Falldog

I was intending to blog much more this week, about exciting developments round here, but the developments haven’t developed. More will follow as soon as they do, promise.

OK, so it’s like this…

If you go back to the very first entry in this blog, you’ll see me talk about a book called Darkland by Liz Williams. You’ll see how reading that book inspired me in a rather-blithe-at-the-time manner to give up full-time work and try to write a novel myself, in the spirit of ‘I can do that’. That’s the seed.

The sapling came later. I stumbled across a writing course, organised by the excellent Arvon Foundation, run by Liz and another author who writes quite lovely books, Graham Joyce. So (as a very kind birthday present from the Mrs), I booked on the course and, a couple of weeks ago, travelled up to Yorkshire – shortly before the heavens opened – to the wonderfully picturesque and remote Lumb Bank, there to learn what I could learn.

What I learnt was this: Liz loves my idea, loves my writing, and really thinks I have a shot at publication. She was so enthusiastic about where I was going with the novel, and so flattering, that I was quite staggered.

So, with the exception of a few already booked freelance gigs (I’m not so stupid as to cancel any – and, sod’s law, the offers have come flooding in since I got back from the course), I’ve cleared the decks to concentrate on the writing between now and the middle of October. I’m very lucky in that my partner is unbelievably supportive about the whole thing, and that my main freelance employers completely understand why I’m saying no to offers of work. This last thing is crucial, as I don’t want them to forget about me, and I will need to come to them for more work in future.

Now, I’m at the start of a reasonably long stretch of time (though, of course, it’s already feeling like it’s too little time, but these are just self-defeating Jedi mind tricks) in which to actually write a draft of the novel that, preferably, I’m happy to hand to Liz and see if she can still stay true to the claim that she’d be pleased to pass it on to her agent.

Hugely exciting, and hugely horrifying in equal measure. I’d say “Wish me luck”, but actually all I want is you all to stand over me with big sticks and make sure I do it.

Oh, there’s simply loads to tell you. And I will soon, promise.

But MOST IMPORTANT THING: I think I’ve cracked the comment spam, with a new thing that will ask you to solve a simple maths problem (like “What’s 10 + 9?” – that simple) before it will let you post a comment.

Hopefully, that will fend off the nasty bots.

It’s getting on for a month. That won’t do. Some notes on recent events:

1. Rufus Wainwright has broken pop music for me. If I try to listen to anything but his new album, it isn’t long before my finger snakes on to the iPod dial and hunts it out. It’s glorious, and I love it.

2. In the past, when I’ve said I work for TV listings magazines, some people have said, “Oh, so what do you do? Sit there watching telly, then write about it? And they pay you for this?” Until this week, that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Since Monday, though, I’ve been working in a new place. Here, I watch TV, write about what I’ve seen, and get paid for it. This is the life.

3. Must get better at blogging. It’s been a relatively quiet, fun, undemanding few weeks – there have been things to talk about, and time to talk about them. And, the minute any of them occur to me, I shall be back to tell you all about them.

Yesterday, in an effort to brighten the gloom of the UK’s undeserved Eurovision failure, we repaired to Kew Gardens with a couple of my oldest and loveliest friends (plus the Mrs, and one friend’s Mr) to celebrate another year without falling down a manhole.

Our birthdays fall within a couple of weeks of each other – this happens every year, much to our considerable surprise – and we more often than not meet up to commiserate. Over the years, I think Kew has been the venue used more than any other for these meetings and, while it’s always been a bloody trek to get over there, it’s worth it. Luckily, the crappy weather yesterday kept the hordes away, and we were rewarded by a cessation in the rain long enough to have a very slow walk around the gardens.

Very slow, because we were trailed by two tardy hangers-on, who insisted on either posing for pictures…

Or dicking about in puddles…

Or just basically walking very slowly indeed. What’s up with that?

Then we had to stop because they wanted to go to the cafe – and all for this shocking mess:

These two lovelies are my godson Raphael (pictured with his mum) and Joshua (not pictured with his mum, as his mum did an exceptional job of offloading him to the Mrs the minute she arrived – good work). The children are both aged around two now – Josh is slightly older – so they are getting to that point where they’re an interesting mix of fun and exhausting. Josh has a slightly better grasp of grammar, and Raph could do well to pay more attention to him and try to follow his example, cutting out the nonsensical gibberish he currently tries to pass off as conversation.

Kew Gardens, you may have heard, has a few plants in it. By coincidence, we’d managed to time our day out to hit the annual open day of their tropical nursery, the hidden nerve centre of all the fantastic, enormous greenhouses on the site. I’m not quite green-fingered enough to appreciate the wonder of the lengths the staff go to to maintain the temperature and humidity inside the different glass sections of the nursery, but there were vast chunks of thundering machinery around every corner, the constantly hissing of sprays of moisture above every roof, and a liberal smattering of hi-tech control panels down the glass corridors – it all looked like something out of Blake’s 7, so I was happy.

The one thing I think anyone could appreciate about the nursery was the abundance of totally pristine flowers on the various plants inside. Obviously, in the wild, any passing creepy-crawly is going to nibble as it pleases, so any plants you find there are often a little battered – and the plants in Kew’s own greenhouses, brushed past by huge lines of tourists, don’t fare much better. But the specimens in the nurseries, handled carefully only by highly trained gardeners – using a touch so light, lovers might have cause for jealousy – were astounding.

Orchids made up most of the plants they had specially brought out for display, and their delicate nature was belied by fat, smooth blooms in every hue from black to white. These were crowded round by amateurs who, I presume, could never hope to equal such delights on their own windowsills. The orchids were fiercely guarded by the staff, whose pride in the results of their work was matched only by a desire to not let you get too close to them. The only table I could get near enough to photograph was chock-full of cacti – I suppose snobby gardeners look down on the cactus, especially in the presence of the infinitely less hardy, and more flashy, orchid. They were missing out, though: these were fabulous examples of prickly perfection, each one crowned with flowers bigger and brighter than you’d ever see down a garden centre.

It was a quiet spot – if you ignored the two staff members hovering at the side, convinced I would either drop my camera on to their precious charges or plain make off with them – so the Mrs posed for a photo. The Lensbabied blur behind him gives some sense of the scale of the nursery’s operation. And a fern.

More days out like that, please.

(All the photos are from my Flickr page.)

It seems nothing will shake this headache. I’ve been feeling a bit ropey all day, to be honest. (I got travel sick on a 10-minute bus ride to Lewisham this morning. Really. To the almost-puking stage. I sweated through the last two stops, desperately praying that I could keep it together. How mortifying would it have been, if I’d been sick?)

I’ve had a good day and a half rattling words out for the novel, and it’s been beyond fun. I always kind of cringe when writers say, “The characters really surprised me when they suddenly…” Well, it’s been a little like that, and a little more far-reaching than that. The two main characters (Lily and Bernadotte, since you ask) have sprung to life, one in particular seeming wonderfully mentally unbalanced. The story has changed immensely, and both expanded and contracted (Big Human Ideas in/naff aliens out… mostly), and it’s currently sitting there, staring at me, beguiling me with its possibilities. I’m so pleased to say that I’m finally excited about it, and finally feel like I’m on some sort of track with it – which, combined, is a feeling I’ve not had about this project before now. There will be more word-rattling next week, when I have a full five days (ish… the Mrs and I are off for a weekend away on Friday afternoon) to play.

But, for today, this headache/ill-feeling has made me shudder to a halt, and now I find myself thinking dark thoughts about Linux. I’m a terrible one for wanting to know what all the fuss is about; I hate to feel I might be missing out on something. I can almost hear my poor little Macbook whimpering at the thought of what I might do to it.

Spring has sprung! With thanks to Dulwich Woods and my Lensbaby…

I’m working in Windows, using IE7… and quite liking it. I’m still on a Mac, mind you (lovely, lovely Boot Camp), but even so. I am practically shaking at the thought of all the creepy-crawlies trying to hack their way into my machine however, so I won’t stay long.

Play.com still doesn’t work when I try to place orders on it, nor have I had a reply to my week-old email asking about the problem. (Any other Mac users had this? When you click on checkout, it just takes you to a list of your current outstanding orders.)

Oh, and my internet bank is throwing up unrecognised security certificates. I phoned them and they said they knew about the problem, and I should just go ahead and use the service. Which was fine – until the site threw up even more unrecognised certificates. Hmm. I’m just going to leave it alone for the moment.

Also, the spam continues to clog up the pipes behind this site. I’ve a few ideas to cut it down, while also making commenting easier, and I should implement them soon.

Meanwhile, an uberconstructive week reaches its end, with me about 10,000 words richer than when it started. Today, therefore, I’m leaving the computer alone (after this, anyway) and going shopping… If only I knew how much spending money I had in my account…

I’m afraid it’s all gone a bit mental: the blog has received over 700 spam comments in about a fortnight. I just don’t have time to deal with that kind of crap, so if you’d like to comment on this blog, I’m afraid you’ll have to register. Sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s all quite straightforward – just click on a comments link at the foot of an entry and follow the links to register from there. You’ll have to provide a working email to register, but I promise it won’t result in me just forwarding all my spam to you instead.

(Of course, I bet spambots are clevererer than I give them credit for, but this should at least stop them for a while.)