It's always good to set yourself new challenges.
Generally, I get thoroughly enthused and start a good five or so at a time. This week, it's my new Word Count Per Week challenge, my Exercise Everyday challenge (does walking to an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet count?), my Keep on Top of the Washing Up challenge (cheating by buying a dishwasher ha ha), my Blog More Often challenge (working well, thank you) and my Write Something Different challenge.

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Your wedding dress, that is? Or top hat and tails? Bear with me, fellow writers - this is relevant to our craft…

A couple of weeks ago I fetched my wedding dress down from the loft. I hadn’t fitted it on since my wedding day, more than a decade ago. Finally the time had come to swish around in front of my daughter, show her what Mum had looked like for real, instead of in fancy photos. I mean my weight’s more or less the same, give or take a few pounds; my height hasn’t shrunk (yet) and my hair’s still blonde. To the outsider, to me even, there was no apparent reason why it shouldn’t slip on. So I undressed and stepped into the cream puff creation, trying not to tread on the skirts, beaming at my daughter as she helped me hike it up, imagining I’d look like one of those celebs on the cover of OK Magazine or Hello!

Folks, you’ve probably guessed the rest. We heaved, we hoed, but the zipper just wouldn’t budge. ‘It must be jammed!’ I cried as I breathed in hard and my daughter pulled together the seams, straining to do it up. But it was no use, the zip stuck fast at about ten inches from the top. Sheepishly I turned around, red in the face, looking like a half-peeled banana that was just about to fall out...



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It is with great difficulty that I type this - not because of any physical impairment, but because the keyboard in the local library here in the Belgian town of Poperinge has moved the keys around. "A" is in the top left corner, "M" is off the right)hand side, the full stop requires you to press "shift", as do the numbers. It is slowing me down considerably so this will be short.

Wow!

(How is that for short?)

I am here to take up the prize I won in last year's Biscuit Publishing Flash Fiction competition (this year's deadline is April 30th) a week at Talbot House, set up during World War I as a haven for British soldiers amidst the carnage and misery, an "Everyman's Club", a sanctuary. The house has been beautifully preserved and now guests can come and sleep in the bedrooms which used to house the soldiers. I am extremely fortunate to be in the General's Bedroom:
.......

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I stuck my head out of the window and waved until my arms ached and my mother and little sister became specks on the platform. The early April day was gentle, the train warm, but there was no way I was going to risk another passenger pinching my black suede bikers’ jacket with its swanky red sateen lining from the overhead luggage rack. No way. No way Jose. I slumped down on the mottled blue velour seat, propping my pointy-toed boots on the edge of the bench opposite, and slid a cassette into my knock-off Walkman.


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I have to write a synopsis. Actually, I have to write two. There is the chapter breakdown and then there is the shorter summary synopsis.
The reason for this is that a kind friend in America said he might wave them in the way of a literary agent or two over there and see if they bite.

I started it yesterday and went through each chapter and tried to write down the salient points. It sounded flat and lukewarm.

Now, I should have started several weeks ago when he first made the offer but my first attempt was ripped apart so badly (by somebody else) I can't say I prioritised it. Which is stupid. What a wuss.
So I had it hanging over me and thought I should get started. By Chapter Four of insipid prose I was checking ICanHasCheezeburger every five minutes. Ooh! A new kitteh!
Then I checked the weather, the latest news (Gail Trimble's team were disqualified? No!) and the various brands of white tea sold at Sainsburys.
All very interesting stuff.

It is far harder to write a good synopsis than a novel. This is your opportunity to really 'sell' your book and without it your shining novel will never reach anyone. But I can't sell!

And then there is the fear that this is an opportunity I could completely stuff up!
American literary agents want things presented a little diferently than British aagents, who mostly want a one-page synopsis described as a 'book jacket blurb with an ending'. In face, quite a few of these do actually end up as the book jacket.
But Americans want a full chapter breakdown as well as the snappier bit, which apparently can't sound anything like a book jacket blurb with an ending. It has to fully describe the book and the action. I suppose one reason for the difference is that British agents (all sounds a bit 007) also ask for the first three chapters usually whereas the Americans don't let you get that far unless they've been hooked by the synopsis.

And my half-finished synopsis currently isn't good enough to use as toilet paper.

Then this morning I remembered the online writers' community I joined a few months ago, WriteWords. You do have to pay to join but at least there are some friendly souls there who will quite happily give you feedback. It's a good place to start. If they rip my synopsis to shreds then I can have a second chance, something that certainly won't happen if a literary agent uses it to line the kitty litter box.

So maybe I should stop chatting and get on with the f@+$ing thing?

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Right, I’m trying to be a proper author, so I’ve put up an extract of Kill-Grief on my website. I’m also doing a couple of later scenes as sound files, and will add those soon if I can record them without sounding like I’m 12 years old and without the dog bursting in and shaking her ears in the middle of it ...

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The cover proofs for my novel arrived yesterday. I stuck one onto a copy of Meg Rosoff's How I Live Now (hoping that some of the bestsellerliness would rub off, perhaps, but mainly because the spine width was about right...sorry, Meg Rosoff, I shall restore your book to it's full glory when I've had my fun)...

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Well, my 500th post here slipped by without me noticing and, as a result, with nothing to mark it, which is kind of a shame. 500 posts, eh? Two and a half years. Yikes. Where did that go - and how much has happened in that time? Lots and lots.


***


I was really, really pleased to hear that three of the members in my writing group have had poems accepted by W Terry Fox and his editorial team for the Homeage to Cheshire anthology; so huge congrats to Jenny, Betty and Sandy - thoroughly deserved.

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My children , ages 12 and 14, wrote a song the other day. It was a great song, very catchy, and I told them so. What I didn’t have the heart to tell them was that it was , more or less, The Passenger, by Iggy Pop. Yes, different lyrics, slightly different melody, but it was unintentional plagiarism, possibly caused by unintentionally listening to an Iggy Pop Greatest Hits CD, my current washing the dishes music.

This innocent tune pinching got me into a rather jaded, ageing rock chick frame of mind: all the great pop songs have already been written, that my budding brother- sister act would really have nothing to add to rock’s rich tapestry except some rehashed perfect Pop, capital P, and they should hang up their guitar and keyboards and get into, I dunno, chartered accountancy.

Then I realised my two little leaves have not fallen so far from this old tree. I got to thinking that all the great and important books about the thing I want to write about-bereavement- have already been written, and that I should pack in my proposal.. Whatever I had to add, which at this over- read point, was nothing, would be surplus to requirements.



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Today I'm delving into a subject I briefly touched on in my first blog - the journalist writing fiction. It's easy to make the error of believing that a piece of fiction is simply a newspaper article lengthened. In reality the two are as different as zebras and leopards.

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