Group Hug

Thanks to everyone who held my hand and offered advice on my mini-crisis last week – I’m hugely grateful, and relieved to say that it’s all looking a bit more positive now (thanks to you guys, a bottle of wine and an hour long call to Abby Green’s Writers’ Helpline.) I’m not actually that much further on in terms of word count, but I now have a stupidly detailed outline. And I’m not afraid to use it.

As of today I also have a big box of paperback copies of Powerful Italian, Penniless Housekeeper, which is out in both the US and UK in January. That means that next week I can seize that as an excuse to take time out from doing battle with the book I haven’t yet written to blog about one that I have! Excellent!

(This is my Italian film director book. Do you want to see what it looks like? It has Ricky Gervaise on the cover!)

What would you do?

I know it’s been so long since I posted about writing that many people who drop by here will have forgotten that that is ostensibly why I keep this blog—because I'm supposed to be a writer. I haven’t been mentioning it much, not because I haven’t been doing it but because of late I seem to have been doing it very badly, which is all highly frustrating and depressing. The book that I’m working on has been started no less than 3 times now, and each time I’ve trashed ten thousand words or so and gone back to the start, convinced that this time I’ve nailed the small plot/character detail that holds the key to the conflict and all is going to go smoothly from now on.

Unfortunately it’s not really working out like that.

I’ve been stuck on a particular key scene for the last week now, and no matter how I approach it I don’t seem to be able to make it work. The characters don’t seem to be able to relax and talk naturally in the situation I’ve put them in—it’s a bit like working with actors (and Abby Green would know a lot more about this than I do) who are reading the script and rolling their eyes and saying ‘but what’s my motivation?’

I’ve tried to explain their motivation endlessly, but there comes a point where endless explanation becomes a problem in itself. I’ve tried to tell them that they have to do this scene one way or another, or else there’ll be no story and we’ll all be out of a job, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference. So now I’m wondering, maybe it’s just because none of us know each other properly yet? Maybe I should pick up the story after the pivotal point and keep writing, and then go back at the end and fill in the blanks?

I find that idea logical but terrifying. Has anyone else ever done it? Does it work? Is it a direct route into another wasted week of sleepless nights and negative word count? And what would YOU do?

Today's comment on contemporary culture

I read with interest that the Advertising Standards Authority have received complaints from several viewers this year's M&S Christmas advert (sacrilege!) Apparently gruff Philip Glenister’s line about ‘that girl prancing around in her underwear’ is considered by some to be offensive and 'demeaning to women.' Gosh. Funnily enough, I don’t feel terribly demeaned when I watch that bit. Wistful, maybe, and slightly depressed. I'm sure lovely, bad-tempered Philip wouldn't consider it a festive highlight to watch me prancing (prancing? Not sure I even know how…) in my grim, workhouse undergarments.

I hope that M&S respond, with due responsibility, by making a second installment featuring Robert Pattinson stripping off to his (100% easycare cotton) boxers. Actually, I think I might complain too, just to add weight to the argument.

(Have just realized that this is the latest in a succession of TV-related blog posts recently.Oh dear, my cultural references are pitifully limited. Come back next week when I shall be analysing the use of dramatic irony in Harry Hill's TV Burp and discussing madness and morality in the X-Factor.)

Home Truths

Happily settled myself on the sofa last night to watch the BBC 4 docu-drama on childrens' novelist Enid Blyton. Helena Bonham Carter was fabulous (and sexy Matthew McFayden was, well… not sexy, but fabulous too) and I deeply coveted her office, her clothes and her ability to write 6 000 words a day. However, the programme was not all sunshine and lashings of ginger beer, focusing as it did on the bitter irony that Ms Blyton was so busy writing about the endless joys of childhood that she ruthlessly sidelined her own children.

Gulp. Better get back to my own book, where the hero and heroine are lying in the afterglow of hot sex on a car bonnet and try not to dwell on the fact that the most intimate thing I’ve done with my husband this week is discuss car insurance.

Catching Up

A thick, grey fog is hanging over the garden today, like the frozen remains of the weekend’s bonfire smoke, and it’s obvious that Winter has really arrived (generously bringing with it a savage sore throat and vile cold. Thanks, Winter.) Seems like months, rather than just over a week since we were away in the Welsh Marches, having breakfast outside in the garden or walking through golden and sunlit woodland to picnic on the hill overlooking this view…


The clocks changed on the Saturday that we arrived, but instead of going back an hour we might as well have turned them back a century as mobile phones were left to languish and we all - even Facebook-fixated daughter #1 - forgot to miss screen-based entertainment. The house we were staying in was once a gamekeeper’s cottage and retained a pleasing air of Edwardian austerity (ie. there was no dishwasher) but the autumn colours of the woods surrounding it were utterly majestic. The daughters went off looking for sweet chestnuts to roast and racing around cathedral-like clearings trying to catch the leaves that spiraled down on each breath of wind. In a cupboard in what must once have been the head-keeper’s office we discovered a dreadful mud-coloured jigsaw of steam trains and they spent the evenings huddled myopically over it in companionable silence.

It’s taken me a week to ease myself back into modern life and into my current book, set in the high-octane world of Formula One and the glitter and glamour of the Monaco Grand Prix. A week, and an awful lot of comforting tea and chocolate. What's everyone else been up to?

Is it Aliens, part of the recession or just my imagination?

But I have a theory that time is speeding up.

A week used to be a solid, reliable space of time in which you could fit in a trip to the supermarket, at least one conversation with your spouse, five bedtime stories to daughter #3 AND ten thousand words on the w-i-p. Now, five thousand words and half a page of Harry Potter and it's time to iron the uniforms for Monday morning again. There must be some scientific explanation for this because how else can it be half term ALREADY?

Anyway, we're going back to the Middle of Nowhere for a few days, where I shall single-handedly attempt to slow it all down again. Whatever you're doing this week, enjoy every minute!

Because You're Worth It and all that

Here in the UK Tuesday evenings have become girls-on-the-sofa night, thanks to a new series of How to Look Good Naked. For the benefit of those of you elsewhere in the world, let me explain: it’s a programme where women with serious body-image issues are put through several entirely non-scientific forms of therapy to emerge at the end of an hour (TV time) with their heads held high and a smile on their faces as they parade down a catwalk without a stitch on in front of hundreds of people.

Admittedly I have to watch some of it from between my fingers—particularly the parts where they have the dismal contents of their wardrobes strung out in public, with all the sale bargain mistakes and remnants from former ages of fashion history prominently displayed for all to see. And I can’t begin to understand how someone who can’t face looking at themselves starkers in a mirror in the privacy of their own bedroom can agree to go on national television on a programme that is mostly about getting your kit off. But I’m glad they do, because it makes for the kind of viewing that gives you a good feeling about life and cellulite, and how often can you say that?

Key to its success of course, is its presenter. Gok Wan makes the whole thing about female empowerment in a way that superior, bullying alpha-girl gang Trinny and Susannah never did. I love Gok because Gok loves women (although not in a biblical sense, obviously) and he shouts out the message that Mills & Boon has been quietly imparting to readers for years: namely, who cares if you have a big bottom/no bottom at all, a rounded tummy/flat chest, magnificent, child-bearing hips/all the voluptuosness of an ironing board? You’re beautiful. In a house with 3 daughters this makes How to Look Good Naked qualify as Educational Viewing.

In the same vein of boosting self-esteem and all round sharing the love and positivity, I have a lovely review for Spanish Aristocrat Forced Bride from Julie at Cataromance, in which she says

If it’s a gripping romance rich in drama and passion that you’re after, then look no further than India Grey’s latest: Spanish Aristocrat, Forced Bride! Her writing is poised and assured and sparkling with deep emotional resonance which will move you to tears. Her love scenes are pure poetry – sensuous, well-written and affecting – and her ability to pen an unforgettable tale that readers will remember long after the last page is turned simply stunning.

Pure poetry. I LOVED that bit. Thanks Julie-- take a glass of champagne and go and join Gok Wan in my VIP Lounge for People Who Make Life Feel Better.