Like any writer who is supposed to be working on her novel, I spend a lot of time analysing my blog stats (this activity comes under the General Procrastination category, along with cake-baking, deciding to sew a button on something you haven't worn in months, having to dash out to the bookshop for more "research", and staring out the window).

During the course of my analysis it has come to my notice that not everyone comes here to read my mundane ramblings. Some of you actually want advice on stuff. My stats reveal that folk have come here looking for words of wisdom on:

First date nerves
Viakal side effects
"What Not To Wear" (with particular reference to Ugg Boots)
Pineapple health risks

Because I'm a guilt-ridden ex-Catholic / first-born, I feel responsible and have therefore decided to impart ALL my wisdom in one handy post. For ONE DAY ONLY, consider me your agony aunt...

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The funny thing about time travel is that we all do it all of the time. Or until we're dead at any rate. It's the ultimate eco-friendly mode of transport: no machinery required (just one more-or-less functioning mind each); only a modest daily calorific allowance needed (wholly from renewable sources of energy); and all contained within a human-shaped capsule (with self-healing properties and infinite variation).

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Oooh we got snow! And it looks like the real thing; there has been the odd fifteen minute flurry over the last few weeks but this is lying on road and roof. Maybe I won’t have to go to the dentist on Tuesday. Luckily I can work from home if I have to but I can’t see it lasting – we don’t get snow in Glasgow! Well not the kind that grinds everything to a halt, not for years and years. In fact I only remember it happening once, when my son was about three; 1979, maybe. Diesel had frozen and there was no public transport – main roads were packed white and hardly a car to be seen.


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A new year. A new start. Or so I told myself.
Last year, I finished my novel. I edited it to within an inch of its life. I scrutinised every page, every line for excess baggage. I ruthlessly strangled, shot or poisoned my ‘darlings’ – those dearly-beloved phrases or paragraphs that Just Won’t Do in the cold light of day, however much one may secretly admire them. I made sure the timescales worked, that there was enough ‘light and shade’ in the writing, that the plot made sense. I wrote, and re-wrote my synopsis, my hook paragraph, my covering letter to agents. I checked my margins, my headers, my page numbering. I began to send my submissions out.
Time, then, to get on with the new one. And when better than in January, with its whispers of new beginnings, fresh starts?
I stalled.
It’s Second Novel Syndrome, I told myself. It’ll pass as soon as you get into the writing.
But still I stalled.


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From Intro
The Situation West Belfast 1991:
I deployed to Belfast in 1991 as a section commander a Corporal and I was part of the Recognisance Platoon of the Third Battalion The Light Infantry, the majority of the platoon were old sweats, experienced with a few previous tours under their belts, the remainder were just young kids, some of them with less than one years service, apart from being young and unassuming, they were fearless when it mattered. Operational tours always have the same effect on the young soldier, and as the saying goes, they go away boys and come back grown men, and that is so true. You see the young kids before the tour of duty, all full of them self's, cocky and invincible with not a care in the world, after a hard tour of operation you see a totally different attitude within them and they find out about hardship and see a different twist on life.

The physical and personal change is amazing for some it's a good thing, and they go on to become career soldiers, for others it's an instant ticket to disillusionment and Civilian Street. This was volatile time in Belfast to say the least, the provisional IRA was launching a new terror campaign and propaganda war against the security forces, and they were winning. Up to 1991 we would the first English regiment to enter the city on an urban tour of duty for about four years, and we were about to be subjected to the highest levels of terrorist activity and violence not seen since 1974. The reason for these upsurges in terrorist activity could have been the result of the breakdowns in the ongoing peace discussions along with the start of the marching season mixed together had all the makings a powder keg waiting to explode.

This was complicated situation both sides of the Loyalists and Republican divide protesting to claim their right to march through each others side of the peace line both sides would mass against one another always resulting in large scale public disorder, fighting and violent rioting would ensue, allowing the terrorists to manipulate the situation and attack the security forces when they were at there most vulnerable. To the Soldiers this was known as the mad season and we were at the heart of it. The Provisional IRA despised the Light Infantry just as much as they did the Parachute Regiment, but not for the same reasons, it was due to our high success rate of operations carried out against them, resulting in major terrorist arrests and effective disruption to their terrorist operations province wide they were eager to take us on, the stage was set and we were all willing participants whether we liked it or not.

Malcolm Pattison

It's not what I'd call 'treasures' - a few Neolithic jade axe-heads and some ungainly bronze cooking pots.

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One of my favourite ice-breakers for a new workshop or group is to get everyone, in turn, to say the best thing and the worst thing that's happened to them this week. It's personal enough to get people feeling some connection with each other, since personal information is the coin of so much human interaction. And it's un-threatening enough (after all, you can choose what you say, and what it says about you) that it's not too intimate for a roomfull of strangers. And now, apparently, the latest thing going round Facebook is '25 Random Things about Me'; now it's cropped up in the members-only part of WriteWords, and the result is fascinating. Some of the facts are astonishingly trivial and others are truly astonishing. Some beg to have a story written about them, some just pin down a single moment or object. Safe in the semi-anonymity of the online world, among online friends, people are remarkably frank: as every teenager at a sleepover knows, there's something about not being able to see each others' faces which makes taboos melt away. And as the thread got longer, with people's lists and others' reaction to them - odd little bits of fellow-feeling over a liking for sweetbreads, or a fancy for some entirely un-fanciable actor - it became less an exercise in egotism, and more like an offering to the group.

But it's not just because it's online. If we'd all had to list 25 facts about ourselves, I'd be willing to bet that most of them would be where we lived, where we went to school, what our middle names are and our favourite food. Dull stuff indeed, and mostly pretty un-surprising if you have any knowledge of the person. Whereas the necessity to think up random things, and quite a lot of them, seems to draw out all sorts of oddities that wouldn't occur to people otherwise.

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The first question people ask me when I tell them I have written a novel is, "Am I in it?" When I tell them I have written three novels, their eyes narrow and I can tell they are almost sure they must be in one of them! The second question is, "Are you in it?"

My third novel, Life: Immaterial, is about a forty-something year old woman called Jinny who is divorced with children who have left home. She lives with her partner in a large house and works as an executive. She is unhappy and intense to begin with, but after the murder of her mother, she undergoes a transformation into someone who knows more about less.

Hmmm. Forty-something year old who lives with her partner? Divorced, eh? When you put it like that she sounds exactly like me. But Jinny is not me. She is someone I made up in my imagination. Some of the ideals she holds are the opposite to my own. My mother is very much alive, and so is my father. Jinny lives in London. I live in Manchester. Jinny is dark haired and I am flame haired. No, Jinny is not me.



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This week I did my first ever reading (at my daughter's kinder...that's Australian for nursery school), of my pre-school version of The Billy Goats' Gruff, published by Ladybird a couple of years ago.

My pre-reading worries included:
What if the children get up and return to the Lego after the first page?
What if they yawn dramatically?
What if the teacher stops me halfway through because I'm mumbling and stuttering so appallingly that no one can make out a word?
What if I accidentally utter a swear word?
What if I have something funny on my face / up my nose and that's all the children can focus on?
And they start pointing and laughing and I don't know what's funny?
What if something in the story makes one of them cry? And then they all start crying?

So, you know, I was feeling pretty calm about it all...

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Isn't it the case: everyone says something, and you think, Well, maybe that's true but it doesn't apply to me. And then you find out that it does. What am I waffling about? Revising short stories. Everyone says: let it lie, put it away, and then you'll be able to look at it more critically. And I said, No, let me bash away at this for months and months, rewriting, trying different points of views, different tenses, and just NOT GETTING IT RIGHT.

So, today, when thinking about whether I had anything unpublished to send in for a competition, I went to the Very Old Stories I Have Almost Given Up On file on the computer, and opened the document. I loved the premise of this story. But I didn't know how to tell it. Something always felt wrong. I thought to myself, look, send this in, under a psuedonym, since you don't really like it. That felt very sneaky, deceitful, not deceiving anyone else, deceiving myself. Why send in a story you don't really like to a competition? If it wins, how will I feel? But, whatever the case, it was too long, 2500 words had to be cut to 2000.

I started cutting....

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