Writing Restraints,

In theory, the novel entitles 'Yours,' was meant to be coming out on the 7/3/13, which for those of you who don't know, is the two year anniversary of the CharliesWrite blog being up and running. There's a new problem with this though...

Well, no, it's not a particularly new problem really, it's an old problem revisiting.

Some of my joints (mainly my wrists and my knees) have a pretty bad habit of playing up, and rather than accept that, I just try and get on with things as I would without it happening. Now that would be fine, if I wasn't changing keyboards every five minutes and doing extra damage to my wrists.

If you've never used a manual typewriter, take it from me - DO NOT START! They have very powerful mechanisms in the keys, which you won't be used to if you use a computer or laptop. (I, of course, swap between the two). Then there's the keypad on my iPad - whole new kettle of fish, the time I spent testing Aphri (one of the electric typewriters - who lives in London) and then also Hephi (the other electric typewriter - who is currently living in Manchester with my mum). PLEASE NOTE - NONE OF THE TYPEWRITERS ARE CALLED CLICKY!

Anyway, the last few days my wrists have been in and out of compression bandages and I've been in and out of pain with them. They seem to have cleared up now, so I'm going to spend the next few hours trying to get some work done and see how far I can get with sorting out 'Yours,'. In theory - and this one really is just a fleeting theory which may not happen - all three of the books COULD go into paperback this year, but I don't know. I'll have to think about it and see what else comes up.


UPDATE: Well, that was the theory, but as I'm sure most of you know: theories evolve!

Unless I was willing to stay up all night today and tomorrow and live on coffee, ignoring everything else on my social calendar, there is no way that Yours, would be edited in time for release on the Kindle on 07/03/13, which I do apologise for. However, as a treat for those of you who do want to celebrate the birthday of the CharliesWrite blog, Fairies and Insanity Breaks will both be FREE on the Kindle again from 07/03/13 until 10/03/13.

You're welcome :P

My Teddy Will Protect Me,

...and unfortunately I'm not talking about a tall, masculine hottie who accepts the wild things which go on in my imagination. Perhaps one day. 

Anyway, today my flatmate and I had a lengthy chat about the film The Woman in Black and which bits scare the living crap out of us. Since I was already scared of the dark, it was NOT a clever idea to watch such a creation, because ever since then I have been more on edge than ever. This is the reason I would probably struggle to live alone.

I'm going to define the terms of being scared of the dark. I'm not scared because there is a lack of light in the room - I'm scared because my spidey sense or whatever you want to call it likes to tell me something is there, or rather my imagination wills me to believe that something is. 

My peripheral vision is not the best. In an exam where a boy was kicking his orange trainers under his desk, I would have sworn on the Bible that there was a ginger cat walking around, because my over active imagination likes to go cloud watching (or rather, blur watching - making shapes out of the flashes of colour I see) and it's really annoying, and can freak the day lights out of me. 

For as long as I can remember, I've always had a night light on my landing, or I sleep with the backlight for my iPad or my laptop on. I very often have soft acoustic, classical or jazz music on too, just to keep me calm. 

After dark, I really have a problem with windows, mirrors and our bathroom's skylight - plus any funny noises that sound like banging or footsteps. Horror films NEVER FLIPPING HELP!, but some of them aren't really horror films. 

Anyway, after mutual admittance of still being nervous in our house after dark, I was putting away shoes in the hall closet, when I noticed our security light go on outside our front door - twice. 

The first time, I calmed myself saying it was just the fox/badger/mole thing which got into our rubbish last night (we still need to sort out the garden, so it would make sense that it came back, since the split bag is still there) but when it came on the second time, that was scary. 

Since we'd been watching a film, Eeyore and Teddy had been downstairs with us - there is nothing like being comfortable - so Stevie still had Teddy in her arms and the strawberry condom that we had just found at the bottom of our cleaning cupboard in the other hand. Slowly, she approached the door, making to open it. 

"STEVIE! Leave the chain on!" If there was someone behind there, or even a fox or something, I didn't want it in our house! "Wait, wait, I'll get a stick." After checking behind the cupboard door - because I had gotten paranoid by now - I grabbed the solid hose of the end of the hoover and readied it for hitting the fox or whatever came through the door! BUT THERE WAS NOTHING THERE! The looks on our faces were pretty priceless though. To be fair, we're the sort of people who have to have the curtains in our living room closed after dark and I tend to sit with my back to the wall or I get a little edge-y. 

Anyway, in all the panic, I've gone and left Eeyore and my blanket in the living room. A rescue mission would involve turning on all the lights in the house, but I'm not sure I can leave him down there alone...

Nothing News,

Until I moved house, I was pretty oblivious with the news, because I don't have BBC News as my homepage any more, I didn't own a radio and I pick up the Metro or the Standard, but then I just don't really read it, since nothing really draws me into it. When I moved to Roehampton though, I became more into listening out for what's going on, because we have a radio in our kitchen which we have playing BBC Radio One pretty much all the time. I've just turned it off though, because I don't need "projections" of what the closures of HMV stores and Blockbuster going into administration is going to do to the film industry. 

What's basically being said is that film industries rely on the idea that they are going to make X amount of money from DVD sales, and the lack of stores on the high street offering these may reduce the amount of DVDs sold. If I'm honest, I think that is a dreadful pile of poo, because if you WANT the DVD and the DVD is still available through other channels e.g. Amazon then you're more than likely to still buy the bloody thing, right? I'm not saying it's an ideal situation, but it's not quite the dire straits that they're implying. Also, one of the reasons that rentals with Blockbuster are declining is because of the existence of other companies e.g. Netflix and Lovefilm who offer roughly the same service, but you don't have to try and run to the shops after work. Either they are delivered straight to your door and can be posted back, or they are just there on the internet in a beautiful, easy to search online library. The issue for Blockbuster is that they were overtaken. They could have, if they had realised how lucrative this business idea was, still been the big name with it, but Netflix and Lovefilm have developed their own reputations now, and would almost certainly be seen as the better alternative as they've had years to build, while Blockbusters have been declining.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not Amazon's biggest fan - the fact that they make the KDP website so difficult to FIND let alone actually NAVIGATE is something which is particularly annoying about them - but the fact is that when it comes to expanding the business to be more convenient for it's customers, hell, they do that better than anyone. I don't know if any of you have seen these new Amazon lockers - I know there's on in West 12 and Hammersmith Bus Station in London - but they're fantastic. If you live somewhere that isn't great for post *cough cough* Elephant and Castle *cough* or the package that you want would be too big to go through the letter box, you can just get them delivered there and pick them up in a couple of days. Simples. 

One of the things which did worry me though was that if there is seen to be a decline in DVD sales, then film makers will have to look for other sources of income to foot the costs (investors won't put money into it if they won't see a return after all) so whether we like it or not, I guess that means there's going to be more product placement in films from now on. Great. As if it wasn't weird enough to see James Bond drinking Hieniken. What the heck is going to be next? It just reminds me of a line from a truly underrated film called Catch and Release with Jennifer Garner in it where the guy describes movies as Sell, sell, sell, but let's kid ourselves and call it art, but advertising is Sell, sell, sell, and we all know that we're going to hell, so here's a big fat check to smooth out the ride. 

Anyway, with that and the horse meat scandal (which let's face it, most people are only throwing a tantrum about because they didn't know, and if you buy things like Findus anyway the only surprise should be that there's actually meat in it at all) I don't know why I'm paying attention. I don't know if it's that bad news sells better or that there's nothing happy going on in the world right now, but it almost makes me want to bake an absolute --- tonne of cake, take it down to the BBC and London Standard offices and tell them to cheer the hell up. 

Tell me something nice for once. Stop giving people reasons to think everything is crap.

Suitable for Vegetarians,

So, in preparation for the fact that I'm going to *attempt* to spend a full week of Lent following a vegan lifestyle, I walked around ASDA today checking what I can actually eat during that week. Here's what I found: 

Pretty much everything that was vegetarian possessed a wonderful stamp on the front of the packaging to say that it is approved by the Vegetarian society, but there were very few products made for the main market - as in, veggies, vegans and meat eaters alike - that actually bare a label saying that they are suitable for vegans, so instead of a nice quick look on the front of the package, you have to go through the ENTIRE LIST OF INGREDIENTS just to check there's no egg, or milk, or cheese. Here's another thing. Is yeast vegan? I have no idea what it even is!! Okay, apparently it's okay, so that's fine, but still, it would be nice to have a helpful little label on the front of the package, but apparently it puts off meat eaters because they think it's stuff with lentils or something else healthy or whatever. 


Now, I realise this is a little bit late now, but I want to write it anyway, considering how cool this is. I got an electric typewriter. Now, I've had one at my house for a while, but it's not technically mine - it just happens that the owner of it is too damn lazy to come pick it up. Yes Spoons, I'm talking to you - however now, at my house in Manchester there is a lovely Brother GX-300 called Hephi and he's all mine!! :) Best thing I ever got on Valentine's Day. 

I also have a ridiculous amount of corrector tape for him, which might tell you how well I do with typing, but he does have a screen as well, so I can check over everything before it actually gets committed to the page. ~ I can't wait to see him again. 

 

Lent(ils)

So, for Lent Christians often decide to give something up. Others choose to dedicate more time to something, and some just choose to try and do something better.

I'm choosing option three and trying to be a better vegetarian, so that means no more Haribo, no more non-veggie mozzarella and I'm also going to spend a week trying to live with a vegan lifestyle. It means that I have to read all my clothes to see what contains wool or leather and then I can't wear those. :/ also, giving up cheese for a week. :(

I see Lent as a challenge, and I want to. I think I can do this, and I intend to keep it up afterwards - the good veggie thing, not the vegan thing...

Keep an eye out for the posts as to how it's going!!

That's Kind of Gross,

This whole thing with finding horse meat in Beef Lasagne makes me really glad that I don't eat meat anymore. Also, just so that you guys are aware when I get really grumpy - and it will happen - my intention for Lent this year is to be a proper vegetarian (Oh yeah, I'm going to become one of those annoying as packet readers!!) and to attempt to spend a week being vegan. I don't know how well it will go, and it definitely won't stick because I Love cheese and milk and eggs too much, but perhaps I can manage a week?

We'll see.

Also, I figure I should let you guys know the date of this, because it is what I am working towards. 7.3.2013 will mark the two year mark from when the CharliesWrite blog started (originally over on webs, before I realised this was infinitely better). I'm intending that day to be celebrated by the release of Yours, onto Kindle and also - possibly - into print. It all just depends on how all the editting and such goes, but keep your fingers crossed. Since Kindle Select gives you the option of five days free out of every three months, I think it might launch with a couple of days being free on the Kindle, but we'll just have to see about that one. :) I'm actually a little be excited. The problem with sorting out the print version is going to be writing the dedication, I feel. There are two different ones I want to write and I don't know which to choose! Argh. As the Platypus says, deal with it. (The Platypus is, of course, SpoonThePlatypus aka Sophie Greene)

Now I'm off to look into buying some of the new make-up I want from Illamasqua. Why is everything that is so beautiful, also so expensive?


P.s. Started writing the sequel to Fairies. This is going to be fun!

On Tone of Voice,

One of the things which people always comment on about my writing is that I apparently have a strong narrative voice. I do have a list of habits as long as my arm, including (my very favourite) a tendency to describe the mundane, but here's the reason. You know all that time we spent talking about how English teachers make too much of what an author  meant by something? This sort of idea: 

 I've found that they can, to a certain extent anyway, be right. 

If you ever decided, for what reason I don't know :P, to read Insanity Breaks then you'd see that throughout the book the character explains different things to do with her smoking habit. The same is true of Iris' (the main character from the soon to be released novel Yours, - more details coming soon) love of drinking tea, but here's the thing - when I write, I'm writing what is pretty much a dramatic monologue of a characters life, so the things which have importance in their lives will be included, and the things which don't will be left out. Pretty simple, right? If I've put it on the page, there is generally a reason, and granted that reason is sometimes just a vast description which some might call unnecessary, but mostly there is a reason. 

I will just point out that until midnight on 10/2/13 PST (8am 11/2/13 GMT) Insanity Breaks is available to be downloaded completely FREE onto Kindle or any Kindle app compatible device. For those who don't know what it is, it's the first novel I ever finish (Fairies was just the first I had the balls guts to self publish) and from start to finish it took me about 9 months. Fairies was written in one month and Yours, was written in 20 days. Those three, plus a monstrosity named As Yet Untitled (which went straight into my computer's recycle bin!) which took a month to finish, represent my four NaNoWriMo years. :D Useless piece of trivia...

Back to what I was saying about voice: I write what I know, from the perspective I know. All my characters are different, they do have different attitudes, different beliefs, different experiences, but their fundamental nature, THEIR VERY EXISTENCE, comes from the noise in my head. I would agree that my characters often speak from a very similar perspective - they tend to be lower middle class, reasonably well educate women who are either on their way to university or have been to university, they're normally some form of creative and they pretty much always believe in love. Now, I don't see this as a bad thing, because the fact is that most authors do it. Nicholas Sparks makes millions from writing pretty much the same novel over and over with different characters, in a different city and with a slightly different ending. His lead male tends to be a poor boy, with intelligence, but the girl's parents always see him as a whim, because he's sexy and from the wrong side of the tracks. The women are always beautiful and unobtainable creatures, but they have a young summer romance anyway -Yeah, this is the trash I read in the bath :) - and then they get separated. John Green (maybe I'm just a reflection of a teen cliche but I do love his writing at the moment) tends to write from the perspective of a fringe dwelling, witty teenage male (except A Fault in Our Stars, which pretty much made me cry all through it, but then the difference is only that the character is female...) My point is simply, if you like one of the novels, you're likely to like all by the same author, because it's from a perspective you can understand or relate to. Is that so bad? 

I will say one thing, author's voices develop and change over time. Our narrative voices are shaped by our experiences just the same way that we are. Things which seem of an immense amount of importance in what we write when we are sixteen (Insanity Breaks) will look quite different from the things we write at nearly twenty (Yours,) and everything that comes after will be different because every day that we open up our senses to the world, we see a little something we never saw before, or we hear something, or we feel or understand something in a different way and it's important for that to happen, because otherwise, we're not learning anything and if we're not learning anything, what do we really have left to say?

Geekish Nerds and Why I Love the Kindle

Ever since I was a child, able to read, I've pretty much always carried a book with me, except for those early teenage years where you always reject the things of childhood and don't really know what to do with yourself, but you have to do something to stop being seen as that infant. 

Now, because of this and a heck of a lot of other factors, such as the fact that I act on curiosity and find out the answers to the questions I'm asking myself, oh, and the fact that Algebra has always made a lot of sense to me, I always earned myself the label of 'geek' or 'nerd' - I'm talking about the days when this was supposedly an insult, and not a cool thing to have emblazoned on the chest of your jumper.

The silly thing about this is, that most of the time that I'm reading, I've got another book next to me, or I'm screaming for my mum, because I either can't figure out what a word says - the amount of time it took me to learn the word cushion is somewhat embarrassing - although that only applies to the Anglicised versions of Greek words these days (but how many people would know that you say Iannis as 'Yan-is'?) or because I can read the word perfectly fine, but I haven't got the first clue as to what it means. The latest example of that was plutocracy. I knew that I should have known what it meant, but I couldn't remember for the life of me, stupid for a couple of reasons 1. I studied British and American Politics and 2. Arguably, Britain is still a plutocracy. For those who are equally confused, it means a society where power is in the hands of the wealthy. 

Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I love having a Kindle so much - because I'm really lazy. I just had to run up the stairs in my house to get the dictionary, in order to find the meaning of the word plutocracy. By the time that I get back to my book, I'll be quite out of the rhythm of reading it that I had got into, but with the Kindle I can simply hover on a word and it explains it to me instantly. Yes, I am that lazy.

It is also my intention that this month I will beat my current record for amount of posts in a month, which I believe is currently August last year and ten posts. Wish me luck?

I Will Not Be Sad Today

I refuse to do it, on principle, because I have already spent too much time being sad over this person, any yet, when Skype told me I had a notification from him, my heart still did that juddery thing that hearts do sometimes, and I don't know why. It's been over two years, so why is my heart still jumping? Turns out it was only Skype reminding me that today's his birthday and he's been around this world for 21 years today.

If we were still close, if we were still talking in any way I would be calling him about now and screaming happy birthday you old bastard down the phone, and and he'd remind me that it's only a month and fifteen days til my birthday (because he always got it confused with St Patricks, but I always thought his was on the fourth, so it was okay) when I turn 20, so he's not that old really.

Why is my heart still juddering? Probably because he is one of the few people who have walked out of my life, and that I haven't just accidentally let go of, or had a damn good reason to kick out ass first.

Today won't be one of those days though, where I realise and I get back into my jammies and listen to Danni California on loop like I used to have to so I could sleep without crying. Today is going to be one of those days where I go to my friends gig and have an AMAZING time, with some amazing people, and if he pops into my head, well he can pop right out again with the wind, because even though it's his birthday, today is my day. Yesterday, when I was baking like a crazy person without any real reason, yeah, he can have that day. Maybe I was sad because I knew today was coming, but today is my day to feel good and to feel happy and to enjoy myself. I'm going to Barfly, I'm going to watch the guys perform and I am going to love it, because it's worth being happy for.



I don't normally like posting stuff like this, because I hate the fact that I still get upset over something which happened so long ago, but maybe I just need to write it down to get it out of my system. I'm not going to post this one on Twitter or Facebook, so if you read it, you've found it either by chance, or maybe for a reason. If you think it's for a reason, I hope it helps you to find peace of mind, if only because there is someone else out there who feels the same way as you.

I need to get ready - need to do something with my ridiculous hair!!