Keris Stainton's Blog, page 12

Perfect day

For a while we’ve been saying we wanted to go somewhere to watch the sunset and we always want to go to the beach, so yesterday we headed over to St Annes.

We left late to, we hoped, avoid the Bank Holiday crowds and I made pizza (in the breadmaker my sister loaned me) to take with us. We got there about 4 and it was still really busy, so we parked much further along than we usually do and clambered over the sand dunes to the beach.

 

The boys immediately found two girls to play with and I settled down with my book. After an hour or so, Joe wanted to go down to the water and even though the tide was pretty far out, we headed off. It ended up being one of my favourite moments ever.

Not only did it look beautiful, Joe was so excited to be in the water and he just threw himself in. In fact, I had to yell at him to come back to me more than once (“No, Mama! You come HERE!”)

 

We ate the pizza and I drank a glass of wine and then we went “adventuring” with the boys, which mainly meant running up and down in the dunes while Joe waved a piece of driftwood like a sword.

We watched the sun set and then tried to convince Joe to leave. He was, by this point, naked, totally encrusted with sand, and practically feral, so it took some doing, but we managed it in the end (by promising we’ll go back next week).

It was one of those days I know I’ll always remember. Just perfect.

Writing course: Beyond the first draft

I’m running another online course. Oh yes I am.

So you’ve finished your first draft. Yay! And congratulations. Do you know how many people finish writing a novel? No, nor do I, but it’s nowhere near as many people as start one. So you’re already ahead.

But you know you can’t start sending that thing off to agents right? You know it’s probably a bit, um… well, it’s probably just not… It needs work, let’s put it that way. But where do you even start working on it? And then, when it’s done – because it will, eventually, be done (ish) – what do you do with it?

You’ll need to write a synopsis. They suck.

And then you’ll need to query agents. That’s no fun.

And then you know what you should probably do? Start writing another novel.

It’s a lot to take in, I know. But I can help. I’ve written lots of novels. I’ve had three published. I’ve sweated over synopses, quivered over queries and LOST MY MIND rewriting (I know I was doing an alliteration thing there, but rewriting is REALLY HARD).

This four week course is all online so you can do it in you pyjamas (this is one of the main perks of being a writer) and it’s flexible (so there’s no need to panic if you don’t get everything done in the four weeks).

It starts 1 September 2013 and the price is £50. For the full course. Payable in advance via Paypal.

Any questions, please email me.

NICE THINGS PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT MY WRITING FOR TEENAGERS COURSE:

“Keris is an inspiration. She’s been there, worn the tee-shirt and she’s brilliantly at advising, coaching and giving you the specific ‘how-to’ of making your writing dreams into a reality.” Suzy Greaves, Life Coach and creator of The Big Writing Club.

“So inspiring and informative! I found the whole approach a brilliant way in to talking about the issues surrounding writing and editing YA.” Harriet Reuter Hapgood

“The course for me was well rounded and packed with enough information/guidelines for the novice writer to put together a jolly good book. It’s the best fifty quid I’ve spent in a long time.” Paula Smith

“I loved the course. It was supportive, inspiring and helpful. It’s given me more confidence and enthusiasm to keep going.” Lesley Taylor

ABOUT ME:

I’ve had three novels published by Orchard Books:

Della Says: OMG!

“A fun, delicious treat you’ll want to eat up in a single bite!” Meg Cabot

Jessie Hearts NYC

”A breezy summer rom-com with oodles of New York glamour.” The Bookseller

Emma Hearts LA

“In-depth characters make this a light read that’s not frothy at all.” Kiss magazine

Crushing joy: being a parent, being a child

Last weekend, we went to stay at my sister’s house while she was away (treating it as a free hotel, basically). My sister’s house used to be my house, our family house. Our parents bought it when I was a baby. I lived there until I was 18. Mum lived there until her death in 1999 and Dad til his in 2010. Then my sister moved in.

In front of the fireplace. (I’m on the right.)

Since she’s lived there, people have asked me – and I’ve asked her – if it’s weird to live in the house we grew up in, sleep in our parents’ bedroom. I’ve said no, she says no. But last weekend I found it really weird. Every room was bursting with memories. I said, “When I lived here, when I was a child…” so many times that eventually Harry said, “We don’t CARE about when you were a child! We’re only interested in us!”

But there I was, sitting on the loo, remembering hiding from my sister while she hid (or I suspected she was hiding), waiting to jump out and scare me. Or the time some boys were coming round, the doorbell rang, Leanne shouted at me to get it, I shouted back “I’M ON THE LOO!” Of course they heard and I was mortified.

I stood in the bathroom, remembering putting on make-up, shaving my legs, lying on a bench with my head backwards over the bath while Mum washed my hair. (Just typing that, I can feel the bench under my shoulders, the edge of the bath against my neck, the perfect water temperature I thought of as being “like a peach.”)

Dad, in the front room (where these photos are taken), with his foot up on the sofa, playing the guitar and singing Country & Western. (Probably The Crystal Chandelier.) Sitting at the dining table, watching Pepsi & Shirlie on Splash! on the portable TV, the windows all steamed up, the smell of boiling potatoes…

I had to keep stopping myself, pushing my mind away before I got overwhelmed. It wasn’t even just the house – we stopped in town to get some cash and by the time I got back to the car I was almost in tears. We’ve talked about moving there so the boys can be nearer to their cousins, but I don’t know if I can. All those memories bellowing at me all the time.

Joe, in front of the same fireplace. (Harry wouldn’t pose.)

I think part of the reason I get so upset (apart from the whole orphan thing, obv.) is that I feel so guilty about not appreciating my childhood. Until fairly recently, I didn’t think I had a great childhood. I’m not even sure why I thought that. When I scanned in the hundreds of slides after Dad died, happiness shone out of so many of them. We were (almost) always smiling. And we did a lot of stuff. We had great holidays and days out. My sister thinks she had a great childhood, so what’s my problem? Why do the bad memories – they’re not even that bad, mostly the usual childhood angst things – stick so much faster than the good?

I suspect that what came later – Dad’s redundancy, Mum’s MS, their unhappiness, my desperation to leave (to move to London) – has overshadowed the happy childhood stuff. And I worry that all the time (and money) David and I spend trying to create a close-to-perfect childhood for our boys could be washed away too. Does that make any sense?

I guess the upside is that I feel like I’m getting it back. The memories keep coming and I can appreciate them, I can appreciate what our parents did for us. But it’s a total bastard that I can’t share that with them.

“There is a crushing joy that crackles in every corner of this world. I am tiny, and yet I am here…I can do nothing but laugh, and sometimes laugh and cry.”

- N. D. Wilson (via SweetSilver)

Feminism Friday: We should all be feminists – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDx talk covers sexism, systems of oppression, masculinity and more and it’s powerful, funny and inspirational. I know 30 minutes seems like a lot, but it doesn’t seem like 30 minutes when you’re watching it.

“We teach girls shame. Close your legs, cover yourself. We make them feel as though being born female they’re already guilty of something. And so, girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves. They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up – and this is the worst thing we do to girls – they grow up to be women who have turned pretence into an art form.”

A trailer for a film I’m never going to watch

Last week, we went to the cinema to see The Heat and one of the trailers was for a film called 2 Guns.

A couple of minutes into the trailer I said, as I am wont to do these days, “Are there any women in this film?”* Immediately after I asked, a female character appeared, shown from behind, naked but for knickers (you know the shot, we’ve seen it so many times), getting into bed with Denzel Washington’s character. She turns up again later, for a second, tied-up and gagged as the baddie (I assume) asks Denzel “Have I properly incentivised you?”

Having watched the trailer again, it seems that the female character, played by Paula Patton, is a police officer, but the point of her in the trailer at least is as the love interest whose kidnapping is motivation for a male character.

* Paula Patton’s character had appeared briefly already, but the cast was overwhelmingly male. I subsequently looked it up on IMDb and, of the ‘first billed’ cast of fifteen characters, Paula Patton’s character is the only woman. (Mildly interesting side note: Paula Patton is married to Robin Thicke.) In case you’re thinking “Ah, but you went to see The Heat – that has two women in the main roles and 2 Guns has two men, what’s your problem?” Well the Top 15 billed cast on IMDb for The Heat is made up of three women and twelve men.

Oh and Denzel Washington is 58 and Paula Patton is 37, but we already knew that leading men age, but their love interests don’t, didn’t we?

Lips like clouds: confessions of a Brosette

Since Bros are in the news, I thought I’d repost this. It was originally published on Dollymix in 2007 (2007!). If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll have seen this (probably more than once). Sorry about that – I’ve added some photos, if that helps…

Before coming clean about my particular brand of boy band obsession, it was suggested I might like to introduce Bros for the benefit of those who may not have heard of them (imagine that!). They were twins, Matt and Luke Goss and their school friend Craig Logan. They were massively successful pretty quickly and then suffered an enormous fall from grace which included court cases, bankruptcy, ill-health and exile. Between 1988 and 1991, they (particularly Matt) were pretty much all I thought about…

It was always known as “following” Bros, but I’ve no idea why. Some fans “followed” – the fans that had cars; for us pedestrian fans a more accurate description would have been “loitering” or “impeding the public highway” which is what the police often threatened to charge us with. I suppose “freezing your arse off for no reason waiting for Bros” doesn’t sound quite as interesting. And it wasn’t.

The day I moved to London, October 1989. That’s me in the red, with the blue camera.

But why do it at all? I have no idea. It was just something I fell into. I liked Bros, I wanted to meet them, I went to London for a concert and met people who’d been to their houses and had met them and told exciting tales of chatting and hugging and snogging aplenty with Matt, who had “lips like clouds”. This sounded good to me. Funnily enough they hadn’t told me tales of police “harassment”, the terrorisation of anyone new by certain other fans, the long-suffering neighbours chucking buckets of water out of windows and the almost interminable waiting and numerous disappointments before this chatting and hugging and snogging could take place.

The die was cast the very first time I went to Matt’s Maida Vale mansion block, Clive Court, and joined about thirty other “Brosettes” in the road at the back of the flat (he very rarely came out of the front). I’d only been there about half an hour when a frisson ran through the throng and everyone began a slow and mock-casual advance toward the back door. I managed to squeeze myself into a prime position and looked up to see the man I had been dreaming about for just over a year sauntering down the path. He progressed about thirty feet, I took about fifteen photographs (if I had the urge I could easily make a “The First Time I Met Matt Goss” flick-book) and then he was standing right in front of me. I murmured, “Can I have a kiss, please?” and he kissed me. On the lips. And they were right. His lips were like clouds. He got into his car and was away. He hadn’t said a word, nor had he smiled, but I was hooked.

Do you remember the first time?

Perhaps if, that very first time, I had waited twelve hours in the snow and not even seen his curtain twitch – as was to happen more often than not in the future – I would never have bothered going again. But I doubt it. I knew of a way to meet him and I don’t think anything would have discouraged me. But two years later I was discouraged. God, was I discouraged.

In three years I spent – approximately you understand, allowing for illness (though that didn’t always keep me away) and holidays (I only had one) and Christmases – four thousand, eight hundred and sixty hours waiting for Matt Goss (yes, I worked it out). And four hours, at the very most, actually chatting hugging and/or snogging him.

There were good times. He once told us he was off to Hyde Park and we all leapt on the bus. In the park he played us a couple of the new Bros tracks and lay around sunbathing with us. And he once invited us to follow him by taxi to the Embankment at about 3am where we chatted, and he looked at a photograph of me when I was about four years old and said I was cute. And once he turned up on the Kings Road where we just happened to be shopping and weren’t even looking for him. And, er… Well, trust me, there were good times.

Hyde Park. Oh yes.

And it was these good times that caused the problem. It would be terrible, boring, cold, for weeks on end. We’d catch glimpses of him getting into his car and his hand waving out of the window as he sped past. And I’d start to think, maybe I won’t do this anymore, maybe there isn’t much point, maybe there isn’t as much snogging as I was originally led to believe. And then there’d be a good day. And I’d think, but I wouldn’t have wanted to miss that. My Matt, love of my life, thinks I was cute when I was four. My life now has meaning. Well, not quite, but you get the drift.

Or the worst could happen. One day you’d wake up and think, I won’t bother going today – it’ll be shit as usual. You’d have a day behaving like a normal human being and then, just before bed, the phone would ring. And it would be your best friend. Who hadn’t spent the day behaving like a normal human being. She had in fact spent the day playing Rounders with Matt Goss at Virginia Water, and he’d bought her an ice cream, and dipped his finger in and dabbed it on her nose. And her life had meaning. And yours didn’t.

And it was this that kept me going for three years. For three years I would sit outside Clive Court in the freezing cold, pouring rain, baking sun (although I mostly remember the cold) – bored senseless, waiting, longing for the day when Matt Goss from Bros would dab ice cream on my nose.

If he’s got a doll, he must be a girl.

The other night I was putting Joe in bed, he started crying and said he wanted to be a girl. I said okay and then asked why. I said, “What do you think girls can do that you can’t do?” He said, “Play with dollies.” I said, “Boys can play with dollies too!” (Harry and Joe have dozens of soft toys, but no dolls. I didn’t choose not to give them dolls, it’s just not something they’ve expressed an interested in before.) Joe said, “Can I have a dolly?” I said of course.

He wanted one that wees, inevitably, so yesterday I bought him this Baby Amelia potty training doll. I chose her because she was the cheapest (£12.99. Some of them were almost 50 quid!) As soon as I gave her to him, he dressed and undressed her, fed her, sat her on the potty. He took her in the bath with him and we made her a bed (from the box she came in) that he set at the foot of his bed so she could sleep with him.

This morning we walked into town (it’s half an hour’s walk, but it takes an hour with Joe) and Joe insisted on bringing Amelia with him. I’d suggested he leave her at home, but he said, “Can real babies stay at home on their own?” So along she came.

On the way to town, he stopped every now and then to cuddle her and more than once told me “I’m happy you buyed me my baby, Mama.” Halfway there, we sat down on a wall and Joe cuddled Amelia Abigirl (he changed her name on the way – I kept accidentally calling her Abigail, Joe prefers ‘Abigirl’) and kissed her head. It was really sweet.

In town, we went in M&S and there was a man offering food samples. He said, “Are you interested, lads?” and then added, “And lass.” I though he was talking to me. He then said, “I’ll bring the plate round so she can see.” I still thought he was talking to me. And then he asked Joe to help him get a basket for me and said, “Aren’t you a good girl, helping Mummy?”

I didn’t say anything to the man because I didn’t want him to apologise for thinking Joe was a girl – it’s happened before and I know people get embarrassed, presumably because they think I’ll be insulted? Once we were out of the guy’s earshot, I said, “Hey, why do you think that man thought you were a girl?” Joe pointed at his doll and smiled. I said, “That’s funny, isn’t it? Cos boys and men can love babies too, can’t they?” Joe said, “Daddy does!” I said, “Exactly.”

(It was particularly interesting to me, because I think everything else about Joe was signifying boy. Shoes with dinosaurs on, navy jeans, green t-shirt (I know green’s not automatically masculine, but you only have to look at most shops to see that pastels = girl, brights = boy) and he’d just been swinging poor Abigirl by her ankles to try to hit Harry. But the fact that he was holding a doll overrode all of that. Doll = girl.)

Happy Home Ed: Juggling

Someone – I think it was Siân (sorry if not) – asked me this aaaaaages ago:

Have you written anything about the practicalities, about how you manage your working life/writing/you-time alongside homeschooling? I think for many, or possibly just me, the prospect feels overwhelming, simply because of the organisation and juggling. How do you do it? Are you super-organised/structured or do you go with the flow or a bit of both? 

We’ve been home educating for a full school year now so I should have this sorted, shouldn’t I? I think I have… maybe… although generally when I think I’ve got things sorted, they fall apart.

It’s probably not as difficult as people may think because we’re unschooling, so we don’t do any formal, structured learning – the boys can just get on with what they want to do. For example, right now I’m in the front room on the computer, Harry’s sitting  halfway up the stairs on his DS and Joe’s in the lounge doing a painting on the side of a Shreddies box.

I have a daily To Do list on Wunderlist (which I’ve written about before), but I’ve spent the past year paring it down. I’m blogging a lot less than I used to (here as well as on Happy Home Ed, Mum’s Suitcase), posting less on UKYA and I’ve stopped chasing the writers on Bea. None of it is really time sensitive, but I used to feel a responsibility to post everywhere all the time and I’d fret a bit if I hadn’t had a chance, but I let that go and feel much better for it.

Writing fiction, however, is a different matter. I’ve never been one for writing every day and this year, because I’m out of contract, I’ve been writing different things and then waiting to hear back from people, so a routine hasn’t really been needed. Fingers crossed, that’s going to change soon and then I will need to write every day. What I’ve found works for me is getting the writing out of the way first thing so it’s not hanging over me and if, say, it’s a lovely day or something interesting comes up we can just go and do it. So Harry’s been getting me up when he gets up which is anywhere from 5am. Getting out of bed is not so easy, but once I’m downstairs with a cup of tea, it’s amazing how much I can get done before Joe appears (at about 7.30, usually).

Mostly though, the past year has been good for teaching me to relax more. There have been more than a few times when the boys have been asking to go to the park or even just out in the garden and I’ve been at my desk saying, “Just a minute… let me just… I just need to…” and then realising I can do whatever it is later. I’m very lucky in that David is often home by 5 and so if there’s something I really need to do but haven’t, I can skip off to the office, slam the door behind me and get back on Twitter to work.

Feminism Friday: Hair

Facebook ad for Veet Hair Removal. “The view we signed up for”? Seriously?!

I’ve been promising (threatening?) to write this for so long that a couple of brilliant articles have actually pre-empted a lot of what I was going to say. So I’ll link to them first and then I’ll mostly just waffle on about my own personal experience and the things that made me realise how fucked up our ideas about female body hair are. ‘kay?

First up is Body Hair: You’re Doing it Wrong by Lindy West on Jezebel and then  The Comment Section for Every Article Ever Written About Intimate Grooming by Nicole Cliffe on The Toast

I stopped shaving. A while ago. It was gradual and then sudden. Gradual in that I’d always been a very lazy shaver. I didn’t really shave much in the winter, my legs anyway. I’d shave my armpits when they got what I considered too hairy, but I was never bothered about stubble or more than stubble. And if I ran out of razors, they’d get hairier and hairier until I got round to buying (or affording – those things are expensive) new ones.

And then one day the kids wanted to go swimming and I said we couldn’t go because I hadn’t shaved and either I didn’t have any razors or I couldn’t be bothered. And then I thought about how David is covered in hair and he can go swimming without doing any preparation and I just thought, “Fuck it.” And I took my hairy legs and my trailing pant beard and my more than stubbly pits to the swimming pool and no one screamed in horror. I didn’t shrivel like a witch when the water hit me. The lifeguards didn’t rush over and say “For the love of god, woman, cover yourself up!” It was almost as if no one even noticed…

We’ve learned to be disgusted by hair on women. I know there will be people – male and female – reading this, who will be thinking “No, I didn’t learn it. I just don’t like the look of it.” But you learned that. You learned not to like the look of it. We weren’t born thinking that hair on men’s bodies is fine and on women’s it’s “disgusting.” Honestly, we weren’t. Harry and Joe aren’t horrified by my hairy pits, in fact they haven’t said anything about them at all. Because they’ve seen their dad’s and they’ve seen mine and as far as they’re aware, hairy armpits are just something adults have.

I remember when I first became aware that hair on women was not ok. At least I think it was the first time. It was watching Thirtysomething. Eliot and Nancy were in bed and starting to get amorous. He ran his hand down her leg and made some disparaging comment about how she hadn’t shaved. She was, I think, annoyed, but, in my memory, she was also slightly ashamed. (This may, of course, be the way I remember it, rather than how it actually played out. It’s a long time ago.)

I remember a family we met on holiday in Portugal when I was 15 or 16. Her bikini line was sticking out of her bikini bottoms. I don’t think I’d ever seen that before and I remember feeling embarrassed and also sniggery about it. I was embarrassed for her that she either didn’t know or didn’t care.

On another holiday a man we befriended (as a family, not just me) and who I had a massive crush on was having a holiday thing with a German woman. I was watching them on the beach one day and studying her in a bitter and envious way and when she lay down to sunbathe, she put her arms over her head and had hairy pits. I was scandalised. I thought it was disgusting – how could he possibly fancy her? But, weirdly, it also made me feel like she was probably good at sex… (I’ve just been reading a book about old Hollywood and they used to make all their actors – male and female – shave their body hair because they thought it was immoral. Isn’t it interesting that now it’s fine for men, but not for women?)

Last year, when I fell up the stairs on the way to a book signing and bashed my leg, I was self-conscious because I hadn’t shaved and various people kept looking at THE ENORMOUS LUMP sticking out of my shin. I got in a taxi to take me to the bookshop and when the driver looked at my leg I said something like “Sorry, I haven’t shaved.” He said, “Neither have I. If it’s ok for me, it’s ok for you, isn’t it?” And I felt like a total tit for having felt the need to apologise to a stranger about natural hair on my own body.

Recently, we were watching Nashville and there was a shot of Gunnar lying in bed, arms over his head, hairy pits ahoy. The next shot was of his sometime girlfriend Scarlett lying in bed, arms over her head, pits totally pristine. And I thought about how if her pits were hairy like his, people would think it was vile. And how fucked up that is.

A couple of weeks ago I saw this photo on the Vogue website (which I was on for the dinosaurs, obv.), it said “Day 10″ and, in my internet-addled state, I thought it was a woman’s legs and she was recording hair growth and, I don’t know, people’s reactions to it. “Huh,” I thought. “That’s interesting, particularly in Vogue.” Then I clicked on it and turns out it’s Henry Holland. But my point is: if it had been a woman, people would’ve thought it was “brave” and they would have thought it was “disgusting.” Because it’s a man’s legs, it’s just a man’s legs. WTF is that about?

Now I’m not saying that “as a feminist” you shouldn’t shave/wax/pluck/whatever. If that’s what you want to do, go for it. But please don’t then judge me or any other woman for not doing it. Please don’t tell me or any other woman our body hair is disgusting and must be removed. Please don’t curl your lip if you notice hair curling out from under my arms.

Oh and I don’t think it has to be either/or. Last week I went to a funeral and I wore a dress so I shaved my legs and my armpits. I do think it looks nicer because society tells me it looks nicer and I’ve had 42 years of conditioning. Does that mean I’m not as good a feminist this week (shaved) as I was last week (unshaved)?

(Forgot, but meant to link to Armpits for August – a month long no-shave event for charity. Why not try hairiness out for a month and raise money and awareness of PCOS?)

July…

… has been quite a month. I haven’t been blogging for the past couple of weeks and I’m struggling to get back into it, so I thought I’d just post my favourite July photos instead.