New Year Resolutions

A great idea in one of the newspapers for the New Year. When packing away your Xmas decorations, put in a note to yourself to be opened next year when you get them all out again. I guess the note should be more than just a billet doux. It should say what your resolutions are, and you can then see how well you did.
    Last year I vowed to lose weight and write an Anastasia novel. Well, as of Jan 1st 2012 I have lost nearly 3 stone. I have put on 5 pounds over the Xmas period, so call it 2.5 stone. I've gone from a tight squeeze into size 16s to a fairly easy size 10. My diet tips will follow.
     However I only made a start on my  Anastasia novel. I developed an addiction to This Morning, Food Network, and other daytime fripperies which whiled away the time and whiled away my motivation, too. Then in the summer, my Primula Bond editor told me and his stable of respected authors that the powers that be at Harper Collins were looking to jump on the 50 Shades bandwagon (which I prefer to read as knocking that bloody book into a cocked hat) and totally overhaul the way we've been writing erotica. Actually, it's all to the good. They want less graphic, full on and explicit language and more focus on relationships a la Christian Grey/Anastasia (yes, I know!) but with better writing basically. Now, that I can do, but it wasn't quite as easy as I thought throwing off the shackles of Primula Bond's previous style. So the autumn has seen me writing and then re-writing my 50 Shades competitor and it is, as we speak, with the editors for final approval - or rejection.
  What I haven't told my editor is that if Avon reject it, I have an agent over in the States who is keen to see any Primula work that hasn't been sold over here, so I reckon doors are opening.
  And this has gone on long enough, so I will tell you my New Year Resolutions when I wake up tomorrow morning.  For now, the last day of 2012 is going to be spent watching THE SOUND OF MUSIC and then after various other plans went awry I am going out to dinner with my family to our favourite pub The Old Forge.

Wacky Races

Not a lot of people know you can borrow a wheelchair from the Red Cross for free if you find yourself incapacitated with a broken toe or worse. So my first driving trip last week after ye accident was to Red Cross and thank goodness I did. I can move very slowly round the house on crutches, but am not safe outside. Too slow, terrified someone will stand on my toe, and not very stable. 
   And so to Tesco, with Richard pushing the chair and Edward refusing to do that (though he loves whizzing round the house in it) and on trolley duty. I felt a little like Boadacea urging on her troops as we whizzed round the aisles and gondolas (did you know that's what the lines of shelving are called? My sister Min, who used to manage a supermarket in Jersey and now runs a flying school near Perth, Australia, told me that), avoiding other people's children and ankles. I know my way round, which neither R nor E do, so it was a pretty brisk trot around the supermarket but how funny is it the way people react to someone in a chair.
    I'd put red lippie and a jaunty scarf on especially not to look, you know, properly disabled, but still people glanced, once they'd been jabbed sharply in the shins, with a strange kind of glazed pity when they saw what/who had attacked them. Maybe it was the red lippy, come to think of it.  Did I look like a kind of deranged Hollywood ex-starlet who doesn't know it's not 1943? I tried staring back at them with assumed confidence, or waving my arms around to show I'm not totally disabled, even talking loudly and intelligently, but the more I think about it the more that would have confirmed their first impressions.  A crazy, arm waving, opinionated has-been. Helped along by my son's refusal to come anywhere near me in the chair, and R's breaking of the speed limit as we charged for the tills, indicating that he wanted to get me out of polite society as soon as possible.
    Next challenge: negotiating the posh shop of Hambledon in The Square, and Winchester's world famous Christmas market.
 

Broken Toe

No, not the name of a mountain, or a Cherokee Chief, but a broken digit at the end of my foot, and it's no joke. I am writing this from a prone position on the sofa where I am trying to enforce rest on myself and elevate my foot and get the other end of me, my head, round how much has to be done and thought about when you're a wife and mother. Stereotyped, but true. What they have to take to school each day. What they must do when they come back. Jobs they have to undertake around the house. Making sure they come upstairs to give me a kiss before they go. Trying not to get at the husband, who is fantastic bless him and a natural at dishwasher emptying, washing hanging, children dragooning.  I am still in charge of cooking, though.    
   Viz work, thank the Lord I covered several days last month, and don't have a rigid full time job commuting to London or something, because hopefully I can get away without going to the office until after Xmas.
  So, how did it happen? With a wobbly left leg already, I managed to get my big toe tangled in Ed's draw string PE bag, dragged it halfway across the hall, felt a huge wrench, and when I landed on the bottom step of the stairs I felt no actual pain because of the numbness in my foot, but there was my big toe sticking out sideways at 90 degrees like something out of the Exorcist.
   Long story short, my father took me to A&E as I felt too peculiar to drive myself to Winchester (spots before eyes, nausea etc) and Richard had unavoidable commitments at work. The A&E at Andover, nearer my parents, is very small, new, neat and quiet.  Even so we were there for 3 hours. I have never broken a bone before, despite plunging off horses when I was young, playing hockey, slipping on ice rinks, increasingly falling over in streets, and being chucked off the back of a motorbike on Shepherds Bush roundabout in 1987. But  the X ray showed that now I have a dislocated and broken big toe. So two very nice nurses lay me down on a couch and 're-aligned' the dislocated joint like they do in 'Casualty' and boy did the feeling come back to my foot then. It was shocking, sickening pain, and horrible, but I eschewed gas and air although I loved it when having my babies because it meant staying longer in the hospital.
   So.A follow up visit to the fracture clinic where Iwas shown my own Xray and the wide crack running down my toe, and was told no weight on it for 2 weeks, and probably won't be fully mobile for 4-6 weeks. Apparently a stick glue will form, forming a callus to heal it. Meanwhile, enforced rest. Elevated foot. Lady Muck barking orders from bed or sofa. Crutches to hobble round the house, and I borrowed a wheelchair from the Red Cross for Richard to take me round Tesco. Not a lot of people know that you can do that. It's free! No reason to be housebound, which can also make you agoraphobic. Wheelchairs. There's another story. How people react differently to you, even if you're wearing lipstick. Will talk about that in my next post.  For now, I have no excuse not to get on with writing projects including this blog. More anon!

Jungle Diet

So Rosemary Shrager has come out of the jungle 2 stone lighter. Why she got like that in the first place, along with Colin Baker, isn't clear, but why don't the overweight people watching take note how much happier and pleased with themselves they are? Two weeks on rice and beans and Bob's your uncle. Cheap. Simple. Nutritious. Yes, boring as hell, and you're damned hungry, but grow a spine and some wil power and put up with it. Two weeks. And she's happier, lighter, better, healthier.  It's really a no brainer.
      As mentioned in my earlier post, I woke up on 1st January this year and decided that the photograph of me on Christmas day with the back fat and the chubby cheeks just wasn't me. The thin person was struggling to get out of plump one. I wasn't fat. Most people didn't think I needed to do it. But I did it 7 years ago after my last baby, and it was time to do it again.
    My goal was our summer holiday in Mallorca where we would be with my slim sister and even slimmer Miss Flower, who used to be our night nanny.
    So how did I do it? Well, first off I wish I'd patented my own idea of what is now fashionable, which is the intermittent fasting diet. My own version was to start the diet off with two days of fierce fasting, just to get my mind round the new regime (incidentally the French word for diet). I reckoned my biggish bod could cope with a bit of deprivation.  Otherwise it would be marching straight back to the toaster and the biscuit tin. I kept on a few treats, coffee, cheese and wine so I wasn't totally denying myself.
    Then it was basically cutting out things such as bread and chocolate, and introducing new, healthy, delicious things such as ryvita, avocado, tomato, cottage cheese, fruit, yoghurt, porridge with brown sugar, and regulating helpings and meal times. Broke all the rules. No breakfast, first meal at midday, trying not to eat after 6pm except sometimes Horlicks to stop hunger at night.
   Hmm. Might contact my editor at the Health Section at the Mail on Sunday, see what he thinks about a column?
 

Short Story Advice

http://www.writersworkshop.co.uk/blog/how-to-write-short-stories/

Churchill described Russia as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. A short story shouldn't trip you up or leave you in the dark, but it should encapsulate the magic of a critical moment within a life, and all, as Jamie Oliver says, in 15 minutes!

The constraints of time and space are actually liberating. They permit, even challenge, the writer to use its tight structure to create a character's history. Their past, intense present, and the hint of a future. Some stories are left hanging on a cliff edge, leaving you wondering or guessing what comes after. That is fine so long as it isn't too abrupt, or inexplicable. Why alienate your readers by frustrating them? Rather, leave them intrigued, wanting more and especially more from you. Some stories have a twist in the tail which is glorious especially when used in horror stories, but equally effective in a supposedly every day situation. The end should be satisfying but not necessarily trite.

Take inspiration from a snapshot in the street or out of a train window, a note or comment from your own life, news from the world around us, a crazy, sad, mad, mundane idea plucked out of an over-active imagination. So, an awkward family gathering igniting a forbidden passion. An adulterous weekend trashed by a message from home. A crippled woman giving hope to the able- bodied. Nick what you've seen or imagined, dress it, trick it out in technicolour or monochrome depending on the mood you want (I also have a cinematic commentary in the back of my mind when writing). Then load it with drama and potential, propelling it, with the tools of a handful of bright characters and realistic, relevant dialogue, in the direction of and into whatever conclusion you want for it.

So far the only novels and short stories I have published have been erotic (see my other blog, Primula's Progress). But the build up, climax, resolution and afterglow analogy of sex – the outline structure I have already mentioned, in fact - is equally useful for any story telling arc.

You have around 6,000 words, though there are no rules except in competitions, and more experienced writers will restrict their word count to a handful, or expand their story to a novella.

So, you're allowed to, indeed you should, hit the ground running. Place your character straight into the heat of their dilemma or crisis. This can be like plunging into a cold bath, or stepping more tentatively, but the central crux must fairly quickly be visible. The deceptively leisurely approach makes a later shock all the more unexpected.

The golden rule is show, not tell. So paint a picture through scenery and smell, sounds, clothing, even food, to create the atmosphere. Some initial introspection can be helpful to introduce a character's thoughts, their modus vivendi, but not through an over-arching voice that tells us what to see and how to respond.

To avoid the domineering narrator a more dynamic technique is showing a protagonist's interaction and genuine responses, however brief, with their surroundings and other characters. This will flesh them out and make them three dimensional, make us love or loathe them. Dialogue, used skilfully, is an essential tool to reveal what is happening and illustrate how characters react, but it must be realistic. Study the unfairly maligned soaps on telly for consummate script writing. Possibly the most jarring sign of an amateur author is wooden, pompous or over-written dialogue.

Dialogue and narrative combine to drive us inexorably towards their conflict and how they will resolve it. Conflict indicates a moment where a dilemma is faced, a decision or change is required or thrust upon us, like the splitting of two great rivers. A character can tackle it, however chaotically, or they can avoid it. Either way there should be a resolution, even if it is tragic, otherwise we won't have a story.

The stories in 'Stabbing the Rain', my Amazon collection, commit to fiction moments from real life: mysterious encounters in Venice, an extraordinary Christmas in Alexandria, unexpected pregnancies, lost love, diagnosis with serious conditions, all treated with a somewhat black, compelling humour. Here is the link and I hope you enjoy them. http://tiny.cc/rkqaow

Stabbing the Rain

I have reached a milestone birthday since I last wrote.  It was a larger number than I care to admit to, but it marks the time to stop waiting for that Martine McCutcheon perfect moment to arrive. Time to achieve what you have always dreamed of achieving. So as well as losing 2.5 stone this year and getting back into clothes I haven't worn since my 24 year old was born, I would also love to show the UK publishing world that short stories, as in the US, are just as formidable and compelling a genre as novels. The short story writer aims to encapsulate a critical moment (not always perfect)within a life, and all, as Jamie Oliver says, in 15 minutes!
   We create a character's history, a past, an intense present, and the hint of a future. Some are left hanging on a cliff edge, leaving you wondering or guessing.  Some have a twist - glorious in horror stories. Some are wrapped up neatly. Mine do all of those. I like them to add satisfyingly, but not necessarily tritely. We want you wanting more. Some could even build into a full length novel one day.
    So far the only novels and short stories I have published have been erotic (see my other blog, Primula's Progress).  But the sexy build up, climax, afterglow analogy of erotica is useful for any story telling arc.
   Start with inspiration from a snapshot spotted in the street or out of a train window, a note or comment sounded in your own life, something funny or touching the kids have said, comic or tragic stories from the world around us, a crazy, sad, mad idea plucked out of an over-active imagination. Then you nick it, dress it, trick it out in technicolour or monochrome depending on the mood you want (I have a kind of telly, cinematic commentary going on in the back of my mind when writing, seeing it all on screen as well).  Then load it with drama and potential, taking it with the tools of a handful of bright characters and realistic, relevant dialogue, to whatever conclusion you want for it.
     My youngest son coined the muscular phrase 'Stabbing the Rain' which is the title of my Amazon collection. The stories commit to fiction moments from real life: mysterious encounters in Venice, an extraordinary Christmas in Alexandria, unexpected pregnancies, lost love, diagnosis with serious conditions, all treated with a somewhat black, compelling humour. Here is the link and I hope you enjoy them.  http://tiny.cc/rkqaow