Edge of seat

I currently have two stories shortlisted in very exciting places.

Now if only I had enough time at the moment to keep writing more like those…

Trolley

Even for someone with more spatial awareness than I have, my workplace’s location would be best described as ‘the back of bloody beyond’ (with, of course, all due respect). If you miss the bus – no thanks to the print shop man who’s commandeered the street outside his shop front for huge posterboards that obscure the single-deckers coming – there’s no margin for error. Run out of sticky tape before an authorised person can procure you some more through the approved channel, and it’s going to be the best part of an hour’s round trip.

Somebody has wheeled a supermarket trolley on to a grass verge by the road. This isn’t (you would think) a favourite area for drunken louts. I can’t imagine anyone was wheeling their shopping home with it until an acquaintance drove past and offered them a lift. That supermarket doesn’t even have a branch anywhere near here.

So what did they think that they were doing with it?

On ghostpigs

Instead of a proper post today, some advice on opening paragraphs from Catherynne M Valente, who recently became the fiction and poetry editor of Apex Magazine:

Dudes, a short story is not that long. You do not have 50 pages to hook a reader (you don’t, really, in a novel either, but that’s another post), you cannot lazily dick around for a page and a half before being all CHECK IT OUT GHOSTPIGS. Because no one ever made it to the GHOSTPIGS, who were buried under: “Robert walked down the street. The sky was cloudy. All the houses were brown. He thought about work.”

OH MY GOD.

Housekeeping

It may be another quiet two weeks, I’m afraid. Sorry.

Plants

I’m going to have to give up on another house plant. Maybe I should have done it weeks ago and taken it outside in the dark without my neighbours saying: ‘What do you do to those?’

When they head off for beach holidays somewhere sunnier on the South Coast or family reunions in Poland, I don’t anticipate being asked to come in and water theirs. I even own a sickly cactus. Yes, a cactus.

I keep being promised ferns and spider plants from other people’s houses, but keep forgetting to go round with a bag large enough to take them home. It’s probably for the ferns’ own good.

The only plant I can’t harm is called a dracaena. That really does mean ‘dragon plant’, as consolation. It’s third in a list of ‘Houseplants You Can’t Kill‘, along with the Christmas cactus and the spider plant. Some other plants in the genus Dracaena produce a red resin that really is called dragon’s blood. I’ve ended up with three of different kinds. One is the only survivor of a house plant generation when I went on holiday for Easter and forgot about them.

Once, I helped raise a cat from kittenhood. When did I stop being able to care for something that doesn’t even move?

At least it’s an excuse for me to decorate the house with dragon plants.

In-tray

All right, that’s one piece of work revitalised (I hope) and sent on its way, so that I now have five short stories on the market again for the first time in a couple of months. Even though my real in-tray at the office is going to be just as full when I go back tomorrow, I still have half a dozen un-replied-to emails and the corrections I owe somebody in another country are shaping up to be non-fashionably late, I somehow feel as if I have a lot less to do.

Now I can relax, maybe, and watch some football.

—-buzzbuzzbuzzbuzzbuzz—-

Now I can watch some football, anyway.

Except that I’m still thinking about what I made the mother in one of the short stories do, even now that I’ve submitted it…

Stuck

Today,

the

down

key

on

my

keyboard

has

got

stuck.

Football

I’ve never seen what my road looks like when England have qualified for a major football tournament. Two years ago, the team fluffed qualification for the European Championships, and during the last World Cup I was living somewhere else.

The flag-to-car-corner ratio is high. Even the flag-to-balcony ratio is rising from its general democratic baseline, zero.

I don’t even know who all the teams in the World Cup are. I could never have said that before. When I dug my sweepstake entry from the Quality Street tin belonging to the nice lady at work, my first response to the also-rans I pulled out was: ‘Is that country in it?’

Football was more exciting when I was younger than the players. In the early nineties, thanks to top-trump cards, I knew a fair proportion of the birth years of the top-trump-worthy footballers in the English Premier League. Their adulthood was anchored reassuringly in the sixties and seventies, where grown-ups came from.

In fact, sometimes they weren’t very grown up. Today’s captain of Manchester United was part of a squad brought up from the youth team in 1994 or thereabouts who infamously caused a defender-turned-pundit on the BBC to say, ‘You’ll never win anything with kids.’ A decade and a half later, he looks – well, he looks like a tweeker, actually. I’m really sorry.

I learned an extra layer of European geography from UEFA Cup ties: Vigo, Cagliari, Olomouc. The league globalised and – in that sweet spot where stars were the same age as me – bought in exciting, androgynous boys. Now those pretty fine-boned youths have grown broad shoulders and full beards. Elizabethan theatre-goers – Athenians, even – must have had the same complaint.

People who were teen idols when I went to school are now retiring. And the crease between my eyebrow and my nose, these days, could almost hold a thin pencil tight on its own.

Wasteline (yes, wasteline)

India Drummond points to a useful little tool called The Wasteline Test that measures your wtiting for five common things most of us need to edit out: overuse of ‘be’, abstract nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs and ‘it’, ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘there’. (Those do begin to look like Monty Python levels of ‘five’.)

Happily, I pasted in a few paragraphs from one of the stories I have out on the market at the moment, and it rated it ‘lean’ in all five categories. On the other hand, it did colour most of a paragraph about railways in central Europe blue because it thought ‘stations’ and ‘compartments’ were abstract nouns.

The copy-editor in me is glad I can’t be replaced by a robot just quite yet.

Distraction

Found while retrieving a shopping list from the notes in the organiser section on my mobile phone:

‘Someone needs to call T out on her relationship with Mik and say it’s time to let him go. Debbie?’

Work, and the ongoing task of optimising a text for someone else’s translation when any personal engagement I had with it dissipated months ago (yet that’s the one that’s going to have my real name on it…), has been taking its toll on my short-term memory for other things all month, but this is a step up. I have no flaming idea who any of these people are. I do know, like every woman in the southern suburbs, my fair share of Debbies, but couldn’t say I was on sufficiently intimate terms with any of them to ask them to become an emotional go-between between myself and T and Mik. When did Mik ever become so toxic? And at what stage of work-induced tiredness did I even meet a man and woman who had nicknames like those?

Why don’t I have the strength of character to deal with this myself instead of implicating Debbie?

‘Mik’ gives a clue. At some stage this week, I must have briefly turned my mind to a short story that has never worked since January but still compels me to explore its setting. I’m still not sure I’ve found the right characters to do it with. But two of them do have names that could be shortened down to T and Mik. And T, although not Mik, does know a Debbie.

At some stage this week, I must have come close enough to believing in these characters as real people. And lost that sense immediately before I could go back and edit the story the right way.