Okay, So That's What That Sign Means,

Very often, when I am on the motorway, I see those really annoying signs that say reduce your speed to sixty, and it's because of xxxxx. Sometimes it's because of reports of pedestrians on the road, animals loose on the road or other reasons, but more often than not it's a report of debris. The amount of times it happens and then there is literally nothing on the road is a nightmare, partly because I like driving at seventy on the motorway, sixty annoys me, so driving at sixty for no reason is just irritating. 

Driving back from work today, there were a number of signs that said slow down, sixty and debris on the road, and whilst most people slowed down (I also slowed down) I was rolling my eyes at the whole thing because I've never known it be anything. Well, except that time my ex and I were driving to Dover and there as a full on tree across one lane, but there weren't any smart signs up then and I wasn't driving so I don't really count that!

In the stretch that was sixty, a lorry had pulled into my lane to get past a slower moving vehicle and then he slammed on his brakes, because everyone was slamming on their brakes and I felt like I pretty much had to do an emergency stop from sixty miles an hour, which was not comfortable at all. My left shoulder and elbow have been twinging since, though not enough to worry about. When the lorry started moving again, there as a huge flexible pipe like thing on the floor and it was so far into the lane that I was driving in that I practically had to swerve into the next lane to avoid it, which I didn't want to do because that lane was still going at sixty (and my car takes six months to go from naught to sixty). I was kind of struck by the fact that, hey, there was actually a reason for the sign this time around! I ended up driving over part of it which probably wasn't advisable and wasn't comfortable and made a noise that didn't sound great and then I looked in my rear view mirror and saw everyone behind was thankfully keeping their hazard lights on (I had hit mine when I was stopping, but then turned it off when I was stopped and the car behind me had managed to stop as well, and not uncomfortably close to me.) 

I realise that this isn't the scariest thing anyone has ever been through and honestly, it's not even up there with the worst things that have happened within the last week, but it was the scary sort of thing that made me think, okay, I should really pay a little bit more attention to those signs, and also maybe I should listen to the sat nav when it tells me to take the dual carriage way all the way home instead of going on the motorway, even though I like motorways and I can't stand all of the roundabouts on the dual carriage way because of the aforementioned problems with the car accelerating. Though, even with that said, if the Prime Minister revived Liz Truss's ridiculous idea of making the seventy mile an hour speed limit on motorways advisory (I know it's never going to happen, I know) instead of mandatory, I would definitely be driving faster than seventy on the motorways, even in my ridiculous little car.

What a F***ing Day,

 I am going to admit that I have been kind of checked out of politics and the news for a while because honestly, it is so overwhelming, but today BBC News notifications have been going off a lot and I've seen more than I usually would of what is going on in Westminster.

Firstly, the idea of a resignation Honours List sounds bonkers to me, especially when that person has effectively had to resign in disgrace, especially after they clung to power for as long as possible despite it being clear that their hands were not clean. All political appointments to the Honours list are somewhat baffling to me to be perfectly honest, particularly when it's to stack the House of Lords with people who think one way or another. Although I stick to my view that having the Upper House be the UK system rather than the American system (voting for a second house just doesn't make sense to me, sorry) having an outgoing Prime Minister, or in this case a Prime Minister who has already gone and has been that way for months (and two new PMs) appointing people to that house seems crazy to me. 

Putting all of this aside, how on Earth can we - the UK in general, I mean - justify allowing such a person, who has also now stepped down because of the report into one of the things he had to step down from the PM roles for, to appoint people to the Upper House? Whilst the list came out first and then he stepped down, and it's highly possible that he held out stepping down for the reasons he stepped down until the moment that the list was out, I don't see how there is any justification for giving someone who is no longer an MP because of poor judgement and worse behaviour carte blanche to install new people into the Upper House where they have the attendance allowance, the expenses accounts and all of those sorts of perks of retaining a role in Westminster. Whilst several were 'stepping down at the next election' I would genuinely take a guess that at least a few of them have made the calculations that actually they are likely to suffer a crippling defeat at that election and rather than having a political career which ended in failure, they choose to jump before being pushed, and were more than happy to be put forward for a role that they can't easily be pushed out of, even if all they do is take a nap during debates. 

House of Lords reform is something that no one has real appetite for - or no one with any power to do it - so these people who are appointed there will likely be there for the rest of their lives, and many of them can only claim to be good at one thing: being a career politician, and personally, one of the reasons I prefer the Upper House of the UK to the US is that the appointments based system is, mostly, more of a meritocracy, and is far more diverse than the Lower House. Politicising that environment, which does happen on occasions like this, isn't good for anyone. Having experts in different fields, whether you know their names or not, has far, far more value than having household name politicians who have given up on the idea of becoming the PM.

I've Been Spending a Lot of Time on Reddit,

 Okay, so don't judge me, but... I kind of love reading the AITA (Am I The A**hole) thread of Reddit, even when I'm just lurking and not commenting. It's been something of a guilty pleasure for a while, like a version of Post Secret, but somehow far more fun, even if it's a bit obvious sometimes that some of the stories are utter fiction. It's probably the interactive element and the thought that suddenly everyone can be an agony aunt. I love seeing the different perceptions of a situation that people chime in with, although I do hate that it sometimes seems to highlight how many a**holes are in the world. 

One of the things I did to try and get back to being okay with people reading things I had been writing was writing comments on these threads and others, because it's interaction with people, but it's easier than writing something personal to me. Giving my opinion on someone else's situation is definitely a lot easier than putting something of my own out into the world, though I'm thankfully getting past that fear, it seems. 

Now, I don't want this blog to become one of those places that recycles AITA content into videos, blogs, articles and the like, listing the comments, or speaking through situations, and I'm certainly not going to use it as a springboard for everything I ever write which is a piece about having an opinion - Lord only knows that if you've come across me on a day where I feel 'awake' and 'normal' (caveat: normal, for me) that I have enough of my own - but I do think that periodically it might creep in, because sometimes talking about current events or celebrities is just too much and I would rather discuss something that an anonymous internet stranger posted, because at least it was their choice to put it out there, in their own words.

And here's the point I was coming to in a round about way...

On AITA, it can be clear that there is at least a bit of fibby going on even when it's not clear that the story is an out and out lie, but it's also clear that each story is the Original Poster's perception of events, and it's possible to advise them on where they've gone wrong, or where their interpretation of a situation might be a bit faulty, even if they don't want to hear it. In the media, you get a second, third or fourth hand story often cooked up to sell newspapers or gain clicks on the article. Very often there is a vague quote from a source and in order to understand what is actually going on from the whole article you have to read between the lines and accept that the headline is probably a mile or so from the truth with only a vague relationship betwixt the two. People will think what they think anyway, because there is too much that is said that's not believed, too much that isn't said or isn't answered and, the worst part of it for me, there is absolutely no understanding of the fact that there is very often a person or a few people behind the article, and they are people with family, friends and people that care about that person who are going to be hurt in the process. At the end of the day there is more than one truth, because everyone is going to have a different version of events, and there is the truth that people believe, and then there is the more elusive truth. There is a truth of what happened and why people did certain things and sometimes they might not even know why they did something themselves, but this is the sort of truth that can never really be found, much less read online or in a newspaper.

Just Do It,

A few years ago my ex partner - can't remember if he was the ex at the time or not, and I'm not sure that it really matters - showed me a video that Shia LaBeouf made that was the phrase, Just Do It, and a couple of other little gems like, if you want to stop starting over, stop giving up. Periodically, it pops into my head clear as day, because I get sick of the doubts in my head that stand in the way of the things I want to do or the things I intend to do. Today is one of those days. 

When I bought the new laptop, I managed to pull myself out of a pretty major writing funk that had made me feel as though I had lost a significant part of myself. I've been writing since I was a small person, or a smaller person, and I've been a part of NaNoWriMo since I was sixteen, so thinking that it was a part of my life I was going to walk away from and that I thought I was closing the door on completely and I didn't realise how awful that felt. I have it written everywhere that what I am is a writer, a dreamer and a fairies believer, so walking away from that completely should have felt disgusting, but at the time I just wasn't feeling the decision and it's only when I've walked it back that I've realised how much of an impact that it had on me. 

Saying that though, the whole, I walked that decision back, I recommitted to writing and I knew what I was doing with it more than I had for a while - don't take that as I have any idea of a direction or destination for what I want in terms of writing, because I definitely don't - I knew what I wanted to do, I knew more what I wanted to write about and I knew that I actually wanted to write which was something pretty new - well, old, missing for a while and then new - but the problem has come in the space in between writing something - whether it be blogs, short stories or sometimes emails - and putting it into a space where someone else can read it. 

I've taken a few knocks recently, and honestly there have been points where I have felt like it was everything that was going wrong, and when it comes to my writing it's something that is often so personal that the idea of being kicked from another direction when I was already feeling more than bruised was just completely overwhelming and completely paralysing. I'm starting to feel like things are turning a corner, or at least I'm hoping that they are, because I'm trying to refuse to feel worse than I have over the last few weeks, and if that is the case one of the things which needs to happen is I need to be okay with sharing things I have written with the world again. I need to actually click 'Publish' on the blog posts I have written, 'Send' on the emails I have left in Drafts and I need to kick my ass into finishing a couple of drafts of things that I want to think about what I want to do with, but I have been putting it off. 

Anyway, this is the first thing I have pressed 'Publish' on. Long may it continue.

It's Camp NaNo and Everything I Am Writing Is Boring,

 It wasn't such a long time ago that I was really excited about the idea of being back to writing. I was enjoying feeling like myself again, or something that felt like myself, because since I was very young, writing has been my thing and it's been the thing that got me through some of the worst moments of my life, even though it has brought me to some of the worst moments, too. (Losing novels never seems to get any easier.) Unfortunately the 'it's all going so well' thing didn't last as long as I wanted it to, and now I'm at the stage where I feel like everything that I am writing is boring, or total trash and instead of feeling great the last few days, it's felt like a bit of a slog and it's felt as though that slog is not worth it. 

I felt the need to take a short break from the draft of the novel that I wrote - technically it's a novella at the moment but the intention is for it to become a novel by the time I am done with it - because I really needed to have some space from it, for one thing, and for another, much like with Fairies, I felt the need to let it breath for a bit before I start trying to continue drafting it and aim at getting draft number two done. Part of it is that I really think that I need to step away from the novel to make sure that when I re-read it, the characters are who I was thinking of, the story comes together the way it was meant to and that I have the time to think about it, and also not think about it, because re-reading over it before redrafting is definitely better when you don't remember every single bit of the plot line. I think it's also a bit of a hangover from having to redo Fairies not long after it was published because there was a word missing on the first page. 

The problem with taking a break from that novel is every new idea I have had sucks. It sucks f**king hard, and when I'm sat there thinking, oh my God, I'm bored writing this it does make me question what it is the point of continuing working on that. I think sometimes I continue with it because I'm trying to keep up with the 4 the words quests and monsters, because it does help to keep me motivated, but I'm questioning right now if that is healthy. Maybe what I really needed was to take a step back from writing when I finished the draft, and take a week or so thinking about writing - so logging onto 4 the words and telling it that I'm thinking about writing, even if I'm not actively doing any - without actually writing, and then come back to do the first redraft. One of the reasons I don't want to do that, or that I can't really do that, is because it's Camp NaNo and I had committed myself to trying to write, on average, a thousand words a day. I am terrible at Camp NaNo and always have been, so the fact that I'm not managing to stick to that is no real surprise. I haven't actually managed to keep track of what I am doing or have been doing so I haven't kept the NaNo site up to date, and I'm just trying not to stress about that. I think the other reason I don't want to do the fully stepping back thing is that I took so long 'off' of writing from not having a proper, working laptop, so I think I would feel really guilty if I didn't keep writing. Even if everything that I'm writing is crap. 

We're Back Online,

 Yesterday was the start of something that felt good for the first time in a while and that was sitting somewhere - although I was sitting in my bed and that's not the best thing, from experience - and writing something, even if it wasn't working on the novels that I want to write, and will hopefully one day finish. 

I wish that I could say that it was as simple as now the laptop has arrived I have sat all day and powered through a few thousand words to battle the monster of 4TheWords and have been able to write something more of one of the things which has been buzzing around my head, but alas, my birthday and Mothering Sunday appear to have coincided this year, so I felt the need to see my mother and my dad's mother, since next weekend I will be away from home and occupied. I wish I was doing something like I did for my twenty first birthday - flying away to Budapest for a city break - or my twenty fifth birthday - getting the train to Paris and having my first birthday ever in the snow, spending a rainy day eating madeleines, drinking fresh orange juice and reading the rest of Ready Player One - but this one is going to be a little different, partly because I will still be in the UK, but for other reasons as well. 

What has happened is I have found the excitement to come home and write again, and the ability to just open the laptop and get straight on with it is something which really helps with that. I'm able to just get straight on with whatever, and even though that does help me to get distracted, too - research, who is that person I'm thinking of, what am I naming this character, no I don't like that, why is my brain so itchy right now - it helps me spend my limited ability to focus on the right things, like writing this blog and getting back onto 4TheWords to write something, anything and just about everything. Somehow it seems to have helped my brain feel a little bit less loud and that will always be welcome. 

Anyway, I'm going to get back to it.

It Takes Me a While to Be Impulsive,

It's been about four months since four keys died on my Pixelbook and I have been honestly struggling to cope with my other laptop so much that I tend to avoid doing anything on the laptop and only use it as a last resort for when my phone really won't cut the mustard or I don't want to use my work laptop in my off time for researching things, and honestly, I came to the conclusion that I was upsetting myself and affecting my mental health for no good reason. It might sound stupid, but when one of the things that you identify yourself as is a writer - you know the whole writer, dreamer, fairies believer, I'm a general cloud head and a Scout leader... - it's really hard to admit that actually, I can't be one of those things at the moment because it feels like there is something physically blocking me from being it. My crap laptop (otherwise known as the Craptop because it's me and everything has to have a name, even if it's stupid) is the one that swallowed an entire novel a couple of years ago (when I say a couple of years ago, I'm doing that old person thing of I don't mean two years ago, I mean about five years ago) and I've never truly forgiven it, and I've never really gotten over it. 

Yesterday I had a conversation with one of my more techy friends who told me, in far more polite terms that were a bit beyond my technical knowledge, the Pixelbook is fxxxed and whilst I knew that changing laptops was one of the last things I wanted to do because I hate change, I also knew that trying to struggle along on the Craptop wasn't doing any good and that as much as I could use Pixie with an external keyboard or something, it's not the same and the reason I bought it in the first place was because I needed a portal computer, and a Chromebook worked well because it was zippy and light and everything I wanted it to be when I was away from my tower PC. The problem over the last six months has also been that my office (at home, but home office means something different to me) just doesn't work for me to be using the PC. 

All of that is the reasoning that added up to me doing something somewhat crazy and impulsive and that was, I bought myself a new laptop. And it's a Mac. 

Yes, I realise saying that I don't like change and then switching operating systems like that is stupid and I have been utterly baffled and confused since finishing the set up because everything feels weird and new and different, but holy heckery, it's beautiful and it's fast and it's light and I love it. Yes, there is a learning curve to using it, and there is one thing about it which I don't love like I loved Pixie for, but it is the single most ridiculous complaint I could come up with and that is that the power plug only goes into one side and when I'm plugging it in to charge in my room, ideally I would have preferred the power cable on the other side, but it's also on the side which I think is the most common for power cables to be on. 

It's already making a difference, too, because sitting here and writing this has felt the most comfortable I have felt in months (when it comes to writing) so even though I will probably take a lot more time to get over the fact I can't just Control + A to select everything, and the fact that the buttons to close the window are on the wrong side, and the fact that this laptop isn't touch screen (that actually makes me happy because I hate touching the touch screen and forever having fingerprints up my screen) I am really thrilled that my new laptop is here, and it's working and it's relieved a level of stress that I didn't even realise that I was feeling. 

Hopefully this is the change I have been needing!