay an extra fiver for submitting such a long piece.

I’ve also just spent two weeks in Barcelona working on my novel.

It’s had a few false starts and I’ve thrown away at least two novels worth of words but finally my first draft is done.

I stayed in my brother’s flat while I was away since he was on holiday and looked after his little cat.

It was the first time I’d ever looked after a cat. In my mind I fully expected it to be as easy as looking after a house plant.

The cat, called Kitty, (pronounced Kiddy due to my brother’s fiancée being American), insisted on collaborating with my novel. As soon as I began to write she’d walk nonchalantly over my keyboard.

You'll be able to differentiate our writing styles quite easily.

Her sentences read something like this: jrierhvkw;lmnvfjfjdfdm

Occasionally mine aren’t much better.

Apart from her eagerness to play at 4am, our time together was enjoyable and productive.

I wrote more in two weeks than I would normally write in two months.

Now I’m faced with the fresh challenge of editing the whole book and I expect it will take a few months

But I've lots of short stories up my sleeves and on my hard drive. I’m thinking it’s time they got together in a short and sweet compilation, a perfect little read before bedtime.

Be it the end of the world or not, I'm going to make 2012 a year of action.

Merry Christmas!

Dear readers

I've decided to take a break from my blog until the new year.

It's been running reasonably smoothly since June 2008, so I think I deserve a little holiday from it, don't you?

I'll be using that time to concentrate solely on my novel, which takes significantly longer than a tweet or a blog to complete!

Thank you all for reading this year. Have a wonderful Christmas and I'll be back posting blogs in the Happy New Year.

Shop Girl X

Dodgy Diagnosis

It was my brother's 30th birthday and we were discussing aches and pains in a restaurant in Barcelona.

“I went to a chiropractor the other day and he said I’d need to see him for 6 months," my brother said. "When I said ‘no’ he messed my back up out of spite.”

“They don’t recognize it as a treatment here in Spain,” his girlfriend said.

“It hurts every morning now,” my brother said. “I was fine before, I only went because I thought it was good for you.”

The waitress came over and my brother’s vegetarian girlfriend asked if the rigatoni a la putanesca contained meat.

The waitress shook her head, “No…only bacon”

We exchanged baffled looks. Only in Spain, we all thought. His girlfriend chose a salad instead and the topic moved onto dentists.

On my last visit the dentist had said there was decay under my fillings and I’d need to replace them.

I had one nice white filling and one nasty grey filling. To spread the cost I decided to have one done now and one later.

By the time I realized he’d chosen to replace the nice white filling instead of the more obvious antique grey one, he was already poking metal instruments in my mouth and I couldn’t talk.

“When will I need to do the other one?” I’d asked, once he’d finished.

“Soon,” he’d said. “The other filling is worse than the one I’ve just done.”

The table shared my frustration and we all ‘grrrd’ in unison.

“Well when we went to the dentist he told us we had to sleep with special gum guards on,” my brother’s girlfriend said. “Apparently we grind our teeth in our sleep.”

“Can you imagine how sexy that’d be drooling everywhere when we said goodnight to eachother?” my brother said and he pretended he had the gum guards on as he leant over to his girlfriend, “Goo’ ni’ daaa’ ing”

“Goo’ niii’” she mock spluttered back.

My cousin then recounted the time when her dentist had recorded her oral problems into his dictorphone as she sat in the chair beside him.

“The teeth will return to their position after two years,” he’d said, “as the patient has a GINORMOUS tongue.”

To make it worse, an osteopath had then told her that her head was too big for her neck.

“But that’s ridiculous, what are you supposed to do about that?” I cried.

“Take steroids,” my husband said, “to get a body builder’s neck.”

My husband’s own dentist had told him when he was little, that he would need a chin implant when he got older.

“Not that I might need a chin plant, that I would have to have one.”

My husband’s chin is just as a chin should be.

“The problem is we don’t know any better!” I said. “We don’t know when they’re right or wrong.”

The rigatoni a la putanesca arrived.

At least in food we could make a correct diagnosis.

My husband looked at it with great disappointment.

The plate of pasta twirls was covered in pesto and grated Parmesan; there was no rigatoni, no putanesca and not a bit of bacon in sight.

Note to Self

I realise I’m procrastinating when I find myself wiping down my keyboard with a cotton bud.

Don’t try it at home. It just spreads dust from one key to the other.

When I set myself an amount of words to write, I get those words written. If I don’t set myself a deadline, no one else will.

I’m fifty words away from completing my target but I’ve stopped to play with a cotton bud.

It’s because I’m feeling hypersensitive about a comment I received on my blog.

The reader wrote that he didn’t agree with my recent views and that I was getting sloppy.

It’s good that people have different opinions and express them. In fact I wish the author of the comment would get a blog going so I could read what he has to say more fully.

Alas, not everyone has time to write a blog. You’d be surprised how many hours they take.

Which is why it’s irritating when a reader only comments when they don’t like the post.

Criticism doesn’t succeed in its aims without encouragement.

My writers group (who meet monthly) is ruthless with their feedback but when I leave, though I may want to temporarily burn my manuscript, I feel good because I know and they know it’s because I can do better.

To help me get through my novel, I began the ‘Enough is Enough Writing Group’ with a fellow writer, who was fed up of procrastinating. It consists literally in the two of us getting together every two weeks and reading through each other’s chapters.

The energy that our meetings produce and the motivation we feel afterwards is enough for us to power through to the next stage.

I really recommend to anyone struggling through a project, whatever it may be, to join forces with someone like-minded.

But choose wisely.

If you find yourself coming away from a session with them, feeling as flat as road kill in the middle of the motorway, then they are not the right people for you.

Find someone who’ll make you fight for what you want, not someone who’ll leave you pondering the efficacy of a cotton bud.

Occupy London - Day 1

Photo by Elizabeth Hacker

‘There are none so hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free’ - Goethe

Saturday marked the beginning of Occupy London.

My cousin and I sat alongside thousands of other people in front of St Paul’s Cathedral.

A People’s Assembly was set in motion.

These assemblies have been taking place in Spain and Greece since spring.

They discuss the reasons why we are there and the practicalities of occupying the space.

With only a weak loudspeaker, it was difficult to hear so people echoed the speaker and passed the words through the crowd.

Why were we all there?

For some people the catalyst was the bail-out of the banks, others have been feeling uneasy about the system for much longer.

What unite the protesters are the questions and answers they are waking up to.

Is our democracy a real democracy?

Does our government work for us or for financial corporations?

We’re told that cuts need to be made to our public services because of massive national debt and yet there’s no law in place to stop an estimated 18 billion pounds being lost in tax havens ever year.

The Assembly suggested splitting into different groups: Shelter, Toilet, Food and Drink, Internal Affairs, External Affairs, Media, Legal Advice and Liaison.

“This movement is about empowering each one of us,” a girl said, in our group.

On one level, the message is simple. We need to take care of each other.

“People over Profits!” the protesters chanted in America.

Across the world people from of all walks of life came out to protest.

‘This is the Ethical revolution,’ a sign said.

My cousin and I didn’t camp out at St Paul’s. We were ill-equipped and went to leave at 6 o’clock.

Three lines of police refused to let us go home, though there were only a handful of us in the alley way.

“It’s not kettling,” one snapped at us. “It’s containment.”

It looked more like a power trip to us.

We waited patiently, knowing that if we were calm, they would have nothing to react against.

“Why did you come here?” one said to us. “You know protests all end up with you all getting kettled.”

“Contained,” his colleague corrected.

My cousin quickly reminded him that, without protests, we wouldn’t have the rights we have today. She reminded him women may not have got the vote.

“Women got the vote but they still can’t drive,” the second policeman scoffed.

“It was new back then,” the first policeman said, referring to demonstrations. “Now it’s old hat.”

“I just don’t know why you came,” the first one said.

His statement summed up what he thought a protester was; a scruffy, aggressive, negative, trouble maker whose actions were uncalled for.

In the demonstrations in Barcelona, I saw a sign that read, ‘You don’t have to have dreadlocks to join this revolution.’

This is a global movement. It is open to and for all humanity and no one should feel intimidated if they choose to show their solidarity.

Frankly, I hope standing up for what you believe in never becomes old hat.

Demonstrations around the World on 15th October:

SPAIN - Madrid

PORTUGAL - Lisbon

USA - New York

Death of a Sales Mouse

We found him under the floorboards, without a head.

At the time we were decorating the rooms above our shop. Alfie was laying new floor and I was painting walls.

He might have been there since the 30’s when there were still trams running through Tower Bridge Road.

He wouldn’t say. He was a vain mouse and he didn’t want to admit his age.

He looked at me, with his tail, and sighed.

“Don’t look at me like I’m the odd one. You’re entire world has lost its head.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“Money,” he said. “You’ve lost it all. The banks are empty and they want it back.”

Alfie didn’t have time for a talking mouse skeleton and put him back under the floorboards.

But perhaps the mouse knew something.

Yesterday the prime minister came close to telling us we should all pay off our credit card debts.

At the last moment he was warned that such absurd advice was a threat to the country’s economy and he must reword his speech at once.

The economy depends on growth and to grow we must spend money, even if we don’t have it.

It doesn’t want us to fear debt.

The economy would like us to hunger for possessions so that we’ll use our credit cards and pay five times the value of the item in interest.

The advice Cameron was supposed to give was: Be greedy, go out and buy like you’ve never bought before.

If you worry, if you can’t sleep at night because of nightmares full of machete wielding credit cards, then you should be happy that at least you’re helping the economy.

“Beware! It is a trap.” From beneath the floorboards I heard the Sales Mouse whisper. “Who is benefitting from this system? If you don’t ask questions you could lose your head!”

“What?” I cried, as my paintbrush dribbled duck egg blue onto my jeans. “Tell me the answer!”

But he did not reply. He was quite dead.

It was up to me to seek it out.

My Blog Mojo

I’ve always said, rather smugly, that I don’t believe in ‘Writer’s Block'. You can always write, just sometimes it’s total rubbish. Real 'Writer’s Block' requires a boxer in between you and your laptop. Yet lately I’ve been squirming as the time lapse between my blog posts grows. Have I lost my blog mojo?

After three years of writing weekly here on Shop Girl Diaries, it’s getting tough. It doesn’t help that we’ve closed our shop where all the stories came from.

I could blame twitter. Being on twitter is like standing in a room full of people shouting out random facts. Some are yelling about human rights violations, mocking politicians, analysing the economic climate and calling on fellow tweeters to stage demonstrations around the world. Others are constantly updating me with publishing news, author events, blogging tips, writing competitions and book reviews. In the middle of it all, someone dull tells me they’ve just had a cup of tea. (I delete them).

Faced with such overwhelming information, I ask myself, is there anything left to say?

Perhaps the problem is that I’m writing more than ever. Offline I’m fully immersed in my new novel. It’s cooking slowly and steadily like stew and I can’t wait to dish it up. But meanwhile a blog can’t sit around getting dusty.

The clock is ticking. I’ve got a week to find my blog mojo.