The novel progresses. And as our heroines would tell us, if you don’t stop, you can’t quit. I do very little well in life and most of the time my path is garlanded with examples of what I should have done, or where I would be, if only I was a little different. But I do think that I need to tread carefully with this novel when it is finished. Because that is only the first draft finished. It needs rereading, the start needs to be redone completely, and several key scenes need to be arranged.

But when I see something like the book fair that has a deadline of 16th of March (I’ve gone hunting for the link, can’t find it), both angel and devil on my shoulder told me to avoid it. My little work is far too unprepared to get out there just yet. It is too sloppy, too unpolished, only I can see the worth that these ladies and this story has. No, not yet. Not yet.

It clarifies the situation, though. One of the people listed in the festival was the very person I have circled with red ink in my mind. She will be the soul I want to entrust this story to. And now she is in my mind as the end goal. Hmmmm…..

So. Where I work, we have a large interview coming up. One of the candidates is internal, and all of the candidates have the potential to seriously affect all our working lives. The interviews happen not this coming week, but next week. We’ve got some major projects off our desks, and now we’re just going through the motions until we get a clearer picture of the months and weeks ahead.

Same thing for other projects; the plans are set, now we just need to get stuff done to reach the finish line. The time for talking is over.

Writing-wise, I’m in the prologue to the final chapter; the bend in the road before the final furlong, if that doesn’t stretch a metaphor to breaking point. Seventy-seven thousand words, and our heroines have yet to reach race day. God, I honestly hope they make it. I’m actually nervous for them, I’m finding that I’m hoping for them. They have been magnificently brave, in a way that you normally see thin women wearing pearls who talk like thiseaux, but here they are flobby, sweaty, ungraceful women, who have hearts bigger than their doubts and who are going to do it anyway. I love them so much.

Hope you have a great day, the lot of ye.

Hey all. I survived last week. I made sure little man had some idea, and then made sure his Dad and he were okay, and got on with it. That first morning I drove to work with no will or happiness at all. And of course, it was not as bad as I feared. But it was pretty bad. Grief, I’ve found, is a silent thing. I parked the car and sat in the darkness and wondered at life. Then I made myself get out, and go on, and just kept moving. His wonderful Dad left a voicemail message that reassured and comforted and it was okay. But this week is not easy. And I am still doing the Lotto.

I discovered this week the website www.archive.org. Turns out it can provide you with access to old websites. Some of you may remember the blog I had for years, www.wallpaper.blogs.ie, which simply got deleted without any warning, and with nothing recovered. So I went looking for it on this website.

The blog had become a real memory aide to me. I charted my mother’s illness, my wedding and everything else on it. And then, poof, it was gone. It used to get about 500 people per day reading it. Reading through the old posts that were captured by Archive was quite telling.

Firstly, I have it seems always been convinced of my idiocy. Utterly, without any real doubt, I’ve written myself off. Secondly, by christ sometimes I can write. There were turn of phrases there that were magnificent, almost masterly in their finesse. And I never saw it, or recongised it, I never gave myself the slightest credit for it.

But what stands out the most, as Alan Rickman said, is the pain, the sheer pain of it all. I watch myself walk towards loosing Mum with a shrill inflexibility that just gets worse and worse and the life that became a horror. I honestly don’t know how I did it, I still don’t. I would have said I am much too weak but it seems that I am not.

I’m 42 years old. It already feels like a long time.

Tomorrow morning, my little man will wake up and I won’t be there. I’ll be doing the last of my things to do before finishing up before Christmas and snatching him from the creche for two whole weeks with his Mum. He’ll be mine, and for two weeks I’ll have him to myself, no care staff, ta very much.

I’m astonished that it is the end of December, the end of the year. My performance at work, family and at writing sucked in comparison to other years. I’m tired, distracted and fighting fires rather than planning and achieveing. It seems to be a thing, everyone else seems to be behind on the presents and the to-do lists. Last Thursday saw me come in at 6.3oam not to write but just catch up on the most basic stuff. I’m slow as an earthworm these days and I know it.

Can you consider this your Christmas card, by the way, while we’re at it? Please consider this the complements of the season. May you eat until you’re stuffed and then some.

Merry Christmas, y’all

Last weekend was mad, and I’m not sure how much time I have to type this one out too. So anyway, quickly; I’ve reached 45,000 words, hurrah. Childe is good, hubby is good. Isn’t this weather awful?

I’ve a manic week ahead. I have not one but three main events happening this week, the last one starting Friday at 5pm. So busy, stressful, and lots of it this week. The house is messy, and I have no decorations taken down, no presents bought and my 1950s dress with the pearls has still not arrived.

None of this is real.

So this week, writing between 6.30am onwards is the easy part.

There’s the doorbell. Talk to you all next week.

Bank holidays mean there are no work. So my work began on Tuesday, after not three, but four blissful days with the other half and little man. I’m in luxury when I can spent four days with them, which at times can seem a little unfair. Anyways.

Tuesday, I get up, I get myself out the door as usual, I pull into the car park at 6.30 am. And that is when I realise I have left the keys to the office in my other coat. The keys that will let me get into the building and which otherwise won’t be open to me for at least another hour. Back at home, in the hall.

Idiocy. It’s rare, but it’s real, people.

So what do I do? Sit in the car and think?? Well nuts to that! Back in the car, drive home, pick up the keys, back in the car, and back into work. I make it to my desk at .650 am and turn the computer on. I turn the coffee up to Sqqqqueeeeee! And I get going. And what I wrote was an interesting little cul de sac for one of my characters about a sad little moment that I have always wondered about and am now able to write out and use, no, exploit, for my own uses.

By 8.00 am I had two thousand words down, in an interesting counterpoint to the movement of the novel so far. Managed to make it in on Thursday without clapping my hands together like a seal, and got the word count up to 26,000 or so.

All we need now is for the coffee be emptied over the machine or for the computer to blow up or for a bloody comet to hit the office and it will be the icing on the cake.

“Weeeeeeeee!”

Have a good one, lads.

I am writing this from the one bloody computer that remembers the blog log in details. I am somehow keeping going with this damn thing, but I am right now the equivalent of a rolled up piece of paper, sellotaped to a chair in an empty room in an abandoned building; no one is going to read this and it’s not clear what they are going to get out of it if they do… My blog stats are flatter than my wit, which is at half-mast as it is.

Anyway. To get you all up to speed, because it is my blog and I can if I want to; I am writing again, to the extent that I have submitted an entry to the Penny Dreadful novella competition. If it does well, I find out in December. If it doesn’t do well in December, you find out too, because I will put it out to sell electronically as an ebook, so I will. I worked on it since my maternity leave so I am eager for it to strut its stuff.

I submitted that at 7.30am last Thursday at my office desk. Which is where I will be for quite sometime. My usual routine is to get to a swimming pool before work, but increasingly the nagging voice on my shoulder has been asking me which is more important, writing or swimming? Usually followed with a sarcastic Hmmmmm? as nagging voices are oft to do. It also usually points out all the flaws I have as a worker, a parent, and so on, but on this point it has been getting louder. So twice a week I will be working solely on my writing. It is the weirdest thing, to do what I want. No doubt it will play out like the first fifteen minutes of Casualty and I will be killed in a car crash/left by my husband for a stripper/see a meteorite crash through the ceiling while a bunch of cardiganed middle aged women, standing a safe distance away, will watch the fireball unfold, fold their arms and purse their lips and say nothing more than a smug hmmmmm… Ah here!

“Good luck!”

I do have a novel that I have about 15k written about and most of the rest plotted out, and I want so much to write it I think I would enjoy doing it with Dolores Umbridge’s pen. It is about people who I love so much I think they are almost real, really, and I can’t let them not be read. Being able to get to a desk to discuss them is so wonderful I would do it at any time. I do not have that space often, very few of us do, so I am very, very lucky.  Really looking forward to it, am willing to dodge comets to do so.  I am to swim three days a week, and still try to get home at a sensible time to clean the house and pick up mah son and do all the other stuff.

I aim to write up again next week, next Sunday hopefully. Very much hope you’re well, reading this, and that life is all good and happy. Drop us a line if you can? Best wishes…

In which a woman realises to her shock that mothers are useful employees, too.

…I secretly rolled my eyes at a mother who couldn’t make it to last minute drinks with me and my team. I questioned her “commitment” even though she arrived two hours earlier to work than me and my hungover colleagues the next day.

It seems like a fairly thinly disguised promo for her own company, but the attitude of her younger self is indeed very widespread. I’m regarded as a non-essential member of staff here in UCD, but the attitude exists all round for all staff members in the university who don’t put that role as a priority.

I’m not a fan of her earlier behaviour, mainly because it is repugnant. It insists that one should live to work, and that this is the moral centre of one’s life. To live otherwise is morally vacant and wrong; why else would she herself enjoy such disdain of those who make other choices?  Her own story, however, at least suggests that the attitude is one that can be changed, even if it takes a life changing event to do it.

Katherine Zaleski

From here. 

I am typing this at the bus stop as I try to escape the torrential rain about to hit us.

Lord but I miss the sun.

Stay dry out there.